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Call
for an International Conference of Principled Trotskyists and Revolutionary
Internationalist Workers' Organizations
The revolutionary
organizations that jointly wrote and signed this document – Lucha Marxista of Peru, Groupe Bolchevik of France, the Communist
Workers' Group of New Zealand, the Grupo Obrero Internacionalista (CI) of Chile
and the Liga Obrera Internacionalista (CI)-Democracia Obrera of Argentina –
agree to call, on the basis of the principles and the programmatic lessons
contained in it, an International Conference of Principled Trotskyists and
revolutionary internationalist workers’ organizations.
We met in the Congress of the COTP-CI [COPT-CI is Committee of
Principled Trotskyists - Fourth Internationalist – the grouping of Workers
Democracy of Argentina and Workers International League of Chile.] in Buenos
Aires in December 2002 and, during the heat of the Argentinean revolution, the
heroic fight of the Palestinian people and of the preparations for the war
against Iraq, we decided to launch a call for an International Conference on
the basis of revolutionary lesson and essential programmatic agreements on
these crucial facts of the world class struggle. A first result of these
agreements and this common fight, was the joint declaration before the war
against Iraq, published on January 22nd, 2003, raising a principled and internationalist position
against it, and concentrating the struggle against the treacherous leaderships
grouped in the World Social Forum – a real counter-revolutionary international
– and against those revisionist Trotskyists and the liquidators of the Fourth
International currents whether they are subordinated to the WSF or not.
In the few months since then, the world
proletariat has entered into new struggles and suffered new defeats and
repeated betrayals such as in Iraq, in Palestine, in Argentina, in Bolivia, in
Venezuela.
We, the revolutionary internationalists,
must firmly say that the partial victories won by the counter-revolution and
the bourgeois-imperialist reaction are not because of the lack of heroism of
the exploited in these fights, nor because of the technical and military
advances of the genocidal imperialist troops, but the betrayals of the
treacherous leaders of our class.
The revolutionary upsurge at the end the
1960s and the beginning of the 1970s was a world wide process: the mobilization
of youth and workers in China; the anti-bureaucratic revolution in
Czechoslovakia; the war fought by the Vietnamese people; the general strike in
France; the large scale strikes in Italy; the victorious miners' strike in
Great Britain, the national movements in Ireland and the Basque Country; the
students' movement in Mexico; the revolution in Bolivia; the Cordobazo in
Argentina; the fight of the Blacks and anti-war movement in the United States;
the revolutions in Chile and Portugal; and so on. But this wave was contained
and betrayed by the bourgeois or petty-bourgeois nationalists and the
treacherous leaderships of the workers' movement.
From the 1980s, new defeats inflicted on
the world revolution allowed the bourgeoisies of the imperialist countries to
take the offensive again. A critical turning point was the defeat of the
British miners in 1985, but the decisive event was the destruction of the USSR
in 1991 and the subsequent restoration of capitalism in the former USSR and
Eastern Europe by the Stalinist bureaucracy that had usurped workers' power
from 1924.
This historical victory of the world
bourgeoisie encouraged American imperialism to lead the coalitions that crushed
Iraq in 1991, the Balkans in 1999, Afghanistan in 2002, and Iraq again in 2003.
But the imperialist powers cannot stabilise
the situation. At the end of the 20th century, the successful
struggles of the South African masses, the Palestinian Intifada that began in
1987; the mass demonstrations in East Germany and in China in 1989; the strikes
of November-December 1995 in France; the strikes of 1997 in South Korea; the
revolutions of Albania and Indonesia in 1997; came one after the other. The 21st
century began with powerful mobilizations of the masses, such as the heroic struggle
in Palestine in 2000,the uprising in Algeria, the strikes and demonstrations in
Italy and the revolution in Argentina in 2001, and the rising in Bolivia in
2003. The imperialist mobilisation for war on Iraq was answered by an enormous
anti-imperialist mobilization of the masses all over the world,that
reverberated in the heartlands of the imperialist countries. Today the workers of Europe put up a fierce
resistance to the liquidation of the historic gains won during preceding
revolutionary advances.
