Speech by Carlos Munzer, leader of the FLTI and director of the paper The International Workers’ Organizer
"The greatest tribute that we can pay to Comrade Trotsky is to affirm that his greatest work is having founded the Fourth International together with hundreds of revolutionary cadres in 1938."
“Revisionism in Marxism was key to decomposing the world working class and shaping its cadres to support the capitalist system. This the Second International did by sweetening the bourgeois regimes and Stalinism by falsifying the legacy of the Third International and Lenin."
"If we manage to unite the working class every day and regain militant internationalism, we will create the best conditions to recover the Fourth International and refound it and set up vanguard revolutionary parties"
Comrades, we want to thank all of you who have joined us in this tribute that we are paying to our comrade Leon Trotsky. These have been two days of hearing and reading different speeches by leading internationalist organizations and militants of the world working class struggle. We have been surrounded by comrade representatives of the relatives of the heroic wounded, assassinated and political prisoners of Senkata, harshly repressed by the coup government of Añez. We have been able to listen to spokespersons of the heroic Iranian resistance and the struggle of the working class in the Mexican “maquilas”; the parents of the 43 disappeared by the Mexican murderous state; revolutionary militants among the Syrian partisans; personalities with an enormous combat tradition in the French proletariat; fighters of the most advanced organizations of the Colombian, Chilean and South African countries working class, as well as internationalist militants, revolutionary Marxists from Japan and leaders of the Editorial Board of "The International Workers Organizer" that has organized this tribute to Trotsky.
As it could not be other way, a period of crisis of reformism has once again opened that is attached to the bankruptcy of capitalism as the soul to the body. Reformism can no longer make miserable handouts appear as reforms before the working class. Class collaboration is no longer possible. Classes worldwide are entering a period that is not and will not be one of "social peace", but rather of class war. We are in a historical period of counter-reform, which is and will not be anything other than the crisis of those who left neither traces nor tracks of continuity of revolutionary Marxism, that is, of the Fourth International.
I have seen and followed with attention the various tributes paid by currents claiming to be from the Trotskyist left, 80 years after Trotsky's assassination. None of them said and they all keep silent that our world party, the Fourth International, has been led to a terminal crisis. Only isolated currents and remnants remain of those that dissolved in the reformist parties or have directly adopted their program. The brutal crisis and liquidation of the Fourth International is a new obstacle in addition to those that the working class already has in resuming the path to socialist revolution.
It draws my attention the fact that they are not telling the truth to the Trotskyists and revolutionaries: the Fourth International, which three or four generations fought to build, failed because of opportunism, revisionism, and adaptation to treacherous leaderships. There is no thread of continuity left from the revolutionary lessons of the international proletarian struggles of decades.
There is no thread of continuity left from the revolutionary lessons of the international proletariat’s decades-long struggle. The currents that exist today are the result of brutal splits, whether in the post-war period as well as in 1989.
This has happened in a generalized way throughout the 21st century and especially in the last 2-3 years, with the neo-Trotskyist currents, breaking again and bursting into pieces around discussing how to give in and capitulate to the bourgeois regimes and Stalinism, as it happened with the ISO in the US that dissolved tied to the apron-strings of Sanders, the left agent of Wall Street. The same happened with the group The Militant, which in its different variants has been supporting imperialist social democracy and the worst of the native bourgeoisies in the semi-colonial world for decades.
It is also the case of the PSTU of Brazil, which has lost a huge sector of its party that went to openly pro-Stalinist positions and is an ally of the PT and the PSOL.
Likewise, the Argentine PartidoObrero (Workers Party) has split after the experience it carried out in its “international current” together with the EEK of Greece and the DIP of Turkey, with whom they tried to set up a "revolutionary International" or “re-found the Third International” together with openly Stalinist parties such as the Unified Communist Party (OKP) of Mitina who is a secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the butcher Putin in Russia.
Not to mention the FIT-U, which is the continuity of the old groups of Argentinean national-Trotskyism that had previously “splintered” and later united into a single party with the sole goal of rotating a couple of seats in the bourgeois Parliament.
Meanwhile, the so-called "anti-capitalists", who hadrenounced to the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat decades ago, after years of openly betraying within Podemos and Syriza, they have now been thrown away, as waste after being used by those fronts of class collaboration, while in France they are on the verge of dissolution.
To speak about this crisis of the Fourth International is also to speak about the renegades of Trotskyism promoting open policies of class collaboration, subordinating the proletariat to the bourgeoisie, as is the case of the UIT-CI, which in Peru is within the Broad Front and had its leader Fernandez Chacon as a candidate of that front alongside old priests, imperialist NGOs and bourgeois environmental parties.
For its part, the LIT-CI, from its PST group in Colombia, has supported Gustavo Petro in the last presidential elections, a bourgeois candidate settled in the business chamber of Antioquia, an old informer and a man who sold out the Colombian resistance.
At the same time, from the PSOL of Brazil, Pedro Fuentes, the historical leader of Morenoism, was traveling to the United States to propose to the billionaire Sanders that he set up a “Socialist International”.
Meanwhile, all, absolutely all, the parties that speak on behalf of the Fourth International gave political support to the class collaboration front of the PT, Haddad and the church in Brazil, with the excuse of "facing Bolsonaro."
Let's tell the truth. The currents that have liquidated the Fourth International and come to embrace Stalinism and the waste of social democracy in the self-styled "New Left" have led the Fourth International to this prostration. This crisis is undeniable. In the same way we see them now in the tributes to Trotsky that took place in São Paulo, in May last year all these currents traveled to Havana and in a solid thick wall classroom closed to the eyes of the Cuban workers and peasants -that is, behind their backs- they reconciled with Castroism. Cuban Stalinism today tries to praise the figure of Trotsky as a “personality of the socialist movement”, as if this were a task of the same people who received Mercader with honors - as the Castro brothers did- when he was released from prison in Mexico in the 1950s, after assassinating Trotsky.
In the face of this, today we come to pay tribute to Comrade León Trotsky reaffirming that there is no other immediate task than to recover the Fourth International from those who led it into the mud of opportunism and servility to the bourgeoisie and its agents, and open the way to its revolutionary re-founding.
***
Comrades,
The greatest tribute that we can pay to Comrade Trotsky is to affirm that his greatest work is having founded the Fourth International in 1938 together with thousands of revolutionary militants. The World Party of the Socialist Revolution was the historical continuity of revolutionary Marxism that, since 1914, at the beginning of the First World War, regrouped its forces to confront the social-imperialist currents and later on Stalinism that betrayed one by one the revolutionary struggles of the working class.
Trotsky affirmed in 1940 that the Fourth International entered the war as a “compact force”. Revisionism in the Fourth International made a thousand and one attempts to falsify and erase his theoretical and programmatic legacy, but what life's experience shows is that the theory and program of Trotskyism passed the test; the Trotskyists, did not and that is why they burst into pieces before each lithmus test of the revolution and the counterrevolution.
The preservation of the Communist Parties by the bourgeoisie and the states in the leadership of the unions and workers' organizations of the world, where they play their counterrevolutionary role, is a decisive motor that brings permanent crises to the currents that long ago broke all ties with the Fourth International. In many countries they are simple photocopies of revived Stalinism and when not, they accompany it in its crises and decomposition.
