Editorial
The international situation, the development of the crisis in the world imperialist capitalist economy, and the immediate tasks of revolutionaries
The third congress of the FLT discussED in depth The changing world situation and approved the documents submitted to the Congress on the nature of the crisis in the capitalist world economy included in the special dossier published in the iwo nº6 of november 2007. Based on these documents the 3rd congress debated and approved the following resolution that updates the evolution of the worldwide situation and economic crisis over recent months,the current moment and its likely further prospects, as the basis of programatic points of the appeal for an internationalist bloc to fight for an international conference of principled trotskyists and revolutionary workers’ organizations.
The savage blows of the world economic crisis unite all the demands of the exploited masses of the world against the rising cost of living, for food and against hunger
The crisis of the imperialist capitalist world economy that began in early 2007 is developing into a "big bang" over the coming period. The first major symptom of this crisis was the collapse of the subprime (high risk) housing mortgages in the United States. But this was not the root cause of the crisis which is the falling rate of profit of capital in the production process. This is a feature of the totally parasitic character of capital in the imperialist epoch which represents the extreme contradiction between the social character of production and the individual ownership of private property. The falling profit leads to an overproduction of capital which proves that in the imperialist epoch the productive forces are not only utterly constrained but have stagnated, which demonstrate that capitalism has reached its limits and poses the necessity for the replacement of the capitalist mode of production by a planned socialist society.
The global economic crisis concentrates the complete decomposition of capitalism in the imperialist epoch. It survives only by destroying the productive forces and fighting inter-imperialist or colonial wars. Mass resistance to imperialism is contained only by the treacherous leaders of the social imperialist and reformist left of all kinds. Therefore, this poses as an immediate task the struggle for international socialist revolution to stop the rotten capitalist system from deepening the already unprecedented sufferings of the masses, through wars, starvation, genocide etc, and from destroying the planet in its desperate attempts to survive.
The first act of the global crisis took place in February/March 2007 with falls in the stock exchanges of Shanghai and Wall Street. It continued in July / August 2007 with the bursting of the housing bubble that dragged down not only US finance capital but also that of the European powers. These had gambled on high rates of profit from this high-risk debt, to counter the falling rate of profits in production. The imperialist then used their reserve banks (eg US Federal Reserve) to bail out the hundreds of billions of dollars of bad debts of its major banks and monopolies. The crisis then became a global financial crisis.
The second act of the crisis came in early 2008 with the effects of the financial crisis causing the breaking of the economic, political and military equilibrium in the planet with the rapidly rising prices of commodities. This means that we are witnessing “the” crisis of the capitalist system itself. There are too many imperialist powers. Capitalism has already exhausted its profits -even the future ones- as today, it is expressed trough the cracks in the stock exchanges. It has thoroughly incorporated the new capitalist markets of the former degenerated workers states of Russia, China, the republics of the former USSR and Eastern Europe into to the global division of labor and used up the massive blood transfusion that flowed as a result into the imperialist global economy.
Therefore, in this crisis, finance capital can only survive by a re-division of existing markets, sources of raw materials and cheap labor to derive new sources of super-profits, at the expense of its imperialist rivals, and downloading the crisis onto exploited masses of the world, beginning with the working class of the imperialist countries, and then driving down the masses all over the planet into poverty and starvation.
This crisis is first and foremost a crisis of the United States, the dominant imperialist power. As we said in the thesis published in OOI No. 6, US imperialism has transformed the world economy into its own "internal market", so much so that the U.S. transnationals obtained at least 50% of their earnings outside the United States, while with wars and military bases, U.S. imperialism controls and dominates global trade and politics.
US imperialism is trying to transfer the huge devaluation of US finance capital, through the devaluation of the dollar, into massive price increases of commodities that pushes the costs on the crisis in the first place onto the exploited masses of the world with brutal increases in living standards, onto the US working class with plant closures, sackings, and thousands of evictions from foreclosures due to unpaid house mortgages. In the second place it attempts to make its imperialist rivals pay the cost of the crisis such as Japan and the European powers, whose banks and monopolies had to be bailed out as they lost hundreds of billions of US dollars in bad debts and in turn made fierce attacks on the living standards of their own working classes.
The onset of recession in the United States threatens to extend globally into a process of widespread stagflation (recession with inflation) and increases the economic, political and military imbalance; thus has already begun the third act in the expansion and development of the crisis.
Under these conditions, the situation of the working class and the exploited masses in the United States – thanks to the betrayal of the bureaucracy of the AFL-CIO which collaborated with plant closures and tens of thousands of layoffs, cut wages and the destruction of pension and health schemes – is approaching the terrible hardships of the 1930s following the crash of 1929: massive layoffs, plant closures, exhausting working hours for those who have jobs, wages cut in half, casualisation; two million families who are losing their homes, etc. Twenty-eight million people in the US today are forced to use government food stamps to eat, the highest level reached since 1960, when food stamps were introduced! In the past two weeks, flour and bread has tripled in price. In March 2008, 407,000 workers applied for unemployment allowance, the highest level since Hurricane Katrina in 2006, increasing by 15% the total unemployed to nearly 3 million workers. In the same month, the net loss of jobs came to around 60,000. Unemployment is 7% according to official figures. This means wasting billions of labor hours of work per year of the laid off workers demonstrating the deep decline of the productive forces in this imperialist epoch which is revealed clearly in the current crisis. Such a system that is not even able to feed its wage slaves, deserves to perish, not only in the United States but throughout the world.
Today, the bourgeois analysts cannot agree on how big the crisis will get. But the exploited workers of the world know because they are already paying the costs. They are paying with a brutal increase in the cost of living, inflation, hunger, layoffs, and even deeper misery. Amid the crisis and the disruption of the economic, political and military balance, and amid the growing inter-imperialist disputes, all the imperialist powers and the national bourgeoisies of the colonial and semi-colonial world agree on one objective: make the exploited masses in every country pay for the crisis and for the hundreds of billions of dollars lost by the banks and monopolies by driving down their wages and living standards!
Meanwhile, the crisis can only make the barbaric attacks on the masses worse, causing new disasters and famine on top of the imperialist looting of the raw materials of the colonies and semi-colonies and the endless drainage of resources through the repayment of the external debts. Countries such as Egypt, India, Malaysia, Pakistan, Vietnam, have been transformed into "maquiladora" [cheap labor assembly plants often in duty free zones] colonies of the transnationals looking for even bigger super-profits than they can make in China -where the profit rate is falling-, exploiting millions of workers including millions of children as slave labor. In countries which are producers of a single or few exports, such as copper in Chile and Peru, a global slowdown of demand could cause prices to fall at the expense of these countries, sinking them into a thorough ruin.