It is necessary to tell the truth to the
masses, no matter how hard and cruel: the defeats, the retreats in the
revolutionary processes, the military defeats of the oppressed nations, they
all resulted from the treachery of the existing leaderships of the proletariat
and the exploited masses, which are in most cases, grouped in the World Social
Forum today.
Imperialism, with this succession of
counterrevolutionary victories, is looking for a way-out from the world
economic crisis, by making the world working class and oppressed peoples
produce more surplus value. At the same time each imperialist country is
competing against its rivals for the resources and markets of the colonies,
semi-colonies of Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and the
former workers’ states. It has to be seen yet whether imperialism can resolve
its crisis by these means. To achieve
this the counter-revolutionary leaderships of all kinds must consolidate the
triumph of the counter-revolution by forcing the masses to the conclusion that
imperialism cannot be defeated, and therefore must be accommodated.
Therefore, the immediate perspective for revolutionaries in the current
world situation is dictated by the reality the working class is experiencing of
the wars, economic crises and sharpening of the class antagonisms of the
imperialist epoch.
We
believe that under these new conditions it is necessary, on the basis of the
revolutionary lessons of the many struggles, of the defeats and the betrayals
suffered by the world proletariat, to clearly separate the reformists,
liquidationists and centrists from the revolutionary internationalists, and to
prepare the international proletariat for the coming battles, as the
imperialist counter-offensive begun in the early 1980s, now sharpens against
the working class, the workers' states, (countries were capital has been
expropriated) and the oppressed peoples
of the world.
Under these conditions of economic crisis,
war, and revolution, the struggle of revolutionary internationalists to unite
on the basis of these lessons and a revolutionary program to prepare for the
coming struggles, is a task of utmost urgency.
Today the imperialist war against Iraq –as
before it the heroic Palestinian struggle and the Argentinean revolution –has
established a new Rubicon not only of the treacherous workers’ leaders, but
also of the revisionists of Trotskyism who provide a ‘left cover’ for the class
traitors. The various wings of the liquidators of the Fourth International
cling to the shirt tails of the UN and the French and German imperialists
collaborate with the stinking corpse of Stalinism and social democracy, with
the national bourgeoisie as in Venezuela, and with the radical petty bourgeois
nationalist movements such as Hizbollah and Hamas.
In the Argentinean
revolution, they are the enemies of the struggle of the masses to create armed,
self-organising mass organs based on direct democracy, and they use the minimal
and democratic demands of the revolutionary program as a chain around the neck
of the masses. They became the servants of the stinking remains of Stalinism
and supporters of the notorious, hated regime.
In Brazil, the
revisionist currents of Trotskyism and liquidationists of the Fourth
International have openly supported and called workers to vote for the class
collaborationist government of Lula-Alencar, and some ministers, governors and
Secretaries of State of the Brazilian reactionary regime come from their ranks.
In France, these currents support of the imperialist regime of
the Fifth Republic: they have openly called workers to vote for "the
lesser evil", for Chirac against Le Pen; or they have supported it by of
refusing to fight for an election boycott and for a general strike before the second
round of the elections. In France, in Spain, in Italy, in Great Britain, etc.,
these currents are completely subordinated to social democracy, to the new
parties of recycled Stalinists, and to the workers’ aristocracy and the
trade-union bureaucracies.
These are only some examples how the liquidators of the Fourth
International have crossed the Rubicon. These liquidationist and revisionist
currents do not leave in place one stone of the theory and the program of
revolutionary Marxism. Their bankruptcy is complete.
Because of this bankruptcy we must extract the revolutionary
lessons from the past struggles and the betrayals we have suffered. We must
prevent the flags of Trotskyism and of revolutionary Marxism from remaining in
the hands of these misleading usurpers. We must unite the dispersed ranks of
revolutionary internationalists. We must fight to set up Leninist combat
parties, and to build a revolutionary international. To achieve all of this, is it necessary to convene an
international conference to re-group the healthy forces of the workers’
movement and in particular of those who say they continue to fight for
Trotskyism and the Fourth International.
