Thu Mar 28, 2024
March 28, 2024

IWL (FI) and CITO reunited

After over a decade of separation, the International Workers League – Fourth International and International Centre of Orthodox Trotskyism (CITO) have decided to be reunited at the forthcoming IWL World Congress to be held in March 2008. In countries where both organisations have groups of parties, shared fraternal work has already begun through which the process of reunification is being actually built.

This decision is the outcome of over three years of discussions, joint meetings, shared policies for the main events of class struggle and united action in the countries where both organisations have parties. It has been a frank and loyal process where divergences were clearly posed, always in quest of a shared programme and policies that would allow us to advance in the construction of an international that would get us nearer to the solution for the principal problem of the workers and mankind: revolutionary leadership that may make it possible to destroy imperialist capitalism and start building socialism with workers’ democracy.

What are drawn together by basic agreements today challenged or abandoned by a great amount of organisations incorrectly dubbed revolutionary and Trotskyist who have succumbed to the opportunist landslide produced by the restoration of capitalism in the former Bureaucratic Workers States, falsely known as socialist countries, and the destruction of the enormous apparatus controlled from Moscow by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that we knew as the world Stalinist apparatus. These agreements are:

·                                                     Imperialist capitalism is the main enemy of the workers and peoples of the world. American, European and Japanese imperialism, in spite of all their differences, get together to exploit and oppress the working class and peoples of the Earth, including those of their own countries.

·                                                     We stand for World Socialist Revolution and there can be no socialist revolution unless factories, banks and banks are expropriated from national capitalist by workers and a Workers, Peasants and Popular Government is established, meaning Revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat functioning with workers democracy, the same as the regime established by the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky did from 1917 to 1924, the epic years of the great Russian Revolution, the most democratic regime ever known by mankind.

·                                                     In all the countries of the world and in all workers and popular organisations we are for unrelenting struggle to achieve and defend workers democracy, the very core of the matter for the existence of Trotskyism ever since the days of the Left Opposition in the USRR, mercilessly persecuted by the Stalinist bureaucratic regime that replaced the democracy of the soviets. Struggling for workers democracy means unyielding battles against trade union and political bureaucracies that rule over workers’ mass organisations with gangster-like methods that prevent workers from discussing freely in assemblies the tasks and policies against the yoke of capitalist exploitation. Struggle for workers democracy means, ultimately, fighting for working class with its methods to lead all the exploited against imperialism and all their direct and indirect allies, who will oppose the replacement of capitalism by socialism as Marx conceived it and the Bolshevik Party put it into practice during the first years of the Russian Revolution. The struggle for workers democracy means at the same time the most uncompromising ideological and political combat against all the expressions of bourgeois democracy which – with its formal parliamentarism – lures workers away from the battle against imperialist capitalism and so keeps them under the control of their class enemy.

·                                                     We stand against all Popular Front administrations such as Lula, Evo Morales and Tabaré Vázquez. They are all bourgeois governments putting the plans of the national bourgeoisies and of imperialism into life. We are furthermore against nationalist bourgeois governments like that of Chavez in Venezuela, Correa in Ecuador and Ortega in Nicaragua who, using the flimsy disguise of confronting imperialism and talking of XXI century socialism, have no other aim than to safeguard capitalist exploitation and digress workers form the struggle against imperialist capitalism from their target. While fighting against these governments we fight against the policies of all the organisations that claim to be for workers movement but they stand arm in arm with the bourgeoisie and capitulate to it. We, therefore, stand up against the policies of Social Democracy and the of Stalinist Communist Parties that uphold them, We are also against the trends that, as Lambertists and Mandelists of the USec have given up the Leninist and Trotskyist tradition and have joined the bourgeois Lula administration.

·                                                     The working class is the subject of the socialist revolution and it is their task to win over the peasantry and the toiling masses in general. We consider the old demands of the founders of the First International: the liberation of the workers is the task of the workers themselves! Proletarian of the world, get together!

·                                                     In order to fulfil these tasks, we must build the Party of the World Revolution functioning with democratic centralism, centring its activity round the working class, that struggle for power in each country of the world for the working class to take over the control of the state and that can turn the revolutionary theory into one of it major tools to define programme and demands. That is to say: a Leninist combat party for the destruction of imperialist capitalism that will challenge the leadership of the so-called “anticapitalist” parties, who, under the “socialist” disguise, conceal their intention of resigning open confrontation with the ruling bourgeoisies and imperialism, and dispute their control over the workers’ awareness.

We are for the military defeat of the occupation armies in Iraq and for the triumph of the resistance of the Iraqi people. We stand by those who are fro the military defeat of UN armies and for the triumph of the popular resistance in Afghanistan. We demand immediate withdrawal of the imperialist troops of UN and of the NATO from Kossovo, Haiti and from all the countries where they intervene with the excuse of “humanitarian reasons”.

We summon the people of Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Argentina to depose all expectations in the administrations of their countries and to confront their plans by means of class mobilisation. All these governments are bourgeois administrations and they must be defeated if there is to be an end for capitalist exploitation.

We summon the working class to keep fully independent from the states, the governments and bourgeoisie parties and to build their own political tool: International Revolutionary Party. Because of all the above, we make an urgent call to all the revolutionary parties and groups – whether they are or are not Trotskyist – who stand for these basic principles and for the task that crops up from them: let us get together to take over the task of the reconstruction of the Fourth International founded by Trotsky in 1938 as a response to the Stalinist degeneration that has ultimately led the USRR and all the remaining Workers’ States, including China, to the restoration of capitalism. The call is to work jointly to build the World Party that that would give itself a revolutionary programme and function with democratic centralism and whose target is the destruction of imperialist capitalism and the construction of socialist society.

The reunification of the IWL (FI) and CITO is a first step in that direction inasmuch as it is part of the reconstruction of the IWL founded by Nahuel Moreno aiming at the reconstruction the Fourth International.

Sao Paulo, 12 March 2007.

 

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