This resolution was adopted by the 18th World Congress by 106 for, 14 against, 1 abstention and 9 no votes.
Introduction
The situation of multiple and interlocking crises and the resulting growing urgency for humanity to leave the capitalist mode of production to avoid the larger catastrophes outlined in our resolutions renders the role of the Fourth International as an international current with active and militant national organizations still more necessary.
This resolution does not go over the arguments for our current orientation to building new left and anti-capitalist parties, understood as a transitional form in the current level of politicization and radicalization as outlined in our resolutions since 1995 (2003, 2010, 2018). We summed this up in 2018:
Our task today is building parties that are useful in the class struggle. That is to say parties that can assemble the forces and decide on actions that have an effect and advance the class struggle on the basis of a class struggle approach and programme, the ultimate goal of such a party being obviously to get rid of the existing capitalist system, in whatever general terms this may be expressed. This perspective commits the forces of the FI to being an integral and loyal part of building and leading these new parties, not simply aiming to recruit or wait to denounce eventual betrayals. Our strategic objective is the building of mass revolutionary parties and a mass revolutionary International.
This resolution focuses on how to strengthen our own politico-organizational profile and capacity as an international current that is a source of theoretical, analytical and programmatic work, attractive and welcoming to currents from other traditions, and a force for impulsing international campaigns, as well as the activity of our organizations at the national political level and in social movements. As the resolution Role and Tasks of the Fourth International of the World Congress 2010 said:
The Fourth International and its sections have played and still play a vital role in defending, promoting and implementing a programme of demands that are both immediate and transitional towards socialism; a united-front policy that aims for mass mobilization of workers and their organizations; a policy of working-class unity and independence against any type of strategic alliance with the national bourgeoisie; opposition to any participation in governments that merely manage the State and the capitalist economy having abandoned all internationalism or fight for an end to inequality and discrimination on gender, racial, ethnic, religious or sexual orientation grounds.
The Fourth International has played and still plays a functional role in keeping alive the history of the revolutionary Marxist current, “to understand the world”, to confront the analyses and the experiences of revolutionary militants, currents and organizations and to bring together organizations, currents and militants who share the same strategic vision and the same choice of broad convergences on revolutionary bases. The existence of an international framework that makes it possible “to think about politics” is an indispensable asset for the intervention of revolutionaries. Consistent internationalism must pose the question of an international framework. […]
[…] a major difference between the FI and all these tendencies, over and above political positions, which is to the credit of the International, is that it is based on a democratic coordination of sections and militants, whereas the other international tendencies are “international-factions” or coordinations based on “party-factions” which do not respect rules of democratic functioning, in particular the right of tendency. […]
We have, in fact, a particular role that is recognized by a series of political currents. We may be the only ones who can make political forces of various origins converge. […] We want the FI to play the role of a “facilitator” of convergences in the perspective of new international groupings.
As a result, in order to strengthen ourselves and play this role all the bodies of the FI must be reinforced: regular Bureau meetings, International Committees, specific working commissions, travel, exchanges between the sections. It is necessary to reinforce the activity that the International has deployed over the last few years in regularizing and strengthening EPBs meetings and the efforts of coordination between the Latin American sections. The meetings of the International Committee (IC), which are held every year representing about 30 organizations, must ensure the organizational continuity of our international current.
A/ International public profile
Since the 2018 World Congress we have fulfilled the mandate to create a multilingual fourth.international website which ensures simultaneous publications of our statements and leadership resolutions in our three working languages (and others where sections pick up that task from that resource) as well as a selection of significant articles representing in general the opinion of our own organizations on the situation in their countries, and our general positions on international questions, even if in the form of signed articles. It is also a an archive resource with the published resolutions of our previous World Congresses and International Committees, qnd an ar.
The Bureau and IC have been more active in adopting statements giving a position of the international on major international events for publication – issuing about 50 statements since the World Congress, although the rhythm has slackened since 2021.
