After the article dedicated to analysing the positions of Marco Rizzo’s Communist Party (1), which has been read on our networks by thousands of people, we continue examining “communist parties’” positions, now those of the IMT’s Italian section, Sinistra Classe Rivoluzione (Left Class Revolution).
By Francesco Ricci – PdAC/Italy
The purpose of this series of articles is to try to explain why, in our opinion, the current split in so many “communist parties” is motivated by real strategic differences over “what to do”, i.e. which party is necessary to build in the mass struggles that are burning on every continent. We do this in a methodical way: comparing programmes and positions, avoiding sterile counterpositions based on caricatures and insults. Always respectful of the commitment and sacrifices of comrades who militate in organisations different from ours, always ready for confrontation and also, obviously, for unity in the struggle.
Is it not possible, at least, to unite the Trotskyists?
If it is simpler to note the differences between our project and that of the Stalinist Rizzo’s CP, it may not be so to understand at first glance our differences with various organisations that refer to and come from Trotskyism.
“Why don’t the Trotskyists at least unite?”, we are often asked. In reality, here too, the Marxist method applies: not to be bound by anyone’s definitions of oneself, but to verify the correspondence between name and thing, between appearance and substance. In order to do this, one can only examine the programmes and concrete actions of each organisation. The question is not to proclaim oneself “more revolutionary” than others but to understand what the basic differences are, to stimulate debate, to allow each militant to make an informed choice. All this reckoning that the revolutionary party with mass influence, which is an urgent necessity (all the more so in this convulsive phase), does not yet exist. Nor do the PdAC or the IWL-Fourth International, have the pretension to be one now, although we are convinced that we are a fundamental and largely unique instrument to succeed in an enterprise that will necessarily have to go through processes of fusion between different organisations, splits, programmatic confrontations. After all, this is the path that was followed by the party that remains a model for us: the Bolshevik Party that led the working class to victory in October 1917.
There are four organisations that come from or claim Trotskyism in Italy (excluding groups that just animate some blogs): PdAC, Sinistra Anticapitalista, the PCL and SCR. It is the latter that we will deal with in this article.
Two points of agreement with SCR
Of the organisations mentioned, SCR is the only one, apart from us, which has a conception of the party made of militants and is also the only one which is part, like Communist Alternative, of a real international organisation, present in different countries, centralised around a common programme, with real-world congresses. These are not common or secondary issues: so much so that, precisely, they do not characterise the other organisations we have mentioned. One more reason to clarify our views on the main programmatic differences with the SCR.
We insist: we are not referring to small differences in analysis, not to secondary issues, which would not explain the existence of different organisations. We refer to differences of a programmatic and strategic nature, trying to use as a criterion of comparison the Trotskyist programmatic conceptions that, in a way, both we and SCR claim.
How to build the party: Lenin or Alan Woods?
SCR is today an independent organisation: but this is relatively new, dating from the last few years, after its exit from Communist Refoundation (in 2016). In fact, from its birth in 1986, 33 years ago, SCR (or, previously, Falcemartello) has had a life outside another party only in the last three years (2).
For years the PdAC has also been an “entryist” party, that is, it has gained strength within another party (the same Refoundation), before constituting itself as an independent organisation. But what has been a tactic (as elaborated by Trotsky in the 1930s) for us, it is a strategy for SCR. In other words, its current “external” life is an exception, while the norm is to build itself within other organisations. And this exception is not a choice but a necessity: the terminal crisis of Refoundation left SCR without another organisation in which to enter. Indeed, the fact that a large majority of the IMT sections (International Marxist Tendency, of which SCR is the Italian section) act as tendencies within reformist parties confirms entryism as the rule, just as SCR has done for a large part of its life.
What might appear to be a question of tactics in party building has in fact for the IMT programmatic motivations. It was Ted Grant, the founder of this international current (who died in 2006), who defined entryism as a revolutionary party-building strategy in his 1959 “Problems of entryism” (3), which inspires the IMT to this day.
