December 8th, 2019 

Speech of the spokesperson of the Collective for the Re-Foundation
of the 4th International / FLTI in the political meeting of the JRCL-RMF

Seven years ago we were here with you. Middle East was on fire and we were looking for the forces to break the siege on the Syrian revolution. In the middle of the world crash on 2008, imperialism brutally attacked the masses. They responded with fierce struggles, also in Europe and in USA. Those revolutions ended up being diverted by reformism or in a bloodshed, as in Syria and Ukraine.

Today we meet again. Middle East is once again on fire. Idlib, the last trench of the Syrian revolution, keeps on resisting. There’s fighting in Algeria, Iran, Sudan and Iraq, where a revolutionary offensive threatens to sweep away the entire regime under the tutelage of the imperialist oil companies.

The imperialist crisis does not give a rest. The trade war that Trump declared on Maastricht imperialist Europe and to subjugate China under the jackboot of Wall Street to take its big businesses is nothing more than a war on the world working class. Among them, they agree. They clash so later they can negotiate and agree, but the ones that really suffer this bankrupt system are the working class and the exploited. The labour flexibility plans are the recipe of the imperialist system in every country of the world. The plundering of the raw materials in the semi colonial world is being fiercely disputed by the ruling powers. Meanwhile, more than 200 million workers cross the borders of the planet as refugees seeking bread to survive. This time the capitalists stop the machines for their parasitism, while the 1% of the imperialist pirates take for themselves the majority of the wealth of the planet.

In Latin America, just as in Middle East, the masses also wage a fierce battle. The workers have understood that with minimum economic struggles there will not be any solution in the middle of the capitalist economy crash. That’s why the demand in Chile, in Ecuador, in Bolivia, Haiti, etc. as in the Middle East or in the very Hong Kong in the Pacific, is the fall of the governments and regimes. The masses know that without defeating them they won’t get any of their demands. The economic struggle rises to mass political struggle. Thus, in Chile, the attempt of the government of negotiating minimum demagogic demands, the youth and the workers go for all and in their struggle they affirm that the problem is not the 30 pesos of the increase of the metro fare but the 30 years of plundering, oppression, torment and starvation of the Pinochetist regime.

A chain of great uprisings, of mass independent actions, revolts, revolutionary strikes, fighting in barricades, spontaneous insurrections, start to spread all around the continents. The fight of the youth and the works of Hong Kong is nothing more than the tip of the iceberg of a tough resistance of youth and workers of China. In France, a new general strike was made against the attack on the gains of the working class. With the Yellow Vests, they fight against the hated Macron government. Meanwhile, Catalonia rises against the Bourbons. In USA the workers fight against the bosses of GM against labour flexibility and the teachers fight for their wages. The working class did not go out of the scene.

Comrades,
We are entering in times of counter-reformism. Social peace and class collaborations are broken. The treacherous reformist leaderships start to lose control of the masses in struggle. They never expected that these revolutionary struggles developed. They tried to take all these struggles to the dead end of class conciliation or bankrupted parliamentarianism.
Stalinists, local trade union bureaucrats, renegades of Trotskyism, several pacifists and native bourgeoisies who scam its own people are being overtaken by mass actions and must be thrown away to the dustbin of history. THIS IS OUR TASK.
The masses come out to fight for what belongs to them, against imperialism that imposes the worst sufferings and inequities. The rise in fuel prices, devaluation of currencies, the attack on the workers gains are the spark that lights on the revolution.

Comrades
In Latin America, the masses responded with huge revolutionary uprisings to the war launched by US imperialism.

In Ecuador, the masses have shown that they can besiege and corner the citadel of power. The October uprising was ignited by the rise in the prices of diesel that increases the cost of living of the peasants and all the subjugated masses. The exploited took over Quito, the capital city, and kicked out the president that took shelter in the city of Guayaquil.

Ecuador is a revolution that they want to hide. The leadership of the peasants confederation CONAIE and its Stalinist party Pachakutik together with the bureaucracy of the trade union confederation FUT reinstalled the government in power. The president had to treat from the increase in the price of diesel and also in the plans of labour flexibility. Power is at the reach of the hand. The bourgeoisie gave something in order not to lose everything. Thus the Stalinists leaderships prevented the masses to take everything, that is, power, which escaped from their hands.

In Chile, as it happens today in Colombia, a huge uprising of the youth and the working class is developing. They don’t leave the streets until the government of Piñera falls as well as the entire Pinochetist regime. The bourgeoisie still does not dare to send the army, because it feels that what is at the order of the day in Ecuador may happen: that the rank and file soldiers go with their weapons to the side of the people. A revolutionary situation is open and the traitors of Stalinism cannot control the masses. The police and the repressive forces attack on the rising masses and they respond with the so-called “first line”, a heroic militant workers and popular self-defense that places as main task the need of the workers militia for the Chilean revolution to climb another step forward and breaks with the poison that Stalinism imposed over decades, which was the “peaceful way to socialism” that ended up in a bloodshed in Chile and the entire Latin America.

