This year marks the beginning of the twenty-fifth year of the publication of the World Socialist Web Site. Prior to the launch of WSWS on February 14, 1998, was a full year of intense discussion and preparation.

This discussion was initiated by a report submitted by David North on February 1, 1997 to the National Committee of the Socialist Equality Party (USA). North proposed that SEP and the sections affiliated to the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) – cease publishing their print newspapers and establish a new, online publication, which would serve as ICFI’s voice.

North motivated his proposals with a comprehensive review of the political lessons of the ICFI’s struggle against Stalinism and pabloistic opportunism, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the collapse of all the old reformist workers’ and trade unions, the rapid development of economic globalization, and the implications and potential of the Internet. global class struggle, and for the building of the Fourth International as the World Party for Socialist Revolution.

The National Committee meeting, which was held on the weekend of 1 to 2 February 1997, was attended by the entire SEP. North’s report was unanimously accepted. But this meeting marked only the beginning of the political discussion, the technical work and the organizational preparations, which lasted for a whole year.

At the time of the meeting, David North was SEP’s National Secretary. He is currently National Chairman of the Board of SEP (USA) and Chairman of the Board of WSWS ‘International Editorial Board.

This report and North’s concluding remarks at the conclusion of the discussion maintain their significance, not just as historical evidence of the World Socialist Web Site’s political foundations. Both are also a demonstration of the relationship between Marxist theory and truly revolutionary practice.

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The basis for the party’s political work is the perspective developed by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) following the split with the Workers’ Revolutionary Party (WRP). The fourth plenary session of the ICFI in July 1987 represented a milestone in the development of this perspective. The plenum marked the renewal of theoretical work based on international perspectives, which for many years had been thwarted by the WRP. In the decade before the split at the end of 1985, the WRP had subordinated the work of the International Committee (IC) to the nationalist orientations of the British section and to the opportunism of the WRP. The systematic disorientation of the International Committee found its most devastating expression in the perspective resolution adopted by the 10th Congress of the International Committee in January 1985,

Let us recall the positions put forward by Slaughter in the document he presented to the 10th Congress. He wrote, for example: “The objective laws of capitalist decline now operate unhindered.” This was an absurdity. Objective laws can never operate “unhindered” in the real world. The operation of such laws is always broken through an incredibly dense and complex superstructure‘], as light is refracted through a prism. The contradictory movement of this superstructure, which in the final analysis derives its essential impulse from economic forces, is reflected in politics. But according to Slaughter, by January 1985, the world had reached the incomparable situation, that is, a situation in which the so-called “objective laws” of the capitalist economy no longer met any resistance. All the elements of social and political reality that intervened in these objective laws, or that these objective laws had to be broken through, were written out of existence.

This absurdity was the main theme of Slaughter’s document. In another passage, Slaughter wrote: “The capitalist class finds itself – and this is historically unparalleled, confronted with a working class which, despite growing mass unemployment, acquires revolutionary mass experiences as an undefeated class.” This sentence was, in every way, contradictory. If the working class was “undefeated,” how could Slaughter justify “growing mass unemployment”? When Slaughter wrote these lines, the nearly one-year-long British mining strike was on the verge of collapse.

The document included a series of demagogic proclamations, which 1) «The reality is that the decisive revolutionary struggles have already begun. Every single day is a movement in the continuous change of revolutionary development. It is not a question of something that builds for the future. ” 2) “The political struggles are struggles where the question of state power has already been raised directly and must be answered.” 3) “The proletariat of the United States, undefeated, enters into struggles of a revolutionary nature, at the same time as the rest of the world.” And 4) “The revolutionary class confrontation, the struggle for power, the development of a whole series of interconnected, unevenly developed but unified struggles for state power has now begun, not just expected.”

Slaughter’s document represented a complete misinterpretation of the objective situation. Just at the moment he trumpeted the “undeserved character of the working class,” the worldwide degeneration of the old working-class parties and trade unions had reached a very advanced stage. The result of this degeneration was soon to be seen in a series of political disasters and defeats, unparalleled since the 1930s.

All the wording used in this document served to justify the WRP’s adaptation to the Labor and trade union bureaucracies, and the subordination of the International Committee’s sections to the immediate practical needs of the British organization. This subordination was based on the premise that the growth of the International Committee should arise as a by-product of the WRP’s practical successes and achievements in the United Kingdom. As Healy once said to me, “As our star rises, so do yours.”

