We Take Our Seat: The Accessist International Assumes the Mantle of the Fifth International

“Professor… what are your political principles?”

“May I first ask yours? If you can state them?”

“Certainly I can! I’m a Fifth Internationalist, most of the Organization is… But I’m no Marxist; we Fifths have a practical program.

–Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

For centuries, the abuses and inherent contradictions of capitalism have necessitated the organization of anti-capitalist resistance.

Since Capital recognizes no borders, resistance can only be effective through internationalism, which results in the creation of global political federations committed to the interests of humanity over self-interested greed and profit.

While many others have emerged, including our own, until today, four anti-capitalist organizations have defined the political struggle against Capital, and have become what are seen as THE Internationals.

The Historical Evolution of the Internationals

Each of these four anti-capitalist Internationals, which will be detailed below, were created as a response to the socio-economic realities of its time, representing an ideological and organizational break that addressed the shortcomings of its forerunners.

Their genesis shows the continuous evolution of anti-capitalist thought by various internationals to changing conditions, but also their failure to defeat the biggest challenge of their epoch:

International	Period	Key Breakthrough	Overcame	Ultimate Limitation (The Failure)
First International (1864–1876)	Early Industrialism	Global platform for proletarian unity; prioritizing class consciousness.	Isolated national struggles and craft unions	Organizational Fragility: Loose, federal structure and internal splits (Marxists vs. Anarchists).
Second International (1889–1916)	Mass Movement Era	Created structured mass socialist parties and utilized parliamentary politics.	Ad-hoc depth of the First	Reformist Betrayal: Failure to prevent nationalist co-option and support for World War I.
Third International (1919–1943)	Revolutionary Vanguard	Centralized revolutionary strategy; disciplined, anti-imperialist tactics.	Second’s reformism and nationalism	Bureaucratic Degeneration: Succumbed to tyranny and subservience to Soviet state interests.
Fourth International (1938–present)	Anti-Stalinist Resistance	Preserved authentic anti-bureaucratic Marxism; developed transitional demands.	Third’s bureaucratic caste	Sectarian Decay: Chronic fragmentation and isolation from mass bases, reducing its impact.

The Fourth’s fragmented nature has led to repeated calls for a new, final Fifth International, to lead the elements of anti-capitalism to victory.

The attempts at a Fifth International

The following summary matches with the summary one can find on Wikipedia¹, which seems to have captured the important moments of these attempts pretty well.

Period	Authors	Events	Ideological current	Fate
1938-1941	Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification activists, Argentine Trotskyist Liborio Justo	Campaigning for a fifth, after internal disagreements	Trotskyism	Brief proclamations, no follow through
1965	Lyndon LaRouche	Call made after leaving the Spartacist League in 1965²	LaRouche Movement	No follow through, while the movement itself drifted towards far-right insanity
1994, 2003	Movement for a Socialist Future(MfSF), League for the Fifth International(L5I)	“Fifth International of Communists” proclaimed by MfSF, while the “League for a Revolutionary Communist International” renamed to L5I, and demanded the creation of the fifth “as soon as possible – not in the distant future but in the months and years ahead”³	Trotskyism	MfSF became defunct as a political party, L5I merged into the International Socialist League in December 2025⁴
2009	Hugo Chavez	Called for a Fifth International based on anti-Western socialist solidarity, especially in Latin America⁵. Critically supported by L5I.⁶	Bolivarianism	Limited support, no further developments, Venezuela currently under massive economic strain, and possible regime collapse due to Trump’s imperialistic destabilization against Maduro in the Caribbean⁷
2015	Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist Movement(RAIM)	Proposal of a maoist-third worldist Fifth International⁸	Maoism–Third Worldism	RAIM defunct⁹, so any plans moot
2012(Half-serious)	Fifth International(@5thComintern)	X account¹⁰	Marxist-leninism	Defunct
2020(Half-serious)	Fifth International(@Antifatm)	X account¹¹	Anarchism	Defunct

In summary, especially since the start of this millennium, it seems all the significant anti-capitalist schools of thought(except perhaps the more fringe left-communism) have attempted to forge their own Fifth International, yet they were never able to move beyond their labor-based horizon.

Ironically, Marx himself glimpsed this horizon in his vision of communism as the ‘realm of freedom,’ where labor’s necessity yields to free development, a post-scarcity society beyond class and state.¹²

Yet Marxism, confined to industrial scarcity, never crossed that threshold.

