We fight to overthrow Capitalism
Historically, capitalism expanded
world-wide to free much of humanity from the bonds of feudal or tribal society,
and developed the economy, society and culture to a new higher level. But it
could only do this by exploiting the labour of the productive classes to make
its profits. To survive, capitalism became increasingly destructive of
"nature" and humanity. In the early 20th century it
entered the epoch of imperialism in which successive crises unleashed wars, revolutions
and counter-revolutions. Today we fight to end capitalism’s wars, famine, oppression
and injustice, by mobilising workers to overthrow their own ruling classes and
bring to an end the rotten, exploitative and oppressive society that has exceeded
its use-by date.
We fight for Socialism.
By the 20th
century, capitalism had
created the pre-conditions for socialism –a world-wide working class and modern
industry capable of meeting all our basic needs. The potential to eliminate poverty,
starvation, disease and war has long existed. The October Revolution proved
this to be true, bringing peace, bread and land to millions. But it became the
victim of the combined assault of imperialism and Stalinism. After 1924 the
We fight to defend Marxism
While the economic conditions for socialism
exist today, standing between the working class and socialism are political,
social and cultural barriers. They are the capitalist state and bourgeois ideology
and its agents. These agents claim that Marxism is dead and capitalism need not
be exploitative. We say that Marxism is a living science that explains both capitalism’s
continued exploitation and its attempts to hide class exploitation behind the appearance
of individual "freedom" and "equality". It reveals how and why the reformist,
Stalinist and centrist misleaders of the working class tie workers to bourgeois
ideas of nationalism, racism, sexism and equality. Such false beliefs will be exploded when the
struggle against the inequality, injustice, anarchy and barbarism of capitalism
in crisis, led by a revolutionary Marxist party, produces a revolutionary
class-consciousness.
We fight for a Revolutionary Party
The bourgeois and its agents condemn
the Marxist party as totalitarian. We say that without a democratic and a
centrally organised party there can be no revolution. We base our beliefs on
the revolutionary tradition of Bolshevism and Trotskyism. Such a party, armed
with a transitional programme, forms
a bridge that joins the daily fight to defend all the past and present gains won
from capitalism, to the victorious socialist revolution. Defensive struggles
for bourgeois rights and freedoms, for decent wages and conditions, will link
up the struggles of workers of all nationalities, genders, ethnicities and
sexual orientations, bringing about movements for workers control, political
strikes and the arming of the working class, as necessary steps to workers'
power and the smashing of the bourgeois state.
Along the way, workers will learn that each new step is one of many in a
long march to revolutionise every barrier put in the path to the victorious
revolution.
We fight for Communism.
Communism stands for the creation of a
classless, stateless society beyond socialism that is capable of meeting all
human needs. Against the ruling class lies that capitalism can be made
"fair" for all; that nature can be "conserved"; that
socialism and communism are "dead"; we raise the red flag of
communism to keep alive the revolutionary tradition of the' Communist
Manifesto of 1848, the Bolshevik-led October Revolution; the Third
Communist International until 1924, the revolutionary Fourth International up
to 1940 before its collapse into centrism. We fight to build a new, Fifth,
Communist International, as a world party of socialism capable of leading workers
to a victorious struggle for socialism.