Brazil - September 10, 2023

2nd "Leon Trotsky" Meeting in Sao Paulo, Brazil

Convergence between Trotskyist renegades and recycled Stalinists

Correspondence by Walter Montoya of the International Workers' Organizer Board Committee

Hugo Parreira for Luta pela Base

The united party of a new reformism holds its second congress

In the footsteps of the old social democracy and the Stalinist CPs

As a continuation of the 1st. Havana Meeting of 2019 and the Virtual Meeting of 2021 organized from Brazil, now the 2nd Leon Trotsky Meeting was held in Sao Paulo, which once again brought together the whole range of the renegade currents of Trotskyism in the world together with the Stalinist currents.

It was attended by the currents of the LIT-CI, the UIT-CI, the International Marxist Current led by Alan Woods, who years ago handed over the Trotskyist Transitional Programme to Chávez to show him as "socialist", the FIT-U of Argentina (PTS, PO, MST and Izquierda Socialista/UIT-CI), Altamira's Política Obrera current, the currents coming from Spartakism and the EEK of Greece. Most of these currents that are tendencies within the PSOL of Brazil played a prominent role, including all the Mandelite tendencies, which are the self-styled "anti-capitalists"of the French NPA. The former ISO from the USA, the SWP from England and Die Linke from Germany also intervened.

As we can see, almost the whole range of the renegades of Trotskyism came together in this event which was directly directed by the Communist Party of Cuba, through Frank García Hernández. This leader of Cuban Stalinism is the same one who in 2019 organized the 1st Meeting on Trotsky in Havana.

This 2nd Meeting was held 83 years after the assassination of Leon Trotsky by a Stalinist agent. These former Trotskyists met with the Stalinist parties that murdered Trotsky and the Leninist Bolsheviks.

For a week they met on the premises of the Pontifical Catholic University of Sao Paulo. Throughout 13 symposiums and 5 round tables they carried out, on the basis of falsifications, the task of transforming Leon Trotsky into just another figure of the Russian revolution, liquidating his greatest work which was the foundation of the Fourth International and his theoretical, political and programmatic legacy.

It was new meeting that advances in the centralization of the united party of former-Trotskyists with the Stalinists, the executioners of the international revolutionary movement

As in 2019 and 2021, the event was led directly by the Communist Party of Cuba, through Frank García Hernández. It is around this man from Havana, a Castroite leader of the CP, that Trotsky is claimed as a harmless icon, together with the sellouts of the Fourth International to cover with red garb the Castroite party received with honors and sheltered as a hero Mercader, the assassin of comrade Leon Trotsky.

Frank García Hernández, of the "Communists Cuba" current openly stated that Cuba is still a "workers' state in transition to capitalism" and that "capitalist restoration has not yet been completely consummated". This was a key point of the Encuentro, since it is the former Trotskyists who legitimize and turn their backs on Castroism, hiding the fact that the capitalist restoration on the island was imposed with hunger, super-exploitation, savage repression and prison for the working class. They hide the fact that private property has been re-established, that the maquilas are being set up and that Puerto Mariel is a free zone, without taxes, for the juicy business of the imperialist transnationals. Meanwhile the new Cuban bourgeoisie is getting richer in association with imperialism in tourism, nickel mining, oil, etc., and the Cuban workers receive miserable wages and do not even have enough to eat, as we saw in the days of 11J 2021, on which more than 700 political prisoners are still being held and sentenced to dozens of years in prison.

It was here that both those who agree and those who deny that Cuba is still a workers' state have disciplined themselves before the Castroite leader, in order to give him a revolutionary garb. That is why the conference referred to Cuban "Trotskyism", trying to pass Frank Hernandez off as its continuator. For this they brought the son of one of the founders of "Trotskyism" in Cuba, Rafael Acosta, Castrist leader of the José Martí National Library in Havana. But the truth is that this supposed "continuity" they claim is that of a current that spent some years fighting alongside Trotskyism, but which during the 1930s adhered to the POUM, that had broken with the Fourth International. Then they claimed "Posadism", which became Castroist in 1959, after the Cuban revolution, joining Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement and then the CP, supported by the leadership of Michel Pablo, the usurper of the Fourth International. But in the mid-1960s all of them were expelled by the Stalinists.

This Second Meeting showed that Frank Hernandez does not aim to build any revolutionary party, much less a Trotskyist one, since neither he nor any of the former Trotskyists who participated in this event, fight to build factory committees, independent trade unions, nor to free political prisoners, help the exploited to Rose up and defeat the Cuban capitalist government of the restorer Diaz Canel, with the method of civil war, as the program of Trotskyism and the Fourth International puts forward.

