In the name of the Permanent Revolution Collective, I thank you for the invitation to participate to this international conference.
Why an international conference? The goal can only be to adopt a program, a common understanding of events and tasks.
The Permanent Revolution Collective has signed two declarations with the PCL/ITO on the main event of world class struggle this year. These two resolutions constitute a considerable step forward, despite the small size of the CoReP and the national isolation of the PCL, for:
- They condemn the Russian imperialist invasion and the enlarging of NATO;
- They term Russia and China imperialists;
- They consider that in each imperialist country, the main enemy is one’s own bourgeoisie.
But the leadership of the PCL has ceased to try to adopt common resolutions. The leadership of the PCL has refused to prepare a common international conference with the CoReP.
The leadership of the PCL has preferred to court organisations, larger ones, but which refused to defend Ukraine against invasion. They refused to defend the position of Lenin and Trotsky, the right to self-determination for an oppressed people to separate and to constitute its own State. One of them is present at the conference and the comrade of the OKDE/TRI has just explained that his position is neutrality between Russia and Ukraine. The other, on the same position, the Partido Obrero has remained in Argentina.
The leadership of the PCL opposed itself to the propositions of the CoreP for the “refoundation” of the former “International Trotskyist Opposition.” But on which basis?
- A positive point is your position on the 4th International, for, we agree, the 4th is dead. But you search for “consequent Trotskyists” who did not break, I quote, “openly et completely with revolutionary Marxism.”
- An analysis of the world situation as an imaginary polarisation between “the left” and “the right.” But this is an ideology that is foreign to the Communist International and the Fourth International.
- A revision of the program of the Fourth International by defending the « anti-imperialist united front » that has always served and will always serve to justify capitulations in front of bourgeois fractions.
The anti-imperialist united front is the alliance between the proletariat and the national bourgeoisie in dominated countries. It was erroneous at the moment of its adoption by the Komintern, it showed itself catastrophic in China. Instead of that, communists adopted permanent revolution as a coherent strategy with the analysis of imperialism as an epoch of capitalist decline.
The break of the Fourth International in 1952-53 resulted from the adaptation of its own leadership, in 1949-51, to the apparently triumphant Stalinism and to bourgeois nationalism of dominated countries. Mandel and Pablo effected a revision of the program from two points: the return to the possibility to reform the Workers’ State and the “communist” parties, and the regression into the anti-imperialist united front.
The anti-imperialist united front is the popular front in dominated countries. The application of the anti-imperialist united front by the former sections of the 4th International, by the revisionist centres of the epigones, led to failure after failure, to liquidation and dispersion in Bolivia, in Argentina, in Algeria, in Sri Lanka, in Palestine, in Iran, in Mexico, in Venezuela, etc.
Comrades of the PCL, of the NPA, of the OKDE, of the L5I, in which countries the anti-imperialist united front must be applied today?
The 4th International has been destroyed as an international centre by its own leadership from de 1949 to 1953. More than 60 years later, there is thus no more possibility for a refoundation.
Where are the “consequent Trotskyists” whom the leadership of the PCL opposes to the CoReP? The WIU-FI, the Pablo-Mandelist “4th International,” the Argentine PO, the Russian RRP are not the solution, but part of the problem:
- The young comrades of the RRP from Russia have just said, in videoconference, that they chose a position of neutrality in the war. We must help them to beak with Grantism and to develop the fight against the invasion by one’s own imperialism.
- With the IWL-FI and the RCIT (« general secretary » Prosbting), the WIU-FI, on March 13, declares “for the break of diplomatic relations with Russia by all governments,” that is, those of Western imperialist powers (including Italy).
- Le PO dismisses both Russia and Ukraine. It judges that Russia is not capitalist. In the Buenos Aires parliament, like the representative of the PTS, the two representatives of the PO (among which its leader Solano) voted on September 3 a common resolution with all bourgeois parties in solidarity with Kirchner.
Down with the rotten heritage of Lambert, Pablo, Healy, Mandel, Cliff, Lora, Moreno, Posadas, Grant and others! Enough of the centrist confusion that prolongs the leadership crisis of the proletariat!
To prepare the victory of the world socialist revolution, it is necessary to build a new international. On the basis of the communist program, of a common response to the invasion of Ukraine and to the uprising in Iran, we must start without delay to gather proletarian revolutionaries. Long live Bolshevism!