OPEN LETTER TO THE COLECTIVO EMANCIPACIÓN PROLETARIA

July 3, 2020

Comrades: we found out, not without surprise, that you have recently formed an international bloc/(fusion?) with the RCIT, a neo-Stalinist, pro-Zionist and social-imperialist current. What captures more our attention is that, without having made public the balance of your militancy in the FLTI, without making clear to the international workers vanguard the elements that you still defend and which you do not, of the current that you belonged to, and without having yet made public your programmatic platform, you have impulse, around a circumstantial anti-Marxist declaration with a series of red phrases that serve as a cover for an opportunist policy, a call:

… all authentic revolutionaries to join us in a fighting bloc against the lockdown policy and capitalist bonapartism which will have the immediate task of calling and preparing an International Revolutionary Conference. The COVID-19 counterrevolution demonstrates once more the desperate crisis of revolutionary leadership. The official “left” is useless, in the best case, and more often an outright obstacle in the revolutionary struggle. In order to fight against the reactionary offensive of the ruling class and the outrageous betrayal of the reformist and bureaucratized centrist left, we must advance the struggle for building a new World Party of Socialist Revolution, based on the tradition and the method of founding program of the Fourth International [1].

A call to form an international bloc to call for an International Conference where the RCIT and the CEP (Colectivo Emancipación Proletaria) will be a wing to build a World Party? Is this serious? That is to say that, without having carried out a common experience, without a balance, they have accepted at a stroke the whole programme of the RCIT that poses, among other brutalities, that Russia, China and South Korea are new imperialisms. Or worse, ignoring the previous experience and delimitation of the FLTI with that organization, when you had not yet been expelled, a few years ago. Read well what you have signed, it is not about an action unity bloc to hit on one point in which you might have agreement. It is about the setting up of a wing, a common fraction that calls on the other forces to make a bloc for an International Conference. Since the CEP has no program, we assume that they have adopted the reformist program of the RCIT. Let’s take a quick look at some of the aspects of the international program of the organization with which you have signed a bloc/(fusion?).

In Israel they have an official section, which claims national rights for «Israelis», that is to say speaking without euphemisms, for the Zionist occupiers. Therefore, they claim:

Clearly, the Israeli settlements near Gaza are suffering as well. To them we say – your nightmare can and must end. The only way to end it is by breaking with Zionist ideology and help form a single democratic state for all – Palestinians and Israelis

We, as socialists, support the creation of one Red Democratic Palestine from the river to the sea, where Palestinians and Israelis will live as equals socially and politically [2].

This is nothing but Zionism with a slightly «democratic» cover. When the Palestinian masses continue confronting the Israeli occupation and the traitors of the FIT come from voting in the Buenos Aires legislature a law in favor of Zionism, from the CEP you cannot promote a bloc without principles with this Zionist current to «fight against the quarantines» and much less a wing inside a Conference for a common World Party. Your statement is, frankly speaking, a capitulation to Zionism. We understand that, in this point, you have not broken with the FLTI which a few years ago, when the ISL (International Socialist League) was not yet merged with the RCIT, maintained fraternal relations and fought together for «the release of Palestinian prisoners». At that time, the FLTI published on its website an ISL statement posing a Plurinational State in Palestine [3].

But if we leave Palestine and move to Ukraine, we see that the RCIT, after «critically supporting» the revolutionary insurrection of the Dombas miners and claiming the Stalinist Borotba group as a «socialist» organization, held the following:

Until now, the RCIT considered the uprising in Donbass in the first few months until summer 2014 as a primarily spontaneous popular movement against the threatening discrimination by the pro-Maidan government in Kiev. Hence the RCIT lent critical support to this movement in the first few months – until the Russian imperialist state intervened openly on the side of the Donbass rebels from summer 2014 onwards. From that moment on the RCIT considered the civil war as reactionary on both sides and took a defeatist position on both sides. (…)

However, there was an ultra-reactionary faction of the Russian imperialist bourgeoisie (…) which strongly pushed from the very first moment for a military intervention of Russia in Donbass. While the RCIT was aware of this extremely aggressive faction of the Russian imperialist bourgeoisie, it under-estimated the degree of control it exercised over the movement in Donbass from the beginning. In fact, the spontaneous popular character of the rebellion was rather a subordinated element.

