March 25, 2024

On the centenary of Lenin's death, the EEK of Greece, the DIP of Turkey and neo-Stalinists hold an international meeting, where they proscribe and hide Trotsky and the Leninist Bolsheviks

The Mediterranean Conference: an amalgam of ex-Trotskyists and Stalinists that aims at leaving no stone upon stone of the Fourth International

Traitors and liquidators, Hands off Lenin's Bolshevism and his legacy!

On January 21, 2024, on the anniversary of Lenin's death, a virtual conference was held on "Lenin's legacy" organized by the Christian Rakovsky Socialist Center, a joint venture by the EEK- Workers Revolutionary Party of Greece, and the DIP- Workers Revolutionary Party of Turkey.

In this conference, different speakers from different countries of Europe, Russia and Latin America participated, who call themselves Trotskyists, like those mentioned above, or like Osvaldo Coggiola, a militant of the PO of Argentina until its rupture, or Opción Obrera of Venezuela (another party of the now dissolved CRCI, an international grouping gathering together the PO of Argentina, the DIP and the EEK). There were also others openly Stalinist like Iosif Abrahamson, and Darya Mitina, a Putin official whom they want to paint as a repentant Stalinist, and Frank García Hernández, leader of the Communist Youth of the Cuban CP, whom they pass off as "opposition wing" and "Trotskyist section". That is to say, it was a conference directed and organized by two official Trotskyist parties of Turkey and Greece (which were part of the international of the Workers Party until its rupture in 2019), together with Stalinist groups which they want to pass off as "left and repentant" wings of Stalinism, or directly as "Trotskyists".

After 8 hours of uninterrupted expositions, without debates or counterpoints, the only thing that became clear was that there was a political agreement to dent the revolutionary edge in the figure of Lenin, to proscribe the Left Opposition and Trotskyism, the true continuity of Bolshevism in the resistance, and to hide the crimes of Stalin and his clique, such as his abominable pseudo theory of socialism in one country and the assassination of all the members of the leadership of the Bolshevik Party at the hands of the Stalinist scum. Thus, falsifying Lenin, outlawing Trotsky and sweeping under the carpet the aberrations of Stalinism, this single-party Conference of Stalinists and ex-Trotskyists developed, trying to erase the river of blood that separates the Fourth International from the Communist Parties that surrendered the Workers States to capitalist restoration, committing the most brutal crimes against the vanguard and the revolutionary masses. Their objective is that no vestiges of the Fourth International and its program remain, so that it becomes impossible to settle accounts with the traitors and exploiters. This demolition of the Fourth and its program is a task to which the liquidators of Trotskyism have been dedicated for years, soiling its clean banners by taking them to the mire of class collaboration. This conference was a meeting of the agents of Stalinism, who try to guise themselves as Trotskyists. And it is this imposture what we want to expose here.

The single party among ex-Trotskyists and various neo-Stalinists is once again centralizing in Athens, to support Putin and the new Cuban bourgeoisie

This conference is a continuity of other meetings, encounters and conferences held by these same groups, or their sister groups in different countries. For example, the EEK, the DIP and the PO of Argentina organized the Mediterranean Conferences, in 2013, 2014 and in 2018. One of the most nefarious characters who took part in those meetings and also attended this meeting in 2024 was Daria Mitina, a real "minister without portfolio" of Putin, she is a leader of the Unified Communist Party of Russia, appendix of the official Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF). Another participant who has been also meeting with EEK and DIP along more than 10 years now, is Iosif Abraham, a self-confessed admirer of Stalin, from the Russian Communist Party, a collateral of the CPRF, Zyuganov's party.

Mitina intervened in the Conference with a recorded video, because she was attending an act of homage to Lenin with other Stalinists in Moscow. Her message was to justify Putin's criminal intervention in Ukraine, arguing that "The undisputed record, in terms of degradation and extinction, is the former Soviet Ukraine that has distinguished itself in the field of decommunization", wanting to disguise Putin's actions as an anti-imperialist fight against fascist forces. She repeats in her social networks that "Russia is liberating and denazifying Ukraine" and her party has taken actions before the European chancelleries in Russia for "arming the Nazis in Kiev". Even more, on the second anniversary of the criminal Russian invasion of Ukraine, Mitina published a photo of "Borotba" (an Ukrainian Stalinist group, which has published an arsenal of articles against Trotsky and Trotskyism) presenting Putin's white troops as heirs of the "red army", next to a photo of Trotsky and other Ukrainian members of the Left Opposition such as Antonov-Ovseenko, together with Kliment Voroshilov, an ally of Stalin, one of the organizers of the Cheka and member of the CPSU Central Committee from 1921 to 1961. With respecto to that photo montage, the Borotba Stalinists comment: "The struggle started by our great-grandfathers continues! Ukraine will be liberated from NATO and all those bastards! We remember our roots! Happy day to all involved! Glory to the Red Army and its heirs!”. We are not surprised at Mitina, who supported the annexation of Crimea at the hands of Putin in 2014 and called for annexing the Donbass as well as to founding "Novorossia", a perfidious Stalinist popular front policy to divide the ranks of the Ukrainian workers.

