Towards a Fifth International

Each of the four Internationals represented an attempt to unite the fighting working class and popular forces of the world in a global political party. Each began with the aim of coordinating struggles between the workers of several countries, drew together (or attempted to draw together) parties and movements from different traditions and ideological starting points, but which were being compelled to fight together on the same historical and political terrain. Each sought to develop an international democratic structure, so that differences of analysis and programme could be not merely discussed or stated, but actually resolved at a higher level. In this way, Congresses and delegate voting enabled a higher level of unified action and coherence to be achieved not just through negotiations between established national leaders, but through open political struggle and voting by the delegates and activists of an international movement.

How can this be achieved today? We must fight at the London ESF and the WSF in Porto Alegre in 2005 for all anticapitalist, worker, peasant and youth organisations to unite in a democratic structure. This means that we must reject and overturn the so-called "Porto Alegre Principles" in the Charter of the WSF, which ban decision-making, democracy and political parties from the Forum.

What is more, we must utilise initiatives like the Assembly of Social Movements to propose permanent delegate-based, elected, co-ordinating bodies that can prepare the way for a structured Congress in which organisational and policy proposals can be debated out, amended and adopted.

In order to express the real historic interests of the working class movement, and to challenge the essence of capitalism, not just this or that expression of it, these movements will need to agree to struggle for political power. The new International will therefore be a political party or it will not be an International at all. But this emphatically does not mean that there would be the no role for a broader movement, no role for forums for encounters and debates, no role for unions or alliances with peasant initiatives.

But the need for alliances and forums cannot and must not be allowed to remain an argument against the formation of a world party in which the working class organisations express their political independence. The counter-argument that this stress on class independence will break the unity of the movement is an illusion. Class is a real social relation that cannot be "excluded" from the global movement through an act of will. If working class interests do not come to the fore in the movement, then the interests of other classes will continue to predominate: the interests of the capitalists, which the reformist policies of the Second and Third Internationals ultimately uphold; or the interests of the petit-bourgeoisie, which are so clearly expressed by the vacillating and inconsistent programmes, the petty maneuvering and intrigue, and the tawdry horse trading of the inheritors of the First and Fourth.

A strong working class international will not bring the era of the broad global movement to an end, but will deepen it and raise it to a higher level. While some arch-bourgeois elements might well withdraw, this would be no loss, certainly not when we take into account the tremendous attractive force that the movement would achieve by bringing the power of workers in action to the head of all its campaigns and initiatives...

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