Home Meetings Athens 5th International Conference in November 2023 The Central Tasks Of The Anti-Imperialist Struggle – Ricardo López Risso |...

The Central Tasks Of The Anti-Imperialist Struggle – Ricardo López Risso | Peruvian Communist Party

I. Scientific analysis of the current world situation. The configuration of the new world order.

1.1. Brief overview of the world economy.

After the great crisis of 2008, the world entered a phase of accelerated geopolitical changes in different parts of the globe. Latin America advanced in the hegemony of progressive and leftist governments far from the US influence. Europe was suffering the aftermath of the subprime mortgage crisis and Russia was preparing to return to the world scene when it put down Saakashvili’s Georgia’s meritorious attempt to join NATO on the eve of the definitive defeat of the Wahhabi jihad in the North Caucasus. Likewise, Saudi Arabia began to distance itself from US energy recipes, making OPEC its most effective instrument of denial vis-à-vis the Western bloc, always within the framework of the world recession.

After a brief period of reactivation of the world economy, it can hardly be doubted that the world economy, after being in a “slowdown” phase for a prolonged period, has entered a recessionary period since 2020. With the exception of China’s PR, the data provided by multilateral organizations coincide in pointing out that the world’s GDP shows unmistakable signs of weak growth (average 1.5%) or, at times, negative growth. This is not only a cooling of the economy, but a recession with all its consequences on employment and income, aggravated by the announced slowdown of the economies of China, the US and the EU in 2023 (IMF).

This situation is not only a consequence of the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine and the absurd Western sanctions against Russia, but of the capitalist system that is feeling the blow of the downward trend of the average rate of profit, which seems irreversible. 

Wars and the fierce competition for world hegemony are only brutal forms that pretend to distort the sentence that “capitalism carries the germ of its own destruction due to its insatiable thirst for surplus value and profit”.

In this sense, war is inherent to capitalism as a mechanism for solving economic crises or, as it is usually called in liberal literature, as a form of self-regulation of the capitalist system. The deployment of war on a global scale includes sanctions such as those imposed by the US against Russia, Venezuela, Iran and Cuba, even against China, regardless of the disorder generated in markets and global supply chains. The important thing for the empire is to restore the vigor and primacy of US capitalism in the international order.

Despite this, the global recession is still underway. If it were not for China, the aforementioned 1.5% average would be lower and will probably be so this year and next if the economies of the North slow down. This performance, which will continue until 2024, is part of the long cycle of crisis that began before 2008, despite the fact that multilateral organizations such as the IMF and the World Bank are trying to generate a climate of optimism with less discouraging estimates that are far from reality.

1.2. Multipolarity or the dispute for world hegemony.

The war waged by Russia against NATO in Ukraine is but the tip of the iceberg that hides the most diverse and complex forms in which the dispute against the world hegemony of the USA and the collective West is developing. The narrative that it is an invasion of the “bad guys” (Russians) against the “good and small” (the fascist government of Ukraine), is nothing but a cynical attempt to distort reality. In this war scenario, not only the predominance of NATO in Eastern Europe is at stake, but also the world control of the means of production and logistics linked to the supply of food, energy, technology and the survival of the unipolarity embodied in the USA with the consequent breakdown of the old world order.

It is no longer possible to hide the desperation of the once undisputed power of the US on the planet. Although without concrete expressions, China is present in the war conflict and therefore, as a main actor in the dispute for multipolarity. Although this could insinuate that the world is moving towards a re-edition of the old bipolarity, what has been happening does not seem to come close to that perspective, since multilateralism and its multiple manifestations are becoming more and more valid and claim for themselves, in line with the shifting correlations of global forces towards a multipolar scenario.

This is where the BRICS, G77+China, the G20, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, among others, are, as actors of fragmentation that will seek collective and individual protagonism without, therefore, having to break “formally” with the new “multipoles” (China, Russia, India, Brazil, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, etc.) in the configuration of the new world order.

1.3. Multipolarity and the New World Order for Non-Hegemonic Countries.

What do the peoples of non-hegemonic countries aspire to in multipolarity and the establishment of a New World Order (NWO)?