Those who call for this Conference all come from the splits in
the Fourth International, and we still have differences that we will publicly
debate in our press in the period before this International Conference. The
most significant of these differences is over the present character of the
revolutionary international.
One position is that it is necessary to struggle for a new,
Fifth International. Others say that the organization built by Trotsky, the
Fourth International, is dead, but its program is still alive and that
militants and regroupments are still seeking to apply the program for the world
socialist revolution. Consequently they raise the algebraic expression
"for the revolutionary workers’ International" saying that it will be
the debate and conscious action of the living forces building this
international that will determine its concrete form.
Yet others the struggle today,
more than ever, is for the regeneration and the refoundation of the Fourth
International. The theory and program retains their validity and actuality and
have passed the test of history. It is the usurpers and renegades of Trotskyism
who have not passed this test. Therefore, it is the validity and actuality of
its theory, program and strategy that determines the number of an
International, as has been demonstrated several times by the experience of the
world proletariat since the middle of the 19th century.
But we will discuss these differences –and others that exist before the International Conference –within a common international bulletin, since we are linked by our programmatic agreements facing the explosive events of the international situation: of crisis, revolution and war. So, we are far from any centrist alchemy and from signing agreements with those who will then go away and betray the proletariat.
Therefore, we call for an
International Conference to go forward towards setting up an International
Center of Revolutionary Marxism. The program we promote here for this
Conference is not written for small circles of intellectuals or for the
editorial boards of Marxist papers. It is a program that we undertake to
develop –and to fight for it –in the heart of the workers’ organizations in our
countries. Hundreds of workers’ and class struggle organizations are affiliated
to the World Social Forum, tied to the UN and the French and German
imperialists by their treacherous leaderships. Our fight will be to win mass
support for this revolutionary program from the combat organizations of the
working class. They will have an honoured place beside the revolutionary
Trotskyists.
The epoch of crises, wars and
revolutions will not allow the would-be liquidators of Marxism and of the
Fourth International to rest in peace.
Our forces are very weak, but our program and the ideas that we defend
are the fruit of more than 150 years of struggle by the world proletariat. They
deserve to live, and sooner rather than later, they will be adopted by the many
millions of exploited who enter into class combat.
Long live the struggle for an
International Conference of the healthy forces of Trotskyism and of the
revolutionary internationalist workers’ organizations!
20 August 2003
Collective for an International Conference of Principled Trotskyism
and revolutionary internationalist workers’ organizations.
§
Communist
Workers’ Group (New Zealand)
§
Groupe
Bolchevik pour la construction du Parti ouvrier révolutionnaire, de
l'Internationale ouvrière révolutionnaire (France)
§
Grupo Obrero Internacionalista Cuarta Internacional
(Chile)
§
Liga Obrera Internacionalista Cuarta Internacional -
Democracia Obrera (Argentina)
§
Lucha Marxista (Peru)
Programmatic agreements for
an International Conference
We call for an International Conference, in which groups,
fractions, militants, who are for the following principles and programmatic
points, will be able to take part:
(1)
All kinds of pseudo-theories have been adopted or invented by the revisionists
to explain that decadent capitalism can overcome its crises and develop the
productive forces without limits: “technical and scientific revolution”,
“monopoly state capitalism”, “neo-capitalism”, “the permanent arms economy”,
“neo-liberal globalization”, “new economy” etc. Against all these false theories, we affirm that for the whole
imperialist epoch, capitalism has already exhausted its progressive role and is
reactionary through and through. The
current imperialist counteroffensive and the war against Iraq is proof that
this capitalist system in its dying, destructive, imperialist phase, survives
only by ferociously exploiting wage earners, and casting millions of workers
out of production where they are condemned to misery, destroying the productive
forces by means of economic crises and wars, each time more parasitic and
destructive than the last, and threatening to destroy the whole of human
civilization.
