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