Action Day of Solidarity with the Revolutionary Uprising of Colombia
May 9, 2021
Speech by Carlos Munzer, from the Editorial Board
of "The International Workers Organizer"
"When the bourgeoisie loses control over their slaves, treacherous leaderships want to prevent the exploited from setting up dual power bodies of the working class and the masses"
"This new wave of revolutions has set the fight to recover the banners of the Fourth International red hot"
First of all, I would like to greet the hundreds of comrades and worker and student fighters who are following this conference.
For our international current, it is very important that from two revolutionary centers of the planet such as Colombia and Syria, the protagonists of the revolution are expressing themselves. We have witnessed and listened to an exchange of revolutionary lessons, of learning and political elaboration between revolutionary fighters from the Syrian resistance of Idlib with comrades who today are in the most advanced battle front of the events that are shaking Colombia.
Trotskyism flourishes whenever there is revolution. We prepare for it. We learn from it. And we draw the lessons that allow the proletariat to overcome the crisis of leadership, that is to say, the overaccumulation of treacherous leaderships that prevent them from achieving victory.
Holding a meeting where we can draw conclusions and learn from the living processes of revolution and counterrevolution is key for a current that prides itself on being revolutionary and that firmly believes that, if the revolution does not succeed, if a chain of socialist revolutions does not spread again on the planet, what awaits the working class is war and fascism, unheard-of hardships, catastrophes and massacres as in Syria.
If we revolutionaries do not begin to discuss revolution, who else is going to? The masses do not enter into the revolutionary processes, nor do they lead great revolutionary actions, armed with a previous historical and strategic understanding of "what they are doing". The proletariat, being an exploited and oppressed class, cannot enter a revolutionary process with class consciousness prior to the seizure of power. As Marxists say, the working class does not enter the revolutionary process with a book under their arms, but what pushes them to struggle are their unheard-of sufferings. These conditions lead the masses to attack the citadel of bourgeois power, to overthrow governments and regimes, to open real revolutionary crises and even to arm themselves. But to conquer victory and finish destroying the bourgeois state and impose their power, sustain it and extend it internationally, the working class needs a revolutionary leadership.
The masses enter the revolutionary processes when they manage to break all the dikes of containment imposed on them by their traditional reformist leaderships, the regime and the state; when they conquer true independent actions, which is the moment when the oppressed break the shackles of their chains of control of the oppressors and their institutions.
The traitorous leaderships conspire to undo every mass offensive, to disorganize their struggle, to surrender or divert it, while fascism and counterrevolution crush the most advanced vanguard.
The task of the slaveholders is to regain control of their slaves through their institutions of domination. For that they also pay and finance trade union bureaucracies, labor aristocracies and their parties, which give decisive battle to bring the working class back into subjection to the various bourgeois gangs. That is what the fronts of class collaboration are about: to take the masses out of the streets and bring them to the parliamentary detours. Chile is a recent and current example of it. Also the revolutions in the Maghreb and the Middle East, are other example of this, as the Constituent Assemblies or parliamentary elections were nothing but a diversion for the imposition of fascism and the return of counterrevolutionary regimes. These are the stark facts.
In revolutionary processes such as the one that is shaking Colombia today, where a revolutionary situation is opening up and an enormous mass offensive is unfolding, it is also clear that these independent actions take place when those at the top can no longer continue to dominate those at the bottom as they have done up to now. The exploiters had to advance in a brutal attack against the Colombian masses to repay that fraudulent foreign debt of 150 billion dollars that Colombia owes. They had to finance the business and robbery of the bankers and transnationals like Chiquita Brand in one of the most oppressed nations of the Latin American subcontinent, which has become a true US colony dominated by 9 military bases.
They dumped the entire economic and health crisis on the exploited. As Lenin says, in a revolutionary situation, "the upper classes cannot live in the old way" at a time when the suffering and needs of the oppressed classes have become more acute than usual. This is a moment like the one we see breaking out in Colombia, where the masses that let themselves be robbed without complaint in the "times of peace", in these turbulent moments feel pushed to charge against the institutions of domination and power of their tormentors.
No organization or party called to jump the turnstiles or to take over the Plaza de la Dignidad in 2019 Chile. No party called to set ablaze Minneapolis, Portland and over 50 cities in the US last year. No institution upraised the masses of the Middle East in two revolutionary waves. In these revolutionary processes that unfolded, it was the aggravation of the objective conditions and the great mass actions what defined the opening of these situations that Marxists consider objectively revolutionary.
