English

The Communist League is born

Against skepticism, to build a revolutionary trotskyist party that belongs to the working class!

“It is ridiculous to plead different circumstances and a change of periods: the building of a fighting organization and the conduct of political agitation are essential under any “drab, peaceful” circumstances, in any period, no matter how marked by a “declining revolutionary spirit”; moreover, it is precisely in such periods and under such circumstances that work of this kind is particularly necessary, since it is too late to form the organization in times of explosion and outbursts; the party must be in a state of readiness to launch activity at a moment’s notice.”

(Lenin: Where to Begin?, 1900)

We present the workers, the youth movement and the vanguard of the worker’s movement with all of the reasons for our break with the Liga Bolchevique Internacionalista (LBI).

As never before in history, the lack of a worker’s revolutionary leadership pays today its price. It has been a century since capitalism has entered its senile decay. Although they enjoy the greatest amount ever achieved by humankind in technological evolution, capitalism drags civilization to barbarism, degrading men and the rest of nature. Concomitantly, the currents that claim to be Marxists are reduced to small clusters of propaganda with absolutely no real influence on the proletarian masses, the only ones that can liquidate the agony called capitalism. Marx and Engels had the legitimate right t of constituting an advertizing league at the debut of scientific socialism.

However, for the organization of the worker’s movement to be under the same conditions 150 years after the drafting of the Communist Party Manifesto is no longer a right, but a delayed deformation which decisively contributed to the deterioration of the working class life conditions under the capitalism decay. The lack of a revolutionary direction of the masses’ struggle relates to the imperialist barbaric in a dialectic manner, as cause and effect. As Trotsky predicted, the objective conditions for the proletarian revolution perishes and humanity heads towards a catastrophe.

It is not valid as well to justify the current impotence using as parameter the weakness of the first Trotskyist organizations in the decade of the Fourth International's founding. Trotsky and his comrades were subjected to a hunt physical extermination by the GPU (future KGB), the Moscow trials and the highest process of both first worker’s state and III International bureaucratic degeneration and policing. Simultaneously, thanks to Stalinism, the Chinese revolution was drowned in blood, the revolutionary processes in France and Spain were aborted by the popular fronts and Nazi and fascist dictatorships took control of major capitalist states. Besides creating the fascist reaction, as an opposition to the USSR, the imperialism attempted to resolve the crisis of overproduction in 1929 through the Second World War.

Under terrible persecutions, the proletarian revolutionary vanguard, the founding core of the Fourth International was, according to Trotsky, "exiled from its own class." The fatal physical repression which destroyed the Bolshevik Central Committee, the best elements of the generation that built the 1917 revolution, also murdered the best members of the Fourth International. This physical and objective elimination cannot be compared to today's ideological isolation. These are two unfortunate circumstances that require distinct surviving tactics.

The LBI’s political atrophy can only be understood within the framework of the working class consecutive defeats in the last 20 years. It is important to point out that this development can be understood, but not justified. The LBI was born after all the of historical mass movement waves in Brazil (metallurgical strikes against the dictatorship which led to the founding of the PT and the CUT, the national movement for "Direct Vote Now!," polarized election of 1989, the “Collor Out!” campaign), and under the anticommunist offensive fomented by the principal defeat of the world proletariat which was the counter-revolution that restored capitalism in the USSR and Eastern Europe (1989-1991). To aggravate the situation, if the demoralization of the post-USSR has weakened the world’s lefty parties in the 90s, in Brazil this situation was even worst, particularly because of the consolidation of the most refined mechanism of co-optation of the proletariat in the planet with the rise of a Popular Front to the federal government in 2002.

The young current was born orphan and lonely for its principled programmatic positions, defending retrospectively the USSR as a worker’s state which no longer existed when the LBI was born; and combating the popular front which has become the main ruling instrument of the Brazilian bourgeois and the imperialism in the continent. In this framework, it was imposed an increasing sense of powerlessness and conformation front to the situation unfavorable to the workers' struggle. In recent months, aware of the new reactionary offensive generated by the economic crisis, the LBI crystallized a political course of reducing its activities of combating the revisionism by only interacting in the literal-virtual sphere, limiting itself to the critic of a small fraction of the Popular Front lefty parties, PSOL and PSTU.

WHICH HERITAGE ARE WE RENOUNCING?

