- V - The fight of revolutionary marxism in the imperialist epoch is the fight of the proletariat for seizing the power and solving the most urgent problems of the masses. as for reformists and liquidationists, these tasks are left for the next milennium

“The left wing of the Fifth International”, that is the Trotskyite renegades, by “turning Trotsky into an inoffensive icon” try to surround him with “a certain sacred halo” with the aim of “notching the revolutionary edge of his ideas and struggles”. From this viewpoint, they have reached the same level as the Stalinist “tributes” to Lenin… such is the way of “the revolutionaries that are incurably afraid of revolution”. The hate to tell the proletariat the only truth in the last days of the first decade of the twenty first century, and Capitalism shows openly its bankruptcy: if we could not stop the retrenchments in Greece in spite of having done 8 general strikes; if the attack on our historic gains goes on in Spain, France, Germany and the entire Eastern Europe: if the US working class continues being submitted –the same as or worse than the Latin American workers to the calamity of unemployment and despair; if martyred Africa, as the rest of the semi colonial world, is bled-white by the imperialist powers’ pilfering and the carnages fostered by them; if the immigrants that yesterday erected the buildings and harvested the crops of the transnationals in the imperialist countries as slave labour, are today expelled as rabid dogs to the Mediterranean sea or murdered by the fascist sheriffs of “democratic” Obama on the Rio Grande border or the fascist Mexican vigilantes… IT IS DUE TO THE WORKING CLASS NOT HAVING YET SEIZED THE POWER!
This new batch of Menshevism emerging from the own belly of the Fourth International refuses to say the Chinese working class that if today they have to endure the worst sufferings is because the political revolution did not prevail, as the filthy Stalinist-Maoist restorationist bureaucracy could smash it through a bloodletting blow in Tiananmen, so opening their way to become a new propertied class, a sort of modern slave-owners that jailed million hundreds of young workers in their maquilas and submitted them to a terrible overexploitation in the world capitalist economy.
They refuse to tell the Chinese working class that the hour has come for them to link their present struggles to the fight for the restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat under revolutionary features, not only in China but also in the former USSR and Eastern Europe. Moreover, in the latter countries, the fake Trotskyists, servants of the “democratic” imperialists affirm that the restoration came in a “peaceful way”… no matter that the NATO massacred in the Balkans; that Putin’s white counterrevolutionary troops on their turn massacred all over the Caucasus and realized a thorough genocide in Chechnya; that a myriad of counterrevolutionary coups were staged in the small –or not so small- former Soviet Republics by the old KGB shots backed by the US military bases… that a counterrevolutionary Bonapartist regime has been established in the Russian Federation that vies with those of Chilean Pinochet and Argentinean Videla for the title of “most antidemocratic strongman’s dominion”… The fake Trotskyists have to invent the “Trotsky was wrong” because “the capitalist restoration was a peaceful process”.
Such a bunch of cynicism, cheekiness and lies ought to be exposed in this 70th Anniversary of Leon Trotsky’s murder.
And what do the Trotskyite renegades say about the Chinese question, one of the most decisive and urging questions in the twentieth century? Reformists have split in two wings, both of them sharing a common premise: “the Chinese question concentrate the expansion and drive of the capitalist system”
For some of them Capitalism is so strong and flowering that it can allow for the emergence of new imperialist powers… they deny that the planet is seeing THE capitalist crisis and decadency, which makes many of the imperialist powers supernumerary. While Greece, Spain and Portugal are sunk and imperialist Japan has been in perpetual recession for the last 20 years, they come and tell us with a unparalleled cheekiness that a new imperialist superpower has been born in China!
 The FLTI has just demolished this position that fails to differentiate a concentration camp of millions of slave workers labouring in maquilas (sweatshops) on account of the pilfering and the overexploitation of the different imperialist powers, from a “new imperialist power”.
The other wing is headed by the social democrats as the PTS, the LIT and all the similar currents stuck to the coat-tails of the Menshevik pseudo-theories. Though starting from the same premise, this wing affirms that the capitalist drive is so strong that China “is a big shop” that has gathered under its roof 400 million workers; as a result, the Chinese working class has allegedly achieved now a great strength “due to their numbers”. This is a Menshevik thesis: first a certain worker concentration would come larger thanks to a phase of capitalist expansion that “the worker party has to support”; in a second phase “the fight for socialism” would be possible. It seems according to them that in China this second phase has just started.
 This cynicism has no parallel. “China is now a big shop”. Why don’t they go to work to that “big shop”?...China is actually a concentration camp where a massive unemployment is beginning to be felt, plus generalized starvation, uprooting from the countryside, etc., as before the ’49 revolution (when the bourgeoisie was expropriated and so massive hunger was liquidated -including the episodic outbursts of cannibalism). What was there in China if not millions of workers and rural workers that could for the first time have decent meals every day in a “big shop”, which was afterwards turned into a concentration cam of a sort that not even Hitler could have dreamt of? These people call “big shop” to what is actually a generalized “Warsaw ghetto”!