Therefore the RCIT corrects its position in retrospect and concludes that Marxists could not have provided any critical support at any moment neither for the annexation of the Crimea nor for the “rebellion” in Donbass (RCIT International Secretariat, On the Donbass Uprising in Spring 2014, 13 July 2019).

The RCIT was among the traitors who slandered the revolutionary militias of Dombas. You, with your bloc/fusion/wing/international conference, cover the left flank of an openly counter-revolutionary organization. But let’s look at its policy in the United States:

The RCIT continues to consider it as impermissible for revolutionaries to support the Sanders campaign in the primary election in the Democratic Party (as for example Socialist Alternative from the “ISA/CWI Majority” is doing). However, it is equally important to relate in agitation and tactics to the Sanders supporters in order to win them for joint struggles against reactionary attacks and, most importantly, for the struggle to build an independent Workers Party. Such tactics should include a call to the supporters of Sanders to demand from their leader a break with the Democratic Party and to stand as an independent candidate. Naturally, revolutionaries need to warn that any illusions in Sanders as a “socialist fighter” would be misplaced. However, it is evident that such tactics could improve the conditions to break sectors of the workers movement, migrant and Black organizations from the Democratic Party away and to win them for building an independent Labor Party (our bold letters) [4].

The RCIT positions itself as the left wing of Sanders’ left, calling on him to run as an independent candidate. What if Sanders were to agree to run an independent candidacy ? Would they do his electoral campaign, as their Mexican section, the ALS, did for the EZLN’s independent indigenous candidate, Marichuy?

In Argentina, after maintaining an unprincipled bloc with the TPR, they became servants of the FIT-U, which they call upon to lead the fight for an International Conference, like the one they are currently promoting with you. In a shameful letter, they, posed the following:

Dear comrades of FIT-U and its participant organizations PTS, PO, IS and MST!

Our international organization – the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT) – strongly welcomes your initiative to organize a conference on the revolutionary struggles in Latin America which should take place in Buenos Aires between 1 and 4 May. (…)

The CCRI/RCIT considers a conference as an extraordinary crucial issue given the current global events. Such a conference could play a role similar to Zimmerwald during World War One. What we are currently experiencing are historic events of no less importance than the collapse of Stalinism in 1989-91. In such a situation, discussion, collaboration and if possible joint campaigns of revolutionary and socialist organizations is of utmost importance! [5].

In other words, the RCIT considers possible to hold an international conference with the FIT-U. A disgrace for any organization claiming to be marxist or internationalist. It is as if in Zimmerwald and Kienthal Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht had called on the social-chauvinists to lead the fight for a regroupment of the internationalists.

This is the totally opportunistic policy of the RCIT for building itself, a regroupment of reformist currents that functions as a federation of national groups. From Austria, fishing rod in hand, they plunge up to their necks into the sewer stream of the reformist left currents, proposing agreements without principles and pushing, here or there, with a clear policy of fattening, mergers with small groups that may be adrift and thus aborting any possibility of their evolving towards militant internationalism. We find it very difficult to understand why, having recently broken with the FLTI, you have so quickly abandoned any thread of continuity with the organization to adopt, at a stroke, a reformist programme. We have developed in different documents our differences with the FLTI leadership. But we are far from abandoning any theoretical and programmatic legacy with that organization, of which we claim ourselves a public fraction. In any case, it is the Munzer clique that is destroying the FLTI and its legacy. You, with your opportunistic fusion with the RCIT, do nothing but favour that task.

If this is a misunderstanding, we ask you to clarify, if possible, what your relationship with the RCIT is about. If it is a bloc to strike together and march separately, which is not clear from the document you signed, you should make the necessary rectifications. In such case, we must affirm that your bloc «against quarantines», is a bloc without principles, an adventurous policy, an «August bloc». A bloc with a neo-Stalinist current with a sectarian program, «against quarantines», when workers are dying for being producing in the maquilas, in the factories and workshops, and the fight for safety conditions, even for «paid quarantines», is the engine of hundreds of workers’ conflicts all over the world.