Faced with the opening of these revolutionary situations, the reformist and traitorous leaderships got organized under the command of the bourgeoisie to strangle these revolutionary processes, as we have already said, while the Marxists prepare the working class and its organizations to advance decisively to create the conditions for the seizure of power.
This poses a serious problem for the proletariat and revolutionaries. They must be aware that the bourgeoisie is not only a class that acts in the productive process and controls all the mechanisms of the state to exploit the class it oppresses. According to Trotsky, the bourgeoisie is also a social force that defends its interests and its business to the death. This is reaffirmed today in Colombia, when the news of the fascist attacks on the heart of the workers vanguard and of the most brave and combative of the youth arrives. The bourgeoisie is a social force that uses all the institutions and agents at hand to dominate, enslave and control the masses, and to crush and defeat them when they rebel in revolutionary uprisings.
The international character of the Colombian revolution that has begun
In Colombia, in short, a phenomenal mass outburst of an independent character has opened up. April 28, which for the Stalinist bureaucracy of the trade unions was a day of strike to control the hatred of those below, was taken by the workers and exploited in what to this day is an enormous pre-insurrectional uprising of the masses in the face of Duque's brutal attack of taxes on the people and privatization of health care.
Contrary to what all the parliamentary and reformist Left of the American continent affirms, Duque’s government, based on the Uribist regime of the US military bases, is an openly Bonapartist government, supported by the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) and by paramilitary forces and fascist gangs with which the worker and peasant vanguard of that country is disciplined and kept at bay.
This regime has been strengthened and dressed up as "progressive" and "pacifist" by an infamous counterrevolutionary pact between imperialism, the Duque-Uribe government and the Stalinist scum. In 2008, the Chávez-Uribe embrace in UNASUR to share the oil business when the price of a barrel was at 130 dollars, had as its background the Uribe government assassinating the entire leadership of the FARC guerrilla in Ecuador. Beyond this or that complaint of the "Bolivarian bourgeoisie", everything ended in a big hug.
This extended to a sinister pact in Havana, from where Castroism handed over the FARC disarmed to the government and the murderous regime of the US bases in a "peace agreement", closing a historic cycle of peasant civil war. This was the so-called "reconciliation pact". As a reward, imperialism allowed good business conditions to the new Castroite bourgeoisie.
Meanwhile, the jails of Colombia were filled with political prisoners and there was not a day in which the paramilitary and fascist groups did not assassinate former leaders of the FARC or politically influenced by them in the cities and in the countryside. Not to mention the union fighters. All of them were openly surrendered by the petty-bourgeois guerrilla leadership and by Castroism. A treacherous betrayal, as they had already done in El Salvador and Nicaragua in the '80s. This betrayal continues to this day. The wings and fractions that refuse to disarm themselves are and have been assassinated and surrendered by Stalinism itself. Stalin did it at the end of World War II with the partisans who refused to surrender their weapons in the devastated post-war Europe. Castroism did it in the 1980s in Central America. And they also have been doing it in Colombia.
This semi-fascist government of Duque and this Uribist regime of the US bases, covered with a cloak of "reconciliation" and "goodness", thought it was strong enough and attacked the masses violently. It was a miscalculation. A new urban workers' movement had just surpassed in 2019 the Stalinist leadership of the trade unions in hard fights for their demands. Broad sectors of the peasant movement, uncontrolled by the FARC guerrilla apparatus, entered the struggle. A hardened student movement took the cause of free education and health care into its own hands.
The whip of capital was uniting all the exploited sectors that exploded on April 28 and terrified the government, the regime and the traitorous leaderships that quickly, on April 30, called for the struggle to be stopped. Duque immediately withdrew the "tax reform"... but it was too late. The mass uprising had already begun.
From the international point of view, the Colombian revolution which is in its beginnings has a decisive importance in Latin America, which all the reformist Left of the continent tries to hide. Actually, this revolution attacks both the most important counterrevolutionary device, together with the military base in Honduras, which the United States has for Central America, the Caribbean and South America, and an infamous pact between US imperialism with Castroism and all the Stalinist bureaucracies of the trade unions and workers' organizations of the Americas.
Colombia’s government, the paramilitaries, the army, its judges and Parliament are direct puppets of the U.S. embassy and the US centurions of the military bases.
An advance and a victory of the Colombian revolution would be a hard blow to one of the key counterrevolutionary devices of imperialism for Latin America, at the level of the military bases in Honduras or the Chilean Pinochetista army, direct appendix of West Point.
