October 27, 2022

International Correspondent

Letter to the Marxists of Japan

Comrades of the JRCL-RMF
Comrade Kihara

We have received your note in response to the translations we have done so far of book the on Ukraine. In your note, you informed us that you have sent us the Ukrainian letter from the JRCL OrgBureau dated on May 2. This statement has already been sent to all leaders of FLTI groups abroad and is being distributed there. 
Your inflexible struggle against Putin's monstrous war of aggression and denunciation of leftists who forgot proletarian internationalism is shared by all our militants.

As it could not be otherwise, internationalist revolutionary Marxists find each other in the same trench of combat against Putin's counterrevolutionary forces, with the Ukrainian working class, who provides the dead and the worst sacrifices to face the invasion, while the Ukrainian oligarchy and Zelensky, at every step, attack them from behind by adopting anti-worker measures of lay-offs and attacking their conquests.
The Ukrainian proletariat has received the greatest help in their struggle, which is the uprising of the Russian youth and workers who refuse to kill their siblings, who, not many years ago were part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, handed over to imperialism by Stalinism.
We fight alongside the working class and against all the Stalinist traitors and renegades of Marxism. They claim to fight against NATO, but from the trade union, such as the CCOO of the Spanish State, the French or Belgian CGTs, the Italian CGIL, the Greek GSEE, they openly support the imperialist governments that constitute NATO's military forces under U.S. command.
Neither the imperialist Europe of Maastricht nor the US is preparing to liberate Ukraine as an oppressed nation. They, for decades, have been seizing their wealth and plundering it.
The US are ready to take for themselves most of Ukraine's loot. Anglo-American imperialism has, so far, subdued the Franco-German axis, to go together to make new businesses in Eastern Europe. This has deepened a brutal economic crisis in the old continent.
As you have correctly put it, while the U.S. in Ukraine are waging a war of attrition against Russia, handing over Ukraine to be massacred and split, they are also peeking China. They strengthen Taiwan militarily, and with their political, economic, and military offensive, they seek to divide the Chinese bourgeoisie. Also, likewise, they seek to find direct agents of their businesses in that country by dividing and opening fissures in the party of the "red businessmen" of Beijing.

US imperialism, supported in Taiwan politically and militarily, seeks to take advantage of the open crisis in the Chinese CP where all the contradictions of the economic crash that has opened internationally and in that country between the bourgeois gangs are expressed. Some of them have now fallen into disgrace, such as bankers and real estate companies, who are being blamed for the disaster and bankruptcy of this sector impacted by the bursting of the real estate bubble, which even makes the 2008 Wall Street bubble pale into insignificance.
The Chinese bankruptcy is part of this round of global crises and is affecting, to a large extent, its important production branches. The US technological encirclement is already driving Hewlett-Pakard out of China and looking for new maquilas in Asia. Korean companies, front men for the City of London and the United States in high-tech products, have begun a process of disinvestment. US have banned the production of fifth-generation microchips there to prevent them from being copied by the Chinese industrial apparatus. The crisis of electric cars, which have not found the energy or the microchip to develop widely in the world market, tends to weaken the Chinese domestic market. The rise in the price of minerals and hydrocarbons is exacerbating the recession and the outflow of capital from the production process. The bankruptcy has arrived there and imperialism, by encircling China, only seeks to deepen it.
All the bourgeois gangs of the “Great China", especially the Chinese CP hierarchs who control the state service enterprises, need a strong referee who, with a firm hand, centralizes them against any danger of disintegration that could be exploited by the imperialist powers to penetrate their territory politically and economically even further. But, above all, they need a strong referee, to unify the ranks of the ruling classes to prepare for an onslaught by the working class and the exploited masses. Thus, the regime of the counter-revolutionary Stalinist Party in Beijing has multiplied Bonapartism a thousandfold in the ruling regime.
Xi Jinping, with his third term in office and the possibility of being re-elected again, has self-crowned emperor.
With the excuse of Covid, he is keeping an iron fist against the masses and the army on the streets. Like the entire Chinese big bourgeoisie, he is afraid of a rebellion of the exploited and thousand times martyred masses in capitalist China. Chinese Stalinism is now giving China a new emperor in the 21st century.
This crisis was expressed during the recent congress of the Chinese CP, where Xi Jinping and his clique of bandits expelled the now disgraced former president Hu Jintao.
Comrades, we would also like to inform you that our book "Ukraine at War", the foreword (which you already have), and the presentation of each of the 9 chapters has already been translated. These are available on our website http://www.flti-ci.org/index_eng.html. Anyway, we attach them again. We would also like to inform you that the translation of part of chapter 9, which deals with the conclusions of the work in question, has been completed and is also attached. This would allow you to have in your hands an important part of the work carried out with an enormous effort from our militants.

