The material we publish below is part of two articles of polemic with the Trotskyist Faction (TF). One of the articles is by our comrades from the Brazilian PSTU and the other is by comrades from the IWL team and our party in the US. We publish them because, although they address the same issue, they do so from their own perspectives, highlighting some aspects that differ from each other.
By Jeronimo Castro and Mariucha Fontana (Unified Socialist Workers’ Party, PSTU – Brazil)
Recently, two militants of the MRT (Revolutionary Workers’ Movement), the Brazilian section of the TF (Trotskyist Faction), wrote a long article entitled “Debate: The Dilemmas of the IWL-FI in its Self-Criticism of Nahuel Moreno and the Current Situation of the Permanent Revolution,“ based on a controversy with the article ”On the Situations of the Class Struggle at the National and International Levels,” one of several programmatic update texts that the International Workers League (IWL-FI) has been producing in recent years.
In this extensive article, they revisit their theoretical differences with Moreno, formulated since the 1990s, and intertwine them with the concrete programmatic and political differences with the IWL and the PSTU, in order to reaffirm their conceptions and also the politics they applied in each case.
In the early 1990s, an extensive work by the TF (Controversy with the IWL-FI and the Theoretical Legacy of Nahuel Moreno) presented what would be the organizing principles of its critique of Moreno: “objectivism”; his contribution to the theory of Permanent Revolution, which would be “stageist”; his interpretation of what a revolution is, which would lead him to support any revolution under any leadership; and, secondarily, his interpretation of World War II and the period between 1945 and 1989.
On this theoretical basis, on more than one occasion, the TF criticized the currents that claim to be Morenist, especially the IWL, in the face of numerous events in the class struggle. On Palestine, in the confrontation with the Chávez government, in the Arab revolutions, in Brazil, in the Syrian revolution and civil war, in the war in Ukraine, etc.
In our opinion, although there is no mechanical relationship between theory and politics, we can look to theory to find the political errors committed by someone, some current, or some organization. However, we do not see that our intervention, in the vast majority of cases cited by our comrades, was erroneous, much less that, in general, the theoretical body of Morenism or Moreno’s updating and contribution to the theory of Permanent Revolution is erroneous.
On the contrary, in our opinion, Moreno was the one who best defended and continued the development of Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution in the postwar period. The TF says that Moreno does not defend the theory of Permanent Revolution, but rather “Democratic Revolution,” that he is a “stager.” This is not true.
We want to make it clear that we consider this way of framing the debate to be very bad, because by debating with a falsehood or a caricature, it ends up preventing the debate or dialogue that our comrades are asking us to establish with their current and their theoretical elaborations.
It would be impossible in an article that was not very long to respond in depth to all the differences we have with the TF. Therefore, we will focus on a few aspects.
Later, we will write a more in-depth article solely on the theory of Permanent Revolution, in which we intend to demonstrate the richness of Moreno’s elaborations on the specific revolutions to which he sought to respond and intervene.
1. The importance of not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, or making reverse schematics
Moreno, of course, is not exempt from errors, as no Marxist is. In fact, he was always very self-critical and the first to recognize and correct the errors he criticized himself for. We, in the IWL-FI and the PSTU, undoubtedly have made many more mistakes than Moreno did. And we see no problem in self-criticizing ourselves for them. On the contrary, we must learn from our mistakes.
Nor are we dogmatic. Just as Moreno criticized and updated Trotsky, we see no problem in criticizing and updating Moreno or Trotsky, or in updating theory and program in the face of changes in reality. Otherwise, we would not be Morenoists, Trotskyists, and Leninists.
In fact, we are undergoing an intense process of updating and programmatic elaboration in the IWL-FI and the PSTU, which our comrades may not be aware of or may not be following. The 2020 text with which our comrades are arguing is one of several produced and published in recent years, such as “Elections” (2015), “On the Stages” (2017), “National Question,” “Oppressions,” “China: An Emerging Imperialist Power,” “Imperialist Russia,” “Environment”; “Debates on Historical Materialism,” “Agitation and Propaganda,” “Relationship between the Party and the Union,” among many others.
In this process, and also in previous drafting processes, we have developed critiques and pointed out our mistakes, first and foremost, as well as Moreno’s mistakes.
We see features and problems of objectivism and schematism in some texts intended especially for popularization, or in the attempt to categorize specific moments of processes in a pedagogical way, as in “Revolutions of the 20th Century” or “Elementary Political Concepts,” which, if read and assimilated literally, as a manual, can lead to schematism, determinism, and objectivism.
But that is not what characterizes most or all of Moreno’s programmatic and political elaboration for intervening in the class struggle and revolutionary processes of the postwar period until the 1980s. Quite the contrary. Although there are also errors of prognosis (which is very common among all Marxist authors) and analysis, which are independent of theoretical formulation. Some processes escaped him, perhaps one of the most important being his failure to see that capitalist restoration had taken place in China in 1978.
The crisis and division of the Argentine MAS (Movement Toward Socialism) and of the IWL-FI itself in the late 1990s led several organizations to a dogmatic reading and an objectivist vision, relying on predictions that did not come true, or taking some texts literally, becoming, in our view, caricatures of Morenoism. They often distorted reality to express their desires or forced it to fit into objectivist schemes.
However, it is not a good idea to try to correct this type of error with a reverse subjectivist framework which, in our opinion, with all due respect, permeates the theoretical framework of the TF, which also has its origins in the Morenoist current, born out of the split in the 1980s of a part of the youth of the Argentine MAS (Nahuel Moreno’s party).
This is because a subjectivist framework equally distances us from reality, from dialectics, and from a revolutionary formulation capable of uniting strategy and tactics to provide a fruitful and effective response, especially to revolutionary processes, which are always much richer than any framework.
The question of Permanent Revolution and Moreno’s update
In 1930, Trotsky wrote his book The Permanent Revolution. It was a long process in which he incorporated and adjusted his theory to the concrete experiences of the class struggle and the various revolutions he witnessed. In its first version, from 1905/1906, the theory of Permanent Revolution was an explanation/program for the Russian Revolution that was unfolding, and it was presented in its first definitive form in Balance and Perspective.
It was, in a sense, a continuation of Marx’s work, who in 1850, writing about the German Revolution, ended with the phrase: “our battle cry will be long live the permanent revolution.” It is worth noting that, despite the coincidental name, Marx’s and Trotsky’s theories of Permanent Revolution were different.