In the uncertainty of multipolarity and the New World Order, unipolarity is replaced by multipolarity: Beijing, Moscow, New Delhi, Brasilia, Pretoria, from January 1, 2024 will be added Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Addis Ababa, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Tehran, will replace Washington; the yuan, ruble, real, Indian rupee, rand, Egyptian pound, rial, birr, riyal, dirham, Argentine pesos to replace the dollar; the New Development Bank (NDB BRICS) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) to replace the World Bank, the European Investment Bank. In concise terms: the BRICS+ would be the real agent of this “expected” change in the unipolarity—Old World Order duality, which will give impetus to the emergence of multiple centers-peripheries-multipolarity-NWO. The BRICS and the upcoming BRICS+ would be consolidated in response to the abusive trade practices of the hegemonic countries of the Collective West, the punitive sanctions regimes against countries qualified as “real and potential dangers” to US national security, such as the cases of Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Russia and China; the international piracy carried out by the US and allies against sovereign funds and assets of sovereign countries such as Iran, Russia, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Syria and Venezuela; the neglect of the development needs of the poorest countries and the domination of the Collective West.

The BRICS emerge from the rubble left by the Great Recession of 2008 and are strengthened by the same causes that the hegemonic states stubbornly insist on maintaining. The founding countries of the BRICS moved away from the neoliberal model of the “Washington Consensus”. Let us recall that in Yeltsin’s Russia and in the countries of the defunct COMECON, neoliberal recipes were implemented without setbacks or opposition. In Russia, neoliberalism suffered its first defeat with the arrival of Vladimir Putin to the presidency in 2000 and the political restructuring under “the vertical of power”, in which the State has played a leading role in the management of the Russian economy [semi-centralized planning], which has allowed growth since then and until before the 2008 crisis, at a rate of 6.95% in its GDP and 7.31% in its GDP per capita. China’s PR was not permeable to the neoliberal prescriptions of the “Washington Consensus”, maintaining the control of economic agents from a scheme of central planning and five-year plans, and is currently a moderately well-off society.

The starting pedal behind the success of the BRICS lies mainly in the policies of the PR China, which are based on the so-called “Beijing Consensus” (Cooper Ramo, 2004), whose fundamental elements are: 1) Business on the basis of the interests of the parties and without generic or principled conditionalities; 2) Friendship, cooperation, and mutual respect; 3) Structural development of China’s partners; 4) infrastructure, economic development, and then social and civic issues; 5) Respect for the internal policies of each country; 6) being more competitive and expeditious. These fundamentals are the ones that have seduced the other countries that are joining BRICS. An example of this is the expansion of the “Belt and Road” initiative based on trade and development partnerships on the railroad routes linking Asia and Europe and the maritime routes linking new and renovated ports in Africa, Asia and Latin America, such as the future mega port of Chancay in the coastal center of Peru.

The G7 and the BRICS are the leaders of the center and the semi-periphery of the current world system, respectively. What is the main vision and strategy promoted by each bloc to overcome the Great Recession of 2008?

The Great Recession of 2008 was caused by the economies of the hegemonic countries of the world system due to their neoliberal policies [it originated in the United States in August 2007, the cause was the default of subprime mortgages]. Faced with this crisis, the central states have persisted in their “laissez faire, laissez passer” policies, while the semi-peripheral states of the BRICS space have made progress in promoting an international order critical of liberalism and the international institutions controlled by the hegemonic countries, but also of development opportunities.

For the peoples of the non-hegemonic periphery, the BRICS+ would emerge on the horizon as the global space that will break with the scheme of domination of the old world order headed by US imperialism, which will concentrate the largest producers of hydrocarbons, the largest populations, the largest markets, the largest industrial centers, far surpassing the G7, although at present the BRICS countries represent 25% of global GDP, 42% of the world population and more than 16% of world trade. The economies of the G7 countries will account for more than 45% of global GDP by 2023, 10% of the population. Their weight in the global economy is evident but also decreasing. As of January 1, 2024, the BRICS+ countries will accumulate 36.6% of world GDP, while the G7 will shrink to 29.9%.