Those military bases installed in Colombia have a Commander in Chief who is in the US and his name is Joe Biden, the new friend of the entire reformist left of the planet. We must know that in the world there are five military commands with which the United States try to control the five continents. One, AFRICOM, is to control all of black Africa under the conditions of plunder imposed by imperialism. In Okinawa, Japan, there is the most powerful US military base on the planet, from where the Pacific Rim and Asia are controlled. From NATO, in the center of Germany, there is the EUCOM for Europe. For the oil-producing areas of Iraq, Iran and Turkey there is the Central Command (CENTCOM). And, as we have already said, in Latin America there is SOUTHCOM, controlled directly by the Pentagon.
Colombia is a "grounded aircraft carrier" of US imperialism. There is no revolution more international, more anti-imperialist and more "Latin American" than the Colombian revolution.
If we defeat the largest counterrevolutionary device of imperialism, the confrontation against imperialism and its plundering of the oppressed nations would be greatly facilitated for the Latin American masses, and the dominance of the United States, including the domestic one, would be terribly weakened.
This is a task that the Colombian workers and exploited will not be able to lead to victory if they are not part of a generalized struggle of the workers and poor peasants of Central and South America, together with the North American working class.
This is what the enormous pre-insurrectional uprising that is underway already poses. Millions of Colombian refugees have left the country becoming political exiles due to persecution and death and also due to hunger and misery. They constitute an important part of the Hispanic movement in the US, the Spanish State and several European countries, taken as second-class workers and super-exploited in the metropolises. They too have entered the struggle. There was no important capital city of the world in the imperialist powers and in Latin America, as in the Southern Cone, where there have not been enormous vanguard actions by Colombian migrants in support of their revolution.
Colombia: a mass semi-insurrection that breaks with the control of the old reformist leaderships and the bourgeois state
As we have seen, it was the the masses who imposed the indefinite strike at the national level and began to cut off all access to all the cities in Colombia. Day by day clashes developed with the counterrevolutionary forces of ESMAD, the paramilitaries and the proto-fascist gangs.
The popular assemblies, the blockades with their resistance committees, the setting up of the pickets of the first line as happened in Chile, are already going through the whole country. The masses have set up the embryos of organisms of their own power that allow them to take the resolution of the crisis into their own hands.
The union leaderships had to "reject" the agreement proposed by the government by withdrawing the "tax and health reforms", but they have already lost control of the working class and the masses.
Here and there the workers, on different days, carry out strikes by locality, city or union and when they leave their workplaces, they go to the blockade point in their neighborhood.
Charlatan politicians of the bourgeoisie and old snitches such as Petro and the bourgeois party “Colombia Humana”, (in the last elections they got 40% of the votes supported, among others, by the PST of the LIT-CI), complained bitterly because on May 2 the fight was not postponed and people did not celebrate "the government's withdrawal of the tax reform." Whom is this man, a bourgeois pictured as a "leftist", laughing at? There is nothing to celebrate. Those below didn’t take to the streets and left their life, their blood, their dead and their prisoners to continue living as they have been until now. This time, the exploited are going for everything. Mr. Petro is furious: his deception mechanisms are not taking the masses off the streets.
The millions of exploited who enter the combat in Colombia have already understood that they will not be able to achieve any of their demands if they don’t topple down the government. From the economic struggle, the working class and the masses have risen to the political struggle. According to Lenin, they are no longer in the "school of war" of the economic struggle, but in the war itself. The political struggle subsumes and concentrates all the demands of the exploited for a better life.
Three years ago, a process of worker and peasant uprising began in Colombia and enormous pressure struggles. There were agrarian strikes, 24-hour general strikes, a thousand attempts by the vanguard to get rid of the traitorous Stalinist bureaucrats of the trade unions. But the masses achieved nothing. Then came the catastrophe that the governments and the regime threw on the workers and oppressed with the Covid pandemic. And on top of that, Duque gave a twist in his offensive with huge rates and taxes. Far from giving in, he redoubled his attack.
Mass response was immediate. The masses recognized their enemy: the government.
What has begun -which is what no reformist can understand, because they only see the working class as the subject of union struggles- is a phenomenal mass struggle that threatens the citadel of power and that doesn’t want to stop. It’s because the masses know that if they stop and don’t kick out the government, they will achieve nothing.
The government holds on so that the masses don’t overthrow it away, because if Duque falls, he will drag all the Bonapartist institutions and the counterrevolutionary pacts that support him. And the masses, with the demand for bread and to be able to live, are tied to throwing out the government. A decisive fight has begun, and on today, May 9, it has been going on 12 days.
