Among the topics, which regularly crop up in the anticapitalist movement, is the formation of a new, Fifth International.

Belgian writer François Houtart posed it ironically at the World Social Forum in 2003 as “Fifth International or activists Woodstock”. The reformist leadership of the WSF uses the idea to silence talk of making the Social Forum a centre for initiating struggle against neoliberalism and war.

Four years ago Bernard Cassen, then honorary president of Attac, declared himself firmly opposed to the “nagging temptation of the Fifth International”.

The “left” in the WSF and ESF has been forced by these attacks to take up the issue, albeit to deny the charge. Michael Löwy noted that a French newspaper had spoken recently of “the danger of a Fifth International” but insisted he preferred a new International “without name or number”. Odd, you might think, for a member of the Fourth International.

In the anthology, The Politics of Empire, South African author Patrick Bond has a section of his essay called “Next steps: towards a ‘fifth international’”. He argues: “The time may well arise for a formalisation of the movement’s character in explicitly political terms, such as within the traditions of international socialism – for which the four internationals provide a host of lessons”.

More strikingly still, in August 2006, Samir Amin, a celebrated anti-imperialist author since the 1950s, wrote an article entitled Towards a Fifth International? In it he posed the question, “Should we conclude that a new International is needed to assure the convergence of the struggles of the people against capital?” and answers thus:

“I do not hesitate to give a positive answer to this question, on the condition that the envisioned new International is conceived in the same way as the First, but not as the Second, the Third, or the Fourth Internationals. It should be a socialist/communist International open to all who want to act together to create convergence in diversity.”

We believe the time has come to debate this vital question. The time for an “activists’ Woodstock”, celebrating diversity rather than achieving unity, is over. The deadly serious struggles since the murder of Carlo Giuliani in Florence in 2001 pose time and again the need to unite in action across a range of issues: war, privatisation, debt and poverty, climate change, racism, etc.

The WSF slogan “In our diversity is our strength” is at best only a half-truth.

Of course we must bring together and learn from all the ongoing struggles. But it is equally true that in the divisions between lies our weakness.

The dead grasp the living
Each of the four Internationals represented a great gain for the anti-capitalism. In their heyday they represented a deadly threat to the exploiters. Capitalists used every possible means to divert them from their goals and break them up.

By means of direct pressure from without and from bourgeois agencies within, these Internationals collapsed as an effective instruments of social revolution. What remains of them today represents their period of degeneration and betrayal.

Anarchists – with their prejudices against mass organisation, phobias about politics, leadership, decision-making – represent the degeneration of the First International. Attac and the Workers Party in Brazil continue the class collaboration of the Second International after 1914, just as Rifondazione Comunista and the Parti Communiste Française do the Stalinised Third International.

Today, the Fourth International and its fragments – from the LCR to the SWP – continue the unprincipled policy adopted in 1951 of systematically adapting to reformism, nationalism and populism, hoping that they will spontaneously evolve towards revolution.

These forces of the dead grip the living at crucial moments. We need a new leadership, a new instrument of revolution, a new world party.

Towards the Fifth International
So how can the forces struggling against corporate globalisation and the imperialism create such a new leadership? How can they decide on and coordinate effective action on the worldwide battle front? Certainly gatherings, like that due to take place in Rostock in early June. present opportunities to do this. The Assemblies of the Social Movements at the WSF and ESF present a forum in which to begin such a process if we can use it. We must place before such bodies clear calls to action, proposals to create democratic decision making bodies to decide our programmatic goals.

The left wing groups in the social forums have demanded a radical change from the “open space” approach. Writers, Arundahti Roy and Samir Amin, activists, like Trevor Ngwane, have stigmatised the paralysis and called for a new organisation, even a new International. These organisations and individuals need to progress beyond appeals for change. Appeals like those launched in Porto Alegre in 2005 and Bamako in 2006, for all their mildness, were rudely rejected by the WSF “leaders”.

These reformist bureaucrats and privileged executives of NGOs hold the WSF franchise and mobilise funds from the likes of the Ford Foundation to mount these giant events. These servants of big capital on will never willingly relax their grip. Nor will their anarchist supporters stop trying to block any political decision making, content with playing the role of jesters at the court of capital. Their grip on the world anti-capitalist movement must be broken.

Therefore the genuinely anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist left needs to gather its forces and plan how to do this. We should start this process in Rostock and take it into the ESF. However, we must look beyond Europe. The forces calling for such a change today are varied. But those, who base themselves on the working class, who are really active in its struggles, who see the need for a socialism based on destroying capitalism and replacing it with a democratically planned economy, have a lot to discus.

We can take real steps together to win the mass forces to the project of a new, fighting International. In the process they can achieve greater programmatic clarity, hammering out a strategy for world working class power, the communism of the 21st century. Along this road a Fifth International must be created to make this a reality.