But the social-imperialist currents such as the SWP in England, which were Corbyn's best militants in the Labour Party of the imperialist pirates, also participated in this event, passing him off as an "anti-imperialist" and "anti-militarist" politician. They are the servants of AngloAmerican and other British transnationals plundering the African continent and the world. They are the ones who pushed in the US for the dissolution of their group, the ISO, to join the "Democratic Socialists of America" (DSA) of Bernie Sanders, i.e. the "left" of the US Democratic Party.

Thus the now defunct US ISO intervened again in this Second Meeting with its leader Paul Le Blanc, who played a fundamental role, since he was positioned as the "spokesman" of US Trotskyism.

Le Blanc, usurping Trotskyism and its legacy, went so far as to claim that the struggle of the American working class against the war, the "Occupy Wall Street" movement, the struggle of the black people of "Black Lives Matter", are today expressed and organized in Sanders' DSA. With which they did nothing but subjugate the revolutionary processes inside the US imperialist beast to the butchers of the Democratic Party and the murderous Biden administration.

And he dared to assert, without being confronted during the symposium discussing the "History of Trotskyism", that the SWP of Trotsky and Cannon had left the necessary lessons for the construction of a vanguard party in the USA.

And he affirmed, without blushing, that it was the ISO that gave continuity to the Fourth International, to conclude that "today Trotskyism lives and strengthens itself in the workers' vanguard within Sanders' DSA", that is, within the Democratic Party of the butcher Biden with whom they govern. Not even Stalin dared so much in his falsification of Lenin, as Le Blanc does with Trotskyism.

Isabel Loureiro of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation of Brazil and Latin America, which belongs to the German party Die Linke (The Left), also took part. During the round table discussion on "The German Revolution of 1923-24", she clearly stated that she is neither a Trotskyist nor an expert on Trotskyism, but has serious disagreements with the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky. Loureiro represented the German social-imperialist current Die Linke, that is, the successor of Honecker's Stalinist party (SED) of the old East Germany, mortal enemies of Bolshevism and its continuity, Trotskyism and the Fourth International. The fact is that Die Linke today governs in several German states, is represented in the German parliament and in the EU as a majority of the Left Eurodeputies bloc. This party, together with Melenchon (France Insoumise) and Varufakys (former finance minister of Syriza of Greece), as a bloc of European social-imperialist currents, were the ones who elaborated the so-called "Plan B", to propose that in the imperialist Maastricht "A social Europe is possible". Following in the footsteps of Syriza and Podemos in Spain, they are preparing to sustain their policy of class collaboration in the heart of European imperialism, in the face of a future outbreak of German social democracy. These are the ones absolutely responsible, together with the Stalinist trade union bureaucracy of the CGT, for bringing the revolutionary struggle of the French working class and its youth of the cités to a dead end, saving the murderer Macron and the slaveowners' regime of the Fifth Republic. These currents of the imperialist Maastricht left are which prevent the unification of the struggle in France with the struggle in the French colonies in martyred Africa as in Mali, Niger, now in Gabon and in all the French overseas colonies.

In this way the destroyers of the Fourth International disciplined to Stalinism and the US and European social-imperialist currents, usurping the clean banners of Trotskyism, legitimize and cover up for the new billionaires of the Cuban Communist Party who have become the new Cuban bourgeoisie. Thus they have falsified and destroyed the program, the strategy and the whole revolutionary legacy of the Fourth International in order to erase the river of blood that exists between Trotskyism and Stalinism, to set up a common party with the Stalinist scourge that has imposed on the American continent a "new 1989" (the year in which Stalinism consummated the capitalist restoration in the USSR, China and other former worker states). And when the revolutionary struggle for the seizure of power by the workers and peasants is being stabbed in the back, making the masses of Cuba and the continent believe that "socialism" is the hunger and misery suffered by the exploited of the island, the former Trotskyists find themselves embraced with the betrayers of the socialist revolution.

Currents coming from Spartakism and the EEK of Greece also participated in this 2nd Meeting. The latter, together with the PO of Argentina (including the Política Obrera Tendency of Altamira) used years ago to hold conferences and to discuss setting up a common International with a representative of the butcher Putin, Darya Mitina of the Unified Communist Party (OKP) of Russia. In the debate on the war in Ukraine, the Spartacist currents of the Tendency for the Fourth International and Revolutionary Regroupment fervently intervened for Putin's victory. And it could be seen how the LIT and the UIT fraternally discussed about the war in Ukraine, where they claim to defend the Ukrainian working class, together with those who march in Putin's tanks and fight for the triumph of the Russian invasion, as if they had only small tactical differences.

