Introduction

Ever since the 40s we have been fighting a long and difficult battle to build revolutionary parties with mass influence in all the countries and to build an International. We regard our struggle as the continuation of the one initiated by Marx, Engels, Rose Luxemburg, Karl Liebnecht, Lenin and Trotsky as an effort to build the First, the Second, the Third and the Fourth Internationals.

We assert the First and the Second internationals to be part of our own past, but our model world party is the Third, conceived as the Communist International. It responds to the needs of the imperialist epoch that we are now living in, as much for the programmatic propositions of its first four congresses as in its internal regime, the democratic centralism.

The III International was degenerated and the dissolved by Stalinism. The Left Opposition and then the IV International drew together the revolutionaries who were most consistent in the way they confronted the Stalinist degeneration. Many organizations today claim to belong to the IV International. The hold forums,, joint actions, but a IV International as a centralized organisation does not exist any more. The reverses of the class struggle and the deviations of the leaders after Trotsky's death were the cause of itsthe dispersion. That is why we stand for its reconstruction.

Many ask us, "why reconstruct the IV if it barely is a symbol of Trotskyism?" Trotsky has always been against the use of the term "Trotskyist" because he did not regard himself as a sector differentiated from Marxism and Leninism. It was Stalinism who dubbed "Trotskyist" - meaning that they were not Leninists - all those who supported Trotsky in his confrontation with Stalin. Trotsky's trend called themselves Leninist Bolsheviks. This was the trend that spawned the Left Opposition and later on the IV International. It was born to defend the principles of Marxism and Leninism -internationalism, workers' democracy, workers' power - and to provide an offensive policy with which nazism and the II world War could be confronted after Stalin's capitulation.

The IV International is the continuation of the III with Lenin in the leadership and is the synonym of the awareness in the struggle against the Stalinist counterrevolution. It is necessary to rebuild it, not to build something altogether different, because the principles and the bases of theory and programme expressed in the Transitional Programme valid no matter what obvious updating there is to be done.

The Transitional Programme systematised the resolutions of the first four congresses of the III International: workers' and peasants' control and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Apart from that, it posed the need to make a new revolution in the USSR , the political revolution against bureaucracy. The Transitional Programme, following the orientation of the IV Congress of the III International, overcomes the division between the minimum programme and the maximum programme. It provides the method to elevate the masses to the programme of the socialist revolution through the elaboration of a system of transitional demands that stem out of the need and the current level of awareness of the masses and leads to the conquest of the power by the proletariat.

The Theory of the Permanent Revolution asserts that democratic tasks and socialist tasks combine in the process of the revolution; it highlights the need for the working class to lead the process and that it should spread all over the world.

The validity of these premises makes it impossible for a revolutionary programme to be built without stemming out of the Transitional Programme and the Theory of the Permanent Revolution. That is why, any revolutionary who wishes to fight for the defeat of imperialism, of bureaucracy and for the worldwide triumph of socialism is approaching - even if unawares - to the central positions of the IV International.

Today, when we see he struggles against the application of the imperialist neoliberal plans, we feel the helplessness of not being able to display a world revolutionary party that might lead those struggles in Latin America . That is why, the reconstruction of the IV International is a central task to advance in the struggle against imperialism.

This reconstruction is not a task for the so-called "Trotskyists" alone but for all those who agree as to the bases of the programme. Trotsky tackled the task of the building of the IV International not only as a task for the Left Opposition (the "Trotskyists of those days") but for all those who agreed to the Leninist principles and to the need to take up a mortal combat against imperialism, national bourgeoisies and bureaucracies. In the thirties, the advance of nazism and Stalinism caused the capitulation of organisations and leaders with whom Trotsky was working in order to build a new International. It was for that reason and also because of the urgent need to materialise a centralised organisation that might preserve the revolutionary Marxist principles that the IV International was built by those who were part of the International Left Opposition. In spite of that, Trotsky never forsook the aim of a mass International, there "Trotskyists" would be minority.

We do not regard ourselves as the only revolutionaries on earth. Neither do we believe that the solution to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership is to be found in the vegetative growth of our trend. That is why our history is the history of attempted mergers and also of splits that the main event of the class struggle have caused.

