A letter to the Fourth Internationalists
from the JRCL

June 5th, 1999

To the Fourth Internationalists over the world:

On the 5th of June, Japanese Zengakuren students waged a demonstration in Tokyo against the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia in solidarity with working people around the world; this followed the mass struggles that they had fought several times since the late-March. The JRCL lead the struggle in its forefront.

Now, we recently found slogans for a manifestation that was carried out by a Fourth Internationalist organization in France, which aroused a great question among us. What is meant by the first slogan, 'Oppose the war of NATO and EU'?

Why does the Fourth International neglect a concrete call against the NATO bombardments, which are still going on? Why do the Fourth Internationalists in France neglect to manifest against those cruel bombings which the very French Sate power has been carrying out? From the air craft carrier Foch with the fluttering Tricolour on the Adriatic Sea, and from other bases, more than a hundred French crafts fly to the skies over Yugoslavia every day to rain bombs upon people there. And you see more than six thousand French people, clothed in military uniform by Chirac and Jospin, have been already mobilized to battle fields in the Balkans. Don't they have any sense of shame about these?

To say what they mean by 'Oppose the war of EU' in a positive way, it comes to 'Defend the French uniqueness', doesn't it? Don't be obedient to America! Never be engulfed in the European unification! Save the Republic! Save the French culture! We'd like to ask them when they made a Gaullist turn.

Now the Fourth Internationalists over the world! Today, when the imperialist state power of your own country has committed the war of aggression, why could you neglect to call on your working class to rise in a resolute anti-war strike? Why could you neglect to prepare for overthrow of your home government? Is it wrong to say you are dozing now? Among you is there any one which has made a resolute call for overthrowing the current Euro-socialist governments?

The "United Secretariat" has not. In their manifestation in Paris they walked hand in hand with Jospin Administration's 'communist' ministers. Poorly, what they did was only to propose a 'multiethnic' alternative to the government, which was really carrying out the war.

C. Slaughter in Britain has joined a cheering band for Bomber Blair by saying that he disagrees to the argument that the 'humanitarian intervention' is deceptive. And the late R. Dunaevskaya's group in the USA supports the NATO bombing by calling it 'the violence that resists oppression'.

In the face of imperialist bluffs, such as 'What is the alternative for Kosovo?' or 'To do nothing would have been acquiesce to Milosevic', it seems as if the Fourth Internationalists couldn't move an inch in a straitjacket of their thesis 'unconditional defence of a colonial revolution'. N. Chomsky issued a denunciatory statement together with other American Jews, where they protest against the 'false and exaggerated analogies to the Holocaust and WWII, which are being used to garner support for a bombing campaign'. How shall we understand that a linguist is superior to politicians?

To look back, it is in a discussion in 1994, held five years ago, that the JRCL asked a European Trotskyist to organize an anti-war struggle together; however, his organization came to be immersed in economic struggles in trade unions by saying that the focus was a 'campaign against unemployment'. They have been persistently negative to the efforts to bring an anti-war task in labour movement, as is often the case with Fourth Internationalists.

In conclusion, you, the Fourth Internationalists, do not seem to have a basic tactics concerning how the communists should advance labour movement in this turbulent fin de siecle situation after the collapse of the USSR, in the times when the smoke of power is covering the earth. It is for this reason that you had to let your rulers, components of the NATO, launch the atrocious bombing of Yugoslavia, isn't it? If you had no humiliating sense of this, it would be hard to find a good reason for which you could call yourselves internationalists.

We wish this criticism to be seriously received and examined by all the Fourth Internationalists.