The small universe of the petty bourgeois opposition became more fetid in the 2010 elections, being crushed by the Popular Front pressure and the bourgeois opposition, recycled around the PT-PSDB symbiosis that was the candidacy of Marina. Electing the left wing of the petty bourgeois opposition as the center of its political intervention, the LBI limited itself to perform a completely inoffensive warning regarding the pseudo-Trotskyism that exits in this political environment.

Front to the growing reaction, the revisionist pseudo-Trotskyists generally sell the working class defeats as victories. Through this approach, they have sold the counter-revolution in the USSR as some kind of "political revolution", the global financial crash, used to justified the increased cutbacks in salaries and the destruction of workers’ historical rights, was announced as a pre-announcement of a capitalism implosion. The aim of these delusional falsifications of reality is to mask its own demoralization and its impotence front to the reaction and to make the militancy euphoric. Not utilizing these methods, but suffering from the same impotence, the LBI falls into prostration when it is required to find that their remarks about revisionism don’t produce either political or organizational effects.

While the pseudo-Trotskyists desperate to leave the marginality adapt itself to opportunistic directions and to the pressures of the ideological reaction, adopting more and more of a shameless collaborationist character of counselors to the Popular Front left wing, the LBI contents itself to be part of this chain dedicated to make critical warning to the popular front counselors.

The founders of the Fourth International were executed by Stalinism and its followers have declined the task of rebuilding it, abandoning the most basic principles of the thesis of the permanent revolution and the transition program to follow the wave, first, of Stalinism itself, then social democracy and bourgeois nationalism. In the same way, and even earlier, they deserted themselves from the struggle for the working class consciousness, where the social and political reserve to break with the political and revolutionary isolation is located.

Also neglecting the patient work of forming recruits from outside the circle of the very deformed petty bourgeoisie and the aristocracy of Brazil, the LBI has set itself to a dead end. Passive victim of unfavorable increasingly conjunctures to the classes struggle, the LBI arrives in the mid of 2010 prostrated front to the anticommunist ideological reaction of post-Soviet Union and especially to the pressure of the popular front in Brazil.

Even considering that the LBI is one of the most active current in the world of virtual militancy compared to hundreds of other virtual group in the twenty first century, its self-exclusion from the labor movement, its exclusive work in a micro-vangardist way within a labor militancy anticommunism and anti-bolshevism of PT, will never lead to building a revolutionary organization of the proletariat. It has been more than proved that correct predictions, asserted political diagnostics and initiatives by itself, when aimed at such demoralized people, does not elevate the working class to the height of its historic tasks. At best, it could generate, in the words of Trotsky, "a club of high-level discussion" (The social Composition of the Party, Writings by Leon Trotsky, 10/10/1937) entirely disconnected from the fight which could elevate the working class struggle toward their historical interests, to liberation from idiocy and bestiality to a different historical course, away from the barbaric imperialism.

We renounce the heritage of those who despise the work of raising the proletariat to the Bolshevik consciousness, a very common practice of all revisionists, and a problem that the LBI has not been able to overcome and didn’t wanted to do so. All lefty organizations in Brazil have abandoned the job of the worker’s political formation at least since the 1980s. The newer generation of lefty parties (PSOL and PSTU), already educated by the PT school, mantaining completely deformed relations with the working class (trade-Unism, parliamentary cretinism, populism, welfareism), reproduces the Lulism deviations.

When we talk about the education of the working class, we are not referring to schools of socialism for students and workers held entirely separate from the political struggle of parties. Neither, we have the illusion that workers will find socialism from the accumulation of unionism, movement or "struggle" experiences. It is necessary to recruit the masses in the struggles, in places of work and study, to then educate them to understand the strategic political organization, to instruct them within the communist ideology towards building a vanguard party. As for now, it can’t enable them to fight the Brazilian main mass movement cancer, the Lulism and its satellites, that sabotage the class struggle from the path to social revolution.

RETURN TO THE WORKER’S MOVEMENT TO PREPARE THE NEW GENERATION OF REVOLUTIONARY MILITANTS WHO WILL OVERCOME LULA’S DEFORMATION ERA

To swim against the waves, to confront the well framed opportunism of the State, the satellites centrist adapted to their regime in the middle of the reflux of spontaneous fights, during a gray situation, peaceful and of the revolutionary spirit decay, our work needs to be especially patient and abnegated. We have made clear that there is no other way to overcome the period of Lula's Brazilian labor movement history without a new generation of labor activists who are prepared under a Trotskyist program. Therefore, we must begin the task by going back to the labor movement. There are no shortcuts.

