redrave

Declaration on Peru: International Leninist-Trotskyist Fraction

2009-07-05T03:28:00.000-07:00

Peruvian workers and peasants are shouting in the streets, barricades and pickets for everybody to hear: “The spilled blood will never be forgotten!
THE WORKERS AND PEASANTS OF PERU STAND UP AGAIN

FORWARD! DO NOT STOP WAGING OUR HEAVIEST BLOWS AGAINST THE EVIL FUJIMORISTA-FTA REGIME!

For a national congress of rank and file delegates from the CGTP, from the exploited peasants of Amazonia and the militant youth organizations.
Lets unite all the pickets in a national committee of self-defence to organize now the INSURRECTIONAL GENERAL STRIKE to overthrow the Fujimorista-FTA regime of Garcia.

We must create a Fighting Front to centralize our forces and build the road to the revolutionary general strike. Organize right now the REVOLUTIONARY GENERAL STRIKE that throws out Garcia and does not leave any part of the Fujimorista –FTA regime standing. It is imperative to set up a United Front to fight, centralizing our forces and imposing a way forward to the revolutionary general strike!

Down with the bloody government of Alan Garcia and the Fujimorista regime, that have a long record of massacres going unpunished!
Unconditional freedom now for all the political prisoners, stop attacking the Amazonian fighters!
Down with the Stalinist traitors of the CGTP, PCP and Patria Roja leaderships!
Down with the farcical “Bolivarian Revolution”!

For a revolutionary provisional government of workers and peasants that breaks with imperialism, gives the land to the peasants and expropriates the expropriators!
Latin American working class: stand up alongside Peruvian working class and exploited in revolt! Stand up for the beginning of the Peruvian revolution!

In the morning of June 5 the police tried to vacate Belaunde Road in the place called “Curva del Diablo”, close to Bagua in the Amazonas department. The struggle of the Amazonian exploited brothers and sisters has been going on for 3 months. The struggle focused on the passing of a set of laws that hand out the rainforest to the transnationals, which are part of the new legislation resulting from the FTA signed with USA.

The struggle of the poor peasants, Amazonian indigenous people and settlers alike remains an anti-imperialist struggle, with democratic-revolutionary demands that attack the heart of the FTA-regime, which is giving the Peruvian resources away and ties this oppressed nation to US imperialism. Unions in the Amazonian districts immediately supported the struggle, during almost two months of successful strikes. The worker-peasant alliance was built up in the streets during the fighting. During those months, April, May and June, there were oil well occupations, challenging the interests of the Peruvian bourgeoisie and their chief partners, US, British, Spanish and French imperialists with their companies Hunt Oil, Repsol and Total.

The bourgeois attack was unexpected, brutal and perfidious, as Rocca Autukai (one of the leaders of the revolts) declared some days later: “The police won because that day we were leaving before 10 am; that had been the agreement. We were about to leave” (IPS report, June 13, 2009)

A police battalion arrived, supported by armoured cars and two heavily armed helicopters, while snipers were set on all sides. While climbing a hill to get a better place to kill the demonstrators, one of those sniper groups met a worker-peasant picket, which disarmed them and used those weapons to defend the blockade; thus they showed the right way to win arms for the workers.

That correct and heroic action couldn’t prevent the rest of the snipers and the armed helicopters from murdering over 100 peasants, only 6 of which could be found; among those were some leaders (all which proves the action of snipers and police intelligence). Santiago Manuin, leader of the struggle committee in Condorcanqui, tried to talk with the cops and was shot point blank, like many others. The people of Bagua Chica, Bagua Grande and Jaen then took the streets.

They occupied and burned the APRA and state offices. In Jaen they overan the police stations, and the cops had to run over the roofs as frightened rats; however they kept shooting at the exploited people from their new positions. “They only talk about the dead cops and say 5 indigenous people have been killed, but things are different. There are over 100 dead brothers and sisters” denounced Daysi Zapata, president of AIDESEP, the organization of Amazonian indigenous peoples (El Pais, Madrid, June 14, 2009).

When the peoples’ fighters at Petroperu`s 6 plant -where 20 cops were held as prisoners- heard of the killing, they decided to give “an eye for an eye” reply.

The bourgeoisie and their armed thugs used this event to point to the “savagery” of the fighters. Alan Garcia was the first one to call the fighters, “savages” and the executed cops, “democracy's martyrs”. We Trotskyists must say that taking hostages was not invented as a method by the working class and the exploited. To speak only of the last decades, military dictatorships as well as “democratic” governments have detained and jailed without any evidence or right our leaders and most active fighters to destroy our struggle organizations and make them surrender. During the dirty wars fought on us by the Belaunde, García and Fujimori administrations, any worker or peasant leader was a “terrorist”, and whole families were used as hostages; those governments went on threatening the exploited struggles with taking hundreds as hostages, and they locked up without evidence workers leaders, or even killed them without a trial.

Wasn’t it Garcia and Mansilla who killed Castilla, the miners’ leader? Wasn't it APRA’s thugs who shot the members of Sendero Luminoso (shinning Path) who surrendered in El Fronton? Wasn’t it Fujimori who massacred half of the leadership of the CGTP between 1991 and 1992? Isn’t it true that in all these years of democracy each government has taken hostages, under the cover of punishing “legally” the exploited for blockading, fighting and protesting? In these years of “democracy” under Paniagua, Toledo and Garcia’s command, the “democratic” army and police have murdered the best sons and daughters of the exploited people. Puno, Cusco, Pucallpa, Ancash, Casapalca are soaked in workers and peasants’ blood. How dare these parties (all of them taking part in the murderous Fujimori regime of 1992-93) to call “murderers” and “savages” those fighters who are defending themselves? Why are now these bloodthirsty jackals –so used to feast on the corpses of their victims, showing such hypocritical fastidiousness?

Enough is enough! The Peruvian working class and peasants will not allow those gangs of the bourgeois and transnationals, who plunder the nation, who keep their power by spilling the blood of the nations exploited, to try to present themselves as the victims: they are the murderers of Peruvian workers and peasants. We revolutionary socialists defend unconditionally the elementary right of the masses to defend themselves from the bourgeois murderous state; we defend without hesitation their freedom to rebel.

The Bagua fighters had taken cops as hostages precisely as a guarantee, because they knew that if the government attacked it would not stop at anything. The government chose to declare war, so the exploited had no other choice but to take “an eye for an eye”. Would they let the enemies go free after they had killed elderly men and women, pregnant and unarmed women and children? Weren’t the Amazonian fighters eager to do everything possible to avoid the clash? Hadn’t theirs been a peaceful, defensive struggle over several weeks, only occupying oil wells and land and blockading roads, but avoiding making offensive blows?

They could not allow a serious defensive measure, as is taking cops as hostages to defend their lives, to end as a joke. In front of the barbaric repression, the fighters’ revenge is fair, natural justice; the defence of our class brothers and sister is above any illusion about the “justice” and “balance” of the state and the regime which serves the exploiters. Only traitors as Cesar Levana (CP leader), from the columns of the Bolivarian paper “La Primera”, can call this revenge “unacceptable”. Carmela Sifuentes (CGTP leader) in an ILO meeting “paid a tribute” to the cops who fell in combat! These people are the same traitors that labelled as “criminals” the members of the Ilave commune who revolted in 2004. They are the same who praised the murderous general who surrendered in Moquegua in 2008. In the meantime the “radical” Stalinist and the fake Trotskyists refuse to defend the right of the fighters to reply to class repression with any means they choose.

As Trotsky said, the whole of life is based on diverse forms of violence, on the opposition of some kind violence over the other, and to repudiate the use of liberating violence amounts to supporting that of the oppressors that are currently governing the world.

To condemn the violence of the exploited towards the exploiters, as do the treacherous misleaders (Stalinists, reformist of all colors, Trotskyist renegades included) means in fact to renounce revolution and the emancipation of the exploited. This is a Marxist’s ABC, but all those traitors have long renounced Marxism.

After the army entered Bagua and with the zone already militarized, they declared a permanent curfew to prevent meetings or demonstrations of the workers and indigenous peasants. They established censorship and closed local radios so no one could know how the army got rid of the bodies of our dead brothers and sisters, as was denounced in Lima by the leader of the Indigenous Student Movement to the National Radio Coordinator on June 6. As the Institute of Legal Defence denounced on June 11, the army kept the zone closed for 5 days and didn’t allow entry even to the Red Cross. The army so created a “military-political zone”, as in the worst years of the dirty war: they detained tens of fighters, they were even pulled out of the hospitals and sent to the barracks and tortured. They chased fighters, who had to hide in the vegetation, far villages or churches. They declared AIDESEP, which is the leading organization of the Amazonian peoples, illegal and also Alberto Pizango, its main leader, had to go underground and then find political asylum in Nicaragua.

Under the surveillance of the armed forces, the Amazonian fighters were forced to leave Bagua and go back to their towns in trucks. The cops and the army officers broke open the shelters, chasing the fighters, detaining sick and wounded, or expelling them from Bagua. They tried to humiliate them, abusing them as “savage murderers”. But the Bagua exploited people recognized clearly their brothers, and even under the threat of the machine guns, demonstrated their emotional support and empathy: “170 indigenous people lie as refugees in the Franciscan nun’s shelter. Many are wounded and sick. Inside the shelter, the natives are thoroughly searched by the police, who deprive them from their belongings, throw them to the floor, look for any “evidence” to prove their alleged sedition… Those who are “clean” are put on a truck, after being registered in the state prosecutor’s office and at the ombudsman’s, and sent back to their homes. As they climb on the trucks the natives are cheered and applauded as heroes by the public:”Keep fighting, brothers and sisters!”. Some women with kids in their arms give them bags with fruit, cookies and water.” (El Comercio, Lima, June 13, 2009)

The ripples of Bagua’s events are spreading all over the country.
The treacherous bureaucracy of the CGTP keep the Lima workers separate from those in the rest of the country to prevent a revolutionary general strike that throws down the government and imposes the demands of the exploited.

The response of the masses to the massacre was outrage. Immediately the CGTP bureaucracy moved slightly to the left and declared a “national day of struggle” on June 11. That day was a demonstration of the workers’ strength, in spite of the overt boycott of the union bureaucracy.

From Thursday, June 11 to Tuesday, June 23 when an agreement was signed with the government, the workers and peasants in Andahuaylas imposed a general work stoppage. The governor –actually a kind of “prefect”, a representative of the government, not an elected official - kept hidden in the Andahuaylas garrison, while the police locked themselves in their police station. The struggle committee, integrating local unions and peasant organizations, was in fact the master in the city; a de facto dual power was instituted locally. The only point in the struggle committee’s program was the resignation of Garcia and all his cabinet of ministers.

The workers and peasants in the province of Canchis tried to take the Cusco airport; they succeeded in blocking the departures from Cusco to Puno and Bolivia. In Cusco proper, the (popular) Council of Ma-chiguenga-Urubamba River (COMARU) and the Revolutionary Agrarian Federation of Cusco (FAR) tried to organize together with other organizations a departmental (regional) indefinite strike in the Cusco region (including the city) but the Stalinist bureaucracy of the CP again betrayed the workers, refusing to march together with the Cuscan peasants to a strike on June 24.

A week before, a march of ethnic awajun and shipibos poor peasants, together with conscript soldiers that had just been trained, reached Pichanaki, in the Junin department, in their way to La Merced, declaring that their final goal was Lima (the capital). But when the government signed the agreement with the Amazonian workers and poor peasants, they stopped marching.

Lima ‘s readiness to fight is undeniable. June 11 showed that unmistakingly. In spite of the CGTP leadership having called a strike with the aim of decompressing the fighting mood of the workers and peasants, 20,000 protestors –construction workers, teachers and students took to the streets of Lima. The old union bureaucracy could not prevent that the most militant protesters –students and construction workers - clashed for two hours with the mounted police, putting up with teargas grenades and police assaults, trying to cross the barrier that separated them from the Parliament and government palaces.

Though the agreements signed by the government have defused for the moment the struggle in the Amazonian rainforest region and in Andahuaylas, the struggles do not stop. An ever increasing hatred against the infamous Fujimorista-FTA regime is gathering momentum. Peasants block the roads that go from Arequipa to Puno; in the province of Azangao-Puno a strike was declared and staged for 72 hours; poor peasants unions in Cajamarca, Ancash and Cusco threaten with a generalized struggle against the mining companies that deprive them of their land and water. Coca growers in la Convencion, in the Cusco region, demand a better price for their crop to the state company Enaco. The poor peasants of Ashaninka Central in Ene River denounce the state concession for the new Paquitzapango Hydropower Central Project that will deprive them of the water they need for their crops. The workers of the struggle committee of the province of La Oroya are repudiating the treacherous Acta (agreement) signed on June 23 by the strikebreaker bureaucrat Luis Castillo with the imperialist bosses and their servants. The national unions are demanding the repeal of the anti-labor laws; the port workers struggle in defense of their jobs.

Therefore it is crystal clear that conditions to bring down Alan Garcia and his whole government, and to demolish his Fujmorista-FTA regime, are more than ripe. It would only be necessary to organize a powerful revolutionary strike, centralizing the self-defense pickets, taking control of the roads, and attacking the property of the transnationals and the bourgeoisie. If this has not been achieved up to now, it is not the fault of the exploited, or the conditions or determination for the struggle, it is the betrayal of the leaderships of the CGTP, CP, Patria Roja, backed by the Trotskyist renegades that put obstacles and then more obstacles in the road to the revolutionary general strike that could bring about the downfall of the government and of the FTA regime.

The workers and peasants’ uprisings, the local quasi-insurrections, the revolts, have left the Fujimorista-TLC regime in crisis

Up to now we have witnessed the opening of the civil war; the “normal” and “peaceful” relationship between the classes is shattered. The classes have begun to clash directly. This civil war is developing in the provinces, but now threatens to hit directly at the capital, stepping up and becoming in an independent action of the masses that could open the Peruvian revolution. In order to develop this way, the working class and the poor peasants have to defeat the politics of the CP and Patria Roja, which to counteract the enormous struggle of the exploited are preparing a peaceful replacement of the Garcia government by a “Bolivarian” soldier, Humala, in order to stop the revolutionary downfall of the government at the hands of the masses.

On June 5 in Bagua, Amazonas department, after weeks of stoppage, the government had intended that its massacre would stop the insurrection. The intelligence services, the Digemin* had been warning the regime about the climate of insurrection for some time before. To avoid this scenario, the government tried to head off an insurrection with the Bagua massacre. But instead, the cold-blooded murder of unarmed peasants only produced a massive response of outrage and retribution among the exploited.

So the Fujimorista-FTA regime had tried to stop with iron and blood the insurrectionary process and to prevent a mass eruption, but it miscalculated the just and heroic response of the masses. Therefore it was obliged to back pedal, repealing the so called “rainforest laws” against which the Amazonian poor peasants revolted, and getting the AIDESEP to sign the end of the struggle. But as the own Prime Minister Yehudi Simon said, it is all about “taking a step back to take two steps forward”. Namely, it is all about sitting around a table to dialogue with the leaders of the struggles in Amazon and Andahuaylas to make them sign agreements that won’t be respected by the authorities. They seek to win time for reconstructing the broken bourgeois front, a fact recognised by the accusations of “weakness” launched by the Fujimorista and Social-Christian parties against Garcia’s government and his party, APRA; at the same time Humala and the native “Bolivarian” bourgeoisie are sounding the possibility of an alliance with former president Toledo.

This much is clear: the complete loss of prestige on the part of the government. An imperialist paper, the Wall Street Journal, says “Garcia is living through his worse crisis since he began his second term in July 2006” (quoted by El Comercio de Lima, June 8, 2009). While the Fujimorista and Social-Christian parties attack the government for being weak and erratic, the government took advantage of the breathing space given to it by the treacherous leaderships of the CGTP to partly reform its cabinet, appointing a representative of the Social-Christian right wing. However without defeating decisively the workers or at least diverting their forces once more, those partial measures don’t give the exploiters a definitive solution.

Peru of the workers and the poor peasants stands up

Imperialist plunder has left Peru, that is, its workers and poor peasants, completely ruined. Imperialism -in the form of the FTA imposed by the lackey Peruvian bourgeoisie and their Fujimorista regime - has meant transforming Peru into a truly big “maquila” (sweatshop) and a source of raw materials for the transnationals. The bankruptcy of the imperialist capitalist world economy, with its epicentre in the US today in recession, has hit very heavily those countries in Latin America that are trebly tied by chains of super-expoitation to US imperialism through the Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) signed with it. This is also true of Mexico, the Central American countries, Peru, Chile, and Colombia, among others.

The crisis has not only depressed the international price of raw materials that these countries export, primarily to the US or to the Pacific market –as minerals, oil, etc. That also means that the imperialists transnationals that have located their maquilas in those countries, today are closing plants, suspending and laying off workers, without restraint –as Doe Run company has done in the metallurgical complex of La Oroya in Peru - while US imperialism intensifies the plunering of those nations to extract from them the last drop of blood.

The present situation in Peru is the most advanced outpost in the struggles of Latin American workers and exploited against their submission to the FTA, against the intensified imperialist plunder and against the imperialist chains that strangle those nations and smother the worker and peasant masses.

Today the Peruvian exploited are staging an upsurge against the UK-US imperialists of companies as Doe Run, Barrick and the rest of the mining companies that get millions and more millions every day by over exploiting semi-enslaved proletarians– more than 70% of them are subcontracted and unregistered workers, enjoy no rights or benefits - making them work long work hours so they die like insects every day; they are even denied a proper grave, buried as they are in the pits or blasted to pieces by the dynamite explosions in the shafts of mines that have not received any kind of investment in infrastructure.

The workers’ wages are at below ground level while the profits of the capitalists are reaching the skies. For the exploited there are neither decent health benefits nor education systems and the ever rising cost of living is a lash permanently whipping the masses.

In the rural areas, the FTA means the complete ruin of the poor peasants. The oil transnationals –the imperialist leeches of Hunt Oil, Repsol, Total-Petrobras-, the mining, chemical, pharmaceutical companies, the usurer sharks of the imperialist banks with the help of their junior partners –the regional “Bolivarian” bourgeoisies who trickle down the crumbs of the nation’s wealth and the agrarian-trading bourgeoisies - are determined to take the most and best part of the lands, dispossessing the ruined peasants, and they do not stop even at massacring them to achieve that aim.

While the ruined peasants leave their starving families working in the tiny plot of land that cannot even support their miserable subsistence, they march in tens of thousands to the city shantytowns and are used by the bourgeoisie as an enormous industrial reserve army that manage to survive by going sporadically in and out of precarious jobs –if they are so lucky to get any- in the productive process. Meanwhile, millions are condemned to abject misery, social decomposition, which the bourgeoisie take advantage of by recruiting them in the narco-industry/traffic, prostitution, death squads, etc.

So, in the country there is an open expropriation lands on the part of the transnationals. Imposing the FTA on Peru and other Latin American countries means a heavy concentration of land in the hands of the transnationals, even liquidating the miserable subsistence economy of the poor peasants who had not yet lost their tiny plot. Alongside these very poor peasants a rural proletariat coexists brutally over-exploited by the food and seed transnationals and the landowners dedicated to the production of food and industrial crops. These thousands of rural workers have been abandoned by the CGTP leadership that refuses to organize them in its unions, so leaving them to their fate in a form of modern slavery.

Such is Peru under the imperialist domination of the FTA: plundered by the transnationals that exhaust the labor power of the proletarians in exchange for miserable wages; robbed of the land and the natural resources by the oil and mining companies; with hundreds of thousands of ruined peasants that emigrate to the cities trying to survive, and with an army of rural workers working as slaves from sunrise to sunset.

These are the terrible conditions which push the Peruvian proletarians and poor peasants to their current uprising. That’s why in the country the rural workers are heading the revolts and drawing behind them the ruined peasants, in that way transforming themselves into the natural nexus (by facilitating the incorporation of the oil, mine, urban, etc. workers, NT) of a worker-peasant alliance that can be created all over the country. That is because the only social force that can confront and defeat the imperialist transnationals is the proletariat at the head of the ruined poor peasant that has been robbed by imperialism and the national bourgeoisies; only that alliance can confront the imperialist domination, the national bourgeoisie and its state, that have sold out the country to imperialism. That is the social base of the mass combats and the forces that have going into action in a militant mood trying to of find a revolutionary road ahead at each step.

On the other hand, the middle-class peasant, who is tied by many links to the transnationals and exploits the rural worker; the middle-class peasant who sends his/her children to the universities trying in this way to climb the social ladder, that is, the rural petty bourgeois - is the social base of Humala and his party and of the class collaborationist organs like the “regional fronts”. It is the rich peasant that wants to retain some crumbs from the pilfering of the nation by the transnationals, and that is why he/she demands “equity” in the sharing of the oil and mining royalties. This sector tries to transform itself into a national bourgeoisie that negotiates with imperialism over dividing the wealth of the nation. That is why this sector tries to take advantage of the rage of the ruined peasant and the impoverished urban middle classes to control the rural worker and use it to pressure the central (national) government of Garcia, with the aim of receiving in due course its own share of the plundered wealth of the nation.

But in Peru, as in every semi-colonial or colonial country the two fundamental classes that are head to head are the proletariat and the imperialist bourgeosie. Only the Peruvian proletariat acting as leader of the oppressed country can take the majority of the country, that is, the poor peasants out of the ruin created for them by the exploiters, by raising in the streets a program that, by sealing the workers-peasant alliance gives a response to the land problem, to the question of the liberation of the nation from the imperialist yoke.

It is the proletariat, by its role in production, which can expropriate the factories to give tractors and technology to the ruined peasants; it is the proletariat who can expropriate without compensation the usurer banks that ruin the poor peasants, declare null and void all their debts and give them cheap credit to run their plots; it is the proletariat who can impose the monopoly on foreign trade and guarantee collective farms to produce efficiently food and all kind of necessary crops under heavy investment in state-of-the art equipment and technology.

To impose this course the proletariat must have at its head a truly revolutionary leadership to guarantee the worker-peasant alliance, preparing the way for the imposition of a revolutionary workers-peasants’ government.

In order to achieve this, the current rebellion must not be stopped; far from it, it must be deepened and centralized to give a final blow against the enemy. The treacherous leadership of the proletariat that is entrenched Within the CGTP is trying by every means in its power to prevent this prospect from developing into reality.

It is imperative to defeat this leadership! It is imperative to convene without delay a congress of the rank and file of the workers and the poor peasants that prepares a great action of the masses for a revolutionary general strike to defeat the government of murderous Garcia and destroy the Fujimorista-FTA regime, and then to expropriate without compensation and under workers control the oil and mining transnationals!
Expropriation without compensation of the new agro-exporter landowners, for the benefit of the poor peasants!
Expropriation without compensation of the usurer banks and creation of a unique state bank under the control od the workers to impose the immediate annulment of all the debts of the ruined peasants and give them cheap credit!
For collective farms with strong investment from the state! Down with the FTA and all the political and economic agreements, treaties and accords that tie the nation to imperialism! From the heart of Peru, workers and peasants are starting to stand up, do not stop!

The Bolivarian bourgeoisie, supported by the Stalinist leadership of the CGTP, is working to contain the masses.
Down with the farcical “Bolivarian Revolution”!
It is imperative to make the worker organizations break with the bourgeoisie and advance on the road to socialist revolution!

The open civil war in the provinces left the bourgeois power in crisis there. Immediately, the partners of the party in government, together with the opposition of Humala, asked for the resignation of the entire cabinet of ministers. The bourgeoisie began to shake in fear: it was the exact moment that a revolutionary leadership would have chosen to raise the entire worker-peasant alliance of Peru to give the definitive blow. But once more the union bureaucracy of the CGTP, the PCP and Patria Roja (Maoists) alongside the entire reformist “left” came out in defence of the regime, and delayed the response of the masses for the following week, putting all kinds of obstacles in the way of the centralization of their forces.

Today the bureaucracy of the CGTP calls for a national strike as late as July 8, that is, a long month after the massacre of our class brothers and sisters in Bagua. These traitors want to convince the exploited their problems can be resolved by moving this or that minister, by leaving intact the government, the corrupt slave-owners’ institutions, without destroying the murderous officers’ caste of the Fujimorista army, without expelling the transnationals, without breaking with imperialism, without imposing the power of the exploited masses.

So the bureaucracy and the reformist leaderships try to mark time to prevent that looming volcano of the Peruvian workers and peasants rage from erupting, and its revolutionary lava from destroying the citadel of the capitalists’ power and all their institutions.

Yes! The leaders and spokespeople of the so called “Bolivarian Revolution” see very clearly that if the Peruvian revolution starts, and manages to achieve its first victory by sweeping away the Fujimorista-FTA regime, all the counterrevolutionary pacts and agreements in the continent between the Bolivarian governments –junior partners to French imperialist government and transnationals and, all supported by the World Social Forum - and the governments that are direct agents of US imperialism in Latin America, would be in danger.

Those pacts and agreements were sealed when Chavez and Uribe embraced over the spilled blood of the Colombian resistance massacred with the applause of all those governments; we saw those pacts and agreements used in Venezuela to expropriate the anti-imperialist fight of the masses; we saw them in Oaxaca, Mexico when they served to isolate the workers-peasants’ Commune and prevent the struggle of the Latin American exploited rising in support of a revolt the most exploited sector of the US proletariat – which had began to rouse its ranks- fighting against Bush government and its wars of occupation.

These pacts now put in peril by the Peruvian uprising are those counterrevolutionary pacts that have subordinated the US proletariat to the warmonger Obama; they are part of the politics driven by Fidel Castro, the World Social Forum and the Kirchners to abort the revolutionary combat started by the Argentinean masses in 2001; the same counterrevolutionary agreements can be seen in Bolivia where Evo Morales makes pacts with fascism to defeat the proletarian revolution started in 2003-2005. Counterrevolutionary pacts are also the means prepared to give a full “final” blow to the international proletariat and the exploited people: that is the completion of capitalist restoration in Cuba now in the joined hands of the Castros and Obama.

The revolutionary combat of the Peruvian masses today puts in question all this counterrevolutionary dealing. That is why the treacherous leaderships of the international proletariat are concentrating all their forces in stopping the onset of the Peruvian revolution, which would mean the re-opening of a revolutionary process all over Latin America, after the bourgeoisie was taking a breather, having expropriated it through the “Bolivarian Revolution”.

It is not an accident that Humala is now talking about going to meet Toledo –that alleged “pro-indigenous” former Peruvian “Indian” president that signed the FTA and massacred workers and peasants during his government - and perhaps build an alliance with him. Humala is getting ready to abort the struggle of the proletarians in the cities and of the poor peasants and the rural workers in the countryside, submitting the exploited masses to the bourgeoisie through the trap of “indigenismo”. He is preparing to use the spilled blood of the workers and peasants to enhance the business deals of the Bolivarian bourgeois gang - agents of the French transnationals that scramble with the US monopolies of the FTA for the spoils of the Peruvian nation.

To reach his goal, the former soldier Humala has to lean on the leadership of the CGTP to prevent the revolutionary irruption of the proletarians in Lima, which could be the starting point for a revolutionary general strike that could dethrone the government of Alan Garcia and his Fujimorista regime. Beware! Humala is an enemy of any workers and peasants’ revolution!
For his part, Evo Morales, after having sent a letter to the summit of the Peoples in Puno (Peru), last May, calling for a struggle for the “second independence”, today from his position as one of the commanders of the “Bolivarian Revolution” and representative of the counterrevolutionary pacts in the continent, is declaring hypocritically that “what happened in Peru is the genocide caused by the FTA, the privatizations, the sell-out of the Amazon Rainforest of South America to the transnationals” (Agencia EFE, June 13, 2009).

His are merely cynical crocodile tears: Morales, who sold out the Bolivian revolution, has signed a pact with the Media Luna fascists, and attacked ferociously on three different times the Huanuni mineworkers… dares to, speak about “genocide” in Peru! He is merely trying to hide his own hands soaked in the blood of Bolivian miners, workers and peasants! He who kneeled down before Obama asking him to “re-establish the historical relationship”, asking not to be left out –he and his bourgeois fraction - of the business deals in payment for making the counterrevolutionary pacts between MAS (Morales’ party, NT) and the fascists, now speaks of a “second independence”… for Peru! A thousand times cynical impostor!

We the internationalists that sign this declaration want to warn the masses about the “Bolivarian Revolution”! We alert everyone that the representatives of the “Bolivarian Revolution”, along with Humala and his lackeys of the union bureaucracy of the CGTP and the reformist left, are getting ready to prevent a revolutionary overthrow of the government and are eager to negotiate another “peaceful” transition, rescuing the Peruvian bourgeoisie with a Bolivarian government by spilling workers and peasants’ blood!

We are not surprised: we have already seen the Bolivarians dealing pacts with fascism in Bolivia and with Uribe –US imperialist gendarme - in Colombia; we have also seen Bolivarians in the governments administering the imperialist CAFTA (Central America Free Trade Agreement) as is the case of the Sandinista government of Ortega in Nicaragua and the FLMN government (Frente Farabundo Marti of National Liberation, former petty bourgeois pro-Castroite guerrilla, NT) in El Salvador…

Down with the farcical “Bolivarian Revolution”!
Forward to the workers and peasants’ revolution!
No to a new “provisional government” of the Peruvian bourgeoisie as that of Paniagua in 2000 (after Fujimori-Montesinos’ fall, NT) that spared the Fujimorista regime and prepared the government of Toledo and the signing of the FTA!
For a revolutionary provisional government of the direct-democracy and self-defence organizations of the fighting workers and peasants!

The exploited have an urgent, immediate task: Revolutionary general strike, not in a fortnight: NOW!
To win bread for the people, jobs for all the workers, land for the poor peasants;
expelling the transnationals, smashing with the FTA and throwing down the bloody government of Garcia and the Fujimorista-regime!

The workers and peasants’ alliance won in the streets, in the struggle against the police and the army, is based primarily on the program that was demanded by the masses: stop the exploitation by the transnationals and their servants! Down with the Fujimorista regime and with Garcia government that today embodies this regime!

The poor peasantry, instinctively, turns its head towards the only allies it has: the urban working class. That’s the reason for the marches to the cities, the setting up of joint fighting committees that have guaranteed the occupation of the oil wells, attacking the imperialists 'property for over two months. This has also meant the breaking of the peaceful relationship between the classes; on one side the imperialists and their junior partners, the Peruvian bourgeois; on the other side, the workers and the rural exploited. The clash of the two sides, civil war, became unavoidable.

Alter two months of struggle, today the AIDESEP has suspended the Amazonian strike after signing with the government an agreement (“Acta”) that is no more than a wet paper. How many times the government has signed agreements pledging to meet the peoples’ demands? So many that nobody can say for sure their number. The regime, knowing for sure that it is too weak “to teach a lesson” to the workers and the exploited people, wants more time to be able to re-arm, divide the struggles and deactivate them by means of cheap demagoguery. And while the union bureaucracy of the CGTP and the reformist “left” leaning on the middle class peasants, make the workers and the exploited people to accept the betrayal sanctified by the Actas, the APRISTA government (Garcia belongs to the traditional bourgeois APRA party, NT) and the Fujimorista-FTA regime wins some time to reconstruct the bourgeois front and prepare the counterattack.

So the government is “arming” itself calling the murderous officers’ corps of the army to take control of the departments (administrative districts, NT) where the workers are still fighting or threaten to re-start their fighting. The government has militarized Cusco, Apurimac and other departments. The ruthless officers’ corps, the so called “Vladi-generals” (Vladimir Montesinos was an infamous secret police chief who in the times of Fujimori and under his orders created a parallel army within the army, devoted to the persecution and torture of the oppositionists, specially of thousands of workers, students, professors, and “lefts” in general, and also amassed together with Fujimori and other cronies huge fortunes through a web of contracts, bribes, extortions, slanders, cheap yellow media campaigns and private crimes, NT) who show themselves as the patrons of the Fujimorista-FTA regime. Meanwhile the government is deepening its Bonapartist characteristics; it leans on the armed forces and threatens the bourgeois opposition, from social Christians to Humalistas, saying it is going to dissolve the congress if the Prime Minister Yehudi Simon gets a vote of censure.

The results of the plotting of the CGTP leaders have been revealed: they have left isolated in the forest for weeks the peasants and rural workers, to be massacred by the police and the army. The revolutionary program must revolve around how to make the semi-insurrectional local rebellions, strikes in each sector, mass mobilizations accompanied by attacks to the private property, etc., that is, all those half deaf; half-dumb, half-mute uprisings, to be centralized and transform themselves in a powerful mass action to bring down the government, the Fujimorista-FTA regime, and destroys the murderous Peruvian bourgeois state.

For a revolutionary general strike NOW, no more delays!
To get bread, jobs, and land for the poor peasants, to expell the transnationals, break with the FTA and defeat the government of Garcia and his Fujimorista regime!
For a revolutionary general strike NOW, so that the fight of the exploited masses does not stop, and to get justice for the martyred comrades murdered by the bourgeois state!

From the struggle committees, from the union rank and file assemblies, from the pickets of the rural workers, from the mobilizations…. we have to force the CGTP to break with the bourgeoisie, to win back the union to work in the interests of the workers, defeating the union bureaucracy and launching a Revolutionary General Strike to win all our demands.

In that way, by mobilising and organizing an action that unifies all our forces and demands, the exploited must organize a powerful WORKERS’ CONGRESS OF RANK AND FILE DELEGATES OF ALL THE FACTORIES, WORKPLACES AND MINES FROM ALL OVER PERU; WITH DELEGATES REPRESENTATIVE OF RURAL WORKERS, THE TRUE AND FIRMEST ALLY OF THE URBAN WORKING CLASS IN THE COUNTRYSIDE, A CONGRESS WITH DELEGATES FROM THE POOR PEASANTS, THOSE THAT SCARCELY SUBSIST ON THEIR PRODUCTION IN SMALL PLOTS OF RUINED LAND.