The crisis reveals clearly how the productive forces collide with the national borders. For example, food production in the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Australia and Ukraine is sufficient to feed the world’s population. However at a time when global food production reaches a historical record, skyrocketing food prices worldwide matched to food scarcity in many countries, are causing famine, hunger and starvation among the masses to approach a new historical record.
Moreover, the crisis also reveals the contradiction between the social production and the individual - private- appropriation. Thus, being the maximum of profits -not the needs of the masses- the principle that guides the investors, the creation of new poles of development and consumer markets by the bourgeoisie – e.g. in China, India- means new business opportunities and bigger profits for the transnationals, but at the same time causes a dramatic increase in the prices of commodities which brings about scarcity, famine, starvation and sinks whole regions of the planet. Another clear example is the fact that it is precisely in the countries that produce most food such as USA, Brazil and Argentina where the cost of living, hunger and famine are most quickly expanding among the masses.
Since the crisis creates new business opportunities for the oil and food transnationals, the great powers are engaged in increasingly fierce disputes over areas of influence, sources of oil, commodities, cheap labor and markets. At the same time, these new business opportunities allow the national bourgeoisies, especially in the countries that produce oil or agricultural commodities of which demand is increasing, to negotiate for an larger share of the business, teaming up with this or that monopoly and economic power, using the disputes between the imperialist powers such as the US and EU (or even Japan) to drive hard bargains.
The crisis has broken the world economic balance. US imperialism by devaluing the dollar is moving to increase its exports. By also exporting devaluation and inflation it is downloading the cost of the crisis onto the world’s masses and its economic rivals
With the onset of the crisis and devaluation of the dollar, the US, which has had a massive current account deficit for the past four decades, is moving rapidly to expand its exports. This is particularly the case in manufacturing which make up around 50% of its exports –and of this 50%, 80% is in armaments and machine tools –but also in grain of which is it the biggest producer in the world.
The devaluation of the dollar is the policy of the US monopolies to try evading or minimizing recession and to download the crisis onto their competitors and the workers. As well as shifting from being a net importer to a net exporter, the devaluing of the US dollar allows the US to reduce its external debt held in dollars. Price inflation makes other economies, whose currencies are pegged to the US dollar or which devalue in relation to the dollar, pay higher prices for imports from countries -particularly the other powers- whose currencies revalue against the dollar. At the same time, the latter see their exports become less competitive against those from US. The rising prices of export commodities and energy produced in semi-colonial countries bring windfall profits to the export sector which is dominated by the multinationals and rich farmers, pushing up the domestic prices to the workers and poor farmers, causing shortages and destroying living standards. Thus the crisis begun in the US is forcing a break in the balance of the world economy and the global division of labor that was established in 2002/2003 after the 1997-2001 crisis.
In first place in this changing division of labor is China, the most rapidly growing US competitor in exports, but which is also the biggest capitalist semi-colony where the US is a major investor. The US seeks to make China pay for the crisis. The devaluing of the US dollar has wiped out about a third of the value of the US$1.2 trillion dollar debt (800 billion of which in Treasuries) held by China. This has introduced a factor of future instability for the Chinese economy that makes it a dubious place for further investment. Besides, the huge profits made by the US in China have seen a rising organic composition of capital (i.e. of constant capital –machinery and raw materials - relative to variable capital –wages). Therefore the US is facing a tendency of the rate of profit to fall on US investments in China (which was expressed in part in the rapid falls of over-valued stock in the Shanghai Stock Exchange in February 2007). One result is the rise in the cost of skilled labor force, which has driven up wages faster than productivity thus reducing the rate of exploitation. For example, less skilled workers went from US$112 dollars to US$168 a month, an increase of about 50%, while the most qualified earn between US$210 and US$ 280 dollars a month. These increases mean than in China the hourly rate is between US60c and US$1- low enough to keep Chinese workers under miserable conditions, but too "high" if compared to Vietnam, Cambodia or Bangladesh, where the monopolies pay between US20c and US30c and hour. So the US is shifting part of its maquiladora production from China to countries such as Malaysia, Pakistan, Vietnam, Egypt, India, where it can increase the rate of exploitation and the rate of profit.
To add insult to injure, as once happened in Enron and other transnationals, it has been brought to light that numbers as regards Chinese economic growth were false. Measuring the real energy consume, even bourgeoisie annalists have reached to the conclusion that, linked to a decrease in the economy and standstill tendency, China economic growth has not been bigger that 6% during the last years.
Today China is exposed first, to the crisis in the United States, but also to a devaluation of Japanese financial capital, which as discussed in No. 6 OOI, during the short cycle of expansion in recent years, was a big lender of yen to foreign investors, particularly of US transnationals, in China. Financial capital and hedge funds were gambling through the so called yen-carry trade taking a huge financial profit from the difference between near zero interest rate on yen loans and much higher rates of other currencies as the NZ, Australian, Canadian dollar, etc. Japanese Yen revaluation increases the price of loans in that currency so that capitals cancelled and left China Besides, Japan holds US Treasure Bonds (treasuries) for a nominal value of 600.000 million dollars, so devaluing the dollar reduces in 30% the value of the Japanese US$ reserves and makes Japan pay for part of cost of the crisis, weakening its relative position as the biggest investor in China, a territory Japan likes to consider as primarily its own sphere of influence . Also as the dollar devalues against the yen, Japanese exports become less competitive.
The restoration of capitalism in China meant its incorporation into the global division of labor not only as a source of cheap wage labor, but also creating a new market of some 400 million consumers (the former bureaucracy which has become a new bourgeoisie, a rapidly expanding new middle classes of urban and rural areas, and a sector of 10s of millions of skilled workers), at the expense of the vast majority of the population of nearly around 1 billion workers and rural poor barely surviving on the brink of famine.
That is why, with the crisis and the devaluation of the dollar, with the U.S. becoming the largest exporter in the world, and with China so far resisting U.S. pressure to devalue the yuan, China’s economy would likely begin to switch from big exporter of consumer goods to net importer (of a range of goods gong from food to products of high technology) for its own 400 million consumers.
Thus the onset of recession in the United States has already seen a slowing down of the growth of Chinese exports to the US from an increase of 20.4% in the first quarter of 2007, to 15.6% in the second quarter and 12.4% in the third quarter, according to the Chinese Minister of Commerce.
