November 12th, 2019
In Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt and Algeria, people fight as in Chile, Ecuador, Haiti and Honduras. There people fight against the capitalist regimes and imperialism in harsh revolutionary uprisings and independent mass political actions
Today in Bolivia, as yesterday in Egypt, the Armed Forces under imperialist command deliver counterrevolutionary blows
The Middle East and Latin America, twin revolutions
In the midst of the marasmus of the world economic crisis and the disputes between the imperialist powers, they have launched both a fierce offensive against the working class and the looting of the oppressed peoples. Great capital has centralized its attack on the exploited worldwide. Hyper-taxes, labor flexibility, skyrocketing cost of living, devaluation of the currencies cover most of the planet.
The masses resist and fight this imperialist offensive. The uprisings and revolutionary processes in Ecuador, Chile, Honduras and Haiti in Latin America or in Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt and Algeria in the Middle East are battles of the same class war.
Imperialism does not give peace in its offensive. It has already begun an open coup in Bolivia with the semi-fascist bands of the Media Luna and the police putsch, guarded by the Banzerist Armed Forces. Morales fled to Mexico. But the masses also fight there.
Huge independent mass actions are thus developed. Revolts, revolutionary strikes, semi-insurrections, barricade fighting... this is how these revolutionary processes manifest themselves in their beginnings, which surpass all the traitorous leaderships and bourgeois controls over the exploited and openly attack, waging a revolutionary political struggle against the exploiters’ governments and regimes.
The masses have already understood that they cannot get rid of their unprecedented sufferings, or even recover their previous standard of living, without overthrowing the various regimes and governments, puppets of imperialism. They distinguish their enemy and choose the right path to victory to conquer a decent life and put an end to the miserable conditions imposed by imperialism with its trade war and plunder.
The economic crac that imperialism throws on the masses is the engine of the current struggles.
The economic struggle, which pushes the masses into combat, has no solution within the framework of peaceful coexistence between classes. The political struggle subsumes the economic struggle. Fighting for wages, against the hight cost of living, against unemployment, against high fees, can only come to victory by defeating the governments that sustain and drive these fierce attacks by the capitalists.
New revolutionary foci stand up under the same premises of world politics and economy. In Latin America and the Middle East we are then facing twin revolutions.
In different hot-spots in the planet, battles of the exploited are fought, but for now they do not tend to generalize or spread. This happens with the great revolts in Mozambique, the revolutionary combats in Hong Kong, the independentist and republican uprising of Catalonia and so on. But it is in Latin America and the Middle East where the conditions of the imperialist offensive and the response of the masses allow these revolutionary flashes to generalize country by country.
Middle East on fire once again
In the Middle East, the fall in the price of oil, the currencies devaluation and the plundering of imperialist oil companies, which do not give up a penny, has led the masses to the most abject misery. 200% -300% increases in food prices are a common strait. The states are in bankruptcy and have also had to borrow heavily, as has happened with Lebanon, whose foreign debt reaches 150% of GDP. Subsidies are trimmed while fees, taxes and prices of staples are savagely increased and not a penny is earmarked for investment in a decaying infrastructure, which leaves the population without electricity in the oil-producing region par excellence.
Imperialism and its agents lead these attacks in a region where the fighting of 2011-2012 remains in a tough resistance, as in Syria, Yemen, Tunisia or Gaza. The revolutionary fire that has burned the Middle East since 2011 was not completely extinguished when the attack of imperialism once again set the prairie on fire with new revolutionary outbursts.
An open revolution process has begun in Iraq. There was where in 2008 that enormous chain of revolutions began that shook the region, since the Iraqi resistance, together with the anti-war struggle of the American working class, imposed the withdrawal of the invading US imperialist troops. Iraq has become today the most advanced outpost of the Middle East revolution, with masses that have been winning the streets in increasingly massive mobilizations for a month, leaving 300 dead and thousands injured, colliding with all armed security guards of the imperialist oil companies, be it the police, the army, mercenaries or paramilitary militias sent by the Iranian ayatollahs and their Iraqi partners. It is a generalized uprising across the country, from north to south, from east to west, centered in Baghdad, fighting over the fall of US imperialism’s protectorate government and regime.