We have also relaunched the Punto de Vista site in Castilian - alongside International Viewpoint in English and Inprecor in French (and Al-Mounadil in Arabic, and more recently Alomamia). The principle of a publication in Portuguese has been agreed.
These monolingual websites have a broader role than fourth.international. They take into account the specificities of their linguistic audience, publishing articles on current affairs but also reviews, debate and so on. The weakness of our international apparatus means that apart from Inprecor all our own websites are dependent on the voluntarism of comrades who already have many leadership tasks.
The next step is to create a more coherent international presence based on these websites.
To make concrete progress in this direction, we need to make this issue a priority for the next IC and the next Bureau. Better dissemination of our analyses and positions can only be beneficial for building the International. We propose to move forward in two phases, taking into account our real strengths (limited) and our financial resources (also limited).
1st phase: coordinate and strengthen existing teams
What is the current state of the forces behind our sites?
The Fourth.International website (in 8 languages) is updated by a small group of people, mainly in English, Spanish, French and Greek. Occasionally in Arabic, and more exceptionally in Portuguese, Italian and German. This group meets every fortnight or so to select the articles to be published, using existing translations or calling on a network of translators, mainly for the International's 3 working languages. The site receives around 4,000 visits per month.
Inprecor has a website and a paper magazine in French. Inprecor has one full-timer who is also a Bureau member, as well as the voluntary support of a comrade for administrative matters and bookkeeping, and a volunteer proofreader. For several months now, an editorial committee has been meeting once a month to define the themes for the next issue of the paper magazine. The website receives around 3,500 hits a month.
Morasalat Alomamia (International Correspondence) is the Arabic equivalent of Inprecor. It has just been launched and translates and reproduces articles from Inprecor, until it has the capacity to encourage the writing of original articles. It is run by an editorial board made up of a number of comrades.
International Viewpoint (IVP) is the English-language website of the IV (the paper journal was discontinued in 2005, mainly because the postage costs were too high to send the journal to the four corners of the world, especially in countries where the readership could not afford a subscription) and is published by two comrades on the Bureau who also rely on a network of translators. There is an ongoing fund-raising campaign to make this possible. The site receives around 17,000 visits a month.
Punto de Vista Internacional (PVI) is the FI's Castilian-language website. It is run by an editorial committee made up of comrades from Latin America and the Spanish. The site receives around 1,000 visits a month.
The ernestmandel.org website brings together texts by Ernest Mandel in six languages. Initially created by the Belgian section, it was not updated for several years. The structure of the site is very old and a comrade is currently in the process of transferring the content to a more recent version. But it's a job that's impossible for just one person to do. So we need reinforcements, firstly to transfer the existing content. Secondly, we also need one or more people who can continue to feed and maintain the site. The site receives around 1,000 visits a month.
internationalcamp.org is the website dedicated to the International Youth Camp. It has been updated up to 2018 with RIJ programmes, recordings, etc. The current plan is for the Jeunes anticapitalistes (JAC, the youth group of the Belgian section) to take over this site in order to publish the programme and content related to the 2025 Youth Camp, which will take place in Belgium. Management of the site will then be transferred to the section hosting the next camps. The youth comrades also want to set up a joint international communication campaign for the 2025 Camp. Although the site is not updated very often, it receives around 1,000 visits a month.
We have to note other sites in our “perimeter” (IIRE as well as ESSF), and important independent websites where our comrades are active [for example Spectre, Tempest, New Politics (USA), Contretemps (France), Jacobin America Latina, Jacobin Italia, Viento Sur (Spanish state), Amandla (South Africa), Asian Marxist Review....] which to a certain extent are our “rivals” for the publication of original material for our websites. Our websites cannot simply be channels for republication of existing material.
Our short-term objectives:
1) To strengthen the collective aspect of the management of our sites through more regular meetings of the various editorial committees.
2) Develop the distribution of these publications through newsletters and social networks (in particular Instagram, which allows us to reach a younger audience and publish short news videos, including live from mobilizations, public activities, etc.). This aspect could perhaps motivate younger comrades to join the editorial committees.