The bourgeoisie, once it has lost control of the masses, will not sit idly by. All the reformist workers' leaderships, all the variants of Colombian Stalinism, all the bourgeois liberal "opposition" or "leftist" parties such as Petro's, are trying to re-control the masses. They have joined the popular assemblies of the oppressed with their mayors and councilors of cities and departments to give them a pacifist content from within.
All members of the human rights organizations, which are parastatal institutions, have turned to the first lines so that they don’t arm themselves, to prevent decisive clashes with the police and the disarming of the latter. Meanwhile, the union bureaucracies began to call off the general strike of the productive sectors.
We are facing a real conspiracy and concentration of reactionary forces to demobilize the masses and disorganize their vanguard, for them to be later crushed by ESMAD and the para-police and fascist gangs.
A counterrevolutionary plan is already underway. This enormous mass action has a limit which is its spontaneity, its lack of leadership, which prevents the exploited from seeing this enormous conspiracy that has been organized to undo what they conquered in the streets.
In these moments in which they have lost control of the masses, the objective of the bourgeoisie and the treacherous leaderships is that the exploited don’t set up the organisms of self-determination and power of the working class, of the millions of unemployed and hungry, of the rebellious youth, of the poor peasants, organized, centralized and armed by city, department and at national level. If that body arises, the masses will quickly take the crisis into their own hands. It would be the order of the day to win over the rank and file of the army. The burning of police stations would become widespread. It would mean a step forward in helping the masses to overcome the pacifism that comes from the "reconciliation pact" of Castroism with the Uribe regime. A state within a state would arise; a dual power that would place the victory of an insurrection, that is, of the revolution, on the order of the day.
All the agents of the bourgeois state, be they fascists, Bonapartists, leftists or Stalinists, have focused their forces so that this dual power isn't set up, let alone armed and centralized at the national level, overthrowing and defeating the bureaucracy of the National Strike Committee, which for now goes unnoticed but is the one that is leading the negotiations with the government and taking the working class out of the indefinite strike to protect the property of the capitalists in this revolutionary offensive.
Preventing the emergence of a centralized dual power body at the national level is also the objective of all those who are already beginning to suggest that we must go to a “Chilean-style” solution. All the renegades of Trotskyism in Latin America have begun to proclaim that the way out is a Constituent Assembly that leaves the Uribe regime intact and takes the masses off the streets, as has happened in Chile.
The LIT-CI and its group PST go very far in stating that the masses will be able to “politicize” and “get educated” with a Constituent Assembly. These people have no return to the revolutionary movement. They want the masses to retreat to a parliamentary consciousness, when in their combat they have already been educated enough, understanding that the bourgeois governments are only overthrown with the revolutionary struggle in the streets. The workers and the exploited are “politicized” and organized for the revolution in the unions, in the Soviets, in the pickets, in the first lines. Not even Kautsky would have dared to propose such anti-Marxist brutality, that the working class can be "politicized" and "educated" in bourgeois parliaments, which are the mechanism by excellence of deception and lies.
How backward has the consciousness of the "socialists" been in relation to what the masses have already conquered in their revolutionary uprising! The truth is that these currents need to be educated in civil war, where they undoubtedly feel neither comfortable nor satisfied.
But despite so many leaderships hanging onto the coattails of the bourgeoisie, in the current phase of the Colombian revolutionary process, the revolutionary spontaneity of the exploited is deployed like an enormous force, surpassing the containment dikes of the state and the reformists. This gives the masses and the revolutionary movement time to regroup their forces, set up the dual power and overcome the obstacles that the treacherous leaderships mount at every step.
The limits of this spontaneity are also expressed by the lack of a revolutionary leadership that were at the height of the combat that the masses are giving. That is the current crisis. The masses put everything. The traitors of the Fourth International have much to explain in Colombia. There, since the mid-1970s, two or three generations have fought to set up a revolutionary party under the banners of Trotskyism. The non-existence of this revolutionary party is due, neither more nor less, to the adaptation of the old currents of Mandelism and Morenoism to Stalinism in its union, neo-Castroite, etc. variants. This produced recurrent outbreaks and the dispersal of the forces that speak in the name of Trotskyism in small groups such as those that exist today in Colombia. That there are no parties with relative weight in the vanguard, as the FIT-U groups in Argentina or the PSTU and PSOL have in Brazil, is because the crisis of parliamentarism has broken out in Colombia for a long time. The forces of the renegades of Trotskyism are not able to break through and strengthen themselves under clandestine conditions and fierce repression of the bourgeois state or conditions of revolution. They are not suitable to move in those conditions that are deepening and will deepen both in Colombia and at the Latin American and international level. As Trotsky argues, the crisis of parliamentarism carries with it, as soul to body, the crisis of reformism.
