Presentation IWO 16
We are presenting here this new issue of the "International Worker Organizer " (IWO), voice of the Collective for the Re-foundation of the IV International / FLTI, dedicated to the current acid tests of the global class struggle which are the focus of all the exploited in the world.
The “French May” begins to wake up… Paris dresses up in Commune
No doubt, today France is in the center of the scene. There, the imperialist employers through the Government of Hollande and the regime of the Fifth Republic seek to wrest the 35 hours’ workweek from the French working class. They thus seek to impose France workers the same conditions of slavery and labor precarization French imperialism has already imposed on the masses of the semi-colonial world, the exploited of its overseas colonies and immigrant workers in its interior.
Just as this "labor reform" Bill was sent to the Parliament, the French working class and youth won the streets and staged huge days of struggle, whose climax was the general strike on March 31. That same day sectors of youth occupied the Place de la Republique (Republic Square) in Paris and put on foot the movement Nuit Debout (Standing Up Night) from which an appeal was prompted for an international fight day on May 15 against 1% of parasites. A huge battle was in the works in the depths of the workers, youth and all the exploited masses of France.
Before this, bureaucracies of trade unions like the CGT (directed by Stalinism) and the entire reformist left sought to carry the fight of the working class and the exploited masses to pressure Parliament to not pass the Bill. Meanwhile, all the "new left" social-imperialist currents as Syriza, "ruptures" of Syriza, the French Left Front, PODEMOS of the Spanish State, supported by all the Renegades of Trotskyism as French NPA, the English SWP, etc., concentrated their forces in Paris to remove the revolutionary content from the Republic Square, talking about such an attack of the capitalists can be slowed down fighting for "real democracy"; saying that it was not necessary to defeating the Government of Hollande or the imperialist Fifth Republic that invaded Mali, were massacring in Syria, support counter-revolutionary Zionism and keep hundreds of military bases to guard their looting across Africa; the same that with the excuse of the ISIS framed up self-attacks so to be able to militarize France; and after all this they were now coming for their own working class.
We present in this edition of the IWO, on page 5, a declaration on May 12 where we state that they were French capitalists who declared a direct war to the workers, booting them at one blow all their conquests.
The bourgeoisie was responsible for dispelling the lies of reformism which carried the working-class to pressure struggles so that “better conditions” in such law “could be renegotiated”. Instead, Hollande used constitutional mechanisms of the French Fifth Republic to impose through a completely Bonapartist decree the law eliminating 35 hours work-week. This is the true French imperialist democracy!
France shows that the crash and the stagnation of the world economy are making the bourgeoisie to ruthlessly attack the toilers and eliminate all the margins for concessions for dispensing alms that reformism pretends to be "reforms". The margins for concessions become smaller up to disappearing.
It was the bourgeoisie which broke the "social peace" between classes. Now for French imperialism it has become a question of life and death to impose conditions of maquila to all French workers. It needs to increase productivity and the exploitation of the working class to compete in the world market with other imperialist powers. Decisive clashes between classes are here: either the Hollande Government imposes its rule with a decisive defeat to the working class or the workers impose their will by defeating the Government and the imperialist system.
The working class did not make them wait for its response. Despite and against all the Union collaborationist bureaucracies, despite the chants of sirens of the left-wing servants of European imperialism, French workers and battle-hardened youth are presenting battle. The powerful French proletariat starts to stand up.
On May 12 itself the working class and the exploited were mobilized throughout the country against the attack of Hollande and imposed on the Union bureaucracy a general strike on May 17 and 19.
As the reader can see, on page 11 of this IWO we tell about the vigorous general strike and rally along the streets on May 17 where the cry thundered of "We are all vandals, all of us break everything!" All we hate the police!"
They began the pre-revolutionary days of the workers and youth’s combat. THE “FRENCH MAY” BEGAN TO WAKE UP AND PARIS DRESSED IN COMMUNE.
We present here also a correspondent’s report from Paris, reproduced at page 11, on May 18 fight, which would be a new step in the struggle of the working class waging massive political combat on the streets of the French May.
On May 18 France dawned under a serious tension: the dreadful riot police (…organized in the Stalinist French CGT! Shame on the Stalinist bureaucracy! ) called for a rally “against the hatred that people feel toward” them... A real provocation organized by the Government of Hollande and mounted by the same Stalinist apparatus of the CGT and treacherous and corrupt Force Ouvrière bureaucracy. In different cities, not only in Paris, these marches were supported by (extreme-right) Le Pen and the Zionist community in France... The response was swift. Tens of thousands of workers and young people marched in Paris to defend the Republic Square that the masses had conquered with their camp.
