Tribute to Leon Trotsky, 80 years since his assassination by Stalinism
Accompanied and with the support, solidarity and greetings of hundreds of revolutionary workers and dozens of currents and organizations of the revolutionary vanguard of the world proletariat...…
The Trotskyists of the FLTI paid tribute to Comrade Leon Trotsky, 80 years after his murder at the hands of Stalinism
Last August 22 and 23, from the Collective for the Refoundation of the Fourth International / FLTI we paid our tribute to León Trotsky and the founders of the Fourth International. In this tribute, promoted by “El Organizador Obrero Internacional” (International Workers Organizer) the FLTI newspaper, we were surrounded by dozens of currents, internationalist organizations of the world working class and hundreds of Trotskyist militants who participated in it. Together with all of them, we fight daily against this rotten world capitalist system and the treacherous leaderships that support it. This tribute was paid via teleconference and in it dozens of interventions, greetings and messages from all the organizations that accompanied us in these days were expressed. They were also present to pay tribute to Trotsky 80 years after his assassination.
We were accompanied by organizations and militants from currents that are in the forefront of huge battles of the world proletariat. This shows that Trotskyism and Trotskyists have begun to break our isolation, imposed by the successive and cruel partial defeats to which the treacherous leaderships led the various assaults that the masses have been leading since 2008 in the face of the catastrophe of the world capitalist system. With this second outbreak of capitalism manifest bankruptcy in 2019-2020, and the consequent deepening of the terrible sufferings of the masses, here and there, under these objective conditions, the exploited are waging enormous battles, uprisings, and revolutionary offensives. At times class clashes are diverted and betrayed by reformist leaderships. Other times, these fights resurface with greater momentum.
The “siren songs” of reformism and its perfidious policy of class collaboration are followed by hard blows from fascism, whether generalized as in Bolivia or by winning the streets against the rising workers, as in the United States or Lebanon, where the bourgeoisie of Hezbollah tries to crush the revolution that started there. Imperialism threatens to bring "new Syrias" and bloody massacres to the revolutionary processes that are underway. Here and there the "social peace" is exhausted. Class reconciliation is already unbearable. "Reformism without reforms" accompanies the crises of parliamentarism as soul to body. Decisive clashes are underway that will be defined in the streets and in the civil war among classes.
The mechanisms of deception of the bourgeois regimes and the "siren songs" of class collaboration are overcome by strong blows from the left of the masses. This has happened in the USA, where renegades of Trotskyism, Stalinists and various social-imperialists were hanging on the coattails of Sanders (who was trying to bring the martyred exploited to the feet of the Democratic Party) when they were surprised by the uprising of the black people and the whole of the American working class. The masses are attacking the police stations and begin to organize themselves in combats against fascism in the fire streets of Portland, Wisconsin, etc. This clearly paints the crisis of reformism.
None of the revolutionary actions of the masses that are underway, whether in the Middle East or in Africa, in Europe, in the Pacific, or in the Americas, were prepared or organized by this "New Left" made of Stalinists, bourgeois political swindlers and former Trotskyists tied to their fate.
An enormous process of radicalization is opening up within the world proletariat and in it Bolshevism is fighting and living, and also the possibility of regeneration of the revolutionary movement, on the condition that they fight hand in hand to reconstitute militant internationalism in the ranks of the world working class.
How can we then forget to mention here, the greeting sent by comrades from the "Association of Victims, Dead and Wounded of the Senkata Massacre" who accompanied us, raising their demands for justice and fighting against the murderous Bolivian state.
Comrade Claude Marill from the "Emancipation"Unitary Inter-union Tendency of France also sent his greetings, he who for decades has been fighting in the heart of the French proletariat.
On the day of tribute to Trotsky we read the letter sent by the comrades of the JRCL-RMF, the revolutionary Marxists of Japan.
The Trotskyists of the FLTI were not alone in this tribute. From the heart of the civil war, fromencircled Idlib and divided Syria, comrades of the revolutionary and internationalist fraction of the partisans of the Syrian revolution took part in our tribute.
From the Iranian resistance, one of the toughest class wars of the exploited against the exploiters, came a greeting from comrade Shiva Mahbobi, spokeswoman for the organization "Campaign for the Freedom of Political Prisoners of Iran." Trotskyist workers from Africa, both from Zimbabwe and Marikana, paid tribute to Trotsky, as well as comrade “Cheo” Navarro, leader of the FLTI, who was a member of the Simón Bolívar Brigade that went to fight in the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979.