Grant’s reasoning is roughly this: both in the absence of struggles and in the early stages of the resurgence of struggles, the masses turn to reformist parties because they must “experience” reformism before they understand the necessity of revolution. The task of revolutionaries is therefore to join these reformist parties, to be their left opposition, and to wait in there for the masses to awaken. Only then can revolutionary parties be born: either as an evolution of the old reformist parties, which will be induced by objective dynamics to break with the right-wing or as a split of the Marxists from these parties.
The error of this reasoning – in our opinion – lies in the fact that it starts from three wrong premises: first, that the reformist parties are the “natural” parties of the class; second, that reformism is an inevitable stage which the working class must live through and overcome; third, that the masses are a homogeneous bloc which matures its own experience at the same time.
This is the opposite of Lenin’s conception in the building of the Bolshevik Party. Let us look at these three premises, confronting them with Lenin’s method.
For Lenin, the reformist parties were bourgeois-worker parties, i.e. parties with a working-class base, a tradition and a symbolism linked to the workers’ movement, but with a petty-bourgeois leadership and a bourgeois programme. That is why Lenin (unlike the IMT and SCR) identified the role of the reformist parties as that of “agents of the bourgeoisie in the workers’ movement”, i.e. conscious instruments in the hands of the bureaucracies, which sell the strength of the class struggles (a strength they deceive and divert into the dead-end of class collaboration, ensuring that they never go beyond the threshold of private ownership of the means of production) in exchange for privileges, small and large, for their caste.
From this characterisation, Lenin did not consider these parties as “natural” expressions of the class and did not nurture any illusions about a “reform” of these parties or about the possibility of evolution within it of a progressive current led by a section of the bureaucracy. Therefore, the aim of the revolutionaries was for Lenin to destroy these parties politically to win over their rank and file who, unlike the bureaucracies, have no class interests different from those of the revolutionaries.
James Cannon, the main leader of the Fourth International in Trotsky’s time, added, in response to conceptions similar to those of the IMT/SCR (already widespread in his time) that the task of the Trotskyists is not to accompany the masses in a reformist experience. And he explained the concept with a joke: “If another man takes poison, you do not have to join him in the experiment. Just tell him it is no good. But don’t offer to prove it by your personal example.” (4)
Again Cannon (in Election Policy in 1948) responded to IMT-like conceptions in this way: “There is the reformist conception that (…) reformism is a necessary and inevitable stage of the development of a working-class political movement. Against that is the Marxist conception that a reformist stage of working-class politics is not necessary and not preferable; (…) What we do advocate is the revolutionary party of the working class which formulates the program of its historical interests.” And when the masses supported reformist policies he added: “We stood on the side and we told them they were wrong.”
Finally, the idea that the masses are a bloc simultaneously making the same experience in the class struggle is the exact inversion of the conception on which Lenin (and, before him, Marx) based his idea of building a vanguard party. For Marx and Engels, and later for Lenin and Trotsky, there are not “the masses” but different sectors which, at different times, enter into struggle. To use a metaphor employed by Trotsky: “Concentric circles of an increasing number and decreasing consciousness”. The smaller circle is the vanguard which the party seeks to organise, in order to drag along in the process the larger circles of lower-consciousness workers. All this is in a process that is not static but dialectical, and is precisely the process of the class struggle, with its ebbs and flows. By eliminating dialectics from the process of building the revolutionary party what is left is Ted Grant’s, Alan Woods’ (IMT’s current main leader) and SCR’s conception: an evolutionary process of construction by stages. Something that, besides falling short of the Leninist conception, has never happened in history.