In this long and arduous battle to build the International we have did some thing well but also we have committed many mistakes. In January 1982, when the IWL was being founded, Nahuel Moreno said, ". the leaders of the Trotskyist movement thought they were colossuses, who made no mistakes. The Trotskyism under their leadership, however, was regrettable." ". this experience of constantly knocking around with "geniuses" led us to make indirectly propaganda for our grassroots to convince them that we make a lot of mistakes, that they must learn how to think by themselves, for our leadership is no guarantee of genialities. We want by all means to transmit a spirit of self-criticism, Marxist spirit, and not religious faith in a leadership that is modest, provincial for their schooling and barbaric for their culture. That is why we believe in internal democracy and we see it as an unmovable necessity. We move ahead through blows and errors and we are not ashamed to say so."

". The problem is how to commit fewer errors, and lesser errors. In my opinion, the tendency is to commit fewer errors if we are in an international organisation and based on democratic centralism. I state categorically, that any national party that is not in a Bolshevik International, with an international leadership. tends to commit more and more mistakes and one that is qualitative: because they would be national Trotskyists, they would inevitably end by disowning the IV International and adopting opportunist or sectarian positions and finally just fade away.

Our Origins

The trend that today is known as IWL-FI has been around as an international trend since 1953 and has been known under different names. On a national level, it emerged in 1944, in Argentina as a small group directed by Moreno , the GOM (Marxist Workers Group). The main aim was to go to the working class trying to overcome the marginal, bohemian and intellectual origin of the Argentine Trotskyist movement. During the early years we suffered from a proletarian-ist, sectarian and propagandist deviation. No work was done among students and the main guideline of the activities was to lecture on the Communist Manifesto and other classical texts. Between 1944-48 we also had a national-Trotskyist deviation, that is to say, we believed that there was a solution to all the problems of Trotskyism within the boundaries of our own country. Only by 1948 did we begin to participate in the life of the International attending its Second Congress.

Intervention in workers' struggles and in the International made it possible for us to overcome these deviations and the group was strengthened. In 1945 we took part in the great strikes of the packing houses workers - at that time, main sector of the working class in argentina . It was very important and allowed us to recruit nearly all the comrades of the body of shop stewards. We got over our sectarism and propagandism, but we fell into a trade-unionist deviation which, in turn, began to be overcome thanks to our participation in the International.

Slowly but surely we began to grow in strength. We led factories producing cement tubes, leather goods and then the club of a working-class parish (Villa Pobladora). In spite of the fact that we were a small group of about 100 militants, we became deeply rooted in the working class and we built our principal proletarian cadres, the best example was Elías Rodriguez, who is today part of our tradition.

The Argentine party turned into the most proletarian party within the Trotskyist movement, together with the SWP that was build following Trotsky's orientation.

Our Participation In The Iv International

After the II World War, the leadership of the IV International, consisting of the SWP (USA), Pablo ( Greece ), Mandel ( Belgium ) and Frank ( France ) was very young and inexperienced and did not manage to get over the qualitative weakness caused by the murder of Trotsky in 1940. The essential feature of the IV International of those days was its sectarism. Its II Congress was an example of that. It was held in 1948, in the midst of great changes: in China a revolution was underway and it overcame a year later; in Czechoslovakia , the bourgeois ministers were swept out of the government and bourgeoisie was being expropriated a process that was to be repeated in Yugoslavia since 1947. The Congress ignored these events and made their discussion hinge round the class character of the USRR and round whether the USRR was to be defended from imperialist attacks. That discussion had already been solved in the American party in Trotsky's lifetime, in 1939-40.

In spite of the sectarian and propagandistic character of the congress, our participation in it was momentous for the GOM. It was as from that moment on that we began to work within an international framework. Imperialism and its relations with national bourgeoisies received a lot of attention when political analyses were being made. International definitions were also taken up very strongly, as in the case of the position that the GOM - as a part of the IV International - stood for in favour of North Korea in its confrontation with South Korea . Moreno always highlighted the importance of having joined the IV International even if our group was never acknowledged as the official section. At that time, the official section was the group led by Posadas .