This theory of revolution was debated with others, such as Lenin’s, who, agreeing with Trotsky on the role of the bourgeoisie, gave greater importance to the participation of the peasantry in the revolution and saw the need for a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, as a bourgeois revolutionary stage, before the proletarian socialist revolution, with the aim of fulfilling all bourgeois democratic tasks. However, when the Russian Revolution of 1906 reached its peak, Lenin wrote: “We are supporters of uninterrupted revolution. We will not stop halfway.”
And also with that of Bukharin, who saw the Permanent Revolution as a leap over the democratic tasks, moving directly to the socialist tasks of the revolution.
The Revolution of 1917 revised theories and practices. Lenin, in the April Theses, adheres, in terms of content, to the logic of Permanent Revolution. Trotsky, for his part, joins the Bolshevik Party and, in practice, incorporates this element into his theory of revolution.
But when the Third International discussed revolution in colonial and semi-colonial countries in the Theses on the East, the version that prevailed was a return to the understanding of the Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry, especially since neither Lenin nor Trotsky thought that the East was ripe for socialist revolution.
The final version of the theory of Permanent Revolution would be the result of the second Chinese Revolution, when Trotsky would confront the policy of the Third International, now under Stalin, of capitulation to the Chinese nationalist bourgeois party, the Kuomintang.
In its final version, Trotsky will conclude that there are no countries that are not ripe for proletarian revolution, that in backward countries it will take place in an alliance of the proletariat with the poor peasantry, against the local bourgeoisie and imperialism, socially led by the proletariat and politically by the revolutionary party of the proletariat, and linked to the world revolution, which will define the future of humanity. Therefore, the theory of Permanent Revolution was, until then, incorporating new elements based on events and experiences. It could not be otherwise, since, as we never tire of repeating, but do not always understand, theory is not a dogma, but a guide for action.
In the Transitional Program, Trotsky opens up another possibility for the dynamics of revolution. He says: “We must not categorically deny in advance the theoretical possibility that, under the influence of a combination of exceptional circumstances (war, defeat, financial crisis, revolutionary offensive of the masses, etc.), the petty-bourgeois parties, including the Stalinists, may go further than they intended on the road to breaking with the bourgeoisie.”
When Nazi-fascist rule collapsed in Europe, a world emerged in which, on the one hand, the United States established itself as the hegemonic imperialist power and, on the other, the Soviet Union, which at the same time as opposing the United States politically, was its main ally in maintaining the world order. And there were dozens of new workers’ states, important conquests. But, in turn, having achieved this status through Russian military occupation (in the case of Eastern Europe) or through revolutions carried out by peasants and guerrilla armies led by Stalinist or reformist parties, they reinforced the prestige of those leaderships and hindered the emergence of revolutionary leaderships.
The Fourth International reorganized itself in this context, after having spent most of the war years without functioning organically and having suffered a great loss of cadres, mainly victims of Stalinism and fascism.
It was necessary to explain and intervene in this new world and to update the theory of revolution. And this task inevitably led to crises and ruptures. There were at least three major responses.
There were those who denied the emergence of the new workers’ states, since their appearance and the regime they expressed did not conform to the norms established by the theory of Permanent Revolution. There were those who concluded that what had happened was exactly what the theoretical body of Permanent Revolution had predicted. And there were those who, admitting that there had been revolutions and expropriations, recognized that these had not taken place in the expected way, that the least likely hypothesis, with which Trotsky worked in the Transitional Program, had occurred, and that it was necessary to face this new reality head-on.
The Cuban Revolution, for example, was emblematic: one sector, correctly seeing that the leadership was not revolutionary, considered that Cuba had not made a socialist revolution, had not created a new workers’ state, and remained capitalist; another sector, recognizing that there had been a revolution and that there was a new workers’ state, concluded that its leadership was revolutionary. And those who, like Moreno, analyzed, not without great difficulty at first, that there had been a revolution that expropriated the bourgeoisie and created a new workers’ state, but that its leadership was petty-bourgeois and counterrevolutionary; therefore, Cuba was a new bureaucratized workers’ state.
Other processes were added to these: the anti-colonial revolutions in Africa that brought armed guerrilla groups to power but did not expropriate the bourgeoisie (although in some cases, such as Algeria, a workers’ and peasants’ government reverted to capitalism). Several defeated political revolutions in Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. Finally, there were revolutions that overthrew dictatorships and Bonapartist regimes and, in their place, established bourgeois democracies.
In the face of these events that marked the second half of the 20th century, it was necessary to rescue Trotsky’s legacy, but also to update it, and that is what Moreno did.
Nahuel Moreno
It was in the context of the postwar period, of important structural changes in the world, which brought to the fore the problem of imperialism, the crisis of revolutionary leadership, and the relationship between colonial and semi-colonial countries and the metropolises, that Nahuel Moreno emerged as one of the leaders of the Fourth International.
It should be noted that the crisis of revolutionary leadership had two poles: on the one hand, the victories over Nazism and fascism in World War II strengthened Stalinism as the leadership of broad sectors of the mass movement and the working class, and, on this same pole, of the counterrevolution, in Western Europe, the social democratic parties that made a series of concessions to the masses, in what would become the welfare states, were strengthened.
On the other pole, that of the construction of a revolutionary and alternative leadership to these two powerful organizations anchored in the control of the Eastern states (Stalinism) or in the administration of the bourgeois states of Europe (social democracy), the Fourth International emerged from the war practically destroyed. Its cadres had been persecuted, imprisoned, and murdered by all the belligerent powers, even before the war broke out. Democratic imperialism, Nazi-fascist imperialism, and Stalinism participated, with varying degrees of intensity, in the persecution of the Fourth International.
Moreno was part of the leadership that developed the correct explanation of the new bureaucratically deformed workers’ states (since they were born with a deformation), differentiating them from the Russian state, which had degenerated. At the same time, he was among those who recognized that revolutions had taken place in Yugoslavia and China and that, to the extent that they expropriated the bourgeoisie, they became workers’ states, but that their leaderships were not revolutionary, despite advancing beyond their intentions.
But it was the Cuban Revolution that was the great test for Moreno, in which, at first, he made a series of mistakes, for which he criticized himself, but not the mistake of not recognizing or denying a revolution. He recognized that Cuba was the first socialist country in America, that its revolution was a milestone in the history of the continent, and he sought, without ceasing, to engage in dialogue with the powerful vanguard that emerged from this process. How would the FT’s subjectivist scheme explain the Cuban Revolution?