But this provocation from the Government was already underway. From the masses of rebellious youth, from all the squares of insubordinate Paris and assemblies in factories came out calls to support the day of fight and the strike for May 19. The same 18 already oil tankers, railway, mining, nuclear power workers stopped working. Worker assemblies sprang everywhere. Youth won the streets. A new round of fighting began. The mass action reached a new rung up. The French May is getting up. New decisive battles are yet to come.
The “Square of the Republic” was banned by Government Decree. The masses refuse to give it out, much less to get off of their struggle in defense of the 35 hours. Night was falling in Paris on May 18, and already the churches of Rouen appeared taken with the Red posters of "Long live the Commune!" And subway station of the Square of the Republic, the surrounding streets and the square itself changed name and were known as de la Commune. Long live then the Paris Commune!
Open the way to militant internationalism!... Bringing the voice of the Syrian resistance, of the struggle for the freedom of political prisoners and the combat for the Commune against imperialism, "International Worker Organizer" correspondents were present on May 15 in Paris
We Trotskyists of the FLTI are honored to be able to combat today on the streets of Paris next to workers and rebellious youth, participate in these engagements and from May 6 intervene in the Place de la Republique. The reader may also find reflected in this IWO issue this huge experience of our correspondents in Paris and the combat we Trotskyists fought there. at the Republic Square there were expressed ultimately two programs: on one side those who defend the "real democracy" of the Fifth Republic, and on the other those who, as we do, proclaim that the Paris Commune should return this time all over France.
Our intervention on the international day of Nuit Debout on May 15 -which reunited tens of thousands of students and workers in the square-, as well as in the previous days, raised two decisive points.
On the one hand, we called to break the siege to the Syrian revolution and fight for the freedom of all political prisoners in the world with the cry of "The enemy is at home!" and "Imperialists, get out of the nations whom you oppress!” and “Out with your wars of plunder and colonialism!".
On the other hand, we gave a political battle against the scam of "new left" and their telltale of "real democracy" while it was crumbling when Hollande signed the Decree on the elimination of the 35 hours workweek. That May 15 in the evening our delegate culminated her speech before thousands of students and workers raising the cry: "Down with the 1%! For a Committee of all labor organizations to convene from rebel Paris to a European General Strike to defeat imperialist Maastricht! Let’s revive the Paris Commune! A Commune where all the workers of the world are citizens of honor! LONG LIVE THE COMMUNE! "."
These interventions are found in various videos that the reader can see on our web site (www.flti-ci.org) reflecting the tough fight that we Trotskyist internationalists fought in the Place de la Republique from May 6 until 15, where we also fought alongside members of Committees in Solidarity with Syria in France against defenders of Al-Assad who were in the square.
The reader could also find interventions of our correspondents starting on page 12 of this issue, where we publish a report on May 15 about the International Conference convened by Nuit Debout, as well as our interventions at the General Assembly in the Republic Square that day and on 6th and 11th May. And we also reproduce the various motions of struggle that our correspondents presented in meetings of Nuit Debout on the Paris square on behalf of the "International Network for the Freedom of Political prisoners in the world"; the Leon Sedov Brigade and the Committees for Syria of San Pablo and Buenos Aires; and from the movement of revolutionary black workers in South Africa and from Zimbabwe’s WIL.
In Ukraine the revolution and counter-revolution face each other and the Stalinists’ fifth-column acts by shooting revolutionaries in the back like yesterday it did in the 1930s in the Spanish civil war
While in Athens and the Spanish State are conditions still latent for revolutionary new offensives and clashes between the classes…this French May brings new fresh air to East Europe)
In this OOI, we are also presenting a new article on the Ukrainian question on page 16. There Communists parties which yesterday sold out the USSR to imperialism today submitted the working class of the Donbass to “Novorossiya’s” bourgeoisie and divided Ukraine on Obama and Putin’s Minsk Covenant.
A tricky "ceasefire" agreed in Minsk ended up saving the bourgeoisie of Kiev and the IMF which controls and loots the entire Ukraine through the Government of Poroshenko. The fact is the masses of the Donbass had militarily imposed over them; and this was so because Kiev’s workers had refused to fight against their brethren the miners from the East, and to join the fascist Army… It was necessary for the bourgeoisie and imperialism to submit the Donbass working class to the "anti-imperialist" and "democratic" bourgeoisie of Lugansk and Donetsk, namely oligarchs of the same size as Poroshenko, Yanukovych or gangs of bandits and assassins paid for by imperialism like Putin and Medvedev of the "great Russia".
