October 14, 2023

The internationalist event was held of the International Workers Organizer, voice of the FLTI

Questions and answers developed at the FLTI conference about its presentation

Regarding the international conditions that are refracted in Argentina, Palestine and the hot spots of the planet, and the role of the left in this new historical moment

Answers by Carlos Munzer

Are you suggesting that the decline of the US in the control of the world economy has begun?

Yes, but to maintain it, it will do this by gunfire, i.e., in the same way it achieved its preeminence in World War II. That's what they are doing now. Whoever believes, like the PTS, that imperialism expands itself by developing democracy and not fascism, Bonapartism, war, or using traitor leaderships with perfidious policies of class collaboration and popular front, is not a Marxist but a vulgar reformist who sees an era of harmonious development of productive forces. And what is more severe, they affirm that the proletariat can improve its standard of living without the victory of the socialist revolution. This is what the currents that have already broken all ties with the program of the Fourth International say.
That is the handicap that imperialism, the USA's one in particular, has in its favor at the time of its decline: to defend its interests, it has regrouped all social democratic, Stalinist and even ex-Trotskyist leaderships.
It is enough to see the renegades of Trotskyism yesterday in the imperialist government of Podemos and PSOE in the Spanish State, or now in Brazil, where they are part of Lula's government and the Great São Paulo employers. Not to mention those who have joined the US imperialist Democratic Party that commands NATO under the orders of Biden.
The reformist left is paying dearly for this policy and will do so more and more. There has been no focus of war, revolution and counterrevolution where they got along well with life itself, all the contrary.
From the historical point of view, there is a contradiction: in the US, the dominant imperialism, where the world economic crisis broke out, it is throwing this crisis at the whole world in the form of inflation, taking on debt and generalizing its bankruptcies to the competitors. This is different from the 1930s, when the world crash also broke out in the US, but the dominant power was England, which closed its market and protected itself from the crisis.

What would be an example of where this New Left you refer to do get along “really badly” with life itself?

Let's look at the electoral campaign in Argentina, which will be discussed later by different comrades. But let's anticipate that here there is a crisis of parliamentarism and the party regime. The economic crash, as we saw in 2001 and the class war that it opened, left1 parliamentarism and peacetime reformism suspended in the air. Otherwise the “Milei phenomenon” and the high abstention that occurred in the last primary elections would not be understood, which is nothing more than disbelief and fatigue of millions against the party regime. This crisis of parliamentarism is the expression of the capitalist crisis and catastrophe, at a time when imperialism needs the most totalitarian government at hand to crush the masses.
Nothing is resolved in Parliament anymore, but in the meetings of the large economic groups. And it will be defined in the class combats and the war against the workers that all the politicians and the establishment are preparing.
But, as we see, the entire axis of the FIT-U in this electoral campaign, far from being the regrouping of the workers' ranks for these battles that are already here -and that will become more acute in the future-, has been and continues to be an effort to put more deputies in parliament, with which they promise to solve the problems of the masses. For this reason, millions of exploited who are fed up with mere words and hollow promises, do not see the FIT-U as a way out and consequently, do not intend to vote for them.
Under these conditions, and with Peronism openly attacking the masses and the bureaucracy betraying the struggles, the conditions were created for the emergence of a proto-fascist movement like Milei's.

The FIT-U parties let a thousand and one opportunities to regroup the workers' vanguard pass by, as when the outbursts of Chubut or Jujuy, which they reduced to simple “ecologist uprisings.” Truly, a reformist brutality.
The desperate masses see them as part of the regime. That is why we are perhaps witnessing the electoral campaign with the greatest crisis of the FIT-U, notwithstanding the number of votes they get. They are in a precarious situation, hanging from a paintbrush from the ceiling of the regime, like a painter whose ladder has been removed... far from the ground. It's a shame that this is paid for by the working class who do not see them as an alternative not even for showing a bit off class independence for the electoral process. Even Peronism indulges itself with telling millions of workers in the electoral campaign: “why are you going to vote for the FIT-U, if the same FIT-U has voted for me, with its representatives in Parliament, 24 of the 26 laws that I presented to be voted on?”
Undoubtedly, the FIT-U does not get along with life itself. How are they going to be an alternative for millions and millions who already hate this regime and its charlatans?