In the same way that they did in ’89, they not only renege the fight for seizing power in the Chinese question, but also tell the working class that it is not necessary at all to seize it, because “Capitalism is still developing the productive forces”, so what is necessary now is to sit down and wait for the number of workers to augment so that they become stronger and so in a vague future it would be possible to seize the power.
Reformists will never learn from reformism. Revolutionary socialism and Trotskyism have demonstrated and will demonstrate all their potentialities in History.
Imperialist powers suffer bankruptcy due to the crisis that continues to hit the planet since 2007, however the imperialist corporations are earning 70 or 80% of annual profits abroad, that is what explains ultimately the “Chinese growth”… they are the million immigrant workers expelled from Europe and USA; they are the million workers suffering unemployment and destruction of jobs in Europe, US and entire regions in Asia… Meanwhile “China grows”, with its million peasants and rural workers deprived from their land, in chronic starvation, with millions unemployed (around 1,200 million inhabitants in those conditions). No doubt, the next crac will hit China if the proletariat does not enter in new socialist revolutionary manoeuvres all across the Pacific Ocean, and will also leave the great majority of the 400 million Chinese workers without their jobs, as it has done in the West and in the imperialist countries.
The Trotskyite renegades, who see an ultimately “democratic” and “economic” progress in the former worker states, have abandoned any struggle for restoring again the dictatorship of the proletariat under revolutionary feature there where the bourgeoisie had been expropriated.
A hodgepodge of treacherous leaderships doesn’t want that the masses combating in the national civil wars see that the native bourgeoisies at each step seal deals and agreements with the invaders that occupy their territory as in Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq. They have long ago abandoned the military program of the proletariat for the national liberation wars. Much more they do not want the actors of the heroic national resistances see that their victory lies in the socialist revolution in their countries, expropriating the invaders and uniting their fight with that of the European and American working classes, that this latter in times of the Vietnam war was who granted the victory of the Vietnamese masses in the streets of Washington and New York.
Although the reformists and liquidators of Trotskyism do not say that, and had locked under seven keys the truth, we internationalists of the FLTI affirm that if in revolutionary Bolivia people goes on cooking with llama dung; if in Madagascar we couldn’t get the bread in spite of having armed ourselves; if in Guadeloupe we have not yet conquered the promised 200 euros; if in Greece and imperialist Europe the attack of the exploiters is passing unchecked; if in the US we are as an exploited class worse even than in Latin America; if in Africa slave-owner Capitalism bleeds white the countries and oppresses with double chains of exploitation, pilfering and genocides the proletariat of that continent; it is because the working class has not yet seized the power.
Now we understand why there is so much silence in the “tributes” to Trotsky about the tasks and the program on which the Fourth International was founded under the leadership of comrade Trotsky and his internationalist team: that silence serves to hide before the new generations that for the Fourth International, the same as for the revolutionary Third International, the daily immediate task was to prepare the proletariat for the seizing of power. Contrary to what Stalinism and Social Democracy used to do, the Fourth International said openly that only by seizing power the working class could keep its gains or achieve some new ones. Drawing lessons from History, he Fourth International taught that the only possibility to snatch here and there partial demands to the exploiters is fighting everyday for the power, as exploiters only feel obliged to give something when they are afraid of losing everything, that is, in the face of proletarian revolution.
  These are the revolutionary algebra and strategies that set the bases for founding the Fourth International as the continuity of Bolshevism and the German internationalist revolutionaries of early twentieth century.
 Trotskyism and the Fourth International have not succeeded in being an objective factor in the life of the world proletariat. Our world party was taken by revisionism and opportunism. That’s why this rotten capitalist system has succeeded today (in the middle of one of the deepest and gravest crisis of its History) in dispersing and desynchronizing the struggles of the world working class and in fencing the revolutionary processes. And it could do that thanks to having concentrated all its servants within the working class in order to block a successful mass counteroffensive.
 As a result, they achieved what Kraft parasitic major shareholder, Warren Buffet, could shout enthusiastically at the Wall Street Stock Exchange floor: “If there exists a class war, we are winning it!”, while the murderous police of the Kirchners’ were grinding the backs of the Kraft plant workers on strike in Argentina.
The crisis of the proletarian leadership, that is, the overabundance of treacherous leaderships, also of opportunists, frightened centrists and political cripples, has become worse and worse with the passing of time. Backed by capitalism in crisis –not precisely because of their intelligence and ability, but enjoying a strong support of the bourgeois states in their misdeeds, the reformist and opportunist leaderships have submitted the working class to the popular fronts and the national bourgeoisies, keeping isolated the revolutionary processes and desynchronizing the struggles of the proletarians in the semi colonial world with respect to those of the working class in the imperialist powers.
