(Manifesto of the Permanent Revolution Collective Conference)
1
The world’s situation is highlighted by the growing rivalry between old US imperialism and young Chinese imperialism, in the context of a serious ecological crisis. For the moment, this rivalry remains essentially on the economic and diplomatic fronts, but it is irreconcilable. Every year, both sides step up their military preparations.
In the long term, one side will have to triumph over the other in a global confrontation at global scale, unless the working class succeeds in charting its own course towards the seizure of power and reversing the inescapable logic of imperialism.
American imperialism is no longer as hegemonic as it once was, but it remains the leading economic power and by far the leading military power. Since 2011, it has redirected its diplomatic, economic and military efforts in an attempt to contain the rise of Chinese imperialism. Far from free trade, this struggle is now taking the form of an increasing number of bans, barriers, taxes, etc. affecting both Chinese exports to the United States and exports to China of advanced technological equipment and components, not only from the United States but also from third countries on which US imperialism can exert pressure on. However, this protectionist policy towards a country with the economic and scientific potential of China has, in the medium and long term, contradictory effects for the United States’ own interests, because it pushes the Asian giant to make its technology, supply chains and international finances independent of those currently controlled by its rival or allied imperialisms.
Since the pro-capitalist reforms of 1978 and the restoration of capitalism in 1992, China has gone from being a country largely dependent on foreign investment to a conquering imperialist, as it is the world’s second largest economy. It owes this to the youth of its imperialist stage, which does not drag behind it as much of the weight of capital invested in old technologies that have become obsolete as the old imperialisms. It also owes it to the police control and ferocious exploitation of the Chinese proletariat, the labour camps for the Uyghurs, the colonisation of the Tibetans, etc. This imperialism, which, like any other imperialism, has its limits, crises and brakes on the development of the productive forces, is an open candidate to dethrone American imperialism. It is exerting growing economic pressure on all the second-tier imperialisms, particularly European ones, and is successfully contesting all the other imperialisms’ zones of influence in Africa, Latin America and Asia. It has undertaken to extend its military control of the China Sea, to the detriment of all its neighbours, and regularly threatens Taiwan with military intervention to force it back into China.
2
This struggle between the two most powerful imperialisms to re-divide the world is upsetting all global relations between imperialisms and between different regional capitalist powers, not only in economic terms but also by reviving old military conflicts or opening up new ones. It was by taking advantage of the relative disengagement of American imperialism in Europe that Russian imperialism invaded Ukraine, and it was to prepare for a confrontation with China that Japan, in support of the United States, decided to double its military budget and described China as ‘an unknown and unprecedented strategic challenge’. In the same vein, invoking the ‘need to prepare for war against Russia’, the German government plans (10 May 2024) to increase military spending by 50% (from 2 to 3% of GDP) and to reinstate compulsory military service in 2025. The creation or reconstitution of economic and military blocs around the two main imperialisms not only tends to fragment the world’s market, but also draws the lines of force for a possible global military conflict. While NATO is expanding, strengthening its capabilities and now including a conflict with China in its projections, China and Russia have strengthened their economic and military alliance, for the benefit and under the direction of the much more powerful Chinese imperialism, and are trying to expand their bloc of allies (especially through the BRICS coalition). This is why all the imperialists are increasing their military spending.

3
The heirs of Stalinism, many social democrats, most of the trade union bureaucracies and the pseudo-Trotskyist organisations at their heels generally refuse to open up the perspective of socialism. For more than a quarter of a century, they have explained that the enemy is not capitalism, but ‘neo-liberalism’; not imperialism, but ‘globalisation’; not capital, but ‘finance’; not their own state, but the WTO or regional alliances. They have called for the strengthening of the national bourgeois state, they have advocated protectionist measures (sometimes painted green), they have supported Brexit, and so on.
The economic war between the two main imperialist powers is adding to the recurrent economic and financial crises of capitalism at the imperialist stage. It is hampering the accumulation of capital, trade, etc.