On Ukraine, we also send you the work "Marxism and War" translated into English. It was written at the beginning of Putin's invasion. The coincidence between the development of this work and the statement we have just received from you is surprising and striking. They were both written on either side of the world. Ours was written in April 2022 and yours in May.

Comrades, we are convinced that the imperialist bankruptcy opens the way to big new military conflagrations, economic wars, brutal attacks on the labour and mass movement, but also, under conditions of unprecedented suffering, it opens the way to huge struggles of the exploited masses. We have seen it in Latin America, or in Sri Lanka with the oppressed coming to the government house, as they did so in a semi-spontaneous insurrection in Iraq.
The Iranian revolution has once again placed an enormous responsibility on the shoulders of revolutionary Marxists before the working class in the Middle East. An enormous revolutionary situation has broken out there. It is being fought street by street in Teheran, in every university in Iran. The oppressed ethnic groups and nationalities are entering the combat. The proletariat, with its strike method, plays a central role in this uprising.
In Europe, the French working class has already taken to the streets. Hard strikes are taking place in England, Greece, and Italy, some of them openly against the war. The high cost of living and inflation are pushing sections of the working class into combat more and more, even in Germany itself.
Last weekend there was a huge mobilization of pensioners in defence of their standard of living and against the increase of electricity bills, supported by large sections of the militant trade unionism of the Spanish State. The significance of this event is that the militant metal workers of Cadiz and Andalusia, militant trade unionism, which has been waging fierce battles, which openly confronts the Stalinists of the CCOO and the no less treacherous social-democratic trade union bureaucracy of the UGT, is standing up.
The militant trade unionism of the Spanish State gave an example of international class solidarity and is preparing to march to the French embassy next October 28th in support of the struggles of the working class in that country. This is militant internationalism in deeds and not in words. A huge step forward.