Faced with this crisis, the only honest policy is to try to draw lessons and patiently explain why the Fourth International, the World Party of the Socialist Revolution, no longer exists and what is the way to re-found it and put scientific socialism back on its feet, as revisionists and opportunists surrendered it to the class enemy.
To look for the origin of the crisis of the Fourth International is necessary to start from its foundation and the assassination of Trotsky. If the founding of our world party turned out to be a solid grouping of internationalist revolutionaries, despite the enormous casualties suffered and the counterrevolutionary blows fromimperialism and Stalinism, the assassination of Trotsky was a severest blow to the Fourth International. As the comrades who preceded me said, it was a great counterrevolutionary milestone, because it liquidated the last of the great leaders of the internationalist and revolutionary left wing of the world working class.
But that terrible fact that hit our world party does not suffice to explain the bankruptcy of the Fourth International, its capitulations or adaptations in the last 80 years. It does not explain the sad spectacle of seeing their parties reviving the Stalinist scourge and adapting to those who strangled the international socialist revolution for decades.
The currents of “Yalta Trotskyism” and those of today also affirm that the crisis of the Fourth International is the result of the assassination of Trotsky. With this, they cover themselves with an aura of “weakness”, hiding, in reality, that upon Trotsky's death his leadership teammates, led by the American SWP and other revolutionaries, returned to their countries and left the international general staff, leaving all sections of the Fourth International adrift under conditions of war, revolution and fascism. This is called capitulation and adaptation to the hostile pressures of war and those imposed by Stalinism.
We want to pay tribute to Trotsky and the Trotskyists who fought until 1940 precisely because they did not succumb to these pressures, they did not adapt to them, they did not kneel before them and they were the perfect continuity of the revolutionaries who regrouped their ranks in the First World War in Kienthal and Zimmerwald, preparing the conditions for the victory of the October Revolution and the founding of the Third International. When Trotsky was expelled from the USSR, he did not go looking for a country to build a national party, but put all his forces together with the revolutionary Marxists to recover the Third International first and then to found the Fourth International.
We affirm that the crisis of humanity is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership, as the Transitional Program says, and that the current crisis of the Fourth International has only exacerbated as the 21st century started.
We affirm that there was not a single victory of the capitalists in the world, no crushed revolution, no victorious fascist coup, no fall of a worker state that was achieved by the intelligence and capacity of the bourgeoisie or by the strength of their armies. This did not happen because the international revolutionary Marxism that founded the Third and Fourth International did not leave a program and an unstained flag to fight for. We believe that the main struggles of the world working class have been defeated from within, because of the betrayal of their leaderships, as the comrades who preceded me have said.
In 1918, together with the October revolution in Russia, a huge revolution took place in Germany, led by the Workers and Soldiers Councils, which had rebelled against the war. They rose up together with their brothers and sisters who had already conquered the USSR, when the troops of imperialist Germany defeated on the battle front just returned. At the beginning of that revolution, the first assembly of the Workers and Soldiers Councils met with Karl Liebknecht, a brave socialist leader who had spent most of the war years in prison andknew and understood what it was about. He spoke there saying: “the enemy of this revolution is the one we see every day, they are the capitalists whom we recognize and we know that we must fight against them; the enemies are the soldiers of the junkers that we face and disarm. But the most powerful enemy that we have, the most perfidious that we have, is the one that is here indoors”.
“This system survives itself since the bourgeoisie in its phase of decay has bought a sector of the class that it oppresses and exploits and has corrupted it to make it take care of its interests, its businesses, its markets, its states and its regimes.”
Liebknecht said a great truth. This is the truth held by the internationalist wing of the working class throughout the 20th century to the present day. This is precisely why the Third International was founded by Lenin and Trotsky against the traitors of the Second International.
The true enemy of the working class is not only the powerful armies, the insight of the bourgeoisie and this capitalist system that can no longer support minimally maintaining a civilization with the possibility of life on the planet. This system survives itself since the bourgeoisie in its phase of decline has bought a sector of the class that it oppresses and exploits and has corrupted it to make it take care of its interests, its businesses, its markets, its states and its regimes. That and nothing else was the decomposition and cooptation by the imperialist bourgeois states of the Social Democracy and later Stalinism, the bureaucratic outgrowth of the workers' state.
All the opportunist and revisionist currents have risen against this Marxist position we have. They want to make everyone believe that the masses and their "backward consciousness" (what they call "crisis of subjectivity") are to be blamed for the defeats, or that they are caused by the intrinsic strength of the capitalist system.
There is a very important tendency of reformism in Argentina, the PTS, which says that “this system partially develops the productive forces.” For them, this system, which is in a mortal state of decomposition and parasitism, at times moves the wheel of history forward and the entire civilization advances. Although it does not do it totally, at least it does it “partially”. That's what PTS university professor Christian Castillo said, while we were listening to him and we couldn't believe what our ears were hearing.
If the wheel of history advances forward, as Castillo affirms, then the working class fighting in times of peace can achieve demands and raise its living standards within the current capitalist system, without fascism, counterrevolution or the treacherous leaderships crushing the working class before that. Or even without the danger that the crash and the crisis, which is the most recurrent thing in the imperialist phase, would sweep away all the conquests of the masses. The PTS affirms in fact that we are facing a reformist era at times. What an anti-Marxist theoretical revision to justify a reformist policy.
What the history of the 20th century and what is going on in the 21st century has shownthat far from achieving this or that demand with this or that struggle, if we do not seize power, we lose all conquests, and even power itself if we stop fighting for the extension of the revolution internationally, as happened with the USSR and other former worker states.
What we see today is a world working class that has nothing to envy the proletariat of the 19th century and even worse. These people see the labour movement from the upper strata of the labor bureaucracies and aristocracies.
The truth is that this revisionism, also in a state of decomposition, cannot explain why 200 million workers and peasants roam around the planet, like outcasts and landless migrants, looking for a country to live in, a bed to sleep in and a machine to work with, because this rotten capitalist system doesn't even give you that right.
With Trotsky and revolutionary Marxism, and against reformism, we declare the productive forces have stopped growing in a harmonious, organic and balanced way on the planet for a long time. With 80% of civilization in semi-colonial countries’ with their sources of raw materials plundered, reduced to backwardness and increasingly to barbarism; with 800 million workers away from the production process in each crisis and outbreak of the crash; with 40% of the world's industrial capacity stopped; with nations and private companies that have lost all repayment capacity, destroying the world market itself, these people want the working class to believe that capitalism continues to play a redemptive role in history, as it did in the 19th century, when it advanced civilization in its own way. Now what is advancing is chronic unemployment, the paralysis of most of the productive forces, strapped into national borders, the ruin of most of the world economy - despite the growth of this or that sector-, and a sub-class of outcasts who will never even dream of entering the production process. Under this rotten capitalist system, man and nature are increasingly being driven to barbarism and destruction.
It is enough to look at U.S. imperialism that in its attempt to maintain control of the world market through its transnational corporations and its army since 1989, what it has achieved is to destroy its own powerful American internal market. 40 million laid-off and homeless workers in the US are a blow to the nose for both reformists and liquidators of Marxism.
After two world massacres in the 20th century due to inter-imperialist wars, in the midst of brutal crashes and crises that are the norm in the world-economy of the imperialist capitalist system, after technological advances based on the war industry for destruction, no serious revolutionary who claims to be socialist can affirm that capitalism continues to play, even partially, a redemptive role in human civilization.
