May Day, a day celebrating the international struggle and solidarity of the working class, coincides this year with a tremendous advance of the liberation struggles in Southeast Asia. The lightning successes of the revolution in Cambodia and South Vietnam have dealt a heavy blow to the military, political, and moral positions of imperialism throughout Southeast Asia and even well beyond this geographic region. These victories are victories for the workers of all countries.
At the same time, the wave of workers struggles that has developed over the past several years in West Europe is continuing. In Portugal, where the dictatorship fell little more than one year ago, a prerevolutionary situation has developed; the Portuguese working class is beginning to challenge the very foundations of capitalism. This development, too, has its broader consequences. In Spain, prerevolutionary conditions are maturing and threatening to topple the Franco dictatorship. These developments could stimulate a revolutionary upsurge in several countries of capitalist Europe.
Today, there is an exceptionally serious conjuncture for the international capitalist system. This system has been shaken by the first generalized economic recession since the beginning of the Second World War. In all the major imperialist countries production and national incomes are falling, and more than fifteen million workers are totally unemployed. The toiling masses of many colonial and semicolonial countries have been hit even harder.
In this situation, the international bourgeoisie is exhibiting clear signs of a crisis of political leadership, whose root cause lies not in the absence of capable bourgeois politicians but in the contradictions that have accumulated over the post-World War II period, particularly the serious deterioration of the worldwide relationship of forces between capital and labor. The capitalist political, economic, and financial order after World War II, which was based upon the overwhelming world military and economic superiority of American imperialism, has been undermined (although the American bourgeoisie still retains its preeminent position within the capitalist world). The crisis of leadership of the bourgeoisie is immediately aggravated by the worldwide economic recession, which accentuates interimperialist competition and makes it more difficult for the various imperialist powers to agree on common economic and monetary policies. Furthermore, the combativity of the workers in the imperialist centers, particularly in Western Europe, remains unbroken; the workers have shown no willingness to accept capitalist solutions for the crisis.
But the aggravation of the overall crisis of the capitalist system does not mean that the system will collapse automatically or that the bourgeoisie will allow itself to suffer important defeats without reacting or preparing counterattacks. As long as the bourgeoisie continues to wield the decisive levers of economic, political, and military power it will fight for its survival even at the cost of new catastrophes that would far surpass the horrors before and during the Second World War. However, despite setbacks and defeats—and there will be many before a final victory can be achieved—opportunities for revolutionary successes will present themselves ever anew.
The bourgeois solution to the economic crisis is simple and straightforward: to make the workers pay the costs. But to impose such a solution implies an attack on the social and political conquests of the proletariat in the imperialist countries, threatening democratic and trade-union rights, including the right to strike. Their political strategies include, if necessary, the establishment of "strong states," or even military dictatorships or fascism. In the colonial and semicolonial countries, wherever its prerogatives are challenged, the imperialists are prepared for new wars of aggression, even at the risk of dangerous escalation into nuclear catastrophe. They retain their ultimate goal of destroying the USSR, China, and the other workers states and reintroducing capitalism there.
The preservation of the capitalist system entails the wasting of enormous unused productive capacity that could otherwise serve to satisfy the needs of millions of disinherited people. This callous and criminal disregard for human needs is most apparent in the decisions in several capitalist countries to limit fertilizer production and the area of land under cultivation in order to boost world market prices—with the inevitable result of creating famine in the poorest areas of the world.
In face of capitalism's attacks on the working class and the impoverished masses, the Social Democratic and Stalinist parties counsel class collaboration, particularly in the form of reformist experiences or popular-front-type electoral or governmental alliances with sections of the bourgeoisie. For their part, the ultralefts project sterile sectarian and adventurist policies. These false strategies undermine the combativity of the workers, divert them from the struggle to overthrow capitalism, and pave the way for capitalist reaction, including bloody dictatorships. Of particular help to the imperialists are Moscow and Peking, which in pursuing their goal of détente with Washington, seek to come to the rescue of capitalism whenever it is threatened by the workers.
Only the overthrow of the capitalist system and the establishment of a democratically planned economy on a world scale will permit a way out of the present chaos and will spare the human race new wars, famines, and dictatorships. Likewise, the development of the international socialist revolution will help the masses in the bureaucratized workers states to carry out a political revolution and oust the privileged bureaucracies that have usurped power there, and to march forward towards genuine workers democracy and worldwide fraternal building of a socialist society.
Only the revolutionary mass action of the proletariat and its allies in the oppressed and toiling masses will make it possible to overthrow capitalism and build a better world. This historic task requires the construction of mass revolutionary-Marxist parties capable of leading the coming revolutionary upsurges to success through the conquest of state power by the workers. That is what the Fourth International stands for.
On this May Day, the Fourth International calls on the workers of all countries to give a resolutely anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, and antibureaucratic character to their demonstrations and strikes. In particular, we call for mobilization around the following:
• For solidarity with the heroic Indochinese revolution. Mobilize against any renewed attempts by imperialism to intervene and rob the toiling masses of the fruits of their victory, paid for at the price of so many sacrifices.
• For solidarity with the Portuguese revolution. Bar the road to any imperialist attempts to strangle it through economic blockade or military intervention. Thwart all Social Democratic and Stalinist attempts to slow down and betray the struggle by maintaining it within the bounds of class collaboration.
• Oppose the criminal hand of imperialism, which threatens to unleash new wars of aggression in the Arab East, Africa, and elsewhere.
• Oppose political repression, police brutality, and torture, which are features of capitalist rule the world over. For the release of all political prisoners from Spain to Chile, from Sri Lanka and India to Brazil and Argentina.
• For a workers boycott of aid to the Pinochet dictatorship.
• Against the victimization of communist and socialist oppositionists in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the other bureaucratized workers states of Eastern Europe. Free all political prisoners in the USSR; stop the criminal policy of confining dissidents to mental institutions. Free the Chinese Trotskyists, revolutionists who still remain in prison.
• Beat back the employers' offensive against the working class. For the sliding scale of wages and the sliding scale of hours to counter inflation and unemployment. For the radical reduction of the workweek with no loss of pay. For the nationalization without compensation and under workers control of all companies that are subsidized, threatened with closure, or closed by the bourgeoisie.
• For the greatest fraternal solidarity among the workers of all countries. For a common international workers front opposing the multinational corporations. Against the Europe of the trusts, for the Socialist United States of Europe.
• End discrimination and victimization against immigrant workers and oppressed national minorities. Solidarity with the self-determination struggles of Palestinians, South African Blacks, the Irish people, the people of Euzkadi and Catalonia and other nationalities oppressed by the Spanish state, Blacks and Chicanos in the USA, and other oppressed nationalities.
• Support the worldwide women's liberation movement. Fight to win and defend the right of free abortion on demand.
• Support the struggles by soldiers for democratic rights and against the oppressive conditions they face in the bourgeois armies.
For workers power based on workers councils freely and democratically elected with the most scrupulous regard for workers democracy and for the diversity of tendencies and parties within them.
Forward against capitalism, fomenter of crisis, unemployment, and war; toward the world socialist revolution!