This is the tomb of the infamy of the reformist left that affirmed that in Syria and the Middle East we were facing “interethnic struggles” between “barbarian peoples”, “jihadists” and “terrorists”… With these deceptions, this left slandered the Syrian revolution to sustain al-Assad. Today these deceptions have fallen, when we see the uprisings of Iraq, Lebanon and Egypt, as those who fight there are oil workers, construction workers, revolutionary students. The unemployed, the "throwaways," be it Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Christians, they rise against the bourgeoisies, lackeys of imperialism.
In the Middle East we witness the beginning of new revolutions. In Lebanon, as stated in the article included in this newspaper, the Shiite, Sunni and Christian masses rise against the national unity government of all bourgeois gangs. They have been two weeks of a great uprising that overthrew Prime Minister Hariri, of the Sunni bourgeoisie, and four of his allied ministers, corresponding to the Lebanese Phalanx. But the government is still standing, not only the president of the Christian bourgeoisie, Aoun, but also his Hezbollah allies, the true power in Lebanon that manages the biggest businesses, and the entire cabinet.
In Egypt the exploited rose against the military dictatorship, as happened some time ago in Algeria and Sudan. For now, these last two processes have been contained with transitional deceits, but not before charging the heads of the dictatorships that had been in power for years in these last two countries, such as Bouteflika and Omar al Bashir respectively.
The working class and the people of Iran, who have been starring in huge uprisings earlier this year and the previous one, continue to resist in hard struggles factory by factory, establishment by establishment, facing repression, jail and torture by that bloodthirsty theocratic regime, assassin of the Syrian masses.
The Syrian resistance has not given up and collides with al-Assad in the advance and marches against the HTS (former Al Nusra) businessmen in Idlib
In this new wave of mass combats, the heavy blows of the defeats in Syria and Yemen, where imperialism concentrated its forces to stop the chain of revolutions initiated in 2008-2011 in the Maghreb and the Middle East, still weigh heavily. Imperialism filled these rebellious countries with blood and martyrdom. And today it shows them as examples to the insurgent masses of what can happen to them if they "dare" to go as far as they did. But the Syrian revolution lives in the new revolutionary mass centers. The unprecedented sufferings push them to the fight to avoid starving.
In Latin America, people fight against the imperialist offensive: a phenomenal clash between classes, political crises and revolutionary irruptions of the exploited
On the other side of the planet, in Latin America, the same process is taking place. As we have already said, imperialism deepens its plundering of those nations and its attacks on the masses. Its plan is the same as that applied in the Middle East: to impose a fierce labor flexibility and a redoubled imperialist plunder. All Latin American countries have fraudulent external super debts, an expression of the imperialist plunder of recent years. Responses to hyper-taxation, the reduction of state expenditures, health and education budgets, have placed the masses first in a position of resistance and then of counteroffensive. In Mexico, the revolutionary uprising of the workers of the maquilas embodies the struggle against labor flexibility of the entire working class of the Americas, to which, whether by decrees, by laws or in the facts, the exploiters seek to wrest all their conquests.
In Panama, in Honduras, in Nicaragua, in Colombia or, as we see now in Chile, the student movement wins the streets in very hard anti-imperialist fighting against the destruction of education budgets. The ruin of the retirement funds, expropriated by the IMF to collect its loans, has caused great mass actions, both now in Chile as yesterday in Nicaragua and Argentina. In the latter country, in December 2017, when the parliament was discussing the “pension reform”, enormous independent revolutionary actions that surrounded the Congress were developed, throwing tons of stones over that den of bandits, while an active general strike of 36 hours took plance and cacerolazos began to be heard as in 2001. That was a blow against the government of Macri, which then the bourgeoisie, with its electoral trap, channeled again through Peronism.
In Colombia a general strike is already announced for November 21st. The massacre of workers and indigenist leaders, the attack on all the workers’ conquests, are the engine of that journey of combat by the masses who are looking for a course to respond to the attack of the hated Duque government. The counterrevolutionary pact of the Castroites and the FARC has left the peasantry vulnerable for landowners and paramilitaries to take back their land.
Haiti remains in an uprising. In an infinite decline, the masses there do not accept starvation.
Both in Peru and Honduras, a huge mass offensive struggle develops. The bourgeoisie “opposition” to the governments that manage the imperialist businesses try to ride on these struggles to contain them in parliamentary ways. The bourgeoisie is divided. The masses do not stop ramming. Prerevolutionary situations remain open.