2 – The revolutions of the 20th century (the book and Moreno’s elaboration)
Nahuel Moreno’s interpretation of the postwar revolutions is one of the central axes of the Trotskyist Faction’s critique. Its range of objections is broad, covering everything from the concept of revolution itself and the extension of the notion of exceptionalism, to the discussion of the “democratic revolution,” seen by the FT as a new form of etapism or semi-etapism.
To substantiate this critique, the FT’s primary sources are the work The Revolutions of the 20th Century and the posthumously published Course for Cadres given by Moreno on the subject.
However, before getting into the substance of the debate, it is necessary to highlight a recurring problem in the critiques: an apparent ignorance of Moreno’s theory. A recent example is expressed in an article by MRT/FT militants in Brazil, which claims that Moreno “escaped” the analysis of the impacts of imperialist policy developed since the 1970s, which deepened with the end of the Cold War. According to the article, the United States, in order to compensate for the decline of its hegemony after the Vietnam War, began to support “democratic transitions” around the world. This accusation can only stem from a lack of knowledge of Moreno’s work, since it was he who coined and developed the concept of “democratic reaction” to explain precisely this “democratizing” policy of imperialism as a mechanism to divert and contain revolutionary processes.
The complexity of the period becomes even more evident when analyzing the political revolutions that took place at that time. Although the working class was the social subject of many of them, in none was it present as a political subject in the form envisaged by the theory of Permanent Revolution.
Furthermore, the FT’s analysis of the decolonization processes in Africa is deeply insufficient. For example, they summarize that movements such as the Mau Mau (Kenya) and the struggle of Patrice Lumumba (Congo) only achieved “formal independence as semi-colonies,” and that Algeria, after achieving a “workers’ and peasants’ government,” regressed to a semi-colonial bourgeois state. Regarding the Portuguese colonies, they claim that petty-bourgeois leaderships (such as the MPLA) did not establish even deformed workers’ states.
We find this reading erroneous because it is teleological and deterministic, as if the final outcome were inevitably contained in the beginning of the process, judging it through today’s lens, fifty years later. In doing so, the FT disregards the real historical context: what they call “only formal independence” represented, at the time, gigantic tactical victories. These revolutions, which preceded and followed the Portuguese Revolution (another crucial event ignored by the FT), were great historical events that, within the framework of permanent revolution, developed in an unexpected way.
They did not advance and subsequently receded precisely because of the absence of a revolutionary leadership with mass influence. However, they influenced millions of people around the world and demanded a correct political response. It was necessary to recognize their progressive character in order to contest the political leadership in those countries and engage in dialogue with the vanguard sectors around the world affected by them, with the ultimate goal of building a revolutionary alternative. In short, these were processes that, although ultimately defeated, diverted, or frozen, were at their origin monumental events in the class struggle.
The example of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal
To give one example, the Portuguese revolution was another great challenge for Trotskyism in the postwar period. A military uprising by young captains tired of the colonial war triggered a broad revolutionary process. Imperialism reacted with a range of policies ranging from a counterrevolutionary Bonapartist plan by the Armed Forces Movement-PC, on the one hand, to the proposal for bourgeois parliamentary democratic normalization with the PS and its allies in the Portuguese imperialist bourgeoisie, on the other, and at the same time the attempt at economic strangulation caused by joint imperialist sabotage.
All this took place in a situation that, on the whole, was characterized by revolution and by a regime with significant seeds of dual power, even though it only encompassed a minority sector of the mass movement.
In this context, part of the Trotskyist movement presented a minimal and democratic program for the Portuguese revolution, calling for the withdrawal of troops from Angola, without linking these defensive democratic tasks to the seeds of workers’ power.
Moreno, on the contrary, as can be read in his book Revolution and Counterrevolution in Portugal, argued that it was necessary for revolutionaries to focus on defending, developing, and centralizing the workers’ commissions and soldiers’ committees, giving them the perspective of socialist revolution, and combining them with all the tasks facing the Portuguese masses. He said that any policy that did not strengthen the seeds of dual power organizations in the direction of socialist revolution was not Trotskyist, but rather “Poumism” of various kinds, which, although apparently defending a Bolshevik-Leninist program in form, defended bourgeois democracy in content and refused to confront the counterrevolutionary government of the MFA-CP.
Moreno, who was committed to deepening democratic gains as a way of developing the elements of dual power and the organization of the working class itself, stated that “if the workers’ revolution does not succeed, the trend of imperialist Portugal leaves no room for doubt: its backwardness will condemn it to become a sub-metropolis, that is, a junior partner of other more powerful empires in the exploitation of the working class and the colonies; and in the short term, the total loss of its influence in the colonies cannot be ruled out, which will lead it to become directly a semi-colony. Portugal, in order to maintain its current independence from foreign capital, has only one alternative: socialism, which would allow it to overcome its backwardness without falling under the domination of the big international monopolies.
From this vision, it cannot be concluded in any way that Moreno worked with a strategy of “democratic revolution,” or that any revolution was acceptable.
In the Portuguese revolution, as in his intervention in other revolutions, one can find Moreno’s mistakes, but one will certainly not find any clue leading to the conclusion that he had a stage-by-stage conception and strategy of the process that was unfolding. On the contrary, what we see is Moreno’s search for ways to enable the permanent development of the Portuguese revolution. How would the FT explain the Portuguese revolution? Was there no revolution in Portugal? Was April 25 irrelevant? Because it ended up freezing and then retreating through democratic reaction, should the revolutionaries not have intervened in it?
The Carnation Revolution confirmed Moreno’s thesis in practice: revolutions often begin under democratic banners and can only be completed under proletarian leadership. The absence of a revolutionary party with mass support allowed the process to be channeled into parliamentary institutions, but this did not prevent it from being a revolutionary milestone of international significance.
The same superficial, or inattentive, treatment is given to the multiple processes of overthrowing dictatorships that took place from the 1970s onwards, especially after the defeat in Vietnam.
In a number of countries, dictatorships of varying lengths were overthrown in different processes: Portugal, Spain, Nicaragua, Argentina, and Brazil, to name a few. It was necessary to understand these processes in order to intervene in them. We do not believe that these phenomena are the same, and Moreno did not treat them as if they were.
He did not treat them in a generic and superficial way, but rather tried to understand them in depth in their specificity, in order to intervene in reality and build both the bridges necessary for October and to contest the Bonapartist, “democratic reaction” or reformist solutions in concrete terms, not in the abstract, and to build revolutionary vanguard parties with mass impact and influence.