“The reformists and those who sold out the Fourth International have refusedto tell the workers the truth; the truth is that if we are bad, we can only be worse in the framework of this rotten system.And if we do not fight and our decisive fight is not for the seizure of power, we will never be able to improve our standard of living and the conquests that we achieve will be lost.”
With the aforementioned thesis, all the revisionist and reformist currents of the Fourth International were eager to liquidate their program and remove from the world working class the perspective of the struggle for socialist revolution as their immediate task.
The reformists and enforcers of the Fourth International have refused to tell the workers the truth; the truth is that if we are wrong, we can only be worse in the framework of this rotten system. And if we do not fight and our decisive fight is not for the seizure of power, we will never be able to improve our standard of living and the conquests that we achieve will be lost.
This is what the internationalist revolutionary fraction of the world working class throughout the 20th century defined. Led by Rosa Luxembourg, Lenin, Liebknecht and Trotsky, they waged an intransigent fight, stating that all the struggles we make for the most minimal demands every day, for bread, for wages, for living, for being able to speak, for having a piece of land to feed on, to free oneself from imperialism, cannot be achieved or resolved, nor can our struggle triumph, unless the working class takes power by destroying the dictatorship of capital, its governments, regimes and states.
All over the world, these neo-Stalinist currents were heard saying (to whitewash the clothes of their political cowardice) that since 2008 "there have been no revolutions, but citizen revolts." Incredible, they want to go back three or four centuries, to the time of the bourgeois revolutions. They say that the working class has not intervened when the only thing the working class has done has been to fight while their leaderships betray them.
If not, what are the Middle East revolutions? "Citizen revolts"? How dare they treat pariahs as "citizens", with citizens' rights? You have to be a very vicious university professor to attribute the power of "citizen" to a slave worker in an oil well in the Middle East, when imperialism has drowned those countries in blood and fire to plunder the "black gold" of the entire region.
How would the slave route of the black workers of Africa who rise up in the United States be treated as "citizens"? How dare they treat the black workers of the United States who today rise up and rebel as "citizens"? How dare they treat as “citizens” the black workers of South Africa who have no salary and live in shacks to work as slaves in the mines? How dare they say that they are "citizens"?
Citizens are the bourgeois, who have property rights, to educate their children, not to be killed by the bullets of a policeman. The workers are going to be citizens the day we take power and put the Paris Commune back on its feet, we take power as in the USSR in 1917. We are going to be proud citizens with the worker and peasant governments.
If this has not yet been achieved, it is because citizens like those now called "anti-capitalists" have surrendered the struggle of the international proletariat.
In recent days we have come to hear similar anti-socialist and anti-Trotskyist brutalities from people who claim to fight under the banners of the Fourth International.
Revisionism in Marxism was the key to decompose the world working class and form its cadres to support the capitalist system. This the Second International did by sweetening the bourgeois regimes, and Stalinism by falsifying the legacy of the Third International and Lenin.
You cannot pay tribute to the revolutionaries as university professors do, who give lectures from bourgeois universities to the workers' movement and have uprooted revolutionary Marxism from the revolutionary mass struggle and taken it to the university to throw waste of minimum and reformist programs to the working class. And then, they blame revolutionary Marxism for the "crisis of subjectivity" and "political backwardness."
Marxism must return to the working class. This is the second point we want to affirm in this tribute that we pay to Comrade Trotsky.
"How are we Trotskyists going to organize a tribute day to Leon Trotsky with the Cuban Communist Party that pays the Cuban workers 18 dollars a month and has already established the right of inheritance to reproduce private property as a new ruling class?"
The comrade who opened this day stated that among the tributes to Trotsky that were paid this week, there was also one performed in São Paulo.
We were invited by Frank García Hernández, the leader of the left wing of the Cuban Communist Party, to participate in their events, such as the one they had in San Pablo, and even to travel to Havana.
We told them: why are you disrespecting us? How is ittha we Trotskyists are going to have a day of homage to Leon Trotsky with the Cuban Communist Party that pays 18 dollars a month to the Cuban workers and has already established the right of inheritance to reproduce private property as the new ruling class? How daresCastroism invite us to pay tribute to Trotsky, who fought for the broadest workers' democracy in the workers' state so that all currents in the democratic soviets and all the positions of those who fight for the revolution are expressed? Castroism would never allow us to set up a Trotskyist party in Cuba to fight for this program, without imprisoning ourselves and shooting us.
We are Trotskyists. We are in favor of organizing a revolutionary civil war to sweep away all the former millionaire bureaucrats, partners of world imperialism, and end with all the medals and decorations that still remain. We are the party of the civil war to overthrow the Stalinist party of the new possessing classes that are in power in Cuba, causing the defeats of all the revolutionary processes in the Americas. We insist, if that Trotskyist party arises in Cuba, with the program that we propose here, its militants will be proscribed, persecuted and even assassinated, as happened with the Trotskyists in the 1950s and 1960s, when they were treated the same or worse than in Stalin's time.
We Trotskyists will return to Havana not to sell Trotsky's books and have him “rehabilitated” by the same ones who received his murderer Mercader with fanfare, but to revolt the Cuban workers and peasants to recover the lands that are being stolen by the Stalinist nomenclature. We are going to return to Cuba to fight against the new rich who steal 80% of the salary of each doctor who works outside the island, for them to pay for the countries, the yachts and the privileges of a new ruling class that not only reconstituted the private property, but also the right of inheritance to reproduce capitalist property.
NOT WITH US. No matter how much they call themselves “Commune” group, they are the ones that are destroying the workers' and peasants' Commune in Cuba. Their party, the Cuban CP has long been allied with the "Versailles" officials who live in Wall Street. They did so when they embraced Obama and called on the workers to trust the repressors and murderers of the Democratic Party of the US imperialist pirates.
"What did they go to do in São Paulo with Castroism and the Stalinist theorists from Brazil, paying homage to Trotsky with the executioners who murdered him and other Trotskyists of the Fourth International?"
I want to ask a question to Mr. Alan Woods, who speaks on behalf of British Trotskyism and brought the Transitional Program to Chávez; to the gentlemen of the American SWP, which was founded by Leon Trotsky in the 1930s and in recent days has threatened those who rose up in the United States to send picket lines against them to discipline them; to the gentlemen of the FIT-U who are striving for new seats in the Argentine bourgeois Parliament; to the "anti-capitalist" gentlemen, enemies of any socialist revolution set to destroy the system. My question is: what did they go to do in São Paulo with Castroism and the Stalinist theorists from Brazil, paying homage to Trotsky with the executioners who murdered him and other Trotskyists of the Fourth International? I answer: it is simple; they are in a same party with them internationally. They are the other leg of the "New Left".
Comrades,
The Fourth International did not reach this situation of splinter, crisis and bankruptcy in a day. It took 80 years of yielding to hostile enemy pressures, of adapting to the reformist leaderships and then capitulating, later betraying and finally decomposing the Trotskyist movement.
In all the speeches that we have heard in their tributes to Trotsky, we have perceived these currents argue that he and the Fourth International were wrong in their prognosis after the Second World War. When the Fourth International was founded, a handful of three thousand revolutionaries who also represented the Soviet section proclaimed that our party was going to become a mass party at the end of World War II.
Let us begin by clarifying that the condition for becoming a mass party was not to betray or capitulate to Stalinism as they did during and after the war. The forecast of the Fourth International did not expect they would betray.
