Open letter to the whole Brazilian working class and to the working class of the entire American continent

A response of the South African Trotskyists of the FLTI to the invitation of the Conlutas-Intersindical merger Congress and the International Meeting of ELAC

We, the comrades of the Workers International Vanguard League (WIVL) from South Africa, members of the FLTI, in the last days of March received in our email a letter from Fabio Bosco, speaking on behalf of LIT, with an invitation to participate at the merger congress between CONLUTAS (led by PSTU/LIT) and Intersindical (of the PSOL in CONCLAT Mandelites) and to the International Meeting of CONCLAT, continuity of ELAC, between days 3 and 7 of June, in Brazil.

In his invitation, Bosco said that Conlutas is a “.. militant union federation that has 200 unions, 70 oppositions within the unions, 70 people's movements for housing and land, and many student's, women's, black and LGBT groups”. And that to the unification congress between Intersindical and Conlutas between June 5th and 6th at around “three thousand delegates from all over Brazil” will be gathered together and the unification between “both organizations will represent a step forward for the militant Brazilian working class”. All the activities will finish on June 7th with the International Meeting of CONCLAT.
The fact that 3,000 delegates will gather together would mean a political event of the proletariat in Brazil and in Latin America. These 3,000 delegates in key sectors of the industry, public servants, metalworkers, chemistry workers, bank workers, teachers, oil workers, and also the peasants without land, the people without shelter, the movement of the black workers, the student’s movement, express a layer of the proletariat and the exploited who emerged in 2003 with the fight against Lula as a part of the Argentinean and Bolivian revolution and have been fighting for years and suffering also several frustrations due to the appeal to create new militant organizations.

In the documents with the theses of CONCLAT they speak about unifying the workers ranks, fighting Lula’s government, fighting the policy of the CUT’s bureaucracy and setting up a class central, even they state that this “merging congress” will fight for socialism. However, if this congress really states this fight as an immediate alternative, in the middle of the imperialist capitalist crisis that hits over the working class in the whole world, their program hasn’t defined one single measure that attacks the property of the capitalists nor unifies the fight of the workers in mass political fight against the governments and regimes.
For that we want to answer to the invitation that they gave to us, even more on the new facts of the international class struggle and to approach our proposals to the delegates gathered together because the Brazilian working class and Latin American working class needs a workers and peasants governments that prepares the conditions for victory against the capitalist attacks and not a meeting where they speak about socialism so every day they don’t satisfy the needs of the whole exploited and the expectations of huge layers of the militant vanguard.

We have to follow the example of the industrial workers of La Paz and the Argentinean unemployed and occupied workers that are rising against the pacts of surrendering the working class.  CONCLAT must call on all the working class to rebel against the infamous Social Pact of imperialism, Lula and the pelega bureaucracy (scab/yellow bureaucracy).

While Lula travels around the world as a democracy statesman and peacekeeper at the service of French imperialism, the working class under its government lives the worst of the dictatorships. With the social pact, Lula conquered national stability, guaranteed control of the workers movement with CUT and PT for preventing a general strike against his government. He sanctioned decrees twice as much as F.H. Cardoso. He multiplied the militarization of the shanty towns with the army and the police to kill the “poor devils”, as Trotsky would say, who live all piled up in the favelas (shanty towns) in inhuman conditions, where the rain might cause the death of hundreds, as it happened in April 5th catastrophe. In the farms, the exploited are suffering the massacre of the white guards of the land owners and the repressive forces of the state. That’s how Lula’s anti-worker government treats the masses!

