Last January 30 and 31, social, trade union and popular organizations have convened through the Strike National Committee to a National Meeting to discuss how to continue the measures to be taken to keep the fierce combat of the Colombian vanguard and exploited who struggle to get rid of the traitorous union bureaucracy that ties their hands and prevents them from fighting.
The Colombian working class have proven their predisposition to fight. The days of the last national strike in November were a clear example of this, which hike was the marches during a whole week of mobilizations and blockades throughout the country. Under the slogan of "Out with Duke!" and "Down with the regime!", and tired of so much abuse and exploitation exerted by the ruling class that repress and kill us, the Colombian people lost their fear and took to the streets against the tax, labor and pension reforms required by the IMF; against the repression and murder of social leaders; and for a living wage, free and quality education, the dismantling of the assassins of ESMAD and the defense of life and natural resources.
In this National Encounter, the leaderships of the CGT, CTC, CUT and the Colombian Federation of Educators (FECODE) headquarters, led by Stalinism, tried to restrict the participation of grassroots organizations, students and working youth by establishing quotas and using perfidious maneuvers to prevent the access to the militant base. But these leaderships, hated by the masses, were overtaken by them, who, breaking all containment dikes thanks to the belligerence of the young workers and students who forced the security thugs to back off and open the access doors. This allowed all those outside to enter under the cry of "The strike is not a property of the MOIR!" and "Long live the National Strike!"
From the stage, the union bureaucracy called to sing the national anthem, which was widely repudiated and booed by the majority of the participants. This motivated the people to change the music for The Internationale, which was sung and cheered by all the attendees, while a sector of the bureaucrats retired panicking.
This is how justice is done: those who stay are the workers and those who leave are the traitors! And workers singing The Internationale!
The MOIR ("Movement of the Revolutionary Left") that ruled with an iron fist sold out and betrayed the Colombian labor movement was repudiated and expelled from the meeting board by the rank and file.
That MOIR party represents a sector of Colombian Stalinists who strangled unions for decades, while the regime massacred the masses. As the FARC controlled the peasant insurgency - which Castroism openly surrendered to the government and the infamous regime - the MOIR controlled the trade union. Thus these two sides of Stalinism controlled the workers and peasants of Colombia, preventing and betraying their struggles constantly. But today the situation has changed: treason has already been stripped. Workers, students and peasants with their indigenous guard, fighting to set up a unitary front to fight for their demands against the murderous government, seek to prepare and open the way to a great struggle. They are not pleased with making a national strike that shook Colombia's foundations. Now they go for the indefinite general strike. They do not accept that anyone negotiates or sells out their fight.
The workers and peasant bases face trade union bureaucracies that do not represent even 4% of the nation's working class, who yesterday agreed to miserable wages with the government, which divided the labor movement, which betrayed every struggle against the bosses, who left the peasant movement and the students in struggle isolated. This time they will not be able to do it. The rebellion of the workers against the traitors has already begun. The road to prepare a great struggle is open.
The MOIR and the bureaucracy would rather destroy and divide the working class rather than unifying their forces to defeat the bosses and the government.
We cannot allow it! Now the bases have come together... Out with the agents of the bosses and the government from workers' ranks!
For the revolutionary mass movements that have begun to climb a new step, the workers struggle have to get rid of those who conspire and sell out their struggles...
A wave of huge mass revolutionary struggles shakes the planet in response to the brutal offensive of imperialism and the bourgeoisie against the working class worldwide. The Middle East has been flooded with new revolutions. In France, workers do not leave the streets after weeks and weeks of general strike. In Chile the mass rebellion does not stop. In Ecuador, Moreno's government and the regime have been in crisis after a fierce offensive by the exploited that stopped the attack of imperialism on the workers, since when the government sent the army to repress the people in October, rank and file soldiers lowered their rifles and joined the rebel masses.
But here and there, these revolutionary processes get bogged down or recede because they are severely betrayed and also led to cruel defeats. Fenced and massacred Syria is an example of this.
