Speech by Alejandro Villarruel, leader of Avanzada Obrera - Black List of the Río Santiago Shipyard in Argentina, adherent to the FLTI
"The crisis of leadership of the proletariat is the fundamental law that has defined, ultimately, the survival of the decomposing capitalist system, in its imperialist phase”
Good afternoon, comrades. For me it is a pride and an honor to be at this table, on this anniversary of the assassination of Comrade Leon Trotsky, debating the enormous tasks that comrade Leon Trotsky carried out and left us to carry out.
I want to send a greeting to the comrades who are on the front line of combat, where they clash with the state, the police and the employers. Greetings to my class, to the world working class.
In the 20th century, imperialism achieved three great conquests over the world proletariat, corrupting, in order to survive, the aristocracy and the upper layers of the proletariat. It corrupted and co-opted the Second International in the First World War, which guaranteed that the proletariat of the imperialist countries would shed their blood among class brothers on behalf of the different powers. The Third International was destroyed from within by Stalinism, which acted as a true “Trojan Horse” within the workers' state, after the defeat of the European and German revolution in particular and in the middle of the isolation of the USSR. Then, imperialism achieved a new victory at the end of the 20th century, supported by revisionism and liquidationism that ended up handing over the Fourth International to Stalinism in '89, just when the latter became a new ruling class, liquidating the enormous conquests of the socialist revolutions.
After more than 30 years of the fall of the workers' states, the degeneration and decomposition of the currents that for decades spoke in the name of the Fourth International are in full sight for every minimally serious Marxist.
Comrades,
We are entering the discussion of the crisis of revolutionary leadership which, as Comrade Trotsky said, is the crisis of humanity. The irrefutable proof that the leadership crisis has only worsened is the passage to the field of reformism of the liquidators of the Fourth International who today, on this 80th anniversary of the assassination of Trotsky, are in common homage with Stalinism, and Castroism in particular.
The 20th century, like the 21st century that is underway, ratified that imperialism is not sustained by its vigor or by the development that it imposes on the productive forces, increasingly constrained by national borders and settled in heinous parasitism of monopolies and cartels. This rotten system is sustained by what Lenin called the "split of socialism", that is, in the division of the workers' ranks and in the corruption and decomposition of the workers' bureaucracies and aristocracies, used as a true internal police within the workers' organizations around the world.
The fall of the workers' states in 1989 marked a milestone in the confrontation between revolution and counterrevolution of the many that marked the 20th century. It was a colossal blow to the world working class, its conquests and internationalist consciousness.
That blow and that defeat were due to the surrender of the workers' states to imperialism by the perfidious and sinister former Stalinist bureaucracy, which had become a new ruling class. It was this counterrevolutionary action by the leadership of the world working class that ultimately gave the capitalist system a survival, which in 2008 and 2020 again exploded into the air. That is why we affirm that the crisis of leadership of the proletariat is the fundamental law that has defined, ultimately, the survival of the decaying capitalist system, in its imperialist phase.
The surrender of the former USSR and China to the world economy meant a transfusion of fresh blood to the sclerotic veins of the capitalist system, with new sources of raw materials, slave labor and new markets.
Already in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the economic bankruptcy of the workers' states was brutal. Many of them were indebted to the IMF and imperialism like any semi-colonial country, with its productive forces destroyed and with open underproduction crises. In the case of China, Maoism had already agreed to hand over its labor to imperialism to rebuild the profit rate of the big monopolies and trusts.
The prize for the former Stalinist bureaucracy was its integration as a new possessing class after having destroyed the planned economy and the productive forces of the workers' state, openly surrendering them to imperialism.
Comrades,
From there, an enormous amount of old songs began to come out of the mouths of the "Marxists" and the leaders of the Fourth International.
The fall of the workers' states in '89 opened the greening of revisionism in Marxism, just as it had happened with the betrayal of the Second International in the First World War and then with the Stalinist scoundrel, usurper of the October Revolution, who developed that farcical theory of "socialism in one country", which ended up destroying the workers' state and the Third International.
In '89 the reformist forces that were in the Fourth International followed bourgeois charlatans who said that socialism had historically died and referred, as Fukuyama did, to the fall of the workers' states as "the end of history”. They stabbed Marxism in the back, claiming that capitalist restoration, as they continue to say today, was guaranteed by the "political backwardness of the working class" and by a vigorous capitalist system. They deny that this was because of the betrayal of the Stalinist leadership that handed over the former USSR, Eastern Europe, China, Vietnam and Cuba itself to imperialist prey, becoming a new bourgeois class. So the working class of the former workers states had no more conquests to defend before the capitalist restoration. The Stalinist bureaucracy, having turned into a direct agent of imperialism, caused a brutal catastrophe in the former worker states.
These currents also had said throughout the Yalta period that a new cycle of expansion of the productive forces, of a historical nature, had opened of the capitalist system. And they continue to say this even today, in the midst of a global crash, of two heart attacks in the world-economy such as those of 2008 and 2020 and an acute pre-heart attack such as that of 1997-2001, which suggest that the norm of the bankrupt capitalist system consists of its crisis and not its expansion.
