The European Social Forum in Istanbul on 1 to 4 July is a great opportunity to build a European wide fightback against the capitalist cuts. The ESF is a gathering of activists from the trade unions, youth, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist movements that first took place in Florence in November 2002. Once again this year militants will gather to debate the lessons of recent events – the historically severe capitalist crisis blighting Europe, the fightback against the horrific slashing of our jobs, wages, pensions, social welfare, presently spearheaded by Greek workers. At hundreds of different meeetings and a final Assembly of Movements they will hopefully decide on a course of Europe-wide actions, a strategy for coordinated resistance and action on vital issues outside Europe, like breaking Israel’s blockade of Gaza.

The ESF has huge power – if it decides to use it.

In Florence eight years ago a bold decision for coordinated action on 15 February 2003 – a call taken up by the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil in January of the following year – led to the 20 million strong worldwide protests against the impending invasion of Iraq. When the war began on 20 March, a further wave of demonstrations, strikes and other forms of direct action took place. Though ultimately unsuccessful in halting the war and occupation, owing in large measure to our failure to win the major trade unions to take strike action, nevertheless it showed the power an international call can have, when a powerful alliance of working class organisations addresses millions all over the world.

However, this success was not followed by equally bold actions at subsequent Forums. The European Social Forums held in Paris (2003), London (2004), Athens (2006) and Malmo (2008) failed to set themselves the task of mobilising resistance. They passed up the opportunity to create a permanent network of anti-capitalist parties and militant trade unions, coordinated nationally as well as internationally, with a central delegate executive body holding regular international meetings.

European Preparatory Assemblies (EPAs) did gather roughly three times a year. But the meetings did not focus on a fighting strategy, restricting themselves to the administrative questions of organising the next ESF. This was not challanged by even the more radical forces present, including representatives of the more militant unions (like COBAS, Cgil-FIOM, SUD, FSU) and, under various disguises, representatives of left-wing parties like Italy’s Rifondazione Comunista and political groups like the Fourth International and the International Socialist Tendency. Networks on particular topics – education, Palestine – built useful links and called some common actions, but the failure to take any real steps to creating an organising centre was a serious error.

If there had been a European coordinating committee in 2008 when the crisis hit, it could have issued an authoratative call, backed by significant organisations in every country, for unified resistance to the cuts. The wave of demonstrations which took place across the continent on the slogan, “We Won’t Pay for Their Crisis” could have been turned into a wave of strikes and workplace occupations to halt the governments in their tracks – and an alternative radical course of action could have been promoted as a challange to the path of compromise of the official labour leaders.

From 2003 onwards, the League for the Fifth International argued within the ESF to set up a permanent coordination for action. To this end we argued that the ESF and the WSF should renounce the Porto Alegre Charter of Principles that banned political parties from participating and forbade the Forums from making decisions on strategies of resistance.

In addition at every ESF, from Paris in 2003, and at the World Social Forum in Mumbai 2004 and Porto Alegre in 2005 we repeated our call on the parties, unions and movements fighting neoliberalism at home and imperialist wars abroad to set about founding a new workers’ International – a new world party of social revolution. The first four Internationals each played a vital role in building militant trade unions and revolutionary parties. In the era of globalisation and it its general crisis after 2008, we argued that we urgently need a Fifth International. We argued it could be launched through a process of uniting the militant participants in the ESF and WSF around common actions to resist the onslaught on workers and turn this into a counterattack on capitalism itself. This would mean a democratic debate within the ESF about the programme a movement should adopt.

In the following years prominent figures on the left of the Social Forum movement – Walden Bello, Samir Amin and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez – also called for the crippling restrictions on the Social Forums to be removed. Last November Chavez added his voice to the call for a Fifth International to be launched. After a strange period of silence it now appears that an international gathering to debate this may finally take place in Caracas in the autumn of this year.

The European Social Forum needs to discuss this initiative – and that is why the League for the Fifth International will be hosting a discussion on this subject and participating in all other meetings that address the question of how to move forward. We will argue that a Fifth International cannot be centred on any President or capitalist government, however radical. It must be an independent organisation of the working class

So what can the ESF in Istanbul do? Today we are facing a situation hardly less serious than that we faced in 2002 – not in the form of an immediate threat of war, but an internationally coordinated attack on the social gains European workers have built up since the Second World War: our welfare, pensions and jobs.

Greek workers have launched five one-day general strikes this year in protest against the savage austerity programme being imposed on them.

In Turkey itself we have witnessed the months-long struggle of the Tekel workers. We have also just witnessed the heroic attempt by the Turkish-based Mavi Marmara and seven other ships in the Freedom Flotilla, to break the Israeli siege of Gaza. In Italy Portugal, Spain, France and Germany we have seen a wave of protests against the austerity programmes now being imposed.

