On the 27th October 2019, general elections, including a presidential vote, will be held in Argentina, a key country of Latin America, rocked by the deepest economic crisis in the capitalist world at this moment and an ascendancy of workers’ struggles, be it the piquetero movement of the unemployed, the resistance of workers of factories that are closing down, the state workers of Chubut in Patagonia and still others. The major candidates for president are Mauricio Macri, the incumbent president, and Alberto Fernández, joint candidate of various Peronist tendencies with the definitive stamp of Cristina Fernández Kirchner, twice president between 2007-2015 and considered to be the nationalist left-wing of the Peronist movement. The result of the presidential election is almost certain: The primary elections (so-called PASO) of 11th August have clearly given a quasi insurmountable lead to Alberto Fernández. This will create a situation in which Peronism will be squeezed between a rock and a hard place, suqandering its credentials in the eyes of the popular masses in order to satisfy the demands of international financial capital and the Argentine bourgeoisie in overcoming the dire economic crisis Argentina faces. This situation is bound to create openings for the revolutionary forces of the working class towards the masses.
It is in this context that the existence of the Frente de la Izquierda y de los Trajabadores-Unidad (FIT-U or the Front of the Left and Workers-Unity) becomes so important for the working class and the poor of Argentina. Composed mainly of four parties that all come from a revolutionary Marxist background, including the Partido Obrero (PO-Workers Party), our sister party in Argentina, this Front is a beacon of hope for a proletarian course that can help achieve the political independence of the working class in the face of the two major blocks of the bourgeoisie in Argentine politics. The FIT-U has existed since 2011 as mostly an electoral bloc of left forces. It is the major channel today through which the struggle can be advanced in the key country of Argentina. But more, it is the only one of its kind in a world that is dominated by political forces on the left, from Syriza in Greece to the Democratic Socialists of America, from Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour in Britain to the presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico, under which the hopes of the masses for a different kind of political course catering to the needs of the great majority of the working class and the poor have been, are or will, in the future, definitely be betrayed and buried. The FIT-U is the only bloc of parties in the world that has a credible accumulated strength and squarely promises the masses a workers’ government.
The DIP (Revolutionary Workers Party) of Turkey has very serious political differences with some of the parties of the FIT-U. However, it extends its support to its policy of class independence and its efforts at organising mass resistance to the plans and measures of the Argentine bourgeoisie, guided by the IMF under the approving gaze of Trump. The DIP calls, unswervingly, for the Argentine masses to vote for the FIT-U and for the international left to support the Argentine masses in their struggle against the brutal attack of the Argentine bourgeosie, guided by that accursed enemy of the labouring masses and the poor of the world, the IMF. We present below the letter the DIP has sent to the FIT-U in support of its electoral struggle.
Compañeras y compañeros de la FIT-Unidad,
Dear Comrades of the FIT-Unidad,
We, the DIP (Revolutionary Workers’ Party), are calling out to you from a country that is almost an exact mirror image of Argentina. You are coming out of winter going towards the spring, while we are leaving the summer behind and moving towards winter. You are in bed when we wake up and we go to bed while you are in the midst of the afternoon. And yet our peoples, the working class and the vast labouring masses and the poor share precisely the same objective situation. Unemployment rocketing, inflation impoverishing, low wages famishing, police repression striking the poor and the destitute when they raise their voices, and the trade union bureaucracy unfailingly siding with the bourgeoisie. In terms of economic crisis, comrades, if we leave aside the very special case of Venezuella, you are number one in the world, but we are right behind you!
But on one thing we differ immensely. You in Argentina have created over the years a political instrument that has the potential to achieve the independence of the working class and the labouring population vis-à-vis the diverse forces that represent the bourgeoisie, while the left in Turkey is suffering from a stagnation that has deep-rooted causes. Argentina, in fact, is perhaps the only country in the world where the so-called “radical opposition” to the unquestioned sway of capital does not, as opposed to the cases of many from the traitors of Syriza to the renegades of the Democratic Socialists of America, advocate an openly reformist project, but declares itself revolutionary. Whatever our differences on many an issue, only natural in the historic tradition of revolutionary socialism, we therefore support the effort of the FIT-U to achieve the political class independence of the Argentine proletariat, which is the only way to overcome the suffering inflicted on the working masses of all countries because it is the only way that leads to real, functioning, effective workers’ power.
