| Agosto de 2002- |
B.I.O.I.
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FACED TO THE ROUNDS OF CONFRONTATION
BETWEEN REVOLUTION AND COUNTERREVOLUTION, IT COVERS THE
LEFT FLANK OF THE TREACHEROUS LEADERSHIPS AND THE RÉGIMES
IN CRISIS
"The historical crisis of mankind
boils down to the crisis of its revolutionary leadership" (León
Trotsky. The Transitional Program.)
This
essential premise of the Program of Transition has acquired
a sharp character and a precise form at the beginning
of the 21ST century. It has become worse due
to the worldwide economic crisis and class polarization.
But at the same time it has acquired a new character due
to the qualitat4the jump in the crisis of the 4th
International. After years of extreme splitting (“bursting”,
we say) and revisionism the opportunists have crossed
the Rubicon and today they are already part of the International
“5 and a quarter” (2 (Social Democrats)+ 3 (Stalinists) + a ¼ of fake Trotskyists) with the recycled remains of Stalinism,
Social Democracy, the union bureaucracy and an arrange
of liquidators of Trotskyism side by side in the World
Social Forum. All of them are integrated in this new “international”, which is Lula’s,
Bové’s, Colonel Gutiérrez’s, Chávez’s, Le Monde Diplomatique’s
and Castro's World Social Forum!
We
are before a turning point that will decide for an entire
historical period the continuity of revolutionary Marxism.
But this is not a fated process. All of us, revolutionary
fourth-internationalists can and must fight against the
liquidators of Trotskyism. On the shoulders of the healthy
forces, albeit disperse today, there have been accumulated
enormous responsibilities. The International gravediggers
of the Fourth International go country by country enrolling
themselves in the ranks of the “organic unit” with the
remains of the recycled Stalinism, making unprincipled
agreements at international level to cover up their capitulations
and adaptations to the treacherous leaderships.
Most
of the Trotskyist movement has gone with bags and baggage
to the support of the union bureaucracy, the Stalinists
and Social Democracy and through this road they have come
to willingly serve as a support and reassurance of the
bourgeois regimens.
And
this qualitative fact has its explanation in that the
regimens and states need the opportunists’ sustaining
the treacherous leaderships, which are not any more able
to put brakes to the revolution neither to capitalize
to their favor the enormous energy that the sharp crashes
of the class struggle generate. For it is not gratuitously
that the imperialists have lulled and protected for years,
for decades those that usurp the name of Trotskyism, allowing
them to have parliamentary and union positions, to take
out votes in the elections, to live well in the fullest
legality.
The
imperialism and their regimens are aware that they will
fail if they only have the old mediations [i.e., union
bureaucracy, Stalinist or Social Democratic Parties, bourgeois-populist
leaders or parties, etc. NT) to curb the fighting power
of the world proletariat. The Palestinian and Argentinean
revolutions, the struggles that the Italian and Spanish
proletarians have just began to fight, in short, the world
revolution demonstrates that Social Democracy is not enough.
It has been completely discredited and burnt out after
administering --with its Jospins, Blairs, Schroeders,
and all the governments of the so-called “Third Way”--
the business of the imperialistic butchers. Neither is
the recycled Stalinism enough, that which was until yesterday
the puppet of the restorationist bureaucracy – the ones
that gave the workers states to the imperialism.
It
isn’t enough either with Fidel Castro who gets more and
more exposed before the eyes of the world working class
vanguard as one of butcher Bush accomplices while the
latter maintains in the Guantanamo jails the anti-imperialist
militiamen of Mazar i Shariff. Castro, the one who hugs
the genocidist Jimmy Carter while impelling with determination
a “perestroika” without “glasnost” to the interior of
Cuba --that is to say, the gradual capitalist restoration
in Cuba, cannot be enough!
For
that reason they need and subsequently call in the liquidators
of Trotskyism, so that, speaking on the regimes’ behalf,
they put in place popular fronts, raise new bureaucracies
on the movement of unemployed as in Argentina, call to
the masses to vote Chirac against Le Pen, tell to the
Italian working class that the general strike is for economic
gains alone and not to throw Berlusconi down, etc. Moreover
they tell to the Palestinian working class and people
that they should accept UNO’s plan. Doing this the imperialistic
bourgeoisie demonstrates (once again!) having taken out
historical lessons and gotten sharp class perspicacity.