Despite an improvement in near-term prospects, the global outlook remains subdued by historical standards. In 2024-25, growth is set to underperform its 2010s average in nearly 60 percent of economies, comprising over 80 percent of the global population. Downside risks predominate, including geopolitical tensions, trade fragmentation, higher-for-longer interest rates, and climate-related disasters. (World Bank, June 11, 2024)
In 2022, the major increase in the key interest rates of the central banks of the main imperialist powers in response to inflation precipitated monetary and financial crises in many dominated countries, leading to capital flight and out-of-control inflation that plunged the population into misery and aggravated the burden of debt, as in Turkey and Argentina. According to the UN, 9.2% of the world’s population suffers from chronic hunger, and more than 60% of Africans were affected by food insecurity in 2022. Even in imperialist countries, poverty and undernourishment is spreading among layers of the proletariat, students, small farmers and independent urban workers.
Conversely, capitalism is incapable of rationally organising world production in order to provide for the most basic needs of the population, such as food, housing or health. It is dominated everywhere by the relentless pursuit of profit, competition, anarchic production, speculation and complete disregard for environmental conditions. Even the federal government of the United States has to admit in 2024 that hunger there hit its highest level in nearly a decade last year, with 18 million households, or 13.5%, struggling to get enough food. In the UK, 7.2 million adults and 2.7 million children were food insecure by June 2024 (14% of households and 18% of households with children).
The working class taking power will give agriculture and industry the sole mission of satisfying human needs. By expropriating the industrial groups such as the agri-food groups, the big farms, the big trading companies, the banks and the insurance companies, the workers’ government will take control of the economy. It is the producers themselves who will best define both the needs to be met and the means to be employed. This is the fight of internationalist communists!
4
The weakness of the rate of profit and of world capitalist growth and the intensification of inter-imperialist rivalries and militarism, are leading each bourgeoisie, in the imperialist countries as in the dominated countries, to strengthen their attacks on the working class, on all social gains, on public services and on the majority of the petty-bourgeois strata.
Everywhere, the dominant classes are at the same time reinforcing the nationalist and protectionist tendencies of sections of the national bourgeoisies, varying in size from one country to another, which are victims of international competition. The democratic and anti-racist consensus that was the dominant ideology in the imperialist countries after the 2nd World War is crumbling. Nationalism and protectionism, xenophobia and racism, clericalism and religious fundamentalism, masculinism and hostility to women’s rights, hatred of minorities (religious, ethnic, sexual), conspiracy and anti-vaccine obscurantism, etc. are the banners of reaction. The traditional bourgeois parties are becoming increasingly reactionary and are themselves being challenged by the emergence of fascist or fascist-leaning parties, or are fuelling fascist currents within them, such as the Republican Party in the United States.
This rise of this reaction on all continents can take and even combine different forms, but it is always the proletariat that is targeted, and first and foremost the fraction of the proletariat that is most oppressed because it is foreign, deprived of rights, which is designated as the scapegoat and which pays the price. To xenophobia, racism, nationalism and protectionism, we oppose total freedom of movement and settlement for all migrants, the abolition of borders, proletarian internationalism and the construction of world socialism. This is the fight of internationalist communists!
5
Even if, today, the majority of the bourgeoisie has not yet resolved to install fascist or military regimes as was the case with Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain, or closer to us Pinochet’s Chile or Videla’s Argentina, the rise of reaction is the most striking trend of our period. The possible return of Trump to the presidency of the United States, the presidency of Milei in Argentina, the major advance of fascistoid or fascist currents in most European countries, with the rise in Germany of a racist party that adopts Nazi codes and the coming to power in Italy of a party of fascist origin, all combine with bonapartist, autocratic, dictatorial or semi-dictatorial regimes. Russia has slipped into an authoritarian regime. In China, the bourgeoisie is resigned to a single party, which claims to be achieving ‘Chinese-style socialism’, invoking the historic achievement of independence.
