December 2019

From the Middle East on fire to revolted Latin America...
From insurgent Hong Kong to Paris spring...

Fighting to recover the militant internationalism of the working class...

FLTI in Japan:

Conversations with the revolutionary Marxists of the JRCL-RMF

As we announced in the presentation of this Special Edition of the "International Workers Organizer", a delegation from the FLTI participated in the annual political meeting of the comrades of the Japanese Revolutionary Communist League / Revolutionary Marxist Fraction (JRCL-RMF). Invited by the leadership of the Marxists of the Pacific, we were then present in this meeting that was held last December 8 in Tokyo.
On this occasion, we also had intense days of discussion and elaboration in common with the Japanese revolutionaries on key issues of the current revolutionary outbreaks of the masses.

We arrived in Japan to fight for coordinating and breaking the isolation of these revolutionary battles that are shaking the planet, and fighting for the exploited of the semicolonial world to conquer a unity in the struggle with the working class of the imperialist countries.
As we stated in the presentation of this newspaper, during our stay in Japan we were able to carry out common interventions with the comrades of the JRCL-RMF, fighting together to break the siege of Senkata and to unite the combats of the working class and the rebel youth of Chile and Hong Kong.

 

The revolutionaries discuss about what they should do: the revolution

With the Marxists of the Pacific we moved forward in defining with full clarity that the crisis of leadership of the world working class does not cease to intensify, that is, that the disastrous role played by Stalinism, the renegades of Marxism and other reformist leaderships is the main obstacle the masses have for achieving the success of their fighting.
Stalinism, social democracy and the renegades of Trotskyism, which make up the so-called "New Left," lend an enormous favor to the capitalist regimes that are in crisis as a result of the masses' offensive. They seek to limit the extent of the exploited's combats. They say that these struggles can only solve bourgeois tasks such as "expanding existing democracy." Their motto is to fight for a "real democracy." Here and there and for all situations of the class struggle, they articulate their entire program around the fight for Constituent Assemblies, such as petty-bourgeois liberals. Thus, reformism gives formal democratic slogans a strategic character, while for revolutionary Marxism they have only a tactical and episodic character. The fact is that these currents have long since given up the struggle for socialism.
They also try to push back the mass political struggles, wherein the oppressed understand that in order to conquer even the slightest of their demands they must defeat the governments and regimes of the exploiters, to minimal impotent economic struggles of pressure, in the middle of a brutal marasmus and crisis of the capitalist system.

The trade war between the imperialist powers proves to be a war against the labor movement and the oppressed peoples. This is a proof that the objective conditions for the socialist revolution are rotting. The world division of labor is breaking once and again. Not only is the dispute among imperialist powers over China's business, but the USA's mainstay is against Maastricht's Europe and particularly against Germany. The fight over gas and who would end looting Russia is open and is as violent or more than the dispute over China. The new pipeline that goes from Siberia to Germany, called Nord Stream 2, has bothered Wall Street so much that it has compelled the administration to the point of applying sanctions to every company that builds it.
Meanwhile, dozens of countries collide with the underwater rocks of the international financial crisis, which pushes the bourgeois governments to launch brutal attacks against the masses, and the imperialist powers to promote new recolonizing offensives. Imperialism needs to extract super-profits from the semicolonial world so that capitalism survives, after a handful of parasites have collected on account and spent beforehand what human labor has not yet produced.
With the comrades of the JRCL-RMF we verified, on the one hand, that the objective conditions are more than mature to advance to the socialist revolution and, on the other, we denounce the perfidious role of the traitorous leaderships, which is the key element of immaturity of the current revolutionary processes.

Along with this, a very important agreement that we reached with the leadership of the JRCL-RMF is about the democratic structural tasks that are posed in the colonial and semicolonial countries. These are to break with imperialism and the resolution of the agrarian question, that is, the question of the land that is in the hands of the great bourgeoisie, the oligarchy and also imperialism. Faced with this, we agree in the theory-program that the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, by leading the oppressed masses of the countryside and the city is the only one that can fully and effectively solve the land problem and the national question in the semi-colonial world. This places the anti-imperialist tasks posed in the colonies and semi-colonies as part of the struggle of the world working class for the international socialist revolution.