3) Give priority to the news websites (IVP, PVI, Inprecor and Alomamia) by setting up a multilingual press team to meet every fortnight. The aim of this team will be to coordinate the Fourth International’s editorial policy (which does not necessarily mean having identical sites in all languages) and to develop a network of correspondents for coverage of events such as major mobilizations, international meetings, etc. At the February 2024 IC meeting, a group of comrades met to make small steps in this direction. This group could already form a nucleus for this work.
4) Reserve the use of the Fourth.International site for the IV's more ‘institutional’ publications (declarations, resolutions, congress texts, links to archives, to the sites of our organizations and our press, etc.).
5) Launch a financial campaign to move on to the 2nd phase.
2nd phase: taking a qualitative leap forward and harmonizing our graphic identity
This second stage requires financial resources to be able to carry it out. When the fourth.international website was launched in 2020/2021, the sum of 10,000 euros was raised. It is essential to launch a new appeal for donations, both externally and within the sections, with a detailed estimate of the amount we will need.
We need to distinguish between two aspects that need to be tackled in order: first, the substance and then the form.
Substance:
The first priority will be to diversify our productions through more elaborate videos and podcasts (for example, by taking advantage of IC or Bureau meetings to interview comrades). This means investing in audio/video equipment, sponsoring certain posts on social networks to publicise our sites, etc.
Form:
The final stage involves revisiting the graphic identity of our main sites to come up with something that is visually attractive, consistent and immediately identifiable as part of the same international organization, and which also allows videos and photos to be published on all the sites, etc. This stage should be based on the existing sites, so as not to lose the efforts made to date. At the same time, the graphic identity of the Inprecor paper magazine could also be redesigned to be consistent with the new version of the sites.
The preamble to all this will be the organization of a seminar on our press at the IIRE in Amsterdam before the IC 2026 meeting to allow for a more in-depth discussion at the IC. The aim of the seminar will be to bring together comrades ready to commit themselves to these tasks and to pool the know-how of the different sections on the press (print, web, social networks). This meeting will strengthen coordination between national sections and motivate comrades to join editorial committees. It should also serve to reflect collectively on the collaborative tools to be used to facilitate the use of the same production in different languages (translating, subtitling videos, sharing photos, etc.).
An effort (organizational, militant and financial) must be made by the International to make this qualitative leap in the dissemination of our ideas, in accordance with our statutes:
‘The IC is therefore responsible, through the bodies it appoints, for the publication of the official press of the International - if possible in three languages, English, Spanish and French - which will publish the essential documents of the world congresses and bodies of the International, articles and documents on international events and the life of the sections and will relay international campaigns.’ (Art. 15 of the Statutes of the Fourth International).
There must be a mutual reinforcement between our national and international public expression with mutual promotion of websites, social media publications, sharing of articles and so. Many of our national leaders have audiences far larger than those of our international publications - this should be used to promote articles, statements etc of the International.
Book publishing
We have developed an English language publishing operation through joint SR/IIRE publications although the IIRE may publish books in other languages and Socialist Resistance/Anti*Capitalist Resistance may publish books of specifically British interest. We have also an agreement with a publishing house (Merlin Press) in Britain, which ensures better design and distribution for books they agree to jointly publish. We have also cooperated with Haymarket Books and the Historical Materialism book series to publish books written by comrades.
Our comrades in Italy and in the Spanish state also have viable publishing operations, and in the case of the Spanish state the project of extending their audience into Latin America.
It is important to cross-fertilize these operations and to help to project works by our own comrades internationally. One of the most difficult barriers to overcome is translation. There are several books by comrades that we would like to publish in translation. We have been able to publish books in translations thanks to the efforts of individual comrades.
Based on the contributions developed in the publications of our websites, our books and activities organized by the IIRE we should seek to strengthen our presence in spaces where the Marxist left is discussing: Historical Materialism conferences notably the annual London conference including its Marxist-Feminist stream, Socialism in the US and other occasional or regular conferences such as those organized in Latin America around Trotsky and Trotskyism.
