January 25 marks the 39th anniversary of the death of our greatest teacher and leader. Unfortunately, as we commemorate this new anniversary, we have to say that his most important organizational work, the International Workers’ League-Fourth International (IWL-FI), after a long crisis, has exploded.
The cause of this outbreak was the bureaucratic actions of the majority faction, led by the leadership of the PSTU of Brazil.
That leadership acted with a method alien to Leninism and Trotskyism, to that of Moreno himself, with slanderous campaigns, sanctions, political persecutions against a minority that questioned a growing tendency towards reformism, and in general with anyone who raised differences. That culminated on the first day of the XVI World Congress with the expulsion of four leaders who were going to present at the congress the positions of the minority organized in the Fraction for the Defense and Reconstruction of the LIT: Alicia Sagra, Bernardo Ceredeira, María Rivera and Martín Hernández. Along with the expulsions, member parties were guided to apply the same measures against fraction supporters, cadre and base.
Repudiating the expulsions and considering that the IWL-CI abandoned the democratic centralism regime, changing its character, other parties and groups left the IWL: The PST of Peru, a minority sector organized as a Tendency, which included the PT of Costa Rica. The same decision was taken by others who considered themselves expelled: more than 100 militants of the PSTU of Brazil , the MIT of Chile, the GOI of Argentina, Corriente Obrera of the United States and part of the PT of Paraguay.
The IWL explosion did not stop there, nor was it only from those who identified themselves as opponents of the majority faction, recently there has been a rupture in the majority.
Corriente Roja of the Spanish State has just suffered a rupture led by its historical cadres. Unfortunately, these cadres not only break with the IWL but also with Morenoism, joining the project of Corriente Revolucion Permanente (former Trotskyist Fraction) and assuming its positions on «democratic revolution» that are based on the falsification of Moreno’s thought.
This latest rupture confirms what we stated in the IRC’s Founding Manifesto; that new separations and ruptures would continue and, as those who break with Corriente Roja accuse the majority leadership of not having gone deep enough in Moreno’s revision, they confirm that the abandonment of democratic centralism, the expulsions, were at the service of a revision of our historical program in order to implement their approach to reformism. It is no coincidence, then, the closeness with Corriente Revolucion Permanente, since its main party, the PTS of Argentina, for several years has had electoral and parliamentary activity as its main task.
From the IRC we call for the reconstruction of Moreno’s IWL along with the defense of his legacy against this new defamatory attack. That defense has nothing to do with an abstract theoretical discussion. Denying the existence of the democratic revolution has consequences in politics for concrete situations of the class struggle, leading to hesitant politics of the PTS. Recognizing processes of democratic revolution such as the one taking place today in Iran has to do with the participation of revolutionaries in it, raising the task that is posed, the fall of the Ayatollahs dictatorship and also proposing socialist tasks: arming the proletariat, an organism of workers’ power, a workers’ and people’s government. Because for Moreno, and for us, the democratic revolution is part of the socialist revolution.
In this sense, we consider it useful to reproduce the article published for the 38th anniversary of the death of our leader.
Nahuel Moreno and the Democratic Revolution
By Alicia Sagra
January 25 marks the 38th anniversary of the death of Nahuel Moreno. In a text in tribute to the 30th anniversary of his death, Ricardo Napurí said: «The fact that thousands and thousands of activists and militants still claim to be part of «Morenoism» is an indication of its political vitality.» We would add that another indisputable proof of the strength and validity of Moreno’s political thought is that, more than 30 years after his death, he continues to receive slanderous attacks from different organizations, among which the PO and PTS of Argentina stand out.
We claim Morenoism, we consider him the greatest builder of Trotskyist parties in the working class, and the one who best responded to the challenges that arose post-WWII, but we are far from deifying him, nor from thinking that he did not make mistakes. That would not be «Morenoist.» Moreno always insisted that the history of our current is the history of our mistakes, by explaining that all revolutionaries were wrong at some point, but that the difference was that Lenin and Trotsky were wrong three times out of every ten, and that in him that relationship was reversed.