Therefore, it is necessary to observe all of these processes and ask, first of all, whether Trotsky’s strict predictions about the mechanics of revolution were fulfilled in the revolutions of the second half of the 20th century and, if not, what happened? Did the revolutions of the second half of the century reject the theory of Permanent Revolution?
The question of leadership
We believe that Moreno is right in stating that the revolutions did not develop as Trotsky predicted in his last book on the subject, nor that this theory was rejected by the new revolutions. These revolutions reaffirmed and enriched the theory of Permanent Revolution, confirming an aspect that appears in the Transitional Program. That is, that revolutions, due to a series of factors, can go beyond what their leaderships desired. But also, as Moreno says, this has a limit. Because, as he says in thesis II of the book Actualization of the Transitional Program: “as long as the apparatuses continue to control the mass movement, every revolutionary victory inevitably turns into defeat […] in this era, every advance that is not followed by another advance means a setback. Hence, the bureaucracy, with its policy of holding back on the one hand and defending its privileges against the masses on the other, is forced to fight against the permanent mobilization of the workers, to transform their victories into a defeat of the permanent revolution.”
Therefore, this process, which can occur at the national level, in its collective essence, or from the point of view of world revolution, is impossible, which only reaffirms, in Moreno’s words, that we are even more defenders of the theory of Permanent Revolution, and that we consider the crisis of humanity to be the crisis of revolutionary leadership.
Therefore, to want to reduce Moreno’s interpretation to the text Revolutions of the 20th Century is a tremendous reductionism, for several reasons. First, this book was originally written as a series of notes to aid in a course being prepared on the subject and was only published in book form in 1986. Second, because it ignores Moreno’s books, texts, and contributions on the subject. There are at least dozens (if not hundreds) of texts by Nahuel Moreno on the Cuban Revolution, the Portuguese Revolution, the Angolan Revolution, the Nicaraguan Revolution, the revolutionary process in Central America, the political revolutions in Hungary and Poland, and many others.
Much can be found in these texts as a whole. One may agree or disagree with Moreno, but what is certain is that they do not reflect the idea of “any revolution with any leadership.” Much less do they reflect the objectivist idea that these processes advanced without contradictions in our favor. On the contrary, alongside his militant enthusiasm for the rise of the masses and the triumphs of their struggles, Moreno always points out the limits and contradictions of these same processes.
Moreno expressed on several occasions in his work that the dialectic between defeats and victories was reversed in relation to the dialectic that underpinned the evolutionary vision of social democracy and Stalinism, which claimed that the path of the proletariat was full of defeats leading to victory. For Moreno, “as long as the proletariat does not overcome its crisis of revolutionary leadership, it will not be able to defeat world imperialism. And all its struggles, as a consequence, will be full of triumphs that will inevitably lead us to catastrophic defeats” (Update of the Transitional Program). In other words, tactical victories and great conquests, but which will become strategic defeats if they reinforce the weight of counterrevolutionary and non-proletarian leaderships.
However, at the same time, there is no possibility of overcoming counterrevolutionary leaderships by confusing the mass movement with its leaderships, or revolutions with the leaderships that eventually lead them.
This, however, does not deny the fact that this book, Revolutions of the Twentieth Century, in its eagerness to categorize and didacticize several specific moments of concrete processes, really sins of schematism and simplifications that must be overcome. The book, in fact, does not express Moreno’s work on these same processes.
Another thing is the critique made of the 1984 course, also on this subject, which was transcribed and published as a book in 1992. Contrary to what the FT expresses, regardless of whether some or all of Moreno’s criticisms of some of Trotsky’s theses on Permanent Revolution are correct or not, we find the open approach and methodology with which he addresses the debate on permanent revolution in this school and how to update it, without schematism or determinism, to be extremely correct.
Not afraid to call revolutions by their name
The FT called the great Arab uprisings of the early 2010s the “Arab Spring,” but never “Arab revolutions.”
Firstly, various Morenist currents often abused the concept of revolution and, in this context, also that of “democratic revolution,” transforming any crisis of the regime or rise of the mass movement into revolutions, and the fall of these regimes into democratic revolutions. However, we repeat, this is a caricature of Morenoism and has nothing to do with the concept coined by Nahuel Moreno, nor with the political phenomena he sought to explain.
When Moreno calls a phenomenon a revolution, he applies the same content as Trotsky in his introduction to The History of the Russian Revolution when he says: “The most indisputable characteristic of the Revolution is the direct intervention of the masses in historical events. Usually, the state, whether monarchical or democratic, dominates the nation; history is made by specialists in the field: monarchs, ministers, bureaucrats, parliamentarians, journalists. However, at decisive moments, when an old regime becomes intolerable to the masses, they destroy the walls that separate them from the political arena, overthrow their traditional representatives, and, by intervening in this way, create a starting position for a new regime. Whether this is good or bad is for moralists to judge. As for us, we take the facts as they present themselves in their objective development. The history of a revolution, for us, is initially the narrative of a violent irruption of the masses into the spheres where their own destinies unfold.
That is, for Moreno, as for Trotsky and Lenin, revolution is the action of the masses, their irruption into history, when they create a starting point for a new regime. It is not for nothing that Trotsky, unlike the MRT/FT, says that “revolutions are impossible until they become inevitable.”
In the text “Argentina: A Triumphant Democratic Revolution,” Moreno attempts to explain precisely why what is happening in Argentina is a revolution. He shows that the Argentine process is developing without constraints, without control by the oligarchy and the army; that it has opened up a crisis in the armed forces; that there has been a strong popular mobilization; and that this strong popular mobilization preceded the overthrow of the regime and the crisis in the armed forces.
Comparing this with other processes in Argentina itself, where there had been a transition from reactionary, Bonapartist, or semi-Bonapartist governments to democratic governments, Moreno observes that in most, if not all, of the previous cases, despite there being more or less popular mobilization, what happened was control, dosing, and a controlled transition by the bourgeois institutions. A kind of democratic “reform.”
Moreno also observes that there may be another example, which is that the regime itself organizes its replacement, maintaining the central elements that composed it, which he called Senile Bismarckism. A transition controlled from above and maintaining central elements of the Bonapartist regime.
For Moreno, this democratic revolution, which overthrows a dictatorial regime and gives rise to a democratic regime, is, due to its social, working-class, and popular composition, a revolution that objectively has an anti-capitalist impulse and is directly linked to the socialist revolution. Objectively, there is no interregnum between the two; it is not necessary to wait to consolidate democratic gains. On the contrary, one should immediately begin to take advantage of the mobilizations of the masses and democratic gains to carry forward the struggle for socialist revolution, even though its future, its development, and its continuity have various possibilities, paths, and alternatives in dispute.