These questions make the essential premises of a revolutionary Marxist program. Hence we can say that in these days of debate, where differences were also expressed that were fraternally discussed but without diplomacy, there was something in common: we were revolutionaries discussing what had to be discussed, the revolution and the path to its victory.

 

The conditions for the beginning of the revolution according to Lenin and revolutionary Marxism

Today we are in the midst of a wave of enormous revolutionary outbursts that here or there recede or cannot conquer decisive triumphs due to the betrayal of the leaderships that are at the head of the masses. Imperialism and its lackey governments and regimes have centralized their forces and disciplined their agents the traitorous leaderships, to strangle the revolutionary processes that are underway.

We moved forward in specifying how new processes of combat and independent actions of the masses develop incessantly, since they surpass and break with the corset imposed by reformism and with all the control mechanisms of the bourgeois states over the exploited. In doing so, direct clashes of the masses against the power of the exploiters begin.
The economic struggle becomes a political struggle. As Lenin would say about situations like these, "those above cannot maintain their dominance as before", "those below do not allow them" and start performing superior and independent actions that openly clash with the citadel of power. Acute revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situations open here and there. As Lenin says in his work The Collapse of the Second International, "for a revolution to take place", the masses "feel driven by all the circumstances of the crisis and by the 'upper classes' themselves towards an independent historical action" . Every serious Marxist, seeing the enormous revolutionary outbreaks of today, would be able to understand that these are the conditions in which these processes arise and mature. But it goes without saying that without a revolutionary leadership, these processes cannot succeed and here and there they recede or are defeated.
This is the view that we brought from FLTI to the debates carried out on the ongoing events of the revolution and also of the counterrevolution, as it happens today in Bolivia, and were developed yesterday to a greater extent in Syria and Ukraine.

This issue is not a secondary one, since the beginning of any revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situation poses to the masses that the central thing these processes have ahead is the conquest of an armed dual-power organizations. That's because after independent revolutionary actions of the masses are developed, the task is to prepare the organizations of power of the exploited that allow them in their combat to advance to triumphant insurrections that demolish the bourgeois power. As Trotskyism puts it, at the beginning of any revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situation, whoever does not organize his entire program - including the minimum and democratic slogans and tasks - "around the fight for the Soviets", does not prepare the masses for the revolution but for surrendering their fight to the bourgeoisie.

Imperialism perceives with total clarity that in the current revolutionary processes the crux is the conquest of dual-power organisms. The bourgeoisie learned from the previous revolutionary processes. Therefore their fundamental objective is to contain every revolutionary offensive and therefore they discipline all their agents. When they cannot prevent the emergence of mass eruptions that surpass the traitorous leaderships - as is the case in all current uprisings - all their forces are focused on making it impossible for the masses to set up their bodies of self-determination, self-organization and direct democracy.
Many times, the masses in their offensive give that content to the old existing organisms. Undoubtedly, this happened in the revolutionary events of October in Ecuador with the peasant central CONAIE and the workers' organizations of the FUT. In an insurrectional process, the masses imposed the army and the police a brutal defeat on the streets and drove the government off. It was the leaderships of these organizations that later reinstated the president in power. But today the FUT and CONAIE are true dual power organizations. It is the collaborationist leaderships that prevent them from seizing power, arming and splitting the Armed Forces horizontally.
We also saw the trend to the emergence of dual-power organizations in all the acute revolutionary or pre-revolutionary processes that have developed: the Coordination Committees in the Syrian revolution, the factory committees that occupied Tahrir Square in Egypt in 2011, the trend towards an embryonic worker militia in the “first line” of the current Chilean revolution, the power of the barricades in the territorial control of various mass battles, etc.
The task of reformism is to prevent these organisms from maturing, developing, coordinating and arming, since such would be the institutions, the "Commune-type" organisms, the soviets for the masses to advance to the seizure of power. The nurses of capitalism know this perfectly, that is why their bourgeois liberal democratic program, which liquidates any direct democracy from the dual power of the exploited.