The restoration of capitalism in China and the transnationals wild entrance for reaping big superprofits has meant the destruction of agricultural production, even that of subsistence level: the Communist Party bureaucracy -turned itself into a new bourgeoisie has grabbed large portions of the land, actually (if not juridically) destroying the former nationalized property of the land and expelling millions of peasants to the cities to work as cheap wage labor. Much of the arable land once farmed by peasants is now turned into industrial parks, dams, roads, power plants, etc. as infrastructure to support the investment of the transnationals. But much of this state investment in infrastructure is standing idle and unused representing a waste of arable land and other resources.
In short, capitalist restoration and the destruction of nationalized property in land means today that China must import most of its food. As food prices constantly increase so does the cost of living. In the year up to last February food prices increased by 23.3%. In the same period the price of pork rose by 63.4%, edible oil 34%l, vegetables 30%, and water services, gas and electricity, almost 6%.
The new bourgeoisie and the “red entrepreneurs" of the Communist Party fear that the extreme increases in the cost of living will lead to widespread riots –not only farmers, who have been already protesting, but also workers strikes, which have started to multiply despite the ban on strikes and the state repression facing striking workers.
At the same time, the onset of the crisis means that the new Chinese bourgeoisie must try to balance the budget and eliminate the internal deficit, doing away with the old mammoth, stagnant state enterprises. This means dismissing some 40 million industrial workers and the need for the new bourgeoisie to find support in the new social base of the rural and urban middle classes.
We can then say that in the heat of the onset of the global economic crisis the Chinese working masses are like a "volcano” waiting to erupt. Such an eruption will either bring about a victorious new social revolution that will overthrow the new bourgeoisie and restore the dictatorship of the proletariat based on revolutionary soviets and militias, or the spreading famines, the sequel of neglected natural catastrophes and the repression of the masses, may bring about the destruction of the revolution and even the re-partition of China among the imperialist powers.
With the devaluation of the dollar and revaluation of the Euro, the U.S. also downloads the costs of the crisis onto its European competitors. Exports from the European imperialist powers have become much more expensive and have less competitiveness in relation to the U.S. This is what explains that France first, but also Germany, Italy and other European imperialist powers, etc. are in a desperate race to retain and gain zones of influence and sources of oil, commodities and minerals as well as cheap labor. They are also trying to pass on the cost of the crisis to their own workers and onto the former degenerate workers states of Eastern Europe which have become new colonies supplying cheap but highly qualified labor for the German, French, Italian etc. monopolies that have shifted production to these countries, making plant closures, layoffs and wage cuts to blackmail their own working classes to accept wage cuts, increasing the hours of work, and driving down labor conditions.
We are entering a period of intensifying inter-imperialist disputes for zones of influence. The US has challenged its rivals by devaluing the dollar and downloading the costs of the crisis not only onto the world masses but onto its competitors, in its course from net importer to leading world exporter. Japan and the EU powers cannot survive without entering the arena to fight for their own zones of influence, sources of raw materials and cheap labor. Therefore, while it is too early to be absolute, we cannot exclude that, for example, the onset of a recession or a process of stagflation in Europe will drag down the over-valued Euro into a major devaluation, heralding a major trade war. The crisis and the global economic destabilization are underway. The outcome will depend on the balance of class forces and the class struggle worldwide as the inter-imperialist disputes escalate, trade wars, plunder, and the revolution and counter-revolution develop on a global scale.
Recession and crisis develop with record high oil prices and agricultural commodities, that is destroying the living standards of the masses while driving up the profits and business opportunities of the transnationals
Increased demand for, and speculation in, these commodities is driving up their prices rapidly.
In the case of oil, partly reflects the dollar devaluation (at constant values, the price of oil not yet reached the level of the crisis of '70s), and also fact that it is a non-renewable resource which may be reaching its ‘peak’ and certainly will be exhausted during this century. This crisis will therefore leave its imprint in the entire course of the 21st Century. The importance of oil in the capitalist economy explains why the imperialist powers are engaged in “wars for oil” such as Iraq, for the control of reserves and pipelines.
Needless to say, in the oil-exporting countries like Russia, Venezuela, the countries of the Middle East, Iran, etc. fat profits from oil revenues benefit only the transnationals and their national bourgeois partners. For the masses, the rising price of oil compounding the high prices of food, brings only rising living costs, and growing misery in the oil producing countries that are virtual ‘monoproducers’ [one primary export] because they must import most of the food they consume.
The rising prices of soybeans, corn, wheat and other agricultural commodities, is high as the result of three main factors. Firstly, the counter-revolutionary restoration of capitalism in China, brought not only a new, huge supply of cheap wage workers, but also a mass consumer market of about 400 million people, who import 80% of the food they consume from the world market. India also has increased its demand for imported food as a result of the investment of foreign capital in the production of software and call centers, taking advantage of a highly educated, English-speaking, skilled workforce, creating a new market that may approach 400 million people which must also import much of its food.
A second factor that pushes up the price of such commodities is undoubtedly the development of the biofuel industry which uses corn, soybeans, sugarcane, etc., taking up arable land that could be used for food, as feedstock. Added to this factor are natural disasters such as the drought in Australia that have reduced the supply of grain.
These factors are compounded by the fact that in recent months, much of the imperialist finance capital that can no longer be invested profitably in production, turns to speculation in the future value of commodities, inflating their price and creating a “food bubble" which gambles on food taken out of the mouths of children.
The high price of oil and agricultural commodities, coupled with the devaluation of the dollar, is causing a massive surge of inflation over the whole world economy, brutally raising the cost of living, especially of food, and creating widespread hunger and starvation in many places on the planet.
The rupture of the economic equilibrium and the existing division of labor has greatly intensified inter-imperialist disputes. Latin American nations with oil, gas and other raw materials, some of which have currencies undervaluated with respect to USdollar, are now the subject of fierce imperialist rivalry for control of these resources. In Africa, these disputes are mainly expressed in fratricidal proxy wars between factions of the national bourgeoisies that side with one or other imperialist power, as in Somalia, Chad, Sudan, etc. Combined with the devaluation of the dollar, the onset of recession in the United States imposes a process of stagflation (ie recession with inflation) in those countries that export raw-materials and import manufactured goods. This is true of those semi-colonies in Latin America, including Chile and Mexico that are tied to the U.S. by FTAs.
On the other hand, the intensification of inter-imperialist rivalry and the high price of oil and commodities allow some leeway to the national bourgeoisies of the semi-colonial countries take advantage of these disputes to negotiate new deals with the imperialists to increase their slice of imperialist super-profits. But this collaboration exposes the role of the national bourgeoisie in the region. After 5 years of growth, the proletariat and poor farmers can see the division of the super-profits between the transnationals and their national partners at their expense, and will surely no longer put up with further attacks by the bourgeoisies, including rising food prices and rising hunger. The plausibility of this scenario makes native bourgeoisies shudder.
