Re: Local/International Organization

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 11/1/03 5:42:45 PM Pacific Standard Time,
typefoundry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:

> I believe the Fourth International was a bad idea altogether,
> but if it had been a good idea, it would have had to base itself in a real
> social movement. This means that the Fourth International would have become
a
> formidable force in the colonial world because that was the curve of the
direction
> of the fight.

<I don't agree with that, I think that's coming to be true today, though.>

Comment

My meaning is that the Fourth International was formed during the era of the
revolt against the direct colonial system, as opposed to proletarian
revolution in the imperial centers of world capital.  These revolts reached 
their high
point with the emergence of the "Third Way" or Third World Movement and the
war in Vietnam. This era of history is gone and very few direct colonies exist
in the world political equation. If the Fourth International was a fighting
organization of class engagement the front of the struggle was in the colonial
world for the last fifty or so years.

The fight today in the less developed countries is proletarian revolution -
flat out.

That is to say it is time for the revolutionaries in the imperial centers -
especially America, to master their own history and the art of engagement so
that they may, in the course of a decade of two, place themselves at the head of
the world revolutionary upsurge. In yesteryear the concept of world
revolution was ideological at best and wishful thinking at worse because of the
concrete class alignment of earth. The majority of earth - the former colonial 
world,
was composed of small producers - the petty bourgeoisie, and the only avenue
opened was to attempt to draw the fighting colonial masses into an alignment
with the proletariat in the advanced imperial centers, in onslaught against
capital.

The best that could be hoped for was the defeat of a local detachment of
world capital and a political military alignment with the world of socialism as
protection from the onslaught of aggressive imperialism.

In America this concrete world class alignment was used to convert the
various ideological groups into basically support committees of the fighting
colonial masses or a support committee for the Soviet proletariat. In my 
opinion this
is a matter of history alignment as primary and politics and ideology as
secondary factors. The hard facts of politics is that one can only lead people
where they are already going. Screaming and advocating world revolution when the
world is not ready for world revolution only gets one isolated and
marginalized.

The only real basis for international unity of action is engagement with the
forces of evil - capital, within ones own multinational state system.
Organizations and groups involved in engagement never merge with or enter an 
alliance
with ideological groupings. In this meaning the Fourth International was an
ideological grouping, while the Third International was a fighting detachment of
people, even if one believes everything they did was wrong.

My own point of view is that the heroes of the Third International - brave
troopers, were simply historically limited, especially in America. No one could
overcome the anarcho-    syndicalism of our history, until the third
generation of communists had the industrial rug pulled from under our feet. 
Today it is
fairly obvious where industrial concentration lead - the dustbin of history.


Melvin P.


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