The FIT-U is broken. The internal row for posts in the PASO (primary elections) showed that the FIT-U was a deal among apparatchiks to have seats in Parliament. Even now, each one off its constituting parties campaigns for their candidate. They don't even plan to hold a central campaign closing event. If we are sure of one thing, it is that the FIT-U no longer directly expresses the vote and support of broad sectors of the Argentine working class. It is an agreement for electoral convenience. That's what the New Left is about...

Of course, for the FIT-U the fight for the socialist revolution disappeared from the picture, at a time when in Latin America an enormous revolutionary upsurge of recent years is beginning to be diverted. They called to support the Constituent Assembly scam in Chile. Some of their parties “critically” supported Petro in Colombia and Castillo in Peru. Not to mention the “anti-capitalists” who entered the Lula and PT government in Brazil. In the US, many of them, like the MST, supported the “Democratic Socialists”, who in turn supported Sanders and Biden, being the latter the one who is today massacring in Palestine and commands the worst counterrevolutionary offensives on the planet.
In the middle of the electoral campaign, the FIT-U saved the life of Cuban Stalinism, which handed Cuba over to imperialism. How can we remain silent about the capitalist restoration in Cuba, which is one of the great models of the hardships that the masses go through when their conquests are lost?
The FIT-U play hide and seek with the Palestinian question, with the fight for socialist restoration in Cuba and with the revolution, just at a time when broad sectors of the masses want and are fighting for drastic change.
Currently, in Argentina there is an "end of the regime" period, and the FIT-U is part of this regime that is already exhausted.

What do you think of the condolences that the FIT-U has given to the supposed “civilian victims” of the Hamas attack?

The Palestinian question took them by surprise and they ended up either ignoring it or playing hide and seek with Zionism and the struggle of the Palestinian people. They are very angry with us. But the truth must be told: in the middle of the debate of the presidential candidates in Argentina, watched by more than half of the population, Myriam Bregman, like the rest of the bourgeois candidates, expressed solidarity with the Zionist “civilian” victims. And this beyond the symbolic support that they could give to the Palestinian people. We also say this because in the march in front of the Zionist Embassy that took place in Argentina they were present with only a couple of dozens of their militants.
The world is being shocked by a mass rise in support of the Palestinian people, massacred a thousand times now and historically, and the condolences of the FIT-U are for the executioners. Yes, the executioners, the Zionist settlers, who have already stolen 90% of the territory from Palestine.
The settlers are not civilians. They are just that, settlers, who are “colonizing”, at gunpoint, a nation and stealing the land from the Palestinians who today live as pariahs in their own land and as refugees in Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt. Those who had fun at the Zionist electronic party are armed usurpers of the Palestinian nation. The fact is that everyone over 18 years of age must join the army and carry their weapon. Israel is not a state, it is a US military fortress, a true aircraft carrier on land, supported by 8 billion dollars annually that US imperialism gives it to arm it to the teeth and allows a minimum wage of U$D 4.000 for each one off its inhabitants.
Nobody goes to Israel if they are not willing to take a rifle and kill a Palestinian to make a living. They must perform military service from 18 to 45 years of age. The super-privileged Zionist workers have long had fascist militias to kill Palestinian workers from their Histadrut union center, which only defend their occupation state, while the Palestinian workers live in concentration camps and have to present a permit to go to work, which costs them 10% of their meager wages of U$D 200 per month and is given in scarce number. 
61% of Gaza's youth are unemployed. And the fascists armed to the teeth organizing festivities on the weekends... Condolences with whom? Why don't they send it to Videla's murderous generals and officers? Already in the '90s the old MAS did it to those military who repressed the guys of La Tablada. They are on that path.
To recognize these “civilians”, who at gunpoint and genocide are stealing the lands of the Palestinians, is to recognize Zionism, which emerged with the infamy of announcing that there was “a landless people (Israel) and a land without people (Palestine). We must remind the “left of condolences” that they are spokespersons for that Zionist position, that Palestine is a “land without a people.”
We insist, the Palestinian people have been killed, their lands stolen and they were expelled from their homes. They have been reduced to ghettos. Every measure that the Palestinian resistance takes to recover its land is legitimate, regardless of whether or not we agree at the moment with the methods, program and policy of its leadership.