The Discussion On The New States In The East

In 1949 the discussion on the class character of those states began. Moreno defended the manner in which this discussion was held as a great example of democratic centralism. Two positions were posed. According to Mandel ( Belgium ) and Cannon ( USA ) these states were capitalist. The opinion posed by Pablo ( Greece ) and supported with some objections by Hansen (USA) and Moreno was that new workers' states had emerged. The discussion was settled relatively soon. Mandel and Cannon acknowledged the existence of a real revolutionary process in the European East and that new, deformed workers' states had emerged. This political success increased Pablo's prestige among the international rank and file and that was how, in 1951, we reached the III Congress.

The Struggle Against Pabloism

In 1051, right in the midst of the cold war, all international commentators announced the inevitable armed clash between USA and USSR . Pablo and Mandel, following the bourgeois press arrived at a conclusion that proved fatal for the International: in their opinion, the Third World War was inevitable. Faced with this, the communist parties, eager to defend the USSR , would adopt violent methods to confront imperialism and seize power. The same was supposed to happen with the bourgeois nationalist parties in the dependent countries.

Based on this analysis, Pablo and Mandel proposed "entrism sui genenris" into the communist and bourgeois nationalist parties and we were expected to follow them withot any criticism until after power was seized. Most of the international Trotskyism, following the lead of the French section, refused to carry out this policy. We, the POR (the new name given to GOM), denounced this position for it meant forsaking the definition of Stalinist bureaucracy as counterrevolutionary and abandoning the struggle against it. It was a complete revision of the essential points of the Trotskyist programme. We asserted that these positions emerged because of the petty bourgeois, impressionist and intellectual character of the European leaders.

Bolivian Revolution. Division In The Iv International

These definitions of the leaders of the IV International had important political consequences. Because of this definition, Pablo refused to demand the withdrawal of the Russian tanks confronting the uprising of the workers in Berlin in 1953, which meant actual support for the soviet bureaucracy. But the most tragic consequence of this policy was the betrayal of the Bolivian revolution.

In 1952, a typically workers' revolution took place in Bolivia . Workers, organised in militias, defeated militarily the police and the army and the COB (Bolivian Workers Central) emerged as a dual power organisation. In 1953 the peasant revolution began invading the large estates and occupying land. Until 1954, the main armed force in Bolivia was the workers militias under the leadership of the COB.

Ever since the 40s the Bolivian Trotskyist organisation (POR) was gaining enormous influence in the workers movement. Importan leaders of the miners, factory workers and peasant were members of this organisation. Its main leader, Guillermo Lora, wrote the Pulacayo theses, an adaptation of the transitional programme to Bolivian reality and adopted by the Miners' Federation. In the 1946 elections, Lora was elected senator by a front headed by the Miners Federation. In the 1952 revolution the POR was the co-leader of the militias and was the co-founder of the COB. The POR had great influence among the masses.

Unfortunately, following the orientation of the International secretariat of the IV International led by Pablo, did not pose the demand for the COB to seize power. To the contrary, they granted critical support to the bourgeois government of the MNR (bourgeois nationalist movement). Without a revolutionary orientation, the masses were gradually disarmed and demobilised. A few years later, the revolution was disassembled. As a consequence of this betrayal, Bolivian Trotskyism became very deteriorated and a process of successive divisions began.

Repudiating the line of "sui generis entrism", most of the French Trotskyists - led by Lambert - and British Trotskyists - led by Healy), the SWP (USA) and the South American Trotskyists split away from the Pablo-led International Secretariat and in 1953 we created the International Committee (CI)

The Slato: The Peruvian Revolution

Following the Argentine POR together with Trotskyists from Chile and Peru , there was a strong discussion in Latin America against the policy for Bolivia . In April 1953, Nahuel Moreno wrote the text "Two Guidelines", stating that critical support for the MNR was treason and All Power to the COB should have been raised. At the same time we demanded that the International Committee should act as a centralised organisation for this was the only way to defeat Pabloist revisionism. The refusal on behalf of the majority forces in the International Committee to act in a centralised way and with an offensive policy allowed for further advance of the Pabloist positions in spite of the fact that most Trotskyists were against them. When our efforts to make the International Committee act in a centralised way failed, we began acting as an international tendency and, in 1957, together with leaders from Chile and Peru , we constituted the SLATO (Latin American Secretariat of Orthodox Trotskyism).