The
only way to control to the masses that enter the combat
in Argentina, United States, Pakistan, Iraq, France, Italy,
Spain, Brazil, etc., is to legitimate this control making
it be applied by the liquidators of Trotskyism [because
Trotsky’s Transitional Programme is the only one which
speaks to the masses! N.T.]. And for that reason [the
imperialist bourgeoisie] has incorporated them into the
“new international” armed by the French imperialism. In
such a way it attempts to establish that no program or
action of the vanguard runs unfettered. And that every
struggle remains within the frame of what is decided by
this new reformist international which is always ready
to defeat the world revolution --but this time with the
liquidators of the 4TH International as partners.
This
new reformist international discusses politics for countries
and whole regions. This way it discussed, for example,
a precise politics for the Argentinean revolution that
is now being carried to the letter. It has just had a
meeting for the Asian countries. Near 50 parties and workers
organizations of Asia and Africa, several Communist Parties
--of Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Pakistan, India;
petty bourgeois and bourgeois democratic movements and
parties concurred along with the inescapable: the French
LCR of Alain Krivine, and the Socialist Alliance of England
(where we can find all mixed up Scargill the traitor of
the English miners’ strike of the 86, the CPS, Tony Cliff's
SWP, [the LIT’S ISL] and the LRCI).
All
of them went to the Asian encounter. Therefore Pakistani
LPP (Labour Party Pakistan) could not be absent, sending
there its main leader Farooq Tarik that has become quickly
a “world personality.” The same Farooq Tarik, leader of
the LPP that --though leading unions of workers' thousands,
refused to send working class militias, to combat shoulder
with shoulder with the Afghan militiamen. The same LPP
that is part in the Koorcom, --called pompously this way
by the LIT-CI, to put in place an international working
-class party. A committee In which they discuss in a banal
and amicable form, --as if they were tactical and secondary
questions, in what trench they are located at the war
in Afghanistan.
This
is nothing but that “centrist alchemy” of Social Democratic
currents!
In different countries the liquidators
of Trotskyism constitute decenial united fronts (that
is to say “of a permanent character”), or joint parties
with the remains of Stalinism, so erasing, at the beginning
of the 21st century, the dividing line between
reformation and revolution.
This
is possible because we are in the face of a new version
of the Pabloism of the ‘50s. The latter surged when Stalinism
came out of the Second World War perfidiously strengthened,
due to the fact that it had capitalized the heroic USSR
workers’ fighting against fascism –that USSR workers and
peasants had defeated fascism after having suffered 20
million casualties. In countries like China or Yugoslavia,
neo-Stalinist leaderships like Mao Tse Tung, or Tito had
been forced to take power pushed by the revolutionary
masses fighting to surmount conditions of collapse and
catastrophe. In the Glacis [postwar buffer states], the
Red Army, though unwantedly, was forced to expropriate
the bourgeoisie. After the Second World War the capitalist
system in crisis, used Stalinism as agreed in the Pacts
of Yalta and Potsdam to control the revolutionary ascent
in those places where imperialism itself could not control.
For all these reasons big, mass communist parties emerged
in the entire world.
In
that moment Pablo, International leader of the 4TH
International outlined a “theory” that the key was
to enter the communist parties because the United States
was to declare war to Russia, which as an answer would
be obliged to organize the world revolution. That is to
say, the bureaucracy of the USSR “under the pressure of
the objective factors” would stop to be counterrevolutionary.
For this reason it was necessary to enter in them [for
an entire period] to take the power with the USSR and
the European CPs. So Pabloites dissolved the sections
of the 4TH International into the CPs. The
reformist and revisionist theory of the Pabloites and
Mandelites spoke of two confronted world blocs: “the socialist
camp” and “the capitalist camp.” Disastrous theory, copied
from Stalinism’s: in fact there was (and is) only one
(capitalist) economy dominating the entire world, and
worker states usurped by bureaucrats keen to impede the
world revolution.
Characteristic
of the Pabloism of the ‘50s, then, was an adaptation to
the material pressures of the moment. Their " theory
" served them to justify their adaptation to Stalinism.