He warns of the problems arising from this democratic victory, which he will first call a democratic counterrevolution and then a democratic reaction, but whose content is the policy of the bourgeoisie and imperialism, seeking to empty the mobilizations and direct struggles of the workers, and thereby slow down the revolution, channeling everything towards elections and the organs and institutions of the regime.
Moreno does not defend the revolution in stages here. He notes that a revolution has begun, that it has advanced one stage and achieved partial victories, which will be used by the bourgeoisie to prevent it from becoming permanent, to freeze it, to divert it, to make it retreat; and he notes the need to confront the democratic reaction, to fight for the permanence of the revolution.
Obviously, like any revolution that does not have a revolutionary party at its head, this process tends to be diverted, frozen, or defeated at some point. Let us see, if the Bolshevik Party had not existed in Russia, the February Revolution would most likely have stopped there and regressed; or it would have been defeated by Kornilov, or stifled in the pre-parliament (in this regard, Trotsky’s book Lessons of October, published by Sundermann, is a lesson against waiting for “pure revolutions,” easy solutions, determinism, and general schemes).
However, other revolutions, such as the Cuban one, for example, did not stop at democratic tasks like the Argentine one, they stopped at the expropriation of their own bourgeoisie, but, due to the lack of a revolutionary, proletarian, and consistent leadership, they became a brake on other Latin American revolutions advancing towards other Cubas or new Vietnams.
Seeing the Brazilian process, in which millions took to the streets in 1984, Moreno predicted that the Brazilian (democratic) revolution was beginning. He thought that a revolutionary crisis had opened up and that the military and the dictatorship had lost control of the process, although he assessed that it had been a less profound process than the Argentine one, because it did not put the Armed Forces, the pillar of the bourgeois state, in complete crisis. There was no revolutionary crisis or total chaos, and Moreno was wrong about that. But, in fact, a much less controlled process opened up there than in Spain, for example (which had a mass leadership that signed the Moncloa Pact). In Brazil, on the contrary, that moment was not the beginning of the decline of a mass Communist Party and the reconstruction of a Socialist Party at the hands of the bourgeoisie, but the emergence of the only mass class-based party of the postwar period, as Perry Anderson notes. The nascent PT voted against the Constitution that emerged from the 1988 Constituent Assembly (the most advanced Brazil has ever had). The process ended up being controlled, the Armed Forces emerged intact and even maintained some authoritarian vestiges in the Constitution, which today make all the difference, as we saw in Bolsonaro’s coup attempt almost 40 years later.
The Brazilian transition was certainly not like the Argentine one. But that does not mean that it was simply a transition agreed upon from above, meticulously prepared by the military and the bourgeoisie. On the contrary, the years from 1984 to 1989 saw the highest levels of direct participation by the working class and the “people” in the life of the country.
Moreno is wrong to confuse, or imply, that the pre-revolutionary situation is already revolutionary and that a revolutionary crisis has opened up. But he is absolutely right about the dynamics of the class struggle in Brazil, and that is why he was able to build one of the most working-class and deeply rooted Trotskyist organizations in the objective and historical process of a country.
The pre-revolutionary situation was diverted by the mechanisms of democratic reaction, but with ups and downs it came to an end years later, with the decisive participation of the PT, which, from the relatively progressive role it played in the 1980s, went on to play a totally counterrevolutionary role after 1989, reaching a pact with Collor.
Moreno’s mistakes, our mistakes (those of the LIT and the PSTU), and the mistakes of the FT/MRT
The text by our comrades in the MRT/FT says that we are “not getting to the root” of our mistakes, which they attribute to their interpretation that Nahuel Moreno did not defend the theory of Permanent Revolution, but rather that of “Democratic Revolution,” and was therefore a stageist.
On the other hand, they say that Moreno would have escaped the policy of democratic reaction of imperialism. But, as we have said, it is not true that Moreno does not defend the theory of Permanent Revolution, and it also seems to us to be a misunderstanding of Moreno’s works to claim that he escaped the policy of democratic reaction of imperialism (when that term was coined by him).
In the LIT-CI (and in the PSTU), we consider that one of Moreno’s important errors, paradoxically, came from having evaded a fact for which, we must say, he was theoretically better prepared. Even the FT defends the book The Revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat, in which Moreno, contrary to Mandel, argues that the bureaucracy does not have a dual nature and that the restoration of capitalism must start from it.
Moreno experienced an enormous mass upsurge in Latin America, where he built important parties, without neglecting processes such as the Carnation Revolution or the process in Spain. But Moreno did not see the capitalist restoration in China in 1978 or in the USSR in 1986, despite his great theoretical elaboration and insight on this issue.
In the LIT, we assess that one of our errors dates back to the 1985 Theses and a historical analysis of the third stage, in which, supposedly, a stable correlation of forces had been maintained on a global scale from 1943 to 1989-1990.
In “On the Stages,” a text voted on in 2017 by the LIT-CI and accessible at this link https://archivoleontrotsky.org/view?mfn=23753, the reader can access the entirety of this assessment, of which we reproduce only a part below, in a very summarized form.
However, there is one aspect that we were not aware of until much later and which was of decisive importance for the development of events: the restorationist turn of the Stalinist bureaucracy, first in China, from 1978 onwards, with the Four Modernizations, and then in the USSR, from 1986 onwards, with Perestroika.
From the moment the bureaucracy launched a conscious plan to restore capitalism, its foreign policy ceased to be based on maintaining the peaceful coexistence pact of the end of World War II and sought, directly, an undisguised pact of integration into the world system of states and the global division of labor dominated by imperialism.
Thus, after the trip of the then Prime Minister of the People’s Republic of China, Deng Xiaoping, to Washington in 1979, two fundamental events took place: the investments of Coca-Cola and Boeing in China, which paved the way for a widespread wave of investments by large transnational corporations, and the invasion of Vietnam by the Chinese army, which acted as direct support for US imperialism to stabilize Southeast Asia.
The “effort to modernize the Chinese economy” was nothing more than a conscious plan to destroy the economic pillars of the bureaucratized workers’ state. We were no longer dealing with a workers’ state, but with a bourgeois state directly serving capitalist restoration (El veredicto de la historia, Martín Hernández). “China’s ticket to the world capitalist order,” which had its blood pact in the invasion of Vietnam, also had other expressions, such as military collaboration with imperialism in Africa (Angola) or the recognition of the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines and that of Pinochet in Chile.