The founders of the Fourth International also warned that if the war regime survived, that is, if Stalinism emerged strengthened, the revolutionary parties could degenerate, as they actually did. This prognosis was accurate, because according to Trotsky, only Bolshevism with its international general staff as the internationalist left wing of social democracy, then in Kienthal and Zimmerwald and later in the Third International, could rise above the pressures that shaped it and lead the working class to take power. The Fourth International not only passed the test in its theory and its program, but also in its prognosis.
If the continuity was interrupted it was by the destruction of the general staff of the Fourth International and by its dissolution after the assassination of Trotsky. As a consequence of this, the national isolation of its sections took place, which was then followed at the end of the war, by a regrouping of caudillos and tendencies that year after year and revolution after revolution were digging their grave, adapting to Stalinism and Social Democracy.
We believe that Trotsky's prognosis was correct. The Fourth International could have become a mass party after the war. Perhaps this is going to sound strange to comrades from other currents, because everyone has said that Trotskyism was a marginal current. That is a lie, I regret to disappoint all those who have listened for a long time to Mr. Altamira, Mr. Alan Woods, the “anti-capitalists”, the Albamontes, the Mercedes Petits, the Jack Barnes. But that was not the case.
In the first place let us clarify that for the founders of the Fourth International their insertion in the masses was not defined in a single revolution but in a whole historical period of crises, wars and revolutions. They affirmed that in these revolutions the new generation of the proletariat could learn. And, in this historical cycle of revolution and counterrevolution, the mass parties could arise that lead the working class back to the seizure of power on condition of not betraying, on condition of not handing over the program to opportunism, on condition of not yielding to the reformism, on condition of not capitulating to the bourgeoisie.
***
Comrades
The only thing Marxism didn’t forsee at the end of World War 2, even before the war, was that the working class had too much power and was too militant. Despite their leaderships, against the “democratic allies” which, as in France, joined Hitler to plunder northern Africa, the working class waged battles with the maquis, the partisans, with the workers in arms in the resistance during the war and at the end of it. The working class confronted fascism while the “democratic imperialisms” such as USA and England only entered the fight in Europe in 1945, as they were waiting for Hitler to crush and destroy the USSR, so the “democracies” could get the gains of the workers state. That is the historical truth.
Meanwhile, the sections of the Fourth International, separated country by country, ended up adapting to every pressure.
The Stalinists raised monuments to the generals and marshals of the Red Army, after the defeat of Hitler and the German army in World War II. But they had not been the ones who defeated them.
We can find the truth -and anyone can see it- in the head of the Red Army newspaper called "Red Star", which covered the battle of Stalingrad. That journalist, on the one hand, had the official reports that he sent to Stalin in Moscow and, on the other, he had the real notes that he took on the battlefront with the Red soldiers.
In the first notes, praises were sent to Stalin, because if not he would have killed him and his comrades on the battlefront. In the other notes -based on which a book that appeared in the archives of the former USSR has been written- this journalist was telling the truth to his colleagues. He said that on winter nights in Siberia, in Petrograd, on the outskirts of Stalingrad, the workers argued: “What do we do first? Do we defeat fascism or do we overthrow Stalin"? In the campfires of the frozen nights of Russia that fought fascism, the workers argued whether they overthrew Stalin at that moment or waited to defeat Hitler in order to later have the best conditions to go after Stalin.
20 million Soviet workers and peasants were killed in guerrilla warfare and war of positions against German army and during cutting off all supplies and supply lines, under no leadership of Stalin or other cowardly scoundrel traitors of the bureaucracy. They were millions of workers in the rear who destroyed the German army in the winter and ended up marching on Germany, advancing to liberate the European working class.
Trotskyism did not foresee such heroism of the masses, but its theory and its thesis of a "degenerated workers state" do explain it. The defensist policy towards the USSR of the Trotskyists in the 1930s was because they believed that despite the Stalinist bureaucracy, the workers' state was a conquest of the revolution and of the working class. The workers of the USSR gave their lives for their conquests: the nationalized productive forces, the right to work, education, health, etc. Millions of agricultural workers gave their lives to defend the land they worked. Conscience, as Trotsky says, lived in the property relationships. That was the engine of such great actions and revolutionary offensive.
Let's see comrades, and let's take a parenthesis, why did no significant sector of the Soviet labour movement defend the USSR in 1989? At that time there was no longer any conquest to defend. The Stalinist bureaucracy, becoming a new bourgeoisie, had handed over all the conquests to imperialism. The USSR was bankrupt. The supermarkets were empty. The workers fought for soap and toilet paper, just like the Bolivian miners, while Stalinism had fulfilled its pact with imperialism: it had generated the defeat of dozens and dozens of revolutionary processes in the West and had placed the world proletariat in an open crisis. These, and not other, were the conditions that led to the emergence of the Reagan and Thatcher governments, which in the mid-1980s began to directly control the decomposing USSR, through Gorbachev and the CPSU.
We are tired and fed up of being told that the fundamental crisis of the defeats and setbacks of the working class is that the masses are "backward", "brute" and "barbarous", when in reality the exploited never missed the appointment.
Those who did not measure up to the masses were the leaders.That is the thesis of the revolutionaries; this is the thesis of the Trotskyists. We missed that forecast. We did not see that even the masses would arrive at the gates of Berlin in Germany, revolting the entire Eastern Europe, despite and against Stalinism and also the ranks of the Fourth International that were scattered in the face of such mass offensive.
At the outset of World War II, the Red Army and its battalions marched on Germany. What had not been able to be conquered at the end of the First World War, when the USSR succeeded, which was the seizure of power in Germany, was within reach at the end of the Second World War. The Soviet masses and the European working class made conquering a Soviet Germany that could function alongside the productive forces of the USSR a point on the order of the day. The Stalinist bureaucracy contained the revolution in Berlin and sealed a deal with imperialism, guaranteeing that the revolution was not to advance towards Western Europe and they controlled the masses of Eastern Europe at the point of guns and tanks.
The French working class also had power in their hands, the maquis fought an enormous resistance to fascism and were armed. In Italy and Greece the partisans were the ones who truly defeated fascism. Stalinism disarmed them and supported all the governments of imperialist Europe.
“To affirm that the key to the crisis of our world party is because Trotskyists were very weak after Trotsky's death, because Trotskyism “was sectarian” and “did not have a correct program to intervene in the war and at the end of it”, is an infamy to cover up the capitulations and betrayals of the Fourth International during the war and the postwar period. Weakness is not an excuse to betray or to adapt to the enemy."
And now they dare tell us that "democratic fronts" must be made with the "progressive" bourgeoisie to confront fascism. We assert that it was the Greek partisans, the Italians in Milan, the French resistance workers, who defeated Hitler's army and the fascist beast. And it was Stalinism that made them disarm at the end of the Second World War to “rebuild Europe”. Let them dare to deny us this truth! The "democratic" imperialisms, like the "fascists", fought in the war for business, plunder and control of the world market.
To affirm that the key to the crisis of our world party is because Trotskyists were very weak after Trotsky's death, because Trotskyism “was sectarian” and “did not have a correct program to intervene in the war and at the end of it” is an infamy to cover up the capitulations and betrayals of the Fourth International during the war and the postwar period. Weakness is not an excuse to betray or to adapt to the enemy.
