With dozens of smoke bombs, Terracota has initiated an open break with the best traditions of Bolshevism
and the Fourth International
Once Again Trotskyism versus Stalinism
Comrade Jorge,
You have sent two new minutes. But we are still waiting for your programmatic position, which starts from the assumption that there isn't and has never existed any special commission or team reigning on moral questions in revolutionary organizations.
In your notes, you have scattered between 10 and 20 methodological questions that in turn open another 500 discussions. We believe that this is an error at the beginning of a discussion, where the programmatic positions must first be defined. This obscures the particular debate at hand and doesn’t help clarify it. Moreover, on various methodological, political or linguistic questions we could talk for hours or write pages after pages. But that would mean creating a swamp that doesn’t clarify the crux of the difference that is in question. Actually, you start from the premise that it’s the Central Committees, the Executive Committees and the political directorates that resolve moral issues within an organization. That’s the discussion. Is this your program, so we can discuss it in depth?
You are so confused about the political issues and the moral and principled issues in Marxism that you confound, to give an example, a political difference about Tosco's program in the '70s with a moral attack on him. In other words, criticizing Tosco and his politics would be a moral infamy. Read what you have written about it.
Tosco was a great fighter of that period and a sympathizer of the Argentine Communist Party. Well, in the face of a political criticism of Tosco and his current and with the excuse that the Triple A was searching him or that he was imprisoned, you create a true amalgam around him affirming, we insist, that he is being morally accused. This position of yours puts a limit to any serious Marxist preventing them from being able to raise any political debate on the positions of the different currents in the 1970s. By this method, we would be invalidated from making any political balance of the PST that, to tell the truth, played a heroic role in combat, spilling blood for the Argentine working class, beyond its political errors that we have already debated with total clarity.
This position of yours prevents anybody from proposing that in the year 1974, Tosco together with Piccinini, supported by the Communist Party, Montoneros and the PRT-ERP that had already passed to the camp of Castroism, in an assembly in Villa Constitución in the middle of the Villazo, held a position contrary to PST's. The latter, in a plenary session of more than 2,000 delegates and internal commissions, affirmed that a National Coordinator had to be set up urgently to centralize all regional and provincial coordinators. Every member of the PST in the 1970s could remind you the two slogans that were agitated in a stadium in Villa Constitución in that assembly: the PST, which had brought more than 700 delegates, chanted its slogan "The time has arrived for the Coordinator" and Tosco, Piccinini, the PRT-ERP and Montoneros chanted their slogan "Do not fuck up anymore, with the fucking Coordinator." That defined two strategies in the vanguard of the proletariat in the '70s.
For you, to point to this political difference amounts to defamation. However, it would be enough to read the PST newspapers of the time about this assembly, where this issue is denounced, to also accuse the PST of being a defamer. But the debates are not won with mystique and dramatic effects. Here there is no moral accusation against Tosco, but rather a political difference about the role of the Coordinators. We insist, there is no attack on his class morale or on his impeccable personal behavior as a class fighter. We even claim that about Turco Alac, leader of the Choconazo and also a member of the Communist Party.
This is an example of your program in the face of moral questions: you use them as a bombshell to settle political questions. Reread what you have written about it and you will see that we don’t exaggerate your position.
As we have seen in the previous example, your method of mixing political with moral questions makes any debate impossible. Everything gets muddled. For this reason, we insist, we are awaiting your programmatic position that comes off from what you affirm: that it’s the political organisms that define the moral questions of the militants in the revolutionary movement.
In your minutes you make all kinds of characterizations of your opponents, but we are inclined by what Comrade Trotsky taught us. Characterizations are done at the end of the debate. At least, that is our method, as we try to draw lessons from the factional struggles within the Fourth International, and we are not going to change it. Trotsky's characterization of the petty-bourgeois character of the fraction of Burnham and Shachtman in the tendency struggle within the SWP in 1940, is made once the programs have been clarified and the debate has taken place.
We read and reread our correspondence with you and we don’t see that anyone has suggested to you that you are a traitor who has crystallized as a Stalinist. What we do criticize is that your program is rapidly approaching there.
We haven’t raised that because no one thinks that at the beginning of this discussion. The only thing that we have discussed with you in political-personal debates that we were able to observe and that you ratify is that you had a POSITION on this issue, product and as a consequence of the degeneration of the revolutionary movement ... We don’t see any attack from us on your positions that is not political. Your positions, that is, your ideas, are being discussed, not a moral characterization about you.