In spontaneity, according to Lenin, lies the embryo of the conscious. The masses have overcome the brutal crisis imposed by the Stalinist bureaucracy on the workers' movement. Unions represent less than 10% of the working class.
By surpassing these leaderships, the exploited have managed to set up organizations capable of fighting that unite all the masses that entered the combat beyond their professions. These organizations bring together all sectors of the working class and the exploited, the working and student youth, the unemployed, the black people, the poor peasants. These organisms are the popular assemblies, the blockades committees, the factory and workplace coordination committees, the security and self-defense committees of the first lines. These are the real organizations that in their "spontaneity" the masses have conquered, which are superior to all the organizations that are under the control of the prison guards of the Stalinists and reformists in the mass movement, which don’t represent anyone.
The tasks of getting these organizations recently conquered by the masses to centralize, arm themselves, coordinate and send the traitors of the Strike Committee to the old dustbin of history, need urgently a revolutionary regrouping of the workers and the rebellious youth that consciously act on events, distinguishing who are the allies and who are the enemies of the revolutionary uprising that has begun.
The counterrevolutionary response of the bourgeoisie and the regime has not delayed
The exploiters clearly perceive the character of the mass uprising and that it calls into question their power and dominance. As we said, they enlisted all the treacherous leaderships, Colombia Humana and the entire bourgeoisie that poses as "opposition" to support Duque and not let him fall.
The bourgeoisie understands that a revolutionary process has begun and that “siren songs” are not enough to sustain its rule of domination. For this reason, the exploiters have launched their battle cry to call for the breaking of all the blockades imposed by the front line and the resistance committees throughout the country, preventing the circulation and trade of merchandise, while production remains paralyzed in various sectors. The bourgeoisie correctly perceives that it is facing a political struggle of the masses that have overwhelmed the leaderships that control them and the former have set up embryonic organisms of dual power, including territorial ones.
Thus, they have sent semi-fascist forces, that is, ESMAD and parapolice and paramilitary gangs that before, during and after the demonstrations go out to kill the vanguard and activism in the working-class neighborhoods.
The bourgeoisie is forced to develop all its instinct for self-preservation in the face of a revolutionary onslaught because it knows that it must attack violently the masses in order to continue maintaining its business, its profits and its power. The capitalists do not come to fascism by choice, but by necessity. Duque's brutal attack on the masses with his "tax" and "health" reforms, expresses that the same bourgeoisie could no longer continue to dominate as before. The bourgeoisie cannot retain private ownership of the means of production, unless it is by leading the offensive against the workers, reinforcing oppression, sowing misery and despair around them. They did it in the US, in Europe, in the Middle East, in Latin America. The crisis and the current crash accelerate this process. But, at the same time, the capitalists fear the inevitable response of the workers. They appeal to the middle classes against the proletariat, which they accuse of making the crisis longer and deeper. And they finance fascist gangs and repressive forces of all kinds to crush the workers. Here and there they prepare the generals' sabers, while, as we have already said, the class collaboration fronts are at work, trying, with "sweet phrases", to lull the masses to sleep.
The Pentagon's plan and military doctrine to defeat the revolutionary processes in Latin America
In Colombia, the plan of the 11 Latin American armies gathered by the Pentagon in 2019 is being applied. There the bourgeoisie and imperialism discussed a "doctrine of national security." That is, a strategy to contain, divert and / or crush the revolutionary mass ascents. They did so after the revolutionary uprising in Ecuador, where the army had even begun to turn around, with the soldiers lowering their rifles before the onslaught of the workers and peasants who were taking Quito.
At that meeting held on October 30 and 31, 2019, it was defined that the policy was to sustain, support, surround and encourage the "peaceful" and isolate, defeat and crush those they call "violent."
They did this in the face of the revolutionary uprising in Chile in 2019. Imperialism and the bourgeois front supported Piñera and strengthened the "pacificos" of the union bureaucracies of the Mesa de Unidad Social and with the call for a Constituent Assembly. The more the trade union centrals were united from above and took the workers' movement out of the fight in the streets and out of the way of the General Strike, the more the repressive forces were able to attack and punish the best of the vanguard organized in the front line. The Chilean masses were left with 2,500 political prisoners, dozens killed and thousands wounded.