The reformists affirm that we are before “impotent” outbursts and revolts in order to justify their submission to the “democratic” traps and deviations of the ongoing revolutionary fighting.
In fact, as we have seen in all the revolutionary processes that developed from the 2008 crash which confront the objectively revolutionary conditions of capitalist marasmus, we are witnessing outbursts that open phases of civil war, of broken social peace between the classes, which  include riots, local insurrections, revolutionary general strikes, clashes with the soldiery. This phase of civil war that develops in revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situations has ahead the task of opening the way to insurrection. That is the thesis of Bolshevism. It was its program, its policy and its strategy since the February Revolution and in all the revolutionary processes that it went through.
Reformism wants to roll back the wheel of history, including leaving behind the Paris Commune and going to 1789, to the bourgeois capitalist revolutions, no less than in the 21st century! at the time of a capitalism that is decrepit and in a state of decay.
When the path to advance to the seizure of power is open, today's reformism, as Stalinism did yesterday, states that it is a mandatory task for these revolutionary or pre-revolutionary ascents to stop at a democratic-parliamentary stage.
This is the old pseudo-theory and program of Stalinism, against which we discussed and agreed with the Marxists of the Pacific, who daily fight the Communist Parties in Japan and throughout that region of the planet, to confront together.

For reformism, the immaturity of the outbreaks and of the current fighting in hot spots of the planet is given by the immaturity of the objective conditions and of the proletariat in particular. For Marxism, true immaturity is the result of the betrayal of the leaderships that divide the ranks of the working class, break up and fragment their forces and subject the masses to pacts and agreements with the bourgeoisie on fronts of class collaboration (popular fronts) or diversion and electoral traps to get these masses out of the direct revolutionary struggle.
When this perfidious policy disorganizes the mass offensive, the moment comes for the bourgeoisie and their general staff to call the sabers of the generals or fascism to crush the revolutionary processes. The emergence of class collaboration governments - which are the ones before the last bourgeois government - and of fascism or Bonapartism - which are the last  governments of the bourgeoisie to prevent the victory of the revolution - indicates that the peaceful relationship between the classes has been broken, that the revolutionary situation is open, that the normal stable mechanisms of bourgeois dominance no longer have a way back and that the smallest demands such as eating, ending imperialist looting or curbing the price increase, are pushing the masses into revolutionary battles that call into question the power of the bourgeoisie.

This development of revolutionary events once again presents that what is in question today is the Marxist theory of the revolution to face the pseudo-theories of reformism that sees a vigorous capitalism, "backward masses" and a reformist era, in a time when the bankruptcy of the capitalist system falls on the backs of millions of exploited people around the world. It is the productive forces that have revolted not only against the relations of production and capitalist parasitism, but also against national borders. Ultimately, what is in question is the character of the imperialist era, of crises, wars and revolutions. Also on this point, on the character of the epoch and on the central task of the revolutionaries at the beginning of revolutionary situations, important debates and fundamental agreements with the Marxists of the Pacific took place.

During all these debates, JRCL-RMF leadership remarked that there is no possibility of conquering a revolutionary praxis or a program at the height of the fighting of the masses, without a truly revolutionary theory. Comrades insisted on this point. The high Marxist quality and the theoretical level of JRCL-RMF leaders and cadres impress and fill with great enthusiasm all the revolutionaries who aspire to set up Leninist vanguard combat parties.

 

On the role of Stalinism in the 21st century

After having given away the greatest conquests of the world proletariat in 1989, Stalinism was placed again by the bourgeoisie at the head of the mass organizations to close the road to revolution

In intensive days of fraternal debate we were able to observe our coincidences with the Marxists of Japan in the fight against the treacherous and reformist leaderships, such as Stalinism. The latter was preserved by the world capitalist system after 1989 to control and manage trade unions and central unions manu militari, as they do in large sectors of the planet, from Greece to France to Chile to Sudan to the Spanish State to South Africa, for giving just a few examples. Meanwhile, Stalinism was used by imperialism in the former workers states as a counterrevolutionary force of capitalist restoration and in the settlement of the bourgeois governments that emerged under the imperialist aegis to discipline the masses with brutal Bonapartist regimes such as in Russia or semi-fascist ones as in China. From this point of view it is possible to understand in depth the open battle of the Marxists of Japan around the fight against imperialism and Stalinism, whose parties that became new bourgeois forces today control North Korea, Vietnam and China, the most populous countries in the region and some of them, in the whole world.
These governments are the product of a successful restorationist bourgeois counterrevolution. From this point of view, the Marxists of the West can understand the combat slogan of the Marxists of the Pacific i.e., "fight against imperialism and Stalinism." They also refer to the governments of China, Vietnam, North Korea, etc., as we have said, and to the role of these counterrevolutionary parties in the world labor movement.

