In the beginning of the 80’s, Nahuel Moreno, founder of the IWL-FI, debated extensively and in depth with the Frenchorganization OCI (Internationalist Communist Organization, led by Pierre Lambert) regarding its policy of capitulation to the Popular Front headed by the Social-democrat François Mitterand, thus expressed in several materials. We extract the main part of one of those debates in 1982, which is still valid for the current Greek situation.
“The main point which opposes opportunists to revolutionaries, and revisionism toTrotskyism nowadays, has to do with the policies regarding this type of government. […] they oppose in three fundamental aspects. The first is that […] opportunists are characterized by giving their support to the popular front government. This support can be open or veiled;
it can be to the government’s measures or by not opposing clearly those measures… As opposed to that, Trotskyism is characterized by not giving any kind of support, under any circumstance, neither to the government nor to its measures. This does not mean that it does not defend those measures when they are attacked by the counter-revolution. […]
“In the second place, the opportunists are characterized by having a complicit silence about the government. They do not denounce it as a bourgeois government and, as every bourgeois government, counter-revolutionary. That is to say, there is no policy to systematically denounce the government, of opposing and confronting it. The revolutionary, instead, systematically denounces the bourgeois and counter-revolutionary government; he claims not to believe in any of its promises or measures.
“In the third place, the opportunist is characterized by not raising slogans of power as the center of his policy and agitation. That is to say, demanding a type of government opposed to the existing one is not at the core of his policy. On the other hand, the core of the Trotskyist policy is the regular agitation for a working class government, completely opposed to the popular front”.