B/ National organizations and the International
Our statutes state:
Preamble
[…] The national sections constitute the basic organizational units of the Fourth International. The aim of every national section is to bring together all the forces which share our common goals to build a mass revolutionary Marxist party capable of playing a decisive role in the class struggle within the country to a successful conclusion in a socialist victory. This is the means through which the Fourth International aspires to achieve its great emancipating goal since an international organization does not replace or substitute for a national leadership in acting in a revolution. […]
Part I. The Sections
Article 1
The International is made up of national sections, which subscribe to the principles laid out in the preamble to its statutes, participate in its activities and organizational life, and pay the agreed dues. National sections are rooted in the reality of their countries’ class struggles while building the International together, including by committing people and resources to it. The dues to be paid to the International are agreed with the section leaderships taking into account their resources.
It is through the very existence of the national sections and their active participation in the meetings, schools and other activities that the International itself exists.
They are informed of these activities by circular letters sent under the responsibility of the Bureau by electronic mail to their IC members and their national organization addresses. The national leaderships must therefore ensure that these mailings are monitored, that the destination addresses are kept up to date, that their contents are brought to the attention of the appropriate leadership bodies, and where possible comrades proposed to participate in the activities.
Similarly, the different regional and thematic email lists should be monitored, and the possibility for the exchange of information used to develop the internationalist consciousness of all our comrades.
The publications online or in paper of the International also rely on the efforts of the sections in supplying articles and in their turn diffusing them by sharing the websites, Facebook pages, twitter feeds of the international publications prominently in their own publications.
The financing of the International is similarly the product of the contributions of the sections. The payment of direct dues to enable the International itself to have the means to maintain a (very limited central apparatus) and to attempt to aid the sections which need it to attend international events is crucial. There is not a fixed formula - in the budget of the sections this item should be a priority.
The sections also contribute to the financing of the International by the payment of the travel and fees for their own comrades attending international meetings and schools.
The payment of direct dues comes essentially from the advanced capitalist countries (who also take the full burden of financing their participation) while from the global south we ask the sections to pay at least 50% of their travel and participation fees as their contribution.
Article 3
In order for the International to be effective the ranks of revolutionaries identifying with the FI should be united in each country. For this reason, members of the International should act in such a way as to bring about such unity within the framework of one unified section of the International. […]
In recent years we have seen a growing number of cases where our sections have divided usually over national orientation and yet all sides wish to remain within the Fourth International.
Thus we have had to recognize as groups of members two or more organizations in the same country, considering them taken together as the section. This has been done with the goal of maintaining comrades as far as possible within a common framework that we hope in time will make it possible to reconstitute a united section. In such cases this objective should remain a constant in the organizations’ activities and forms of common activity such as publications, schools, public meetings as Fourth Internationalists should be pursued. The ultimate aim should be the building of a common orientation in national politics, which should be the basis for the reunification of the section.
The Mandates Commission at each world congress should examine these cases with a view to assessing how far this commitment continues to be present and whether this status should continue.
The Mandates Commission at each congress in any case reverifies the status of each organization and whether it continues to meet the criteria for recognition. In certain cases a special commission of the congress may be formed to do this work and make recommendations. The Mandates Commission and any specific commissions report to the Congress which votes on their recommendations, in line with the statutes which state “On questions involving the national sections the World Congress serves as the final appeal and decision-making body.”
The statutes provide for two other statuses.
Article 7
To recognize that in varying conditions there will be organizations which support the FI and are not yet able or ready to assume the responsibilities of sections the World Congress, or its elected IC, can grant the formal status of sympathizing organization to such groups. Sympathizing organizations publicize the positions and promote the press of the FI, support and participate in internal and external FI activities and make a regularized contribution to the FI.
Representatives of sympathizing organizations will be invited to meetings of the IC and to the World Congress where they will be granted voice, and are entitled to cast consultative votes in cases where the criterion of formal financial contribution has been met. The goal of the formal status of sympathizing organization is to provide a bridge to the development of national sections in the countries concerned.