Likewise, the JRCL-RMF comrades listened very carefully our point of view, not only on the degeneration of the Fourth International, but also of its organizational liquidation, as it happened with the dissolution of the US ISO on the left of the Democratic Party alongside Sanders or the British SWP openly joining the Labor Party under the direction of Corbyn, who was painted as "anti-capitalist", "anti-militarist" and "anti-imperialist", when we are before a party that is fervently supportive of NATO and one of its managers, a defender of the London City and an administrator of its businesses together with the Tories. Also, the JRCL-RMF was surprised that currents like the PTS of Argentina preach that a Gramsci-Trotsky party must be set up, so trying to make a Stalinist agent of the '30s like Gramsci pass as a revolutionary.
This meeting of revolutionary Marxists discussing the revolution could not ignore the biggest obstacle it has, which is the “New Left” that has emerged from the partnership of renegades of Trotskyism and Stalinists who are the ones who today take the post of the leaderships Capital needs to survive and defeat the onslaught of the masses, after the farce of the "Bolivarian Revolution" and the World Social Forum have already played their full role and that the open passage of Castroism to the field of the bourgeoisie has been consummated.
The perfidious role of the so-called “anti-capitalist” parties that, as in the Spanish State and in France, openly support the left flank of Stalinism or its camouflaged heirs such as Melenchon, Podemos or Syriza, was debated after the experience of the JRCL-RMF in his trip to France to participate in the festival and political action of a nationalist pseudo-Trotskyist group like Lutte Ouvrière.

***

The Committee for the Refoundation of the Fourth International / FLTI was then present in Japan to carry out its proposal to set up an Internationalist Block of the world working class, based on key points of the revolutionary program that arise as a necessity for the masses from life itself and their combat. The essence of this fight, what the exploited people really need, is to get back on their feet and reconstitute the militant internationalism in the ranks of the working class, which reformism has destroyed by subjecting the workers to the bourgeoisie and the capitalist regimes of their own country.

We debated broadly the challenge that lies ahead of the Marxist movement, which is to set up strong Leninist vanguard and combat parties in the ongoing revolutionary events.
On this issue, we insist that founding these revolutionary parties is an international task inseparable of the struggle to set up a world party of the socialist revolution, which for us means to re-found the Fourth International of 1938. This is one point still in debate with the comrades. They come from an open break with Stalinism, which they effected when it crushed the 1956 Hungarian revolution. As the left and revolutionary wing of this split, the comrades have built themselves through fighting international Stalinism for decades.
This is an important experience for us Trotskyists who for decades have seen opportunistic and treacherous currents emerging from our world party, which subjected the Fourth International to Stalinism at every step. This speaks of the failure of the Fourth International in Yalta: its servitude to the Communist Parties prevented it from regrouping the ranks under a revolutionary banner of thousands of communists who openly broke with Stalinism. For example, they refused to fight for the expulsion of the Red Army from Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, when it invaded those nations to crush the rebel masses.
Without this dialectical vision of the historical processes that have shaped the evolution of the crisis of leadership in the last decades, it becomes impossible for any internationalist current to advance seriously in its construction, separating reformists from revolutionaries and opportunists from heroic combatants of the cause of the proletariat.
While advancing in real theoretical and strategic debates, we organized together with the comrades the concrete fight to coordinate and centralize the struggles of the masses at the international level. As we have seen, we agreed on a common intervention in Chile and Hong Kong and to be part of the fight to break the siege of Senkata, which we consider an important step in the struggle of the internationalists of the planet.

 

The combats in Chile, Hong Kong and China: key issues in the debate with the Japanese Marxists

 

On the Chinese question

From the FLTI we are having a common combat relationship with a wing of the youth that has rebelled against the Communist Party of the Chinese "mandarins" and, as they state, are fighting alongside the working class to recover socialism in China against the capitalist restoration imposed by the counterrevolutionary policy of Stalinism. Also, the JRCL-RMF comrades are doing a deep work in China, which for us is a huge leap for revolutionaries from an imperialist country like Japan.