Now this was a simplistic view that ignored the problem of the united development of the International Committee as the World Party for the Socialist Revolution. The development of the International Committee was considered to take place under predominantly nationalist conditions. The development of the World Party was considered to be the result of the ICFI sections’ essentially unrelated achievements in their home countries.

We opposed these views, in order to restore the political authority of the International Committee. It was on this question that the WRP broke with us. In the fall of 1985, we asked Slaughter and Banda: “Did the Workers’ Revolutionary Party Accept the Political Authority of the International Committee? Was there a world party that dominated the national sections? ” By raising this question, we asked the WRP again to reaffirm their commitment to the fundamental programmatic traditions of the Trotskyist movement, which date back to the founding of the Left Opposition in 1923.

The WRP leadership opposed this. At a meeting of the International Committee in December 1985, Slaughter, Simon Pirani, and the late Tom Kemp voted against a resolution calling on the Workers’ Revolutionary Party to reaffirm their defense of the International Committee’s political program and traditions. This vote meant that the WRP had decided to break politically with Trotskyism. The formal separation came less than two months later.

In the aftermath of the split, ICFI’s theoretical work focused on analyzing the political and historical problems raised by the WRP’s degeneration and the party’s break with the International Committee. After this was achieved, ICFI devoted its attention to analyzing the development of the organization’s international perspective. At the fourth plenary session of the ICFI, in July 1987, we initiated a discussion on the changes in the essential structures of world capitalism, and their impact on the international class struggle. I recall raising the following question: “How do we envision the evolution of the socialist world revolution? What processes and contradictions will provide the basis for a new upsurge of the working class, and a renewal of revolutionary class struggle? “

Comrades may remember from Workers League Summer School in September 1987. My report was based on the discussion we had at the Fourth Plenary Session. I would like to refer to a number of passages from that report. For the first time, we focused on the emergence of two intertwined and very important phenomena: the globalization of production, and the transnational group.

I said that the most serious weakness of the document introduced by Slaughter to the 10th Congress of the International Committee was its inability to perceive at all “the new economic forms which the growth of the productive forces brought within the imperialist era: It is the internationalization of production, of a measure completely unsurpassed in history, and the emergence of truly global production, where the production of a single commodity is the result of integrated transnational production. The transnational or multinational group is an economic reality, which has profound implications for the development of the class struggle in all countries, and for the development of revolution. ” [ Fourth International , January-March 1988, p. 69]

Two essential conclusions were drawn, from our analysis of these new phenomena: First, we emphasized the inability of trade unions to respond effectively to globalized production, and the objective necessity for the working class to organize its political struggle against capitalism on an international basis . I argued: “Trade unions are not equipped to face this new situation. They can not defend the working class all the time they are exclusively waging the class struggle on national soil. In fact, the development of transnational organizations requires the international organization of the working class. American, Japanese, Korean or German workers are finding it increasingly impossible to conduct nationally isolated fighting. And just as the bourgeoisie is trying to organize production worldwide, the working class will be forced to organize its own struggles worldwide, thereby necessarily creating new and more advanced forms of organization. ” [Ibid., P. 73]

The existing unions could not fulfill this role:

The workers will have to develop their own international strategy, their own international forms of organization. But these forms cannot be created spontaneously. And they can not be created by the existing leaderships. It is an organic, historical creation that drives the creation of an international proletarian party. The working class must take the step into the twenty-first century. It can not be based on organizational forms developed in the nineteenth. The international party is not a phrase. It is a reality, based on this development. That must be at the center of our perspectives. [Ibid., P. 82]

These concepts were developed in the International Committee of the Whole’s 1988 resolution on perspectives. We wrote: “It has long been an elementary claim in Marxism that the class struggle is national only in its form, but that it is in its essence an international struggle. But, given the new nature of capitalist development, the very form of the class struggle mustassume an international character. Even the most elementary of the struggles of the working class raise the necessity of coordinating their actions on an international scale … the incomparable international mobility of capital has left the nationalist programs of all the different countries’ labor movements obsolete and reactionary. Such national programs are inevitably based on the voluntary collaboration of the workers’ bureaucracies with ‘their’ ruling classes, for a systematic lowering of the living standards of the workers based on strengthening the position of ‘their’ respective capitalist countries in the world market. ” [ Fourth International , July-December 1988, p. 4]