All of them will be presented below, together with leaders of the "National, Trade Union and Popular Coordinator" of Colombiawho are fighting for the general strike, workers dismissed from the GM of Mexico and comrade Mario González, father of one of the 43 disappeared teaching school students from Ayotzinapa, among others who were present at this tribute.
An era of counter-reformism has already opened. As Trotsky affirmed, a Marxist current that in a situation like this is not capable of finding a way toward the masses, deserves to die. Such is the challenge that we Trotskyists take up in this tribute we paid to Comrade Trotsky, 80 years after his assassination.
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We present below the different interventions and greetings that were part of these intense days, grouped by blocks and not necessarily the order they had in the tribute to Trotsky, for a better organization of the concepts expressed there and to highlight the valuable messages of the participants who accompanied us.
The Trotskyists of the Collective for the Refoundation of the Fourth International / FLTI pay our tribute to Leon Trotsky reaffirming that the program, the theory and the strategy of Trotskyism have passed the test of history, but the Trotskyists have not.
We defined the moment and our struggle to recover and refound the Fourth International. We made a historical balance sheet of the great battles of Trotskyism and also of the thousand attempts of entire generations that from 1940 on, sought to retake the course of the founders of the Fourth International.
We reaffirm, however, speaking to the new generations of the international revolutionary movement, thatthese attempts failed as a result of revisionism, opportunism and adaptations to Stalinism and other treacherous leaderships.
This led the forces that speak in the name of Trotskyism today, 80 years after his assassination, to be paying tribute to Trotsky, as happened in São Paulo, along with his executioners, with opportunist wings of Cuban Stalinism that try to "dress in red" and to cover up the former Castroist bureaucracy, which as a new ruling class is getting rich at the expense of Cuban workers (after betraying the revolution throughout the Americas) with Trotsky's figure. When we talk about this we refer to a recently appeared group named "Commune", which has been dressed as a leftist by all the renegades of Trotskyism who ultimately ended up paying homage to Trotsky with those who yesterday received in Havana Mercader, the hitman who assassinated the founder of the Fourth International, with honors and fanfare. So low, the liquidators of Trotskyism have carried the clean banners of the Fourth International. All of them are part of a “New Left” where ex-Trotskyists coexist alongside remnants of the social democracy and the forces of the old Communist Parties that the bourgeois regimes have preserved as internal police in the unions and workers' organizations in a large part of the countries of the world.
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Comrade Martín, a member of the FLTI, referred to these issues at the presentation of these two days of tribute. Likewise, comrade Paula Medrano, from Democracia Obrera (Workers' Democracy) of the Spanish State and leader of the FLTI, intervened from Madrid regarding the fight of Trotskyism in the 1930s and the founding of the Fourth International.
Comrade Carlos Munzer, leader of the FLTI and director of the newspaper "El Organizador Obrero Internacional" closed the first day, making a historical balance of 80 years of struggle and attempts to resume the fight of the founders of the Fourth International and also of 80 years of selling out by revisionism and opportunism of the flags and of our world party. The fight against revisionism and liquidationism in the Fourth International was the central axis of his intervention.
Comrade Alejandro Villarruel, a member of the Advanced Workers group of the Rio Santiago Shipyard (ARS) (Argentina), completed this vision by stating how the crisis of the Fourth International, which was liquidated and dissolved even organizationally by revisionism and opportunism, is a decisive factor that has exacerbated the crisis of leadership of the world working class in moments of open bankruptcy of the capitalist system. This has aggravated the contradiction between objective factors, more than mature for the proletarian revolution, and the crisis of leadership, which is nothing more than the overabundance of treacherous leaderships that at every step undo and disorganize what the masses build in their revolutionary struggles. .
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We were accompanied in this tribute to Trotsky by the revolutionary Marxists of the Pacific, the comrades of the Revolutionary Communist League of Japan - Revolutionary Marxist Fraction (JRCL-RMF), with whom we from the FLTI maintain a fighting bloc, fighting in common at the international level. The comrades of the JRCL-RMF vindicated Trotsky's unwavering combat against Stalinism and put forward their own historical vision of Trotskyism, as the reader will be able to see in the letter from the Japanese revolutionaries that we are publishing.
As we have already said, we were able to pay tribute to Trotsky together with these comrades because together we fought in Hong Kong, in Syria, in Chile, in China against the Stalinist beast that became a new ruling class and also in the anti-Stalinist and anti-imperialist class battles of the Ukrainian working class.
