Worker Policy

Grave moment

Marxists have the duty to dedicate themselves to the maximum to build the revolutionary party

Masses, 32^th year, n. 619– Setember 13, 2020.

Among the various currents that claim of Trotskyism, it is common to recognize that the great task lies in the need to overcome the crisis of revolutionary leadership. To claim does not mean to be. Recognizing does not turn out to be on the right path. But, recognition is important. It means that there is still the possibility that a fraction of those who claim of Trotskyism will break with appearance and false conviction.
The currents that still claim Trotskyism are manifestations of centrism. They refused to constitute the program of proletarian revolution and proletarian dictatorships. Thus, without the program, they oscillate between reformism and Marxism, depending on the conditions of the class struggle. As a rule, they are organized within a layer of the petty-bourgeoisie, which tends to the left. Rare are those that penetrate the working class. The one that got a union leadership position adapts to the pressure of the leading bureaucracy. It expresses the petty-bourgeois influence in some workers’ union.

Centrists, in general, tend to be dragged behind the influence of reformism, which makes use of workers’ and popular organizations, to support the bourgeois or petty-bourgeois party, which is dedicated to parliamentary politics, and practices the class’ collaboration policy, more or less directly. It is noted that the crisis of leadership results in the projection of the petty-bourgeoisie, mainly of the urban middle class. Centrism, in its variants, expresses the vertiginous growth of this middle class.

A mark of this social projection is materialized in the movements around democratic demands, racial, sexual and woman oppression. Unlinked to the working class program, they are limited to corporatism and electoralism. The vast middle class is ruined and clashes with bourgeois governments; to its left, it feeds reformism and centrism; to its right, fascistizing rightism.

These compositions appear as predominant in the political life of the national daily life. The policy of the proletariat, on the contrary, remains in a more or less embryonic state. The overlapping of petty-bourgeois and bourgeois demonstrations arises as a powerful impediment to the proletariat’s instinctive tendencies of revolt, and to their programmatic, political and organizational establishing as an independent class.

The sedimentation of a statist, collaborative and conciliatory union bureaucracy was only possible through the historical retreat of the conquests of the world proletariat, whose greatest expression was the liquidation of the Bolshevik party, the destruction of the III International, the triumph of capitalist restoration and the collapse of the Union of Socialist Republics Soviets. In short, revisionism and Stalinist politics, which led to capitulation in the face of imperialism, destroyed all communist parties in the world. Such a historic catastrophe resulted in a long period of devastated land, which remains today, although in different conditions. The dissolution of the IV International, after Trotsky’s death, is part of this picture.

The victories of the world bourgeoisie, however, did not result in the liberation of the productive forces from the straitjacket of production relations, conditioned by the monopolies. On the contrary, they enhanced their contradictions, which irresistibly push world capitalism to disintegration. The crisis opened in 2008 could not be overcome, precisely because the only way left to imperialism is to massively destroy part of the productive forces, and to exacerbate social barbarism. It is in these conditions that the petty bourgeoisie despairs and proves to be powerless. The reformism and centrism ways move towards an impasse. It is under these same conditions that the proletariat appears as the only revolutionary class.

The vanguard that preserves the program of proletarian revolution and dictatorship has in its favor the emergence of Marxism-Leninism-Trotskyism in the objective conditions of capitalism’s decomposition , and of the imperious needs of the proletariat to take the lead in the class struggle. It is the class-conscious vanguard to establish programmatic positions in the practical movement of the masses.