They explained their adaptation “beautifying” a Stalinism
that posed as the “winner” over fascism. Pabloism finished
liquidating the 4TH International with its
“entrism of a suigeneris character” per decades in the
Communist Parties. The result was that the 4TH
International ceased to be a world party and became a
“movement” with many tendencies during decades. Then,
after going through several crises, it became totally
degenerated in the ‘80 and burst in the ‘89.
The current senile Pabloism is the inverted
version of that of the ‘50s. It affirms that with the
debacle of the former workers-states, the material bases
of the Stalinist bureaucracy, the Western Communist Parties
have lost their character and become centrist. That is
to say, they fluctuate between reform and revolution.
Therefore they have stopped to be counterrevolutionary.
They are new, "progressive phenomena". Again
they turn to beautifying Stalinism --but now in its decadence
and rot. As a conclusion they propose to build joint parties
with the remains of Stalinism as a way of building “revolutionary
parties”. Again, to the likes of the first Pabloism, they
finish erasing the barriers between reform and revolution,
This they attain by having “left anticapitalist parties”
in common [with Stalinism] like in Europe or by united
fronts [with Stalinism] of “high political homogeneity."
For
us this is only a “new theory” to cover up their adaptation
to the current conditions. And it finishes the same as
the Pabloism of the ‘50s, liquidating the 4TH International.
We are before a “senile” version of the Pabloism of the ‘50s, and like that it has
an explanation: the years of revisionism and opportunism
gave a jump in the ‘90s. Today, in the face of the first
assaults of world revolution and counterrevolution, it
threatens to delete the 4TH International forever.
The
majority currents of Trotskyism have taken a step ahead
in their debacle. Today there is a widespread Pabloism
that tries to liquidate all continuity of the revolutionary
Marxism. This senile Pabloism surrenders to Stalinism
the same as or worse than the Pabloism of the postwar
period.
They
want to convince us that the CPSU in ruins --that of the
Stalins, the Jruschevs, the Gorbachevs and the Yeltsins,
today developed as a restorationist bourgeoisie--, the
party of those who corrupted the workers vanguard during
70 years, has become a centrist party thanks to the the
Kremlin’s fall, a party which it is possible to build
revolutionary “poles” or joint parties with!
The
current pablismo is more disastrous than the first one
because it considers that out of CPs like the Chinese,
with the children of the bureaucrats that explode the
workers as slaves, centrist currents may arise with which
“Revolutionary United Fronts” [the Morenoite “tactics”
of replacing the revolutionary Leninist party with the
Frente Unico Revolucionario of a Trotskyite party or group
together with any “centrist” group, “even if the Trotskyists
were a minority”!...] can be made. “Pro-Trotskyist” RUFs
of a kind?!
They
want to make us believe that with the Latin American CPs
--proxies to the restorationist Cuban bureaucracy (those
that together with the FMLN [Frente Farabundo Marti de
Liberación Nacional] and the Sandinistas surrendered El
Salvador and Nicaragua, respectively with truces and pacts
during the ’80, and the ones that today apply the same
politics in Colombia and Mexico) anti-imperialist fronts
can be made to defeat the “sepoy” national bourgeoisies
and the imperialism!
They
want to make us believe, throwing overboard historical
materialism, that out of bourgeois parties or of Wall
Street shareholders' partners' groups Centrism can arise!
They want to convince us that out of the party of Ziuganov
in Russia, Centrism can arise. They mean that all of them
are parties which oscillate between reform and revolution!
Do
they mean that the Italian Stalinism, a Christian Democracy’s
servant for decades, supporter of the imperialistic governments
has become centrist in its variants of Il Olivo (Olive-tree)
or Rifondazione Communista?
They
mean that the French Communist Party that strangled the
French revolution for the sake of De Gaulle at the end
of the 2ND World War, and again, the French May 1968 for
a miserable salary increase to sustain the V Republic
--this slaughterer of the peoples of the colonies--, has
become centrist as a part of the “gauche plurielle” (plural
left).
They
mean that the Portuguese Communist Party that smashed
into pieces the committees of soldiers and tenants beating
the vanguard in the ‘75’s revolution has become centrist.