The plan for restoration in the USSR, launched with Perestroika in 1986, was soon reflected in the foreign policy of the Soviet bureaucracy, which embarked on an active line of normalizing international relations with US imperialism, culminating in the Washington Agreements in 1987. The signing of the Esquipulas Agreement that same year, which liquidated the Nicaraguan and Central American revolution, was an important part of this policy.
The full incorporation of millions of Chinese workers into the world market not only allowed large imperialist corporations to significantly lower the cost of their products and increase their profits, but also exerted decisive downward pressure on the wages of workers around the world, both in imperialist and semi-colonial countries.
It was the beginning of globalization, which ushered in a new global division of labor, integrating China and its enormous working class into the world market. The ten commandments of globalization would be enshrined in 1988 in the well-known Washington Consensus, which unified the imperialist multilateral organizations (IMF, World Bank, etc.), defining the measures of the neoliberal program: liberalization of trade and foreign investment restrictions, cuts in public spending, guaranteeing a primary surplus to ensure debt repayment, widespread privatization, and deregulation of the financial system.
Once the bureaucracy set in motion the plans for capitalist restoration, its action changed in nature. It was no longer a question of continuing the old counterrevolutionary policy to fulfill the pacts with imperialism, but of a policy directly serving its full insertion into the imperialist world market. If China was no longer a workers’ state since 1978, the invasion of Vietnam and military support for the Angolan counterrevolutionary guerrillas were already acts of a restorationist bourgeois state. From 1986 onward, the Russian bureaucracy’s actions in the “regional conflicts” of the “Cold War” followed the same pattern. One of the pillars of the period that began in 1943, the counterrevolutionary pact between imperialism and the bureaucracy, was replaced by a “new pact” of submission, which completely affected the bureaucratic apparatuses that led the main confrontations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
The counteroffensive led by Reagan and Thatcher, which began in the 1980s, reaped victories by points that, combined with the restorationist turn of the Chinese bureaucracy in 1978 (and later, in 1986, of the Russian bureaucracy), achieved important victories for imperialism that changed the situation. This began to reverse the downward curve at the end of the boom, boosted a recovery in profit rates, and paved the way for the takeoff of the 1990s (which included the semi-colonization, through the European Union, of the countries of Eastern Europe, where capitalism had been restored).
In this context, we also underestimated the heavy defeat of the British miners’ strike at the hands of Margaret Thatcher’s government. This defeat dealt a severe blow to one of Europe’s most important working classes and had a strong impact across the continent. Moreover, it came after the serious defeat of the air traffic controllers in 1981 in the United States, at the beginning of Reagan’s term.
By failing to see this process, we considered that even the attacks by Reagan and Thatcher had limited validity, downplaying the key factor of the crisis of revolutionary leadership. On the other hand, even if the situation were revolutionary in Latin America, the results of the struggle must always be subject to alternative forecasts, as they depend decisively on the political leadership of the classes in struggle. T
The 1985 Theses are one-sided, Moreno dies in 1987, and the MAS elaborates the objectivist Theses of 1990.
We, in the LIT, only correctly identified the capitalist restoration a few years after the explosion of the MAS, precisely in 1995 (see the book Verdict of History). This was an important advance in our elaboration.
But we found it difficult to see, in addition to other important issues or limitations, the full effect of the change in the global division of labor that took place in the world and the role of raw material exporters, especially in South America, and how this (together with successive “neoliberal adjustments”) would have profound structural consequences on countries, social classes, etc.
Recently, in 2023, also belatedly, we came to the conclusion that China is an emerging imperialist power, just as Russia, the second military power on the planet, is a regional imperialist power.
And in Brazil, also with some delay, we are building a more concrete transition program for the country, based on updating the challenges of the Brazilian permanent revolution.
We believe that the FT/MRT are further behind than we are in their analysis of the current world, which leads to serious errors, such as, for example, not defending a democratic mobilization of Cuban youth (and LGBTI) against a capitalist dictatorship associated with various imperialisms (except the US).
We are not arrogant, nor do we consider that we have all the answers. At the same time, we consider that our leadership, and also the leaderships of all the other organizations that emerged from Morenoism, are far inferior to what Moreno was in his time. We are susceptible to making many more mistakes and unilateralities than Moreno. That does not mean that we are satisfied with this, on the contrary. But we take very seriously the fact that we must become more working class, more Marxist, and more internationalist every day. And that, to do so, we must be able to face our mistakes and fight to correct them.
However, sincerely, and with all due respect, we do not believe that it is enough to point out, as the FT does, that we are not in a stage (or whatever we want to call it) in which there will be no “February expropriators” and to return to Trotsky’s rule (which we all know) to respond to the challenges of our time. Today we are not living in the 1950s and 1960s. But neither are we living in the 1930s and 1940s. We defend the relevance of Permanent Revolution, as Moreno did. But we insist that the schemes, whether objectivist or subjectivist, as we assess the formulations of the MRT/FT to be, do not respond to reality and the need to forge a revolutionary and working-class leadership in the processes as they occur today, formulating a true transitional program for reality as it is.
And we believe that the FT and MRT’s responses to the main challenges facing the world today, especially revolutions, are wrong. Moreno’s ambition to respond to reality in a revolutionary way, seeking to build revolutionary parties with influence and capacity to impact the mass movement, is our ambition and an enormous challenge.
3 – Our controversies on Palestine, Ukraine, the Arab revolutions, and Brazil
For the FT, unlike Lenin and Trotsky, one cannot speak of revolutions if petty-bourgeois or even bourgeois forces lead the struggle of the masses, or if imperialist forces intervene in them. With this criterion, they did not recognize the Arab revolutions and have an abstentionist stance on revolutionary processes.
Lenin said: “Those who wait for a pure revolution will never see it. They will be revolutionaries in words, who do not understand the true revolution.”
The FT works with the concept of pure revolution and refrains from disputing the course of real revolutions, of revolutionary processes that can have countless outcomes: they can be crushed, defeated in part, achieve some partial or incomplete victory, or, if they have a revolutionary leadership capable of getting the process right and influencing the majority of the vanguard and the masses, they can be victorious.
The FT transforms the theory of Permanent Revolution into a normative dogma. If the process does not correspond to the “classical model,” it is not a revolution.
The LIT-QI recognizes that it made a serious mistake in Egypt during the process, for which it is self-critical. But that does not deny that there was a revolution in Egypt and also that Libya, Syria, Tunisia, etc., experienced a revolutionary process, and that it was necessary to be with the masses in the revolution to contest its leadership.
