Presentation of the tribute days, by comrade Martín
“We are a nucleus that is fighting to recover the flags of the Fourth International against those who today vilify it and who, of course, have to pay tribute to Trotsky because it is the only place from which they can speak to the international working class"
“The regrouping that is being set up today in São Paulo, has united, not the Trotskyists paying tribute to Trotsky; it has united those who want to speak in the name of Trotskyism together with those who have persecuted, assassinated, imprisoned and massacred the Trotskyists and whatever revolutionary fraction has arisen in the world"
Comrades, female comrades, all comrades, good afternoon, we are starting the first day in homage to comrade Leon Trotsky, assassinated at the hands of a Stalinist KGB agent, namely Ramón Mercader.
We believe that this activity is fundamental, because we consider that the combat the Fourth International gave, its program, its strategic and theoretical legacy, are still more valid today than ever. So much so that thousands of vanguard worker and youth militants have seen during this week dozens and hundreds of tributes, symposia and talks around Comrade Trotsky.
In these days we will try to demonstrate what was the fight that Trotsky and the Trotskyists gave, the internationalist revolutionary Marxists who carried out the historical task that culminated in the founding of the Fourth International.
But we are seeing in these days different talks and conferences around Trotsky and, fundamentally, we humbly believe that what those who today honor Trotsky are doing has the objective of castrating the program of revolutionary Marxism and Trotskyism, nicking its revolutionary edge and leaving Trotsky and the Trotskyists as harmless icons.
The bourgeoisie has done just that with every revolutionary and all sectors in history that fought in defense of the oppressed worldwide throughout the history of mankind. First, in life they persecute them, slander them, falsify them, denigrate them, revile them and, once they are dead, they try to surround them with a harmless halo only with the aim of appeasing the oppressed and transforming those revolutionaries whom they had chased and killed tirelessly into herbivorous lions or icons that do no harm.
But we want to stop fundamentally at one of the conferences in particular, among those that have been held by different organizations that claim to be Trotskyist, which is the one that has just been held in São Paulo, Brazil, under the name of “Mario Pedroza”.
That conference had a precedent in the "Leon Trotsky Encounter" held in Havana, convened by a person named Frank Hernández who, precisely, is the son of militants of the Stalinist Communist Party of Cuba.
Comrades, there, in Cuba, capitalism has just been restored. It was in Cuba that Stalinism, led by Fidel and Raul Castro, harbored León Trotsky's murderer, Ramón Mercader, honored by Stalinism in the USSR with the medal of honor for having fulfilled that counterrevolutionary role.
They got together last year and are getting together again today, not by chance in São Paulo. This huge regrouping that is rising today, has united, not the Trotskyists paying homage to Trotsky, but unfortunately, it united those who want to speak in the name of Trotskyism together with those who have persecuted, murdered, imprisoned and massacred him, the Trotskyists and whatever revolutionary factions have risen up in the world since the beginning of the 20th century.
It's not by chance. We just have a huge problem. All the conferences that the left is holding aim to define the crisis of leadership that the world working class has today. But what they are trying to hide is what we are going to define in these two days the FLTI is paying homage to León Trotsky.
We must remember that in the 19th century when the working class began to swell its ranks, and began to strengthen as a class, it did so by entering the fight against the bourgeoisie as a homogeneous class, because it had understood that it was a single class on a world level. That is, it understood in its combat that it could not fight in each country, other than fighting as an international working class.
Militant internationalism was one of the central foundations for which the working class fought. One of the greatest examples in the 19th century is the fight for the eight hours, which ended with comrades Chicago martyrs hanged on America's gallows. On May 1, all of us workers remember our martyrs.
In the 19th century, when Marxism entered into political struggle and fought internationally with anarchist currents such as that of Bakunin, such as that of Proudhon, with which they fought in common, for example in the Paris Commune, where the working class took Heaven by storm in Paris but could not advance to take and destroy the citadel of power in the whole France and, from Versailles, the bourgeoisie regrouped and conspired together with the Prussian bourgeoisie, and advanced and murdered all the revolutionary workers of the Paris Commune.
No one at that time would have come up with the idea that currents that were then debating very fraternally though without diplomacy about what was the best program for the proletariat's struggle to achieve victory, would end up in persecution, slander, even imprisonment.