On the other hand, in Bolivia imperialism concentrated its forces. In there, with a fascist coup of the oligarchy, it accelerated the fall of Morales. He ran away because he is more scared of the armed masses than imperialism. A brutal crisis was opened in the heights. Workers and peasants broke out at the war cry “Now, civil war” and “death to fascism”. El Alto, the neighboring city to La Paz, where the vanguard of the Bolivian working class is, rises as in the 2003-2005 and threatened to go back to be the “headquarters of the revolution”.
The COB bureaucracy took the workers movement out of the scene and betrayed the struggle for crushing the coup. The peasants that were blocking all the highways of Bolivia didn’t find the miners and the rest of the working class in the cities to lead their struggle. The uprising was impotent. Fascism took over the streets.
A sector of the working class went to occupy the gas plant in Senkata, which supplies southern Latin America with gas. The fascist generals were waiting for them and, as in the ‘70s, they filled Bolivia with workers and peasants blood.

Beyond hard partial defeats, in Middle East, Latin America, Hong Kong, France, etc. a new mass offensive deepens. The US working class keeps its forces intact. The bourgeois analysts seek an explanation of what is happening. Some speak about a “Whats App revolution”, “transversal revolution”, “contagious”. But not… a thousand times no! Those are revolutions of hunger, against the imperialist plundering, against the attack on the workers gains. Imperialism is in bankruptcy. The world financial system and the transnational companies only accumulate debts. Those debts are over 188 trillion dollars, which is 230% of the world’s GDP. Capitalism keeps consuming the benefits yet unproduced. The rotten capitalist system did not come out of its bankruptcy. The ones on the top comes for all and the ones of below does not accept and go for them. The trend to a world revolutionary uprising has started.

None of the general staffs of Stalinism and the renegades of Trotskyism and the so-called “New Left”, that gathered in single parties, called for these great mass fights. They are the left of social peace and class collaboration. The revolutionary uprisings and the revolts are despite and against them. They are the most reactionary factor and the biggest limit that the current revolutionary wave has.

 

They, supported in the handing over to imperialism of the workers states in 1989, are still telling the masses that the fight for the socialist revolution is no longer possible and that “socialism is no more not even in Cuba” as Castro brothers asserted while they ended up handing over the island to the US. They spread all over the world the fight to extend the bourgeois democracy. They say to the masses that in the constituent Assemblies within the frames of the institutions that belong to the bourgeois state there will be solution to their problems and demands. But Reformism tries to make the masses believe that without taking over power, without the victory of the socialist revolution, the exploited can increase their living standards. This is a total lie. Without expropriating the expropriators of the people, without defeating their governments and states, it is impossible to expel imperialism in the countries that it oppresses and it will be less possible to conquer bread, work and decent wages.
Reformism cannot already get alms for the masses. The objective conditions for the proletarian revolution are not only ripe, there are becoming somehow rotten.

Comrades,
A new re-groupment of the internationalist forces of the working class to coordinate and centralize the current combats is at the order of the day. To collaborate with the masses to remove the reformist leaderships that coordinate and centralize with imperialism and their governments is an obligation of the revolutionary Marxists of the planet.
Here and there, reformism with their siren signings spread their class-collaboration poison upon the masses. With their pacifism they prevent them to be armed when fascism and the sabers of the generals seek to smash them. Here and there, in entire continents, the masses break out in chains of revolutions and reformism seeks to divide them country by country.

At the beginning of the open revolutionary situations, the masses set up self-determination direct democracy organs, where the power of the exploited exists and lives. Or masses give that content to their old organizations, as organs of power, like it happened in Ecuador with FUT and CONAIE- the old union and peasants organizations. There is the road to victory. From the FLTI we fight for setting up, coordinating and centralizing the organs that masses set up to advance in the political struggle against the governments and oppressive regimes. We fight for developing the power of the councils of workers, poor peasants and rank and file soldiers. When the class struggle gets deepen at extreme levels, the bourgeoisie knows very well based on their own experience, that if the organs of mass direct action get coordinated, centralized and armed, the seizure of power and victory of the socialist revolution is at the reach of the hand. The reformists want to take these huge energies of the masses to class collaboration fronts and to a parliamentarianism of fake promises. The contradictions between classes are already resolved in the streets, in the barricades, and wherever acute revolutionary situations exist; with weapons in hands. Everything else is a lie to prepare the road towards cruel and hard defeats. Reform and Revolution is the alternative that leads the working class to the defeat or victory.

Comrades
The time has come to set up an internationalist revolutionary block to declare an open battle against the treacherous leaderships, to Stalinism and its henchmen, to the trade union bureaucracies, the so-called “anti-capitalists”, that only try to reform capitalism in bankruptcy. The revolutionaries that fight under the banners of the Fourth International affirm that the moment to rebuild the militant internationalism, which Stalinism and the renegades of Marxism destroyed decades ago, and that the advanced workers and rebel youth seek to conquest in every decisive combat.  This is the road for the ongoing revolutions to be generalized, extended and led to the victory at international level. We are here to take a step in this path.

The time to set up an internationalist revolutionary block has come. The world working class, with its combats that spread around entire continents, have already put this forward as a motion.