   In the FLTI we are not afraid of declaring before the eyes of the masses an inclaudicable political war to all the proletarian leaderships that live stuck to the coattails of the bourgeoisie, all those charlatans that have told the working class that “fighting for some few and little demands something can be got”, that “we have to fight for the possible and not for the necessary”. Those servants to the bourgeoisie tell the workers that “going step by step, in a somewhat stealthy way, pressuring the exploiters to convince them to be reasonable” and give up some crumbs, we can get a lot! But every class-conscious worker knows that we are going from bad to worse; that capitalism is not a system based on charity or good will; that to get even the most humble of the gains we have to wage decisive struggles; that capitalists only give something when they fear to lose everything. These reformist leaderships have long ago stopped explaining the masses that any gain acquired under capitalism IS LOST SOONER THAN LATER if you don’t advance to seize power.
It’s impossible to pay homage to comrade Trotsky and speak in his name, while you tell the masses day after day that the correct course “is not that leading to revolution”, that it is a lie or a fantasy the Leninist apothegm that soviets and seizing the power are the shortest road to getting bread and a better life; that the working class in the semi colonial world should not get ready to overthrow the national bourgeoisies through the socialist revolution because it is necessary first to demand those bourgeoisies “to complete their democratic revolution”; that it is necessary to pressure those bourgeoisies to give bread, land and national independence to the masses of those oppressed countries… so some day, nobody knows when, it would be possible to advance to socialism there!
It is necessary to separate completely the banners of the fourth International from those of reformism that were mixed up there by the opportunists, the revisionists and the liquidators of the Fourth International. Today the Trotskyite renegades have dug out and stuck to the old and stinky –arch reactionary Menshevik theory and practice of the “two stage revolutions”, of class collaborationism, of submitting the proletariat to the “democratic wings” of the exploiters. A new batch of Menshevism has incubated and is in full display in the own belly of the Fourth international because of years of adaptations and capitulations, and due to the national degeneration of the international revolutionary movement.
In the last 70 years, from the same day when Trotsky was murdered, a centrism and opportunism have emerged that abandoning the international centre in Coyoacan, left adrift, country by country, the groups and militants of the Fourth International, what ended in the imposition of the worst features of the national Trotskyist adaptations and degenerations of the national sections. Those adaptations, in their turn led to new capitulations, the capitulations led to betrayals and the betrayals led to the complete degeneration of the movement as Trotsky had previously warned about.
We affirm with the Fourth International and its founders that the epoch of national programs has long ago passed away. We affirm that the socialist revolution is not the summing up of a series of “national revolutions” with national programs, as Stalinism promised. It is about a one and only international socialist revolution to which the different national revolutions in each country are only links in an international revolutionary chain. Only in the international socialist revolution, at a worldwide level, the revolutions and insurrections of the world proletariat in each country could attain victory.
The entire experience, the victories and tough defeats of the world proletariat show this Marxist apothegm in the present epoch of crises, wars and revolutions. The founding anew of the Fourth International amounts, in short to recovering the militant internationalism of the world proletariat; that is the condition for attaining victory.
Taken country by country, the proletariat can only wait to be submitted to its own bourgeoisie, which as has been sufficiently demonstrated, has no fatherland, only its greediness for profitable business at any price; but the proletarians have only chains to break!
Many people want to pronounce the definitive obituary of the Fourth International, as if it were a relic of the past. All the Trotskyite renegades have centralized as the “left wing” of the fifth International of Hu Jintao, Chavez and the restorationist Castroite bureaucracy, that is, of the modern Chiang Kai-sheks, similar to those that Stalin and Bukharin supported in late ‘20s from the degenerate Third International. Their objective is the same. To leave the proletarian international left wing hand-tied and feet-fettered to their class enemies.
This is the truth. Today the Trotskyite renegades are not centralized taking in their hands or camouflaging themselves under the banners of the Fourth International. Today they are overtly centralized from their “Peoples’ Summit” in Madrid, their “World Social Forum” in USA, their CONCLAT in Brazil and their new encounter they are preparing to be held in Tokyo, as the Stalinism was centralized from Moscow or social democracy from the privileges of the German Imperialist Parliament.
That’s why today in all the “tributes” paid to Trotsky this lesson has disappeared and the legacy of Trotskyism and Bolshevism’s been lost: no solution exists for any of the problems of the masses if the latter fail to reconstitute their proletarian internationalism, if they do not advance in outstrip their present leaderships that submit them to the bourgeoisie; these are the indispensable prerequisites to advance in the way to the victory of the Socialist revolution.
Let’s affirm then what Trotskyism affirms and the combat for which comrade Trotsky gave his life, as every one of the internationalist revolutionaries. The program that keeps all its full validity, the Transitional program of 1938, says: “The orientation of the masses is determined first by the objective conditions of decaying capitalism, and second, by the treacherous politics of the old workers’ organizations. Of these factors, the first, of course, is the decisive one: the laws of history are stronger than the bureaucratic apparatus. No matter how the methods of the social betrayers differ – from the “social” legislation of Blum to the judicial frame-ups of Stalin – they will never succeed in breaking the revolutionary will of the proletariat. As time goes on, their desperate efforts to hold back the wheel of history will demonstrate more clearly to the masses that the crisis of the proletarian leadership, having become the crisis in mankind’s culture, can be resolved only by the Fourth International”.(Transitional Program, “The Proletariat and its Leadership”)