The new course requires developing the revolutionary political agitation over the masses, an activity that the small organizations either abandoned or are doing in a very atrophied way; and the centrist and opportunist major parties do so in a completely deformed way. This does not imply any disregard for the theoretical or ideological struggle in defense of the principles. Without this propaganda, there will not be genuinely Marxist preparation and much less revolutionary movement.

History is not over, the political life as a total is an endless struggle composed by an infinite number of links. It's time to break through the opportunistic bubble, reestablishing close ties with the class that, because of its production role, happens to be the most progressive of the contemporary society. Without any pretentions to invent a new formula for political organization, we call for the struggle to build a party of professional revolutionaries, centralized and conspiratorial, composed by the conscious vanguard of the 21st century proletariat.

Appropriating from today’s best logistical resources, to carry on the task is necessary to go back to the good and old Bolshevik methods of agitation, propaganda and political organization that later led the struggle for socialism, which were able to consciously bring the workers to the power takeover through the social revolution and the introduction of the worker’s revolutionary dictatorship.

FROM PROSTRATION TO SKEPTICISM, SEVERAL STEPS BACK

The recognition of the historical working class as the protagonist of socialist revolution is part of the LBI’s programmatic points. It is mentioned in many of the concluding parts in their articles. However, it has become just words as the group itself became convinced after three global imperialist offensives (capitalist restoration in the worker’s states, the post 9/11 war on terror and the economic crisis of 2008) that not only the revolution was no longer a task for our lives, but that the struggle for the construction of the working class Bolshevik party was no longer a valid effective practice. At a meeting on September 8, 2010, the great majority of LBI’s direction made a catastrophic evaluation by stating that, "Faced with the current class ideological setback, it is impossible for a revolutionary core to insert itself into the proletariat." This statement is nothing more than the formula to prostration, as characterized during the meeting itself.

This conceptualization generated another step back. In the midst of a disruptive crisis with a militant from the Sao Paulo’s regional in July 2010, the majority of the central committee voted, against Humberto’s positions, deciding to close Sao Paulo’s regional and re-establish the LBI as an organization in Fortaleza instead of Sao Paulo.

The decision meant an autophagic degradation of the correct orientation policy deliberated at the LBI’s Fourth Conference five years ago, which guided the party’s leadership gradual political shifting from Fortaleza to Sao Paulo, justified by the fact that there resides the Latin American most influential city for the working class and the national political center in Brazil.

What's worse is that this huge setback wasn’t guided by any strategic plan which crystallized the course of the party’s prostration.

The majority of the LBI’s leadership took a step back in a structural orientation which had been a mark that used to differentiate the party for its audacity when compared to the inactivity of other smaller regional groups. By adopting this measure, the LBI was retreating from its national-Trotskyism position to what we could call in a very optimism way, to a municipal-Trotskyism one. After completing 15 years of existence, 200 editions of the Workers' Struggle paper and became a principled political reference for the lefty vanguard, national and international parties, the LBI receded toward becoming a single-celled organism. The abandonment of the class consciousness struggle invariably leads to reviewing the ABC of Trotskyism. The next step in this setback is to blame the proletariat and not its cowardly political leadership for the exitless situation in which humanity finds itself.

Nowhere and under any circumstances, the proletariat alone was able to understand its historic task. It’s our job to remember that the proletariat alienation or lack of political consciousness is not a new phenomenon to Marxism. Rather, we learned that the dominant ideas among the workers are the ideas of the ruling class; the workers themselves do not develop socialist consciousness, that it can only be introduced by the materialism dialect intellectuals as were Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.

But if the Marxist vanguard, originated from the petty bourgeoisie, settled down and only practice politics among themselves, using the working class to only ask for support in union and bourgeois elections, how can Trotskyism advance within the class? Expect that the proletariat, under the impact of historical defeats and under the education provided by the parliamentary cretinism, trade-unionism, or non-governmental organizations, etc, not to have decades of retrocession in their political understanding, is to idealize a proletariat that does not exist or has never existed.

