IV419 - December 2009

World congresses are always significant moments in the history of the Fourth International. Delegates from all the organisations, currents, and militants meet to discuss the international situation, key questions of the revolutionary Marxist programme, and the significant and diverse experiences of construction of anti-capitalist, socialist and revolutionary parties.

Robert Service has written, to great acclaim, a new biography of Leon Trotsky. “Trotsky moved like a bright comet across the political sky,” Service tells us.

Elected to the Bundestag on September 27, 2009, Andrej Hunko is active in Die Linke in Aix-la-Chapelle, in the land de North Rhine-Westphalia. He belongs to the “Antikapitalistische Linke” (“Anti-capitalist Left”) current. He was interviewed for IV by Friedrich Dorn, a member of the internationale sozislistische linke (isl, international socialist left, one of the two parts of the German section of the Fourth International). The interview took place on October 19, 2009.

Despite the significant losses of the SPD and the gains of the FDP, the government is not in a comfortable situation. For one thing, because of its very high dependence on exports (more than 28% of GDP) and the comparatively low share of internal consumption, the German economy will end 2009 having shrunk by around 5%.

The German elections of August 30 and September 27 — regional in five Länder and legislative at the federal level — marked a significant break. The bourgeois parties did not win the general election; they even lost a few votes. However, the new left wing party, Die Linke, obtained an excellent score and established itself on a lasting basis as fifth biggest party in the German parliament, while the social democrats (SPD) fell back into the “ghetto of 30%” of the 1950s.

We have lost our four most brilliant comrades Abdul Salam, Najma Khanum, Rehana Kausar and Wahid Baloch in a road accident on 13th December 2009 near Ormara, Baloachistan. They were in the coastal region, one of the most deprived areas of the country, to organize the home based women workers (HBWW) on one platform.

The climate summit is over and the Danish presidency must be left with a bitter taste on their lips. What was called the meeting to save the world have been a complete failure. Even towards the end negotiations where going on about a document, that would have allowed a concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere almost twice the level that have been recommended by science - threatening global rises in temperature of at least 3° C. Obviously a scandalous conclusion for millions of people as well as countless bio-systems and species.

We knew the United Nations summit in Copenhagen would not conclude with a new international treaty but a simple statement of intent – just one more. But the text adopted at the end of the meeting is worse than anything we could imagine: no quantified objectives for emissions reduction, no reference year for measuring them, no deadlines, no date!

System Change, not Climate Change! Statement issued by Klimaform09 in Copenhagen, December 10, 2009

On Saturday Dec 12, 100,000 demonstrated in the streets of Copenhagen outside the COP 15 summit demanding urgent action against global warming - more than double the numbers that organisers had predicted - or even dared expect. While of course a high percentage of demonstrators came from Denmark itself and from neighbouring countries Sweden and Germany (where there is somewhat of a tradition of mobilising for each other’s events) - this was a truly international demonstration.