ClASS STRUGGLE # 64  NOVEMBER 05 –JANUARY 06

Contents

Air New Zealand jobs under attack

Supersize my Pay and my Party

Workers Charter: a new, new Labour Party?

Chavez’ Socialism’ not good enough?

Defeat Bush, Howard & Clark's War of Terror

French Youth make Paris Baghdad

Workers can stop the War for Big Oil

Iraq, US and Venezuela’s Oil Workers Unite

A General Strike to Bring Down Howard

Deputy Sheriff Howard No 2 Terrorist

Bolivian Revolution at the Crossroads

 

The Alliance came out with some radical ideas about worker occupations and workers control in response to the threat of job losses at Air NZ. CWG acknowledged these good ideas and took them further

 

In an article on Aotearoa Indymedia on 27 October titled "Creative destruction" by Air New Zealand’ Len Richards of the Alliance wrote:

“The announcement by Air New Zealand of the sacking of a highly skilled workforce is a massive disinvestment in New Zealand. If the government will not act, the workers can. They should take a leaf out of the Argentinean workers' book and occupy the maintenance hangers to keep them going.

Six hundred workers are to be thrown onto the economic scrapheap by Air New Zealand. The company, which is 82 per cent government-owned, has decided to transfer the heavy maintenance of its aircraft off-shore to Europe and Asia. This is expected to save $100 million over the next five years (ie $20 million a year on average). This is a company that made $250 million profit this year and expects to make $100 million next year. The redundancy costs will be $13 million.

Air New Zealand claims it cannot find enough work for all its maintenance engineers. Deputy Prime Minister, Michael Cullen, washed his hands of the announcement, saying that it is "company business". This is the government welcomed by the Council of Trade Unions as having a "commitment to an investment approach to economic and social development". The announcement by Air New Zealand of the sacking of a highly skilled workforce is a massive disinvestment in New Zealand. It is reminiscent of the closure of the railway workshops in the early 1990s which destroyed a similarly skilled workforce and dismantled another significant section of this country's industrial infrastructure. The CTU must demand that the government intervenes to prevent this act of economic vandalism. . .

. . .The newly elected Labour-led coalition government should act urgently and "creatively". It must step in to take direct control of Air New Zealand. These jobs can be saved if the government has the will to do so. If the government will not act, the workers can. They should take a leaf out of the Argentinean workers' book and occupy the maintenance hangers to keep them going.

The loss of these engineering jobs is completely unnecessary. It is not about the engineering operation losing money. It is all about return on capital. It is about extracting more profit to ready Air New Zealand for another round of privatisation. The company chairman John Palmer is blatantly promoting a sell-down of the government's shares. The government would do better to take-over the whole company. It could be run as a peoples' co-operative under the control of the workers who, after all, know better than anyone how to operate the enterprise most efficiently.”

 

CWG replies:

“Good point about the management preparing Air NZ for reprivatisation. And the NZ economy as 'third world' being driven down the drain by profit. This shows a grasp of the seriousness of NZ’s decline in the world and the need for a strong socialist stand to lead the way forward. Air NZs predicament is classic and opens the way for the nationalising of assets and trading with other third world countries as the only way to combat monopoly capitalism.

The demand right now should be to take up the workers criticisms of failed management and put the company under workers control. Opening the books to the EPMU heads won't prove anything other than cost cutting is necessary to return a profit. Profit in a state owned company should be rejected as the bottom line. The bottom line should be the public interest in a national asset build out of the labour of generations of kiwi workers.

So the demand should be to put the company under workers control and management to protect the accumulated wealth of workers as well the 'public interest'. Why should the 600 workers under threat of sacking put up with a state owned corp run by private sector cost cutters who destroy the skill base of the working class while they strut around in Zambezi gear?

The rising costs of fuel and airports are inevitable while we are subjected to monopoly capital. Nationalisation under workers control (with no compensation especially after all those massive state subsidies!) is the answer. The airports should all be renationalised. The big oil company assets in NZ should be nationalised and oil sourced from Venezuela in a swap for food and agricultural technology.

While it's necessary to demand that Cullen puts up a fight to keep these jobs, we know that he won't even consider it unless put under huge pressure from workers. The 82% state shareholding is just a subsidy to the private sector. He won't want to see the company profits fall and more subsidies being paid out when he wants to keep business on side.”

 

0n how to fight for occupations and workers’ control we added:

“It’s good that the Alliance has raised the example of the occupations in Argentina. Kirchner's just been re-elected. He is a left Peronist with official union support not too dissimilar to Labour in NZ. But neither has any interest to take-over companies and run them as workers' cooperatives. Cullen has said he will not subsidise Air NZ jobs. They HAVE to keep onside with global monopoly capital.

            That's why the solution has to be posed right from the start as a workers' solution that workers' can only do INDEPENDENTLY of the bosses' state. So where to start at Air NZ?

The current Blairite partnership approach goes through the charade of the union officials doing their own audit for two months to see what cuts they can make the workers accept to keep some of their jobs. The EPMU logo is some for all, all for some. Meanwhile workers will be left out of the picture, worrying, or looking for other jobs.

This is the same blackmail that the US unions are using right now to force autoworkers to sacrifice their health insurance in the vain hope they can keep their jobs. As long as the union officials share the same view that companies must be profitable at all costs, the workers are the losers. see http://www.rankandfilers.blogspot.com/

The rank and file engineers need to organise now and take the dispute out of the hands of the EPMU officials. They need to reject the bottom line of profit, and the payment of a dividend to the state that goes straight into the consolidated fund to run the capitalist system. Anyway as an SOE Air NZ is doomed as a national carrier in this global environment and will be gobbled up by Qantas or Singapore sooner or later.

Instead the rank and file should put up a new bottom line - the workers' need for safe, reliable air transport that can survive the oil shocks (get the oil from Venezuela!) and the race to the bottom of cutthroat (ours!) international airline competition. The engineers would have a say in whether it’s good for the peoples' airline to buy carbon fibre planes at $170 million a pop.

That's why Venezuela is a better map than Argentina of the socialist road. The factory occupations there are taking place as part of a society wide revolution where workers are pushing Chavez further and further towards outright expropriation. Oil, paper, gas, steel, and land is being nationalised and a huge fight is going on to turn co-management into real workers' control. The result is that there is a better chance that when Chavez finally baulks, or if the US invades, the workers will be able to defend and complete their socialist revolution.

The great thing is that Venezuela is not a blueprint but an ongoing experiment, and it exists in the flesh and is not fated in advance to be either a pie in the sky reformist utopia, or a discredited Cuban style Stalinist regime. It is an open book where the workers are doing the reading and writing.

A page or two would go down well at Air NZ right now. A campaign to renationalise Air NZ under workers control could be generalised to extend to Telecom, Toll rail, CHH, BNZ . . .

 

Matt McCarten’ s Unite Workers Union has got off to a good start in building a union base for a new workers party. This project took a leap ahead with its Supersize my Pay campaign.

Unites campaign to recruit young casualised fast-food workers has met with some success. Recruiting, organising and introducing active campaigns like the Supersize My Pay campaign is a good start.

Attacking youth rates is way overdue.  But the call for a minimum wage of $12 an hour is too small. Even the NZCTU leadership can endorse these demands. They do not reflect the real needs of workers for higher wages, and are a compromise with the labour bureaucracy of the CTU to embarrass the Labour led government.

This strategy betrays the left bureaucrat’s credo that a revived labour movement can push the Labour Party to the left. This is has been the politics of Matt McCarten since his early days as a union organiser and Labour Party insider. It remained his objective as a leader of the Alliance from 1980 to 2003. These demands are not strong enough to expose the clapped out labour bureaucrats or the Labour government who pay give lip service and stall for money, but to build a base in the unions for the new reformist workers party that will emerge from the Workers’ Charter before the next election.

            The irony is that even though McCarten’s strategy is a rightward break from the Alliance the rump of the Alliance voted for the Workers Charter at its annual conference after an address from John Minto. Does this mean that the Alliance now has two programs, or that its vote was indicative of a cooperative attitude to WC or what? It seems that the rump of the Alliance now recognises that McCarten has stolen a march on them so there is a sheepish shuffle back to acknowledging the only viable Green Left kiwi franchise in town.

 

 

Workers Charter had its founding conference in October. CWG members went along to offer some advice. Here is a report of how we saw it.

We stand by our critique of the Workers Charter (printed in Class Struggle 62) and its parent movement the World Social Forum (critiqued in Class Struggle 59).  We wish to continue to engage in critical support of the Workers Charter (WC).  Communist Workers Group does not wish to build another parliamentary-type of workers party and will criticise unreservedly any movement the WC makes in that direction.  We are keen to support the building of a revolutionary party, unfortunately the origins of the WC indicate that it will mislead workers. 

Members of Communist Workers Group decided to test the un-democratic (Stalinist) methods of Workers Charter, which had said they were going to exclude us (and ACA) from the conference (quote the post on NZ activism?).  We considered it important to challenge the internet noise of SWO / Unity, on NZ activism, in reality.  (The Socialist Workers Organisation has renamed itself “Unity”, it was previously the Communist Party of New Zealand – a Stalinist group). Unity members were the gatekeepers on the front desk and did interview us on how critical we were going to be, to which we wished to maintain our rights to speak critically, while giving a positive direction for the workers movement. This could have gone either way, however, the appearance of democracy was maintained. 

The meeting rules were set out from the start, we had to leave if we thought the Charter was useless.  This does not allow for overall discussion of the weaknesses of the Charter. Unfortunately the Charter may be worse than useless, it may suck working people into a dead end road, which does not challenge capitalism.  It is urgent to pose the question of how to avoid this Charter becoming a bureaucratic parliamentary vehicle for the likes of Matt McCarten.

The speakers to introduce the Charter were a SWO leader followed by Matt McCarten.  It wasn’t what was said but what wasn’t, that is notable: I failed to get a clear understanding of what the purpose of the Charter was from either speaker, and neither made distinct their own politics from that of the charter, or declared their own intentions. No history of the Charter, or connection with the World Social Forum was declared.

It was a milestone for the writer to be allowed into a Unity dominated meeting, and to speak.  Our opportunity for contribution was time limited. The writer put about 5 amendments or additions within 2 minutes speaking time.  This limited my ability to argue for the amendments and additions that were put to the charter itself. 

Many others raised their criticisms and suggested improvement to the charter –which created a squeeze on time, with numbers of amendments and additions put.  Many of these were put to vote and successfully added, for the next rounds of discussion.  And have improved this minimal program of rights.  Some amendments were left as contentious issues for further discussion.  I will leave much of the detail of the Charter and its ongoing discussion for Workers Charter to run with, and discus a couple of additions we put to the conference. 

We asked for the addition of the word capitalism to describe current social system.  This charter was so minimal in its approach that it did not even include the word capitalism or describe capitalists as the ruling class.  While the WC is appealing to workers, the level of class consciousness in its program is minimal.  To fight for workers rights is to take on the capitalist system, unless the charter is clear about that, then it is likely to end up like the current Labour Party, negotiating with and ruling on behalf of the capitalist class. 

