FLTI – THE LTS-PTS AND THE RENEGADES OF TROTSKISM: THE DREAM OF DEMOCRATIZING THE REGIME OF THE BOLIVARIAN CONSTITUTION
We are posting the following translated article as we think this analysis of Venezuela by the International Leninist Trotskyist Fraction (FLTI) is good as far as it goes, but that it ultimately fails politically for lack of understanding of the contemporary development of capitalism. It is an analysis that is stuck in the past where Russia and China have only just restored capitalist property relations and have not become contenders with the U.S.-led imperialist bloc for world market domination. We are linking here our tendency’s historic documents that detail our split with the FLTI:
http://www.humanistsforrevolutionarysocialism.org/IFLT_index.htm
The FLTI statement says nothing about the perspective of the Asian-Pacific countries’ (APAC) substitute trade pact with China. It is likely Trump will reject the TPPA like he promised. These APAC countries will conclude a separate trade pact with China. The question is who will be the tail and who will be the dog in such trade agreements? The vulnerability of South American countries to Chinese imperialism is nowhere to be found in their analysis because they don’t even recognize Chinese imperialism.
THE LTS-PTS AND THE RENEGADES OF TROTSKISM:
THE DREAM OF DEMOCRATIZING THE REGIME OF THE BOLIVARIAN CONSTITUTION
The positions of the renegades of Trotskyism over Venezuela are a sign of how, in the midst of world capitalist bankruptcy, the currents of the “New Left” play the role of supporters of states and regimes. The LTS, a small group run from Buenos Aires by PTS, is one of the most shamelessly supportive of the decaying Bolivarian Republic. At the other end of the renegades of Trotskyism, from a democratic opposition to Maduro, the PSL (ITU) and the UST (LIT) also raise this policy. They are rare opponents of Maduro who are in a class collaboration front with Chavista currents. These are sample buttons of the renegades of Trotskyism, who abandoned years ago the struggle for socialist revolution to embrace that of “extreme democracy.” That is why, when debating with the LTS, we will also be debating with all of them.
In the statement of October 26 published in The Daily Left, the LTS says that the task of the moment is “to conquer greater freedoms for the working people.” According to this current, it is “to respond to the legitimate democratic aspirations of the working people, who seeks a solution to the grave situation and wants to really weigh their will in national affairs.”
It is a shame to say that the workers are fighting to expand their democratic rights in a country where there have been literally thousands of spontaneous revolts due to hunger since 2015, against the African conditions imposed on them by the exploiters. If PTS leaders queued for 8 or 10 hours to get some rice or bread, or if they went down to the pickets because of hunger or water in the slums, they would not find people demanding to vote but hungry workers who ask for food, medicines , Potable water, to which their children are killed. All the exploiters know it. The MUD and the Church do not tire of saying it.
The PTS-LTS address also knows. This is not an oversight, but the true demands of bread workers are hidden to justify a program of support of Maduro and the Bolivarian regime, as we will see below. That address does not tell the truth to the working class.
THE LTS-PTS AND ITS “EXTREME DEMOCRACY” TO THE BERNSTEIN
In that statement, the LTS says that the working class must fight for “greater democracy”, for a “Constituent Assembly” that will solve the exploited all problems … but without needing to defeat the government of Maduro and the General Staff of the FANB, nor to throw down the Bolivarian regime to take power. In that statement they speak of “socialism”, of “self-determination organisms”, etc. But they do not even mention this central issue.
This current omits hunger, repression, the dead, mass arrests, fascism; They are silent that the Bolivarian Republic is a ferocious class dictatorship organized so that Wall Street continues looting and sinking Venezuela. The leaders of the PTS are abstracted from all this and dream that Maduro and the generals will retire peacefully, and that from this Bolivarian Republic a beautiful ‘democracy’ will emerge that will be the deepening of the ‘partial and limited conquests’ of chavismo. In this “extreme democracy” (a “Constituent Assembly”), arising from the expansion of the Bolivarian Republic, the workers will have many ‘social rights and conquests.
Chavez, says the LTS, advanced in that way but unfortunately had limits, and now the right tries to liquidate these conquests, as in Brazil with Dilma.
This “extreme democracy” is the longing of these people. It has nothing to envy to the utopia of the right-wing social-democrat Bernstein, who sought to move from capitalism to socialism by a peaceful and evolutionary extension of bourgeois democracy. The Trotskyists warn the workers of these people that they only want a political career in the bourgeois regimes.
DEMOCRATIZATION OF THE BOLIVARIAN REPUBLIC OR SOCIALIST REVOLUTION?
No one denies that the exploited need more democracy. That is elementary. The question is what kind of democracy do you need, how do you conquer it, and for what purpose.
In recent years, the exploiters confronted the Maduro government by setting up assemblies, strike committees, pickets, de facto committees in the neighborhoods, but not to demand to vote as LTS says, but for wages, food, medicine or water. There they decided to show what action to take forward, determining their future always with the method of workers’ democracy. There lived the democracy that the exploited needed to face Maduro. This happened in SIDOR, in the streets of San Félix, Ciudad Piar, Puerto Ordaz, in Catia and Petare.
The extension, deepening and centralization of these organisms was a great danger not only for Maduro, but mainly for Wall Street and the oligarchy. That is why the army, the Gendarmerie, the police, the fascist Bolivarian groups of the SEBIN, the union bureaucracy and the lumpenaje came to dissolve these organizations of direct democracy and crush the struggle of the workers with tanks and lead.