Not a word was said at this conference by the Russian speakers about al-Assad, the Iranian theocracy and Putin, after martyring the Syrian masses by drowning the revolution in blood with more than 600,000 murdered, today guarding the Golan Heights for the state of Israel, and maintaining the siege of Gaza, without having sent a single man to fight, nor fired a single bomb against Zionism. On the contrary, these former Trotskyists and their friends the neo-Stalinist currents, lackey of imperialism, want to pass Putin off as "anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist".

At this meeting in Athens there was also Frank Garcia Hernandez, an eminent leader of the Communist Party Youth, who presented his 10 norms for setting up a "new" communist party in Cuba, with independent trade unions, while he silences that capitalism has already been restored on the island, and speaks of a "bureaucracy in the government", without even putting forward a program consistent with his scandalous position. Because if he believes that in today's Cuba, where the US imperialism flag flies and imperialism and the new Castro bourgeoisie do fabulous businesses, there is a bureaucratized workers' state, he should put forward the program of Trotsky and the Fourth International, which was: civil war to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR, restore the power of the soviets and transform the workers' state into a lever of world revolution. But that's not the case.

This true agent of Stalinism that the former Trotskyists want to camouflage, uses to cry out to the new Castro bourgeoisie for "more democracy", positioning himself as their advisor, while they keep dozens of political prisoners in the dungeons of the regime, while they ban the political parties of the exploited, repress and imprison anyone who dares to question the rotten CCP and the new Cuban bourgeoisie, demanding from them the payment of a decent salary, the supply of electricity or a simple plate of food. "Canel's dictatorship is going to fall!" says now García Hernández cynically in social networks, to adopt his imposture as an oppositionist. And how is it going to fall? Is he organizing the general strike, the workers' councils? Of course not. He seeks to frighten the masses by threatening that if this government falls at the hands of a popular rebellion, a pro-US imperialism dictatorship will come to restore capitalism, when the island is already ruled by a real anti-working class dictatorship of the CCP, which has sealed a pact with the US imperialists! Hernandez only seeks to position himself as a "critical and oppositional wing", advising his friends to save the party from the Stalinist bourgeoisie of Havana. The new Castroite bourgeoisie with Diaz Canel and his counterrevolutionary Communist Party are going to fall by means of a new workers and peasants’ revolution of the armed masses, and this time with Soviet democracy and placing Cuba as a bastion of the Latin American revolution and not of its betrayal. Because what is necessary in Cuba to get the masses out of the misery of capitalist restoration and imperialist plunder is a new social revolution to overthrow the bourgeoisie and impose the restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat under revolutionary ways, re-expropriating both the new “gusanos” of Havana and the imperialist pirates.

If Frank Hernández is not with Putin and the Díaz Canel government in Cuba, let him show what Trotskyist newspaper he is selling in Cuba, how many leaflets he has distributed in the factories of Havana arguing that independent trade unions must be formed and what work he is doing to organize the rank and file of the Cuban armed forces to set up a committee of soldiers to overthrow this government of hunger and misery for the masses, and of surrender of the nation's wealth to imperialism. Because while he is playing hide-and-seek and writing norms to pose as a "Trotskyist" or "left wing of the CCP", and participating in teleconferences giving a cold shoulder to the sufferings of the Cuban masses, the latter are once again mobilizing for the demands of electricity and food to the cry of "We are hungry, milk for the children!”

On the centenary of the death of Vladimir Lenin, there was a new meeting of the single party of Stalinists and former Trotskyists. Tell me who you are hanging out with and I will tell you what you are....

Although the ex-Trotskyists want to dress up the Stalinists as Leninists... Stalinists they remain

Although this Conference was organized by groups that claim to be Trotskyist, any revolutionary who looks at it and reads the interventions that took place in it will be powerfully struck by a fact that, being so enormous, cannot go unnoticed. The fact is, in this conference on Lenin's legacy… Leon Trotsky, the Leninist-Bolsheviks and the Fourth International, that is to say, Bolshevism in the resistance, were hidden and outlawed.

