The following article appeared in the January 1973 issue of Was Tun, now the organ of the Gruppe Internationale Marxisten (GIM - International Marxist Group), West German section of the Fourth International. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
From December 30, 1972, to January 1, 1973, the GIM and the Revolutionär-Kommunistischen Jugend [RKJ- Revolutionary Communist Youth] held a fusion conference in Kassel at which a new German section of the Fourth International was formed. The conference was attended by 240 comrades representing local units and support groups in more than thirty West German cities and West Berlin. It marked the culmination of a year-long period of preparation for the unification, which was opened at the second national convention of the RKJ, held in Cologne from October 30 to November 1, 1971.
During the preparatory period, a united national leadership was built, the central committees of the two groups held joint meetings, and the local groups developed joint work. With this issue Was Tun appears as the organ of the GIM, the new united section of the International.
Two representatives of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, as well as guests from many sections and sympathizing groups in Europe, took part in the conference.
European Document
The convention discussed the draft theses entitled "The Building of Revolutionary Parties in Capitalist Europe," which were adopted by the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International for presentation to the forthcoming Tenth World Congress.
This document proceeds from the lessons and experiences of the situation since the strategie turn of 1968 and the end of entryism in Europe, to an orientation for the work of the
European sections in the present period. The general line of the draft was approved nearly unanimously by the conference, along with a proposal to the leading bodies of the International to make certain points in the document more precise. It will be viewed by the GIM as the basis of its strategic orientation.
As soon as the leading bodies of the International decide to make this document public, the GIM will make it available to the West German left.
Action Program
By far the greatest part of the conference was taken up in discussing the action program for the new German section, which was presented to the convention in three various drafts and many supplementary theses.
During the discussion, broad agreement was reached on some key points:
basic orientation toward the workers' vanguard, now developing within given limits in the factories, and the mechanisms of the GIM's trade-union work; the working out of qualitative, transitional demands for the struggles of this vanguard; the political linking of this workers' vanguard to the revolutionary potential (which has a relative mass character) that has been generated by the youth radicalization.
The drafts relating to these points were seen as corresponding to the general line of the European document. Nevertheless, it was decided not to vote on the proposed texts and not to publish the three drafts, because neither the proposed theses nor the state of the discussion within the organization yet fully meets the objective requirements of the struggles in West Germany.
This state of affairs is primarily attributable to the lack of political centralization of both previously existing organizations, which has caused the strategic development of the organization's politics to lag behind its quantitative growth and geographical expansion. During the next six months, the GIM will hold a special conference to deal with this problem and will publish the results.
Indochina
In the center of our activity during the past year, along with intervention in the movement against price increases and in other economic struggles, and in the fight against repression, has been our work in solidarity the Indochinese revolutionwith carried out, among other ways, through the Indochina Solidarity Committees (ISC) and by publication of the weekly Viet-Info.
There are certain differences within the organization over assessment of the current relationship of forces in Vietnam, the character of the North Vietnamese leadership, and the effects of the nine-point accords.
The majority of the conference supported the previous general line of the RKJ and
GIM as it has been expressed, among other places, in the October 30 joint statement of the RKJ Central Committee and the GIM Political Bureau (published in issue No. 20 of the magazine Inprekorr) and in various articles published in Was Tun.
The conference unanimously approved a resolution that called for making January a high point of mobilization against U.S. aggression and, proceeding from our assessment of the present situation and the objective importance of the solidarity movement in the imperialist countries, decided to bring continuous pressure to bear on the other left groups by demanding unity in action, by making general proposals for activity, and by pressing forward our own independent work. It was also decided to intensify the work of the ISCs and to centralize it nationally.
Centralization
In order to overcome the greatest weakness of the old RKJ and GIM and to strive toward political and organizational centralization in the new section it was decided:
• To set up a permanent, centralized leadership in Frankfurt;
• To qualitatively improve the organization's communications facilities and activist structures;
• To merge the magazine Die Internationale, which in the past period has been coming out very irregularly and insufficiently, with Permanente Revolution, the magazine put out by the West Berlin group;
• To then aim at improving Was Tun, both in style and content, to structure it around priorities set by the European document and the discussion around the action program, and to convert it from a monthly to a biweekly.
Also, the conference elected a new Central Committee, one more reflective of the organization's actual forces than the old leadership.
Necessity for RKJ-GIM Unification
The convention adopted a resolution that once again summarized the essential reasons for the unification of the two organizations, which during the two organizations, which during the past year has become an accomplished fact.
The RKJ never was an organization having a different political program from that of the GIM, so this is not a "unification" in the usual sense, when two distinct tendencies unite on a common basis. Rather, the RKJ was initiated (in the winter of 1969-70), established, and, at the beginning, built by the GIM.
On the other hand, the RKJ was never a "youth organization" in the classical sense-a group guided by the "mother organization" and having specific tasks in the field of youth work. The strategic conception of the RKJ was rather that it be a "lever" with which to build an organization capable of intervening in the class struggle under the special conditions of the youth radicalization. That is, fundamental to the founding of the RKJ was the GIM's extreme weakness after the end of entryism and the split in the spring of 1969 that gave rise to the "Spartacus" group. Thus, from the very beginning, the goal of unification of the RKJ and the GIM was a logical implication of the general conception of the RKJ.
Nevertheless, we believe that the conception of the RKJ, despite its great practical value in building the section, was based on a number of mistakes, which are described in this resolution: an underestimation of the newly arising revolutionary left itself, which generally strove to overcome an outlook restricted to its own sector and to work out a general perspective for the whole society; an underestimation of the February 26, 1973
practical effects of the upsurge of West German workers' struggles, which opened up increasing possibilities for bridging the gap between the workingclass movement and the movement of radical youth by direct intervention in the proletariat; an underestimation of the concrete significance of the weight of the Fourth International in West Germany, which in the long run, if this development of a "special West
German strategy for building the organization" had been carried further, would have led to a political regression.
An increasing identity of tasks between the RKJ and the GIM arose from all these factors and finally made the continued existence of two parallel organizations with parallel leaderships and structures an anachronism.