This sort of vagueness about class leads to a Labour Party outright attacking workers, to maintain profits for the capitalist.  The NZ Labour Party clearly did that in 1984 – 1990 when it cut services to workers (health, social welfare, education) and sold socially owned assets or restructured them into capitalist ‘for profit’ SOEs (State Owned Enterprises).  A very current example of this was discussed at the conference. Air New Zealand has just announced its attack on workers of the Engineering services by its proposed redundancies and closing of a whole branch of service.  Air NZ is part owned by the state.  We argued that the WC needed include nationalising assets (even the Alliance Party program already includes this in their program). To re-nationalise Air NZ fully could then be used in order to maintain those jobs.  Pressure needs to be applied to the current Labour Government by picket line defence of the engineering facilities.  If this Labour government allows Air NZ engineers to be sold down the road, that is another betrayal of workers interests.  Communist Workers Group is for the expropriation without compensation of Air New Zealand, to be run under workers control.  It would take a working class pickets and engineering workers occupation of the engineering facilities to achieve this. 

Interestingly ‘Unity’ / Socialist Workers voted against an addition we put up of “for socialist revolution”.  To us this indicates they continue a Stalinist tradition of running with minimal programs and mass parties, while hiding their “revolutionary” beliefs until the ‘critical’ moment.  Even the pre-Blairite British Labour Party had a clause for “socialism” (also known as clause 4).  So this WC is in great danger of becoming just another parliamentary party, sucking workers into sell-outs and a dead-end. 

Communist Workers Group fully support building a party on a rank & file trade union basis.  We were successful arguing for rank & file run, democratic fighting unions, to be included as part of the charter.  Only a strong rank & file driven union can avoid being sold out by bureaucratic deals between misleading paid officials and the employer or government.  Those sort of sell outs are rife, for example where union officials just argue about how many redundancies, and how much redundancy pay.  Officials can give false hope of stopping redundancies, when they are up against the capitalist system.  

Organising workers into picket lines and strike committees is the localised strength of the workers movement.  The extent that Workers Charter members can build a fight back around existing struggles, can organise workers in on-the-ground fight backs, will be the real test.  It is heartening to hear that WC members have supported pickets of striking workers.  However it is also frightening that the WC steering committee (leadership) could have left out basic trade union rights from its Charter.  http://www.workerscharter.org.nz/

Communist Workers Group looks forward to working with any activist or group committed to the overthrow of capitalism.  And we will criticise any movement that is vague about that!

 

In a discussion on  Aotearoa Indymedia

http://indymedia.org.nz/newswire/display/39130/index.php  Unity Reader defended the SW’s ‘turn to social democracy’ and the expulsion of the CWG from the Alliance in 1989 and its exclusion from Workers Charter.  A member of CWG replied:

“Someone called Unity Reader says that the SWO is justified in taking a turn to social democracy because socialist revolution is not on the agenda in NZ right now.

. . .There has never been a revolutionary situation in NZ in the nearly two centuries of its capitalist existence. And that is because the working class has never been independent of parliament or the bourgeoisie. The first step out of a non-revolutionary situation is to assert the class independence of workers from the bosses!

What Unity Reader fails to understand is that there is a difference between united fronts and revolutionary programs. In non-revolutionary times workers should join forces in united fronts that advance their interests as a class, but not by suspending their revolutionary program and making a 'turn' to social democracy - the bosses program! Revolutionaries are obbliged to fight inside united fronts to prove that it is their program that will advance the interests of workers.

What Workers Charter is a reduction of the political program of the working class to a minimal program that does not even MENTION socialism. If this was just a loose network to organise in the unions and fight in united fronts, this would not be so bad. But WC presents itself as the embryo of a new mass workers party, on a social democratic program of the bosses

This takes us to Unity Reader’s 'study' of the history of the New Labour Party. The CWG entered the NLP because it its leaders claimed to be forming a new workers party. We were obliged as revolutionaries to fight for a revolutionary workers party, not meekly sit around while Anderton and McCarten betrayed the workers who had broken with Labour and took the NLP back into parliament as part of a middle class' Alliance, which then propped up another Labour Government.

Workers Charter is headed down the same road, but this time it’s not a tragedy; it’s a farce. Its a farce because it has already been rejected by a large number of militants as too little, too late, based on manifestly dead-end reformist politics, and at a time when its own international allies, the militant workers of Latin America, Asia etc are moving rapidly towards socialist politics under a reborn 'socialism of the 21st century' championed by Chavez in the spirit of Che, Castro etc.

When the militant masses are moving in the direction of socialism, WC moves backward. This is not the 'backwardness' given by NZ's particular place in the world, because in itself that's deceptive and open to rapid changes, but the backward political perspective of those who have given up on socialist revolution in order to build another parliamentary party.

Defeat Bush, Howard & Clark's War Of Terror 

 

Support the Dec 1 US Nationwide Strike against Poverty, Racism and War!

NZ out of Afghanistan! Stop ANZ war profiteering! International Day of Solidarity with Venezuela, December 2! Unite Workers Against the War Of Terror!

 

Bosses' posse

The US imperialist sheriff and his Deputy, John Howard, closely followed by the Deputy’s Dog, Helen Clark, are riding roughshod over the oppressed of this world. They are doing this because US imperialism and its weaker allies such as Australia, Britain and Italy, and its ‘good friends’ like NZ , must grab what is left of the world’s resources to overcome the crisis of monopoly capitalism caused by falling profits.

The cynical wars for ‘democracy’ and the ‘cancelled’ debt in Africa and Iraq are a cover for monopoly capitals plans to re-colonise the world.

In the Pacific region the ‘peacekeeping’ role of Australia and NZ is a front for monopoly capitalism’s plunder of the Pacific’s economic resource base and reserve of migrant labour.

When this fails and resistance rises up against the WOT, domestic anti-terror laws are used to criminalize and jail political opponents of the WOT.

To defeat the WOT it is necessary for workers to mobilize internationally against the roots of the WOT, the crisis-ridden global capitalist economy that threatens to destroy humanity and nature.

 

War Of Terror

Bush and his neo-cons planned the WOT well before 9/11 to occupy Afghanistan and get a strangle hold on the Central Asian oilfields. Then they lied about WMD to invade Iraq to gain control of Iraqi oil from China, Russia and the EU, and bust the OPEC cartel.

The new Iraqi Constitution guarantees Big Oil like Exxon-Mobil, Shell etc around 80% control of Iraqi oil. Big Oil is backed up by the IMF, WB and the JP Morgan bank consortium (which includes ANZ ) to ‘reconstruct’ Iraq along the lines of a free market where monopoly corporates like Halliburton, Bechtel etc., can rip off the tiny share of oil wealth left in the hands of Iraqis.

The scandal of ‘kickbacks’ paid to Saddam Hussein during the UN imposed ‘oil for food’ scheme in the 1990s is a smokescreen designed to blame companies like Fonterra which supplied vital imports during the embargo which killed a million Iraqis, and to cover up the ruthless imperialist multibillion dollar plunder of Iraq planned in the 1990s and now being put in place.

The imperialist posse is using the WOT to invade, terrorise and recolonise oil rich and mineral rich countries. Not just pre-emptive wars against Afghanistan, Haiti and Iraq, but the threat of preventative war against Cuba, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe.

The US justifies this mounting genocide, terror and torture as a war for ‘democracy’ against Islamic ‘fundamentalism’, ‘drug cartels’ or ‘rogue states’ for which they themselves are responsible.

From the Taliban and Saddam Hussein to Castro, Chavez and Aristide these regimes are the product of US imperialist policies that created the oppressive conditions out of which they emerged as allies or opponents.

            The WOT has got nothing to do with ‘democracy’ and everything to do with eliminating ‘rogue’ nationalist regimes and imposing imperialism’s dictatorship under the cover of ‘democracy’. Thus the recent Iraqi Constitution was dictated by the US to guarantee continued control of Iraq oil by Big Oil and Big Banks.

 

Anti-terror torture laws

Imperialism and its allies suppress rising opposition at home with draconian anti-terror laws that allow the arrest, incarceration and torture of ‘suspects’ without legal rights.

Blair used the London bombings to immediately suspend basic civil rights and authorised a ‘shoot to kill’ policy the led to the killing of the Brazilian migrant worker John Charles de Menezes.

Bush’s FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Authority) was empowered to suspend civil rights in the emergency of the aftermath of Katrina. Workers can be drafted to work gangs and shot for ‘looting’ food and water for their survival while the corporates move in to profiteer from the reconstruction of New Orleans just like they do in Iraq!

Emboldened by Bush, Howard has used the hysteria following recent bombings in Indonesia to deport a visiting US non-violent protest advocate, and to rush through anti-terror laws that include suspension of habeas corpus and ‘shoot-to-kill’.

NZ rapidly passed anti-terror laws legislation modeled on US and UK laws to earn its share of the spoils that fall off the imperialists table. In the Ahmed Zaoui case it used ‘intelligence’ passed on by the French state that fought a bloody colonial war against Algeria to lock up Zaoui as a suspect terrorist. NZ remains an integral part of ‘Echelon’ the US imperialist spy network that monitors internet communications.

 

Attack on Labor

At the same time the imperialists and their allies impose new labour laws to smash the unions and defeat organised labour as it begins to mobilize against the WOT.

Bush found bipartisan allies in the AFL-CIO to block the Million Worker March against the war in Iraq during the last Presidential election campaign. US corporates are outsourcing most of their production and for twenty years have used bankruptcy laws to close plants, cut jobs, wages and conditions of their remaining US workers in steel, airline and auto industries.

After abandoning the poor people of New Orleans, Bush suspended labour and health and safety laws to rebuild New Orleans with poor, migrant workers. New Orleans his is a metaphor for US imperialism’s attacks on its own workers rights, wages and social security. The vast majority of US workers are not covered by any decent public health or pension entitlements while CEOs payouts are in the millions of dollars.

Howard’s workplace ‘reforms’ are designed to smash the unions and put workers on individual contracts so they have no power to prevent the complete erosion of their past gains like overtime and holiday pay. In this way Howard hopes to follow NZ’s lead in the 1990s in cutting labour costs and boosting the profits of monopoly capital.

Clark’s new Labour led government has moved right in agreements with NZ First and United Future. NZ First will try to shut down the border to migrant workers and refugees.

 

Fight the WOT as a class war!

The WOT is a continuation of imperialist neo-colonial politics which is itself the symptom of the global economic crisis. To restore profits, imperialism must cut costs.

This is what is behind the ‘drive to the bottom’ – the sourcing of the cheapest supplies of raw materials and labour world wide by monopoly banks, energy corporations and manufacturers. The effect is to concentrate and centralise production and destroy the forces of production. Nature is depleted and exhausted and the surplus population is killed off by endemic disease, overwork or genocide.

There is nothing ‘progressive’ about imperialist globalisation and free trade or investment. In China today, the restoration of capitalism has created a huge multi-million reserve army of cheap labor to boost the profits of monopoly capital. Despite the problems of the former state economy the masses’ needs were better served than by the capitalist world market.

The only way to defeat imperialist destruction of humanity is to eliminate its roots in the capitalist system and replace it with a socialist planned society. Fighting back against the imperialist military machine, and mutinies within imperialist armies, can inflict defeats but they cannot win a decisive victory.

The world proletariat must fight a class war to politicise the masses, win over the rank and file of the imperialist armies, and occupy and control vital economic resources. The vital steps towards this socialist revolution are workers’ and peasants’ militias, a popular constituent assembly and workers ownership and control of production, distribution and exchange.

 

Victory to Iraq and Venezuela!