A cruel revisionism attacked Trotskyism and revolutionary Marxism from behind... speaking in its name and destroying it again from within.
I want to stop for a minute at the PTS of Argentina. This current only in the year 2005/2006 recognized that capitalism had been restored in the USSR. 15 years later!!! The PTS shed the udder of Stalinism and recognized capitalist restoration, although it still maintains that Cuba is a decomposing workers' state. Theargument? That since 1989, “capitalism was not functioning normally in the former USSR” because there were mafias, parasitism and decomposition… A brutality. That is the normal functioning of capitalism in its imperialist times, which reformism denies.
The PTS, apart from raising its own revisions like this one, is also known for copying other revisions without even naming the authors. Thus, copying the libretto of the old Mandelist currents, today "anti-capitalist", they argue that there is a partial advance of the productive forces. At least they should have announced that this had been copied from Mandel, the greatest revisionist in the second postwar period and the greatest agent of Stalinism, destroyer of the Fourth International. This was a fallacy during Yalta on Mandel's part, but he had a better and more camouflaged world to show and not the current catastrophe of human civilization that the "Albamontism" of the Río de La Plata today sweetens.
"These revisions in Marxism (...) pursue the sole objective of proposing to the working class that it is not necessary to make a socialist revolution to improve their standard of living, recover their work and even be able to live"
These revisions in Marxism, beyond being laced with drops of rabid Stalinists like Gramsci (who is passed off as "progressive"), pursue the sole objective of proposing to the working class that it is not necessary to make a socialist revolution to improve their standard of living, get their job back and even be able to live. "Imperialism spreads democracy and we are ready to take it to the end."“Capitalism develops the productive forces. Let us fight then - they affirm - because we can achieve improvements”… within the framework of this rotten system of war and barbarism.
This is the matrix of the revisionism of the entire 20th century, which has already been proven in history: first by leading the Fourth International to a brutal crisis in the Yalta period, then to blow up into a thousand pieces in '89, and finally to go over to the side of reformism in the 21st. century, causing the deepening of the crisis of leadership to an extreme degree, by liquidating the Fourth International and its revolutionary program.
Comrades,
Many years have passed since 1989. Revisionism has blamed Marxism, not the treacherous leaderships and the Stalinist bureaucracy bought by imperialism, for the fall of the worker states. They affirmed that the problem was the "weaknesses, crises and theoretical and strategic insufficiencies" of Marxism and the Fourth International and their combat. This is a huge historical falsification since Trotskyism prepared the revolutionary forces of the world proletariat to defeat the Stalinist bureaucracy as a link in a single international socialist revolution, both in the semi-colonial world and, decisively, in the imperialist countries. It was Trotskyism that affirmed the thesis that either the working class prevailed; overthrowing the Stalinist bureaucracy with the political revolution, or it would become a new ruling class restoring capitalism.
"Revisionism blamed Trotskyism for its own adaptations (...) They said, among other barbarities, that demanding the exit of the Red Army from the Glacis, in an open process of political revolution, amounted to "playing the game of imperialism."
Then they complained that they did not have a single Trotskyist group from East Germany to Moscow that would confront Stalinism… Traitors. "
Revisionism blamed Trotskyism for its own adaptations. In the West they have always supported Stalinism, while in the East they supported from the left the Stalinist bureaucracy, which dedicated itself to crushing every revolutionary uprising against them, as it happened in East Germany in 1953, in the Hungarian revolution of 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and in the successive heroic struggles of the proletariat of the USSR against the Stalinist scoundrels. They said, among other atrocities, that demanding the exit of the Red Army from the Glacis, in an open process of political revolution, amounted to "playing the game of imperialism." Then they complained because they did not have a single Trotskyist group from East Germany to Moscow that would confront Stalinism… Traitors.
They said that Trotsky was sectarian, that the forecasts of the Fourth International were not correct. They said that the plans of the architect who built the house were badly drawn, that the theory and the program of the Fourth International were incorrect and that is why the Fourth International fell, when in reality they went over it like a bulldozer and left no stone on stone of our world party.
All of them today are where they had to be: they organizationally liquidated the Fourth International. Beyond facades of national sects with satellite groups that they maintain to cross-dress as Trotskyists, in their key places of intervention they are part of the “New Left”.
In Argentina it was not necessary to invent much since with the FIT-U they dedicated themselves to rapidly propagating these reformist ideas from the bourgeois parliamentarianism, from where the entire revolutionary edge was castrated at a thousand and one attempts by the workers' vanguard to set up a revolutionary leadership.
Today they are all within the "anti-capitalist" parties in Brazil, in France, in Greece, in the Spanish State, in "Broad Fronts" as in Peru or as union appendages of the Stalinist bureaucracies, which the bourgeoisie preserved after the 1989 to keep them as prison guards of the international labor movement.
