What is the Partei für Soziale Gleichheit?

The Partei für Soziale Gleichheit (Socialist Equality Party) is the German section of the Fourth International. It aims to unify working people of all countries in a common party, in order to transform the economy and society according to socialist ideals.

The principal organ of the PSG is the World Socialist Web Site, which is updated daily in several languages. The WSWS is a comprehensive source of news and analysis: statements on current world-political developments, background articles, historical documents, film and book reviews, and much more. The WSWS is the political centre of our world movement and now ranks among the most widely read sites on the Web.

The Partei für Soziale Gleichheit was formed in spring 1997 from the Bund Sozialistischer Arbeiter (League of Socialist Workers), which was founded in 1971. In the mid 1990s, the other sections of the Fourth International also transformed themselves into parties, in order to prepare programmatically and organisationally for the change in social conditions.

The Fourth International regards the current transformation in economic and political relations as establishing the conditions necessary for the implementation of its goals. Globalisation unites working people across the world in a single process of production. The nationally based labour bureaucracies – Stalinism and Social Democracy – trample underfoot even the most basic interests of wage earners. Globally, society is polarising into a tiny rich minority at one pole, and an impoverished majority deprived of all rights at the other.

The Fourth International was founded in 1938. It emerged from the struggle of the Left Opposition, led by Leon Trotsky, since 1923, against the rise of Stalinism. The Stalinist apparatus seized political power from the working class in the Soviet Union and betrayed the goals of the 1917 revolution. Under Stalin, an entire generation of Marxists were executed in the USSR in the 1930s. Internationally, Stalin’s policies were responsible for the bitter defeats of the socialist movement, leading to war and fascism.

The collapse of the Stalinist regimes after 1989 has confirmed the stand taken by the Fourth International. Fifteen years later this nomenclature had transformed itself into gangsters and brutal exploiters, Social Democracy is undergoing a parallel development. It has abandoned the defence of working people within the framework of capitalism and is now destroying all previous social achievements and progressive reforms.

The failure of Social Democracy and Stalinism means that working people around the world can seek a new way to defend their vital interests. As a section the Fourth International, the Partei für Soziale Gleichheit stands for the international unity and political independence of the working class. It challenges all organisations who claim to be leftwing, but which in one way or another accommodate to Social Democracy or the successor organisations of Stalinism.