I forgot to mention this as the last General Meeting, even though @HipGnosis had prompted me.
Alan Benjamin, who is a friend and a member of LCIP, extended an invitation from the Organising Committee for the Reconstitution of the 4th International (OCRFI). They wrote a long letter outlining their stances and why they want to open a dialogue between various labor/left wing groups (see quote below).
You can see a response from Nmamdi Lumumba, an American activist in the Ujuma People’s Party here.
@HipGnosis, @anon26178869, and I worked on a draft for a little while after the last Reading Group meeting. I just finalized it today. I tried to keep it fairly broad because I did not want to include issues that the Membership did not agree on.
Since this is a letter going out on behalf of WCU, I believe it needs steering approval + 3 member approval so we can send it + publish it on Voices. @Robert_H, what’s your opinion on that?
Read it over, suggest edits, or leave comments below. If Steering/Members don’t believe that we should send it out, then we do not have to. Please read the response and their letter carefully. Think about how engaging with OCRFI fits into your idea for our organization long term and raise any concerns or issues you may have.
Personally, I think engaging in a conversation with comrades abroad is a great opportunity for us, especially since we are just starting out. With our global economy, many of the issues we face cannot be solved at the local, state, or even national level. An international coordinated effort will be requried and I believe building these relationships will be beneficial for us in long term.
(Our letter is the first 1.5 pages; below the cutoff is their letter).
Below is an explanation for what their goals are:
We do not set any preconditions for joint action, for joint initiatives. We do not seek to impose our positions. But to all the comrades with whom we are led to act, notably in the framework of the International Workers’ Committee, we say: the discussion on the reconstitution of the 4th International is not the exclusive property of militants who claim to be Trotskyists.
The conference we are preparing for the autumn of 2023, because it raises all the questions of the relevance of the programme of the 4th International, in reality poses, through this, other questions: the actuality of Lenin’s struggle for a vanguard party and for the seizure of power by the workers’ councils of the Russian revolution (soviets) refusing to participate in the alliance with the bourgeoisie that the Mensheviks and the revolutionary socialists advocated, a struggle that led to the Third International before its Stalinist degeneration; the continuity of Marx’s struggle in the First International to regroup all the currents of the labour movement, whatever their labels, as long as they were situated on the ground of the political independence of the working class; the continuity of Engels’ struggle in the Second International for the construction and establishment of mass workers’ parties.
That is why we are addressing this invitation to discussion to all activists, currents and organisations of the labour and democratic movement who - whatever their history and political origin - like us, have not given up the fight for class independence and socialism, and in particular to the comrades with whom we work in the framework of the World Conference against War and Exploitation, for a Workers’ International and the International Workers’ Committee. To all of them, we extend this invitation.
We are inviting these comrades freely, if they agree, to participate in the discussion and, if they wish, in the Trotskyist International conference in the autumn of 2023. Not with the aim of necessarily joining us, but because the extraordinarily difficult task of reconstituting the labour movement on a new axis means that no single current can claim to hold the truth, and that, consequently, exchange, confrontation and democratic discussion are indispensable, without which the labour movement will not rebuild itself. This is why we are taking the liberty of addressing this letter both to the organisations of the OCRFI and, more widely, to a wide range of organisations, groups and activists on an international scale, and we are publishing a discussion bulletin open to all.