For a free Palestine from the river to the sea
We also consider the positions of the FT and the MRT on Palestine and on the war in Ukraine to be erroneous. In both processes, the FT shows that it has enormous difficulties in working with democratic issues. And in Palestine, especially, in our opinion, it shows that it does not understand the Theory of Permanent Revolution or the methodology of the Transitional Program.
Our controversy, from the LIT, with the FT on Palestine is very well reflected in this article by Víctor Salay – https://litci.org/es/la-fraccion-trotskista-y-su-postura-en-la-guerra-de-gaza/, from which we extract a part for our article.
We believe that, in abstract terms, we all agree on being part of the Palestinian Resistance and, united in its military camp, this does not imply agreement with and political support for the Hamas leadership. But that does not mean that any criticism of Hamas is valid.
One aspect that the FT harshly criticizes is the taking of prisoners of war (misnamed hostages) by Palestinian militiamen. But the political crisis in Israel, provoked by the prisoners’ families, demonstrates the political usefulness of this method.
Our comrades argue that one of the main reasons for their criticism of “Hamas’ methods” is that they consider them a major obstacle to fraternization between Palestinians and the Israeli working class. And while they recognize that the Israeli working class is largely Zionist and plays a key role in colonization and the apartheid regime, in support of ethnic cleansing, they assert that fraternization between Palestinians and Israeli workers and youth is “the only possibility of emancipation for both peoples.”
The problem with FT’s thesis is that Zionism is, above all, a colonial and terrorist state built on the theft of Palestinian land and ethnic cleansing, a state with an apartheid system. The majority of Israelis, including its workers, are a population that came from abroad and live on stolen land. The State of Israel is a US military enclave in a strategic region of the world.
A secular, democratic, and non-racist Palestine, from the river to the sea, can only come about through the destruction of the State of Israel (a necessary formulation that we do not see in FT’s texts), as Victor Alay says. This means that only a minority of non-Zionist Jews will agree to live in peace and with equal rights alongside Palestinians in a secular, democratic, and non-racist Palestine.
Victory over the State of Israel will come from the struggle of the Palestinian people, including armed struggle, from the active solidarity of the peoples of the Arab and Islamic countries in the region (who will have to confront their cowardly bourgeoisies), and from the solidarity of workers and youth in the rest of the world. Of course, the collaboration of a small anti-Zionist Israeli minority will undoubtedly be relevant, but to argue that fraternization is “the only possibility for the emancipation of both peoples” is a serious mistake.
Equally or even more serious is FT’s refusal to defend the slogan “A secular, democratic, and non-racist Palestine, from the river to the sea.” FT is uncomfortable with this historic and central slogan of Trotskyism in relation to the Palestinian conflict and has replaced it with “A working-class and socialist Palestine.”
FT comrades believe that defending the slogan “a secular, democratic, and non-racist Palestine, from the river to the sea” is equivalent to defending a “democratic stage” and renouncing the socialist character of the Palestinian revolution. But they are completely mistaken, because this slogan is currently the main slogan of the program for socialist revolution in Palestine and throughout the region.
Instead of integrating this slogan into a transitional program, combining it with economic and social demands, both transitional and socialist, and giving a regional and international dimension to the Palestinian revolution (culminating in the struggle for a socialist federation of the Middle East and North Africa), the FT replaces it with a “working-class and socialist Palestine.” This represents a sectarian ultimatum that prevents the building of unity and struggle among the Palestinian masses, the region, and their unity with pro-Palestinian masses around the world, as well as with the small and courageous anti-Zionist Jewish minority in Israel. It amounts to imposing on them the condition that they agree to a workers’ and socialist Palestine, instead of taking steps together and leading them down the path of socialist revolution based on the common struggle for a democratic, secular, and non-racist Palestine, from the river to the sea. In reality, this position of the FT reflects a profound misunderstanding of what permanent revolution means and clashes with the methodology of the Transitional Program.
Trotsky says in the Transitional Program that in “backward countries” we must “combine the struggle for the most elementary tasks of national independence and bourgeois democracy with the socialist struggle against world imperialism.” He adds: “The democratic, transitional demands and the tasks of the socialist revolution are not separated into different historical epochs, but arise immediately from one another.”
Trotsky applied this same methodology in Spain in the early 1930s, in the midst of the struggle against the monarchy, when he wrote to the Spanish Trotskyists calling on them to take the lead in the struggle for democratic demands: “Not to understand this would be to commit the greatest sectarian error. By putting democratic slogans at the forefront, the proletariat does not mean that Spain is moving toward bourgeois revolution. Only cold pedants, full of routine formulas, could raise the question in this way.”
Ukraine
No one can deny the intervention of the United States and the European Union in the war in Ukraine, as well as the pro-imperialist and anti-worker character of Zelensky. But the problem is that this does not eliminate the fact that we are facing a war of national aggression by the world’s second military power against a semi-colonial nation that it wants to subjugate by force.
A war whose goal is the military, economic, and political control of a country that has resources that Putin considers essential to his imperialist project of Greater Russia, inspired by the former Tsarist empire. We are facing a just war of national liberation against regional imperialism and its invading army.
Revolutionaries must therefore unconditionally be on the military side of Ukraine and fight for the military victory of the oppressed and invaded nation, without this implying any kind of political support for Zelensky or NATO. On the contrary, we must denounce their plans and maneuvers and work for the independent organization of the Ukrainian proletariat against Zelensky, NATO, the EU, and the IMF.
But this political confrontation with Zelensky, and for the political and organizational independence of the Ukrainian proletariat, must be carried out while remaining in the military camp, as “the best soldiers against Putin.” It is not possible to unmask NATO or Zelensky outside the Ukrainian trenches, or with a “neither-nor” stance.
The FT denounces the war in Ukraine as a reactionary war from the outset, as an inter-imperialist war (or a “war for power” by the US and the EU/NATO against Putin’s Russia), as if there were no just war of national liberation. To the point of opposing the delivery of weapons to Ukraine.
It even campaigned in Europe in defense of “no tanks for Ukraine.” Sending imperialist troops, which everyone must oppose head-on, is very different from sending weapons to combatants in a just war. Putin must have been grateful for the FT’s campaign. Neither the EU nor the US delivered the weapons necessary for Ukraine’s defense.
This is even clearer now, with Trump and the US intervening in favor of Putin and a “peace with annexations.” For more on this issue, we recommend the article https://litci.org/es/la-fraccion-trotskista-el-contraste-entre-gaza-y-ucrania.
