April 20th, 2019

From the heart of black Africa

Statement of Workers International League (WIL) of Zimbabwe, adherent to the FLTI

Towards May Day 2019

Appeal to a Revolutionary Socialist Internationalist May Day

Under the banner of world socialist revolution!
Under the banner of the Fourth International!

This May Day, we revolutionary socialists stand up with our siblings, the workers from South Africa, Mozambique, and all over our martyred continent.
We salute the miners of Marikana and Hwange, who rebelled against their starving wages and the slave work-conditions. They are the advance of the struggle against the plundering of our minerals and wealth by the imperialist transnational companies.
We demand to judge and punish all the politicians, bosses and cops who organized the massacre of the 34 Marikana miners.

We are standing alongside the toiling communities from Southern Africa who survive without electricity, water, enduring starvation and the worst living conditions.
We are siblings of the militant workers and unions from South Africa who have broken away from COSATU’s bureaucracy and ANC’s infamous regime and made the starvationist government of Zuma to fall with the method of the general strike and fighting on the streets, while they threaten to overthrow this pro-imperialist Anglo American regime.
They show us how to end with the ignominious military dictatorship in Zimbabwe, which is an agent of IMF and imperialism, plunderers of the peoples of Africa.

From Zimbabwe, and for May Day 2019, we greet the new revolutionary uprising of the exploited of Maghreb and Middle East, like in Sudan and Algeria, and also the masses that resist in Iran against the millionaire clerics that repress the peoples in the Middle East.
On this May Day, we call to deepen the solidarity with the fights and the resistance of the Palestinian people against the Zionist occupation forces.
On this International Day of the Workers we do not forget of the martyred masses from Syria and Yemen beiong massacred by fascist al-Assad, Putin, the counterrevolutionary forces of Saudi Arabia, Iranian theocracy and murderous bourgeois gangs, all of with repress their own people on behalf of imperialism.
In the Maghreb and the Middle East people are fighting for bread and freedom and against fierce dictatorships like the one suffered by us workers and people of Zimbabwe.

On this International Workers’ Day we fight alongside the workers and oppressed peoples of Latin America who are suffering a though offensive by US imperialism. We condemn those that speaking on behalf of “Socialism” and “anti-imperialism” have been responsible for the advance of imperialism in the Americas. Today US imperialists are fencing Venezuela and assaulting the conquests of the exploited masses with anti-worker regimes. 
We denounce this scam of “Bolivarian Revolution”, which through Maduro in Venezuela has not laid a hand on imperialism’s assets, though it is blocking and besieging that nation to take all its oil and riches.
We denounce this scam of “Bolivarian Revolution” that with Castro brothers has handed out Cuba to imperialism, by re-establishing inheritance rights and private property, and signed counterrevolutionary agreements with the US, like the one surrendering the Colombian resistance to the regime of the 7 US military bases in Colombia.
And this happens while the Evo Morales government in Bolivia has established new records in the sellout of minerals and hydrocarbons to the transnationals that are looting this nation in the likes of old times’ “Rosca” (traditional oligarchy ) direct agents of US imperialism.

From Zimbabwe and Southern Africa, we revolutionary socialists salute and consider our own the revolutionary uprising of our black siblings of Haiti. Their fight is the one that unifies us with our comrades, the black workers in the US, who have imposed on the streets the fact that “Black Lives Matter”. This war cry must run throughout the entire world working class.

On May Day we salute the workers and the people of Algeria, whose migrants have become a third of French working class and have taken to the streets of Paris with the Yellow Vests and the workers, fighting against labour flexibilization and the attack on their conquests.

We feel as our own the struggle for independence and self-determination of the Catalan nation against the Bourbons’ Monarchy. This is the same national struggle that we defend for the independence of all the peoples of Africa, plundered by imperialism.

We salute the Chinese workers who have started a fierce struggle to set up their unions and fight for their rights against the fascist slave-holding regime of the Chinese CP “Mandarins”.

We express our solidarity with the workers of Russia who are confronting Putin’s fierce civic-military bourgeois dictatorship; he is the hit-man attacking the peoples of Eurasia on behalf of imperialism. We support the punished masses of Eastern Europe and particularly those in Romania, Serbia and Hungary who today, like the workers from the rest of Europe and the world, are fighting against labour flexibilization that the transnationals are trying to impose all over the planet. We stand with Ukraine tormented and divided by fascism and surrendered by Stalinism together with Putin and the “Great Russian” counterrevolutionary rifles.
Most of Russian workers, today enslaved by this rotten capitalist system, feel that their sufferings will end when USSR returns, this time however, under revolutionary traits, as it was under the banner of Trotsky and Lenin’s III International. Back then, the USSR was a stronghold for international socialist revolution. It was the USSR of the soviets, workers’ and soldiers’ councils, bastions of European revolution, which were stolen and surrendered by Stalinism’s counterrevolutionary forces.