The masses full of internal contradictions will only have their conscience changed in favor of the Marxist revolution if the revolutionary leaders help them to do so. To think otherwise is to focus on spontaneity that has nothing to do with Leninism. To wash our hands from this task, to consider it "impossible", consolidates the destructive divorce from political theory to the class, conducting to a programmatic break with Trotskyism and, surely, heading to skepticism.

IN DEFENSE OF THE STRUGGLE FOR THE WORKER’S CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS

The general defeat of the European proletariat, in particular, the Greek one, obligated to pay the cost of the European and Yankee speculators’ extravaganza after several general strikes, demonstrates in full that for the workers’ any future success it is essential for the proletarian masses to be conducted by a revolutionary leadership. Even in between the “grayest and the next explosive moment”, to use Lenin's expression in the paragraph that opens this document, even if it takes decades, we believe that the foundation of our existence should be to create a combative organization and to promote political agitation that rescues what is to come.

Most of the LBI’s leadership also argues that such conceptions from our side does not justify the split in the party, considering that even if our criticism is right, they argue that the LBI "has not crossed the Rubicon", in other words, "has not broken programmatically with the boundary of class.” The reality is not exactly like they depicted. Neither the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks nor the split between defenders and defeatist in the Fourth International, important divisions of Marxism, seemed essential at first. However, after 15 years without acting toward building itself within the proletariat, after more than 10 years of international isolation as an organization, existing today with only its little agonizing work done in the opposing union groups it has, the crisis of leadership had its share inside the LBI as well, leading the party to skeptic prostration.

Trotsky himself who at the beginning of the twentieth century did not find necessary the split between Bolsheviks and the Russian Mensheviks, two weeks before his assassination, evaluated the split, this time inside the U.S. SWP: "If we take the political differences as they are, we can say they were not sufficient for a split, but if they developed a tendency to turn away from the proletariat in the direction of petty-bourgeois circles, then the same differences can have an absolutely different value; a different weight; if they are connected with a different social group. This is a very important point. (...) It is very characteristic of the disappointed intellectual. He sees the war, the terrible epoch ahead, with losses, with sacrifices, and he is afraid. He begins to propagate skepticism and still he believes it is possible to unify skepticism with revolutionary devotion. We can only develop a revolutionary devotion if we are sure it is rational and possible, and we cannot have such assurances without a work in theory. He who propagates theoretical skepticism is a traitor.” (Leon Trotsky On the “Workers” Party, August 7, 1940).

By going towards the skepticism practical, the LBI has become stagnated over the years. Restricting it to promote only occasional recruitment, relatively anarchic and empirical given its restricted area of union influence and sporadic, given the inexistence of assemblies promoted by the Tendencia Revolucionaria Sindical (TRS/LBI) in Fortaleza. The party contented itself as being a critical witness of the calendar promoted by PSTU, the block that serves as a counseling party to the Lulism.

It is important to mention that the crisis in the LBI worsened in July after a major union participation in the CONCLAT, Santos, Sao Paulo.

The organization presented brilliant critics against the bureaucratized, helpless and crashed character of the Conlutas leadership, opposed to arm the class against the popular front. However, the lack of continuous and structural work training of the revolutionary militant deeply aggravated the LBI’s political isolation imposed by the Popular Front and its satellites. The party’s sterile intervention as a vanguard organization inside the worker’s movement is aimed at activists who are addicted to the long life inside the union apparatus betraying their own workers.

To conclude, the organization spent a decade and a half arguing for the foxes not eat the chickens, refusing to work and teach the chickens the abilities of the eagles.

The LBI is seen as a group that could make accurate predictions and critics, but is not willing to fight in a consequent way to gain the proletariat consciousness against the numbing front populist to which the workers are conducted by the ones they criticize.

To break with an orientation that renounces the struggle for the proletariat consciousness against opportunism and revisionism is an obligation for those who have a life strategy the Trotskyist revolutionary militancy.

The concepts of Trotskyism and skepticism are incompatible. We can recall once again the old Bolshevik when front to the skeptics who under pressure from a hostile anti-communist reaction germinated within the ranks of the Fourth International: "Will a genuine revolutionary leadership be formed capable of leading the proletariat to the conquest of power?

