This resolution on the world situation was adopted by the 18th World Congress by 109 for, 12 against, 7 abstentions and 4 no votes.
Introduction
Four years ago, it was impossible to predict how quickly the multicrisis, or convergence of capitalist crises, would gain speed. Donald Trump has returned strengthened to the government of hegemonic imperialism, this time with an openly neo-fascist or ‘pure’ post-fascist cabinet and project: the Heritage Foundation’s (one of the oldest and best-funded think tanks of the US far right) Project 2025, taken over by the Trumpist Republican Party. It represents the most radical sectors of US capital – in terms of neoliberal libertarianism and contempt for the institutions of the longest-lived bourgeois democracy: nominally Big Tech, crypto finance, venture capital, and the fossil industry, to which is added the now more lucrative than ever arms industry.
Given the depth and violence of the measures it is already applying at the domestic and international levels, the US administration under Trump-Musk is becoming a ‘bomb’ of maximum intensification of all the crises of the ‘multicrisis’ that we point out in this document. It’s a turning point, inaugurating a new moment in the world, even more turbulent, dangerous, and unpredictable. Trump 2.0 seeks to combat the relative decline of American hegemony in recent decades by projecting an expansionist, recolonizing, depredating, and annexing supremacy globally – one that would return the US to the situation of hegemony without competitors in the immediate post-World War II era. This impossible goal is the domestic and international meaning of MAGA.
The second-term Trump is much more actively harmful for American workers and people, for geopolitics, the global economy, and the international balance of power than his first administration. Everyone is his enemy: China in the first place, the UN, and with it all the institutions of the global order of the last 80 years, as well as the BRICS and any sovereign government in its path. Not to mention the American bourgeois-democratic institutions on which he intends to impose unprecedented change.
With a convincing electoral victory, control of Congress and the Supreme Court, a ministry of hawks and unqualified but loyal billionaires, Trump is serious when he threatens to retake the Panama Canal, seize Greenland, and annex Canada, as well as an explicit plan to sweep away Gaza and export its inhabitants to Egypt and Jordan, support the Israeli colonization of the West Bank, after having imposed the recent ceasefire on a reluctant but completely submissive Netanyahu. His administration is already carrying out humiliating and media-driven deportations (Latin American and Indian immigrant workers, labeled as bandits, arrive in chains in their countries).
The global leader of the climate deniers, Trump 2.0, has announced total incentives for the exploration and exploitation of fossil fuels (Drill, baby, drill!), has already destroyed the EPA (the US environmental agency), and ordered the cancellation of funding for all programs with which the US collaborated on ecological protection projects abroad. The rejection of even ‘green capitalism’ by these new imperialist factions in power concerns competition with China, which is dominant in alternative technologies to fossil fuels (wind, solar, and electric transport). Artificial Intelligence, which they are betting on as the fastest way to overtake the Chinese, requires gigantic energy resources and control over mineral resources.
To put ‘America First’, the neo-fascists now supported by essential sectors of US capital need climate denialism, absolute contempt for the terrible threats that ecological catastrophe poses to the lives of hundreds of millions of innocent human beings just as they need hatred of those who are different, of those who resist, of women, of LGBTQIA+. They need the virile-misogynist exaltation of force as a means of imposing themselves, the desire to subjugate China, Russia, Europe, and the whole world. But first and foremost, they need to defeat the trade union, student, community, feminist, black and indigenous peoples’ movements, pro-democracy NGOs, and even the critical US corporate press.
The Trumpist project also expresses the need for those factions of imperialist capital that he represents to prevent at any cost – even at the expense of the dismantling of the American state and the end of any remnant of social and pro-equality policy – the demographic transformation of the US into a racially, politically, sexually and religiously diverse nation, and the consequent political threat to the Wasp political and economic elite that this means. As Black Lives Matter analysts point out, this is a strategic reaction to the danger of the US population becoming no more majoritarian white, Protestant, or Anglo-Saxon, just like California no longer is (including Latinos, African Americans, mixed race, Asians, and native peoples).
Trump’s victory has stimulated extreme right movements in capitalist centers and peripheral or semi-peripheral countries. The people most directly threatened by hegemonic imperialism under Trump are the people of the Middle East, starting with the Palestinians. The new US administration is now becoming, together with the genocidal Netanyahu government, the vanguard of the global far right, with full support for the colonial project of the Zionist state. Israel is waging a massive terror campaign in an asymmetrical war, which is a qualitative leap in the 75-year-old war of apartheid, colonization, and ethnic cleansing. The first goal is to eradicate the Palestinian people through the dehumanization of Palestinians and a supremacist logic. But in country after country, refugees and migrants, environmental activists, Palestine solidarity activists, and others are being targeted by repressive measures adopted by right-wing (and other) governments, formally directed against supposed ‘terrorist,’ ‘criminal,’ and ‘antisemitic’ threats.
The Trump 2.0 administration also aims to isolate Iran further and attack it, along with Israel – one of the explanations for the US attempts to separate China from Russia and make separate agreements with Modi’s India, in a word to divide the current fragile BRICS. In the Middle East, neutralizing Putin so that he does not interfere in the area in exchange for pro-Russian peace in the Ukrainian War could mean a new and bloodier chapter in the US-Israeli expansionist war against Iran.
In Western Europe, the impact of Trump, his threats, tariffs, and blackmail had already pressured Macron to bring French military spending up to the 5 per cent demanded by the US. The threats of US imperialism against Greenland are, first and foremost, a threat against the population of Greenland, who are getting caught in a web of imperialist competition that was not of their choosing. But it is also a threat to the world, endangered by the greedy exploitation of Greenland’s riches and the militarization of the fragile Arctic. A single accident like the one in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 could signify irreversible damage to the world’s oceans. In the same way, a military clash in the Arctic could prove fatal for the global ecosystems. The short and medium-term outlook is a strengthening of general rearmament.