In Chile the working class is being brutally betrayed by the bureaucracy of the trade unions, while the CP and the SP, who ruled Chile together with the Christian Democracy for 30 years, seek to take the masses to the dead end of a fraudulent plebiscite to divert the revolution. Along with this, they took charge from the "Social Unity Board" to close the way to the independent intervention of the working class with its methods of fighting, work stoppages, pickets and the general strike to break the resistance of the bourgeoisie, attacking capitalists' property and defeat Piñera's government in order to open the revolutionary crisis.
In Ecuador, the working class and peasant masses have the power to overthrow the government that today is supported by the collaborative leadership of the workers and peasant organizations. Poor workers and peasants, due to the betrayal of their leaders, are missing the opportunity to seize power in that country. This will cost them dearly. There is a new electoral trap underway. As in Chile, these frauds and electoral traps are only detours that will take the working class to fall under the yoke of the generals' sabers sooner rather than later.
However, today the French workers, who have suffered hard partial defeats, show the way. This time they fight to defeat the offensive of the capitalists who yesterday snatched the 35-hour work week from them and imposed labor flexibility. Macron's government fails to get through with their attack on pensions. There have been up to now two months of strike with pickets, street fighting and most importantly: every time the union leaders try to sign an agreement with the government to surrender workers' struggle, the trade unions are taken by the bases. In revolted Paris, the workers recognize that in order to defeat the government and the bosses, the leaderships that betray them everyday must be defeated. Colombia is following that path that must be followed by any mass offensive that seeks to defeat the fierce attack of the capitalists and the plundering of the oppressed peoples by imperialism.
This is what the masses of Idlib (Syria) are trying to do today, denouncing that HTS has hidden the weapons and is selling out the revolution. At the same time the masses of Idlib are organizing a great march towards the border with Turkey to get to Berlin.
It is the same path followed by the Iraqi revolution, which already openly confronts the Shiite bourgeoisie of Al Sadr, an agent of the Iranian counterrevolutionary theocracy who has sent his militias to slaughter the insurgent masses. But the exploited have burst under the cry of "Out with the US imperialists!" And "Out with the Iranian counterrevolutionary clerics from Iraq!"
In the Spanish State, the Basque working class has just staged a general strike despite and against the Spanish bureaucracies of the CCOO and UGT, servants of the Crown.
To open the way to victory, the masses desperately seek to get rid of the traitorous leaderships they have. This is the path that the workers and peasants of Colombia have begun to follow, in an enormous example for the working class of the American continent and the world. The trade union bureaucracies and the treacherous leaderships can be defeated in the struggles, in the streets and imposing the direct democracy of the bases! This is a huge lesson for the world proletariat.
Out with the union bureaucracy! Open the way to the democracy of the bases! Forward to workers democracy to organize and open the way to an indefinite National Strike!
The entire base of the labor movement must be declared in a state of assembly! The groups that have joined forces to conquer a Struggle Front standing for the indefinite general strike, must now make that call to set up bodies of mandated delegates, able to be recalled any time by the same base that votes them, voted by each company, union, school, college, faculty, poor peasants organization, etc. Only a Congress of grassroots delegates mandated by the entire labor movement and the organizations of the struggling masses, together with poor students and peasants, can bring the revolutionary struggle that has begun in Colombia to its victorious end.
We must move forward with the alliance and unity in a National Struggle Front of workers, poor peasants and students! That is the absolute majority of the Colombian people.
We have to set up the power of those below that will shake the Colombia of the military bases, the USA surveillance, the murderous generals and their fascist gangs!
The revolutionary leadership that the Colombian and international working class deserve and need to succeed must be set up
The enemies of the masses are powerful: they are the 9 military bases, the nation's US imperialist guardianship, the semi-fascist regime and Duke’s government with its murderous army and paramilitaries. But they have never defeated the working class and Colombian peasants in a face-to-face combat. The defeats suffered by the workers and the peasantry have been perpetrated by the traitors who sold out their struggles from within. Stalinism has buried for decades, one by one, the offensive struggles of workers and peasants in Colombia, in Central America, the Caribbean and throughout Latin America.
Stalinism has given Cuba to the US and capitalists’ voracity. They support Maduro who starves the people of Venezuela, while paying the fraudulent debt to the US imperialists. They also support Morales who has surrendered cowardly in Bolivia, leaving workers and peasants exposed to the massacre of the Banzerista generals.
