December 2019

Presentation (of Special Edition “El Organizador Obrero Internacional” / “International Workers Organizer")

New revolutionary focuses are developing internationally with fierce class clashes. Around these hard events, in November, we made an appeal from the FLTI to all the currents that claim to be of revolutionary Marxism to intervene in common, conquering a policy of revolutionary action, in the mass uprisings with which the exploited wage a fierce battle against the imperialist offensive.

We made this appeal while the workers and the peasant masses continue to revolt in the Americas. It was after the revolutionary struggle of the Ecuadorian masses against diesel price hike and labor flexibility, which occupied Quito and took more than 200 army officers and politicians as hostages, forcing the Lenin Moreno government to flee to Guayaquil and make it step back  its attack on the exploited.
This appeal was also made when a huge revolutionary uprising began in Chile as well as in Colombia and the counterrevolutionary coup was taking place in Bolivia, where a tendency emerged towards revolutionary mass eruption against the fascista coup. Meanwhile, Hong Kong burned in the Pacific, as an outpost of the fierce resistance of the Chinese masses against the government of the CCP's red businessmen, and a new revolutionary wave started to overturn the Middle East, with the Iraqi revolution as its epicenter.
In France, the Yellow Vests do not leave the streets and continue fighting against the fuel price hike, while a wave of strikes has began that is paralyzing the country, this time against the attack on pensions, which means that in Paris a trench remains of the entire European working class.

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From our point of view, a grouping of the internationalist revolutionary forces of the world working class is an urgent task to make it easier for the masses to overcome the limits imposed on their struggles by their current leadership.
The forces of Stalinism and the renegades of Trotskyism group together, as happened in the meeting convened by Castroism in Havana in May, and they coordinate in unified parties such as Podemos (Spain), the Labor Party (England) or Syriza (Greece), or to support US pirates’ "social democratic" wing of the Democratic Party.
The goal of these currents is imposing a class collaboration and "two-stage revolution" policy, with which they seek to strangle the revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situations in their beginnings, as here and there those situations break out on the planet. The so-called "New Left" takes up the worst traditions of Stalinism and social democracy of the twentieth century.
The pact of the "anti-capitalists" with Podemos in the Spanish State ended with all of them supporting the Bourbon monarchy that occupied rebellious Catalonia. The actions of the treacherous leaderships led to the partial defeats of the working class in Portugal, Italy, Greece, while the submission to the Labor Party of the so-called "radical socialists" helped bring the English working class to the dead end of either staying in the imperialist Maastricht or following Johnson and his Brexit, promising workers that with their alliance with the US they would recoup the conquests they once had.
Meanwhile, the policy of these currents is to show the worst enemies of the working class and the oppressed peoples, such as Putin (e.g., supporting his massacre to the Syrian revolution alongside al-Assad), Castroism that sold Cuba out to the US imperialism or the new slave-driven bourgeoisie of the CP of China, as allies.
The conditions for a step forward in the coordination and centrality of internationalist revolutionary currents find fertile ground. New historical events expose how, by means of independent mass actions in the revolutionary outbursts the exploited break or overcome the enormous containment dikes imposed by their treacherous leaderships (parties, currents and labor bureaucracies belonging in the labor aristocracy) to save the capitalist system in crisis. 
The objective conditions for the revolution are not only mature but also rotting. In the face of the great battles of the exploited, the crisis of leadership intensifies. The spontaneity and independent actions of the masses have a limit and collide with the betrayals of the leaderships constantly.
When the “New Left” sees these huge battles, it says that they are not revolutions. They argue that we are facing simple "revolts" or shy "riots" with a "fragmented" and "impotent" working class. This lie and deception collapse on  their own. How can there be mass actions that threaten to collapse the citadel of power, without the intervention of the working class, which is the majority class of the society together with the ruined middle classes?...
What these currents are really saying is that they are and will be the ones in charge of closing the way for the exploited towards the victory of the revolutions that have begun. They boast that they prevent here and there the armament of the masses and the emergence of dual-power organizations, in which the working class can lead its alliance with the poor peasants and the ruined middle classes. Without these dual-power armed organizations, every revolution that begins cannot develop and succeed in a victorious insurrection that ends up defeating the regimes and destroying the oppressors’ states.
The bourgeoisie knows very well that if organizations of direct mass democracyemerge, which do not delegate but take the leadership of the combats and the resolution of the crisis in their hands, the masses would quickly make the experience with their treacherous leaderships. Thus, the exploiters send their agents to set up new containment walls to the revolutions that have begun.