Actually, the LIT and the UIT make their solidarity campaigns in general and reduce everything to calling for arms for Ukraine... from NATO. Meanwhile, their opponents at symposiums and discussion tables, like the Spartacists, put it to them that "you can't be Trotskyist without supporting Russia in the war against NATO". The one and the other trampled on the programme of Trotskyism and the Fourth International. But all together they concealed and still conceal the indefinite general strike that the workers of Mariupol, in the territories under the occupation of the butcher Putin, are calling for starting from September 10. The fact is that, to tell the truth, the war in Ukraine exposes that both "wings" of this single party of Stalinists and Trotskyist renegades are enemies of the struggle for the proletarian leadership of the war, of the struggle for the national liberation of the Ukrainian nation, of the struggle for a soviet and independent Ukraine and, obviously, of the struggle for the restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Ukraine, Russia and in the whole of the former USSR.

The LIT-CI is not marginal at all, it is the leadership of the CSP-Conlutas which groups more than 4 million workers in Brazil and of the International Trade Union Network of Solidarity and Struggle, together with the anarcho-stalinist central CGT of Spain and the "anti-capitalists" of Solidaires in France, representatives of 80 trade union centers and unions of the world. These forces should be ready to extend the struggle of the working class of Mariupol and its call for a strike, which aims to generalize it to the whole Ukraine in order to fight for the proletarian leadership of the war, as the first step to unite the ranks of the working class of the whole Ukraine and Russia, to break the subjugation to Zelensky and the wretched Ukrainian oligarchy, and to defeat the butcher Putin. This raises more than ever that the strike in Mariupol should be a banner of struggle throughout Europe and that it is clearly within reach that this should be a major task of the CSP Conlutas and the International Trade Union Network, which would meet in its congress from September 7 to 12 in Sao Paulo.

It is also essential to point out that the great absentees throughout this entre 2nd Leon Trotsky Meeting have been the Syrian masses and the new uprisings of the resistance, with a generalized uprising against the dog Bashar, Putin, Turkey, Iran, etc., who work on behalf of US and European imperialism... While the entire world left was slandering them, the Syrian have masses took to the streets again.

Those who yesterday swore themselves to be fighters of the revolution in Syria and the Middle East, like the LIT and the UIT, today call for silence. In Syria, their representatives were the generals without battle of the Free Syrian Army. Today the masses are returning to combat in the areas controlled by the fascist al-Assad and under Putin's bombardment and, particularly, they are coming out facing the surrenderers of the revolution, the bourgeoisie of the FSA, Turkey, the Kurdish bourgeoisie and the Stalinist PKK and all the fractions that stabbed their revolution from inside. The reason is the Stalinist factions and most of the former Trotskyists of this single party, have supported and still support the genocidal al-Assad and Putin. The silence of the LIT and the UIT is so as not to make their allies uncomfortable.

Lora's POR also participated in this meeting. It does not attract attention. They presented themselves as "the only current in the world that had not capitulated to Stalinism". But, without going any further, they are the ones who years ago voted in the Mining Congress to support the jackal Khadafy and in the last few years supported and supported the coup of Áñez in 2019.

For its part the PTS of Argentina has broken with Trotskyism to kneel before the Cuban CP. Particularly the PTS makes real in this II Meeting what it has been longing for years, when they dedicated themselves to writing rivers of ink about the convergences between the Stalinist Antonio Gramsci and Leon Trotsky, bringing to life the single party of former Trotskyists and Stalinists, burying the counterrevolutionary role of Castroism and hiding the revolutionary program of Trotskyism.

Most of the internal tendencies of the PSOL in Brazil that are now part of the Lula-Alckmin government also participated, including all the Mandelite tendencies, self-styled "anti-capitalists", as well as the International Marxist Current led by Alan Woods, who years ago handed over the Trotskyist Transitional Program to Chávez in order to disguise him as "socialist".

