Europe in a world in turmoil
Tectonic shifts are dramatically changing the entire world historical landscape, at a pace and depth never seen before from the end of the Second World War.
The last fifteen years, the post 2008 spiraling world capitalist crisis has transformed the European Continent as well into a “Zone of Tempests”. This last term has been famously used in the past for what it was called “Third World” and now Global South. But forty years of finance capital globalization and its implosion in the 2008 global financial Crash, not only affected the fate of the majority of over-exploited and over-oppressed humanity living in the Global South. It created also a new kind of Global South within the Global North, a periphery and semi-periphery within the center, new vast areas of social disaster.
Advanced capitalist Europe, is the weakest Metropolis in the Global North. It has been transformed from the birthplace of global capitalism and modern colonialism into a decaying imperialist capitalism, subordinated to America, a focus of constant turbulence by contradictory forces, shaken by social economic, political and geopolitical upheavals. It became a real Zone of Tempests:
The euro-zone crisis that started a decade ago, has never really ended. Now it is coming back in force. The stagnant European Union economy is the most vulnerable to an explosive combination of finance fragility, debt crisis, rising inflation, and interest rates hikes driving it into recession, affecting even the industrial powerhouse of EU economy, Germany.
Polarization and radicalization lead to feverish political zigzags to the left and to the right; failures of the mainstream parliamentary left either in government or in opposition; a threatening rise of far right, xenophobic, and fascist forces coming now in position of government, not only in the Central/Eastern Europe but to Western and Southern Europe, as in a founding member of the EU like Italy, as well as in the previously social democratic Scandinavian North.
Mass social mobilizations erupt, workers strikes and popular rebellions of pauperized masses and youth (France is an ominous example)), producing sharp regime crises.
There are non-stop gigantic migration waves of the victims of the West in Africa and Asia towards a “Fortress Europe” waging a barbaric “war against the poor” with murderous “push backs” and a “non-rescue” policy that made the Mediterranean a maritime cemetery for tens of thousand desperate migrants. A regime of detention in concentration camps under inhuman conditions is established in European soil and in North Africa.
Above all, the European Continent and the entire world are brought at the brink of the abyss of a Third World War by the ongoing US led NATO proxy war at the heart of Europe, in Ukraine, against Russia, and indirectly China too. A war, which rightly was recognized by German Chancelor Olaf Scholz as a Zeitenwende, an inflection point of world history.
Greece at the crossroads
Greece is an epitome of all the problems of Europe.
Crashed under the burden of foreign and private debt, it remains subjugated to the draconian ‘austerity” orders of the EU, and the European Central Bank, faithfully implemented by all Greek governments.
Second in poverty only to Bulgaria in the EU, with a third of the population living under the poverty line, in conditions of high unemployment, precarious labor, low wages and rising living costs, Greece is reduced to a profitable field only for rapacious foreign funds and speculators in real estate and tourism, becoming a kind of a Thailand for rich.
The Greek State is notorious for its bureaucracy and corruption. It functions as a cover and bastion for the far right, a machine of repression of the “internal enemy” as well as a ferocious gendarme and prison guardian against the migrants in the South- Eastern borders of Fortress Europe. As a loyal member of NATO, it is entangled in all war plans and actions of the US and NATO imperialists in Ukraine, the Balkans, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Middle East.
Undoubtedly Greece remains the weakest, or, rather, the already broken (from the previous euro-zone crisis) link in the European chain. At the same time it is situated at the crossroads of all international social economic contradictions and geopolitical conflicts.
It is in n this overall context, and from an international viewpoint that it should be grasped the class struggle and political life in Greece including in the recent Greek parliamentary elections of May and June 2023 and the inglorious “triumph” of the Right
The 2023 Greek Elections: Chronicle of a Defeat Foretold
The results in the two electoral contests provoked a real shock because of the enormous gap between the 40 per cent won by the right wing “New Democracy”, despite its pitiful record as outgoing government, and the less than 20 per cent received by the “official opposition” of the left reformist Syriza. Such a huge gap was unexpected by most of the people. To add insult to injury, the landslide victory of the conservative Right was accompanied by the coming back to Parliament of the heirs of the Nazi “Golden Dawn” criminal gang, masqueraded this time under the ridiculous nickname “the Spartans”. All together, the Nazis plus another three far right fringe groups entering the Parliament, got an increased vote of 13 per cent.