As the economic and geopolitical competition between the US and China intensifies under Trump, the world will become even more militarized; the nuclear threat will grow stronger, and conflicts and tensions will multiply in the wake of the contradictions heightened by the new imperialist project. Nothing will happen without significant contradictions. How will they disconnect the US economy from the Chinese manufacturing machine? If the central enemy is China – asks the New York Times - why then fight with those who could be allies against it (referring to India, Europe, and neighboring Mexico and Canada)? Why the generalized tariff war, which will raise domestic prices? If climate collapse has the potential to wipe out a large part of humanity, why encourage it?
It is the nature of capital in general and of these sectors in particular: faced with an unsurpassed reduction in growth and their rates of profit and accumulation after 2008, they embrace the ultra-liberal, warlike and fascist way out. Faced with the impossibility of remaining managers of a system that guarantees extraordinary profits for capital on all sides, they choose to take care of their own and impose their rules on the world. A global project for change of this magnitude and virulence cannot impose itself without significant resistance.
Even though the exploited are deprived of social and political alternatives from the revolutionary left, conflicts from all sides will intensify. The militants and sympathizers of the Fourth International must respond to this uncertain and challenging scenario with revolutionary understanding and action. The multidimensional crisis of capitalism, with its monsters – one of them in the White House – brings the planet closer to collapse and humanity closer to extinction. Our immense task is to collaborate in building the necessary emergency brake.
I/A multidimensional planetary crisis
The significant problems of humanity are as international as never before. The capitalist crisis has become multidimensional for human society and the Earth. There is a dialectical articulation of the different spheres, without hierarchies, between (a) the environmental crisis – which for some years now has been producing increasingly extreme climatic phenomena and shortening the deadlines for measures to ensure the very survival of humanity on Earth, (b) the period of lasting economic stagnation and its disintegrating social consequences, (c) the advance of the extreme right along the path opened up by democracies and neo-liberal governments in crisis, (d) the intensification of the dispute for hegemony in the inter-state system between the United States and China; (e) the dangerous multiplication and intensification of wars.
The crisis of neoliberal globalization has opened a new moment in the history of capitalism. A period qualitatively different from the one we have lived through since the establishment of neoliberal globalization at the end of the 1970s, and particularly more conflictual from the point of view of the class struggle and the struggle between states compared to that opened 33 years ago with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the bureaucratic regimes of Eastern Europe.
1.1. What distinguishes the current multicrisis?
There are two significant differences between the present situation and the convergence of crises in the early 20th century (the ‘age of catastrophes’ 1914-1946). The most immediately threatening facet, which did not exist a hundred years ago, is the ecological crisis provoked by two centuries of predatory capitalist accumulation.
Based on burning fossil fuels and increasing consumption of meat and ultra-processed food, the capitalist economy is rapidly exacerbating the climate crisis, which shrinks humanity’s future on the planet. Melting poles and glaciers are accelerating the rising seas and the water crisis. Agribusiness, mining, and hydrocarbon extraction are advancing (not without resistance) to tropical forests, essential for maintaining the planet’s climate systems and biodiversity. The effects of the climate crisis will continue to manifest themselves violently, destroying infrastructure, agricultural systems, and livelihoods and causing massive human displacement.
None of this will happen without a jump in social conflict.
The second element (quite different from a hundred years ago) is the absence of mass revolutionary alternatives. In fact, during ever-more rapid changes, the problem of the absence of a credible alternative to capitalism in the eyes of the masses, the lack of an anti-capitalist force or set of forces leading economic and social revolutions, becomes more serious. The precarious moment for capitalism and its inter-state system is also that of a significant political and ideological fragmentation of the social movements and the left.
1.2. Crises strengthen each other: wars, social reproduction, and algorithms.
A multidimensional crisis is not a simple sum of crises but a dialectically articulated combination. Each sphere impacts on and is affected by the others. The link between the war in Ukraine (before the conflict in Palestine broke out) and economic stagnation has aggravated the critical food situation of the world’s poorest, with over 250 million more hungry people than ten years ago (2014-2023). The flow of people displaced by wars, climate change, the food crisis, and the spread of repressive regimes is increasing, especially among the poorest countries.
One cannot explain the growing regional and international military tension, as well as the rapid militarization of government discourse and budgets or the recent growth of the arms industry, without taking into account this exacerbation of competition in global markets, the intensification of neo-colonial extractivism and the struggle for strategic minerals (whether for the production of electric vehicles or the latest generation of weapons or to feed the digital economy and artificial intelligence monster). No region of the planet is without its high-tension zone: the Middle East, the China Sea, and Africa are good examples of this. Nor can the sequence of ecocides on the five continents and in all the seas be explained if not linked to this upsurge in inter-capitalist and inter-imperialist competition, which once again shows that the arms economy – especially after the Second World War – is a constituent and permanent element of imperialism in all its forms, geographies and times.
Climate change, the impoverishment of the land, the grabbing of the most fertile territories by the oligarchies, together with the fall in the share of wage earners in national incomes, the abandonment and deterioration of essential services (health, education, water, etc.) by the neoliberal states, have generated an increase in inequality between individuals – but above all a greater distance in access to income, goods and wealth between countries, social classes, communities and peoples, and between men and women, racialized people and others.
The disastrous environmental and economic outlook has pushed significant bourgeois factions in different countries to abandon the project of formal democracy as the best way to obtain increasing profits. Increasingly essential business sectors are shifting to support authoritarian alternatives within liberal democracies, resulting in the strengthening of right-wing fundamentalist movements and the rise of extreme right-wing governments on all continents. There is a fracture – the lasting nature of which remains to be seen – between bourgeois factions within the various countries, with one part of the ruling class turning to the extreme right and another remaining with the bourgeois-democratic project. The most notable example of this split between capitalist factions is the polarization between Trumpism (which has taken the Republican Party by storm) and the Democratic Party in the United States.
The expansion of hyper-individualistic neoliberal sociability, combined with the use of social networks by the far right and now Artificial Intelligence (AI), further encourages depoliticization, fragmentation of the working classes, and conservatism. Digital technologies, in addition to the impact on employment and the organization of wage earners, also contribute to deepening the subordination-customization, if not the direct reduction, of the small and medium peasantry, considered to be the primary food producers in the world. Today’s neoliberal capitalism introduces digital devices and algorithms as new productive forces, giving rise to the emergence of labour on digital platforms – sometimes called uberization and which already occupies more than two hundred million workers – and to various social relations mediated exclusively by the market.