We asked them what would be their position if the US and Japan launched a military attack against China; the position of the Marxists of the Pacific was clear: to condemn the aggression, call to confront it and defeat the enemy, which for them "is at home”, in the imperialist Japan. This raised and opened the possibility of a joint intervention agreement in China.
In this debate, the JRCL-RMF comrades criticized our alleged view of China as a colonial or semi-colonial country. From the FLTI we clarified that this was not so, as we actually consider it a capitalist country dependent on the imperialist world economy but that is still in transition to be a colony or semi-colony of some imperialist power. We explained our position that the goal of imperialist countries is to finish colonizing or semi colonizing China to get out of their current catastrophe and that the ongoing trade war is part of that offensive. Imperialism does not allow China to have military bases in the world, or to take advantage of technology from their Transnational Companies. Imperialists take advantage of the enormous amount of Chinese slave labor and the powerful new domestic market that exists there, as a countervailing tendency to the capitalist crisis.
We presented our view that China has an over-accumulation of trade capital, as a result of the surplus of its exports, and that the very world-economy controlled by imperialism uses this, either to cover the treasuries deficits of the dominant powers or, for China to take the risk and contribute raw materials, commodities and intermediate goods to the production process of the transnationals operating in that country.
Undoubtedly, the type of transitional state that exists in China, with a very powerful national bourgeoisie, cannot stay like this for a very long time. It is precisely this situation what makes the dispute between US and the imperialist European Powers of Maastricht more aggressive, not only for China, but also for the control of Russia's military industrial apparatus.
Thus, we clarified our point of view around the Chinese question which is being debated and will be a point of discussion with the comrades of Japan, as it is throughout the international Marxist movement. However a coordination policy for a common intervention in China as a policy of immediate action was defined, where the worker movement struggles to set up independent unions and a socialist youth emerges collaborating in that fight against the Chinese Government.

In these days of debate we realized the comrades of the JRCL-RMF and the revolutionary youth Zengakuren have just carried out two militant demonstrations to the Chinese Embassy in Tokyo in support of the uprising of the revolutionary masses of Hong Kong and against the Chinese CP and the latter's attack to the working class of that country. Just the opposite to the policy of the social-imperialist parties, which at every step they turn their backs to the struggle of the colonial or semi colonial countries. This internationalist action of the socialists of Japan opens a path to recover the best traditions of the world proletariat.

 

On the Chilean question

This debate was enriched by a profuse exchange of experiences. The revolutionary uprising of the Chilean masses has hit the Pacific Left deeply, not only in the present but historically. At the heat of the Industrial Cordons Revolution in the seventies, the JRCL-RMF, which had emerged as a wing of the Japanese Communist Party that had split from Stalinism in the late 1950s, organized a tough fight against the Communist Parties which proclaimed the “peaceful way to socialism". The generation that is giving that battle today has taken the fight for the victory of this new uprising of the working class and the rebel youth of Chile, as their own responsibility.
The need of promoting a decisive working class struggle to overthrow the Piñera Government and to avoid the pitfalls of dialogues and agreements of the reformist leadership was the conclusion of a common elaboration by socialists. To succeed, the Chilean revolution needs a revolutionary leadership and a revolutionary vanguard party that collaborate with the masses to get rid of the treacherous leaderships that prevent their combat's success.
The limits of the spontaneity of an independent mass action that surpassed the treacherous leaderships in Chile, has established a huge obligation for the revolutionary currents, that is to fight to set up the dual power of workers, poor peasants and rank-and-file soldiers and a strong workers militia so that the Chilean revolution that has already started is able to stand up. Reformism, which could not curb the revolutionary mass action, can disorganize the path to the armed dual power of the working class and the exploited masses, without which it is impossible to carry out a successful insurrection.
The struggle for an indefinite revolutionary general strike until Piñera falls and the organization of a "first line" in all factories, ports and mines in Chile, becomes decisive for the working class leading all the exploited masses that have entered the fight, attacking the capitalists’ and imperialist property, to throw down the Government and the Pinochetista regime.
This is the way to avoid a revolution impasse, which only would allow the politics of electoral traps and distraction of the bourgeoisie to advance in order to achieve its objective of demobilizing the masses and removing them from the streets.