The Fourth International has replied in the affirmative to this question, not only through the text of its program, but also through the very fact of its existence. All the various types of disillusioned and frightened representatives of pseudo-Marxism proceed on the contrary from the assumption that the bankruptcy of the leadership only ‘reflects’ the incapacity of the proletariat to fulfill its revolutionary mission. Not all our opponents express this thought clearly, but all of them – ultra-lefts, centrists, anarchists, not to mention Stalinists and social democrats – shift the responsibility for the defeats from themselves to the shoulders of the proletariat. None of them indicate under precisely what conditions the proletariat will be capable of accomplishing the socialist overturn.

If we grant as true that the cause of the defeats is rooted in the social qualities of the proletariat itself then the position of modern society will have to be acknowledged as hopeless. Under conditions of decaying capitalism the proletariat grows neither numerically nor culturally. There are no grounds, therefore, for expecting that it will sometime rise to the level of the revolutionary tasks. Altogether differently does the case present itself to him who has clarified in his mind the profound antagonism between the organic, deep going, insurmountable urge of the toiling masses to tear themselves free from the bloody capitalist chaos, and the conservative, patriotic, utterly bourgeois character of the outlived labor leadership. We must choose one of these two irreconcilable conceptions.” (The proletariat and its Leadership, The USSR in War, Leon Trotsky, September 25, 1939).

In fact, not all skeptics clearly and formally express its belief that the proletariat has become incapable of following a revolutionary strategy. In the case of the LBI, after our split, the group has been trying to cover up its own stagnation with anti-prostration statements, a high dose of arrogance or boastfulness, a frenetic publication of articles, above its normal practice and the urgent restoration of the recently removed regional of São Paulo. Knowing the LBI as we know, we have reasons to believe that these actions have shortness of breath, aiming only to camouflage the very immediate level of weakness crystallized over the years.

FOR A PROLETARIAN VANGUARD OF THE IV INTERNATIONAL

We took the initiative of splitting from the LBI, aware of the voluntary, bassist and laborite pressures that could threaten our new course. It is certain that we won’t be safe from making mistakes in this new journey. At first, our program will inevitably be incomplete and confusing. We will return to the study of the rich experience left by the old communists as an intent to dissipate these confusions. More importantly, we will, together with the militancy sectors that will be with us, learn from our mistakes. There is no other way to have direct access to the workers and gain their trust through correct tactics but without common developed experiences. It is only possible to win the proletariat to a revolutionary organization by strengthening the ties with its most conscious faction that has not been disturbed by the many tentacles of the vast ruling Popular Front apparatus, including labor organizations such as Intersindical and Conlutas. Does it mean to abandon the struggle in the forums promoted by these entities? Obviously not. It means that other than that, we must build a basis, communist and revolutionary opposition inside each union against the central bureaucratic leaderships overtly controlled by either the government or by its satellites.

Today’s extreme need of a true proletarian political organization that is the willing to establish a Bolshevik militancy armed with a Trotskyist program is an enormous advantage to our group in making our task successful. Our job now is to build a revolutionary workers' opposition to Lula’s government and the bourgeois government that will replace him.

When in the hands of those bastards who were LBI’s well asserted target of criticism, this document might cause some perverse moral satisfaction to them. We advise these gentlemen to enjoy this brief moment. From now on, they can no longer take advantage from the fact that the Trotskyist organization that criticizes them is isolated from the working class vanguard’s task forces. We are very confident that once aware of its historical interests, the proletariat task forces will march upon the politics of class collaboration towards the worker’s takeover aiming the construction of a socialist future for humanity.

Humberto Rodrigues

Founder and former member of the LBI’s Central Committee, a member of the Newspaper and Magazine Workers' Struggle Revolutionary Marxism editorial board.

Nadia Silva

Former militant of LBI and TRS;

Luiza Freitas

Former militant of LBI and TRS;

Pilar Oliveira

Former militant of LBI and the TRS

October 2010

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LBI - Liga Bolchevique Internacionalista (Internationalist Bolshevik League) is a Trotskyist Brazilian organization born in 1995. It was originated from a split with PCO (Partido da Causa Operaria), the party that then represented in Brazil the international organization of Partido Obrero Argentino, led by Jorge Altamira. The LBI split with the PCO because it disagreed with the political support that PCO gave to Lula’s popular front in 1994. Another reason for the split was that the LBI, different from the PCO, characterized that the 1989-1991 re-restructuration of capitalism in the USSR and in Eastern Europe were historical defeats for the working class.

