Our Tendency

It was born as the International Communist Left, driven by the Russian Left Opposition in the struggle against the degeneration of the III International. It constitutes external left-wing fractions with the aim of recovering the parties of the Komintern and incorporates different tendencies -many of them founders of the different national parties- in the construction of a world class perspective.
It founds the Fourth International in 1938 when the road to a new world war was opened by the International's capitulation without a fight to Nazism in 1933 and, above all, after the defeat of the Spanish Revolution in 1937, in which Stalinism took on for the first time the role of driving force and director of the counter-revolution.
From 1942 onwards, it fought against centrism in the Fourth International, denouncing the International Secretariat's renunciation of revolutionary defeatism and the betrayal of internationalism by the member parties that supported "national resistances". It follows an independent policy of that of the centrist leadership in 1944, calling for the conversion of the imperialist war into revolutionary civil war and denouncing the imperialist character of the Russian military occupation in the countries of Eastern Europe. The split is made formal at the second congress of the International (1948).
In 1949 it is constituted as the "International Workers Union", grouping together the internationalist sections and fractions in rupture with the surrender policy of the International. Among them, the two sections that have lived the two characteristic revolutions of the period - the Spanish and the Vietnamese - and fractions and groups of the extinct International that have participated in the attempts of the class to turn the imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war in Greece, France, Germany and Italy. It political framework recognized Stalinist Russia and its satellites as state capitalisms and reject the "defense of the [Stalinist] USSR," the possibility of progressive national liberation and in general the progressive character of any alliance with bourgeois factions. They initiate the criticism of the union as a structure integrated into state capitalism and it is the only internationalist group to maintain a militant structure under the conditions of repression of the Franco dictatorship.
It reorganizes internationally from 1958 under the acronym FOR ("Workers' Revolutionary Ferment"), organizing from the 60s to the 90s sections in France, Spain, Italy and Greece. In this stage the criticism of national liberation -already started in the 1930s by the Communist Left in Argentina- and the role of the trade unions in state capitalism, started in the 1940s in the IWU, is paramount. In 1961 FOR published "For a Second Communist Manifesto", a fundamental text of balance of the revolutionary experience under the conditions of decadent capitalism.
From 2011 onwards, initiatives appear in different countries that accentuate and regroup on the programmatic positions of the tendency. In 2017 the process accelerates and culminates in June 2019 with the constitution at the Llerena Congress of "Emancipation" as a world and internationalist political organization.
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Tag: class conciousness

Pandemic and Class Struggle in 2020

31 December, 2020 · News

Ontario, Canada

The pandemic has accelerated the global capitalist crisis and the course of imperialist conflicts, but it has also made explicit a level of contradictions between the workers and the bourgeois classes that is only comparable to that of a war. All capital -small and large, private and state-owned- and the classes that represent it -bourgeoisie, bureaucracy and petty bourgeoisie- have openly shown themselves as organizers and enforcers of sacrificing lives to save investments. The overall response of the working class has been a development of massive and growing combativeness throughout the year. And yet the understanding of the historical meaning and the ultimate potentialities of the moment is still far away, and with it an orientation, a conscious direction of the struggles capable of affirming in the concrete and under the perspective of the satisfaction of universal human needs. There has never been so much work to be done, but it has been a long time since conditions were so favorable for doing it.

The proletariat and the future

15 December, 2020 · Marxism

We have a class, Proletariat, whose struggle, even unconsciously, asserts the possibility and the necessity of the communist future. And which, being completely and universally denied, can only be understood in each moment and in history as a whole, in relation to that future made present by its struggle. In other words, the particular relationship of the proletariat with the future is permanent and constant... even during the darkest periods. For our class there is no longer any stable accommodation possible in present society. The future is everything.

Understanding racial, sexual, linguistic and other forms of discrimination

23 November, 2020 · Critique of ideology

Puck's caricature in 1893 of the American bourgeois classes' rejection of immigrants, then Irish.

A new article in response to what our readers are asking about different forms of discrimination and how to fight them.

1st Congress of Emancipation

On June 21, 22 and 23, we held the first Emancipation Congress with the participation of comrades and nuclei from three countries. The congress constitutes Emancipation as a global and internationalist organization.