In summary, it is clear that around the Chilean question we have opened a process of common internationalist action and intervention with the Marxists of the JRCL-RMF.
In the debate, the comrades saw that the Communist Party and the CUT (Trade Union Central), led by the CP, had a greater control over the revolutionary uprisings of the Chilean masses than which really is. Our view of the crisis of the CUT bureaucracy, repudiated by the vast majority of the labor movement, which organizes its struggle outside of them, was an important contribution in this discussion. Likewise, also the fact that the masses also repudiate the Frente Amplio (Broad Front), which voted together with the Piñera Government and the parties of the former “Concertación” a parliamentary agreement calling for a referendum to amend the Constitution. This required to precise in the debate the characterization of the revolutionary process opened in Chile and to deepen the discussion about the spontaneity of independent mass actions and the limits they have.

On this point, the leadership of the JRCL-RMF affirmed that in these conditions, the small revolutionary nucleus can, and have the obligation to, fight for conquering weight in the revolutionary vanguard. The comrades told us that any sectarian policy, impotent to raise tasks of tactics of unity in action or unified front to expose the leaderships that betray the masses, can take the revolutionary movement to a dead end.
The Marxists of Japan insisted on this position, seeing our small nuclei of hard-working Trotskyists are intervening in the ongoing most acute processes of revolution and counterrevolution in Chile, Bolivia and Colombia in Latin America, in China and in Hong Kong combats, as in rebel Catalonia or in Iran, Iraq and Syria in the Middle East, from where we publish "The Truth of the Oppressed," a socialist newspaper in Arabic.
The comrades went on debating around this point, raising their struggle to conquer a revolutionary party in Japan started with a single comrade who broke up with the PC in the 1956. And that today, when Stalinism and the treacherous leaderships unmask themselves at every step before the masses, as servants and agents of capital, we are before the opportunity to deliver them lasting defeats and thus advance in the construction of revolutionary parties.
This persistence of the Pacific comrades counterbalances the possibilist or movimentist tendencies of small revolutionary nuclei located at the heart of the tide of the masses' great battles worldwide. The fight for the cadres to set up strong revolutionary parties is sharpening but finds more favorable conditions in situations like these. The revolutionary socialist movement arrives weakened into these great events. The bourgeois states have prepared, shaped and protected reformism. This is the contradiction that needs to be solved. This is what the internationalist work of Marxists is about.

 

About Hong Kong: As in Chile, a revolution where youth has played and still plays a leading role

The struggle to intervene in the revolutionary uprisings in Hong Kong and also in China occupies a central and prominent role in the politics of the JRCL-RMF comrades. This was felt throughout their National meeting and all the meetings we held in common.
For the comrades, in Hong Kong there is a revolutionary masses' uprising against the Chinese bourgeoisie and the imperialism, led by the student movement, while an action of partial general strikes by the labor movement is taking place, which so far does not end up intervening openly, since it will do it and find its strength in the whole Chinese working class.
The Marxists of Japan have been denouncing the danger of the CCP to unleash a new massacre as in Tiananmen in '89, this time in Hong Kong. That is why they face the nationalist campaign of the Chinese bourgeoisie that prepares this way the conditions to have a social base for a direct military intervention to slaughter the exploited’s uprisings in Hong Kong. The JRCL-RMF calls, as an anti-Stalinist Left, to defeat the Chinese Government. As part of this fight, they have written successive statements to publicize the enormous action that took place alongside the Zengakuren of Japan in support of Hong Kong and the Chinese masses, while they are calling on the entire Japanese and the world working class to revolt in solidarity with the Hongkongonese exploited.
The FLTI has endorsed the slogan raised by the JRCL-RMF of “Stop a second Tiananmen!” in Hong Kong and we pledged to take it out to the whole world labor movement. The same about the Uyghur rebellion, which the Chinese Mandarins' Army has attacked and crushed in the successive uprisings of that oppressed nationality, while keeping more than two million of them in concentration camps to make them work later in jail - factories. The struggle of Hong Kong students in defense of the Uyghurs is part of the solidarity of the Honkongnese masses with all the exploited in mainland China.