In India, imperialism is being built under the aegis of clericalism and Hindu nationalism, which persecutes the Muslim minority. In Iran, the bourgeoisie, in order to protect itself from the proletarian revolution which broke out in 1978, placed its fate in the hands of the reactionary Islamist government which has kept the country under a blanket of lead ever since. In Turkey, the autocrat Erdogan continues the Kemalist tradition of oppressing the Kurdish minority. Genocide has struck the Rohingya in Burma. Pogroms have targeted Muslims in India, Hindus in Bangladesh, Christians in Egypt, etc., and immigrants in Greece, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Ireland, Great Britain, etc.
The strengthening of reactionary tendencies is leading everywhere to the questioning of a number of rights conquered by women in certain countries: the right to abortion, the right to study, the right to work, the right to dress freely, etc. Women like Meloni in Italy are part of this regression. Women’s resistance and the fight for equality are progressive. However, the women’s movement cannot be left in the hands of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois feminism. The workers’ movement must make the demands of working women its own and take the lead in the women’s liberation movement.
The struggle for all democratic freedoms, for equality and in particular the rights of women and sexual minorities, the rights of migrant workers, the rights of linguistic and religious minorities and of oppressed peoples is inseparable from the struggle for social revolution, for the overthrow of dictatorships, through the mobilisation of the working class and the establishment of workers’ power. Only a workers’ government that expropriates capital will be able to satisfy the immense needs of the masses and guarantee all democratic freedoms, including the freedom for national minorities to form their own state if they so wish. This is the fight of internationalist communists!
6
The rise of reaction throughout the world is not inevitable, but the product of the capitulation of the reformist parties (‘labour’, ‘social-democrats’, ‘communists’, etc.) to their respective national bourgeoisie. It is the product of the trade union bureaucracies’ capitulation to the demands of their bourgeoisie. It was facilitated by the policy of adaptation of centrist organisations (born out of Castroism, Maoism or the destruction of the 4 e International) to the ‘democratic’, ‘environmentalist’ or ‘anti-imperialist’ fractions of the ruling class, of their following of bourgeois workers’ parties, of their capitulation to the trade union bureaucracies, of their adaptation to the apparatuses of petty-bourgeois environmentalism, petty-bourgeois feminism, identitarian movements, Islamism, and so on.
When they come to power, the bourgeois workers’ parties form bourgeois governments, either alone or more often in alliance with bourgeois parties that despair the proletariat and the petty-bourgeois strata that used to support them. More often than not, they continue the attacks on social gains and the measures against refugees and immigrants. In the age of imperialism, the workers have nothing to expect from the fractions of the bourgeoisie. None of them want to break with decadent capitalism. Anti-imperialist united fronts, popular fronts, electoral or governmental alliances between workers’ parties and sections of the bourgeoisie only lead to the maintenance of its domination.
Parliamentary combinations such as the so-called constituent assemblies serve only as a screen behind which reaction is quietly preparing to take over, as happened in Egypt, Tunisia and Chile.
The trade union bureaucracies systematically agree to negotiate the plans and counter-reforms of the bourgeoisie, they sabotage mobilisations by multiplying days of action and fight against self-organisation and the general strike when it is necessary to win (Great Britain and France in 2023, Argentina and Bangladesh in 2024), they sometimes go so far as to support and finance the parties of the exploiters with workers’ dues (Argentina, United States, Canada,etc.).
The centrist organisations (revolutionary in word, reformist indeed) adapt more or less profoundly bourgeois nationalism and traitorous leaderships of the workers’ movement, ranging from support for bourgeois candidates (O’Neill-McDonald, Renzi-Letta-Schlein, Chirac-Macron, Biden-Harris, Kirchner-Massa, etc.), to rally to the popular fronts, to compliantly follow the manoeuvres of the corrupt trade union leaderships on which they depend in part because they integrate with the bureaucrats rather than the workers.), to rally to the popular fronts, to complacently follow the manoeuvres of the corrupt trade union leaderships on which they partly depend since they join the bureaucrats rather than fight them. It is all this which leads the working class from defeat to defeat, sabotages any working-class’ perspective, and drives layers of the petty-bourgeoisie and even the proletariat into the arms of fascist-leaning or fascist parties.