The ICFI insisted that a revolutionary program could only be developed on the basis of an international perspective, and that this view separated our movement from all forms of opportunism. We wrote:

Opportunism expresses, in one form or another, a definite adaptation to the so-called realities of political life within a given national environment. Opportunism, which is always looking for shortcuts, elevates one or the other national tactic over the fundamental program of socialist world revolution. The opportunist considers the program for ‘socialist world revolution’ to be too abstract, and tends to go for more concrete tactical initiatives. Not only does the opportunist choose to ‘forget’ the international character of the working class. He also ‘overlooks’ the fact that each country’s crisis has its essential origins in global contradictions, which can only be resolved on the basis of an internationalist program. No national tactics, no matter how significant its role may be in the party’s political arsenal … can preserve its revolutionary content if it is either elevated above, or that which constitutes the same, is detached from the world strategy of the International Committee. Consequently, the key historical contributions that sections of the International Committee make to the labor movement in the countries in which they operate are the collective and unified struggle for a perspective of socialist world revolution. [Ibid., Pp. 30-31]

Our position was attacked by Ray Athow of the Workers Revolutionary Party. As you can see, every crucial strategic initiative of the International Committee has been immediately condemned by the Torrance group. On the basis of more than a decade of experience, we can say that such attacks can only be welcomed, as a sign of the correctness of the International Committee.

Athow wrote that “the almost religious nature of this program is revealed by statements such as ‘The Workers’ League is adding to the United States ‘labor movement the strategy of socialist world revolution.'”

I answered this in the report to the 13th Congress of the Workers League, in August 1988:

Our scientific analysis of the epoch and the nature of the current world crisis not only convinces us that this [international] union of the proletariat is possible; but also that only a party which in its daily work is based on this strategic orientation can be rooted in the working class. We expect that the next phase of proletarian struggles will inevitably develop, under the combined pressure of objective economic tendencies and the subjective influence of Marxists, along an international course of development. The proletariat will tend more and more to define itself in practice as an international class; and the Marxist internationalists, who carry out political orientations that are an expression of this organic tendency, will cultivate this process and provide it with a conscious form. [Ibid., P. 39]

All of the work of the International Committee has endeavored to achieve exactly what is said in this passage, through its program of cultivating and practicing the conscious internationalist self-definition and the international struggles of the working class.

As the comrades know, this required a number of political struggles within our party, especially over the change in our attitude to the call for the establishment of a workers’ party based on the trade unions. Later, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, we recognized the end of the objective transformation of the workers’ bureaucracies into the open and direct instruments of imperialism, and insisted that the independent political mobilization of the working class must proceed, not through the protracted radicalization of the old bureaucratic organizations. by placing demands on their leaders, but partly through the working class revolt against these old organizations, and partly through the fact that the vast majority of disorganized and politically unaffiliated workers surrounded these reactionary organizations.

During the National Assembly in June 1995, where we introduced the proposal to transform the Workers’ League into the Socialist Equality Party, we summarized the lessons learned from the previous decade:

If the working class is to gain leadership, it is our party that has to take care of it. If a new road is to be opened to the masses of the works, then it must be opened by our organization. The problem of leadership cannot be solved on the basis of smart tactics. We can not solve the crisis of working class leadership with “demands” that others provide this leadership. If there is to be a new party, then we must build it. ” [ The Workers League and the Founding of the Socialist Equality Party , (Oak Park, MI: Labor Publications, 1996), p. 30]

This was the basis on which we and the other sections of the International Committee initiated the transformation of leagues into parties.

Our unwavering internationalism and strong opposition to the reactionary workers’ bureaucracies have separated the Socialist Equality Party from all different variants of petty-bourgeois radicalism. All the petty-bourgeois groups have at least so much in common: They insist that it is illegitimate to raise questions, let alone challenge, the authority of the bureaucratic unions over the working class.

The document written by Slaughter seeks to provide a theoretical basis for this subordination of the working class to the trade union bureaucracy. Slaughter rejects the basic theoretical principles of What must be done? , and he defines the bureaucracy as “the own vanguard of the working class” and condemns all efforts to set up Marxist politics against this “vanguard”. In the radical press one can find, in one form or another, dozens of references that echo Slaughter’s arguments.