On May Day and well advanced the 21st century we revolutionary socialists of WIL (Zimbabwe), adherent of the FLTI, state that there is no chance of moving towards the victory of socialist revolution without recovering the legacy of revolutionary Marxism of the 20th century, whose continuity was established by the Fourth International. The task is no other than writing in the Marxist program the fight for restoring proletarian dictatorship under revolutionary traits in every former workers’ state. This fight is inseparable from the fight for the world socialist revolution.
We state that such historic continuity will not be achieved without settling accounts before the eyes of world proletariat with the Stalinist beast, traitors and “Judas” of the working class. They surrendered the biggest conquests of the world working class of the 20th Century to imperialist banks, namely the expropriation of capitalists in a third of the planet. Thus they gave an extra life to this rotten capitalist system.
Mao-Stalinists of the past and capitalists of the present cannot speak on behalf of socialism anymore as they placed the Chinese working class in concentration camps; they have sold it as slave labour force to transnationals. We denounce as enemies of the revolutionary struggle for socialism those who betrayed the blood of over 3 million workers and peasants from Vietnam who defeated US imperialism in 1975 after years of struggle and today they see how those US transnationals are exploiting them, under the military-like regime of the old Ho Chi Minh band.
Those scoundrels who surrendered the USSR, and their sequel fascist Putin, stole the nationalized companies of the old workers’ state through terror and counterrevolutionary actions. They took billions of rubles to London, bought properties in Monaco and partnered world imperialism.
Stop defiling socialism! Stalinism means surrender and betrayal! That is why the bourgeoisie preserved it all over the world to become a true police within the working class in the form of bureaucratic union leadership, to which role they have been preparing for decades.

Trying to make the wheel of History move backwards means betraying the working class. We are the revolutionary force that fights under the banner of the Fourth International, which fought and continues fighting the world capitalist system; which fought and continues fighting alongside the oppressed peoples of the world; which raised and continues raising the banner of victory for socialist revolution in the advanced powers and which fought and continues fighting relentlessly Stalinism, which has  surrendered every worker state.
We are the Fourth International founded in 1938, the only heir to Bolshevism and of the revolutionary Third International, which was sold out by Stalinism to the world imperialism and put at the service of its counterrevolutionary policy. We revolutionary socialists of Africa are a core of revolutionary internationalist workers who fight for being continuations of this heroic struggle. We know that we count on the millions of workers and youth who are fighting. Those are the forces to take the revolutionary program towards victory, if we can show them who their allies and who their enemies are at every step of the way. This is our task and the obligation of every revolutionary who claims to be so.

Capitalism entered history through blood and fire, with salvage piracy, slavery and ethnic slaughters. Centuries ago, the bourgeoisie bought Kings and princes, against whom they fought. Today the capitalist system survives through wars and barbarism and refuses to leave the stage of history. In order to stay on it an extra time,  however in its decay and bankruptcy, the bourgeoisie buys a privileged layer of union bureaucrats and worker aristocrats who strangle the workers’ struggles, disorganize our combats, divide us country by country and save the regimes who are cornered by the masses’ revolutionary struggle, by submitting the exploited to their executioners. They are the ones that handed over the workers’ states-like USSR, China, Vietnam and Cuba- to imperialism from within, becoming new ruling classes.

We revolutionary socialists warn the world working class that if we do not defeat this rotten capitalist system in bankruptcy, it will be able to go on and survive through wars, fascism and barbarity. The trade wars of today among the imperialist bandits will turn tomorrow in the source of new military showdowns at a planet scale, through which the imperialist powers will scramble for the spheres of influence and the looting of the semi-colonial countries.
To build up insurrectionalist, combative, revolutionary Leninist parties is the task of the moment. Re-founding the World Party of the Socialist Revolution, the Fourth International, under its 1938 founding program, is a urgent struggle.

Last century, imperialism bought off social-democracy and Stalinism, which let it survive by betraying vast revolutions at a international level. This 21st century the imperialists try to do the same with the forces of the Fourth International, the only place from where anyone can speak with clean banners and revolutionary socialism to the world working class. Unfortunately many of the latter have already surrendered, capitulated and corrupted. They have entered new Stalinist parties. They have become into new servants and minions of capital. They now try to demolish the party of World Socialist Revolution to the ground.
Here and there they take old Stalinist leaders as their own like they do with Gramsci, so through them they seek to erase any trace of Trotskyism before the eyes of new generations of the revolutionary youth. There are others who set up “new internationals”, but with the very same old Stalinist Communist Parties who surrendered the workers’ states. In other countries they have directly entered reformist parties, which support capital, like the so called “anti-capitalist” parties, which today support parties such as Podemos in the Spanish State, Syriza in Greece, Melenchon’s party in France, and the rest of social-imperialist parties in Europe from the left. Through Sanders they have entered the Democratic Party of the imperialist pirates in the United States, speaking in the name of “Socialism”, from the offices of the biggest thieves and bandits in the planet, the financial oligarchy of Wall Street.
The battlefield is full of rubbles of old ancient apparatus that were only good for supporting the rottening capitalist system. Nevertheless, the working class is far from surrendering.

We Trotskyist workers of Africa will not allow our world party, the Fourth International, to be destroyed. We have fought and continue fighting to recover its banners.
We take as ours the Transitional Program of the Fourth International, written in 1938, that states the conditions of the battlefield which are totally valid today: “The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only “ripened”; they have begun to get somewhat rotten. Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind. The turn is now to the proletariat, i.e., chiefly to its revolutionary vanguard. The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.”

The Reformists hold the working class responsible for the cruel defeats and limits on the struggle they develop internationally.
Truth is that the history of the class struggle and the current struggles show that the exploited have never shunned combating against the attacks of capitalists, their regimes and states. There have been traitorous leaderships, of which there are plenty in the planet, which have surrendered and sold out the masses’ struggles, while living on the crumbs that fall from the table of the banquet of super profits that the imperialist take from the super exploitation of the workers and the plundering of the oppressed peoples.

The forces for re-creating the militant internationalism of the workers are now in the thousand battles featuring the world working class.
We know that due to our fighting we are already deservedly hated by the Stalinists, Social Democrats, bourgeois liberals and fascists as well as by the renegades to Trotskyism. But we also know that in this combat we are winning and will win the sympathy, support and force of millions of exploited who, self-organized and free from the treacherous leaderships, will take this struggle to victory.

For a revolutionary, socialist and internationalist May Day!

Workers International League-Zimbabwe