As they have been doing for years, in this conference, the sellouts of the Fourth International subordinated to Stalinism, have revised the program and the theory of revolutionary Marxism, castrating its revolutionary content and disguising the Stalinist program in Marxist garb. Thus, they raised a cult to Lenin's personality, to his "ideas" and "legacy", but they presented a Lenin adapted to the "good manners" of the "cultured" and "professorial" bourgeois circles, transforming him into an inoffensive icon and hiding above all his greatest struggle, which was to found the Third International in the combat of Kienthal and Zimmerwald against the treason of social democracy which in the imperialist war had gone over to the camp of imperialist counterrevolution. Just as years later Trotsky and the Trotskyists fought to recover the Third International and later founded the Fourth International, Bolshevism in the resistance, and stood up facing the treason of Stalinism which had usurped the workers state and liquidated the best Bolshevik elements, destroying Lenin's party and the Third International.

This meeting of the new single party of Stalinists and ex-Trotskyists, as we have said, sought to "sweeten" the legacy and the figure of Lenin to make him harmless, kept a shameful silence on the crimes of Stalin and outlawed Trotsky, the Fourth International and its program of political revolution to overthrow the bureaucracy fighting hard to recover the Third International, and transform the USSR once again into a bastion of the world revolution, liquidating the perks, the privileges and the bureaucracy itself, as an excrescence of the workers state.

But the sun cannot be covered with a finger. However much the false Trotskyists may want to reconcile Stalinism with Trotskyism, the river of blood that separates us cannot be erased. Suffice it to say that in 1940 the only member of the central committee of the Bolshevik party that had seized power in the USSR who was still alive was the murderer Stalin. The fact is, as Nadya Krupskaya, Lenin's companion, denounced, if Lenin had not died in 1924, Stalin would have assassinated him. Because to impose his counterrevolutionary policy of socialism in a single country, and to strangle the world revolution, it was necessary not only to assassinate the leaders of the internationalist fraction of the world working class that showed that it was possible to take power by challenging the imperialist domination of the planet; it was also necessary for him also to try to liquidate any hint of militant internationalism in the world proletariat aiming to unite it as a single fist to hit the exploiters. This was the legacy of Lenin and the Third International, which Trotskyism struggled to recover: the demonstration that it was possible to take power in a country, and that this power only succeeded or was maintained as an episode of the international revolution on condition it managed to extend to a world level.

It really makes one's skin crawl that in this meeting on the centenary of Lenin's death it wss hidden the fact that in the Moscow trials, in the concentration camps of Stalinism and in the Spanish Civil War, tens of thousands of Trotskyists were murdered at the hands of the Stalinist scum, such as Trotsky himself, his son Leon Sedov and Rudolph Klement, to mention only a few examples. And after outlawing and silencing Trotsky and the Fourth International and the Trotskyists who died in the Stalinist concentration camps shouting "Long live Trotsky"... These imposters announce with great fanfare that they will hold a new Leon Trotsky meeting in Argentina.

A new meeting of former Trotskyists and Stalinists, and that makes dozens already... a real international in action

Beyond their nuances, the ex-Trotskyists have subordinated themselves to the policy of García Hernández and Mitina, the friends and advisors of the nouveau riche of the Cuban CP, who starve and repress the masses, and of Putin who represses, persecutes and imprisons the Russian workers, while he is massacring the masses in Ukraine and Syria on behalf of imperialism.

This was a meeting of great importance, where once again former Trotskyists and Stalinists were centralized. Even the International Campaign for the liberation of Georges Abdallah of Lebanon was officially present. Thus, they brought to this meeting the weight and prestige of the figure of Georges Abdallah, one of the most important leaders of the PFLP, who has been imprisoned for 35 years and is a hero for the resistance.
It was a new meeting of the New International that the ex-Trotskyists have brought to its knees before Stalinism. And to justify their surrendering the Fourth International and their submission to the Stalinists, they want to convince the vanguard that there are sectors of Stalinism with which to converge. They even went so far as to affirm, like the PO of Argentina and the EEK of Greece, that the aforementioned Mitina was part of "that sector of Stalinism that is rethinking and drawing lessons from its actions".

This was a meeting of currents that call themselves Trotskyists with recalcitrant Stalinist Communist Parties that have massacred in Syria, betrayed the European proletariat, invaded Ukraine with Putin and surrendered Cuba to capitalism. Against all of them, we Trotskyists fight to recover the Fourth International from the hands of those who have handed it over to Stalinism, who have led our world party into the mire of ignominy and betrayal. That is why the struggle to re-found the Fourth International is inseparable from recovering its clean banners.

Nadia Briante and Milenka Lopez
For the Editorial Board of The International Workers' Organizer

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