The victory of the Right was based mainly on the absence of any credible rival able to form an alternative government. The New Democracy’s victory was primarily built on the political ruins of a discredited Syriza. After its capitulation to the ultimatum of the EU-ECB-IMF troika in July 2015, betraying not only its previous promises but also the mandate of the Referendum that rejected troika’s ultimatum by a tremendous 61 per cent, Syriza continued its disastrous right wing course, losing its own left reformist identity and discrediting the Left as a whole in the mass social consciousness.
As a government in 2015-19, Syriza faithfully implemented the worst third “Memorandum of Understanding” of draconian “austerity” measures. In 2019-23, as toothless “center left” official opposition, it voted half of the anti-popular bills introduced by the right wing Mitsotakis government. It declared continuously its loyalty to the EU and NATO. Last but not least, in the May 2023 elections, Syriza had no other alternative government to propose than the formation of a coalition, “center left”, “progressive government” with the social liberal PASOK – a proposal that PASOK itself repeatedly rejected as preposterous..
The crushing defeat of Syriza is a severe indictment of a Left that earlier had attracted- and betrayed- the hopes and support of a significant part of the Greek people, in the tumultuous years 2012-15. Thanks to this popular support, it was able to form, for the first time in the post-war (and post-civil war) Greece, a so-called “government of the left”.
The meteoric rise of Syriza had attracted exaggerated hopes and uncritical support beyond Greece, among a vast majority of the European and international Left, including of the so called anti-capitalist Left. Even most of international Trotskyist currents adopted this impressionistic consensus on Syriza and exercised from afar great pressures to their Greek sections – without success.
Internationally, Syriza had appeared as a “new paradigm of a victorious radical Left”. For other sectors of the international Left, Syriza’s rise was a signal for an opportunity to win influence by the new turn of the masses to radical politics. The “new” opportunistic orientation (or rather, disorientation) was realized merely in electoralist terms, by policies of supporting, voting or even joining as a left faction the ranks of Syriza. Now, Syriza’s inglorious collapse spreads great political confusion, disappointment, and disorientation both in Greece andt internationally.
From another, apparently opposite side, combining sectarianism with opportunism, the Stalinist Communist Party of Greece KKE, during the initial upsurge of the masses had vehemently opposed and denounced the popular “movement of the squares”, boycotting even the 2015 anti-troika Referendum. Now, after the 2023 elections, the KKE celebrates as a victory its modest electoral gains of a 7 per cent of the vote, while underestimating the negative impact of the victory of the Right and the threatening increase of the vote to the Nazis and the Far Right..
Throughout the entire political spectrum , from the right to the left, in most of the cases, there is no critical reconsideration of past policies but only self-justification, repetition of the same policies and projection of them blindly into the present and future….
The end of the first wave
It is remarkable that in their national-provincial myopia both the triumphalist declarations of an arrogant “New Democracy” as well as the lamentations of a defeated Syriza in disarray agree just on one point: namely that “an entire historical cycle for Syriza from 2012 has been closed”.
The truth is that a much wider, international cycle has been closed: the first international wave of struggles unleashed after the eruption in 2008 of the global capitalist crisis.
In various forms and dimensions, in an uneven and combined development, these mass struggles engulfed a vast area, involving the revolutionary Arab Spring that brought down the Ben Ali and Mubarak dictatorships, the unprecedented “Movement of the Squares” of the Indignados in Puerta del Sol in Spain and of the rebellious masses in Syntagma Square in Greece, the Gezi Park occupation in Turkey, and, later, the upheavals and mobilizations in Lebanon, Iraq, Algeria, Sudan, Chile, even in the United States, where with the Occupy movements, as David Graeber noted, “the shadow of people’s power came to Wall Street”.
