https://iclfi.org/pubs/pamphlets/icc-ig-lm/appx-lm-break
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 648, 5 July 1996.
The International Communist League has dissolved its fraternal relations with the Brazilian Luta Metalúrgica/Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil (LM/LQB) group. In a June 17 letter to LM by the ICL’s International Executive Committee (IEC), we explained:
“For many months now the ICL has fought to bring the actual practices of Luta Metalúrgica/LQB into accordance with the revolutionary political program expressed in the Declaration of Fraternal Relations endorsed by both of our organizations in September 1994. In particular, since our January 1996 IEC meeting there have been sharp political struggles against LM’s trade-union opportunism and centrist subordination of the revolutionary program to a policy of endless unprincipled blocs and amorphous combinations in the trade unions….
“As the LM/LQB is evidently adamant on its opportunist course, we therefore dissolve fraternal relations and separate our organizations. We look forward to opportunities for common struggle.”
LM originated as a proletarian formation with a militant history in the steel industry center of Volta Redonda. In 1989, this group joined the Brazilian Causa Operária group (a tendency allied with the pseudo-Trotskyist Partido Obrero of Jorge Altamira in Argentina) but split in l994 centrally over CO’s centrist accommodation to the popular front. CO called for a vote to the “workers’ candidate,” Lula, in the bourgeois formation, the Frente Brasil Popular, a class-collaborationist alliance between Lula’s Workers Party (PT) and various “progressive” capitalist politicians (see “Brazil: IMF Candidate Wins Election,” WV No. 608, 14 October 1994).
It was LM’s opposition to the Lula Popular Front and also its understanding of the centrality of the fight against racial oppression—ignored by the rest of the Brazilian left—as a strategic question for socialist revolution in Brazil which laid the basis for our establishment of fraternal relations in the fall of 1994. Fraternal relations are a dynamic process of testing the apparent programmatic agreement through common work and debate of differences. A lengthy and difficult process in any case, this process was rendered more difficult in Brazil because of geographic distance, language difficulties and low level of communications technology. We sought to deepen our ties to LM, overcoming differences or potential differences, through patient and pedagogical discussion.
Recognizing that there is no stasis in fraternal relations, i.e., if we weren’t moving forward we were sliding back, the ICL brought one of LM’s leading representatives to an authoritative gathering of our International Executive Committee in January. We then invested significant resources to maintain an ICL representative in Brazil for many months to pursue an agreed-upon agenda for common work. This centered on the need to publish a party propaganda organ, to extend our presence to a major metropolitan center, and to seek to win recruits from the younger generation, including in the steel industry where LM has earned authority.
In the months prior to the IEC meeting, LM was centrally involved in an amorphous and unprincipled lash-up, Municiparios em Luta (MEL), which had recently won the leadership of the municipal workers union in Volta Redonda. At the January IEC meeting, the ICL first learned that this union includes police! For the past six months, our relations with the LM/LQB have been dominated by the interrelated issues of fighting to oust the cops from the union and of breaking the LM group from its ingrained practice of unprincipled combinationism in the unions. Despite a formal advocacy of the class independence of the workers, LM combined with non-Marxist and even sinister elements and braintrusted the MEL slate without ever mentioning in their election propaganda the question of removing the cops from the municipal workers union. Moreover, this election program, which sounded quite left-wing, was so sparsely distributed that a majority of the cops in the union voted for the MEL slate!
While LM opposed the bloc between Lula’s PT and various bourgeois politicians, a “union” between workers and cops is actually a purer form of popular front than that which exists at the parliamentary level: the mass organization purportedly for defense of the workers’ class interests is directly tied to the armed bodies for the defense of capital. The most dangerous form of popular front, especially common in neocolonial countries, is that between the leaders of the workers movement and “progressive” commanders of the armed forces. The outcome has been measured in rivers of blood, from the Chinese Communist Party’s bloc with the Guomindang (Kuomintang) in the mid-1920s, to the Indonesian Communist Party’s bloc with Sukarno and the Muslim generals in the mid-1960s, to the agreement between Allende’s Unidad Popular and “patriotic” generals like Pinochet in Chile in 1970-73. In microcosm, a similar bloc exists in the Volta Redonda municipal workers union.
In a February 23 letter to LM, we noted: “The fight for removal of the cops from the unions is the equivalent of the call for no vote to Lula: it is the concrete expression of the Marxist principle of the independence of the labor movement from the capitalist state.” Furthermore, we warned that LM’s stated position on the black question is undermined by and stands in contradiction to its actual current practices:
“Among the political issues that draw Luta Metalúrgica and the ICL together is our emphasis on and fight for a proletarian-centered strategy to smash racial oppression. Comrades, consider what this means in concrete terms. If tomorrow the need were posed for the municipal workers union to take the lead in organizing labor/black defense, such a mobilization would be obstructed. vitiated or made impossible by the presence in the unions of the forces which carry out racist massacres like those of Candelária, Vigário Geral and Carandirú, who massacre peasants in Rondônia.”
