Defend the
Palestinian People – Defeat Israel’s
Genocidal Blitzkrieg!
Drive Zionist
Army/Settlers Out of the Occupied
Territories! For Arab/Hebrew
Workers Revolution!
Defend Afghanistan,
Iraq Against Imperialist Attack! U.S./NATO Out of the
Near East and Central/South Asia!
The Israeli government has
launched a genocidal war against
the Palestinians. Its purpose is to
“decapitate” the Palestinian Authority,
kill thousands of those who oppose
Israel’s brutal rule, and “ethnically
cleanse” key areas of the West Bank and
Gaza by driving out tens of thousands of
Palestinians. The Zionist leadership has
received a green light from the United
States government to carry out this
terrorist war. The U.S. and its NATO
allies meanwhile are keeping Afghanistan
under the iron heel of occupation as they
prepare a new war against Iraq. The League
for the Fourth International issues an
urgent call to defend the Palestinian
people against the Zionist “final
solution”! Drive the Zionist occupiers out
of the West Bank and Gaza – Bring down the
Zionist state through Arab/Hebrew workers
revolution, in a socialist federation of
the Near East! Defend Afghanistan and Iraq
against imperialist occupation and attack!
Defeat imperialism through international
socialist revolution! Defeat
Israel's
genocidal Blitzkrieg! (30 March
2002)
India-Pakistan: For Workers
Revolution Against the Chauvinist
Warmongers!
As the U.S. and NATO
terror-bomb Afghanistan in the name of
fighting “terrorism,” the two regional
capitalist powers (India and Pakistan)
which signed onto the imperialist war
drive are at each other’s throats. More
than one million Indian and Pakistani
troops have been mobilized to the
frontier. The immediate object of the
dispute is the predominantly Muslim land
of Kashmir, which has been divided since
the 1947 partition of the Indian
subcontinent by the departing British
colonialists. Today a fourth
India-Pakistan war could escalate to a
nuclear conflagration killing millions.
We print here an article by
Revolutionary Fourth International, a
small group of Indian Trotskyists in
Calcutta that sympathizes with the
League for the Fourth International. The
RFI calls for revolutionary defeatism on
both sides in this new India-Pakistan
conflict, while defending the right of
self-determination for Kashmir and all
the oppressed peoples of the region and
fighting for a socialist federation of
South Asia. For
Workers
Revolution Against the Warmongers
(March 2002)
Build
Working-Class Defense Guards to
Fight Against
Communalist/Fascist Barbarism!
Since the end of February
there has been a wave of communalist
attacks beginning in the north Indian
state of Gujarat which have killed more
than 1,000 people, mainly Muslims. These
are not just the Hindu-Muslim riots of
the past but full-fledged pogroms
organized by fascistic Hindu
communalists and outright fascist terror
squads like the RSS. While opportunists
call on the capitalist government to
protect the victims, the fact is that
police have stood by and even
participated in the slaughter. The
Revolutinary Fourth International calls
for workers defense guards based on the
working class and laboring masses in
various religious communities to combat
the pogromists. Workers
Defense
Guards Against Communalist Terror
(March 2002)
Fascists,
Conservatives and Reformists Vote
for Police-State Laws
National Front At
Forefront of Capitalist Drive
Toward “Strong State” in France
Break with the
Popular Front! Build a Trotskyist
Party to Lead the Struggle for
International Workers Revolution!
The presence of Jean-Marie
Le Pen, Führer of the National
Front (FN), in the run-off round of the
French presidential elections stunned
France and sent shock waves around
Europe. The reformists, from the
Socialist and Communist parties to the
“far left,” channeled outrage against
the fascists into support for the
corrupt conservative president Jacques
Chirac. Some call for outlawing the FN
under laws that will be (and already
have been) used to ban leftist and
anti-colonialist parties. Others,
including Lutte Ouvrière and the
International Communist League pretend
that the FN is merely an “electoral
party.” This classic social-democratic
conception sows deadly illusions. The
National Front has a veritable private
army, at the core of which are
paramilitary units notorious for their
racist attacks. In the 1995 FN campaign
two immigrant youth were murdered by FN
thugs. FN operatives run agencies
supplying strikebreakers to French
companies and mercenaries for French
interests in Africa. The fight against
the the drive toward a bonapartist
“strong state” requires revolutionary
mobilization of the working class to
crush the fascists and break with the
popular front of war and racism.