It is imperative to make a workers and peasants parliament that represents the largest majority of the Peruvian people, that centralizes the self-defence committees and pickets in an only one NATIONAL COMMITTEEE OF WORKERS AND PEASANTS SELF-DEFENCE. Facing the danger for the fighters in Andahuaylas and Cusco being massacred, we have to set up this national congress right there in the south of the country.

It is necessary to fight for dual power now, that is, the power of the exploited confronting the power of the transnationals and their government, in order to prepare the forces to defeat the government and its Fujimorista-regime, break with imperialism, expropriate the transnationals and give the land to the peasants, a task that can only be guaranteed by a revolutionary workers and peasants provisional government

It is imperative that the workers and peasants’ revolution stands on its feet! The actions of the masses must not stop! It is imperative to impose the Revolutionary General Strike! It is urgent for the exploited to centralize their struggle in a national workers and peasants’ congress in order to reach victory! Down with Garcia! Down with the military Fujimorista regime! Out with the transnationals!

Down with the class collaborationist leadership of the CGTP!
Down with all the union bureaucracies!
Long live the workers democracy!

The Stalinist leadership of the CGTP and the different brands of reformism, fake Trotskyists and Castroites alike, have put all their weight behind preventing this breakthrough, to keep the struggles of the masses in the provinces divided from the fight of the workers and the youth in Lima, the Peruvian capital. The politics of those traitors is to subordinate the masses to Humala and the Bolivarian bourgeoisies. Down with the leadership of the CGYP! Down with all the union bureaucracies!

It is now clear that the spontaneous fight of the Peruvian masses has been a thousand times more effective and clear-sighted than the political cowardice of all the reformist general staffs put together; far from calling the masses to carry on any of these actions, the treacherous leaderships have run to help the bourgeoisie and its institutions. In their spontaneity the masses have demonstrated an enormous degree of consciousness: independent actions, attacks to the bourgeois property, committees of self defence, against the government and the FTA, against the sacking of the transnationals, for the land to the poor peasants. This is the starting point and the way to be developed in order to defeat in the streets the class enemy and its lackeys.

However this enormous spontaneity of the masses has a big limitation. If the combat of the exploited is not centralized by their own organisation of direct democracy, there will not emerge a dual power regime to open the way to the victory of the revolution, and then the bourgeoisie, supported by the treacherous leaderships of the proletariat, will re-organize its forces and defeat the struggle of the masses.

It is imperative to create workers democracy. That means the winning the factory, workplace, etc., committees in Peru. With the method of building workers assemblies in every factory, mine, workplace, etc. we must also build rural workers committees, with a delegate every 50 workers to set up and organize the absolute majority of the Peruvian working class. Workers democracy means working class self-emancipation bringing to the head of the class its most capable and combative leaders. The fight for the workers democracy is inseparable from the fight for defeating the union bureaucracies and for winning the independence of the unions and of all the workers organizations from the state and from all the political forces of the bourgeoisie.

For a revolutionary program to build the alliance of workers and poor peasants in the streets

In order to lead the worker-peasant alliance in the streets workers have to unite our ranks, guaranteeing our demands making our exploiters pay for them. Misery and starvation are reaching unheard of levels. Peru is officially in recession. Capitalists are not even capable of guaranteeing us the opportunity of earning our daily bread.

It is necessary to unite the workers’ ranks around the demand for work: Generalized wage rises! A minimum movable wage that covers the necessities of the families and goes up according to the inflation! Decent jobs for everybody! Sliding scale of wages and work hours to share all available work among all the capable hands! All the workers must be registered in the permanent payrolls in all the companies! It is necessary to set up unions for the rural workers that are brutally exploited by the transnationals!

Facing the situation of misery and starvation in the countryside, where the poor peasants are pressed and expropriated both by the commercial middlemen, the new agro-exporting landowners and the imperialist banks usurers and oil and mining companies: For the expropriation without compensation and under workers control of all those bloodsuckers! Nationalization of landed property to give productive plots of land, cheap credits and technology to the rural exploited! For collective farmers with heavy investment by the State under the control of the rural workers! Annul all the debts the poor peasants have taken with the bank usurers! Expropriation of the banks without compensation and creation of a single state bank to guarantee credits, cheap machines and fertilizers to the poor peasants!

It is imperative to expropriate the infamous Peruvian bourgeoisie without compensation and to nationalize those factories and enterprises under workers control. Expropriate the Romeros, the Benavides, the Chlimpers, etc., as well as the “Bolivarian” bosses - such as Conveagro, who overexploit the poor peasants; also expropriate the regional bosses that take part in the plunder of our resources as junior partners of the imperialists, through mining or oil rents.

Expropriate without compensation every factory or workplace that closes or sacks its workers! For example, expropriate without compensation and under workers control the entire textile industry, which has fired 10s of 1000s of workers! We must recover La Oroya from the claws of imperialist Doe Run, which is about to fire all its workers! For factory-, mine- and workplace-committees that guarantee the production in all the recovered pits, plants and shops!

The bosses say: “There is no money!” No money for wage increases, saving jobs, meeting the peasants’ demands, and providing health and education to our children… THEY ARE LYING! There IS ENOUGH MONEY, AND MORE! But the imperialists are carrying it out of the country by the billions, helped by their junior partners, the Peruvian bosses!
It is necessary to kick out of the country the imperialist transnationals, expropriating them without compensation and under workers’ control; it is necessary to expropriate Yanacocha, Barrick, Hunt Oil, Doe Run, Repsol, Total-Petrobras. That is the way to liberate the nation from the imperialist yoke.

The only government that can guarantee completely and effectively these demands of the exploited masses is a government of the Workers and Poor Peasants based on the self-organization and arming of the proletariat. This is the only government that can guarantee the break with imperialism and the agrarian revolution.

A very tiny minority gang composed by bourgeois shareholders, bankers, managers and frontmen of the imperialist transnationals impose a vicious dictatorship against the large majority of the exploited of the Peruvian nation. Only the dictatorship of the proletariat, supported by the poor peasants will be able to win the most democratic government, one that is a genuine representative of the vast majority of the Peruvian nation, and solve the most urgent demands of the exploited people. No doubt it would become a stronghold of the socialist revolution in Latin America and the world. The entire forces of the true Trotskyists and revolutionary workers are devoted to starting, deepening and winning the worker-socialist revolution in Peru.

Against the repression of the murderous bourgeois state and its Fujimorista regime: The self-defense pickets must be generalized and centralized as a worker-peasant militia!

For that huge, heroic and so necessary task, we need our own national worker-peasant self-defense. Our enemies, the US, Spanish, French imperialists and their junior partners, the Peruvian bosses, will not abandon the battlefield without a fight. Bagua has shown that, in spite of all those that do not want to see the facts as they are.

The enemy is sharpening their weapons; they call for help from their auxiliary corps, the “buffalos” (the bloodthirsty thugs of the old union bureaucracy of the APRA party); they have already mobilised them on June 16 in front of the CGTP headquarters in Lima, under the supervision of the ruthless Mantilla (Garcia’s secret police chief, NT); that gives them the legitimacy to act, applying the law that allows “ordinary citizens" the right to arrest anyone they think is behaving “incorrectly”.

Workers and poor peasants love peace, but in order to free ourselves, to end with exploitation we are obliged to use violence and meet iron with steel.

“Using violence", the well known treacherous leaders are sure to say, "would leave us in a false position at the eyes of the people”. To expose this fallacy, it is sufficient to remember: How many peaceful national marches have been staged by construction workers, and how much support from the people have they won? Compare that to the fight of the Amazon workers and poor peasants. Is it not true that the “wild” and “violent” Amazon fighters have won the empathy and the support of the exploited people and even of the well-off middle classes of the cities, as is shown by the dozens of thousands of private university students (only the children of the rich can go to those universities, NT) who went on a rally on June 11 in Lima and other cities (Trujillo, Chiclayo, etc,) in support of them? This means that to “go for all”, i.e., using revolutionary methods, like occupations of imperialist plants, self-defense pickets, etc., is the sure way to victory, and also the way of winning over the rest of the exploited and the middle classes’ respect and support. Conversly, these same middle classes are indifferent to each February peaceful rally of the construction workers federation before the offices of the World Labor Organization or the Ministry of Labor.

But the traitors don’t stop talking. From “La Primera”, a rag subsidized by petrodollars, Cesar Levano calls the union bureaucracy and the "bolivarians" to smash the working class fighters; he calls the so-called “workers guard” of the CP to give a good beating to the “infiltrated people” that fought back against the police battalions in Lima on June 11. Another additional reason to throw down the old Stalinist union bureaucracy: instead of organizing the revenge for the proletarian blood that was spilled, they plan a massacre against the fighters. We cannot fight and win with the threat that the servants of the bosses, this fifth-column in our ranks, shoots us from behind.

It is imperative to defend ourselves and our families. Every struggle we begin will have to confront the army’s submachine guns or the handguns and the batons of the “buffaloes”. As well as that, we will be chased and attacked by the union bureaucracy and its thugs. Against the vicious repression of the dogs set on us by the bosses and imperialism, we must unite all the pickets in an single Workers and Peasants’ National Self-defense Committee.

The “buffaloes” are a relatively minor nuisance: we can defeat them easily if we are determined. Actually, the problem lies in the army. The bourgeois armed forces are the essential support of the bosses’ state. There are fake revolutionary clowns (as “Lucha Marxista”, “Tribuna clasista”) that believe the armed forces can be dissolved by a decree**. There are reformists like Mario Huaman, or the ML19 or the PST, that say we ought to befriend the police, and support their “rights” to win them as “allies”. Don’t pay attention to them, comrades. All these “organizers of defeats” tell lies and poison the consciousness of the workers. The way to win over the soldier, to win his support, has been clearly pointed out long ago by that strategist of the October insurrection and creator of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky, in his book The History of the Russian Revolution.

“…The more the soldiers in their mass are convinced that the rebels are really rebelling-that this is not a demonstration after which they will have to go back to the barracks and report, that this is a struggle to the death, that the people may win if they join them, and that this winning will not only guarantee impunity, but alleviate the lot of all - the more they realise this, the more willing they are to turn aside their bayonets, or go over with them to the people. In other words, the revolutionaries can create a break in the soldiers’ mood only if they themselves are actually ready to seize the victory at any price whatever, even the price of blood. And the highest determination never can, or will, remain unarmed.(…) The street fighting began with the disarming of the hated Pharaohs (police), their revolvers passing into the hands of the rebels. The revolver by itself is a weak, almost toy-like weapon against the muskets, rifles, machine guns and cannon of the enemy. But are these weapons genuinely in the hands of the enemy? To settle this question the workers demanded arms. It was a psychological question. But even in an insurrection psychic processes are inseparable from material ones. The way to the soldier’s rifle leads through the revolver taken from the Pharaoh. Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, Volume One: The Overthrow of Czarism - Chapter 7: FIVE DAYS (February 23-27, 1917). Written in 1930)

The workers and peasants’ congress must centralize the already existing self-defense pickets into a workers and Peasants’ National Self-defense committee, against the murderous, anti-exploited people caste of Fujimorista officers commanding the Peruvian army. For the revolutionary general strike it is imperative that we can count on organs to defend us and be able to prove to the rank and file soldiers, who are our class brothers under military rule, that we are ready and determined to go to the finish. Only then the soldier will put aside his doubts, choose to support of his class brothers and sisters and join the struggle against the regime that is starving the people and selling out the nation.

It is necessary to call for the formation of rank and file soldiers’ committees that disarm the officers’ caste and send their soldier delegates to the workers and peasants’ congress! Destroy the murderous officers’ caste of the Fujimorista Peruvian army! Form workers, peasants and soldiers’ committees!

Governments have come and gone over these last years, but the core of the Fujimorista regime hasn’t changed. The recent “pageantry” of Fujimori’s trial was nothing but cover for the impunity enjoyed by the murderous regime and its components. The anti-working class repressive forces strike here and there and continue to be unpunished, the courts are mere offices of the transnationals and the bourgeois parliament a den of thieves where corrupt hand-raisers legitimate everything imperialism asks for. Every struggle of the exploited is met by the regime with bullets and jail.

Freedom for the more than 8000 political prisoners who lie -and are tortured- in the dungeons of the Fujimorista regime!
In order to achieve justice for our working class, peasant and student martyrs: workers’ and popular tribunals that punish the murderers of the workers and the poor peasants!
For the dissolution of the entire state repressive apparatus!
For the dissolution of the bosses’ justice and its judges, who are in the payroll of the transnationals!

For a new revolutionary regroupment of the vanguard to centralize our forces and build the road to the revolutionary general strike!

Therefore, it is imperative to create a strong, centralised, action of the masses, able to hit with one single fist to win the demands of the exploited. To realise this fight it is imperative to centralize right now the already existing struggle committees, that have been born in the heat of the fight and which are at the head of the most militant and dedicated sections of the proletarians and the poor peasants. It is imperative to set up a Fighting Front to guarantee the road to the revolutionary general strike in order to win bread, living wages, jobs, land, to kick out the transnationals from the country and defeat the government and the Fujimorista regime.

Thus the Andahuaylas Struggle Committee that is centralizing the workers and poor peasants of the region, and who are on a war footing; the Bagua fighting organizations and all those that are also struggling all over the Amazon region; the joint struggle committee of the metalworkers and the exploited people of La Oroya; the combative unions and struggle committees of Moquegua, etc. have gained the authority necessary to call immediately for the formation of rank and file assemblies of all the unions and fighting organizations of workers and poor peasants, to set up a Fighting Front to prevent a new betrayal and centralize the forces of the exploited, and to march on Lima without delay to build support for a general strike to win all our demands. We have to take advantage of the call for a national strike on July 8 to organize without delay the revolutionary general strike that has as its objective the downfall of Garcia government and the Fujimorista-FTA regime.

The left that claims to be for the working class and socialism must immediately break their subservience to the bourgeoisie of Humala and to the union bureaucracy, and put their entire forces to build a Fighting Front without delay. They speak in their papers and statements about “the urgent task of unifying the workers’ struggles with those of the Amazonian Indians to make Garcia resign”. But in fact they stand for unity only to subordinate our fighting organizations to the “Bolivarian” bourgeoisie.

Thus, currents like El Militante propose the formation of a Fighting Command together with the Nationalist Party, that together with the national Bolivarian bourgeoisie tries to exploit the blood of the workers and peasants to advance their business deals as agents of French imperialism. In the same sense, the LIT calls for the formation of a Front for the Defense of Life and Sovereignty, a new class collaborationist organ headed by the Nationalist Party together with the regional “indigenous” bourgeoisie. Meanwhile, currents like the Argentinean PTS copy the same politics of the LIT (in a left colored version) demanding a wide and democratic coordination of the rank and file unions, the indigenous and peasant organizations… with the regional fronts headed by the regional bourgeoisie and Humala.

They are the left wing of the World Social Forum and its policies of class collaboration. All of them, breaking with the Trotskyist program and with the Permanent Revolution theory, adopt openly the “Maoist theory” about the “main contradiction”, which says that above the antagonism between proletarians and bourgeoisie, there is the antagonism or contradiction “nation vs imperialism”. This fake “theory” claims that the national bourgeoisie that poses as “nationalist” (i.e., defenders of the oppressed nation) in oppressed countries such as Peru, is capable of playing a progressive role; so that these “lefts” subordinate the workers to the "progressive" bourgeoisie. This is the root of their appeals to the formation of “anti-government”, “anti-Garcia”, “anti neo-liberal” fronts; their politics serves to subordinate the proletarians to the Bolivarian bourgeoisie of Humala.

Enough is enough! This policy of subservience to the bourgeoisie has ruined the Peruvian proletarians’ revolutionary prospects many times in the past. In the gigantic revolutionary uprising of workers and peasants of the late ‘70s, the Peruvian masses, turning to the left, went to the FOCEP (Worker-Peasant-Student-Popular Front) which was led by currents that claimed to be Trotskyist with renowned left leader Hugo Blanco at their head. But those currents put all their strength and the authority won before the workers, to submit the masses to the bourgeois regime, opposing the formation of "defense fronts” – embryos of soviets that in those years were mushrooming all over Peru; on the contrary, they put all their bets on the constituent assembly.

But these currents, far from using the constituent assembly as a platform to expand and centralize the organs of direct democracy of the masses and the workers’ militia, they subordinated to the constituent assembly the entire revolutionary drive of the exploited masses. This policy prevented the proletariat from tasking their role in leading the alliance between workers and peasants. This alliance –falling in total impotence - finally broke up allowing the conditions for revolution to lapse and preparing the victory of the counterrevolution, which came back with a vengeance.

Today, the Trotskyist renegades retrace their steps of those days… Break with your sub-ordination to the Bolivarian bourgeoisie!

We call the left organizations that claim to be for the working class and the exploited people; the Movimiento Cumbre de los Pueblos (Movement of the Peoples’ Summit), which influences the Amazonian organizations; the PST-LIT that has influence in Loreto, the Liga Socialista (Socialist League) of Cusco that influences the construction workers and students in that city; the Partido de la Clase Trabajadora (Working Class Party) that has influence on the miners’ rank and file and on the Lambayeque regional of the CGTP; the FUR (Revolutionary United Front) that influences the university students in Lima; the broad tendency Huaynalaya that is the opposition to the SUTEP (teachers’ union) leadership and has a real presence in the universities; we call all of them to break their subordination to the Bolivarian bourgeoisie, and begin working to centralize and unite democratically our fighting organizations setting up a Fighting Front that puts all its forces into defeating the union bureaucracy of the CGTP and building a workers and peasants’ rank and file congress.

They criticize the bureaucratic leadership of the CGTP; they say they stand for the unity of the masses. Well, we call on them to 'walk the talk'. If they don’t, they will be exposed before the eyes of the proletarians and poor peasants; this “left” would have proven not to be interested in defeating the CGTP bureaucracy, but instead to be competing to become a new “left” bureaucracy, if necessary bringing again Hugo Blanco back to head it, to support Humala’s Bolivarian bourgeoisie alongside the Stalinists - the same that backed Toledo so he could sign the FTA, as today they back Garcia against the outrage of the exploited.

We internationalists do not trust the leaders of the renegade “Trotskyist” parties. They have been supporting the farcical Bolivarian revolution that has been so destructive for the international proletariat. However, we do trust the honest workers and youth in their rank and file, we trust their strength and their eagerness to fight for the victory of the proletarian revolution. So we call on them to fight for a new revolutionary re-groupment of the vanguard capable of defeating the treacherous leadership of the CGTP; of setting up the dual power of workers and peasants; of going forward to a revolutionary general strike to defeat the government and the regime, opening the road for the second Peruvian revolution.

The fight to set up a revolutionary leadership for the Peruvian proletariat is getting critical

The World crisis has shown that the reformists, from social democrats to Stalinists to fake Trotskyists, are used by their masters –who pay for their privileges, their high salaries in the unions and parliaments - for halting the fightback of the masses trying to respond to the imperialist attacks with worker-socialist revolutions. That is why to support the usual work of the union bureaucracy of the PC, Patria Roja and SP in the CGTP leadership to prop up the government and the Fujimorista regime, new reformist parties are being set up, to create new obstacles to the centralization of direct democracy and self defence organisations of the workers capable of seizing power.

The above mentioned blind alleys, the FUR, the “Cumbre de los Pueblos” (Summit of the Peoples) Movement, the Party of the Working Class, etc., are only reproducing the schema of the “anti-capitalist parties” to the service of the regime that has been proved many times in Latin America, and is repeated today in the imperialist countries, with the NPA of Oliver Besancenot in France and all the rest of the contraptions of the so called “European anti-capitalist left”. Putting themselves to the left of the old CPs and SPs, they cover the latter’s left side to prevent the masses as long as possible from throwing down these treacherous leaderships and meanwhile they get ready to be the next reformist leaderships.

The Trotskyist renegades play a principal role in the formation of these new reformist parties, having turned themselves into Castroite-Stalinists, as they have broken with the program and the principles of the Fourth International of 1938. It is sufficient to notice that the Lambertites that are the leadership of the Partido de la Clase Trabajadora in Peru, are supporting Luis Castillo, presenting him as a consistent revolutionary (Castillo is the secretary general of the mine and metal workers federation, and a strike-breaker that sold out and betrayed some months ago the miners of Marcona, and who is now betraying and selling out the miners of Doe Run-La Oroya).

Against the politics of the Trotskyist renegades that was the cause of cruel defeats for the proletarians and the poor peasants in the late ‘70s; in a moment that these renegades are plotting together with the Bolivarian bourgeoisie a trap that is similar to that which ruined the masses in those years, and prepar-ing for a bourgeois renewal in the government –and even for the old trap of a new Constituent Assembly to strangle the struggle of the exploited, the combat that we the internationalist Trotskyist are waging to give the Peruvian working class a revolutionary leadership it so much deserves and needs to triumph, is placed in its crucial point.

Our forces are still weak, but the program for which we fight is a very strong one. Gathering together around the lessons of the hottest developments of the world class struggle –the Bolivian revolution, the Greek struggle, the combats of the proletarians in the French colonies, the Palestinian resistance, etc- we are conquering a program that allows us now and in the future establish the necessary links with the revolutionary fighters all over the country to build up with them a revolutionary internationalist fighting party.

That new generation of revolutionaries already exists. Years of struggle combining both the economic and the political struggle, the minimal demands and the fight against the regime, give to this new gen-eration of fighters a class consciousness, ferocity and hatred against the exploiters that are necessary to carry the masses forward. That’s why the bourgeois say in fear that this new generation of revolutionaries do not believe in the solution of “their demands via the procedures established by the state… no routines are built for negotiation, they do not respect the standards of the institutionalized politics” (La Republica, Lima, June 14, 2009). What this young generation of revolutionaries need is an immaculate flag around which to re-group.

The Trotskyists of the FLTI put our modest forces to the service of gathering together the Peruvian revo-lutionary workers and youth, which will not be possible without a ruthless fight against the old CPs and the new “anti-capitalist parties”. As we have said, we know that we have only the force of a small nu-cleus of revolutionary internationalists. Today our forces are put to the service of setting up in every corner of the country direct democracy, self determination and self defence organs of the fighting workers and exploited, expanding the and centralizing them at a national level.

We know that in those organs, under the vigilant eyes of the masses, both leaders and programs are put to the test at every moment, and very soon traitors and reformists are exposed, the wolves in a lamb’s skin that prepare to strangle the fight of the masses get unmasked. On the contrary, even a small nucleus of revolutionaries can be quickly increased its forces because in those organs the masses can understand the correctness of our program and our strategy through their own experience and get rid of the treacherous leaderships. The condition for that change is that the revolutionaries tell frankly to the masses at each step who are their allies and who are their enemies, and do not stop our ruthless fight, even for an instant, against all -both overt or covert- the enemies of the proletariat,

But the construction of a revolutionary, Trotskyist and internationalist party of the Peruvian proletariat is not a “national” task, as it is not “national” the action of the treacherous and reformist leaderships, which, on the contrary, are systematically and very precisely centralized an a continental level,. From Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, and from the Pacific to the Atlantic Oceans, in the meetings of the World Social Forum, in its encounters and summits, under the blessing of Chavez, the “Bolivarian” bourgeoisies and the Cuban restorationist Castroite bureaucracy.

A revolutionary, Trotskyist and internationalist leadership of the Peruvian working class will only be able to be born as an inseparable part of the combat to put again on its feet a revolutionary general staff that unifies the class conscious and revolutionary workers of the world, in the backward countries as in the imperialist powers, to defeat the counterrevolutionary general staffs, guided by the legacy and the program of the Fourth International of 1938. We have to re-group at an international level all the revolutionaries that show the same ferocity, audacity and centrality showed by the counterrevolutionary general staffs and their hirelings within the workers movement (reformists, Stalinists, social democrats, fake Trotskyists).

In the next days a common internationalist congress by the Trotskyist of the South African WIVL, the HRS from the US, Sao Paulo’s comrades that come from a split with the sister organization of the PTS in Brazil; the Nucleo Obrero Revolucionario (Revolutionary Worker Nucleus) in Trujillo-Peru; the Nucleo Revolucionario Internacionalista (Internationalist Revolutionary Nucleus) of Argentina, together with groups in Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, New Zealand, Chile and Peru that today integrate the FLT. That congress will discuss and resolve about the setting up of the Internationalist Leninist Trotskyist Fraction or FLTI. This is a small but important milestone in the way of Trotskyists towards building up a revolutionary General Staff, an international centre of the likes of the Third International under Lenin or the Fourth International in 1938. We call all the honest revolutionary fighters to join us!

June 25, 2009

NOTES

* The Digemin, General Direction (Leading Office) of the Interior (Home Security) Ministry, “is considered the most powerful intelligence organ in the country. It receives the support of the US Embassy and generates strategic intelligence in all the areas” (Caretas Magazine, Lima, June 11, 2009). This is under the government of Alan Garcia, the return to the intelligence services under Agustín Mantilla, Carcia’s right hand, widely know for organizing death squads in the APRA government of 1985-1990 (first Garcia administration)
** “For the elimination of the bourgeois army and police through the seizing of power” (“Tribuna clasista” , February, 2009). That is, they propose the seizing of power in a peaceful way, without destroying the armed resistance of the bourgeoisie.

BOX/ANNEX 1:
The meaning of the struggle of the Peruvian proletariat for the Latin American working class

The global economic crisis of the imperialist financial capital has demonstrated before the eyes of the exploited, the complete bankruptcy of the capitalist system, with absolute clarity. Here and there the proletarians worldwide have responded to the attack by the bourgeoisie, imperialist as well as semi colonial and colonial, that seek to make the workers, exploited and oppressed peoples in the world to pay for the crisis, with enormous revolutionary combats in several zones in the planet. Before the terror to the proletarian revolution, the international bourgeoisies have centralized the forces of the world labour aristocracies and bureaucracies and their reformist parties sp that they work for preventing a true generalized revolutionary uprising of the world masses that could make the exploiters pay for the crisis that only they themselves have caused.

Therefore, though only for the moment, the reformist leaderships of the proletariat and their parties have succeeded in containing the masses in their revolutionary combats as in Greece, France, Madagascar, Martinique and Guadeloupe, to name only a few. The world bourgeoisie, frightened by the revolutionary action of the masses in the midst of the crisis, leans on the help of the treacherous leaderships of the world proletariat. The bourgeoisie, full of terror, are now taking their breath, soaking the sweat off their forehead and prepares to launch a renewed attack against the world masses.

We are before a world situation that has decisive confrontations between the classes in the works, be-cause not only the entire world proletariat but also some imperialist power/s must pay for the cost of the crisis. Under these conditions, we are witnessing revolutionary flashes on the part of the masses. In the edges of the enormous contradictions of the world situation, there are fissures that creak and break, incapable of containing the hatred and the legitimate reaction of the masses before such terrible condi-tions of exploitation and unheard of sufferings. Today the breach has opened in Peru where workers and peasants try to stand up and fight back.

The international character of the mass struggles in Peru is shown by the fact that the Peruvian workers and poor peasants are questioning everything. From their barricade combats, violent confrontations, land and oil wells take-ins, from their strikes and pickets, the Peruvian masses are telling the international proletariat that under the conditions imposed by the capitalist bankruptcy, if one wants to achieve anything, even something as elemental as the daily bread, jobs, wages, land education and health, the masses are obliged to fight for the whole everything, against the transnationals and imperialism, against their puppet governments and regimes, against the capitalists’ property.

Therefore in the combat of the Peruvian masses live today the factory sit-ins with bosses and managers taken as hostages that we saw in France, the workers and youth’s barricades as in Greece, the worker and peasant militias of Madagascar, the revolutionary resistance combats as those in Palestine and the Middle East, the mass combats to get free from the imperialist colonialism as in Guadeloupe and Martinique.

All these combats are today living within the rebellion of working class and peasant Peru. There resist and nestle the forces of the Latin American proletariat that try to face the farcical “Bolivarian revolution” forces, to be able to break all the counterrevolutionary pacts and agreements between the Bolivarian bourgeoisie and imperialism designed to defeat the working class. The Peruvian workers and peasants in revolt have in their hands the key for the Bolivian proletariat to stand up again and recover their fight-ing organizations as the COB from the hands of the treacherous class collaborationist bureaucracy, breaking with Evo Morales and smashing fascism.

If these forces can develop in a revolutionary direction, they will put into question the counterrevolutionary international politics of the Cuban Castroite bureaucracy. That is why the Castros brothers and their restorationist gang support Humala in Peru; just because they have to prevent a revolutionary process that puts into question the settlement of the farcical “Bolivarian Revolution” that barred the victory of the proletarian revolution in the continent, concentrating their counterrevolutionary forces in Argentina, Ecuador and fundamentally in Bolivia, to make the bourgeoisies in crisis prevail in spite of the revolutionary assaults of the masses.

The Castroites support Humala because the eventual opening of the Peruvian revolution would mean an enormous impulse for the Cuban workers and peasants to revolt against the process of capitalist restoration that has been started by the Castros and is marching on in the Island facilitated by the imperialist bomber Obama.

As we have said, today the Peruvian workers and poor peasants are showing the exploited all over the planet that under the conditions of capitalist bankruptcy, to conquer even the most minimal demand it is necessary to fight for the whole: for revolution. Therefore Peru puts into question the kernel of the politics and the strategies of the World Social Forum and of its left wing of Trotskyist renegades that speak up overtly for class collaboration, as was the case of the Encuentro Latinoamericano y Caribeño de Trabajadores (Latin American and Caribbean Encounter of Workers = ELAC) led by the Morenoite LIT-CI to strangle the left wing of the Latin American proletariat.

The combat of the Peruvian masses must be the point where today the Latin American working class digs up to stop retreating and be able to impose a true counteroffensive of masses that exposes defini-tively and reduces to fragments the farcical “Bolivarian Revolution” and reopens the way to the proletar-ian revolution. This is the decisive importance of the Peruvian developments for the international prole-tariat. The Latin American and world working class must stand up alongside the Peruvian exploited!

BOX/Annex 2

The LIT and its PSTU, with CONLUTAS and the ELAC, lie down before Lula, Humala and the blood-stained monopolies

The PST, Peruvian section of the LIT, calls the exploited masses to “reaffirm the unity achieved in the Front for Life and Sovereignty, uniting the workers and popular demands and give the government a due date to meet these demands, by the CGTP’s approbation of the National Strike for next July7-8-9”. The Front for Life and Sovereignty is a movement organized by the Nationalist Party of Humala alongside the regional “indigenous” bourgeoisie that in their confrontation with Alan Garcia aims to carrying the exploited masses to the feet of the oppositionist bourgeoisie.

Once more the LIT is supporting the Bolivarian bourgeoisie; now in Peru. However its job is far from completed. The LIT and its mother party, the Brazilian PSTU, that conduct CONLUTAS and the ELAC, reproduce the statement of the PST and do not say even a word about the enormous interests of the Brazilian bourgeoisie, junior partner to the imperialist monopolies that are sacking Peru and are today threatened by the uprising of the Peruvian exploited masses.

Because there are oil giants Total-Petrobras, the construction companies as Odebrecht, Camargo Correa, Andrade Gutierrez, Queiroz Galvao, the OAS Company, together with other companies as Ele-trobras (energy); steelmaker Gerdau; Cia Vale do Rio Doce (iron mining), Ocean Air (Airline); Natura (cosmetics based on rainforest species); AmBev (drinks); Votorantim (Cellulose, paper and mining) and Azaleia (shoes) –to name only a bunch of the most important ones- which are sacking gas, oil, mining and other resources of the Peruvian Amazon; they also have in their hands the infrastructure business as the inter-oceanic highway -1000 km of roads that connect Brazil with the Pacific Ocean ports; the enlarging of the Callao port in the Peruvian Pacific coast; the hydroelectric power plants that are constructed as well as those in project, etc.

The CONLUTAS and its ELAC under the leadership of the PSTU/LIT –with their miserable muteness- are covering up the business deals of the Brazilian bourgeoisie –junior partners of the imperialist mo-nopolies settled in the MERCOSUR/MERCOSUL, of the French Total in the first place- which have their tentacles firmly engaged in Peru, as well as in Ecuador and Bolivia. This yellow bureaucracy with all their forces is preventing the Brazilian proletariat from going to the streets to fight to help their class brothers and sisters that have revolted in Amazonia, on the other side of the common border, against the same monopolies that enslave the Brazilian proletarians for the sake of making them pay for the crisis created by imperialism

These Trotskyist renegades that usurp from many decades ago the flags of the Fourth international, are who prevent the exploited in the great urban working class concentrations in Sao Paulo, Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, etc., from taking in their hands their internationalist tasks and launch their war cry: Expropriate without compensation and under workers control Petrobras, the construction companies, the Gerdau, and all the companies that are sacking Peru, Brazil, etc.! Set up Assemblies in all the workers, land-less peasants and combative students’ organizations to break their subordination to Lula, PT, CUT and to pronounce immediately about the Peru events and the internationalist tasks for the Brazilian exploited!

So the CONLUTAS and the ELAC –that have not even promoted any solidarity strike with the fighting masses that were massacred by the lackey Peruvian government, though they lead hundreds of workers organizations (unions, factory committees, movements, grass-roots working class organizations, etc.) in the continent- do not play on the side of the struggles of the Peruvian workers and peasants; on the contrary, they are an additional obstacle that prevents the re-opening of revolution in South America, and take special care to impede the reopening of the Bolivian revolution.