Even before the invasion of Ukraine, we had seen the huge uprisings in Belarus, and Kazakhstan, and the violent clashes in the Caucasus, which heralded the re-entry into the international struggle of the proletariat of the former workers' states, which became real semi-colonies after the capitalist restoration of 1989 and the dislocation of the USSR.
It is precisely Putin who invades Ukraine feeling that he is indispensable to contain this revolutionary struggle in Eurasia. But he did so at a time when US imperialism is already preparing to move on Moscow as well.
Comrades, the masses still have enormous willingness to fight and their forces have not exhausted, although their struggles have not been able to develop to the end and lead to victory because of the treacherous leaderships at their head. The shameful support we’re seeing today from the Stalinist traitors and the renegades of Trotskyism for the electoral front of Lula (the agent of the church) and Alckmin (representative of the upper bourgeoisie of Sao Paulo) is one more example of how the working class of Brazil, which was in an offensive stage of great struggles, was diverted and is betrayed, as it was yesterday in Chile, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, USA.
All the Stalinist and Trotskyist renegade parties on the American continent openly supported the "democratic" executioners of the proletariat. Stalinism, which has survived capitalist restoration, sustained by the bourgeois states, has played a central role in Latin America. Today it is about to complete the surrendering of the enormous conquest of the Cuban revolution to imperialism and capitalists, who already control the fundamental businesses there: finance, hotels, nickel, hydrocarbons, and trade.
As could not be otherwise, hunger, unheard-of misery, and the collapse of housing is spreading all over the island. It is capitalism returning in the hands of new worms, incarnated in the counter-revolutionary forces of Stalinism, which are turning Cuba back in Batista's island. Tens of thousands of exploited people revolted on 11 July 2021. Successive social explosions have developed these days in the face of the electricity cut and the deepening hunger. Thousands and thousands of political prisoners are piling up in the jails of the Cuban CP and its boss Diaz-Canel. Meanwhile, as in Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, Central America, etc., millions of Cubans are fleeing the island, even encouraged by Castroism. On this new capitalist island, governed by Castro brothers’ CP, there is plenty of labour force to produce wealth. And there are also plenty of traitors, millionaires, and new rich who plundered it.
While war, Bonapartist coups and fascism threaten the world proletariat with new bloodbaths, the "popular fronts", i.e., class collaboration, are once again playing a central role in world politics, with which the revolutionary struggles of the masses are diverted and their offensives disorganised with "siren songs" and deception, only to be crushed by fascism and Bonapartism.
The most cynical and perfidious side of this policy was the open and shameless support of the counter-revolutionary forces of Stalinism which, allied with fractions of former Trotskyists, supported the "anti-terrorist front" of Macron, U.S., Putin, and Erdogan, which, supported by the genocide of al-Assad, crushed and massacred the heroic Syrian revolution.
We speak, then, of fronts of class collaboration between the workers' organizations and the direct bourgeois agents of imperialism. Fronts like those promoted by Stalinism in the 1930s, led the Spanish and French revolutions, etc to the strangulation, with their policy of class collaboration.
In 1936 Stalin signed a pact of opprobrium and betrayal with Laval, the foreign minister of the popular front of Blum’s government in France. A counter-revolutionary pact of an international character.
The Stalin-Laval pact of the 21st century is carried out by the counter-revolutionary forces of Stalinism and now also by all the renegades of Trotskyism, who legitimise them on the left so that they, already stained by the surrender of the USSR, China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc. to imperialism, can wash their dirty laundry before the masses.
That is the cynical role of these currents which usurped the banners of the Fourth International, to finish dissolving it and handing it over to Stalinism.
We have seen the LIT in Latin America, the PSTU, currents of the so-called anti-capitalists calling in the last elections to vote and politically support Boric, Petro, Lula, Castillo, Sanders... and even Biden, whom they considered a "lesser evil" against Trump. All these betrayals are today being suffered by the masses. As Stalinism did and does historically, the ex-Trotskyists are today looking for the progressive bourgeois. With the excuse of the "lesser evil" they tie the fate of the working class to the siren songs of the bourgeoisie that only seeks to throw water on the fire of the revolutionary uprisings, to divert them so that later, fascism and Bonapartism take over the already disorganised and shrinking masses and return to re-establish and re-order their regimes of domination.
The reformist currents and counter-revolutionary social forces of the worker aristocracy and bureaucracy have been more recruited and centralised by imperialism and the bourgeoisie than ever so that they, in the midst of the stagnation of the world bankruptcy, can save it from revolution.
It is high time the internationalist forces of the world working class regrouped to defeat the perfidious policies of the treacherous leaderships, which are ultimately saving capitalism from one of the deepest crises of its existence. A crisis that threatens to drive the whole of civilization into barbarism.
We believe that proletarian internationalism, as it did in the 20th century, must be concentrated in international combat organizations, as were Kienthal and Zimmerwald, the international fraction of the Bolshevik-Leninists, and then, in the 1930s, the revolutionary foundation of the Fourth International.
The deadly crisis of capitalism, war, counter-revolution and the great struggles of the working class require coordination and centralization of the revolutionary Marxists. The time for a Kienthal and Zimmerwald has come.
From the perspective of this internationalist battle of the FLTI, we see your declaration on the Ukrainian question as a breeze of fresh air for the world working class, as well as a sharp tool of fight against Stalinism and all the forces grouped under the banners of reformism.
The working class who is fighting in Ukraine defending their homes, their families and their land, the youth rising up against Putin's wars, the European working class awakening in fierce struggles against the Maastricht crisis and explosion, the heroic masses of the Middle East, the thousand times betrayed masses of Latin America, need now, without delay, an international general staff to coordinate and centralize their battle.
The militant workers of the Spanish State will be marching these days to the French embassy to surround it and to send their effective and concrete solidarity to the French workers. There lies the road for the masses to recover militant internationalism, the only way for the working class to ensure new victories.
Please extend a fraternal embrace to all internationalist comrades in Japan. We anxiously await your views on the new crisis of the Chinese Communist Party, which together with the crisis in that country and the martyrdom suffered by its working class, merits the overturning of all the attention, monitoring, and combat of all the internationalist Marxists of the world.
The Ukrainian working class must, without delay, take the proletarian leadership of the war, in order to raise up the workers and youth of Russia and enter into decisive combat together with the European working class.
Long live proletarian internationalism!
Let us fight together!
For a new Kienthal and Zimmerwald of revolutionary internationalist socialists!
A strong hug,
Carlos Munzer