Lula maintains an industrial reservoir army of 60 million slave workers earning 70 dollars per month of welfare plans, dismissing 2 million workers since December 2008 guaranteeing a higher super-exploitation and increasing the production rhythms. That is how Lula presents the “Brazilian miracle” to the world: link brazil to the Chinese market, keep exporting there cars and different imperialist companies getting a huge amount of surplus value from the working movement and having a domestic market of consume of middle classes and labour aristocracy.
Since early 2009 there has been countless attempts of the vanguard to face the government, achieve better labour conditions, increasing wages, prevent dismissals. But as to the rest of the continental working class, CUT imposed AFL-CIO plan; i.e. agreements and state law to save capitalists’ business with sliding scale of suspensions, dismissals and cutting wages. Unfortunately the policy of the leadership of Conlutas and Intersincidal was keeping all strikes and combats as struggles of putting pressure on the government; they kept those fight isolated without the call to impose a general strike over the bones of union bureaucracy. The policy of the leadership of Conlutas was to convene demonstrations of pressure over the parliament, demand the representatives of the bourgeoisie to vote a law to ban dismissals, they even said that Lula must be pressured to nationalize GM and Vale do Rio Doce, just like Obama, while the company dismissed hundreds of workers. How can dismissals be stopped with a “law”? When all laws defend private property, guarantee dismissals and allow the bosses to do whatever they want. A law for the workers voted in that then of thieves at the service of the imperialist transnationals and Brazilian slave bosses?
That is why the first task that this congress has to vote –if it wants to be a real alternative to the unity of the working class- is to break with that policy carried on so far by Conlutas and Intersindical and follow the path of Bolivian and Argentinean workers and call on the working class to revolt. Down with the “social pact” of imperialism, Lula, slave bosses, PT and CUT! Down with all kinds of union bureaucracy! CONCLAT must non-recognize the wages agreements and the Pact of Union Action signed by CUT, Forza Sindical, CTB, CGTB and UGT; they must call on workers and exploited to defy them! The general strike must be prepared to face this slave government! In order to conquer a real congress for the struggle we must impose to the conveners of CONCLAT to vote: Enough with the submission to the bourgeois laws, their parliaments and infamous regime! All links to the bourgeoisie must be broken and let’s do a real congress of unity of the working class! We, workers, organize ourselves as we want to! State’s hands off! Down with the compulsory agreements with the Labour Minister! Down with the compulsory dues!
In order to start the unification of the workers ranks –as CONCLAT claims to aim- let’s vote that the first measure is: Immediate rehiring of the 2 million dismissed workers, decent jobs to everyone and sliding scale of wages and sliding scale of working hours for the whole Brazilian workers movement! Down with the social welfare plans! All workers permanents under collective agreements! Wages according to the cost of living, indexed according to the inflation that should be measured by workers organizations!
This congress should pose clearly that the solution will not come with fake “nationalizations”, like Conlutas leadership has been proposing. The working class has to trust in its own forces and vote in this congress: Occupation and expropriation without payment and place under worker control all companies that shut down, furlough or dismiss its workers! We want the expropriation of the profitable factories and those with high-tech! Expropriation without payment and nationalization under worker control of the entire auto industry, imperialist monopolies such as Ford, VW, Fiat, etc! Re-nationalization without payment and place under worker control Petrobras, Embraer, Vale and all the privatized companies! For the monopoly of foreign trade! Down with the business and bank secret! Open the books of accounting and the bank accounts of all the bosses, to prove that with financial roulette and financial assistance given by Lula, they took millions of dollars away, while workers and poor people pay them with closure of factories, dismissals, furloughs, wage cuts and repression to their struggles!
This is a rare “socialist and working congress”, as it doesn’t say that the 200 billion dollars in the “reserves” in the Central Bank belong to the workers and poor peasants. Expropriation without compensation of the banks, starting with Citibank, HSBC, Itau, Santander! For a unique state bank under worker control to cancel all debts and give low rate credits to the poor and landless peasants, ruined middle class and to the workers! No to the payment of foreign debt; to guarantee health and education systems for the workers and poor people! Expropriation without payment of all private and church education! Progressive taxes to the huge fortunes!

Rank and file committees, factory committees and assemblies to organize the workers movement from below to the top!

What “unity of the exploited” are the leaders of Conlutas and Intersindical talking about? They don’t even call the working class to seal the alliance with the poor peasants without land and to rise as the leader of the oppressed nation. Why don’t they call to expropriate the “fazendeiros”, to nationalize the land without compensation and put it to produce in collective farms under workers control financed by the state? Let the land be given to the poor peasants without land! End of all debts of the petty producer who has less than 100 hectares, who work the land and does not exploit labour force! No more slavery for our black brothers and sisters of the workshops and the “fazendas” where they are enslaved! The path is to fight for the expropriation of the land. This is the only way to free the slaves! Why don’t they call from this congress to build up self-defense committees against the repression of Lula and the white guards of “fazendeiros”?

The truth is that only ten percent of the working class is in the unions of Brazil. To conquer the unity of the workers ranks, is not necessary to invent anything new, neither fusions of “parallel central trade unions” with the official ones, neither devices behind the masses that are oppressed by the pro-government bureaucracy. It’s necessary to re-take the tradition of the “strike commands” which were put on feet in 1978/79 making the dictatorship to tremble. Factory committees and pickets to overthrow the pro-government bureaucracy from all the workers organizations! We need to impose the direct democracy! Let all the leaders get back to work once their term is over!