This is what had to be said, regardless of the differences we have with the bourgeois leadership of Hamas, which has every right to have its own army and to exercise the government for which it was voted by the people of Gaza. We insist, the Zionists are usurping the Palestinians' land. Our differences with Hamas are over its policy and the bourgeois class character of its leadership. It negotiates, with circumstantial military putschs, its agreements with Zionism, to maintain the status quo. In the West Bank, they let power return to the Palestinian Authority so that it could make a pact of "the two states" with the UN and Zionism, and as we see, what was left was a Palestinian nation in ghettos, totally occupied by the state of Israel.

Our position is the opposite of that of the FIT. We demand that Hamas and all resistance organizations of the Palestinian people be recognized as a belligerent force and that arms be sent to them.
But, in any case, the fundamental thing when it comes to confronting the politics of Hamas is a question that neither the PTS nor the vast majority of the currents that surround it can say, much less the Stalinists in Havana with whom the FIT-U parties have made, in fact, a single party. What they would not say is that Hamas, Hezbollah and the Ayatollahs of Iran supported al-Assad's massacre in Syria, and now it is the Palestinian masses who are paying for the historic defeat of that great revolution.

The FIT-U hid in the electoral campaign the fight for the socialist revolution, the surrender of Cuba to imperialism and not to mention the Syrian issue. They were very careful not to denounce the bourgeois “left” governments that expropriated the revolutionary processes in Latin America in recent years, such as in Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, etc. And now they will do whatever they can to hide the Palestinian issue. This is what the parliamentary cretinism of the FIT -U and its parties is all about.
But the sun can no longer be covered with a finger. The laws of history are stronger than any apparatus.

What prospect do you see for the aftermath of the elections in Argentina?

Imperialism is coming for everything. It is doing so in Argentina and throughout its “backyard”, and also against its own working class. We have seen huge strikes in the US, such as those of Amazon workers, teachers, service workers, transport workers and large automakers. The workers are once again recovering what was stolen from them in 2008 when the US American state took all their conquests from them and handed them over to Wall Street so that it could get out of its crisis.
In Latin America there has been an enormous wave of worker and peasant struggles, which were taken to dead ends or diverted by the waste of Stalinism and the union bureaucracies of the continent with the open collaboration of the renegades of Trotskyism. As we have already stated previously, many among the latter supported class collaboration fronts such as with Petro in Colombia and Castillo in Peru, they are with the Lula-Alckmin government in Brazil, and were part of that parody of a constituent in Chile that took the masses out of the Plaza de la Dignidad.

In other countries, like Ecuador or Argentina, to give just one example, the pendulum that had tended to swing to the left went now to the right. The masses did not find a solution in the working class to the brutal crisis that the government and the capitalists were throwing at them. The union bureaucracy handed over the workers. They tied the workers hands and they could not fight.
Unlike in 2001, the middle classes in Argentina did not find the working class in a revolutionary offensive. A relentless Piquetera bureaucracy made the unemployed movement look like a beggars' march to demand a plate of food and prevented them to be the vanguard of the fight to defeat the bureaucracy of the unions and for decent work.
The workers' ranks were torn apart. Millions of hungry people are looking for an urgent solution to their crisis. Unionized sectors survive in the midst of an inflation that cannot be tolerated anymore, something that makes them more conservative, with the union bureaucracy giving up all serious fights, collective bargains and collective agreements.
As in 2001, the masses recognize that the government and the party regime are responsible. But this time, in the absence of a breakthrough for the workers as a result of the betrayal of their leadership, Milei's proto-fascist movement, with bold demagoguery and speaking the language of the crash and the war that must be established, has penetrated deeply into the exploited and became the new whip of big capital to discipline even all the bourgeois gangs.
If the working class does not quickly manage to reunify its ranks for the decisive battles that are going to take place, it will see its living conditions and even its existence in danger.