All the bourgeois workers’ parties which advocate an alliance with sections of the bourgeoisie to combat the rise of fascist-leaning or fascist parties are deceiving the working class. All they do is strengthen the bourgeoisie, sow confusion, prevent a united workers’ front and the mobilisation of the working class on its own terrain, which is the only way to neutralise or drag along the intermediate classes and defeat fascism.
To ask the bourgeois state to ban fascist groups or parties is to sow illusions by letting the working class believe that bourgeois democracy can stop the rise of fascism. It is necessary to set up workers’ self-defence groups and security services now, to keep fascist groups off the streets. We need to build class struggle and internationalist trade union fractions and revolutionary workers’ parties. This is the fight of internationalist communists!
7
In addition to wars, economic crises, impoverishment and the destruction of social achievements, there is the climate crisis, which is already manifesting itself strongly and is set to worsen rapidly as a direct consequence of the anarchy of capitalist production, wasteful spending and the constant race for profits. This threat to the climate is accompanied by pollution resulting directly from the capitalist mode of production, countless attacks on biodiversity, and so on.
Global greenhouse gas emissions are directly linked to the use of fossil fuels – coal, gas and oil – organised by powerful multinationals that are the flagships of various imperialist states or regional powers. Many regions of the world are now suffering devastating heatwaves and droughts and/or floods that are just as destructive, and which the poorest populations can no longer protect themselves from. Global warming is becoming an existential threat for hundreds of millions of people, while one COP after another piles up pious hopes and fruitless resolutions.
By its very nature, the imperialist system is incapable of taking the necessary measures to resolve the climate and environmental crisis that it is itself generating. The energy transition touted as a solution for maintaining capitalism is both a new battleground for the various bourgeoisies over the appropriation and control of necessary resources such as rare earths, and a new source of various forms of pollution, most often imposed on the dominated countries, in order to put ‘green’ products on the market. Consequently, the defence of humanity against the destruction of the environment and global warming necessarily involves the seizure of power by the proletariat, the expropriation of capital and the establishment of a socialist mode of production determined by the satisfaction of human needs. This is the fight of internationalist communists!
8
A revolutionary organisation is judged by its analysis and the prospects it opens up for the working class in the face of major international events. The struggle of internationalist communists on Palestine is unambiguous.
In Palestine, the Israeli colonial state is continuing its genocide of more than 2 million Palestinians held as prisoners in the Gaza Strip. Colonisation, assassinations and imprisonment continue in the occupied West Bank. All the imperialist powers are now hypocritically calling for a ceasefire. But the United States, Germany, Great Britain, France and Italy have approved Israel’s military offensive and continue to supply arms and munitions to Israel. They are not the ones who will stop the massacre. Only the proletariat can organise an effective boycott in factories, ports and airports of the deliveries of arms and munitions essential to Netanyahu. This is what the Palestinian trade unions are demanding.
The imperialist governments and, in their wake, the reformists of all stripes claim that the solution lies in the creation of a Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel. But it is precisely the Oslo Accords that have led to today’s situation, with on the one hand the PLO capitulating, reduced to serving as a police auxiliary to Israel in shreds of territory, and on the other an all-powerful Zionist state that is stepping up colonisation. Zionism implies oppression, expulsions and permanent violence against the Palestinians. There will be no peace in Palestine without the dismantling of the Zionist state, without a democratic, multi-ethnic, bilingual, secular and socialist Palestine. For a workers’ and peasants’ government in Palestine! For a socialist federation of the Middle East! This is the perspective for the Palestinian proletariat as for the Jewish proletariat, which must break with Zionism. This is the fight of internationalist communists!