Leading the fight back today is the armed resistance and rebuilt unions of Iraq, and the workers movement of Venezuela. Here the defence of national self-determination can only be realised by the mobilisation of the workers to found their own state and plan for a socialist economy.

 

Victory to Iraq!

For a Popular Constituent Assembly!

US reparations for reconstruction!

Big Oil, Big Banks Out!

Bush Out!

For workers control of the reconstruction of New Orleans!

US Hands Off Venezuela!

No Venezuelan Oil for the WOT!

End the US blockade of Cuba!

Destroy Guantanamo!

US and Latin American troops out of Haiti! Reinstate Aristide!

Bring down the Howard Government!

No WOT laws!

No workplace 'reform'!

NZ Troops out of Afghanistan!

Occupy and Nationalise Air NZ under workers’ control!

No to FTAs with Chile, China and the US! Socialise Big Oil, Big Banks and MNCs!

For Workers’ and Peasants’ Governments!

For a United States of Socialist Republics of the Pacific!

 

Build and International Workers opposition to the WOT!

International solidarity with the December 1st US Nationwide Strike against Poverty, Racism and War!

International Day of Solidarity with Venezuela, December 2nd!

 

WAWOT (Workers Against the War on Terror) 027 2800080

see also: http://redrave.blogspot.com/2005/11/defeat-bush-howard-clarks-war-of.html

http://redrave.blogspot.com/2005/11/nz-troops-out-of-afghanistan-now.html

 

French Youth Make Paris Baghdad!

This article is a freely translated and adapted summary of parts of a longer article by the Internationalist Trotskyist Fraction (Fourth International).

We are grateful for the use of this material for which the responsibility of any errors of translation and interpretation is ours.

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FRANCE

Anti-Capitalist and Anti-Imperialist Youth Revolt opens new stage of struggle in Europe

 

For a General strike to defeat to the government of Chirac-Villepin- Sarkozy and to impose the demands of young workers, railworkers and all workers in struggle! Long live the heroic revolt of young workers and their slogan "Every night we make Paris a Baghdad"!

 

For more than three weeks in October, cars, police stations, schools, and factories burned every night in the working class dormitories, called "Cités" of greater Paris and in more than 300 cities all over France. The spark that set alight the fire was the fatal electrocution of two young people of 17 and 15 years when they hid from pursuing police inside a high-tension transformer in Clichy-sous-Bois (department of Seine-Saint Denis, district 93), Paris.          On Friday 28 October, a revolt of young workers began all over district 93. On the Sunday the CRS (police anti-riot) tear-gassed women and children in a mosque, and the Interior Minister Sarkozy went on TV and promised to ‘clean up the rubbish’ and the ‘scum’ ("racaille", or rascals) of the Cités. This reactionary response of the Government poured gasoline on the fire so that the revolt spread all over France.

This tremendous rebellion of young working people all over France was both anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist. To the shout of "This is like Iraq", and "Every night we make a Baghdad", youth took as their own fight the heroic resistance of the Iraqi masses against the imperialistic occupation. It was also an anticapitalist revolt of youth for jobs that was inseparable from the resurgence of struggles of French, Belgium and Spanish working classes.

The rebellion was not Islamic. Islamic students did not join their rioting friends even when living in the same neighbourhood. Islamic Mullahs were brought in by the government to calm things down. The result was the burning of the main Mosque in Lyon. Nor is it the rebellion of the ‘marginalised’ or ‘poor’ that can be socially engineered out of existence. Capitalism does not exclude or create poor people, except as a consequence of exploiting and oppressing workers, employed or unemployed. You cannot eliminate poverty without eliminating capitalism; or for starters Sarkosy!

The youth revolt opens a new stage in the fight back of European workers against the boss’s reactionary attacks

It is clear that the rioting youth are one of the most oppressed sections of the French working class - the reserve army of labour made up principally of migrant worker or their descendants. It is no accident that the youth revolt comes at the same time as other major working class struggles are building up in Europe. In France, the transport workers of Marseilles went on strike for 46 days. They have been joined by sailors of the Merchant Marine (SNCM), electricity workers of the EDF , and many other industrial struggles.

On November 21 a national strike of railworkers against privatization and for a wage increase began. This national strike could have become indefinite, but after Chirac promised not to privatise rail the workers voted not to continue the strike on the 24th. In Belgium, also in October the working class made two enormous active general strikes, while in Spain strong struggles are developing in particular that of the workers of SEAT.

All of these struggles threaten to break the tenuous grip that the ruling class has on Europe thanks to the treacherous reformists, Stalinists and fake Trotskyists who so far have rallied workers to the utopia of a ‘social Europe’.

 

Down with the labour bureaucracies, servants of the European imperialistic bourgeoisies!

Those that give holiday speeches about the "Europe of the workers" and against the "Europe of Capital", today, when the rebellion of the young workers threatens to join forces with the striking Belgian working class and raises the spectre of a united European workers movement, try to isolate the youth and douse its rebellious spark for fear that it might spread into a prairie fire that can destroy the Europe of Capitalist Imperialism!

But even as they desperately try to hold back independent workers struggles by defending capitalist ‘democracy’ against ‘fascism’, the democratic imperialists, Chirac, Sarkosy, Villepin etc have little faith in the ability of the reformists to hold back the rising tide of labour militancy. A year after calling on workers to vote for Chirac as the ‘democratic’ alternative to ‘fascist’ Le Pen, and months from the ‘victory’ of a ‘No’ vote against the ‘neo-liberal’ Europe, the Socialist Party, Communist Party, Workers Fight (LO) and the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) etc now see that Chirac and Sarkozy acting like fascist Le Pen. In desperation the SP and CP are using the fake Trotskyists LO and LCR to lend a spurious ‘revolutionary’ credibility to ‘restoring order’ and maintaining ‘social peace’ to keep alive their fading utopia of a 'social Europe'!

 

For a continental workers congress, of rank and file mandated delegates

But this fight has only just begun. The street fighting of rebellious youth has been suppressed for now. But it has already revealed 'emperor' Chirac to be naked. Not only him, but the reformists are naked too. What drove the youth to spontaneously revolt, the terrorism of the French police state, has but one cause – the crisis of French and European imperialism. This cause will not go away and must make the bosses state use more force to suppress and smash the emerging workers struggles.

It is no accident that the state of ermergency came into force on 21 November the same day that the national rail strike began. It has been extended for three months. The French imperialistic bourgeoisie is preparing to use state force to smash the growing anger of the working class which threatens to come together in a single torrent. If the treachery of the reformist leaders manages to isolate the heroic fighters of the working youth of France from the other struggles of workers, and brings about its defeat, the result will be a new slavery and "apartheid" against youth in the reserve army of labour.

The imperialistic bourgeoisies in the US and in Europe are driven to go on the offensive against their own workers. They can use the world wide reserve army to drive down wages and conditions at home.

The restoration of capitalism in China has created a vast pool of cheap labour of many millions of workers. In the former worker states of Eastern Europe, new "assembly plants" have been build to take advantage of the cheap labour. Smashing Afghanistan and occupying Iraq strengthens imperialism’s hold over the middle East and Central Asia where in India and Pakistan there are huge reserves of enslaved manual labor. European Imperialism has within a few kilometers of its coasts a massive labour reserve of hundreds of million workers in black Africa and the Magreb - many from which, risk their skins on the fences of Ceuta and Melilla trying to enter Europe to find work.

But even with this huge world-wide reserve of labour at its disposal, the European imperialist bourgeoisies must go on offensive to take back the most important gains won by their own workers. The crisis of the world economy has revived the rivalry between the US and the EU. To compete with the US, the EU must cut its labour costs also. The revolt of French working youth, to the shout of "Every night we make of Paris a Baghdad", it is a magnificent answer to these attacks, and joining forces with the railworkers strike, the two Belgian general strikes, the struggles of Spanish and German workers, makes it clear that the united fight of all European workers based on a Transitional Program must be the next step.

 

    * Work for All! A sliding scale of working hours without loss of pay, equal pay for equal work, must be raised against the imperialistic regimes and governments.

    * A great united action of workers over the continent, in support of the heroic resistance of the Iraqi masses and for the military defeat of the Anglo-Yankee troops! For the immediate withdrawal of NATO from Afghanistan!

    * For the right to national self-determination of the oppressed peoples of Europe - Ireland, the Basque Country, Kosovo, Chechnya! For the right to self-determination of the colonies and semi-colonies of Europe in Africa and the Pacific!

    * Smash the labour bureaucracy and its social imperialist parties that led to the betrayal of the former workers states, acting as bourgeois agents of the imperialists to make these countries capitalist semi-colonies!

    * For the creation of a new world party of socialism to lead the fight for social revolution in Europe, and the recovery of the former workers states, and a Socialist United States of Europe, from Portugal to the Russian steppes!

 

 

Workers can stop Big Oil’s War for Oil! 

Recent evident proves beyond doubt that oil was the prime motive for the invasion of Iraq. Big Oil has gone on to make record profits. We argue that oil workers in Iraq, and in oil producing countries like Venezuela, and workers in the imperialist countries like the US, can unite to close this war and occupation down.

                       

Greg Palast recently reported on the evidence that the invasion of Iraq had been long planned to seize control of the oil resources. The only issue was privatize or not.

 

“. . .Two years ago today - when President George Bush announced US, British and Allied forces would begin to bomb Baghdad - protesters claimed the US had a secret plan for Iraq's oil once Saddam had been conquered.

In fact there were two conflicting plans, setting off a hidden policy war between neo-conservatives at the Pentagon, on one side, versus a combination of "Big Oil" executives and US State Department "pragmatists".

            "Big Oil" appears to have won. The latest plan, obtained by Newsnight from the US State Department was, we learned, drafted with the help of American oil industry consultants.

Insiders told Newsnight that planning began "within weeks" of Bush's first taking office in 2001, long before the September 11th attack on the US.

            We saw an increase in the bombing of oil facilities and pipelines [in Iraq] built on the premise that privatisation is coming Mr Falah Aljibury An Iraqi-born oil industry consultant, Falah Aljibury, says he took part in the secret meetings in California, Washington and the Middle East. He described a State Department plan for a forced coup d'etat.

Mr Aljibury himself told Newsnight that he interviewed potential successors to Saddam Hussein on behalf of the Bush administration.

 

Secret sell-off plan

The industry-favoured plan was pushed aside by a secret plan, drafted just before the invasion in 2003, which called for the sell-off of all of Iraq's oil fields. The new plan was crafted by neo-conservatives intent on using Iraq's oil to destroy the Opec cartel through massive increases in production above Opec quotas.

The sell-off was given the green light in a secret meeting in London headed by Fadhil Chalabi shortly after the US entered Baghdad, according to Robert Ebel.

Mr Ebel, a former Energy and CIA oil analyst, now a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told Newsnight he flew to the London meeting at the request of the State Department.

Mr Aljibury, once Ronald Reagan's "back-channel" to Saddam, claims that plans to sell off Iraq's oil, pushed by the US-installed Governing Council in 2003, helped instigate the insurgency and attacks on US and British occupying forces.

"We saw an increase in the bombing of oil facilities, pipelines, built on the premise that privatisation is coming."

 

Privatisation blocked by industry

Philip Carroll, the former CEO of Shell Oil USA who took control of Iraq's oil production for the US Government a month after the invasion, stalled the sell-off scheme.