(2) All the imperialist powers, in the
present crisis phase and the recurrent failure of the world economy – that
since 1997 has struck from Asia and Japan, to Brazil and Russia, to Argentina
and Turkey, and has now arrived at the heart of the United States itself – as
well as exploiting their own working classes, urgently need cheap sources of
commodities, slave labor and reserves of unemployed to super-exploit the
colonial and semi-colonial world and boost their drive for super-profits, in
their attempt to resolve the present crisis and drive up the rate of
profit. The present colonising
offensive of US imperialism is for a new repartition of the world at the
expense of the imperialist powers of the second or third order. The second war against Iraq carried out by
the US and Britain, despite the opposition of France and Germany, illustrates
the inevitable increasing rivalry among the imperialist powers. If the revolutionary proletariat does not
stop it first, capitalism will take humanity to new depths of barbarism beyond
that seen in the 20th century.
(3) Revolutionaries must join forces
militarily in the trenches of every oppressed nation attacked by imperialism,
and be for the military victory of that nation and for the military defeat of
imperialism. But we fight for the proletarian leadership of the war, and to
transform that national war into a socialist revolution both in the country
attacked and also in the aggressor imperialist nation. We proclaim to all who
will listen, that those who, in the imperialist countries, are not
unconditionally for the defeat of their own imperialism and for the victory of
the working class and of the oppressed nations, are neither revolutionary nor
anti-imperialist. We call on the US working class, today confined in a straight
jacket by the national patriotic politics of the AFL-CIO, and the Japanese and
European working classes, to fight to break the subordination of workers
organizations to the imperialist bougeoisie and to ally with its class brothers
and sisters in the colonial and semi-colonial countries, to overthrow the their
own imperialist bourgeoisies, their governments and their states, on the road to the socialist
revolution.
(4) We fight against the reactionary utopia
of a united capitalist Europe, and we call on the European working class to
oust the monarchy and the reactionary government of Aznar in Spain, the
Gaullist 5th Republic in France, the anti-worker imperialist
government of the united Germany, and the monarchy and the imperialist
government of Tony Blair in Great Britain, etc. In other words, we call on all to defeat the governments and the
states of the imperialist powers, by overthrowing the bourgeoisie, by
demolishing the bourgeois state and putting in place Workers and working
Farmers’ governments in these countries, opening the road to the United
Socialist States of Europe.
(5) We reaffirm the validity of the theory
and program of Permanent Revolution, against the policy of the "united
anti-imperialist front" refuted after the tragedy of the Chinese
Revolution in 1927. We support the widest anti-imperialist unity for action
which takes even a small step forward in the struggle against imperialism for
the working class and the exploited, always maintaining our absolute
independence and political intransigent before all bourgeois currents in
opposition or in government. Every semi-colonial bourgeoisie is necessarily
pro-imperialist. As the smaller partners of the imperialists they can haggle
over the surplus value extracted from the workers of their own countries, but,
because they are an exploiting class, they are more afraid of the proletarian
revolution than of the victory of the imperialists. Bourgeois or petty
bourgeois nationalism, secular or clerical, always gives up the national
struggle against imperialism and contains the proletariat and the masses under
the yoke of capitalist exploitation. We fight for the overthrowing of the
bourgeoisie and for the imposition of a Workers' and Peasants' government,
because the only class that can liberate the oppressed nation from the
domination of imperialism is the working class, leading the peasants and the
exploited and oppressed masses.
(6) We denounce the surrender of the Iraqi
bourgeoisie and of Saddam’s anti-worker officers and the Republican Guard
before the imperialists attack, for betraying the national war of the Iraqi
people and the anti-imperialist struggle of the masses of every Middle Eastern
country, which today allows many leaders of the Ba’ath bourgeois nationalist
party to collaborate with the Yankee and British occupiers. We denounce the
bourgeois nationalist leaders of the oppressed Kurdish people because they were
the allies of the invading Yankees and British in their war of colonial
occupation against Iraq, and who will deepen the oppression and crush every
struggle of the people for their legitimate right to national
self-determination, including their right to secede from Iraq, Turkey, Syria
and Iran. We denounce the governments and states of the Persian and Arabian bourgeoisies
of the Middle East, who kept “neutral” in the war against Iraq, refusing to
constitute, against the imperialist military coalition, a coalition of all the
oppressed nations of the Middle East to send arms, military equipment and
supplies to fight against imperialism in Iraq.
