What We Fight For

Twenty years ago, following the downfall of “Communism,” the rulers of the world proclaimed Capitalism victorious, that no alternative was possible, and that a “new world order” had arrived.

They believed a tiny handful of billionaires should act as they wished.  They helped the capitalists to:

• Put entire continents on rations




• Amass vast fortunes while millions starved




• Turn the fruits of humanity’s labor into their private property




• Bomb, blast, and blockade any country whose rulers defied their will




• Pump poisons into the atmosphere while the globe burns, the deserts spread, and the oceans rise




• Pollute our food, debase our culture, and divide our species against itself with racist and religious hatreds




• Make us worship their Dollar or their Euro, covet their branded banalities, and dream their consumer nightmares




• Slander, tear gas, beat, imprison, shoot, and bomb us if we dared to resist

Nevertheless, the masters of the world celebrated too quickly.  As banks collapsed and profit margins shrunk across the world, it seemed that the excitement about globalization, about expanding capitalism, was misplaced.  For the bankers, dreams turned into nightmares – but it is worse for the working class, the youth, and the poor.  Now they want us to pay for their crisis.

The anti-capitalist movement showed that there was a new generation of workers and youth willing to fight capitalism.  Now the world recession and the subsequent rise in unemployment, poverty, and exploitation will show even more people the need to struggle for a different system.

We say:

• The capitalists must be expropriated, with not a penny paid to them in compensation




• Abolish Capitalism across the globe, and create a world without class division, state repression, the oppression of women and subject races and nations.  What Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky referred to as Communism.




• All power must pass from the capitalist cliques into the hands of democratic councils of delegates from the working class, the small farmers, and the poor: directly elected by the masses and subject to instant recall; these councils must draw their support from the armed working class and its allies.




• The force of millions acting together must break up the resistance of the exploiters to the new social regime. Armed workers must forcibly break up the police and army that exist to support the rule of private property.




• Organize all production and distribution democratically and sustainably, without private ownership and the blind and brutal dictatorship of market forces.




• Overcome the social inequality and the underdevelopment of whole continents through the planned allocation of humanity’s resources: raw materials, means of transportation, communication, technology, and labor.




• The 21st century must become the century of human freedom!

There is only one road to this freedom; it is the road of class struggle and the fight against all forms of exploitation of workers, the farmers, and of the urban poor.  It is the fight against racism, national oppression, the oppression of women, the youth, and gays and lesbians.  We must give maximum support to all these struggles: to every strike, occupation, picket line, and demonstration.

We will aim to bring together in unions the vast numbers of un-organized workers, young workers, those in new industries, and those slaving away in “sweatshops” without the right to organize.

We fight against imperialism: the great global capitalist powers and corporations that use their vast military machines to pulverize peoples who resist them.  We support all resistance to them. We oppose every penny spent and every person sacrificed to its invasions and occupations. We demand an end to the US, the UK, and their NATO allies’ bloody bombing and enslavement of the Iraqi and Afghani people.  We support the Palestinians in their heroic struggle against national oppression and the racist Israeli state.

We fight the global financial institutions that starve the world: the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and World Trade Organization.  We will resist their plans: austerity programs, privatization, and free-trade treaties, which enforce submission to multi-national corporations.  We will chase their congresses and summits across the globe until their abolition.

We fight against racism, which divides us and acts as an excuse for deep-seated global inequality.  We demand equal rights for minorities, an end to all discrimination, and an end to the lies of the racists in the mass-media and press, which whip up violence against black people, Asians, Latinos, Roma, Jews, and other oppressed nations, religions, and ethnic groups.

We fight for full rights of asylum seekers and for the right of all to travel where they want.  The capitalists send their money around the world in search of the best returns, causing havoc and leaving devastation behind it when it pulls out without a moment’s notice.  Yet they deny the victims of capital the right of free movement.  We fight to break down all borders, to defend refugees and asylum seekers from the capitalists’ sinister lies.  When fascist and reactionary gangs engage in physical attacks on refugees and minorities, we will not flinch from physical confrontation to drive them back.

We fight to free women from systematic inequality, discrimination – whether open or hidden – consignment to domestic labor, sexual exploitation, low pay, daily abuse, and the denial of reproductive rights.  We struggle to eliminate the root cause of women’s oppression by creating a society in which the work of childbearing, cleaning, and cooking are carried out in a rational, planned way, not divided up among billions of families in which the woman is left to do all the unpaid labor.

We fight the catastrophe of climate change and global warming – resisting corporations that pollute the earth, governments that refuse to take action against the emission of greenhouse gases, and policies that put the profits of the big oil and auto industry before the very survival of our species.

We fight to organize young people to fight for their democratic rights: the right to vote at 16, for an end to child labor, and for fully funded, free, universal education, under the control of the youth themselves, not in the service of big business.  We fight for an end to conscription and militarization, which prepare the youth for slaughter in our masters’ wars.

We fight against reformism and the policy of the labor, socialist, social-democratic, and misnamed communist parties.  The reformation of Capitalism by peaceful, legislative means, through elections is impossible; its overthrow by the masses through force is vital.

We fight the control of the labor unions by bureaucrats, the privileged officials of the unions. These overpaid officials must not control mass organizations; the members should have full democratic control.  All officials must be elected, recallable, and removable at a moment’s notice; they must earn the average pay of the members they claim to represent.

We fight Stalinism, which was not Communism but a dictatorship over the working class by privileged, bureaucratic elites. Their socialized economies, however, did represent historic gains for the working class and poor; nevertheless, without a political revolution to establish democratic planning and workers’ control over production, it was doomed to eventually collapse.

We fight against the failed policies of the official communist parties: the nationalist policy of “socialism in one country” – the self-defeating policy that the revolution must limit itself to a non-socialist “democratic stage,” the policy that the working class must tie itself to capitalist forces in “patriotic blocs” or “peoples’ fronts.”

We declare our goals openly and reject all deceitful attempts to mimic reformism in the belief that history or the objective process will do the job that open and honest revolutionaries alone can perform. We oppose the strategy of centrist parties that zigzag between revolutionary words and reformist practice.

Sharing power with reformist, capitalist governments, relying on parties that blur the distinction between reform and revolution, is a recipe for confusing the workers at the crucial stage.  We fight for the establishment of revolutionary parties in every country.

We reject the passive propaganda of sects that oppose active involvement in the social movements and the daily struggles of the working class.  We will forge unity in action and a united front with all working-class forces against our common enemy, without renouncing our views or our revolutionary methods.

With the communist goal firmly in our sights, along the road of the class struggle, we propose the unity of all revolutionary forces in a new Fifth International, a party organized across national boundaries to fight for world revolution and a global workers’ republic: a World Commune.

The capitalists, for all their arrogance, are watching apprehensively as the forces assemble for the great battle of the 21st century: the battle to free humanity from their grip. Certainly, those forces have not yet attained the necessary degree of organization, discipline, and clarity to achieve this.  Nevertheless, they can and they will – if the new generation of working-class fighters can unite to build a new world party of social revolution.  For this to occur, revolutionaries must dare to proclaim this goal and openly rally the forces to achieve it.

That is what we Fifth Internationalists are doing.  If you agree with our goal and our methods, then we urge you to join us.