In the current furious disputes for oil routes and reserves, and agrarian rent among the different imperialist powers and transnationals, each one rallies their respective partners who are the native bourgeoisies from producer countries. Agrarian rent and oil sources have become so essential that Chicago stock market – where the commodities market is concentrated- is now the “star”, even overpassing Wall Street as a focus of speculation.
The disruption of the economic equilibrium and of the political and military balance of power
Us "big stick" and French "new deal": two opposite imperialist policies -both the instruments of a fierce dispute over areas of influence, but having a common aim, throwing the crisis over the world masses
As we have said, the development of the crisis causes disruption not only of the economic equilibrium but also the political and military balance of power on the planet. This is clearly expressed that there are two different policies for imperialist domination of the world: a policy of "big stick" driven by U.S. imperialism as the dominant power, and another policy that might be called the "New Deal" (New Deal), driven by French imperialism –along with other smaller imperialist powers such as Holland, Belgium and Spain itself. Both policies are equally the instruments of a fierce dispute over areas of influence.
Meanwhile, German imperialism, for its part, has a bet each way in these disputes. Thus, Germany backs France in its plan to create an FTA in the Mediterranean with the semi-colonial nations of North Africa, and at the same time backs the US occupation of Afghanistan to share control of raw opium required for its medical laboratories and of oil and gas from the Caspian Sea area, reinforcing its strong position with Gazprom and in some countries in Central Asia. Japan is a rival of the US for dominance in China, but as we say above it will lose its leading role in China to the US, have its dollar reserves devalued and suffer a decline in its high tech consumer exports as a result of the shift of investment up the technology chain in both the US and China.
Of course the existence of two imperialist policies does not mean that the various powers have not agreed on a fundamental point: both want to make the exploited masses of the world pay the costs of the crisis, and they know that to do so, their essential task is to focus on stopping the uprisings of the proletariat, and to crush and destroy its revolutionary potential.
Thus when the global economic crisis began US imperialism was already in the process of recomposing its political leadership. The Bush regime faced a massive crisis of legitimacy as it faced the resistance of the Iraqi masses and the growing opposition to the war by the US working class as US deaths in Iraq mounted. However, as the dominant imperialist power, the US has no other chance than to go on embarking itself on unilateral wars of re-colonization to maintain its primacy
The presidential elections this year will provide the possibility of renewing a legitimate “Republicrat” regime with a new political "General Staff" of US imperialism for the continued policy of military aggression in disputes with its rivals for new zones of influence. All candidates essentially agree to the ongoing US policy of marking before its rivals which are its pretentions, through the continued occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan; the entry of Turkish troops in Northern Iraq; the role of the Zionist policeman in killing the Palestinian people; the "independence" of the US protectorate of Kosovo from Serbia (whose bourgeoisie, is like that of Russia, a junior ally of France); and backs the murderous Uribe, the gendarme of US imperialism in Latin America, and so on.
The US military policy of the ‘stick’ is the form that politics takes in the dominant imperialism. The revolutionary III International defined the epoch of imperialism as the death agony of capital i.e. the destruction of productive forces and the production of destructive forces. Imperialism must go to war to survive. The huge military spending of the imperialist states acts as a temporary counter to the onset of recession. The US military budget for 2008 is $600 Billion (not including the funding to maintain the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan); France is $147 Billion; German and Japan both $50 Billion each; not counting the total spending on production and marketing of weapons by private imperialist companies.
The last fall in the Wall Street Stock Exchange was in the shares of General Electric, along with Westinghouse, one of the biggest armament manufacturers. If the US responded to the crisis of 2001 with invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, there is not doubt that its response to the current crisis will be even bigger wars and colonial adventures.
The other policy is being driven by French imperialism, a weaker imperialist power that competes with the United States in key branches of production such as chemical weapons, aerospace, automotive, among others; which has been increasing labor productivity and needs to find new areas of influence to make super-profits. In its disputes for zones of influence, French imperialism presents itself as "democratic" and is allied to national bourgeoisies, especially in Latin America, with the so-called "Bolivarian bourgeoisies", and the Castro restorationist bureaucracy, sometimes jointly with the minor Spanish imperialism, as in the case of increasing its share of oil and gas resources on the subcontinent.
We can call the policy of French imperialism the "New Deal" and "good neighbor" policy, because it is similar to that of the United States in the 1930s. This was a time when British imperialism was in decline, and the US was expanding, disputing the declining British spheres of influence to become the dominant imperialist power. In Latin America the US under the government of Roosevelt, adopted the “good neighbor” policy treating the subcontinent as its “backyard”, and posing as “democratic” to drive out its imperialist rivals.
In 1938, Leon Trotsky said: "Under Roosevelt, the policy of iron fist is covered by the velvet glove of the populist pretensions of friendship and democracy". The policy of "good neighbor" is nothing but an attempt to unify the western hemisphere under the hegemony of Washington, as a solid block. Put forward by the latter in its vigorous campaign to close the door of the two American continents to all the imperialist powers, except itself. This policy is complemented materially by the favorable trade treaties that the United States strives to negotiate with Latin American countries in the hope of evicting their rivals systematically from the market. The crucial role that trade plays in the economic life of the United States impels the latter toward even more determined efforts to exclude all competitors from the Latin American market through a combination of cheap production, diplomacy, trickery and when necessary, force. (The policy of Roosevelt in Americas, 3/09/1938)
This historical analogy is much like the "good neighbor" policy that drives French imperialism, allied with the "Bolivarian" bourgeoisies which get a share of the profits. For example, Totalfina/Petrobras has made agreements with Morales in Bolivia, and Chavez in Venezuela to exploit the oil and gas, and to share a small part of the profits with the their joint venture partners. The same is true with its partnership in joint ventures with the Castro bureaucracy in Cuba These deals are made behind the velvet glove of the “peaceful”, “democratic” "good neighbor".
This policy of French imperialism applies not only in Latin America, but also, for example, in Lebanon, where its troops make up most of the "blue helmets" of the UN, and French companies are in joint ventures with the national bourgeois fraction Hizbollah for big profits from rebuilding what was destroyed during the Zionist attack on the Palestinian masses and the exploited people of the South of Lebanon in 2006. And in Iran France is linked to Ahmadinejad and the government of the ayatollahs, and so on.
