30/08 Broad Parties: Penny Duggan

Introduction

“Crisis of civilisation” -> find a solution to save humanity and the planet for a better life.

• Our strategic goal: create the conditions where mass movements of the exploited and oppressed can overturn the existing order and impose a new one that eliminates, creates the conditions for eliminating, all exploitation and oppression (“make the revolution”)

• tools we need,

• parties

• social movements

• how do we create them,

• struggles,

• movements,

• winning reforms and gains

• developing consciousness and politicisation

• How do we think we can best do this in today’s conditions?

• political situation created by “Fall of the Wall” in 1989

• changed political landscape

• 1995 World Congress

• Revolutionary regroupment rarely successful

• Broader regroupment other left forces to increase audience

• 2003 World Congress

• Building broad anti-capitalist proletarian parties

• series of stages, organisational forms specific to each country

• 2010 World Congress

• How do we conceive a political organisation appropriate to the task of “making the revolution”?

• Collective and democratically-decided action, real pluralism

• need for political organisation

• bringing politics into the economic (or other) struggle

• active intervention to have an effect

• need for centralisation and democracy in action of such an organisation

• shared programme to be effective and democratic

• systematisation

• integration of experiences

• ability to analyse and update

• collective action to make a balance sheet

• feminist and feminised

- general dynamic of women’s exclusion from political process, disrespect for women and their political activity

- changing relationship of forces, not a natural process

- positive action

- women’s caucuses

- no islands of socialism but prefigurative relations

- bourgeois society cannot be a school for the proletariat

• special attention to recruiting youth for three reasons :

• youth are the new generation who will take the struggle forward on the basis of what has already been learnt

• they are a source of continuing radicalisation by their status as young people –victims of a specific but transitory oppression - and not weighed down by the experience of defeats and bureaucratism

•  in a period of big changes they are the ones whose daily experience is really impregnated with these changes and react on the basis of this new experience

• Trotsky in TP “When a programme or an organization wears out, the generation which carried it on its shoulders wears out with it. The movement is revitalized by the youth who are free of responsibility for the past.”

• Che Guevara “The youth must also create. Youth that does not create is really an anomaly…”

• The role of the Fourth International

• need for an international

• even small, but organic

• not a “mother house” with offshoots

• programmatic elaboration

• framework for strategic debates

• Future mass anti-capitalist, revolutionary International

• logical consequence but still more difficult than national parties

Reading material

• World Congress 2010 “Role and tasks of the Fourth International”

• Extraits de Jo Freeman, "La tyrannie de l'absence de structure", Ms. Magazine, 1973

• Extraits de : ICS (FI Indian section) 'Code of Conduct'