20 - 01 - 2017
Liaison Committee for the Fourth International Statement
As a working class, we must unite all oppressed to oppose the imperialist ruling class at home and its imperialist maneuvers around the world!
More than ever it is necessary to unify our class, women, whites, blacks, Muslims, Indians, Asians, Latinos, LGBTQ and immigrants against the rising police state. Donald Trump is an oafish, far-right racist, Islamophobic, sexist, misogynist homophobic, ablest bigot who rose to power with the support of a far-right constituency that includes white supremacists and fascist groups such as Ku Klux Klan. His victory has greatly strengthened these groups’ ideology as it has also happened in Britain after the Brexit, in Europe and internationally.
Racist attacks on immigrants are proliferating and are bound to advance strongly in the next years. We are for black self-defense, as the Black Panthers defended themselves in their fight against the police state that will get a big boost under Trump.
We must fight in this way as part of the struggle to build a revolutionary party on the basis of the multiracial proletariat throughout North America.
Most of the rustbelt states in the mid-west and in the upper northeastern where the economy was once heavily based on industry and manufactory, voted for Obama both in 2008 and 2012 under the belief that “Hope was on the Way!” The great majority of people in these states are no more racist than Northern English and Welsh workers in Britain are these days. Neither were most Hitler voters strongly anti-Semitic or anti-communist back in 1932. However, in both Britain and the US a large section of these people are now under the political influence of far-right and fascist forces, which are appealing for the allegiance of the lumpen elements of the class. This is a clear task where revolutionary leadership is needed to tackle this crisis.
Without a clear understanding of the death of the American manufacturing as a capitalist process, and without any revolutionary struggle against the capitalism and the ruling class, the working class from these old manufacturing belts bought into the argument that getting rid of immigrants would help to free more jobs for them.
The election of Trump is an indication of the rise of economic nationalism and protectionism and its consequent immigration control, which led in the past to WWI and WWII, proclaimed by serious representatives of the global ruling classes as a phase in history that would never happen again.
Trump Says Go Back, We Say Fightback!
In a first moment, the fightback posed by the oppressed has been on social matters, the ongoing racism in the USA, the police murders and cover-ups – actions that point out indeed that to American bourgeois society black lives don’t really matter as much as white lives.
And this all happened under the nation’s first black President. In fact, Obama’s failure to address this assault on black lives let alone reverse the declining living standards and appalling unemployment, which felt most acutely in the black inner city ghettos, sparked the Black Lives Matter movement back in 2013. The Native American movement at Standing Rock too is a stirring of the poorest and most oppressed in the USA. And it’s getting support from all the world’s oppressed, adding to the solidarity between Black Lives Matter and the Palestinians under murderous assault in Operation Protective Edge in Gaza in July and August 2014. These two now are showing solidarity to the Native Americans’ battle at Standing Rock over the Dakota pipeline.
Trump threats to build a wall along the US Mexico border has a purpose of terrorizing and taming immigrants; it is more profitable to criminalize them to increase class exploitation than to get rid of this category of empire slaves. Under the threat of deportation many of the oppressed immigrants will do any kind of work for any payment. This is clearly the main purpose of xenophobia; to set one part of the working class in competition against another.
What is not so transparent to native US workers is that after associating with their class enemy, the trap is sprung on them next. This is the system. More than ever our motto is “workers of the whole world, unite!”
A change that could ignite a fightback might come from the young Americans who are losing their respect for the god-like figure of the American president who represents the holy writ of the American Constitution through street protests which started to be held immediately after Trump was declared elected.
Saying no to Trump symbolizes an awakening call to all oppressed and working class and could materialize into a heartening leftism revival like in the Vietnam anti-war protest days. Even though Obama headed the imperialism agenda for eight years, nobody has ever asked him how many kids he had killed on a given day as they did Lyndon Johnson; they may well ask Trump this very same question at the first opportunity.
USA: Hegemonic Imperialism
Even though the USA’s political and economic strength and influence have weakened, it’s still the only global hegemonic imperialist power in the world since the end of WWII. Even though unwillingly, all other imperialist powers are subordinate to the US.
This does not mean that global imperialism cannot be defeated. Since its defeat in Vietnam in 1975, the empire has largely relied on proxy forces to do its dirty work, however such forces have often turn on them.
