IC 2020

The new rise of women’s and feminist mobilizations in recent years is an inescapable fact. In July 2019 the women’s commission of the Fourth International, through an international seminar, started the process of writing a resolution to propose to the March 2020 meeting of our International Committee to outline our positive appreciation of this upsurge.

The Covid-19 pandemic prevented the holding of our meeting. Nevertheless we think it is useful to publish the resolution as it was at the end of 2019, knowing that a new version at our meeting in early 2021 will take into account the state of the mobilization we have seen since then and in particular the way that the Cov-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of women’s work in both the public and private sphere.

In 2019 the IC of the Fourth International discussed a “Proposal for a programmatic debate”. Following this it decided to pursue in a broad and open way the discussion on our conception of a new society. In this light it requested three of its commissions that alongside organizing ongoing activity in the existing social movements develop our thinking on the type of society that we want. These three commissions, on Ecology, LGBTIQ questions and women’s oppression and feminism, each wrote a short contribution to develop the discussion. We publish these three contributions, along with the original document below, in the spirit of promoting such a discussion which is more than ever necessary today. These contributions were of course written before the Covid-19 pandemic.

This contribution to the debate in the FI on the “Future Society” takes up a series of elements from the document “Capitalist Destruction of the Environment and the Eco-Socialist Alternative”, but also some paths explored in a more personal way by authors, members or not of our current. It should undoubtedly make a greater distinction between what is part of the society we want and the strategy to achieve it. Finally, questions are only raised because they will necessarily be the subject of other contributions (question of social reproduction, democracy, etc.). Ecology Commission

A contribution from the Women’s Commission.

The question of the relationship between the fight for LGBTIQ liberation and our vision of socialism was addressed to some extent in the document On Lesbian/Gay Liberation agreed at the 15th World Congress of the Fourth International in 2003 ”On Lesbian/Gay Liberation ” particularly its second section, “0ur standpoints”.

The LGBTIQ commission therefore started from that text in writing these theses for the IC and also attempted to incorporate key insights from Peter Drucker’s book Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism (2015). We have tried to make our language more inclusive than in the 2003 text and adding new points which we hope reflect key discussions which we and the movement have had more generally since then.

We think this is an important, if not an easy, discussion. Especially in these dark times it is important to affirm the principle of hope.