Yet, in those semi-colonial countries which are directly under its control, as are the former French colonies like Algeria, Chad, etc., there is no "new deal", or velvet glove of the "good neighbor" and "democratic and pacifist" imperialism! There, French imperialism uses force as ruthlessly as the US, intervening directly with its troops today in Chad, as yesterday in the Ivory Coast, causing the worst fratricidal wars, and backing the most brutal puppet dictatorships such as that of Bouteflika in Algeria.
In this "New Deal" and "good neighbor" bloc of French imperialism with the restorationist Castro bureaucracy and the "Bolivarian" bourgeoisie, we also find the treacherous leaders of the World Social Forum, including the deserters of Trotskyism, who tell the proletariat that putting pressure on the national bourgeoisies will allow them to negotiate with imperialism to force it to agree to a more fair or equal distribution of the super-profits. Supposedly, in return, the national bourgeoisies will share with the masses the crumbs of the feast. That is why, for example, the WSF and most of the fake Trotskyists supported Chavez in the constitutional referendum to strengthen Chavez regime to negotiate better terms with France and the European Union to retain a bigger slice of the oil revenues that they get in Venezuela, telling the workers that this is the only way to achieve their demands.
The renegades of Trotskyism support this "New Deal" policy in two ways. One sector led by Celia Hart Santamaria openly supports the "Bolivarian" regimes, where, for example in Venezuela , the Mandelites and others of the "new left" like Socialist Tide (Marea Socialista) have joined the PSUV saying it is a ‘workers’ party. Yesterday, the Mandelites in Brazil joined the popular front of Lula-Alencar and served as ministers in this government, while today they have formed the PSOL with a left reformist bourgeois ("desarrollista") program.
Another sector of the fake Trotskyists (those of a more "social democratic" bent) take a "left", "critical" position outside the popular front, like PSTU (LIT), the Workers Party (PO) and Socialist Workers Party (PTS) of Argentina, and call on the masses to fight to put pressure on bourgeois governments so that they will pass "progressive" reforms ... when, under current conditions, the only thing those governments have to "give" the masses is super-exploitation, hunger, plundering of the nation, and violent repression or all who dare to protest!
For example, the LIT calls for workers to pressure the Chavez government to make it "move to socialism." The PSTU promoted referenda to pressure Lula to abandon his plan to "reform" the laws on working conditions, union rights and organization, and on universities. During the dispute between rich farmers and the Kirchner administration, the PTS in Argentina called the masses to struggle to pressure the parliament to repeal the rural labor law "passed by the dictatorship" [1976-84] in an abstentionist, reformist policy that covertly takes sides with a bourgeois faction (the “Bolivarian” bourgeois regime allied to a sector of the imperialist monopolies) against another bourgeois faction, that allied to the big grain multinationals.
In short, the fake Trotskyists have followed in the steps of Stalin and become the camp followers of social democracy. They all agree with the "theory" that the working class can "socialize" the bourgeois state and the capitalist market, a pseudo-Marxist theory whose main ideologue is James Petras. Petras refers to capitalism only at the level of the market, saying that the capitalism can be socially regulated to create an Utopian "equal exchange". In other words, he argues that the problem of capitalism is not at the level of production, but at the level of distribution: hence his entire theory revolves around "socializing" the market. This theory rejects the contradiction between the forces of production and social relations of production, which is manifest at a secondary level as the global market breaking down national borders, leading to trade wars and military wars such as the colonial invasions of oppressed countries and the two (interimperialist) world wars of the 20th century (of which the second was at the same time a war against the USSR degenerate worker state).
"Socialising the market," is nothing more than the famous "market socialism" that proclaims the total subservience of the working class to capitalist exploitation. This is the "market socialism" of the new bourgeoisie that brought about capitalist restoration in China. It is how the Castro bureaucracy plans to restore capitalism in Cuba!
"Market Socialism" is the name of the farcical "nationalization" of SIDOR by the Chavez government, where it has compensated the owner Techint, paying well above the market value of the shares, in fact above the best price its shares had had at any time, while the owners had privatized SIDOR in 1998 for much less than the market value and have extracted millions in surplus-value since!
Thus, for Petras, the “New Deal” means peaceful coexistence at the level of the bourgeois state between the workers, the ‘Bolivarian’ bourgeoisie, and French Imperialism which allot democratically their fair share among themselves. The fake Trotskyists work to make this possible by keeping the workers putting pressure from inside and outside the popular front.
We would remind them not to forget that this "New Deal" has as its right wing French imperialism that still rules directly its American colonies of Martinique and French Guyana where it maintains a military base. On this fact all the "Bolivarians" keep quiet. The "center" of this "New Deal" goes to the Bolivarian bourgeoisies. And the "left wing" is formed by all the misleaderships, including the fake Trotskyists –inside and outside the popular front – who only tell the workers to pressure the bourgeois state, regime, government, institutions, to oblige them to "redistribute" a part of the "cake". Their servile role as the left cover of the bourgeois regimes is asking the bourgeoisie to cease to act as such!
Despite and against the treachery of the leaders, and facing the brutal attacks of the bourgeoisie to make the workers pay for their crisis,
The exploited people are responding to these attacks with spontaneous revolts and with workers uprisings which call into question the world wide balance of class forces
In the 21st century the treacherous leadership of all kinds who are grouped in the World Social Forum has successfully suppressed the revolutionary “dress rehearsals” of the semi-colonial masses, and isolated and subordinated the struggles of the workers of the imperialist countries to their "democratic" imperialists, both the Franco-German blocs, and the US Democratic Party. But the onset of the global crisis has broken the economic, political and military equilibrium, and the treacherous leaders will find that they are increasingly unable to prevent the counter-offensive of the proletariat rising up in response to the brutal attacks of the bourgeoisies. However the social equilibrium has not been broken yet, due to the success of the misleaderships of the masses in helping the bourgooisies to expropriate, suffocate or deviate their revolutionary struggles, desynchronizing the fighting of the proletariansand the masses in the imperialist powers from that in the semicolonies.
With the outbreak of the crisis that began in early 2007, the global situation became uncertain. The bourgeoisies opted to a policy of denial, downplaying the magnitude of the crac and at the same time tried to rescue themselves with central bank subsidies of billions of dollars to save their banks and monopolies, offloading the costs of the crisis onto the masses.