This plan is the one that is being applied now in Colombia. As we said, the worst betrayal of the revolutionary uprising that has begun is that the union bureaucracy, relying on the economic crisis and economic despair, tries to get the workers to go back to work in the factories and establishments. To this their added aim is preventing the masses from taking over the Plaza de Bolívar in Bogotá, where the reformist apparatuses are strongest, while fighting intensely in all the working-class and popular zones that surround the capital.
For now, the difference between Colombia and Chile is that they have not been able to end up pushing back the labor movement since dozens of workers' layers are still striking. Some go back to work but when this happens, other sectors return into the fight because their factories are paralyzed due to the lack of inputs, caused by pickets and roadblocks.
In addition, the front lines have an enormous weight in the working-class neighborhoods. The popular assemblies support and do not leave their front line isolated in Cali, Pereira, Medellín, Buga and in key cities throughout the country.
Today all the Stalinist currents and their new epigones, the renegades of Trotskyism, have located themselves surrounding the traitors of the National Strike Committee, who are the ones devoted to destroying the strike from within. Some currents say that the Strike Committee must be supported and others that it must be "reformed" and "democratized", "incorporating other organizations." Ultimately, this means ending the revolutionary rise that began because the National Strike Committee is the greatest enemy of the indefinite strike. "They do not represent us!", is shouted in the blockades, in popular assemblies and in resistance committees.
The current weakness of the offensive of the exploited lies in the fact that those allies of Duque, the strikebreakers of the National Strike Committee, who are the other end of the same ESMAD rope, were not expelled, defeated or separated from the fight and are free to go on to strangle the mass struggle.
It is life or death for the insurrectionary process to set up a National Struggle Command that centralizes and coordinates the mass onslaught until Duque falls and the exploited open the way to resolve the crisis, taking it in their hands. This is crucial to the revolutionary process that has began.
In recent days, the bourgeois left, the mayors who flirt as "friends of the people" and Stalinism are dedicating themselves to transforming a fierce struggle -which is already leaving dozens and dozens of dead, disappeared and prisoners-, into a festive act, as they did in Chile. They organize cultural festivals in the squares, events, kiosks, etc., as if the people had something to celebrate when their best children die in the fight against the government and the regime or from hunger in their homes.
The leadership crisis is deepening to extreme degrees. All the organizations built by the masses in previous periods turn against them, at times when they have started a relentless fight against their enemies. The FARC and all the guerrilla groups have long ago negotiated and agreed with the government and the infamous regime and they support them to the letter. The unions in the hands of a fierce Stalinist bureaucracy are the "Trojan horse" of the insurrectionary process.
However, the persistence of the combat and the tenacity shown by the masses continue because of their unprecedented sufferings and a hatred of decades and decades that has burst up. This gives time, with enormous casualties and with serious suffering for the masses due to a crisis of leadership, to regroup the forces of the most radicalized fringes of the vanguard, to coordinate and centralize the front lines and the resistance committees into a true workers' and popular militia to concentrate its forces and hit dozens of police stations in key places against ESMAD and the repressive forces to provoke their dispersal and take up arms for the people.
This independent action of the masses has ahead of it to traverse this path, which has in itself all the birth pains of a revolution that is beginning, or else will go backwards, plagued by betrayals, stabbing in the back and in a bloodbath. This will not be defined in an act. Several more acts are ahead for this play to end. The bourgeoisie is still very far from developing all that it has as an enemy class against the exploited, but the masses are still far from having exhausted all their energies. At such a time, the key is the leadership of the proletariat and the masses, to shift the balance in favor of the exploited.
A new revolutionary regrouping of the workers ranks is necessary, which advances to understand that the tasks of the moment are the fall of Duque and the dismantling of this infamous regime, which allows the working class and the poor peasants to recover the land, expel the imperialism, attack the super-profits of the bankers and the transnationals so that the people can eat and live with dignity, and set up worker and peasant Colombia. This revolutionary regrouping is what the Colombian working class needs to conquer.
The fight for these tasks is a fight within the entire vanguard of the world working class, to clearly define the flags behind which they fight and die.
On the one hand, those of reformism, those of the traitors who have said that "socialism is no longer possible, not even in Cuba," those of the "Bolivarian" bourgeoisie scoundrels who spoke of "21st century socialism" and became in a new elite of bourgeois millionaires, agreeing with imperialism at every step; those of the renegades of Trotskyism who, hanging at the feet of Stalinism, save that National Committee of the Strike that does not represent anyone or are trying hard new pseudo-parliamentary detours as in Chile.