A while ago Stalinism handed over the martyred Colombia in an infamous pact of the FARC leadership with Obama and Castro. That pact of "social peace" is what the treacherous bureaucracy of MOIR tried to impose, this time in the labor movement. This pact of "graveyard pacification", aimed to enslave the people, is also what Petro and the bourgeois center-left want to impose with tender phrases and by sweetening this murderous regime. They lie to the workers, making them believe that they will stop suffering with scammed and fraudulent elections. The PST, LIT’s group in Colombia, called to vote Petro's transvestite "leftist" fraud in the last presidential elections. Thus they created illusions among the masses in that straw puppet of the bourgeoisie and imperialism.
But despite this, the workers' response to the traitors of the bureaucracy found among its fundamental animators dozens of groups of workers and students who have been looking for a revolutionary path in Colombia for years. The experience of the outbreak of the LIT and the Colombian PST, as a result of its enormous capitulations to Stalinism in the '80s and' 90s, left dozens of groups seeking a course in Marxism in the face of the crisis and dispersion of their movement. Many of these groups and cadres of years of combat, which have influenced this new generation of workers and students that emerges from the struggle, were very important animators of the revolt of the workers' ranks and of the rebel youth against the union bureaucracy. It was that confluence that created the relative maturity at the forefront to take this step forward.
Today there are plenty of conditions to refound Trotskyism in Colombia, this time under the internationalist flags of the Fourth International. The struggle to set up a revolutionary leadership of the Colombian working class becomes essential, because otherwise, reformism and Stalinism will lead the working class and poor peasants to new frustrations and massacres.
Colombian Trotskyism should this time be re-founded on internationalist bases, drawing lessons from hard learning based on serious crises, while fighting Stalinism irretrievably, which has long been selling out revolutionary processes throughout Latin America.
In the mid-1970s, the socialist revolutionary movement in Colombia tried to find an internationalist path to set up a revolutionary party. This and no other is the direction. But a huge crisis closed this process when all the currents of the old Trotskyism of Yalta ended in '89 capitulating to Stalinism... Regrouping forces to try again becomes a key issue of all conscious workers. The working class have already greatly facilitated this path.
On one side of the barricade there are the bosses, their murderous government along with the whole Stalinist scourge. On the other, there are the working class and the forces honestly claiming Trotskyism.
In this preparatory phase of huge class combats and clashes, the central task is to set up the direct democracy organizations, that is, the factory committees and the committees of students and peasants in struggle, together with a powerful worker and peasant militia.
Fighting the scam of the "Bolivarian Revolution" and Stalinism that have sold out Cuba and that in the Middle East support al-Assad and the massacre of the Syrian revolution, is a leading internationalist task for Colombian workers.
Patiently explaining to the great masses that the allies of this great combat that has begun are the workers of the US, Central America and all of Latin America becomes essential. As Trotsky said, we must unite the combat of the workers and exploited of the Americas as a sensitive nerve capable of vibrating from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego before any event of reaction, counterrevolution or large mass struggles.
The task of the moment is also to face the perfidious class collaboration policy of those who sold out our world party, the Fourth International, and that today together with Stalinism seek to sell out the struggle of the Chilean and Ecuadorian revolutions, of Syria, of the Middle East, of France and internationally. This is a revolutionary obligation that cannot be avoided. Here and there, these currents supported popular fronts with the bourgeoisie to subdue the working class, as do the so-called "anti-capitalists" of Europe, who support Podemos in the Spanish State, Syriza in Greece, the scoundrels of the Labor Party of the City of London or the imperialist agent Sanders in the USA.
A revolutionary regrouping of the working ranks has become more necessary than ever. This will take place under the hot fire of the current struggle, the attack of the class enemy and the revolutionary lessons that the Trotskyists can consciously draw internationally from the many capitulations and revisionism that led to the Fourth International and its clean flags to the feet of Stalinism.
The efforts of FLTI, our international current, are at the service of deepening this enormous effort that hundreds of cadres and socialist workers have already begun to undertake in Colombia.
Núcleo Obrero Internacionalista de Colombia
(Internationalist Worker Nucleus in Colombia)
Adherent to the FLTI |
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colombi
"The strike may die"
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