You are using moral issues as a defense shield for your political positions, just as you did in the Tosco issue. That is mixing everything, that muddles any debate between Marxists.
We consider that the deviations in the program and the tendencies to sectarianism or opportunism that every living Marxist current has, are the product of the pressure of either hostile or revolutionary forces of the working class. And everyone has the right to raise this idea, if they consider this to be so. Because ideas don’t fall from the sky like a "holy spirit" that illuminates heads, but rather they come from the praxis of Marxism in concrete reality, where the leadership crisis has worsened, the continuity of the Fourth International has been broken, and the political independence of all its parties has been liquidated. This reality influences us daily and frequently. Maybe not you, because you are immunized for life. It’s not our case.
This is the experience of Bolshevism that went through some centrist phases, other sectarian ones… Stalinism didn’t fall from the sky. It grew out of real pressures that shaped it.
This is also our evolution: during these 30 years we had to get rid of thousands of theoretical, political and methodological positions that we dragged from the degeneration of the Fourth International and its capitulation to Stalinism. For example, when we were still in the MAS, for years we shared Nahuel Moreno's Stalinist theses on "democratic revolution." These theses were the product of a concrete pressure: the weight of Stalinism during the postwar period. And we clarify that we don’t consider that Moreno was a Stalinist.
Receiving a criticism to your political positions and from there drawing the conclusion that you are being attacked as an enemy of the proletariat, not only isn’t correct, but it also prevents the opponent from freely discussing with you and having the political opinions that they consider pertinent of your political positions or others that are in debate. When we speak of moral questions we refer, as we have already said, to the principles of all proletarian conduct in the revolutionary movement. For example, not betraying comrades in torture, not corrupting oneself before the bosses and the state, etc., etc. It’s extremely perilous if the resolution of these questions of morals and principles remains in the hands of a political leadership, since it could use them in any factional struggle, in the way as Stalinism did.
We are not going to accept that you impose any gag or ultimatum on our militants who enter the debate, as you don't have a gag hindering you and no one should have.
If there is someone who accuses his opponent of being a true Stalinist, that is, a counterrevolutionary, it’s you. Just look at your notes against us. You must cease with this method quickly in order to move forward in this discussion.
You are a leader of many years, you come from MAS, you were part of their newspaper team, you have debated with many leaders of Argentine Trotskyism. You are neither a base comrade nor a new comrade. It’s enough to see all your works and how you define yourself in each controversy, to realize that you are a leader of many years, with enormous political experience.
Victimizing yourself as a "crushed rank-and-file cadre" was the demagoguery carried out by all MAS cadres, incapable of waging any serious political struggle against their leadership when it really had to be done.
We are facing a delicate debate since the “hypothesis”-program that you started by holding and that you are investigating is about foundational and principled issues of our organization. It’s like going to a church and raise: "I am investigating if God exists." Let's clarify that at least the investigation starts to show that God doesn’t exist.
Our current is so democratic that it even gives you the possibility of convincing us on this fundamental question of principles, which makes our foundation. In this time of crisis in the continuity of the Marxist movement, we consider it opportune to debate all the questions that have to be with its principles. We hope to convince you.
Accusing us of having Stalinist methods and of being brutal towards you is out of place since it’s not consistent with reality. We asked you to edit your conclusions in the Internal Bulletin of the next International Conference of the FLTI and you haven’t responded to this.
Nor do you answer the question we posed in our note on whether or not you would have participated in the Moral Tribunal of the post-war Fourth International in defense of Hansen, Napurí, Varga or already in the 21st century, of Bacherer and Pico Muzzio, who marked threads of continuity of the Fourth International in defense of class morality after Trotsky's death.
You have at your disposal the work on the "Crisis of the French section" where the moral questions with its leader Molinier occupied a very important place in the construction of the Fourth International in the 1930s, as you will see in a quote that we reproduce at the end of this letter. Molinier was expelled by the Moral Commission of the French section and this resolution was vindicated by the International Secretariat of Trotsky, Cannon, etc.
A revolutionary party, in Trotsky's words, is about "people organized around a program".
Let us stick to a serious debate. Our program on this is written. We want to know what yours is so that we can publish it in the pre-Conference period in the second half of the year in our Internal Bulletin.
You, as a socialist personality, even have a Facebook group where you intervene politically and independently with respect to many of our positions.