The CONLUTAS and the ELAC, in the hands of PSTU/LIT are covering the shoulders to the slave-owing Brazilian bourgeoisie and the monopolies that have their hands soaked in the blood of the Peruvian exploited; because there were the Brazilian bosses and their imperialist chiefs who financed from Brasilia the massacre perpetrated in Bagua by murderous lackey Alan Garcia; now, from their Folha de Sao Paulo – they commend not to be too vocal “Brazil for the moment must not pronounce on the crisis in Peru, but the situation is being accompanied by the international advisers of the Planalto (= Brasilia) (Folha de Sao Paulo, Fávia Marreiro, June 11, 2009)

The Morenoites, taking advantage of all the weight of the organizations they control and their political influence of them, are building a new fence around the struggles of the exploited Peruvian masses –in the same way they did with the Bolivian revolution- helping the Bolivarian leaderships to defeat the struggle of the Peruvian proletarians and peasants against imperialism and its Peruvian and Brazilian lackeys and keep their power in their hands.

Zimbabwe: The revolution betrayed - drawing the lessons

2009-07-03T16:48:00.000-07:00

The mistakes made by the International Socialist Organization-Zimbabwe (ISOZ) can be traced back to the reformist politics of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) of Britain. The SWP and the trend of the International Socialists (IS) all distort Trotsky’s position on entrism into a Labour Party. This semi-permanent entrism into not only Labour parties but also bourgeois nationalist parties, has at its centre the watering down of the revolutionary programme, with the resultant opportunist politics. The opportunist politics of the ISOZ in Zimbabwe has played a major role, if not the major role, in the betrayal of the revolution in Zimbabwe. We place the responsibility for the betrayal at the feet of the British SWP and the IS trend, as at all times the ISOZ looked to them for political leadership and guidance.

On the so-called dual nature of reformism

The SWP justify their entry into capitalist reformist parties by the following: “We in the IS Tendency understand that reformism is a contradictory formation that both expresses and contains working class struggle. Relating to it means knowing how to work with and against people to our right- with them when they want to fight against the bosses and the regime, against them when they hold the struggle back.”(letter from Alex Callinicos to ISOZ, responding to a request for advice on how and when the split with of ISOZ with the MDC (Movement for Democratic Change) should take place : May-June 2002 Socialist Worker-Zimbabwe).

But, working together with reformists in a united front and entering a capitalist reformist party are 2 completely different things. A United Front is a temporary front for a specific purpose in which all the participants maintain their separate identity and discipline, while we ‘strike together’ against a common enemy. We can break from it at any time. To enter a capitalist reformist party means subjecting yourself to the discipline and programme of capitalism. This creates illusions in such a party and undermines the fundamental principle of working class independence.

Such entrism is thus generally permitted into a Labour/workers’ party only when such party is in the process of formation before its programme is fully established; it is also normally of short duration as the clash of programmes (revolutionary versus reformist) would lead to a split; it is also possible in the case of a reformist labour party in the process of formation, that the revolutionary group wins the day, resulting in a mass revolutionary party. The MDC was never a labour/workers’ party as from the beginning it had capitalist representatives. It had been initiated and funded by imperialism from the beginning.

It is not a question of being ‘with the reformists when they fight the bosses and the regime’, but a question of exposing at all times in the eyes of the working class that the reformists cannot be depended upon to wage a fight against the bosses and the regime to its end.

In fact at times of revolutionary upsurge of the masses, the capitalists class are forced to put reformist leaderships forward to head off or side track the masses from the revolutionary path. This is the central reason why the capitalist class needs a Popular Front at a time that its traditional capitalist parties have been discredited in the eyes of the masses. Thus the question of maintaining working class independence at all times, and especially not forming part of Popular Fronts, is so crucial. How else will the masses see the importance of independent working class action, if false hope is placed on reformists to act against ‘the bosses and the regime’ and in this case, of putting hope of reformists in a capitalist party to act against ‘the bosses and the regime’.

The masses also need to learn about the capitalist nature of Popular Fronts. Popular Fronts are in essence reformist capitalist parties that base themselves on support from the trade unions, either directly forming part of them (through ex-trade union leaders forming part of their leadership and/or in alliance with the current leadership of the trade unions). The masses need to learn about the nature of the middle class and about the middle class nature of the leadership of the MDC, Zanu-PF and other pro-capitalist parties. To support the reformists when they appear to act against the bosses and their regime is to help contain the masses.

In the heat of the fire of the 1917 Russian revolution, when the threat of counter-revolutionary military coup by General Kornilov against the interim government led by Kerensky, was raised, the Bolsheviks led the fight to put down Kornilov. The Bolsheviks used the opportunity to openly arm the masses, in other words, to advance their own programme, not to ease for one second any criticism of the Kerensky government that they had; they correctly analysed the class nature of Kerensky, that he and the Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, were not consistent fighters against Kornilov and were, behind the scenes and sometimes openly, cutting deals with the counter-revolution (Trotsky: History of the Russian Revolution see Chapters on Kornilov insurrection and Bourgeoisie measures strength with the Democracy).

The SWP would have supported Kerensky, by even joining his party, against Kornilov, as they have supported a vote for Zuma in the April South Africa elections (just because of the promise of free education). Bolsheviks support the masses against Kornilov and for the struggle for free education while warning the masses about the Kerensky’s and Zuma’s of the world. The SWP supports Tshivangerai against Mugabe, instead of the masses against the Zimbabwe state, instead of at the same time exposing the middle class nature of Tshivangerai. The SWP policy of duality of the reformists acts as a containment, a brake on the revolution of the working class. It is not for nothing that Trotsky said that the experience of entrism into the British labour party had yielded more negatives than any gains.

Watering down of the programme

The entrism supported by the SWP, is not only based on watering down of the revolutionary programme under the guise of being close to the masses, but leads directly to opportunism and tailing the consciousness of the masses: In 2002 Callinicos asks the ISOZ: “How much has changed since you joined the MDC? Crucially, are the most advanced workers and activists in the process of breaking from it?” The ISOZ in their letter to the MDC (8 April 2009) point out that the MDC Bridge programme was in fact a structural adjustment programme of the IMF, yet Callinicos, having seen this letter, still asks: ‘How much has really changed?’ Thus for the SWP, the programme of the MDC does not matter; all that really matters is where the so-called advanced workers are. The ISOZ points out that scope for criticism in the MDC has all but vanished and all the SWP is concerned about is that the fact that the ISOZ has a parliamentarian in the name of the MDC, makes the timing of the withdrawal ‘critical’.

The SWP sees it as ‘odd’ for the ISOZ to depart even though the MDC has adopted the programme of the IMF! Trotsky in his 1932 discussions on the Labour Party question in America was clear: We cannot stand before the masses with 2 banners, one cheaper ticket and a first class ticket. At all times we have to have one banner and one programme. The SWP has no problem for the ISOZ members to be associated with the IMF programme and at the same time with a ‘revolutionary’ programme. The ISOZ, under the guidance of the SWP presented a second class ticket (a watered-down programme) and a third class ticket (the capitalist programme of the MDC) to the masses.

But the political mistakes do not start in 2002 when the ISOZ, to their credit, initiated a break from the MDC. They start in 1999 when the MDC was formed.

The revolution starts in Zimbabwe; SWP betrays

The 1980 transfer of power to Zanu-PF meant that Mugabe became the favoured agent for imperialism in Zimbabwe. Although minor aspects of the economy were nationalized, the bulk remained in the hands of imperialism. The 1980’s were characterized by heroic fights by the world working class but these ended in defeats of the working class by Thatcherism and Reaganism; on local soil the uprising of the peasants for land in Matabeleland was brutally put down in 1983-4 resulting in the death of about 20 000 peasants and their families. The protection of the rule of imperialism-capitalism was perpetrated by the armed forces of the Zanu-PF and supported by North Korean troops. The support of US imperialism for the massacres was also implied by the fact that they gave open military support to Mugabe right up to 2001.

The stagnation of the world capitalist economy resulted in imperialism-capitalism creating various mechanisms to shift their crisis onto the working classes of the world; structural adjustment programmes were forced onto the Soviet bloc of countries as they were in Africa and elsewhere; the cutbacks on social expenses contributed to the uprisings of the working class in the Soviet bloc countries which resulted in the restoration of capitalism there although the Stalinist world apparatus was shattered- a new market for imperialist exploitation was opened.

Even this was not enough to bring imperialism out of their crisis. Everywhere the cutbacks on social expenses and privatization of the means of production were being resisted by the working class. In Africa country by country was forced to adopt structural adjustment programmes, and here too resistance by the working class limited the plans of imperialism. In Zambia the resistance of the masses was so great that imperialism created the MMD (Movement for Multi-Party Democracy) led by former trade union general secretary, Chiluba, to head off the uprising and direct it into parliamentary channels.

In Zimbabwe the Structural Adjustment programme was formally adopted in 1991, although cutbacks on social expenses has started before this. The cutbacks on social expenditure went hand in hand with the collapse of the local agriculture as self-sufficiency in food production was replaced by single crop commodity-for-export production. The imperialists forced the creation of new markets for their processed food and other products on the bones of the peasantry, the workers and the unemployed. From 2002 to 2007 the food monopolies exported US$ 400 million in ‘aid’ to Zimbabwe, on the back of the deliberate collapse of local agriculture.

The old bureaucracy (aligned to the Zanu-PF) in the ZCTU (Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions) were overthrown in 1988 when the stagnation of the economy had already taken serious proportions. In 1994 there was a general strike against the effects of structural adjustment; by August 1996 revolt from the masses burst into open rebellion; a form of workers’ councils, labour forums, became widespread and these meetings of rank and file worker delegates called and ran the strikes over the head of the trade union bureaucracy.

The open revolt of the Zimbabwean working class at the same time of world economic crisis in 1997 posed an international danger for imperialism- they had to head off the revolt by any means necessary. The danger was that this revolt may spread to South Africa and any other part of the world. The new trade union bureaucrats placed themselves at the head of the strike wave and turned it into a wave of 5 day stayaways instead of 5 day factory occupations, thus actively discouraging factory seizures. The trade unions offered no solution, while the working class demanded a united fight against the state and their system.

In the absence of a deep tradition of a Communist Party, in the context of the restoration of capitalism in the East bloc countries and with the ISOZ being only a handful of activists, the formation of a Labour Party was placed on the agenda.

The ISOZ correctly, under these circumstances, called for the formation of a workers’ party and attempted to provide a left pole around which the working class could rally. The WIVL condemned the MDC as a reactionary organization, created by imperialism to head off the revolution. While this was true, WIVL’s call should have been linked with the call for a workers’ party and this critique (of the MDC) taken into movement leading up to the formation of the MDC as a party. The centre of this critique should have been to break the working class from the capitalist party, the MDC, and to call for an independent labour/workers’ party. In this sense that the WIVL was not for the ISOZ to call for a labour party within the labour forums and making propaganda for this (counter-posing the workers’ party to the MDC) among the base of workers discussions that were debating the ‘people’s convention’ (the fore-runner of the MDC), our position was sectarian.

The ISOZ entered the MDC, creating illusions that it was a workers’ party when in fact it was a capitalist party. To its credit when the MDC had adopted the economic programme of the IMF, the ISOZ initiated a split from it in 2002. The ISOZ leaders also acknowledged that the MDC had already isolated them as far back as 2001. Thus even in this split from the MDC, the ISOZ were tailing developments. The MDC is not a United Front but a Popular front as it had capitalist representatives in them from the beginning (such as Eddie Cross of the Zimbabwe Chamber of Industries). Despite the failure of the WIVL to call for a workers’ party in Zimbabwe at that time, that the SWP directed the ISOZ to not to pose certain critical transitional demands, to not openly warn the masses of the treacherous nature of Tshivagerai and to stay join and stay in the MDC and build the Popular Front, means that WIVL was to the left of both SWP and ISOZ. While the WIVL position was sectarian initially, the SWP position was opportunist through and through (‘Entrism requires patience’ wrote Callinicos, as he argued in 2002 for the ISOZ to remain even longer in the MDC).

After 2 failed attempts to build reformist parties in Zimbabwe, imperialism finally realized they needed the support of the trade union bureaucracy as they had in the case of Zambia. In order to head off the revolt, imperialism funded the calling of a people’s convention in 1998-9, leading to the MDC (Movement for Democratic Change) to be formed in September 1999. The British Tories funded the formation of the MDC while the imperialist Frederich Ebert Foundation funded the formation of the NCA (National Constitutional Assembly) and actively promoted Tshivangerai as its leader. The NCA was a major player in the calling of the ‘People’s Convention’, and thus in the formation of the MDC. The SWP failed to warn the working class of the counter-revolutionary aims of those who were leading the setting up of the MDC, instead they merely referred to it then as an ‘enigma’ (mystery). They failed to direct the ISOZ to expose this from the very beginning. Clearly, at this stage, the SWP gave support to Tshivagerai, instead of supporting the working class and warning them about him.

Further, no call was made to set up soviets or workers’ councils as the main basis to unite the struggles and to make attempts to win over the army. The call for soviets would have created a basis to counter-pose this workers’ assembly to the ‘people’s’ assembly being led by the capitalists.

Further, the ISOZ programme at the initial stages of the formation of the MDC, before its programme and structure had been finalized, was defective in a number of ways:

1. There was no call for the expulsion of all capitalist representatives from the ‘People’s Convention’ and thus from any efforts to form a worker’s party; this fight would have helped to expose the true capitalist nature of the MDC and facilitated the development of a workers’ party in opposition to it - a successful battle on this front would have meant the setting up of a labour party- not a guarantee of a revolutionary party, but the first step to take independent political organization of the working class forward; in the absence of even raising this demand, the SWP, through the ISOZ created, if not supported the illusion that the MDC was a labour party and not a Popular Front;

2. There was no call for the formation of soviets or the transformation of the labour forums into soviets;

3. There was no call for the formation of a workers’ militia (which Trotsky in the 1938 discussions on the Labour party emphasized as an essential part of a set of transitional demands to be presented by Fourth International groups entering labour parties);

4. There was no demand for an end to unemployment and a sliding scale of hours;

5. there was no call for a workers’ and peasants government, ie a workers’ government which has the support of the poor peasants;

6. while there was a call for nationalization – this was not linked to expropriation of imperialist assets without compensation, under workers control of production.

In short the programme of the ISOZ was a left bourgeois programme, a minimum programme. This shortcoming is to be blamed on the SWP and the IS tendency, who have access to all the writings of Trotsky and Lenin, and should have given direction to the ISOZ.

Trotsky warned in 1938 that the formation of a labour party shows that the class conflict is sharpening and that the capitalist class would prepare a fascist option if necessary. He went further to warn that the programme that we present should be transitional and not a minimum programme. Trotsky said in the 1938 discussions on the labour party: “we also have the possibility of spreading the slogans of our transitional program and see the reaction of the masses. We will see what slogans should be selected, what slogans abandoned, but if we give up our slogans before the experience, before seeing the reaction of the masses, then we can never advance.”

Further he said: “These demands are transitory because they lead from the capitalist society to the proletarian revolution, a consequence insofar as they become the demands of the masses as the proletarian government. We can’t stop only with the day-to-day demands of the proletariat. We must give to the most backward workers some concrete slogan that corresponds to their needs and that leads dialectically to the conquest of power.”

Thus the posing of a minimum programme by the SWP for the entry of ISOZ into the MDC, not only disarmed the Zimbawean working class but also the ISOZ itself. This meant that the ISOZ presented 2 reformist programmes to the working class, the ultra-cheap MDC ticket and the 2nd class ISOZ one. This resulted in confusion in the minds of the working class. If a transitional programme had been presented by the ISOZ in the beginning stages of the formation of the MDC to help expose it, this would have drawn the class line between the ISOZ and the MDC. This might have led to a quicker expulsion from the discussions of the ranks of the People’s Convention but at least the working class would have seen the revolutionary programme that the ISOZ stood for and the masses would know which door to come knocking on when the analysis of the ISOZ became reality. But a more positive outcome could have developed, namely that the ISOZ could have grown as a revolutionary pole for the creation of a labour party as opposed to the MDC, with a possible development into a mass revolutionary party- this would have placed the ISOZ in a world historic leading role in the struggle for Socialism.

Of course, analysis is always easier with hindsight but the importance of this analysis is to draw the lessons for the world proletariat so as to clarify our tactics and strategies for the present and future.

The degeneration of the ISOZ

In the March 2000 elections, the ISOZ put up a candidate (Gwisai) in one of the working class neighbourhoods, Highfield, in Harare. He had been scheduled to stand in central Harare where there were capitalist factories in the constituency. Due to pressure from the capitalist elements the ISOZ then shifted the candidacy to Highfield. With an approach of forming soviets and a workers’ militia, and considering the militant mood among the masses at the time, they should have contested the central Harare constituency. But even in the Highfield constituency, no attempts were made to form workers’ councils or even the beginnings of a workers’ militia. This was part of the ongoing opportunist adaptation by the ISOZ (under guidance of the SWP) to the capitalist order.

From 2000 up until the present date, the fascist crackdown against the working class by capitalism imperialism, through Mugabe, has intensified. While the selected land invasions by Mugabe’s rich peasant base took place, his troops stood guard over commercial farms, factories, shops and mines owned by imperialism. The response of the National Co-ordinating Committee of the ISOZ to the fascist crackdown was to place faith in the church: “we could start with prayers at designated local churches followed by marches and protests from the churches led by the pastors and leadership of the movement” (NCC statement 11.06.05, Harare).

In the run-up to the June 2008 presidential elections a pre-revolutionary situation existed in Zimbabwe, the masses had voted earlier in the year, despite huge intimidation by Mugabe’s fascist gangs, for the MDC; at a point one of the military heads of Zanu-PF fled to South Africa citing that 75% of the armed forces were against Mugabe; when the masses started to turn even against Tshivagerai, who did nothing to mobilize the masses to arm themselves in self defence, the ISOZ was still mobilizing support for the MDC: “we are demanding a constitution that enshrines basic socio-economic rights and labour rights and ensures their enforceability centrally through a constitutionally guaranteed budgetary system as illustrated by the Venezuelan constitution.” Whereas the ISOZ initially opposed a government of national unity they now called for “ speedy finalization of the current ongoing talks for a government of national unity”. (Fortune Rera ISOZ NCC 20 Nov 2008- letter to WIVL).

On the 23rd Sept 2008 Gwisai presented his analysis of the current situation: “we are cognizant that in the short term the possibility of massive mass action is slim…..we welcome the position taken by the ZCTU and NCA for a continued demand of a genuine people driven constitution and the holding of free and fair elections thereafter……it is imperative that there be the urgent regroupment in a united front of the radical, anti-neo-liberal and left forces, including organized labour. We are hoping the coming Zimbabwe Social Forum in October provides a further platform for the remobilization of radical forces….a united front struggle ……immediately means….a new people’s driven constitution…”

Although the ISOZ has now split into 2 fractions around Rera and Gwisai respectively, the above positions show that their position in essence the same: namely promoting faith in a bourgeois constituent assembly, instead of exposing at every step of the way that such processes, irrespective if they are worker driven, would not result in the demands of the masses being met. While the masses were in the streets and soldiers even left their barracks for the streets in support of the masses, neither fraction of ISOZ made any attempt at calling for workers councils and workers’ militia. But then how could the ISOZ do this while they were still ‘patiently’ implementing the SWP position of support for the MDC, although supposedly ‘critically’! Yet another example of the SWP marching with the reformists instead of with the masses.

The ISOZ and SWP support Chavez, who is cracking down on the Venezuelan working class and safeguarding capitalism there. They support the World Social Forum whose main aim is to divert the working class masses from revolution against capitalism.

Was it sheer coincidence that the wave of so-called xenophobic violence, against Zimbabweans and other black Africans, was swept up in South Africa at the same time that there was a pre-revolutionary situation in Zimbabwe? Did the imperialists utilize the nationalist sentiments in the petty bourgeois layers of the ANC and the desperation of the lumpen proletariat, to their advantage by creating fascistic gangs to destabilise the Zimbabwean masses and to divert attention of the rising masses away from the taking of power?

The mass attacks against black foreigners in South Africa took place in May 2008, weeks before the June Presidential elections in Zimbabwe. At the time there were over 1 million Zimbabwean refugees in South Africa (by far the largest group of refugees). The capitalist media fanned the flames of violence by openly showing front page pictures of a foreign worker burning while the police were laughing and doing nothing. This handed a blank cheque to the fascist gangs to opportunistically act and sweep many workers along with them.

The aim of the fascistic violence against black African refugees was 3-fold: Firstly to destabilize the Zimbabwean working class from launching a mass revolutionary uprising against the imperialist-backed Zimbabwean state; secondly, such an uprising could have had serious spill-over into South Africa, one of the key bastions of imperialism in Africa- the masses protests against the state and capital in South Africa could have intensified and opened the road to mass uprising in South Africa; thirdly, it could have provided a beacon to the rest of the working class in the world in the current global attacks by capitalism-imperialism.

The massive devaluation of the Zim dollar since 2002 was not due to ‘farm invasions’ but were a deliberate ploy by imperialism to starve the Zimbabwean working class, to break its spirit of resistance. The masses may be tired but the events of 2008 show that the Zimbabwean masses can never be written off, the masses will rise again. The dollarisation of the Zimbabwean economy is another mechanism to shift the burden of the crisis of capitalism onto the masses in Zimbabwe. It was a vicious attempt by imperialism to break the fighting spirit of the Zimbabwean masses. This comes at a time when the value of the US dollar is less than the Zimbabwean dollar in real terms but the violence of world imperialism imposes an artificial value to the US dollar- one of the chief means of super-exploiting the masses of the world and a means to extract surplus value from the workers of the world.

The way forward

The first step for the members of ISOZ is to break decisively with the opportunist politics of the SWP and IS tendency and to make a public self-criticism available to the Zimbabwean working class. If this means breaking from the ISOZ or refounding it or forming a new revolutionary working class formation, it is not for us to prescribe to you.

Secondly, we invite you and the heroic Zimbabwean working class to join in discussions with the WIVL and the FLT (Leninist Trotskyist Fraction) to form an International Leninist Trotskyist Fraction as part of the process of co-ordinating the fight against capitalism imperialism from here onwards.

Thirdly, a programme of transitional demands needs to be developed for Zimbabwe for the current situation and we invite you to give the lead in developing such proposals. It is this programme that should be counter-posed to the Constitutional referendum, not calling for a no or yes vote for questions that may be manipulated to give no choice to the working class in any case. The cornerstone of such a programme has been confirmed by the negative experience of the MDC, namely that to achieve the full democratic demands, can only be realized through the working class taking power in Zimbabwe, through the application of the permanent revolution. Such a programme can be the only way that an independent revolutionary working class party can develop in Zimbabwe, as part of the rebuilding/refounding a revolutionary International; we believe this to be the Fourth International. Shinga Mushandi Shinga! Qina Msebenzi Qina!

Workers International Vanguard League - South Africa. 24.05.09

References:
1. Leon Trotsky, 1932, On the Labour Party Question in America.
2. Leon Trotsky, 1938, On the Labour Party Question in the United States- 3 discussions in Mexico City with James P. Cannon, Vincent R. Dunne and Max Shachtman.
3. National Co-ordinating Committee ISO, 8 April 2002. ISO Objections to MDC (May-June 2002 Socialist Worker).
4. Alex Callinicos, undated, Entrism needs patience (May-June 2002 Socialist Worker).
5. Oscar Simbi,undated, Revolutionaries can’t remain in a hegemonic right wing popular front (May-June 2002 Socialist Worker).
6. NCC ISOZ, 2002, Build an alternative to MDC & Zanu PF neo-liberalism.
7. NCC ISOZ, undated, Tax the rich to fund the poor- Support an MDC Manifesto that Fights Hunger and Poverty (Socialist Worker)
8. NCC ISOZ, undated, Build an MDC that fights poverty and hunger- Vote Munyaradzi Gwisai-Secretary Legal Affairs (in MDC Executive) (Socialist Worker).
9. Rob Davies & Jorn Rattso, February 2000, Zimbabwe: Economic Adjustment, income distribution and trade liberalization, Working paper no 21 (CEPA).
10. History of Zimbabwe- Wikipedia
11. US Department of State- Bureau of African Affairs, Nov 2008, Background Note: Zimbabwe.
12. Patrick Bond, 30 January 2002, Zimbabwe: On the brink of change, or of a coup? A Znet Commentary.
13. Patrick Bond, 2002, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and the Power Politics of Bourgeois Democracy. Monthly Review, Vol 54, no 1.
14. Mahmood Mamdani, 4 Dec 2008, Lessons Of Zimbabwe. London Review of Books.
15. Fortune Rera ISOZ NCC, 20 Nov 2008, Letter to WIVL: Our position, Relationship with the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and Plan of Action.
16. NCC ISOZ, 11 June 2005, Operation Povo Yaramba: ‘Great Stir in the air’ …We must continue the struggle!
17. Munyaradzi Gwisai ISO, 23 September 2008, Zimbabwe elites deal does not resolve underlying crisis…Aluta Continua! An ISO update on the situation in the country no 5.
18. WIVL, 2 July 2008, MDC diverts the working class in Zimbabwe from seizing power.
19. Munyaradzi Gwisai ISO, 22 July 2008, letter to WIVL re: MDC diverts the revolution in Zimbabwe.
20. Communist Workers Group, 2000, Permanent Revolution in Zimbabwe. http://www.geocities.com/communistworker/cs33.html#Permanent%20Revolution%20in
21. Leo Zeilig, 10 April 2007, Zimbabwe- From Liberation to Dictatorship (Socialist Worker archive- issue 2047)
22. Weizman Hamilton, March 2002, Clinging to power in Zimbabwe (Socialism Today, issue 63, 2002)
23. Munyaradzi Gwisai interview, 2000, Zimbabwe- A Worker’s Voice (Socialist Review interview by Peter Alexander, Sept 2000, issue 244)
24. Norm Dixon, August 2001, Zimbabwe: Socialists confront the Mugabe Dictatorship (Green Left Weekly 22 August 2001).
25. Herman van der Wee, 1986, Prosperity and Upheaval- The World Economy 1945-1980.
26. Leo Zeilig, June 2008, Zimbabwe: imperialism, hypocrisy and fake nationalism (International Socialism issue 119, 24 June 2008)
27. Leo Zeilig, Spring 2002, Crisis in Zimbabwe (International Socialism issue 94 …“MDC is an enigma” ) http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj94/zeilig.htm
28. Workers International News, dec 2001, Article on Trotsky on the Labour party (with commentary on the MDC) http://www.workersinternational.org.za/nov-dec01.htm#p

Declaration on Peru: International Leninist-Trotskyist Fraction

2009-07-03T01:28:00.000-07:00

Los obreros y campesinos peruanos lo gritamos en las calles, en las barricadas y los piquetes: “¡La sangre de-rramada jamás será olvidada!”

NUEVAMENTE SE PONE DE PIE EL PERU OBRERO Y CAMPESINO

ADELANTE NO DETENGAMOS LOS GOLPES CONTRA EL MALDITO REGIMEN FUJIMORISTA DEL TLC

Por un congreso nacional de delegados de base de la CGTP, las organizaciones campesinas y organiza-ciones de explotados de los pueblos amazónicos, la juventud combativa!
Unamos todos los piquetes en un comité nacional de autodefensa!
Para organizar ya la HUELGA GENERAL REVOLUCIONARIA!
Que no deje ladrillo en pie del régimen fujimorista del TLC y eche abajo a García!

¡Hay que poner en pie un Frente de Lucha para centralizar nuestras fuerzas e imponer el camino a la huelga general revolucionaria!

¡Abajo el gobierno masacrador de Alan García y el régimen fujimorista!
¡Libertad incondicional y cese de persecución a los luchadores amazónicos!
¡Abajo la dirección stalinista de la CGTP, el PC y Patria Roja!
¡Abajo la farsa de la revolución “bolivariana”!

¡Por un gobierno provisional revolucionario de obreros y campesinos pobres que rompa con el imperia-lismo, les de la tierra a los campesinos y expropie a los expropiadores!

La clase obrera latinoamericana y mundial: ¡De pie junto a la clase obrera y los explotados del Perú sub-levado! ¡Adelante con el inicio de la revolución peruana!

La mañana del 5 de junio, la policía se dispuso a desalojar la carretera Belaúnde en el tramo llamado “Curva del diablo”, a unos kilómetros de Bagua, departamento de Amazonas. La lucha de los compañeros amazónicos ya entraba a su tercer mes. La pelea se centraba en la derogación del paquete de leyes que entregan la selva a las trasnacionales, leyes que son parte de la nueva legislación para el TLC con EEUU. El combate de los compañeros campesinos pobres, de etnias amazónicas y colonos, era y es una lucha de clase con un profundo contenido anti-imperialista, con demandas democrático-revolucionarias que ataca al corazón de la política del régimen, el TLC (que ata a la nación oprimida a los dictados del imperialismo estadounidense): la entrega de los recursos de la nación a los imperialistas. Inmediatamente, obtuvo el apoyo de sectores sindicales en los departamentos amazónicos, llevando así paralizaciones exitosas durante casi dos meses. La alianza obrera y campesina se soldó así en las calles, en la lucha. Durante esos meses, abril, mayo y junio, se llegó a la toma de pozos petroleros, golpeando a los intereses de la burguesía peruana y sus socios mayores, los imperialistas yanquis, ingleses, españoles y franceses de la Hunt Oil, Repsol y la TotalFina.

El ataque de la burguesía fue sorpresivo, brutal y alevoso, ya que como dijo días después el dirigente Rocca Au-tukai «La policía nos ganó, porque nosotros ya íbamos a retirarnos ese día antes de las 10 de la mañana, ese era el acuerdo. Estábamos a punto de volver» (reporte de la agencia IPS, 13/6/09).

Llegó un batallón policial con apoyo de tanquetas y dos helicópteros artillados, mientras disponían destacamentos de tiradores a los costados. Precisamente, uno de esos destacamentos de francotiradores al ir a una colina para desde allí a balear a los manifestantes, se encontró detrás de esa colina con un piquete de obreros y campesinos que rápidamente desarmaron a los asesinos y que, con esas armas, defendieron el bloqueo, mostrando el camino más eficaz para la conquista del armamento proletario.

Esa acción heroica y justa no impidió que el resto de francotiradores, junto a helicópteros artillados, asesinara a cerca de un centenar de campesinos, hallándose solo seis, entre ellos dirigentes de los pueblos, lo cual demuestra la acción de francotiradores y la inteligencia policial. Santiago Manuin, dirigente del comité de lucha de Con-dorcanqui, que trató de dialogar con los policías, fue acribillado a quemarropa, como el resto de bloqueadores. Ante la barbarie, los pueblos de Bagua Chica, Bagua Grande y Jaén salieron a las calles. Ocuparon y quemaron locales del Apra y del estado. En Jaén avanzaron sobre la comisaría y los policías huyeron como ratas por los techos. Desde allí los verdugos siguieron acribillando al pueblo explotado. «Sólo se habla de los policías muertos, y de cinco indígenas, pero las cosas no son como se han contado. Son más de cien hermanos muertos» denun-ció Daysi Zapata, presidenta del Aidesep, la organización que agrupa a las organizaciones de etnias amazónicas (El País, Madrid, 14/6/09).

En esos mismos instantes, en la planta 6 de Petroperú, donde permanecían de rehenes una veintena de policías, al saberse la matanza, los luchadores decidieron el “ojo por ojo”.
Esta acción es tomada por todos los burgueses, y sus perros de presa, para llamar a eso “barbarie”. El carnicero Alan García, fue el primero en llamar a los luchadores “bárbaros” y llamar a los policías asesinos ejecutados como “mártires de la democracia”. Ante esto los trotskistas tenemos que declarar que jamás fueron los luchadores del pueblo explotado y la clase obrera quienes inventaron el sistema de toma de rehenes. Para no referirnos sino a la experiencia reciente, en las últimas décadas de luchas de clases, las dictaduras militares y los gobiernos seudo-democráticos no dudaron jamás en detener y encerrar sin pruebas y sin derechos a nuestros dirigentes y luchadores más activos para descabezar nuestras organizaciones de lucha y ponerlas de rodillas. En la guerra sucia de Belaúnde, García y Fujimori, donde cualquier dirigente obrero o campesino era un “terrorista”, se usó de rehenes a las familias, se amenazó con ello, se encerró sin pruebas a dirigentes obreros, o directamente se les asesinó.

No fueron García y Mantilla quienes mataron al dirigente minero Castilla; no fue el Apra que fusiló a los senderistas rendidos en El Frontón!
No fue Fujimori quien masacró a media plana mayor de la CGTP entre 1991 y 1992!

Y no es verdad que en estos años de seudo-democracia, en cada lucha, el gobierno toma rehenes, bajo la cobertura de “detención” por bloquear, por luchar, por reclamar!

En estos años de seudo-democracia, bajo Paniagua, Toledo y García, los “democráticos” ejército y policía asesinaron a mansalva a los mejores hijos del pueblo explotado. Puno, Cusco, Pucallpa, Ancash, Casapalca están regadas de sangre obrera y campesina.

Cómo se atreven los partidos del régimen fujimorista asesino de 1992-93 a llamar a los luchadores que se defienden como “asesinos” y “bárbaros”!
De dónde vienen ahora estos remilgos hipócritas de chacales con el hocico ensangrentado!

¡Basta! La clase obrera y los campesinos peruanos no vamos a permitir que esas pandillas de burgueses y transnacionales que saquean la nación, que mantienen su poder sobre la base de la sangre derramada por los explotados sobre toda la nación, quieran posar de víctimas cuando son los asesinos y masacradores del Perú obrero y campesino. Los socialistas revolucionarios defendemos incondicionalmente el derecho sagrado de las masas explotadas a defenderse del estado burgués asesino; defendemos sin vacilaciones el dere-cho irrestricto de las masas a la rebelión.