Those were not just statements, since when he saw a mistake, he recognized it and corrected it publicly. Thus, in 1973 he self-criticized and corrected his position on Palestine; he did the same in the 70s for his expectations in the Cuban leadership; In the 1980s, he corrected definitions of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Moreno’s attitude, of not falling in love with his ideas, of recognizing and correcting his mistakes, is a central element of his greatness and differentiates him from most of the Trotskyist leaders of his time and of today, since there are very few who admit when they are wrong.
We want to apply the same method, we are not those «Morenoites» who consider heresy, any questioning of a political or theoretical definition of our teacher. On the contrary, in the permanent work of programmatic updating of our elaborations, we analyze with the same critical spirit in which he educated us.
The attacks on Moreno and «Morenoism» that come from organizations we mentioned are not about the mistakes, about what could be weak points. Nor are respectful theoretical-political polemics. In most cases they are lying attacks without any evidence, as was the case of PO accusation of having capitulated to the military coup of 1955 in Argentina, when the front pages of our newspapers of the time insisted on requesting weapons to confront the coup. Concerning PTS, they accused us that, in the face of the advance of the Argentine fascist gangs in 1975, we defended our premises with soda siphons; when their leaders know very well that our premises, converted into fortresses, had a permanent armed defense, led by our party leaders.
An alleged theoretical debate that starts from a falsification
In addition to those infamous attacks, easily disarmed, the PTS has been developing an apparent theoretical debate, falsifying Moreno’s position about «democratic revolution.»
The PTS accuses Moreno of being «stagist» (now semi-stagist) because according to them, he would not defend the permanent revolution, but would defend a revolution in stages, first the democratic revolution and then the socialist revolution, that is, the old Stalinist proposal.
Where is the falsehood? In that Moreno does not defend the «democratic revolution», not as a policy proposal, but rather as an analysis and characterization of reality.
Let’s see what Moreno says:
The democratic revolutions that characterized the last century or the beginning of this century were labelled by Marxism as bourgeois democratic. They were revolutions that overthrew the feudal or feudal monarchical regime, to impose a democratic regime that would promote capitalist development; power passed into the hands of sectors of the bourgeoisie or petty bourgeoisie. It wasn’t only a political revolution that inaugurated a new political regime, but also a social revolution that wrestled power from the feudal monarchies and handed it over to the bourgeoisie.
The historical content of bourgeois-democratic revolutions has changed radically since the triumph of fascism in Italy. From that moment on, totalitarian, anti-democratic, directly counterrevolutionary regimes emerged, which used methods of civil war against the workers’ movement, its parties and unions.
These regimes are not the expression of feudalism but of the most advanced capitalism, that of monopolies. The workers’ movement struggle acquires a profound democratic significance, similar to that of the anti-feudal democratic revolutions of the last century, but with a totally different content: of struggle against non-feudal bourgeois counter-revolution.
Trotsky already pointed out at the beginning of 1930 that democratic slogans, due to the rise and triumph of fascism, acquired a new magnitude, an enormous importance. We would add: that the rise of fascism and counterrevolutionary regimes posed the need for a genuine democratic revolution carried out by the proletariat accompanied by the people. This democratic revolution, whose goal is to overthrow the bourgeois counterrevolutionary regime, is therefore transformed into a task of the working class and the working people, although when the counter-revolutionary regime is defeated, it will be the bourgeois, petty-bourgeois or reformist parties that will climb to the government. Precisely for this reason it is a political revolution.
(…) Before the fall of the military dictatorship, everything was crossed by the immediate struggle against it; But after its fall, the axis of struggle of the working class and the people began to be against the scourges of the capitalist and semi-colonial regime and no longer against its mere counterrevolutionary expression.
(…) During the democratic revolution stage, our fundamental slogan – which does not mean that we do not propose all transitional democratic ones– is of a negative sign: Down with the Tsar, the King, the Kaiser, Somoza, Batista, the military dictatorship of Peru, Bolivia or Argentina! We want the fall, to break and overcome the counterrevolutionary regime. But after the triumph of the democratic revolution, the slogans of power become positive. Without abandoning the negative ones, such as «Down with the capitalist regime!», now the priority is to raise slogans such as «Dictatorship of the proletariat!», or their concretization as «Power to the soviets, the workers’ committees, the COB!» or For a workers’ and people’s government that breaks with the bourgeoisie!, also in its concrete expression – that is, specifying which parties with mass influence we demand to break with the bourgeoisie.