PT – Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers' Party) was created in 1980. This is the party that has a major influence in the masses in Brazil. It controls CUT (Central Unica dos Trabalhadores, the largest central/federation of workers in Brazil). The PT, through Luis Inacio da Silva, known as Lula, was elected president of Brazil in 2002 by a popular front with many other bourgeois parties. Lula performed an anti-worker and pro-imperialism government sustained by CUT, MST (Movimento Sem Terra) e by the UNE’s (Uniao Nacional dos Estudantes) political support. 

PSTU - Partido Socialista dos Trabalhadores Unificado (Unified Socialist Workers' Party) created in 1994, is a centrist party. Also, it’s the Brazilian section, as well as the largest one worldwide, of the LIT (Liga Internacional dos Trabalhadores, International Workers League, built by the Argentinean Nahuel Moreno).

PSOL - Partido Socialismo e Liberdade (Socialism and Freedom Party), a reformist party, generated by Euro-communist and Trotskyist tendencies, constituted by ex-members of the PT and PSTU in 2004.

Conlutas - Coordenação Nacional das Lutas is a labor-union organization controlled by PSTU. It was created in 2006 from a split between unions and social movements inside the CUT.

Intersindical – Unionized grouping formed from a split with CUT, composed by unionists from PSOL, Partido Comunista Brasileiro and other groups close to the PT lefty who auto denominate themselves as Unionized Socialist Alternative (ASS). They lead the Sindicato dos Metalúrgicos in Campinas SP. In 2008, the Intersindical’s wing connected to the PSOL split with the ASS-PCB wing in order to organize a fusion with the Conlutas.

Conclat – A working class conference. It was an unsuccessful fusion attempt between the Conlutas and the Intersindical/PSOL in 2010 in the city of Santos, Sao Paulo.

TRS - Tendência Revolucionária Sindical, LBI’s collateral labor-union.

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STATEMENT ON LIBYA BY LC-SF-RMG

DECLARATION TO THE WORKERS OF THE WORLD
AND THEIR INTERNATIONALIST VANGUARD

For the unconditional defence of Libya against Imperialism!

For a Military United Front with Gaddafi to defeat NATO and the CIA armed "rebels"!

No confidence in the government of Tripoli; only by arming all the people and by the permanent revolution can we win the struggle!

The global economic crisis has increased the appetites of Imperialism to appropriate the planet's riches by super exploiting the working class and recolonisation. Capitalist governments of the world have moved enormous sums of money from state coffers to large private capitalist financial intuitions in the name of saving capitalism’s crisis cause by speculation. Now the bourgeois governments are seeking to recapitalise their coffers. For this, they force the working class to pay the price of this financial orgy. This payment is made through fiscal adjustments, the attacks on wages, and victories over unionised labor and the attack on social security, etc. It has also increased the cost of living for the masses, and increased inter-Imperial competition in the semi-colonies.

In Europe, from Greece to Ireland, popular resistance was restrained by pro-Imperialist party leaders and trade unions. In Wisconsin in the USA workers leaders linked to the Democratic Party did the same. In Latin America, so far, but not for long, the governments of the "centre left" are delaying and dampening social conflict by the control they exert over mass organizations. Obama ordered the start of the bombing on Libya when he was with the pro-imperialist President Dilma Rousseff, in Brazil.

In Africa the liberal bourgeois opposition to dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt made democratic transition arrangements to install new puppet governments to stabilise the country and keep it sympathetic to the U.S. and Israel. We do not consider these processes as "Arab revolution" or "democratic revolutions." These popular uprising are genuine expressions of the outrage at price increases and increased oppression caused by the imperialist crisis which began in 2008 but Imperialism seek to divert these potential revolutionary situations enhance and extend its dominance in Africa and the Middle East.

If Imperialism cannot take ownership peacefully as in the fraudulent referendum that divided the Sudan, then the UN will come to occupy the country by military force and impose their fraudulent elections as happened in Ivory Coast. All this, with the support of the African Union and the ANC government in South Africa.

