Greetings to the ICL’s Conference

International Socialist Alternative (Revolutionary)

Greetings,

First, I want to extend thanks to the ICL for inviting ISA-R to this conference. In many ways, it represents a qualitative step forward in our ongoing dialogue and joint work.

Formality aside, it is necessary to talk about the process that brought us to this point. It is no coincidence that the ICL's critical reorientation coincides with our struggle with the ISA's tradition.

A reexamination of Marxist theoretical work was part of both of our struggles, with the ICL's often inspiring and informing our own and vice-versa. But more importantly, the clashes with our long held understandings of Marxism and Leninism are brought forward by dynamics at the base of the world situation.

We come from totally opposite traditions. From two different sides of the split that destroyed the Fourth International after World War 2. One where prognostics “determined everything” to the detriment of program, and the other a school of “formula theorizing” as Dick Fraser put it.

We also have drawn totally different organizational practices. As we march towards revolutionary regroupment, the collision of these two traditions will have to produce something qualitatively new. This requires us to seriously and collectively examine the past and present of Bolshevik-Leninism in order to determine its future.

We have to be clear—we are only at the very beginning. We are still able to speak the same language of Trotskyism. This is not to be the case of the millions currently organized in the various Communist parties, social democracy, and the radical petit bourgeois parties of the global South. We have to learn to speak new languages and translate our revolutionism.

The neoliberal period has come to an end, and with it the illusions of a Pax Americana have gone up in smoke. For the past few decades the left of the imperial center, no matter how sectified, found itself stumbling behind the trends and traps of the neoliberal narrative.

We accommodated liberal pacifism, gave support to bourgeois "radicals," became artisanal NGOs, and, most importantly, we turned our backs on the working class—to which they responded by turning their backs on us. We became unserious, and irrelevant.

The world is unraveling itself, an American empire in decline is clawing back with greater aggression than before seen. Anyone who denies that US imperialism still represents the great bastion of reaction and parasitism is now proclaiming blindness.

The world faces two paths. One, where the collapse of US hegemony, which is inevitable, leads to an even deeper strangulation of the productive forces and a period of deep isolationism. The other is the road to world revolution and globalized socialist development.

Our subjective task is to build the leadership capable of steering our class and all humankind down the second path. Our first obstacle is our own fragmentation and subjective failure, beyond it lies a reforged party of world communism!

From Nigeria to the United States-communist greetings from ISA-R, long live the international working class!

POR-Comité de Enlace por la Reconstrucción de la IV Internacional

Dear comrades of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)

Fraternal and internationalist greetings on the occasion of your Ninth International Conference

We thank you for your invitation to participate. This is another important step towards further strengthening our relationship, gaining a better understanding of our political positions, and learning how we organize ourselves to intervene in the class struggle from the standpoint of Marxism-Leninism-Trotskyism. We share the concern for resolving the task of all tasks: rebuilding the international leadership of the proletariat by rebuilding the World Party of Socialist Revolution, the Fourth International, which is essential for leading the struggles of the world’s oppressed towards their liberation.

We are living through a period of deepening crisis, with decaying U.S. imperialism attempting to preserve its hegemony by escalating the trade war even against its closest allies, waging wars, and engaging in military interventionism. It is advancing the plunder of the semi-colonies, further trampling on their sovereignty to seize their resources and block supplies to China. The growing arms race in imperialist countries is part of the preparations for a large-scale conflagration. The U.S. is forcing its NATO partners to significantly increase their military budgets.

The blockade of the Caribbean Sea, the sinking of several vessels that killed their occupants, the economic blockade, followed by military intervention in Venezuela and the kidnapping of its president; the occupation of the Panama Canal; pressure to seize Greenland; the continued suffocation of the Cuban Revolution through a blockade that has lasted more than six decades; the prolongation of the war in Ukraine; the genocide in Gaza; the advance into the West Bank and Lebanon; the attacks on Yemen; the U.S. and Israeli war against Iran; bombings in Nigeria; and threats of intervention in Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil, in the name of combating drug trafficking; etc. These are recent examples of the U.S. military offensive around the world with clear annexationist objectives.