Article 8
Organizations who share the International’s perspective of struggle but do not wish to join it formally can obtain the status of “permanent observer”. This status enables organizations to participate in meetings of leading bodies - which bodies will be specified in each case - with the right to speak but not to vote.
C/ Functioning of leadership bodies
The International Committee is the leadership body of the International elected at the World Congress on the proposals from the different national delegations. We have decided in recent years to represent all our national organizations. Holding such a meeting is a major logistical and financial effort that we have decided to undertake with the concern of building a horizontal international leadership not, as is the case with other international currents, an International dominated by one single national organization. While online meetings are a valuable addition to face to face meetings they do not make possible the same quality of exchange, both formally and informally, as physical meetings. In addition, the constraints of meeting across time zones, severely limiting the time available, rule out work in commissions or smaller groups. Thus the annual physical IC meeting remains a priority.
Its composition in attendance at its annual meetings can be subject to change as national organizations have the right to replace temporarily or permanently the elected members (with the agreement of the elected member concerned). This can make it difficult even in normal times (leaving aside the pandemic which means we did not have a physical meeting between February 2019 and October 2023) to create a collective team of the IC as a whole or in commissions emanating essentially from IC members.
In the composition of the International Committee the general rule is that where there are two or more members from one organization there should be parity (women/men) not be two men and that the composition of the body as a whole should strive to meet this the target of parity. This is the responsibility of the Nominations Commission in discussion with the organizations about their nominations, and of the national organizations if they replace their members for individual meetings or permanently.
The minutes of the International Committee are sent to national organizations to give information not only on decisions taken but also who was present, the level of participation in different discussions etc. The transmission of the content of discussions, leading or not to decisions, is one of the roles of the site through the publication of texts, but also in the ways appropriate to each organization through report backs from IC members.
The Bureau is an executive body elected from within the IC. Its composition is based on the major sections of the International and includes the comrades that take on major ongoing tasks of the International notably in relation to our external publications and our educational work. Comrades elected to the Bureau have the agreement and support of their national leaderships, they are not isolated individuals.
Since 2010 we have made the effort to have regular Bureau meetings (two or three per year) with the presence of the comrades from all continents, even if the western European component remains predominant. The development of online meetings during the pandemic allowed us to have more frequent meetings and leads us to envisage continuing with fewer physical meetings for reasons of cost and time and combining them with online ones.
To strengthen the relationship between the Bureau’s activity and the sections we have started the practice of sending a circular after Bureau meetings to explain the discussions that took place and any decisions.
Since 2018 we have also had a broader Bureau secretariat also benefiting from the possibility of online meetings and have more recently been able to integrate comrades from Latin America. The secretariat deals with all questions as they arise either directly or in relaying them to the appropriate bodies. It prepares the Bureau and to a large extent the IC meetings and ensures that decisions are implemented.
However collective leadership functioning both for the Bureau and its secretariat remains weak because between meetings it is not always possible to have rapid and collective reactions, and few comrades have been able to take on ongoing responsibilities or commit to tasks over and above attendance at meetings. Very few of our national organizations themselves have full-timers and thus the vast majority of comrades taking on responsibilities at international level are already combining this with national leadership tasks as well as paid work - when they are not already retired.
We must examine the possibility of sustaining further staff costs to make it possible for other comrades to be party professionals on a full or part time basis, as well as the resources that our sections are able to contribute…
The question of the renewal - rejuvenating, feminizing - of our leadership bodies has to be a preoccupation at every level. This is a particularly difficult challenge for the international leadership where all the factors that play against the full participation of younger comrades, women comrades, and others, are particularly strong. In addition, for the countries that do not use one of the three working languages of the International there is the barrier of the need for a good level of fluency in a foreign language.
The effort to ensure simultaneous translation in our leadership meetings is therefore politically important. This is a major organizational task that then requires a number of comrades do this work on a volunteer basis. This difficulty is a barrier to organizing more regular meetings of leadership bodies, commissions and so on. It would be increased by adding any further working languages and any proposals to do so must be taken in charge by the organizations that would be concerned.