The programmatic clarification of the Labor Party and the role of trade unions was crucial, but it must be understood in relation to our essential strategic orientation, the construction of the International Committee of the Fourth International as the World Party for Socialist Revolution. I would like to emphasize once again the basic point that we clarified in 1987, that the historical parties of the working class only emerge as the political expression of international social processes and changes introduced by objectively revolutionary developments of the capitalist mode of production.

The second international was the result of a colossal growth of the productive forces, driven by electricity, which gave rise to a new industrial mass proletariat. The third international arose as a result of the collapse of these parties, under the pressure of imperialism and the transformation of the world economy along imperialist lines. The Fourth International was founded in response to the betrayal of the Third, but its growth as the World Party was delayed, in the final analysis, by the post-war boom, which continued to provide financial support to the old opportunistic organizations. But the economic foundation began to disintegrate during the 1970s, and especially in the 1980s. By studying the changes in the world economy, ICFI continuously emphasized that the globalization of production, accelerated by enormous technological advances, would provide the essential objective impetus for the genuine internationalization of the class struggle, and for the growth of the Fourth International. That analysis, I think, has been clearly supported.

It is therefore, quite predictably, attacked by the Spartacist League, which condemns the International Committee’s emphasis on the globalization of production, and our insistence that the degeneration of trade unions is an objective and inevitable expression of this process. The Spartactists have come out, in the latest issue of Workers Vanguard , with a long article entitled “The Global Economy and Workers’ Reformism: How David North Embraces Karl Kautsky.”

They argue: “Today, it is intellectually fashionable to explain the sharp deterioration in living standards of the last generation of American working people as a result of ‘globalization’, especially the transfer of production by large American companies (‘multinational companies’ or ‘transnational’). , to low-wage countries in East Asia and Latin America. ” As they put together their own version of the Flat Earth Society, the Spartacists proudly declare that they will not acknowledge facts, which are indisputable.

As an example of my complete disorientation, Workers Vanguard refersa passage from a report I gave in 1992: “The collapse of working-class old organizations is fundamental, the product of specific historical and economic circumstances. That we understand these circumstances does not mean that we disclaim the leaders of these organizations the responsibility for what has happened. Rather, it enables us to recognize that the rottenness of leaders in itself is merely a subjective manifestation of an objective process. … The global integration of capitalist production under the control of massive transnational corporations, and the terminal crisis of the nation-state system, have shattered the fundamental geo-economic foundations on which the activities of the working class old organizations have been based.

The Spartacist League responds by declaring that it is wrong to relate the political guidelines of the trade union bureaucracy and the defeat of the working class to objective reasons. They state three reasons. First, they reject our emphasis on the globalization of production, denying that in the last 80 years there has been any significant change in the character of the world capitalist economy and production process, that is, since Lenin wrote his pamphlet, Imperialism . Secondly, they claim that attributing the decline of trade unions to objective causes will demoralize the working class, by pulling the rug away under its confidence in the efficiency of trade unions. Third, they insist that militant trade unions can persuade the capitalist class to change its orientations and make major concessions to the working class.

In support of their claim that globalization has had nothing to do with the decline of trade unions, Workers Vanguard declares : “Not during any of the great strikes of the 1980s, which marked the decline and defeat of the American labor movement – PATCO air traffic controllers, Greyhound bus drivers “The Phelps-Dodge Copper Miners, the Eastern Ailines Mechanics, the Hormel Meat Packers – played a significant role in foreign competition or the operations of multinational companies abroad.”

What a display of ignorance and intellectual failure! First of all, it does not seem to have occurred to Workers’ Vanguard that the crushing of PATCO in 1981 was carried out directly by the US government, which represents the political leadership of world capitalism. But let’s overlook this minor detail. It is safe to say that the supporters of the Spartacist League’s political guru, James Robertson, have no idea of ​​the nature of modern capitalism. They try to deny the relationship between the globalization process and the trade union crisis by claiming that a series of strikes were broken down in their entirety only by American companies.

The Spartacist League seems to believe that the political guidelines for companies are determined entirely on the basis of national factors. It is safe to say that the CEOs of the strike-breaking companies referred to by Workers Vanguard have a far better understanding of the dynamics and imperatives of the world market than these Robertsonists have. Every significant company is inextricably linked to the world market, regardless of the particular percentage of revenue derived from domestic sales. Efficiency, labor productivity, the rate of profit are all measures of global, not just national, standards. Capital circulates around the globe where investors seek the best return on their capital.