FIFTH INTERNATIONAL

The League for the Fifth International has argued for many years that the assaults on the social and economic gains of the workers, carried out by the capitalist class under the banner of Globalisation, Neoliberalism and the War on Terrorism, urgently required an internationally coordinated fight back
to found a new global party of socialist revolution, a Fifth International.
Revolutionaries however cannot agree to entrust the initiative of founding a new workers’ international to the head of a bourgeois state
that defends capitalist ownership of the means of production and enforces this by a standing army and police force against the workers and poor of Venezuela
Chávez has clashed repeatedly with US imperialism
and has, under mass pressure, carried out important reforms for the popular classes in terms of healthcare and education
Venezuela remains a capitalist country and the state machine a capitalist one
An International tied to such a state would not be a working class International

committed to the socialist revolution, but one run by bourgeois nationalists merely dressed up as socialists
under
Chávez and his bourgeois regime, then it would never be able to chart a course of class independence
it might even include such overtly pro-imperialist enemies of the working class as the Mexican PRI or the Argentinian Peronists
Chávez recently supported and solidarised with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s brutal repression of the workers, women and youth of Iran who were fighting for democratic rights and with Robert Mugabe’s prolonged attempts to do the same in Zimbabwe
an era of a severe, indeed a historic, crisis of capitalism, strategic alliances with the “progressive” or “anti-imperialist” or national bourgeoisies, not to speak of a common International of workers and such bourgeois nationalists, would tie the working class hand and foot to a section of capital.
It would block the road to the socialist revolution
repeat the errors
crimes of the Communist International under Stalin.

Venezuelan president addressed a real need. A need felt by millions of workers, peasants and poor struggling against capitalist exploitation and imperialist rule. In order to repel the bosses’ offensives, in order to prevent the governments making the workers pay for the crisis and also to prevent reactionary nationalist “solutions” to it, the working class does indeed need a new, fighting, revolutionary International
They need it to repulse the attempts to make them pay the costs of the crisis. They need it to bring an end to the series of imperialist wars of conquest and occupation. They need it to bring succour to the oppressed nationalities like the Palestinians and the Sri Lankan Tamils.
The working class
the oppressed
are threatened by a period of deepening chaos for the capitalist system
massive environmental destruction
new conflicts between the major powers as they try to re-divide the natural resources and the exploitable labour of the world