Brazil 2016: there was no coup
The MRT reproduces the PT’s narrative that there was a “coup” in Brazil in 2016, when Dilma Rousseff was subjected to impeachment proceedings (a mechanism of the bourgeois democratic regime to change governments and avoid a major crisis of the regime).
The MRT joins the PT and PSOL in slandering the PSTU as a supporter of a coup in Brazil. What the MRT fails to do is explain the reality of Brazil in its entirety. By omitting central parts of the story, it helps to save the image of the PT, which ruled the country for 14 uninterrupted years, within the framework of the Washington Consensus.
What does the MRT omit in its narrative and analysis? First, that the working class and the laboring class turned definitively against Dilma because her government promoted a veritable electoral fraud. After promising during the 2014 election campaign that she would not take away rights “even if hell froze over,” she appointed a banker as minister to implement the neoliberal project demanded by the bourgeoisie, taking away labor rights (to which allegations of corruption were added). More than 80% of the working class, especially in the south and southeast, turned against the government, as did most of the working class. Dilma’s government became one of the most unpopular in the country’s history, falling to just 6% popularity. The middle classes took to the streets in 2015 under the leadership of the liberals against Dilma (although not because of the liberals’ agenda; most were against privatization and in favor of public services). The Bolsonarist right, with 1.5% support and a very small minority, also joined the demonstrations (as it had done in a different way in 2013).
The majority of the bourgeoisie, which was initially against impeachment, largely came out in favor of it, to replace Dilma with her vice president, Michel Temer of the MDB, as Dilma lost the ability to continue implementing all the policies she wanted. The PSTU opposed the impeachment because it would mean overthrowing a class-collaborationist government and replacing it with a bourgeois democratic government through parliamentary action, and we told the workers this. But we agreed with the workers that this government was very bad and that we would have to mobilize to overthrow everyone, including the vice president, and allow, at a minimum, new elections.
Temer (MDB), Dilma’s (PT) vice president, was obviously not elected by the PSTU, but by the PT. And as the popular saying goes, “turtles don’t climb trees; if one is on top of a tree, it’s because someone put it there.”
Impeachment, parliamentary maneuvers, and even legal battles are all within the rules of the bourgeois democratic regime. There was no coup, so it is difficult for the MRT to explain how, after a (soft?) coup, the balance of power, instead of receding, is advancing. How does the MRT explain the largest general strike in Brazil in 2017, after the great defeat imposed by “a coup”? It turns out that the MRT uses the same narrative as the PT that Bolsonaro is a product of the “2016 coup.”
But in reality, Bolsonaro, if from a historical point of view he is the product of more than 20 years of PSDB and PT governments and disappointment with the PT, from the specific point of view of the current situation, he is the direct product of the failure to continue the 2017 general strike, for which the union bureaucracy, especially the CUT and the PT, are responsible.
This narrative that the impeachment is a coup and that essentially attributes the crisis of Dilma’s government to a reactionary movement, in addition to everything else, does not help to properly arm the vanguard and the working class for when a real coup project and a real coup attempt actually appear, as was the case with Bolsonaro’s attempt on July 8.
Even more impressive is that it cannot explain why the PT gets along so well with so many supposed “coup plotters,” such as Renan Calheiros (MDB) or Geraldo Alckmin, Lula’s current vice president (formerly PSDB, now PSB), and so many others who are now part of his government.
4 – Because we are Morenoists
Being a Morenoist does not mean repeating prefabricated formulas or denying the mistakes that have been made. It means defending an anti-dogmatic method deeply rooted in revolutionary Marxism, which starts from the living reality of the class struggle to formulate the program and policy. This heritage is the opposite of the formalism that characterizes the FT.
The FT claims to dialectically surpass Moreno because it vindicates two of his works, The Revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat and The Betrayal of the OCI (published in Brazil by Sundermann under the title “The Popular Front Governments in History”).
These are two great books, but they are not the only works by Nahuel Moreno that we defend. Moreno was, in our view, the postwar Trotskyist who did not give in to revisionism and who best responded to the reality of his time. We believe that disregarding the “Four Theses on Spanish and Portuguese Colonization of America,” for example, implies a very important deficit in understanding Latin America.
To leave aside the “Morenazo,” published in Brazil under the title “The Party and the Revolution,” is to forego knowing and studying not only a Marxist analysis of numerous Latin American countries in the 1970s and the whole controversy with Mandelism over its capitulation to the guerrilla, but above all, to lose access to a lesson on politics and on the methodology of the transitional program. A dialectical vision in which minimal, democratic, and transitional tasks do not fulfill that role in themselves, regardless of circumstances, but rather “minimal tasks can fulfill a transitional role and transitional tasks can have a minimal role,” depending on the class struggle. In this book, Moreno also makes some mistakes. By leaning toward political polemics (the book is a Congress document), he places a mistaken emphasis on slogans for action and presents a limited view of the role of theory and propaganda. However, these mistakes do not invalidate the book and are corrected in “The Betrayal of the OCI” (“The Popular Front Governments in History,” Editorial Sundermann, Brazil).
Together, these two books constitute an important lesson on the methodology of the transitional program and on how to do politics. Moreno’s schools, or books such as Revolution and Counterrevolution in Portugal, confirm a work that is anything but schematic, in which permanent revolution is applied in revolutionary processes not as a dogma.
He was concerned with intervening in reality and building revolutionary parties capable of influencing the course of events and history. He was also concerned with building a revolutionary International, precisely because permanent revolution clashes head-on with the Stalinist theory of socialism in one country.
Moreno was by no means someone who believed he had a recipe or a scheme into which reality could be fitted. He did not operate with an objectivist or subjectivist scheme. Above all, Moreno, with his successes and mistakes, always sought to understand and intervene concretely in real revolutions.
To be up to the task of our time, just as we must return to Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky, we must also learn from Moreno.
Even those of us who consider ourselves Morenoists, and owe him the tribute of our existence, are far from surpassing his ability to respond to today’s world, as he, with his successes and mistakes, responded to his own time.
But in vindicating Moreno and being Morenoists, we will not fail to criticize or update Moreno, because he would do the same.
And yes, trying not to fall into a reverse subjectivist scheme, we must distance ourselves from the traits of objectivism which, we repeat, do not mark the entirety of Moreno’s work or his actions at specific moments in the processes.
The challenge before us is the same one that guided Moreno’s life: to build revolutionary parties rooted in the class, capable of intervening in real revolutions and disputing their leadership until the end.