Los luchadores de Bagua habían tomado de rehenes a los policías precisamente como una garantía, pues sabían que si el gobierno iba a atacar, no se detendría ante nada. El gobierno decidió declarar la guerra, los explotados no tuvieron alternativa sino hacer el “ojo por ojo”.

Acaso se iba a permitir que los enemigos salieran indemnes luego de que asesinaran a mansalva a ancianos, mujeres y niños!

Acaso los luchadores de la selva no hicieron todos lo posible para evitar el enfrentamiento!

Acaso no se había mantenido durante semanas una lucha pacífica, defensiva, ocupando y bloqueando, pero evitando salir a la ofensiva!

Cómo iban a dejar que una medida defensiva como tomar detenidos a policías para defender las vidas de los pueblos en lucha, terminara como una payasada!

Ante la barbarie, la venganza de los luchadores es justa, sagrada; la defensa de nuestros hermanos de clase está por encima de cualquier ilusión en la “justicia” y el “equilibrio” del estado y del régimen al servicio de los explotadores. Solo los traidores, entrega luchas, como Cesar Lévano, dirigente del PC, desde las columnas del diario bolivariano “La Primera”, pueden hablar de que esto es “inadmisible”. Carmela Sifuentes dirigente de la CGTP, en una reunión de la OIT homenajeó a los policías asesinos que cayeron en el combate. Estos son los mismos traidores que declararon “criminales” a los comuneros de Ilave sublevados en 2004. Estos son los mismos que alabaron al general asesino que se rindió en Moquegua en 2008.

Mientras tanto, los vocingleros stalinistas “radicales” y los seudo-trotskistas, se niegan a defender el derecho de los luchadores a responder a la represión con todos los medios que ellos decidan. “Toda la vida está edificada sobre formas diversas de violencia, sobre la oposición de una violencia a otra y repudiar la violencia libertadora, es sostener la de los opresores que actualmente gobiernan el mundo.” (León Trotsky).

Condenar la violencia de los explotados hacia los explotadores, como lo hacen las direcciones traidoras, los stalinistas, los reformistas de todo tipo, incluidos los renegados del trotskismo, significa de hecho renunciar a la revolución y a la emancipación de los explotados. Esto es el ABC del marxismo al cual han renunciado todos los traidores.

Tras la entrada del ejército a Bagua, y ya militarizada la zona, se declaró un toque de queda permanente para evitar la reunión y manifestación de los trabajadores y los nativos campesinos. Se estableció la censura y se ce-rraron radios locales para evitar que se supiera cómo el ejército estaba deshaciéndose de los cadáveres de nues-tros hermanos asesinados, como denunció en Lima el 6 de junio, el dirigente del Movimiento Estudiantil Indígena a la Coordinadora nacional de radio. Tal como denunció el 11 de junio el Instituto de Defensa Legal, el ejército durante cinco días mantuvo cercada la zona, no permitiendo el accionar ni de la Cruz Roja.

En esos días, el ejér-cito actuó como en una “zona político-militar”, como en los más miserables años de la guerra sucia: se detenían a decenas de luchadores, incluso se les sacaba de los hospitales, y se les mandaba a los cuarteles, siendo some-tidos a torturas por parte de la soldadesca. Se persiguió a los luchadores, quienes tuvieron que esconderse en las espesuras, en poblados alejados, o en las iglesias. Se puso fuera de la ley a Aidesep, la organización dirigente de los pueblos amazónicos, y su máximo dirigente, Alberto Pizango, pasó a la clandestinidad, consiguiendo después asilo político de Nicaragua.

Bajo la mira de los fusiles, los luchadores amazónicos fueron obligados a abandonar Bagua y regresar a sus pueblos en camiones. La policía y la oficialidad del ejército genocida entraron a los refugios persiguiendo a los luchadores, deteniendo a enfermos y heridos, o expulsándolos de Bagua. Intentaron humillarlos, calumniándolos como “bárbaros asesinos”, pero los explotados de Bagua reconocieron a sus hermanos, demostrando, bajo los cañones de las ametralladoras, emocionantes muestras de adhesión: «170 nativos yacen refugiados en un alber-gue de las franciscanas. Muchos están heridos y enfermos. Al interior del albergue, los nativos son revisados de pies a cabeza. La policía les quita sus cosas, los tira al suelo, buscan alguna “evidencia” de sedición... Los que están “limpios” son metidos en un camión, previo registro de la fiscalía y la Defensoría [del pueblo], para retornar a sus hogares.

Conforme van ingresando a los camiones, los nativos reciben dádivas del público. Los aplauden como héroes. “Sigan en la lucha, hermanos”, se escucha. Algunas mujeres con sus hijos en brazos, les regalan bolsas con frutas, galletas y agua para el camino.» (El Comercio, Lima, 13/6/09).

Las ondas expansivas de Bagua se extienden a todo el país.
La burocracia traidora de la CGTP divide a los trabajadores de Lima de los del resto del país para impedir una huelga general revolucionaria que derrote al gobierno e imponga las demandas de los explotados

La respuesta de las masas ante la masacre fue de indignación. Inmediatamente, la burocracia de la CGTP se corrió un poco a la izquierda declarando una “jornada nacional de lucha” el 11 de junio. Ese día fue una demos-tración de fuerza pese al boicot abierto de la burocracia sindical.

Desde el jueves 11 hasta el 23 de mayo en que se firmó un acta con el gobierno, en Andahuaylas hubo un paro total impuesto por los obreros y campesinos. El gobernador –una especie de prefecto, representante del gobierno– estaba oculto en el cuartel de Andahuaylas, mientras los policías permanecían escondidos dentro de la comisaría. El comité de lucha, integrado por los sindicatos y las organizaciones campesinas, fue prácticamente dueño de la ciudad, y constituyó un semi-doble poder local de hecho. El único punto de programa del comité de lucha era la renuncia de García y todo su gabinete.

Los obreros y campesinos de la provincia de Canchis intentaron tomar el aeropuerto de Cusco, y bloquearon la salida de Cusco hacia Puno y a Bolivia. En Cusco, el Consejo Machiguenga del río Urubamba – COMARU y la Federación Agraria Revolucionaria de Cusco -FAR intentaron organizar junto con otras organizaciones un paro indefinido departamental en Cusco; pero la burocracia sindical del PC nuevamente traicionó y se niega a ir junto a los campesinos de Cusco a un paro el 24 de junio.

Una semana antes llegaba a Pichanaki, departamento de Junín, una marcha de campesinos pobres awajún y shipibos, junto a soldados conscriptos licenciados del ejército, rumbo a La Merced, declarando que su objetivo era llegar a Lima. Levantaron la medida cuando el gobierno acordó con los dirigentes de los trabajadores y cam-pesinos pobres amazónicos.

En Lima hay disposición a luchar. El 11 de junio lo demostró de manera contundente: a pesar que la dirección de la CGTP llamó a un paro con el objetivo de descomprimir la lucha obrera y campesina, 20 mil manifestantes, obreros de construcción, maestros y estudiantes ganaron las calles en Lima. La vieja burocracia sindical no pudo evitar que el grueso de la manifestación -los estudiantes y los obreros de la construcción- enfrentaran durante dos horas las bombas lacrimógenas y las cargas de caballería, pugnando por cruzar la barrera que los separaba del parlamento y el palacio de gobierno.

Pese a los acuerdos que firmó el gobierno, desactivando por el momento la lucha en la selva amazónica y en Andahuaylas, las peleas no se detienen. Se ha desatado el odio contra el maldito régimen fujimorista del TLC. Campesinos bloquean la salida de Arequipa a Puno; en la provincia de Azángaro-Puno se inició un paro de 72 horas; gremios de campesinos pobres en Cajamarca, Ancash y Cusco amenazan con salir a pelear si las mineras les quitan su tierra y el agua. Los cocaleros de La Convención, Cusco, exigen un mejor precio a la empresa estatal Enaco por su producción. Los campesinos pobres de la Central Asháninka de Río Ene denuncian la concesión para el proyecto de la Central Hidroeléctrica Paquitzapango que les quitará el agua para sus tierras. Los trabaja-dores del comité de lucha de la provincia de La Oroya, repudian el acta traidora que el 23/6 el burócrata vende-huelgas Luis Castillo firmara con la patronal imperialista. Los sindicatos a nivel nacional exigen la derogatoria de las leyes antilaborales; los portuarios defienden sus puestos de trabajo.

Queda absolutamente claro que sobran condiciones para tirar abajo a Alan García, a su gobierno y para demoler su régimen fujimorista del TLC, con una poderosa huelga general revolucionaria, centralizando los piquetes de autodefensa, tomando el control de las carreteras, atacando la propiedad de las transna-cionales y la burguesía. Si esto no se ha conquistado a la fecha, no es por falta de condiciones ni de predispo-sición de los explotados a luchar: es por la traición de la dirección de la CGTP, el PC y Patria Roja, sostenidos por los renegados del trotskismo que vienen impidiendo el camino a la huelga general revolucionaria para imponer el derrocamiento revolucionario del gobierno y el régimen del TLC.

Los levantamientos obreros y campesinos, las revueltas, y las semi-insurrecciones locales dejan en crisis al régimen fujimorista del TLC

Lo que vimos fue la apertura de la guerra civil: se han roto las relaciones “normales” y “pacíficas” entre las clases, y éstas han ido a un choque directo. Esta guerra civil se desarrolla en las provincias, pero ya amenaza con golpear directamente a la capital, con subir escalones y convertirse en una acción independiente de las masas que abra la revolución peruana. Para desarrollar este camino, la clase obrera y los campesinos pobres deben derrotar la política del PC y Patria Roja que ante la enorme lucha de los explotados, preparan una salida pacífica del gobierno de García y la asunción del milico bolivariano Humala, para impedir una caída revolucionaria del gobierno a manos de las masas.

El 5 de junio en Bagua, departamento de Amazonas, tras semanas de paralización, hubo un intento de hacer una masacre para detener el camino a la insurrección. Los servicios de inteligencia, la Digemin*, ya venían advirtiendo al gobierno –el administrador del régimen oprobioso de entrega y miseria del fujimorismo y el TLC- que se venía un clima de insurrección. Para evitar este panorama, el gobierno lanzó un golpe con la masacre de Bagua, que fue respondido con un contragolpe de la clase obrera y los explotados. Ante el ASESINATO A SANGRE FRIA de campesinos indefensos, el pueblo explotado respondió con una sagrada y justa ira.

El régimen fujimorista del TLC ha intentado parar a sangre y fuego, el proceso de insurrección, y adelantarse al estallido, pero no pudo calcular la respuesta heroica y contundente de las masas. Ante ello, se vio obligado a recular, a derogar “las leyes de la selva” contra las que se rebelaron los campesinos pobres selváticos, para ob-tener de la dirección de la Aidesep el cese de la lucha. Pero como dijo el mismo primer ministro Simons, se trata de “dar un paso atrás para dar dos adelante”. Se trata de entrar al diálogo con los dirigentes de la lucha en la selva y en Andahuaylas y de firmar acuerdos que no se cumplirán. De esta manera, buscan ganar tiempo para recomponer el frente burgués hecho añicos, como lo muestran las acusaciones de “debilidad” que el fujimorismo y los socialcristianos han lanzado contra el gobierno de García y el APRA, al tiempo que Humala y la burguesía nativa “bolivariana” exploran una alianza con el ex presidente Toledo.

Hay un hecho tan claro como el agua: el desprestigio total del gobierno. Un diario imperialista como el Wall Street Journal, dice que el gobierno de García está en “su peor crisis desde que asumió su segundo mandato en julio del 2006” (citado en El Comercio, 8/6/09). Mientras los partidos fujimorista y socialcristiano atacan al gobierno por ser blando y errático, el gobierno aprovechó el respiro que le dan las direcciones traidoras de la CGTP para renovar parcialmente el gabinete, metiendo un representante de la derecha socialcristiana. Pero sin propinarle una derrota contra la clase obrera o desviarla nuevamente, estas medidas parciales no resuelven nada a favor de los explotadores.

El Perú obrero y del campesinado pobre se pone de pie

El saqueo imperialista ha dejado a Perú, es decir a los obreros y campesinos pobres, en la absoluta ruina. El TLC imperialista impuesto por la burguesía cipaya peruana y su régimen fujimorista, significó transformar a Perú en una verdadera maquiladora y fuente de materias primas para las transnacionales.

La bancarrota de la economía mundial capitalista imperialista, con epicentro en los Estados Unidos hoy en rece-sión, ha golpeado duramente a aquellos países de América Latina que están atados con triples cadenas al impe-rialismo yanqui por la imposición de los Tratados de Libre Comercio (TLC), como son México, los países cen-troamericanos, Perú, Chile, Colombia, entre otros.

La crisis no sólo ha hecho caer el precio internacional de las materias primas que estos países exportan central-mente a los Estados Unidos o al mercado del Pacífico –como minerales, petróleo, etc.-, sino que también significa que las transnacionales imperialistas que instalaron sus maquilas en los mismos, hoy cierran plantas, suspenden y despiden trabajadores a mansalva –como lo ha hecho la empresa Doe Run con el complejo metalúrgico de La Oroya en Perú- mientras el imperialismo yanqui redobla al máximo el saqueo de esas naciones, para extraerles hasta la última gota de sangre.

La actual situación en Perú no es sino el punto más avanzado del combate de la clase obrera y los explotados en los países latinoamericanos sometidos por los TLC, contra el redoblado saqueo imperialista y contra las cadenas imperialistas que estrangulan a esas naciones y asfixian a las amplias masas obreras y campesinas.

Hoy, los explotados del Perú se levantan contra los imperialistas yanquis e ingleses de la Barrick, la Doe Run y demás mineras, que ganan millones y millones de dólares superexplotando a un proletariado minero esclavo, con un 70% de trabajadores totalmente en negro, contratados y sin ningún derecho, que mueren como insectos cada día enterrados bajo los socavones o inmolados por las explosiones en minas que no tienen ninguna inversión en infraestructura.

Los salarios obreros están por el piso mientras las ganancias de los capitalistas están por los cielos. Para los explotados no hay sistema de salud ni de educación dignos y la carestía de la vida es un flagelo permanente con-tra las masas.

En el campo, la imposición del TLC significó la absoluta ruina de los campesinos pobres. Las transnacionales del petróleo - los imperialistas chupasangres de la Hunt Oil, la Repsol, la TotalFina-Petrobras-, de la minería, de la industria farmacéutica y los usureros de la banca, con la ayuda de sus socios menores -las patronales regionales “bolivarianas”, que administran migajas del saqueo de las riquezas de la nación-, y la burguesía comercial agraria, buscan quedarse con la absoluta mayoría de las tierras, despojando por miles a los campesinos arruinados y masacrándolos. Mientras dejan a sus familias trabajando la pequeña parcela de tierra que apenas alcanza para una subsistencia miserable, decenas de miles de pequeños campesinos arruinados migran a las ciudades y son utilizados por la burguesía como un enorme ejército industrial de reserva que sobrevive entrando esporádicamente –los que tienen la suerte– al proceso productivo. Mientras, millones quedan condenados a la miseria y des-composición social, a merced de la burguesía que los utiliza para fortalecer sus negocios del narcotráfico, la pros-titución, etc.

En el campo hay entonces un saqueo y una apropiación de tierras descarados por parte de las transnacionales. La imposición del TLC significó un proceso de enorme concentración de tierras en manos de las transnacionales, inclusive liquidando la economía de subsistencia de los campesinos pobres arruinados que mantienen su pequeña parcela de tierra.

Junto a éstos coexiste un proletariado agrícola brutalmente explotado también por las transnacionales y los lati-fundistas en la producción de alimentos. Estos miles de obreros agrícolas han sido abandonados por la dirección de la CGTP que se niega a organizarlos en sus sindicatos, dejándolos a merced de la esclavitud absoluta.

Este es el Perú sometido al dominio imperialista del TLC: saqueo de las transnacionales que exprimen los músculos del proletariado a cambio de miserables salarios, apropiación de la tierra y de los recursos naturales por parte de las petroleras, mineras, etc.; centenares de miles de campesinos arruinados que migran a las ciudades intentando sobrevivir, y los esclavos obreros agrícolas trabajando de sol a sol.

Estas condiciones son las que empujan al proletariado y los campesinos pobres a la rebelión actual. Por ello, en el campo, los obreros agrícolas acaudillan en las revueltas a los campesinos arruinados y se transforman en el nexo para imponer la alianza revolucionaria obrera y campesina. Es que la única fuerza social que puede enfrentar y derrotar a las transnacionales imperialistas, es el proletariado acaudillando al campesino pobre arruinado y expropiado, contra el dominio imperialista, la burguesía nativa entreguista y su estado. Esta es la base social de los combates de masas y son las fuerzas que se pusieron en movimiento y pujan por irrumpir de forma revolucionaria a cada paso.

Por otro lado, el campesino medio -aquel que está ligado por miles de lazos a las transnacionales y explota al obrero agrícola, que manda a sus hijos a estudiar a las universidades intentando ascender socialmente, es decir el pequeñoburgués-, es la base social del humalismo y de organismos de colaboración de clases como son los “frentes regionales”. Es el campesino rico que quiere quedarse con unas migajas del saqueo de las transnaciona-les, y por ello clama por “un reparto equitativo” de las regalías petroleras y de la minería. Este sector intenta transformarse en una burguesía nacional que regatee con el imperialismo el saqueo de la nación. Por ello, desde los gobiernos departamentales, intenta utilizar al campesino arruinado y a las clases medias urbanas para controlar al obrero agrícola y utilizarlo para presionar sobre el gobierno central de García, intentando arrancar una tajada del botín del saqueo de la nación.

Lo cierto es que en Perú, como en todo país semi-colonial o colonial, las dos clases fundamentales que se en-frentan son el proletariado y el imperialismo. De la ruina a la que fueron llevados los campesinos pobres, la abso-luta mayoría del país, solo puede sacarlos el proletariado como caudillo de la nación oprimida, levantando en las calles un programa que dé respuesta al problema de la tierra y de la liberación del yugo imperialista, sellando la alianza revolucionaria obrera y campesina.

Es el proletariado, por su rol en la producción, el que puede expropiar las fábricas para darles tractores y tecno-logías a los campesinos arruinados; es el proletariado el que puede expropiar sin pago a la banca usurera que arruina al campesino pobre, anular todas sus deudas y otorgarle créditos baratos; es el proletariado el que puede imponer el monopolio del comercio exterior y garantizar granjas colectivas de producción bajo fuertes inversiones del estado y tecnificación en todo el campo.

Para imponer este camino, el proletariado debe contar con una dirección revolucionaria a su frente, para garanti-zar la alianza revolucionaria obrera y campesina preparando el camino de la imposición de un gobierno revolu-cionario obrero y campesino.

Para ello, el estado de rebelión actual no debe detenerse; lejos de ello, debe profundizarse y centralizarse para darle un golpe certero al enemigo. La dirección traidora del proletariado enquistada en la CGTP intenta impedir esta perspectiva a cada paso ¡Hay que derrotarla!

Hay que conquistar ya mismo un congreso obrero y del cam-pesinado pobre de base que prepare una gran acción de masas una poderosa huelga general revolucionaria para derrotar al gobierno del asesino García y destruir el régimen fujimorista del TLC, en el camino de imponer: ¡expropiación sin pago y nacionalización bajo control obrero de las transnacionales petroleras y de la minería!

¡Expropiación sin pago de los nuevos latifundistas agro-exportadores, en beneficio de los campesinos pobres! ¡Expropiación sin pago de la banca usurera, y creación de una banca estatal única bajo control de los trabajadores que imponga la condonación inmediata de todas las deudas de los campesinos arruinados y les de crédito barato! ¡Granjas colectivas con fuertes inversiones del Estado! ¡Abajo el TLC y todos los tratados políticos y económicos que atan a la nación al imperialismo!

El Perú profundo, el Perú obrero y campesino comienza a ponerse de pie: ¡que no se detenga!

La burguesía bolivariana, sostenida en la dirección stalinista de la CGTP, sale a contener a las masas.

¡Abajo la farsa de la “revolución bolivariana!
¡Hay que imponer la ruptura de las organizaciones obreras con la burguesía y avanzar en el camino de la revolución socialista!

La guerra civil abierta en las provincias dejó en crisis al poder burgués. Inmediatamente, los socios del partido de gobierno, junto a la oposición humalista, pidieron la renuncia de todo el gabinete. La burguesía entraba en pánico: era el momento de aprovechar para levantar a todo el Perú obrero y campesino y dar el golpe definitivo. Pero nuevamente, la burocracia sindical de la CGTP, el PC y Patria Roja, junto a toda la izquierda reformista, salió en defensa del régimen, y postergó la respuesta para la siguiente semana, poniendo obstáculos a la centralización de las fuerzas.

Hoy, la burocracia de la CGTP llama a un paro nacional recién para el 8 de julio, es decir, un mes después de la masacre de nuestros hermanos de clase en Bagua. Quieren convencer a los explotados de que sus problemas pueden resolverse cambiando tal o cual ministro pero dejando intacto al gobierno, a las instituciones corruptas y esclavistas, sin destruir a la casta de oficiales asesina del ejército fujimorista, sin expulsar a las trans-nacionales, sin romper con el imperialismo, sin imponer el poder de los explotados.

Así, la burocracia y las direcciones reformistas intentan ganar tiempo para impedir que estalle ese verdadero volcán en erupción que son los obreros y campesinos peruanos, y que su lava revolucionaria destruya la ciuda-dela del poder de los capitalistas y todas sus instituciones.
Es que los voceros y dirigentes de la “revolución bolivariana”, ven claramente que si empieza la revolución pe-ruana y logra su primer triunfo barriendo al régimen fujimorista del TLC, se pondrían en peligro los pactos contra-rrevolucionarios establecidos entre los gobiernos bolivarianos -socios menores de las transnacionales y el impe-rialismo francés y sostenidos por el Foro Social Mundial- con los gobiernos agentes directos del imperialismo yanqui en Latinoamérica. Estos pactos son los que vimos actuar en el abrazo de Chávez con Uribe sobre la san-gre derramada de la resistencia colombiana masacrada; los vimos actuar en Venezuela para expropiar la lucha antiimperialista de las masas; los vimos en Oaxaca-México para aislar la comuna obrera y campesina e impedir que la lucha de los explotados latinoamericanos sublevara a lo más explotado del proletariado norteamericano en lucha contra Bush y sus guerras de ocupación.

Son los pactos contrarrevolucionarios que subordinaron al proletariado norteamericano al carnicero Obama; es la política impulsada por Fidel Castro, el Foro Social Mundial y los Kirchner, con la que se abortó el combate revolu-cionario que las masas iniciaran en 2001 en Argentina. Es el pacto contrarrevolucionario que hoy actúa en Bolivia donde Evo Morales pacta con el fascismo para derrotar la revolución proletaria iniciada en 2003-2005. Con pactos contrarrevolucionarios se prepara también un golpe certero contra el proletariado internacional y el conjunto de los explotados: la consumación de la restauración capitalista en Cuba, de la mano de los Castro y de Obama.

El combate revolucionario de las masas en el Perú hoy, pone en cuestión todo este despliegue contrarrevolucio-nario. Por ello, las direcciones traidoras del proletariado internacional concentran todas sus fuerzas en impedir el inicio de la revolución peruana, que significaría la reapertura del proceso revolucionario en Latinoamérica, que ha sido expropiado por la “revolución bolivariana”.

No es casual entonces que ahora Humala diga que se reúne con Toledo –ese supuesto “indigenista” que firmó el TLC y se dedicó a masacrar obreros y campesinos- y que no descarta aliarse con él. Se está preparando para abortar la lucha del proletariado en las ciudades y de los obreros agrícolas y los campesinos pobres arruinados, sometiendo a las masas explotadas a la burguesía mediante la trampa del “indigenismo”. Así se prepara Humala para utilizar la sangre obrera y campesina derramada en los combates, al servicio de los negocios de la pandilla burguesa bolivariana agente de las transnacionales francesas que se disputan la rapiña con el TLC yanqui.

Para esto, el milico Humala tiene que apoyarse en la dirección de la CGTP para impedir la irrupción revolucionaria del proletariado en Lima que sería el punto de partida para la huelga general revolucionaria que derroque al gobierno de Alan García y su régimen fujimorista. ¡Humala es un enemigo de la revolución obrera y campesina!

Por su parte, después de haber enviado una carta al encuentro Cumbre de los pueblos realizado en Puno en mayo pasado, llamando a luchar por una “segunda independencia”, hoy Evo Morales, desde su posición como uno de los jefes de la “revolución bolivariana” y representante de los pactos contrarrevolucionarios en el continente, dice que «lo que pasó en Perú, es el genocidio del TLC, la privatización, la entrega de las selvas amazónicas de Suramérica a las trasnacionales» (Agencia EFE, 13/6/09). ¡Cínico! Morales, que expropió la revolución boliviana, que pacta con el fascismo de la Media Luna, que atacó ferozmente tres veces a los mineros de Huanuni, habla de “genocidio” en Perú para ocultar que él mismo tiene las manos manchadas de sangre minera, obrera y campesina boliviana. El que se puso de rodillas ante el imperialismo yanqui, pidiéndole a Obama “restablecer relaciones históricas”, es decir, que a Morales y su fracción burguesa no se le deje por fuera de los negocios a cambio de mantener el pacto contrarrevolucionario MAS-fascismo, habla de “segunda independencia”… en Perú. ¡Mil veces cínico!

Los internacionalistas que firmamos esta declaración alertamos a las masas de que la “revolución bolivariana”, con Humala y sus sirvientes de la burocracia sindical de la CGTP y la izquierda reformista, se preparan para im-pedir un derrocamiento revolucionario del gobierno y para pactar una transición “pacífica” conquistando un go-bierno bolivariano sobre la base de la sangre obrera y campesina.

Esto no es de extrañar: no sólo vemos a los bolivarianos pactar con el fascismo en Bolivia, o con Uribe de Co-lombia, el gendarme del imperialismo, sino que también los vemos, desde los gobiernos, administrando la aplica-ción del CAFTA imperialista (el tratado de libre comercio de América Central), como los sandinistas en Nicaragua y el FMLN en El Salvador.

¡Abajo la revolución “bolivariana”! ¡Adelante con la revolución obrera y campesina! ¡No a un nuevo gobierno pro-visional de la burguesía, como el de Paniagua en 2000 que salvó al régimen fujimorista y preparó el gobierno de Toledo y la imposición del TLC! ¡Por un gobierno provisional revolucionario de las organizaciones de democracia directa y autodefensa de los obreros y campesinos en lucha!

La tarea inmediata de los explotados: ¡Huelga general revolucionaria YA!
Para conquistar el pan, el trabajo, la tierra para los campesinos pobres, expulsar a las transnacionales, romper con el TLC y derrotar al gobierno asesino de García y su régimen fujimorista!

La alianza obrera y campesina conquistada en las calles, en la lucha contra la policía y el ejército, se basa ante todo en el programa que conquistaron las masas: acabar con la explotación de las transnacionales y con sus sirvientes, el régimen fujimorista y el gobierno de García que hoy lo encabeza.

El campesino pobre, instintivamente, gira hacia el único aliado que tiene: la clase trabajadora de las ciudades. De allí las marchas a las ciudades, la puesta en pie de comités de lucha conjuntos que garantizaron la toma de pozos petroleros, atacando los intereses imperialistas durante dos meses. Esto ha significado también la ruptura de las relaciones pacíficas entre las clases: de un lado han quedado los imperialistas y sus socios menores, los bur-gueses peruanos; y del otro, los trabajadores y los explotados del campo. El choque, la guerra civil, se hizo inevi-table.

Tras dos meses de lucha, Hoy la Aidesep ha levantado el paro amazónico, tras firmar con el gobierno un acuerdo que no es más que un papel. ¡Cuántas veces el gobierno ha firmado actas! El régimen, sabiéndose débil para escarmentar a la clase obrera y al pueblo explotado, busca ganar tiempo, dividiendo las luchas, desactivándolas mediante demagogia barata. Y mientras la burocracia sindical de la CGTP y la izquierda reformista, apoyándose en los campesinos medios, les hagan aceptar las actas de la traición a los trabajadores y al pueblo explotado, el gobierno aprista y el régimen fujimorista del TLC ganan tiempo para recomponer el frente burgués.

Así, el gobierno se blinda, llamando a la oficialidad genocida a tomar el control de los departamentos donde los obreros y explotados luchan o amenazan con volver a hacerlo. Ha militarizado Cusco, Apurímac y otros departa-mentos. La oficialidad genocida, los vladi-generales, se muestran como los tutores del régimen fujimorista del TLC. Mientras, el gobierno ahonda sus características bonapartistas, se apoya en las fuerzas armadas; y amenaza a la oposición burguesa, desde los socialcristianos hasta los humalistas, con disolver el congreso si se censura al primer ministro Simon.

La labor de los dirigentes de la CGTP se ha mostrado de cuerpo entero: dejaron aislados durante semanas a los campesinos y trabajadores de la selva, para que fueran masacrados por la policía y el ejército. El programa revo-lucionario debe girar en torno a cómo hacer que las revueltas, semi-insurrecciones locales, huelgas duras por sector, movilizaciones masivas con ataques a la propiedad privada, esos levantamientos medio sordos, medio ciegos y medio mudos, se centralicen y se transformen en una poderosa acción de masas que tire abajo al go-bierno, al régimen fujimorista del TLC y destruya al estado burgués asesino.

¡Huelga general revolucionaria YA para conquistar el pan, el trabajo, la tierra para los campesinos pobres, expulsar a las transnacionales, romper con el TLC y derrotar al gobierno de García y su régimen fujimo-rista!

¡Huelga general revolucionaria YA, para que no se detenga la lucha de los explotados, para conquistar la justicia para los mártires asesinados por el estado burgués!

Desde los comité de lucha, las asambleas de base de los sindicatos, desde los piquetes de los obreros agrícolas y las movilizaciones, hay que imponer la ruptura de la CGTP con la burguesía, recuperándola al servicio de la lucha de los trabajadores, derrotando a la burocracia sindical e imponiendo la Huelga Ge-neral Revolucionaria hasta conquistar todas nuestras demandas.

En ese camino, impulsando y organizando una acción que unifique todas nuestras fuerzas y demandas, los ex-plotados debemos organizar un poderoso CONGRESO OBRERO DE DELEGADOS DE BASE DE TODAS LAS FÁBRICAS, ESTABLECIMIENTOS, Y MINAS DE TODO PERÚ; CON DELEGADOS REPRESENTATI-VOS DE TRABAJADORES AGRÍCOLAS, EL VERDADERO Y MÁS FIRME ALIADO DE LA CLASE OBRERA URBANA EN EL CAMPO. UN CONGRESO CON DELEGADOS DE LOS CAMPESINOS POBRES, QUE APENAS SUBSISTEN CON SU PRODUCCIÓN EN PEQUEÑAS PARCELAS DE TIERRAS ARRUINADAS.

Se impone conquistar un parlamento obrero y campesino representante de la amplia mayoría del pueblo peruano, que centralice los comités de autodefensa y piquetes en un solo COMITÉ NACIONAL DE AUTODEFENSA OBRERA Y CAMPESINA. Ante el peligro de ser masacrados que corren hoy los luchadores de Andahuaylas y Cusco, debemos realizar ese congreso nacional ya allí, en el sur del país.

Hay que poner en pie un doble poder, es decir el poder de los explotados, enfrentado al poder de las transnacionales y su gobierno, para avanzar en el camino de derrotar al gobierno y su régimen fujimoris-ta, imponer la ruptura con el imperialismo, expropiar a las transnacionales y darle la tierra a los campesi-nos, tarea que solo puede garantizar un gobierno provisional revolucionario obrero y campesino.

¡Hay que poner en pie la revolución obrera y campesina! ¡Que las acciones de las masas no se detengan! ¡Hay que imponer la Huelga General Revolucionaria! ¡Que se centralicen los explotados en un congreso obrero y campesino nacional para triunfar! ¡Abajo García! ¡Abajo el régimen fujimorista blindado! ¡Fuera las transnaciona-les!

¡Abajo la dirección colaboracionista de la CGTP!
¡Abajo todas las burocracias sindicales!
¡Viva la democracia obrera!

La dirección stalinista de la CGTP y las distintas variantes del reformismo ex trotskista y castrista, tienen todas sus fuerzas jugadas a impedir esta salida, manteniendo dividido el combate de masas de las provincias de la lucha del proletariado y la juventud de Lima, la capital. Su política es subordinar a las masas a Humala y los bolivarianos. ¡Abajo la dirección de la CGTP! ¡Abajo todas las burocracias sindicales!

Ha quedado claro que la espontaneidad de las masas peruanas ha sido mil veces más perspicaz y eficaz que la cobardía política de todos los estados mayores reformistas juntos que, lejos de llamar a alguna de estas acciones, se han espantado con ellas y socorren a la burguesía y a sus instituciones. En su espontaneidad, las masas han demostrado un enorme grado de conciencia: acciones independientes, ataque a la propiedad de la burguesía, comités de autodefensa, contra el gobierno y el TLC, contra el saqueo de las transnacionales, por la tierra para los campesinos pobres. Este es el punto de partida y el camino que hay que desarrollar para derrotar en las calles al enemigo de clase y a sus sirvientes.

Sin embargo, esta enorme espontaneidad de las masas tiene un gran límite. Si no se centraliza el combate de los explotados conquistando su propio organismo nacional de democracia directa, no surgirá un régimen de doble poder que abra el camino al triunfo de la revolución; y entonces la burguesía, sostenida por las direcciones traido-ras del proletariado, reorganizará sus fuerzas y derrotará la lucha de las masas.