But the imperialist offensive does not give peace. In Brazil, Bolsonaro is attacking all the workers conquests, as do Piñera or Lenin Moreno. A class clash was, is and will be inevitable. The two fundamental classes that face each other in semi-colonial countries are imperialism and the working class along with their allies, the poor peasants. The bourgeoisie understood this situation and left Lula free, for him to numb the masses by asking them to wait until 2022 to win the elections to Bolsonaro. It is the “leftist” support for the imperialist offensive. And if the masses overflow, there will be Lula to channel them.
It was in Ecuador and Chile where the workers and the people and their revolutionary processes took a leap turning into enormous revolutionary actions of the masses, insurrectional or semi-insurrectional processes, which have left the bourgeois mastery devices on their slaves totally dislocated. Huge revolutionary crises developed in the heights, as in Ecuador, where true dual-power organizations emerged, such as the FUT and CONAIE, whose leaderships saved the bourgeoisie from its collapse when Lenin Moreno fled from Quito to Guayaquil before the semi-insurrection of masses. These leaderships brought him back to Quito and restored him to power, after the army base refused to repress the insurrectioned masses. It is the collaborationist leadership of CONAIE and the FUT that supports the government of Lenin Moreno today. The mass insurrection set up dual-power organizations, which in turn, returned it to the bourgeoisie.
An immense mantle of silence today covers Ecuador and this truth. It would be enough for CONAIE and FUT to break up with Moreno and declare land, banks and oil nationalized to win over the army base and take power. So far came the revolutionary struggle of the masses ...
The next day after Moreno returned, the bourgeoisie tried not to leave traces of the revolutionary mass struggle. They paid hundreds and hundreds of volunteers to clean the streets of Quito and that everything is covered in a great blanket of oblivion. But you can't cover the sun with a finger. In Ecuador a dual power regime has been temporarily established. It can't last long. The state realigns its Armed Forces and prepares new blows. These revolutionary processes are not defined in a sole act.
In Chile the barricade fight in the streets does not stop. The masses refuse to withdraw from there. The bourgeoisie conspires. With the "sweetener" of a reform of the Constitution and taking the military from the scene to preserve them, they prepare, in the town halls, a trickster plebiscite on the "constitutional reform" for December. The same is announced by Piñera, who is preparing an agreement with the “Social Unity Board”, controlled by the CCP and the Frente Amplio, which will seek to peacefully channel and wear down this revolutionary rise of the masses. They try to do it at every step, but the masses have already made the experience with the Concertacion and its traps, and therefore the barricades are not abandoned.
As we can see, in Latin America the juice of squeezed lemons from the Bolivarian bourgeoisies, such as Ortega and Maduro, is depleted. In Bolivia, to stop this revolutionary wave in Latin America, imperialism concentrated its forces in one of the most stable countries in the region, where the labor aristocracy and union bureaucracy supported the Morales government, which did not distribute any wealth to the workers and peasants, but quite the opposite ... Both the bourgeoisie and imperialism found the excuse and the moment of greatest weakness of Morales's relationship with the masses, which he systematically attacked, to launch a rebuff of the elections and then openly a military coup, based on a police putsch and the fascist bands of the Media Luna. Now, they seek to impose a government that emerged from the puppet parliament, even voted by the deputies of the MAS, to close the open political crisis. The more and more the working class submitted to Morales, the more and more the right was strengthened for its blow.
In the current phase of the struggle in Latin America, before it deepens, Bolivia is the place where imperialism concentrates all the forces of the counterrevolution to scar the masses and cut the revolutionary offensive at one point. This is what it did with Syria in the Middle East in 2011. This experience ended in a bloodbath. Do not doubt that this will also apply in Latin America to take care of its interests.
Political crises, class clashes, mass offensives, the IMF, the UN and the OAS acting as US ministries of colonies, mark that Latin America as a whole is entering a prerevolutionary situation.
The capitalist system has an advantage, which is the sold out of the Cuban revolution and the Colombian resistance to the US imperialists, in an infamous pact that Castro signed with Obama, which allowed the Bolivarian bourgeoisie to strangle the anti-imperialist struggle of the Latin American masses and in this way the Castro bureaucracy could become a new owner class.
The sold out of Cuba wants to convince the masses about these chains of revolutions cannot win as a socialist revolution, since, as the Castro said, "socialism can be no more, even in Cuba." It is the great counterrevolutionary favor left by the Stalinist scourge for imperialism to dominate its backyard.
Likewise, the scam of the Bolivarian revolution leaves in Venezuela millions of hungry people and in Bolivia the majority of the working class brutally attacked by the Morales government, with the COB and the peasant movement divided. The working class must overcome all these betrayals to make its way to the struggle against imperialism and the bourgeoisie.