(…) The experiences of the revolutionary triumphs in this post-war period have confirmed more than ever the theory of permanent revolution and at the same time have completed and enriched it. Among the theoretical novelties that enrich our conception there are two, which the Argentine revolution has confirmed.
The theses on permanent revolution insisted that the revolutions that were combined were the anti-feudal bourgeois democratic with the national and international socialist revolution. The emergence of a new type of counterrevolutionary regime of a bourgeois nature, such as the fascists or semi-fascists, and the loss of power of feudalism in backward countries, has led to the emergence of a new type of democratic revolution, the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, not the anti-feudal. It is a revolution against a political regime that is socially part of the capitalist system, and not one that confronts another pre-capitalist, feudal system.
We believe more than ever in permanent revolution, in the combination of this new democratic revolution with the socialist revolution.
Something else. All the great revolutions of this century, except that of October, brought bourgeois or petty bourgeois parties to power. These revolutions were the product of an objective action of the workers’ and people’s movement that was not aware that it could and should take power. The consciousness of the revolutionary masses was much more backward than the revolution they had carried out, as was shown by the fact that they had handed power over to the enemy class.[1]
That is to say, Moreno never had the policy of «democratic revolution», that is a falsification that the PTS consciously makes. Falsification that, as we will see shortly, is at the service of justifying a capitulatory policy in the face of revolutionary processes.
Moreno always defended the theory of permanent revolution. What he explains is that the democratic revolution that is combined with the socialist revolution is different from the anti-feudal democratic revolution that Trotsky spoke of, it is the democratic revolution to confront totalitarian capitalist regimes, not feudal ones.
The political consequences.
The great political consequence is that we intervene with all our strength in those mass revolutionary processes that the masses confront against counterrevolutionary regimes, regardless of who their leadership is. Thus, we intervened with the Simón Bolívar Brigade in Nicaragua, and we considered that the collapse of Somoza by Sandinismo was a democratic triumph, that is, a triumph of the democratic revolution, as was the fall of the Argentine dictatorship in 1982 and that of Bolivia the same year.
We acted the same way toward the Syrian revolutionary process of 2011, intervening to the extent of our strength and suffering the consequences of Assad’s murderous repression. Today we celebrate the fall of that murderous dictatorship as an important democratic triumph, regardless of the enormous differences we have with its leadership.
We participated strongly in all these revolutions, just as the Bolshevik workers did in the February Revolution of 1917, which produced a government headed by a prince.
For Moreno and for us, these «democratic revolutions» are part of the permanent revolution, that is, part of the world socialist revolution. This is so because of the class enemy they face, although because of the crisis of revolutionary leadership, bourgeois or reformist leaderships freeze them in the democratic phase, preventing their advance towards the triumph of the workers’ revolution. But, at the same time, the fall of these counterrevolutionary regimes, these democratic triumphs, increase the possibility of advancing in overcoming this leadership crisis, on the condition that the revolutionaries act forcefully in these processes.
What is the policy of the PTS? They don’t recognize those revolutions and simply say: no thanks, we don’t want any of it. They held that position in 2011 during the civil war against Assad, which in effect meant that the murderous dictatorship continued, as they did not give military support to those who confronted it. Meanwhile, its current position is one of capitulation to the bourgeois leadership, by not disputing against it. They also capitulate to those who argue that it was better under the «anti-imperialist» Assad, whose greatest example is the different variants of Stalinism.
We have no doubts. The Syrian revolution confirms the relevance of Moreno’s thought. It is that framework which allows us to intervene together with the masses who confront these counter-revolutionary regimes, without giving any political support to their leadership, calling for the independent organization of the workers, with a program for national and international socialist revolution.
[1] Nahuel Moreno, Argentina: A Triumphant Democratic Revolution (published in 1984).