Mr Carroll told us he made it clear to Paul Bremer, the US occupation chief who arrived in Iraq in May 2003, that: "There was to be no privatisation of Iraqi oil resources or facilities while I was involved."

Ariel Cohen, of the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation, told Newsnight that an opportunity had been missed to privatise Iraq's oil fields.

He advocated the plan as a means to help the US defeat Opec, and said America should have gone ahead with what he called a "no-brainer" decision.

Mr Carroll hit back, telling Newsnight, "I would agree with that statement. To privatize would be a no-brainer. It would only be thought about by someone with no brain."

New plans, obtained from the State Department by Newsnight and Harper's Magazine under the US Freedom of Information Act, called for creation of a state-owned oil company favoured by the US oil industry. It was completed in January 2004 under the guidance of Amy Jaffe of the James Baker Institute in Texas. . .”

 

View segments of Iraq oil plans at www.GregPalast.com

 

This plan worked. Not only are Iraq’s oil fields now controlled by Big Oil but oil profits have never been higher The ‘results are in’ according to Evelyn J Pringle:

“By the end of 2004, the big three American oil companies, ChevronTexaco, ExxonMobile, and ConocoPhillips, realized profits of $33.6 billion during Bush's first three years in office.

. . .On October 27, 2005, Reuter's reported that Exxon Mobil posted a quarterly profit of $9.9 billion, "the largest in U.S. corporate history, as it raked in a bonanza from soaring oil and gas prices." Exxon's record earnings topped the $9 billion net profit previously reported by Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Reuters said.

Exxon reported third-quarter net income up 75 percent from the year-ago period. "It was among the biggest quarterly profits of any company in history, and amounted to a per-minute profit of $74,879.23 during the quarter," according to the October 28, 2005 Wall Street Journal.

"Shell, the third largest oil company by market value behind Exxon and Britain's BP PLC, said its third-quarter net income rose 68 percent to $9.03 billion, on $76.44 billion in revenue," the Journal reported.

According to the Federal Energy Information Administration, the price of a gallon of regular gas in the same week the profits were announced, was up 28% from a year ago. Natural-gas prices have almost doubled in the past year and the EIA predicts that owners of gas-heated homes will see a 48% hike this winter over last year's already inflated prices, and homes heated with heating oil could see a 32% increase.”

            Big Oil’s massive profits are at the expense of workers and poor peasants everywhere. Big Oil must be the main target of worker’s expropriation and control from Iraq, to Caracas to New Orleans!

Evelyn Pringle is a columnist for Independent Media TV and an investigative journalist focused on exposing corruption in government. She can be reached at: [email protected]

Iraqi, Venezuelan and US workers can unite to shut down US Big Oil’s War!

 

While Big Oil makes record profits, Iraqi, Venezuelan and US workers have the power to shut down Big Oil and its oil for war. In Iraq the rebuilding of the Oil workers unions provides a platform for workers to fight to gain control of the nationalized oil industry back from Big Oil. At the same time Big Oil profits has driven up the cost of oil to US workers. Chavez provision of cheap heating oil to US workers opens up the opportunity for a higher level of class unity between Venezuelan and US workers that can block the supply of US oil for the war machine in Iraq!

 

Iraqi Oil Workers Against the Occupation and for Workers Control of Oil.

The formation of the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions (IFOU) independent of both the main union federations is a significant step forward. Representing over 23,000 workers in the key oil industry, across 3 provinces and nine state oil and gas companies, the union has a militant record and strong positions against the occupation and against privatization of oil.

 “The union has on two separate occasions halted oil exports through strike action over unpaid wages, repressive Baathist managers and officials in the Ministry of Oil and land allocations for employees. It has successfully reconstructed infrastructure, port equipment, drilling rigs and pipelines without the help of foreign companies. It has succeeded in canceling the last two tiers of the Occupation’s Order 30 wage-table and raising the minimum wage for Iraqi oil workers from 69,000 Iraqi Dinar (US$32) per month to 102,000 ID (US$60) per month.

The union’s ‘Troops Out’ policy calls for the immediate withdrawal of all occupation forces from Iraq.” It’s policy on ownership states “The privatization of oil and industrial sectors is the objective of all in the Iraqi state/government. We will stand firm against this imperialist plan that would hand over Iraq’s wealth to international capitalism such that the deprived Iraqi people would not benefit from it.”

While Big Oil can maximize its superprofits from the control of Iraqi oil without privatization (see previous story) the IFOU has the potential to take control of the oil industry from below and close down the imperialist siphoning of Iraq’s oil wealth. But they cannot do it alone. It is necessary for workers in the imperialist countries to shut down Big Oil at home, and for Venezuelan oil workers to take the lead in shutting off the supply to US oil for war.

http://www.basraoilunion.org

 

Venezuela: for workers democracy in the oil industry

Chavez is using V oil as a ‘geopolitical weapon’ threatening US supplies, offering cheap oil to US workers, making plans for an alternative energy bloc in LA etc. But there is a problem. Chavez and his LA partners are national leaders who will not go all the way to nationalise and put under workers control the most powerful imperialist corporates – Big Oil. At best Chavez, Lula, Kirchner and Morales (the likely new Bolivian President) can only negotiate shares of the oil wealth to be retained in their countries. This leaves the giant share being of oil and gas being pumped out of LA and used power monopoly capital and its war of Terror.  Only real worker ownership and control of oil and gas can reverse this process, stop the war for Big Oil, and make oil available to meet the needs of the masses of the world.

As we pointed out in the last issue, under Chavez’ control oil is being used as a weapon against workers. Not only to fuel the war in Iraq, but to strike break in Ecuador and at home in Venezuela where anti-strike legislation can be used by Chavez to lock out oil workers.  Even the deals done with the Caribbean states and with China for cheap oil may not end up benefiting workers but the capitalists who are on the way back in Cuba and raking off huge profits from China. Unless oil is under real workers control it becomes a subsidy from the Venezuelan people to monopoly capital. The only way to ensure that workers benefit is to make sure that the ownership and control of Venezuelan oil is in the hands of the workers, so that its production and distribution can be planned by workers for workers.

US Workers: Hurricane Katrina and cheap oil

We can see how this would work in the case of the supply of cheap oil to the US. Chavez offer is for cheap oil to be administered by the Venezuelan owned Citric collaborating with local authorities. But Venezuelan oil workers could do better than that by offering free oil and demand that it be distributed by rank and file union groups in the US. This would become a platform to launch real workers control in Venezuela so that workers could renegotiate the current deals with Big Oil for exploration and exploitation of oil and gas. Chavez and the Bolivarian state energy policy of creating an alternative Latin American energy company called Petrosur, which would integrate regional oil and gas industries. But this plan is not based on the expropriation of the key Big Oil players in Latin America, Repsol, Petrobras, Exxon etc. It is an attempt to negotiate better terms with Big Oil. The limits to this collaboration with Big Oil are evident in Chavez deals with Kirchner, supplying oil to Ecuador to replace that lost by strike action, and his plans to introduced no-strike laws in Venezuela.

Real workers control will only result form the transformation of the workers organizations that co-manage nationalized industries along with the state taking complete control of industry from the state. The oil workers can show the way by fighting to take control of production and distribution of oil, setting the price and end use of oil.

No Oil for War! Iraqi and Venezuelan oil workers unite to smash Big Oil’s monopoly!

Oil for the Poor!  Iraqi, Venezuelan and US oil workers unite to defend the rights, wages and conditions of oil workers!  Unite to distribute oil to the workers of the reserve army of unemployed in the US under rank and file control!

No Oil to strike break!  Follow the lead of the Venezuelan oil workers who condemned Chavez’ sale of oil to Ecuador as strike breaking! 

Workers control of production and distribution of oil to meet the needs of the world’s workers!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Recently the NZCTU organized solidarity rallies in New Zealand in support of the ACTUs national day of community protest against Howard’s' union busting legislation. see www.union.org.nz

For more information visit the ACTU campaign website: http://www.rightsatwork.com.au

CWG supported the rallies but distributed a leaflet critical of the ACTUs electoral strategy to defeat Howard, and calling for a General Strike.

------------------------------------------------------------------

So the CTU wants unionists to turn out to their 'protests' on Tuesday in support of the ACTU national day of 'community' action. We should certainly get along there and raise our voices. But what should we say? Only trust the CTU heads or the ACTU heads as far as we can kick them!

The problem in 1991 and the campaign against the EC Bill was that apart from a few small strikes, we were limited by the CTU leadership to 'protests'. We didn’t force a general strike. The mass memberships of the unions were overwhelmingly in favour of at least a 'national strike'. It was the CTU and union bureaucracy that stood in the road of a general strike. Even a strike that took the whole country out for 1, 2 or 3 days would have been better than nothing. If we had gone down in defeat it would have made the job of screwing the unions more difficult than it was in the 1990s.

The problem was that the rank and file of the unions did not exist independently of the bureaucracy and the ground swell of members’ anger was sold out by a small minority of officials. The CTU today is no different to the CTU that sold out the fight against the ECA in 1991. It is a labour bureaucracy committed to a partnership with the bosses on the bosses’ terms - sufficient profits.

 

It's 'protest' is part of the Aussie wide national day of action organised by the ACTU. So as we would expect instead of the rallying cry being 'workers unite to kill this union smashing Bill" we have the ACTU taking the line that 'Aussies' should unite because the Bill is 'un-Australian'. What this means is that the ACTU is expecting to negotiate a better Bill without coordinated strike action – that appealing to public opinion will make Howard very unpopular and he will withdraw the most offending parts of the Bill.

Where have we heard this one before? Remember Ken Douglas getting up on the stage of the Auckland Town Hall telling the packed hall that 'he' would negotiate with the National government to improve the Bill? No strikes because that might make the government unwilling to negotiate. In fact we now know that Bill Birch was prepared to back off parts of the Bill if he had meet solid industrial action.

'Un-Australian'? NO! Appealing to national sentiment to back negotiations is a sellout to the bosses. Australia is a capitalist, imperialist country, and until workers rise up and take power, Australia belongs to the bosses. If this Bill goes through workers will belong to the bosses too on individual nose-ring contracts. Right now it's workers who have to be 'un-Australian' by chucking this patriotic bullshit of class unity behind the Aussie flag back in Howard's face.

The 15th and thereafter should be devoted to preparing the Australian unions for a general strike to bring down Howard. We should be raising the red flag and the flag of the Eureka stockade not the Aussie flag with its symbolism of British imperialism and colonialism in the South Pacific.

NZ unions can play a vital role in this by refusing to handle trans-tasman sea or air cargo that breaks Aussie picket lines, like the seafarers voted to do during the big MUA blue in 1998. Meanwhile those of us who are committed to rebuilding the unions on the basis of democratic rank and file control should get along to these 'protests' as militant members of our unions and argue that appeals to nationalism are defeatist and that what is needed is a general strike to dump Howard.

 

Postscript: Predictable Results

There was a lot of self-congratulation following the massive turnouts on November 15. But as CWG predicted, these massive street rallies went nowhere. They were designed to create the impression that mass pressure could bring about electoral change. Howard ignored and insulted the turnout.  Result? 

True to form the ACTU has subordinated militant rank and file opposition to Howard’s Bill to an electoralist strategy of defeating Howard at the polls ‘next time’ and taking up Labor’s ‘offer’ to scrap the legislation. Pathetic!