On the other hand, the BRICS and the next BRICS+, unlike the G7 and Triad countries, are not at the forefront of the development of new technologies for now, except for China’s PR, which has focused in recent years on non-sanctionable technological developments [to refer to technologies subject to sanctions or bans by the US], which has allowed China to continue to lead in 2022 with 46% of patent registrations worldwide, followed by the USA with 17%, Japan and South Korea with 8.5% and 7% respectively. The factor of technological development is crucial in the strategy of building a multipolar world and the new international order, because otherwise it will not be possible to survive in a new world order in which accelerated technological innovation consolidates its intrinsic duality: independence—not dependence.

The BRICS countries in the transit of becoming a counterweight to the global West, in the context of US tensions with the P.R. China and Russia’s Special Operation in Ukraine, or rather, NATO’s war against Russia in Ukraine, the increase in the number of members of the bloc would give more real weight and greater content to their message of global reform.

1.4. Preventing the multipolarity—new world order from turning into a new scheme of distributed world domination.

The Imperial Ambitions of the United States in the national security strategy of 2002, more than twenty years after it was formulated, maintains its essence. It established three core principles of U.S. strategic policy: First. To permanently secure America’s undisputed global dominance, so that no nation will be allowed to rival or threaten the United States. Second. The permanent readiness of the United States to rapidly develop preemptive military strikes against states or forces anywhere on the globe that are considered a threat to the security of the United States, its forces and facilities abroad, or its friends or allies. Third. Immunity of U.S. citizens from prosecution in International Criminal Tribunals.

Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, each with their details have maintained the same strategic line. Thus, China PR in its rapid economic rise forced Trump to unleash the “commercial-technological war” against China and against companies of that nationality, forcing the largest producers of microchips to move their production to U.S. territory, forcing ASML of the Netherlands not to sell lithography machines of the latest generation to China, agitating on the way the waters of the Taiwan Strait attacking the territorial sovereignty of China PR, in order to recover some of the spaces ceded to the Asian giant in the last fifteen years.

Likewise, the strategic dispute over the European hydrocarbon consumption market, which led the US to promote a sustained rivalry with the Russian Federation that has led to the war in Ukraine, having as visible consequences: the capture of the European hydrocarbon market by the US, or rather, in the words of Condoleezza Rice: “changing the energy dependence structure [of Europe] to depend more on the energy platform of North America [the US]”; also, the exponential increase in the international profit share of the US arms industry, i.e.: “To permanently secure America’s undisputed global dominance, so that no nation will be allowed to rival or threaten the United States.” Successive military aggressions by the U.S. and its European allies since the beginning of the Cold War. The successive military aggressions of the U.S. and its European allies since the destruction of Yugoslavia, the Arab Spring, the invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan, the destruction of Libya and Syria; the subversive uprisings in Ukraine that led to the overthrow of Yanukovich, the conflict in the Russophone territories, the independence of Crimea and the current war in Ukraine; the expansion of NATO; the coup in Bolivia; the subversive attempts in Belarus, Cuba, Iran, Venezuela and Hong Kong; that is: “The permanent readiness of the United States to develop in a rapid manner preemptive military strikes against states or forces anywhere on the globe that are deemed a threat to the security of the United States, its forces and facilities abroad, or its friends or allies and the immunity [impunity] of American citizens from prosecution in International Criminal Tribunals.”

Multipolarity and the NWO are linked to security issues, which in turn are linked to the welfare of the peoples of all countries, to the cause of world peace and development and to the future of the common humanity, as well as to the most effective struggle against imperialism and the construction of the material bases of socialism. 

What do the peoples of the non-hegemonic or peripheral countries aspire to? Evidently we aspire to world détente and peace, to the defeat of U.S. imperialism, which will allow us to redirect the resources of the countries to welfare, to the protection of the environment, to the fight against the effects of climate change and not to the arms race, in frameworks of cooperation, mutual benefits, trust and security. The Global Security Initiative (GSI) announced by President Xi Jinping, coupled with the Asian giant’s win-win / win-win initiative. Chinese President Xi Jinping proposes the Global Security Initiative (GSI) calling on all countries to adapt to the profoundly changing international landscape in a spirit of solidarity and to address complex and intertwined security challenges in a win-win spirit. The Global Security Initiative aims to eliminate the root causes of joint international conflicts to bring more stability and certainties in an unstable and changing era and to promote lasting peace and development in the world.