 

Our meeting with the revolutionary Marxists of Japan:
A new starting point to unite the internationalist forces of the world working class

Our intervention in the national political act of the JRCL-RMF and the debates held with this Marxist current in Japan mean a step forward to conquer a Marxist program and open a path towards the masses. They have entered into a revolutionary effervescence in a very hard fighting against imperialism, overcoming at every step the barriers of reformism trying to curb their revolutionary struggles.

We are struggling to set up a foothold for the beginning of an international regrouping of the workers' vanguard and rebel youth. The evolution of this initiated path will depend, to a large extent, on the development of the ongoing revolutionary processes. The processes of radicalization of masses are developing and will create new ruptures to the left of reformism.
From the FLTI we come from a combat experience of years to regroup the healthy and revolutionary forces of the international Trotskyist movement. We have conquered a program and a foothold to develop an internationalist combat. But the road to set up a Kienthal and Zimmerwald, which is a true pole of action for the vanguard of the world working class, is far from being conquered.
The pro-Stalinist turn of all former Trotskyist currents is already manifest and undeniable for any serious observer of the evolution of the former parties of the Fourth International. Under the banners of the "anti-capitalists", they have entered common fronts with Stalinism or directly act as part of their parties. Meanwhile, the subordination of the pro-social democratic wings of the former Fourth International to the bourgeois "left wings " of the imperialist parties, such as Corbyn in England or Sanders in the US, demonstrate the collapse and the political and organizational defeat caused by reformism to the Fourth International.
In the revolutions of Maghreb and the Middle East, and in Syria particularly, all these currents were tested. The banners of Trotskyism and its program were dirtied and muddied by them because they supported the fascist counterrevolutionary policy of al-Assad and Putin, which was blessed and coordinated by imperialism from Geneva and Astana Conferences. From that defeat, our current has learned. In Syria we have buried many of our best men. There, we conquered a path to the masses, but they were cruelly crushed and betrayed. These conditions are the "optimal" ones to generate skepticism and opportunistic shortcuts. We fight daily against this and select our ranks.
The revolutionary movement comes from cruel partial defeats of the masses. These conditions have shaped and trained our cadres and militants who are today, as we see, in the most advanced focus of the world revolution. Far from staying passively, we seek again and in a bold and principled way to regroup the internationalist forces that would open the way to the victory of the socialist revolution.
Reformism did not fare and will not do well. At every step the bourgeoisie imposes it to expose itself before the masses. Here and there it is hit by strong revolutionary offensives of the workers. History needs the revolutionary movement to collaborate decisively with the masses to get rid of the leaderships that have betrayed them at every step.

The days of discussion we had with the revolutionary Marxists of Japan were also days of intervention and common international action unity, which also means a huge step forward. The Marxist theoretical and strategic debates have greatly strengthened our current and the comrades of the Pacific to deepen their intervention in China, Hong Kong and also in Japan, where the working class suffers terrible living conditions.

From the FLTI we will continue our struggle to set up a Revolutionary International Block of the world working class. A new Kienthal and Zimmerwald, a new revolutionary internationalist regrouping becomes essential to maintain, conquer and support the program for the world socialist revolution.

A turning point towards to the masses is settle down to re-found the Fourth International in a political, theoretical, programmatic and organizational all-out war against reformism and the sell-out Trotskyists, to set up the first combat and insurrectionary, Leninist revolutionary parties that in the 21st century retake the strategy of the revolutionary 3rd and 4th Internationals.
As Trotsky said in the "Manifesto of the Fourth International on the imperialist war and the world proletarian revolution" in May 1940, for the small parties of the Fourth International, it was not just about seizing the opportunity to advance towards the masses in this or that revolution, but about conquering an international revolutionary current in a whole historical period of crises, wars and revolutions.

 

Fighting to recover the Marxist program and from the vanguard's combats of the international proletariat,
we will be able to move forward to recover an internationalist praxis in the world labor movement...

That is our way to re-found the Fourth International

In the current processes of masses' radicalization, Bolshevism is and will be forged. Bolshevism is the only international current capable of carrying out the current fighting to victory.
With small nucleus settled in the revolutionary processes, the FLTI is taking a new internationalist turn, like the one we took in 1988, when we broke up with the LIT-CI and the MAS of Argentina which had made a front with the Communist Party, while the bricks of Berlin Wall were falling over their heads and the former USSR was sold out to world imperialism by Stalinism.
We are facing a turn like that we also did when we broke up with the PTS of Argentina in 1998. This Party showed off as “super-Trotskyist”, but in their practice they showed to be the nationalist continuity of the MAS of the '80s, or even worse in their parliamentary and democratizing cretinism, as is clearly revealed by the policies of the FIT.