An emergency workers’ programme to deal with the health and economic crisis must distinguish between the bonapartisation of regimes and the health measures needed to deal with the pandemic. Therefore, as we develop in our materials, it is the workers’ organizations that must define, together with committees of independent scientists and specialists, which branches of production are essential and which are not, which health measures are effective -including quarantines- and which are not. All this as part of an emergency workers’ plan to get out of the crisis, based on the struggle against the bonapartisation of the regimes and to promote workers’ control of production, the expropriation of private health care, among other measures necessary to face the health and economic crisis that are developed in our declarations. «Down with quarantines» is the policy of Trump, Bolsonaro and AMLO who send workers to die in the factories, workshops and maquilas. Of course, quarantines in the hands of the bourgeoisie become a tool for attacking the masses. However, there is no denying that this is a health measure, necessary from the point of view of capitalism to «flatten the curve», that is, so that the sick are distributed over time and the dismantled health systems do not collapse. We repeat, only as part of a workers’ emergency plan can quarantines be freed from the reactionary character that permeates them by the bourgeoisie. The workers go out to fight, demanding in hundreds of conflicts paid quarantines and health conditions, and the RCIT and the CEP, with an ultimatist policy, refuse to take their demands into their hands. The workers do not want to produce because they put their lives and those of their families at risk and you refuse to take their demands as a basis for a transitional programme to enable them to carry out a revolutionary struggle. And don’t go saying that you can’t fight from your homes, that fighting presupposes the breaking of the quarantine, etc. With this criterion, it would not be possible to defend the demand for «paid holidays», because the worker who goes on holiday cannot fight for socialism. These charlatans build their whole argumentative edifice on the basis of pointing out a «contradiction,» but this is not a good contradiction, that is, a dialectic, but a formal contradiction that exists only in their heads. The demand for quarantine is a motor of struggle only where the bourgeoisie cannot allow production to be stopped. This is what the sectarian leaders have not understood, that the working class ranks are not homogeneous. «Down with quarantines» is the slogan of the declassed, ultra-left petty bourgeoisie, which is unable to assimilate that capitalism can only offer them death from COVID or starvation, and that only a workers’ solution to the crisis can combine a response to both problems.

But let us return for a moment to your opportunistic agreement. Where can you apply your bloc to intervene in the masses? In Palestine we assumed that you would be in the trenches of the Palestinian people fighting for the destruction of the State of Israel, while the RCIT would be convincing the fascist settlers to «break with Zionism» and the Palestinians to accept to share their historical territory with the Zionist occupiers. Your unprincipled bloc to «defeat the quarantines» cannot be applied in Palestine. In Ukraine, we assumed that you would be in the Dombas trench facing the Kiev government and confronting the Minsk accords, while the RCIT is «defeatist on both sides,» i.e., shameful agent of Kiev and NATO. And in the U.S. the RCIT would be demanding that Sanders presents an independent candidacy while you would be, we would like to believe, organizing Soviet organisms and workers militias. Under these conditions… how could you strike together «against the quarantines»? We repeat, your bloc is an adventure, it has no principles. It’s an opportunistic agreement that has nothing to offer to the international working class. From the NTI we call on you to break this shameful agreement, to rectify the course, to delimit yourselves in a revolutionary way from your previous experience in the FLTI, and to conquer your own international programmatic platform, breaking, we repeat, that unprincipled agreement with the social-imperialist current that is the RCIT. Any other perspective will be doomed to failure. You can count on our internationalist collaboration if you opt for the perspective we propose here.

An internationalist greeting, Tomás Cuevas, for the NTI-CI

03 July 2020

PD.1- We were finishing this document when we found a new statement from the CEP together with the RCIT where you talk about your «comrades from occupied Palestine». You failed to say that your new comrades from occupied Palestine are Israelis, not Palestinians, and that they stand for equal national rights for Palestinians and Israelis. Obviously our differences only deepen. Let us hope that you are in time to break with this policy of capitulation to Zionism.

PD.2-Beyond the enormous differences we have, we believe that we have a fundamental point of agreement, which is the struggle in defense of proletarian principles and morals. From the NTI-CI we have promoted an International Moral Tribunal against the leadership of the ALS and RCIT because of a Stalinist provocation that they set up for us and that we explain in the link below [6]. We call on you to make a statement on the matter.