But what these currents cannot boast about is being able to contain the enormous revolutionary energies of the masses who enter the battle constantly in spite of and against them, attacking the citadel of bourgeois power, when no one expects it. The lava burst out of the volcano and entire countries explode with strong mass eruptions. The unprecedented sufferings push the masses into combat and create the conditions for the revolutionary movement to take enormous steps forward and collaborate in releasing the masses from the leaderships that prevent them from advancing. The passivity of the revolutionary movement under these conditions means digging its own grave. Not turning around and looking for a channel for the masses means leaving the way for reformism to betray them.
As Trotsky said, any pre-revolutionary or revolutionary situation, by the nature of its leadership, can become non-revolutionary or directly counterrevolutionary. Wehave seen this for example in Greece, in Ukraine and in the first revolutionary wave of 2011-2012 in the Middle East, which ended in a bloodbath in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Yemen, and we see it today in the enormous betrayal to the worker and peasant masses of Bolivia, as we will develop later.
Taking these conditions into account, the FLTI called boldly for grouping the forces that claim themselves to be internationalist and openly fight against reformism in every decisive combat of the world working class.
In this Special Edition of the “International Workers Organizer” we reproduce this appeal that we made on November 22nd.

 

Our meeting with the revolutionary Marxists of Japan:
A step forward in the fight to regroup the internationalist forces of the world working class to wage battle to reformism

In particular, we had sent this appeal to the comrades of the JRCL-RMF in Japan. As shown in this newspaper, they responded by inviting us to a fraternal debate about the tasks of the revolutionaries at the present time and to participate in their national political meeting in Tokyo.
From FLTI we were the only international current that participated in this important meeting in the life of the Marxists of Japan. There, we were surrounded by the solidarity and enthusiasm of more than 1,500 workers and young revolutionaries who set up a fighting trench of their class siblings from the semi-colonial world, from China and Hong Kong in particular, in an imperialist power like Japan.
The conversations we had with the JRCL-RMF in this event in Tokyo developed in intense days not only of fraternal political debate, but also on finding a way for a common revolutionary intervention.
The first conclusions of these debates were the open support of Japan's revolutionary youth for their fighting siblings in Chile. It is clear that the Zengakuren will be present in the "First Line" of the Santiago fighting. They gave us their flag to be part of the hard confrontations of youth and workers in that country.
Quickly from Japan, in the midst of very rich debates about the ongoing revolutionary outbursts, we jointly organize solidarity and the struggle to break the siege of the families of those killed and detained in Senkata, Bolivia, and we collaborate to set in motion all the forces surrounding the "International Network for the Freedom of Political Prisoners of the World."
From the FLTI, together with the Marxists of the Pacific, we initiated the common international campaign promoted by the comrades of the JRCL-RMF to prevent a new Tiananmen -like the one of '89-, which the CCP counterrevolutionary mandarins are preparing against the rebel Hong Kong masses.
Also, the struggle for a Marxist theory and strategy for the victory of the socialist revolution was the focal point of the fraternal debate and discussion that we had with the comrades of the JRCL-RMF.
Our appeal then had one objective: to recover militant internationalism in the ranks of the world working class. Here and there the masses impose milestones of socialism in the revolutionary centers, turning left and marking a 180º angle with the old treacherous leaderships and with the new reformism of the 21st Century, no less cynical and anti-Marxist than that of the 20th Century.