None of this would have been possible if Europe's Stalinist parties had not commanded "internationalist volunteers" to Ukraine. They supported Putin plundering that stole Crimea, the partition of Ukraine and the division among the working class of that country that threatened to put in place the Councils of workers and soldiers. They must explain why since their arrival in the Donbass all the heads of the brigades and militia were killed who refused to abide by these agreements of Minsk. And they must also explain why independent militias were dissolved and submitted to the bourgeoisie of the Donbass and its regular army. On this issue the article reads that we published in this IWO on page 25 with regard to the actions of Stalinism.
This new French May is a gust of fresh air helping to break the chains of the treacherous addresses that subject the spark of Athens. The power struggle by the working class in France, the combat for the Commune, is the large flag in Greece to defeat the Government of class collaboration of Syriza and for the Greek rebel youth to collaborate with the labor movement in breaking the control that Stalinism exerts upon it. The struggle for the Paris Commune is the same battle cry of workers of Ukraine and its slogan "Let’s make the USSR come again!" to take steps towards a single worker and socialist revolution from Portugal to the Russian steppes.
Along with this we here also reflect the awakening of the Russian working class, which has begun a wave of strikes against Putin, the Hitman of imperialism. We are presenting on page 27 an article about the fighting the Russian proletariat has embarked to the cry of "Putin, bourgeois, your days are numbered!" and with regard to the May 1 commemoration in Russia, a date in which the Russian CP held a joint event with Putin’s party. This is the same CP that along with the rest of the Stalinist Communist parties of Europe - all of them also part of the "new left", all supported by the Renegades of Trotskyism- went to Ukraine to act as fifth-column and drown that cry of "Let’s make the USSR come again!" They were the same Communist parties that sold out the Soviet Union, the workers States in East Europe, and China to the Citibank, Reagan, Thatcher and the financial oligarchy of the City of London and Wall Street.
In Syria all treacherous leaderships of the world working class show their true face
The Syrian revolution: a bloody revolution a thousand times betrayed…
A revolution that does not surrender
If somewhere in the world this "new left" shows its true face it is in Syria. This "democratic" left traveled twice to Tunisia, to meetings of the World Social Forum (WSF), which proclaimed that the "enemy was the ISIS" and thus comes supporting 5 years the brutal genocide, massacre and extermination perpetrated by filthy Dog Bashar together with Putin, under the leadership of Obama, against the heroic Syrian revolutionary masses.
In these pages the reader will find the latest hot facts of the Syrian issue that continues into the center stage of the global class struggle. At the end of April, on the eve of the “International Day of the Workers", an attack of extermination began on Aleppo, the bastion of the resistance, demonstrating the "ceasefire" farce of Assad, Putin and Obama agreed at the Geneva Conference. 1,000 bombs were dropped there in less than 48 hours, destroying everything in their path. This May 1 was dyed red with the color of the blood of the "Martyrs of Chicago today", namely the martyred Syrian masses and their more than 500,000 dead and 10 million refugees… Thousands and thousands people won the streets of major cities of the world -as Berlin, Stockholm, Washington, New York, etc.- against the massacre in Aleppo.
Counter-revolutionary attack in Syria continued and this time it was a refugee camp inside Syria, called Sarmada, the target of Al-Assad, who bombed without mercy men, women and children living in tents in the desert. This aroused hatred among the Syrian resistance which ended up breaking the fence to the working-class neighborhoods South of Aleppo and waged a huge defeat to the mercenary troops of Assad and Putin, so recovering the town of Khan Al Touman.
We present here on page 32 the Declaration of Leon Sedov Brigade from Aleppo resistance about the battle of Khan Al Touman. At the same it explains the enormous meaning for the resistance of the defeat of Dog Bashar in that city and the breaking of the siege to Aleppo.
We also reproduce from page 30 on all reports and correspondents of the Socialist fighters of the Syrian revolution with regard to the massacre in Aleppo.
On page 35 the reader may find an article on March 24, entitled "ISIS, the excuse" written by Abu Muad, which keeps a great freshness as it shows the true role of the ISIS who is the "perfect enemy" "found" by imperialism and its lackeys to legitimate and deepen their counter-revolutionary offensive in Syria and across the globe.
In Latin America, this May 1 two barricades were expressed
In the Latin American sub-continent on one side there are the Castro brothers and the "Bolivarians", supported by left by the Renegades of Trotskyism. On the other side, at the barricade of the revolution, we Trotskyists are fighting along with the vanguard of the working class of Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile…
In Latin America, this May 1 the "new left" - as the Brazilian PSOL, the PTS of Argentina with its collateral offices in other countries, etc. - has been defending "real democracy" in Brazil together with the Castro brothers and all Latin American Stalinists. They are now hung to the coattails of the PT and Dilma’s bourgeois fraction, as we will show later.