Within, or alongside, of these mass movements and struggles, or “surfing” over them, new or renewed political formations had risen, sometimes in a spectacular way like Podemos in Spain or a radicalized Syriza in Greece. “Broad Fronts” of left and far left parties and movements were formed like the Bloque de Esquerda in Portugal, the anti-capitalist front Antarsya in Greece, or the FIT in Argentina, acting mainly as electoral blocs to capture the support of the left turn of large sections of people. Similarly, attempts were made to found “broad parties”, unifying a large spectrum of “radical left” organizations, factions and tendencies as in the case of the formerly Trotskyist Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire in France liquidating itself in the post- Trotskyist Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste-NPA.
Most of these experiments, in one way or another, have politically failed leading to internal crises, multiple splits, or collapse.
In conditions of political impasse and of a sharpening capitalist crisis, the conservative right and, especially the racist, xenophobic, “alt-right” or openly fascist far right started to rise again all over Europe and beyond.
But at the same time, a new powerful strike movement, driven by inflation and rising living costs of an impoverished population in a decaying capitalist society with growing monstrous inequalities, has spread in 2022-23 from the post Brexit Britain to all the EU countries in continental Europe.
The beginnings of a new international wave of social struggles are manifested during the first five months in 2023, by the gigantic mobilizations in France against the counter-reform of pensions imposed by decree of the Macron weakened Bonapartist regime.
Macron had not time to celebrate his “victory” à la Pyrrhus, and he was confronted, after the murder of a young boy in Nanterre by the police, with a massive rebellion, on a national scale, of a proletarian and pauperized youth, living in disastrous social conditions and facing day and night the racist brutality of State repression.
It is obvious that neither the class war nor the capitalist crisis have ended with the failures of the Left in the previous, first international wave of struggles. The capitalist regimes and governments in Europe and internationally including the newly re-elected Mitsotakis government in Greece enter in a new period of turbulence.
It is very important now for the workers movement and for its vanguard to draw the strategic lessons of the previous historical cycle to overcome the reasons of the failures and elaborate a strstegy for victory.
Strategic experiences
The important post-2008 first sequence of mass struggles, including the failures and defeats of the Left during that period, have to be studied as strategic experiences, in the sense given to these terms by Leon Trotsky: as historically important experiences posing at the center the most crucial question of strategy: the question of political State power:
By tactics in politics we understand, using the analogy of military science, the art of conducting isolated operations. By strategy, we understand the art of conquest, i.e., the seizure of power. […] The great epoch of revolutionary strategy began in 1917, first for Russia and afterwards for the rest of Europe. Strategy, of course, does not do away with tactics. The questions of the trade union movement, of parliamentary activity, and so on, do not disappear, but they now become invested with a new meaning as subordinate methods of a combined struggle for power. Tactics are subordinated to strategy. L Trotsky, Lessons of October 1924)
This central question of a revolutionary strategy, the struggle for power was precisely what it was deliberately avoided and/or openly rejected, during all this period, by those at the leadership of the mass movement, the forces of the Left, including those of the radical and anti-capitalist Left.
Very briefly, some examples:
The question of power was posed in the most obvious way with the overthrow of the dictatorships by the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, where the working class played an important role at the head of the impoverished popular masses in the cities and the countryside. But the road to power of the workers and poor was blocked not only by State terrorism and bureaucratic control but also by a disastrous disorientation, even among the radical left looking for a solution in an alliance to various sectors of the divided ruling bourgeoisie and their traditional nationalist or Islamist,political forces, such as the Muslim Brotherhood or the military of Nasserite nationalist descent. Finally the subordination to bourgeois forces, the lack of political independence of the working class and of a revolutionary leadership with a strategy for of a struggle for workers power supported by the poor led to a counterrevolutionary backlash: the military coup that established the al Sissi military dictatorship in Egypt or the Presidential coup in Tunisia, both at the service of local ruling elites and of Western imperialism.