On the other side, the forces that fight under the banners of the Fourth International so that the power of the workers and peasants in Colombia can stand up. This would be an electric shock in the entire American continent, which would break the detours and betrayals of the worker and peasant leaderships in Chile and Ecuador, which would quickly uplift the Venezuelan working class against the scoundrels of Maduro & Co. and his Castro partners than in Cuba and Venezuela are applying the same misery plans as Duque. There is the unification of the currencies that starves the Cuban people. The payment of an infamous foreign debt by Chavismo has left 7 million workers outside Venezuela looking for bread and a roof to live under and millions eating in the garbage dumps. A worker and peasant Colombia would awaken the support of the entire working class in Latin America and the United States. To make it a reality, all the forces and the attention of the revolutionaries must be turned there.
Twin revolutions...
We have called this wave of revolutions in Latin America, of mass attacks that here and there are diverted, retreat or withdraw momentarily, as twin revolutions to the Maghreb and Middle East processes.
We are talking about revolutionary uprisings where the bourgeoisies and imperialism can no longer even continue to exploit the oppressed peoples as they did until now. To survive, this rotten capitalist system must redouble its attack. To save the City of London, Wall Street, the imperialist Europe of Maastricht, they devalue currencies, increase the prices of food and minerals, redoubling the looting of the oppressed nations.
Life becomes unbearable. The masses enter the fight. Here and there they are crushed. The reformist leaderships are prepared to numb these processes with deviations, traps, illusions, as we saw with the policy of "two states" in Palestine -which blows up today-, in Sudan with a "coalition government", with attempts at electoral diversions, and sticks and repression as in Iran, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, with cruel defeats as in Syria.
But here and there the masses return to combat. They die from the bullets and sabers of the bourgeoisie or they die of hunger. The exploited fight to save civilization against capitalist barbarism. Their energies drive new waves at each superior attack of the capitalist system and imperialism.
Although even slower and more out of sync is the wave that we are experiencing in Latin America with Ecuador, Chile, Peru and now Colombia, at a time when George Floyd's blood is still hot and the tough battle waged by the American working class that showed that Imperialism can be defeated and that there are the greatest allies of the Latin American masses, against the cowardice and cynicism of the native bourgeoisies and the treacherous leaderships.
All the forces of the revolutionary movement fighting under the banners of the Fourth International, to Colombia!
We must set up a revolutionary insurrectionalist combat party, which is what the masses need!
Trotskyists, as we see on this day, are inserted in the key processes of the revolution and the civil war. This is not by chance. It is not because we were awarded by chance, but because we were eagerly looking for it. In Syria, in Palestine, as yesterday in Libya and today in Colombia and Chile, we intervene directly and sharply in the most advanced foci of the world revolution, fighting to set up leagues of revolutionary cadres who are eagerly seeking a path for the masses in the better conditions that the revolutionary movement can have: in the revolution itself, where reformism at every turn breaks its teeth with its program and its revisionist strategy.
Intervening in these revolutionary processes we were able to maintain our course, update the program of the Fourth International and recover the enormous validity of its theory, its program and its strategy, which has proven to pass the test against all the revisionists and opportunists who today are hanging on to the coattails of Stalinism, of bourgeois regimes and "democratic" imperialism.
But we can not be content with it at all. We know that with the time given to us by the masses with their undeniable sacrifices in their revolutionary offensives, our challenge is to create the conditions to put strong Trotskyist combat parties back on their feet, this time in the heat of the revolution itself.
All the forces of the former Trotskyist groups have been handed over in Havana in a "reconciliation pact" with Castroism at a conference where Stalinism "rehabilitated" the figure of Trotsky in Cuba in May 2019. The liquidators of the Fourth International have given Stalinism that flag so that it could clean the filth of its betrayals: Cuba's surrender to imperialism, its pacts in Venezuela, its betrayal of the indefinite strike in Colombia, its backstabbing at the revolutionary uprising in Chile, its support to Lula and the PT in Brazil and their delegates sent to support the fascist al-Assad who massacres the masses of Syria. In the meantime, they have all clung to the coattails of the planet's new counterrevolutionary staff under Biden.
Stalinism and the renegades of Trotskyism are and will be responsible not only for the deviations and traps that the bourgeoisie seeks to impose on the revolutions that are underway, but also for the massacres that the Wall Street “democrats” are or will organize.