This global imperialist offensive also aims to destroy living and working conditions, freedoms and rights that have been won, and the political and labor organizations of the working class. The imperialists also apply these policies in their own countries. And they face resistance from the working class and the oppressed. We affirm, alongside the ICL, that the working class has never lacked the will to fight; what it lacks is a leadership capable of guiding it in the struggle for its historic interests.

We understand that in the semi-colonies, communists must apply the tactic of the anti-imperialist united front, under the leadership of the working class, raising the democratic and national banners betrayed by the bourgeoisie and its parties; this is the decisive tactic for contesting the leadership of the masses against nationalism, reformism, and all variants of the Popular Front in order to achieve national liberation. We must combat all sectarianism and opportunism as if they were a plague. Our agreement to defend Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba—including demanding Maduro’s freedom—is important. The decisive question is to fight for leadership of the national liberation struggle in opposition to the national bourgeoisie, which claims to represent the interests of the entire nation and uses nationalism to reinforce its authority.

Establishing genuine proletarian leadership is the central question in the strategy of the proletarian revolution and dictatorship, and in the struggle for communism. Regarding this task, we must draw on the enormous political, theoretical, and ideological capital that the working class has accumulated over more than 170 years, as well as its best experiences in organization and centralization; we must learn from mistakes and defeats by conducting a thorough analysis of these experiences. On this foundation, we must rebuild the Fourth International, guided by the Transitional Program, and build sections in every country—the “party is the program.” To defeat the bourgeoisie, we must first defeat it ideologically, demonstrating that only the working class has a way out of the current crisis and social decay. It is in this task that its political independence is concentrated. That program determines what kind of parties and what kind of International we must build. With this line of work, we must reach out to organizations seeking to orient themselves toward this perspective so that we can work together.

It is essential that the Conference stands as a weapon capable of defending the foundation of the Fourth International’s Transitional Program—that humanity’s emancipation from barbarism depends on the revolutionary victory of the international proletariat. The tactics, means, and methods of the anti-imperialist struggle are inseparable from its objectives.

With fraternal Fourth Internationalist greetings,
Liaison Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International (CERCI)
July 21, 2026

Communist Unity

Dear Comrades,

It is my great pleasure to greet the Ninth International Conference of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), as a representative of Communist Unity in Australia.

We are gathering in a period of imperialist reconstruction as the declining rate of profit drags down the neoliberal world order. This declining rate of profit, which is caused by capital saturation and overproduction in the imperial core as well as in China, is the chief cause of the social ills of our time. The massive and irrational shift to asset speculation, the ‘AI’ bubble as an attempt (so far failed) to revolutionise production and restore profits which is set to burst any day now with dramatic consequences, the competition between Chinese and American capital over Taiwan, as both a militarily strategic site, and a vital producer of Computer Chips, and the groaning collapse of the US imperialist hegemony. As this epoch changes the socialist movement is very slowly getting back on its feet across the world. There is a new generation of revolutionary and socialist leadership, very slowly, emerging through the generational changing of the guard. A generation has come of age after the fall of the USSR, and in the midst of the failure of sectarianism. If we are to take advantage of this epochal shift and to pick our defeated movement off its feet, we must unite. The question of regroupment is no longer an abstract one, but an existing and serious debate. One in which the ICL is making its mark.

In Australia the six months of fusion with the comrades of the Spartacist Tendency (ST) have been nothing short of a major success. From the transformation of Partisan into the increasingly high-quality publication that comrades have seen, to the increasingly rapid snowball effect of growth. These recruits are coming to us because they see we are politically serious and this has only grown stronger with the fusion. This has raised the level of debate in our organisation, and we are increasingly seen by others in the movement as the most politically principled, theoretically rigorous, and strategically minded group on the left. New recruits see that though we are still insignificant from the perspective of the workers’ movement, that we have serious open debates over concrete questions which are free of sectarian, bureaucratic, and interpersonal squabbling. The ST has raised the level of debate and education within the organisation. We have achieved more, and learned more from one another, together than was ever possible apart, and it has been a pleasure to work with comrades who fought for decades as part of the Spartacist League of Australia (SL/A). Finally, unity and principled communist regroupment is increasingly on the order of the day as a question to be addressed.

Comrades, look to Australia, for example!

We are very excited to be attending and learning more about your reorientation, and we hope that discussions over the coming days prepare the ground for further regroupment and international communist unity.

Thank you, Comrades, we wish you well.