What does Green Left have to say about this? It covers for the ACTU by refusing to call for a general strike,  instead playing up the radical rhetoric of certain unions to stage industrial action at some future point. Pathetic!

 

 

Howard's anti-terror squads stake out and raid a number of homes, arrest scores, shoot to kill, all to protect 'us' from terrorists.

 

But he is the No 2 terrorist. Aussie bosses backed Uncle Sam in Vietnam, terrorising and killing millions. They backed overthrowing Sukhano and the killing of half a million in an anti-communist purge in 1965. Aussie bosses backed Suhato's invasion of East Timor in 1975 and the killing of another half million. Now Aussie bosses back Bush in Iraq and the US ruling class WOT.

How to fight back? Its no accident that Howard is copying Bush in the class war. His attacks on democratic rights come hand in hand with the attacks on labor rights. Aussie capitalism needs to smash the unions to boost the profits of monopoly capital. Any attempt to align politically with the 'enemy' of Howard's ruling class will make you a terrorist suspect. The anti-terror laws are class laws designed to smash workers resistance.

The unions have to stand up and strike back against both attacks.

On the 15 November the ACTU has to be bombarded with demands to build a general strike to bring the Howard Government down!

 

 

This document is proposed as a draft founding document of the Leninist Trotskyist Fraction of the Liaison Committee for an International Conference of Principled Trotskyists and revolutionary workers organizations which was formed in December 2005.

 

The Bolivian Revolution at the Crossroads

The magnificent revolutionary uprising of May-June of 2005 has been contained by the class collaborationist popular front of the reformist leaders who have once again rescued the government of Rodriguez representing the mine owning bosses. But the revolution has not been defeated and will re-emerge following the Presidential elections.

 

-I-

The huge Bolivian uprising of the masses of 2003 removed   Sanchez de Losada, and the uprising of May-June 2005, removed Carlos Mesa. As in 202003, in May and June of 2005 the working class had the opportunity again to finish off the regime of the  mine-owners and replace it the centralized and armed organise of workers and farmers power, a regime of dual power, opening the way to the victory of the workers and farmers revolution.

But this victory was snatched from them, once again, by their treacherous leaders, Evo Morales, Solares, Quispe, Mamani, and POR Lora, who once more saved the regime of Rosca by making a truce with the government of President Rodriguez.  Meanwhile, the hydrocarbons, which the Bolivian masses have twice mobilized to nationalize, are still in the hands of the imperialist transnational companies.  And all this is covered with the smoke screen of the elections of December.  This it is the result of the popular front that supports Rodriguez and guarantees the continuity of the regime of the mine-owners.

In May-June of 2005, the Bolivian masses uprising opened up a crisis in the ranks of the ruling class., that is, a vacuum of power at the top. The insurrectionary general strike of 16 days saw the working class and its organizations use both legal and military means to create a true dual power with more than 100 blockades, barricades, street fights.  Confronting the police in the streets with the sticks of dynamite, the miners united with poor farmers to defeat the policy of Evo Morales of increasing the oil taxes on foreign companies to 50% of the value of the hydrocarbons". The workers and poor farmers’ slogan was "Neither 30%, nor 50%,  but full Nationalization"!

This heroic uprising had its most conscious expression in the COR [regional union central] of El Alto [workers’ city of 1 million above La Paz]. On the 8 of June the COR El Alto passed a resolution for a revolutionary course of action, that reaffirmed the struggle for the nationalization of hydrocarbons, rejected all new elections as a trap, summoned the Aboriginal Popular Assembly [in which the masses who are ethnic Almara or Quechua are represented] and created a congress of rank and file delegates and a workers and farmers’ militia, declaring El Alto to be the "headquarters of the revolution".  That call was in reality to form a centralised organ of workers and peasants power that could prepare for a victorious insurrection to form a workers' and poor peasants' government.

The insurrectionary general strike succeeded in overthrowing Mesa.  But once again, the treacherous leaders allowed the bourgeoisie a way out.  Solares, Quispe, Mamani and POR prevented the Aboriginal Popular Assembly with its congress of base delegates and its centralized military services from being founded. Meanwhile, Evo Morales and his MAS (Movement for Socialism) MPs in Parliament in Sucre, where it had fled to escape La Paz, but still surrounded by the masses, agreed to Rodriguez succeeding Mesa.

Thus, we see the politics of class collaboration of the popular front – that has one “leg" of the poor peasants led by Evo Morales; and another “leg” of the labour leaders headed by Solares that once more joined forces to prevent the masses from smashing all the institutions of the state and of the regime and imposing a regime of dual power, before taking the taking of power by the proletariat.

 

-II-

The actions of the popular front of the labour leaders collaborated with the bourgeoisie to support its regime and government and to strangle the revolution.

The leaders of the workers movement took the proletariat from the streets. In this way, they broke the worker peasant alliance, and allowed Evo Morales to divert the peasants’ movement into the reactionary elections thus supporting the social base of the bourgeoisie and the regime of the mine-owners and their policy of bargaining with imperialism over the division of the spoils from the hydrocarbons.

At the same time, the leaders of the workers movement under Solares excluded the COB and put the COD and COR (that are, in the cities, true organs of dual regional power), under the control of the mayors and the Civic Committees. By that means they strangled the embryo of workers and peasants power and prevented it from centralising and coordinating as an El Alto soviet.

Meanwhile, under the cover of this popular front, finance capital and the transnational companies have mobilized the officer caste of the army, and the landowning bourgeoisie of Santa Cruz – main collaborators with oil interests of the imperialists - supporting and revival of fascist bands to drown in blood the proletarian revolution.

In spite of this new treachery, the Bolivian revolution is still alive.  The revolutionary situation is temporarily on hold pending the elections.  The crisis of the regime that had its head split open by the masses in its two revolutionary attacks of 2003 and 2005 is still far from being resolved.  The breaches at the top are still open.  The question of hydrocarbons has not been answered, and the demand for its nationalization still drives the political struggles of the masses. In each struggle, road block, strike, and demonstration, "Nationalization of hydrocarbons" continues being the demand and the slogan that expresses the feeling of the masses.

The pre-insurrectionary mood of the masses remains seething below the surface. What does this mean?  That the masses are conscious that none of their demands, not even the most elementary, will be won without an all out fight.  For that reason all demands in whatever sector are expressed as struggles, road blocks, strikes, mobilizations, and occupations of universities.

The tragedy continues to be that the organs of struggle were not centralized nationally by the treacherous leaders.  Yet they remain as organisms of semi-dual power localised in CORs and CODs, since the working class keeps them alive as their organs of struggle, and is them that workers go to solve all their demands and problems.

Thus, the revolutionary situation remains unresolved.  Much more water will need to be thrown on the fire, and counter-revolutionary repression in the streets will be needed, to smash the heroic Bolivian revolution that not yet said its last word, far from it.

 

-III-

The politics of the popular front that tries to strangle the heroic Bolivian revolution are not "national". 

The imperialistic monopolies that extend their businesses in all Latin America, employ all their concentrated counter-revolutionary intelligence in smothering the Bolivian revolution, because they know that if this revolution advances and wins, their property, their businesses and their dominion in the subcontinent will be under threat.  For that reason, they have a highly centralised international General Staff acting from day to day to defeat it.

The "Summit of the Américas" on 4-5 November in Mar del Plata, Argentina, had as its main task that of guaranteeing a continuous increase in the super-exploitation of the proletariat and the plundering of the natural resources of Latin America.

The "Summit of the Peoples", an appendage to the main summit, was organized by the native bourgeoisies. Evo Morales and Chávez were the main protagonists along with Castroite unions, Stalinism in all its variants, union bureaucrats and the liquidators of Trotskyism. Its main objective was to strengthen the popular front surrounding the Bolivian revolution to abort and defeat that revolution, burying the nationalization program, and unearthing the bourgeois policy of bargaining over shares of oil rent with imperialism.  That is the famous "Bolivarian revolution" that they proclaim:  nothing but the haggling of the national bourgeoisies with their imperialistic master, to try to get a greater slice of the surplus gained from the working class and the plundering of the oppressed Bolivian nation.  The "Bolivarian revolution" is the expropriation of the anti-imperialist and revolutionary struggle of the masses, it is a caricature of a revolution.

The ‘sepoy’ governments of the region, who participated in both "Summits", like that of Lula, Kirchner, Vázquez, Duarte of Paraguay, and Chávez, are those that organize the "power ring" that guarantees the supply of Bolivian gas so that they can supply the imperialistic monopolies and their smaller partners, the national bosses, in the countries of the MERCOSUR.  They protect and guarantee the interests of the biggest foreign investors in Bolivia, Petrobras and Repsol, and that act as the ‘beach head’ for all the imperialistic transnational companies that want to keep expropriating tens of billions of  dollars from the reserves of Bolivian gas.

 

-IV-

Despite the enormous poverty of the oppressed masses in Bolivia, this nation is not only rich in its natural resources, but these are strategic resources for the economy of the continent.  Although the working class and the poor farmers do not have natural gas, the gas ducts are mere hundreds of meters from their homes.  The gas reserves of Bolivia are appraised between 80,000 and 100,000 million dollars.  The masses know this, and the fact of such wealth rubbing against their poverty is what motivates their revolutionary will and their intransigence in the fight for the nationalization of hydrocarbons. 

The proletarian vanguard already knows that only the nationalization of the hydrocarbons meet the needs of the workers and the poor farmers.  The imperialistic bourgeoisie, that needs each cent of Bolivian hydrocarbons, also knows it, and for that reason it has concentrated against the Bolivian revolution all the forces of the reaction, it has called on all its agents, and without a doubt prepares the counterrevolution to smash the revolution, if the current policy of the popular front and elections fail to strangle it to death.

It is the central demand of the revolution and the international character of the struggle over the nationalization of hydrocarbons - that began in 2003-, that makes the revolutionary thrust of the Bolivian proletariat so powerful, and likewise the response of the international counter-revolution so reactionary. 

Bolivia concentrates the expression of the struggle of the masses of Latin America against plunder and super-exploitation.  Its victory will put on the immediate agenda the expropriation of the expropriators, not only imperialists, but all the native bourgeoisies that are their junior partners.  For that reason, to a great extent, the destiny of the exploited ones of the continent will be defined by the result of the magnificent Bolivian revolution.

 

-V-

In Bolivia there is a life and death situation:  either the workers and poor farmers revolution prevails overthrowing  the bourgeoisie, expropriating the expropriators and imposing the dictatorship of the proletariat as the beacon for the Latin American and world;  or, on the contrary, under the leadership of the World Social Forum of Chávez, Fidel Castro and Evo Morales and their fantasy of the "Bolivarian Revolution", the revolution will be strangled and the counter-revolutionary defeat will end transforming Bolivia into a direct colony or protectorate of imperialism and transnational companies. Such a defeat will rank with those they made in Chile in 1973, Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1980s, or in Argentina and Brazil in the 1970s

Now is the moment for regrouping internationally the healthy forces of principled Trotskyism and for the struggle to build internationalist revolutionary parties in Latin America that do not bend to the siren songs of the popular front to the terror of fascism. 

While the leaders of the masses make their "meetings of two cities" – to make a ‘Holy Alliance’ of "peace" between El Alto and Santa Cruz -, the oil barons and the bourgeoisie of the ‘cross’ openly organise the fascist bands.  The General Staff of the bourgeoisie knows perfectly well what is the problem is and how it must solve it:  it knows that it faces, no more or less, the proletarian revolution.

