1848+: Last and First Men

History of the Marxist Internationals (conclusion, the call for a Fifth International)

Despite the tidal wave of commentary on Hugo Chavez’s call for a Fifth International during a conference of left parties in Caracas on November 19-21, 2009, it is difficult to find his actual words. Thanks to Australian activist Roberto Jorquera, you can read them here.

I want to take a few minutes to reflect on these issues, particularly to point to the importance that this call has […] In relation to the Fifth International I ask this special congress to include this issue in its debates so that we can analyse it and put it into context and study this proposal and its context. This proposal to call on political parties, revolutionary parties and social movements, to create a new organisation that is able to adapt to the time that we are living under and the situation that we live under; to put itself at the forefront of the people of the world and their calls; to become an instrument of articulation and unification of the struggles of the world’s peoples so that we can save this planet. It is important that the congress discuss this issue. That is why I made the call.

The Fifth International — let’s remember that the First International was established in 1864. Karl Marx with a number of other comrades called for the First International. Many years later Frederick Engels called for the establishment of the Second International at the end of the 19th century. And then at the beginning of the 20th century Vladimir Lenin with many other great revolutionaries established the Third International, and Leon Trotsky in 1936-37 established the Fourth International. All of them had a context but remember that all four Internationals, experiments to unite parties and currents and social movements from around the world, have lost their way along the road for different reasons — some degenerated, lost their force, disappeared soon after their formation. But none of them was able to advance the original aims that they had set themselves…

I honestly believe that the time has come to convoke the Fifth Socialist International and we call on all the revolutionary parties, socialist parties and currents and social movements that struggle for socialism and against capitalism and imperialism to save the world. Let us reclaim Rosa Luxemburg’s slogan “Socialism or barbarism”. Let us save the world. Let’s make socialism. Let us save the world and destroy capitalism. Let us save the world and destroy imperialism. That is what it is about. That is the essence of this congress.

By Riane Eisler Roadmap to a New Economics: Beyond Capitalism and Socialism
We can all be leaders in building a social and economic system that really meets human needs.

Two emails from sciftp

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http://www.truthout.org/the-crisis-motor-capitalism58234

Crisis: The Motor of Capitalism
Monday 29 March 2010
by: André Orléan | Le Monde
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Cognitive Science & Anarchism

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By Noam Chomsky

Q: Do you currently see an elephant room of cognitive science, just like you named one 50 years ago — I guess that’s a reference to my critique of radical behaviorism — something that needs addressing that gets too little attention?
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The Future of Socialism
by
Robert Paul Wolff
An unpromising title, this, in the seventh year of the third millennium of the Common Era; rather like “Recent Developments in Ptolemaic Astronomy” or “Betamax – a Technology Whose Time Has Come.” My grandfather’s dream, the faith of my younger days, has turned to ashes. And yet, I remain persuaded that Karl Marx has something important to teach us about the world in which we live today. [Read more →]

http://www.solidarity-us.org/current/node/2036

Is Anti-Capitalism Enough? The New Crisis & the Left
— Howard Brick

The New Spirit of Capitalism
by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello
translated by Gregory Elliott
Verso Books 2006, paperback edition 2007, 656 pages, $39.95.
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Behind Closed Doors
An Economy Without Firewalls
By ALAN FARAGO

More than two years after Wall Street’s closest brush with death since the Great Depression, taxpayers, investors and voters are still waiting for the kind of bare knuckles Congressional action like the Pecora Hearings in the 1930s that resulted in federal legislation creating basic firewalls within the banking industries.

Re-moralise the market, Re-localise the economy, Re-capitalise the poor
by Phillip Blond
respublica.org.uk (October 03 2009)
It is now clear that we are at one of those epoch-changing moments in
British political history. Just as the ‘Winter of Discontent’ in 1978/1979
marked a paradigm shift, an utter and complete reversal of the
pre-existing order and the arrival of something new, something
revolutionary and something transformative – so the present unprecedented
debt crisis of 2008/2009 is doing the same.
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http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/25-03-2010/112718-world_war_three-0

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