This is a proof of the old adage from Jacque Fresco, that “When growth limits are met in an environment or system, we either break through, emerge and evolve, or die”.

Accessism is, however, this necessary rupture, realizing Marx’s dream through cybernetic abundance, where automation and AI dissolve necessity not through dialectical struggle, but through technological transcendence.

Delving into why they failed

As mentioned, each international was born out of an ideological breakthrough, aimed at conquering limitations in the previous ones, one lacking when gathering forces for a fifth.

One can see that plans for a Fifth International have not gone anywhere simply because there was no differentiating factor for its creation.

All have been stuck in endless variations of attempts at building a “true workers’ party” that will “fearlessly fight” for the proletariat through Marxist ideological purity, transitional demands, united fronts, and anti-sectarian regroupment.

Marxism’s historical role was to articulate liberation under industrial scarcity. Its categories were optimized for a world where labor was central.

That world is ending.¹³

Why class warfare is no longer the axis of liberation

In an economy run by machines and artificial intelligence, that framework is now useless, even harmful, since it produces the same steep hierarchies that capitalism does.

When production grows automatic, work drifts away from people, and shifts towards algorithms, robots and cybernetic systems design, build, but also move goods with almost no help from human hands.

Grabbing “the factories” would not give power to the many, but it would hand power to a handful of technicians, programmers and administrators who grasp the intricate networks.

That small group would turn into the new “bosses.”

They would decide who receives what using knowledge as the key instead of property deeds, and the old inequalities would survive beneath a socialist label.

History offers examples, where the Soviet Union’s technocrats, alongside China’s state planners took command, yet workers stayed shut out of every important choice.

Accessism avoids that trap, since it insists on open cybernetic data as well as on direct democratic governance open to all, so abundance reaches everyone without a human gatekeeper.

Why socialism lost

There is a profound irony here: fighting for the working class in an era where automation is gutting the working class is inherently counter-productive.

As jobs vanish and labor becomes redundant, clinging to class warfare perpetuates a labor mindset that delays the very abundance technology promises.

The subject of Accessism is not a class defined by labor, but all those excluded from access to the systems that govern their lives, be they users, residents, caregivers, creators, the unemployed, the automated-away, and the yet-unborn

A cybernetic economy thrives precisely by automating more and more, generating increasingly objective data for efficient allocation, free from the tamper-prone subjectivity of bureaucratic reports, five-year plans, market whims.

Just as the Soviet Union’s OGAS (Nationwide Automated System for Computation and Control) was suffocated under Marxist bureaucracy, fearing loss of party control, today’s anti-capitalist struggles must recognize that true liberation lies in embracing automation, not resisting it.

In many ways, the fight against capitalism is a fight for automation, and, paradoxically, against Marxism and its principles, which remain tethered to labor-centric myths unfit for our abundant future.

Accessism does not deny that labor yet persists; it denies that labor must remain the organizing principle of society as it’s being phased out.

Objections that under a socialist economy automation would serve the working class ring hollow, for history tells a different story.

Socialist states and cooperatives were structurally constrained from shorter shifts or superior technological adoption compared to their capitalist counterparts, even when automation was in their direct interest, to ease workloads and boost productivity.

Instead, they prioritized full employment and industrial retention, fearing unemployment’s social unrest.

One need only witness the Soviet Union’s resistance to the cybernetic reforms of OGAS, or Eastern Bloc co-ops clinging to manual labor to prove that point.

Capitalist societies, driven by profit, invested heavily in transistors, robots, and computers, inadvertently planting the seeds of their own obsolescence through automation’s rise.

A new beginning

Sadly, the results of this paradoxical positioning of the two sides towards automation are clear.

An ever more devouring and ecologically destructive capitalism that is simply less and less able to provide the average citizen housing, healthcare and education off a regular paycheck, while making it more and more difficult to even find a job to earn a paycheck.¹⁴

Meanwhile, the only opposition to it has been a second international that has been long ago broken and co-opted, a third international that died more than 80 years ago, a fourth that is shattered beyond recognition, and a fifth’s whose midwives have died still waiting for their child to be born.

And with the last of these children ending up stillborn, via the dissolution of the League for the Fifth International into the International Socialist League¹⁵, the chair of the Fifth International is now empty, ready to be occupied by an ideology fit for the automated, AI-driven 21st century.