In Libya, Syria and Iran, Imperialism seeks to accomplish coups camouflaged as "democratic", by taking advantage of the "popular uprising" in neighbouring countries. In Iran, the U.S. and Israel seek to revive the reactionary "green revolution". In Syria U.S. Imperialism and its Zionist enclave strive to create the same scenario of civil war to justify another military intervention. In Libya, Imperialism made a qualitative leap in its intervention. Not only by what it did after starting the "rebellion", but they had also prepared beforehand. A "revolt" in Libya is not any kind of revolution, but a counterrevolution, directed by Imperialism and supported and sponsored by the CIA. It is the continuation of a series of attempts to restore the monarchy and tribal privileges in favour of U.S. and European Union, which began shortly after Gaddafi took power in 1969 and continued sporadically since then. Not coincidentally, the flag of the "rebels" is the flag of the monarchy imposed by Imperialism, the flag of the puppet King Idris (1951-1969).

Rebel leaders in Libya were CIA agents from the beginning, as were the anti-Chavez coup leaders in Venezuela in 2002. Imperialism, headed by the U.S. and France, seek to balkanised Libya, as it did in Yugoslavia or to dominate it together, as in Afghanistan and Iraq. We have also have seen this in Bolivia, where Evo Morales surrendered a larger share of the revenues from gas exploration to the pro-Imperialist coup makers in the east of the country.

Those who hold the naïve notion that what happens in Libya is a revolution of "masses" and a continuation of the riots in Tunisia and Egypt, they forget that the masses have been duped by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution (Czechoslovakia), the Orange Revolution (Ukraine) and all other ‘revolutions’ made in the CIA. They were all, in fact, counterrevolutions, sponsored by Imperialism.

Since the new escalation of Israeli attacks against Palestinians 20 Palestinians have been killed and 50 wounded in the worst Israeli offensive in Gaza for two years. It is the bloodiest attack since the 2008 military operation that killed 1,400 Palestinians. We are for the destruction of the Zionist state of Israel and for a multiethnic workers’ and peasants’ government a based on workers’ and peasants’ councils.

For 21 years Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP) in Egypt was a member of the Socialist (Second) International (SI) alongside the New Zealand Labour Party, the Australian Labor Party and the British Labour Party. The SI only expelled the NDP in January 2011, after the mass demonstrations emerged that brought down Mubarak, but not the NDP. But true to its long history of defending British Imperialism British Labour leader Ed Miliband gave unequivocal support to the Benghazi rebels and to the bombing of Libya on the totally hypocritical basis that, “as internationalists we have both the responsibility and the opportunity to help enforce international law and save innocents from slaughter”. Using Gaddafi’s foolish threat of "no mercy, and no pity” he sanctioned the bombing which will result in far more deaths than Gaddafi could have caused, but, as an ‘unintended consequence’ will put the oil resources of Libya in the hands of western Imperialism to invest in the markets of Wall street and the City of London and divert it from schools, hospitals and welfare payments in Libya and investments in other African countries.

Jim Murphy MP, Labour's Shadow Defence Secretary gave the cue that the rest of the soft-left in Britain and internationally have followed, “Inaction would have undermined the cause of freedom not just for the hundreds of thousands of people who have risen up against Gaddafi in Libya, but in other countries where people are also fighting for change.”

And just so as we are left in doubt about the Labour party’s position on Imperialism’s murderers Murphy writes; “our thoughts should be with all British Forces around the world, including the more than 10,000 Britons in Afghanistan. Those undertaking courageous acts in the sky above Libya and in the Mediterranean should be given all the support they need because their bravery is what enables the UN resolution to be enforced and the Libyan people to be protected”. There is, naturally, no concern about the civilians and fighters blown to pieces ‘to save lives’ in Iraq, Afghanistan or now Libya only concern and praise for the killers.

The greatest proof that the "rebels" are nothing but butchers and Libyan agents of Imperialism is that they have invoked NATO bombing on their own people, as did the collaborators at all times of the class struggle since the Paris Commune Thiers (1871) to Lebanon (2006). As each day passes it becomes clearer that the native agents of Imperialism are merely open cat’s paws for multinational intervention in the country. They are racists and xenophobes, the enemies of all black working class Saharans in Libya. In the hunt for "Gaddafi mercenaries” they seek to demoralise the work force in the country, preparing it for the super exploitation in a new era of extreme Imperialist plunder. The Libyan "rebels" are a bunch bourgeois turncoats from Gaddafi regime in favour of big business internationally.

