Ecosocialism or class compromise: A fork in the antifascist road after Porto Alegre

Ivan Drury Zarin

Posted April 22, 2026

Report on the 2026 international antifascist conference in Porto Alegre, Brazil

The most important success of the 2026 antifascist conference in Porto Alegre was the one I know I felt as a participant. It was a tremendous achievement of the organizing committee to bring together a mass gathering of militants to chant, march, talk, debate, learn, and celebrate together. The connections we made in the streets of Porto Alegre and the halls of its university, hotels, and other gathering spaces have inspired and encouraged us and made connections that must, if only each of us can continue to build on them, strengthen our organizations, politics, and movements against fascism, imperialism, and capitalism. For this we owe the organizers a debt of gratitude.

The second most important success was more local: for the Brazilian organizations and movements. Brazilian militants told me that the conference helped improve the electoral coalition between different groups, which will be critical in the fight against Bolsonaro in the next election. Israel Dutra, an activist with the Left Socialist Movement (MES) in the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), summarizes this success in an article on the MES website as first of all demographic: 7,000 people at the opening march, 4,000 registered attendees from 40 countries, and 150 self-organized breakout sessions. This level of participation was a coup for the organizing committee, demonstrating its capacities for common political activity.

It was the composition of the leading coalition that organized this success that made it significant for the coming election. The coalition was comprised of three major left parties in Brazil: Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT); the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), which split from the PT in 2004 in opposition to the PT’s rightward turn; and the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB), which is allied with the PT. Dutra surmised that the effectiveness of these groups in organizing the tremendous mobilization in Porto Alegre “arms us, on the national and international ground, for the challenges of confronting the far right, imperialism, and Trump, where the Brazilian election itself will be a key chapter.”

These two successes are important, but the conference concluded with a note sounded by a structural limitation: the Porto Alegre Declaration, which settled on a definition of fascism that is wanting for consistency and radicalism, and a strategic vision that is halting. And because it was the final word of the more-than-three-day gathering, that limitation feels pronounced.

I want to assess the limits of the Declaration and the conference generally, and to make a proposal for how we can get around it in the future work of this inchoate international antifascist movement. The best path for working-class internationalists, I want to argue, is to be found in another germ that was present in the conference, represented by the Fourth International’s Ecosocialist Manifesto.

Anti-fascist Putinism

The Fourth International’s (FI) balance sheet of the conference includes the problem that “under the influence of the ‘campist’ sectors of the conference, there was no condemnation of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, nor a clear stance on the nature of the dictatorial regime in Russia.” Beyond a problem in anti-fascist consistency, the FI writes, “This is a serious problem and potential obstacle to joint activity with anti-fascists from Russia and Ukraine.”

The FI rightly focuses on the strategy problem that comes out of a coalition that includes groups with political commitments to a vision of anti-imperialism that stops with anti-US coalitions, and also parties that have diplomatic and pragmatic reasons to prioritize their relations with Russia. The Communist Party of Brazil’s José Reinaldo Carvalho critiqued this Declaration from the other side, bemoaning its refusal to celebrate Russia’s “military action of an anti-fascist character against the pro-imperialist regime of Zelensky, with liberating purposes of the oppressed and massacred populations of Donetsk and Lugansk.” With openly Putinist bedfellows, it’s no wonder that the best the closing declaration could do was omit the question of Russia’s war on Ukraine entirely.

An anti-fascism in need of feminism

The Declaration is guilty of other critical omissions too. The body of the text includes mention of the fascist persecution of women, LGBTQ communities, and migrants, but these points of analysis are not reflected in programmatic calls to action. The Declaration concludes with a set of proposals that deal with logistical problems in arranging follow-up gatherings, lists nations to defend against imperialist war and occupation, and promises support to upcoming global mobilizations. There is nothing wrong with these priorities, and certainly anti-imperialism generally must be central to a world anti-fascist movement, but it is curious that the people and communities that fascism especially singles out for attack within nations are not priorities for counter mobilization, defense, and as leaders for future anti-fascist gatherings.

Women played leading roles in the facilitation and coordination of the Porto Alegre conference. Women led chants, carried banners, and spoke throughout the demonstration that started off the conference. Women chaired and spoke on countless self-organized panels. And women spoke during the main plenary events, though often outnumbered by men. But, as the FI notes, “the problematics of feminism were largely absent from the official panels, although of course present in a number of self-organized workshops.”

Also absent from the main program were representatives of LGBTQ movements. Given the worldwide fascist attack on trans communities and movements, this absence feels especially stark. This gap is methodological and political, not coincidental. The centrality of nation-states as units of analysis for fascist assault and anti-fascist defense led to the homogenizing of national populations, treating complex, often multinational, always multiply classed, multigendered, multisexual, and multiracial peoples as singly encapsulated as a single nation represented by a single government. This preference for nation-state-centered organization of power and counterpower conceptually squeezes out feminist critique, as well as critiques of compulsory heterosexuality, and attendant struggles. If the conference had been planned with a socialist feminist politics, it is likely that problems of gender and sexual expression, like the fascist assault on trans communities, would have been included in the main program.