9
In Ukraine, Russia is waging an imperialist war of invasion. But it is not yet a war between imperialist powers. The Western states are supplying arms to Ukraine, but for the moment they are refraining from intervening directly against the Russian army. Ukraine is finding it increasingly difficult to resist the pressure of the Russian army. Zelensky’s government is waging war with the methods of the comprador bourgeoisie, combining chauvinist ideology, business dealings, preferential treatment, restrictions on democratic freedoms and pressure of all kinds on the proletariat, subjugating and selling out the country to the economic and strategic interests of American, German, British and French imperialism.
As a bourgeois government, it cannot appeal to the Russian proletariat, to proletarian internationalism, to put an end to the war, without risking a fraternisation of the Russian and Ukrainian proletariats which would put it in danger. This policy demoralises the working masses, who are the backbone of the front, and stifles the enthusiasm of young people to join the defence. Democratic freedoms, including for soldiers, repeal of Zelensky’s anti-worker legislation, cancellation of the privatisations, under the control of the workers and poor peasants! Military training, arming of workers and management of the war under the control of workers’ and peasants’ organisations! Respect for the Russian, Tatar, Russian, Belarusian, Moldavan, Roma, Jewish, Hungarian and Romanian minorities in Ukraine and in all the states of the region! Withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine! Withdraw American, British, French, Spanish and Italian troops from Central Europe! Dissolution of NATO! This is the fight of internationalist communists!
On the Russian side, Putin has set up a war economy with a 70% increase in military spending by 2024, to the detriment of the working population. He is stepping up repression. The Russian proletariat has no interest in confronting its Ukrainian neighbour. It can stop the imperialist war that the Russian bourgeoisie is waging in Ukraine. It lacks a revolutionary organisation that would revive the Bolshevik Party of 1917 and lead the fight against Putin. Abolition of the privileges of the warmongering Orthodox Church, lifting of the ban on Memorial, release of all imprisoned opponents of the war, democratic freedoms! This is the fight of internationalist communists! Withdrawal of Russian troops, return of conquered territories to Ukraine, dissolution of the CSTO! Soldiers at the front, turn your weapons against your generals, impose an immediate halt to hostilities! This is the fight of internationalist communists!
10
The stubborn Palestinian resistance, Kurdish irredentism, the inability of the Russian army to conquer Ukraine; the latest uprisings in Burma, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh; the uprisings against the murder of blacks in the United States, against pogroms in Britain, in defence of refugees in Italy and Germany; the strikes by workers in the United States, Britain, France, India, Indonesia, Korea, etc.; the mobilisations in recent years by working women in Argentina, Poland, Spain and Iran, the United States; the workers’ revolts in China in 2022 against the prolongation of the bureaucratic lock down during covid, the mobilisation for freedom in Cuba; international support for the Palestinian people, etc. all show that the masses are fighting back, that they are defending their rights. The problem that has not been resolved since the betrayal of the Second International and the degeneration of the Communist International (Third International) is that of their leadership. Without a world party of socialist revolution, the working class cannot lead the exploited and oppressed masses. It remains itself a victim of the betrayals of the agents of the bourgeoisie.
It is possible to put an end to this rotten system if, across borders, the vanguard of workers unites in a revolutionary workers’ international. In each state, the international will help to build a Bolshevik-type party to expropriate big capital and destroy the bourgeois state, establishing workers’ governments based on councils. The best elements of the world workers’ movement and the struggles of the oppressed must be brought together without delay for this purpose, on the basis of the scientific socialism established by Marx and Engels, the programme of the CI in Lenin’s time and the Fouth International in Trotsky’s time.
Then the working class, guided by the International, will be able to take the lead in the struggles against exploitation and oppression, for democratic freedoms and secularism, for the rights of oppressed nations, for women’s equality and against the ecological crisis. Then the working class will be able to form its councils and arm itself, expropriate big business and destroy the bourgeois state, and establish a workers’ government based on the councils. The dictatorship of the proletariat will pave the way for state-free world socialism-communism, a mode of production based on equality and solidarity, where workers will consciously manage resources, production and distribution for the benefit of present and future humanity. Join the fight of internationalist communists!
1st Conference of the Permanent Revolution Collective