Through regroupment we will fight and win, from the Fields to the Stars.

International Bolshevik Tendency

On behalf of the International Bolshevik Tendency, I bring Trotskyist greetings to the attendees of the Ninth International Conference of the ICL. This gathering comes at a moment of significant developments in the world, from the wars in Ukraine, Iran and Lebanon to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, from the heightened threat of counterrevolution in Cuba to the growing tensions between a declining US imperialism and a rising Chinese deformed workers’ state.

This is the first time representatives of the IBT have ever attended official proceedings of the ICL. Our participation here has been made possible by the reorientation your tendency took at your last international conference in 2023.

We find ourselves in an ongoing dialogue that has to date seen discussions and debates between our groups in London, Johannesburg and Melbourne. Even when in sharp disagreement with you, we have found our exchanges to be politically stimulating. Some of the points you have made in the course of debate have generated fruitful internal discussion within the IBT, and we hope that our contributions have produced similar results within the ICL.

As you know, the IBT continues to support the program of the international Spartacist tendency as expressed up to the beginning of the 1980s. Since then, the politics of the Spartacist tendency and the ICL have taken an uneven path.

You are still in the process of carrying out a thorough revision of your historic program. Our view is that, in breaking with the sectarianism of what we have come to call the period of “middle Spartacism,” you have identified real problems with your organization’s application of its historic program, but that you have mistakenly understood those problems to be rooted in that program itself. You have, as we put it, thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

We note significant disagreements between our tendencies on the question of imperialism and the current global order, as well as on the relationship between national struggles and proletarian revolution.

We have characterized your new orientation as representing a slide towards neo-Pabloism. It therefore comes as no surprise to us to see that you are re-evaluating the history of the Fourth International in the post-WWII period and considering the argument that Cannon and the anti-Pabloite IC did not represent, even in a flawed manner, the revolutionary continuity of Trotskyism.

We look forward to discussing these issues at the appropriate points on the agenda, and we thank you for the opportunity to present our views.

Labor Militant

Greetings, comrades, and solidarity.

Labor Militant was launched in February of this year, following a split from Kshama Sawant's organizations, Revolutionary Workers and Workers Strike Back.

Kshama was the socialist on the Seattle City Council for ten years, with Socialist Alternative. That's the U.S. Socialist Alternative, not the Australian Socialist Alternative.

We were effectively purged from those organizations after raising political disagreements. Kshama Sawant now is running an independent socialist campaign for Congress, which we've been supporting even after our purge.

While we were in that organization, we were told that that campaign was just too important to have any debate. The Bolshevik Party was debating up until the moment of the revolution. If we can't debate during an election campaign, when can we debate?

So they handed a couple of us some draconian suspensions, in which they told us we weren't allowed, not only to engage in the work of the organization, but we weren't allowed to speak to any members of Workers Strike Back. That includes one of our members' mothers! So we decided to leave the organization.

We have gone through a period of reassessment ourselves, including the way that democratic centralism is practiced in so much of the left, including so much of the Trotskyist movement, including in Revolutionary Workers, where we think it's taken on a really Stalinist and bureaucratic character — reflecting so many of the purges and clamping down on any sort of debate within the Stalinist organizations.

Across the left, we've seen a whole period of sectarianism and isolation which are reinforcing the worst aspects of each organization on the left. Kshama, when she was elected to City Council, had an organization of 150 members. That today, after 10 years in City Council, is 25 members. They're not moving in the right direction.

We’re very happy to be back in the same room as ISA-R after a messy split of Socialist Alternative that we were both a part of a couple of years ago.

Marxists are punching below our weight. We have to debate. We have to reassess our own traditions.

We're reassessing not only democratic centralism and the way that was practiced in Revolutionary Workers and Socialist Alternative, but their position on China, their position on collaborating with the Green Party.

This conference is an important step forward. I’m very happy to see everyone in the room today.

We need open debate. We also need to find the places where we agree, and not just theoretical agreement. As Lenin said, the truth is concrete — and the test of theory is in action.

We launched United Front for a Workers’ Party to bring socialist organizations, unorganized socialists, and workers together to build unity in action, in concrete campaigns.

