Our Tendency

It was born as the International Communist Left, driven by the Russian Left Opposition in the struggle against the degeneration of the III International. It constitutes external left-wing fractions with the aim of recovering the parties of the Komintern and incorporates different tendencies -many of them founders of the different national parties- in the construction of a world class perspective.
It founds the Fourth International in 1938 when the road to a new world war was opened by the International's capitulation without a fight to Nazism in 1933 and, above all, after the defeat of the Spanish Revolution in 1937, in which Stalinism took on for the first time the role of driving force and director of the counter-revolution.
From 1942 onwards, it fought against centrism in the Fourth International, denouncing the International Secretariat's renunciation of revolutionary defeatism and the betrayal of internationalism by the member parties that supported "national resistances". It follows an independent policy of that of the centrist leadership in 1944, calling for the conversion of the imperialist war into revolutionary civil war and denouncing the imperialist character of the Russian military occupation in the countries of Eastern Europe. The split is made formal at the second congress of the International (1948).
In 1949 it is constituted as the "International Workers Union", grouping together the internationalist sections and fractions in rupture with the surrender policy of the International. Among them, the two sections that have lived the two characteristic revolutions of the period - the Spanish and the Vietnamese - and fractions and groups of the extinct International that have participated in the attempts of the class to turn the imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war in Greece, France, Germany and Italy. It political framework recognized Stalinist Russia and its satellites as state capitalisms and reject the "defense of the [Stalinist] USSR," the possibility of progressive national liberation and in general the progressive character of any alliance with bourgeois factions. They initiate the criticism of the union as a structure integrated into state capitalism and it is the only internationalist group to maintain a militant structure under the conditions of repression of the Franco dictatorship.
It reorganizes internationally from 1958 under the acronym FOR ("Workers' Revolutionary Ferment"), organizing from the 60s to the 90s sections in France, Spain, Italy and Greece. In this stage the criticism of national liberation -already started in the 1930s by the Communist Left in Argentina- and the role of the trade unions in state capitalism, started in the 1940s in the IWU, is paramount. In 1961 FOR published "For a Second Communist Manifesto", a fundamental text of balance of the revolutionary experience under the conditions of decadent capitalism.
From 2011 onwards, initiatives appear in different countries that accentuate and regroup on the programmatic positions of the tendency. In 2017 the process accelerates and culminates in June 2019 with the constitution at the Llerena Congress of "Emancipation" as a world and internationalist political organization.
Today we are Emancipation/ Emancipación/ Émancipação /Émancipation/ Emancipazione and we publish Nuevo Curso y Escuela de marxismo in Spanish, and Communia in English.

History

The Gwangju commune 31 May, 2020 | History

ne of the more advanced examples of proletarian insurrection occurred exactly forty years ago in South Korea, a date so recent that many of the participants are still alive. The events of that time are a lesson not to be forgotten.
The socialist origins of co-living 25 May, 2020 | History

The real slaughter that we witnessed in the nursing homes during the Covid pandemic has brought media attention to more or less cooperative “co-living” models, whose functioning has been shown to be much more reliable than the average nursing home. As always, they try to get us excited about the idea that “everything could be better” without having overcome the economic system. This is not true. Production in this society is guided by the placement of capital and the realization of profit. And nursing homes are excellent placements of capital. They are not going to become anything else. On the other hand, the “alternative” models that today are presented as novel, were not born precisely from capital and its state, but from the workers’ organizations of the end of the 19th century. It might be a good idea to recall their history now.
When did March 8 stop having class meaning? 8 March, 2020 | History

The original March 8 was neither “Women’s Day” nor was it celebrated in March. What does today’s celebration really commemorate and when did it cease to be what its creators intended it to be?
Alexandra Kollontai… was no feminist 5 March, 2020 | History

Alexandra Kollontai wrote about women’s liberation and relationships, but from a perspective that had nothing to do with feminism and everything to do with communist morality.
Educational work in the Third International 10 November, 2019 | History

Ninety-nine years after the congress in which the International discussed the educational work of the PCs, cultural associations of workers, gatherings and self-training initiatives among workers continue to emerge.