***
Comrades,
Revisionism and its falsifications of the combat of the Fourth International over the last 80 years must be unmasked.
As we said, Trotskyism with its theory of the Permanent Revolution, which combined the tasks of the socialist revolution in the semi-colonial world, in the degenerated workers' states and in the imperialist countries, has passed the test of history. It even foresaw that petty-bourgeois leaderships would have to go further, as happened in the postwar revolutions in China, Cuba and Vietnam, due to the imposition and decisive weight of the mass movement, under exceptional conditions of crisis and crash. What Trotskyism and the Fourth International did affirm is that all those victories, if they happened, were going to be tactical, since Stalinism was going to capitalize them to use them as a battering ram to crush the world revolution with their prestige. This is what happened. They were tactical victories and strategic defeats, for Stalinism continued to control the world proletariat, subjecting it to a deal with the US imperialists. The Fourth International adapted itself to that infamous Yalta Agreement, to rescue the world capitalist system.
Comrades,
Not only was the Fourth International forecast totally correct, but, as we have already said, it did not contemplate betraying. That was the tragedy of the Fourth International in the Bolivian revolution of 1952. Trotskyism could have led the seizure of power in there. The Bolivian working class, which had taken over the Trotskyists' program, the Pulacayo Theses, defeated the bourgeois government of La Rosca, armed itself with the COB (Bolivian Central Union) and formed workers' militias and then, due to the leadership crisis, handed over power to the bourgeoisie, to the bourgeois government of Paz Estenssoro.
The class-collaborationist bureaucracy of the COB handed over power to Paz Estenssoro. Meanwhile, the Trotskyists, who led and had the majority in the COB and the Mining Federation, gave tactical support and supported the bourgeois government of Paz Estenssoro from the leadership of the COB, then giving time for it to disarm the proletariat and reestablish bourgeois power. What prognosis could be made that would explain that the Trotskyists, those of us who were preparing for the revolution, were going to commit such capitulation and betrayal?
The new generation of Trotskyists has to know that in Sri Lanka, in the Pacific, the Trotskyists had enormous influence and won the elections in the 1950s but ended up making a front with the bourgeoisie and destroying the revolutionary upheaval, so that later a fascist military coup came and crushed the masses.
“The capitulation and surrender of the so-called "Yalta Trotskyism” went too far. They openly revised Marxism, stating that in the post-war period there were "two blocs" and "two economies," one "capitalist" and the other one "socialist." (…) THE RENEGADES OF TROTSKYISM IN THE POST-WAR PERIOD CARRIED ALL THE WAY THE STALINIST "THEORY" OF 'SOCIALISM IN A SINGLE COUNTRY'.”
A group of capitulators, adapted to Stalinism, made the Trotskyists believe in the postwar period that the US was going to attack the USSR and then the USSR would be obliged to respond. They claimed that the USSR was going to defeat world imperialism and therefore it was necessary to be within the Communist Parties. Thus they dissolved the Fourth International within those parties. A revisionist theory of absolute adaptation to the Yalta and Potsdam Agreements put the Fourth International as an appendix of Stalinism throughout the second postwar period.
The new forces entering the combat for the Fourth International must know that from the 1940s on, Stalinism in Vietnam massacred hundreds of Trotskyists and their leader Ta Thu Thao, who had led enormous processes of struggle in 1936 and after, co-directing the great industrial strikes in Saigon, in particular the railroad workers' one in 1937. When this happened, the Vietnamese Trotskyists were isolated in their own country, as was the case with all the national sections of the Fourth International just leaving the war, due to the dissolution of the international center of our world party. Later, the forces of the Fourth International led by Michael Pablo, dissolved themselves within the Communist Parties, I.e. the same Stalinism that had persecuted and massacred the Trotskyists in the East, as happened in Vietnam.
The capitulation and surrender of the so-called "Yalta Trotskyism" went too far. They openly revised Marxism, stating that in the postwar period there were "two blocs" and "two economies", one was "capitalist" and the other one "socialist”. It is a typical vulgarity of obsequious of the counterrevolutionary forces that expropriated the victorious revolutions. Actually, there is one single capitalist world economy that even subdued the workers states for decades and ended up destroying them internally, turning the Stalinist bureaucracy into a direct agent of the transnationals and international finance capital to impose capitalist restoration. How can the countries that are backward in relation to the most advanced productive forces of the imperialist countries be independent from the world economy? THE RENEGADES OF POST-WAR TROTSKYISM CARRIED THE “SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY” "THEORY" OF STALINISM ALL THE WAY. In Yalta, they destroyed all the theses on which Trotskyism had been founded when it set up the Left Opposition as a fraction of the Third International.
The Marxist thesis is that the world-economy would be destroyed with the victory of the socialist revolution in the imperialist powers and at the international level, when the proletariat controlled the most advanced of the productive forces.
This shameful revision was held by the Pabloites and poisoned the Fourth International for decades, the same Pabloites who after 1989 pontificated that the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat was "no longer possible". Miserable!
Comrades,
In 1953 the workers rose up in East Berlin under the Stalinist troops with the slogan of "wage increase". The metalworkers revolted against the Red Army that oppressed them. In 1956 the Hungarian working class rose up in Budapest shouting: "Out with the Stalinist bureaucracy!" "Long live the Soviet working class!" "Let Lenin's revolutionary soviets come back!"
Do you know what did the leadership of the Fourth International in Europe say, like all those who today affirm that “the working class is backward”? They said that the slogan "out of the Red Army from Hungary, from Germany and the whole Eastern Europe” could not be raised because that amounted to act in favor of imperialism. That is to say, according to them, a political revolution that expels the bureaucracy, destroys its power and its officer caste, meant to “act in favor of imperialism”. For these people, to fight to set up the Workers' and Soldiers' Councils and provide the workers' states of Eastern Europe with a revolutionary and Soviet leadership meant to be an "agent of imperialism". For them that was "counterrevolutionary" because it was “acting in favor of imperialism”.
When I started my militancy they told me that. Let the old leaders of Trotskyism show their faces and tell us that this was not the case!
How can they say very strait forwardly that the matrix of the crisis of the Fourth International lies in the theory and the program of Trotskyism, in its "insufficiencies"? This is a lie. You, the revisionists, the Pabloites, the Healyites, the eclectic centrists like Moreno -with a beginning but without an end in their turn to the right throughout the Yalta period- have “chosen the wrong party”. All of them came to the Fourth International to hand it over to Stalinism tied hand and foot in the political revolution processes of the 1950s and 1960s. Then they broke up and they all unified again in 1963 under the leadership of Fidel Castro, with the excuse of recognizing the Cuban workers' state, to end up in 1989 all embracing Stalinism in the West.
The eastern working class never stopped fighting. The new generations have to know that the Soviet workers, the workers from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, from the Donbass mines in Ukraine, rose up a thousand and one times against the bureaucracy and did not let it live in peace.
What did the Trotskyists say in the West? That "you could not support those revolutions, because they were in favor of imperialism”. Dare you say this was not so!
Those who did not accept this position, such as the Healy current, the Lamberts (old partners of the PO and Altamira of Argentina) and the group The Militant, all entered the English Labor Party saying that what was “progressive” was not Stalinism, but rather the Social democratic currents and it was necessary to make entryism there to build mass revolutionary parties. That is how they remained for about 50 or 60 years within the social democratic parties.