In 2014, President Xi proposed a new vision of global, cooperative and lasting security. The essence of this new security vision consists of: a common security concept, respecting and safeguarding the security of each country; a holistic approach, maintaining security in traditional and non-traditional areas and enhancing security governance in a coordinated manner; a commitment to cooperation, providing security through political dialogue and peaceful negotiation; and the pursuit of lasting security, resolving conflicts through development and eliminating factors that foster insecurity. Maintain the commitment to respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries. Sovereign equality and non-interference in internal affairs are fundamental principles of international law and the most fundamental rules governing contemporary international relations. Remain committed to respecting the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations. Remain committed to taking seriously the legitimate security concerns of all countries (Russia case).

The peoples of non-hegemonic countries expect greater participation in the collective construction of a new world order based on peace, non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states, cooperation and shared development, the cessation of international piracy by the US, the UK and the European Union against sovereign funds and assets of other countries, an end to international blackmail as an instrument of competition and repression against sovereign states, détente and progressive disarmament; joint global action to prevent the effects of climate change; repair and remediation of damages caused by foreign military actions in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen; repair and remediation of damages caused by U.S. and allied embargoes and blockades of U.S. and allied economies; and repair and remediation of damages caused by U.S. and allied embargoes and blockades of U.S. and allied economies. The U.S. and allied embargoes and blockades on the economies of Cuba, Iran, Syria, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and Venezuela. 

II. Probability of the spread of war in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the outbreak of war in East Asia.

The growing world crisis with real possibilities of spreading beyond the Dnieper began in 2007 when the USA and NATO announced the future accession of Ukraine and Georgia to the imperialist organization. For this, Georgia had to “solve” the problems with the separatist territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, meanwhile Ukraine had to eradicate the Russian presence and, of course, the pro-Russian political and social sectors. Russia was already warned, it only had to modernize its armed forces, reorganize the country, strengthen relations with neighboring China and prepare to face Zbigniew Brzezinski’s theses.

In this strategy, US imperialism and the lackey states of Europe, since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, have not ceased to add fuel to the fire, providing Ukraine with more and more advanced weapons, such as cruise missiles, M1 Abrams tank, Leopard, depleted uranium shells, long-range missiles such as the announced GLSDB, which would allow Ukraine to attack targets deep inside Russian territory, as well as the upcoming delivery of F16 aircraft, in addition to the provision of critical information assistance by satellites and reconnaissance aircraft in the vicinity of the conflict area, bringing the world closer to the scenarios of a thermonuclear war. 

The direct involvement of NATO countries has already been confirmed with the annihilation by Russia of NATO instructors and German military personnel in a Leopard tank. These facts prove the direct involvement of NATO in the conflict, in addition to the missile attacks on Crimea and Sevastopol that took place during September 2023, carried out with the satellite and information assistance of the USA, which has led to the announcement by Russia to consider as legitimate targets the reconnaissance aircraft flying over the nearby areas in the Black Sea.

All these sets of events are the ingredients of the recipe book for the war to spread to other countries close to the conflict and to NATO countries that maintain an active interference. The recent rapprochement between Russia and the DPRK has made imperialism assume that there will be a mutual exchange between Russia and the DPRK: weapons for food, military assistance to improve the PLA, a situation that generates a breach in the isolation to which the DPRK is subjected. 

The implication for geopolitics in East Asia is the scale of military tensions between China, the DPRK, Russia, AUKUS and Taiwan Province, which could lead to a sub-regional armed conflict with unforeseeable consequences.

In the US obsession to inflict a historic defeat on Russia in Europe, the possibility of imperialism with AUKUS, South Korea and Japan inaugurating a scenario of military confrontation with the DPRK under any pretext is not ruled out, in order to open an Eastern front to involve Russia and China, but which would lead irremediably to a nuclear war.