Moreover, in the Opinion Columns section of our website, we have published harsh criticisms from you towards our current. We believe that the policy of our organization is totally democratic, fraternal and principled. If we were to characterize you as a Stalinist traitor or counterrevolutionary, do not worry, we would not have this relationship that we maintain with you.
Many times a difference arises in its beginnings in a confused and, why not, virulent way. It is an obligation for all of us who intervene in it, to conquer the best conditions to search for the truth.
We have even seen threats of physical aggression from you, but we consider it an outburst that we imagine you have already withdrawn. Or not? For that would be of an unusual violence like the one Lenin discussed against Stalin in his will.
We must prevent any incident that does not allow a clean debate among revolutionaries. From our experience, every right-wing current in the Trotskyist movement begins every battle it undertakes by creating incidents. It has even happened with splits that we have had of some comrades who have returned to their political origins, for example, to the MAS of the '80s in their program and conceptions. We are talking about people who went so far as to brutally accuse us of killing our most important workers' leader, as in the case of the provocation mounted by Marcial and an obscure character expelled years ago from our ranks by our Moral Commission. Then, they wanted to put us in the dock. They are political fanatics. They are the ones who should sit in the dock as slanderers and defamers. This position is equivalent to and takes on the worst traditions of the Healysm that from England publicly accused Hansen of having allowed the entry of the KGB agents who assassinated Trotsky in Coyoacán.
They are a filth that we do not want even 10,000 kilometers away from our ranks. This is where Trotsky's position of his morality and ours comes in, that is to say, of absolute separation from that current.
This is how these people ended up: in the "anti-quarantine" front, with one hand tied to the RCIT, a pro-Zionist current that defends a "bi-national state" in occupied Palestine, and the other hand next to the new "libertarians" that from time to time march to the Obelisk in Buenos Aires.
It is very healthy for our living organism to detach itself from these elements, that no matter how much they threaten to make 20,000 public discussions, they never allow it. The fact is that they are right-wing currents that never made a political-programmatic contribution to the Marxist movement, let alone to our current while they were in it. Unlike in the reformist parties, here it is the right wings what remain outside the movement and not the revolutionary ones.
Every time we get rid of these elements, we manage to select our cadres, adjust our program and make qualitative leaps in the struggle to regroup the very best of the international proletariat. And this has been always so because every tendency that has emerged within us, and there were many, has had and still has every political right to express itself programmatically.
Any observer of the experience of our more than 20 years of combat will be able to see that these detachments that we had never gave any political and programmatic battle in the LOI-CI. And as you will also be able to see, the splits that there were in the FLTI at the international level were indeed hard debates and programmatic political struggles and clear delimitations, including on the question of the political and programmatic nature of our struggle.
In this we are very far from the experience of the MAS of the 1980's, which in its process of decomposition liquidated all class morality within itself and among its militants, and did not register any serious struggle of tendencies and fractions, with very few exceptions. That was "solved" with tactical electoral "successes" with which they subdued their militants.
The MAS and its "Moral Commission", as you know perfectly well, never judged the attack made by the security group of that party with sticks against the militants of the La Plata regional of the PTS in 1989, sending 50 workers, with their wives and children to the hospital. The MAS militants looked the other way. They had already been led to a brutal political decomposition which led them to break with every moral principle: workers do not resolve their political differences with other workers by beating them up, but in debate before the masses. After that, it seemed "natural", "tactical" and a political question to the MAS rank and file that their leader Zamora should bring flowers to the murderous military of La Tablada who had just come from spraying white phosphorus on already unarmed comrades.
This was an immoral atrocity only comparable to the filth that meant recording the political-personal conversations that the leadership of the TBI (International Bolshevik Tendency, NEd) had at that time with the MAS leadership, which later published them without warning. That is a method of the bourgeois prosecutors and their judges. No Marxist would allow the publication of his private and personal discussions without his authorization and signature. With this method of the MAS leadership, all democratic deliberation of the revolutionary militants, of their teams, in their daily struggle, would be liquidated, because in the midst of the elaboration they have the right to correct themselves, to change, to maintain their position. What counts are the resolutions that are voted and the program that is publicly defended.
The leaders of our current who went through the experience of being important cadres of the MAS, had to make a public balance and a characterization of their capitulations and adaptations during their stay in that party in order to educate a new generation of revolutionaries.