Se impone conquistar la democracia obrera. Ello significa la conquista de los comités de fábrica, empresa y de todos los establecimientos de Perú. Con el método de la asamblea, debemos imponer los comités de fábrica, de minas y de establecimientos y organizar a las fuerzas de los trabajadores rurales con un delegado cada 50, para poner en pie y organizar a la absoluta mayoría de la clase obrera peruana, que autodeterminada y con el método de la democracia obrera podrá poner a su frente a sus más destacados y combativos dirigentes. La lucha por la democracia obrera es inseparable de la lucha por derrotar a las burocracias sindicales y por conquistar la inde-pendencia de los sindicatos y de todas las organizaciones obreras del estado y de todas las fuerzas políticas de la burguesía.

Por un programa revolucionario para imponer la alianza obrera y de los campesinos pobres en las calles

Para poder dirigir la alianza obrera y campesina en las calles, los obreros tenemos que unir nuestras filas, garan-tizando la conquista de nuestras reivindicaciones a costa de los explotadores. La miseria ya llega a niveles inau-ditos. El país ya esta oficialmente en recesión. Los capitalistas ya ni siquiera nos pueden dar la oportunidad de ganar un pedazo de pan.

Hay que unir las filas obreras bajo un solo grito: ¡Aumento general de salarios! ¡Salario mínimo, vital y móvil al nivel de la canasta familiar! ¡Trabajo digno para todos! ¡Escala móvil de salarios y horas de trabajo para que todas las manos disponibles se pongan a producir! ¡Todos los trabajadores a planta permanente! ¡Hay que poner en pie los sindicatos de los obreros agrícolas brutalmente explotados por las transnacio-nales!

Frente a la miseria del campo, donde los campesinos pobres son exprimidos y expropiados tanto por la burguesía intermediaria comercial, como por los nuevos latifundistas agro-exportadores, por los imperialistas tanto a través de los usureros de la banca como de las transnacionales petroleras y de la minería: ¡Hay que expropiar sin pago y bajo control obrero a esos chupasangre y nacionalizar la propiedad de la tierra, para darle a los explotados del campo tierra productiva, créditos baratos y tecnología! ¡Por granjas colectivas con fuerte inversión del Estado bajo control de los trabajadores rurales! ¡Anulación de todas las deudas de los cam-pesinos pobres con la banca usurera! ¡Expropiación sin pago de los bancos, y creación de una banca estatal única para garantizarles créditos, maquinarias y fertilizantes baratos a los campesinos pobres!

Hay que expropiar sin pago a la maldita burguesía peruana y nacionalizar esas fábricas y empresas bajo control obrero. Hay que expropiar a los Romero, los Benavides, los Chlimper; así también a los patrones “bolivarianos”: los de Conveagro, chupasangres de los campesinos pobres, y los patrones regionales que participan del saqueo de nuestros recursos por parte de los imperialistas, cobrándose el cánon minero o petrolero.

Hay que expropiar sin pago toda empresa que cierre o despida. Por eso: ¡expropiación sin pago y bajo control obrero de la rama textil, que ya lleva decenas de miles de despidos! ¡Recuperemos La Oroya de las garras de la imperialista Doe Run, que va a botar a todos sus trabajadores! ¡Por comités de fabrica, mina y empresa que garanticen la producción tomándose las empresas!

No hay dinero, dicen los burgueses, no hay dinero para aumento y para mantener los puestos de trabajo, para solucionar las demandas campesinas, para dar salud y educación a nuestros hijos. ¡MENTIRA! ¡Sí hay plata, y se la está llevando los imperialistas, de la mano de sus socios menores: los burgueses peruanos!

Hay que expulsar a las transnacionales imperialistas, expropiándolas sin pago y bajo control obrero, hay que ex-propiar Yanacocha, Barrick, Hunt Oil, Doe Run, Repsol, TotalFina-Petrobras. Así liberaremos a la nación del yugo imperialista.

El único gobierno que puede garantizar íntegra y efectivamente estas demandas de las masas explotadas es un Gobierno Obrero y de los Campesinos Pobres basado en la autoorganización y armamento del proleta-riado. Este es el único gobierno que puede garantizar la ruptura con el imperialismo y la revolución agraria.

Una pequeñísima minoría de pandillas de burgueses, banqueros y gerentes y testaferros de las transnacionales imperialistas ejercen una feroz dictadura contra la amplia mayoría de los explotados de la nación peruana. Sólo la dictadura del proletariado, apoyada en los campesinos pobres podrá conquistar el gobierno más democrático, representativo de la amplia mayoría de la nación peruana, y dar solución a las demandas mas acuciantes de los explotados, y que, a no dudarlo, se convertiría en un bastión de la revolución socialista de América Latina y a nivel mundial. Todas las fuerzas de los trotskistas y obreros revolucionarios del mundo están en que comience, se profundice y triunfe la revolución obrera y socialista en Perú.

Contra la represión del estado burgués asesino y su régimen fujimorista:
¡Hay que generalizar y centralizar los piquetes de autodefensa y conquistar la milicia obrera y campesina!

Para esa enorme, heroica y necesaria tarea, necesitamos nuestra propia autodefensa obrera y campesina nacio-nal. Nuestros enemigos, los imperialistas yanquis, españoles, franceses y sus socia menor, la patronal peruana, no se retirarán sin luchar del campo de batalla. Bagua lo acaba de demostrar, para quien se niegue a reconocerlo.

El enemigo se afila los dientes; llama a sus cuerpos auxiliares, los “búfalos” (matones de la vieja burocracia sindi-cal aprista), haciéndolos marchar el 16 de junio ante la sede de la CGTP en Lima, bajo la atenta dirección del asesino Mantilla, les da la legalidad para actuar con la “ley de arresto ciudadano”. Los obreros y campesinos po-bres amamos la paz, pero para liberarnos, para dejar de ser esclavos, nos vemos obligados a usar la violencia y responder al hierro con el acero.

“Usar la violencia –dirán los dirigentes traidores de siempre– nos dejará mal ante el pueblo”. Ante esa mentira, basta comparar: ¿cuántas marchas nacionales pacíficas de construcción ha habido, y cuanto apoyo han conse-guido del pueblo, frente a la lucha de los trabajadores y campesinos pobres amazónicos? ¿Acaso los “salvajes” y “violentos” no se ganaron la simpatía y el apoyo del pueblo explotado y hasta de amplias capas medias acomo-dadas, como lo demuestra el que decenas de miles de universitarios de las privadas hayan salido a marchar el 11 de junio en la capital, y en otras ciudades, como Trujillo, Chiclayo? Esto demuestra que “ir por todo”, usar métodos revolucionarios, como la toma de las empresas imperialistas, los piquetes de autodefensa, es la vía del triunfo, y la forma de ganar el apoyo y el respeto de los explotados y de las clases medias, esas mismas clases medias que cada febrero ven indiferentes los plantones de la federación de construcción ante la OIT o ante el ministerio de trabajo.

Pero los traidores no se callan. Desde “La Primera”, ese pasquín subsidiado por petrodólares, César Lévano llama a la burocracia sindical y los “bolivarianos” a aplastar a los luchadores; llama a la “guardia obrera” del PC a apalear a los “infiltrados” que hicieron frente a los batallones de la policía en Lima el 11 de junio. Una razón más para echar abajo a la vieja burocracia sindical stalinista: envés de organizar la venganza por la sangre derramada, planean masacrar a los luchadores. No podemos luchar si existe la amenaza de que los sirvientes de la patronal, esta quintacolumna, nos dispare por la espalda.

Garantizar nuestra vida y de nuestras familias se ha vuelto más que necesario. Cualquier lucha se verá ante los fusiles del ejército, o las cachiporras y las pistolas de los “búfalos”, y atacada por los matones de la burocracia sindical. ¡Ante la represión salvaje y contra los perros de presa de la patronal y el imperialismo: unamos todos los piquetes en un solo Comité Nacional de Autodefensa Obrera y campesina!

Los búfalos no son algo grave; podremos derrotarlos fácilmente si tenemos decisión. El problema es el ejército. Las fuerzas armadas burguesas son el sostén fundamental del estado de los patrones. Hay payasos seudo-revolucionarios (como “Lucha Marxista”-“Tribuna clasista”) que creen que se podrán disolver por decreto**. Hay reformistas como Mario Huamán, el ML19 o el PST que dicen que debemos aliarnos a la policía y pedir por sus “derechos”. No los escuchen, compañeros: estos organizadores de derrotas mienten y envenenan la conciencia de los trabajadores. El camino hacia el apoyo del soldado, ya ha sido señalado por el estratega de la insurrección de Octubre y del Ejército Rojo, León Trotsky, en su libro “Historia de la revolución rusa”:
« ...los soldados, en su gran mayoría, se siente tanto más capaces de envainar sus bayonetas y de ponerse con ellas al lado del pueblo, cuanto más convencidos están de que los sublevados lo son efectivamente, de que no se trata de un simple simulacro, después del cual habrán de volver al cuartel y responder de los hechos, de que es efectivamente la lucha en que se juega el todo por el todo, de que el pueblo puede triunfar si se unen a él y de que su triunfo no sólo garantizará la impunidad, sino que mejorará la situación de todos. En otros términos, los revolucionarios sólo pueden provocar el cambio de moral de los soldados en el caso de que estén realmente dis-puestos a conseguir el triunfo a cualquier precio, e incluso al precio de su sangre. Pero esta decisión suprema no puede ni quiere realizarse sin armas... La lucha en las calles se inició con el desarme de los odiados “faraones” [policías], cuyos revólveres pasaban a las manos de los revolucionarios. En sí mismo, el revólver es un arma débil, casi de juguete, contra los fusiles, las ametralladoras y los cañones del enemigo. Pero, ¿estaban éstos realmente en sus manos? Para comprobarlo, los obreros exigían armas. Es ésta una cuestión que se resuelve en el terreno psicológico. Pero tampoco en las insurrecciones los procesos psicológicos son fácilmente separables de los materiales. El camino que conduce al fusil del soldado pasa por el revólver arrebatado al “faraón”.»

El congreso obrero y campesino debe centralizar los ya existentes piquetes de autodefensa en un Comité obrero y campesino de autodefensa nacional, contra la casta de oficiales fujimorista asesina del pueblo que comanda al ejército peruano. Para la huelga general revolucionaria, debemos contar con organismos que nos defien-dan y puedan demostrar a los soldados rasos, nuestros hermanos de clase bajo armas, que estamos dis-puestos a ir hasta el final. Solo así el soldado dejará de lado las dudas, buscará el apoyo en sus hermanos de clase y se unirá en la lucha contra el régimen entreguista y hambreador. Hay que llamar a poner en pie comités de soldados rasos que desconozcan a la casta de oficiales y envíen sus delegados bajo armas al congre-so obrero y campesino ¡Hay que destruir la casta de oficiales asesina del ejercito fujimorista! ¡Por comités de soldados, obreros y campesinos!

En estos años han “cambiado” los gobiernos, pero lo central del régimen fujimorista no se ha tocado. El circo del juicio a Fujimori no fue más que la cobertura de la impunidad de la que gozan el régimen asesino y sus persone-ros. Las fuerzas represivas antiobreras actúan con total impunidad, la justicia es una oficina de las transnacionales y el parlamento burgués una cueva de levantamanos al servicio del imperialismo.

Ante cada lucha de los ex-plotados, el régimen responde con balas y cárcel ¡Libertad a los más de 8000 presos políticos torturados en las cárceles del régimen fujimorista! Para conseguir justicia para nuestros mártires obreros, jóvenes y campesinos pobres ¡Tribunales obreros y populares que castiguen a los asesinos de la clase obrera y el campesinado pobre! ¡Disolución de todo el aparato represivo estatal! ¡Disolución de la justicia patronal y sus jueces pagados por las transnacionales!

¡Por un nuevo reagrupamiento revolucionario de la vanguardia para centralizar nuestras fuerzas e impo-ner el camino a la huelga general revolucionaria!

Se vuelve urgente entonces una acción de masas superior, centralizada, que golpee como un solo puño por las demandas de los explotados. Para imponer este camino que es el que necesitan los explotados, hay que centra-lizar ya mismo los comités de lucha existentes, que nacieron al calor de la lucha y que encabezan a lo más com-bativo del proletariado y los campesinos pobres. Hay que poner en pie un Frente de Lucha para garantizar el ca-mino a la huelga general revolucionaria para conquistar el pan, el salario, el trabajo, la tierra, expulsar a las transnacionales y derrotar al gobierno y su régimen fujimorista.

Por ello, el Comité de Lucha de Andahuaylas que centraliza a los obreros y campesinos pobres de la zona que se encuentran en pie de guerra, las organizaciones de lucha de Bagua y toda la Amazonia, el comité de lucha conjunto de metalúrgicos y pueblo explotado de La Oroya, los sindicatos y comités de lucha combativos de Moquegua, tienen toda la autoridad para llamar ya mismo a asambleas de base de todos los sindicatos y organizaciones de obreros y campesinos pobres en lucha, para conformar un Frente de Lucha que impida una nueva traición, y que centralice las fuerzas de los explotados para marchar sobre Lima ya e imponer el camino a la huelga general para conquistar todas nuestras demandas. La convoca-toria a paro nacional el 8 de julio tiene que ser aprovechada para organizar ya la huelga general revolu-cionaria hasta que caigan el gobierno de García y el régimen fujimorista del TLC.

La izquierda que se dice de la clase obrera y socialista debe romper ya mismo su subordinación a la burguesía de Humala y a la burocracia sindical y poner sus fuerzas al servicio de conquistar un Frente de Lucha ya. Ellos hablan en sus periódicos y declaraciones sobre que “la tarea urgente es que las luchas obreras se unifiquen con la de los indígenas de la Amazonía para que se vaya García”. Pero plantean la unidad para subordinar nuestras organizaciones de lucha a la burguesía “bolivariana”.

Así, corrientes como El Militante propone la formación de un Comando de Lucha junto al Nacionalismo, es decir, junto a la burguesía nativa bolivariana que intenta utilizar la sangre obrera y campesina al servicio de sus negocios como agentes del imperialismo francés. En el mismo sentido, la LIT reivindica la formación del Frente de Defensa de la Vida y la Soberanía, un nuevo organismo de colaboración de clases que encabeza el Partido Nacionalista junto a la burguesía regional “indígena”. Mientras, corrientes como el PTS argentino adornan la misma política de la LIT exigiendo una coordinación amplia y democrática de los sindicatos de base, las organizaciones indígenas y campesinas… y los frentes regionales encabezados por la burguesía regional y por Humala.

Son la izquierda del Foro Social Mundial y de su política de colaboración de clases. Todos ellos, rompiendo con el programa trotskista y con la teoría de la revolución permanente, adoptan abiertamente la “teoría maoísta” sobre la “contradicción principal”, aquella que dice que por sobre el antagonismo entre la burguesía y el proletariado, está el antagonismo o contradicción “imperialismo versus nación”, por lo cual la burguesía que posa de nacionalista en países oprimidos como Perú puede jugar un papel progresivo, y a ella se subordinan. A eso se deben sus llamados a la formación de “frentes antigubernamentales”, “anti-García” “anti-neoliberal”: su política responde a subordinar al proletariado a la burguesía bolivariana de Humala.

¡Basta! Muy cara le costó ya esta política de subordinación a la burguesía al proletariado peruano en el ascenso revolucionario que protagonizó a fines de la década del ‘70. En aquellos años de enorme ascenso obrero y cam-pesino, los trabajadores y campesinos, girando a la izquierda, iban al FOCEP (Frente Obrero, Campesino, Estu-diantil y Popular) dirigido por las corrientes que se reivindicaban del trotskismo, con Hugo Blanco a la cabeza. Pero esas corrientes pusieron toda su fuerza y la autoridad ganada ante los trabajadores, al servicio del régimen burgués, negándose a desarrollar los frentes de defensa –verdaderos embriones de soviet que cubrían todo el país- y poniéndose, por el contrario, a los pies de la Asamblea Constituyente. Estas corrientes, lejos de utilizar la Asamblea Constituyente como tribuna para extender y centralizar los organismos de democracia directa de las masas y las milicias obreras, subordinaron a ella todo el movimiento revolucionario de los explotados. Esta política impidió que el proletariado fuera el caudillo de la alianza obrera y campesina. Esa alianza terminó por romperse, lo que permitió la descomposición absoluta de las condiciones de la revolución.

Hoy, los renegados del trotskismo vuelven nuevamente tras aquellos pasos. ¡Rompan su subordinación a la bur-guesía bolivariana!

Llamamos a las organizaciones de izquierda que se reclaman de la clase obrera y del pueblo explotado, al Movi-miento Cumbre de los Pueblos, que influyen en las organizaciones amazónicas, al PST-LIT que tiene influencia en Loreto, a la Liga Socialista de Cusco que influye en los obreros de construcción y en los universitarios cuzqueños, al Partido de la Clase Trabajadora que influye en las bases mineras y en la regional Lambayeque de la CGTP, al FUR que influencia a los universitarios de Lima, a la amplia tendencia Huaynalaya que es oposición en el Sutep y tiene presencia en las universidades, a que rompan su subordinación a la burguesía bolivariana, y se pongan a trabajar por centralizar y unificar de manera democrática nuestras organizaciones de lucha constituyendo un Frente de Lucha que ponga todas sus fuerzas al servicio de derrotar a la burocracia sindical de la CGTP y conquistar un congreso obrero y campesino de base.

Ya que critican a la dirección burocrática de la CGTP, ya que plantean la unidad de las masas, los llamamos a pasar de las palabras a los hechos. De no ser así, quedará demostrado ante el proletariado y los campesinos pobres que esta izquierda, lejos de poner su enorme peso al servicio de derrotar a la burocracia de la CGTP, se juega a ser una nueva burocracia de izquierda de recambio, si es necesario con Hugo Blanco a la cabeza, para sostener a la burguesía bolivariana de Humala junto al stalinismo que ayer sostuvo a Toledo para que firmara el TLC y que hoy sostiene a García contra la furia de los explotados.

Los internacionalistas no confiamos un ápice en las direcciones de los partidos de los renegados del trotskismo. Ellos vienen sosteniendo la farsa de la revolución bolivariana que tan cara le ha costado y le cuesta al proletariado internacional. Sin embargo, sí confiamos en los honestos obreros y jóvenes de base que componen esos partidos, confiamos en sus fuerzas y ganas de luchar por el triunfo de la revolución proletaria. Por eso, a ellos los llamamos a conquistar un nuevo reagrupamiento revolucionario de la vanguardia al servicio de derrotar a la dirección traidora de la CGTP, de poner de pie el doble poder obrero y campesino, de avanzar a huelga general revolucionaria para derrocar al gobierno y el régimen abriendo el camino de la segunda revolución peruana.

La lucha por poner en pie una dirección revolucionaria para el proletariado peruano se pone al rojo vivo

La crisis mundial ha mostrado que los reformistas, desde los socialdemócratas y stalinistas, hasta los seudotrots-kistas, son usados por sus amos -los que pagan sus privilegios, las dietas sindicales y parlamentarias- para con-tener la lucha de las masas que pugnan por responder con la revolución socialista al ataque de los imperialistas.

Es por ello que a la acostumbrada labor de la burocracia sindical del PC, Patria Roja y PS desde la cúpula de la CGTP, de sostener al gobierno y al régimen fujimorista, se suma la puesta en pie de nuevos partidos reformistas, que vienen a ser un nuevo obstáculo para la centralización de los trabajadores y el pueblo en organismos de de-mocracia directa y autodefensa, para la lucha por el poder. Estos, el FUR, el Movimiento Cumbre de los pueblos, el Partido de la Clase Trabajadora, no hacen sino reproducir el esquema de “partidos anticapitalistas” al servicio del régimen que ya se hizo en América Latina, y hoy en los países imperialistas se repite, con el NPA de Besan-cenot en Francia y demás engendros de la llamada “izquierda anticapitalista europea”.

Colocándose a la izquierda de los viejos PC y PS, no hacen sino cubrirles el flanco izquierdo, para evitar hasta el último momento que las masas echen abajo a esas direcciones traidoras, y prepararse para ser la nueva dirección reformista. En la for-mación de estos partidos juegan un rol principalísimo los renegados del trotskismo que se han convertido en cas-tristas-stalinistas, rompiendo con el programa y los principios de la Cuarta Internacional de 1938. Basta señalar que los lambertistas, que dirigen al Partido de la Clase Trabajadora en Perú, apoyaron y mostraron como un con-secuente revolucionario a Luis Castillo, secretario general de la federación minera y metalúrgica, el vendehuelgas que ayer traicionó a los mineros de Marcona y hoy a los de Doe Run-La Oroya.

Contra la política de los renegados del trotskismo que tan cara pagaran el proletariado y el campesinado pobre a fines de los ‘70; en momentos en que estos renegados maquinan, junto a la burguesía bolivariana, una trampa similar a la de aquellos años , preparándose para un recambio burgués del gobierno –e inclusive, para la trampa de una nueva asamblea constituyente- para estrangular la lucha de los explotados, la pelea de los trotskistas internacionalistas por dotar a la clase obrera de Perú de la dirección revolucionaria que se merece y necesita para vencer, se pone al rojo vivo.

Nuestras fuerzas son débiles aún, pero el programa por el que peleamos es fuerte: agrupándonos en torno a las lecciones de los acontecimientos más agudos de la lucha de clases mundial - de la revolución boliviana, de la pelea de Grecia, del combate del proletariado de las colonias francesas, de Palestina, etc.- estamos conquistando un programa que nos permite y nos permitirá establecer con los luchadores revolucionarios de todo el país los lazos necesarios para construir con ellos un partido revolucionario e internacionalista de combate.

Esa camada de revolucionarios ya existe. Años de lucha que combinaba la lucha económica y la lucha política, las demandas mínimas y la pelea contra el régimen, dan a esta nueva generación de luchadores una conciencia de clase, una ferocidad y odio contra los explotadores necesarios para llevar adelante a las masas. Por ello, los burgueses señalan, asustados, que esta camada nueva de revolucionarios no creen en la solución de «sus de-mandas vía los procedimientos establecidos por el estado... no se construyen rutinas para la negociación, no respetan los cánones de la política institucionalizada» (La República, Lima, 14/6/09). Lo que necesita esta gene-ración joven de revolucionarios, es una bandera sin mancha en torno a la cual agruparse.

Los trotskistas de la FLTI ponemos nuestras modestas fuerzas al servicio de agrupar a los obreros y jóvenes re-volucionarios de Perú, lo cual no podrá sin hacer una lucha a brazo partido contra los viejos PC y contra los nue-vos “partidos anticapitalistas”. Sabemos que, como dijimos, nuestras fuerzas aún son las de un pequeño núcleo de revolucionarios internacionalistas. Esas fuerzas hoy, están al servicio de que se pongan en pie en cada rincón del país, se extiendan y se centralicen a nivel nacional, los organismos de democracia directa, autodeterminación y autodefensa, de la clase obrera y los explotados en lucha. Sabemos que en esos organismos, bajo los ojos vigilantes de las masas, a cada momento se ponen a prueba los dirigentes y los programas, y rápidamente quedan al desnudo los traidores y reformistas, los lobos con piel de cordero que se preparan para estrangular la lucha de las masas.

Por el contrario, en el seno de esos organismos, aún un pequeño núcleo de revolucionarios puede ver rápidamente multiplicada sus fuerzas porque en ellos, las masas pueden comprender la justeza de nuestro programa y nuestra estrategia por su propia experiencia y deshacerse de las direcciones traidoras. La condición para ello es que los revolucionarios les marquemos a cada paso quiénes son sus aliados y quiénes sus enemigos, y no cesemos ni por un minuto nuestro combate implacable contra todos los enemigos del proletariado, abiertos o encubiertos.

Pero la puesta en pie de un partido revolucionario, trotskista e internacionalista del proletariado peruano no es una tarea “nacional”, como no lo es el accionar de las direcciones traidoras y reformistas que, por el contrario, se centralizan milimétricamente a nivel continental, desde Alaska hasta Tierra del Fuego, y del Atlántico al Pacífico, en las reuniones del Foro Social Mundial, en sus encuentros y “cumbres”, al amparo de Chávez, las burguesías “bolivarianas” y la burocracia castrista restauracionista cubana.

Una dirección revolucionaria, trotskista e internacionalista de la clase obrera peruana, sólo podrá nacer como parte inseparable del combate por volver a poner en pie un estado mayor revolucionario que agrupe a los obreros conscientes y revolucionarios del mundo, tanto en los países atrasados como en las potencias imperialistas, para derrotar a los estados mayores de la contrarrevolución, bajo el legado y el programa de la Cuarta Internacional de 1938. Tenemos que agrupar a nivel internacional a revolucionarios que demuestren la misma ferocidad, audacia y centralidad con la que actúan los estados mayores contrarrevolucionarios y sus sirvientes pagados en el movi-miento obrero: los reformistas stalinistas, socialdemócratas y ex trotskistas.

En los próximos días, se realizará un congreso internacionalista común de los trotskistas de la WIVL sudafricana, el HRS de EEUU, camaradas de Sao Paulo que provienen de una ruptura con el PTS, el Núcleo Obrero Revolu-cionario de Trujillo-Perú, el Núcleo Revolucionario Internacionalista (NRI) de Argentina, junto a los grupos de Bolivia, Argentina, Brasil, Nueva Zelanda, Chile y Perú que hoy integran la FLT. Dicho congreso discutirá y resolverá sobre la puesta en pie de la Fracción Leninista Trotskista Internacional. Este es un pequeño pero importante hito en el camino de los trotskistas por poner en pie un estado mayor revolucionario, un centro internacional como fueran la Tercera Internacional de Lenin o la Cuarta Internacional de 1938. ¡Llamamos a los luchadores revolu-cionarios honestos a unirnos!

25 de junio de 2009

NOTAS

* La Digemin, la dirección general del ministerio del interior, «es considerada el organismo de inteligencia más poderoso del país. Recibe apoyo de la embajada de Estados Unidos y genera inteligencia estratégica en todos los campos» (Revista Caretas, Lima, 11/6/09). Esto se da bajo el gobierno aprista, la vuelta a los servicios de inteligencia de Agustín Mantilla, la mano derecha de García y que organizó escuadrones de la muerte en el go-bierno aprista de 1985-1990.

** «Por la eliminación del ejército y la policía burgueses mediante la toma del poder.» (“Tribuna clasista” febrero 2009). ¡O sea, la toma del poder se hace de manera pacífica, sin destruir la resistencia armada de la burguesía!

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RECUADRO/ANEXO 1: El significado de la lucha del proletariado peruano para la clase obrera latinoame-ricana

La crisis económica mundial del capital financiero imperialista ha demostrado con absoluta claridad ante los ojos de los explotados la bancarrota absoluta del sistema capitalista. Frente al ataque de las burguesías, tanto impe-rialistas como de los países coloniales y semi-coloniales, que busca hacerles pagar la crisis a los trabajadores, los explotados y los pueblos oprimidos del mundo, el proletariado ha respondido el ataque con enormes combates revolucionarios en zonas del planeta. Ante el terror a la revolución proletaria, la burguesía internacional ha centralizado las fuerzas de las aristocracias y burocracias obreras del mundo y sus partidos reformistas para que impidan un verdadero ascenso revolucionario de masas que imponga que sean los explotadores los que paguen la crisis que ellos provocaron.
Así, solo por el momento, las direcciones reformistas del proletariado y sus partidos han contenido a las masas en sus combates revolucionarios como en Grecia, Francia, Madagascar, Martinica y Guadalupe por nombrar solo algunos. La burguesía mundial, aterrada por la acción revolucionaria de masas en medio de su crisis, se sostiene en el accionar de las direcciones traidoras del proletariado mundial. La burguesía, asustada, hoy suspira, se seca la transpiración de la frente y se prepara para lanzar un nuevo ataque contra las masas del mundo.
Estamos ante una situación mundial que prepara enfrentamientos decisivos entre las clases, pues no sólo el con-junto del proletariado mundial, sino también alguna potencia imperialista, deberán pagar los costos de la crisis. Bajo estas condiciones, asistimos a destellos revolucionarios de las masas. En los bordes de las enormes con-tradicciones de la situación mundial, hay costuras que crujen y se rompen, incapaces de contener el odio y la legítima reacción de las masas ante semejantes condiciones de explotación y padecimientos inauditos. Hoy, la costura se ha roto en el Perú obrero y campesino que intenta ponerse de pie.
El carácter internacional del combate de masas en Perú está dado por el hecho de que el proletariado y los cam-pesinos pobres peruanos, con su lucha, ponen todo en cuestión. Desde sus combates de barricadas, enfrenta-mientos, tomas de tierras y pozos petroleros, desde sus huelgas y piquetes, las masas peruanas le dicen al pro-letariado internacional que bajo las condiciones impuestas por la bancarrota capitalista, para conseguir algo, aún lo más mínimo como el pan, el trabajo, el salario, la tierra, la educación y salud, las masas deben luchar por todo, contra las transnacionales y el imperialismo, contra sus gobiernos y regímenes títeres, contra la propiedad de los capitalistas.
Por ello, en el combate de masas en Perú viven hoy las tomas de fábrica con rehenes como las de Francia, las barricadas obreras y de la juventud como las de Grecia, las milicias obreras y campesinas como las de Mada-gascar, los combates revolucionarios de resistencia como en Palestina y Medio Oriente, los combates de masas por liberarse del colonialismo imperialista como en Guadalupe y Martinica.
Todos estos combates hoy viven en el Perú obrero y campesino sublevado. Allí anidan las fuerzas del proletariado latinoamericano para enfrentar la farsa de la “revolución bolivariana”, para romper todos los pactos contrarre-volucionarios entre la burguesía bolivariana y el imperialismo con los que se busca derrotar a la clase obrera; para que el proletariado boliviano vuelva a ponerse de pie recuperando sus organizaciones de lucha como la COB de manos de la burocracia colaboracionista, rompiendo con Evo Morales y aplastando al fascismo.
Si estas fuerzas se desarrollan en un sentido revolucionario, pondrán en cuestión la política contrarrevolucionaria internacional de la burocracia castrista cubana. Es por ello que los hermanos Castro y su pandilla restauracionista sostienen a Humala en Perú, justamente para impedir un proceso revolucionario que cuestione el asentamiento de la farsa de la “revolución bolivariana” que impidió el triunfo de la revolución proletaria en el continente, con-centrando sus fuerzas contrarrevolucionarias en Argentina, Ecuador y fundamentalmente en Bolivia, para soste-ner a la burguesía en crisis ante los procesos revolucionarios de masas.
El castrismo sostiene a Humala pues la apertura de la revolución peruana significaría un enorme impulso para que los obreros y campesinos cubanos se subleven contra el proceso abierto de restauración capitalista en marcha comandado por los Castro y por el carnicero imperialista Obama.
Como dijimos, hoy proletariado y los campesinos pobres peruanos les demuestran a los explotados del planeta que, bajo las condiciones del capitalismo en bancarrota, para conquistar algo, lo más mínimo, hay que luchar por todo, hay que luchar por la revolución. Por ello, Perú cuestiona el centro de la política y la estrategia del Foro Social Mundial y de su ala izquierda de renegados del trotskismo que pregonan abiertamente la colaboración de clases, como lo es, por ejemplo, el Encuentro Latinoamericano y Caribeño de Trabajadores (ELAC) dirigido por la LIT –CI morenista para estrangular al ala izquierda del proletariado latinoamericano.
El combate de masas en Perú debe ser el punto donde se atalone hoy la clase obrera latinoamericana para im-poner una verdadera contraofensiva de masas que entierre la farsa de la “revolución bolivariana” y reabra el ca-mino de la revolución proletaria. Esta es la importancia decisiva de los acontecimientos en Perú para el proleta-riado internacional. La clase obrera latinoamericana y mundial, ¡de pie junto a los explotados del Perú obrero y campesino!

