Statement
Taking into consideration agreements as to the policies, programmes and methods, the leaderships of the FOS (Frente Obrero Socialista) and the COI (Corriente Obrera Internacionalista), we have decided to found a Committee for the Merger, in order to tackle the task of constituting a new party within the framework of the International Workers’ League – Fourth International (IWL-FI), a socialist, proletarian, revolutionary and internationalist party. And so contribute towards the struggle for a new leadership for the Argentina and world working class.
To tackle the crisis of world capitalism and the crisis of capitalist Argentina
Our union is just a humble but enormous and valuable step taking into consideration the serious crisis of world capitalism and the need of the working class to equip itself with a leadership. Twenty years ago, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, imperialist governments, media and multinationals announced the triumph of capitalism, the failure of socialism and sent Marxist ideas to museums. In Argentina, the Peronist Party and Menem insisted that with privatizations and “carnal relations” with USA we would join the “First World” with huge increase of wages and “productive revolution”.
The world capitalist crisis, which began in 2008, reveals the truth. The governments of USA, Europe and Japan are shifting the burden of the crisis on to the shoulders of the toiling masses of the world. World capitalism is driving us to barbarism and jeopardizes the survival of mankind. Nobody now believes that capitalism has a dream-solution.
Wages did not get any better in Argentina and there was no “productive revolution”. “Carnal relations” deepened the recolonization, with millions of unemployed and paucity. The response of the Argentine popular sectors was the 2001 insurrection known as Argentinazo, which toppled the De la Rúa administration and spawned a revolutionary process that has not yet been smothered. But the great entrepreneurs brought the Peronist Party back to power, with Duhalde first and then with Kirchner, adapting their discourse to uphold the plans of adjustments and of handing over of our wealth to imperialism.
The Committee for Fusion is getting ready to found a party that can respond to this reality. Only socialism can put an end to all this poverty, dearth, backwardness, social unevenness and environmental crisis. What we need in our country is a Second Independence that would free us from the imperialist oppression, as San Martín and Bolivar did and that today can only be achieved through the founding of the proletariat and the toiling masses.
Unite the workers and the peoples of the world who are up and fighting
In Greece, Italy, Spain… workers are up and fighting. In the Middle East, In Iraq and in Afghanistan, American and G7 imperialist armies are getting thorough beating, the same as the pro-American army of Israel. Hatred of imperialism accrues in Latin America and so does the resistance to the adjustments imposed by the governments. In Haiti there is increasing resistance to the invasion of the marines and the Minustah. A veritable rebellion against capitalism is sweeping across the world and in it; the working class with its organization is beginning to take the lead. This heroic world resistance of workers and peoples of the world once more places the need of internationalism on the agenda. Karl Marx’s books are sold out once more and such Marxist postures as “Proletarians of the World, unite” acquire new validity.
The Committee for Merger is getting ready to contribute to the enormous task of the construction of the International that workers and peoples of the world need to defeat world capitalism. The party that will emerge from our merger will be part of the International Workers’ League – Fourth International, a principled, proletarian, socialist, revolutionary and universal organization. Strengthening the International Workers’ League is a fundamental step towards reconstruction the IV International, the party of the world socialist revolution.
Neither Chavez nor XXI Century Socialism: socialism is proletarian and world-wide
The world left is suffering a grievous crisis. The “socialist” administrations like Zapatero in Spain, Papandresu in Greece, Binner in our country, as well as all those so-called “communist” parties apply and/or defend brutal adjustments following the orders of the IMF. In Cuba, the dictatorship of the Communist Party of the Castro brothers restored capitalism and Raul Castro announced a ruthless plan of adjustments against Cuban workers and toiling masses.
Such administrations as Obama, Chavez, Lula or the Kirchners are regarded as “progressive”. Chavez even calls his government “socialist”. But the truth is that Obama upholds the attack on Afghanistan and imperialist oppression and imperialist oppression against the peoples of the world while the governments of Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina…, applying their policies lead their countries to increase unevenness and poverty. These governments are not left. They are employers’ administrations, whose policies we must defeat if the problems of the toiling masses are to be solved.
In our country, class struggle causes workers to split away from the old parties of the employers and from trade union bureaucracies. It also puts the policies of self-proclaimed revolutionary or Trotskyist organizations. Those parties and groups refuse to build an International and have drifted towards opportunism, adaptation to bourgeois democracy or to sects of propaganda. Their policies, based on abuse and ostentation of apparatuses, are rejected by broad sectors of activism. The emergence of new activists and leaders, independent from the bureaucracy and Peronism, is still going on in the workers` movement and that opens such gaps as we have not seen since 2001 ready to overcome the national-Trotskyist proposals and to build a strong section of the International Party.
The Committee for the Merger is getting ready for the construction of a party following the Leninist pattern, a section of the International Workers’ League. That is why we have started a process of discussion of agreements and disagreements that will enable us to assess the conditions – which we believe to be there – to approach within the forthcoming months a unification congress.
The party that will emerge from this merger will be in the service of the process of re-grouping of the revolutionaries in our country and in the world and that the IWL-FI is developing.
Socialism will be proletarian and internationalist or will be nothing. Our unity will be in the service of the fighters, new leaders and all the workers that envisage the need of building an organization of the working class and based on a programme and a method that will furnish us with a proletarian and revolutionary solution the crisis of world economic crisis.
Buenos Aires, August 10, 2010
FOS (Frente Obrero y Socialista)- COI (Corriente Obrera Internacionalista)