(7) We denounce the Palestinian bourgeoisie
and its political leadership, the PLO of Arafat, who gave up the revolutionary
struggle of the Palestinian people and who kneel down before imperialism,
before the "two states" plan of the UN and before Zionism. The
Palestinian bourgeoisie wants to administer a caricature of a State as an agent
of imperialism, in exchange for the blood of the martyred people. We declare
war against all the treacherous leaderships and the renegades of Trotskyism who
support the Zionist State of Israel by endorsing the counter-revolutionary
policy of "two states" of the UN and the imperialists. We fight for
the destruction of the State of Israel and for a secular, democratic and non-racist
Palestinian State with a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government of the
self-organized and armed Palestinian masses, on the road to a Federation of
Socialist Republics of the Middle East.
(8) We denounce Chávez and his Bolivariano
Movement for giving up the anti-imperialist struggle of the Venezuelan masses.
Chávez sat at the negotiating table with the USA, with governments like that of
Lula, and with "ambassadors of democracy" such as Carter and
Alfonsín, and signed an agreement in which everything the imperialist and
putschist reaction had not been able to achieve in the streets in two
counter-revolutionary attempts was then handed over to them. We denounce also
in Bolivia, the truce made by the COB, Quispe and Morales – leader of the WSF –
with the murderous government of Sánchez de Lozada, thereby preventing the
working class and the peasants from making the uprising they started last
February victorious. In Colombia, for years, the truces and agreements of the
FARC with the successive genocidal governments of this country have isolated
the peasants’ war in the country from the proletariat in the cities who face
the fascists "death squadrons". At the same time, the Stalinist
leadership of the FARC refuses to expropriate a single oil well, or a millimetre
of territory that it controls. Down with the truces and the agreements! For the
independence of the workers’ organizations from the regimes, governments and
lackey bourgeoisies! Only with such a proletarian strategy will we be able to
set up a workers’ and peasants’ movement that, united with its class brothers,
the American workers, fight to put an end to the slavery and misery in the
"backyard" of Yankee imperialism. It is from this perspective that we
raise the cry: Yankees out of Cuba, Ecuador; Puerto Rico, Colombia and the
whole Latin America! Out with the European powers who are as much exploiters
and oppressors as the Yankees! British out of the Malvinas! For a Federation of
Socialist Republics of Latin America!
(9) We call the Russian working class to take
up again the road of the Red workers, soldiers and peasants who in October 1917
made the first triumphant workers’ Socialist republic. The fight to create new
workers’ states in the territories of the former USSR is an urgent task for the
European and the world proletariat. We fight against Kim Song II of the North
Korea, Fidel Castro and the Cuban restorationist bureaucracy, and with the new
restorationist Chinese bourgeois, who adopted the reactionary and anti-worker
pseudo-theory of "market socialism" which, as is shown by the brutal
exploitation of the Chinese working class, and by the advance of restorationist
measures in Cuba, and the submission of the Argentinean working class, is the
counter-revolutionary policy of the World Social Forum to make the working
class subservient to the capitalists. At the same time, in the case of the
bureaucratized workers' states that still remain in existence, we
unconditionally defend them from imperialism, in order to better overthrow the
bureaucracies that are anxious to restore capitalism in these states.
(10) We declare war on all those
leaderships that cling to the shirt-tails of the bourgeoisie, on their policy
of class collaboration and their "popular fronts". History has proved time and time again that
conciliation of class interests between the capitalists and the workers leads
to the defeat and massacre of the masses. There is no possibility that the
situation of the world proletariat, nor the emancipation of any exploited
class, can be improved by submitting to the interests of any faction of the
exploiters.