 

New revolutionary outbreaks of the world working class
New and cruel betrayals against the combat of the exploited

As we have already seen, France is a battle front of the European working class. In this edition we publish a statement dedicated to the combat of French workers. The French proletariat proves to have enormous fighting energies now facing the attack on the pensions of Macron’s government and the regime of the Fifth imperialist Republic, after the enormous combats of the Yellow Vests and the struggles that the working class waged in defence of the 35-hour working week and against labor flexibility, which were sold out by the union bureaucracy. To a large extent, the fate of the European working class is at stake today in the streets of Paris. This combat cannot be isolated.

With the leap forward in the Iraqi revolution, the new revolutionary wave of the masses in Maghreb and the Middle East is consolidated throughout the region.
Recently, the workers in southern Iraq occupied the oil wells from the imperialist companies that plunder Maghreb and the Middle East. And while the exploited and pauperized masses try to enter the palaces of power in Baghdad, government offices have already been occupied in the south of that country.
This edition then also includes a statement about this new step that upped the Iraqi revolution that has begun.

In 2011-2012, the currents of the reformist left, under the leadership of the Castro brothers, the scam of the "Bolivarian Revolution" and the European pro-imperialist fronts, stated that "springtime of the peoples" had started in the Middle East. The only "paradise" offered to the exploited in the region was to fight for "more democracy" to seize power later. They transformed the workers and peasants revolutions that began for bread and national independence, which clashed against the governments and military dictatorships imposed by imperialism, into pressure struggles for Constituent Assemblies and "democratic ways out." Thus they gave a way out for the bourgeoisie and imperialism in the face of the overthrow of their governments and counterrevolutionary regimes by the masses. All this ended up serving as a deviation from the revolutionary processes, which were then crushed by hard counterrevolutionary blows as happened in Egypt, Syria, Yemen...
Today, when the flames of the first revolutionary wave are not extinguished yet, a new offensive of revolutionary combats sets the Maghreb and the Middle East on fire again, from Algeria to Tunisia, from Sudan to Iraq, from Iran to Lebanon. In addition, we present in this Special Edition an article on the hard resistance of the Syrian masses that remains in Idlib, the last trench of a revolution that cannot be finally crushed, after almost 9 years of heroism of the exploited and fascist massacre.

Under the current conditions a period of counter-reform has opened. The working class of the Middle East returns to star in huge mass fighting and gives a lesson: that the true "vandals" and "backward" are the currents that usurp Marxism to support rotten capitalism.

On our recent trip to Japan we have left the flag of the Syrian revolution, which for years has been taken as theirs by the JRCL-RMF with FLTI, fighting in the trenches of the Syrian revolution.
That is why our intervention in the massive act of workers and young people of the vanguard of Japan, began paying homage to Abu Al Baraa, Mustafa Abu Jumaa and the more than 15 Trotskyist fighters of the Leon Sedov Brigade who fell in the Syrian revolution, in the first line of combat against imperialism and the fascist Al Assad. This tribute was cheered standing up by all those attending the event in Tokyo.