On the other hand, by continuing to attack what remains of welfare states violently, imposing the super-exploitation of industrial and service workers and particularly care and social reproduction work, the system throws women, particularly women workers and, even more violently, racialized women (Afro-descendants, Roma, descendants of indigenous peoples, Africans and South Asians in the Global North) into a dilemma between surviving (badly) or fighting back. Neoliberalism keeps women in the formal labor force (in the North) or less structured and more informal forms (across the globe but particularly in the Global South), further reducing the wages and incomes of those in wage labour (whether in industry, services, or commerce). The ideology of the return to the traditional family, a constituent of the neoliberal matrix and taken to the extreme by far right-wing fundamentalisms, serves to burden all working women with the tasks of caring for children, the elderly, the sick, and disabled people. This kind of work used to be covered by the welfare state, especially in advanced capitalist countries, but now suffers brutal cutbacks.
The formation of geopolitical blocs also has consequences for sexual politics: US allies such as Taiwan and Thailand are introducing same-sex marriage, while China is rolling back previous advances for LGBTQI+ people, and a US adversary like Iran is sponsoring an axis hostile to sexual emancipation (although there are indeed members of the US-led bloc, from the Vatican to the Saudi kingdom, who are equally reactionary in this area).
With social reproduction networks in crisis, more so in neo-colonial countries than in the metropolises, neoliberal society is domesticating (returning to the family) and racializing (handing over to non-whites, blacks, Indigenous women, and immigrants) the tasks of care but does not take responsibility for social reproduction as a whole.
1.3 The economic and social situation
We are still living under the impact of the tremendous economic crisis opened by the financial crash of 2008, which began the previous year and opened a world recession. The neoliberal capitalist mode of operation can no longer guarantee the growth, profit, and accumulation rates of the late 1980s and 1990s. Secondly, geopolitical polarization, aggravated by wars and the rise of reactionary nationalism – immensely reinforced by the arrival of Trump 2.0 – is shaking super-internationalized value chains, production, and international trade.
Neoliberal globalization is in crisis. However, none of the great difficulties of neoliberal capitalism have meant any change in the financialized nature – led by finance capital – concentrating wealth in the accounts of fewer and fewer companies and individuals while throwing more and more human beings into poverty. Although in a crisis, capital and its neoliberal economic regime continue to produce inequality between countries, regions, and within countries. In 2024 alone, the system has created 204 new billionaires, while the number of people living in poverty, on less than $6.85 a day, remains unchanged since the 1990s. In 2023, the wealthiest 1% of the imperialist countries extracted US$ 30 million per hour from the dependent or semi-colonial countries – a result fundamentally of the financial system, which imposes on the governments of the world the unconscionable adjustments, indebtedness, cuts in wages, social rights and the commodification of agriculture.
The digitalization of production and consumption processes, which has been going on for 30-40 years and was the basis of the so-called neoliberal restructuring of production, is now intensifying with the accelerated introduction of AI. Implementing AI is capital’s bet for recovering profit and accumulation rates, seeking a leap in labor productivity and profit rates. Again, this will reduce employment, make jobs and workers more precarious, and give Big Tech more and more power.
In addition to their recessionary nature, neoliberal economic policies – based on the predominant interests of finance – shake the living standards of the working masses through the indebtedness of working people and the dependent countries to the big imperialist private banks or IMF and the World Bank. The raising of interest rates to fight inflation increases sovereign and private debts, creating the conditions for new crises of default, as already erupted in Sri Lanka, Ghana, and Zambia, or avoided in extremis through emergency loans granted by the IMF and China to dozens of countries such as Argentina, Nigeria, Pakistan, Egypt, Kenya, Bangladesh, and Tunisia. Corporations’ unbridled search for ‘crisis protection’ (i.e., maintaining profits) encourages financial speculation. This speculation threatens the system with waves of bankruptcies, like in 2008.
II/ The far-right challenges ‘neoliberal democracies’, workers and the oppressed
Since the post-2008 depression, but more clearly since 2016 (Brexit and Trump’s first victory), new far-right forces have been advancing on states and societies. Their global vanguard today is the genocidal Benjamin Netanyahu and his racist colonial settler role in the Middle East. In addition to growing strength in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, the far right threatens the United States and the world with Trump returning to the White House.
The far right of the 21st century has strengthened and multiplied with electoral victories and then with anti-immigration measures and restricting freedoms and social rights. They present themselves as ‘counter-systemic’ (against political systems that they hypocritically identify with worsening living conditions, corruption, and insecurity), although they are not at all. They are the ultimate expression of the defence of capitalism in its current stage. To ensure the implementation of their ultra-liberal policies or, in some cases of xenophobic nationalism, they use reactionary traditionalist discourses and the most violent racism, usually in fundamentalist religious disguises – Pentecostal Christianity in the United States and Brazil, Hinduism in India, Islamism in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran.
Taking advantage of their extensive and early experience in the use of increasingly gigantic and unregulated social networks, they declare war on the rights of workers in general, but especially on the rights of immigrants, women, LGBTQIA+ people, disabled people, internal ethnic or religious minorities (or majorities), racialized peoples in general, and environmental activists. With their scientific denialism of all kinds and their use of conspiracy theories, they are in open war against environmental movements and anyone who believes in climate change.
Like their classic Nazi ancestors, they are essentially racist towards different ethnic groups – such as second, third, and fourth-generation migrants in Europe and black people, Asian, Arab, and Latino populations in the United States, and often particularly violent towards the most recent waves of migrants, whom they blame for employment and insecurity problems. In Southeast Asia, the ‘chosen enemy’ is minorities of a religion other than the majoritarian one, like Modi – with the country’s two hundred million Muslims.