The political limits of campism

These absences show that making coalitions with campists and representatives of capitalist states is politically as well as strategically limiting. For liberals, fascism is a politics of excessive authoritarianism, which impedes the legally protected expression and property that enfranchised persons expect in a bourgeois democratic society.

For campists and the governments of states under attack by imperialism, fascism is primarily a problem of national subjugation. The politics of these two groups are not identical, but they share a priority: to stop US imperialism as a radical, preeminent threat to “peoples,” whose sovereignty is expressed through a nation-state government. This framing requires a class compromise at its foundation: that class struggles and all social struggles, whether of oppressed nations internal to those states, people persecuted by gender or sexual expression, or by religions, must be subjugated to the interest of national self-determination, a struggle that is represented by the state.

There is a Marxist germ in this “self-determination” analytic. Lenin discussed it extensively in his contribution to debates about the national question in the early days of the first great inter-imperialist war. Lenin said that socialists must support the right of oppressed nations to self-determination because an imperialist assault overwhelms their sovereign historical development. Imperialist wars push all classes into combined national defense, forcing working-class fighters to unite with the capitalist class in their countries, and also forcing capitalists to arm the workers. This process does not end class struggles in the subject country, but it interrupts them and perverts them. Lenin says that the only way out of this pressurized combination is through – that the invaders must be beaten back.

But national defense does not mean that the working class and other nationally oppressed and exploited groups must give up their struggles against their national bourgeoisie. And the ongoing demands of class struggle likewise do not necessarily steer the working class to seek alliance with imperialist invaders. Rather than surrendering to either of these compromised coalitions, which subordinate workers to the political agenda of either a national or international capitalist class, a militant, working-class internationalism sees that working-class struggle, under pressure from imperialism, can take the form of national defense. To paraphrase Trotsky in his defense of his theory of permanent revolution, such class-national war includes a struggle to reconstruct the nation under the leadership of the working class.

There is a disagreement over the meaning of “sovereignty” between such militant, working-class internationalism and the blinkered anti-imperialism of those who dissolve the class interests of workers and oppressed groups into the state. The Fourth International explained this difference in the context of the US war on Iran by saying, “Whilst we defend the Islamic Republic’s right to defend itself against imperialist aggression, and wish for the defeat of this attack, we fully support the social movements in Iran, particularly the feminist movements, which have nothing to do with the representatives of the Shah sponsored by the United States and Israel.” This vision of popular sovereignty recognizes the complexity of national struggles, including the possibility that through the war of national defense, feminists, Kurdish struggles, and workers’ socialist movements may also contest the power of the Islamic Republic.

Ecosocialism: a positive strategic vision against apocalypse and utopianism

Such a positive vision was articulated at the conference through the Fourth International’s Ecosocialist Manifesto, launched to a crowd of more than six hundred.

At the launch event, Manifesto author Michael Löwy presented ecosocialism not as a “chapter” in a socialist program, but as a “throughline.” “Ecology,” he said, “has become a decisive issue.” And he tied the struggle for ecosocialism to the anti-fascist cause. “Capitalists today,” he said, “are ready to destroy the planet for their profits.” This ecocidal mania is “an aspect of the rise of fascism, which is the dominant political form emerging in the dominant countries.” Therefore, he said, “This manifesto can help us in the antifascist struggle. We cannot struggle against fascism without fighting for ecoology.”

This initial part of Löwy’s ecosocialist critique was practical and strategic, but more or less a form of anti-capitalist militancy. Then he explained that the Manifesto goes beyond struggle to elaborate a vision for a post-capitalist society and its values. I thought this was the most moving part of the ecosocialist discussion, and the dynamic that I realized was missing in the rest of the conference.

Löwy said, “The philosophy that inspires us is that the true meaning of life is not having things, it is to have free time to participate in society, to produce socially together. Celebration is important. Having things is not important.” He put this in a social framework by explaining what some socialists call “degrowth” in concrete terms. “We are against the useless consumption of energy,” he said. “Reducing work time will have the effect of reducing the unnecessary use of energy.”

“I would like to finish by arguing that we will only win against fascism if we present a radical alternative to capitalism… a revolutionary perspective,” Löwy said. In his telling, that alternative must refuse and counter the entirety of capitalist production, logic and ways of knowing, culture and ways of feeling; we must counter capitalism’s priorities and values, and explain radically different answers to the problems that vex us in our world today.