The traitorous leaderships are the worst burden that the masses have in the open pre-revolutionary situation in the subcontinent. The crisis of leadership, as observed in the fighting in the Middle East, is the most reactionary and critical factor of the current revolutionary offensives.
Imperialism learned from what happened in the Middle East in 2011-2012 and now uses its manual of counterrevolutionary war against the masses of Latin America and the world that are in a state of uprising
The strategists of the ruling classes know that they cannot concede the fall of governments to mass insurrectionary actions. They know that they have to defend these governments, since if not, the masses collide not only with the governments but also with all the institutions of state domination, such as the armed forces, justice, etc. The need for armament is put into the order of the day. From the revolts, from the revolutionary strikes, from the clashes with the soldiery, the combat rises to civil war. The destruction of the armies of the bourgeoisie is brought to the agenda. It is spread from country to country, where the masses face the same enemies. This happened in Libya, Yemen, Syria, or in Egypt, where a fierce military dictatorship had to return for the bourgeoisie to regain control of its state.
Hence the stubbornness with which Piñera resists in Chile, the firmness with which Bolsonaro leverages himself in Brazil and the great favor that the PJ and the Kirchners did to Macri and US imperialism by preventing the Argentine masses, who rebelled in 2017, from being which overthrow the government.
Anyone who sees the revolutionary uprisings of the Middle East today, will see how imperialism holds the governments notwhistanding all the problems they face. That is because if they fell, there would be a direct clash with the armed forces. That is why they impose transitional governments, partial democratic reforms ... Imperialism knows what it cost them their victories in Yemen in Syria or in Libya itself, where they have not yet been able to definitively reconstitute their dominance. Imperialism and its staff are very aware of the mechanisms of deception as the constituents, the plebiscites, when they turned out to be a bluff and could not sustain their governments and fell as in Tunisia or Egypt. There, democracy turned out to be nothing more than a detour for the sabers of the generals to return.
The New Left of Stalinists and renegades of Trotskyism’s raising of the slogan of "constituent assembly" in Latin America at all times and places, is a true fallacy. It is the exit on the left proposed by the reformists to divert the struggle of the masses in revolutionary crises, when what is on the agenda is the seizure of power. It is to educate the masses that power can be taken peacefully, expanding democracy: "Constituent Assembly, workers 'power" ... that is, the nefarious policy of Stalinism in Chile in the 1970s of "peaceful way to socialism". It is a democratizing left, which in Bolivia has reached the paroxysm of stating that in order to defeat the coup people has to make a Constituent Assembly, when this can be resolved only with weapons in hand. For some time now, the renegades of Trotskyism have become a fundamental support, along with Stalinism, of the New Left, with which Sanders, Podemos, Syriza and their likes strangle the revolutionary processes.
In Latin America and the Middle East the firewood is dry. The revolutionary processes are generalized
In the Middle East and Latin America, where the imperialist offensive does not stop, where the fight is for bread, for land and against imperialism; where revolutionary processes are rapidly generalized, there is the outpost of the world working class against imperialism and its domination. The need to coordinate these combats with the working class of the central countries is imperative. It is the only really decisive path to victory.
To defeat the Banzerist coup in La Paz means to fight and fence Wall Street, from where the latter is organized - together with the OAS and the CIA - that counterrevolutionary blow. Workers are already up there, as in the strikes of GM and the teachers, or the immigrants fighting for their claims.
The combat against the Pinochetist military is part of the struggle of the American working class against the imperialist war. In Washington and in the Southern Command there are the leaders of the Pinochetist army, the Ecuadorian army, the Banzerist officers of Bolivia and all the counterrevolutionary military forces, which will once again fill the Latin American subcontinent with blood, if the proletarian revolution does not succeed, as they already did it in the 1970s. As we see in these big class clashes, Yemen, Syria, Egypt will knock on the doors of Latin America.
The Middle East, again on fire, needs the European working class. The forces are there. The role of the counterrevolutionary leadership is to desynchronize the struggle of the proletariat of the entire Middle East and Latin America from that of the working class of the central countries.