Although the far right in power today does not tend to establish classic fascist regimes based on the model of the 1930s, the far-right governments of India, Turkey, Hungary, and other countries have managed for years to combine the apparent forms of bourgeois democracy with effective repression of the independent media, opposition parties, and movements, as well as critical intellectuals. This trend is intensifying. Russia’s war against Ukraine has led to a fierce crackdown on anti-war voices and dissent in general. Repression also targets sexual and gender dissent, as laws against ‘gay propaganda’ become more savage and are adopted in other countries - while in countries such as Indonesia and Turkey, the space that had opened up for LGBTQI communities has recently been closed. In Israel, the neofascist government denounces all the opposition to the genocidal war on Gaza as ‘antisemitic’ and consequently represses it. The pro-Israeli governments of North America and Europe conduct similar campaigns.
This combination of extreme neoliberalism with fundamentalist traditionalism and racism is deeply functional to the capitalist system: it is the expression of the search of broad bourgeois factions in the North and South for a ‘backward’ economic-political and ideological way out of the structural crisis of the system. These capitalists go on to support those who promise to introduce an authoritarian rule, destroy rights (of course, any vestige of a social welfare state), return women to the domestic sphere (i.e., to the simple reproduction of labor power), push racialized people and LGBTIQA+ people back to the most brutal oppression and invisibility, expulse migrants and their descendants, to control mass movements with an iron fist, to impose brutal adjustments and dispossessions, in particular of what remains of peasantry and communal societies. All this is to achieve a super-exploited majority society, ideally free of conflict, in which capital can recover its lost profit and accumulation rates.
The rise and advance of this constellation of radical rightists is the result of decades of crisis of (neoliberal) democracies and their institutions (including all traditional parties, including ‘left’ parties, which have administered states under neoliberalism). These governments and regimes committed to neoliberalism have increased inequalities, corruption, and insecurity, as well as misery, wars, and climate disasters – which encourage migration from the South to the North. They have given unsatisfactory answers to workers’ and people’s aspirations. In this way, they have helped the property-owning middle classes, the privileged salaried sectors (white-collar workers), and even some sections of the most vulnerable classes to turn to authoritarian alternatives.
The new extreme right is the complex result of the disintegration of the social fabric imposed by 40 years of neoliberalism, the desperation of impoverished social sectors in the face of the worsening crisis since 2008, combined with (1) the failures of the ‘progressive neoliberal’ right and the ‘alternative’ represented by the social-democracies (social-liberalism and ‘progressivism’ in the South and East) to curb impoverishment, job insecurity, insecurity in the face of crime and (2) the generalized lack of popular revolutionary alternatives that present a radically opposite way out.
The far right can be particularly insidious when it presents a ‘modernized’ policy on gender and sexuality, claiming a new commitment to women’s emancipation and tolerance towards LGBTQI+ people while viciously attacking some of the most vulnerable groups. Transgender people are the main targets of the far right, for example, the US Republicans, Bolsonaro, and Milei, while parental and adoption rights for same-sex couples are under concerted attack from, for instance, Meloni’s government in Italy. Resistance to these attacks must be an integral part of the solidarity against the far right.
This situation presents the Fourth International with the task of fighting, on all terrains, against the forces of the far-right, authoritarianism, and traditionalist neo-fascism, but also against the neo-liberal and reactionary policies that gave rise to them and continue to mark them.
III/ The workers, the oppressed sectors, and the world’s people responded with mobilizations. And now?
We have had in this century at least three waves of democratic and anti-neo-liberal struggles (the turn of the century, 2011 and 2019-2020), a renewed women’s movement, the anti-racist movement that emerged in the United States, and a constellation of struggles for climate justice across the globe. However, these significant struggles have objectively confronted not only neoliberal capitalism and its governments but also the dilemmas of the structural reorganization of the world of work.
The working class, in the broad sense (wage earners), is currently preparing to face the impacts of artificial intelligence (as the resistance in the US screenwriters’ and actors’ strike has shown). It remains a lively and numerous force — large industrial complexes with tens to hundreds of thousands of workers across China and Southeast Asia. However, in the context of the loss of social weight of the industrial working class in much of the advanced capitalist world, the oppressed sectors, the youth, and the new strata of precarious workers are not yet organized permanently and, in general, find it difficult to unify with the weakened trade union movement. At the same time, the traditional ways of organizing unions fail to meet the needs of today’s precariat adequately. For their part, peasants in Africa, South Asia (India and Pakistan), and Latin America are courageously resisting the invasion of imperialist agribusiness. Indigenous peoples, who make up 10% of the world’s population, resist the advance of capital over their territories and defend the commons essential for all humanity. The defeat of the Arab Spring, the Syrian tragedy, and now the expansionist advance of Zionism will delay and further delay the resilience of the peoples of the Middle East; despite this, we have witnessed the heroic uprising of the women and girls of Iran.
After the 2008 crisis, mass mobilizations reemerged all over the world: Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Plaza del Sol in Madrid, Taksim in Istanbul, June 2013 in Brazil, Nuit Debout and yellow jackets in France, mobilizations in Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, Santiago, Bangkok. A second wave of uprisings and explosions came between 2018 and 2019, interrupted by the pandemic: the anti-racist rebellion in the US and UK, with the death of George Floyd, women’s mobilizations in many parts of the world, revolts against autocratic regimes such as in Belarus (2020), a mass mobilization of Indian peasants that triumphed in 2021. The year 2019 witnessed demonstrations, strikes and popular upraisings in more than a hundred countries: in six cases, governments were successfully overthrown and in two cases their composition was completely changed by replacing all the ministers..
In the aftermath of the pandemic, the three months of resistance in France against Macron’s pension reform and the workers’ and students’ popular uprising in China that helped to defeat the CCP’s repressive Zero Covid policy stand out. In the USA, the dprocess of unionization and struggle continues in the new branches of production (Starbucks, Amazon, FedEx), with the emergence of new rank-and-file anti-bureaucratic processes and strikes by workers in education and health. In 2022 and 2023, the significant strikes of Hollywood screenwriters and actors stand out, in addition to the historic and, so far, victorious strike of the workers of the three big car manufacturers in the country.