We did see this in the twentieth century, as it happened with the social democracy, when the leadership of the German Social Democratic Party led by Kautsky, allowed the entrance to that slaughterhouse where the workers killed each other on behalf of the imperialist powers in the First World War, against what revolutionary workers such as Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg rose up. Their fundamental war cry was "the enemy is at home" because, precisely, the enemy that had to be destroyed was German imperialism.
There, what Marxism in the imperialist era called the "split of socialism" took place, because the decadent phase of agony and decomposition of capitalism is sustained, not by the strength of its armies, by the strength of its general staff, or due to the strength of its employers' political parties; it was sustained and continues to be so up to this day, precisely because it corrupts and buys the upper layers of the labor bureaucracy and aristocracy, and they are not only embodied in Stalinism and social democracy, but also in the union bureaucracy against which workers and youth fight on a daily basis worldwide.
Precisely, the crisis of leadership that none of the currents that come together to pay tribute to Trotsky today can explain, is that there is a sector, which consists of the upper layers of the working class that have been bought and corrupted to deceive, to dent the edge of the fighting of the working class and, finally, after demoralizing and dismantling them, putting them at the feet of the bourgeoisie.
Against that first split of socialism, which was that of social democracy, the Third International stood up, headed by Liebknecht, Trotsky and Lenin, who demonstrated to the working class that power could be seized as was done in Russia in 1917 and they also showed the world working class that heaven could be taken by storm. While the social democracy said that capitalism and its states were empty shells that could be filled with a content that was now bourgeois, then worker and that by advancing in an evolutionary way, socialism could be conquered peacefully.
This enormous treacherous theory, later taken into their hands by Stalinism, was precisely what led, in its hands, to corrupt the Third International.
But this did not happen overnight. The combat of Trotskyism arises because, the first Workers' State that was conquered in Russia, later called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was isolated. And this was so because the European revolution, to which all the revolutionary workers grouped in the Third International, turned all their forces, was defeated both in Germany and in England, etc.
And after the victorious revolution in Russia was isolated, after the revolutionary processes of 1918-19 were defeated together with the revolution of the Workers' Councils in Germany, of 1921-22 and 1923-24, they allowed the bourgeoisie to surround the Workers' State. And, in that isolation, a privileged layer incarnated in Stalinism arose, against which the International Leninist Bolshevik Left Opposition, headed by Comrade Leon Trotsky stood up and sought to give continuity to Bolshevism, that is, to the most advanced of the theory and revolutionary program of the Third International; but we must not forget that this defeat had been imposed with massacre, persecution and also assassinations of revolutionary leaders at the hands of the Social Democracy who, in Germany, were in charge of persecuting and assassinating previously named revolutionary leaders such as Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg, who were founders of the III International who, during the First World War, were in prison, who refused to vote the war credits and, as I said before, called on the working class to turn the rifle around, stating that the enemy was at home and that it was the bourgeoisie that sent the workers to death for the benefit of the imperialist bourgeoisie.
Precisely, gathering all that experience, accumulating all that revolutionary baggage from Liebknecht, from Luxembourg, from Lenin who, until his last breath, fought to sustain and extend the socialist revolution at the international level, Bolshevism in the resistance stood up. In 1924 the Left Opposition arose.
But the Workers' State was already isolated and the Left Opposition directed its forces with the theory of the permanent revolution that began to generalize as a theory at the international level for the world proletariat, posing in the colonies and semi-colonies, as an immediate task, the fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat to solve the democratic and national tasks in those places, combining them with the fight for the socialist revolution in the imperialist countries. Thus the program of Trotskyism stands up against Stalinism which, in order to carry out its entire policy of betrayal of the international socialist revolution, masked itself with a pseudo-theory called the "theory of the two-stages revolution" and the "theory of socialism in a single country”, with which later on, carrying it all the way in the 1930s, it applied the policy known to all the comrades who fought in each revolution that arose during the history of the 20th century and so far in the 21st century, I.e. the policy of the "popular front", which is nothing other than seeking and supporting a bourgeois, painting it as "progressive", painting it as "democratic" and supporting that sector of the bourgeoisie to climb on to crush and divide the working class so that their revolution does not succeed.
Precisely, what no one can explain is why, after 1917, power could never be seized as was done in Russia led by a revolutionary leadership and what appeared were victorious revolutions led, in an exceptional way, as Trotsky said in the Program of Transition, by petty-bourgeois leaderships like Stalinism in the historical periods that come after the Second World War.
