CoReP Intervention

Thanks to the L5I for the invitation to this Summer Camp and for giving us the opportunity to have that discussion.

The profit-driven capitalist mode of production is destroying the human environment. Economic crises are recurrent, provoking more unemployment and poverty. Bourgeois states are repealing social conquests, are restricting freedoms … Bourgeois political parties look for scapegoats and take advantage of religion, racism, homophobia…

The Russian imperialist state invaded Ukraine, and Putin attributed Ukrainian independence to a betrayal by the Bolshevik Party. Because of national sentiment and the lack of motivation of Russian troops, Ukraine was not conquered. The Russian proletariat can put an end to the war, earning democratic freedoms and forging fraternal relations with the national minorities and with the neighbouring peoples.

The Rohingyas are persecuted by the Burmese state. Kashmir is a victim of the Indian state. The Kurds are a minority oppressed by several capitalist states. Israel continues its brutal colonization of Palestine. The Afghan state has driven girls out of school. The Iranian state imposes the wearing of the veil. Even in the most advanced state – on economic and scientific terms –, the fascistic or clerical wing of the bourgeoisie is restricting abortion rights.

Yet repeated betrayals of “reformist” parties and corrupt trade union bureaucracies have helped capitalism to survive, at many times, including their recent refusal to call a general strike in France and Britain. Reformism is the most influent trend within the workers’ movement. They are corrupt bureaucracies of the social-patriotic parties and of the unions. Entryism in these organizations is an option. The workers’ united front is about workers’ organizations. Communist strategy today, that is permanent revolution, conflicts with any kind of popular front, including in dominated countries, the anti-imperialist united front.

It has not been part of the communist programme for almost a century. When the term was coined in 1922 by Zinoviev and Radek, it had already been invalidated by the 1921 massacre of the Communist Party of Turkey by the bourgeois nationalist regime. The counter-revolution led by the Guomindang in China in 1927 led the International Left Opposition (in the Communist International) to substitute the strategy of permanent revolution for the anti-imperialist united front. The reintroduction by Pablo and Mandel of the anti-imperialist united front in 1951 led to the betrayal of the Bolivian revolution in 1952, when the international leadership supported the left wing of the bourgeois nationalist MNR.

To halt the march to barbarism, conscious workers must band together, in order to expropriate big capital, to replace bourgeois states with workers’ governments based on workers’ councils, with planned production and distribution in a way that spares the planet. To achieve this, we need a program of action, a genuine workers’ party in every country, and a revolutionary communist international on a global scale.

It will rely on the tens of thousands of activists who want to overthrow the bourgeoisie, to confront its armed gangs, to find again the way of the October revolution. The construction of the communist international and of its sections as revolutionary workers’ parties in every country will be the result of a long struggle. It is a matter of gathering, with patience, on an international scale and in each country, internationalist communist activists, whether they come from so-called Trotskyism, from other currents of the labour movement, or from the nationalism of the oppressed.

Questions of national tactics (on the activity in unions, on the vote, on the opportunity to present candidates…) can be better solved only on an international basis, in a centralised and democratic basis. It tries to separate what is revolutionary in the labour movement from opportunism and sectarianism. Communists fight in the whole labour movement for workers’ democracy. On these bases, communist organizations work together at the construction of the revolutionary workers’ international that will allow the definitive victory of socialist revolution, freeing humanity from exploitation, opening the way to socialism-communism, to a society of plenty that will allow the fulfilment of all.

CoReP Conclusion

Thank you very much for that discussion. The comrades’ interventions from the room gave much inspiration, with several good points. They include the youth issue. This is decisive, both for the present and for the future, and it is crucial to have an autonomous youth organization within the International and within each of the sections.

A comrade wondered about reformism. How to delineate ourselves? What posture to adopt? It refers to parties and unions’ bureaucracies which defend the idea that socialism can be reached through reforms instead of revolution. Before WW1 it was an illusion, after WW1 it is a betrayal. It was the practical demonstration that no compromise can be made with capital, we know it. Between reformists and revolutionaries, there are centrists who vacillate between the two, neither reformists nor revolutionaries. At some point they decide one or the other, but as centrists they are not revolutionaries.

Now, how to coordinate? Which steps? What we have to do is to be clear, both programmatically and practically, this why we need to delineate, like Marx and Engels did against the anarchists, like Lenin did against the reformists, like Trotsky did against the Stalinists, like the revolutionary communists did against the centrists.

The crucial point is: no alliance with the bourgeoisie. This is the main issue of our discussion about the Anti-Imperialist United Front: no coalition with the bourgeoisie. Here is one of the points that we need to discuss between our organizations, both in practical terms and in theoretical terms.