National
Front
at forefront of capitalist drive
toward “strong state” in France (8
June 2002)
Fascism,
bonapartism
and police terror in Italy (June
2002)
In Centrist Drift
Toward Lutte Ouvrière
How ICL Turns French
Fascists Into Ballot-Box Rightists
For decades the Spartacist
tendency/International Communist League
(ICL) held that France’s National Front
(FN) was fascist. But over the last three
years, the ICL has decided that Haider’s
FPÖ in Austria, Fini’s AN in Italy and Le
Pen’s FN in France are not fascist but
“electoral parties. ” This is the policy
of the bourgeoisie, which refers only to
“ex-” and “post-”fascists. It is also the
position of Lutte Ouvrière (LO), which has
long claimed that the FN was just another
right-wing party. The ICL’s sudden shift
is one of a series of line changes on key
questions as it has abandoned Trotskyism
for centrist confusionism. Its offer of
conditional “critical support” to LO
reflected a growing political
rapprochement. Neither LO nor the ICL call
to defeat the imperialist war, neither
call for independence for French and U.S.
colonies, both justify a policy of
left-talking abstention from the class
struggle by blaming the backward
consciousness of the workers. This
perspective has led LO to play only a
marginal role in the major upheavals by
the French working class, notably in 1968.
This underscores the need to forge an
authentic Leninist-Trotskyist party. How
ICL
turns French fascists into ballot-box
rightists (8 June 2002).
From Hindenberg to
Chirac...
French
Elections: Beware of Bourgeois
“Saviors of the Nation”!
The main argument raised
by the Stalinists and social-democrats
to convince their ranks to vote for the
reactionary Chirac is the refrain of
“the Republic in danger.” In calling for
a “Republican front” to justify voting
for the candidate of the big bosses,
they reproduce the reasoning of the
German Social Democrats (SPD) who in
1932 called for a vote for Field
Marshall von Hindenburg against Hitler.
Yet less than a year after von
Hindenburg was re-elected president, he
brought in the Nazi Führer as
prime minister. A landslide
victory for Chirac, the deputy and
successor to General De Gaulle, will
only feed his bonapartist appetites.
Votes for bourgeois “democrats” are no
barrier to the fascists, for they
ultimately represent the same class
interests. To stop Le Pen’s National
Front and Hitler’s Nazis it is necessary
to mobilize the power of workers to
sweep the fascist vermin off the
streets, opening the way to proletarian
revolution. French
elections:
beware of bourgeois ‘saviors of the
nation’ (4 May 2002).
No to Chirac –
Le Pen! Sweep Away the
Fascist Thugs
May 1! Boycott the
Elections May 5!
France: The
Popular Front Opens the Door to
Fascist Reaction
Fight for Workers
Revolution!
Build a Real
Leninist-Trotskyist Party!
After the results of the
first round of the French presidential
elections April 21, with the reactionary
Chirac and the fascist Le Pen facing off
in a second round May 5, an explosion of
anger has swept through the country. Le
Pen and his cohorts are not a “current
of opinion” but the political front for
racist shock troops of reaction who
would annihilate immigrants, the left
and labor. They must be crushed before
it is too late. But all the parties of
the popular front of the “plural left”
(Socialists, Communists, Greens) and
even the tame “far left” are calling
directly or indirectly for a a vote for
Chirac. The League for the Fourth
International warns against this call
for a “republican front” against the
National Front. Chirac will implement
much of the reactionary program of Le
Pen. Voting for any candidate of a
bourgeois party or
class-collaborationist coalition will
not stop the fascist menace. It is
necessary to mobilize the power of the
working class to boycott the electoral
circus of the bourgeoisie and sweep away
the fascist thugs of capital. Working
people, immigrants and youth must say
no to Chirac and Le Pen,
and break with the reformist
social-democrats and pseudo-communists
who paved the way for this lurch to
the right. France:
Popular
front paves the way for fascist
reaction (26 April 2002)
Women’s Liberation
Through Socialist Revolution!
On International Women’s
Day 2002, in the midst of the terrorist
“war against terrorism” launched by U.S.
imperialism and its NATO allies, women
around the world are under attack. U.S.
war propagandists use the hideous
oppression of women under the
Islamic-fundamentalist Taliban regime to
justify the Pentagon’s indiscriminate
bombing which has killed more than 4,000
civilians in Afghanistan. Yet the
Islamic-fundamentalist regime installed
by Washington and led by the same bloody
warlords who were the CIA’s terrorist
“holy warriors” against the
Soviet-backed Kabul government in the
1980s continues to violently enforce the
oppression of women. Women's
Liberation
Through Socialist Revolution!