This is the way: a National Congress of factory committees and rural proletariat must be imposed; a congress of poor and landless peasants, militant students, homeless in the big cities, state workers; choosing 1 delegate every 100 in the whole workers movement to unify the working class ranks, prepare the conditions for a general strike for jobs, wages and to break with imperialism, to the defeat the attack of the government and the regime.
Such a congress will open the hope all the exploiteds of Brazil and would place one of the most concentrated working class of the continent in the fight together with its class brothers in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia. If Brazilian working class manages to unleash its tied hands, the conditions for the continental proletariat will be better and it will allow them to take up again the revolutionary combats of the early 21st century. Unfortunately CONCLAT doesn’t say –against capitalist that want to make us pay the crisis, while they get hug profits- that the way is expropriating the expropriators, to conquer bread, wages, land, housing, health, education and expel imperialism.
If Conlutas and Intersindical leaderships break with their current policy of submission to the bourgeoisie and raise this perspective as a way to leave the sufferings of the masses and for the capitalists to pay the crisis, they would awake enthusiasm in millions of exploited all over the country. Otherwise they will prove that this congress, propelled as an objective strength the electoral policy of PSTU and PSOL on the national elections on October 2010, as the left wing of Lula’s popular front, to redouble the submission of the proletariat to the regime’s institutions and preventing the development of the extra-parliamentary masses struggle.

The internationalist tasks of the Brazilian proletariat and the International Summit of ELAC

The call for a Workers Congress in Brazil to fight against Lula’s government and CUT bureaucracy, to fight for the unity of workers, it is not credible since the continental counterrevolutionary policy of Lula, PT and CUT (organized in WSF) isn’t challenged. The role of Lula’s government and the union bureaucracy was key to establish all Bolivarian governments, by acting as firemen on every revolutionary flame since Argentina 2001; those very same governments that expropriated the Latin American revolution. Lula travelled to Bolivia, Colombia, Honduras to seal counterrevolutionary pacts; such pacts used the masses as exchange currency in the dispute for a slice of the business between French imperialist and their native bourgeoisie associated and US imperialism, which is looking by guns and counterrevolutionary coups recover its back yard. Lula, Brazilian companies and transnationals installed there have conquered a privileged place in the plunder of the continent, by playing the role mediator among all, doing business with all of them.