In Spain, Podemos moved from “no-party” movementism to party electoralism and through a series of internal splits to the position of a subordinate second rate partner in the government of Pedro Sanchez's social democrat PSOE to reach finally extinction into another left electoral bloc, Sumar. The political outcome is the rise of the Francoist Partido Popular and of the openly fascist Vox in the regional and municipal elections in May 2023 and then the snap parliamentary elections in July ending into a deadlock. The unresolved crisis of political power is exacerbated under conditions of polarization, leaving Spain in a political limbo.
In Greece, Syriza always, even during the 2012-15 “radical” period, had declared repeatedly its support to “the continuity of the State”, to its capitalist bases, and to its agreements with the EU and the US/NATO imperialism. When in government, it governed in a coalition with the right wing nationalist “Independent Greeks”. All the repressive apparatuses of the capitalist State, the Army, the Police (a safe haven for the far right and the Nazi supporters), the secret services, the judiciary etc remained intact.
The forces positioning themselves to the left of Syriza, the KKE and the organizations or blocs of the anti-capitalist left have as only ambition to be a “militant” opposition to the bourgeois government and power. Despite some rhetorical but vague references for workers power and Socialism as ultimate goals at an indefinite, far away future, they avoided the question posed by a dramatic crisis of political power. They insisted that the “negative balance of political and class forces” made the struggle for such strategic goals “premature and non realistic”, if not “a dangerous adventure and provocation”.
Their “realpolitik” was and remains to act both in elections and in social struggles as opposition groups of pressure from the left, hoping to achieve partial tactical victories and an accumulation of forces and positions in unions and local government. Tactics and program were separated from a strategic orientation for a struggle for power.
Calls for a United Front by sectors of the anticapitalist left turned it from a tactic into a strategy, reducing it most often to an electoral bloc.
The Stalinist KKE openly rejected any question or need of a transitional program, separating short term from long term programmatic aims, waiting for “the conditions to become mature”. Meantime it remains within the limits of immediate demands and sheer trade union economism.
From the other side, among the forces of Antarsya, there was a misinterpretation and a gradualist deformation of a real program of transitional demands as it was first outlined in the early revolutionary period of the Third International and, in a more developed form, by Trotsky as the program of the Fourth International.
The subtitle of the founding programmatic document of the Fourth International had made clear that its method and goal are to intervene in all struggles by advancing demands, for “the systematic mobilization of the masses on the road for the struggle for workers power”. It is NOT a middle of the road list of demands “no more reformist but not yet revolutionary’, “anti-capitalist but not fully(?) revolutionary socialist” leading step by step, gradually, to revolution and Socialism..
Such illusory, shallow and disastrous “realpolitik” is a belated echo of the pre-1914 reformist “Marxism” of the Second International mixed with Stalinist dogma. In practice, it can function at some extent as a temporary stabilizing factor in a destabilized bourgeois system, intensifying the frustration in front of a historic impasse, the feeling of a kind of Thatcherite TINA(There Is No Alternative). “If ever there was a historical movement to which Realpolitik presents a baneful and ominous threat, it is that of Socialism”, rightly Lucács wrote in Tactics and Ethics during the 1919 Hungarian Revolution.
The EEK and the State
Our Party, the EEK, in 2023 celebrates its 60 years of revolutionary existence in struggle, often under the most difficult condition such as under the military dictatorship. Despite all the ups and downs, the leaps forward as well as failures and splits always connected with the tumultuous history of the Fourth International after Trotsky, our constant guiding principle was the struggle for internationalism and the International, for a workers power of the Commune type, for the transition beyond capital and beyond the State-Leviathan, to world communism, the Marxian realm of freedom.
On this line, in the recent period, we have raised the central question of the Statepower in crisis in all its avatars, from the December 2008 revolutionary revolt up to now. For this reason, the EEK became the target of continuous attacks by the capitalist State. In 2009, a murderous attack by the motorized riot police on an EEK contingent in a demonstration nearly killed a well known fighter from the times of the dictatorship, comrade Angeliki Koutsoumbou. In 2013, the general secretary of the EEK was put on trial by the right wing government after a legal action by the Nazi “Golden Dawn” with the ludicrous anti-communist and anti-Semitic charge “to foment a civil war to impose a Judeo-Bolshevik regime in Greece”!! Thanks to an international campaign of solidarity we won the case.
