Fri Mar 29, 2024
March 29, 2024

The struggle for proletarian and revolutionary morals

The imperious need to fight against the bourgeois moral and to recover the proletarian and revolutionary morals as an indissoluble part of the battle for the reconstruction of the IV was intensely discussed at the IWL World Congress.

At the opening report of the discussion, comrade Caps of the PRT of Spain recalled that “As far as we are concerned, this discussion is far from responding to some kind of internal problem; it responds to an objective need, that cannot be postponed, that has everything to do with the construction of a revolutionary International.” And he insisted that the moral issue is a sine qua non condition and there must be agreement on it for without it is impossible to build a joint international. He recalled that Trotsky and Moreno paid a lot of attention to this problem in theory as well as in practice.  

In 1938, Trotsky wrote a brief brochure, Their Morals and Ours, in which he explained that there is no such thing as a universal set of rules, because morals stem out of social development and have class character. The ruling class imposes its goals on society and labels as “immoral” the means that contradict their goals. Trotsky did not have any mystic conception of morals. He regarded, problems of revolutionary morals mingle with problems of revolutionary tactics and strategy. That is why he considered it was utterly impossible to build a revolutionary party without a set of morals totally independent from the bourgeoisie, of proletarian morals. The epoch we are living in is the epoch of capitalist decadence, rotten morals, where it is “by hook or by crook” what prevails, the decadent morals of the bourgeoisie, of the apparatuses and trade union bureaucrats who, in order to destroy class independence, had to destroy the proletarian morals.  

Today, millions of young workers around the world enter a place of work for the first time. When they stand face to face with a strike, the first thing they hear from the trade union bureaucracy is that they must be “democratic”, that everybody has to have his rights: those who wish to work, work; those who don’t, don’t. And the laws explain that a strike, in order to be “democratic” must guarantee a minimum of personnel working. Those young people who begin to work get permeated with this ideology, which is the dominating bourgeois ideology and destroys the workers’ solidarity and class independence.  

That is why, if the IWL project is to reconstruct the IV International, if this is to be possible, it is necessary to retrieve proletarian morals, class morals, and so in an everyday combat against the bourgeois morality, decadent morality, that penetrate the working class through all the pores. It is necessary to recover class solidarity, which must be expressed in workers’ everyday life and is as important as the defence against employers’ attacks; recover proletarian morals as indissoluble part of the construction of an independent organisation of the working class, as an instrument of struggle against capitalism and for socialist society. It is a strategic and tactical battle for the reconstruction of proletarian morals that bourgeoisie, Stalinism and trade union apparatuses have been undermining for years. There is no possible unity of the working class, there is no possible class independence without this reconstruction, without the struggle against the morality of the apparatuses, which is lumpen morality, the morality of privileges, of degeneration of trade union leaders selling their mandate to the employers evidencing that “everybody has his price. This kind of morality is fatal for workers.  

It is therefore urgent that we should recover the proletarian morals so that the class can once again find its path to independent organisation. But that alone is not enough. It is also necessary to recover the party revolutionary morals. Because the decadence of capitalist society presses on the left organisations and these wind up by practising bourgeois morality, cheapened, becoming manifest in all acts of corruption, fraud and disloyal manipulations that have nothing to do with revolutionary morals. This process is so grievous that today we can see left organisation, which claim to be Marxists, even some that come from Trotskyist stock , accepting money from bourgeoisie to get their candidates elected and reach the parliament.   

To recapture the party and revolutionary morals means to confront these methods, identify them and fight against them on every day basis. It means confront and combat male chauvinism and every kind of discrimination and oppression against women, Negroes or homosexuals in the revolutionary party. Because the party is an instrument of struggle to topple the bourgeoisie and that is why it must have a top-level morality, iron discipline, based on the maximum of mutual confidence and solidarity. Without such morals, it is impossible to build an International capable of carrying the struggle against bourgeoisie to the last. That is why this discussion was so important at the IWL Congress and it involved all the organisations present, whose agreements in relation to this issue are fundamental for the advance in the process of the reconstruction of the IV.

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