But this happened because ELAC (founded in 2008) was the left wing of such fence to the Latin American revolution set up by WSF. Every time that imperialism made a counterrevolutionary coup and the Bolivarian bourgeoisie set up pacts to contain the response of the masses, ELAC leaders refused to call to fight against those pacts, unify the workers ranks and allow the working class to intervene independently fighting for their own interests.
Therefore we, the Troskyits of FLTI, have nothing to do in a congress together with COB bureaucracy who sold out the Bolivian revolution to the façade of the Bolivarian revolution of Evo Morales and his popular front government.
LIT leaders can’t hide that Montes –leader of COB- was represented by the leaders of the mineworkers federation in the ELAC foundational congress. They can’t hide that Montes, while Morales was murdering two miners in Huanuni and let tens of wounded in August 2008, left the mineworkers isolated and gave a truce and supported the government of popular front in the revoking referendum. While Fascist Media Luna massacred in Pando, Montes –from COB leadership- supported Morales, refused to call to a workers congress to unify exploited and set up workers and peasants militia to smash fascism and he supported the pact between Morales and fascist Media Luna; the pact let the best lands, the oil, gas and mines in the hands of the cambas and transnationals, while in the highlands the masses suffer starvation and repression of Morales. Today, in the worst conditions (as a consequence of this betrayal of Montes and COB bureaucracy), industrial workers of La Paz are uprising for wages against this pact by shouting Out traitors of our organizations!  And Montes, traitor, out of COB! If ELAC leadership and Conlutas congress say that they support the struggle of industrial workers, will they take as their own industrial workers’ demands? Expel Montes, Mitma and COB bureaucracy from all workers organizations and ELAC!
How can they do a congress to unify Brazilian, US and Honduran workers, with Alan Benjamin and Clarence Thomas –Oakland dock workers leaders- who by calling to support Obama liquidated the most advanced sectors of the anti-war movement within USA and the movement for the rights of immigrants, who called two general strikes against Bush! Those leaders refused to call to paralyze the docks, stop sending weapons to US military bases and send those to the Honduran resistance when the coup in Honduras –organized by Obama- happened. They did nothing to unify the forces of the working class of the continent who wanted to face this counterrevolutionary attack against the masses in Centre America with the methods of the proletarian revolution. They didn’t propel a continental journey of breaking with the bourgeoisie with the general strike in the whole Centre America and that US proletariat set up with their own methods of struggle together with the exploited of Latin America, with barricade combats, pickets, attacking the imperialist’s private company. They are part of ELAC leadership and they never motioned the need of preparing and enlisting worker international brigades to travel to Honduras and smash the coup together with the resistance that was fighting, retaking the tradition of the world proletariat in Spanish civil war in the ‘30s. ELAC never gathered and thus it proved that its policy of “democratic fronts” was the subordination to the Zelaya Bolivarian bourgeoisie, who imposed a pact with the coupers, while the resistance was massacred in the streets. Out Alan Benjamin and Clarence Thomas! That is the only motion that can unify the workers of the continent in war against the butchers of the people Obama!
There can’t be a congress of unification of the workers with leaders of Batay Ouvriere (Haiti). They refuse calling workers militia and worker internationalist brigades of workers, lifesavers and fighters to aid the masses and defeat the imperialist invaders, Minustah of Lula and Bolivarians, to expel them from the island. ELAC leaders in Haiti never called to expropriate capitalist’s food and property in order to allow Haiti and Dominican masses to survive. They never call from ELAC to an emergency international congress to launch an urgent motion to all workers organizations of the continent to propel a struggle plan and Continental General Strike defeating collaborationist policy of all bureaucracies from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.
In this International Summit in Santos, will be the leader of GM and Conlutas Dos Santos, who travelled to Argentina in 2009 in the middle of the struggle of metal workers against the closing Parana Metal (former Metcom) in Villa Constitucion; he hugged and supported the selling out policy of UOM/CTA bureaucracy that imposed the dismissals and cutting wages. Then he went to Cordoba and before metal upraised workers –against dismissals, suspensions and cutting wages propelled by the bosses and government- and he told that they didn’t have to face UOM/CGT bureaucracy that imposed it. We have nothing to do with such leaders in a single international meeting!
Currents like Chukaku-ha participated together with these leaders. From Japan they supported treacherous leaders of US dock workers and they are servants of the government of the Chinese mandarins who exploit they own working class on behalf of US and Japanese imperialism.
But the main prove that shows that ELAC congress is not to unify the international workers struggle is that PSTU/LIT leaders heading ELAC and CONLUTAS call on workers to join the banners of the “anticapitalists” of Europe led by Mandelism. ELAC leaders instead of calling to unify Latin American workers with European proletariat –who is facing and resisting the attack-, calling to vote in this congress on Brazil the immediate call to a Congress in Athens for the international fight of the working class, they tell the Brazilian workers and the continent that they have to join Besancenot and European anticapitalists. They are the ones who in Europe say that “European Union must be strengthen”; the same EU that massacres and plunders the people of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the whole world! LIT needs to explain why they went to the Counter Summit of Madrid to fight for a 2% taxes to financial transactions and why they didn’t went to streets of upraised Athens to call for a continental congress and European general strike, to break the fence and isolation imposed on the Greek masses and the whole Europe combat. How can they call on workers to go behind Besancenot and French NAP banners, the continuers of Thorez and European Stalinism to strangle the European revolution?

How can the Brazilian workers conquer their unity by the hand of the Mandelism that gave ministers to Lula? Miguel Rosseto was a minister of the agrarian reform and during his term of office, the landless peasants were killed! Heloisa Helena was paid homage by that cave of murderous and slavery Brazilian Senate when she finished her office, after she denounced “as an act against democracy” the invasion of the parliament  by the desperate landless peasants in struggle and against the slaughter of the fazendeiros (landowners)!

The FLTI does not participate in that congress but only to affirm as first motion: to condemn the presence of these bureaucrats, enemy of the workers, and to expel them immediately. In Conlutas congresses and ELAC, these leaders and others like Petras and Celia Hart always talk. That is, the supporters of Castrism and Chavism speak, but the Trotskyist voice is never allowed to denounce them. Without expelling these leaders, which kind of internationalist, classist and anti imperialistic meeting are the leaders of LIT/PSTU talking about? Enough, it is necessary to expel the scab leaders and then it could be a congress to unify the workers around the entire continent! Otherwise, it will be a congress like those organized by Stalinism in the 30s under the leadership of Lombardo Toledano to submit the working class to the “democratic” imperialists and popular fronts that strangled the Spanish and French revolutions, from where Mateo Fossa and the Trotskyists who denounced them were kicked out.