And the Accessist International now claims that mantle.

As the market fails to provide for a population it no longer employs, the Accessist International demands the transition of these ‘ghost industries’ into the public cybernetic commons, rather than letting them be scrapped or bailed out.

Accessism’s Core Tenets—the Program of the Fifth

An open-access, cybernetic economy:
The creation of an automated, planned, open-source economy, using cybernetics as it’s guiding principle for production and distribution.
Techno-liberation:
The use of scientific progress toward the emancipation of all life, human and non-human, in a democratic and liberatory manner.
In-built decentralized governance:
Open-source algorithms, real-time feedback and democratic participation, so that the degeneration Trotsky warned of can never take root.
The long-term elimination of obsolete systems(money, wage-labour, the state):
All replaced by intelligent resource orchestration that serves need, not power.
The restoration of the environment, and the integration of planetary carrying capacity into economic models:
The integration of ecology into our planning models, such as the cybernetic “economic geography” of Nikolai Veduta and the Novosibirsk Institute.

Radicalized Transitional Program of Accessism

As a worthy sequel to Trotsky’s transitional demands in the fourth international, we have updated and radicalized them for an automated age, transforming scarcity-bound bridges into immediate leaps toward abundance.

We dare to go further, demanding not incremental relief but the full dissolution of labor’s chains.

From Permanent Revolution to Permanent Cybernetic Evolution:
We demand and push for the use of cybernetics and AI in order to automate as much of the labor of workers as possible, to free humanity from toil, and eliminate scarcity as much as possible.
From Defense of deformed workers states to Defense of Cybernetic Gains:
We critically acknowledge and defend the achievements in economic planning and cybernetic economics made by our predecessors, and use them as building blocks for our systems.
We also support any modern initiative that builds upon them, as can be seen on our website.
From Opening the Books to Opening the Algorithms: We demand all our systems and their documentation, especially the ones that are economically planning the economy, to be under open-source licenses, to prevent any bureaucratic caste from being able to hijack it.
From Sliding Scale of Wages to Universal Abundance Dividend:
Trotsky’s automatic wage adjustments against inflation become our demand to replace wages for displaced workers with either UBI, or a cybernetically-calculated, needs-based dividend, ultimately replacing wages with direct, tamper-proof access to resources.
From the Six-Hour Day to the Zero-Hour Working Day: Trotsky foresaw technical progress shortening labor time until wage slavery ends.
The goal for our age is to demand it’s total abolition.
From Expropriation of Key Industries to Seizing the Infrastructure of Failure:
As companies and infrastructure collapse as we reach the Convergence Point¹⁶, we demand their placement under the management of this automated, cybernetic network, to provide life’s necessities for every human.
From Workers’ Militia to Cybernetic Community-Controlled Defense:
We fully expect the forces of totalitarianism, be they fascist autocracies, corporate powers, religious fanatics or red states to come to blows with us eventually, so we see the self-defense of these communities as non-negotiable.
From ideological to technological Solidarity and Anti-Imperialism:
We stand against the exploitation of the Global South and it’s resources, and push for the share of technology and aid to provide for the most affected.
The creation of a planetary skin:
We demand the creation of a planetary system of sensors to share real-time objective data on any changes in the environment, similar to how they are currently used to track emissions and deforestation, to preventing greenwashing, and using them as input to automatically adjust the cybernetic plan.

Unlike tamperable plans, objective data resists manipulation, and unlike ideological dogma, scientific knowledge and cybernetics are free to evolve and find the best way of providing a limitless future for everyone, since “when education and resources are available to all without a price tag, there will be no limit to the human potential.”

Accessism does not abolish political struggle, it relocates it into system design, oversight, and revision.

And for that, we invite you, as individuals, collectives, existing political organizations, and national parties aligned with the vision of cybernetic abundance and techno-liberation, to join the struggle.

Form new Accessist chapters in your countries, cities, and communities.

Graft your groups, parties, or movements onto our emerging structure as affiliated national sections.

Together, we will build the Accessist International as a federated global force: democratic, decentralized, and dedicated to transcending scarcity through open cybernetic systems.

The chair of the Fifth International stands empty no longer, it awaits the forces of the automated future.

For the liberation of humanity from scarcity,
For the liberation of the Earth from exploitation,
For the liberation of life, both human and non-human, from the commodity form.

Long live the Fifth International of Access.
Because Liberation begins with Access.