As we have seen, different from the renegades of Trotskyism who are supporters of Stalinism, our current has acted directly in civil war processes. Our comrades fell fighting on the battlefield. Setbacks and defeats cause discouragement in the Marxist movement. Not everyone passes the test. Tired souls are in the dilemma of whether they would start again or abandon combat. Others blame Marxism and the revolutionary movement for their own failures. They are obfuscated, unable to understand their own adaptations and capitulations.
The revolutionary Marxists will try again and we are doing that. The working class does not deserve the leadership they have at their head. The task of settling accounts with the treacherous leaderships is not a national task. Our debate and common internationalist action with the JRCL-RMF is a step forward in our struggle to regroup the left wings of the international Marxist movement because we know that in that fight, our combat and the blood we have left in Syria will be transformed into a real vanguard force, proud workers of a revolutionary proletarian current in the Maghreb and the Middle East. We know that in this fight we can collaborate decisively with what the working class and the revolutionary youth of Chile crave for, that is to get rid of the "red pacos" of the Chilean CP that has taken the Chilean revolution to a catastrophe a thousand times. We know that from there we will conquer the best place to face the sinister pact that the Castro sealed with Obama to finally handing over Cuba to imperialism. From this international revolutionary fight we will settle accounts with those who have destroyed the theoretical and programmatic legacy of Trotskyism, making it dirty with the waste of Stalinism such as Gramsci, or the social democracy.
We know, sooner rather than later, the European and American proletariat will enter new combats. A passive policy in the semi colonial world would mean a conformist policy, which denies beforehand the task of accompanying the working class in their processes of going backwards because of bitter defeats and cruel betrayals. That is why we are going to challenge the social-imperialist currents that in the name of revolutionary Marxism put the British proletariat at the feet of Corbyn and the administrators of the London City. We are going to unmask, along with the revolutionary Marxists of the Pacific, those who praise Sanders, Ocasio Cortez and other representatives of the "Social Democratic" fraction of the imperialist Democratic Party of the American pirates. We are not going to let live in peace those who, in the name of Trotskyism, are making common fronts and calling for new Internationals together with Putin's secretaries and Stalinist scoundrels camouflaged as Marxists.
In this internationalist offensive we have met courageous workers and young revolutionaries in Japan who fight under harsh conditions against Japanese imperialism and organize Chinese and Asian Marxism under fierce counterrevolutionary dictatorships. Comrades will count, as they always did, with all our solidarity in combat.
The Western pseudo-Marxism arrogance, imbued of the weight of the labor aristocracies' parties and labor bureaucracies in Europe and the US, has taken the proletariat to a thousand and one defeats. Under the hard conditions of the Pacific countries, a new revolutionary Marxism is maturing.
In China, the thousands of young revolutionaries who enter the combat alongside the labor movement to restore the dictatorship of the proletariat there, as they proclaim, are a million times more at the left in their struggle for socialist revolution than the whole world reformist Left. The latter speaks in the name of Trotsky, Lenin, Marx and Engels and adore chatting about them in bourgeois universities, but they have only lived in history to resurrect the pestilent corpse of Stalinism, which the bourgeoisie has preserved for acting against the world labor movement.
That revolutionary Chinese youth is the closest thing to the young people fighting in Hong Kong, the "first line" of Chile, the rebellious Catalan rebel youth against the Bourbon monarchy or the courageous revolutionary workers of El Alto who fell fighting against the fascist coup and the shameful capitulation of Morales' bourgeoisie in Bolivia.
The crisis of the Fourth International has deepened, but our world Party lives and will live in the fight for raising up and recovering the militant internationalism of the world working class.

From Chile to Hong Kong to Senkata to Idlib and the Middle East combats, from the Paris spring to the rebellion of the Catalan masses, to the insurgent Ecuador: the same class, the same enemy, the same struggle! Let's open the road to the revolution!

At our farewell in Japan, hundreds of young people and vanguard workers set up the call: "Let's fight together!" ... We are already doing it.

 

International Secretariat of the FLTI