In 1062, the existence of SLATO allowed us to participate in a centralised manner in the process of the agrarian revolution in Peru . We sent Hugo Blanco, a Peruvian student militant in Argentina to participate in the Cuzco process. Following the SLATO orientation, Hugo Blanco led the process of land occupation and of the trade union organisation in the countryside. The SLATO sent several cadres to give support to this work. That is how the FIR was built (Revolutionary Left Front) oriented by Trotskyists and it spawned what is now our Peruvian section. In 1963, Hugo Blanco was captured by the army. Between 1963 and 1967 he was kept in isolation. In 1967 he was tried by a military court. Because there was danger of his being sentenced to death, an international campaign was held with support from such people as Satre, Simone de Beauvoir, Isaac Deuscher, French, British and India trade unions, French, British and other members of parliaments. This campaign prevented Blanco from being convicted to death. He was convicted to 25 years in jail instead. Another campaign achieved his release in 1970, During all these years, in all the Peruvian peasants' congresses, Hugo Blanco kept on being elected as the principal leader of the peasants.

Cuban Revolution And The 1963 Reunification

It was the acknowledgement of and support for the Cuban revolution was the base for reunification of the IV International in 1963. That how the USec (United Secretariat) was born, led by Mandel and the SWP (Pablo ended out of the IV International and acting as consultant to the bourgeois Ben Bela administration in Algiers . All the Trotskyist forces that regarded Cuba as a new workers' state joined the USec. The British and the French stayed out fro they did not acknowledge this meaning of the Cuban revolution. It took us a year to join for we kept on demanding a balance sheet of the impressionist method that had led to the betrayal of the Bolivian revolution as a way of preventing similar deviations from taking place in the future. In 1964, even though this balance self-critical sheet was not presented, we decided to join convinced that, in spite of the divergences, a reunion hinging round a revolution was positive and that this would let us participate with more strength in a future ascent that we foresaw.

The Struggle Against The Guerrilla Deviation. The Development Of The Argentine Party. The Portuguese Revolution.

The Cuban revolution made a strong impact on the world advance guard and especially on the Latin American one. In Argentina , during the 60s, this was combined with an ebb in the workers struggles. The Castroite influence had serious consequences for our group.

From 1957 till 1964, our organisation (now known as Palabra Obrera - Workers' Word - from the name of its periodical) applied the tactic of entrism in the 62 Peronist Organisations - as a way of building ourselves in contact with the best of the advance guard of the Peronist resistance. At that time, our group gains a great insertion into the workers' movement. But a strong crisis begins un 1964 when, lured by the Cuban leaders, Vasco Bengochea, the one who was together with Moreno the leader of the Party. A couple of years later a spit occurred that swept some of the main cadres towards focus positions. The main leader was Roberto Santucho, with whom we had got together in 1965 and who then became the main leader of the ERP.

But the pressure exerted by the foqism did not affect only the Argentine group, it was also felt by the leaders of the IV. Mandel's impressionist method had not been defeated and a new capitulation took place in the late 60s. This time he capitulated to castroism for he adopted the guerrilla conception of foqism. In the IX Congress of the IV (1969) the guerrilla warfare was voted for Latin America and consistently with this, it was Santucho´s organisation (PRT-El Combatiente) that was accredited as the official section of the IV International. Our organisation (PRT-La Verdad) was the sympathising section.

The SWP of the USA , the Argentine PST (the name our section adopted after the merger with Juan Carlos Coral, a split from the Socialist Party. And all the South American groups, led a trend engaged in an unrelenting battle against these positions. We said that the theory of a "focus" was a policy for elites, isolated from the mass movement and that is caused great disasters. Unfortunately, facts proved us right. Trotskyism lost countless valuable militants who had followed that mistaken guideline, mainly in Argentina , but also in other countries. As from that moment on, the USec started acting as a federation of tendencies. Each one applied their own policy.

The ascent of struggles starting in 1968 had opened new opportunities and the existence of a united world organisation (the USec) gave room for taking advantage of it. In France , for example, where Trotskyism had all but vanished because of the entrism sui generis, the ISR emerged and it got to gather 5 000 militants and they even had a dialy newspaper. In Latin America, the great growth of the Argentine PST began and the SWP was getting stronger in the USA because of their participation in the anti-Viet Nam war activities.