And we've been very happy to work with the Spartacist League in the U.S., with ISA-R, with Seattle Revolutionary Socialists, which came out of the old ISO, to build support on the ground for independent socialist campaigns like Kshama Sawant with critical support, Andre Easton in New York. We've done joint work on the picket line together at the hotel strike in Seattle. We've organized in defense of Cuba, opposition to the DSA Democrats and the opportunist leadership inside of the Democratic Socialists of America, organizing for a clean break of the socialist movement from the Democratic Party.

Following much of that joint action we're very excited to be here to discuss all of that and to discuss our theoretical orientation to the period ahead.

Revolutionary Communist International Tendency

Right, comrades. Hello, my name is Michael Pröbsting. I'm the International Secretary of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT) and I would like to transmit our warmest greetings to your ninth international conference.

I've studied the documents in preparation for this conference and I can say that despite a number of disagreements, that's definitely a seriously prepared conference. It's clear that this will be a constructive and fruitful debate. You will also understand that I'm here not only to exchange kisses but also to express some criticism. Unfortunately given the limitations of time I want to focus on only one aspect.

I think it is no accident that this conference has two main issues to discuss, which is first the reassessment of the history of the Fourth International in a period 1945-53, and, second, the world situation today. What do these two periods have in common? They have in common that they were both turning points in world history.

And therefore these were also turning points in a history of a revolutionary organization. And it's clear that what was true at that time, eighty years ago, is also true today. Without a correct assessment, a correct analysis of the world situation today, it is impossible to elaborate and to fight for a revolutionary program.

Of course, there are a number of issues which are relevant to understand the world situation. And there are also a number of issues where we disagree. But in my opinion the single most important issue is the China question. This is essential to understand the dynamics of the world situation.

As obviously everyone here knows, the ICL considers China as a deformed workers state. We in RCIT consider it as a capitalist and imperialist state.

Clearly the decisive question is: what is the class character of the economy of China? And related to this, what is the class character of the state apparatus of China? In one of the two China documents which were distributed yesterday, I did read a very remarkable sentence which I want to quote.

We are, and I quote, we are “in an unprecedented situation in world history where a worker state is the world's main industrial power.” And indeed this is true. China is a well-integrated part of the world economy. It is the most important creator producer of commodities. It is one of the most important trading powers, one of the most important exporters of capital. And this has not happened by incident. This was a conscious plan which was executed by the Communist Party of China over a period of 35 years.

What does this tell us? It tells us first the main producer of commodities in a capitalist world economy must be by definition a capitalist economy. Second, a regime which has created such a capitalist economy must be pro-capitalist. Therefore we speak about a Stalinist-capitalist regime. Unfortunately, I don't have the time now to explain this in more detail. But I'm sure in the next days we'll have a number of discussions about this.

And I look forward to fruitful and constructive debate. Thanks a lot.

Socialista Philippines

International Solidarity Message
To: International Communist League (ICL)

Dear brothers and sisters in the international labor movement,

We extend our warmest greetings of solidarity to all delegates, workers’ organizations, trade unions, and people's movements gathered in this important international conference.

Today workers around the world confront a common reality: worsening economic crises, rising inflation, job insecurity, privatization of public services, attacks on labor rights, and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few. While workers create society's wealth through their labor, millions continue to suffer from poverty, unemployment, precarious work, and social inequality.

These conditions are not isolated problems of individual countries. They are manifestations of a global system that prioritizes profit over people and corporate interests over workers' welfare. As working people, we recognize that our struggles are interconnected. The fight of workers in one country is linked to the fight of workers everywhere.

In the face of these challenges, international solidarity is not merely a slogan—it is a necessity. We must strengthen cooperation among workers' organizations, defend democratic and trade union rights, advance living wages, protect social services, and oppose all forms of exploitation, oppression, discrimination, and repression.

We stand united with workers who are organizing, mobilizing, and resisting attacks on their rights and livelihoods. We express our solidarity with all peoples struggling for social justice, democracy, national sovereignty, peace, and genuine development.

Let this conference serve as a platform for collective analysis, mutual learning, and coordinated action. Together, let us build a stronger international labor movement capable of advancing the interests of workers and marginalized peoples across the world.

Our strength lies in our unity, our hope lies in our collective action, our future lies in our continued struggle for a just and humane society.

• Long Live International Solidarity!
• Long Live the Working Class!
• Workers of All Countries, Unite!