Of course, the current correlation of forces is not offensive at all, as it was not during the pandemic – which, however, gave way to Black Lives Matter, so crucial for Trump’s defeat in 2020, and to the French strike against the pension reform – so fundamental to explain the remarkable electoral responsiveness of the French left in 2024. Pointing out, correctly, that the previous wave of struggles has declined and that the rising far-right is a dangerous and fundamental enemy today (correct statements) cannot lead us to conclude that the exploited and oppressed of the world are defeated and crushed in the long run. On the other hand, to say that we are not historically defeated does not mean to say that we are in an offensive or revolutionary situation. Beyond ‘offensivism’ and defeatist impressionism, there is the realistic bet on the capacity of the exploited and oppressed to continue resisting capital and its evils, fighting for their survival and better living conditions amid wars, climatic convulsions, and adjustment plans, although under new forms of organization and with more difficulties than before.
IV/ An era of war and fast geopolitical changes. Towards a reconfiguration of world order
The confrontation between the US, the dominant imperialism, and China, an emerging imperialism, dominates the international geopolitical situation. A distinctive feature of this conflict is the high degree of economic interdependence between the two, a legacy of neoliberal globalization. Globalization as we knew it until 2008 is no longer, but neither is de-globalization. Geopolitical conflicts are a symptom of this structural crisis, and here, too, we are entering unprecedented territory.
The disorder under construction makes the world much more conflictual and dangerous. A few years ago, instability and apparent geopolitical chaos worsened with the Trump 1.0 administration and its concentration on the economic war with China. Still, it took a first qualitative leap with the invasion of Ukraine by Putin’s Russia in February 2022 and a second leap forward with the war provoked by Israeli expansionism, openly supported by the US and less openly by European imperialism. The situation has escalated with the strengthening of NATO to answer Putin and the financial and military support of the US for Netanyahu’s goal of redrawing borders throughout the Middle East. Thus, the war industry makes billions of dollars in profits at the cost of the blood of hundreds of thousands of people.
Despite its role in NATO, its leadership, and its support for Israel’s imperialist war, there is a relative weakening of US hegemonic power from a historical point of view – and there is nothing more dangerous than a challenged hegemon – because it now has economic and geopolitical competitors. New imperialisms assert themselves, such as Russia, or emerge in less warlike forms, such as China. It is a continuous reconfiguration in a global context of immense instability, with nothing consolidated. In any case, the unipolarity of the bloc under US leadership (after the collapse of the USSR) no longer exists. India seeks to assert itself as a regional (or at least sub-imperialist) power by playing a double game: it maintains a political alliance with the US and a rivalry with China but nurtures an intense relationship of economic (oil) and technological (war industry) cooperation with Russia and participates in BRICS.
4.1. Wars and geopolitical tensions are multiplying.
We are witnessing the proliferation and intensification of wars of all kinds: civil wars, inter-imperialist wars, tensions, and imperialist wars of colonization (such as that of Israel in its neighborhood). The war drums are beating in Europe and throughout the parts of the Middle East as yet untouched by Israeli expansionism. In East Asia, geopolitical tensions are growing, and China’s claims to the South China Sea flout the maritime rights of other nations. Military tensions in the Korean Peninsula, the Taiwan Strait, and the South China Sea have continued and even worsened. It seems China never wants does not want an outbreak of war in these three regions. Still, of course, we cannot rule out the possibility that unexpected events – including the drastic change in the domestic situation in China – could lead to military tensions becoming too extreme and even resulting in a regional war.
China is accelerating its military buildup by expanding its navy and deploying into outer space to compete with the US and Japan. It has made deliberate provocations, especially of Philippine vessels, in a policy of indirectly defying the US.
The US aims to maintain its military dominance over the strategically important region and contain China. In a slight reversal of President Duterte’s course, the Philippine government of Marcos Jr. has moved closer to the US. It is urgent to demilitarize the South China Sea. With the US no longer able to strengthen its military presence in East Asia, Japan has partly taken over the military role that the US played, rapidly increasing its military expenditures, strengthening its armaments, militarizing the Nansei Islands chain rom southwestern Kyushu to northern Taiwan, and promoting the integration of the Japanese and the US armed forces. This situation resulted from pressure from US imperialism and Japanese imperialism’s desire for a more potent military force to defend its interests in East and Southeast Asia.
Since the beginning of 2024, tensions between North and South Korea have again escalated after a period of dialogue. North Korea has abrogated the 2018 inter-Korean agreement to reduce tensions and, in October 2024, amended its constitution to designate the South as a hostile state. The North and South Korean governments, backed by China and the US, are taking a confrontational hard line.
The nuclear threat is becoming more concrete. There are already four localized nuclear hotspots. One is in the Middle East: Israel. Three are in Eurasia: Ukraine and Russia in Europe, India and Pakistan, and the Korean peninsula. The latter is the only one that is active. The North Korean regime regularly tests and launches missiles in a region where the US Naval Air Force is stationed and where the most significant US base complex abroad is located (in Japan, especially on the island of Okinawa).
4.2. US: the hegemon in crisis tries to reassert itself
The emergence of rivals has not detracted from the nature of the United States as the wealthiest and most militarily powerful country, with unprecedented war power and the bourgeoisie most convinced of its ‘historic mission’ to dominate the planet at any cost and therefore to wage war for the continuity of its hegemony. Indeed, it is Uncle Sam who continues to have the last word in the Western imperialist ‘collectivity’. The point is: even unbeatable in coercion, the United States has, as never before (at least since the Vietnam War), a severe problem: an imperialist hegemony, like all hegemonies, can only be sustained if it also convinces its allies and its domestic public. The US has serious issues of external legitimacy, but also, more seriously, of internal legitimacy, elements that did not exist in the previous period of supposed ‘unipolarity’ and ‘war on terror’ in the 1990s. Its business, bureaucratic, and political elite is more divided than ever over the project of domestic domination. US capital must confront the imbroglio of unravelling the value chains that have deeply linked the US economy to China’s for the past 40 years.