Our struggle to set up an international bloc that allows the reconstitution of militant internationalism in the world working class finds in the JRCL-RMF one of its main promoters. Their support for the political prisoners of Las Heras, their decisive campaign of struggle alongside the Chilean rebel youth, marching to the embassy of that country in Tokyo not long ago, their fight for the Syrian masses and their solidarity with the Leon Sedov Brigade, are a clear example of this internationalist praxis, which on our part we seek to conquer throughout the world labor movement. This practice is the opposite of the renegades of Trotskyism's, who on “festive days” gather in pompous congresses where they swear fidelity to Marxism and to the theory and program of the Fourth International, and then betray them every day in their respective countries.
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For the reader who will enter our website to see all the videos, greetings and messages from these days, we want to highlight the interventions of comrades from Syria and the Middle East. The Trotskyists fighting in the civil war, on the front lines of the events of revolution and counterrevolution in the Middle East, paid their tribute to 80 years of the assassination of Trotsky. That is why we reproduce the intervention of Abu Muad, from the newspaper "The Truth of the Oppressed", who referred to the combat of the Leon Sedov Brigade in the Syrian revolution, the tribute to its martyrs and the fight at the international level against all currents of the renegades of Trotskyism.
Then came from Syria, comrade Steif Abu Izen, correspondent for "The Truth of the Oppressed", who from the heart of "the free land of the Syrian revolution in Idlib" addressed us on this 80th anniversary of the assassination of Trotsky, denouncing the selling out and massacre of the revolution and raising the need to unite and coordinate all the revolutionaries of the world, from Syria to Lebanon to Chile to Europe.
Comrade Silvia from Brazil, a member of the Editorial Committee of "The Truth of the Oppressed" and comrade Amir Hakim Al Amery from Naples, a tireless fighter for the Syrian revolution and the entire Middle East in Europe, also spoke to pay homage to Comrade Trotsky.
As part of this fight for militant internationalism against the treacherous leaderships, the voice of the resistance of the Iranian proletariat that today is fighting against the counterrevolutionary regime of the ayatollahs could not be absent. Comrade Shiva Mahbobi, spokeswoman for the organization “Campaign for the Freedom of Political Prisoners of Iran” (CFPPI), spoke at these days in tribute to Leon Trotsky, claiming the need for international solidarity to combat dictators and oppressors like the ones of the Iranian clergy regime. The comrades of the “Campaign for the Freedom of the Political Prisoners of Iran” come to carry out, on 06/20, an international day for the freedom of all comrades who are imprisoned by the Ayatollah regime, which we support and are also promoting from the FLTI.
Regarding this fight for the freedom of Iranian political prisoners and against executions, we reproduce the greeting that leaders of the Black Vests of France sent to that day of 06/20.
We reproduce the letter in tribute to Trotsky sent from France by Claude Marill, a fighter for years in French Trotskyism, who was a fighter for the independence of Algeria against French imperialism, a former founding militant of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) of the Unified Secretariat and current member of the "Emancipation"Unitary Inter-union Tendency (from the education sector).
Comrade James Sakala, a dismissed worker and delegate in the David Whitehead textile factory in Zimbabwe and leader of the Zimbabwe WIL and the FLTI, was part of this journey for the 80th anniversary of Trotsky's assassination from Black Africa. The comrade referred to the fight to unite the black working class from Africa to the US, following the slave route. From the WIL of Zimbabwe, they actively participated in the enormous strike and struggle of the Marikana workers in South Africa, where they maintain an enormous job under the banners of Trotskyism in the depths of the Anglo- American mines.
From Colombia, we received the intervention of comrade Sinforoso “Cheo” Navarro, leader of the FLTI, a former member of the Simón Bolívar Brigade who went to fight the Nicaraguan revolution in the late 1970s. In this tribute to Leon Trotsky, the comrade vindicated this internationalist experience in which he was a protagonist, also clearly marking the lessons and strategic differences with the policy carried out by the Morenoite current.
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From Latin America, prominent and advanced sectors of the Latin American working class are fighting against imperialism, who are in an open process of rupture with the old union bureaucracies, Stalinists and agents of the bourgeoisie in the movement, took part in this day in homage to Trotsky.
Comrade Carlos García, leader of the International Committee of the "National, Trade Union and Popular Coordinator" of Colombia, presented the resolution took by its more than 70 member organizations to call for a "Continental Gathering of Workers' Organizations and All Those Who Fight", which has been published in the latest issue of "El Organizador Obrero Internacional” ("International Workers Organizer".)