Comrades. They have just met in São Paulo, precisely where in 1997 a huge counter revolutionary international was set up that gave sustenance and new life to Stalinism that in 1989 fell and handed over the workers' states that we had in a third of the planet. In 1997 the Sao Paulo Forum was set up first and then the World Social Forum later, which included bourgeois leaderships such as Chavismo, such as Aristide from Haiti, such as General Gutiérrez from Ecuador, even with Lula, who later ruled like everyone else. We have known Brazil for 13 years and he handed that country over to imperialism and gave up the entire struggle of the labor movement in the '70s and' 80s.
Those who gather in São Paulo today are led by Stalinism in Cuba that has just handed over the Workers' State to the US imperialists. Precisely in 2008, Stalinism with Fidel and Raul Castro, made a deal with Obama, the Democratic Party president of the USA at that time and handed the island over to Coca-Cola and Cargill.
It is no coincidence that now they want to dress up as Trotskyists and pay their tribute as they are doing today in São Paulo.
We are going to do the opposite, because we want to show that the program and strategy of the Fourth International and its theory have passed the test and are now more relevant than ever and that is why it is the only place from which we can speak to the working class, because it is the only place from which an unblemished flag to fight for and with which to succeed can be handed over to the combats of the working class and the revolutionary youth at this time.
But, unfortunately, those who claim to be Trotskyists, disavow their program and today join with sectors of Stalinism to pay tribute to Trotsky. And that is the gravest thing that can exist, because precisely they join with their executioners to pay homage to the comrades who were murdered.
In closing I would like to tell you that there is a problem here. The program of Trotskyism has passed the test, the Trotskyists are those who did not pass the test and have everything to prove to the new generations that enter the combat. Fundamentally because the banners of the Fourth International today have disintegrated and have been placed at the feet of Stalinism and today they are militating in common in a single party called "New Left."
We, from the FLTI, are a nucleus that is fighting to recover those flags, precisely from the hands of those who today revile it and who, of course, have to pay tribute to Trotsky because it is the only place from which they can speak to the international working class.
We have to say something that is what everyone is hiding. Stalinism played an enormous role as a counterrevolutionary organization worldwide, not only killing Trotsky, because precisely the assassination of Trotsky, to which we pay tribute 80 years after his treacherous assassination by a Stalinist hitman in Mexico, was the culmination of the persecution, the massacre and the physical liquidation of an entire internationalist and revolutionary faction that embodied the continuity of Bolshevism and the best of the revolutionary program that fought for years, when the moment came that socialism and its upper echelons and the labor aristocracy and bureaucracies were bought by the bourgeoisie.
Because it was not just Trotsky. When the Fourth International was founded, the comrade who had to give the founding report, the young comrade Rudolph Klement, was found assassinated and decapitated in the Seine River. Trotsky's son Leon Sedov, who organized the Soviet section and the section under fascism in Germany, Austria and Eastern Europe that were under the boot of fascism and Stalinism in their jails and death camps, was also murdered.
That is, Stalinism played a central role in the persecution and assassination of the internationalist fraction of the proletariat that had conquered and sought to give continuity to the Fourth International, which sought to enter as a compact force and prepared to intervene in the Second World War and it was the Trotskyists who came after Trotsky's assassination who dissolved it, who later revised it and who today have put it at the feet of Stalinism and militate in common in a world party such as the "New Left" and even they pay tribute to Trotsky alongside his murderers such as Cuban Stalinism, which today has become a new bourgeoisie, doing millionaire deals with the US imperialists.
Comrades, let us advance in this reflection, on this journey that seeks to give the combatants of the world working class an unblemished flag to fight for which, for us, today more than ever, is that of the Fourth International founded in 1939.
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Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky in the Petrograd Soviet - 1919
Second Congress of the III International
Trotsky and Van Heijenoort
Meeting of renegades of Trotskyism with Cuban Stalinism in Havana, 2019
Mercader, Trotsky's murderer,
next to Fidel Castro's older brother
Martyrs of Chicago
The Paris Commune, 1871
World War I
Rosa Luxemburgo and Karl Liebknecht
Lenin and Trotsky
Rosa Luxemburg at a rally
during the German Revolution of 1918
Trotsky with members of the Left Opposition
Lenin
Lula andy Haddad, members of PT
Chávez and Lula
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