So they feel it is possible now to lead a revolution in
Portugal together with the same Stalinists and for this
reason it is necessary to make a joint party with them!
[The
senile Pabloism of today] wants to convince us, that the
Chilean CP,--the party of “the pacific road to socialism”,
the one that strangled the revolution in the ‘73, the
supporter of the pinochetista régime until our days--
has become centrist and progressive. For that reason the
LIT-CI has proposed to the recent Congress of the Chilean
Communist Party a political and unionist front “so that
the Chilean working class has a reference pole in its
fights”! To a congress that enjoyed the attendance of
Honecker’s wife and of the Chinese “new riches” that had
left their yachts in Monaco and traveled to Santiago!
All
of them are following Pablo's steps and also those of
Jack Barnes, the destroyer of the North American Trotskyism
who transformed the SWP in a travel agency to visit Havana
while the bureaucracy gives the Cuban workers state each
day a bit more to the imperialists.
They
want to make us Trotskyists believe--like the PO of Argentina
attempts to, speaking of its great political homogeneity
with the PRT and the CP of the bankers of the Credicoop--
that this is correct because the Castro supporters of
the Argentinean PRT and CP, are... centrist!. The Castro
supporters! The ones directly responsible for the mortal
agony of the only workers state of Latin America, the
ones that maintain hand in hand with Bush the anti-imperialistic
Afghan combatants as prisoners in the dungeons of Guantanamo!
The ones directly responsible for there never being another
Cuba in Latin America, for they betrayed the Central American
revolution a hundred times during the ‘80s!
They
want us believe that out of the remains of the parties
of the bureaucracy, today partners of the multinationals,
centrist parties can arise! With all of them, the ample
variety of liquidators of the 4TH International
call to make fronts and to build joint parties. With the
CPs that today are more servant of the bourgeoisie than
ever!
The
most serious thing is that these CPs are a million times
weaker that their pre -’89 predecessors because they no
longer have the banners of the Revolution of October or
of the Chinese revolution to waver. They renounced to
them to impel the capitalist restoration. For that reason
they need [to hide behind] the clean, unpolluted banners
of Trotskyism.
Compared
with the current liquidacionistas of Trotskyism, even
Pablo the liquidator almost seems a mistaken revolutionary!
With
this unhistorical story they justify the politics of joint-parties,
“revolutionary poles”, assorted "RUFs", and
electoral fronts with the smelly remains of Stalinism!
With this politics they reveal their total adaptation
to new and old mediations reflecting the workers aristocracy
and bureaucracy, to impel popular fronts, “democratic
revolutions”, unionism and parliamentarism of the purest
reformist breed!
Never
missing the “historical rendezvous", when the bourgeoisie
needs them, they will impel or enter popular fronts as
yesterday the POUM did in Spain.
Although
all historical analogy always has a perverse character,
if used and understood in a proper sense it serves well
to clarify. We believe that in the 4TH International
we are before a process similar to the one that took place
in the Bolshevik Party from the mid-‘20s.
In
1926, inside the International Left Opposition, the degenerative
process the Bolshevik party was undergoing was characterized
as a Thermidor. That is to say “an
extremely important and advanced process in the heart
of the party; the growth of a stratum of Bolsheviks that
had separated from the masses; they felt safe, they were
committed to non proletarian sectors and satisfied with
their new social position, similarly to the stratum of
inflated Jacobins that were, partly, the prop and the
main executive apparatus of the Thermidorian overturn
of 1794 and thus they paved the way towards Bonapartism”
(Thermidor and Bonapartism. Leon Trotsky. 1930).
This
historical process was “the
first stage of the bourgeois counterrevolution, directed
against the social base of the workers state.” (“The
workers state, Thermidor and Bonapartism.” L. Trotsky.
1935).
The
consequence of this counterrevolutionary process was,
to the interior of the Bolshevik party, the squashing
of the Left Opposition. Trotsky characterized it first
as the displacement of the left wing by the center and
right wings:
"In the party Thermidorian elements
have materialized; the opportunists have displaced the
authentic "Jacobins"." (Leon Trotsky. “About the Thermidor
and Bonapartism.” 1930)
Later
on, when the process consolidates itself he speaks of:
" ...the transfer of Power from the
hands of the revolutionary vanguard to the most conservative
elements of the bureaucracy and of the upper stratum of
the working class." (“The
workers state, Thermidor and Bonapartism.” L. Trotsky.