(11) We denounce and declare war on all the
servants of the UN, including the majority of the renegades of Trotskyism who
kneel before it. They follow their new leader Gladys Marin of the treacherous
Chilean Stalinists, General Secretary of the Latin American Communist Parties
Conference that meets twice a year. She is the spokeswoman for Fidel Castro,
who abandoned the Chilean revolution in 1973, the Central American revolution
in the 80s, and who also went to Argentina to support Kirchner against the
revolution. Fidel Castro and Gladys
Marin, mainstays of the World Social Forum, have declared that "another
world is possible" without expropriating the capitalists, and continuing
the exploitation of the working class. They call for the "redistribution
of wealth" just as do the liberal democrats, hands in hand with the UN,
the “thieves kitchen” of the imperialist gangsters. The same UN that approved
the first war against Iraq, the genocidal blockade, and today is trying to get
back into Iraq to defend the interests of the French and German imperialists.
The same UN that in 1948 established the occupation of Palestine and the
creation of the State of Israel, and which today supports the Zionist massacre
of the Palestinian people with its policy of "two states". The same
UN that promoted and supported the war against Korea in 1950, etc.
(12) We proclaim that, as it has been
clearly demonstrated by the Argentinean revolution, in a pre-revolutionary or
revolutionary situation the basis of any revolutionary program must be direct
democracy and self-determination to enable the development, extension,
centralization and arming of the masses’ organizations, such as the popular
assemblies, the occupied factories, the commissions of the factories won from
trade-union bureaucracy and the piquetero movement, which are expressions of
the movement of the masses to create organs of dual power. In other words, when
a revolution starts, those who do not fight for power and for the creation of
Workers and Peasants Governments are no more than the servants of the bourgeois
state. This is why in the Congress of the COTP-CI we put forward the demand:
“For a government of the Third National Assembly of workers, unemployed and
popular assemblies, with their self-defense organs!”
(13) We declare war on the pacifism that
infects the consciousness of the working class. We also oppose the petty-bourgeois policy of individual terrorism
that separates itself from the masses and disarms the masses. The uprising of the Bolivian working class
and peasants with their cry: "Guns and grapeshot, Bolivians will not stay
silent", shows the necessity to arm the proletariat. The bourgeois and
counter-revolutionary leaderships prevent the arming of the proletariat, the
formation of workers’ militia, and the destruction of the officer strata of the
bourgeois armed forces. This has been proved in Palestine where Arafat and the
bourgeois leadership of the PLO, along with Hamas and Hizbollah, prevent the
generalised arming of the Palestinian people and sacrifice them to the
murderous Sharon and his genocidal army.
Despite this, we defend all anti-imperialist fighters against repression
and demand the liberation of all anti-imperialist fighters in the world.
(14) Everywhere we confront the
bureaucracies of all shades in the workers' organizations, bribed and corrupted
by large capital; the bourgeois nationalists, social democrats and Stalinist
trade-union bureaucrats, paid by the State to confine the workers to their
narrow economistic interests and to the interests of the bourgeoisie and
imperialism; the leaderships of the organizations of piqueteros that dominate
the Argentinean working class, now begging for crumbs from the reformists, and
that prevent the unity of the occupied workers and the unemployed and divide
the workers ranks. The trade unions that were created to defend the economic
interests of the workers have been transformed, over several decades by the
trade-union bureaucracy coming out of the aristocracy of labour, into
apparatuses where the bureaucracy is paid to collaborate with the bourgeoisie
and its state to subordinate and impoverish the workers. We Trotskyists fight
in the trade unions to eliminate the bureaucracy, and to win workers'
democracy. We affirm that this is not possible without fighting for the
complete independence of the workers' organizations from the bourgeois state
that incorporates and corrupts them. We fight to impose workers' democracy
based on the factory committees and the strike pickets; for renewing the
leadership of the trade unions by resolutely putting up militant delegates at
critical times to form a revolutionary leadership in the trade unions.
(15) We proclaim that any people that
collaborates in the oppression of another people is unable to liberate itself.