The Fourth International’s Penelope Duggan then explained that the release of the Manifesto signals the arrival of a historical moment. “In the FI, like in the Marxist and communist movement generally, the production of a manifesto marks an important moment in our history, and in our understanding of the world,” she said. “The first manifesto of the Trotskyist movement was drafted in 1938, on the eve of the Second World War, a major historical event. The FI also produced a manifesto at the end of WW2 to take account of the situation at the end of the war and with the expansion of the Soviet Bloc. So why did we produce this manifesto in 2025 when there had not been a historical event of that scale? Because, as Michael said, the ecological crisis had become such that we had to change our outlook and our understanding of how to fight for socialism.”

Though it was not part of the main program, discussion of the Manifesto rippled throughout the conference. I heard people discussing it in hallways between events, and panelists mentioning it as a reference point right up until the panels on the last day. An article published on the Landless Peasant Movement (MST) website referred to a land reform and agricultural program grounded in the ecosocialist principle Löwy explained, saying, “An ecology that is not socialist has no future, and a socialism that is not ecological is not up to the challenges of the 21st century.” During the closing panel that day, which, admittedly, was about the climate crisis, panelists referred to it as a guiding light for the struggle ahead. That’s a testimony to its positive, forward-looking scope.

A fork in the antifascist road

The conference Declaration states that the existing convening body will be responsible for the next international conference, along with additional groups that this group will appoint, so the hamstrung coalition that bound this conference to the interests of states when it came to strategy is preordained to continue.

What are groups to do that have anti-state or socialism from below commitments? It is important to say that in terms of the active politics of the conference itself, our anti-campist, working-class internationalist politics were prevalent to the point of being characteristic of the great majority of discussions. So long as we continue to participate, there is no reason to think that it would be otherwise in future gatherings. But there is also no reason to think that future gatherings would be any more able than this one to develop a unified strategy.

There are two ways out of this trap. One would be to break away and organize a separate conference and movement. For groups in the USA or Canada, where campist forces are not much of a social force, this would not be a big problem. But for organizations from most of the rest of the world, this would mean splitting up movements that practice unity in action on local campaigns, against the far right, against imperialism, and in elections. A split, in many cases, would weaken their coalitions locally and embolden the far right. Many of these groups would be unwilling to undermine their existing local coalitions for the promise of international action.

Another way forward toward strategic action would be to formalize the conference-within-a-conference that was an organic dynamic of the 2026 gathering. The plenary panels and the conference convenors’ Declaration were where the stalemate between state-campist and working-class internationalist groups was most visible. But in the self-organized workshops and in the many ad hoc meetings, social events, and discussions that took up most of the time and space in the conference for most participants, there was more of a gravitational division between these two political tendencies.

By organizing a conference within a conference, prepared by a coordinating body of representatives from key groups with socialism-from-below, working-class internationalist politics, these informal meetings and discussions could be planned and organized. This coordinating body could provide the feminist, anti-racist, LGBTQ leadership that is missing from the official leadership body.

Our tendency is also broad and has important differences and problems to discuss and debate. What common strategies and tactics we should pursue are not self-evident. So a conference within a conference would allow us space to have these discussions and work on producing a common strategy that could be released autonomously, as a complementary document, alongside a future general conference declaration.

The best example of such an autonomous declaration is this year’s ecosocialist manifesto. While not developed during the conference, it was taken up by many groups and participants in Porto Alegre as a positive articulation — something we all long for, regardless of how we answer the question of how to fight US imperialism.

References

For articles in Portuguese and Spanish, I’ve relied on automated translation, and where I have used quotes, I have edited those translations for readability.

Porto Alegre Declaration: Unity Against Fascism and for the Sovereignty of the Peoples, AntiFascista: Porto Alegre 2026, March 29, 2026.

Fourth International, The Anti-Fascist and Anti-Imperialist Conference in Porto Alegre: Great achievements, challenges and opportunities, Fourth International, April 4, 2026.

Israel Dutra, First international anti-fascist conference: A political victory, Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, April 5, 2026.

Edgard Sanchez, Porto Alegre and the urgent anti-imperialist action, Sem Mexico, March 23, 2026. [Spanish]

Vanessa Dourado, Anti-fascism and the ecosocialist agenda, Lauro Campos e Marielle Franco Fundacao (PSOL), April 1, 2026 [Portuguese]

Marcelo Ferreira, Climate debate and Agrarian Reform in Porto Alegre defends break with capitalism and agribusiness, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rorais Sem Terra (MST), March 31, 2026. [Portuguese]

Paolo de Mello, Chronicle and analysis of the 1st International Anti-fascist Conference and for the Sovereignty of Peoples, Sin Permiso, April 5, 2026. [Spanish]

Fourth International, Against Neo-Fascist Authoritarianism and All Forms of Imperialism: Declaration of the Fourth International at the First International Anti-Fascist Conference for the Sovereignty of the Peoples, Fourth International.

Jose Reinaldo Carvalho, Anti-fascist unity demands strategic clarity and priority in the struggle against US imperialism, CEBRAPAZ.ORG, March 30, 2026. [Portuguese]