segunda-feira, 30 de abril de 2012

MAY DAY - LCFI


May Day Greetings from the Liaison Committee for
the Fourth International to the International Working Class

The Liaison Committee for the Fourth International sends its warmest revolutionary greetings to the world’s working class, the poor and oppressed and in particular to its fighting vanguard, the most class conscious elements who have now begun to emerge on a global scale to fight its cause under the banner of the world revolution so shamelessly abandoned by so many international groups claiming the name of Trotskyism in the past year.
Since the uprising on 15 February 2011 in Benghazi the ‘Libyan revolution’ has been the touchstone for revolutionist worldwide. The mass media supplied us with a great deal of lying propaganda, lies that the majority of the left groups would have no trouble exposing in an earlier period over Iraq, for example, but they did not try. They could not find and expose the racism of the ‘rebels’ shown in the lynchings and summary executions of black people with the transparent excuse that they were all “Gaddafi’s mercenaries from Chad”. They could not expose the CIA connections and obvious pro-imperialism of the Transitional National Council and even those who were eventually forced to acknowledged this told us that there was a ‘real revolution’ in the ranks of the ‘rebels’ pointing to the sole pathetic piece of ‘evidence’, the very sophisticated banner that opposed intervention with six people around it undoubtedly flown in from CIA headquarters in Langley Virginia to fool the gullible and those who wanted to be fooled.


Of course the LCFI recognise that Gaddafi was no revolutionary socialist, he was a bourgeois nationalist who ruled with a corrupt clique of capitalist backers, whose main aim was the preservation of the privileges of that group. He assisted Imperialism by supplying weapons to Southern Sudan to divide the country to enable the US to seize the oil recourses then controlled by China. In return Omar al-Bashir (whom Gaddafi has assisted to come to power in the 1986 coup) was the foremost backer of the rebels in Benghazi, secretly supplying weapons and other assistance to overthrow Gaddafi, totally consistent with the completely unprincipled character of the national bourgeoisie.

Those on the ‘left’ who wish to assist in the overthrow of Assad in Syria, and they are generally the same culprits, can points to similar examples of his treachery and the favours Assad and his father Hafez al-Assad performed for Israel and the US in the Lebanon, intervening to prevent the defeat of the Falangists (Christian fascist forces), when the alliance between Lebanon’s leftists and the Palestinians were on the brink of victory during the Civil War in 1976.

As with the policy of the United Front of working class parties the LCFI champions the Anti-Imperialist United Front as developed by Lenin and the Comintern in its first four Congresses. Just because the semi-colonial world is terrorised by brutal dictator does not mean that they are the main enemy of the world’s working class and oppressed. That epithet belongs to Imperialism and global finance capital and to it alone in all wars and conflicts. A defeat for Imperialism has always two great progressive consequences, the strengthening of the class consciousness of the workers and poor in the oppressed nation under Imperialist attack and, far more importantly in the global balance of class forces, the dashing of illusions in the working class in the imperialist country in their ‘own’ bourgeoisie, as the defeat of US Imperialism in Vietnam showed.

As with the international class struggle, so with the national; you cannot fight for Imperialism in its foreign wars and consistently seek its overthrow at home. Domestically the first line of Trotsky’s Transitional Programme, “The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat” is as true today as when written in 1938. Every refugee from the fight to build the world party of socialist revolution must deny the truth of that proposition, every refugee from the class struggle blames the working class, its lack of combativity, its inability to lead itself and thereby defends the class treachery of the trade union bureaucracy and their political representatives in parliament, the Labour and social democratic parties worldwide. Trotsky said the TU British leaders were the “backbone of British Imperialism” and this is true of every international TU bureaucracy from the British TUC to COSATU in South Africa to those in Brazil, the CUT and the CSP-Conlutas and in Argentina the CGT and CTA. Without for a single moment neglecting our internationalist duties our main task today in our own class struggle is to fight and pose alternatives to these treacherous misleaders. The building of rank and file movements in the trade unions, the placing of demands on all those who claim leadership of the working class, the relentless exposing of the centrist who defend the left Trade Union bureaucrat and left nationalist misleaders is our central task in the class struggle.

As the Transitional Programme says:

“In the struggle for partial and transitional demands, the workers now more than ever before need mass organizations, principally trade unions. The powerful growth of trade unionism in France and the United States is the best refutation of the preachments of those ultra-left doctrinaires who have been teaching that trade unions have “outlived their usefulness.”

We therefore reject totally any suggestions that the trade unions have become simple agents of the capitalist state, that Trotsky’s Transitional Programme no longer applies in 2012, that we must seek to build our own sect in isolation from the mass struggles of the working class.  We are as confident as ever that with a correct orientation to Imperialism internationally and to the class struggle domestically based on irreconcilable opposition to the TU bureaucracy and to those who refuse to fight it consistently our small international current will undoubtedly find the ear of the resurgent vanguard of the class internationally.

·         Defeat World Imperialism, finance capital and its agents in Syria, Iran and in every war!
·         The Malvinas are part of Argentinean national territory, “Las Islas Malvinas son Argentinas”, defeat British Imperialism in the South Atlantic!
·         No reliance on Bourgeois nationalist leaders, even of the left variety like Hugo Chavez!
·         Only the International Working class can defeat Global Imperialism!
·         Build the World Party of Socialist Revolution!
·         Forward to the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International!

Liga Comunista—Brasil
Tendencia Militante Bolchevique—Argentina
Socialist Fight—Britain
1 May 2012