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RECUADRO/ANEXO 2: La LIT y su PSTU, con la Conlutas y el ELAC, a los pies de Lula, Humala y los mo-nopolios con las manos ensangrentadas

El PST sección peruana de la LIT llama a las masas explotadas a “…reafirmar la unidad lograda en el Frente por la Soberanía y la Vida, unir las demandas obreras y populares y emplazar al gobierno a resolverlas con la apro-bación por la CGTP del Paro Nacional para los días 7, 8 y 9 de Julio próximo”. Frente por la Soberanía y la Vida, organismo impulsado por el Partido Nacionalista de Humala, junto a la burguesía regional “indígena”, que en su enfrentamiento a Alan García, pretende llevar a los explotados a los pies de la burguesía opositora.
Una vez mas la LIT sosteniendo a la burguesía bolivariana, hoy en Perú. Sin embargo, su tarea está lejos de terminar ahí. La LIT y su partido madre, el PSTU brasileño, que dirigen la Conlutas y el ELAC, reproducen la de-claración del PST y no dicen una sola palabra de los enormes intereses de la burguesía brasileña, socia menor de los monopolios imperialistas, que saquean el Perú, amenazados por el levantamiento de las masas.
Porque son la Total-Petrobras; las constructoras Odebrecht, Camargo Correa, Andrade Gutiérrez, Queiroz Galv-ão, la OAS, junto a la Eletrobrás; la siderúrgica Gerdau; la minera Cia. Vale do Rio Doce, Ocean Air (aviación), Natura (cosméticos), la AmBev (bebidas), Votorantim (papel celulosa y minería) e Azaléia (calzado), -por nombrar tan solo las más relevantes- quienes saquean el gas, el petróleo y la minería de la Amazonia peruana, como así también tienen en sus manos los negocios de la infraestructura en la carretera “interoceánica” -1000 km de ruta que une al Brasil con los puertos del pacífico-; la ampliación del puerto del Callao; las centrales hidroeléctricas en construcción y las proyectadas; etc.
La Conlutas y su ELAC, bajo la dirección del PSTU/LIT -con su miserable silencio- encubren los negocios de la burguesía brasileña -socia menor de los monopolios imperialistas instalados en el Mercosur, en primer lugar de la Total francesa-, que tienen sus tentáculos puestos en Perú, como así también en Ecuador y Bolivia. Esta buro-cracia pelega es la que con todas sus fuerzas impide que el proletariado brasileño salga a la lucha en auxilio de sus hermanos de clase que se sublevaron en la Amazonia, del otro lado de la frontera, contra los mismos mono-polios que esclavizan al proletariado brasileño a cuenta del imperialismo, para salvarlos de la crisis.
Estos renegados del trotskismo que usurpan desde hace décadas las banderas de la IV Internacional, son quienes impiden que los explotados, desde las grandes concentraciones obreras de San Pablo, Minas Gerãis, Río de Janeiro, etc., asuman su tarea internacionalista y lancen el grito de guerra de ¡Expropiación sin pago y bajo control obrero de la Petrobras, de las constructoras, de la Gerdau, y de todas las empresas que saquean el Perú, Brasil, etc.! ¡Asambleas ya de todas las organizaciones obreras, de los sin tierra y los estudiantes combativos para romper su subordinación a Lula, el PT, la CUT y pronunciarse de inmediato!
Así la Conlutas y el ELAC –¡que no impulsaron ni un minuto de huelga en solidaridad con las masas sublevadas que fueran masacradas por el gobierno sirviente de los monopolios esclavistas, desde las centenares de organi-zaciones que dirigen en el continente!- no juegan a favor del combate del Perú obrero y campesino y, por el con-trario, son un escollo adicional que impide que se reabra la revolución en América del Sur, y se ponga de pie nuevamente la revolución Boliviana.
La Conlutas y el ELAC, de la mano del PSTU/LIT le cubren las espaldas a la burguesía esclavista brasileña y a los monopolios que tienen las manos manchadas con la sangre de los explotados, porque son estos asesinos quienes financiaron desde Brasilia la masacre perpetrada en Bagua por el cipayo asesino Alan García, y quienes desde su vocero -la Folha de São Paulo- recomiendan no hacer olas: “El Brasil no debe por el momento pronunciarse sobre la crisis en el Perú, pero la situación está siendo acompañada por la asesoría internacional del Planalto” -la sede del gobierno de Lula y el PT en Brasilia. (Flávia Marreiro, 11/06/09).
Los morenistas usufructuando todo el peso y la influencia política de las organizaciones que controlan, montan un nuevo cerco al combate de las masas explotadas -como ayer contra la revolución boliviana- hoy para que los bolivarianos derroten la lucha del proletariado y el campesinado peruano contra el imperialismo y sus lacayos peruanos y brasileños, y así puedan mantener el poder.

Sri Lanka: The Collapse of the Ethno-Nationalist Project of LTTE and the Tamil Question

2009-07-01T19:15:00.000-07:00

We reprint this article here to further debate around its position on the Tamil National Question. It seems to us that New Wave confuses two aspects of the National Question; first the right to self-determination, and second the support for that right in the form of a national liberation struggle.
The article seems to say that revolutionaries consider the national question a formal question stating a position against national oppression only. If that is their position, we disagree. Where national oppression clearly exists leading to a mass national war of independence, as in the case of Palestine, the question is not a formality. It becomes the revolutionary duty of workers internationally to enter that war on the side of the oppressed nation to win the leadership of the struggle from the bourgeoise and to ensure that it goes all the way to a socialist revolution.

However, as the article suggests, the Tamil national struggle may not have had mass Tamil working class support and be in fact a bourgeois project that oppressed not only Sinhalese living in the Tamil zones but also Tamil workers. If this is the case then new wave is correct in refusing to recognise a right to self-determination for Tamils in Sri Lanka since it is in contradiction with social liberation as they put it. In that case the duty of revolutionaries is to unite Tamils and SInhalese behind a revolutionary party for a socialist revolution against both communalist wings of the national bourgeosie.

UPDATE 4 JULY 2009
new wave has responded with this statement:

"Thanks for forwarding the publication of the article on Sri Lanka on 'redrave', from 'the new wave'. We must make clarify ourselves on this point to avoid a confusion which has emerged from the note of 'redrave':

We are for the 'Right of Tamils for Self-Determination' and that up to 'secession', but only for the right. We oppose striving of the Tamil Bourgeois to carve out a separate Tamil statelet and dividing the Sri Lankan working class into Tamil and Sinhalese factions. Support the right, oppose the division! This is in absolute conformity with the principles of Marxism and the experiences of the past history of more than a century. We support 'the right to self determination' not with a view to aid the bourgeois project of 'secession', but with a view that existence of this 'right' and the 'freedom' to secede for oppressed national minority, would remove the ground from under the feet of bourgeois and its demand for a 'secession', which on the contrary is a divisive agenda, harmful for the international unity of the proletariat. Anyway, and with the same logic, the opposition to the 'right to self-determination, up to secession' is equally damaging for the proletariat of both nationalities, being an outright support for the oppressor bourgeois. The two extremes, thus, fall outside the precincts of the policy of revolutionary Marxism. We are for the 'right to self determination up to secession' but we are totally against the bourgeois agenda of secession. We call for the unity of the proletariat of all nationalities, to overturn the bourgeois."

Comradely Yours,
Editors
'the new wave'

FURTHER DISCUSSION IN COMMENTS BELOW

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Rajesh Tyagi/28 May, 2009
[reprinted from New Wave which is an Indian Revolutionary Trotskyist group]

The ruthless suppression of the armed secessionist movement led by the LTTE, at the hands of Rajapakse government of Sri Lanka, has put to an end the 26 years old civil war on the island ongoing since 1983, between Tamil nationalists and the Sri Lankan establishment. The entire top brass of LTTE has been wiped out by the Sri Lankan security forces in cold blood under a pre-plan, simultaneously inflicting enormous sufferings upon the civil population. With this, the project for a separate Tamil homeland, proposed by LTTE in the northern and eastern parts of the island, has also lost the ground, almost completely.

The ethnic conflict took a toll upon around 80,000 human lives, before leaving the question of ethic repression of Tamils, unresolved. The recent offensive undertaken by the Sri Lankan government to uproot LTTE, has resulted in one of the biggest human tragedies in South Asia, over several decades. Apart from the cadres of LTTE perished in the war, stepped up since January 2009, 7000 civilians have been killed and 16,781 are wounded. Sri Lankan Army has lost 6,261 soldiers, with 29, 551 injured and 2,556 permanently disabled. According to an estimate of UN, more than three lakh [lakh =100,000] Tamil civilians are trapped in the relief camps, virtual detention camps being run by the Sri Lankan Army. The 32 such camps in Vavuniya alone are home for more than 1,60,000 Tamil refugees. The government, during the military operation, is stated to have blocked even supplies of life saving drugs to the population trapped in areas dominated by the LTTE.

Sri Lankan bourgeois, in order to defend its rule, has raised an army which is largest on the globe in proportion to the size of population of the country. It already had an army of 1,20,000 soldierie, by 2007, which it had replenished with induction of 80,000 more young recruits, mostly Sinhalese, in 2008 alone. To recruit the Sinhalese youth, it had kept its military plans for a major conflict in complete secrecy. In addition, very low level of youth employment i.e. 22.4 percent of the total youth on the island, facilitated the project of this mass recruitment to the Army. Without this fresh recruitment, the war itself and success achieved in it by the Colombo establishment was improbable. By keeping the war plans a secret, the Sri Lankan Government succeeded to lure the Sinhalese youth for recruitment in the Army and then used it as cannon fodder to win the war against LTTE. Even during the war the Rajapakse Government has banned all reporting of conflict from the war zone, while denying access, both to foreign and local media in the zone, with express motive to prevent a public outrage on the quantum of such huge casualties of human lives.

After wiping out the LTTE, the Sri Lankan government has unfolded its plans to further reinforce the already colossal armed force, by raising its strength to a soldierie of three lakhs, which would mean one and a half times of its present size. It is clear that the Colombo rulers are preparing themselves for the future challenges to their regime from their eternal and the real enemy -the working class, emerging from all ethnicities on the island. It is the working class which would be made to bear the burden not only of the recent war, but also of the future plans of the bourgeois rulers to accentuate their rule through the strength of a colossal armed force at their disposal.

Sri Lankan island is habited by around 20 million people, out of which 16% are Tamils, spread over the northern and eastern part of the highland, 8% Moslems who are mostly Tamil speaking and rest of the 75% Sinhalese, who occupy the larger south of the island. After occupation of the island, British colonialists had transported Tamils from India to Sri Lanka, mostly to work as plantation labour in tea gardens. While the working class in Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was then known) was one of the most radical section of the world proletariat and had played immense role in the anti-colonial national liberation movement, through its party Lanka Sama Samaj Party (LSSP) and later Bolshevik Leninist Party of India (BLPI) whose members gave immense sacrifices, was illegalised in 1940 for opposing the war and fighting in the front ranks of the liberation movement, the Sri Lankan bourgeois did not play any role at all in the liberation movement. It remained an auxiliary to the British colonialism.

Till 1946, Sri Lankan bourgeois did not have a party of its own. The bourgeois elite organised the United National Party only in 1946 on the advice of British colonialists, who bestowed upon it the political power handing over the establishment of Island to it in 1948, to look after their interests in absentia. The national bourgeois took power in Colombo, not as a leader of the oppressed nation or in a fight against colonialism, but as direct agent of Imperialism. The only demand the Sri Lankan bourgeois raised was to separate the Island from the Indian State so as to prevent the integration between the working class of Sri Lanka and India. It borrowed the readymade project of national development, like other decolonised countries, from world capitalism and thus failed to resolve even a single basic problem, including that of the nationality, ethnicity etc. Entrenched in the social crisis, and threatened by the revolutionary proletariat, it resorted to most reactionary elements, traditions and forces of the past for reliance and support to its regime. Its fragile regime, however, could stabilise itself again and again, in the face of uninterrupted crisis, for the betrayals by the leadership of the working class.

The strength of the LSSP, at the eve of transfer of power to the national bourgeois by the colonialists, can be gauged by the fact that it emerged as the largest opposition to the government in 1948, where on its call, 50,000 people had gathered for a demonstration against the transfer of power. The biggest challenge before the Sri Lankan government was thus to weaken the labour movement under the leadership of Trotskyist LSSP, which could be done only by dividing the working class on ethnic lines. The bourgeois has learnt this lesson from the colonial legacy of divide and rule. Immediately after taking power at Colombo, the government of rightist UNP thus got passed the most controversial enactment- ‘The Citizenship Act, 1948’ whereby the Tamil Plantation workers of the highland were deprived of the right to franchise and citizenship. While Tamil traders collaborated in that, the BLPI opposed the move. There were demonstrations against the unjust discrimination meted out to the Tamil workers. The government, however, answered them through organising a spate of most violent pogroms against Tamil civilians, through Sinhalese chauvinist groups. This Act has virtually sown the seeds of ethnic conflicts of the future between Sinhalese and Tamils.

In 1953, the rightist elite government of UNP, adopted an economic policy aimed at benefitting the rich, which led to a steep price hike. The LSSP mobilised the working class against it and called for a general strike. Working class actions in cities found an unprecedented support among the rural poor and consequently the entire country came to a grinding halt. The government soon took account of the really grim situation. The cabinet met in emergency on a British warship then anchoring in Colombo harbour and reversed the economic policy without delay.

The proletarian action of 1953, had profound political implications. The bourgeois elite, fearing of the strength of working class, sought refuge in the outdated Buddhist legacy, in order to woo the petty bourgeois peasantry, with a religious appeal. The Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) was thus organised under the leadership of S.W. Bhandarnaike, draped in a Buddhist cloak, which took power in 1956 elections. It passed the enactments declaring Buddhism the state religion and the Sinhalese the sole official language of Sri Lanka. This further aggravated the ethnic divide among the two communities and this was the avowed purpose of the ruling bourgeois.

These were unfortunate times as the LSSP falling into the trap of the then bogus leadership of the Fourth International (FI) to which it was affiliated, which under Michael Pablo and Ernest Mandel, had lost its orientation. With the re-stabilisation of capitalism on a world scale, the then leadership of FI, adapted to it and misdirected its national sections to adapt themselves to the political situation existing in their individual countries. Pablo and Mandel did not see any need for independent movement of the working class either globally or nationally. According to them under the changed conditions the old parties themselves would be forced to take to radical path. With this perspective, the LSSP shared the path with Stalinist Communist Party of Sri Lanka and entered into collaboration with the SLFP, and supported its government. In 1964, the LSSP members entered into the government itself alongwith Stalinist CP, demonstrating complete degeneration of the party. It made a United Front with Stalinists and SLFP which got a landslide victory in 1970 general elections. It introduced a few reforms like nationalisation of the plants still under the control of foreigners, and bringing down the drug prices, but the 1972 constitution prepared under supervision of LSSP leaders, not only restated the privileged positions of Buddhism as the state religion and Sinhalese as the sole official language, it introduced quota for Sinhalese in admissions in Universities and employment in Public Sector.

The working class found the leaders of LSSP sharing the political rostrum with the bourgeois, their mortal enemy and acquiescing in its policies. The working class was pushed into frustration and hopelessness.

The betrayal of the working class, on the part of LSSP, directly led to the emergence of communal forces like the Maoist Janata Vimukti Peramuma (JVP), and the separatist LTTE. In 1970, Rohan Vijeveera, organised JVP mainly from among the Sinhalese students and youth, with a program to bring down the coalition government of Bhandarnaike through urban armed resistance. The movement was soon crushed by the government taking toll upon the lives of more than 15,000 young activists. The JVP leaders retreated to hiding in rural areas, but were wiped out by the army. It then turned to parliamentary democracy and gradually shifted its position to Sinhalese Chauvinism rendering support to the bourgeois establishment. In 1980, three Trotskyist activists were killed by the JVP.

The LSSP having illusions in the bourgeois leadership, was kicked out by it from the United Front government. The 1977 general elections decimated the LSSP, with the UNP once again coming to power. UNP immediately started a wave of rabid liberalisation through economic reforms shifting burden to the shoulders of working class and savagely attacking its movement. In opposition to the policies of the UNP government, a strike of Railway workers began, which soon turned into a general strike. The government crushed this strike by jailing all labour leaders and organising lumpens on a large scale to attack the strikers.

The failure of the strike and the betrayal of the leaders of LSSP, created an environment of hopelessness and desperation among the working class and a defeatist mood took over for the time being, which was accentuated with the stabilisation of the economy through liberalisation and reforms. Taking benefit of this general depression and disintegration of the working class, the bourgeois UNP government, in order to further demoralise and weaken the working class by widening the ethnic divide, once again resorted to anti-Tamil pogroms. The youth leagues of LSSP however were deployed to protect the Tamils from hoodlums, but in absence of an effective resistance from the working class, the State terror became the device to widen the ethnic divide. As the Tamil parliamentary opposition remained totally ineffective, activists in youth wing of Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) the largest formation of Tamil bourgeois, organised itself into a militant wing and formed LTTE. Calling for a separate Tamil homeland LTTE engaged in armed conflicts and ambushed an army convoy on 23 July 1983, killing 13 soldiers. This resulted in new spate of anti-Tamil pogroms, where 3000 Tamils were massacred at the hands of Sinhalese chauvinist groups. Thus started the long drawn out war on the island for which the main responsibility lies on the shoulder of LSSP leaders, for their betrayal of the cause of proletarian revolution, which provided space for this war.

As for LTTE, since the days of its emergence, it remained a petty bourgeois organisation, with a limited and reactionary separatist program of a Tamil homeland. It attacked and killed the Sinhalese and Moslem poor with impunity and thus assisted the Colombo establishment in widening the ethnic strife among the working class of both communities. It relied upon the same rabid communalism against Sinhalese working class, like the Sinhalese chauvinists did against Tamil workers. It started to form a pseudo-socialist rhetoric, but soon found itself not only in the arms of local Tamil owners of Transport and Trade, but remained dependent upon this or that big foreign power, in addition to support from wealthy Sri Lankan NRIs. At one time it counted upon support of the Indian Government under Rajiv Gandhi and agreed to the IPKF, the Indian Security force to take charge in Sri Lanka, under the Indo-Sri Lanka accord. The devastation it brought to Tamils in Sri Lanka is part of the history. Even after its abrogation, LTTE continued to curry favour with other powers. Its 2-3 million dollar annual budget continued to be financed by big powers. Out of this budget it could maintain a navy (sea tigers) and an air force in its embryo, which though was no match for the colossal power of the Sri Lankan state and the Imperialism as a whole, which Rajapakse could mobilise against it. Even then, LTTE continued to appeal to the United Nations, a forum dominated by big powers in the hope to mobilise support of sections of big powers for its project of separate Tamil homeland.

However, these illusions of the LTTE, in big powers, proved fatal. The big powers, continued to play a double game, by assisting in aggravation of the crisis on the island and then seeking material benefit out of this crisis, manoeuvring between the warring parties, solely for their own political designs. In 2008, China sold weapons to Sri Lankan government for $ 75 million, in 2007 India had supplied arms for $21 million, in 2006 Ukraine supplied weaponry for $ 22 million and finally Israel had sold arms for $16 millions in the year 2000. China assisted the Colombo government by time and again deflating the international criticism of the mass civilian casualties committed at its hands on the island and in turn got a strong strategic foothold in Sri Lanka by wining access to a key Sri Lankan port, next to world’s premier shipping lanes.

LTTE never raised an issue against the acute exploitation of the Tamil Tea plantation workers in the highland. The concept of Tamil Ealem advanced by it remained through and through the idea for a bourgeois statelet on the island. This was the idea favouring the aspirant Tamil bourgeois who wanted to establish direct links to the world capitalism through its political power over the independent Tamil Ealem, by-passing the bourgeois establishment at Colombo under Sinhalese domination. Many times it has repeated that the model for Tamil Ealem was the ‘Asian Tigers’ i.e. the capitalist states, like South Korea and Japan. The whole idea of this dreamland of Tamil Ealem was to take hold of the statelet and then offer the cheap labour of its workers and peasants to world capital. LTTE never proved itself distinct from the Colombo establishment, as far as its class and political character goes. In the region under its domination, it treated the Sinhalese minority in the same way as Tamil minority was treated in the south. Its dreamland of Tamil Ealem even if realised, would not have been different in any manner than the Sri Lankan State. More recently, it had taken resort even to a hindu religious stance, making religious appeals to Hindu supremacists in India by shouting that the Sri Lankan security forces were destroying the hindu temples.

It was from this limited nationalist perspective, that LTTE failed to muster any support among the Sinhalese working class, or even among the Tamils in Tamilnadu. Instead of appealing to the world proletariat it continued to appeal to the bourgeois states. However, the big powers-bourgeois states, on whose support it counted for its success, betrayed it at the crucial moment. Even the conscious sections of Tamil working class had turned their back upon its campaign for separate Tamil homeland, realising that it means nothing but another capitalist state. The limited support it could mobilise among the Tamil youth, cannot validate its otherwise essentially invalid program of establishing a capitalist Tamil statelet. The support behind it was in essence the result of failure of the working class leadership and its political crisis. Even this support base among the poor specifically among the working class was gradually eroding because of the proximity of the leaders of LTTE to the rich and the policies it adopted, in the areas under its control, favouring the rich while shifting the entire burden of the war upon the shoulders of the working class. As reports from the war zone show, LTTE leaders have ordered firing upon the fleeing Tamil civilians from the war zone.

In our epoch, there being no scope for any combined national project of working class and bourgeois, much less in the countries with a belated development, the slogan of national state has become obsolete, losing all its political significance. The struggle against national oppression and for national liberation, so far as it has meaning and relevance for the working class, is integral part and subordinate to its historic task of social liberation. Segregated from the task of social liberation, the national question has no meaning at all for the working class. Only the rightist and centrist advocates of petty bourgeois, still chant the sermons for dogma of nation-states, when the same has lost all revolutionary significance. For us Leninists, the theoretical meaning of the ‘right to self-determination of the nation , even up to secession’ has never gone beyond a formal recognition of this right and a political resolve on our part against the national oppression of minorities. We are strategic opponents of the demand of secession and division of states in statelets. These divisions, run counter to the interests of working class and are the agenda of aspirant native bourgeois.

Doubtlessly, the cadres of LTTE have displayed utmost sacrifice and courage in this war against the Sinhalese chauvinist Colombo establishment, responsible for handing out ethnic discrimination and injustice to the Tamil minority. But this note of appreciation for the cadre, must not deter us from evaluating, from the standpoint of working class, the shortcomings of the politics of LTTE leadership and from calling into question the correctness of their perspective, under which this war was prepared and fought.

IRAN : FOR A REVOLUTIONARY PARTY!

2009-06-26T18:26:00.000-07:00

Iran in the last few weeks has been in a political ferment as tens of thousands mobilised around the dispute between the two leading factions of the Iran national bourgeoisie who both represent the rightwing Islamic regime that came to power in 1979. This dispute is about how best to control the masses and how best to gain control of a share of Iran’s wealth in significant deals done with Japan, Germany, Russia and China. The spark that ignited deep dissatisfaction against the Islamic regime among youth and organized labor was what they saw as an election stolen by Ahmadinejad. The mass rallies and repression then escalated over several weeks into a major crisis in which a more politically conscious element came to the fore and raised the demand for the end of the ISI (Islamic regime) and for a ‘democracy’. At this point Rafsanjani began to make overtures to Khamenei to restore social peace and defend the Islamic regime. We argue here that workers need a revolutionary leadership to complete the revolution that was betrayed and smashed in 1979. There is no halfway house of ‘democracy’ that does not become a ‘slaughterhouse’ of the masses. The revolution must be ‘permanent’ and for that there must be a revolutionary party and program based on the Leninist-Trotskyist program of 1938.

The revolution betrayed

Iran has long been a strategic prize for imperialism as a historical power pivotal between Europe and Asia. The imperialist countries squabbled over Iran early in the 20th century. Today this rivalry is hotting up again as the structural crisis of the global economy is bringing about a renewed period of inter-imperialist rivalry. At stake are Iran’s oil and gas resources (second largest reserves in the OECD) and access Central Asian oil. The British lost control of Iran oil when Mossadegh came to power after WW 2. But as he moved toward the USSR he was overthrown by a US sponsored coup in 1953 and the pro-US Shah installed. A national revolution against this US puppet rose up on 1979 but was diverted by the reactionary Islamic clerical bourgeois faction led by the Ayatollah Khomeini into a counter-revolutionary Islamic regime.

The tragedy of the 1979 revolution showed that Iran was ripe for revolution but lacked a revolutionary leadership. The workers and poor peasants were the force behind the anti-Shah revolution, but were led by liberals and Stalinists who allied with the Islamic national bourgeoisie who by 1981 had turned on the most advanced workers and exterminated many thousands of the best militants. The failure of the socialist revolution can be clearly blamed on the role of the Stalinist Tudeh party which following the fatalist Stalinist line of making a democratic revolution in alliance with the ‘progressive’ bourgeoisie to kick out the imperialists. The Stalinists refused to learn from their betrayal of the revolution in China in 1927 when their ‘ally” and honorary member of the Comintern, Chiang Kai Shek, turned on the Communist Party and massacred its leadership.

Playing an equally bad role but this time adventurist rather than fatalist, the Maoist and Guevaraist guerillas thought that they could spark off a popular insurrection that would take over the historic role of the national bourgeoisie. Of course the Islamic leadership obeyed its own laws of motion, its collective hip pocket, and despite the anti-imperialist rhetoric, recognised that its class interests lay in doing deals with imperialism, and so turned on and smashed not only the treacherous leadership of the working class, but the heroic vanguard.

Today, nearly 30 years after the Islamic clerical counter-revolution, we have a split in the Islamic bourgeoisie between two factions who are squabbling over their share of the profits from the privatization of state assets and FDI in oil and gas assets. Both factions are committed to wholesale privatization and a greater role for FDI in oil and gas production.

The dominant faction, that of Khamenei/Ahmadinejad is a rightwing populist faction that continues to follow the Islamic ‘revolutionary’ principles of the 1979 revolution. It mobilises the rural and working class poor around an Islamic nationalism against US imperialism and Zionism in a bloc mainly with Russia, China, India etc, along with the Bolivarian states, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador. Its nationalist rhetoric is designed to suppress resistance on the part of Iran’s poor workers and peasants who have suffered massive cuts to their living standards under Iran’s IMF-supervised structural adjustment program.

The other faction, around Rafsanjani/Mousavi is no less committed to privatization and DFI in the economy, but presents a more liberal program of social welfare and protected living standards. It is based on the urban middle class and some sectors of workers and favors a modernized Islamic state that can do deals with ‘democratic’ EU and US imperialism. Most prominent in support of the opposition against the existing regime are the university students and prominent union activists in the Teachers Union of Iran and the Teheran Bus Drivers Union, both of which have suffered repression of strike action from 2005 to the present.

Who does the reformist left back in this fight?

Those who see the US as the main enemy (or like Petras see the US as a pawn of the Israelis) back the rightwing populists because they think they are genuinely anti-imperialist. This is a lie. The regime is not anti-imperialist. !t uses anti US and anti-Zionist sentiment cynically to control the impoverished masses. In principle the regime has no objection in doing deals with the US and UK but since these countries have imposed the UN economic embargo on Iran, they play the role of foreign “devils” to arouse nationalist sentiment. They play this role well being the two powers who have dominated Iran in modern history. Today they lead the attack on Iran’s nuclear program. UK banks have frozen Iran’s accounts. The US pressures Sarkosy to boycott Iran. This has lost the French Total a major oil and gas contract which has gone instead to China.

Germany, however, has broken ranks and is stepping up its FDI in Iran, mainly to provide technical development in oil and gas production. It is desperate to get gas from a source other than Russia. Iran moreover is very keen to develop the “Persian Pipeline” to take its gas via Turkey to the EU. Japan, also a major imperialist power, is a major export partner. Not only that, Iran is open for business with Russia, China, India etc., a powerful bloc of nations, including Japan, increasingly drawn into economic competition with the US and EU. Most of FDI in Iran developing its oil and gas resources today is now Chinese. Russia refuses to stop cooperating in Iran’s nuclear development. Thus the anti-imperialism of the ruling faction is a smokescreen to contain the masses while the Islamic bourgeoisie pockets its oil and gas profits.

This is why the leadership of the World Social Forum backs this faction. Chavez has come out (on Alo Presidente on 21 June) in support of the Iranian populists. “We send a greeting to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's great president, to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and to the Iranian people. We ask the world to respect Iran because they are trying to undermine the Iranian revolution's strength." This shows that the Venezuelan Bonapartist recognises his class interests are the same as the right wing populist Ahmadinejad. Chavez sees the ability of the Bolivarian states in pressuring US imperialism to reduce the costs of the crisis of finance capital being downloaded on the semi-colonial world as strengthened by the bloc of states allied to Russia, China and Iran. It doesn’t matter that the regimes in these countries are rightwing populist or state capitalist Bonapartist since what is critical is containing the masses behind an anti-US imperialist wave of public opinion so that an anti-US bloc of states can put pressure on the US ruling class towards ‘multilateral’ or ‘multipolar’ world.

Those who think that imperialism can be democratic and peaceful back the modernizing faction. As we have seen Rafsanjani/Mousavi are no more anti-imperialist than the present regime. However, they are openly aligned to Obama and the EU as what they see as ‘democratic’ imperialists. This explains the widespread sympathy for Mousavi and the claim that the election was rigged by all those liberal and ‘social democratic’ and left movements in the imperialist countries.

The left leg of the WSF (IMT etc) covers for Chavez support of the right populists by backing the 'democratic' rights of the protesters, covering Chavez naked backside with the call for a national democratic front in the form of a “constituent assembly”. They hope to "pressure" the WSF popular front to the left as Chavez tends to the right. They do not see their position as contradictory as they operate with the concept of the popular front that pretends that the working class can prevail against the bourgeoisie in a Bonapartist regime.

Alan Woods of the IMT explains Chavez’ support of Ahmadinejad as a “mistake”. Similarly, he does not think that James Petras is deliberately attacking Iranian workers. He too is “mistaken”. What is their mistake? The mistake is to think that Iran is like the populist regimes in Latin America. According to Woods, Iran is an Islamic dictatorship. The regime is a military Bonapartism not a Latin American populism. What Woods fails to see is that Chavez and Petras are correct in essence. Venezuela and Iran are essentially the same despite their surface appearances. And for that reason they are forced to expose the reality under the appearances. Both regimes are forms of Bonapartism which attempts to include the poor masses directly as the ‘subjects’ of the revolution. In Latin America it is a ‘popular front’ for Bolivarian revolution; in Iran it is an Islamic Republic.

The concept that unites all of these regimes and reveals their popular front character is that of the Marxist concept of Bonapartism. A Bonapartist regime is one that claims to be ‘national’ rather than class based and draws its support from a declassed ‘populism’. The Marxist concept of ‘popular front’ is a class critique of ‘populism’ which exposes the role of the ruling class in disguising its class interests with a ‘classless’ formula. Such regimes range between ‘left’ Bonapartism such as Chavez when the leader is able to contain the masses by social reforms, to ‘right’ Bonapartism such as Ahmadinejad, where counter-reforms are imposed upon the masses in the 'national' interest. Thus in the last analysis, Bonapartism is a bourgeois regime that is necessarily pushed to the right as imperialism imposes the costs of its global crisis onto the semi-colonial world. The role of Bonapartism is to divert the working class from independent self-organisation to face the onset of the fascist counter-revolution.

Like the fake Trotskyist left leg of the WSF, the Iranian pseudo-revolutionary left generally supports the modernizers against the ‘dictator’. They recognise that while both factions are part of the ISI but the opposition has set in motion a popular fight for democracy to bring the 1979 ICI regime to an end. For example the Workers Communist Party of Iran is a small party that has many supporters outside Iran including Iraq, and is very active on the internet. It takes a reformist posture adhering to a stageist conception of the revolution. In Iraq for example it called on the UN to replace US imperialism under the illusion that the UN would represent ‘democratic’ imperialism.

In Iran the WCI raises immediate demands but does not call for socialism yet. That comes later…
This is a dangerous position as it does not prepare workers for the insurrection. It does not explain that their 10 immediate democratic demands which include freedom of assembly, release of political prisoners and end of torture etc., cannot be won short of a socialist revolution. It does not explain how workers need to being organizing and arming now to win that revolution. Therefore to the extent that it influences the vanguard, it runs the danger of repeating the betrayal of the Tudeh and the guerrillaists of 1979.

What position should revolutionaries take in this fight?

Revolutionaries back neither bourgeois faction but instead back the fight for the political independence of the working class. We explain that there can be no national independence from imperialism without the working class leading that fight all the way to socialism. For this we need a program for a real Socialist Republic.

Our program is first, to defend the democratic rights of workers, peasants, students etc to vote, to demonstrate, for freedom of expression in the media and on the streets etc. This includes freedom of all political prisoners, freedom of religion, opposition to Sharia law, etc. Without these democratic rights it is not possible to organize openly an independent working class movement.

We also defend the national rights of Iranians to be free from the oppression of imperialism but say that only a Socialist Republic can do this.

To that end we form a united front with those who are protesting the outcome of the election whether or not it was rigged, but without an ounce of political support to the modernizers who have illusions in imperialism. We do not renounce this fight for democratic rights under the delusion that this weakens the rightwing populist credentials as anti-imperialist. As we have seen this is a fraud. The regime is making deals with Japan and Germany every month. And while Russia and China are not imperialist powers, there is nothing progressive about these regimes that we would defend in a war with the established imperialist countries.

Second, we demand a program that will meet the needs of workers, peasants etc particularly facing an economic crisis and state repression, for jobs for all, a living wage, decent housing, education and social security.

Third, we say to workers that to win these democratic rights, to organize an economy that can meet workers needs, it will be necessary to take power. Workers must strike and occupy their workplaces, arm and defend themselves. There can be no compromise with the bourgeoisie of any faction. No trust can be placed in any of the institutions of the state, especially the military and the justice system.

Fourth, this means that workers have to organize their own assemblies around workplaces and universities, and coordinate regionally and nationally. We call on poor peasants to organize their own “shora” and for the ranks of the military to organize their rank and file “shora”. These “shora” have to be defended by armed workers, peasants and rank and file soldiers.

Inside these “shora” revolutionaries have to fight for the leadership around a Leninist-Trotskyist program of world socialist revolution to defeat the traitors of the world social forum.

For a Workers and Poor Peasants Government

Finally, to express the interests of the workers, the poor peasants and students, we call for the formation of a Workers’ and Poor Peasants Government, i.e. the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

We do not accept that to mobilise the forces for revolution that it is necessary to call first for a Constituent Assembly which is a form of bourgeois regime that recognises the right of the bourgeoisie to have an equal vote with workers. This is a Menshevik concession to Stalinist stagism and a vote of no-confidence in the revolutionary capacity of the working class and its vanguard. It is another form of the popular front which entraps workers and poor peasants inside a bourgeois regime.

A Workers’ and Poor Peasants’ Government is the Government of those classes who are exploited by the bourgeoisie, and of the petty bourgeoisie who prove themselves loyal to the revolution. The only form of Socialist Republic that we recognise is the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

Workers of General Motors, occupy and take control of your workplace!

