Dear Comrades,
The World Congress warmly welcomes the Ligue Communiste as the French section of the Fourth International.
The revolutionary upsurge of May 1968 in France, which you contributed so importantly to bringing about, has profoundly changed the political and social climate throughout capitalist Europe. For the first time in twenty years, this upsurge has put struggle to overthrow the capitalist system back on the immediate agenda in one of the fortresses of imperialism. It has helped to shake the apparent stability of bourgeois society in several other imperialist countries of Europe, speeding the development of a "pre-May" situation in these countries.
The revolutionary Marxists are convinced that what happened last year in France was not something exceptional but the beginning of a new revolutionary upsurge in all of capitalist Europe which will culminate in new explosions of an objectively revolutionary nature in a series of countries—and most of all in France itself.
You have already plunged into this process of renewing the drive of the socialist revolution in the imperialist countries. You have done so by the role that your members were able to play in the events of May and June 1968; by the way in which they responded to the Gaullist repression; by your success in launching a mass paper; by consolidating your influence in the high-school and university student millieu; by your systematic pioneering work among the workers. But most of all, you have become part of the process of renewing the revolutionary struggle by your conscious effort to build a revolutionary organization capable of capitalizing on the lessons which the vanguard of the French proletariat drew from the experience of May 1968.
You have shown the entire world that the new generation of revolutionists rising up today is no longer content simply to denounce the mistakes and betrayals of the traditional leaderships of the workers movement, nor to give advice to others. You have shown that this generation has gathered the strength and the needed dynamism to go forward at the head of a section of the vanguard of the masses and demonstrate the difference between a revolutionary policy and the reformist policy of the old leaderships.
This is the great contribution you were able to make toward strengthening the revolutionary movement on a world scale. This example is being studied and will be studied in many countries and on all continents. The revolutionary capital gained from your action will bring dividends to you and our whole movement for years to come.
The turn in the world situation, which we will discuss at our coming world congress, considerably increases the responsibilities of revolutionary Marxists throughout the world as well as the risks and the adverse pressures to which they will be subjected. Lenin's teaching to unite our ranks tightly in a structure based on democratic centralism which dynamically combines revolutionary theory and practice, program and organization, on a national as well as international basis will prove more indispensable than ever as a guide for us in this period.
But this new rise in the world revolution, the beginning of which now confronts us, also increases the opportunities for the revolutionary Marxist movement beyond anything open to us in the past. Breakthroughs like the one you have just achieved in France are not only possible, they are inevitable in several countries, if the revolutionary Marxist militants are able to seize the opportunity offered them to play a leading role in the action of sections of the vanguard of the mass movement.
We are not yet on the eve of mass revolutionary parties and a mass revolutionary International. But we are on the eve of a qualitative transformation of the revolutionary movement. In several countries, the revolutionary movement is entering a very important stage on the road toward the creation of mass revolutionary parties and a mass International. And the decisions of your congress have contributed in an important way to speeding up this process on an international scale.
Dear Comrades,
You are faced today with an immense responsibility. You have an opportunity which has not existed for decades, an opportunity to create a large revolutionary organization in a highly industrialized country. You have a chance to spread revolutionary ideas widely among a working class faced objectively with a historic opportunity to take power and organize a workers state based on the democracy of workers councils, a system capable of exercising irresistible attraction to the proletariat of all the other imperialist countries. On the success or failure of your effort may depend the outcome of the revolutionary upsurge in Europe, the fate of tens of millions of workers.
By remaining faithful to the revolutionary program of Lenin and Trotsky, you can successfully carry out this task—exploiting every opportunity to popularize this revolutionary program, propagating it among the masses, and patiently and perseveringly developing worker cadres capable of winning the confidence of their shopmates in the factories.
The Fourth International and the revolutionary vanguard of the entire world are observing your course. They have confidence in your ability to fulfil your revolutionary mission. They are proud of you and recognize in you the image of their own future, of the communist future of all mankind.
Long live the Communist League, the vanguard of the future revolutionary party of the French proletariat!
Long live the French socialist revolution!
The Ninth World Congress of the Fourth International (Third Congress Since Reunification).