This May 1 the "new left" has placed itself in the trenches opposite to the advanced US and Latin American working class fights. They stayed on the opposite sidewalk in front of workers of SIDOR and the hunger uprisings that have begun in Venezuela against the fierce attacks by Maduro.
They showed their cold shoulder, from the opposite barricade, to the industrial workers of La Paz, Bolivia that in their thousands won the streets on May 1 and today fighting against the sell-out of the bureaucracy of the COB and burning the pictures of Morales, the workers’ enemy in public bonfire. They were together with the Bachelet Government and the traitors of the CUT union bureaucracy in Chile, going to her Act on May 1 (as did the Chilean section of the PTS), while in the South of Chile fishermen and Chiloé Island exploited in revolt were fighting against her Government and the TNCs. In Argentina, they were legislating, churning bills together with the Kirchnerite bourgeoisie, showing their rears to the working class, which has begun a tough resistance against the Government of Macri and the most advanced sectors of which are fighting in Santa Cruz and Tierra del Fuego, where 23 coordinated trade unions are already carrying on more than 80 days of strike.
In this paper we present the special section "Echoes of May Day", where you can find our Declaration on what happened in Latin America this ''International Workers Day", with articles about Argentina, Chile, Peru and Bolivia. All those articles point out these two opposite barricades opened in the Americas, confronting reformism to the fighters of the Fourth International.
It has been shown that the Renegades of Trotskyism in Latin America are accompanying old WSF to its grave while it is withdrawing the historical scene, whitewash it and put new-style outfits on the "new left" that as Syriza, PODEMOS or European Stalinism, are responsible for strangling the revolutionary upheavals of the Greek, Ukrainian and Spanish State’s working class and also the new uprising of the French workers and youth.
The WSF is not more credible to the masses. Its members have sold out and expropriated every revolutionary fight staged by the exploited masses of the world and support the counter-revolutionary genocide of Al-Assad in Syria and many more. The Castroes have just given out Cuba to imperialism, are giving out the Colombian resistance and Chavez's supporters and all the "Bolivarian" are violently attacking the working class of their respective countries.
The reformist left has been "renovated" to continue saving capitalism in bankruptcy. While imperialism goes for everything, and has declared war on the working class and the exploited of the world, when it attacks without mercy the conquests of the workers, the "new left" proclaims the struggle for a "real democracy"… They are a few vile swindlers looking once more to numb the struggle of the exploited and expropriate their combat.
Like yesterday in Greece and Ukraine, and today in France,
In Brazil all the perfidious policy of class collaboration concentrates of the "new left", constituted by Stalinists and Renegades to the Fourth International
We also present the first statements of the FLTI against fraud and smoke-selling by reformist left about an alleged "coup" in Brazil, which the reader will find in page 3 of the special supplement of "Echoes of May Day"
In Brazil all forces of Stalinism and the Renegades of the Fourth international have concentrated to support one of the bourgeois fractions today in misfortune, that for years was the largest guarantor of the business of the transnationals and imperialism in Brazil, such as the PT Government of Lula-Dilma with Temer’s PMDB, a party which in time collaborated with Brazil’s 1964-1985 military dictatorship.
As we show in this IWO, it is already extremely clear what imperialism makes today in Brazil is selecting the best of the executioners, who is able to implement its plan against the masses and defend its interests and business.
In Brazil a fierce economic crisis has begun. Imperialism comes to discipline all the bourgeois native gangs that have taken "undue returns" from the huge financial investment by the imperialist bankers in Brazil. It comes to disciplining both the gang of the PT in the Government and the "opposition" which from the Parliament has pushed the Impeachment against Dilma and stir up the middle classes against her Government.
To select the strongest Government that it may have at hand, imperialism uses bourgeois justice, the Parliament and the Constitution of the ' 88, with which Brazil’s half-democratic, half-Bonapartist regime is run. There is not any coup. In any case, there is a scramble among bourgeois gangs to see which of them controls the business.
The own Dilma accepted the "coup against her" and has 180 days ahead to defend herself.
The imperialism policy then will win whatever the result: Dilma, respectful of the Constitution, accepts the Impeachment and stays at its disposal if her Vice President, PMDB’s Temer fails in his attempt to violently attacking the masses. And if none of them succeeds, there will be new early elections. But if the masses burst into this crisis, there will be a front among all the bourgeois factions to crush them. A coup? Don’t kid me!
Under the banners of the Fourth International!