As yesterday in Syria, imperialism concentrated its forces in Bolivia to stop the revolutionary wave that shakes Latin America
In this Special Edition of the “International Workers Organizer" we also present the catastrophe that means the triumph of the counterrevolutionary coup in Bolivia, marked by the cowardly escape of Morales and the native bourgeoisie before a military pronouncement and a fascist putsch. We publish the statement of the comrades of the LSTI of Bolivia denouncing the pact of the “Pacification Law” that quickly grouped the bureaucracy of the COB, the leadership of the peasant federations and the same deputies of the MAS that voted this law, under the umbrella of the OAS; thus they legitimize the military coup and the fascist government of Añez. It is that everyone present at the “pacification” talk knows that if the mass irruption that sought to crush fascism and the coup in the streets of all Bolivia had developed until the end, the beginning of a new Bolivian revolution would have been in course.
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The sinister role played by COB leadership making a pact with the Banzerist generals and the perfidious policy of POR, which has broken with the program of the IV International a long time ago, were key players in this tough and bitter defeated suffered by the Bolivian masses.
POR has been co-opted by COB bureaucracy and the officers of the Bolivian Army, to which they say they are not pro-coup or counterrevolutionary and that they are not an elite who defends the interests of the bourgeoisie as a whole and imperialism. That is what they have stated in every strategic and historic article. This open revision of Marxism, justified by the alleged “indigenous” character of the officer caste of the Bolivian Army, is a crude scam and shot in the head of the working class.
In their last statement of their paper “Masas” # 2614, POR justifies the unjustifiable; namely they cover up the Banzerist coup and fascist putsch by stating: “MAS government was overthrew by the action of wide layers of the masses for being corrupt, fraudulent, sold to the TNCs, the businessmen and landowners of the East. But such victory was usurped by the old right in an ultra-right version personified in the “Facho Camacho” (fascist Camacho, TN). POR is not walking on the air, he has his feet on the ground covering up the coup.
The masses revolted and stood up in a revolutionary way to smash the fascist putsch of Camacho and Santa Cruz oligarchy. Unfortunately, they did not do it before and they did not overthrow Morales, otherwise the fascist of Santa Cruz would not have dared to enter La Paz with the bible in the hands of one of the richest businessman, attacking workers and peasants, imposing Añez in power and discipline all the bourgeois factions under OAS command. The miners would have arrived in La Paz expelling Morales with their dynamites. If this would have been the scenario, COB and Miner Federation would have led the majority of the peasant movement, defeating Morales. POR want to sell a smoke screen. This is what happened in Ecuador, where working and peasant masses defeated Moreno, leaving the army in deep crisis.

In Bolivia, shouting “Now yes, civil war!”, hundreds of thousands of peasants and workers of El Alto marched to La Paz to smash the fascists and the coup. They were betrayed by COB leadership and mainly by MAS, which proved to be fraudulent, corrupted and sold to transnationals, voting the infamous pact of “national pacification,” -after Morales had ran away- legitimizing Añez’s government by a Law.
The Bolivian working class was left unarmed and divided before the electoral trap of Mesa and Morales in October. Sectors of the working class, like the miners of Colquiri and factory workers of Cochabamba, had been facing Morales’ policy. COB bureaucracy divided the working class since it was part of Morales’ government with its own Ministers. POR is lying. It is saying that the working class rebelled and overthrew Morales against COB leadership, against Miners’ Federation leadership and against the National Federation of Factory Workers. This is a shameless deception of Banzerist generals’ friends. The Bolivian working class will rise sooner or later. POR will never rise again.

 

Bolivia, a new acid test, tests the treacherous policy of the “New Left” and the liquidators of the 4th International

Bolivia is an example of the ruin and pathetic role played by the Troskyist parties of Yalta who have not passed the test of any of the key struggles who are waging the exploited all over the world. In Bolivia they ended up in “pacification” talks. Others have proclaimed Constituent Assemblies, which is a way out of the bourgeois states to face revolutionary crisis in the highs and masses hatred against governments and regimes, to which they confront with huge revolutionary actions. This happened in Egypt and they try to impose in Chile with a Constituent as a escape valve to keep bourgeois dominance and preserve Piñera hated government before masses offensive.
These currents state the only right the exploited –who wage start huge revolutions and heroics uprisings- have is voting. They separate the masses from the only way to stop capitalists’ onslaught and get their slightest demands, which is fighting for the victory of the worker and socialist revolution.
PTS policy in Bolivia was non-less pathetic. In the middle of the coup they called to appeal a Constituent Assembly, as if the bullets of the elite corps of Banzerist officers trained in School of Americas and West Point, as Gurkas, who spilled worker and peasant blood in El Alto, Senkata and Cochachamba, who are the killers of Che Guevara, could be stopped by votes and not with armed masses.
When there was an open coup in Bolivia, PTS called to a General Strike… a peaceful one. These people have made a commitment: not to call for the generalized armament of the masses and of their struggle organizations. The rebel workers and peasants called to civil war and these people turn the blind eye on how to conquer the weapons to succeed: recruiting the rank and file soldiers and setting up workers and peasant militia.
Let’s be clear: the way out proposed by PTS was a strike of pressure to conquer a Constituent Assembly and not to smash the military coup in civil war with weapons in hand.