2009-06-25T04:51:00.000-07:00

The dismantling of the American auto industry, the US government’s bailout of a bankrupt GM, and the deal being cut with the UAW to savage a diminished workforce, if carried out according to Obama’s plan, will be a historic defeat for the working class, with far-reaching consequences. The UAW leadership, which long ago abandoned class struggle methods for classic business unionism, knows it can save its bureaucracy’s privileged position, which enjoys all the perks of Stalinist-era commissars, by selling out the membership, cutting the workers’ pay and benefits, and accepting mass lay offs. Meanwhile, there is not even a glimmer on the horizon of the new industrial jobs desperately needed to build the “green economy.”

The American auto worker’s pay and benefit package (known as the “gold standard for labor”) was won by hard-fought battles on the picket lines, backed by heroic acts of solidarity on the part of tens of thousands of union members, together with their families and communities. Victory could not have been achieved without efforts such as the six-week factory occupations at the Flint Chevrolet and Fisher Body plants in 1937, and the “Battle of the Overpass” at the Ford Motor Company’s Rouge Complex later that same year.

Those historic battles ended in victories for the entire working class, as other industrial and manufacturing workers set their sights on, and fought for, equivalent benefit packages to those won at the “Big Three.” American workers became accustomed to the promise and expectation of vacation pay, lifelong medical benefits, pensions, and a “decent” paycheck. The working class became redefined, in the public discourse and in workers’ own consciousness, as a new “middle class.” Ironically, in part because of their own past victories, workers no longer identified themselves as a class condemned to sell their labor power to the owner of the means of production. The Marxist concept of class, defined by relationship to the means of production, had been displaced in workers’ minds by a concept of class defined by income level.

Meanwhile, a witch-hunt was loosed upon the left within the unions, resulting in the displacement of left-leaning organizers by “loyal” careerists, and even criminals, as union officers. Workers had little natural sympathy for the majority Stalinist left that was still trying to peddle the class peace they had sold the UAW in wartime, so no one noticed the “speedup” at first—or so the story goes. Consequently, business unionism displaced militant trade unionism, and “labor relations” became both an academic discipline and a profession committed to binding labor to capital. The end result was a commitment to capitalism, on the part of the rising cadre of business union bureaucrats, that labor had stopped playing hardball. The crimes of the turncoat labor parasite caste against workers here at home are outweighed only by their role in tying the subjective allegiance of American workers to the overseas exploits, wars, and military interventions of imperialism. These labor fakers traded on the workers of the world for their bowl of porridge. We must demand and fight for a democratic rank and file leadership, with wages and benefits capped at the level of the best paid workers in the union!

Busily selling the “middle class” hype to their members, these labor “leaders” never seriously challenged the Taft-Hartley Act (which, among many other anti-labor provisions, prevents unions from launching sympathy strikes). Our dues and energy should have been used not only to force the repeal of Taft-Hartley, but also to organize the unorganized, educate our membership, build strike funds, and launch a fighting Workers’ Party. Instead, for decades the unions’ parasitic rulers wasted our dues dollars and volunteered our energy electing Democratic Party “friends of labor,” who can’t ever deliver anything of real value to working people (e.g., the ERA, single-payer health care, EFCA, etc.), and who have promoted—and billed us for—every imperialist military action in our history. Meanwhile, generations of labor leaders became accustomed to living the good life along with their corporate counterparts. Now, today, when labor needs to recapture its militant traditions and to fight like hell, the UAW leadership is giving it all away without a shot being fired.

General Motors has announced it is firing another 29,000 American UAW members. Workers fear for their pensions; they see their neighbourhoods abandoned to foreclosures; schools and the social safety net are being destroyed. And what do the “friends of labor” in the White House and Congress have to offer these and the other millions of unemployed? Despite the fact that between them, the UAW and the US government will own a large share of “New GM,” neither the union nor the federal government will be making any use of the leverage this could give them over the company’s future plans.

Revolutionary Marxists do not advocate the nationalization of industries under the control of pro-capitalist governments, rather than under the direct control of the working class. But workers should be told the truth: that the Obama administration, despite its ostensible commitment to the environment and to creating badly-needed “green economy” jobs for US workers, has bent over backwards to avoid even the slightest appearance of nationalizing the company for the benefit of society as a whole. Instead of taking an active role in setting a new direction for New GM, the Obama administration has made it clear that all will remain business as usual. The government will assuming the risk, but retain no decisionmaking power; the workers will make the lion’s share of the sacrifices; and any eventual profit will go straight into the pockets of management and the shareholders.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration boasts in its Fact Sheet on the GM deal that “[t]he UAW has made important concessions on compensation and retiree health care. . . . In virtually every respect, the concessions that the UAW agreed to are more aggressive than what the Bush Administration originally demanded in its loan agreement with GM.” Among other things, the $20 billion that GM owes the UAW for retiree pensions and benefits will not be paid. Instead, the existing pension and benefit trust will be replaced by a new trust that will be given a bunch of currently worthless stock in New GM. This places the UAW in a total conflict of interest with its own members. If the value of New GM stock does not go up, the stock owned by the pension trust will continue to be worthless, and UAW retirees will lose their benefits. But in order for the stock value to rise, New GM will have to make as much profit as possible—on the backs of current UAW members! That is, the UAW’s bureaucracy, as one of the owners of New GM, has a direct interest in increasing the exploitation of the union’s members in order to raise the value of the pension trust’s stock!

To make matters worse, even though the trust will own 17.5% of New GM, it will only have the right to select one independent director, and will have none of the other normal shareholder rights. In other words, instead of taking advantage of its position as one of GM’s major creditors to demand that New GM remake itself into a source of green economy jobs, the UAW has given up any claim to having a say in the company’s future that is proportionate to the trust’s ownership. Meanwhile, the only “green economy jobs” measure to which GM has agreed is the token concession that it will use one idled plant in the US to build a new small car model. This will increase GM’s domestic production by a measly four percentage points.

Who Stands to Gain?

GM’s secured lenders, who stand to benefit from the bankruptcy deal, include Citibank and JP Morgan Chase. These and the other organs of global finance capital have historically exploited and oppressed our brothers and sisters in Africa, Latin America and Asia even more than they have US workers.

Consider all those cell phones, ipods, laptops, and other high-tech toys. Much of the metal for their components came from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). JP Morgan Chase, through its major share in Anglo American Mining has been extracting these metals from the DRC in competition with other banks. The result has been an ongoing war in the DRC since 1996 which has killed over 4 million people.

And working people should never forget that it was Citibank which financed the 1973 overthrow of the democratically elected government in Chile. In the course of that coup, Pinochet and his goons herded thousands into stadiums and executed them.

Obama talks about “change” and a “new beginning,” but what we see is the final nail being placed in the coffin of the “gold standard of labor” by the unholy alliance of Obama, the UAW leadership, and representatives of big finance capital like JP Morgan Chase and Citibank.
Stagnation of the US economy and falling profits

For the past 20 years, the rate of inflation may have been kept nominally low, but in real terms, workers’ wages have fallen. In the struggle to maintain and keep their families afloat, workers resorted to taking loans against their homes, and got into hock up to their ears to credit card companies at usurious rates of interest. What did the banks do with the surplus cash they extracted from workers as interest? Unless it was invested, this capital would have had no value. The banks found these usurious loans and the “financial instruments” that were derived from them more profitable than actual productive investment, thus they offered more and more loans. After the market crash in 2000, the banks were forced to lend at cheaper rates. To make the same profits their shareholders had become accustomed to, they had to issue more loans. A saturation point was finally reached where workers could not afford any more loans, and started to drown under this excessive debt. At the same time, unsecured speculative lending and recklessly risky investments in derivatives left banks wildly overleveraged.

Now the US, European, and Japanese governments are bailing out the banks to the tune of trillions of dollars. But this means nothing in the context of a stagnant world economy. In order to extract more profit from the working class, we see the beginning of inter-imperialist rivalry that threatens to explode on an international scale as the race for raw materials and cheap labor pits the imperialists against each other. The massive displacement of manufacturing facilities into China and third world countries, to exploit the lower wages there and reap the benefit of the consequent higher rate of profit, has cut like a scythe through the gains of working class in the rest of the world. The crisis of the banks and the overall economy is so great that mass unemployment, which has risen to 9% in the US even by official estimates (meaning the real rate is closer to 16%), has not been enough to “stop the bleeding” and increase profits. These western finance capitalists running the US government, who have not hesitated to resort to wars, coups d’état, and punishing workers abroad, are now turning their guns on the American worker, stealing from our pensions, depriving us of medical care, and shredding the safety net for the poor and indigent.

What can workers do?

The Chapter 11 bankruptcy of GM has just been declared; there is still time to intervene!

We call on workers to organize factory committees to coordinate an immediate occupation of all GM plants and dealerships! Tear up the six-year no-strike pledge!

We can have no faith in the sell-out leadership of the UAW; only a revitalized democratic rank and file movement can lead us out of the crisis! An emergency delegated conference of representatives of factory committees must be convened to elect an entirely new union leadership.

Working class communities around the factories should be mobilized to defend the occupations; workers will need to prepare for self-defense against the reaction of the state!
The demand that will mobilize the rest of the working class to take solidarity actions must show the way out of the economic crisis.

Therefore we must demand: Nationalize GM under workers’ control and without compensation! Open the books to give workers full access to all financial information about their company! Workers must take control of all “bailout” funds used to shore up the company. Not a single worker should be laid off. All work should be shared among all those who can work, without loss of pay.

But we need workers’ control to make this happen. It is only under workers’ control that the auto plants can be transformed and retooled to manufacture the infrastructure for green power (e.g., wind turbines, solar panels, and electric vehicles) and clean and ubiquitous public transport (e.g., electric bullet trains and light rail systems). The workers could hire any specialists, such as engineers and designers, that they deem necessary to assist the transition.

Occupations of auto factories aimed at implementing these demands will inspire the entire working class to follow suit, and will be a beacon to the workers of the world, even in China. The international economic crisis is propelling the working class around the world, in countries like France, Greece, and Peru, into massive struggles.

If the UAW rank-and-file undertake mass actions like sit-ins; if they fight for workers’ control and confront the state and its forces of repression as they did in the 1930s, this will provide inspiration for every worker in the world, particularly the many workers in the semi-colonies who produce parts for GM. Nothing could be more inspiring than seeing a key sector of the workers in the belly of the beast take the lead in the struggle to smash US imperialism.

Around the world, every workplace needs to set up factory committees, and these committees need to be united with delegate council meetings in each industrial area, right up to national and ultimately international level. Such structures would be the precursor to the launching of a fighting workers’ party in the US that unites workers across nations, one that sees the struggles of the workers around the world as their own. This is a scenario out of which the Fourth International can be reborn, and all the power of JP Morgan Chase and Citibank be shown for naught, to be as fictitious as the capital their paper accounting purports to represent.

The capitalist class long ago ceased to be progressive. Only the working class has a material interest in rational planning for progressive growth of the productive forces. Capitalist anarchy is all that stands in the way. The time has come for the US working class to put its stamp on events and take a lead in the international struggle against capitalism.

In this struggle, the HRS, FLT and WIVL will be your ally!

Joint Leaflet of Humanists for Revolutionary Socialism (USA); Workers' International Vanguard League (South Africa); Leninist Trotskyist Fraction (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, New Zealand, Peru).

Down with the World Economic Forum!

2009-06-11T17:06:00.000-07:00

MEMORANDUM OF UNITED STRUGGLES AGAINST STARVATION

THIS DEN OF THIEVES IS STARVING THE WORLD!

Every time we go into a super market, the prices have gone up; yet the world food prices have come down by 40% in recent months.

The food gang like Pick ‘n Pay, Shoprite, Woolworths, Spar, Tiger Brands, Pioneer and others, are making billions from overcharging us. All of these companies are owned by international banks. The profits of these same banks are falling; some of them, like Citibank and Merryll Lynch had to be bailed out with workers’ money in the United States. It is these banks that are deliberately pushing up food prices because, behind the scenes, they have a monopoly on food production and distribution, in the world!

Billions of people are being deliberately starved by these banks that the South African government is welcoming here with open arms. Of particular concern is that the SA government is now acting as the mouthpiece of imperialism by justifying the 34% increase in electricity which is nothing else but a legal scam for the self enrichment of US imperialist banks. The 34% increase is nothing else but putting the burden of the falling profits of the monopoly capitalists on the shoulders of the poor of the world.

Further we are concerned that Citibank and JP Morgan Chase are stealing US$ 6 billion ( About R50 Billion) of GM workers pension funds while retrenching 40 000 workers. We call for the expropriation of the imperialist banks and for them to be placed under workers control. We call on the workers of GM to occupy, resist and control their company. Further:

Citibank was involved in overthrowing the democratic government of Chile in 1973;
JP Morgan Chase is the major shareholder of Anglo American and the SA Reserve bank;
Merck profits by pushing the price of medicine up;
HP, Intel and JP Morgan Chase directly benefit from the war in the DRC where over 4 million people have died since 1996
ABB is an ‘economic hit-squad’ that makes money out of governments through projects like upgrading airports, building stadiums and power stations- all projects cost billions while millions are kept homeless

A group of activists and workers’ organizations met in Cape Town on Monday 1 June 2009 to discuss the crisis facing the working class today, namely that none of the unions or mass workers' organizations are waging a serious fight against starvation and poverty facing the working class. Millions are malnourished, many are dying of hunger and many do not have adequate clothing and shelter.

The first step was to form a new movement called UNITED STRUGGLES AGAINST STARVATION (USAS).

It was decided that the first action was to organise this mass protest at the World Economic Forum on Africa on the 10th June 2009 at the CTICC. The capitalists have the audacity to come here to openly plan their further plunder of Africa. We are calling on the working class to take up a sustained campaign against starvation.

Our demands are:

Decent Houses for all! Occupy vacant buildings and land!

Share the work among all who can work, without loss of pay!

No to retrenchments and closures! Sack the bosses! Occupy! Expropriate!

Increase all wages by a minimum of 30%, wages to increase when prices do;

Expropriate all the food producers and distributors, under workers’ control!

Establish a national non-profit food distributor, under workers’ control!

Expropriate and centralise all banks, under workers’ control!

Replace all union leadership with representatives who are prepared to fight the capitalists! Call a national council of workers’ delegates and unemployed to co-ordinate the fight

Establish workers’ defence committees against attacks by the state

Capitalism is the crisis, working class power the solution!

All workplaces and working class communities are called on to elect delegates to send them to our meetings. USAS 10.6.09

CONTACTS:

Mitchell’s Plain Jean Beukes ph 0837213966; Cape Town –Salt River Shaheed Mahomed ph 0822020617; Atlantis Barbara Rass ph 0733150304; Athlone David Appolis ph 0733863582; Seawinds-Retreat-Steenberg Yolanda Anderson de Monk ph 0835234199

Kuilsriver Sarah Fabie ph 0724225182; Parkwood Eleanor Hoedemaker ph 0730122009; Khayelitsha:Loyiso S’Donga ph0731300018 Email:unitedagainststarvation@gmail.com

South Africa: State of Nation address shows the ANC is still pro-imperialist

2009-06-05T04:38:00.000-07:00

The state of the nation address by the new President, Zuma, shows that the ANC's pro-imperialist role is set to continue and that the working class will carry the burden of the crisis of profits of the capitalists.

1. Municipal work is privatised on a mass scale by the implementation of the so-called public works programme; instead of employing full-time municipal workers, temporary work is created. Although within weeks these jobs are over, the ANC government (with the full support of Statssa) somehow counts these as 'jobs' created, even misleading the public that 4 million jobs will be created until 2014. This makes a mockery of the supposed commitment to 'sustainable' jobs. The Cosatu leadership are cheerleaders of this type of privatization of municipal work.

2. More sinister, though, is that this provides a cover for the monopolies to continue to retrench ( they may be asked to keep workers on for some weeks with a nominal training).

3. The food gang (Pick 'n Pay, Woolsworths, Shoprite, Spar, Tiger Brands, Pioneer, and others) are making billions in profits out of deliberately starving the masses, and to this, the ANC has no plan in place. International prices of wheat, rice and maize have fallen by 40% in recent months but food prices still continue to rise. The FAO (Food and Agricultural organization of the UN) admits that there is enough food but almost 1 billion people are starving purely because they cannot afford the high prices. The capitalists are reported to continue to create an artificial scarcity in food by deliberately planting less this year. The government is more worried about sports achievements than the hunger of the masses.

4. The National Health Insurance is another scam to extend the role of the private health sector into the public sector. This is another scheme to enrich the banks that thrive on control of private health care. In the USA over 34 million people are excluded from health insurance as their income is too low. The onset of the health insurance in the US led to a rise on health costs as the private sector that was tasked with handling major sections of the implementation, simply increeased their fees. The Cosatu leaders are once again cheerleaders of this attack by imperialism on our already collapsed health system. The health sector needs to be completely nationalized under workers'control, not further privatised through this health insurance scam.

5. The over R700 Billion for infrastructure will not be for needs of the working class but will act as a cash cow for imperialist companies- nowhere is this massive sum linked to houses for all, of for setting up of a national non-profit food distributor, etc. This money will go to imperialist companies who will build power stations that pollute and in fact capacity that is not needed.

6. Not surprising is the ANC continued commitment for a bantustan for Palestinians (a so-called 2 state solution)- in this the ANC are the direct mouthpiece of imperialism, against the Palestinian masses. The recent study by reformist Levine shows that any '2-state' proposal is not possible.

7. Nowhere does the ANC tackle Anglo American for their role in the war in the DRC- how many people must die before the working class takes international action against imperialism. [already over 4 million people have died since 1996 in the war in the DRC).

8. The ANC repeats the Millienium goals, which are excuses of imperialist agencies like the UN to provide a cover to postpone meeting the needs of the working class now, while capital makes massive profits. Trillions of dollars are used to bail out the greedy banks but the few billion needed to feed the world, no-one is prepared to part with. 'Let them die' is the message from the capitalists and their agents in government.

9. The ANC is pledging to support agents of imperialism to suppress the masses in Madagascar; where is the Cosatu leadership in supporting the heroic fight of the working class in Madagascar.

We need to unite the working class, both employed and unemployed to continue the fight against capitalism and their system. Clearly a new leadership is needed in Cosatu, who is prepared to fight in a real way, and not just symbolically. Activists are being arrested on false charges of public violence, in the middle of winter the homeless in Delft are left to freeze on the pavement, activists are being shot at in the night by veiled gunmen; the working class must get organised, nationally and internationally to fight.

Our demands are:
• Decent Houses for all! Occupy vacant buildings and land!
• Share the work among all who can work, without loss of pay!
• No to retrenchments and closures! Sack the bosses! Occupy! Expropriate!
• Increase all wages by a minimum of 30%, wages to increase when prices do;
• Expropriate all the food producers and distributors, under workers’ control!
• Establish a national non-profit food distributor, under workers’ control!
• Expropriate and centralise all banks, under workers’ control!
• Replace all union leadership with representatives who are prepared to fight the capitalists! Call a national council of workers’ delegates and unemployed to co-ordinate the fight
• Establish workers’ defence committees against attacks by the state
• Capitalism is the crisis, working class power the solution!

Organise or starve

Workers International Vanguard League
1st Floor, Community House, 41 Salt River rd, Salt River, South Africa 7925

USA: For a Fighting Action Program

2009-05-23T02:42:00.000-07:00

We reprint a proposal submitted by the Humanists for Socialist Revolution to be considered and voted on by the Workers Emergency Recovery Campaign WERC at their teach-in held in San Francisco on Saturday May 9. The main organizer behind WERC is Socialist Organizer the US branch of the Lambertists.

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The formation of WERC could become a step in the right direction in the massive fight against the biggest attacks on the working class since the Great Depression. Unfortunately, however, WERC’s platform, as currently formulated, has some serious shortcomings. It is a list of generally supportable demands, but along with the demands there are built-in limitations seemingly designed to keep this campaign palatable to capitalist “friends of labor,” such as the Greens and the Progressive Democrats, who have signed on as endorsers of WERC.

The current gaggle of “liberal/progressive” Democratic politicians, as well as the bloated and entrenched labor bureaucracy, have come together to negotiate away our jobs, our social programs, and our benefit packages. In the coming weeks and months, we can expect a further watering down of the Employee Free Choice Act; a total inability to provide a plan for affordable, quality universal health care; layoffs and/or furloughs of thousands of public workers and teachers; school closures; tuition rises and restrictions on student registration at public colleges; and the commensurate ever-increasing expansion of prisons and the military-industrial complex.

To counter the current attacks against the unions and all working people, we need massive united labor actions from coast to coast. Factory occupations, such as the one at Republic Windows and Doors, are necessary to stop massive layoffs and closures of factories and workplaces. Unified strikes of public workers, teachers, and students are the only tactic that can save social programs, education, and the social safety net. But the current labor leadership, entrenched in its love affair with the Democratic Party, is incapable of launching the type of struggle that can win against the current attacks.

WERC’s current platform and program are not adequate as a fight-back strategy. For example, WERC calls for nationalizing the banks and the automobile industry. But reformist social democratic governments have nationalized banks during this crisis and before. They keep the banks and the financial institutions going for the benefit of the bankers and the capitalists, and then they de-nationalize them when it is safe to do so, returning the bank’s assets and operating capital to private hands once the risk of failure has been averted with the aid of public resources. Therefore, in contrast to pro-capitalist nationalization schemes, we must call for the nationalization of banks, financial institutions, and basic industries under workers’ control and without compensation.

Similarly, WERC’s action plan is limited to measures such as writing letters to President Obama begging him to turn against his benefactors. WERC’s program suggests that labor activists conduct a cross-class campaign of educational forums, devoid of any concrete preparation for the type of militant struggles labor must engage in if we are to turn the current class war around. Of course educational forums are needed to supplement the education we get from the bosses’ frontal attacks every day. But what we really need from labor activists are strategies and tactics for turning our unions back into truly democratic fighting organizations that act in the interest of the entire working class, rather than in their own narrow interests or that of the labor aristocracy.

We propose that WERC commit to organizing and publicizing regional, inter-union general meetings to organize and coordinate preparatory committees in every local.

The preparatory committees, in turn, can take the lead in preparing, mobilizing, and motivating workers in their own locals to help lay the necessary groundwork for massive actions. WERC’s role should be to serve as a framework around which workers can construct sustained, ongoing, democratically run coalitions of unions, working class communities, and the unemployed, with the goal of building for broad-based, militant direct actions such as massive strikes and occupations of workplaces, schools and universities. Our brothers and sisters in France have shown that such actions are the natural response of the working class. We should start organizing and follow their example.

We propose that the WERC adopt the following program and method of transitional demands, to be implemented by mobilizing the working class for a massive fightback:

1. Full Employment at prevailing union rates for all who are willing and able to work. To assure full employment, thirty hours of work for forty hours’ pay must be implemented to spread the available work to all and to compensate for the increased rate of production over the last 50 years that has been exploited by capital to sustain high unemployment rates and lower real wages. Passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) will assist workers in forging fighting unions capable of winning full employment. To that end we must mobilize demonstrations demanding the right to organize not be impeded and for passage of the EFCA.

2. Failing industries (both financial and industrial) must be taken over (nationalized) under workers’ control without compensation to provide adequate access to credit and to get the wheels of industry rolling again. For example, the Big Three automakers, as well as the domestic plants of foreign auto manufacturers, should be taken over under workers’ control. Only then can the industry be rationally planned to assure that production is retooled to provide, first and foremost, a public transportation and energy infrastructure that obviates the need for excessive auto production and the commensurate waste of petroleum. The production of non-polluting electric cars, for example, must be planned and coordinated under workers’ control as a step toward staving off the environmental disasters threatened by climate change.

3. Stop Layoffs! When the bosses declare layoffs or attempt to close down a workplace, workers should occupy the factories and the workplaces and establish workers’ control. Follow the example of our Argentinean brothers and sisters, and go even further by establishing a massive network of occupied workplaces as democratically run organs of an incipient planned rational economy.

4. Housing is a right! Stop all foreclosures and evictions. Move the homeless and those in overcrowded housing into housing already vacated due to foreclosures and the falling real estate market. Massive public works projects to build adequate housing for all, and put people to work doing socially necessary construction, must be financed by a banking industry nationalized and coordinated under workers’ control.

5. Quality universal public education at no charge from daycare and pre-school through the graduate level. Working people know that without a good education, our children have no future. To confront the current economic and environmental crisis, everyone’s intellectual potential must be cultivated. Through education we can build a rational economy and divest the world of poverty and drudgery. Education should be under the control of teachers, parents, and students old enough to participate. In that way, we will assure quality education and not the miseducation, overtesting, and ruling class propaganda that currently plague our public schools.

6. Quality free universal health care at no charge from prenatal to the grave is long overdue. Each person must be given access to the benefit of medical science and current treatment options. Insurance companies must have no “place at the table”; the only way to provide health care for all is to divest it of the profit motive. To accomplish democratic health care, all medical institutions must be placed under worker (Doctor, Nurses, Staff) control with community/patient participation.

7. End attacks on undocumented workers! End the ICE raids! Full employment rights for all workers! To end capital flight through working class solidarity across borders, we demand: Same work, same contract, same wages and working conditions! Down with the maquiladoras! Open all the borders. For the right of all workers to cross the borders and seek work and establish their homes without restrictions and arrests. Free all detained undocumented workers!

8. US troops out of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the rest of the world. Down with imperialist oppression. The defeat of imperialism is a victory for workers and the oppressed in the world.

9. We cannot count on Obama and the capitalists to clean up the environment and prevent catastrophic climate change. For them, profit always comes before the environment and the need of the workers. But the time to stop climate change is running out. The working class must combine its struggle against capitalist exploitation, and against the current economic crisis, with environmental consciousness. We must fight for workers’ control of industry in order to transform the current, outmoded technology of industrial production to totally green and sustainable technology.

10. Break with Democrats. No cross-class coalitions with Democrats and pro-capitalist Green Party politicians. For a struggle to replace the union bureaucracies that give our dues to the capitalist Democratic Party. Fight for the independence of the working class! We need to build a workers’ or labor party based on democratically run unions and organizations of the oppressed and the unemployed.

11. For a workers’ government that can and will implement and defend all the above transitional demands. To accomplish these goals, working people need their own government. If we allow the capitalists to control the state via their government, they will continue to attack and ultimately destroy our social gains. To defend our gains, we need workers’ power.

Humanists for Revolutionary Socialism are based in the US and are a Fraternal Group in discussion with the FLT.

You can find information about them on their website here.

No New Viet Nam War in Afghanistan and Pakistan!

2009-05-23T02:38:00.000-07:00

Oil Industry Tool Obama Fosters Mass Murder of Pashtuns
and Creates Nearly Two Million Refugees in Swat Valley!
Workers can stop him – and we must!

US imperialism is demanding that the Pakistani government take control of the Swat Valley using whatever military means are necessary, even if that means slaughtering the civilian population in the area. Bringing a halt to the progress of the anti-intervention front, which has advanced to some 60 miles from the capital of Pakistan, is critical to the interests of the US and its allies. They must maintain control over Pakistan in order to permit construction of a planned oil pipeline that will cross Pakistani territory on its way to a new port being built on the Indian Ocean. The crumbling governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan are in desparate need of support from Washington, so they are complying with US demands. The resulting intensification of imperialist intervention in Pakistan also brings to the front long-unresolved issues of agrarian reform, national liberation for the Pashtun, and basic democratic demands of the masses. The resulting conflict has exploded over the Swat Valley.

The arbitrary border between Afghanistan and Pakistan means nothing to the Pashtun, whose tribal lands were long ago bisected by British mandate. In recent days, that border has collapsed, as the former Taliban has morphed from an exclusively Afghani reactionary movement, based on archaic theological concepts, into an anti-interventionist front. The emergent neo-Taliban is the only source the Pashtun people can look to to provide armed resistance to the American-backed governments that have long since abandoned their needs, concerns, and safety. The neo-Taliban has not shed its reactionary character, but in a land without justice or protection, it provides a pole of attraction for the oppressed Pashtun in their efforts to resist the seemingly unending deluge of military intervention from the West. The recent murderous bombardment by the Americans, via their proxy Pakistani army, has only resulted in strengthening the neo-Taliban’s influence among the civilian population.

Only the most cynical and reactionary western observers still believe NATO intervention in this area is truly a battle against “terrorism,” or a fight to bring democracy to those who have been living under the rule of the Taliban. Deeper geopolitical interests are in play. One driving force behind this conflict is the intention of Western oil interests – Unocal, Chevron, and Halliburton – to build a north-to-south Trans-Afghanistan oil pipeline across eastern Afghanistan and through Pakistan to the Indian Ocean. Another is Washington’s need to encircle the emerging capitalist giant China, which if left unchecked will challenge Washington’s dominance as the predominant world imperialist power over the next two decades.

Last week, the respective “Presidents” of Pakistan and Afghanistan, Zardari and Karzai, took orders from Obama to suppress and/or eliminate opponents of the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline. To suit Obama’s view of the “National Security Interests of the US,” those Afghanis and Pakistanis who do not want a Western-controlled pipeline running through their homelands must be pacified, removed, or offered a deal by imperialism. Construction of this pipeline is contractually stipulated to begin next year. Hence the sudden step-up of the slaughter.

Tens of thousands of new Pashtun homeless have been forced onto the roads of Waziristan this week. They are heading for bulging refugee camps that already “house” as many as a million and a half refugees. Meanwhile, police troops roam the roads and camps shooting suspected Islamists, because Zardari is anxious to please the imperialists so as to consolidate their tentative support for his regime.

The “spin” would have us believe that the slaughter is limited to the Swat Valley. Not so. While the Pakistani army wreaks havoc in the Swat Valley, the American army continues to slaughter the peasants of Afghanistan. The number of civilians killed by American airstrikes in Farah Province last week comes to 149, according to the peasants’ own handwritten list of relatives killed in the bombardments. All this shows without a doubt that the Obama regime’s intervention in Afghanistan and Pakistan is escalating, accompanied by massive brutality. US imperialism can only maintain its domination through military force. Obama is thus exposed for what he is: just another imperialist politician, who is just as willing as Bush was to escalate the carnage inflicted upon the masses in Afghanistan and Pakistan, if that is what it takes for US imperialism to hold onto its power in the region.

Meanwhile all of Waziristan is subject to air attack by the Pakistani Air Force, which claims to have killed 800 militants as of May 13th. We don’t really know whom they’ve killed, but we do know these bombings are indiscriminate, are killing civilians, and are driving angered residents into the ranks of the neo-Taliban. The overall killing is the combined work of the Pakistani Army and the imperialist army. Here’s why: Predator drones, those robot airplanes with small video-guided missiles, have killed over 700 people this year in the course of eliminating a mere 14 (fourteen!) “Al Qaeda leaders” in Pakistan. The pundits and liberal supporters of the “good war” are stumped to explain the numbers. The casualties are already stressing the Pakistani medical system to the breaking point.

Socialists have no desire to see the reactionary Taliban take power and submit the population to a repressive theocracy. But the defeat of the imperialist forces and their Pakistani proxies will aid the struggles of the workers and the oppressed all over the world. It is our first duty to call for the defeat of our own mighty imperialist forces. We call for a revolutionary struggle to drive imperialism and its local capitalist allies out of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and pave the road to self-determination, peace, and dignity for the Pashtun people. Ultimately, only the socialist revolution, and a socialist federation among Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and the other countries and peoples in this region of the world who are fighting for self-determination, can really resolve the democratic aspirations of the people in the area. For this to happen, the Pakistani working class, in alliance with the peasantry in Pakistan and Afghanistan, must lead the struggle to oust imperialism from the area.

Meanwhile, within the imperialist countries and especially the US, labor must take the lead in the antiwar struggle. Defeat of imperialist warfare is too important to the working class to be entrusted to the traditional liberal/pacifist “peace” movement, which fell silent as soon as the prospect of a Democratic Party presidential victory appeared likely, and has not been heard from to any meaningful degree since Obama took office. Protests led by students and pacifists were not enough to stop the Viet Nam war. To stop this slaughter before many more lives are lost, we need LABOR ACTION NOW, in the streets, on the docks, and at the front lines! Those with the real power to end it through militant direct action include workers in transportation, and the rank and file in uniform.

• Transportation and logistics workers: Organize in your union to “hot cargo” (refuse to handle) munitions and other supplies destined for use in the slaughter of the Pashtun peoples of Afghanistan and Pakistan!

• Soldiers in the U.S. and on overseas bases: Refuse deployment to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan – and all other areas that US imperialism seeks to control!

• Soldiers already deployed: Hold mass meetings to discuss how to refuse criminal orders! Build a “let’s go home” movement that can lead strikes against a criminal war that is killing people who are fighting to defend their countries against imperialist intervention, as well as innocent civilians!

• Workers everywhere: Support these efforts by organizing and leading mass protests demanding immediate, unconditional and total military withdrawal from Afghanistan and Pakistan! Demand the withdrawal of mercenary trainers and covert special operations forces from both Afghanistan and Pakistan! Expose Obama’s “Big Green Lie” and demand abandonment of Big Oil’s pipeline project across Afghanistan and Pakistan! Demand massive aid for the refugees.

Reprinted from Humanists for Socialist Revolution

For a Workers’ Tamaki Makaurau!

2009-05-17T19:07:00.000-07:00

The Royal Commission Report on Auckland [Tamaki Makaurau] has come and gone. After 18 months of deliberation its conclusions have been binned by the National Government. Its proposals for a single city remain, but all the existing councils are abolished. The single city will have no more than 30 elected councilors, a number elected at large. The real power will be in the hands of the Mayor. The model is a corporate Board of Directors. By abolishing the urban and rural councils and creating a new Super City, the NZ capitalist class is set to privatise $28 Billion of Auckland assets.