D/ Regional coordination
Strong regional coordination is a strengthening of the International as a whole, allowing a broader network of comrades to have the opportunity to discuss in an internationalist framework, and our organizations to mutually aid each other within their regions in their political activity through specific campaigns, exchange of speakers for public or internal events thus strengthening our own organizations... Such activity should also contribute to developing relations with other organizations in the region. The ability of the International to attract organizations coming from other traditions is a vital part in building the open yet revolutionary Marxist International that is our goal. We have made important gains in this respect, notably but not only in Asia, and it is a perspective with which we must continue.
Our continental email lists are a forum for exchange between sections. We should also encourage our organizations to have one (or more) comrades assigned to following these lists both to send appropriate material and to share as appropriate material received.
Regional meetings are a crucial step in building this regional coordination. Online meetings are useful but as for all other levels physical meetings are irreplaceable in building the political and human links that develop internationalist understanding among our comrades.
Within the context of these meetings, it is important to encourage the presence of women comrades (and younger comrades as well). Delegations should be mixed (parity) and specific women’s commissions or caucuses organized linked to these meetings. The goal should be to build regional women’s commissions to extend and strengthen our women’s work and the International Commission, as the Asian women comrades are starting to do.
In the past we had specific European and Latin American PBs meetings - and the Manila school for Asia region. We have developed the practice of regional meetings in IC which in particular have replaced European PBs meetings, while some Latin American meetings have been held and the Asia region school continued until 2019. A new session of the Asia school is proposed for 2024.
Two problems have been indicated:
a) there is not enough time in regional meetings during the IC
b) does not allow for development of other comrades as internationalist cadre at this level (only in a sectoral framework, through commissions)
The leadership for regional coordination must come from the national organizations themselves but it must also be a specific and ongoing task of the comrades from the different regions in the Bureau to facilitate regional coordinating committees.
E/ Thematic commissions
Our thematic commissions should play a crucial role in developing our thinking on programmatic questions as well as outlining the general lines of our organizations’ activity on the different questions. The international leadership draws on their contributions to enrich its resolution or to propose specific resolutions.
We are in a contradiction between wanting to build stable bodies that undertake this political elaboration in an ongoing way and wanting to continually integrate new comrades and maintain an organic relationship to the leadership bodies. Some commissions (Ecology, LGBTI) are elected on the proposal of national organizations, the women’s commission is the meeting of women comrades of the IC which then designate working groups for the organization of the biannual seminar. The Anti-racist commission launched during the pandemic has not really got off the ground, it should be relaunched incorporating our anti-fascist work).
Other proposed commissions such as for the Education sector or (as a revival) the economy commission are similarly stalled.
For each commission we must examine the best option for its composition and functioning.
The annual meeting of the women’s commission during the IC is a very important moment. However it needs to be complemented by further meetings during the year - online or hybrid.
It must be a specific and ongoing task of comrades from the Bureau to ensure that these commissions function, in collaboration with other comrades from the IC and section leaderships responsible for the areas of work concerned.
We can hold rich and productive seminars but there is too little written production in the form of articles and other means of expression articulating our opinions. We leave too much to individual comrades’ motivations and prioritization – our commissions should plan, assign comrades and encourage production in a collective manner.
We must find ways of making more of our archive material, not just written resolutions but articles, posters, videos - available to comrades.
F/ Educational Activities
Our educational activity is organized primarily through the Amsterdam Institute [International Institute for Research and Education] alongside the Manila Institute and the Islamabad Institute. There have been proposals to also create an IIRE in Latin America (Brazil) and we would like to support and join similar efforts when the conditions are ripe.
Our educational institutes have two main goals: providing international educational experiences for our own comrades over and above what can be provided at the national level, and to be a platform to develop our presence as a current of thought in the general Marxist left sphere through open seminars and publications.