In 2013 and 2014, the World Social Forum met in Tunisia. It was not casual. There were the Bolivarian bourgeoisies and their continuators today: the New Left of Podemos and Syriza and their entourage, shouting "the enemy is the ISIS", "al-Assad is the ally to be supported". They allied in an "anti-terrorist front" with Sarkozy, Merkel and Obama. They will also know how to do it in Latin America. When they launch their first counterrevolutionary blows, they will talk about their enemies "the terrorists" and the "vandals", as the “red pacos”, the traitors of the trade union bureaucracy of the CUT have already begun to do in the Alameda and Plaza Italia in Santiago de Chile. It would be a tragedy for the Latin American masses if the best combatants of the revolutions that are today ongoing are treated like terrorists and vandals.
That was what they did from the WSF and the New Left with the best worker and youth fighters of the Middle East. Those who sent dictator Qadafy, manager of the business of the Italian ENI in Libya, to better life were treated as terrorists and jihadists. They did the same with the masses that fought 30 blocks from the government house in Damascus, Syria and with the Yemeni masses. They set traps with the same trick they are using today in Latin America, calling to fight for "democracy" as in Egypt, where they ended up supporting the movement of the Liberal Democrats "April 6", which in turn called for the dictatorship of Al Sisi to slaughter the people.
That tragedy must not happen again, either in Latin America or in the new revolutionary wave of the Middle East. The "Bolivarian Revolution" scam is collapsing on the shoulders of the masses in Latin America. The infamy of “interethnic” wars is breaking in the reefs of life and of the facts when in Iraq it is Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish workers who face imperialism and its agents. The imperialist offensive does not give truce and the masses do not give up. Ahead there are new wars, insurrections, new leaps of the crac, fascism and counterrevolution.
The crisis of leadership is red hot. The masses need to get rid of all their leaderships that chronically undo what they build in their struggle.
As the Transitional Program of the Fourth International says, "The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only ‘matured’, they have begun to rot a little. Without a socialist revolution and this in the next historical period, a catastrophe threatens the entire human civilization. Everything now depends on the proletariat, that is, mainly on its revolutionary vanguard. The historical crisis of humanity is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership.”
In the semicolonial world the two fundamental classes that face each other are imperialism and the working class. The native bourgeoisie only tries to use the labor movement - by tightly controlling it - to haggle its slice of business to its imperialist major partner. But they know that if the proletariat enters into maneuvers of revolution, it will not only attack the property of imperialism but also its own. Therefore, as the theory-program of the Permanent Revolution states, only the working class with its allies in the impoverished sectors of the countryside and the city can fully and effectively resolve the democratic tasks in the semi-colonial world through the dictatorship of the proletariat, wielding this power as the leader of the oppressed nation and, above all, of its peasant masses.
The liquidators of Trotskyism broke with this fundamental thesis of the Permanent Revolution. For them, the democratic tasks of the oppressed nations can be solved with a Constituent Assembly, without the victory of the socialist revolution. In the Maghreb and the Middle East, as in Latin America, two programs confront each other, that of the theory-program of the Permanent Revolution of the Trotskyists versus that of the continuators of the Stalinist pseudostrategies.
The battlefield of the world working class is full of heroic revolutionary struggles, but also of enormous betrayals of reformism, as we see in Latin America, in the Middle East and in all the decisive combats of the world working class.
The imperialist offensive has managed to impose itself where the traitorous Stalinist leadership, the former Trotskyists and the social-imperialist parties have saved its businesses, its profits and its states. But the working class has not said their last word and continue waging their battles against imperialism each time they can free from the straitjacket the traitors constrain them with.
These forces of the exploited that, like in Chile, Ecuador or in Iraq and Lebanon, among others, hit the citadel of power, leave reformism and the traitorous leaderships in crisis and they can only babble.
Trotskyism was and continue being a living force of the struggle of the working class because it lives in the real revolutionary workers movement. Its forces are in the indomitable Chilean, Ecuadorian, Iraqi, Syrian, Lebanese, etc., revolutionary masses.
Our forces are there, in the thousands of young people and workers in the most exploited sectors that are now fighting. There the forces are emerging to set up again the party of the international socialist revolution, which was handed over by the former Trotskyists to imperialism and Stalinism.
From the International Trotskyist Leninist Fraction we call on all the forces that claim themselves from international Trotskyism, who declare themselves independent of the Stalinist counter-revolutionary forces worldwide and fight for an independent Trotskyist strategy to continue the struggle of the Bolshevik-Leninists and the Fourth International, to regroup our forces around the program of the Fourth International.
Milton Sánchez, Carlos Munzer, Paula Medrano, Abu Muad and James Sakala
for the FLTI Executive Committee