Let's put up an internationalist fraction of the global working class to recuperate for the exploited masses of the world the revolutionary leadership they deserve to win the victory!
We present this material then from the Committee for the Re-foundation of the Fourth International / FLTI. We do so in a decisive moment for the world working class, since in current conditions, new processes of radicalization are developing with the masses rotating on the left, marking an angle of 180 degrees in relation to the policy and program of their reformist leaderships.
Thousands of young people and workers in Europe face, as in Greece, left smoke-vendors of Syriza, suffer in the prisons of that infamous regime of the Troika, and collide with the Stalinist trade union bureaucracy, the same as the French working class does today and the youth already proclaiming they want to be citizen of the Paris Commune.
Foci of vanguard of the working class in Latin America, under extremely harsh conditions of imperialist offensive, collide with the "Bolivarian" Governments in their decline, as does the Venezuelan working class and its vanguard, SIDOR workers, or the Bolivian industrial workers of La Paz fighting against the traitors of the COB bureaucracy and against the Government of Morales.
US youth and the movement for $ 15 is a break already opened with U.S. imperialist Democratic Party of murderer and starver Obama, who has had to send that fake Socialist who is Sanders, to prevent the working class from breaking with the regime of the "Republicrats".
In South Africa the Stalinist control of trade unions breaks, as the conditions mature for the Russian and Chinese working class flare in the class struggle in the middle of the doldrums of the current economic crisis.
A new period of counter - reformism has been opened. If the old WSF took decades to unmasking before the masses after the sellout of China and the USSR by Stalinism; today under the conditions of the global crash and the scourge of the capital, the cheating by treacherous leaderships and this reformism without reform, will last just for a few months. Our task as Trotskyists, the task of revolutionary socialism is to participate in those thousand- and -one attempts of the vanguard of the working class and youth who struggle to unite their fights at the international level and are breaking here and there the fence that these treacherous leaderships build around them to isolate them one by one.
Our struggle to rebuild the Fourth International is in the combats of the heroic resistance of the Syrian working class, from where greetings and calls to a common struggle are sent to the workers and youth in the Place de la Republique in Paris, to the Greek Revolutionary Youth, to the workers in Tierra del Fuego.
Our place of combat is alongside the Palestinian resistance and prisoners, and next to the exploited masses of the Spanish State and its prisoners, upon whose shoulders PODEMOS’ smoke vendors would build their political career getting on their knees before the Bourbon monarchy.
We are fighting together with the Ukrainian resistance to break the Minsk agreement as well as the Geneva Conventions which in the Middle East are coverage to invade Yemen, massacre the Palestinian nation, invade Libya and continue supporting filthy Dog Bashar.
We fight against Putin, the Hitman of imperialism in Syria and in the Donbass. And we charge him and all his Stalinist thugs with the responsibility for the scandalous murder of all those who have opposed to subduing the Donbass working class at the foot of the oligarchs of Lugansk and Donetsk
We strive for the restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat under revolutionary ways, there where the Stalinist scourge gave the worker States to the bourgeoisie and imperialism.
We fight with Latin American masses to regain Cuba that was given out to imperialism by the new bourgeois gang of the Castro brothers.
We fight with the workers of SIDOR and the industrial workers of La Paz. We revolt together with the Marikana workers against the Stalinist bureaucracy of COSATU in South Africa. We are fighting together with the workmen and women of Tierra del Fuego in Argentina.
We make ours the demand for $15 an hour minimum wage for American workers. With their family, we are looking around the world for the 43 disappeared teaching school students in Mexico. We have offered our martyrs in the revolutions of the Maghreb and the Middle East.
We arrived at the rebel Paris to lift along with the battle-hardened vanguard of the French working class and youth, the fighting flag for bringing back the Paris Commune.
We are fighting under the banners of the Fourth International and for re-founding an internationalist movement of the world proletariat.
To do so, we know that we must defeat all the treacherous leaderships that subject the working class to its own bourgeoisie country-by-country. We are convinced that the labor movement will do much of this task, as it is doing now when breaking the barriers of containment set up by reformism and taking steps forward in its fight.
It is our duty to help untie the masses’ hands, to call them to put up bodies of self-organization, self-determination and direct democracy, suitable for combat and for getting rid of all the Union bureaucracies and treacherous leaderships.
In this battle we’ll never hesitate to tell the truth to the masses: if the Socialist Revolution does not succeed, there is no possible victory either in the United States, or in France, in Greece, in enslaved Africa, in martyred China, in subdued Latin America; and all conquests of today will be irretrievably lost if we do not take power.
We are fighting under the banners of the Fourth International, under the flags of the Socialist Revolution. •
