Meeting of communist internationalists in Latin America

We are publishing the common statement of position adopted by 7 groups or organisations from 8 Latin American[1] countries which draws together the work of a recently held internationalist meeting[2].

This meeting, which was been planned for a year, was made possible by the emergence of these groups, the great majority of which (apart from the OPOP - the Workers' Opposition group from Brazil - and the ICC) did not exist 3 years ago. Secondly, this meeting would not have been possible without the existence of a common will on the part of all those who participated to break out of isolation and develop a common work[3].

The basis of this work was the participants' agreement with the criteria - put forward in the statement - that delineate the proletarian camp from that of the bourgeoisie.

The primary activity of this meeting was necessarily to have a political discussion to bring out the agreements and disagreements that exist between the participants, and to elaborate a framework for future discussion that would make it possible to further clarify these disagreements.

We warmly salute this meeting's ability to carry out important discussions about the present situation of the international class struggle and the nature of the present crisis that is rocking capitalism. We are confident that the continuation of this debate will lead to fruitful conclusions[4].

We are conscious that this meeting represents a small step along the road towards the construction of an international pole of reference whose existence, public debates and interventions, will be able to orientate the comrades, collectives and groups which are emerging around the world and seeking an internationalist, proletarian answer to the increasingly grave situation that capitalism is imposing on humanity.

For comrades with experience of the past - for example the International Conferences of the Communist Left held 30 years ago[5] - this conference represents an overcoming of certain weaknesses that these conferences exhibited. Whilst those conferences were incapable of adopting a common position on the grave threat posed by the Afghanistan war, today the statement unanimously adopted by the participants clearly defends proletarian positions faced with the crisis of capitalism.

In particular we want to highlight the statement's firm denunciation of capitalism's "left"  alternatives that are all the rage on the American continent and which are spreading illusions internationally. From the Obama phenomenon in the United States to Patagonia in Argentina the continent is being covered by governments claiming to defend the poor, the workers, the marginal and presenting themselves as the guardians of a "social", "human" capitalism, or in the case of the most "radical" versions - Chávez in Venezuela, Morales in Bolivia and Correa in Ecuador - pretending to represent nothing less than a "socialism of the 21st century".

To us it is of the greatest importance that, faced with these tricks, a united, fraternal and collective internationalist pole is emerging which opens the way for discussing and formulating positions concerning international solidarity, the intransigent struggle of the class, and the struggle for the world revolution, confronted with these "new prophets" of state capitalism, nationalism, and the perpetuation of exploitation.   ICC 26/4/09

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Here we publish the common position adopted by the internationalist meeting. In the near future we will be publishing the contributions of the different participants in preparation for the meeting and also a synthesis of the discussions that took place during the meeting.

Common Position

The struggle for authentic communism, that is to say, for a society without class, poverty and war, is generating a growing interest amongst minorities throughout the world. As testimony to this in March 2009, at the initiative of the International Communist Current and the Oposição Operaria (OPOP), there took place in Latin America a Meeting of Internationalist Discussion in which different groups, circles and individual comrades from the continent participated and which clearly based itself upon internationalist and proletarian positions. Along with the ICC and OPOP, the following groups participated:

• Grupo de Lucha Proletaria (Peru)
• Anarres (Brazil)
• Liga por la Emancipación de la Clase Obrera (Costa Rica and Nicaragua)
• Núcleo de Discusión Internacionalista de la República Dominicana
• Grupo de Discusión Internacionalista de Ecuador

Likewise comrades from Peru and Brazil also participated in the work of this meeting. Comrades from other countries had expressed their intention of also participating but were not able to due to material or administrative reasons. All of the participants recognised that the criteria used were the continuation of those used for the conference of the groups of the communist left in the 1970s and 1980s:

1. Defence of the proletarian character of the October 1917 revolution and the Communist International, while submitting this experience to a critical balance-sheet which can guide new revolutionary attempts by the proletariat.

2. Unreservedly rejecting the idea that today there any socialist regimes in the world or workers' governments, even if they are called "degenerated"; likewise rejecting any form of state capitalism, such as those that dress themselves up in the ideology of "socialism of the 21st century".

