Statement by the Movement for the Refoundation of the Fourth International

After February 15: we can win the war against the imperialist war!

February the 15^th 2003 became a historical landmark in the world class struggle: for the first time in history, millions of people demonstrated at the same time all over the planet against the barbarism of the impeding war against Iraq and its instigators, imperialism and its governments. From New York and London to Sydney and Tokyo, from Madrid and Rome to Buenos Aires and Baghdad, from Berlin and Moscow to Tel Aviv, Athens and even Antarctica, an unprecedented upsurge of the oppressed humanity has shaken the world and its rulers.

The U.S-led imperialist war drive has brought the masses on the scene of political struggle, on a scale never seen before, even before the war explodes. Bush, Blair, Aznar, Berlusconi, etc. with all their generals and political stooges who are preparing the Armageddon are lacking of any public support and legitimacy in their criminal actions. Even the nightmare of the American generals during the advanced stages of the Vietnam War to wage a war without public support has been superseded by the current anti-war mass movement all over the world and particularly in the countries of imperialist aggression, the United States, Britain, Italy, Spain and Australia.

The gap between the rulers and ruled is widening bringing into crisis the entire political system of political representation. The mass anti-war attitude and opposition to imperialism is combined with social anger from the dramatic deterioration of living conditions and mass unemployment produced by the capitalist crisis and the anti-popular measures taken by the bourgeois governments and international financial institutions. The war drive itself is educating millions that the world social economic crisis is so deep that it cannot be resolved solely by economic means.

It is this world crisis, manifesting itself in a world downturn, the bursting of the financial bubble, the bankruptcies of colossal U.S. corporations, the stagnation in Europe and Japan, the collapse of entire countries such as Argentina, as well as the upsurge of the masses that sharpens all the inter-imperialist rivalries. For the first time after the collapse of the Soviet Union and of the Soviet bloc, an open split in NATO has developed and the sharpest conflict has erupted between the United States and the French-German hard core of the European Union. These conflicts make clear that the war against Iraq has nothing to do with the nature of the Baghdad regime or the existence of “weapons of mass destruction” but has as motives not only the richest oilfields of the region but above all world hegemony in the post Cold war chaotic world. The UN and its Security Council is only a space of bargaining between rival imperialisms using the smaller states as proxies and weapon to legitimate the aggression against an oppressed country.

The anti-war movement has to be totally independent and politically opposed to all European imperialist governments and the United Nations, the tool of imperialism. The line proposed by pacifist organizers and sections of the Left, including the leading group in the European Social Forum and the so-called “United Secretariat of the FI” to ask the European governments and the Security Council to act in favor of a “peaceful solution” through “more inspections’ etc. is totally misleading and pro-imperialist. It produces deadly illusions and adaptation to European, particularly French and German, imperialisms and to the “kitchen of the thieves”, the UN, guilty already for a series of disasters from Korea, Cyprus and Congo to the Balkan wars in the ‘90s and Iraq itself.

The only force that really can stop the war is the world working class and the popular masses whose strength has been clearly demonstrated in the February 15 international mobilization.

The determination to stop the imperialist war has to inspire a continuing and escalating multiform mobilization all over the world with popular demonstrations, blockades of the U.S./NATO bases, stopping the transfer of military material and personnel by harbors, airports and railways, strike actions etc. The call by the Confederations, Federations and individual trade unions in Italy, Greece and other countries for a General Strike against the war has to be fully supported and adequate measures for its preparation has to be taken.

The struggle against imperialism and its war means that no hypocritical “equal distance” stand can be taken between the butchers and their victims: the defense of Iraq and its oppressed people for the defeat of the imperialist aggression is our common international and internationalist duty.

The CIA machinations to use the Kurdish forces in South Kurdistan for an invasion of Iraq from the North have to be defeated. The Kurdish national self-determination cannot be achieved by an alliance with Bush, Rumsfeld and their local agents but with a united struggle with the Iraqi Arab people and all the oppressed peoples of the region to defeat imperialism and all its stooges and build a Socialist Federation of the Middle East which will provide guaranties for the right of national of self-determination of the Kurds and all other oppressed nations of the region.

The struggle against the imperialist war is directly connected with the fight to defeat the genocidal plans of the Sharon Zionist Government to use an aggression on Iraq for its “final solution”, the transfer of the Palestinians, the struggle for defense of the Palestinian people, the support for its heroic Intifada until victory, the defeat of Zionism and the establishment of a Socialist democratic secular Palestinian Republic in the entire historic territory of Palestine where Arabs and Jews could live together and free.

February 15 has shown that we can win. The tremendous anti-war movement developing in the imperialist countries- a movement in which the mobilizations against capitalist Globalization from Seattle to Genoa and Florence have merged- has to be united with all the other revolutionary movements and struggles all over the world. First of all in the backyard of American imperialism, Latin America is transformed into a volcano with the Argentinean revolution, the Bolivian revolt, the Venezuelan revolutionary crisis, the continuing armed struggle in Colombia, the growing crisis in Brazil. Solidarity in action with the Latin American revolution is a most powerful weapon against Yankee State terrorism.

The aggression on Iraq is an initial, not a final step in an indefinite war campaign by U.S. imperialism and its allies against all the oppressed peoples for world domination. Already the war drive produces enormous political crises and convulsions that have to be transformed into battles of a war of the oppressed against the warmongers and war criminals of American and world imperialism.

The war of liberation from imperialist war barbarism has to be developed until the total eradication of the roots of war: the overthrow of imperialism, of all capitalist governments and bourgeois repressive State machines and their replacement by organs of workers power to overthrow Capitalism and build a world of peace and social justice, the world of Socialism.

For victory we need unity in action and above all a revolutionary strategy, tactics and organization- i.e. a revolutionary International. The task in front of the revolutionary vanguard all over the world, posed also in all previous occasions where humanity has faced the barbarism of imperialist war, is now more urgent than ever: we have to build the International- to move boldly, without vacillations forward to the Refoundation of the Fourth International.

The Coordination Committee

Of the Movement for the Refoundation of the Fourth International

25 February 2003