Imperialism is coming for everything. General Richardson of the US imperialist Fourth Fleet is already the boss in Chile, Peru, Argentina and also Bolivia. She is the queen of lithium, at the orders of Wall Street.
Imperialism sees fabulous sources of raw materials and is relegitimizing its institutions to strike a counterrevolutionary blow.

The conditions of Argentina will depend on how soon the Latin American working class breaks with the bourgeoisie and resumes its revolutionary path where class collaboration governments have paralyzed it, and on the extent to which the Argentine working class puts a revolutionary leadership to its front and can be part with its own organizations of an independent attack to break with imperialism and the IMF. This fight can only take place together with the masses of the entire Latin America. The US American working class is now the one that is taking the offensive against imperialism at its own home, as we see in the struggle of the workers of the large automobile companies. The new slaves of Cuba are revolting against the scum of capitalist restoration. The forces of the proletariat of the Americas, although weakened, are still alive.
No victory is assured before the battle is fought, neither for the proletariat nor for the bourgeoisie. But none of the decisive classes of society can avoid combat. What we have to say to the workers is that, either we enter the fight and organize ourselves, getting rid of the leaderships that prevent our fight, or we must look at ourselves in the mirror of the Middle East, Syria, Palestine, in the wars of Ukraine and the Caucasus, in the hard blows to their conquests that the working class have just received in Greece, and on our Americas in Peru.

US imperialism is coming for everything, to place North American bases throughout Latin America, as they already have in Peru, Chile, Colombia and now they also want to do in Argentina. That is the “campaign against drug trafficking” carried out by all the bourgeois parties, and the “there were not 30,000” of Milei and company. Their true strategy and pact with the nation's establishment, which has already been signed, is the installation of US military bases in the country.
They want to place the genocidal Armed Forces under the direct orders of their US imperialist bosses and their military bases stationed in Argentina. And on this, everyone of them agrees. That is the military doctrine of this infamous regime of the Constitution of 1853 that pushes the nation more and more towards its open colonization.

If imperialism has carried out genocide to control the hydrocarbon zone of the Maghreb and the Middle East, while today it is preparing another one in Palestine, what will they not be willing to do in Latin America?

But the last word is not said. The energies of the masses are not exhausted. And that gives time to regroup the revolutionary and internationalist ranks of the proletariat of the American continent.
Reformism, we insist, is already not getting along at all with life itself. They are sawing the branch of the tree where they are sitting.
It is for small revolutionary groups, which support Marxism and the fight for the Fourth International, to be aware more than ever that our program, the program of Trotskyism, is the only one that has passed the test of history. The same events will leave reformism breathless. The battle to resolve the leadership crisis of the proletariat remains open.
We are preparing the working class for great class conflagrations and for revolution. Reformism prepares it for times of peace. But barbarism is already here. Socialism or barbarism is the alternative.
The flag of the Fourth International will be raised in Argentina, as in dozens of countries, by the most advanced and insightful of the world working class. The fact is, either the proletariat either tries again to win new processes of international revolution, or its very life will be in danger.

US General Richardson with Argentine Defense Minister Taiana

Peru's coup leader Boluarte with Boric from Chile

Argentina: Milei, Bullrich and Massa, the candidates of the US embassy

Massa together with the union bureaucracy

The candidate for president of the FIT, Myriam Bregman, in the presidential debate giving condolences to the Zionist occupiers

Paris marches in favor of the Palestinian masses

March in Daraa, Syria, in support of Palestine

March in Sanaa, Yemen, in support of the Palestinian people

Jordan, mobilization in support of the Palestinian masses