To find a justification, so to speak “theoretical” for this conception alien to Leninism, the IMT and Alan Woods (especially in his books on the History of Bolshevism) present a reconstruction that does not correspond to historical facts. Since the growth of Bolshevism as a de facto independent organisation, separate and counterposed to Menshevism since late-1903, is objectively in contradiction with the party theory of the IMT, Woods argues that – “against a sectarian conception” – Lenin and Bolshevism effectively split from the Mensheviks only in 1912. In reality, anyone who wishes to study the history of Bolshevism from primary sources will find this assertion to be false. The first to deny it was Lenin himself in a famous book (Ultra-leftism, the infantile disease of communism) when he stated: “Bolshevism, as a current of political thought and as a political party, has existed since 1903.” In fact, it is true that there were moments of partial unification and that the formal birth of the Bolshevik Party was only in 1912, but already in the period when the Bolsheviks were still formally a “faction” of the same party (the POSDR) with the Mensheviks, the two fractions functioned as distinct parties, with their own leading bodies (which actually met, unlike the common ones), their own structure, separate finances, separate media. The connection between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks was essentially a function of their common membership in the Second International.
The question of the state and power: a turning point
It requires fewer words and it’s easier to explain the other big question that separates us from SCR. Not because it is secondary; in fact, it is exactly the central question. Since Marx’s time, it is a watershed that separates consistent revolutionaries from reformists, and, to use a Lenin’s expression later taken up by Trotsky, from the “centrists”, i.e. those who oscillate between reform and revolution, affirming revolutionary conceptions but then falling into reformist practice.
The IMT and SCR’s conception of the state is the opposite of that of Marxism, summarised by Lenin in The State and the Revolution and practised by the Bolsheviks during 1917.
For Lenin, communists cannot in any way, even critically, support capitalist governments, whether national or local. It was thanks to this principled position (which Marx had indicated as the main lesson of the 1871 Paris Commune) that the Bolsheviks won a majority in the soviets in 1917, in the necessity of overthrowing the “left” provisional government. This was the crux of Lenin’s battle in his Letters from afar (written to the party leading group from Switzerland) and then, on his return to Russia, in the April Theses: “No support for the provisional government”, because it is a bourgeois government in disguise. And it is useful to remember that even that government was (unlike the more recent examples) composed of left parties which had made a revolution (the February revolution) and had the support of the majority of the soviets.
Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht held Lenin’s position in the subsequent 1918-1919 German revolution (which cost their lives), that Rosa condensed into fundamental teaching: communists can go to the government only on the ruins of the capitalist system, i.e. after the revolution having “broken” the old state machine and replaced it with one of a completely different type: the dictatorship of the proletariat.
This same programmatic position was then codified by the Third International in the theses of its first congresses, before Stalin’s victory, which brought back to the workers’ movement the policy of collaboration with bourgeois governments, under the term “popular front governments”, that has provoked so many defeats in history, from Spain in the 1930s to Allende’s government in Chile and so on.
SCR and the IMT adopt the old “centrist” conception of “contested” governments, which can be conditioned by the masses. That is while opposing “ordinary” bourgeois governments, they hold the possibility that, under pressure from the masses, “left” bourgeois governments can evolve in a progressive direction. We will see below some examples.
The practical consequences of theoretical misconceptions
From what we have said so far, any reader might think that these are important issues but without immediate consequences. Unfortunately, this is not the case. As Lenin reminded us, an error of one centimetre in a theory becomes an error of metres in practice.
Let us see how this is true by referring to the two strategic questions we have examined so far: the question of the party and the question of the attitude of revolutionaries towards the bourgeois state and its governments.
The conception of party-building through permanent entryism (with some exceptions, as in the present anomalous situation of the SCR) and the conception of reformist parties as “natural” parties of the class have resulted in the past and today in disastrous policies.
To limit it to a single case, take the IMT’s policy in Britain. This is a particularly important case considering that this is the section led by Alan Woods, the main IMT theorist.
In Britain, the current from which the IMT originated (the CWI) began many decades ago, under the leadership of Ted Grant, to practise entryism in the Labour Party. For Ted Grant, it was long-term entryism, awaiting a breakaway evolution of the party. But the break was, in 1992, from the CWI: because a wing led by Peter Taaffe, at the time more to the left, proposed to leave the Labour Party and return to the surface. Faced with this position, Ted Grant and Alan Woods led a minority faction and broke away, giving birth to the IMT (with which the Italian group, now SCR, aligned itself). The English IMT section, Socialist Appeal, has always remained in the Labour Party.
