Capitalism creates its own gravedigger, the modern proletariat. The working class both manual and white collar workers, workers in production, commerce, administration and social services makes up the majority of the population in all the developed capitalist countries and is a growing force in the Third World.

The working class, because of its concentration at the heart of capitalist profit making and its systematic exploitation in this process is the only class with both the historic interest and the objective power to bring it to an end and replace it with a higher form of social organisation which abolishes exploitation and social oppression completely.

Social Revolution
The replacement by of capitalist production for profit by socialist production, planned to satisfy human need can be accomplished only by a socialist revolution and the smashing of the capitalist state in every country. Only the working class, led by a revolutionary vanguard party and organised into workers' councils and workers' militia can lead such a revolution to victory and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.

There is no peaceful, reformist, democratic or parliamentary road to socialism#not because of the bloodthirstiness of revolutionary communists but because the bourgeoisie will never give up its power and possessions as a result of an election.

The Reformist Workers' Parties
The Communist, Socialist, Social Democratic and Labour parties are not parties of the working class serving its historic and immediate interests. Where they are parties with historic and organic roots in the organised working class but are bourgeois in their politics and practice, we consider them-as Lenin and Trotsky did as bourgeois workers' parties. They represent an historic organisational break from the bourgeois parties-a formal step towards class independence.

Where they are allied or affiliated to the trade unions or provide the bulk of the leadership of the trade unions, acting together as "twin pillars" of a national labour movement they are agents of capital within the workers' movement. They represent a massive obstacle to the winning of the working class to a mass revolutionary party.

Revolutionaries cannot overcome this obstacle simply by propagandistic exposure but must also utilise various forms of the united front, depending on the circumstances and their own strength. Included in these united front tactics can be critical electoral support, entry as a revolutionary opposition into the reformist parties and their auxiliary organisations (youth leagues etc.)

Wherever a substantial section of the proletarian vanguard are to be found in reformist parties, struggling against the reformist leaders, revolutionaries must join that fight whilst seeking to building a revolutionary faction to win workers away from reformism-left as well as right-and to the construction of a revolutionary party.

The Trade Unions
These basic organs of economic self-defence of the working class are almost everywhere dominated by a privileged bureaucracy -the "labour lieutenants of capital". These unions can only be transformed by a rank and file movement which ousts the reformist bureaucrats, democratises the unions and wins them to a revolutionary action programme based on a system of transitional demands which serve as a bridge between today's struggles and the socialist revolution. Central to this is the fight for workers' control of production.

We are for the building of fighting organisations of the working class-factory committees, industrial unions, councils of action, and workers' defence organisations. If the reformist bureaucrats expel masses of militant workers from the unions or if they neglect the great mass of the most exploited and oppressed proletarians in favour of an aristocracy of skilled workers then a revolutionary party will not flinch from organising new, militant, democratic trade unions, pledged from the outset to the struggle for socialism.

The Russian Revolution
The Russian revolution of October 1917 was not only the first successful workers' revolution but the only one so far that succeeded in establishing a workers' state based on workers' councils (soviets). It remains the fully valid model for the revolutions of the twenty first century. Its key lessons-the need for soviets, for a revolutionary vanguard party, for a workers' militia, for an armed insurrection have become a permanent and irreplaceable part of working class strategy.

However, isolated internationally, in large measure due to the counterrevolutionary actions of Social Democracy in strangling the European workers revolution, the young Russian workers state underwent a bureaucratic degeneration and then a political counterrevolution.

This was led by Joseph Stalin who represented a parasitic caste which took power, destroyed the old leaders and cadres of Bolshevism and crushed the last remnants of workers' democracy. At the same time this caste was not able, in the 1920s, to overthrow the economic gains of the October revolution. Rather it distorted them in the reactionary and utopian project of building "socialism in one country".

In the USSR, and the other degenerate workers' states that were established by bureaucratic decree, capitalism was destroyed but the bureaucracy excluded the working class from power, blocking the road to democratic planning and socialism. By the 1970s the parasitic bureaucratic caste had led these states to stagnation, crises and in the 1990s to destruction. The remains of the bureaucratic caste and in China a still ruling Stalinist party is restoring capitalism and seizing the socialised means of production. Trotsky's prediction that either the working class would destroy the bureaucracy or the bureaucracy would destroy the remnants of the socialised property relations is being born out- negatively so far.

Political revolution
As long as the gains of the working class remain in existence Trotsky's programme of political revolution remains valid. Indeed only political revolution can save the state owned industries, planning and the monopoly of foreign trade from destruction. In Cuba, China and North Korea we are for the smashing of bureaucratic tyranny through proletarian political revolution and the establishment of workers' democracy.

We oppose the restoration of capitalism. In times of war we unconditionally defend all workers' states against imperialism. In a series of states in Eastern and Central Europe and the ex-USSR pro-bourgeois governments came to power in 1989-91 and set about restoring capitalism in the now moribund workers' states.

Stalinism
Stalinism has consistently betrayed the working class from the 1920s to the 1990s. The Stalinist Communist Parties' strategy of alliances with the bourgeoisie (popular fronts) and their stages theory of revolution which obstructs the working class from fighting for power have inflicted terrible defeats on the working class world-wide. In China (1927) in Spain (1939) it helped brutal military dictatorships and fascist forces triumph. After the war in Indonesia (1966) and in Chile (1973) it did the same again. Only the destruction of Stalinism will prevent this record of betrayals being repeated.

Social Oppression
Oppression because of gender, sexual preference, colour, nationality or age is an integral feature of capitalism systematically oppressing people on the basis of race, age, sex, or sexual orientation. We are for the liberation of women and for the building of a working class women's movement, not an "all class" autonomous movement. We are for the liberation of all of the oppressed. We fight racism and fascism. We oppose all immigration controls. We fight for labour movement support for black self-defence against racist and state attacks. We are for no platform for fascists and for driving them out of the unions.

Imperialism
Imperialism is a world system which oppresses nations and prevents economic development in the vast majority of third world countries. We support the struggles of oppressed nationalities or countries against imperialism. We unconditionally support nationalists in these countries fighting to drive imperialist troops out of their countries.

But against the politics of the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois leaderships, we fight for permanent revolution – working class leadership of the anti-imperialist struggle under the banner of socialism and internationalism. In conflicts between imperialist countries and semi-colonial countries, we are always and everywhere for the defeat of the imperialist army and the victory of the country oppressed and exploited by imperialism. We fight imperialist war not with pacifist pleas but with militant class struggle methods including the forcible disarmament of "our own" bosses.

The LFI
The LFIis a revolutionary communist organisation. We base our programme - From Protest to Power - and or day to day policies on the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, on the revolutionary documents of the first four congresses of the Third International and the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International.

The League for the Fifth International does not claim to be a revolutionary International: rather it is an international revolutionary tendency of groups fighting to build one. The last revolutionary International (the Fourth) collapsed in the years 1948-51. The LFI is pledged to fight the centrism of the degenerate fragments of the Fourth International and to help buld a Fifth International and build a new world party of socialist revolution. If you are a class conscious fighter against capitalism; if you are an internationalist-join us!

Feedback