In addition to its relative economic decline, the United States is a bourgeois-democratic society and regime in open crisis since the Tea Party and Trump took control of the Republican Party from within – with pretensions of changing the rules of the world’s oldest bourgeois democracy – and polarization deepened. This crisis tends to deepen further, with Trump in the White House contributing to weakening the once all-powerful ‘America’, which will face onslaughts between the Executive, Congress, and Justice, capable of harming its global objectives.
The US has been working to decouple its economy from China's, but apart from the advanced technology sector, it is impossible to cut off global supply chains in which China has played a key role. So, the US has no choice but to continue to compete (and impose sanctions) in the high-tech sector and engage in military rivalry while remaining economically interdependent.
4.3. The nature of China today
The nature of the Chinese ‘great leap’ of the last 30 years is capitalist. Heir to a great social revolution and a turn towards restoration from the 1980s onwards, essential to the neoliberal redesign of the world (conducted in partnership with the US and its allies), the emerging Chinese imperialism has specific characteristics, like all imperialisms. A statist capitalism centralized in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Armed Forces (People’s Liberation Army, PLA) is central: a developmental capitalism with overtly developmental policies where most large corporations are joint ventures between state-owned or state-controlled enterprises and private companies.
The party-state does not control everything in the economy. There is no centralized planning, as there was in the Soviet Union. The Chinese capitalist economic model must also satisfy market forces’ demands, determining the government’s actions. In other words, they influence the policies that are planned and implemented. Planning, therefore, takes place in the convergence of state-initiated planning policies with market interests and actions, including the free market at the national and international level, including its movements outside the control of the state.
China’s emerging imperialism, of course, is still in the making. Since the beginning of the century, China's capital exports have grown significantly until stabilizing in 2016. Direct investment in the Chinese economy, on the other hand, has been falling since 2020 due to geopolitical uncertainties. Thus, since 2022, China has been a net exporter of capital (it exports more capital than it imports). Chinese companies have acquired large stakes in energy, mining and infrastructure businesses in neo-colonial countries (Southeast and Central Asia, Africa and Latin America) and the dragon has become the world's largest patent registrant. It is investing more and more in armaments and warning with increasing vehemence that there is a line (or lines) – Taiwan and the South China Sea – that rivals and weaker states must not cross.
China has not yet invaded or colonized ‘another country’ on the European or US model, although its policy towards Xinjiang is colonialist. Today, China is the leading non-Western power exploiting Africa’s wealth. Chinese creditors hold 12 per cent of Africa’s global external debt. China is already the leading trading partner of almost all Latin American countries and a major investor (energy sector). It uses its economic power to impose unequal trade through natural resource-backed loans, trade agreements, or investments in extractive industries and infrastructure.
4.4. Imperialist Russia
Today’s Russia is the state resulting from the massive destruction of the foundations of the former Soviet Union and the chaotic, non-centralized restoration that took place there, based on the takeover of old and new businesses by bureaucrats-turned-oligarchs. At the turn of the century, Putin and his group, drawn from the old espionage and repressive services sectors, devised the project of re-centralizing Russian capitalism, using Bonapartist relations between oligarchs and a 21st-century version of the old national-imperialist ideology of Greater Russia. This ideology became the main instrument to reassert Russian capitalism in competition with other imperialisms and to qualitatively increase the repression of the peoples of the Federation, including the Russian people. The ultra-repressive nature of Putin’s regime could evolve towards fascism.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine had been years in the making. It was part of a grand plan to restore the Russian Empire within the borders of the Stalinist USSR, but with the Tsarist Empire as a reference point. For Putin, Ukraine’s existence was nothing more than an anomaly for which Lenin was to blame. For Putin, Ukraine must brought back into the Russian fold. The military occupation of Donbas, Luhansk, and Crimea in 2014 was the first phase of the invasion. The current so-called ‘Special Operation’ was to be swift and continue to Kyiv, where Russia wants to establish a subordinate government. The scale of Ukrainian resistance, unforeseen by Putin but also by the West, stopped Putin’s war machine
4.5. Europe: the old continent in decline and conflict
The new global situation affects the European Union and Europe as a whole to a great extent.The continent is warming twice as much as the rest of the planet, with extreme precipitation events, marine heat waves, etc. The economic crisis has hit the region hard, with productivity growth of only 10 per cent since 2002, compared to 43 per cent in the US, and a deep crisis in the car industry. The labour movement is now in great difficulty, especially in Spain and Italy, where the left suffered a significant setback after managing a system that no longer provided anything to redistribute.
Relative economic decline, the structural weakening of the class, combined with bad experiences with so-called left governments and the growth of migration resulting from wars, climate change, and imperialist interventions, explain the growth of the far right in most countries, including countries such as Portugal, Germany, and the Scandinavians, which until now had seemed protected. The far right is an increasingly real threat.
Building an independent working-class political force is a slow process with different rhythms in different countries. However, the working class still has a considerable capacity for intervention, as we saw in France with the pensions movement and the New Popular Front or in Britain with the reaction to the racist riots and against the genocide in Palestine.
4.6. Generalized instability
Bombs and drones kill in Palestine, Lebanon, Sudan, Yemen, and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. In addition, we see covert civil wars, such as the case of the constant struggle of Latin American states against criminal organizations and, in turn, of these against the population, as evidenced in Mexico, Brazil, and Ecuador.
In the troubled and threatened Middle East, the collapse of the hated regime of Bashar al-Assad was an important event. Half a century of bloodthirsty dictatorship has come to an end. The fall of the regime was not achieved through mass mobilizations but by a military operation led by a radical Islamist faction. However, the Syrian people’s aspiration for freedom and the accumulation of resistance since the beginning of the Syrian uprising have played an important role. The end of the Assad era has been a relief for millions of Syrians. At last, there are possibilities for social, feminist, and democratic movements to organize themselves from below. But this hope is accompanied by a profound mistrust of the reactionary character of the ruling group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.