And so far we are talking about what could be a question of party-building tactics. But, fully in tune with the fundamentals of this permanent entryism, i.e. in accordance with the non-Leninist view of the role and nature of social-democratic parties, the IMT, led by Alan Woods, supports the current [at the time this article was written] leader of the party, Jeremy Corbyn, and even the prospect of a Corbyn-led Labour government.
As can be read in dozens of articles in the Socialist Appeal and SCR, the role of revolutionaries in Britain is to remain in the Labour Party to support Corbyn against the right-wing of the party. We are talking – for those who do not know – about a party which, among other things, is now “Labour” in name only and is the counterpart of the Italian PD. In other words, one of the two parties on which the English bourgeoisie relies to govern according to the logic of alternation of power. Certainly, under Corbyn’s leadership, the Labour Party has been repainted to the left, which has helped it to emerge from the deep crisis it was in. But, precisely, it is just painting.
Corbyn’s manifesto (“For the many, not the few”) promises a series of reforms and even some nationalisations, with compensation. All financed by a tax on the “richest”, which however does not call into question either the private ownership of the big industries or the banks; which does not call into question the bourgeois regime or its institutions (or NATO). In other words: a programme with neo-Keynesian overtones, prepared by Corbyn’s economic advisors, such as Ann Pettifor or Martin Wolf, advocates of a revival of the anti-Marxist theories of Lord Keynes. A programme which, paraphrasing and returning to Marx, does not propose to “expropriate the expropriators” but only to tax them a little more, in the name of an impossible “capitalism with a human face”: in one of the main imperialist countries of the world…
But the consequence of this position of the IMT (the famous metre in practice born of the centimetre of error in theory) is even more serious and brings us back to the second strategic issue: that of power.
The IMT’s British section is fighting for a Corbyn-Labour Party government “under a socialist programme”. (5) This is what the English comrades of the SCR wrote this week: “A Corbyn government will have to mobilise the working class in response to the sabotage of big business in order to advance the socialist transformation of society. This is the only possible response to the crisis of capitalism. Only in this way can the Labour Party realise its programme and radically transform the lives of the majority of people in Britain. This is what we must fight for“. (6). And the title of another article breaks the traditional British understatement and even proclaims: “It’s the fight of our lives: let’s mobilise for Corbyn’s victory!” (7)
These positions are the heritage of the IMT and are also fully shared by SCR.
SCR, for its part, adjusted these positions to Italian politics, for example by arguing (at the time when it was called Falcemartello) that in Naples the council of Mayor De Magistris could have been pushed “by [class struggle] dynamics” to clash with the strong powers. For this reason, they suggested to Refoundation (of which they were part at the time) “to fight a hegemonic battle even from its position in local government“, exploiting “a position of objective advantage, as the only left-wing party within the De Magistris alliance.” (8) All this while De Magistris, behind a “leftist” rhetoric, imposed an austerity policy and cutting of public services in Naples.
Even after the end of Refoundation, SCR persevered in the line of “critical support” for De Magistris’ bourgeois municipal council: “We support De Magistris in his fight against the speculative hypothesis and the plundering of the city, in his discontinuity with regard to the logic of power produced by the PD, in all his provisions in favour of the underprivileged classes. But we do not suspend our critique at the limits of his administrative experience.” (9)
It is perhaps useful at this point to recall that, apart from the absurdity (for Marxists) of thinking that one of the biggest cities in Italy can “escape” stealthily and by an “objective dynamic” from the big bourgeoisie, or worse, that one of the main imperialist European countries, such as Britain, can do so. It is necessary to point out that the theory of “neutral” governments or states, conditioned by the dynamics of the class struggle (admitting in fact that “of course, Corbyn is not a Marxist”), is not particularly new and constitutes the quintessence of reformism in every epoch. It was upholding this theory that Kautsky, according to Lenin, sought to transform Marx “into a common liberal”, deserving for this reason, from Lenin, the nickname of “renegade of Marxism”.