 

-VI-

Following the truce with Rodriguez, the reaction tries to seize of the organizations of struggle out of the hands of the masses

 

Once the truce with Rodriguez and shut down the revolutionary crisis of last May-June, the immediate objective of the leaders of the truce was to prevent the national congress of delegates of base of the Aboriginal Popular Assembly from meeting and forming workers and poor farmer’s militias. And once this was achieved their objective was the one to win the leadership o0f  all the struggle organisations.

Thus the truce opened up a reaction inside these struggle organisations. In El Alto on the  8 of June there was a meeting to  bury the resolutions of the COR, and to smooth the way to the fraudulent elections of the regime of the spiral.

Once sure of the leaderships in El Alto, the reaction organised the meeting of the “two cities" where the leaders of the COR of El Alto embraced the fascist bourgeoisie of Santa Cruz. Then behind the backs of the rank and file of these organisations a meeting was arranged in Cochabamba on the 9 of July, headed by Solares,  the FEJUVE of El Alto, representatives of Evo Morales, and of POR.

On the 12, 13 and 14 of August s Continental conference on the Nationalization of Hydrocarbons was organized by representatives of the CUT of Brazil, the Lambertists, the LIT and the PSTU of Brazil, the "Revolutionary Marxist Tendency" of Alan Woods, the Uit-ci, the P-SOL of Brazil, the bureaucratic and Stalinists PST of Argentina and other renegades from Trotskyism. Once more the leaders of these currents went behind the backs of the revolutionary vanguard to hand over the Bolivian revolution to Chavez and the "Bolivarian Revolution".

This meeting decided to hold a symbolic day on the 17 October in all Latin American countries dedicated to the ‘nationalisation of the hydrocarbons’  - that nobody observed -, and summoned a new "Continental Encounter" in 2006 hosted by Chávez in Venezuela.

That conference was a vile trick against the Bolivian revolution. All the currents taking place have collaborated time and time again against the Bolivian revolution, yet claimed to speak in the name of the revolutionary.

At the same time, regional or departmental congresses of the federations and unions were being held all over Bolivia. In them all the reaction tried to dominate. The clearest example was the congress of the FSTMB - the mining Federation based in Huanuni, where a scandalous fraud organized by the employer's association of the private companies expropriated the leadership of the Federation from the Miners leaders that had consistently fought for a national congress and a revolutionary program. 

But against this reaction a tenacious resistance of the workers rank and file and radicalised youth against the truce began. Its vanguard was centered in the COR El Alto, and was the one that it prevented the endorsement of Evo Morales as Presidential candidate in the elections. Nevertheless, because the revolutionaries lack sufficient weight in the vanguard and the masses able to centralise and organise this resistance of the radicalised rank and file, the oppressed masses have not been able to break the stranglehold of their misleaders and throw out this new truce.

Then another example of the control of the masses organs of  fight by the collaborators was the anniversary of October 2003. This commemoration was turned into a symbolic act. Thousands of young people, workers and poor farmers were mobilized all over the country, but the treacherous leaders did not allow these acts to be united across all the sectors. Once again, on the 17 of October, they did not allow the mobilized masses to transform the Continental meeting on nationalisation of the hydrocarbons into a true congress of the delegates of the rank and file of the Aboriginal Popular Assembly, for fear that it would spark of a return to the revolutionary road of October of 2003 and May-June of 2005.

The masses try to keep alive the COR's and semi-dual power COD's as local and regional embryo soviets.  Solares,  Patana and the treacherous labor leaders on the other hand try to dissolve them into the institutions of the bourgeois regime

-VII-

Between February and October of the 2003, the workers and the farmers threw out the old leadership of the COB - that collaborated with Sanchez de Losada -, and began to centralise the mass organisations of struggle.  

After the fall of Goni, and his succession by Mesa with whom Morales and Quispe made a truce in October 2003, Solares worked inside the COB to prevent the workers and poor farmer from transforming it into an organ of dual power as was the case in the 1952 revolution.

Despite this treachery, the masses, with great determination, began to win influence in the departmental and regional Workers Unions - the COR and the COD -, and to coordinate their organizations of struggle at local and regional level.  It was this influence that enabled the blockades, the insurrectionary general strike and the fights around the barricades of last May-June.  The poor farmers blocked the routes all over Bolivia and occupied oil wells of the multinationals.  This influence came to a head in the dual power organs of El Alto, especially the COR which brought together many workers including the vanguard of the miners and poor peasants.

The treacherous leaders aborted the implementation of the resolutions of the COR El Alto of June 8; the reconvening of the congress of Aboriginal and Popular Assembly that could have centralized the masses fight for militias and soviets. They broke the workers and poor farmers’ alliance by imposing the truce with Rodriguez.  They divided the labor movement with Solares dissolving the COB and making each department fight alone, while Patana was going to hug Rodriguez and the fascist bourgeoisie of Santa Cruz in "encounter of two cities" with the blessing of the church. They diverted the poor farmers into a demagogic campaign of Bolivian nationalism promoted by Morales and other servants of the Bolivian employer's association.

But nevertheless, the treacherous leaders of the labor movement could not prevent the COR and COD -, the true revolutionary organizations that led the revolutionary days of last May-June from remaining organs of semi-dual power at the regional and local levels.

Today, to try to eliminate that semi-dual power character of the COR and COD, the leaders of the workers’ leg of the popular front truce, Solares and Patana, subordinate them to the hated, discredited and battered bourgeois institutions of the mine-owners regime in the cities and regions, such as the Civic mayors and Committees, and the projects of these bosses’ institutions. Typical of this collaboration is the inclusion of Patana by Rodriguez in the Pre-Constituent Assembly Commission.

Another example; when the government decreed that the budget of the departments had to be proportional to the wealth that these generated, the mayors of the different departments began to demand that the government increase the taxes on the Hydrocarbons (IDH). For, without more taxes the money would not be available for guaranteed health, education, etc.  The bourgeois mayors began to organize pressure to haggle over their share of the oil taxes, allowing the oil companies to continue to exploit the hydrocarbons.

The treacherous labor leaders tried to get the masses in the COR and COD to endorse the policy of the Mayors to increase the oil taxes, thus bringing back Morales defeated position of bargaining over taxation and rejecting the popular demands for outright nationalisation won in the heat of the struggle of May-June of 2005. 

Similarly, the students and university Federations were dragged into the process of bargaining over increasing oil taxes to pay for the education budget.  POR Lora, which has an important influence in the student movement, played a  central role in this subordination of the students to the Mayors in, for example, Cochabamba.

 

-VIII-

The working class does not have its own revolutionary leadership that can embody the historical experience of the world revolution.  The bourgeoisie and the transnational companies do have a general staff.  Thus, the proletariat, lacking a revolutionary leadership, was contained by its treacherous leaders, and the poor farmers were diverted down the road of Bolivian nationalism by Morales and co; yet the big bourgeoisie was able to subordinate the organs of revolutionary struggle to its established institutions such as the Mayors and civic councils.

What we see in Bolivia today is the same policy applied by the German social democracy when Hilferding argued that soviets could coexist with a Constituent Assembly.  With that policy they strangled the revolution of 1918-19 in Germany.  First, with sweet phrase to win over the rebel workers, and them with massacres perpetrated by the Social-Democratic police.  In both cases the ruling class understands clearly that the existence of its state (a Constituent Assembly) is irreconcilable with the existence of the independent organs of the centralized and armed dual power of the masses. The battle for state power can only be decided by a civil war of the classes in which one must win and one must lose.

Today, in Bolivia, we are at the tipping point, when the sweet phrases and the policy of class collaboration in the popular front, disarms and it demobilizes the revolutionary masses while the class enemy buys time to prepare the armed reaction.

 

-IX-

After making the truce with Rodriguez, Solares wanted to use the COB to nominate himself in the fraudulent elections, with the program to create a "Political Instrument of the Workers" (IPT), that is,  a reformist workers party.  But this program was already in existence in practice with the plan of the popular front with its two legs (one in the unions the other in the farmers organisations) to subordinate the workers and poor farmers organizations to the bourgeois institutions .

The IPT policy was a reformist attempt to try copy what happened in Brazil with the founding of the PT (Workers Party) at the end of the 1970s. In that country, the formation of the PT was the method used by the bourgeoisie, the church and the reformist labor currents to abort the process which threatened to open a revolution in the years 1978-79. But in Brazil, this diversion of the vanguard into a reformist workers party succeed because the revolution had not yet begun, and the military dictatorship had just fallen at the hands of the masses.  The state and the bourgeois regime were left intact.

In Bolivia, on the contrary, the masses have already mounted huge revolutionary attacks, to throw out two presidents with street actions and to carry out one of the greatest revolutions of the history of the continent in 1952.  The revolutionary masses, definitively, could not be strangled by means alone of creating a reformist workers party.

It was a reformist variant that lost all legitimacy when the revolutionary workers organized in the COD and the COR the revolutionary uprising of May-June 2005.  The rank and file openly repudiated Solares, and many extended congresses and, such as those of the FSTMB, the COR El Alto, etc., called for an emergency congress of the COB to dismiss the traitor Solares.

The reality is that Solares - now a political advisor to Morales and the boss’s regime -, alongside Patana, supports the leg of the truce that supports Rodriguez and the fraudulent elections. They could do this because they followed the program of Fidel Castro to control the labor organisations from the inside to prevent the centralisation, their arming, and the formation of organs of dual power.

It is a life or death question for the proletariat, to defeat the treacherous leaders and their front popular policy, that is, class collaboration.  Only with a revolutionary leadership and program will the working class be able to ensure its independence of all the fractions of the bourgeoisie and to take over the leadership of all exploited and oppressed classes.

For this to happen it is necessary that the radicalized rank and file of workers to break with the treacherous leaders of the COR and COD and their policy of class collaboration with the bourgeois institutions, and to set this in motion to call for an immediate national congress of rank and file delegates of the COR, COD, FSTMB and all the organizations in struggle to return to the unfinished tasks of October and May-June.

Thanks to the treason of the leaders of the proletariat like yesterday in Venezuela, Evo Morales and Chávez, today prepare the abortion of the Bolivian revolution by means of a bourgeois nationalist policy

 

-X-

Thanks to the treason of the workers leaders, Evo Morales managed to divert the poor farmers movement back into the electoral trap,  thus maintaining a social base in the petty bourgeoisie in the cities and the rural areas to back him as a candidate to reform the regime of the mine owners,  and by that route, to gain a social base in the masses for a return to the bourgeois nationalist policy of haggling with imperialism over the share of spoils of hydrocarbons.

The revolutionary uprising of May-June, to the shout of "Neither 30” nor 50”; Nationalization!",  had attacked head-on this bourgeois policy.  In that struggle, the urban centers, that is, the working class, influenced the poor farmers’ movement with its program of nationalization.  The treason of the workers leaders has once more pushed the peasantry back into the arms of the bourgeoisie.

The peasantry is not a homogenous class. Only when the proletariat wins the streets and can demonstrate to the poorer farmers that it can carry the fight to victory and has the power to give land to the tiller, provide machinery, fertilizers and cheap credit, can it be separated from the rich peasantry who side with the bourgeoisie in the hope that they can enrich themselves with more land or businesses in the cities. The stronger the proletariat the more will the masses of poor farmers follow its lead and weaken the petty bourgeois social base for fascism.

