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.
Today we are Emancipation/ Emancipación/ Émancipação /Émancipation/ Emancipazione

FR | ES

Tag: communist morality

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.

A morale of victory?

28 October, 2020 · Morality

The "Morale of Victory" narrative is not just a discourse on the overall level of morale or stamina. It is a discourse on morality. It is the state separating the good guys -who resist and sacrifice themselves- from the bad guys, a bunch of selfish and defeatist cynics.

Four Keys to Overcome Fear and Overcome Slaughter

1 October, 2020 · Morality

EU food aid distributed in France.The banner reads "Products EAFD". The EAFD is the "European Fund to help the most Disadvantaged".

Under the grammar of the fear of unemployment and poverty what they call economy -the accumulation of capital- has been revealed as an arithmetic of slaughter. But everything that is presented to us as "superhuman forces", unbeatable, inexorable... is not.

Alexandra Kollontai… was no feminist

5 March, 2020 · Internationalist militants

Alexandra Kollontai

Alexandra Kollontai wrote about women's liberation and relationships, but from a perspective that had nothing to do with feminism and everything to do with communist morality.

What is to be done?

3 March, 2020 · Literature

What did a social democrat of Lenin's generation mean by a proletarian who became a "professional revolutionary". For answering we have to revisit the original "What Is to Be Done"... by Chernishevsky