Other members of the National Coordinator of Colombia also took the floor, such as Edgar Ospina from the group “Democracia Directa” (Direct Democracy), founder of the Colombian PST and the LIT and prominent leader of the Morenoite current during the 1980s. He greeted the audience and raised the balance elaborated by his current on the crisis of the Trotskyist movement. This position was the subject of a debate and was answered by different interventions that we will soon make public, as part of a balance of the principled break we made with the MAS and the LIT-CI in 1988 from the TBI. That is because 80 years after the assassination of Trotsky, the trenches between reformism and Trotskyism must be established, black on white, before the vanguard of the world proletariat.
From Cali, Colombia, the comrades of the “Comuneros” Group sent their message in homage to Comrade Trotsky and to comrades and fighters who fell in the fight against the Duque government and the regime of the 9 US military bases.
From Mexico, comrade Israel Cervantes, a worker fired from General Motors in Silao, took the floor to pay tribute to Trotsky, from the maquiladoras where imperialism super-exploits the working class.
As a decisive contribution to the current combat of the working class in the American continent, the comrades of the LSTI of Bolivia /FLTI, elaborated on the thousand and one opportunities that Trotskyism had, mainly in the acute battles of the Bolivian working class such as the revolutions of 1952 and 1971, and the balance sheet of the intervention of the forces of the Fourth International in those events.
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In addition, in these days of tribute emotional greetings were heard that cried out for justice for the martyrs of the working class and endorsed the fight of the Trotskyists who suffered the massacre in the prisons of the old USSR and the murder of leaders of the Fourth International as Leon Trotsky, Rudolph Klement and Leon Sedov, at the hands of Stalinism.
Thus, they paid tribute to Comrade Trotsky who suffered in their own flesh the massacre, the persecution, the jail and the most cruel attacks of the murderous bourgeois states, as did from Bolivia members of the “Association of Victims, Dead and Wounded of the Senkata Massacre”. Also taking part in this tribute to Trotsky were comrades from the Commission of Condemned Workers of Las Heras, their Relatives and Friends and comrade Mario González, father of César Manuel, one of the 43 disappeared teaching school students from Ayotzinapa(Mexico). Likewise, comrade Lourdes Hidalgo, an immigrant worker in Argentina and a survivor of the massacre at the Luis Viale clandestine textile factory, intervened giving an account of her struggle, raising the cry of the black people and the US workers of "no justice, no peace".
The second day of tribute to Trotsky was presented by a video of comrade Jorge Terracota, an internationalist revolutionary who collaborates with "The International Workers Organizer" with his opinion columns, making real contributions of Marxism against reformism and the struggle for militant internationalism. As a revolutionary personality, he has waged an enormous battle for the Syrian revolution and the heroic fighters of the Leon Sedov Brigade in it.
These two days of tribute culminated with the intervention of Comrade Carlos Munzer, who closed the event, specifying that the physical attack on Comrade Trotsky was part of a counterrevolutionary civil war organized by imperialism through social democracy and Stalinism against the leaders of the revolutionary internationalist fraction of the world working class in the 20th century.
The tragedy of the abandonment of the international center of Coyoacán by the old leaders who deserted after the assassination of Trotsky, returned to their countries and left the national sections adrift and isolated during the war. This is what started the process of degeneration of the Fourth International during the Second World War, an issue that worsened throughout the 20th century to the present day.
In this final intervention, the policy of the renegades of Trotskyism who marched to unified parties with or directly raised the program of Stalinism was denounced. Stalinism has once again raised its head, reintroduced by the bourgeois states in the leadership of the unions and mass organizations in all the world. The tragedy is that the forces claiming to be "Trotskyist" accompanied Stalinism to its grave in 1989 and later revived it as Lazarus and supported it from the left, as has already been fully demonstrated.
In its great majority, "Trotskyism", in the 21st century, operated a definitive passage to the camp of reformism. Their regrouping in Havana with a wing of political impostors of Castroism and Stalinism is the most reliable proof that a liquidationist current revolted against the foundational bases of the Fourth International and seeks not to leave any traces of them. These currents support Sanders who is preparing a death trap against the revolutionary struggle of the American working class. With the excuse of publishing a book by Trotsky in Havana, they whitewash Cuban Castroism's blood-stained dirty clothes. As part of the PSOL, the NPA and other “anti-capitalist” currents, they serve and support the old Bolivarian bourgeoisies, the left-wing union bureaucracies and the regimes of imperialist European Union. Everyone is embracing the fascist al-Assad and his bloody counterrevolutionary policy, and all this has led the Fourth International to the most serious crisis of its entire existence.