To these scenarios we must add the successive coups d’états in sub-Saharan Africa (Mali, Chad, Guinea, Sudan, Burkina Faso, Niger, Gabon), in France’s former colonial territories, which have distanced France and deprived it of the export of critical resources for that country, forcing it to withdraw its military units. The new African scenario contributes to increase the danger of a more extensive world conflagration, since what happened in the Sahel can be replicated in other European ex-colonies, forcing these European powers to launch military adventures to restore their tutelary “democracy”. 

Since October 7, 2023, the risk of the expansion of the war has intensified with the military operation “Al-Aqsa Flood” carried out by the Hamas group against the occupation of Palestine by Israel and the harassment of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. We are facing the development of the fourth war of the Jewish State against the Palestinian people, but also the imminence of this local war spreading to the entire Middle East in the scenario of the balkanization of the Arab and Islamic worlds in accordance with the “Bernard Lewis Plan”, which would involve Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iran, with the aim of destroying the latter country, starting with the destruction of its oil infrastructure as requested by US Senator Lindsey Graham.1)

The recent dispatch of the aircraft carrier USS Gerald Ford to “protect” Israel is not mere election propaganda by Biden as some believe. It is a direct threat to Iran, which if “heeded” Senator Graham’s request, Iran would be forced to respond by attacking Israel and US ships in the Persian Gulf, which would include Israel’s use of nuclear weapons.

In this possible scenario, the expansion of the war in the Middle East could involve countries such as Russia allied with Iran and Syria, the US allied with Israel (already involved), Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Qatar, in the modernized development of the “Yinon Plan2)”, in which it formulates that the confessional and ethnic balkanization of the Middle East is the appropriate scenario to favor Israel (with US sponsorship) to effectively absorb the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and the Golan Heights, eliminating Israel’s potential enemies, refeudalizing the Arab countries into confessional fiefdoms, making them unviable as unitary states, and of course sustaining the unfeasibility of two states in the same territory. Recall the active participation of the US and Israel in the organization of ISIS and the “Arab Spring”.

III. The priorities of the ideological struggle in the current international communist movement.

“The aphorism is well known that, if geometrical axioms were to affect the interests of the people, there would surely be those who would refute them. The theories of the natural sciences, which have clashed with the old prejudices of theology, provoked and continue to provoke to this day the fiercest opposition. There is nothing strange, then, that the doctrine of Marx, which serves directly the education and organization of the vanguard class of modern society, which points out the tasks of that class and demonstrates the inevitable substitution—by virtue of economic development—of the present regime by a new order, should have had to struggle to conquer every step of it”, wrote Lenin.3)

We communists are convinced that one of the fundamental struggles for socialism that must be waged and sustained is the ideological struggle. The ideological struggle must take place in three scenarios: the first is the battle in the field of culture and communications, which allows counteracting the bourgeois and imperialist ideology in the broad masses and in the working class; the second is the struggle against bourgeois ideologies of all kinds, such as liberalism, libertarianism, neoconservatism, fascism and neo-fascism, bourgeois populism, etc., which should be the center of this struggle, because in this struggle not only the consciousness of the workers is disputed and awakened, but also the ideas for the future of humanity and socialism are confronted; The third ideological struggle is the battle that takes place within the workers’ movement, which lies in the struggle against opportunist, bourgeois and petty-bourgeois currents and deformations within the working class and the Communist Party, such as the social dialogue-class conciliation, promoted by NGOs financed by U.S. government agencies. USA, Canada, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, Spain, Belgium, etc. In this battle the struggle against “onegerism” is central, since these organizations fulfill the function of the “Trojan horse” of international social democracy and imperialism to penetrate the workers’ movement, cutting off class consciousness and the struggle for power, to reduce them to the agenda of “decent and dignified work” and better wages. Likewise, within the communist parties, the struggle against leftism and political adventurism is a permanent struggle, since this political deformation leads to confuse which is the main enemy, resulting in the division of the labor and communist movement in favor of the interests of the bourgeoisie.

We Peruvian communists consider that in the present stage characterized by the sharpening of the contradictions with imperialism and the class struggle against the bourgeoisie, it is not prudent to exacerbate the contradictions, visions and positions that may exist and do exist within the international communist movement, because this would lead to their weakening, contributing to the strategy of our common enemies.

