Argentina - Octubre 27, 2023

THE BANKRUPTCY OF THE FITU

Before the last elections, our current called on the PTS-FITU to promote the regroupment of the vanguard and those who are fighting. They could have done this by using their TV spots time to call for this re grouping in Jujuy, where the teachers had been fighting against the attack. But unfortunately they refused to do so. They simply ignored this course of action that we had proposed and, giving their cold shoulders to the fighting workers, they ended up covering the left flank of the electoral trap.

The first issue is about Palestine resisting the Zionist occupation, which burst in the middle of the campaign, to which Bregman responded, in the presidential debate, by sending greetings and condolences to the Zionist "civilians". What Congresswoman Bregman did not clarify is that there are no civilians in Israel, they are all armed settlers. Israel is a real US aircraft carrier in the Middle East. The fifth best armed army on the planet to crush and make disappear the Palestinian nation.

The PTS, in its bankruptcy, is incapable of recognizing that Hamas rules in Gaza, and as such it has its army. The PTS condemns Hamas aggression under the accusation of "terrorists", the same accusation made by the US and Netanyahu. The PTS salutes the fascist settlers and moves on to recognize the two-state policy. This it does while Zionist missiles keep falling on Gaza causing some thousand killings. Children, women and old people lie under the rubble. And finally, the PTS-FIT-U has not mentioned in any of its electoral propaganda the demands of the martyred Palestines. Their silence betrays them as accomplices of Zionism.
While hundreds of thousands are taking to the streets all over the world in support of Gaza and Palestine, Bregman, Castillo and Vilca send condolences to the fascist "civilians" of Israel, and accuse Hamas of being "terrorists" instead of recognizing it as a belligerent force. They deny and destroy the struggle for a free, secular, democratic and non-racist Palestine over the rubble of the Zionist enclave.

The second point is the Argentinean nation's break with imperialism and the IMF. This question is presented by Bregman, Castillo and Vilca to the workers vanguard and the class as a simple formality. The actual reason is that these people of the PTS-FITU, having assimilated to the bourgeois regime and its parliament, claim to represent the struggle against the International Monetary Fund and against the imperialist companies that plunder Latin America supported by dozens of US imperialism military bases of the US Southern Command throughout the continent, under the baton of General Laura Richardson, and part of the US imperialism fleet on the Peruvian coast. These people think that with five parliamentarians in the congress, a couple of marches to pressure the government and by voting their "progressive laws", they will disnown the foreign debt and break with the imperialist oppression.
This is the program of the students in the bourgeois university.

Now, the PTS-FITU is celebrating the fact that it obtained five deputies. We ask them, what are they celebrating in the midst of this catastrophe of the nation, a thousand times subdued and a working class torn apart in its ranks while the government and the bourgeoisie, under the command of the US imperialism, go on unmolested with their business?

Thus they have disarmed the workers and their vanguard, defeating them beforehand, and without a continental struggle, without actions of the working class in alliance with the peasants, separated from the American working class and without defeating the bourgeois, petty bourgeois and Stalinist leaderships. The PTS-FITU think it is possible to break with imperialism without attacking the property of the monopolies and their companies in the countryside and the city.
That is to say that they want to break with imperialism without colossal actions of the workers and the people poor with their methods of struggle, such as factory takeovers, picketing roadblocks and the revolutionary strike. Ultimately, only as it was done in Cuba and Vietnam, with the socialist revolution in a relentless struggle, can imperialism be broken with. Is there any other just road for this struggle? The PTS presents the anti-imperialist struggle as a peaceful, national demand that has nothing to do with the socialist revolution. The bankruptcy of the PTS-FIT-U denies the struggle for national liberation, its Latin American character and that only a workers' and popular government can guarantee, preparing a continental struggle, together with the US American working class that has been struggling.

The PTS and the FIT-U, speak of class independence but have just voted twenty-four laws to Massa and two of them together with Milei. They poison the head of the workers vanguard, sowing illusions in the progressive measures of the government and in its parliament. Liquidating the confidence of the vanguard and the working class in themselves and in their methods of struggle,  now "replaced" by a bloc of five socialist parliamentarians who from the parliament will "confront" the IMF and imperialism. That is why their campaign had as its central axis the socialist deputies of the FIT-U, PTS.

The PTS-FIT-U has not been the base of support for those who struggle, as in the northwest of Argentina, in Jujuy. On the contrary, it has been a dissolving element for the vanguard. The PTS and its partners of the PO, IS and the MST, even denied the vanguard a common campaign closing. The PO did had its in the Obelisk with a handful of militants, while the PTS did the same in Plaza San Martin in La Plata. A tragedy.
The disputes of these apparatuses of the left of the regime are above the needs of those who struggle, of the vanguard. They go in the opposite direction of any tendency towards the political and organizational independence of the working class. They are liquidators of the emergence of any Soviet-type organization, such as struggles coordinators and a workers' congress. They are enemies of marching on the CGT to impose a path to resume the struggle in the streets, the general strike until the government and its plan are defeated. They hide that in Cuba capitalism was restored under the leadership of the Castro brothers and now with Diaz-Canel, and that there have been millions marching in the streets of Cuba against the hunger and persecution that the nouveau riche of the Cuban CP have imposed. They do this while they meet with Frank Garcia Hernandez of the Cuban CP in Sao Paulo, Brazil, allowing him and his men to use the flag of Trotsky, when they are the ones who prevented a continental struggle from being organized and are part of the governments like Petro, Boric, which have prevented the possibility for the Latin American workers' revolutions to succeed, saying that socialism could not be done anymore. They subjugated the American working class to Sanders and Biden, as they had fone before with Obama. However, the Cuban CP is the same that hid Mercader, the murderer of comrade Leon Trotsky.

Parliamentary cretinism has no limits. When the working class is suffering a situation of total attack on its conquests, on its living conditions and in a state of desperation, subjected to the permanent plundering of their wages by inflation, with dozens of defeats and deviations that the Peronist trade union bureaucracy imposed on it and where the PTS did not allow the vanguard to organize and left its hands tied to confront the attack as a whole, this current celebrates a fifth deputy! A party for the apparatuses of the parliamentary left over the misery and hunger of the workers and the people poor.

Ahead is the runoff between the candidates Massa and Milei who are two variants responding to the bosses. It is the consummation of the trap of the democracy of the rich where the workers are led to vote for their executioners. Bregman assures that Milei and Massa are different. Are they suggesting that there is a "progressive" or "democratic" camp of the bosses? Yes. The struggle "against the threat of the right wing",  must be developed as allies of Massa, Bregman's good friend, according to this left that has prevented the vanguard from organizing itself so that it can weigh on the national scene and not be subjected as today to this opprobrious regime.

The working class needs a revolutionary party that stands up for the fights that lie ahead over the rubble of the leaderships of class conciliation, agents of some bourgeois variant.
Because the last word has not been said. The working class did not surrender, it was subdued.
What today is more urgent than ever is to set up a revolutionary party, that of the Fourth International and its program of 1938. In this sense, in view of the bankruptcy of the FITU and the PTS, to conquer this party is a question of life and death for the vanguard and the working class.