The workers response towards the end of 2007 was spontaneous food riots in Pakistan, Burma and Georgia. By 2008 the food riots began to turn into uprisings against the regimes, as in the case of Argentina were the fight against shortages and high food prices threatened to turn into a fight against the ‘social pact’ of the Kirchner regime. More recently, similar protests in France, Germany, Italy and other European powers reflects a widening wave of workers' struggles against the high cost of living. But despite the first attempts by workers to turn the food protests against the regimes, the treacherous reformist labor leaders, including the fake Trotskyists, prevented those early battles from developing into an organized counter-offensive against the crisis. Their action was specially harmful in isolating and containing the struggles of the proletarians in the imperialist countries and prevented them from taking momentum and generalizing. Those struggles could have hit imperialism from inside, helping the workers and people from the oppressed nations in their fight for liberation and against their exploiters.
For example, they stopped the strike action of the US dockers who called a wildcat strike on May 1 against the US imperialist butchers against the war in Iraq and in defence of migrant workers rights from spreading to other unions. This is because for the last years the US working class has been subjected to a fierce attack by the bourgeoisie with the collaboration of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy, Castro, Chavistas and the fake Trotskyists, to keep them trapped in the Democratic Party of Obama, Clinton and other imperialist butchers. Similarly, workers mobilisations in Europe were contained and diverted by social pacts made by the labor bureaucracy and the bourgeois regime.
It was the complicity of the misleaderships what allowed the exploiters to appropriate three revolutionary uprisings of the workers and peasants in Ecuador in 1997, 2000 and 2005, and to suppress the workers and peasants revolution in Bolivia by the Popular Front government of Morales, backed by continental bourgeoisies and the Castro restorationist bureaucracy. This, together with the diversion and defeat of the struggles of the US working class were the two key factors that allowed the fraud of the "Bolivarian revolution" to succeed, for the process of capitalist restoration in Cuba to speed up, and for the U.S. and its servant Uribe to attack the FARC and the Colombian mass resistance.
This created a reactionary conjuncture, allowing time for the bourgeoisie for reconstituting its institutions (which had been severely hit by the revolutionary uprisings). So it could recover the initiative and go on the offensive to make the masses pay for the crisis, suffering massive inflation and a brutal rising in the cost of living driving down the living standards of workers throughout the world. Contrariwise, the masses could not backfight because their misleaders got them paralysed.
This created a reactionary conjuncture, allowing time for the bourgeoisie for reconstituting its institutions (which had been severely hit by the revolutionary uprisings). So it could recover the initiative and go on the offensive to make the masses pay for the crisis, suffering massive inflation and a brutal rising in the cost of living driving down the living standards of workers throughout the world. Contrariwise, the masses could not backfight because their misleaders got them paralysed.
The outbreak of food riots contains within it the sparks that can transform these defensive struggles into offensive struggles. Thus the hardships inflicted on the masses tend towards generalizing and synchronizing the scattered struggles. We can see that the spontaneous food riots raise demands that challenge the regimes and governments, preparing a disruption of the social equilibrium among the classes. In Philippines the government was threatened by social unrest due to the increase in rice price. In Haiti, the masses took to the streets demanding bread, pounding their empty plates and crying "down with hunger down with the government!" Facing the UN mercenaries from Argentina, Guinea, Mauritania, Senegal, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Morocco etc they shouted "If the government does not cut the cost of living, out they go!", "If the police and troops of the UN kill us, that's okay, because if not we don’t die by bullets we just die of hunger!” (Most UN troops in Haiti came from countries where there had been already food riots!).
Meanwhile, in China, there have been thousands of worker and peasant revolts each year against evictions and working conditions. Now the cost of living is rising steeply with the revaluation of the yuan, together with the high price of oil –of which China is a net importer –and food, especially rice (staple food of the masses for much of Asia) which has doubled in price in recent weeks. It is these factors that are causing widespread food riots, not only in China but in all the countries of Asia.
In these revolts of the masses for food, driven by hunger and need, that are spontaneous and lacking any direction and self-organization, there is, as Lenin said “an embryonic class consciousness”. This is because when the masses burst into spontaneous activity, in spite and against the designs of their misleaders, they begin to see clearly the class enemy that starves them: the treacherous bureaucracy, and the regimes, governments and states of the repressive bourgeoisie.
There is no doubt that the huge advance of the heroic national resistance of the Iraqi masses against the war constitutes a second revolutionary development. The workers and exploited that made an armed insurrection in the south of Iraq against the forces of the puppet government of Maliki backed by US forces, stopped short of victory only because of the ceasefire of the bourgeois nationalist al-Sadr who operates like Hamas in Gaza or Hizbullah in Lebanon, to restrain and disarm the masses, to prevent a genuine Vietnam-type defeat of the occupying troops.
Also in Middle East, in Egypt the working class and the masses have taken up the struggle against the repressive dictatorship of Mubarak, following the example of the heroism of the Iranian masses who in 1979 overthrew the Shah Reza Pahlevi, and the heroism of the Palestinian masses in their struggle against the Zionist occupier. Meanwhile, Africa is shaken by dozens of rebellions in particular the uprising in Nigeria led by the black workers against the transnational oil companies.
In Latin America the indefinite strike and militant occupation of the SIDOR workers in Venezuela forced the bourgeois government of Chavez to announce the "nationalization" of SIDOR to end the workers struggle after failing to suppress the strike with the National Guard in March. This “nationalization” is actually a transfer of ownership under the Venezuelan bourgeois constitution between Techint and the “Bolivarian” bourgeoisie, paying the private owner market compensation. The struggle of SIDOR workers puts them in the vanguard of the Latin American proletariat, and it puts on the agenda the re-convening of the UNT on the basis of break with Chavez and any link to the bourgeois state, and for urgently convening in SIDOR a national congress of delegates of the rank and file of workers organizations. Such a congress would launch a decisive struggle for a real nationalization of SIDOR, without compensation and under workers’ control, for the re-nationalisation of PdVSA, expropriating without compensation of Repsol, Totalfina and other imperialist oil companies "associated" to the state company, and for the expropriation of the 31 families who, together with transnational companies control the Venezuelan economy, and so on.
And in Europe, there is the indefinite general strike of the workers of Dacia-Renault in Romania with the demand for equal pay as their fellow workers in Renault in France, which opens up the prospect of reviving in the next period the revolutionary process in the countries of Eastern Europe where capitalism has been restored.
For the moment, however, the social pacts of the collaborationist bureaucracy with the imperialist regimes continue to contain the European workers. In the US the millions of state welfare benefits to the most exploited workers, and their subordination to the U.S. Democratic Party, still prevents the further development of workers resistance to the crisis. Therefore, we can say that the conjuncture remains reactionary while the defensive struggles against hunger, super-exploitation and war, in many places in the world nevertheless remain relatively isolated and disorganized. However some preparatory pre-revolutionary elements are slowly building up in the world situation.
