Tribute to Leon Trotsky, 80 years since his assassination by Stalinism
From France, salute by Claude Marill, member of the Unitary Intersindical Tendency, Emancipation (education branch)
“With emotion and modesty I send you this message from France on the occasion of the commemoration of the death of L. Trosky, a great figure of proletarian internationalism.”
“The exacerbated crisis of capitalism pushes the peoples to rise up even within the dominant powers. In the US, the black people threaten the White House, in Hong Kong the people continue the Tiananmen Square insurrection (not to speak more widely here about the emancipation struggles of the Uyghur and Tibetan peoples); in Minsk the workers' revolt is still shaking the Kremlin. The peoples of South America are retaking the torch of the impulse given by the Arab revolutions that was also retaken by the Sudanese, Algerian, Malian, and Lebanese peoples…”
Message on commemoration of L. Trotsky's death
Comrades:
With emotion and modesty I send you this message from France on the occasion of the commemoration of the death of L. Trosky, a great figure of proletarian internationalism.
This message is that of an old union activist whose only ambition is to maintain a place among those who, today, militate within their union organizations to oppose the opportunist deviations that commit themselves to the policies of the bourgeois state. For almost a century the leaderships of union organizations and bureaucratic politics have sent us into the quagmire of class collaboration.
As member of an inter-union unitary tendency called "Emancipation", we strive to build a "class struggle" opposition against the union federative leaderships whose permanent betrayals with their policy of class collaboration try to exhaust, with their incessant dilatory maneuvers, our fighting potential.
In the context of the current acute social crisis, the priority of ending the capitalist system is winning over the militant collective conscience.
"History bites our heads" ... as comrade Ben Said, at that time a member of the "Unified Secretariat of the Fourth International" in the 1970s, liked to repeat. It was already urgent, half a century ago, to end with this system!
The depredations and human catastrophes generated by this deadly system require our determination to change the course of history that is already leading us towards the worst extremes: devastating imperialist wars in a context of climate change phenomena that threaten the survival of humanity.
I stopped being a member of the LCR in the 1990s after it abandoned the Chechen people in their irreducible fight against the Russian colonial tutelary power, which on that occasion massacred a third of the Chechen population and reduced its capital, Grosny, to rubble...
The "Chechen seed" will once again take root and the Russian colonial power will have to restore its territory to that people. Today is the time to resume anti-colonial combats.
During this genocidal colonial war, the labor movement as a whole turned its back on this fight of an entire people for their freedom.
Painful and scandalous betrayal that will leave the field open to an oversized Russian imperialism, without real industrial resources, to assert its power and determination of the appetite for conquests in the face of a retreating US imperialism, on the defensive, after its calamitous adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq and having, in addition, to contain the increase of China's power in the southern hemisphere.
After these betrayals, the American hegemonic power leaves Moscow its role as gravedigger to the advancement of revolutionary struggles. This is how the struggles of the peoples in the Caucasus, then Syria, in Crimea, in Donbas were defeated or contained and it will certainly be so tomorrow in Belarus if the workers' insurrection movement take it to the seizure of power.
The bureaucracies of the left, but also those of the extreme left, try to maintain the survival of their organizational power by consolidating such role "games" between imperialist powers. Inscribed in the paradigm called "American anti-imperialism", they reinforce the international forces linked to Moscow to crush, in their spheres of influence, any will of the peoples for revolutionary independence.
What is now called "Campism" contributes to emptying the pseudo "internationalist" support of our organizations of any political meaning.
Great was then our surprise when we learned of your direct armed support with the insurgents of Aleppo in the fight against the crypto-Nazi regime of the bloody Bashar al-Assad ... and all the international forces that are allied to him.
I want to pay tribute to the Katiba Leon Sedov made up of more than a hundred fighters who fought to the last breath against tyranny and who continue this fight today in Idlib!
Your involvement in the Syrian revolution will be historic!
On the contrary, we can only deplore and condemn the illusion of a ghostly revolutionary Rojava whose leaders linked to the PKK-YPG, closely corseted by the American and Western imperialist powers, will be held accountable for the diversion of the anti-colonial combat of the Kurdish people against the Turkish state, in pursuit of imperialist interests.
Their betrayals reached ignominy when YPG forces allied with all reactionary forces, including ISIS, to bring down the revolutionary people of East Aleppo.
Since 2011, the revolutionary dynamics of the Syrian people, associated with that of the Kurdish people, would have allowed the reaffirmation of their own objectives.
This historic revolutionary meeting between the Kurdish and Arab peoples will not have taken place. The Palestinian people are therefore more isolated in their fight against Zionism.
The exacerbated crisis of capitalism pushes the peoples to rise up even within the dominant powers.
In the US, the black people threaten the White House, in Hong Kong the people continue the Tiananmen Square insurrection (not to speak more widely here about the emancipation struggles of the Uyghur and Tibetan peoples); in Minsk the workers' revolt is still shaking the Kremlin. The peoples of South America are retaking the torch of the impulse given by the Arab revolutions that was also retaken by the Sudanese, Algerian, Malian, and Lebanese peoples...
In France, let's impose the withdrawal of French imperialist troops from Iraq, Syria, Libya, Mali and West Africa!
Restitution of the territories colonized by the French colonial power!
The world revolution resumes its relevance. The Leninist Trotskyist Fraction is one of its engines.
I salute your fight and your determination.
Your desire to associate without sectarianism all the revolutionary forces, even those that do not participate in your historical current, gives you credit. We must appreciate your full support for the Greek anarchist comrades, a great example of generous workers' solidarity.
Very modestly I tell you "see you soon", comrades, for the present and future struggles.
The paths of revolutionary freedom will be, as you know, long and painful.
We owe all of our confidence to you to set and maintain the goals!
You carry our hopes!
Let me send you a fraternal greeting from a trade unionist convinced of the need for a committed class struggle for many years! And for the internationalist class combat.
Claude Marill, member of the Unitary Intersindical Tendency, Emancipation
Trotsky with Rudolph Klement, Yvan Craipeau
and
Jean Van Heijenoort