We insist that the tragedy of the Fourth International lies in the dissolution of the international center led by Leon Trotsky, Leon Sedov, Rudolph Klement, Abraham Leon, Jean van Heijenoort, James Cannon and the leadership of the American SWP. Some of them, like Trotsky himself, Leon Sedov and Rudolph Klement, were assassinated by Stalinism. The rest dissolved the international general staff after Trotsky's death. Thus, the Fourth International was stumbling throughout the postwar period become in what was called "Yalta Trotskyism."
How was Yalta sustained? What was Yalta, where the Trotskyists became pro-Stalinists or pro-Social Democrats and dissolved the Fourth International? It was an agreement by means of which imperialism was able to sustain itself after the Second World War, signed with Stalin. This agreement stipulated that the Stalinists would control the working class from the Berlin Wall towards Moscow and guaranteed that there was not to be a successful revolution in the West. That was the policy of "peaceful coexistence" of Stalinism in the Yalta-Potsdam Agreement. This ended with Stalin handing over the Third International to the "democratic imperialism" victorious of the war so to be able to enter the League of Nations.
The world of "peaceful coexistence" between imperialism and Stalinism was the world of Yalta in which the dissolved forces of the Fourth International, all ended up adapted to Stalinism shouting from the rooftops: "there are two blocs", "there are two blocs”… Meanwhile Stalinism gave survival to the world capitalist system by betraying every revolution that was within its reach.
Comrades,
During those years and decades, in hard struggles among tendencies, the left wing in the Fourth International arose, pushed by acute mass revolutionary processes, which during a stretch of the path of our world party gave correct and principled battles and left threads of continuity, as for example the lessons of the Portuguese and Chilean revolutions, the Cordobazo in Argentina, the fight against the Vietnam War in the USA. Of all of them, we must also affirm that by revising the theory of the Permanent Revolution and the program of the Fourth International, with the pseudo-theory of "democratic revolutions", they all ended up adapted to Stalinism, as happened with Morenoism and not to mention the American SWP, who today ended up becoming the US section of the CP of Havana.
This acute process of tendency struggle occurred first during the second postwar period, around the discussion about the class character of the deformed workers states that arose in Eastern Europe, and then it developed in the generalized uprising of 1968 -1974.
A large part of the Fourth International reached that enormous revolutionary uprising of 1968-1974 within the Communist Parties, with which it had to break, since that rise was a left-wing blow against Stalinism and the entire Yalta Agreement.
When 1968-1974 came, most of the forces of the Fourth International had played the role of appendix of Castroism, with Cuba used as a “Berlin Wall” to contain the socialist revolution in the Americas. It was a fundamental stronghold of Stalinism's policy of "peaceful coexistence" with US imperialism.
There is no doubt that Castroism played a key role in strangling the revolution in Latin America. They were the ones who proclaimed in Chile that it was possible to take power and make socialism "by peaceful means", as Fidel Castro proposed. That was what he said when he was in Chile to the workers and soldiers who sought to arm themselves to confront fascism. Chile and Latin America were drowned in a bloodbath.
“The key was that when the masses were defeated in 1968 -1974, the bureaucracy desperately sought capitalist restoration. The productive forces of the workers' states were shattered. With the arms race, the US had bankrupted the Soviet economy. More and more the USSR got into debt and more and more the IMF and Citibank lent money and controlled the economy of those states.”
The 1968-1974 revolutions were defeated, the mass ascent was closed and once that had happened, the Soviet bureaucracy said: “if another ascent like this one that we have just defeated comes, there will be no trace of our privileges left.”
Thus, at the end of the 1970s and during the 1980s, after cruel and harsh defeats of the proletariat, the Stalinist bureaucracies began to openly prepare the capitalist restoration in the USSR and China. The Fourth International had anticipated that unless a political revolution could triumph in the USSR that expelled the bureaucracy from the workers' states, transforming them into the trenches of the world revolution, the Stalinist bureaucracy would struggle to have property and become a new possessing class.
The key was that when the masses were defeated in 1968-1974, the bureaucracy desperately sought capitalist restoration. The productive forces of the workers' states were shattered. Through the arms race, the US had plunged the Soviet economy. The more the USSR and the worker states got into debt, the more the IMF and Citibank lent them money and controlled their economies.
In 1975 Den Xiao Ping signed a treaty to Nixon for the selling out of the Chinese working class and in the 1980s the USSR under Gorbachev started the Glasnost and Perestroika with which an open process of capitalist restoration began.
Many "Marxists" today turn a blind eye on this process of decomposition of the former workers states and the sinister counterrevolutionary role of Stalinism in that period. The old Maoist bureaucracy was in competition to see which gang of all of them would win the favors of US imperialism to enslave their own working classes. At the end of the 1970s China invaded Vietnam, which was subordinate to Moscow, and provoked a bloody war between workers' states; that was the starting point of capitalist restoration in both. This was a tragedy that left no trace of the socialist revolution in the Pacific, where US imperialism had been crushed by successive defeats of the masses, from China to Korea and from Korea to Vietnam.
In the West, the revolutionary uprising of 1968-1974 had already been left behind: the British miners were defeated, as was the Italian working class; the revolutionary tides of pro-Vietnam struggle in the US had receded; the black night of the military dictatorship had already descended in Latin America. The great revolutionary uprisings of 1968-1974 had been completed and the bureaucracy began a desperate search to hand over the workers' states before another revolutionary wave comes.
The surprise of everyone, when 1989 came, is that the statues of Lenin fell, the statues of the revolutionaries, and the workers no longer defended the USSR.
The renegades of Trotskyism could not explain this. They got angry and hid their own capitulations and betrayals. That is why 1989 is the year of the big bang. Don't be disoriented. All the "Yalta Trotskyism" parties splintered, though they really had huge influence in the vanguard. This happened to the MAS of Argentina, a powerful party that got Luis Zamora as a representative in the Congress and had more influence in the labor movement than all the currents of the FIT-U together today. The same happened to the French LCR, and to the American SWP.
That was because nobody could explain why the USSR fell in 1989. But neither could they explain why the Trotskyists had not been and were not involved during decades of fighting by the masses of the workers' states against Stalinism.
Trotskyism in the West stayed as an appendage of Stalinism, while in the East Stalinism was crushing the masses of the workers' states. Let's say it clearly. The catastrophe of the Marxist movement that started from there is due to the betrayal of its leaderships, not of the masses.
That's when our current was born, proposing in the year 1988 that the fate of the world working class was going to be defined in whether or not the USSR and other workers' states fell. In those years we still raised it in a confusing way, but the TBI of the MAS and the LIT-CI that engaged in that battle touched a sensitive nerve. The entire Trotskyist movement and its currents supported Gorbachev and his Perestroika. Everyone had said that Castroism was the "greatest revolutionary leadership in history”.
Why would starving workers within the USSR bled by imperialist plunder go to defend the workers' state? And why would the workers be Trotskyist if the Trotskyists were never with them when they faced the tanks of the Red Army that were crushing them on account of imperialism?
“When we were in Japan in a meeting with the leadership of the JRCL-RMF, they told us: ‘In 1956, when there was the massacre of the Red Army in Hungary, we broke away from the Japanese Communist Party (…) The Trotskyists (in reality, the Pabloites and Mandelists, we said) came to ask us to re-enter the CP when we had broken away from it."