Ten years after, after the 2023 elections, the EEK becomes again the target of a State orchestrated witch hunt by the bourgeois press and the re-elected New Democracy government. Our “crime” was to denounce a real State crime: on July 18, 2023, the Solidarity Network of Free Clinics, animated by the EEK and independent activists, had organized a powerful event in Athens, with nearly a thousand people denouncing the criminal shipwreck of “Adriana” near Pylos, last June, when seven hundreds migrants, mainly women and children, were drown helpless.
There is no doubt that in the period in front of us there will be an escalation in the clash between the masses, the working class and its most militant sections from the one side, and from the other side, the capitalist State, the right wing government and their para-State, fascistoid troops. There is no luxury to repeat the same “realpolitik” of “radical” reformism that has miserably failed.
Roots of a failure
The last thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the high days of neo-liberal offensive and finance capital globalization, prevails a general “disorientation of the world”, to use the concept elaborated by Alain Badiou. If the initial ludicrous claim by Fukuyama for an “end of History” was abandoned even by its initiator, any sense of history, or of orientation in history is generally abandoned, replaced by a “democratic consensus” for an Eternal Return of the Same in a world where everything continuously changes to remain unchanged.
Disorientation in the ranks of the Left is exacerbated by the fact that all the previously known or used roads of political action, either the road of reforms or the path of revolution appear both blocked.
Reformism in the post World War II period was tied to the “Welfare State” during the ‘Thirty Glorious Years” in the Keynesian framework of the Bretton Woods settlement that has collapsed it in the 1970s. Social democracy turned into the infamous neo-liberal “Third Road” of Tony Blair and of the Eurocrats in Brussels imposing not reforms but vicious counter-reforms destroying all workers’ rights and gains of previous struggles.
From the other side, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the fall of so-called “actually existing Socialism deeply affected not only the camp of their former supporters but also their critics, even those fighting for an alternative revolutionary alternative. The main constant points of political orientation in the 20th century were lost. The dominant Zeitgeist calims that the epoch of social revolutions met its end.
The declaration of Enrico Berlinguer, the leader of the PCI, the architect of the “historical compromise” with the Right and pope of Eurocommunism, that “the historical circle opened by the October Revolution in 1917 has been definitively closed” became the mantra of the majority of the Left and far left for an entire period, especially from 1991 until our days. Recently, in December 2022, in an interview after the disastrous split of the NPA, François Sabado, a historic leader of the LCR, later of the NPA, and for a long period of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International(USFI) repeated approvingly and verbatim Berlinguer’ s words on the “closure” of the cycle opened by the October Revolution…
When a new tide of radical struggles has risen, driven by the world capitalist crisis, the dual impasse both of “old” social democratic reformism as well as of “communism” as “we knew it in the 20th century”, fed the attempts to find another kind of a radical “third road” beyond reform and revolution.
This illusion can explain the early great enthusiasm of the Left in Europe and internationally for Syriza and Tsipras, as well as later the deep disappointment with the capitulation in July 2015, the efforts to find excuses and justifications, and, finally, the deadly shock from Syriza’s 2023 electoral Waterloo.
It was a crushing blow to illusions that flourished for an entire historical period. This does not mean that automatically have disappeared. The world historical causes of disorientation remain. Most probably, with the failure of the institutionalized former “radical” left, prevailing confusion will be compounded, at least temporarily.
An entire circle of meteoric rise and precipitous fall of a series of radical left formations has indeed terminated. But a protracted adaptation to the capitalist framework, the systematic avoidance of the strategic questions of poltical power and class domination, the refusal to challenge the “continuity of the State” remain. The dangers from this long adaptation of the left, even of its more radical sectors to the “democratic consensus”, the capitalist framework, the State itself grows immensely with every historic turn of the spiraling world crisis
Disorientation, War, and Internationalism in action
The dramatic inflection point of history, the Zeitenwende of the international military conflagration at the heart of Europe by US led NATO imperialism against Russia was a crash test for all sections of the international Left, including all organizations and currents claiming to be Trotskyist or having their origins in Trotskyism and the Fourth International. The vast majority failed the test of history.