The imperialist bourgeoisies oppress what remains of their colonial empire (Puerto Rico, Northern Ireland, Martinique,
Guadeloupe, New Caledonia…) and occupies again dominated countries (Bosnia,
Afghanistan, Iraq…). We are for the independence of all protectorates and all
colonies from imperialism. We are for the national rights of those peoples kept
under armed oppression within bourgeois states (Basques, Kurds, Kabyles,
Tamouls…). We categorically support the oppressed and invaded Chechyen nation
against the genocide it suffers at the hands of the troops of the white
counter-revolutionary army of Putin and the Russian bourgeoisie, today the
agents of imperialism. We are for the unconditional right of national
self-determination of all oppressed peoples, including the right to separate if
the majority demands that right. In no case do we adapt ourselves to bourgeois
or petty bourgeois nationalism. Only the recognition of the right of the
self-determination of the oppressed people ensures the unity of the
proletariat. For the same reason, we pronounce ourselves for the freedom of
movement and settlement of workers, and for the complete equality of rights of
all workers.
(16) We reaffirm the validity of
Leninism–Trotskyism, of the program of Fourth International, as the continuity
of that school of revolutionary strategy founded by the Third International of
Lenin and Trotsky. It is from this strategic position that we call all the currents
that say they fight for the interests of the working class, to break with the
bourgeoisie and to start the struggle for power based on the autonomous and
armed organizations of the masses. In the process of this combat, we are
prepared to enter all united fronts and united actions with any workers'
current ready to make even a single step forwards to advance our class. But as
Lenin would say: while we are ready to
strike together, we march separately. Before, during and after any such action
we will not weaken our criticism of the reformist leaderships that are obliged
to leave their luxurious offices and to put themselves at the head of the
action of masses.
(17) The social democrat and Stalinist
reformists poison the workers with the claim that capitalism can be reformed by
means of the bourgeois state. It is useful for the plans of the bourgeoisie
that the political apparatuses of social democracy and of the trade unions
allies with it through "participatory" or "popular" democracy
and manages their state to prevent the proletarian revolution. Social democrats
and Stalinists are agents bought by the capitalist enemy.
(18) Pseudo-Trotskyist centrism has claimed
to be revolutionary for fifty years while in practice it was subordinated to
the reformist apparatuses. The Pabloist IC-USEC, the Lambertist IC-AIT, the
Morenoist LIT, UIT, MAS and CITO, the Hardyist UCI-LO, the Cliffite IST, CIT of
Socialist Appeal, the Grantist Militant, the Altamiraist MRCI, the Loraist POR,
etc., represent tendencies that have broken from Trotskyism into the camp of
reformism.
(19) Social democracy, Stalinism and the
trade-union bureaucracies have liquidated the most elementary principles and
morals of the class. The centrists, revisionists and liquidators of the Fourth
International are following in their path. The proletariat wants staunchness,
honesty, loyalty, and the broadest workers' democracy. To discuss, to decide
and to act, workers and youth must expel from the workers' organizations the
method of lies, misrepresentation, and physical violence introduced by these
leaderships who try to suppress or conceal the political differences inside the
workers' movement
(20) We affirm that the 21st
century has begun in the same way the 20th century finished: as an
epoch of crises, wars and revolutions, highlighting all the characteristics of
capitalism in decomposition. Against all the revisionists of Trotskyism who
want to put the responsibility for the defeats on the masses and to hide their
own capitulations and treacheries by saying that the problem is the
"crisis of subjectivity" of the masses, or its "backward
consciousness", we state that the start of 21st century
confirms the central premise of the program of the Communist International and
of the Fourth International: without a social revolution in the next historical
period, all of human civilization is threatened by catastrophe. Everything
depends on the proletariat, and on its revolutionary leadership: the historical
crisis of humanity is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership.
(21) Those who call for this International
Conference, proclaim the necessity for revolutionary internationalists to build
revolutionary workers' parties and the world party of the socialist revolution,
from the forces emerging out of the struggle of the masses. With such
organizations, the proletarian insurrection will be able to triumph, world
revolution will succeed, and socialism will be able to develop.
Collective
for an International Conference of Principled Trotskyists and Revolutionary
International Workers Organisations