But, In the 70s, far from having overcome the guerrilla deviation, we soon had to challenge a new capitulation of Mandel's. This time it was a numerous advance guard stemming out of the French May and influenced by Maoism. Our discussion with Mandel is accounted for in a book by Moreno "El partido y la revolución".

In the course of this struggle against guerrilla orientation and vanguardism, our Argentine party, the PST (emerged from a merger with a sector that split away from social democracy) developed as a strong advance guard party. This strengthening takes place applying a policy that was the opposite to that of Mandel carried out: taking part in the ascent of struggles known as "cordobazo" and participating in electoral process. It was then that we organised the party in Uruguay and in Venezuela .

In 1974, when the Portuguese revolution broke out, the PST sends cadres to take part in this process and we encouraged a policy that commenced the struggle for power hinging round the development and centralisation of the dual power organisations cropping up around us. Thus we recruited a sector of high school students and organised the Portuguese party that provided important cadres for the International.

That revolution evidenced another capitulation of Mandel's who, following in the footsteps of Maoism, gave support to MFA (Armed Forces Movement) co-governing with the Portuguese empire. This process also caused the 1975 split in FLT (a fraction that we constituted with the SWP to confront Mandelism) for we found it impossible to share the same policy for the revolution. They thought that the central task was to pose democratic demands and to publish Trotsky's works.

Most of the organisations and militants of Colombia , Brazil , Mexico , Uruguay , Protugal , Spain , Italy and Peru left the FLT and, together with the Argentine PST built a tendency that soon turned into a fraction of the USec, the FB (Bolshevik Fraction) that later on spawned the IWL-FI.

The participation of the Portuguese revolution and the discussion with Mandelism and the SWP allowed us to advance in the work on theory on the building of parties in revolutionary processes and that was expressed in "Revoución y Contrarevoludión en Portugal ."

The Party In Brazil

A group of young Brazilian exiled in Chile contacted our trend. After the coup, they went over to Argentina and started militant activities in the PST. In 1974, they went back to Brazil to build the party. The Workers League emerges and later on Socialist Convergence. The group started growing up and, in contact with the leaders of the FB, they worked out a policy for a summons to a Workers' Party (PT)

The young Brazilian organisation was developing for 12 years and dissolved itself in the bureaucratic leadership for capitulated to it. That was possible becausethey belonged to an international trend that oriented the entrism in the PT, guided the work centred on trade union oppositions in the CUT and provided clarity as to the bureaucratic haracter of the Lula leadership.

In this way the Socialist Convergence (CS) could get out of the PT 12 years later stronger than it was when it joined in and with a policy of a revolutionary united front aimed at sectors of the advance guard that was drifting away from Lula's party.

Colombian Party

The military coup occurred in Argentina in 1976 and spawned Videla's semi fascist dictatorship. The PST had to remove important cadres from the country and this circumstance was taken advantage of in order to reinforce the international work At that time we built our organisations in Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Panama and we reinforced our work in Portugal and Spain. But the most important process took place in Colombia where we contacted the Socialist Block, an organisation drifting towards revolutionary positions with cadres coming from Castroism and the church. That is how the Colombian PST appeared. It was rapidly consolidated and became one of the two pillars on which our international work rested.

The Struggle Against The Argentine Dictatorship

The Argentine PST has a heroic role in the resistance against the genocide dictatorship in Argentina . About 250 militants were jailed and over 100 were killed and missing. Acting in the most absolutely clandestine conditions, the party kept on producing the paper and developed work among the workers, the youth and the intelligentsia.

At the beginning of the Falkland War, the hatred towards the dictatorship did not prevent a principled policy of identifying and attacking invading imperialism as the main enemy. From the first moment, and without for one moment relenting in the denunciation of the dictatorship, the PST stood in the Argentine military camp for the defeat of imperialism. Surrounded by great prestige among the advance guard, the PST saw the end of the dictatorship with 800 solid cadres who started building the MAS incorporating to the task a group of cadres coming from another socialist trend.