In South Africa they entered a common Party with the Communist Party leadership of the COSATU, which invited them to a congress, but before entering they had to put on the T-shirt of Chávez and Castro. And they put it on.
Today in the USA the ISO was dissolved to support Sanders, who spoke of socialism. The SWP went to organize pickets to discipline the revolutionary action days of black workers.
And in Syria, comrades, where together with the aristocracy and the worker bureaucracies that lead the Communist Parties of Europe, they desynchronized and isolated the fight against Bashar al-Assad. They prevented the revolutionary days in Greece from uniting with the revolution taking place in North Africa. They openly supported al-Assad and when not, the "democratic" generals of the ESL, representatives of the Sunni bourgeoisie that gave in the revolution from within, as did the LIT-CI. They got tired of asking the US for weapons, the "democratic" imperialism... The US sent Putin, ISIS and the PKK to crush the revolution, it cleaned the skies for al-Assad to slaughter the masses and now Turkey is going to strangle resistance in Idlib. The LIT-CI tied the luck of a revolution to US imperialism. Amazing.
Everyone, absolutely everyone, was attached to the PKK and Kurdish Stalinism that is a partner of Zionism and that together with al-Assad attacked the best of the Syrian revolution in the fighting in Aleppo and today is a bodyguard Corps of the US imperialist oil companies in Raqa and Deir Ez Zor. And so they have ended.
If in Spain, in 1936-on, the CP was the fifth column killing the POUM militias and the Trotskyists from behind, in Syria, those who were revisionists and liquidationists have now become the CP, slandering the resistance as in Spain Stalinism had done in the 1930s. They made themselves so much of the CP, they love them so much, they cry so much, that Altamira of the Partido Obrero (Workers Party )went to put his shoulder to help Darya Mitina -the leader of one of the Communist Parties in Russia- to set up the Third International.
They all came together to support Sanders, the expression of Wall Street, who they say is a socialist. The PTS raised, in front of the revolutionary days of black and immigrant workers, "Committees to clarify the death of George Floyd", demanding the police, the FBI and the imperialist bourgeois state and the Democratic Party to be transparent, while the masses in their revolutionary action days destroyed the State apparatus with what they had at hand, burning the police stations and setting up Communes, as they are doing in Portland.
The working class never missed the date, comrades. In all the revolutions that are underway, and in those that have occurred, the workers never miss the date.
The leadership crisis, ultimately, is the overabundance of treacherous leaderships. And now, those who speak on behalf of the Fourth International, and hold Latin American Congresses, are dissolving what remains of the liquidated Fourth International in Havana, at the feet of a new Cuban bourgeoisie that stole Cuba on wheels, restored the right to inheritance, and now their children are going to keep the factories and bank accounts. This new bourgeoisie needs a "left" to cover its left flank so that they keep stealing. Yesterday they did it for Stalinism in Moscow; today they are doing it for the liquidators of the socialist revolution in Cuba.
The political operator of this brutal betrayal, the great Judas and agent of the new Cuban bourgeoisie, is none other than Alan Woods, a direct agent of Stalinism, who even brought the "Transitional Program" to Chávez in Venezuela. He deserves to go looking for food in the garbage dumps as the masses made hungry by the "Bolivarian bourgeoisie" have to do.
Others, such as Savas Matsas of Greece, dressed the Unified Communist Party of Russia (OKP) of Mitina, Putin's deputy foreign minister, as a partner to refound the Third International.
You have to put a name and a surname. They are the Judas who delivered the Fourth International. This is the best tribute we want to pay to Trotsky even if they want to persecute us as they did with him.
They, those who speak on behalf of the Fourth International, are just now meeting in São Paulo together with the leaders of the CP of Havana who have come from the University. And it is not surprising that this is so, because its leaders and most of its figures come from the university cloisters, where even the bourgeoisie grants them “Marxist chairs” to teach Marxism and transform the "revolutionary movement" that came out of the university classrooms into a toothless and herbivorous lion.
Comrades,
On the 80th anniversary of the assassination of Leon Trotsky we have to say that the greatest conquest of the revolutionaries of the 1930s, which is the Fourth International, has been sold out by revisionism and opportunism to the enemies of the proletariat. The destruction of the Fourth International in the last period is a decisive factor that has deepened the crisis of leadership of the proletariat at a time of a brutal crisis of the capitalist system and of huge mass uprisings that threaten to break into a revolutionary torrent at the world level.
Our conviction and our struggle are to recover our world party and re-found the Fourth International. This is the best tribute we can pay to Comrade Leon Trotsky and to the founders of the Fourth International.
For our part, we will stand firm in the program and strategy of revolutionary Marxism that has passed the test of history, while those who spoke on its behalf not only failed, but betrayed it. Good afternoon, comrades.
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Workers of Astillero Río Santiago struggling
Graffittis in Iran defending attacked workers Esmail Bakhshi (Iran) and Alejandro Villarruel (Argentina)
Logo of Avanzada Obrera - Lista Negra
Leon Trotsky
Rosa Luxemburgo and Karl Liebknecht
Lenin
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