Certainly, it is not necessary to remind the leaders of SCR how the Kerensky government presented itself in the eyes of the centrism of the time as “conditionable” in 1917. It was (let us repeat), unlike an eventual Corbyn government, a government born in a revolutionary process and supported by the soviets… However, Lenin and Trotsky considered it a bourgeois government and did not think for a moment of supporting it more or less critically or “conditioning” it, but developed an intransigent opposition until they could overthrow it to replace it with a workers’ government.
Comrades interested in going deeper into history – that is, the real history of Bolshevism – might even limit themselves to reading the famous April Theses with which Lenin programmatically armed the Bolshevik Party in preparation for the 1917 October revolution. Thesis number 3 leaves no room for misunderstanding: “No support for the Provisional Government; the utter falsity of all its promises should be made clear, particularly of those relating to the renunciation of annexations. Exposure in place of the impermissible, illusion-breeding “demand” that this government, a government of capitalists, should cease to be an imperialist government.” (10)
Even in the face of General Kornilov’s attempted coup, Lenin did not change his position and, contrary to what some claim, did not offer any support to the government. This is not a personal interpretation: it is precisely Lenin’s reasoning, explained with his usual clarity (avoiding future interpretations by certain “Leninists”) in a famous letter on August 30, 1917, addressed to the party’s Central Committee: “Even now we must not support Kerensky’s government. This is unprincipled. We may be asked: aren’t we going to fight against Kornilov? Of course we must! But this is not the same thing; there is a dividing line here (…) We shall fight, we are fighting against Kornilov, just as Kerensky’s troops do, but we do not support Kerensky. On the contrary, we expose his weakness. There is the difference. It is rather a subtle difference, but it is highly essential and must not be forgotten.”
A “highly essential” difference, Lenin explains: and he defines (pre-emptively) the IMT’s position as an “inadmissible” break with the basic principles of Marxism. And for those who did not understand, Lenin further clarifies: “We must relentlessly fight against phrases about the defence of the country, about a united front of revolutionary democrats, about supporting the provisional Government, etc., etc., since they are just empty phrases.” (11)
“Relentlessly”. This is Lenin, this is the real history of Bolshevism.
For Bolshevism (for Marxism) there can be only bourgeois governments in capitalism; governments that are neutral or “conditionable” by dynamics or by the masses are pure fantasy. Hence the “principle” of opposition to any government (national or local) in capitalism: it is not an abstract principle (there is none in Leninism) but the indispensable condition for not sowing illusions among the masses and being able to win the workers for the struggle for a workers’ government, which can be built only after having overthrown capitalism by the revolutionary road, i.e. only after the “rupture” of the bourgeois state machine.
Ambassadors of “Bolivarian socialism”
Another example of the grave consequences which can result from the elimination of the Bolshevik-type conception of the vanguard party and the Marxist conception of the state is the position of SCR and the IMT on Venezuela.
The IMT was one of the main organisations supporting the dictatorial regime of Chávez and his so-called “socialism of the 21st century” during all the years of Chávez government.
Alan Woods proudly presented himself for years as an advisor to Chávez. When Chávez, in 2004, founded the PSUV (United Socialist Party of Venezuela), the IMT’s sympathetic group participated and merged into the regime’s single party. The logic is the explanation given by Alan Woods in his text “Theses on revolution and counter-revolution in Venezuela.” (12)
Venezuela, both under Chávez and today under Maduro, has never broken its bourgeois state, has never expropriated its companies and multinationals under workers’ control, nor has it broken with imperialism (only frictions). In Chávez’s time, internal elections were not possible in the unions controlled by the regime. The regime of this “Bolivarian socialism” did not allow, even in Chavez’s time, the organisation of workers in council-like structures (soviets). Nothing to be surprised about, given that Chávez’s “revolution” has never “broken” (as Marx would have said) the bourgeois state. Under both Chávez and Maduro, Venezuela continued to be strangled by the payment of the foreign debt, which both have always paid punctually (with the blood of the workers).
