International appeal by the International Workers Unity-Fourth International (IWU-FI)
The rise of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States is a serious threat to the oppressed and exploited peoples of the world. Trump is the head of world imperialism and the representative of a sector of imperialism that intends to launch a new counter-offensive against the workers and peoples, imposing reactionary labor reforms, especially on young people, worsening the depredation of nature, against the most basic rights of women, of oppressed people, of poor migrants, with the only goal of preserving the capitalist-imperialist system, and the profits of multinationals and big business.
This offensive is economic and can translate also into direct or indirect military action and promote a repressive escalation of bourgeois regimes against their own people.
Trump is supporting the worsening of the genocidal politics of Israel against the Palestinians. In Greece, Brazil, France, and dozens of countries all social gains of the workers are under brutal attack. Multinationals and banks are still trying to submerge the peoples under new amounts of external debt to continue to dominate and exploit them and plunder nations. Hunger is on the rise again all over the world, while a small number of ultra billionaires controls most of the world riches. The crisis that continuously exacerbates the misery of the masses, threatening the very survival of the human species, has its roots in the existence of capitalism in its imperialist phase of decadence and decay.
A hundred years after the Russian Revolution it is a fact, as ever, that humanity’s only way out is a struggle to replace the capitalist-imperialist system with Socialism with Democracy for the workers. The multinationals and banks of the USA, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Japan, must be expropriated and turned into collective and social property. The same must be done with all the big businesses and the large expanses of lands in the hands of big companies and landlords in all countries. To do this, the workers, the youth, the women and all popular sections of society must fight for workers’ governments in each country.
It is with this perspective that we must confront the new imperialist counter-offensive. The rebellion of workers, the oppressed peoples, women, and youth, is the answer to the reactionary politics of Trump, Merkel, Macron and the rest. In spite of the defeat of the Syrian Revolution, expressed in the massacre of Alepo, the rebellion of the Arab peoples continues today with the protests in the Rif area of Morocco, and the heroic resistance of the Palestine people. In France and Greece, workers strikes are the answer to austerity plans and labor reforms.
In Latin America, Dilma Rousseff of the PT fell for lack of popular support, and Temer is faltering. Popular rebellion is on the rise in Venezuela against austerity and the attempt of Maduro to establish himself as a dictator. Big strikes, especially by teachers, are growing in Colombia, Peru, Argentina, and other countries. Huge protests by women against femicides and patriarchal violence, in support of abortion rights and equality, is another new international phenomenon on the rise. And the movement for the independence of Catalonia is another expression of the rebellion of the peoples in search of self-determination.
These struggles are boycotted by reformist leaderships and trade-union bureaucracies. The political confusion of sections of workers and the people that vote for right-wing alternatives is caused by the open betrayal of all popular demands by Social Democratic parties and governments in Europe, including new variants of the reformist left such as Syriza in Greece or Podemos in the Spanish state or the false «progressive» governments of Latin America. It is the case of the failure of the so-called «XXIst Century Socialism» of Chávez and Maduro, of Lula-Dilma and the PT in Brasil or Evo Morales in Bolivia, that governed and continues to do so in some cases, making pacts with the multinationals and imposing austerity on their peoples.
Considering this situation, we are calling for urgent and general united action of all struggles to confront Trump and imperialist and capitalist governments. We are calling for international united action against austerity imposed on workers and popular sections of society; against criminalization of protests; against the destruction of nature; for non-payment of foreign debts; in defense of democratic rights, of women, of popular health and education, of our jobs, of our food, of our future, exposed to lay-offs, hunger, repression and climate disasters.
The most important need of the masses today is to overcome their crisis of revolutionary leadership. Considering the betrayal of the reformist machinery, we need new revolutionary socialist leaderships in each country and in the world. We need to build strong revolutionary parties that struggle for class independence and internationalism. We must return to the revolutionary path of Lenin and Trotsky.
The VIth Congress of the IWU-FI ratifies the appeal to unite revolutionaries in each country and the world in an international revolutionary organization towards the reconstruction of the IV International. The IWU-FI rejects all sectarianism and self-proclamation in that path. That is why we are making a new appeal to all organizations that uphold the validity of the struggle for World Socialist Revolution and for Workers’ Governments to carry out common actions and define steps towards the unity of revolutionaries in each country and in the world.
Unity of struggles against economic austerity and anti-popular repression! Unity of revolutionaries to rebuild the Fourth International to struggle for the defeat of capitalism, for real Workers’ Socialist Governments!
VIth Congress of IWU-FI
July, 2017