The holding of international physical educational meetings is a valuable opportunity to train cadres with an internationalist outlook. The experience of living and discussing over several weeks with comrades from across the world is often a defining point in the acquiring of a deep commitment to revolutionary internationalism. Sections should see the international schools as opportunities to not only build themselves but also the FI on an international level. The Youth Schools and the Ecosocialist Schools in the IIRE Amsterdam are among the most important activities of FI organized on an international level. By organizing a yearly Asian Regional School, the IIRE Manila has been instrumental in building the Fourth International particularly in South-East Asia.
In recent years, we have noticed an increasing unevenness in the level of political education among comrades who attend the schools. Some might have decades-long experience in Marxist reading and discussions, whilst others are new to our current. This unevenness reflects the uneven state of development of the left in different countries. It has pushed our educational activities to try to provide a general introduction to our ideas and strategy, to face the challenge of being useful for comrades with different backgrounds.
However, we are seeing a decline in the number of participants. While the staff of the institutes and respective commissions are the main comrades responsible for organizing the schools and seminars, it is our collective responsibility to find participants and to create resources for the schools and seminars to function.
Sections should take a more active attitude in sending candidates to the schools and provide more information on their educational needs, They should also be open about their financial restrictions, as we can collectively support sections who have candidates for the schools and seminars but cannot pay the fees or travel expenses.
It is also getting harder to find speakers and to rejuvenate our speakers’ pool. Moreover, most of the international schools and seminars in Amsterdam are conducted in the three languages of the Fourth International and we are facing difficulties in finding volunteer interpreters for our activities. We ask sections to propose speakers on the different topics covered in our schools, and to help find interpreters.
As stated before, our second goal is to develop our presence as a current of thought in the general Marxist left sphere. We need to develop our publication program and coordinate this more with the publication programs of national organizations. Until now, our schools and seminars are not publicly advertized. They specifically cater to the members of the 4th International and comrades in its network. We believe that by also organizing shorter courses and seminars, on specific themes, organized and led by 4th International comrades but open to the wider left, we can attract more people to the 4th international and help us expand our positions in larger circles. The experience of youth camps shows that people who get to know the 4th International in real life activities have a better understanding of who we are and what we want.
During the pandemic, we explored the possibilities of online education and managed to hold shorter schools and seminars online. While the online experience, particularly when held in several languages with interpretation, cannot replace the actual in person schools and seminars, where participants do not only join lectures and discussions but also spend several weeks living together, we would like to provide online resources for our sections as well.
All our educational activities should be taken as collective works to empower our sections and the International. For this, we need to make sure that information is properly distributed and we should elaborate on creating even more active ways to coordinate and organize our international education. Comrades who are active in organizing political education in their respective sections are encouraged to get in touch with the IIRE to be able to work together and strengthen each other.
G/ Youth work
“Youth must be the motor force of our revolution” (Che Guevara)
The importance of youth work for recruiting young people, for continually pushing for a readjustment of our programme and activity to meet the needs of a changing world has been continually stressed in our party-building resolutions. The pace of change in the world today makes this all the more pertinent at national and international level.
The youth camp has been for forty years a precious experience for our European sections in attracting young comrades and in developing new internationalist leading cadre for our organizations. It has been during this time the major public activity of the Fourth International, and an exceptional experience as a self-organized internationalist experience for young people. The European sections must engage in a serious discussion in how to ensure this initiative remains a useful tool.
The possibilities of expanding coordination of youth work and campaigns beyond the European organizations should be examined and developed, towards creating other regional coordinations and an international youth coordination.
At both national and international level, the youth work, the youth initiatives, must be prioritized as training ground for our new international leading cadre.
H/ Campaigns
The necessity for the FI to be involved in active international campaigns comes from both for objective reasons of the necessity of the campaigns themselves but also to demonstrate its existence and usefulness as an international current.
We initiate international solidarity campaigns through ESSF, or directly though our international websites, or relaying a campaign started by one of our sections. We also encourage all our organizations to support certain broad-based campaigns. Proposals for campaigns can come from our national organizations, thematic commissions, regional coordinating committees or from within the Bureau or IC.
Nevertheless, we face the difficulty for initiating campaigns in our own name combining international and national organizations of the wide variety of organizational configurations of our national organizations. In a number of countries our comrades are not active publicly in their own name as a section of the Fourth International.
