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Introducing
this issue
THIS issue of International Marxist Review is entirely given over to the publication of the texts of the 13th World Congress of the Fourth International which took place in February 1991. An account of the Congress and a number of statements adopted by it were published in International Viewpoint (see Nos 201 and 202).
We are publishing all the political texts adopted which amply illustrate the subjects and main themes discussed by the delegates, fraternal delegates and guests. Discussion will continue on the text "Ecology and Socialist Revolution" which was provisionally approved by the congress but will be voted on at the next World Congress. In a future issue of IMR we will publish a text discussed and voted by the Congress dealing with the place of women within the Fourth International.
One other text dealing with major questions of our political period was also discussed at the Congress — a draft Manifesto of the Fourth International.
The aim of this manifesto is to give a revolutionary Marxist answer to the ever more dramatic questions posed for humanity at this end of the 20th century. To cite a passage from the draft:
The world is at a crossroads. The knowledge and technical means exist to conquer hunger and disease and to satisfy the basic social and cultural needs of our whole planet. But, ine-
4 International Marxist Review qualities grow and catastrophes threaten us. ... The existence of enormous military stockpiles, the development of biological and chemical weapons and the proliferation of nuclear power stations likely to be transformed into so many nuclear explosions, could physically wipe out the human race. .. The greenhouse effect, the destruction of the ozone layer, the devastation of tropical rain forests, the poisoning of oceans, rivers and reservoirs and air pollution — all these threats combine to endanger humanity's physical survival.
Famine increasingly threatens entire peoples — not because agricultural productivity is inadequate, but because it is too high to guarantee sufficient profits for agro-business and the big farmers in the richest countries.
It is against this world reality and the extreme dangers that it implies that revolutionaries must fight for:
the liberating ideal of human rights. This includes not only civic and political rights, but also social rights — the right to work, to a decent standard of living, to healthcare, education and housing. Neither the capitalist jungle nor bureaucratic dictatorships can meet this challenge.
states the Manifesto, continuing:
Only through their revolutionary overthrow can the unfolding possibilities of a socialist and internationalist solution to the crisis - based on the potential for struggle and innovation of the proletariat and the oppressed — be successful.
The World Congress decided to continue the discussion on this draft until the International Executive Committee meeting in January 1992, which will adopt the definitive version after broad integration of amendments.
We are submitting the draft text to public discussion of all revolutionaries. We invite them to submit to the leaderships of our sections and sympathizing groups as well as to the International leadership, any suggestions, proposed amendments or criticims that they think useful.
In this issue of IMR we are also publishing texts proposed to the World Congress by the different minorities which defended their point of view in relation to different questions on the agenda. These include a text on the international situation presented by a tendency called by its initiators " Tendency for Building the Fourth International", composed of the majority of the British organization the International Socialist Group, and a minority of the French Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire which had six delegates (of a total of approximately one hundred), a text of an Italian minority called the "Left Tendency" which had one delegate, and a text presented by Socialist Action, one of the organizations in the USA identifying with the Fourth International but prevented from membership by reactionary legislation. There is also another alternative text on the international situation presented by a group of British members of the International.
APPEAL OF FOURTH INTERNATIONAL