Military disaster stares Bush and Blair in the face in Iraq, where the toppling of the puppet regime in the Green Zone will result in the spread of revolution throughout the Middle East.
In Afghanistan the US/UK forces are also losing, with their CIA agent president Karzai incapable of venturing outside the capital, Kabul.
In Gaza, Israel has been unable to bomb and slaughter the Palestinian masses into submission. Rather, the world has recently witnessed their unity and defiance in the most spectacular fashion, with unarmed women using their bodies to shield their fighters from Israeli bullets and missiles.
The unity of the Iraqi, Afghan and Palestinian people exists in their insurgencies, which are revolutionary wars of national liberation.
The British trade unions, which have stood idly by while the Iraqi, Afghan and Palestinian masses have been slaughtered by the imperialists and Zionists, must be made to take action to achieve the immediate withdrawal of British troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and a total arms, trade and cultural boycott of Israel.
In The death agony of Capitalism and the tasks of the Fourth International (The Transitional Programme) the chapter entitled The Struggle against Imperialism and War states: ‘The struggle against war must first of all begin with the revolutionary mobilisation of the youth. . .
‘The chief enemy is in your own country. . . the defeat of your own (imperialist) government is the lesser evil.’
It was predominantly youth who led the two million-strong march through London against the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, and it was youth who erupted out of their schools and colleges a week later, climbing fences and locked gates to get out to march on Parliament, where they were batoned by police.
The building of a mass Young Socialists, youth section of the Workers Revolutionary Party, with its policy of ‘revolutionary defeatism’, is the key to mobilising the trade unions for strike action to bring down the Blair/Brown government and to bring in a workers’ government that will carry out socialist policies at home and abroad.
Colonial and semi-colonial countries, says The Transitional Programme, are part of a world dominated by imperialism. Their development has a combined character – the most primitive economic forms combined with the last word in capitalist technique and culture.
‘The central task of the colonial and semi-colonial countries is the agrarian revolution, i.e., liquidation of feudal heritages, and national independence, i.e., the overthrow of the imperialist yoke. Both tasks are closely linked to each other. . .
‘The banner on which is emblazoned the struggle for the liberation of the colonial and semi-colonial peoples, i.e., a good half of mankind, has definitely passed into the hands of the Fourth International.’
The chapter entitled The USSR and Problems of the Transitional Epoch calls for a ‘political revolution’ in the Soviet Union.
‘The USSR embodies terrific contradictions. But it still remains a degenerated workers’ state. Such is the social diagnosis.
‘The political prognosis has an alternative character: either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers’ state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back to capitalism, or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism. . .
‘There is but one party capable of leading the Soviet masses to insurrection – the party of the Fourth International.’
Sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International are being built and are growing rapidly in many colonial and semi-colonial countries and in the Soviet Union.
Lenin, co-leader with Trotsky of the Russian Revolution, the beginning of the World Socialist Revolution, said when the ruling class cannot rule in the old way and the working class cannot live in the old way, it is a revolutionary situation.
Today in Britain ‘innocent until proven guilty’ has been reversed by the new ‘police caution’, non-jury courts and trials are being introduced and ‘suspects’ can be held for 28 days without charge, with an increase to 90 days imminent.
Those the police arrest are being told plead guilty or lose your one third sentence remission and the police are being given the right to throw families out of their homes within 48 hours if they are deemed to be engaging in anti-social behaviour.
Under the new Mental Health Act people with a ‘personality disorder’ can be detained in secure units indefinitely. This creates the conditions for the indefinite detention of people who are judged to follow ‘mad’ ideas and act in a way that the state does not approve of.
Police-military dictatorship in Britain can only be averted by the working class overthrowing parliamentary rule and smashing capitalism and the capitalist state through socialist revolution.
The Transitional Programme warns Against Opportunism and Unprincipled Revisionism, saying: ‘The Fourth International sweeps away the quacks, charlatans and unsolicited teachers of morals. In a society based upon exploitation, the highest moral is that of the social revolution.
‘All methods are good which raise the class-consciousness of the workers, their trust in their own forces, their readiness for self-sacrifice in the struggle.
‘The impermissable methods are those which implant fear and submissiveness in the oppressed before the oppressors, which crush the spirit of protest and indignation or substitute for the will of the masses – the will of the leaders; for conviction – compulsion; for an analysis of reality – demagogy and frame-up.
‘That is why Social Democracy, prostituting Marxism, and Stalinism – the antithesis of Bolshevism – are both mortal enemies of the proletarian revolution and its morals.’