 

-XI-

The popular front policy of class collaboration is an attempt to abort the Bolivian revolution by dividing the peasantry and isolating the workers’ vanguard. This is similar to what happened in 1998 with Chávez in Venezuela. During the Caracazo of 1989 the masses began an anti-imperialist insurrection that exploded the rotten regime of the ‘Pact of Fixed Point’ and broke with the main the bosses’ parties: COPEI (Christian Democracy), and AD (Social-Democracy).  After several failed attempts to strangle the uprising of the masses, imperialism and the bourgeoisie resorted to the ex- lieutenant colonel Chávez (who was in prison for his role in failed military coup).  They released him from jail and after winning the elections Chavez formed a left-populist bourgeois nationalistic government which expropriated the anti-imperialist struggle of the masses and aborted the Venezuelan revolution.

We can see the same happening in Bolivia. Evo Morales was one of "stars" of the "Summit of the People" in Mar del Plata, Argentina, the ‘alternative’ to the "Summit of the Américas" where Bush and its crew members discussed how to strangle the Bolivian revolution and how to distribute superprofits to the monopolies by sacking the Latin American nations and oppressing its peoples.  Evo Morales was embraced by Chávez signaling clearly that the super-exploited Bolivian workers and poor farmers, and of all the continent must be prepared for Morales to complete the abortion of the Bolivian revolution, like Chávez did in Venezuela.

 

-XII-

But to carry out this plan, as we already said, the need to be able to count on the ability of the treacherous leadership of the proletariat.  That is,  they need that the traitors to  guarantee that the revolutionary organizations of struggle are subordinated to the bourgeois institutions of the mine owners regime.

Evo Moral and the MAS, in the event of winning the elections, want to be sure that the COB, the COR and the COD will be subordinated to the bourgeois state, and by that route, to have under its control the great part of the revolutionary masses, and in particular, the heart of the working class:  the miners and the revolutionary workers of El Alto.

That is why Morales did not want to make specific the electoral proposals that Patana of the COR, and Mamani of the FEJUVE had made to him.  Because their  role is to drive the workers leg of the popular front and along with Solares to do the dirty work of making the COR and COD bow down to the Mayors and city councils.  In this way, having already totally paralyzed the FSTMB thanks to the employer's association electoral fraud, Morales wants to be guaranteed that, as President, he can count on controlling the great part of the working class.  Because only in this way will he be able to begin to rearm the bourgeois state structure and defeat any further attacks of the masses.

It is for that reason that, Morales meanwhile, maintains the openly pro-imperialistic government of Rodriguez, and at the same time threatening blockades and "revolutions of 1952" if the reactionary bourgeoisie puts barriers in the way of the elections.

This he is then the plan of the reaction, the popular front and its policy of collaboration of classes that, with a leg in Evo Moral and the MAS, and another one in the working direction with Lots and Patana at the top, maintain to the regime of Rosca, to the government of Rodriguez, and guarantee that the hydrocarbons follow into the hands of the transnational companies.

The bastion of the counterrevolution:  the bosses keep the officers caste of the Armed Forces at the ready, and the bourgeoisie of Santa Cruz builds its fascist bands as an insurance policy. If the popular front does not manage to contain the masses, they will drown it in blood.

 

-XIII-

While it currently adopts the popular front policy of containing the masses, the big bourgeoisie and the officers’ caste maintain the armed forces at the borders, prepared for deployment to massacre the people.

At the same time, in Santa Cruz  the General Staff of the mine owners concentrates the bastion of the counterrevolution, with the bourgeois ‘cruceña; faction who  represent the transnational companies, it is preparing to use military methods to crush the revolution if the popular front does not abort it completely. It maintains and strengthens the fascist bands, holding periodic congresses to openly recruit new members to the fascist bands.

There is not doubt that it will if necessary stage a military coup, or secede from Bolivia, if that is the only way to guarantee delivery of the hydrocarbons to imperialism and their own slice of the dirty spoils.  Meanwhile, threatens secession so as to negotiate in better conditions for its interests, like for example, on the question of its influence in the "new" parliament that will be elected in December.

Although they are not likely to win the  presidency the Santa Cruz bourgeoisie are the most powerful fraction of the native bourgeoisie because they are the allies of the transnational companies.  They are the bunker and the General Staff of the counterrevolution, and they do not have in mind to back down.  They are those that issue the orders of the transnational companies to its agents in the popular front to throw water to the fire, to divide the proletariat, to disorganize its forces, while at the same time they arm themselves to the teeth preparing the counterrevolution. 

The General Staff of the transnational companies, uses its left hand to pull the strings of its bourgeois nationalist agents and the reformist leaders so that they divide and they disorganise the oppressed, and with its right hand, at the same time, it pulls the strings of the fascist bands and officer cast of the military.

They are daring:  they know that if the plan of class collaboration Chávez, Evo Morales and Fidel Castro fails, and the transnational companies cannot take the lion share of the superprofits of Bolivian gas, they will have no problem with dissolving the "power ring" of Mercosur and Chávez, and leaning on the western flank of the counterrevolution - with Chile and Peru ' - they will secede from Bolivia to retain the huge gas reserves of Santa Cruz.

The disputes between the Santa Cruz bourgeoisie sitting on the hydrocarbon reserves of Bolivia -, and the fractions of the native bourgeoisie that want bigger taxes imposed on the transnationals,  are exacerbated by the masses opening up the prospect of full nationalisation and a loss of profits for all bourgeois fractions. These are the breaches that remain open, and that each struggle of the masses, small as they are, can use and develop.

The plans of the reaction and the counterrevolution of the bourgeois and imperialistic front are being kept in reserve.  At the moment, the transnationals are able to extract their superprofits through the policy of the popular front.  For that reason, Chávez and the Morales are a bourgeois nationalism with empty hands:  because the lions share of the profits of the hydrocarbons goes to imperialism and the transnational companies. And if the transnational companies cannot get it superprofits by this means, it will use the force, mobilising fascism and the open counterrevolution.

For that reason, the only and true alternative for the Bolivian revolution in its future development, is Communism or fascism. Only by the defeat of the revolutionary masses, thus solving in their favor the question of hydrocarbons, will imperialism and the bourgeoisie be able to impose a stable bourgeois regime in Bolivia. That will mean without doubt a colonisation a thousand times more brutal and rapacious than the mine owners’ regime.

The proletariat needs its own general Staff.  Without this its enormous energies and the organisations of struggle that were created from February 2003, will be subordinated to class collaboration and their forces will be dissipated or smashed.

At this present juncture of the Bolivian revolution the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the Bolivian and Latin American working class has been become critical in the extreme.

The nationalization of hydrocarbons continues to be the motor which drives the revolutionary struggle of the masses

-XIV-

The working class continue to see their organizations of struggle,  the COR and the COD, as the tools of fight for the nationalization of hydrocarbons.

The revolution still lives, and the masses do not abandon it for a moment, despite their treacherous leaders, the struggle for the hydrocarbons.  Week after week blockades and tough but isolated fights are provoked, all motivated by the  fight for hydrocarbons.

This shows that the motivating demand of this huge revolution that is underway continues to be the fight for the nationalization of hydrocarbons.

The working class is pressing to return to street fighting to continue the heroic uprisings of October 2003 and May-June 2005.  The labor movement knows that the only solution to its oppression and suffering is the nationalization of the hydrocarbons;  that the elections will not solve any problem.

As we said, because of the treachery of the workers leaders, large numbers of poor farmers who in May-June had taken up the fight “No to 30%, nor 50%: Nationalization!", today have been pushed again into the arms of Morales, thinking that in the elections they will be able to increase his majority, and solve the question of the hydrocarbons by negotiation with imperialism.

But, in spite of this, the demand to nationalise the hydrocarbons continues to drive revolutionary anti-imperialist struggle in Bolivia, because the oppressed, exploited people know that none of their necessities - work, bread, good health, education, and wages can be solved without also solving in their favor this key question.

For that reason, each struggle of the fight of the working class and the exploited ones, small as they may be, has at it centre the question of hydrocarbons.  The budgetary problems of health, education and a living wage do not have a solution if the hydrocarbons are not nationalized.  Neither the mayors today, nor the government, nor Evo Morales tomorrow, can give a solution to the daily problems, for example the current shortage of bottled gas, without this key demand of the struggle of the exploited ones of Bolivia.

Nobody can think seriously about Bolivia solving its situation of hunger and misery, if the hydrocarbons are not nationalized, without compensation and under workers control.  For that reason, it is the main demand of the workers to direct at the poor farmers so as to divide the petty bourgeois and to split the army between the officer caste and the ranks.

It is the fundamental demand to unmask the treacherous leaders.  It is the demand that pushes the masses to break to each step the truce.  It is the demand that keeps alive the semi-dual power of the COR and COD as proto-soviets, despite their current leaders.  It is the demand that motivated three revolutionary uprisings - February and October 2003, and May-June 2005- even during the lapse of two years;  that it keeps the revolution alive, and makes the treacherous truce unstable.  It is the demand and the struggle that can expose the politics of the popular front of Morales and Co and their attempt to lend the poor farmers movement to the service of the reaction.

It is the demand that puts on the daily agenda the need for the proletariat, and only the proletariat, to become the leading class in the oppressed nation.  It is the one that calls for a workers and poor farmers' alliance, for the proletariat to lead this alliance.  It is the revolutionary demand that manages to unite the great masses, and causes  them to combat the forces that try to abort their revolution.

 It is the demand that will only prevail in Bolivia with the victory of the workers and socialist revolution, that can win only as a Latin American workers and poor farmers international socialist revolution alongside the North American proletariat that begins to stand up, alongside the heroic young French workers, and all those oppressed by the imperialist powers that rise against the imperialistic transnational companies that plunder Bolivia and all Latin America; the same ones that face the blood and fire of the massacres of the people of occupied Iraq by the troops of the Anglo-US imperialists.

In order to win the nationalization of hydrocarbons, it is necessary to defeat the mine-owners regime and to lay the way open to the victory of the proletarian revolution There is still time:  it is necessary to convene a Congress of rank and file delegates of the COD, COR, COB and all the organizations in struggle, and its worker and poor farmer militias!

 

-XV-

In order to revive the street fighting for the nationalization of hydrocarbons, it is necessary to break the truce that supports the government of Rodriguez, and that allows that the imperialistic transnational companies continue plundering the gas and the petroleum of the nation.  For that reason, because only the working class leading the poor farmers will be able fight until the end for the nationalization of hydrocarbons, the COR, the COD and the COB must break with their subordination to the mayors and the agents of the mine-owners.

Enough kneeling before the bourgeoisie!  It is necessary to strengthen the hand of the working class to win back most of the poor farmers who have fallen under the influence of the bourgeoisie: 

For an immediate National Congress of rank and file delegates of the COR, the COD, the FSTMB, and of all the organizations of fight!  That is the way to make sure that the Aboriginal Popular Assembly is created, that is, the centralised organ of workers and poor farmers’ soviets and militias.