For years, self-declared Marxists (the Tariq Alis and the Daniel Bensaïds and the Alex Callinicos’s) and other socialists (the Chomsky’s and the Wallersteins) caused immense confusion within the international socialist movement by lending their support in petitions written in high-flown expressions to figures such as Lula, after he had already capitulated to the IMF, all the way to Tsipras of Syriza, whose capitulation to the Troika was preordained, a crónica de muerte anunciada if there ever was one. It is now our turn, the turn of the revolutionary Marxists, to commend to international socialism a front of the left and of the workers, whose declared programme is a quest for workers’ power.
We are all aware, comrades of the FIT-U, that our countries are mired in their respective crises as a result of the overarching deep economic crisis of world capitalism, what we at DIP call the Third Great Depression, which set in in September 2008 with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a Wall Street bank. We should also be aware that this economic depression is but the manifestation of the historic decline of capitalism, with the socialisation and the consequent internationalisation of the productive forces crying out for democratic central planning on the world scale while capitalist private property erects an insuperable barrier in the way of this solution.
Hence the threat of world war once again looming on the horizon of humanity, with imperialism feeling the dire need of bringing the newly rising world powers China and Russia on their knees, a world war that would annihilate not only humanity, but all living species as well, given the means of destruction now wielded by the warmongers, unlike anything in the history of humanity. Hence the gravity of the ecological disaster that is visiting our planet, insoluble under the conditions of capital exploiting nature as it does labour, whatever shows “green capitalism” puts on through the United Nations.
Hence, perhaps most importantly, the resurfacing of the barbaric tendencies of finance capital, the long-dormant fascism of the veritable kind, in the form of a proto-fascism that dares not speak its name yet, but tries to convince the masses that the problems that haunt them do not derive from capitalism but other sectors of the working class, the immigrants, the “Mexican rapists” in Trump’s America or the “Muslim terrorists” in the Europe of the Marine Le Pens and Salvinis and Farages, why even the Boris Johnsons, reaching all the way to the anti-Semitics of the Privat Sektor, the National Corps and others that are not so shy as not to use Nazi symbols and call explicitly for the revision of history in Hitler’s favour in Ukraine, in that Ukraine of the Maidan events, which even some leftists hailed as a “revolution”.
This tendency, dear comrades of the FIT-U, has gone so far as to sow the seeds of fascism in countries that are subordinated to imperialism, countries like yours and ours. From Bolsonaro in your neighbouring Brazil to the Modis and the Dutertes of Asia, fascism is on the rise almost on all continents. A different kind of barbarism, not the product of the rise of finance capital, but a perverted and poisoned reaction to the oppressive nature of capital’s world system, is the takfiri sectarian movements in the Muslim world, decapitating men, enslaving women, poisoning children, burning others’ mosques, banning music, destroying sculpture, the Al Qaedas and the ISIS’s and the HTS’s and the Boko Harams and the al Shabaabs of Asia, the Middle East and Africa, considered appallingly by some on the left as “progressive”, even “revolutionary” forces that need to be supported by Marxists.