3. Denunciation of the Socialist and Communist parties and their acolytes as parties of capital.

4. Categorically rejecting bourgeois democracy, the use of parliament and the electoral process as weapons with which the bourgeoisie have contained and diverted proletarian struggles through getting them to choose between democracy and dictatorship, fascism and anti-fascism.

5. The defence of the necessity for internationalist revolutionaries to move towards the formation of an international organisation of the proletarian vanguard, the indispensable arm for the victory of the proletarian revolution.

6. The defence of the role of the workers' councils as organs of proletarian power, as well as of the autonomy of the working class in relation to the other classes and layers of society.

The agenda for the discussions was as follows:

1. The role of the proletariat and its present situation; the balance of forces between the classes

2. The situation of capitalism (within which the present struggles will develop), and a more general reflection on the concept of the decadence of capitalism and/or the structural crisis of capitalism

3.The growing ecological catastrophe brought about by the system. Although it was not possible to discuss this point due to the lack of time, it was agreed to carry out this discussion through the internet.

On the first point, examples from Latin America were used in order to illustrate the analysis of the present state of the class struggle. However the concern of the majority of interventions was to see them as part of the wider international struggle of the proletariat. Within this, the meeting agreed to insist on denouncing the different ‘left' governments now in charge of many of the countries of Latin America as mortal enemies of the proletariat and its struggle. It also denounced all those who support these government even if critically. Similarly, the meeting condemned the criminalisation of the workers' struggles by these governments and insisted that the working class cannot allow itself to have any illusions about legal or democratic methods, that it can only have confidence in its own autonomous struggle. This condemnation particularly applies to the following governments:

• Kirchner in Argentina,
• Morales in Bolivia,
• Lula in Brazil,
• Correa in Ecuador
• Ortega in Nicaragua
• and particularly Chávez in Venezuela whose so-called "Socialism of the 21st century" is nothing but a huge lie aimed at preventing and repressing the proletarian struggle in that country and mystifying workers in other countries.

On point 2, all the participants were agreed upon the gravity of the present crisis of capitalism, the necessity to develop a more profound understanding of it from a theoretical and historical perspective. They concluded by agreeing on the following points;

• the holding of the meeting was an expression of the present tendency towards the development of the class struggle and of revolutionary consciousness within the proletariat at the international level;
• the present considerable aggravation of the crisis of capitalism cannot but further reinforce this tendency for the workers' struggle to develop, making it all the more necessary to defend revolutionary positions within the proletariat.

In this sense, all the participants believe that it is necessary to continue the work expressed by the holding of this meeting with the aim of constituting an active presence in the struggle of the international proletariat.

More concretely, as the first step in this effort, we have decided upon the following:

- the opening of an internet site in Spanish and Portuguese under the collective responsibility of the participating groups in the meeting. Similarly the possibility of publishing a pamphlet in Spanish based on the content of the internet site was posed;

- the publication on this site of: the present statement of position (which will also be published on the sites of the participating groups); the contributions that prepared this meeting; a synthesis of the minutes of the different discussions that took place; all the contributions of the groups and elements who were present as well as those of all the other groups and comrades who recognise the principles and concerns that animated the meeting.

Amongst these concerns, the meeting especially underlined the necessity for an open and fraternal debate between revolutionaries and the rejection of all forms of sectarianism.

 

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[1] Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela

 

[2] Those who participated were OPOP, ICC, LECO (Liga por la Emancipacion de la Clase Obrera, Costa Rica - Nicaragua), Anarres (Brazil), GLP (Grupo de Lucha Proletaria, Peru), Grupo de Discusion Internacionalista de Ecuador, Nucleo de Discusion Internacionalista de la Republica Dominicana, as well as individual comrades.

 

[3] We have already noted the effervescence in Latin America in our article on the two new sections of the ICC in Turkey and the Philippines.

 

[4] One of the decisions made by the meeting was to create an internet forum where common positions and discussion will be published. See: en.internationalism.org/forum

 

[5] For example see, https://en.internationalism.org/ir/122_conferences