Turkey, through the Syrian National Army, is also intervening out of an subimperialist ambition to take advantage of the country’s reconstruction but, above all, to put an end to the Kurdish autonomous administration in North and East Syria, in the region of Rojava on its border. Paradoxically, supported by Washington and Tel Aviv (to defend their interests), the Syrian Kurds strive to maintain their process of self-determination and their administrative structures by all means available, both through diplomacy and through arms.
In Southeast Asia, India maintains its nuclear rivalry with Pakistan. North Korea has been increasing its military, political, and economic dependence on Russia, providing weapons and ammunition to Russian forces and dispatching troops to the battlefields in the Ukraine. In exchange, Russia cooperates with technology transfer to North Korea on the development of nuclear weapons.
In Myanmar, resistance against the military junta is growing, and has made significant military and diplomatic gains. A military defeat of the junta is possible. Although China gave decisive support to the junta after 2021, it is taking a pragmatic approach. If the junta cannot guarantee the protection of Chinese investments, Beijing would be willing to engage with an authority that could.
This conflict situation is advancing the geo-economics and geopolitics of Africa, where Russia competes economically and militarily with France and the United States, especially in the former Francophone colonies of West Africa. For this reason, China continues to try to increase its economic influence in all parts of the African continent, Latin America and the Caribbean.
After forty years of neoliberal globalization, semi-colonial countries continue to concentrate on higher proportions of inequality, hunger, lack of social protection systems, authoritarian governments, expropriations, and bloody social conflicts. However, financial, productive, commercial and cultural internationalization has also produced a perverse equalization with the North in terms of problems and political polarization: the rise of the extreme right (Duterte, Bolsonaro, Modi, Milei), the growth of the power of criminal organizations, climatic tragedies (as in India, Bangladesh, Philippines, Brazil), crisis of state and political systems, civil wars (as in Myanmar, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti) and wars between countries.
Since the beginning of the century, South America has been the scene of a series of struggles, mass demonstrations, popular outbursts, the election of reformist governments born out of these struggles, and much political polarization – because neo-extractivism, predatory exploitation of nature, social decomposition, inequality, daily violence, militarization, and political crises are growing, which also feed extreme right-wing alternatives. From 2018 to 2022, a new mobilization cycle radically swept the Andean countries. Resistance, outbursts, and social struggles – which have combined democratic and economic demands – on the one hand, and the permanence of the extreme right as the central enemy, on the other, have combined. Elections often channeled these struggles in favor of the so-called ‘progressive’ governments of the second wave.
Africa, a region of 1.2 billion people, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, is a victim of the "uneven" part of unequal and combined capitalist development. The World Bank estimates that 87% of the extremely poor in the world will live in Africa by 2030. Africa is only responsible for 4% of global carbon emissions, but seven of the ten countries most vulnerable to climate disasters are in Africa. Four years of drought in the Horn of Africa have displaced 2.5 million people. The continent is experiencing a wave of conflicts, many of them related to new oil and gas discoveries, the race for control and extraction of rare earths and other critical minerals (cobalt, copper, lithium, platinum) for the low-carbon technologies needed for the "green economy" of the imperialist countries.
Alongside the former colonial powers, the United States, China, and Russia play an important role in extracting wealth through super-exploitation and fueling conflict on the continent. Regional wars, coups, and civil wars continue to define their political economy. Russia is taking advantage of the fighting in several African countries to challenge Western influence and increase its own. A series of coups in West Africa undermined the power of French neo-colonialism, and new regimes turned to Washington’s competitors for military and financial aid.
The Treaty of Pelindaba, which came into force in 2009, makes almost all Africa a legal and recognized Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone. The Chagos island chain, including the Diego Garcia (DG) island, has just been accepted as part of Mauritius, even as the US retains its military base there. So, the (International Atominc Energy Agency) must monitor DG (which has signed agreements with the Treaty members) to ensure the absence of nuclear weapons on US airplanes, storage, or transit. The African Commission on Nuclear Energy should also be in charge of it, but it must be done either way, and the Mauritius government must accept this.
V/ The emergence of "campism"
Over recent years, we have unfortunately seen the growth – and the spread to new layers – of the ideology of campism as an expression of the search for alternatives to capitalism. An expression originating from the idea of the existence of ‘two camps’ confronting each other in the international arena in the past times of the Cold War, campist ideology is based on the idea that against the ‘camp’ of hegemonic imperialism, any enemy or adversary of the United States (the enemy of my enemy is my friend) is worth allying with. So, they defend the regimes of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Putin in Russia, Ortega in Nicaragua, and Maduro in Venezuela. According to some campists, China, surely in serious friction with the US, would be not only better than the adversary but also a model of socialism.
This dangerous trend bases itself on preconceptions and misdiagnoses of the world, which is no longer bipolar (in any case, ‘multipolarity’ is no guarantee of anything positive). It gains strength because it is much easier to believe in alternatives represented by real states (even if they are not alternatives) than to face the challenge of building them from below. In addition, China wields a powerful soft power (financial and propaganda capacity) to convince progressive activists and intellectuals worldwide of its status as an ‘alternative model’. Various so-called communist organizations, heirs of the remnants of the old communist parties, particularly appreciate this harmful ‘campist’ ideology. Contradictorily, campists are also growing among sectors of the youth of Europe and Latin America (at least). In some countries, leftist organizations from anti-Stalinist tradition also take it on. The situation obliges us to make an organized and permanent effort of propaganda, education, and specific concrete actions in support of the victims of campist reasoning – such as the peoples of Ukraine, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.
VI/ The central demands in these times
Faced with the extreme rights of the North and the South, the unitaries policies of the exploited and oppressed, including the united front, remain an essential part of our repertoire, but never negotiating or accepting the loss of our political independence, nor that of the social movements. As in the past, this fight against far right movements must prioritize defending democratic rights, such as the right to demonstrate and strike, the right to vote, and freedom of expression.