PTS in Bolivia want to travel in time, to 2008, when Morales made a pact with Media Luna to appeal a Constituent Assembly, like the one proclaimed by PTS today. This Constituent Assembly guaranteed land to the oligarchy, minerals and hydrocarbons to imperialism –with a bribe for Morales’ bourgeoisie- and keeping the counterrevolutionary elite of the Army who had massacred 100 workers and peasants in the revolutionary uprising of 2003-2005.
The catastrophe of the groups of former Trotskyists in Bolivia is pathetic. Even LIT-CI had to make self-criticism for supporting leaders of the miners’ union in Huanuni who called the Armed Forces, the ones who massacred in El Alto, to defend the mine of rebel unemployed miners in Oruro who demanded decent jobs. 8-9 months ago the miners entered the political and social life of Bolivia controlling the state mine of Huanuni, summoned by union bureaucracy. The miners’ leaders were publicly supported by LIT and guarded from the leadership of Brazilian trade union, Conlutas.

We publish in this paper the statement against the pact of MAS of Morales, COB bureaucracy with Añez’s government and the Banzerist generals, together with the enormous solidarity struggle of the “International Network”, which placed all their forces to break the isolation of the relatives of those killed, disappeared and political prisoners of Senkata last December 12th in the International Day of the Persecuted Worker.

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The reader will see in this paper the orientation and struggle of the FLTI to re-found the 4th International, fighting against revisionism and opportunism, based on the acid tests of the class struggle where they are exposed constantly, as well as the action policy of setting up a pole of re-group and internationalist of the revolutionary forces of the world working class.

We also reproduce in this paper the political intervention of the delegates of the FLTI in the meeting held by JRCL-RMF in Tokyo, which gathered worker and youth delegations from all the regions of Japan. Our intervention was met with a warm support, greetings and cheers in the meeting and thrilled, as they say, this huge current of workers and revolutionary youth members. Their answer was “an appeal to struggle with the FLTI” all over the world against imperialism, Stalinism and the renegades of Marxism.”
In this special article, we present an article by Carlos Munzer expressing the political balance sheet of the debates held with the Marxist of the Pacific. This article will express not only the agreements reached by our international practical struggle, which we expressed in this presentation, but also the rich debates that allow us opening a path to regroup the revolutionary internationalist forces of the world working class and the enormous steps forwards that these meetings meant, which created the condition to have a common action in tough revolutionary focus of the Pacific and Latin America.

In their last paper, Kaihoh (Liberation), the comrades of the JRCL-RMF mentioned the meetings we had and our political intervention in the closing rally of the national meeting of their party. As we felt and lived, Kaihoh states the “affection, respect and revolutionary solidarity showed to our delegation by the hundreds of workers and youth” who salute us during the break saying “Let’s fight together!”. Also, they praise “the common struggle we are carrying out in Chile so the revolution take steps forwards”. Moreover, they salute our intervention in the meeting by our delegation in the rally and “our common struggle against Stalinists, union bureaucracies and renegades of Marxism, currently cornered by mass revolutionary actions.” We re-state what the comrades said: “Zengakuren, Anti-War Youth and FLTI are committed to keep fighting from the Pacific to the Atlantic.” Like their banners of the Zengakuren and Anti-War youth: “We fight with the comrades of the FLTI. Workers of the world, Unite!”

 

Editorial Board of the “International Workers’ Organizer”