This is also expressed in our statutes, which have shocked you so much: that the cadres coming from the traitor currents of the Fourth International are integrated into our teams or as sympathizers without the right to vote for 5 years. This is a pride of our current, which has every right, as Lenin would say, to delimit its borders and to select its men to fight for this program. We do this in Congresses and these are resolutions of the same. This point of the statute was applied with you. You spent years within MAS and you must demonstrate to the base of our organization that you have really overcome the decomposition from which you come.
Having seen your last minutes, we are left with one concern: do you intend the entire FLTI to be paralyzed in the thousands of tasks and obligations that we have, in order to discuss your point that was discussed by our current for 30 years and that for you is a "doubt" or a "hypothesis" as you claim now? That is not going to happen. Write your program. We have already provided you with all our materials in this regard and we insist once again that you will have our Internal Discussion Bulletin at your disposal.
Before we finish, one last question or concern we would like to raise.
We have to achieve a healthy relationship in this debate. It seems that at times you place yourself as a professor who is above all mortals. You would have consulted a specialized historian and a language psychologist to discuss our positions. Of course, if they are not familiar with the debates within the Trotskyist movement and their dialectics, they would be quite irresponsible if they were to give an opinion on the matter.
It is as if Lenin had called a group of "experts" comprising psychologists, psychiatrists, semiologists, etc. to discuss the lessons of the rupture of Russian Marxism in 1902 and had written with them the greatest balance sheet ever made of that Congress, as was "One step forward, two steps back (the crisis of our party)". Actually, the historical-dialectical materialism is the only one that, as a scientific method, can interpret the debates within the Marxist movement, including the words used in it.
You also bring to our attention Erick Pernett, who is said to have discovered some 500 errors in his reading of Capital. Perhaps that is an interesting contribution, but the question is the errors of content. We know of many debates, especially from the social democratic wings that used the German language to revise Marx and Marxism for decades. Astarita is an open example of this.
An important question about this we saw around the central lessons of the Paris Commune that were defined around one word, which changed and adjusted all of Marxism in the late 19th and early 20th century around whether to "replace" or "destroy" the state machinery. We do not believe that any linguist, follower of Lacan or structuralist would have noticed this "detail" and "word" that meant the breakup of the Second International, with Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg in a bloc against Kautsky, Hilferding, etc., since this "word" defined the lessons of the Paris Commune, regarding the theory of the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
On the other hand, you have spoken with a certain Esteban, a teacher of literature, semiotics and semiology, but who is clearly ignorant of the very hard fights and political struggles with which Marxism was formed. Esteban's method has nothing to do with historical-materialism. But you have consulted him as an "expert". And this Esteban has answered you. He has fixed a position on a part of the text, not on the whole polemic. That is what the bankruptcy of bourgeois thought is about, which infects the conscience of the great masses with partial knowledge so that they do not rise to the whole, that is to say, to the system in order to destroy it.
The truth is that one must be an adventurer or a quack, like Mr. Esteban, to intervene on loose phrases of a political struggle, separated from the context and the questions of Marxism put to debate. And you have to be a politically irresponsible person like yourself to debate within the revolutionary movement by bringing liberal bourgeois professionals into the discussion. It is an atrocious pacifism to treat a revolutionary current in this way.
But analyzing your report on the consultation you made to this Estaban, the answer he gives you on the "disqualification", is like answering that when it rains, water falls. In any political and programmatic struggle, it is a matter of demonstrating the incorrectness of the position of the opponent until convincing him or being convinced. For the petty bourgeois semiotician, that is "disqualifying". Anyone who reads your minutes and the political struggle you have established, using quotes from Lenin, Trotsky, semiologists, historians, linguists and psychologists against us, will see that you are trying to disqualify our position as incorrect. That is what the political struggle is all about. But what the semiologist and other liberal professionals will never be able to understand, is that here we seek the truth for the vanguard workers and that in the debates within the revolutionary movement, the future of the working class is at stake, which surely these intellectuals do not give a damn about. The liberation of the workers will be the work of the workers themselves.
If the discussions in Marxism could be solved by scientists, psychologists, semiologists, epistemologists and even geneticists or archeologists, they would surely have already solved the crisis of Marxism, crossed by thousands of political struggles, betrayals and adaptations and corruption of the upper strata of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie.