We firmly trust in the science of dialectical and historical materialism, in the revolutionary transformation towards socialism, in the creative action of Marxism-Leninism and liberating socialism, which in the words of José Carlos Mariátegui: “socialism in Peru will be neither a tracing nor a copy, but a heroic creation”. What, in the particular case of the Peruvian communists, the struggle for socialism in Peru and the socialism that we manage to build will be the result of the conditions of the social forces and the development of the material bases, it will not be the result of preconceived formulas.

We Peruvian communists agree with and subscribe to the statements in the three central objectives of the World Anti-imperialist Platform:

To promote the anti-imperialist struggle. We are convinced that the voracity of imperialism can lead irremediably to a third world war or the only thermonuclear world war, which would spread from North America, Europe, the Far East and Australia. In view of this, the anti-imperialist struggle must go hand in hand with the struggle for peace, disarmament, non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries, it is necessary to link all the evils suffered by humanity with the existence of imperialism. The anti-imperialist struggle is not an isolated struggle, reduced to the space of the international communist movement, it must involve other movements and social sectors conscious of the imminent danger of a third unconventional world war.

Intensify the ideological war. We fully agree that the objectives of the ideological war are revisionism, opportunism and sectarianism among other ideologies, tendencies or currents opposed to the struggle for socialism. We Peruvian communists affirm that we will not feed a fratricidal war in the international communist movement and consequently in the workers’ and popular camp. Nor put in the first order of the ideological battle the divergences or disparate ideas that arise in small geographical redoubts, since at this stage we consider that the great ideological battle must be given against the range of imperialist ideology such as liberalism, neoliberalism, libertarianism, conservatism, which constitute the most versatile anti-communist network worldwide.

Consolidate the international communist forces. We Peruvian communists fully agree with what was stated by Comrade Stephen Cho in the article “The three major goals of the World Anti-Imperialist Platform“4). In that mission we have joined the Platform and other anti-imperialist spaces. 

IV. Principles and methods to strengthen the national communist forces in each country and the international communist forces in the current political situation.

The Peruvian Communist Party since its foundation on October 7, 1928 has maintained a gravitating influence in the Peruvian workers’ movement, leading at present the largest central workers’ union in Peru, the General Confederation of Workers of Peru-CGTP, maintaining a presence in the Assembly of the Peoples of Peru which is a united front of the masses and social organizations of diverse sectors which at this stage have as their central objective to stop the dictatorship of the Dina Boluarte-Congress of the Republic alliance.

We Peruvian communists find ourselves engaged in a process of organic, social and political strengthening with the objective of successfully confronting the struggle against the dictatorship of Mrs. Boluarte-Congress of Peru and against the forces of the national and transnational ultra-right (VOX of Spain) directly allied with U.S. imperialism.

In this objective since 2017 we have been strengthening the Party from the organizational foundations of Marxism-Leninism, expanding the party cellular organization in the centers of masses mainly workers. Directly linking the Party to the trade unions and social organizations of popular base.

Part of this work of Leninist construction of the Party, is to develop the ideological battles against bourgeois and imperialist ideologies, liberalism, neo-liberalism among others, which after the defeat of Maoism of the Shining Path, managed to impose on a large part of the workers the fear of communism. On the internal side, the battles of the workers and popular movement are against the external social-democratic currents carrying the agendas of imperialism that penetrate into its bosom to cut off the revolutionary edge of the working class and drag them to class conciliation and finally to anti-communism.

These tasks are summarized in promoting the awakening of class consciousness in the workers by linking them to their basic struggles, clarifying the role played by the ruling classes and imperialism in the crisis that the country is experiencing and that the workers are suffering, making use of political schools in the unions, and direct involvement of the workers in the political life of the country.

Note

1) With international arrest warrant by Russia.

2) “A strategy for Israel in the 1980s”, by Oded Yinon in Kivunim. 1982.

3) In “Marxism and Revisionism”. Published in the second half of March, no later than April 3 (16), 1908. First edition: In St. Petersburg, Russia, between September 25 (October 8) and October 2 (15), 1908 in Karl Marx (1818-1883) with the signature: “V.l. Lenin”.

4) https://wapnews.org/?p=2703

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