https://iclfi.org/spartacist/en/2024-lfi-debate
In the January 13 debate between the ICL and LFI, entitled “The Fight for the Fourth International Today,” the ICL provided an answer to the problem of revolutionary leadership and a road forward on key questions, from Palestine and China to the fight against imperialist oppression. The LFI for its part showed that it has no serious answers to advance the interests of the international proletariat. ICL bashing was the LFI’s core platform. They denied the existence of hegemonic U.S. imperialism’s liberal order in the post-Soviet period and put forward no way to break the working class and oppressed from their liberal and reformist misleadership. Instead, they regurgitated timeless Marxoid mantras while at the same time capitulating to liberalism, Stalinism and trade unionism. They also rejected the essence of permanent revolution by denying both the centrality of the national liberation struggle as a motor force for socialist revolution and the necessity for communist leadership of the anti-imperialist struggle in the neocolonial world. This culminated in the grotesque claim that Greece is a sub-imperialist power, not an oppressed country under the boot of U.S. and German imperialism. As Trotsky noted in “Sectarianism, Centrism, and the Fourth International”:
“The sectarian looks upon the life of society as a great school, with himself as a teacher there. In his opinion the working class should put aside its less important matters, and assemble in solid rank around his rostrum. Then the task would be solved.
“Though he may swear by Marxism in every sentence, the sectarian is the direct negation of dialectical materialism, which takes experience as its point of departure and always returns to it. A sectarian does not understand the dialectical action and reaction between a finished program and a living—that is to say, imperfect and unfinished—mass struggle.”
There are only two roads possible for the LFI. The further coming apart of the U.S.-dominated neoliberal world will only deepen social polarizations. If the LFI maintains its current course, giving a Marxist veneer to liberalism, they have no future but to be swept along to the right. The other road, which would actually advance the fight for the historic interests of the proletariat, is to move toward the ICL and intervene in struggles to chart an independent path forward for the workers and oppressed as the crucial task of reforging the Fourth International today. We sincerely hope they will choose the second.