Today with Maduro and yesterday with Chávez, Venezuela is a state and a regime that represses and crushes the proletarian masses. The hunger and poverty from which the masses try to escape are the results of twenty years of “chavismo”, the other side of the coin of a bourgeoisie (the so-called “bolibourgeoisie” or “Bolivarian” bourgeoisie) which in the meantime has enriched itself by exploiting the oil reserves of the country, a junior partner of the imperialist bourgeoisie. All this has nothing to do with socialism. It is precisely against this regime (among the most ferocious in Latin America) that the masses have mobilised even in the last few months: unfortunately, when this happened, the IMT condemned these mobilisations, as did the Stalinists all over the world, saying that they were just manoeuvres of the bourgeois opposition and imperialism.
Today the IMT, after having supported “Bolivarian socialism” for years, becoming its propagandists in the world, are critical of the Maduro regime: but that is only because they say that… he would have somehow betrayed his predecessor Chávez, of whom they defended and spread for years the totally fanciful image of a “fighter for socialism”. In any case, the “critique” does not go so far as to call for the destruction of the regime by the masses in order to replace it with a genuine workers’ government.
Among the hundreds of texts published by the IMT to support this caricature of socialism, it suffices to recall the shameful text written on the death of the dictator: Hugo Chávez is dead: the struggle for socialism is alive! In 2013.
The more eloquent passages read: “We mourn for Hugo Chávez but we must not let the tears blind us (…) When the pain is over, the struggle will have to continue. Chávez would expect nothing less (…) We are committed to continuing and intensifying the struggle to defend the Bolivarian revolution. (…) Hugo Chávez died before completing the great project he had set himself: the fulfilment of the socialist revolution in Venezuela“.
As if that were not enough, the IMT also spent heavily on the elusive project of a … Fifth International (not a typo: they speak of the Fifth, not Trotsky’s Fourth). We read in the same text: “In June 2010, during the PSUV congress, Chávez proclaimed the urgent need for a Fifth International. (…) He devoted an important part of his speech to the question because he considered it essential. And he was right. He died before he could put this idea into practice (…). The IMT is committed to continuing the struggle to build this revolutionary International of the workers“. (13)
In other words: the IMT intend, as faithful executors of Chávez’s will, to “complete” his “great project” of a “socialist revolution” in Venezuela, as well as his desire to build a “Fifth International”, and they want to do so following the teachings of this former colonel who, in power, accumulated with his family and his party friends an immense fortune.
Is the IMT a Trotskyist organisation?
In recent weeks, Alan Woods has been in Italy for a series of lectures organised by SCR, presenting the translation of his book on the history of Bolshevism.
Woods is certainly a good speaker and a good connoisseur of the history of the workers’ movement (although he sometimes adapts it, so to speak, to the needs of his politics). We too think that the history of Bolshevism should be studied by all revolutionaries in order to draw from it valuable lessons for solving, as the Bolsheviks were able to do, the historical problem of building a new leadership for the workers’ movement, an alternative to the reformists.
But we ask ourselves: can the example set by Lenin and Trotsky be reconciled with the positions we describe in this article?
How, we ask, can we reconcile the Bolshevik demands with the conception that Woods and the IMT have of party building? With their conception of reformism and the possible evolution of a section of bureaucracy? With their accommodation to left reformism rather than a fight to the death against all bureaucratic currents? With their waiting decades for a “left” to emerge in the Labour Party to break with the “right” (both factions of a now thoroughly bourgeois party)? How does one reconcile the Marx of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the Lenin of The State and Revolution with the theory of the supposed possibility of contested governments within capitalism? Or with the invocation of a Corbyn government for Britain? Or, finally, with the support, first full, now critical, for the brutal nationalist and populist, anti-worker, nationalist regime in Venezuela? And what does the Fifth International announced by Chávez have to do with Trotsky’s Fourth International? This is not a problem of “numbers” but, as Trotsky explained, of the programme: what does the programme of Chávez’s “Bolivarian revolution” have to do with the programme of revolutionary Marxism? And the IMT programme, committed to the implementation of Chávez’s project, what does it have to do with the Trotskyist programme of permanent revolution?