(8 March 2002)
Nigerian Woman
Sentenced to Death for
“Adultery”
Stop the Execution
of Safiya Hussain, Free Her Now!
Over the last several
years, the discontent of the
impoverished masses of Nigeria, Africa’s
largest country is being diverted into
religious and ethnic strife, provoking
riots that have left hundreds dead since
last September. In the midst of the
communal bloodletting, last October a
35-year-old nursing mother, Safiya
Hussain, was sentenced by an Islamic
court in the state of Sokoto to death by
stoning for the supposed “crime” of
adultery. The only proof against Safiya
is that she is unmarried and pregnant.
In Nigeria the court which decreed the
death of Safiya Hussain did so on the
basis of the Sharia, the medieval
Islamic legal code. In the U.S., the
racist death penalty in the U.S. is
legal lynching, and is in fact a product
of slavery and Jim Crow segregation.
Reactionary Islamic family codes in
Africa and murderous attacks on abortion
providers by Christian fundamentalists
in the U.S. will only be abolished
through international socialist
revolution. Stop
the
Execution of Safiya Hussain!
(8 March 2002)
From Protest to the
Struggle for Proletarian Power
Mass Upheaval
Rocks Argentina,
Brazilian Workers
Movement Under Attack
Not Populist Appeals
Against “Neo-Liberalism”
But Workers
Revolution to Bring Down Capitalism!
After four years of
wrenching economic crisis, hundreds of
highway blockades by thousands of
unemployed workers and eight general
strikes, while starving people emptied
supermarkets of food, in late December
the fury of the devastated Argentine
middle class boiled over. In the face of
a state of siege, with demonstrations of
banging pots and pans (cacerolazos),
the
population of Buenos Aires brought down
four presidents in two weeks. The shock
waves of the social convulsions in
Argentina have spread to Brazil and
throughout the world. The Argentine
crisis has opened a potentially
revolutionary situation. The big factor
missing is a revolutionary leadership
capable of organizing and leading the
struggles of the exploited and oppressed
to the taking of power by the
proletariat. Mass
upheaval
rocks Argentina
(January 2002)
U.S./NATO Out of
Afghanistan and Central Asia!
Imperialists’
Terror War Spreads
Next Up:
Philippines, Iraq, Somalia…?
Revolutionary
Defeatism
on
All Sides in an India-Pakistan War!
For
International Socialist Revolution!
Washington triumphantly
proclaimed the victory of its “new war”
after its warllord allies of the Northern
Alliance took Kabul in five weeks. But the
imperialists’ Blitzkrieg-like
“victory” will only bring further
suffering to the Afghan peoples while
setting the stage for more war around the
globe. As U.S. forces direct “mopping-up”
operations in the countryside, and a
British-led NATO “peacekeeping” force
patrols Kabul, it’s clear that Western
occupation forces won’t be exiting
Afghanistan any time soon. One gang of
Islamic fundamentalists has replaced
another, and Afghan women are still
imprisoned in the head-to-toe burqa. Class-conscious
workers throughout the world must fight
to defeat the imperialists and defend
Afghanistan, Iraq and any other country
targeted by the U.S./NATO war.
Imperialists
terror
war spreads (January
2002)
Federal Judge
Upholds Frame-Up Conviction,
Orders New Hearing
on Death Sentence
Battle Escalates
for Jamal’s Freedom
Mobilize Workers
Power to Free Mumia Now!
The case of Mumia
Abu-Jamal, the former Black Panther and
crusading journalist, framed-up and
sitting on Pennsylvania’s death row for
the past 20 years row sums up the racist
essence of American bourgeois “justice.”
On December 18 a federal judge for the
first time declared that the death
sentence against Jamal was the product
of judicial misconduct. Yet his narrow
decision accepted only the most limited
point raised in Jamal’s appeal, while
dismissing out of hand the other 28
issues raised, as well as endorsing
Jamal's frame-up conviction and
refusing to hear dramatic new evidence
of his innocence . The
Internationalist Group and League for
the Fourth International warn: this
ruling does not lift the threat of
Mumia’s execution. It must spur
efforts to mobilize the working class
and the oppressed to free this
courageous fighter against injustice
from the claws of the capitalist state
that seeks to silence his powerful
“voice of the voiceless” forever. Battle
escalates
for Jamal's freedom (9
January 2002)
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