We can only overcome this problem by a coherent and well-coordinated promotion of campaigns and themes of activity through all our public means of expression (which reinforces the points made in section A). Our profile as an open campaigning International, promoting the presence and activity of our comrades in different countries, is a valuable tool in recruitment.
A possible theme for an international propaganda campaign that is relevant throughout the world is around the question of reproductive rights.
The immediate campaign we can undertake is that of popularizing and promoting our Manifesto for an Ecosocialist revolution. As well as its publication on our website it will be published in written form in at least the three working languages of the International as a support for public meetings and forums, promotion on social media, etc.
I/ Our parties
For our parties to be effective they have to be able to recruit, to train, and to keep comrades, especially those who are victims of specific oppression but also all those for who suffer from social inequality.
As Ernest Mandel said, living in bourgeois society cannot be a school for how to be a proletarian revolutionary, that is to absorb and assimilate into our own consciousness a different way of behaving. We need counter-tendencies, counterweights to the prevailing division of labour and power relationships. We outlined this in our 1991 resolution Positive action and partybuilding among women. Obviously, there are no precise remedies that are going to be applicable in all places, at all times, and in all different forms of organizations.
We reiterate that the women-only meetings are an important and necessary tool for women comrades - and others suffering patriarchal oppression - to understand, articulate and combat all forms of this oppression by their action within the collective framework of the party. As far as attracting racialized people into our organizations is concerned, in addition to combating the xenophobia (stereotypes and prejudices) of our own activists, we need to place the fight against all forms of racism at the heart of our writings, actions and mobilizations (and not as a secondary and/or subordinate struggle to the class struggle) and we need to incorporate into our activities and actions the issues that affect them most (structural racism, police violence, international solidarity with Palestine), but also with the countries of origin of their migration or ancestry (particularly if these are former or current colonies), as well as the question of the decolonization of minds, museums and public spaces. Finally, we must recognize that religious minorities are also victims of racism, and that women must be free to own their bodies and dress as they wish, and to exercise or not exercise their religion by wearing or not wearing the veil. In all cases, we are fighting against their exclusion from school, employment and promotion, leisure and sport.
Our goal is not simply to recruit women, racialized people and youth or to achieve specific goals or targets in the number of women members or of women’s presence in our leadership bodies. It is also to ensure that the political work of our women comrades is fully recognized and that they are valued as central leaders of our organizations.
Our 2003 statutes are very limited in their indications of how to deal with question of sexist and sexual violence although they include the proviso that the International Appeals Commission should be able to meet as an all-women body. Our different national organizations are at different stages in their discussions and experiences on how to deal with these. We have many discussions and contributions notably in our women’s seminars and schools that would help us to develop our common framework on this question while not imposing specific procedures on our organizations.
We consider as basic principles that our first response is that we believe women who say they are victims of violence, and/or racialized comrades who say they are victims of sexist and xenophobic violence in all its forms, and we ensure that they feel comfortable in continuing to be active; the procedures and protocols that we put into place are clear and transparent - those accused are informed of the accusation and victims can express themselves freely; the overriding principle is to be true to our commitment to fight oppressions leaving aside concerns about the “party’s reputation”; the outcome of our procedures is that women and all comrades victims of specific oppressions feel comfortable in our parties and that there is an ongoing education process for all comrades.
The extent to which we are able to counter the social dynamic of exclusion of women, younger, racialized people, those with a lesser level of formal education, from political activity and leadership, and to ensure that they feel at ease in our organizations, will be crucial in our goal of building organizations that can have a real weight in the class struggle in its broadest sense, the struggle against all forms of exploitation and oppression.
From this World Congress we will set up an email list for disabled comrades and ask member organizations to inform the bureau of comrades interested in participating. We further ask these comrades to discuss, in collaboration with the Bureau, the potential of convening an online meeting to share experiences of the work they do in their countries and to look at means of improving the coverage of disability politics in our media.
28 February 2025