The UIT (International Workers' Union), which in Brazil broke with the PSOL a short time ago, now takes a "critical" stand on the politics of class collaboration, speaking in the name of "orthodox Trotskyism". But they silence that they were promoters of the "10 million votes for Chávez" before, and now they come from calling to vote critically for the "progressive bourgeoisie" in Peru, Chile, Colombia and all over the continent. Now the Corrente dos Trabalhadores Socialistas, the Brazilian current of the UIT, who were inside the PSOL since its foundation in 2004, in this Meeting are filling their mouths saying that they "never disciplined themselves to the majority policy of the PSOL", but their pulse did not tremble to put the working class at the feet of the PT and the PSOL in Brazil by calling to vote for the broad front of Lula-Alckmin in the second round. The fact is that this 2nd Meeting clearly and openly ratified the common point that all those who participated have in common: the defense of the politics of class collaboration, of calling on the working class to support their "democratic" executioners. In other words, they are reissuing Stalinist politics, thus demonstrating that they have all disciplined themselves to Castro-Stalinism, to Frank García Hernández, Paul Le Blanc, Die Linke and Bernie Sanders.

We must tell the truth! All the currents that are grouped together in this Meeting, although they disguise it as an electoral “tactic” against the “ultra-right”, politically supported the vote for Lula-Alckmin in the second round in Brazil, and the PSOL integrates the government with Ministers and supports it in Parliament and Legislatures! Thus ends the “tactic” of calling the workers to support the “democratic” bourgeoisies! A true scam against Trotskyism and revolutionary Marxism, passing off Stalinist politics as Trotskyist politics.

The II Leon Trotsky Meeting in San Pablo:

 A true political scam against revolutionary Marxism

After decades of revisionism of Marxism and holding Stalinism on their shoulders, now the renegades of Trotskyism in all its variants are centralizing their forces together with Stalinism to destroy any continuity of the Fourth International and to prevent any tendency of revolutionary internationalist action of the vanguard of the proletariat from leading to the rise of the world party of socialist revolution, the Fourth International, in the midst of the bankruptcy of imperialist capitalism.

In this Second Meeting nothing more was done than liquidating the program of the Fourth International of fight to the death against Stalinism, social democracy, the worker aristocracies and the union bureaucracies. They presented the struggle of Trotskyism against Stalinism as if they were “ideological” or “theoretical” differences, liquidating the revolutionary legacy of Trotsky and the Fourth International, which called for confronting those counterrevolutionary executioners, servants of imperialism with civil war, that is, with the political revolution to overthrow the Soviet bureaucracy and once again transform the USSR into a bastion of world revolution.

They erased with a stroke of a pen that, for fighting for that policy, Stalinism persecuted, imprisoned and murdered the Trotskyists, starting with Comrade Trotsky himself. The thing is that, although they appear in “different trenches”, in this new Meeting, the liquidators of the Fourth International once again confirmed that they have become neo-Stalinist currents.

We have to tell the truth! All the currents that are grouped in this Meeting, even if they disguise it as unique, have embraced the policy defined by Fidel Castro: "Socialism is no more, even in Cuba" and revolution as an immediate task is not posed anywhere in the world. They have subjected the working class to their executioners with the farce that "it is possible to achieve better living conditions", in the midst of the greatest catastrophe of the world capitalist system.

The renegades of Trotskyism together with Stalinism reincarnate the policy of class collaboration, the old recipe of Stalinism of supporting the "progressive bourgeois" or "democratic camps" in order to "confront the right wing" and "fascism", subjecting the proletariat to a section of its executioners and liquidating any policy of class independence.

That is why, once again, the former Trotskyists kept silent, in the arms of Frank Hernandez, about both the historic betrayals of Castro-Stalinism to the world revolution and the surrender of Cuba to imperialism, as well as the stabs in the back that the traitorous leaderships have given to the revolutionary struggles of the workers and oppressed of the continent, as in the USA, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, as well as in Ukraine, France, Syria, and the new struggles of the exploited in Black Africa. We see this not only with the Sanders party in the USA supporting Biden, but also with the PSOL governing together with Lula-Alckmin. It is the same recipe they applied in Chile, with the excuse of confronting Piñera and the regime of the Constitution of '80, they all ended up at the feet of the Pinochetista Constituent Assembly scam, while in Peru they called to vote for Castillo or for Petro in Colombia.

The renegades of Trotskyism collaborate in sustaining the deviations imposed on the revolutionary processes that developed throughout the continent. That is why in all the symposiums they have silenced the strategy of Trotskyism which, against all politics of class collaboration, fights for the emergence of armed soviets for the triumph of the mass struggles and the socialist revolution. Thus, they put forward Stalinism's pseudo-theory of "revolution in stages", telling the working class that a whole stage of struggle for "more democracy" and for new gains lies ahead of it, against the "reactionary" bourgeoisie, in the midst of the collapse of the decomposing capitalist system.

An open break with the theory-program of the Permanent Revolution of Trotskyism.

Walter Montoya
Hugo Parreira