They have crossed the Rubicon. They are with Stalinism theoretically, politically and organizationally. They are together with the Kurdish Stalinist Communist Party (PKK) -therefore they are tied to world Stalinism- which put the Kurdish people and their YPGs to act as a fifth-column in the Syrian revolution, and then as direct agents of the US imperialists, defending its oil companies in northern Syria, under the orders of the US military bases in Rojava.
Carlos Munzer affirmed in his speech that the situation of the Fourth International presents a bleak scenario, but at the same time he stated that the worsening of the objective conditions of the class struggle at every step has made reformism blow up and they will continue to do so, without letting it live in peace. In the processes of radicalization of the masses, new detachments of the proletariat seek a path to militant internationalism and revolution. There we Trotskyists will find our way to the masses, without looking for shortcuts or the line of least resistance.
Our homage then culminated in our commitment to recover the Fourth International, our world party, driven to the mud of ignominy and betrayal by years and decades of adaptations, reformism and opportunism. The struggle to re-found the Fourth International is inseparable from recovering its clean flags because it is what the working class needs in this historical epoch of crises, crash, wars, revolutions and fascism we are living in.
This last intervention, which is accompanied by the validity of the key issues on the program of the Fourth International, will be published soon in this section of tribute to Trotsky and also in the section on polemics with the reformist left of our website, as part from a balance sheet of the Fourth International, 80 years after the assassination of Trotsky
We invite the comrades who enter our website to read this tribute that represents a step forward in the struggle to re-found the Fourth International, knowing that for this new historical period our current, maintaining the revolutionary lessons of the litmus tests of the world class struggle of the last decades, is breaking its isolation, leaving behind all the opportunistic pressures to look for shortcuts and easy ways to build itself, as well as any pressure to the sectarian decomposition of political invalids who will never reach the battlefield, such as our Transition Program raises.
We have earned the just hatred of traitors hanging on the coattails of Stalinism and the bourgeois parliaments and of vendors of old formulas already defeated by Marxism, presented today as saving panaceas. They won't stop us.
In these days we have taken a step forward. The forces that we presented in these days are the forces that the FLTI fights alongside with every day. They bring us closer and closer to the key focal points of the world proletariat,deepening our struggle to regroup Trotskyist cadres in order to lay the foundations to begin fighting for the new vanguard insurrectionary Bolshevik parties in the hot spots of the world revolution.
Main speeches of the Trotskyists of the FLTI See more
Salutes and speeches of Trotskyists and internationalist organizations from all over the world See more
Salutes from sectors of the vanguard who are facing the attack of the murderous states See more
From Latin America, homage to Leon Trotsky by the internationalist workersSee more
Tribute to comrade Leon Trotsky
In the 80th Anniversary of the murder of Trotsky, tribute to the martyrs of Brigade Leon Sedov of Syria
Mobilization of the French working class
Colombia, January 2020: the workers' ranks take the seat of the bureaucracy at the Meeting of the National Committee for the Strike
Shiva Mahbobi, spokesperson for the "Campaign for the Freedom of the Political Prisoners of Iran"”
The parents of the 43 disappeared students in Mexico
Lenin and Trotsky
Ramón Castro, Fidel's brother,
next to Mercader, Trotsky's assassin
Trotsky and the Red Army
Rudolph Klement, León Trotksy, Yvan Craipeau, Jeanne Martis des Pallieres, Sara Weber and Jean van Heijenoort (below) in 1933
Japan workers and youth fight against US military bases
Leon Sedov Brigade
Syrian resistance in Idlib
Iran: workers strike from the Haft Tappeh sugar factory
James, WIL leader of Zimbabwe,
with the miners of Marikana
The Simón Bolívar Brigade in 1979
Protest of health workers from Pereira in Colombia
Fight of the workers of General Motors de México
Bolivia: worker and peasant militias of the 1952 revolution
The left opposition in the USSR in Siberian exile in 1928
Mobilization of the “Association of victims, deceased and wounded of the Senkata massacre” (Bolivia)
YPG soldier with his American commander in northern Syria
The 1938 "Socialist Appeal" newspaper publishes "The Transitional Program"
