210. The split with the WRP anticipated fundamental changes on a global scale. The ICFI’s survival of the split and its purging of the nationalist-opportunists prepared it for these changes; it made possible a theoretical and political clarification that would enable the development of a politically united international revolutionary Marxist party. The ICFI analyzed the split with the WRP in detail in How the Workers Revolutionary Party Betrayed Trotskyism, The ICFI Defends Trotskyism and David North’s The Heritage We Defend: A Contribution to the History of the Fourth International. On this basis it began to educate international cadre in the lessons of the split. The development of the ICFI after the split reflected a level of international cooperation unprecedented in the history of the Marxist movement. The objective basis for this conscious response, based on Marxist internationalism and the primacy of world strategy, was the globalization of economic processes and new communication technologies, which made the international unification of the working class more possible than ever.

211. It was only in the late 1980s that the ICFI was able to recognize the enormous objective significance of the unprecedented integration of the world market and the globalization of production for the working class strategy of world socialist revolution. The 1988 Perspectives Resolution, which marked a critical turning point in the ICFI’s development as a united world party, emphasized the “explosive growth in the activity of transnational corporations.” It stated:

The result has been an unprecedented integration of the world market and internationalization of production. The absolute and active predominance of the world economy over all national economies, including that of the United States, is a basic fact of modern life. Advances in technology associated with the invention and perfection of the integrated circuit have produced revolutionary changes in communications which, in turn, have accelerated the process of global economic integration. But these economic and technological developments, far from opening up new historical vistas for capitalism, have raised the fundamental contradiction between world economy and the capitalist nation-state system, and between social production and private ownership, to an unprecedented level of intensity.^[1]

212. Another development, reflecting the breakdown of the post-World War II order, to which the ICFI called attention, was the escalation of inter-imperialist antagonisms. The ICFI also attributed revolutionary significance to the vast expansion of the proletariat in Asia, Africa and Latin America—the result of the international export of capital in pursuit of high rates of profit.

213. The development of transnational production and the global integration of finance and manufacturing dramatically undermined the viability of social and political organizations embedded in the nation-state system. Though the global integration of capitalism was creating the objective conditions for the unification of the working class, this revolutionary potential required organizations and leadership based on a consciously internationalist strategy. Without such a leadership, the working class would be unable to defend itself against globally organized capital. As the ICFI explained in the 1988 Perspectives Resolution:

The massive development of transnational corporations and the resulting global integration of capitalist production have produced an unprecedented uniformity in the conditions confronting the workers of the world. The ferocious competition between national groups of capitalists for domination of the world market finds its brutal expression in a universal campaign by the ruling classes to intensify in their “own” countries the exploitation of the working class. The offensive of capital against labor is realized in country after country through mass unemployment, wage-cutting, speed-ups, union busting, slashing of social benefits, and intensified attacks on democratic rights.^[2]

214. The changes in the form of capitalist production brought with them a change in the form of class struggle:

It has long been an elementary proposition of Marxism that the class struggle is national only as to form, but that it is, in essence, an international struggle. However, given the new features of capitalist development, even the form of the class struggle must assume an international character. Even the most elemental struggles of the working class pose the necessity of coordinating its actions on an international scale. It is a basic fact of economic life that transnational corporations exploit the labor power of workers in several countries to produce a finished commodity, and that they distribute and shift production between their plants in different countries and on different continents in search of the highest rate of profit...Thus, the unprecedented international mobility of capital has rendered all nationalist programs for the labor movement of different countries obsolete and reactionary.^[3]

215. The ICFI warned that the new forms of global production did not diminish, but rather intensified the danger of world war:

The global character of capitalist production has tremendously sharpened the economic and political antagonisms between the principal imperialist powers, and has once again brought to the forefront the irreconcilable contradiction between the objective development of the world economy and the nation-state form in which the whole system of capitalist property is historically rooted. Precisely the international character of the proletariat, a class which owes no allegiance to any capitalist ‘fatherland,’ makes it the sole social force that can liberate civilization from the strangulating fetters of the nation-state system.

For these fundamental reasons, no struggle against the ruling class in any country can produce enduring advances for the working class, let alone prepare its final emancipation, unless it is based on an international strategy aimed at the worldwide mobilization of the proletariat against the capitalist system. This necessary unification of the working class can only be achieved through the construction of a genuine international proletarian, i.e., revolutionary party. Only one such party, the product of decades of unrelenting ideological and political struggle exists. It is the Fourth International, founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938, and led today by the International Committee.^[4]