Opinion Article - October 1, 2024

The book "Trotskyism in Argentina": a Stalinist and apocryphal story by its authors, Hernán Camarero and Martín Mangiantini

The authors' whimsical and outrageously nationalist historical revision deserves serious criticism from internationalist Trotskyists.
We will go into this in more depth later. It is necessary by the fact that their work will be presented at a meeting of neo-Stalinist currents in Havana and by the whole spectrum of ex-Trotskyists.

There is no doubt that today's pseudo-academics are trying to pave the way for a revisionism and opportunism that has left no trace of the legacy of the Fourth International... Even though the authors hide it, that was our party, which we are fighting to recover today...
We are in front of a revisionist current that presents the Trotskyist movement as a sum of national parties. That is the truth. And that is the Stalinist historical falsification of our movement, no matter how much of an "international framework" they try to present it within.
The Trotskyist parties in each country were nothing other than the national sections of the Fourth International or the international tendencies that fought to recover it, beyond all the differences we may have with them. The authors tell different stories of the "national Trotskyisms", in this case of Argentina, based on the crisis and liquidation of the Fourth International in recent decades. And they hide the fact that this crisis and explosion is the culmination of the adaptation and surrender of our world party that found the renegades of the Fourth International embracing Stalinism when the debris of the Berlin Wall was falling on their heads.

It is time for the academy to be at least a little serious:
The Communist Manifesto... The Theses of the Congresses of the Third International... The Transitional Program of the Fourth International... are just that: international programs. As Trotsky said, the time for national programs has long since ended.
Separating the heroic, turbulent and full of crisis struggle of Trotskyism in individual countries from its international organization is like a doctor trying to diagnose a heart disease in isolation from the functioning and condition of the patient's entire organism.
The battle of the Bolshevik-Leninists in the mid-1920s against Stalinism within the Third International was about the lessons of the Chinese revolution, about Germany, England, the Russian question...

The theory of Permanent Revolution and the Transitional Program are a conquest of the entire international Trotskyist current as a continuation of Bolshevism in the 1930s... Trotskyism emerged as the International Left Opposition to the Third International...
Trying to understand national “Trotskyisms” as this new neo-Stalinist historiographical school does is a nonsense that can only end in distorting and even falsifying the history of the heroic struggles of Trotskyist groups and parties in different countries...

An example of this distortion, to give just one small example, is Camarero's view of the PTS's break with the MAS in 1988, which he presents as a "methodological break" and over secondary political divergences, according to what can be read in this work.
In reality, the break of '88 "of today's PTS" with the MAS was an international break of the LIT, headed by leaders and groups from the USA, Chile, Mexico and by cadres and leaders of the MAS. Its program was: "100% of the forces of the LIT to the USSR" with the maxim that "the movement of the little finger of the Soviet proletariat would change History a million times more than thousands of elections in Argentina."

"You, go to Armenia!" was the cry of expulsion of the majority of the MAS.
The subsequent explosion of the MAS into 20 thousand pieces was nothing more than the expression of the fact that it was embracing Stalinism in the Frente del Pueblo (People's Front), at a time the CP with its leader Gorbachev was surrendering the USSR to Reagan, Thatcher and the Citibank. For the author of this work, the People's Front of the MAS with the arch-counterrevolutionary Stalinist party of Vittorio Codovila (historical leader of the CP in Argentina that collaborated in the Stalinist crimes in Spain and was one of the masterminds behind Trotsky's assassination. NT) was a step to strengthen "its own trade union work." In reality, it was its funeral and explosion.

This is just one example of the Stalinist blindness of this new academic intellectuality, which is in no way a continuation of the revolutionary battles waged by the "Argentinean" Trotskyists.
We are open to being convinced of this or that vision, but trying to sell us a different reality, even from the one we lived and participated in from the tendency to which I belong (Collective for the Refoundation of the Fourth International / FLTI), will be impossible.
A drop of vinegar spoils a barrel of honey. A whole cruet has fallen on this book.
Erasing names, hiding facts, concealing realities... those are not mistakes... That is the method of Stalinism, which excessively falsified Bolshevism, even going so far as to erase the figure of Trotsky in the photos where he was with Lenin... You are threading a wrong path Camarero… a wrong path.

I would advise the authors of this work to study the recently discovered documents of the Trotskyists in the isolators of the Urals, who considered themselves an integral part of the Bolshevik-Leninist International Left Opposition. They wrote a work against Stalin's NEP and on the reconstitution of the worker-peasant alliance in the USSR that was at the same level of The Revolution Betrayed, which Trotsky wrote in '36.

The program of the Ural Trotskyists, who were imprisoned in Stalin's prisons, was the program of the International Left Opposition. Their leadership and their link with Trotsky, as has already been historically demonstrated, was Comrade Leon Sedov, with whom they organized an oppositionist offensive around Germany and the rise of Hitler in '33.
They fought the cadres of the Third International who bowed down to Stalinism, like Gramsci (whom the academy adores).

In honor to the Urals Trotskyists and of those who later fell in Vorkuta in 1936 shouting “Long live Trotsky!” when they were executed by Stalinism, we will not remain silent in the face of daring revisionists who try to transform “national Trotskyisms” into native groups, covered in an internationalist guise, when in reality it was the crisis of the Fourth International, in which total adaptation was imposed, which decisively collaborated in their capitulations and adaptations.
It is enough to see the support of the Mandelites for Gorbachev, painting Perestroika as “progressive”, while in Argentina the MAS spoke, in the midst of the Reagan-Thatcher government, of imperialism being “a paper tiger”. Incredible. Imperialism had already subjugated China with the Nixon-Deng Xia Ping pact that handed over the south-east of China to the transnationals…

The definitive collapse of the Fourth International in 1989 and 1990 culminated a period of adaptations of its different tendencies. Trotskyism in the 21st century must seek the threads of continuity of these given battles.
What a paradox: the waste of Stalinism survive after so many betrayals, supported by an academic "neo-Trotskyism" and parties that continue with their work as a new batch of reformism, as Menshevism and Stalinism were in the 20th century.

Ivan León