When we were in Japan, in a meeting with the leadership of the JRCL-RMF, they told us: “In 1956, in times of the Red Army massacre in Hungary, we broke away from the Japanese Communist Party. We were the CP's propaganda commission. The Trotskyists (in reality, the Pabloites and Mandelists, we said) came to ask us to re-enter the CP when we had broken away from it. Thousands and thousands of militants broke away from Stalinism in the Pacific after the Hungarian massacre. And the "Trotskyists" came to tell us to support the crushing of the workers' and soldiers' councils in Budapest! We did not abide by their democratic-centralism…" The tragedy was that the ones who later capitalized on this break with Stalinism were the Hochiminhist and Maoist currents that later imposed new obstacles on the Japanese working class and the entire Pacific.
You will see that the JRCL-RMF, even now, insists that Trotskyism does not fight to set up vanguard parties. Precisely, they refer to this, that they wanted to dissolve them in the Communist Parties in the mid-1950s and early 1960s.
We are going to pay tribute to Trotsky affirming that Maoism and Hochiminhism were strengthened in the Pacific because the traitors of Pabloism and other liquidationists of the Fourth International were servants of Stalinism. A Fourth International ready to lead the processes of political revolution against the Stalinist scourge would have played a central and decisive role among the revolutionary masses of the Pacific.
We have to tell the truth. It is these liquidationist currents that kept the name and the flags of the Fourth International and that is why they all blew up in pieces in 1989.
Western Trotskyism has a big problem. It has a lot to explain in history. And there is no juggler's game or magician that can hide this "elephant" in the room with an optical illusion. We Trotskyists in the West failed the world proletariat.
Because from 1940 to 1989, the only thing Western Trotskyism did was submitting and subordinating itself to Stalinism. And, after 1989 they cried because the workers were “backward" and "not Trotskyist"! and they blamed the working class, dragged into misery and decomposition by the Soviet bureaucracy that gave out the workers' states, for their own betrayals and their own capitulations.
It was revisionism that once again liquidated Trotsky and his legacy, this time not physically, but his work, the greatest work of founding the Fourth International with a correct program and theory.
What has prevented socialist revolutions from being a fact at the end of the 20th century, what has allowed such a “backwardness” of the consciousness of the masses, is that our world party and our leaders and we were not up to the task, i.e. the fightings of the masses.
The masses staged a revolutionary wave in the 1950s. They fought in Hungary, in Poland, in Czechoslovakia, in Ukraine. The Belarusian auto workers rose up. They fought in St. Petersburg and against the Vietnam War, where US imperialism suffered the biggest beating in its history. They were raised in the French May, in the Industrial Cordons in Chile, in Bolivia, in the Cordobazo in Argentina. There were huge revolutions like in Iran and the Middle East. Beginning in the 1950s, huge anti-colonial revolutions also developed in Africa and the scoundrels of Pabloism called for support on all fronts of Stalinist class collaboration with the black bourgeoisies that handed them over. Don't lie anymore. Stop. It is long ago they have broken with the Fourth International that they still use because it is a place from where you can speak to the masses, without lowering your eyes.
Comrades,
What we Trotskyists have to affirm today is that, in that battle within the international labour movement, divided by imperialism between a layer of corrupt bureaucrats, settled in the labor aristocracy, and the vast majority of the working class, exploited and subjected to unprecedented sufferings, the counterrevolutionary fraction paid for by capital has conquered, for adaptations, revisionism and capitulations.
The struggle to re-found our world party means to return for the program of political revolution against all the privileges of the workers' bureaucracies and aristocracies, against their privileged salaries and theft in the mass organizations. It is a decisive battle to expel the bureaucracy from the trade unions and open the way to self-organization and workers' democracy in all the organizations of the struggling masses.
We must re-found the internationalist fraction of the world working class, that of Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, that of the Trotskyists who never surrendered in the concentration camps of the USSR, that of the founders of the Fourth International.
We must pick up the continuity threads of the correct partial battles that, even as centrists, correctly waged sectors and wings of “Yalta Trotskyism” and after 1989. It is in that fierce struggle among tendencies, factions, nuclei and parties that Marxism lives today.
Our world party and its currents have long ago crossed the Rubicon. The decomposition and submission to the Stalinist parties has even led to the organizational liquidation of the Fourth International.
Some time ago we learned of an event featuring a private security team hired by the PartidoObrero-led tyre union in Argentina; this team takes care of the country club of the union... it seems a lie, the Trotskyists running unions and hiring private security. When we found out about this we did not believe our tire worker comrades that were telling us the news. Afterwards we saw that the PTS leader of that union was beaten by those hirelings because he had different positions than the rest of the leadership!
We know this because we also had tasted it firsthand. With us it was not only about slander and amalgam, but also about blows to the head. It does not surprise us.
But we also know that next to this sector that has decomposed, there is a whole wing of the revolutionary movement that seeks a Marxist and scientific explanation for so much ignominy, failure and betrayals.
When he was alive, Trotsky himself affirmed that his most important battle was to give continuity to the battles of revolutionary Marxism in the 20th century, founding the Fourth International. Had it not been for this, not a trace of scientific socialism would have remained in history. It was that handful of Trotskyists who founded our world party who still give us time to get back on track. They did not capitulate. They did not adapt. They did not betray.
That is why the opportunists came to occupy the Fourth International, to speak from there to climb into the regime and make a career in the unions. But thousands of workers who seek to unite their struggle and make the socialist revolution also came and continue to arrive. Our task and our goal in this tribute to Trotsky is to fight hard so that these new generations of revolutionary workers find and destroy every lesson of opportunism, liquidation, careerism and declare war along with us on all those scoundrels, as Trotsky says, that “speak of pacifism without peace, of bread without revolution, of reforms without any reform for the masses”.
The Fourth International, as Trotsky said, does not rest on the apron-strings of the bourgeoisie, nor does it drink from the talks of the bourgeois parliamentarians and their precincts. The Fourth International does not speak to governments, it does not speak to the bourgeoisie, it does not speak to traitors. The Fourth International speaks to the workers, to those on the front lines, to the comrades of the rebellious Mexico, to the masses that resist in Syria. The Fourth International speaks to the heroic Iranian resistance. It speaks, today more than ever, to the black workers who have revolted the working class in the United States and that are a guarantee of stopping the future wars that US imperialism is preparing to get out of the impasse of the crisis of the capitalist system. It speaks to the Chinese workers who are struggling to regain their unions, to those in Japan who daily fight against the US bases, to the heroic American proletariat that is transforming itself into the iron fist of the world working class.
The Fourth International speaks to the miners and workers of Bolivia that are the future of the Latin American revolution. The Fourth International denounces the governments of the capitalists, the "siren songs" of the bourgeois parliaments and the trap of their plebiscites. The Fourth International unmasks at every step the sweetened forms of the dictatorship of capital. The Fourth International speaks only to the working class and in the language of the revolution.
“A small group like ours struggles to be a pivot for the revolutionary workers of the world to regroup their ranks and coordinate their combat. (…) If we manage to unite the working class every day and recover militant internationalism, in that combat we will create the best conditions to recover the Fourth International and refound it and set up vanguard revolutionary parties.
