Chavez Calls for International Organisation of Left Parties
November 26, 2009 - 12:32am
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Venezuela's Chavez Calls for International Organisation of Left Parties
The head of state insisted that the conference of left parties should not be "just one more meeting," and he invited participating organizations to create a truly new project. "This socialist encounter should be of the genuine left, willing to fight against imperialism and capitalism," he said.
If only he did not legitimize the sectarian mistake known as the "Fourth International," to echo Louis Proyect's sentiments.
If only he did not legitimize the sectarian mistake known as the "Fourth International," to echo Louis Proyect's sentiments.
heh. i had the same thought
The only legitimate internationals are:
International Workingmen's Association
Second International: This is the first "Socialist International," up to and including the anti-war Basel Congress of 1912.
Communist International: Personally I'd throw away the Seventh Congress, since it advocated the class collaborationism of Popular Fronts, and the extent to which the Second to Sixth Congresses should be critically upheld or rejected is up for debate. There should be absolutely no question on the validity of the First Congress in 1919, though.
International Working Union of Socialist Parties (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Working_Union_of_Socialist_Pa...): Although this is the "centrist"/"Kautskyite" formation formed just after the war, this international's emphasis on more consideration being given to national situations is more than justified, with the Comintern eventually becoming a Soviet fan club.
International Revolutionary Marxist Centre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Revolutionary_Marxist_Centre): The mere existence of this international shows the outright sectarianism of the "Fourth International" in the first place.
Minimum: Anti-imperialist. Maximum: socialism for the 21st century.
Chavez calls for a 5th International (with video)
The Brazilian Workers party is not a proletarian-not-necessarily-communist party, but a bourgeois labour party. It seeks none of these things: "formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy [by establishing its own cultural hegemony], conquest of [ruling-class] political power by the proletariat."
The lowest common denominators should be a commitment to class struggle of the workers (as opposed to fashionable identity politics of gender/culture/race, Green politics, etc. and expressed explicitly in terms of having only those of a non-working-class background in the party, to the exclusionary disappointment of the typical Student Leftist), a commitment to a participatory economy free of private property and other elitism, a commitment to at least international if not transnational politics, and a commitment to the "genuine political party" model that also incorporates movement and mutual aid functions.