1935).
For
the Left Opposition, the Thermidor began in 1924 and gave
place to the Stalinist bureaucratic Centrism, that is
to say, to a period of the Bolshevik party in which the
Stalinist bureaucracy defended its own material interests
to the expense of the world proletariat. The end of this
parable of the party arrives when the bureaucratic Centrism
becomes counterrevolutionary in 1933.
What we uphold is that the bureaucratic
Centrism in the Trotskyist movement has undergone a "Thermidor"
that prepares, as soon as the conditions require it, an
“August 4." [a direct and conscious treason as the
one performed by social Democracy in 1914] That is to
say the Thermidor is the period in which the qualitative
jump in the adaptations of bureaucratic Centrism to the
regimens and states is prepared. What the current Thermidor
prepares, the wiping out of the revolutionary forces of
the 4TH International, is the moment in which
the liquidators of the 4TH International are
called up by the governments and bourgeois regimens to
thwart the revolution.
The
purges of the Stalinist Thermidor in the ‘30s were the
correlation in the methods of the political decomposition
of the 3rd International. The current accusations
without foundation, the physical attacks, the amalgams,
the permanent expulsions of all critical elements, go
hand in hand with the decomposition of the bureaucratic
centrists in their current Thermidor.
A NEW CLEAVAGE OF SOCIALISM IS IN THE WORKS
This
bankruptcy of the opportunism in the 4TH International
is the starting point of a process that is
the continuation of other two historical moments. By more
than a century and a half of the existence of the Marxist
movement, these historical moments have meant landmarks,
instants in which the imperialism divided it, by corrupting
one of its sections.
The
first division was that of the 2nd International
in 1914, when the overwhelming majority of its parties
voted war credits for their respective imperialistic bourgeoisie.
In the face of the war, Lenin said in 1915 that the opportunism
“‘had arrived to
its full maturity' and carried out until the end its role
of emissary of the bourgeoisie within the workers movement”
and that this meant “the division of the revolutionary
proletariat of all the countries” (“The socialism
and the war”, V.I. Lenin).
In
the ’30s, the imperialism caused a new division in the
socialism, a second division, through buying out the Stalinist
bureaucracy and liquidating the 3rd International as the
revolutionary organization of the world proletariat.
Today
we are witnessing the beginning of a similar process in
the 4TH International
The
partial defeats of the world working class that have their
culmination in the loss of the workers states, are the
material causes of the current Thermidor. It can be explained
starting from the de-synchronization of class struggles
between East and West about 1989, and of decades of revisionism
and national-Trotskyism [i.e., Trotskyism seen from a
national exclusivistic view or with a nationalistic bias]
in the 4TH International. But this is not yet
the last word, because the ‘89 is not defined. The former
workers-states have not yet been incorporated as protectorates
or colonies to the world division of work that is what
the imperialistic powers need to get out of their crisis.
Many
combats of the working class are still ahead before the
period opened up by the ‘89 is defined. And this definition
also depends on what the western proletariat does; today
it has given indications of entering the fight in imperialistic
countries as Italy or Spain, while the working classes
of United States and Japan are still handcuffed by the
bureaucracy.
It
is yet undefined because the revolution of the Argentinean
and Palestinian working classes, the mass struggles in
Uruguay, Paraguay, Peru or Bolivia are making time to
the working class of the former workers –states to erupt.
And it is yet undefined because the Polish workers get
up against the bosses that don't pay them their wages
and the masses in China rebel against the new Mandarins
who are appropriating the productive land, thus generating
recurrent famines.
In
the world revolution, the fight for the restoration of
the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat lives
as a part of the world socialist revolution!
These
big world events --cracs, wars and revolutions are what
prevents the Thermidor to settle and what generates and
will generate crises and bursting to the liquidators of
the 4TH International.
In these crises and bursting the Bolshevism
lives, that needs to regroup its lines at international
level!
Manuel Ledesma
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