The political result of this crash test could find analogies with what happened during the World Wars of the 20th century: the social chauvinist collapse of the Second International in World War I, or the capitulation to “democratic” imperialism and the dissolution of the Comintern by Stalin in World War II.
Now, in front of the NATO provoked proxy war in Ukraine, the vast majority of the left and far left sided with NATO. The pretext was “the defense of the national self-determination of the Ukrainian people”, while the Ukrainian people is reduced into cannon fodder of Western imperialism and their country a NATO military camp and protectorate where no independent decision can be made without Washington’s and NATO’s orders. The ludicrous Biden’s pretext that the war is waged for “for the defense of democracy against Putin’s [and Xi’s] autocracy” could be persuasive only to those fully subordinated to the a dying bourgeois democracy- a term easily adopted now even by the Nazis in Sweden or the fascist Fratelli d’Italia.
But unfortunately among those supporting as “legitimate” this proxy war are included the majority of the NPA, of the USFI and of most organizations coming from the Nahuel Moreno’s tradition, discrediting Trotskyism in the West and the East. They are opposing a genuine revolutionary internationalist answer to the challenge of an imperialist war, which openly, particularly after NATO’s Summits in Madrid and recently in Vilnius, is escalating in all Continents world wide.
Another group of left parties and organizations pretends to keep an “equidistant” position condemning both NATO and Russia. They present the war as a “war between two imperialist camps” or between a more advanced US/NATO imperialism and a Russian “sub-imperialism”, or a “peripheral imperialism”, or an “imperialism in the making” or just as “Putin’s autocracy of oligarchic capitalism”.
Most of the times, “imperialism” is identified with the politics of military expansionism. Or, the features of imperialism summarized by Lenin in his famous pamphlet are taken out of context as a normative list, a supra-historical form without specific historical content. His Marxist analysis of imperialism revealing its essential determination, first of all, as an epoch, the latest stage of historical development of world capitalism, the epoch of capitalist decline is ignored.
Some currents call for a simultaneous uprising both against NATO and the Russian regime, reviving an old formula raised by an opposition in the US Socialist Workers Party in 1939 for an “Insurrection on Two Fronts” rightly and sharply criticized by Trotsky(see In Defense of Marxism).
In Greece, the Stalinist KKE, which previously blindly followed for decades Moscow’s directives(including Kremlin’s orders that led the Greek revolution in the 1940s to betrayal and defeat), now not only condemns both “American and Russian imperialists” but also it organizes demonstrations starting first in front of the Russian Embassy in Athens and then it is directed towards the US Embassy…
The centrists of Antarsya also see in Ukraine an “inter-imperialist rivalry”, strongly condemning both sides in the conflict. This baseless rationalization of “keeping equal distance against NATO and Putin’s capitalist Russia” is not “neutral” in consequences. It strengthens NATO’s imperialist war drive, war propaganda and war plans, by a policy attempting to neutralize any anti-imperialist popular resistance and revolutionary internationalist mobilization of the working class to defeat NATO.
Defending their “equidistant” position, Antarsya’s leadership sabotaged and rejected, on the eve of the 2023 parliamentary elections in Greece, a proposal(previously well received by most of the delegates of in the 5th Conference of Antarsya in January 2023) to form an electoral bloc against the Right, all bourgeois parties and Syriza, of Antarsya with the EEK, The proposal was an actualization in the new conditions of the bloc Antarsya-EEK-independent fighters formed in the September 2015 elections, a bloc based on a common electoral program and plan of class action, with full respect of the political independence and programs of all participants. But in 2023, the war in Ukraine became a casus belli for the leaders of Antarsya against the EEK falsely accused to be “pro-Putin” because it condemns NATO and US imperialism as the instigators of the war and calls for the defeat of NATO.
The EEK has carefully analyzed the war in Ukraine before the conflict and throughout all the phases of its development up to now. It shares the same line with its international comrades in the International Socialist Center “Christian Rakovsky”.