However, sectarians still try to hold the line for capitalism and imperialism.
Against Sectarianism states: ‘At their base lies a refusal to struggle for partial and transitional demands, i.e., for the elementary interests and needs of the working masses, as they are today. . .
‘They remain indifferent to the struggles within reformist organisations – as if one could win the masses without intervening in their daily strife. . .
‘These sterile politicians generally have no need of a bridge in the form of transitional demands because they do not intend to cross over to the other shore. . .
‘A correct policy regarding trade unions is a basic condition for adherence to the Fourth International.
‘He who does not seek and does not find the road to the masses is not a fighter but a dead weight to the party.’
There follows a clarion call: Open the Road to the Women Workers! Open the Road to the Youth!
‘The movement is revitalised by the youth who are free of responsibility for the past.
‘The Fourth International pays particular attention to the young generation of the proletariat. All of its policies strive to inspire the youth with belief in its own strength and in the future.
‘Only the fresh enthusiasm and aggressive spirit of the youth can guarantee the preliminary successes in the struggle; only these successes can return the best elements of the older generation to the road of revolution. Thus it was, thus it will be.’
Youth are suffering the most from swingeing education cuts and tuition fees, mass unemployment, the slave labour New Deal, homelessness, ASBOs, dispersal orders and systematic state attack in every form.
But these attacks only make this generation of youth the most revolutionary in history. The building of the Young Socialists as a mass organisation is the strategic task today.
‘The decay of capitalism deals its heaviest blows to the woman as a wage-earner and housewife.
‘The sections of the Fourth International should seek bases of support among the most exploited layers – consequently the woman worker. Here they will find inexhaustible stores of devotion, selflessness and readiness to struggle.’
Women workers stood bravely on the picket line for five long years at Hillingdon Hospital against the wage-cutting privateers, before their victorious return to work on their old terms and conditions.
The Hillingdon victory dealt a massive blow against NHS privatisation and also the reformist Prentis UNISON leadership, which worked might and main to sell them out.
Likewise at Heathrow Airport, the mainly women workers have not only had to fight the Gate Gourmet bosses and their multi-billion dollar finance capitalist owners Texas Pacific, but also the treacherous reformist Woodley TGWU leadership.
Shortly after calling Gate Gourmet ‘gangster capitalists adopting American-style union-busting tactics’ Woodley signed off a deal giving the company all it wanted.
The forthcoming victory of the Gate Gourmet workers should lead to the downfall of Woodley, and Barber, General Secretary of the TUC and co-signitory with Gate Gourmet bosses of the notorious Compromise Agreement.
‘The orientation of the masses,’ says the Transitional Programme, ‘is determined first by the objective conditions of decaying capitalism, and second, by the treacherous policies of the old workers’ organisations.
‘Of these factors, the first of course is the decisive one: the laws of history are stronger than the bureaucratic apparatus. . .
‘As time goes on, their desperate efforts to hold back the wheel of history will demonstrate more clearly to the masses that the crisis of proletarian leadership, having become the crisis in mankind’s culture, can be resolved only by the Fourth International.’
With revolutionary leadership the working class is more than capable of beating both the capitalists and the treacherous reformist bureaucracy.
Now the TUC must be made to call a general strike to defend the NHS and Councils of Action (Soviets) must be formed to defend hospitals threatened with closure.
The NHS was brought in after the Second Imperialist World War to stave off socialist revolution, now socialist revolution is the only thing that can save it.
Under the Banner of the Fourth International, the final chapter of the Transitional Programme, says of the Fourth International: ‘Its task – the abolition of capitalism’s domination. Its aim – socialism. Its method – the proletarian revolution.
‘Without inner democracy – no revolutionary education. Without discipline – no revolutionary action.
The inner structure of the Fourth International is based on the principles of democratic centralism: full freedom in discussion, complete unity in action.’
The Transitional Programme is the essential weapon in the hands of the Workers Revolutionary Party, the ICFI and the world’s working class for resolving the crisis of revolutionary leadership today.
It concludes: ‘The present crisis in human culture is the crisis in the proletarian leadership.
‘The advanced workers, united in the Fourth International, show their class the way out of the crisis. They offer a programme based on international experience in the struggle of the proletariat and of all the oppressed of the world for liberation. They offer a spotless banner.
‘Workers – men and women – of all countries, place yourselves under the banner of the Fourth International. It is the banner of your approaching victory!’