Nicaraguan Revolution. The Simon Bolivar Brigade

In 1979, when the Nicaraguan revolution began, our trend, in spite of the differences with Sandinism, decided to take part physically in the struggle against Somoza. Through the Colombian PST, a great campaign was launched to build the Simon Bolivar Brigade. It was formed with our militants and independent revolutionaries from Colombia , Panama , Costa Rica , USA and Argentina . Keeping total political independence, the Brigade joined the Sandinist and had a heroic role in the liberation of the southern region of Nicaragua ; the campaign claimed lives and wounds. When the revolution triumphed, the brigadiers were received as heroes in Managua . We had been demanding that Sandinism should split away from the bourgeoisie and seize power together with workers' trade unions. Sandinism, following Castro's policy, joined a coalition government with Violeta Chamorro. The Brigade launched organisation of trade unions and in one week organised over 70 of them. This irked the Sandinist leaders and they decided to expel the Brigade from Nicaragua . Several brigadiers were jailed and tortured by the Panamanian police, allied to the Sandinists.

The USec sent a delegation to Managua to say that we were an ultra left group with whom they had nothing to do and had a resolution voted prohibiting the building of parties out of Sandinism. Their refusal to defend revolutionary militants tortured by the bougeoisie was the consequence of having voted the internal resolution that, in the practice, was a decree of expulsion for our trend, forcing us to spit away from the USec definitely.

These events reveal the real discussion within the USec. We defended the need to build revolutionary parties in Nicaragua , they did not. This discussion was the same as the one about Cuba , as far as the construction of the party was concerned and the need for a political revolution. Everything pointed out to the mounting capitulation of the USec to castroism and Sandinism.

Our Relation With Lambertism

Who did offer solidarity with the Brigade was the trend led by Pierre Lambert. And that was how our relation with Lambertism began, a trend with who we had had no contact since 1963. A process of discussion began, with principled agreements and accords as to the programme expressed in the Thesis de Actualización del Programa de Transición (Theses for the Updating of the Transitional Programme) by Nahuel Moreno. Stalinism and Castroism are defined in this pieces of work as counterrevolutionary and processes of the post war (East of Europe, China and Cuba ) are acknowledged as revolutionary in spite of the fact that they had not been led by the working class and a revolutionary party.

At the same time, the need for launching a political revolution in the degenerated workers' states emerged from those processes is posed. The guerrilla warfare and the opportunist policy of their leaderships is analysed and special emphasis is laid on the defence of the right to self-determination of the oppressed nationalities and the democratic tasks. The beginning of the process of the crisis of the counterrevolutionary apparatuses is analysed, especially of Stalinism, stating the possibility of fighting for Trotskyist parties and a mass IV International. The Parity Committee is established and it 1980 it is all crowned by the formation of a joint organisation: The Fourth International, International Committee (CI-CI). We carried out a campaign in support of "solidarity" in Poland . Everything led to believe that a great step was given in the direction towards the reconstruction of the IV.}But this attempt was frustrated. Our minute insertion in Europe led us to commit a serious mistake. We had not realised that Lambertism had strong links with the trade union bureaucracy and that made him capitulate to the Popular Front administration. When Miterand won the elections in France , Lambert refused to discuss a policy for France and started expelling militants opposed to that policy and that led to the split in the CI-CI.

The discussion with Lambertism forced us to make headway in the work on Popular Fronts and that was reflected in the book " La Traición de la OCI " (the treason of the OCI) by Nahuel Moreno.

Foundation Of The Iwl-Fi

In January 1982, a new international meeting was held of the parties of the FB and two important Lambertist leaders: Ricardo Napuri of Peru and Alberto Franceschi of Venezuela . One of the central points of the meeting was to organise a campaign in defence of the revolutionary ethos of Napuri attacked by Lambert for having political differences with the latter. Another important item was how to advance in the construction of the International.

Once the campaign was agreed on, a unanimous vote was taken to become the founding conference of the new International organisation. The founding theses and the statutes of the IWL-FI were voted. This was not simply the IB with another name, for Franceschi and this party, the workers MIR that had broken off with Lambert joined. Some time later Napuri joined together with half the Peruvian party that had broken off with Lambert.

In 1985, the Dominican party joined the IWL. This group did not come from Trotskyism but from a split with the church. In 1987, the group of Bill Hunter from England , not original from Morenism joined as well and a group of independent young Trotskyist from Paraguay spawning the Paraguayan PT, the biggest left wing party in that country.

In 1985, the manifesto of the IWL makes a call to build a FUR (United Revolutionary Front) as from a minimum revolutionary programme in order to confront the imperialist counterrevolutionary front, national bourgeoisies, the Church, Stalinism, Castroism, Sandinism and the trade union bureaucracies.