Osama Bin Laden was once a CIA asset and, even though the CIA celebrated the overthrow of Najibullah in Afghanistan in 1996, their creatures (Al Qaeda and ISIS) have turned against them there and in Libya, in Iraq, Syria, and North Africa.
Public opposition to ‘boots on the ground’ prevented the bombing of Damascus in 2013 in fear of a repeat of the debacle of pushing million dollar helicopters overboard off Saigon in April 1975.The liberation of Aleppo is welcome as both a manifestation of and a reinforcement of that crucial Vietnam syndrome.
Trump was supported by sectors of the most reactionary fractions of the imperialist ruling class, evangelists and racists, Christian fundamentalists, “gusanos” (worms, as Fidel Castro dubbed the right-wing Cuban exiles from 1959 concentrated in Miami, Florida) and the Israelis. Israel hopes Trump will live up to his campaign promise to break agreements between Obama and Iran; and expects that from now on the new president will take a more lenient and permissive stance on Israel’s warmongering against the Palestinians and the enemies of Zionism in the region.
For an International Anti-Imperialist United Front
We criticize the dangerous illusions of pacifist that Putin and other bourgeois nationalist leaders and their supporters puts in Trump's leadership. Imperialism, with Trump, will continue adamantly to defend its expansionist and neo-colonialist interests.
Trump takes up the old slogan of Roman imperialism "divide et impera" – divide and conquer. Trump came to divide Russia from China, white workers from blacks, all Latinos and Mexico from America.
The revolutionary task is to unify all oppressed and workers’ struggle against Trump and his ultra-reactionary agenda at the heart of the imperialist monster and everywhere else on the planet.
We call for a United Front in the U.S. and for an International Anti-Imperialist United Front with all the political forces that coalesce in practice in the fight against the empire, its multinationals and its agents, without feeding any illusions in the TU bureaucrats or the bourgeoisies that momentarily clash with the US and the EU and without abandoning the struggle for the socialist revolution and a revolutionary international party.
In this task, the Socialist Workers League and the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International bends its militant efforts and invites other revolutionary Marxist organizations to build together the World Party of Socialist Revolution.
More than ever it is necessary to unify our class, women, whites, blacks, Muslims, Indians, Asians, Latinos, LGBTQ and immigrants against the rising police state. Donald Trump is an oafish, far-right racist, Islamophobic, sexist, misogynist homophobic, ablest bigot who rose to power with the support of a far-right constituency that includes white supremacists and fascist groups such as Ku Klux Klan. His victory has greatly strengthened these groups’ ideology as it has also happened in Britain after the Brexit, in Europe and internationally.
Racist attacks on immigrants are proliferating and are bound to advance strongly in the next years. We are for black self-defense, as the Black Panthers defended themselves in their fight against the police state that will get a big boost under Trump.
We must fight in this way as part of the struggle to build a revolutionary party on the basis of the multiracial proletariat throughout North America.
Most of the rustbelt states in the mid-west and in the upper northeastern where the economy was once heavily based on industry and manufactory, voted for Obama both in 2008 and 2012 under the belief that “Hope was on the Way!” The great majority of people in these states are no more racist than Northern English and Welsh workers in Britain are these days. Neither were most Hitler voters strongly anti-Semitic or anti-communist back in 1932. However, in both Britain and the US a large section of these people are now under the political influence of far-right and fascist forces, which are appealing for the allegiance of the lumpen elements of the class. This is a clear task where revolutionary leadership is needed to tackle this crisis.
Without a clear understanding of the death of the American manufacturing as a capitalist process, and without any revolutionary struggle against the capitalism and the ruling class, the working class from these old manufacturing belts bought into the argument that getting rid of immigrants would help to free more jobs for them.
The election of Trump is an indication of the rise of economic nationalism and protectionism and its consequent immigration control, which led in the past to WWI and WWII, proclaimed by serious representatives of the global ruling classes as a phase in history that would never happen again.
Trump Says Go Back, We Say Fightback!
In a first moment, the fightback posed by the oppressed has been on social matters, the ongoing racism in the USA, the police murders and cover-ups – actions that point out indeed that to American bourgeois society black lives don’t really matter as much as white lives.