Therefore, the balance of class forces is being challenged by the food riots and the mass workers uprisings such as in Egypt which are preparing the foundations for a pre-revolutionary world situation, as they tend to become into political mass struggles. The key to the further development of the mass struggles of the world’s workers is in the hands of the US and EU workers and their response to the heroic resistance of the Iraqi masses. We insist: the key is now in the hands of the proletariat of the imperialist powers. If the US workers respond to the Iraq resistance and fight to defeat US imperialism by breaking with the Democratic Party, and if the working classes of the imperialist powers in Europe succeed in breaking from the social pacts and enter into opens political struggles against their imperialist regimes and governments, then such developments would, without doubt signify that we have left behind the current reactionary conjuncture.
However, if the strength and determination of the masses is defeated or contained we cannot rule out that the development of the global crisis will lead to a worsening global recession with stagflation, and that the imperialists will intensify their inter-imperialist conflicts, including military occupations and invasions to re-divide the world economy.
If this happens, and the working class lacking a revolutionary leadership is still unable to break with the bourgeoisie and intervene as an independent force, we could see the rapid completion of the restoration of capitalism in Cuba, and severe defeats of the proletariat of the imperialist countries. In this event the current reactionary conjuncture would be consolidated opening a reactionary situation.
The economic crisis has now spread to the whole capitalist imperialist system. Against all the revisionist fake Trotskyists who speak of a "long wave" of capitalist expansion and a whole era of "reformist re-composition" of the proletariat, this developing crisis is entering its third act –global inflation which is a disaster for the working class and exploited people the planet. The high cost of living plunges the masses in misery, and despite record food production globally, hunger is now rampant in many nations across Africa, Asia and Latin America.
The causes of starvation of the masses are the landowners, the oligarchy, and the agrarian bourgeoisie, who own most of the arable land, and the transnational grain corporates.
Therefore, the solution to end the high cost of living and high food prices will not come from setting limits on food exports as some national regimes propose, or free trade as proposed by the bloodsucking World Bank. This can only come from expropriating the land owners and agricultural transnationals, and the oil multinationals engaged in mass murder in their “wars for oil”, by the millions of exploited masses.
Under these conditions, all talk of a future alternative of "socialism or barbarism" has become today concrete, immediate. The only solution that can meet the minimum needs of the masses for food is a socialist revolution, with the working class taking power and expropriating the expropriators!
Only a victorious proletarian revolution can stop the catastrophe of rotten capitalism descending into barbarism. For the working class and the exploited to live imperialism must die! We do not want the "socialism of the 21st century” by the year 2099, the fraudulent socialism of Chavez, the Castro bureaucracy, the labor bureaucracy and fake Trotskyists, joined together in the World Social Forum. We want socialism now!
Against reformism which tries to constrain the working class to fight only for narrow economic demands –when capital has launched a real war against workers and the exploited! –it is necessary to raise the flag of the Marxist revolutionary who insists that we must struggle every day to take power and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. We must explain to masses every day that this is the only way out of their hardship, and though we do not renounce taking from the bourgeoisie any gains along our way to revolution, it is necessary not to give an inch to the bourgeoisie on that road, nor stop at reforms, knowing that these gains will be taken back as soon as the proletariat does advance to take the power.
But we cannot leave the struggle for the basic and minimum demands of the masses in the hands of the reformists who are unable even to organize a decisive fight for the reforms they preach. It is time to raise a program that starts from the most basic and immediate demands of the masses whose struggle emerges spontaneously to resist the barbarism imposed on them. That struggle can only be won by attacking the private property of the capitalists, so the economic struggle for basic demands will quickly become a mass political struggle.
So, against layoffs and the high cost of living we must raise the demands for the sliding scale of wages and working hours, and the nationalization without compensation and under workers control of all companies that close or sack workers.
In colonial and semi-colonial countries, the fight against hunger is inseparable from the struggle to nationalize the large landholdings and to expropriate the large transnational grain, vegetable oil and petroleum companies, the banks, canceling the national debt and for a monopoly of foreign trade. In the U.S., opposition to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan that cost hundreds of billions of dollars per year is intimately bound up with a program to make the capitalists pay for their own crisis, expropriating without compensation and under workers control the big US monopolies.
In the revolutionary Transitional Program there is a bridge between the immediate demands of the masses and the struggle for socialist revolution, i.e. towards the seizure of power by the proletariat and the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, because it will become clear as the struggle develops that this is the only way to end the hardship and sufferings of the broad masses of exploited and prevent the bourgeoisie from making them pay for the crisis caused by the capitalists themselves.
As was true on August 4th, 1914, with the outbreak of the inter-imperialist World War 1, and the historic betrayal of the proletariat by social democracy, today the crisis in the capitalist world economy and the catastrophe that it brings to the workers, clearly separates the battle lines between reformists, the life-support system of capital, and the revolutionaries who fight alongside the world proletariat, the grave-diggers of capitalism. Either one is for the socialist revolution as the immediate task, or one if for pressuring the bourgeois state to “redistribute the wealth” i.e. the "market socialism" of the Castro bureaucracy, the "Bolivarian" bourgeoisie. Today, the renegades of Trotskyism have already had their own August 4, 1914, going over to the trench of the class enemy.
Yesterday, in 1914, when workers were dragged by the social imperialists to kill one another on the battlefields to serve the interests of "their" respective bourgeoisie, the immediate task to stop the war and win the peace, was one that could not be won without the socialist revolution. The revolutionary program of Lenin, Liebcknecht and the other internationalists of the Zimmerwald Left was to stop the war by "turning the guns around, transforming the imperialist war into civil war against their own bourgeoisie." In 1915 the internationalists could sit in one coach, but by 1917 their program had been adopted by the Russian proletariat to bring realize the program in life.
Today, when the working class and the exploited begin to break into the bread riots and workers rise up, “turning the gun around" means to fight to transform these revolts and rebellions against hunger into the start of the proletarian revolution, and to commit all our forces to fight to re-found a new World Party of Socialist Revolution, based on the program and the lessons of the Fourth International at its founding congress in 1938, that can lead the proletariat to take power, without which there will be no solution to the barbarism of the rotten capitalist imperialist system.
There is no doubt that the character of this crisis, its development and its outcome, will be defined and resolved on the terrain of world class struggle. Against all catastrophist theories, capitalism cannot collapse by itself, it will only fall as the result of the victorious socialist revolution.