The Rakovsky Center has successfully organized on June 25-26, 2022, and International Anti-War Anti-Imperialist Conference, where militants of dozens left parties, organizations and tendencies from all Continents participated and where all the spectrum of views on the war in Ukraine was democratically expressed, the line voted by the vast majority was defined in the Manifesto of the Conference which clearly stresses:
In the context of the historic impasse in which imperialism finds itself, with the ever-expanding spiral of its global systemic crisis, after the implosion of finance capital globalization, it is accelerating its war drive to fully re-absorb the two countries where the world socialist revolution had broken in the past its weakest links, but where the revolution turned later to the road of capitalist restoration: Russia and China.
The defeat of the US/NATO led imperialist war is the primary, necessary and urgent task for all forces fighting for emancipation from the capitalist slavery and imperialist bondage, first of all the international working class and its revolutionary vanguard. No communist, no socialist, no fighter of the anti-imperialist struggle can be “neutral” or “equidistant” in the on-going military conflagration that started in Ukraine[...]
Our anti-imperialist line does not mean that we abandon our firm opposition to the capitalist restorationists, to the Russian oligarchs and Putin’s Bonapartism.
It is the collapse of the Soviet Union and the turn to capitalist restoration that has opened the gates to imperialism’s offensive and a war of fragmentation and colonization of the former Soviet space, as well as of China.
[...]
The only way out of this blind alley, for a renewed, vigorous social development has to break these internal and external obstacles. A radical change of orientation is needed with the political independence, initiative and active participation of the toiling masses themselves: a new revolutionary turn away from capitalist restoration to the path of Socialism.
[...]
Without any support for restorationist regimes, oligarchs or Bonapartes, the international working class and its vanguard should not remain neutral in the face of imperialist aggression but to fight to defeat it. A military victory by US/NATO led imperialism against Russia today (and China tomorrow) will be a catastrophe not solely for the peoples of Russia, Ukraine and of the entire Eurasian region reduced into fragmented semi-colonies but for humanity as a whole. A decisive strategic defeat of world imperialism, on the contrary, not only will advance the world struggle against capitalism and imperialism, but will create the best conditions for defeating capitalist restoration as well.
Internationalism in action: the challenge for Trotskyism
The US led NATO imperialist war in Ukraine with all its international causes, dimensions and implications for the future of humanity has drawn a deepest dividing line among the forces of the international Left, of the workers movement, and all the liberation and emancipatory movements. The need for an organized socialist internationalism in action is urgent. The preparation of a Zimmerwarld type Conference to regroup a revolutionary vanguard of proletarian and anti-imperialist forces to wage war against the imperialist war is needed. Above all what is most urgently needed is the revolutionary International that is lacking.
This need is more and more recognized, although in vague terms, by many dedicated fighters all over the world. It remains the major challenge for world Trotskyism.
The EEK in an international resolution voted in its 17th Congress in June 2021 and re-confirmed by its 18th Congress of December 2022 stresses:
There can be no revolutionary politics and revolutionary party within the limits of a single country, just as "socialism in a single country" is impossible. The Revolutionary Party is built as a part of the building of the revolutionary International, of a World Party of the permanent socialist revolution.[…]
The Fourth International was founded by Trotsky and his comrades amid the most colossal defeats of the international revolutionary movement, when "it was midnight in the century", under the most difficult conditions ever faced by the revolutionary vanguard faithfully pursuing the October Revolution. It was historically necessary, historically justified and historically incomplete. Its purpose was not just to fight against Stalinism but to complete, on a world scale, the work of social transformation begun in October 1917. […]
The struggle for the 4th International does not belong to the past but to the present and the immediate future. It remains alive and relevant. Its actuality rests on the material basis of the imperialist epoch off capitalist decline itself.[…]
.. despite the fragmentation of the forces of the Fourth International, the central core that keeps alive and makes vital the project of the Fourth International is precisely the material-historical basis of the theory and practice of the Permanent Revolution.
We continue in this revolutionary course. Without sectarian ultimatums and national isolation or self-glorification, without opportunist adaptation to the line of less resistance, we continue the struggle for the International with confidence for the victory of the world socialist revolution that started in October 1917!
July-August 2023