Political groupings claiming to be Marxists who portray the popular uprisings in the Arab world as diverted "revolutions" are demagogues, who flatter and stupefy the masses while new pro-Imperialist bourgeois puppet governments are being stabilised. But the worst is when these groups in the name of supporting the Libyan masses in their struggle for democracy, combined with Imperialist war propaganda by the world media to cover up the CIA coup. Those who now refuse to establish a military front with Gaddafi externally and internally to defeat the interests of Imperialism, betray the struggle and the fight against global Imperialism and the genocidal state of Israel that massacres the Palestinians.

We denounce the main international revisionist currents that formally share the following positions:

1) characterise the existence of an "Arab revolution" or "democratic revolutions" in Africa and the Middle East

2) Support the pro-imperialist "rebels" in Libya

These include the USFI (NPA - France), LIT (PSTU - Brazil), ITU (IzquierdaSocialista - Argentina), IMT (Socialist Appeal - Britain); CWI (Socialist Party - Britain): IST (SWP - Britain). FT (PTS - Argentina); FLTI (LOI-DO - Argentina); L5I (Workers Power - Britain).

It was the anti-working class, neoliberal policies of Gaddafi during the last decade that paved the way this reaction. Gaddafi has established new agreements with Imperialism, destroying the gains of the process of nationalisation of the means of production and post-1969 energy resources. Gaddafi banned trade unions and strikes and made racist anti-immigrant agreements with Berlusconi, he has sponsored the election campaign of Sarkozy and privatized and made auctions with the energy resources of Libya. Thus, the caudillo of Tripoli has lost popularity with the Libyan and African population and fuelled the appetite of sectors of the native bourgeoisie to negotiate directly with Imperialism, freeing up Gaddafi clan.

The masses can have no confidence in the anti-Imperialism of Gaddafi. Therefore we demand the arming of the whole Libyan people against Imperialism and the reactionary opposition. We demand the unconditional defence of Libya against Imperialism and its agents. We demand a military united front with Gaddafi against NATO and the royalist, CIA agent, "rebels" who are politically similar to the pro-Imperialist Loyalists of the north of Ireland, the Inkatha Freedom Party of South Africa or, more closely, the Contras of Nicaragua.

This was the revolutionary tactics of Lenin and Trotsky before the Kornilov uprising, Kerensky's former general who tried to carry out a coup in Russia in August 1917. The Bolsheviks called for a united front and military weapons to Kerensky demanded at the same time that Kerensky be blamed for paving the path for reaction, and thus prepared a social revolution. Similarly, the reaction to the responsibility of Gaddafi for the coup will drive the masses to combine the tasks of the anti-Imperialist struggle with the democratic and socialist to move toward the establishment of a workers and peasants government where the pan-Arabism of Gaddafi has stopped. The victory over the counterrevolutionary Imperialist military offensive would not only be a huge boost for the proletariat Libyan who could settle accounts with the warlord of Tripoli, but would also give a huge impetus to the struggle of workers in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Ivory Coast, Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan against Imperialism and the native capitalists.

The first step towards this is to fight in our own countries against the Imperialist bourgeoisie and semi-colonial Britain, Brazil, South Africa. We advocate the defeat of our own governments, as allies against Imperialist recolonisation of the world proletariat. We support the full right of the Libyan masses to seize the multinational British, Brazilian and South African companies and of all capital in Libya to nationalise them without compensation under workers' control.

● Defeat Imperialism, Fight for the sovereignty, unity and independence of Libya with the methods of permanent revolution!

● For a Military United Front with the Libyan army against pro-Imperialist INTC and against all groups sponsored by the CIA!

● Build Revolutionary Committees in all work-places, colleges and regions against Imperialist intervention!

● For Constituent Assembly based on these revolutionary committees.

● For a Workers and Peasants Government!

● In defence of the right to establish trade unions and the right to strike!

● No immigration control, equal rights and conditions for all immigrant workers!

● Workers' Control of work places and oil fields, food subsidies and essential goods, minimum living wage, full employment, expropriation of all enterprises and Imperialist capitals!

● For strikes and occupations to prevent the movement of troops and munitions to attack Libya!

● For a Socialist Federation of North Africa and the Middle East

Statement on Libya by
SOCIALIST FIGHT - Britain
REVOLUTIONARY MARXIST GROUP - South Africa
LIGA COMUNISTA - Brazil
21 April 2011