Main Political Campaigns Of The Iwl-Fi

The first one was for the victory of Argentina in the Falklands war with which we intervened in the anti-imperialist process that began in Latin America . The campaign for the non-payment of the foreign debt with which we converged with great Bolivian mobilisations that forced the Popular Front government to suspend the payments of the debt. There was an important campaign against the Esquipulas and Contadora, agreements launched by imperialism and supported by Castroism and Sandinism to put a brake against the revolutionary process in Centro America . In 1991 we carried out a campaign for the defeat of imperialism in the Gulf War.

The 190 Crisis

After the fall of the Argentine dictatorship (1982), the leadership of the IWL resolved to give priority to the work in that country where an objective and subjective possibility existed for the MAS to become a mass influence party. In the struggles of the mass movement and in the electoral participation, the MAS became the strongest party on the Argentine left. The party earned deep insertion in the main factories and in working class districts, headed lists of oppositions in trade unions, holds rallies with 20 or 30 000 attendants and a first Trotskyist representative gains a seat in the Argentine Parliament and there even was a rally in opposition to the government launched and led by the party attended by 100 000 people..

In 1987, in the midst of this process, the IWL-FI received a terrible blow :the death of it founder and main leader, Nahuel Moreno. His absence caused a qualitative weakening of our international leadership. The new leadership committed many mistakes responding incorrectly to the 89-90 events. The process was correctly defined as revolutionary, but the contradictions remained unseen and so the characterisations were unilateral. That is why the attitude that cropped up for the East and all the countries was self-proclaiming and a policy with opportunistic features of capitulation to the democratic reaction.

At the same time, in Argentina we fell into a national-Trotskyist deviation: the international leadership had been actually monopolised by the leadership of the strongest party, the Argentine, who started acting as a mother-party and did not respond correctly to the great challenges posed in the country.

All this caused the greatest crisis in our history and soon, this led to splits in the Argentine party and its shrinking back, the split in the Spanish party and the Colombian party leaving the International that has all but reached its destruction.

The Fifth World Congress Of The Ilw-Fi

The first steps to revert this process were taken as from the V Congress of the IWL-FI (July 1994). A favourable objective situation (Chiapas, the resistance of the Bosnian people, an uprising in Santiago del Estero - Argentina, an ascent of the struggles of the working class in Europe, the process of reorganisation in Brazil out of which stems the PSTU) combined with the subjective predisposition of the leaders to make every effort to bring the organisation out of its paralysis.

This congress produced a resolution to resume the campaign of Workers' Aid to Bosnia , to regularise the International Courier and to build an International Secretariat with leaders from different countries, top priority being the work in Brazil and Europe , to encourage a process of work on theory and policies and to rearm ourselves with a programme. All these steps tended towards the reconstruction of the IWL_FI which, in turn, was to lead the task of the reconstruction of the IC International.

Related to this strategic task, the congress takes the first step voting a liaison committee with Workers International (an organisation with branches in England , South Africa , Namibia and some Eastern European countries). The victorious campaign of Workers Aid to Bosnia, our participation in the revolutionary process in Mexico, in the construction of a workers internationalist revolutionary party in Ukraine, the merger of our party in Spain, the regularity of our international magazine in Spanish, English and Portuguese, the headway in the construction of the PSTU, the strengthening of our work in Europe, the fact that we worked out a proposal of a programme for the Liaison committee with WI, that we are getting ahead with our work on Cuba, Bosnia, South Africa, the discussion on new form of labour, on the states of European East,,, all this proves that we are fulfilling the resolutions of the latest world congress. And that the IWL-FI is advancing in its battle for the overcoming of the paralysis and is making the first steps to overcome the crisis that started in 1990.

Our Current Project

A close link with the working class and our permanent relation with the International was what has always allowed us to overcome the errors committed throughout our history. Apart from that, a feature of our trend has always been extreme flexibility as far as tactics are concerned and extreme rigidity on issues of principles.