The bosses’agenda

The campaign for one city has been driven by business interests for years. Their target has always been to get local government out of business and confined to provision of basic services. It wants to remove all local body legislative controls on investment, particularly property speculation. The new city will extend from Pukekohe to Warkworth, encompassing three harbours, a Gulf and the most valuable coastal property in the country. Corporates have always opposed the Auckland Regional Council [ARC] which has statutory authority over much of this land and which owns the major asset of the port of Auckland. The first great land theft was from Maori in the nineteenth century, the second is from all the working people of Auckland today.

Rodney Hide the new Minister of Local Government is the leader of the ACT Party whichs says that local government will be required to “shed its commercial activities”. Hide is now overseeing the Grand Theft of Auckland. A Transitional Agency headed by Hide with a few of his cronies will take charge of all the local authorities on the 14th of May for a period of 18 months to prepare the transfer of all their assets so they can be sold off when the Auckland City Council is elected in October 2010. The new Auckland City is therefore the bosses’ way of abolishing the ARC, divesting it of its business assets such as Ports of Auckland, and dispensing with the ARC role in providing subsidized services such as public transport.

Bosses’ abolish the ARC

On the same day as the Royal Commission released its report, Alastair Thompson, chief executive of the Employers and Manufacturers Association of the Auckland region, published an article in the NZ Herald “ARC swimming against the tide with its port holdings”.

Thompson makes the business case for the ARC to sell its majority shareholding of the Ports of Auckland because it makes a profit and uses the money to pay social subsidies to public services. Thompson is saying that state owned assets should not make a profit, or better still sell these assets so that private business can make the profits. Nothing galls the capitalists more than seeing the ARC actually taking profits from the private sector and spending it on workers.

It is clear that the National government is a government of the capitalist class in crisis and that they will impose the costs of their crisis onto ordinary workers without any concern for “democracy” or for our welfare. The seizure of power in Auckland and stripping of its $28 billion worth of assets will increase the costs of basic services and amenities to workers.

Workers Fight Back

The National ACT asset grab in Auckland is a repeat of Rogernomics, imitating the “shock treatment” used by Roger Douglas in the 1980s. Douglas said then that his neo-liberal reforms could only work if they were introduced quickly before there was time for organize resistance. The result was the defeat of the unions and of all other workers organisations, including the desertion of the Labour Left that split from the Labour Party to form New Labour in 1989.

We have to learn the lessons of the defeats we suffered under Rogernomics Mark 1. First we must reject the abolition of the existing councils and their elected representatives. This means junking the feudal institution of the Royal Commission used by the Labour Government to decide on Auckland’s future. Second, we have to fight the plans of the National ACT regime to use this feudal process to seize power and privatise Auckland as a Super City council dominated by councilors elected by the corporate class under a Super-Mayor.

We have to demand that any Auckland Super City should be elected by proportional representation on the basis of democratically formed local and existing city wards, including constituencies that represent Maori iwi in the Auckland region.

Second, to mobilise our forces to stop this coup against democracy we have to organize the unions and community organisations to put bans on the actions of the NACTs Transitional Agency as it usurps the role of the local bodies so as to prepare Auckland’s publicly owned assets and provision of services for privatization or abolition. This will mean stopping the Transitional Agency from preparing public assets and services for privatization by sacking workers and cutting spending.

Wharfies first in the gun

We can start by backing the Wharfies who are facing big job losses as the Ports of Auckland prepares for privatization. While it is owned by the ARC, the Port is run like a capitalist corporation. The threat to jobs today is only the start of the cutbacks in jobs and conditions under a fully privatized Port Company.

While the Port is the main prize of the privatisers there are a number of other “commercial” activities in their sights. The ARC uses its profits from the Port to subsidise its social services such as public transport. Other local body functions such as provision of amenities like swimming pools and libraries will be targets for the Hide axe. Auckland rail which is potentially profitable is likely to be also prepared for privatisation, as with the provision of water.

The resistance to the corporate grab of Auckland has to be on the ground. Those whose lives will be trampled by the capitalist plan to turn Auckland into a capitalist speculators paradise at their expense must mobilise locally, regionally, nationally and internationally to stop it.

What we need instead of a bosses' supercity for superprofits is a socialist supercity to socialise the provision of housing, transport, water, health, education and all social amenities that a are needed by the workers who make all the wealth.

Back the Iwi Have Influence campaign!

Back the unions fighting jobs and services cuts!

Back proposals for mass actions such as a Rate Revolt!

For a Workers’Tamaki Makaurau!

For a Socialist Super City, in a socialist Aotearoa, in a Socialist Federation of the South Pacific!

Antrim/Armagh: Unconditional but Critical Support

2009-05-13T17:35:00.000-07:00

Socialist Fight unconditionally defends those Irish Republican militarists that carried out the executions of British Army soldiers at a barracks in Antrim earlier this year, and killed the officer of the PSNI colonial police force in Craigavon. The British Army are in Ireland as imperialist occupiers, denying self-determination to Ireland and maintaining the last major colony of the British Empire (the occupied 6 Counties of Ulster that comprise "Northern Ireland"). The soldiers were going from the occupation of one country to occupy another. For this reason, British Army soldiers are certainly 'legitimate targets' of those fighting for a united Ireland, free of imperialist forces and free of the Border that divides not only the Province of Ulster and the Irish nation, but also divides the working class. That is where we are in agreement with the "republican militarists".

However, we need to ask what do the republican militarists think can be gained from a resumption of the guerillaist strategy, "armed struggle", by a dedicated, secretive minority that failed so decisively when carried out by the P-IRA on the basis of much more support than is enjoyed by its splinter groups? We need to propose alternatives.

British troops were re-introduced in 1969 to ensure the maintenance of the border dividing Ireland since 1921 and to defend British interests in a much broader context than 'just' in Ireland. The Provisional IRA emerged as the defenders of the beleaguered Irish nationalist minority. Their goal was to "get the British soldiers out" of Ireland. Their campaign enjoyed mass support among those Irish nationalists under occupation, as well as among Irish immigrants worldwide.

Bobby Sands

This support peaked in 1980 and 1981, when Republican prisoners went on hunger strike to win their rights as Prisoners of War against Margaret Thatcher. Hunger Strike Committees sprung up all over the world, mostly in former British colonies. The working class of much of the world was mobilising in defence of "the men behind the wire" against world imperialism as represented by the British Government.

Thatcher's intransigence, with the total support of Labour’s shadow Home Secretary, former Northern Ireland Minister Don Concannon, an NUM sponsored former union official, and the cowardly inaction of much of the far left, caused the deaths of ten hunger strikers between 5th May and 20 August 1981. A brief look at the worldwide reaction to the death of Bobby Sands on 5th May shows its powerful anti-imperialist effect. This is from the Wikipedia account:

In Milan, 5,000 students burned the Union Flag and shouted "Freedom for Ulster" during a march. In Paris, thousands marched behind huge portraits of Sands, to chants of 'The IRA will conquer'. In France, many towns and cities have streets named after Sands. Examples include Nantes, St Etienne, Le Mans Vierzon and St Denis. In the Republic of Ireland, his death led to riots and bus burning. In Dublin, the famous Moore Street market closed for the day of Sands funeral. In Liverpool a march in support of Sands took place from Upper Parliament Street to the Pier Head, chanting "Bobby Sands MP".

It was besieged by enraged Liverpool Orange Lodge members along the whole route. The International Longshoremen's Association in New York announced a twenty-four-hour boycott of British ships. Irish bars in the city were closed for two hours in mourning. In Hartford, Connecticut a memorial was dedicated to Bobby Sands and the other hunger strikers in 1997. The lower house of the New Jersey Legislature, voted 34-29 for a resolution honouring his "courage and commitment."

In 2001, a memorial to Sands and the other hunger strikers was unveiled in Havana, Cuba. After the 1979 Iranian revolution the government renamed Winston Churchill Boulevard to Bobby Sands Street. In the Indian Parliament, opposition members in the upper house Rajya Sabha stood for a minute's silence in tribute. A large monument dedicated to Irish protagonists for independence from Britain, including Bobby Sands, stands in the Waverley Cemetery in Sydney, Australia.

The all-Ireland Hunger Strike Committees and the mobilisations, were dominated by Sinn Fein who used them to build popular front alliances with Fianna Fáil and Labour local councillors in the south. Their policy was no confrontation with the southern state forces and this was rigorously enforced in this second revolutionary situation in May 1981 following the death of Bobby Sands; the other was in August 1969, both, of course, were all-Ireland upsurges.

In the late 1970s early 80s the radicalisation in Ireland was always to pressure the British state to negotiate a way out, so the roots of 1998 Good Friday Agreement (GFA) were firmly planted then. SF used the hunger strikers as voting fodder. But the only force that could have got the Brits out was a united front with the British working class. However, except for currents like Irish Freedom (RCP) and some others, the ‘Brit left’ refused to give unconditional support and fight the Prevention of Terrorisms Act in the unions etc. It was this early British version of a War on Terror that exposed the chauvinism of the British left on Ireland.

The leader of the Hunger Strikers in the Maze Prison, Bobby Sands, was elected with 30,492 votes from his death-bed as an MP to Westminster for Fermanagh and South Tyrone as an Anti H-Block/Armagh Political Prisoner. Sinn Fein won the by-election caused by his death from starvation. With Thatcher trashing the industrial base of the British economy at this time - taking on the most well-organised sections of the British working class "salami-style" (first the dockers, then the steel-workers leading to the great Miners' Strike of 1984-5), the mass influx of workers into the branches of Sinn Fein in the 26 County Republic and... the possibilities for a mass campaign to rid Ireland of imperialist domination, led by the organised workers were certainly there.

Good Friday Agreement

However, this seems to have been the beginning of the end for the Provo campaign against the British occupation of Ireland which finished with the signing of the GFA in 1998 and the subsequent decommissioning of Provo weapons. The central occurrence in the intervening years , 1981 to the mid-1990s' striking of a deal between the petit-bourgeois nationalists of the P-IRA and the imperialists of the British Government (the GFA), was the world-historic defeat for the proletariat of the collapse of the deformed and degenerated workers' states of Eastern Europe, the USSR, China etc in 1998-91.

This victory for imperialism dramatically shifted the whole balance of world forces away from progressives and toward neo-liberal capitalism: its effects being seen everywhere with a huge ideological offensive by imperialism, spreading neo-liberal economics everywhere in the world. Politically we saw the collapse of former opponents of imperialism in the form of political formations 'making deals', or supporting nasty, thoroughly anti-working class Governments.

This was collectively known as "the Peace Process", most famously involving the PLO in Palestine, the ANC in South Africa and Sinn Fein in Ireland. In April 2009 Gerry Adams and his team visited Israel and Gaza to extol the benefits of the GFA. Nowadays, Sinn Fein as junior partners at Stormont, sit almost at the top of the new structure of Government for the occupied 6 Counties - overseeing the running of the hated Northern statelet that their predecessors fought and died to destroy, actively assisting the British imperialists in their continued occupation by attempting to legitimise the occupation and its political structures!

It would seem that the aims of those that carried out the attacks on the British Military and the PSNI colonial police force were to de-stabilise Sinn Fein's involvement in the Stormont regime to collapse the structures. From reading the various websites of these republican militarists, including their statements of Easter 2009, it is clear to see that they offer no way forward for the workers and poor of Ireland or anywhere else in the world but by their actions they damage the opportunities for the workers - the only truly and consistently progressive force in modern society, to impose their own solution to the various crises facing them and the planet.

The militarists have a warped idea that the increase in repression that is an inevitable side-product of their 'terroristic' forms of action is in some way progressive (sounds a bit like recommending a vote for the Tories in a British election - 'because the working class need to be whipped like a dog before they shall get off their knees and fight' or something!). Of course the closing down of civil liberties can in no way be to the advantage of the working class, which needs the utmost liberty in order to arrive at a programme for the conquest of political power.

Hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle

Do we share the aims of the republican militarists? Well, they rarely criticise the partitionist Government of the 26 Counties Republic of Ireland and think that 'justice' shall be done if the 6 Counties currently under occupation were to comprise part of a capitalist 32 county united Ireland. We as revolutionary socialists have to ask what the class nature of such a future united Ireland might be, and we stand with James Connolly who wrote in the Shan Van Vocht in January 1897:

If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.

That is the story of the 26 counties. We are in favour of a 32 county Workers' Republic in Ireland which would be part of a socialist federation of the islands of Britain and of Europe, and of the whole world. We recognise that the only genuine solution to the present finance and economic crises—as well as for problems such as the "national question" in Ireland—is the ending of the nightmare of capitalism worldwide which is based on the private ownership of everything in the world - a tiny number of capitalists own and control the whole of the Earth's resources.

We fight for a world revolution, the vision of October 1917 in Russia. Easter 1916, August 1969, May 1981, were part of that objectively; the Irish working class needs a leadership that consciously fights for it.

Socialist Fight is published by the International Trotskyist Current.
Contact: PO Box 59188, London, NW2 9LJ, Socialist_Fight@yahoo.co.uk

South Africa: Alexandra residents on the march for houses and jobs for all

2009-05-12T15:27:00.000-07:00

On Wed 13th May 2009 at 830am Alexandra residents will march on the Johannesburg High Court, raising their demand for adequate housing and jobs for all. The march starts at Vogas house (corner Pritchard and Mooi streets). Frustrated by years of empty promises by the government for housing and jobs, many residents occupied the RDP houses in River Park, Alexandra.

The Alexandra Renewal Project, a product of the ANC’s so-called broad based black economic empowerment, has not only failed to provide adequate housing for all in need in Alexandra, they have also been involved in corruption, selling houses to their friends which should have been given for free to backyarders and shackdwellers. The Alexandra Renewal Project is seeking a High court action to evict the residents from the RDP houses in River Park. The Alexandra Residents are on the march to oppose this. While several several community and worker organizations support the march, it is being spearheaded by Vukuzenzele and supported by the Landless People’s Movement.

The residents say that the world capitalist crisis is reflected in South Africa, in part by the government not building enough houses for the people, creating an artificial scarcity in housing so that people’s desperation ensures that the banks and construction monopolies can make super-profits. Thus the fight of the workers in North and South America against retrenchments and against homelessness, in the entire world against high food prices and low wages, against unemployment is part of the same fight locally for housing and jobs for all.

Their fight is part of the same fight of workers locally for a living wage or for an end to retrenchment. The government’s commitment to monopoly capital is reflected by their appointment of billionaire capitalist, Tokyo Sexwale to the housing ministry. Mr Sexwale is the head of Mvelaphanda holdings which has substantial shares in construction giant Group 5. He is but one of several paper empowerment billionaires who are owned hand and foot by Anglo American and JP Morgan Chase. To add insult to injury the government has renamed the housing ministry to be that of ‘human settlement’- this shows that the government has now openly given up on housing the masses and will do their masters’ bidding to resettle the poor in shacks away from the city centres (social control).

The Alexandra residents are calling for Cosatu, Nactu and Fedusa to call urgent extended joint shopsteward council meetings to unite the housing struggles with the fight for a living wage, for lower food prices, for shorter working hours and an end to unemployment.

Forward to houses and jobs for all!

Disband the Alexandra Renewal Project!

Down with ‘broad-based’ self-enrichment!

Expropriate the banks and construction companies and place them under working class control!

For further comment:
Freda Dlamini ph 0743520141
Thabo Modisane ph 0781297797

[46 Arrested on MayDay

Frustrated by years of non-delivery and corruption in allocation of the few houses in Alexandra, the shackdwellers and the homeless who live in some of the vacant factories in Marlboro (a section in Alexandra), occupied some flats built by the ANC self-enrichment group, Alexandra Renewal Project. True to form, the police cracked down on the masses, arresting 46 people, today, 1 May 2009. The occupation of the houses symbolises the essence of the birth of Mayday, namely a day of struggle for the demands of the working class on a world scale; this time the right to housing. To date, despite numerous requests by the homeless for the list of who will be able to move into the flats, the Alexandra Renewal Project refuses to release the names. Instead, their instruction was to put the police on the homeless. This summarises the essence of the ANC-SACP -Cosatu popular front: they are talking about worker interests from the platforms of the many Mayday rallies, while in practice are defending the interests of the banks (international capital) by enforcing mass homelessness.

The arrested were being held in the Bramley police station, near to Alexandra but due to the cells being full, they are being transferred to John Vorster square. [John Vorster was one of the most brutal apartheid prime ministers, reknown for his heartless crackdown on the ANC and other then 'liberation' forces]

--
Shaheed Mahomed, Secretary, Workers International Vanguard League
1st Floor, Community House, 41 Salt River rd., Salt River, South Africa 7925
ph 0822020617, fax 0880214476777
workersinternational@gmail.com web www.workersinternational.org.za

Nepal: Maoist farce in slow motion

2009-05-10T16:30:00.000-07:00

The Maoist CP (N) under the leadership of “General” Prachanda has run its course from tragedy to farce. Refusing to complete an armed insurrection after 10 years of civil war it turned to parliament to bring about a ‘bourgeois’ revolution. This would mean another 10 years collaborating with the Congress Party (traditional party of the weak Nepalese bourgeoisie), with the World Bank, the IMF and multinational capitalism, to prepare the conditions for “21st century Maoism Chinese style”.

Really! We condemned this at the time as an open betrayal of the masses and predicted it would end in bloodshed. But this tragedy has turned to farce.

Now Prachanda has resigned because the Nepalese military will not fulfill the agreement to incorporate the members of the demobilised Maoist army! This is not the failure of “21st century Maoism” but 20th century Stalinism with tragic-comic characteristics. The Stalinists first openly betrayed in China in 1927 when the Comintern (Stalinised Communist International) insisted that the Chinese CP formed a political alliance with bourgeois General Chiang Kai-chek against the Japanese. Chiang turned on the leadership of the CP and massacred it.

It seems Prachanda wants to turn the tragedy of China 1927 into the farce of Nepal 2009. While Chiang had to plot to surprise the CCP leadership to kill them, in Nepal Prachanda delivers the flower of the Maoist rank and file into the arms of the bourgeois state military in the name of “democracy”. But when the army refuses to recruit the Maoist rebels into its army, the communist “General” Prachanda, resigns as Prime Minister and incites the Maoist ranks to go back to the ‘streets’ to re-impose “democracy”.

Perhaps he has in mind here the mass public demonstrations such as we have seen in Thailand recently, where the masses have been used by warring factions of the national bourgeoisie to don red or yellow T-shirts in the name of “democracy” i.e. parliamentary musical chairs.

Or perhaps he means something like what happened in the French colonies and ex-colonies recently where mass mobilizations produced rapid concessions from Sarkozy and his local hirelings to re-impose French imperialist rule.

What is sure is that Prachanda has constituted the Maoist leadership as a state bourgeoisie that is in competition with the old bourgeoisie, and is using the masses as street mobilization fodder to win the franchise of the IMF and World Bank to administer Nepal for imperialism.

He is staking his reputation as a new bourgeois Bonapartist, on persuading the “international community” that he is serious about demobilizing his Maoist army into the state military, and that it is only the old guard that has ties to feudalism and the Indian Congress Party that resists his “modern peoples army” and a new decade of peace and democracy.

Now the Australian Democratic Socialist Party has come to the rescue: “All those who believe in the principles of democracy and social justice, who believe that people should not be condemned to backbreaking poverty simply because the powerful have carved the world up among themselves, need to support the people of Nepal and insist that:
* the Nepalese people must be allowed to determine their future, foreign intervention must end;
* the peace accords must be upheld; and
* democracy must be respected and the people’s will implemented.

It seems that the DSP treats Marxism like a religion – beg and you shall receive.

But farce is never an improvement on tragedy. Trotsky said of China in 1927 that the CCP leadership had to maintain its armed independence from Chiang Kei-chek and to take over the leadership of the national revolution to defeat the Japanese and the Chinese ruling class. Only the armed workers leading the poor peasants could defeat imperialism and its national capitalist agents and make a socialist revolution.

The tragedy of the revolution betrayed in China 1927 gave rise to Maoism, where the Stalinist bureaucracy was forced to rule in the absence of a viable national bourgeoisie until it could turn itself into new bourgeoisie. Prachanda has compressed generations and has gone from Maoist insurgent to bourgeois Bonapartist in less than a decade to betray the revolution in Nepal.

Trotsky’s advice to the CCP still holds in Nepal today. There is no capitalist road to socialism. That is the road to counter-revolution. There is only the Permanent Revolution - the expropriation of the capitalists and the destruction of their class state. The Maoist rank and file must abandon the bankrupt farce of Maoism and recover their arms, mobilise independently of the state, and build armed soviets to take power for a socialist revolution.

Three Bolivian Miners Killed - No Accident!

2009-05-08T05:25:00.000-07:00

Yesterday (May 6, 2009) three miners were killed in Caihuasi [town near the Huanuni tin mine]. This was no accident. We hold the government of Morales and his army responsible. These deaths that the direct result of the drive for profits by the bourgeois government of Evo Morales and imperialist transnationals. Stop killing the workers!

On May 6, in the mining district of Huanuni, as they finished their shift, Coca Edwin Cucuna, 24, Julian Lajares Policarpio, 35, and Simón Rodríguez Mollinero, 38, died in a mine explosion. This tragedy happened at the 160 level (at 160 meters below ground) while preparing the site to be worked by the next shift of miners.

All the media talk of the bourgeoisie is that what happened is the result of an "accident."

This a lie! It is nothing but murder! The government of Morales which did not spend any money on maintaining the mine and the safety of miners is responsible. While the minerals, oil and other raw materials are still high on the world market, the "Bolivarian" governments like that of Morales, Chavez and the boli-burgeoisies profit from the bones, muscles and blood of workers.

Thus, while the workers hit by inflation fight for better living conditions, wages and to defend their jobs, and, like the miners of Huanuni, for a decent retirement pension, these governments have responded with brutal repression at the hands of the murderous army of Morales, or like Chavez, brutally suppressed the workers of Sidor steel workers striking for their just demands.

Bullshit! It is the workers who always pay with their lives, while the union leaders like Montes collaborate with this government and its agreement with the counterrevolutionary fascists of the Media Luna [the Eastern part of Bolivia that contains around 80% of the mineral wealth] that smashes our brothers and sisters in the East.

These leaders, Montes, Solares and Mitma [Guido Mitma, the head of the Bolivian Federation of Mining Unions] subordinate the workers organisations to the government of Morales, negotiating with the SMTMH [Sindicato Mixto de Trabajadores Mineros de Huanunian - Huanuni Miners union] an agreement whereby if the government invests in the Huanuni mine, workers will forgo a wage increase for many years!

This is a lie, there is no investment. Already they are making miners redundant and stopping production bonuses. They're just false promises! The government did not invest during the mining boom, how will it invest when mineral prices are falling! Once again trying to con miners!

Huanuni miners, like all workers in Bolivia, are super-exploited: the surplus value is torn from our labor by the national capitalists, the imperialists and the Morales government uses a small part of it to buy the services of the treacherous union leaders to control the workers and make them submit to the pact between the MAS and the fascists!

Last year Montes and Solares disarmed the miners of Caihuasi in the face of armed police repression causing the assassination of two miners and many more badly wounded. Now today they serve the greed of the capitalists to run down the conditions in the mines so that once more Huanuni goes into mourning for the dead! Stop killing the workers!

With the death of fellow miners, the SMTMH decreed a mourning period throughout the mine for 48 hours. This should become a day of mourning and protest in the whole of Bolivia to unite the workers' ranks. The Huanuni miners vanguard should again stand alongside the miners of San Cristobal, who occupied the mine of the multinational Pan American Silver, taking hostage the bosses, technicians and contractors to press their demands; and alongside the superexploited workers of the cooperatives and those thousands of miners out of work.

We must return to the Pulacayo Theses, there must be unity in the ranks of the miners vanguard:

* The sliding scale of wages and working hours to create jobs for all!

* National Congress of rank and file delegates of COMIBOL [State Owned Mines] unemployed and cooperative workers!

* To raise a militant campaign for the nationalization of all the mines, beginning with Mutún, and under workers' control!

* Any miner who does not exploit another miner can get a job in the nationalised mines and share in the gains of all miners!

* Industrialization will come from the expropriation of all the transnationals as demanded in 2003-2005!

* To win this we must fight for the resolutions of the general assemblies of the miners of Huanuni in July 2008, which declared Montes, Solares and Mitma as traitors to be implemented! Collaborators get out of the leadership of the COB [Bolivian Trade Union Central], the FSTMB [National Miners Union], and all local unions!

To build a miners militia that will strike terror in the hearts of the cowardly Santa Cruz oligarchy, the proletariat and poor peasants must break with the MAS, return to the revolutionary road of 2003-2005, re-founding the COB of 1952 together with its armed militia!

* Its Us or Them: Class against class!

* The miners will not be blackmailed with dismissals or wage cuts to pay for the crisis of the national bourgeoisie and the transnationals!

* Huanuni miners unite with all workers such as industrial workers, the teachers of La Paz, and the militant youth of the UMSA [University Mayor de San Andres in La Paz]. For a Congress of delegates of the COB, along with the poor peasants and militant students fighting to rebuild the 1952 COB militia!

The hundreds of miners who have been killed in the mines of Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, Latin America, Africa and Asia are the martyrs of the international working class. Their blood stains the banner of the many millions of immigrant workers and and low paid workers in the U.S. and the imperialist powers of Europe, the workers of the former workers' states now exploited by the former Stalinist bureaucracy reborn as a new exploiting class.

Raise the bloody flag of these martyrs to workers everywhere! Throughout the world the working class has begun its battle against the capitalist parasites: the workers of Madagascar, the militant workers and youth of Greece, France, Guadeloupe and Martinique and the former states workers!

International Trotskyist League (LTI)
Of the Leninist Trotskyist Fraction
May 7, 2009

Thailand: the revolution opens

2009-05-06T03:20:00.000-07:00

The League for a Fifth International [LFI] has written a useful analysis of the current situation in Thailand. We disagree however with its call for a Constituent Assembly and argue for a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government in Thailand to overthrow feudalism and capitalism and open the road to socialism.

Another useful more in depth analysis which also traces the reactionary role of the Maoists in Thailand, does however fall short of offering any political program for workers power.

In summary, the LFI argues that a revolutionary situation has developed arising out a split in the ruling class. On the one side is the King, the Army and the traditional Thai landlords and bourgeoisie that want to keep control of Thailand out of the hands of the pro-imperialist bourgeoisie. They are supported by layers of the middle class who mobilise dressed in yellow shirts.

On the other side is the billionaire populist boss Thaksin and the fraction of the bourgeoisie that wants to enrich themselves by privatizing and selling off Thailand’s assets to the international capitalists. The military removed Thaksin in 2006 and since then has staged several army backed coups to remove and keep the popular red-shirted Thaksin parties from power.

The latest protest by the UDD coalition [National United Front of Democracy against Dictatorship] backed by Thaksin was in response to the December removal of the popular elected government. Of course this ''united front" is really a popular front which ties workers and poor peasants to the middle class and the Thaksin wing of the the bourgeoisie. Thousands of redshirted protestors took over Bangkok and had running battles with the police and the military. Yet it was obvious that the rank and file of the military were reluctant to violently repress the protestors. A revolutionary situation had opened up. The workers had demonstrated their unwillingness to be ruled in the old way and the ruling class was divided on how to deal with the popular insurrection.

Both wings of the bourgeoisie are using their mass supporters to gain the advantage on the streets. Thaksin himself wants a “peaceful revolution”. This is the siren song of the popular front to use the masses but keep them in check while the bosses negotiate. But the problem is that the growing support for Thaksin and opposition to Royalty will see the military used to repress the masses. The revolutionary situation will end in the fire and blood of the counter-revolution.

It is therefore necessary for the workers and poor peasants to urgently break from the UDD popular front and from the Thaksin wing of the bourgeoisie and to form an independent armed workers and poor peasants’ party capable of building organs of workers and peasants' power, splitting the ranks from the officers in the army and taking power.

The LFI calls for a Constituent Assembly [CA] which is radical bourgeois parliament based on one person one vote. Yet to be able to call a CA free of electoral corruption would require the workers to be already in power and this would have to be in the form of a workers government made up of delegates elected by the armed workers, peasants and soldiers councils.

For that reason revolutionaries must be for a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government to overthrow feudal and capitalist society and open the road for socialism.

May Day message to the world working class from South Africa

2009-05-01T01:32:00.000-07:00

The handful of capitalist parasites are plunging the over 5 billion working class and fellow poor, into the abyss. For several decades there has been no real productive growth in the world economy. The control of the world by monopoly capitalism (imperialism), as demonstrated by so-called Anglo Boer war 1899-1903, ushered in an era of wars, civil wars and revolutions.

Today is no different: over 80% of the world's arable land is under the direct control of the world's monopolies- thus they are in a position to shift their burden of falling profits onto the working class- the capitalists know that we can do without many things, but we must eat. Thus the drive by capital through increased prices in food, transport and housing. Thus we have the massive increased attacks by the capitalist class to lower wages and to retrench millions more.

Around the world, the working class is resisting these attacks.

The uprisings in Guadaloupe, Martinique, Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Greece are all signs that the working class is starting to go on the march, to resist the crisis of capitalism being placed on the shoulders of the masses.

The monopoly capitalists are attempting with various strategies to control the working class. In South America and South Africa, they use Popular Fronts (alliances of capitalist parties with the trade unions) to control the masses. When uprisings occur here, the popular fronts increasingly use the fascist jackboot. In the last year fascists took over half of Bolivia. The so-called socialist Morales, allowed the peasants and workers to be massacred; the Morales regime brutally put down a strike by the Huanuni miners- some were killed. The bolivarian regime of Venezuela and the popular front of Lula in Brasil supported a pact with the fascists that has in effect divided the country into half- giving control in part to the fascists. There are some activists in South Africa and elsewhere who want to import the bolivarian regime. This will be a huge mistake.

In South Africa, the crisis of housing reflects the start of the resistance of the working class to the attacks by the capitalists; from Delft, Grassy park, to the Durban Abahlali to Kliptown and Alexandra, the working class has started the resistance; these fights for housing for all and jobs for all needs to be placed on the agenda of all unions so that the unemployed and employed workers join in common fight with common fighting committees (the fights against retrenchment and against high prices also needs to be placed on the agenda of all unions). But without a decisive change in leadership of the unions the working class will be left isolated in struggle. Thus the fight to put broader struggles on the agenda of the unions, it is important to build action committees of employed and unemployed workers, which unite the struggles against high prices, for housing, against retrenchment and for jobs for all. These workers committees should spearhead the resistance to the capitalist onslaught.

There has been growing international support for the scrapping of the sentences of the Kliptown 5 (activists who were sentenced for alleged public violence when the masses rose up for houses 2 years ago- these activists received 2 year suspended sentences. In Kliptown there is a huge squatter camp next to the multi million rand white elephant called Freedom Charter square and a 4 star Holiday Inn. Messages of support have been received from the Leninist Trotskyist Fraction (FLT) [which has a presence in Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, Peru, Brasil and New Zealand; the FLT has spearheaded the campaign in South America and New Zealand in defence of the Kliptown 5 which has resulted in messages being received from the Federal University Local in Cochabamba, Bolivia, from the heroic workers of the Brukman factory in Argentina [the workers took over the factory by force when the bosses unilaterally closed it] and from the Central Union of Bolivia (COB)- the message is appended below.

The FLT and WIVL have begun a process of joint programmatic work and discussions with a view to uniting the revolutionary fighters from South America, New Zealand and South Africa. This is but part of the same process of the fight for the rebuilding of the Fourth International. Without the coming together of the vanguard working class fighters from the imperialist centres, from Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, from China, from all the former deformed workers states and the colonies and neo-colonies, the struggle to defeat the capitalist offensive will yield only temporary gains. The WIVL makes a call for all principled working class fighters and groups to join with us in the fight to turn the current offensive of capitalism-imperialism into an offensive by the working class, in the life and death struggle, for Socialism.

This is our short and brief message to the world working class, on Mayday 2009.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Central Obrera Boliviana

To the comrades of the WIVL (Workers International Vanguard League) and the 4 activists sentenced for their participation in struggle for better housing and living conditions of the people.

Comrades

The workers of the Bolivian affiliates of the COB (Central Obrera Boliviana) hereby present our moral and material support for the cause that you are struggling for and which today has led to the imprisonment of your cadre, who are victims of demagogy, which is a worse form of fascism and veiled iron fist against whomsoever encourages people to stand up for their rights, a struggle we have been busy with since 1955 when we were formed; such social responsibility as housing is today is being neglected by those representatives and defenders of capitalism- they have only one response and that is to criminalise the struggle of those activists who are reclaiming this right to housing, etc.

We, together with yourselves, have only one way to fight against those who greedily cling to power for the benefit of a few while on the other hand the masses are claiming their rights; we dare not lose hope or abandon our struggle and in the spirit of workers internationalism we most energetically raise our condemnation, our protest against the ANC government of South Africa, who is abandoning the people and imprisoning those who reclaim their basic rights.

Comrades, the way forward of our struggle is clear: for a socialist revolution!

DEATH TO THE DEFENDORS OF CAPITALISM!

VIVA THE STRUGGLE OF THE WORKERS!

FOR THE COMPLETE FREEDOM OF THOSE WHO ARE IMPRISONED FOR DEMANDING DECENT SOCIAL CONDITIONS AND BETTER CONDITIONS OF LIVING!

VIVA THE SOUTH AFRICAN WORKING CLASS!

DOWN WITH THE ANC GOVERNMENT OF SOUTH AFRICA!

VIVA WIVL!

La Paz 22 April 2009