This was not done by the oligarchy or imperialism. The Bolivarians did so under the bourgeois Bolivarian Constitution that they themselves sanctioned in 1999, which first protects private property, and above all, the property and business of Wall Street. The Bolivarian Republic that the LTS wants to deepen is a ferocious Bonapartism that maintains under military occupation the factories and the labor districts to guarantee the imperialist plunder. There are dead, missing and imprisoned. For any suspicion, a worker is removed from his house by the SEBIN or the Chavista groups, and if he is lucky, he is not shot in the head in front of his family, but is arrested and tortured.
So what “democracy” wants to expand the LTS? Is “extreme democracy” that breaks with imperialism and makes “socialism” – as it is said in its statement -, to emerge from the peaceful evolution of the pro-imperialist bourgeois Bolivarian Republic? This current speaks of breaking with imperialism with an “extreme democracy” without demolishing the Executive Power, the National Assembly of the MUD, the caste of judges and, above all, the murderous officers of the FANB monitored by the Pentagon from Colombia. That is, they want to break with imperialism and leave intact the bourgeois state machinery that is just to guarantee imperialist plunder with violence and terror over the exploited of Venezuela.
In the Bolivarian Republic, anyone who touches a single dollar of the transnationals ends up dead by repression, shot by the parapolitik bands of the Chávez groups, or imprisoned on false charges and tortured like the CIVETCHI workers. The LTS wants to build an “extreme democracy” that coexists alongside that state machinery of repression at the service of imperialism. Can you be more ridiculous? It is clear that we have a supportive current of the Bolivarian Republic that has nothing to do with revolution or socialism, and that has broken all ties with Marxism and the lessons of more than 150 years of revolutions.
The LTS-PTS knows perfectly well that in Venezuela any serious fight for the rights of the exploited leads to the direct clash with the government and the troops, and that it proposes its revolutionary fall. Let’s look at the elemental question of food, for example.
What did the Executive Branch do with food? Militarized its distribution and placed it under the direct custody of Padrino López, Chief of Staff of the FANB and super minister of Maduro. Today, the Armed Forces guard large department stores and warehouses. Officers handle the “biscotting” of food (resale on the black market) and have hoarded huge food tanks in the main barracks. They guarantee that rich neighborhoods come with meats, fresh vegetables, oils, preserves, etc. In abundance and quality, and that the working-class neighborhoods do not arrive at all.
It is evident that in order to eat the exploited, they must expropriate not only these large stores, but also the property of imperialism and the oligarchy, to produce food and import the missing. And it is also evident that this can not be done peacefully with a Constituent Assembly, if the generals are not defeated beforehand or the institutions of the Bolivarian Constitution regime are demolished, because they guard the food depots and the property of the banks and Transnational corporations. That is why, for the elementary question of obtaining food, the exploited must make the revolution: to establish the organisms of direct democracy, to arm themselves and to leave the army to prepare the insurrection and the seizure of power.
But these issues, which are the ABC of Marxism, perfectly known by the LTS-PTS and all the renegades of Trotskyism, are consciously silenced by these directions.
THE LESSONS OF THE MAGREB AND MIDDLE EAST
Social-Democratic recipes of the LTS type, beautifying ruthless enemies and casting ground in the eyes of the workers, end in tragedy for the exploited. In the Maghreb and Middle East all the renegades of Trotskyism applied a policy based on the LTS. When in 2011 the exploited of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, etc. They went out to the streets for bread and to conquer it they threw dictatorships and they left armies, these currents said that it was not necessary to arm themselves, to move towards the expropriation of the imperialism and the seizure of the power. They said that they were democratic revolutions, whose task was to replace the tyrannies of Mubarak, Ben Ali, etc. By bourgeois democratic regimes. “Eat? Of course “, they said,” but first democracy; Vote and organize. “
Which it was the result? The bread was not obtained because it was not expropriated to the imperialism and the oil companies nor took the power; The “democratic revolution” proclaimed by these renegades ended in a bloodbath at the hands of generals, fierce dictatorships like Al Sisi in Egypt, and in Syria, a terrifying genocide that is costing the lives of 600,000 exploited.
Maduro, Castro, Evo Morales, etc., supported Gaddafi as they support Assad today by demanding the crushing and extermination of the revolutionary masses, because they know that there is not only the political regime at stake, but also the property of the exploiters and the Existence of the bourgeois state that holds that property.
THE PROGRAM OF THE IV INTERNATIONAL IS THE KEY TO THE TRIUMPH OF VENEZUELAN WORKERS AND EXPLOITED
We Trotskyists say to the workers, to the oppressed of Venezuela: to eat we must make the “revolution of the workers” that proclaimed the workers of SIDOR, to whom the LTS turned away. Let the renegades of Marxism accompany the Bolivarians to the grave. They have nothing to do with the deepest aspirations of the deep proletariat that will rise against the Bolivarians. The factory workers of La Paz and their struggle against Evo Morales are the vanguard of the labor movement that begins to emerge from the decline of the Bolivarians.
The Trotskyists of the FLTI defend the legacy of the Fourth International and the program theory of the permanent revolution because that is the flag that will lead to the triumph of the Latin American proletariat. In Venezuela there will be no bread or “democracy” if it is not making the revolution, but is defeating and casting the oppressors and starvators that bleed the people to deliver the nation to Wall Street. Only in this way can a genuinely democratic Venezuela emerge, where the broad masses, and not a handful of oligarchic and Boliburgian parasites, with their executioners generals; A Venezuela independent of imperialism and bankers; A socialist Venezuela, where property is in the hands of the exploited, to satisfy the needs of the vast majority of the people; A Venezuela bastion of the Latin American and world revolution. This is the objective of the Trotskyists of the FLTI … a workers’ and socialist Venezuela without generals, bosses or imperialist bankers.
Venezuela, November 9, 2016