Marxists, revolutionaries, we use the most advanced of modern sciences. Even the psychology of the masses, which in war is a very important instrument. But we revolutionaries do it, based on historical-materialism and not in "groups of experts", since according to Lenin, these would be formed by the fusion of the Marxist intelligentsia with the workers' intelligentsia.
In your answer you make a contribution regarding Trotsky's relationship with the Control Commission of the Communist Party of the USSR that expelled him in 1926. Trotsky replies to the CPSU, as you correctly state: "If you were truly a Central Control Commission, your duty would be to put an end to this filthy, miserable, disgusting, in a word: Stalinian, campaign."
For Comrade Trotsky and for any serious historian, the CPSU had an important Control Commission which decided on moral questions, which was later used by Stalinism against Trotskyism, even incorporating psychiatrists aas an appendix to it who "scientifically" justified sending Trotskyists and dissidents to the Lubianka and asylums, accusing them of being "insane", "mentally ill".
The Fourth International during Trotsky's lifetime took up this historical tradition of Bolshevism, as happened in its national sections. In the mid 1930's, Trotsky from the International Secretariat and Cannon, who was in charge of the French section in Europe, developed a hard discussion against Molinier who used his personal business to exert financial pressure and impose his policy within the French league.
Trotsky, in a letter to the Political Bureau of July 11, 1936, debating this question, states: "the experience of the Communne and the attitude of Molinier, after the most regrettable fiasco of his treacherous adventure, proves in its very essence that there is nothing in common between him, on the one hand, and our principles, politics, methods and rules of revolutionary morality, on the other. Nothing in common. The very fact that the entire organization is obliged to concern itself at every instant with Molinier and not with questions which are infinitely more important, shows the incompatibility of the latter with the revolutionary organization."
And Trotsky continues: "This is not a question of business affairs per se. It is a question above all of the policy of financial pressure in its own organization. The fact has been established beyond dispute and the Control Commission has formally confirmed it."
Let us hope that this letter will be of assistance to you in developing your positions and criticisms.
From this experience of Trotsky and Cannon and the French section and from the negative experience of Stalinism, which used amalgamation, slander, physical arrest and persecution against Trotskyists and dissidents from the political organizations, you will be able to understand the statutes of the LOI-CI that we have sent you.
Because since 1914 with the opening of the epoch of crises, wars and revolutions, the split of socialism has also begun, as Lenin said. A layer of the workers' aristocracies and bureaucracies were corrupted and used by the bourgeoisie as a shock force against the proletariat. Thus the relationship between politics, principles and proletarian morality was drastically changed in the Marxist movement and in the entire world working class. We invite you to study the Marxism of the 19th century, so that you can see that, in spite of the very hard political battles, the differences of Marx and Engels with Bakunin, Blanc, Lasalle, Proudhon, etc. were solved neither with amalgamations, nor with slander, physical persecution, or ice picks in the head. The proletariat in its upper strata had not yet been corrupted and the questions of honor and proletarian morality were the founding basis of Marxism and of all the working-class currents of the 19th century.
We remind you that even though you are a sympathizer of our organization, you appealed to the Control Commission of our organization to settle a moral question about you when a sympathizer of ours attacked you morally with people from outside the organization. This sympathizer came out to defend his wife (both psychiatrists), who has nothing to do with our current, and hurled an infamous slander at you.
You will recall that the LOI-CI Control Commission investigated this case and immediately expelled the sympathizer in question from our ranks. It was a principled resolution on a moral issue. The reason is that beyond all political differences and whoever the attack comes from, the morale of the revolutionaries is defended, just as the workers are defended against the bosses, a question that every worker with a minimum of class consciousness can understand, demand and exercise.
We insist, let us make an effort to clear all this dust and smoke that has arisen and let us go to the central issue at stake.
We remain at your order to channel and organize this debate.
Paula Medrano, Rafa, Toty y Sofía
From the International Executive Committee of the FLTI
PS: We have to channel this debate with you since other discussions have been opened. One on the character of the Histadrut and our policy of refusing to work in this fascist parastatal apparatus. And there is also an open debate about your explicit support to the San Isidro group in Cuba, around which there are differences, including programmatic ones on the Cuban issue.
It is unnecessary to recreate incidents that only impede the political debate.
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Rally of Izquierda Unida in Plaza de Mayo
The MAS supporting Stalinism in Izquierda Unida in ‘89, while the Berlin Wall was collapsing
Congress of the MAS during the '90s
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