These leaderships are responsible for fighting hand in hand in Chile and now in Colombia to tell the masses that the fascists and the murderous police can be confronted with an electoral ballot, with pacifist calls for a Constituent Assembly, where they say that "the worker movement learns”. All of them, like the LIT and its parties, are enemies of opening up to the masses the perspective of weapons and the setting up of the worker and peasant militia. As Trotsky said, if the revolver cannot be opposed to bourgeois parliamentarism when the masses enter trapped in it, it is a million times more criminal to want to hand over electoral ballots to the exploited and not revolvers when the fascists go after them.
This is how Trotsky defined Stalinism: people who go to sing the wedding march to funerals and the funeral march to weddings. This is the reason for the bankruptcy of the liquidators of Trotskyism who, tied to Stalinism, have joined the ranks of the enemy.
In the Middle East they have already unmasked themselves by supporting al-Assad and placing themselves under the orders of US imperialism in Kurdistan. Their support for the Zionist billionaire Sanders is nothing new that they have not already done, upholding the "two-state" policy in Palestine, under the orders of their bosses: the Wall Street Left.
Reformism has imbued the workers' vanguard with pacifism, subjecting it to the bourgeoisie and its "siren songs", while fascism murders the best of the mass uprising. The fight for a revolutionary leadership of the uprising is urgent. The longer the exploited take to carry their combat to the end, setting up a powerful worker and peasant militia, the more fascism will grow to crush them in a bloodbath.
The massacres that imperialism and the bourgeoisies of the Middle East have inflicted to the masses of Syria, Yemen, Egypt and Tunisia, has fattened them. Before it is too late, breaking with pacifism, the exploited will find the way to their own armament and the disarmament of the police, fascist gangs and vigilante groups, in an organized and centralized way. In Trotsky's words, fascism is the vanguard of the bankrupt capitalist system and the workers' militia is the vanguard of the proletariat and its insurrection. There the central battle of the revolutionary moment that has began will be concentrated.
This question is essential to set up and develop a dual power that advances in the victory of the socialist revolution, a victorious insurrection that puts a working-class and peasant Colombia on its feet. A revolution that expropriates the land from the hands of the front men of the transnationals and the "narco-state" who have occupied the nation with iron and fire, expropriating the peasant and poor people of Colombia. A socialist revolution that attacks the transnationals, the mining companies, the oil companies, the Chqiuita Brands and that breaks with the IMF.
The workers and people of Colombia do not deserve the misery life, the hunger, the slavery and the unprecedented deprivations that their ruling elites have imposed on them.
The revolution that has begun will triumph by defeating the Duque government and the infamous regime and expropriating the expropriators of the people: the capitalists, and breaking with imperialism. That is the way for the depeople to eat and live with dignity.
In Colombia, a key link of imperialist domination in Latin America is dislocating. The union bureaucracies of the continent, which subject the proletariat to its own bourgeoisie country by country, prevent a unified and centralized combat of the Latin American working class with its siblings in the US to stop the massacre that has begun in Colombia and so that our class brothers and sisters succeed.
Reformism has not gone beyond declamations in "solidarity" and "support" from afar.
A Day of Fury of the Latin American working class, with strikes, pickets, strikes, actions in the streets, marches to the USA and Colombian embassies, where the representatives of the murderers of the people are, is what the workers and youth of Colombia need to beat.
It is not Biden or Sanders, but the American working class fighting for Colombia as it did yesterday against Trump, who will be able to stop the massacre of the masses.
That is our fight and our commitment. As the Trotskyists put it in the 1930s: “the proletariat of Latin America has not been able, cannot, will not be able to fight effectively for its class interests, except in collaboration with the proletariat of the imperialist countries. Thus, for the Bolshevik-Leninists, there is no task more important than that of establishing the connection and later the unification between the different parts of the proletarian organization of the continent, creating an organism so well built that any revolutionary vibration of it occurred in Patagonia, immediately reverberates as transmitted by a perfect nervous system, in the revolutionary proletarian organizations of the USA. Until such a thing is accomplished, the task of the Bolshevik Leninists in the American Continent will not have been accomplished." That is none other than the task of the international revolutionary movement.
The masses of Ecuador, Chile, Guatemala, Peru, who are part of this same wave of combat, will play a decisive role in synchronizing the enormous combats that have begun.
This new wave of revolutions, children of a deep capitalist crash and crisis, has set the fight to recover the banners of the Fourth International red hot, to regroup the revolutionaries who with these lessons, according to Lenin, make each one of our cadres is worth 10,000 of the traitors. This is what it is about, that we arrive in time to put all our forces as a fulcrum to conquer a revolutionary and internationalist regrouping of the world working class. It is there where we will recover the flags and the strategy of the Fourth International, which were surrendered by those who betrayed it.
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