League for the Fifth International

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Logo of the League for the Fifth International

The League for the Fifth International (LFI or L5I) is an international grouping of Trotskyist organisations.

1 History
2 Member organisations
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] History

L5I was founded as the Movement for a Revolutionary Communist International. Its first member groups were Workers Power in Britain, the Irish Workers Group, Pouvoir Ouvrier in France, and Gruppe Arbeitermacht (GAM) in Germany. After a Congress in 1989 the organisation adopted a common programme, the Trotskyist Manifesto, and a democratic centralist constitution, under which each national section agreed to be bound by the decisions of the international organisation as a whole.

Later renamed the League for a Revolutionary Communist International, it recruited the Poder Obrera groups of Peru and Bolivia and also added a group in New Zealand which renamed itself Workers Power. However renewed factional disputes broke out within the tendency and it lost many of its members in Austria and France. Then a full scale debate led to the Peruvian and Bolivian groups leaving along with a part of the New Zealand group, since renamed the Communist Workers Group, and some militants in Britain, who jointly formed the Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International.

In the late 1990s the League was quick to respond to the development of the anticapitalist movement, launching the youth group Revolution as an independent organisation in 1998. They actively participated in each stage of the movement, from the summit sieges of the late 1990s and early 2000s and the social forum conferences, which began with the World Social Forum in 2002. Of particular note in the summit siege phase, was the leading role its relatively young Czech section and Revolution played in protests against the IMF in 2000 and its participation in the famous direct action protests against the G8 in Genoa in 2001.

The development of the World and European Social Forums marked, according to the League, a qualitative development of the movement, whereby mass organisations of the working class, such as Rifondazione in Italy and the Workers Party in Brazil, entered the movement. In this time the League developed the slogan of a 'new, Fifth International', which called on mass organisations of the working class to form a new global party, while also maintaining that such a party should adopt a revolutionary Marxist programme. The call for the "Fifth" expressed the League's view that the Fourth International, founded by Trotsky in 1938, had degenerated into non-revolutionary fragments since the end of the Second World War and now a new international must be built, with new forces, but one that expressed continuity with the Trotskyist tradition.

This orientation to larger forces, in a period quite different from when the Trotskyist Manifesto was published, necessitated, for the League, developing a new programme From Protest to Power: A Manifesto for World Revolution, in which its fundamental ideas were re-elaborated. It also changed its name to the League for the Fifth International. It regards this progamme as a new "transitional programme", based on the method of Trotsky's original from 1938, but applied to the current global political situation.

The League and Revolution have both argued that young people in the anticapitalist movement should form a new revolutionary youth international. Successes at the Paris ESF in 2003 led to youth groups in Greece, Turkey, and the mass Basque group SEGI signing the youth international statement. Although neither of these groups made any further contribution towards the League's goal of founding a Fifth International.

Through this work the group has steadily regenerated its ranks with younger members but has not made substantial steps forward towards its goal of a Fifth International. Although, there work has led to some on the right wing of the movement such as Bernard Cassen of ATTAC to warn of the dangers of the anti-capitalist movement "becoming some kind of fifth international".^{[citation needed]} In addition, more recently, the academic and activist Samir Amin, has joined their call for a Fifth International - but does not give it the same Trotskyist content as the League.

In July 2006 the League expelled its Australian section, its sympathising group in Ireland and a large minority of its British section. The League accused the International Faction of planning to split the organisation on the even of its Seventh Congress in Prague. This had been revealed in a series of leaked emails from the International Faction's e-group.

In the previous two years, the International Faction (first as a tendency), had struggled against the perspectives and orientation of the League. In particular, they rejected the view that since the turn of the century there had been an intensification in class struggle, that the world economy was either "stagnant" or demonstrated a "tendency towards stagnation" in the imperialist heartlands, which the League had summarised as marking a "pre-revolutionary period". Instead, they argued that capitalism had entered on a "long upward wave" following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the defeats of the working class movement in the 1970s/80s and the League had exaggerated the extents to which breaks had occurred in social democracy.[1].

The International Faction, subsequently launched a new group, Permanent Revolution.

This split followed the expulsion of half of the Leagues Austrian section had occurred several weeks earlier, [2] and has reduced the Leagues strength by a third to half.

In the youth organisation Revolution a separate struggle over independence and solidarity with the League led to a split within its ranks in the Autumn of 2006. The Permanent Revolution has tried to cultivate links with the grouping of young people in Germany, Switzerland and Czech Republic who split away from Revolution.

Recently the League has been working with militants in Pakistan to establish a new section of Revolution and the League there.