And this all happened under the nation’s first black President. In fact, Obama’s failure to address this assault on black lives let alone reverse the declining living standards and appalling unemployment, which felt most acutely in the black inner city ghettos, sparked the Black Lives Matter movement back in 2013. The Native American movement at Standing Rock too is a stirring of the poorest and most oppressed in the USA. And it’s getting support from all the world’s oppressed, adding to the solidarity between Black Lives Matter and the Palestinians under murderous assault in Operation Protective Edge in Gaza in July and August 2014. These two now are showing solidarity to the Native Americans’ battle at Standing Rock over the Dakota pipeline.
Trump threats to build a wall along the US Mexico border has a purpose of terrorizing and taming immigrants; it is more profitable to criminalize them to increase class exploitation than to get rid of this category of empire slaves. Under the threat of deportation many of the oppressed immigrants will do any kind of work for any payment. This is clearly the main purpose of xenophobia; to set one part of the working class in competition against another.
What is not so transparent to native US workers is that after associating with their class enemy, the trap is sprung on them next. This is the system. More than ever our motto is “workers of the whole world, unite!”
A change that could ignite a fightback might come from the young Americans who are losing their respect for the god-like figure of the American president who represents the holy writ of the American Constitution through street protests which started to be held immediately after Trump was declared elected.
Saying no to Trump symbolizes an awakening call to all oppressed and working class and could materialize into a heartening leftism revival like in the Vietnam anti-war protest days. Even though Obama headed the imperialism agenda for eight years, nobody has ever asked him how many kids he had killed on a given day as they did Lyndon Johnson; they may well ask Trump this very same question at the first opportunity.
USA: Hegemonic Imperialism
Even though the USA’s political and economic strength and influence have weakened, it’s still the only global hegemonic imperialist power in the world since the end of WWII. Even though unwillingly, all other imperialist powers are subordinate to the US.
This does not mean that global imperialism cannot be defeated. Since its defeat in Vietnam in 1975, the empire has largely relied on proxy forces to do its dirty work, however such forces have often turn on them.
Osama Bin Laden was once a CIA asset and, even though the CIA celebrated the overthrow of Najibullah in Afghanistan in 1996, their creatures (Al Qaeda and ISIS) have turned against them there and in Libya, in Iraq, Syria, and North Africa.
Public opposition to ‘boots on the ground’ prevented the bombing of Damascus in 2013 in fear of a repeat of the debacle of pushing million dollar helicopters overboard off Saigon in April 1975.The liberation of Aleppo is welcome as both a manifestation of and a reinforcement of that crucial Vietnam syndrome.
Trump was supported by sectors of the most reactionary fractions of the imperialist ruling class, evangelists and racists, Christian fundamentalists, “gusanos” (worms, as Fidel Castro dubbed the right-wing Cuban exiles from 1959 concentrated in Miami, Florida) and the Israelis. Israel hopes Trump will live up to his campaign promise to break agreements between Obama and Iran; and expects that from now on the new president will take a more lenient and permissive stance on Israel’s warmongering against the Palestinians and the enemies of Zionism in the region.
For an International Anti-Imperialist United Front
We criticize the dangerous illusions of pacifist that Putin and other bourgeois nationalist leaders and their supporters puts in Trump's leadership. Imperialism, with Trump, will continue adamantly to defend its expansionist and neo-colonialist interests.
Trump takes up the old slogan of Roman imperialism "divide et impera" – divide and conquer. Trump came to divide Russia from China, white workers from blacks, all Latinos and Mexico from America.
The revolutionary task is to unify all oppressed and workers’ struggle against Trump and his ultra-reactionary agenda at the heart of the imperialist monster and everywhere else on the planet.
We call for a United Front in the U.S. and for an International Anti-Imperialist United Front with all the political forces that coalesce in practice in the fight against the empire, its multinationals and its agents, without feeding any illusions in the TU bureaucrats or the bourgeoisies that momentarily clash with the US and the EU and without abandoning the struggle for the socialist revolution and a revolutionary international party.
In this task, the Socialist Workers League and the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International bends its militant efforts and invites other revolutionary Marxist organizations to build together the World Party of Socialist Revolution.
