IV349 - May 2003

The US, with Britain in tow, has used its massive firepower to smash the régime of Saddam and complete its occupation of Iraq. In the eyes of Bush, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, this represents a resounding military victory and another step along the road towards their master plan for a New American Century: the achievement of total US hegemony based on their concept of ’full spectrum domination’.

Whoever associates themselves with this enterprise risks discredit, opprobrium and rejection. That has been the fate of the British, Spanish, Italian and Australian governments - they have been faced with the largest and most dynamic anti-war movements.

WHEN WE CHANT ’NO BLOOD FOR OIL’ most of us who have been organizing against the war the past few months reject the Bush administration’s claims that the war was about ’weapons of mass destruction’ or ’democratizing’ Iraq.

While Israeli tanks and planes were attacking the Palestinian cities, villages and refugee camps, the US administration began demanding that the Palestinian people reform the political, economic and security systems.

Democracia Socialista is determined to continue the political discussion within the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT)and decided to concentrate first of all on the discussion on economic policy. This text was submitted by DS to a meeting of the national leadership of the PT in March 2003.

The Fourth International held its 15th congress in early February 2003 in Belgium. Delegates and observers, representing organizations from 40 countries debated and adopted resolutions on the world political situation (which also included a balance sheet of Stalinism and resistances to capitalist globalization), the role and tasks of the Fourth International, a new Preamble to the Statutes as well as a reform of the Statutes, and two programmatic documents: ’Lesbian and Gay Liberation’ and ’Ecology and Socialism’.

We should start by noting a marked change in relation to the 14th Congress of the International in June 1995. That congress took place in a situation marked by political and social defeats. The 2003 congress took place in a quite different political situation, marked at our level by the growth of the anti-globalization movement and social resistances in a series of countries.

The interval between this 15th World Congress and the preceding one is unusual in relation to our tradition. Certainly, this time gap stems from our organizational weaknesses. However, particularly in recent years, it is due to a very large extent to the revival of our national organizations.

A leader of the peasant uprising in the Cuzco region of Peru in the early 1960s, a symbol of the unity and renewal of the Peruvian revolutionary left in 1978-1980, imprisoned, threatened with death, exiled and freed thanks to international solidarity, Hugo Blanco has in the last year faced what for him is a new enemy - illness.

Many comrades, men and women, have left us since the last world congress. Our publications have already paid tribute to our memory. Today we symbolically remember some of them.