Written by International Marxist Tendency Wednesday, 17 March 2010
The call issued by President Chavez to set up a new revolutionary international, the Fifth International, has provoked a passionate discussion in the ranks of the workers’ movement in Latin America and on a world scale. It is impossible for Marxists to remain indifferent to this question. What attitude should we take towards it?
The first question that needs to be answered is: do we need an International? Marxism is internationalist, or it is nothing. Already at the dawn of our movement, in the pages of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote: “The workers have no country.”
The internationalism of Marx and Engels was not a caprice, or the result of sentimental considerations. It flowed from the fact that capitalism develops as a world system—out of the different national economies and markets there arises one single, indivisible and interdependent whole—the world market.
Today this prediction of the founders of Marxism has been brilliantly demonstrated, in almost laboratory fashion. The crushing domination of the world market is the most decisive fact of our epoch. Not a single country, no matter how big and powerful—not the USA, not China, not Russia—can stand apart from the mighty pull of the world market. This was, in fact, part of the reason for the collapse of the USSR.
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