Why ILPS?

Urgent Need for the ILPS

The League answers the urgent need of the broad masses of the people for the creation of an international rallying force in the struggle for national independence, democracy and social liberation. It is their weapon against the intensifying exploitation and oppression unleashed by "free market" globalization and the new world disorder under the hegemony of US imperialism.

The contradictions are sharpening between the imperialist powers and the oppressed nations and peoples, those among the imperialist powers and those between capital and labor in the imperialist countries. Under these conditions, the revolutionary mass movement can advance throughout the world.

Since the collapse of the revisionist regimes, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the violent turmoil in China in the years of 1989 to 1991, the world capitalist system has plunged deeper into the crisis of overproduction and into unprecedented social and political turmoil. This belies the absurd claim that capitalism and liberal democracy are the end of history.

But the imperialist powers never tire of dishing up their ideological and political lies in the most cunning counterrevolutionary phraseology. They deploy against the people a tripartite alliance of imperialist and client states, multinational banks and firms and so-called nongovernmental organizations that are imperialist funded.

The League is needed in order to raise the consciousness and militancy of the toiling masses and the middle social strata in the common struggle against the imperialists and their socioeconomic, political and cultural instruments in all the fifteen concerns which are enumerated in the proposed charter of the League. These concerns are responsive to the theme of this assembly "The People’s Demands for Solidarity for the 21st Century".

Origins of the League

We come from various democratic and revolutionary traditions and currents in various countries. We are a broad range of mass formations, taking the anti-imperialist and democratic line and seeking to build a broad international united front in order to arouse, organize and mobilize the people in their hundreds of millions.

Our League is inspired by the anti-imperialist and democratic mass struggles that have arisen since the beginning of the 20th century. It also reflects and draws strength from the recent anti-imperialist and democratic mass struggles that have arisen since the decade of the 1990s. Among our delegations in this assembly are those that have waged various forms of mass struggles for national independence, democracy and socialism in their own countries and on an international scale.

They have participated in international protest campaigns against US wars of aggression such as those against Iraq and former Yugoslavia, and against such US-dominated multilateral formations as the APEC in Manila in 1996 and in Vancouver in 1997, the WTO in Seattle in 1999, the IMF and World Bank in Washington, DC in 2000, the Group of 7 in Okinawa in 2000, the IMF and World Bank in Prague 2000 and so on.

It is appropriate and in its best interest for the League to trace its origins from the great revolutionary mass struggles against imperialism. The League seeks to attract and mobilize the broadest possible range of mass formations for the anti-imperialist and democratic struggle.