Long live the POR Regional Conferences!

The historic task is to overcome the crisis of world leadership

The construction of the revolutionary party in each country is part of the reconstruction of the World Party of the Socialist Revolution

Masses 632, editorial, March 21, 2021

The Revolutionary Workers Party held its Regional Conferences between January and March. Preparation began in October. Two months later, the main resolutions were concluded, and their programmatic foundations, the political line, the banners and the tactics were already being discussed in the cells. In that time, the party developed systematic campaigns, responding to the health crisis, the wave of factory closures, the destruction of jobs, the reduction of wages, the liquidation of labor rights, the advancement of the implementation of distance learning. It fought the struggle against the emergency measures of the Bolsonaro government and the National Congress, rejecting its anti-worker, anti-popular and anti-national content and orientation. In that same period of time, it combatted the policy of class conciliation of the union leaderships and reformist parties, whose consequences were and are to reinforce the passivity of the masses, disoriented and frightened by the unknown phenomenon of the pandemic. In particular, the POR was dedicated to the struggle against Ford’s closure, after having committed itself to defending the strike of Renault metallurgists and the postal workers strike. Even when the Conferences of São Paulo and the Northern region were held, the party was dedicated to preventing the imposture of the teachers’ unions leadership in São Paulo from causing great damage, with its “health strike”.

The rare street demonstrations helped POR to express its criticism of the bourgeois policy of social isolation, and to defend an emergency program, capable of unifying the exploited against the brutal consequences of the health and economic crisis. Its strong and confident militancy, in possession of its political line, tactics and strategy, sought to put itself at the forefront of every concrete and collective struggle. It did everything to participate in the resistance movement of Ford metallurgists, intervening in their assemblies and publicizing at the factory gates, through the Our Class Bulletin, the need for the centrals to carry out a powerful national campaign for nationalization without compensation.

It was in the conditions of the great scourge of the exploited – seldom seen, with such magnitude, in the social history of the country – and of the deep passivity of the proletariat, cornered and deprived of their collective action and organization weapons – their unions – that the POR militancy, committed, convinced, disciplined and fearless, held its three Regional Conferences. Graphically, it can be said that the fulfillment of this task opened yet another trench, which strengthens the defensive struggle of the vanguard with class consciousness, in overcoming the crisis of revolutionary leadership.

The gigantic world crisis, which dragged Brazil to the economic precipice, and boosted social barbarism, made the objective conditions necessary for proletarian revolutions, the overthrow of monopolies, the liquidation of financial parasitism, and the transformation of private property of the means of production in socialist property even clearer. It exposed the complete aging and decadence of the bourgeoisie, unable to defend the lives of the masses, and to protect the economically weakest countries from the deadly pandemic. But it also exposed how far the regression of the revolutionary conquests of the world proletariat has reached.

The death of more than 2.7 million people – the vast majority of the poor and miserable – amounts to a war situation. So much so that it configured the greatest international tragedy after the Second World War. Brazil took the place of the United States, as the epicenter of the health crisis, approaching three hundred thousand dead. The rulers – administrators of the bourgeoisie’s business – tap dance over the mountain of corpses, with their numerous political differences and disputes. They were not even able to promote a common action to combat the pandemic, through vaccination. The great powers and monopolies use the dire scenario of weakening oppressed nations to speculate and fight the trade war around the main weapon for controlling the pandemic and slowing deaths.

It is under this gloomy global situation that the class-conscious vanguard must resort – with the utmost determination and will – to the programmatic, theoretical and practical achievements of Marxism-Leninism-Trotskyism. There is not a single new problem that expresses the disintegration of capitalism, which does not find an answer in Marxism. Obviously, the achievements do not solve the task of knowing in detail the particularities of each country. In this task lies the responsibility of the revolutionaries. We believe that the POR Conferences have taken another step in this direction. We went a little deeper into the historical laws of the formation of semicolonial Brazil. We understand a little more about the economic laws that condition crises, the blockade of productive forces, chronic unemployment, and structural misery. We also understand a little more about the causes that made it impossible for the bourgeoisie to overcome the oligarchic character of democracy and to avoid the most acute decomposition, like the one that has been manifesting since the military coup of 1964.

The Regional Conferences express the construction of the Leninist party. And, as such, they mark the path on which the objective of rebuilding the World Party of the Socialist Revolution, the Fourth International, will be accomplished.