The centralization of the COD, the COR, the FSTMB, etc., in a national congress of rank and file delegates, would have all the authority to call on the forces of combative youth and the miners, to create a workers and farmers militia. . . It would have all the authority to call the soldiers who are the children of workers and farmers under arms not to follow the order of their officers, to constitute committees of soldiers and NCOs, and choose delegates to go to the workers and poor farmers’ congress. It is necessary to destroy to officer caste and to smash the fascists!  It is necessary to set up workers and poeples courts to judge the killers of the martyrs of October and of all the oppressors of the people and plunderers of the nation!

 

-XVI-

Only the working class can solve the demands of the peasantry oppressed by the great landowners and the imperialistic monopolies, since it does not have any ties to these classes.  But today the poor farmer, because of the treachery of the workers leaders, have lost much confidence in the working class ability to free them from the yoke of oppression.

Evo Morales, the representative of the national bourgeoisie, cannot offer any solution to the demands of the poor farmers.  Not even it he could impose a "50% tax on the value of hydrocarbons for Bolivia" because the most of this taxation would be needed to pay the national debt to the IMF, and the rest would be pocketed by national bourgeoisie who are the junior partners of imperialism.

Only the proletariat, coming to power, breaking with the IMF and repudiating the fraudulent external debt, expropriating the bourgeoisie, nationalizing without compensation and under workers control the hydrocarbons, expropriating the banks without compensation and creating a single state bank under control of the workers which provides cheap credit to the small farmers, and imposing a monopoly of foreign trade, can end the sufferings of the poor farmers.

But to reclaim the worker-farmer alliance destroyed by the reformist leaders, the working class must get rid of its present treacherous leaders.  Without revolutionary leadership, the working class will be unable to win back the support of most of the poor farmers, that is, to advance on the road to the victorious revolution begun in October 2003.

Whenever the working class won the streets, it demonstrated that it can lead the poor farmer.  But every time its leaders snatched victory out of its hands and it gave the power back to the bourgeoisie, as in October 2003 and May-June 2005.  Those experiences prepared the poor peasants for the nationalist demagoguery, the big mouth and empty hands, of Evo Morales and company.

For that reason, there is no more important task in Bolivia - an international task of the healthy forces of Trotskyism worldwide -, than to fight create a new revolutionary party such that the heroic Bolivian working class deserves.  Building a new revolutionary Trotskyist and internationalist party is the most urgent task to enable the revolutionary working class to break the truce and the subordination of the workers organizations to the bourgeois institutions, and to convene a National Congress of rank and file delegates of the COD, COR, COB and all the organizations in struggle, and its workers and farmers militias.

 

-XVII-

Then the proletariat could say to the poor farmers with authority that if they want to realise the full numerical weight that they have in the society, the only class that can guarantee to take the fight to the end;  that is, the only class that will be able to create a true free, democratic and sovereign Constituent Assembly, is a provisional revolutionary workers and farmers government based on the self-organisation of the masses and the workers militias, able to win a victorious insurrection that overthrows the bourgeoisie, its government and his parliament, and that destroys the officer caste killers of the people.

Evo Morales won over the poor farmers to boost his majority in the elections by raising the demand to "legalize cocaine".  But even the national bourgeoisie cannot solve this problem. Because even if Evo Morales is elected  President and his majority votes a law that legalizes the culture of the cocaine leaf, the poor farmers are already ruined, indebted, without investments, or machinery, and are near bankruptcy, so that their land will be bought up by the great landowners who alone will benefit from the new law.

For that reason, a workers and farmers provisional government  can not only guarantee the peasantry the free and sovereign Constituent Assembly that is wants,  but the free culture of the cocaine leaf breaking with imperialism, expropriating the banks and creating a single state bank under workers control,  that reduces the debts of the poor farmers, gives cheap credit to the ruined farmers, which expropriates the great landowners and five the land to the landless, and guarantees the agricultural machinery needed to improve the productivity of the land.

 

-XVIII-

The basic democratic tasks of the Bolivian revolution are the break with imperialism land to the poor farmers, and gas for the Bolivians.  But none of those tasks will be able to be fulfilled and be solved completely unless the working class, leading the poor farmers and all the oppressed of the nation, does not establish its own government to expropriate the expropriators and destroy its oppressor state.

Leading  this struggle, the working class will freed itself of the yoke of capital.  The Bolivian working class in power will be able to enjoy, alongside the rest of the exploited, the immense resources of Bolivia, and to have sufficient gas, wages, work for all, and quality health and education  for the workers and the farmers.

The Bolivian working class, in its different revolutions of the XX century and in the present XXI century, has marked out the road to socialism.  The Theses of Pulacayo, proposed by the Trotskyists in 1946 and taken as their own by the Bolivian proletariat, are still the departure point to conquer the independence of the organizations of struggle of the revolutionary masses from all the fractions of the bourgeoisie, and to advance to a victorious revolution.

In order to create a revolutionary party of the Bolivian working class it is necessary to defeat all the liquidators of Trotskyism. The healthy forces of international Trotskyism and the workers and young peoples vanguard together must refound the internationalist Trotskyism in Bolivia.

 

 

-XIX-

The Bolivian revolution once more tragically affirms the premise of the Trotskyists Transitional Program the crisis of the humanity is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the proletariat.

This huge revolution has begun without a revolutionary party in front of the working class.  They Bolivian masses did not want for anger or an accurate class instinct during the series of revolutionary attacks that they have carried out since February of 2003.  Against the petty bourgeois cretins who speak of a "crisis of subjectivity" of the proletariat,  we Trotskyists say that what exists in Bolivia is an overabundance of counter-revolutionary leaders.

This revolution already has taken several giant leaps, and to contain it,  all the counter-revolutionary forces of the world and the continent have been united.  It has been surrounded from the outside and penetrated on the inside.  The policy of the popular front not only uses sweet talk and deception to get the masses to retreat from each victory, but also prepares international blows in the rear.

 Beware Bolivian workers of the policy of class collaboration of the Latin American Stalinism and its hangers on in Bolivia;  of the policy of the Venezuelan and Bolivian bourgeoisies, of Chávez and Morales, who prepare - before the sticks and the bullets of fascism -, counter-revolutionary  blows in he rear of the labor movement, stabs in the back by the fifth columns. This is what happens in every revolution to break and defeat the revolutionary vanguard of the masses.

Beware Bolivian workers!  The proletariat one cannot lose the leadership of the poor peasantry.  If the proletariat today does not give answers to the poor farmers they will fall into the hands of the Chávez and Morales, and will be used to attack the proletariat - as was the case yesterday when Mesa tried to use the urban middle-class, blaming the workers for their disastrous situation.  This is what they are preparing.

The revolutionary party of the Bolivian proletariat will not be built by the treacherous leaders of the working class that supports the government, nor the renegades of Trotskyism whose programs did not pass the test of this huge revolution.  They periodically announce the "insurrection"  and then betray it at each step, as they did it in 1952 and 1971.  The renegades of Trotskyism in Bolivia, as in all Latin America, always promise victory to the proletariat and the oppressed people, but only offer them defeats.   History is full of examples.

There is no time to lose.  The forces needed to build a new revolutionary leadership of the Bolivian proletariat one,  exist;  they are known, they debated and fought together in El Alto, in the mines of Huanuni, in the universities of the UTO Oruro and Cochabamba, in the students and the worker youth that rebel at each trap and truce.  Those forces are in the revolutionary vanguard that continues to raise the Theses of Pulacayo; that consistently fights for workers democracy in the workers organizations, to strengthen and extend them.  Those workers and young people need an international strategy to win.

The ruling class has devised a strategy to contain the Bolivian revolution:  a "power ring" of the bourgeoisies of the Southern Cone, a popular policy front directed from Havana and Caracas to strangle to the Bolivian revolution.   There is a US military base with 400 marines in Paraguay on the border with Bolivia.  The task to create the revolutionary party that the Bolivian masses need and deserve, is a task for all the internationalist Trotskyists forces of the world.  100% of the forces of Internationalist Trotskyism must be put to the service of the fight to break through the encirclement of the Bolivian revolution; in order to defeat to the policy of the containment of the Latin American revolution of Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, Stalinism, the union bureaucracy and the liquidators of the IV International!

Chávez announced his alliance with the bourgeoisies in Mercosur, that is, with Duarte, the president of Paraguay who has allowed the installation of a Yankee base and hundreds of marines with guaranteed immunity, ready to invade Bolivia if it is necessary to guarantee the plunder of the hydrocarbons for the transnational companies.  Chávez announced the alliance with the election of the "popular government" of Tabaré Vázquez and the PC in Uruguay, who holds a join military exercise (UNITAS) with the US Navy.

  Thus, the US base in Paraguay; the UNITAS exercise in the Atlantic, and the North American military base in Ecuador’s Pacific coast, are all counter-revolutionary forces ready to smash the Bolivian revolution, supported by Chávez, Fidel Castro and their policy of the popular front and its political class collaboration, that induces the masses to go to sleep so they can be subordinated to the bourgeoisie. 

We reject that those who pretend to speak in name of the Bolivian revolution, who subordinate the Latin American proletariat to Chávez, to Kirchner, Lula, and the party of the North American imperialist Democrats, and make possible the sacking of our countries and the killing of our people by the murderous Bush, can speak in the name of Trotskyism!.

100% of the forces of the international Trotskyism to build the revolutionary party of the working masses and Latin American poor farmers! 

100% of our forces to defeat the liquidators of IV International so we can refound it.! 

The 100% of the healthy forces of the Trotskyism internationally in the service of the fight to make the Bolivian revolution victorious and to fight at continental and world-wide level to defeat all those who betray it!

The Bolivian working class needs a party that links them to directly to the Iraqi resistance, to the revolt of worker youth in France, to the days of action that are being prepared in the United States - in the heart of the imperialistic beast -  for 1-3 December.  It needs an international General Staff of the socialist revolution:  it needs to refound the IV International as the world party of socialism.  

 

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As the healthy forces of Trotskyism internationally we are regrouping our ranks in the Liaison Committee for an International Conference.  Our last pre-conference of July 2005 - with the participation of Chilean, Peruvian, Bolivian, Brazilian, New Zealand, Argentine, -, has made the call to create an international centre as the embryo of the General Staff of the revolution. 

It was decided at that pre-conference, that the healthy forces of principled Trotskyism internationally will have to intervene in the heroic revolution of the workers and Bolivian poor farmers, to stand by the side of the revolutionaries against the servants of the bourgeoisie and the treacherous labor leaders. 

For that reason, we can say that we consistently fight against Lula and Petrobras, Kirchner and Repsol, and the traitors of the Latin American revolution that subordinate the proletariat to the bourgeoisie.  We are Ilave in Peru '; we are the workers resistance and of the young revolutionary students against the civic-military regime in Chile.  We are those that say to the Bolivian working masses that its revolutionary combat lives in the heroic Iraqi resistance, that their forces are with the French working class youth that threatens to burn imperialist France of the V Republic and to extend to all Europe.  We are the Trotskyists.

Class brothers and sisters of Bolivia:  your forces are enormous, and your true allies will rise 1° of December in the United States, to the heart of the imperialistic beast, with the day of struggle of the North American workers against Bush and their own imperialistic bourgeoisie. 

Our central tasks are to break with the bourgeoisie, to fight for the program of the proletarian revolution, to defeat the treacherous labor leaders, to create a revolutionary General Staff of the Latin American and world proletariat. Then the heroic Bolivian working class will be invincible. 

 

Trotskyist International Fraction (Fourth International)

18 of November of 2005. -