The League for the Fifth International will propose to the Assembly of Social Movements, which concludes the ESF to issue a clear call to all working class organisations, both trade unions and political parties, to social movements and campaigns, to youth, women and migrants, to unite in common struggle across the whole continent:
• No to all the austerity packages. No to each and every cut in wages, jobs, pensions, the slashing of social services, education and health. Cancel the debts of Greece and other countries impoverished by the crisis and the market speculators.
• The bankers and owners of the big corporations must pay the entire cost the crisis. Tax the rich– not the workers and poor. To stop the stock exchange, currency and bond market speculators, we have to take control over the finance system out of the private companies and investment funds. Expropriate the banks and finance institutions without compensation under workers’ control.
• Stop the mass layoffs: no job losses whether compulsory or “voluntary”, We have no right to sell the jobs of the next generation. We demand the reduction of working hours, sufficient to absorb all the jobless, without any loss of pay. We call for the expropriation without compensation of all companies which threaten workers with closures, redundancies or cuts in pay, placing them under workers’ control.
• Stop the nationalist and chauvinist campaign against the Greek people. International solidarity action with the struggle of the Greek workers and youth.
• Build anti-crisis committees and alliances in all towns and regions and coordinate them nationally and internationally. All trade unions, all workers organisations and parties, all the social movements should join in such action committees and organise militant direct action – mass demonstrations, solidarity actions in the workplaces and offices, occupations, mass political strikes.
• At the final assembly of the ESF in Istanbul, we will set up a European-wide coordination in the struggle against the crisis. As a first step, we will organise a European-wide day of action – strikes and mass demonstrations – against cuts and the EU-austerity packages in September 2010!

A crisis of leadership
Despite the mass anger shown by millions of ordinary people at the huge trillion dollar and euro bail-outs of the bankers, the leaders of the labour movements of Europe universally decided to “act responsibly” and recommend accepting real wage cuts, voluntary redundancies and above all not to encourage or support open resistance.

A militant minority of workers and the smaller, more democratic unions took action. But the big battalions were kept off the streets. If the union leaders thought the capitalists and their governments would be grateful they have been cruelly disappointed in 2010.

The leaders of the major unions are paralysed by their belief that there is no alternative to the solutions dictated by the capitalist governments. Behind the scenes they have even concluded truces with right wing governments, as the “Communist” led CGT did last autumn with President Nicolas Sarkozy in France.

This paralysis by the unions was made worse by the record of several Labour and Socialist governments – Brown’s Labour Party in Britain and Zapatero’s Socialist Party in Spain. Not only did they collude in bailing out of the bankers, but also they launched the process of massive cuts in the public sector. The punishment for blocking a fightback has been a series of electoral victories for centre-right and neoliberal parties and the rise of populist and far right parties.

These began with the elections to the European Parliament in June 2009. Then in September 2009 came the SPD’s crushing defeat in the German general elections, losing 11 points to score only 23 per cent of the votes. In the Hungarian elections in April 2010 the Socialist Party slumped to 19.3 per cent and the clear winner was the neoliberal party Fidesz (EPP). In May came the smashing defeat of Labour in Britain. In June in the Czech Republic the Social Democrats lost 10 per cent of the vote, giving a clear majority to a coalition bent on savage cuts.

The parties of the European Left – the French Communist Party, Die Linke in Germany, the Left Bloc in Portugal and Syriza in Greece – protested against the cuts and participated in the Social Forums. But they still harbour ambitions to act as junior partners in coalitions with the main reformist parties, which have certainly not broken with imposing cuts and privatisations. Die Linke actually participates in a cutting coalition with the Social Democrats in Berlin.

Rifondazione Comunista (RC) was already shattered in the June 2008 elections, before the main crisis hit. Its vote fell from 10.2 per cent in the 2006 elections to 3.1 per cent, below the level needed to receive any seats. For the first time since 1945 there were no Communists in the Italian parliament. This was the direct result of RC’s entering the coalition government of the Christian Democrat Romano Prodi in 2006. RC’s leader Fausto Bertinotti had pledged never to enter another Prodi government, at the Florence ESF, to rapturous applause.

Within a year the government was in crisis over the vote to send yet more Italian troops to Afghanistan and open a huge US base near Vicenza – alienating Rifondazione’s large antiwar and working class base. Left wing militants broke from RC; the coalition collapsed. At the same time the Democrats of the Left – the right wing of the old Italian Communist Party – fused with Prodi and the rump of the Christian Democrats. Between them the Stalinists had finally succeeded in destroying the mass party of the Italian working class and replacing it with a copy of the US Democratic Party (even down to the name).

Another member of the European Left grouping, the Portuguese Left Bloc, recently voted in parliament for the Greek bailout, thus helping to impose massive cuts on the Greek workers. This was an act of the grossest opportunism, made worse by the fact that the 16 MPs of the Bloc include several members of the Fourth International, whose section is a part of the Bloc. The Bloc is also (like Rifondazione Comunista) a member of the European Anticapitalist Left. The Portuguese Communist Party and the Green Party voted against the deal.

It is plain from their recent record that the parties of the European Left cannot provide an alternative to the mainstream Social Democrats. They are, for all their criticism of the cuts and the “socialist” parties that make them, only awaiting the call to jump into bed with them. Then, under all the pressures of the capitalist state, they will follow the path of Rifondazione.

In Die Linke in Germany and the Left Bloc in Portugal, the Fourth International’s policy of “peaceful co-existance” within parties that have a reformist and a electoralist majority is now coming under strain, as these parties’ existing leaders show their true colours. The task is not merely to place oneself alongside the reformists and hope to grow along with them, but to fight their misleadership, by launching sharp challanges to their policy, not flinching from breaking with their organisatons, and rallying fighting workers to an alternative.

In France the FI’s section founded the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) as a “clean break” from their preceeding project of forming a new party with the reformist French Communist Party, which is holding back the struggle to mount effective resistance in France. But a third of the NPA has not abandoned this project, and its leadership will not unequivocally condemn the idea of building permanent political allliances with parties that are prepared to govern in capitalist coalitions, with everything that entails.

What the working class needs, and even more so in a period of crisis and depression, is a party based on total class independence from the bourgeois parties and the capitalist state and a revolutionary strategy. That is what the League for the Fifth International and its sections in Europe are fighting for, at this year’s ESF and beyond.