It is urgent to defend the rights of racialized and stigmatized people and activists, going far beyond those who are targets, relying on popular mobilization – as in the encouraging anti-racist demonstrations in England in 2024 – and not only on legal structures, which too often fail at the decisive moments in defending the rule of law. Understanding the deep roots of the advance of the extreme right requires, on the one hand, united-front policies to defeat them in elections and struggles and, on the other hand, upholding the transitional and ecosocialist demands, the only ones capable of leading to a strategic defeat of capitalism.
In authoritarian regimes (such as China, Russia, Belarus, Nicaragua, Syria, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, and the other caliphates) or with elected but authoritarian governments (such as Turkey, the Philippines, and Argentina), our policy is one of frontal opposition to the rulers and all-out struggle for democratic rights. We unconditionally support insurgents against dictatorships, such as those in Myanmar and Yemen.
In the face of the growing inequality between countries imposed by the imperial capitalist system, in the face of wars and protectionist disputes that claim millions of lives, the Fourth International unconditionally opposes all imperialism and colonialism.
We stand for the right of self-determination and the full independence of all the 17 territories still ruled as colonies, such as Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Western Sahara, French Guiana, Martinique, New Caledonia, and Malvinas. We stand for a world in which no state or ethnic group oppresses or restricts the rights of others. The peace we propose is egalitarian and anti-colonial.
In this context, the initiative to hold a broad conference of activists against fascism and imperialism as soon as possible is of immense importance for the International. Supporting and strengthening this idea by working towards its realization through regional or continental pre-conferences must be part of our priorities for action on all continents.
We fight for the dismantling of all military blocs: NATO, CSTO, AUKUS. We oppose any logic of sharing out ‘spheres of influence’ at the expense of the people and any neo-liberal and political conditioning of the aid provided. We oppose the cynical use of the war in Ukraine to increase military budgets, as in Europe.
We denounce nuclear extortion. We continue to fight for world disarmament, nuclear and chemical weapons, for a world peace in which no state imposes, invades, or oppresses another, i.e., peace without colonizers and cemeteries of colonized peoples. The question of rearmament, of the new arms race, of nuclear power must be an imperative part of the activities of anti-war movements everywhere.
We oppose head-on the campist ideology, which leads to seeing China and Russia in the ‘allied camp’ of the exploited and oppressed against the United States, in a farcical repetition of the era of confrontation during the Soviet Union. The proliferation of this distorted idea of the real world imposes on us the task of waging an intense ideological and political battle against campism.
In Africa, we reject the Western imperialist discourse, which, under the pretext of restoring constitutional order, wants to support military intervention to preserve its interests. We fight for the complete withdrawal of French military troops from the whole region, the closure of the US military base of Diego Garcia in the Mauritian Chagos islands, and the US and Chinese bases in Djibouti. We fight for an end to the civil war in Sudan: we reject the interference of the United Arab Emirates, which has armed one of the warring military factions. We demand the withdrawal of the troops of the Wagner group. We support all efforts to conquer the political and economic sovereignty of the people in the direction of a new and anti-systemic movement for the unity of the countries and peoples of Africa.
The so-called ‘progressive’ governments in Latin America, with all their differences in composition, origin, and social base, are ones of class conciliation, are not our governments, nor are they the governments of the exploited and oppressed. We do not participate in them or owe them unconditional support. (We are not referring to exceptional situations, as in Venezuela and Bolivia in the first decade of the century, in whose governments there was no direct representation of the bourgeoisie and, due to the degree of worker mobilization and organization, there were intense confrontations with imperialism and their economic elites). We defend the first kind of government from far-right attacks and support their progressive measures in the democratic, socio-environmental, and financial fields, if any. The concrete tactics towards each of them will vary according to the correlation of forces, their composition, the degree of ‘progressivism’ of each one, and the confidence the working majorities have in them. In the present situation, with the advance of the far right in the world, in addition to promoting the best forms of combat against fascism, with antifascist fronts and unity of action with their representatives in the movements, we combine support for progressive government measures with the demand that they work in the interests of the working people and the oppressed and move forward. In this sense, we support the struggles against their neoliberal and predatory measures. For any tactical variants, it is indispensable to maintain our independence from them and from the movements and parties where we act.
We fight to fulfill basic demands such as universal and free health care, state-guaranteed health infrastructures, decent housing, decent work, wages and pensions, benefits for those unable to work, and access to water and energy at low prices.
We defend the right of all women (and men) concerned to compensation for care work (with children, the elderly, or the sick) guaranteed by state policies. We fight for the right to decide to have children, for the right to abortion and all contraceptive methods, for sex education at all levels, for quality public day-care centers, for quality full-time schools, for equal pay, equal job opportunities, and equal income for men and women.
Against structural racism that discriminates against blacks, Indigenous peoples, and all racialized ethnic minority groups, mainly when they are migrants in the North, we propose and fight for anti-discrimination policies, reparations for slavery and land theft, as well as affirmative action. We stand with all migrants against xenophobia and expulsion policies. We fight for an end to all the walls between countries and people.
Against homophobia and transphobia, which attack the LGBTQIA+ community worldwide, we raise our voices for the entire right to dispose of our bodies as we see fit and as we wish. For full citizenship and rights for gay, lesbian, and non-binary couples, with the possibility of marriage, conception, and adoption. We defend the rights of trans people, the fight against violence, and their full integration into social life.
All these struggles must unite to defeat the new fascism, to overthrow the regimes of exploitation and oppression, and to lead to the confrontation with imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism in one word.
One of our central tasks at this stage is to encourage and support socio-environmental struggles, working to ensure that anti-capitalist ecological demands are those of all working and oppressed sectors. Only the strength of the movements of the exploited and oppressed on the plane can confront the ongoing climate collapse and move humanity towards an ecosocialist alternative, as set out in our Manifesto.
The Fourth International fights for a world in which no state oppresses, invades, or oppresses the other, where peace among equals is possible, with respect for the self-determination of people. We fight for a decolonial, ecological, and ecosocialist world where the defeat of capitalism and its logic allows everyone to be equal in their differences. We fight for a feminist world of all ethnicities and colors, all sexual orientations and identities, all beliefs, and all forms of human life in symbiosis and balance with nature.
28 February 2025