Today, what the working class in the continent needs is to fight against the pacts that tie workers to the bourgeoisie and imperialism and to fight for its interests in a truly Continental Congress of worker and poor peasant delegates to vote to break with the bourgeoisie and unify our forces.

This task would allow immediately that the Cuban working class -facing the plan of dismissals of a million workers by the Castro bureaucracy as a step ahead the capitalist restoration- would have allies to fight side by side with them. Down with the Restauracionist Castro bureaucracy’s dismissals plan! For the political revolution in Cuba, to defeat the Castrist bureaucracy! It is necessary to defend the Cuban revolution from the imperialist siege, and the capitalist restoration led by the Castro Brothers! Down with the bureaucracy, its medals and decorations! For armed workers councils of the majority of the population that lives with 18 dollars monthly, so they are the ones who decide how to defend the conquest of the Worker state!

A Congress to break with the bourgeoisie, to confront the pacts that surrender the working class in the American continent will have full authority to call to defeat this same counterrevolutionary international policy that oppresses our brothers and sisters in the Middle East and first of all the heroic proletariat and the poor peasant of the martyred Palestine. Break with the bourgeoisie! Enough, no more concessions of humanitarian aid to the martyred Palestinian people!  That ELAC calls to set up the March of a Million Workers in the United States and fight to expropriate without compensation and under workers control all the food imperialistic monopolies, the great laboratories and the high tech medical industries in the entire continent to guarantee to get water, food and medicines for the Palestinian people! That ELAC breaks with the bourgeoisie and calls the dock workers of Oakland to break with their subordination to the “obamamanía” and to re-open the path towards the strike and the pickets against the US military machine, to paralyze the docks to prevent the armament of Zionism and to send weapons and supplies to the Palestine resistance so the Middle East can be the grave of Zionist gendarme and all the imperialistic troops in the region! For the destruction of the Fascist Zionist State of Israel!

If this unification congress and International meeting of ELAC want to unify the working class of the continent, it should prove it. Vote to break with the bourgeoisie, and expel the scabs like Montes, Benjamin, Clarence Thomas, Didier Dominique! Denounce and break with that cave of social-imperialist parties that is the Counter Madrid Meeting! The water and the fire do not get mixed-up! If you do not do it, LIT/PSTU will show that again they convened an “international” meeting to contain by left and submit even more the proletariat in the next combats, as the continuators of Lombardo Toledano’s congresses.

In 2008 our Latin American comrades of FLTI warned to the continental working class that LIT leadership, usurping the name of Trotskyism and Fourth International, was preparing to prestige the entire treacherous bureaucracy from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Enough! The flags of The Fourth International cannot be mixed with the party of Besancenot-Thoréz.  It is not possible to unify the 4th International with the party that put the Transitional Program under Chávez arm (in Chavez hands). The militants of that congress in Brazil who call themselves defenders of the Trotskyism’s flags are confronting an iron dilemma: either following the tracks of the Fourth International or following LIT going after Lombardo Toledano.

LIT says that this program that we state here is  sectarian, and we  remember that the Bolsheviks- Leninist and the Fourth International were called sectarian many times by the forces of opportunism.

We, as representatives of martyred African masses’ interests, are proud of being part of the FLTI and fighting to be the historical continuity of the best of the vanguard of America and Africa, prepared every day to fight for the proletarian revolution side by side the masses in struggle, learning from them, while we take the political and theoretical combat ahead to unmask the usurpers and sellers of our party, IV the International. Too much the African masses have suffered under the oppression of Stalinism and the castrism backed by the renegades of trotskism from the American continent and Europe but no longer more! We refuse to tie ourselves to the left of Stalinism! If throughout their own and painful experience the rank and file workers of the CUT/CONLUTAS and Intersindical have understood that in the name of socialism and then the Fourth International so many combats have been sold out, we tell them: break with the bureaucracy of CUT, break with Stalinism, morenism, and mandelism and let`s unify our forces in an organizing Committee to Refound the Fourth International.

Such organizing Committee will have in their hands the task of finishing what the Fourth International of 1938 started in America…”For the Bolsheviks-Leninists there is no most important task than to establish the connection and then the unification among the different parts of the proletariat organization of the continent, creating an organism so well constructed that any revolutionary vibration in La Patagonia echoes immediately, like transmitted by a perfect nervous system, in the revolutionary proletarian organizations of United States. Meanwhile such a thing is not done, the task of the Bolsheviks-Leninists in the American continent haven’t been carried out”. (30/11/1937, published in Clave nº4, First Epoch, January 1939).