InternationaI and Internationalist

Fellow Workers!

So called globalisation is doing enormous harm to our class, not just in the poorest countries but all over the world. Everywhere unemployment and marginal-isation, wage cuts, pension and service cuts are on the increase.

Today’s globalisation is the latest step in the process of capital concentration.

1. Five or six gigantic industrial-financial centres operating across five continents either directly or indirectly control 75% of world production of goods and services. Today the big capitalists are able to split up entire productive processes. They can disperse the manufacture of individual parts to whichever country suits them best and reassemble them wherever they like.
2. The volume of speculative financial capital has swollen with the crisis in production and accumulation. Every day the financial speculators shift a far higher amount of capital around the globe than the value traded in goods and services. The result is a potentially explosive situation which is being criticised from all sides. This is the concrete reality of so-called globalisation. It is in capital’s interest to try and control it by standardising legal and administrative conditions all over the globe. This is what the World Trade Organisation (WTO) is trying to do through its more or less difficult summits. These regularly fail for various reasons, the first being the usual capitalist one: the clash of interests of one country or a group of countries against the rest.

All countries without exception, North or South, American, European or Asian, operate against the working class and - in the final analysis - against humanity.

The crisis of capital accumulation which began in the early Seventies has been able to go on without a dramatic resolution (world war or proletarian revolution) thanks to two key simultaneous events. These are:

• the microprocessor revolution, which has radically changed the whole process of production and distribution, allowing manufacturing itself to be globalised and above all bringing enormous increases in productivity;
• the implosion of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact - i.e. one of the victorious imperialist fronts that came out of the Second World War. For the time being this is increasing the success of the international bourgeoisie’s campaign against communism, against working class struggle, reinforcing the idea that capitalism can last for ever.

The USSR’s “real socialism” was in reality state capitalism. The great lie of Stalinism in the 1930s has been refined to a fine art by the Western bourgeoisie. Hundreds of millions of proletarians who saw the USSR as the beacon of socialism and who thus provided hundreds of thousands of victims of repression, found themselves...without a beacon, disorientated and open to capitalist blackmail: either under bourgeois democracy or in Soviet-style gulags.

All the forces which prospered on the basis of that myth - from the Communist Parties to the more or less red unions - have now become fanatical supporters of liberal capitalism and its needs. Today they have control of the state in many of the metropolitan countries, imposing the cuts in wages, jobs and living conditions that capital requires. Others on the left of the Communist Parties and the unions are reviving the old reformist policies, but with a new image, opposing the form globalisation is taking, and fooling themselves into thinking capitalism can be modified into something less devastating and “more humane” .

The result is that the capitalists are now carrying out a real war against the world working class, with hardly any resistance, and the march towards barbarism and the devastation of the planet meets no serious obstacles. Three quarters of humanity go hungry whilst a few dozen billionaires each possess more than the entire gross product of whole states. This is the most dramatic illustration of capitalist barbarism.

Fellow workers!

This Mayday 2000 sees the class struggle at a critical point, with the bourgeoisie attacking an unarmed working class

Workers have always had to struggle to defend their own immediate interests but in the past they also had the prospect of changing the world to one without bosses where production will be for the satisfaction of human needs, not profit.

Either we allow capitalism to continue hammering us and following the path to barbarism and war, or we revive our struggle and reorganise the political forces of the international proletarian revolution.

Fellow workers!

The international capitalist class, aided by reformist and nationalist forces, sets the workers of one country against those of another:

• it starts wars to force the proletariat to fight in the name of religious or ethnic fanaticism
• it paves the way for attacks on wages and working class living conditions by fuelling xenophobia and the division between native and immigrant workers.

Racism and xenophobia, like nationalism (all nationalisms) and religious fanaticism are the worst enemies of the working class. It is only through the revival of working class struggle against the capitalists that we can overcome these scourges.

We have to start from where we are at now. The international division of labour and the destruction of the traditional working class have created new conditions for the organisation of proletarian struggle. It is no longer possible, if it ever has been, to count on the union organisations (of any kind) to defend working class interests. Bargaining with a capitalism desperate for profit can only mean accepting its demands. Serious reorganisation of class action has to start from the bottom through elected and recallable delegates from workplaces and neighbourhoods; and with the creation of mass organs of struggle, in the struggle itself. Great examples from recent decades - like the Polish workers in August 1980 - show that if these organs linger on once negotiations begin, they inevitably become unions where the forces of compromise and reaction (Walesa) gain the upper hand.

It is therefore essential to have a revolutionary political organisation (the international party of the proletariat) working inside these class bodies, giving voice to the revolutionary programme, struggling against compromises (which mean accepting capitalist domination), and leading them in a revolutionary direction. This political force, the international party of the proletariat, must have settled accounts with the counter-revolutionary experience of Stalinism, with the social democratic inheritance of the Third International, and must have established the methodological, theoretical and political basis of the revolutionary programme.

The Internationalists who slowly but surely are gathering in the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party fight on this level and have already started the process which leads to the construction of the party. We call on working class militants and anyone who sees the political validity of this to join us in this difficult task since without it capitalist barbarism, aided and abetted, however unwittingly by radical reformists of one sort or another, will continue towards its victory.