This fact is defined brilliantly by Trotsky and the revolutionary III International in 1921, when he said: "In a period when the productive forces of capitalism have run up against a blank wall and can go no further we see the bourgeoisie gathering in its own hands the army, the police, science, schools, church, parliament, the press, the White Guard gangs; tightening the reins and mentally saying to the proletariat: 'Yes, my position is dangerous. I see an abyss yawning under my feet. But we'll wait and see who plunges first into this abyss. Perhaps before I perish, even if such is to be my fate, I’ll succeed in casting you, the working class, into the abyss.” What would this signify? This would signify the collapse of European civilization as a whole. If the bourgeoisie, which is doomed historically, to find sufficient strength, energy and power to defeat the working class in the impending terrible combat, it would signify that Europe is condemned to economic and cultural decomposition, as happened in the past to many countries, nations and civilizations. In other words, history has brought matters to such a pass that the proletarian revolution has become unconditionally necessary for the salvation of Europe and the whole world. History has provided the basic premise for the success of this revolution –in the sense that society cannot any longer develop its productive forces on bourgeois foundations. But history does not assume upon itself – in place o the working class, in place of the Communists –the solution of this entire task. No, History seems to say to the proletarian vanguard (let us imagine for a moment that history is a figure looming above us), History says to the working class, “You must know that unless you cast down the bourgeoisie, you will perish beneath the ruins of civilization. Try to solve this task!” Such is the state of affairs today". (Leon Trotsky, "A school of revolutionary strategy". The First Five Years of the Communist International, Volume 2. New Park, p5-6)
In 1921, these lines were written when European imperialism emerged from the First World War. In terror that the revolution that had succeeded in Russia and was breaking out in Germany between 1918 and 1921 would triumph, the bourgeoisie printed money to stimulate an artificial boom. The German and Hungarian revolutions were defeated, restoring the confidence of the bourgeoisie in their forces, and as the economy faced a crisis it launched a counter-revolution against the workers.
Today, at the beginning of the new crisis in the global economy, the world working class faces a fateful alternative. If the bourgeoisie, despite having exhausted its historic role, rallies its forces with the help of the treacherous leaders of the workers, and defeats the workers struggle, the result will be a terrible economic and cultural destruction of entire countries and regions, and ultimately to civilization itself. In other words, history brings us to the critical juncture where the proletarian revolution is necessary to prevent the destruction of civilization.
We are facing two races: first, between the development of the recession and the offensive against the workers, and the development of a international working class counter-offensive to the crisis;
Second, the development of the international working class counter-offensive and the development of a international revolutionary leadership that can transform the counter-offensive into a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system
Under these objective conditions the first race is in the field of global class struggle. If, the proletariat, in the next period, does not intervene in time to find its own solution to the crisis in advancing towards the world proletarian revolution –such as, for example, the break with the bourgeois regimes in one or two imperialist powers; riots and widespread uprisings of the working class in China, a decisive intervention by the Cuban and Latin American masses to halt capitalist restoration in Cuba, etc. –the bourgeoisie will continue to destroy the productive forces, imposing the costs of the crisis on the masses with catastrophic results, and intensify the inter-imperialist rivalry for spheres of influence, including a slide towards new inter-imperialist wars.
So far it is clear that the masses responses to the immediate effects of the crisis in rising up against price rises and the high cost of living shows that they have entered the race to resist paying for the crisis and to turn these costs back onto those that caused the crisis. Once again, the exploited masses prove that they will not miss such an historic race for their survival. The only obstacle standing in the way of the workers winning this race and winning their liberation from wage slavery is the crisis of revolutionary leadership.
Thus the second race is on the terrain of class consciousness, between the crisis of the revolutionary leadership of the proletariat -that is the existence of a present leadership of counter-revolutionary leaders and the absence for the moment of a revolutionary international leadership capable of overcoming this obstacle-snd the tendency of the masses to fightback facing the attacks of its class enemy and the hardships coming from the world economic crisis. The working class can win this second race only by exposing and removing all the treacherous reformist leaders. At the moment, the counter-revolutionary reformist leaders have the advantage as they have diverted the revolutionary processes in Latin America, suppressing the Bolivian revolution, speeding up the restoration of capitalism in Cuba, and at the same time holding back the radicalization of the proletariat of the imperialist countries by subordinating them to bourgeois parliaments.
The outcome of the second race depends on the intervention of revolutionary internationalists. They have the program capable of raising the consciousness of the masses in spontaneous defensive struggles and guiding them forward to the revolutionary seizure of power. That is why the Third Congress of the FLT stated clearly that revolutionary internationalists are facing urgent historic tasks and challenges. These are now not only to defend the program won through historic struggles but also to put this program into practice by creating an international center for the re-founding of a new revolutionary international in the immediate future, that can make a difference as an objective factor within the proletarian vanguard..
The crisis then has made it clear that the contradiction between capital and labor leaves no room for reformism, and that it can no longer be the basis for fooling the masses into paying the costs of the crisis. These are the conditions that will propel the proletariat and exploited people to go beyond food riots and uprisings and advance towards political struggles that can develop into the fight for the proletarian revolution.
These are, then the conditions that will prove that the crisis of humanity is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the proletariat, giving an objective basis for our struggle for a Zimmerwald and Kienthal of the 21st century to found an international center.
It is necessary to call a congress of principled Trotskyists and revolutionary workers organizations to exposeand defeat the treacherous leaders of the masses. We must declare a relentless fight against the bloc of Castro, the populists and the fake Trotskyists which constitute the left wing of the World Social Forum, who are already preparing new barriers to contain and divert the new layers of radicalized worker from forming a revolutionary vanguard.
We must declare a relentless fight against these new obstacles such as the "Congress of Latin American Workers" convened by the PSTU and LIT next July in Brazil, which will tell the working class of Latin America that they will conquer their unity by following the leadership of the bureaucratic collaborators of the COB, which already betrayed the Bolivian revolution subordinating the working class to Evo Morales; of the labor organizations in Haiti who refuse to fight for the military defeat of all UN troops –beginning with their own Argentine, Brazilian, Bolivian and Chilean troops –who occupy that nation and kill the people on behalf of imperialism; and of CONLUTAS created by the PSTU in a new central trade union tied to the state by its “left” bureaucracy!
Put all our forces into the revolutionary regroupment, a new Zimmerwald and Kienthal of the twenty-first century! This is the basic duty of all revolutionary internationalists, and the only way to get out of the swamp of national Trotskyism and to defeat the class collaborationism politics of the fake Trotskyists who today constitute the "left" wing of the "New Deal" bloc.
Traducción final y corrección: Viernes 01 de Agosto de 2008
Publicación Organizador Obrero Internacional Nº 8 Abril de 2008