In the face of these retrograde and barbaric tendencies created by 21st century capitalism, the working masses have risen in disgust and in hope and aspiration for a better world in a whole series of popular rebellions and revolutions around the world. The revolutionary outbursts on your continent, from the Argentinazo of 2001-2002 and the two million that descended on the streets in the face of the coup against Chávez in 2002 to the frustrated Bolivian revolutionary crises of 2003 and 2005, predate the Third Great Depression. But the Arab revolutions of 2011, starting in Tunisia and Egypt and spreading like wildfire to all Arab countries at different pace, except for a few, between 2011-2013, signalled for us at DIP the beginning of the third wave of the world revolution in the history of capitalism. Turning the Mediterranean basin into a home for popular revolt and revolution, the mass mobilisation leapt from Greece and Spain to Turkey and the Balkans, even leading to the establishment of a two-month sit-in in Tel Aviv, the capital of Israel, that sent greetings to the epicentre of the Mediterranean revolution in Cairo’s Tahrir square! The Occupy Wall Street movement in the US, spreading beyond New York City to 50 plus locations, and the Brazilian protests of 2013 in 600 cities were the expression of the same tendency in the Western hemisphere.
Then came a lull, especially with the dwindling of the Arab revolution under the twin blows of the Bonapartist al Sisi coup d’Etat in Egypt in 2013 and the fanning of the takfiri sectarian movements by the US and regional reactionary powers in Syria, which turned an abortive revolution into a civil war. Even then the masses sought parliamentary solutions to their problems wherever they could, from Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn in the Anglo-American world to Syriza, Podemos, the United Left in Portugal all the way to the victory of AMLO in Mexico. But the tide has turned once again from parliamentary methods to that of revolt and revolution. The Arab world is again in ebullition, with popular rebellions in Jordan, Tunisia and Iraq in 2018 (not to mention non-Arab Iran) and the ongoing revolutions of Sudan and Algeria currently. The masses have started testing the limits once again even in Egypt, where the repression reaches inconceivable proportions. On your continent Puerto Rico, with a human flood that brought down the governor, has joined destitute Haiti, where these very days the masses are out on the streets for the fifth time in roughly one year’s time.
Humanity, dear comrades of the FIT-U, is struggling with itself. Either revolution and socialism or barbarism. Against this, we revolutionaries should set our eyes on the historic decline of capitalism and the remedy for its barbarism: proletarian dictatorship. Identity politics, greenwashing and pinkwashing, Green politics, mindless pacifism—all divorced from the working class are diversions from, even barriers in the way of, the struggle for the real solution. The suffering of the oppressed must of course be addressed and redressed, but not in isolation from working class politics. The turn of the international left to identity politics is the root cause of the popularity of the Trumps and the Bolsonaros and the Le Pens and the Farages and the Erdoğans and the Orbans and the Modis of this world. We must, dear comrades, insist on working class politics of the Bolshevik kind, squarely put the struggle of the proletariat in all its manifestations to centre stage, all the while trying to rally all of the oppressed groups, from the oppressed nations and peoples all the way to women and gays, around the hegemonic project of a Leninist programme of emancipation, giving anti-imperialism the central place that it deserves in such a programme.
Argentina is one of the countries, perhaps the only one for the moment, where a working class hegemony can be achieved in the struggle against capitalism. As opposed to all the renegades of the Syrizas of all continents, the FIT-U claims the revolutionary heritage of the international proletariat. We urge you, dear comrades of the FIT-U, to unswervingly persist advancing on the time-tested road of Leninism and working-class hegemony in order to finish this great task that you have set out for.
Our cause is the same cause. The working classes of our countries, and of all countries, can really overcome the destitution and barbarism of capitalism by making world revolution victorious. For that reason your fight is our fight.
Long live the struggle of the Argentine working class against the exploitation and oppression of capitalism!
Viva la lucha de la clase obrera de Argentina contra la explotación y opresión del capitalismo!
Long live the unity of the international proletariat!
Viva la unidad del proletariado internacional!
For workers’ power everywhere, emancipating all the oppressed from their suffering!
Por el poder obrero en todos paises, emancipando a los oprimidos de su sufrimiento!
Long live world revolution!
Viva la revolución mundial!
Long live the Fourth International, the only true heir to the Communist International!
Viva la Cuarta Internacional, sola heredera verdadera de la Internacional Comunista!
DIP
(Revolutionary Workers’ Party)
Turkey
3rd October 2019