Argentina PTS wants to build a LP like the British Labour Party? On May 29th, at the meeting in tribute to the comrades of the PST slaughtered by the Triple A in the ‘70s in Pacheco, I was able to witness a discussion between a comrade from Democracia Obrera [Workers Democracy] and an activist laid off from Kraft-Terrabusi 2009 struggle and member of PTS [Socialist Workers Party]. It all started when the comrade from DO posed them a fight for setting up a trotskyist party in Libya to seize power. The PTS member answered that that “was alright”, but for him the task was to concentrate forces in the places where the conditions were already given to build that party and that was what they were committed in Argentina, studying with the Argentinean workers in the unions the book “Stalin: Great Organizer of Defeats”, from Trotsky. He also said that in Libya there was no “Trotskyism tradition” and that the working class there had no experience, and that it was very difficult that the workers would take the Libya campaign in their hands because they “didn’t understand”. The comrade from DO told him why the Syrian masses had to be defended, and told him about the great example of the comrades from Venezuela who are making the campaign in the land of Chavez in the unions, gathering a daily wage per worker to send to the Syrian resistance, and about how this campaign is conducted in Japan, collecting one yen per worker and student. He explained to him that despite the leadership issue, in Japan a current of thousands of workers and students took this campaign to Toyota and to all the Japanese student federations that were taking it in their hands. That to set up a party in Libya, the masses conquered the conditions by setting up the militias that had destroyed the army and that there were masses were radicalizing like the workers in Tripoli, the same as in Syria, Tunisia, Greece. That this wasn’t happening yet in Argentina and that the fight to set up a trotskyist party in Libya was to be taken by all the organizations in the world that claim to be revolutionary. That there is no tradition in Libya because all the left-wing organizations said that the militias and the Libyan workers were “OTAN troops”. The PTS member insisted on setting up parties in places where there was “trotskyism tradition” and a working class “educated in the unions”, in “years” of combat, like in “France” or “Europe”. The comrade from DO posed him that that was what Mensheviks and social-democrats said when the Bolsheviks seized power: that they couldn’t do it in Russia because the working class was backward and had no organizations or parties like in Europe. The most “backward” became the most advanced, as today is done by the Libyan working class that had no experience in unions or reformist parties and ended up setting up workers militias and destroying the army, becoming in that way the most advanced of the working class around the world. And he concluded that a party had to be set up because if the power is seized in Libya it will change the history of mankind. Meanwhile, all the speakers in the event said that we had to do union fights, opposition lists and then make the party... and only then “the International”. The PTS member asked if DO was “against” setting up union lists. The comrade from DO vindicated the rupture with MAS in ’88, when the PTS posed “all our forces to the URSS that the political revolution is coming there”; and the MAS said “go to Armenia, the party will be constructed in Argentina, you don’t want to work in the unions”. Why do I tell this? I understand that the comrade from DO explains the need of sending “all the forces to North Africa that that’s where the revolution is” and the PTS member answers... “In Argentina the party will be built based in the union lists!” This is a reissue of morenoism in a small scale, and the truth is that that’s the old thing, that’s the past. What’s new is the revolution, the crisis, the fascism, that’s what is going to come and all these reformist parties will disappear from the scene. The PTS wants to build a party based in the unions, like the English Labour Party based in the trade unions. For me the continuity of the rupture of the PTS with MAS in ’88 for the political revolution is reflected by the comrade from DO; the PTS went back to a feverish version of the ‘80s MAS, mixed up with English labourism. O., meat industry worker. |