In other words, as we said at the beginning, it is laudable that the IMT want to build a party of militants and a centralised International. Sure it is. But to do what? With what programme?
With all due respect, especially to the young people who are committed to the sacrifice of militancy on this road, we ask: can all this really be called “Trotskyism”?
Notes
(1) Fabiana Stefanoni’s article on Rizzo’s CP can be read at this link: www.alternativacomunista.it/politica/viaggio-tra-i-%E2%80%9Cpartiti-comunisti%E2%80%9D-/-1-puntata-quando-stalinismo-fa-rima-con-opportunismo
(2) According to what the author of a book on Trotskyism writes, in reality, the Falcemartello group (now SCR) was born after a brief experience as a member of Bettino Craxi’s PSI in the early 1980s (a party that was socialist in name only, being a fully bourgeois-liberal party). The nucleus that later gave life to Falcemartello would have been formed in Ferrara as a “Marxist current of the PSI”, led by a leader who later moved to Great Britain. We have not found other sources to confirm this news: but certainly, the fact, if confirmed, would not be in contradiction with the general logic that motivates the IMT’s permanent entryism and which we explain in the article. The text in question can be read at this link:
http://nuovointernazionalismo.blogspot.com/2016/01/falcemartello-abbandona-trentanni-di.html
(3) Ted Grant’s text, “Problems of entryism”, which founds the entryism strategy followed by successive decades in his current, can be read at this link: www.tedgrant.org/archive/grant/1959/03/entrism.htm
The same party-building strategy is explained in this other IMT text: “A brief history of the IMT” which can be read at the following link: https://web.archive.org/web/20120617224628/http://www.marxist.com/history-marxist-tendency.htm
(4) Read Summary Speech on Election Policy in www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/swp-us/idb/swp-1946-59/v10n02-1948-ib.pdf
(5) The claim for a Corbyn government is contained in dozens of articles and texts, see for example, “What we are fighting for“, available at: www.socialist.net/socialist-appeal-stands-for.htm.
(6) One of the most recent articles of the English section of the IMT on this subject, entitled “Britain, the Corbyn tide is rising: we can win“, can be read at this link www.socialist.net/the-corbyn-surge-begins-we-can-win.htm.
(7) The article is available at this link: www.socialist.net/we-face-the-fight-of-our-lives-mobilise-for-a-corbyn-victory.htm
(8) This position is expressed in the document “Por el partido de clase“, presented by Falcemartello (today SCR) to the VIII Congress of Communist Refoundation. The document can be read at this link:
http://web.rifondazione.it/viii/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/2011documento2.pdf
(9) See the article “La candidatura di De Magistris a Napoli: la nostra posizione“, 13/05/2016, in the link: www.rivoluzione.red/la-candidatura-di-de-magistris-a-napoli-la-nostra-posizione/
(10) LENIN, V. I. April Theses (1917), in Collected Works. Editori Riuniti, 1967, volume 24, p. 10 ff.
(11) LENIN, V. I. To the Central Committee of the D.S.D.L.P. (August 30, 1917), in Collected Works, Editori Riuniti, 1967, volume 25, p. 273 ff.
(12) The text recognises that Chávez’s Venezuela is “still a bourgeois state“, but then goes on to specify that “it is a bourgeois state with peculiar characteristics. The most peculiar is that the bourgeoisie has lost – at least temporarily – control of its own state“. (sic)
(13) The IMT statement on the death of Hugo Chávez (2013) can be read here: https://www.marxist.com/hugo-chavez-is-dead-fight-for-socialism-lives.htm