This permanent relation with the international is proved by the fact that we have never abstained in relation to the Trotskyist movement. To the contrary, we have fought a strong battle to correct the policy of the Bolivian POR, the advance guard deviations of the French LCR, the guerrilla deviation that caused the death of so many Argentine Trotskyists. we wanted to avoid the destruction of those parties and leaders for they were important achievements of the world working class. This battle was not fruitless. We managed to rescue important cadres from these deviations and, in the heat of the combats and in the participation in class struggle we built our trend in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, USA, France, England, Poland, Belgium, Germany, Australia and the former USSR.

We built searching for the best form of establishing relations with the mass movement, working out our demands taking into consideration the degree of awareness in order to enhance mobilisation. But at the same time we never belittled our programme in in the slightest nor did we fear to confront the level of awareness when it was a question of defending principled policy. We confronted the Latin American pro-Castro advance guard in the campaign against the Contadora and today we do the same thing around our programme and our policy for Cuba , hinging round the political revolution against Castro bureaucracy. Our small groups in Europe confronted the pro-imperialist awareness of the European advance guard during the Falkland War respecting the Leninist principle of posing the defeat on one's own imperialism as priority number one. That is why we also maintain our policy for Bosnia because there is a principle of revolutionary Marxism that is opposed to any type of genocide and to stand by the oppressed nationality against any attack by the oppressing nationality.

That is why, in spite of all the errors committed, we are proud of our history. Obviously we do not pretend all the PSTU militants to approve of everything we did during 50 years. We come from different backgrounds and more likely than not, we have different interpretations of many events. Certainly there will also be differences in some theoretic definitions- and these also exist within the IWL-FI - for events have happened that changed the face of the earth and are causing great debates in the world Marxism. Apart from that, we do not want an International where there is unanimity for everything. We want a centralised organisation as far as the entral issues of programme are concerned, but it must be a living thing, with discussion aspects of theory and o policies that will allow a constant headway.

What we do want is to reach an agreement with the militants of the PSTU, an agreement revolving round the great tasks posed form now on. Our project is based, first of all, on the fact that statement made by Trotsky; "The crisis of mankind is the crisis of its revolutionary leadership", is now dramatically valid. It is the lack of a world revolutionary leadership what allows imperialism - in spite of its chronic crisis and great struggles of resistance - to continue encroaching upon the living conditions of the toiling masses. For example, it is the absence of that leadership what explains the headway of capitalist restoration in the East and creates the danger that the revolutionary actions of the Cuban masses against the Castro bureaucracy may be capitalised by the pro-imperialist bourgeoisie to accelerate the process of restoration already initiated by Fidel.

In the second place, we believe that the process of crumbing down of Stalinism - in spite of all its contradiction - is a revolutionary event. The downfall of the Stalinist apparatus caused tow opposite facts. On the one hand, the traditional leaderships swerve right and became increasingly integrated into the bourgeois regime. On the other hand, this originated splits - so far only minorities - towards the left in search of a new revolutionary organisation. This also happens inside Trotskyism where the most traditional and the strongest trends (USec and Lambertism) make headway in their integration into the counterrevolutionary apparatuses causing sectors wishing to challenge such capitulation to split away.

The construction of the PSTU is the fruit of this process of reorganisation caused by the fall of Stalinism. And so it the construction of the POI in Ukraine , the merger in Spain , the Liaison Committee with the WI and many others. It is this process of reorganisation what also explains the fact that the IWL, in spite of all our crisis, has now established a greater number of contacts with leaders and organisations than we have ever had before. All that leads us to declare that the fall of Stalinism opens better opportunities for the rebuilding of the IV International. This does not mean that it will be an easy task, just as the building of the PSTU is not.

Our project is to advance in the relations with the different leaders and organisation taking the discussion on the programme and the joint activity in class struggle as a starting point. In this way, we shall see whether there is sufficient agreement on points of principles, of programme and of methods in order to build an international organisation that can be superior to the IWL-FI and so advance in the reconstruction of the IV International. We do not pretend to create a new organisation with Trotskyists alone not even with all those who call themselves Trotskyists but also with those with - regardless their origin - we can have a revolutionary agreement.

We have taken up the task of driving for the reconstruction of the IV International. We have a history and accumulated experience, a programme and an embryo of a revolutionary international organisation, the IWL-FI. We place all this at the disposal of the toiling masses to advance towards the reconstruction of the IV International. To gains strength in the fulfilment of this difficult and historic task, we call on the militants of the IWL-FI and all those who agree to our project, to build up this revolutionary embryo.