FIFTH INTERNATIONAL III

FROM LOUIS PROYECT

The Fifth International — let’s remember that the

• First International was established in 1864. Karl Marx with a number of other comrades called for the First International.

• Many years later Frederick Engels called for the establishment of the Second International at the end of the 19th century.

• And then at the beginning of the 20th century Vladimir Lenin with many other great revolutionaries established the Third International, and

• Leon Trotsky in 1936-37 established the Fourth International.

All of them had a context but remember that all four Internationals, experiments to unite parties and currents and social movements from around the world, have lost their way along the road for different reasons — some degenerated, lost their force, disappeared soon after their formation. But none of them was able to advance the original aims that they had set themselves…

Let us reclaim Rosa Luxemburg’s slogan “Socialism or barbarism”

Two Socialist Alliance members, Frederico Fuentes and Kiraz Janicke, are reporting on location from Caracas and participated in the conference where Chavez issued his call. I would strongly urge reading Fuentes’s article that appeared shortly afterwards and that adds much to the excerpt translated by Jorquera above (Jorquera was formerly a member of the Democratic Socialist Party in Australia which dissolved into the Socialist Alliance.) Fuentes writes:

Hugo Chavez’s call for a Fifth International on November 19-21, 2009, it is difficult to find his actual words. you can read them here

One of the more interesting contributions comes from Carlos Fonseca Terán
of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN)

But if nothing else comes out of it except the idea, that would be a step forward since as Chavez and Terán have correctly concluded, it is time for a brand-new movement.

We are living in a period in which very important attempts to break with sectarianism are being midwived by a growing economic and environmental crisis.

the idea of 21st Century Socialism and the call for a Fifth International forces us to think about the future rather than the past. It is about time.

FIFTH INTERNATIONAL II

the Fifth International must be “an instrument for the unification and the articulation of the struggle of the peoples to save this planet”
It calls for an urgent mobilization against the new imperialist offensive in Latin America, by the US administration and the Latin American Right
to oppose the new US bases in Colombia, to support, in particular, the mobilization of the people of Honduras against the new dictatorial regime.
but it is decisive to learn together the lessons from Stalinism and social democracy, so that the tragedies and the errors of the past are not repeated
* An anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist programme of emergency demands
* Unity of action of all the organizations
against the attacks of the governments and the capitalist classes
* Independence of the social movements

* Solidarity with all struggles of peoples against all the imperialist powers.
* The fight against oppressions

Is not a step forward
http://thoughcowardsflinch.com/2009/11/24/chavez-fifth-international-is-not-a-step-forward/

http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/fuentes281109.html

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