Comrades,
A small group like ours struggles to be a pivot for the revolutionary workers of the world to regroup their ranks and coordinate their combat. Fighting to restore militant internationalism as a daily combat in the workers' ranks, we fight for the American workers to unite with the workers of the Mexican maquilas, so that the workers of Syria break the siege and unite with the workers who are rebelling in Lebanon, Iraq and Tehran. We fight for the working class of Africa to rise up together with their brothers from New York, Pennsylvania, Portland. If we succeed in uniting the working class every day and recovering militant internationalism, in that combat we will create the best conditions to recover the Fourth International and refound it and set up revolutionary vanguard parties.
Our struggle is committed to that, to unite the scattered threads of continuity. The working class must put back on its feet a world fraction of the most exploited sectors of the working class, which are supported by the struggle and the revolutionary onslaught against the citadel of power, to defeat the aristocracies and labor bureaucracies that are the enemies that sell us out and leave us unarmed against the enemy from within the revolutions and struggles.
The great lesson that we want to draw in this day of tribute to Trotsky is to say what Comrade Liebknecht raised and what Trotskyists suffer: "the enemy is inside."
Every worker who is listening to me knows that what prevents him from fighting in his factory, what causes layoffs, isolated struggles, revolutions that are massacred, is the leaderships bought by the capitalists with the coins that fall from the wealth gained through the exploitation of the labor movement and the plunder of the colonial and semi-colonial world. Those corrupt leaderships bought with the money from the slavery of the planet's waged slaves, are responsible for surrendering us from within.
That is why we fight together with the workers who promote workers' democracy and the independence of workers' organizations with respect to the bourgeois states at every step. With them we fight for the self-organization of the masses and to conquer the weapons to fight fascism and defend ourselves from the attacks of the repressive forces. We fight tooth and nail to set up the bodies of power of the workers and the people in struggle because it is from there that the victory of the revolution is prepared in the pre-revolutionary or revolutionary periods.
The Fourth International disappeared and entered into crisis because it abandoned this revolutionary Soviet strategy, because it capitulated to the counterrevolutionary fraction of the workers' aristocracy and bureaucracies, because it got on its knees before them and thus left no traces of our movement.
But despite so much liquidationist policy, revisionism could not destroy the legacy, the program and the theory of Trotskyism, which did pass the test. In the hands of the new generation of revolutionaries, this program is going to get back on its feet. Because the working class is going to try again and is trying again.
Reformism can no longer give the working class anything else. This capitalist system is a catastrophe. New wars are being prepared. Bolshevism is already a necessity and history is looking for it to give the masses the leadership they deserve.
For our part, we want to be a pivot because there are hundreds and thousands of cadres in the world who seriously seek Trotskyism to lead the working class to victory.
Comrades,
We pay tribute here to Comrade Leon Trotsky. For us, this tribute surrounded by revolutionary and militant organizations of the world working class is an obvious symptom that enormous processes of radicalization have begun, which must be organized, coordinated and centralized at the international level to hit hard the general staff of the reformist left and bankrupt capitalism and pave the way for socialist revolution.
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Carlos Munzer with Abu Muad at the presentation of the book "Syria Under Fire" at the National Library of Argentina in 2015
Trotsky reading the newspaper of the American SWP:
"World Congress founds the Fourth International"
Mobilization of the “Association of victims, killed and wounded of the Senkata massacre” (Bolivia)
Mass Uprising in the USA
Sanders and Biden
Darya Mitina and Savas Matsas at the Argentina
PO Conference held in Buenos Aires in 2018
Tsipras of Syriza with Iglesias of Podemos
Lula and Haddad from the PT of Brazil
Ramón Castro, Fidel's brother, next to Mercader,
Trotsky's assassin
Lenin and Trotsky
Facsimile of Conference resolutions of foundation
of the IV International
Stalinist bureaucrats of the trade union of Greece
Rudolph Klement, Leon Trotksy, Yvan Craipeau, Jeanne Martis des Pallieres, Sara Weber and Jean van Heijenoort in 1933
Publication "Socialist Appeal"
Lenin at a Congress of the III International
German Revolution of 1918: Workers
and Sailors at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin
Karl Liebknecht
Trotsky in the Second Congress of the
Third Communist International, 1920
2008 Wall Street Stock Market Crash
Widespread famine in entire countries like those in Africa
Honduran and Salvadoran migrants making a chain
to cross the Rio Grande
A group of Syrian refugees awaiting to cross to Turkey
Mass graves in the US
World War I
The Storming of the Winter Palace in Russia (1917)
Rosa Luxemburg at a rally during
the German Revolution of 1918
Workers' militias in the Libyan revolution (2011)
Marikana miners' strike in South Africa (2012)
Paris Commune
Meeting on Leon Trotsky in Havana (May 2019)
August 2015: Kerry, Obama’s Secretary of State,
raising the US flag in Cuba
The left opposition in the USSR in Siberian exile in 1928
March 2016: Raúl Castro with Obama in Cuba
Fidel Castro with Nikita Krushchev, Stalin's successor
Alan Woods with Chávez
Trotskyist militants of the Fourth International
in Johannesburg, South Africa 1934
Leon Trotsky, founder of the IV International
and the Red Army of the USSR
Trotsky with León Sedov
Italian partisans during World War II
Soviet soldiers at the Battle of Stalingrad
Soviet workers confront the Nazi army in Stalingrad
Soviet workers confront the Nazi army in Stalingrad
Gorbachev with Reagan,
President of the United States, in 1987
The Soviet masses arriving in Berlin (1945)
French maquis during World War II
Greek partisans during World War II
Italian partisans during World War II
Rudolph Klement, one of the founders of the Fourth International, assassinated by Stalinism
Cuban Revolution, 1959
Bolivia: worker and peasant militias of the 1952 revolution
Bolivia: worker and peasant militias of the 1952 revolution
Abraham León, one of the founders of the IV International
1938: the magazine “Quatrieme Internationale”
announces the Founding Congress of the IV International
Ta Thu Thao, leader of the Vietnamese
section of the IV International
Leon Trotsky with Left Oppositionists of the USSR in 1927
Political revolution in East Germany in 1953
Political revolution in Hungary in 1956
Czechoslovakia, 1968
Trotsky with Jean Van Heijenoort
Yalta Pact between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin
Revolution in Portugal in 1974
Cordobazo (Argentina, 1969)
Fidel Castro with Pinochet in Chile (1970)
Military coup in Argentina in 1976
Mao and his successor, Deng Xiao Ping
The masses defeat US imperialism in Vietnam in 1975
Fighting in the US against the invasion of Vietnam
The Red Army invades Czechoslovakia
to crush the political revolution (1968)
Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989
Carlos Munzer intervention in the political plenary National JRCL-RMF in Japan (2019)
07/13/20: Mobilization of the Zengakuren youth and the JRCL-RMF to the Chinese Consulate in Japan denouncing the repression of the Hong Kong people
Budapest workers tear down Stalin’s statue
in the process of political revolution, Hungary 1956
French May in 1968
Revolution of the Industrial Cordons in Chile (1972)
Left Oppositionists of the USSR exiled in the 1930s
Trotsky exiled in Coyoacán, Mexico, in 1937
Leon Sedov Brigade in Syria
Iran: strike by Haft Tappeh sugar workers
Uprising of black people and workers in the US
Revolutionary combat in Lebanon
Mothers Wall in Portland, USA
Rosa Luxemburgo and Karl Liebknecht
Workers in the maquilas of Matamoros, Mexico
The masses surround the White House in the US
Leon Trotsky, founder of the Red Army
and the Fourth International
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