Just a few weeks after we sent this letter, military police carried out a massacre of peasants in El Dorado dos Carajás (see WV No. 644, 26 April). At the same time, cops in the municipal workers union were exposed in the bourgeois press for their continued participation in death squads responsible for the murder of street children.
The urgent issue of ousting the cops from the labor movement came to a head when the state itself threw down the gauntlet through an ominous raid on the March 13 municipal workers union meeting by the notorious military police. In defense of our fraternal comrades and of the union, and based on our principled stand for the independence of the labor movement from the capitalist state, the ICL mobilized its resources for an international campaign of solidarity. Organized by the Partisan Defense Committee, this campaign drew the support of labor unions and militants from South Africa to Tokyo to demand that the cops keep their hands off LM and the union itself. Since the battle was brought to LM, they have waged a principled and difficult struggle against the police presence in the union.
However, in the crucible of this campaign, our political differences were sharply revealed even as we made a united stand with LM against state repression. Despite abstract agreement with the need to forge a Trotskyist nucleus in Brazil, LM subordinated necessary party work—such as publishing a newspaper to openly make their case to the workers and expose the witchhunters—to preserving their control of the union from the top through the unelected position of “union adviser.”
Yet the MEL slate included the chief witchhunter himself, one Arthur Bonizetti Fernandes, who has made himself the spokesman for the cops. Scandalously, this pro-cop provocateur is working under the direction of an ostensible Trotskyist group, the Liga Bolchevique Internacional (an affiliate of the Argentine PBCI)! In a joint leaflet issued by the ICL and LM/LQB (reprinted in Espartaco No. 8, Spring-Summer 1996) we wrote: “This is a dirty matter: a recent letter (1 March 1996) from the Liga Bolchevique Internacionalista (LBI) to Arthur (coup-plotter against MEL) instructs him to attack Luta Metalúrgica and the ICL because we defend blacks and homosexuals…. The fake-leftists like Arthur and the LBI spit on blacks and women and embrace the repressive forces of the state.”
Fraternal relations were at an impasse over the two most fundamental issues for revolutionary Marxists: the state and the party question. In another letter to LM on June 11, we wrote:
“The job of Marxists is to have a program that conceptually opens the road to a working-class revolution. Luta Metalúrgica, in its program and treatment of the state and its armed bodies of men threw up roadblocks to this program of working-class revolution, sowing confusion among the workers by running for the leadership of a union with cops in it and without specifically and forcefully addressing this crucial question in the union election campaign. The point is not to feel miserable about this, or annoyed with us for insisting on the question. The point is to do something about it….
“A solid core of genuine Bolsheviks must be forged in a clear political struggle for the political independence of the workers movement from the bourgeois state, even if the risk is losing influence at the top of this union at this time. Continued delay in subordinating the question of principle to the quotidian struggle for influence in the union’s leadership can only lead to continued provocations by the police, the political forces who run the police and the ‘leftists’ who do their bidding. More importantly, the struggle for Marxist clarity and revolutionary political consciousness will be set back. The trustworthy base for revolutionary Marxists is to be found, and fought for, at the base of the union—among the actual workers.”
Trade Union Consciousness vs. Revolutionary Consciousness
Leninist work in the trade unions is directed at the base, to programmatically win the most advanced workers to an understanding of their class interests—embodied in the revolutionary program—and to building the revolutionary leadership that is needed to fight for those interests against the exploiters and fake-left misleaders. The famous “21 Conditions” for admission into the Communist International of Lenin and Trotsky were aimed precisely at separating genuine communists from reformists and centrists by insisting on the fight to implement a communist program, not to merely express abstract agreement with such a program while violating it in practice. Similarly, the entire thrust of the Organizational Resolution of the Communist International was to direct and organize communist cells in the unions, not to engage in maneuvers and unprincipled blocs at the top.
A negative example is seen in the practice of the Stalinized American Communist Party (CP) which let its powerful base in the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) in the late 1930s dissipate. Pursuing its popular-frontist strategy of “left-center coalitions,” the CP focused on maneuvers for positions of influence with pro-Democratic Party bureaucrats at the top of the unions. Having frittered away a substantial amount of their working-class support, they were then largely destroyed by the McCarthyite witchhunt in the late 1940s and early ’50s which followed the promulgation of the Marshall Plan, the Truman government’s anti-Soviet assertion of U.S. imperialist domination in West Europe. Even some of these Stalinists came to publicly regret their neglect of their base.
A base of support for a revolutionary party in the trade unions cannot be built and maintained simply through trade-union militancy. A central aspect of Leninism is the understanding that socialist consciousness is not a linear extension of the economic struggle between workers and employers at the point of production. Advanced workers must be won to the program and perspective of leading all sections of the exploited and oppressed in overthrowing the bourgeois order and reconstructing society on a just and egalitarian basis. As Lenin wrote in What Is To Be Done?, polemicizing against the Economist trend which glorified the day-to-day struggles of the workers:
“Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. This idea cannot be insisted upon too strongly at a time when the fashionable preaching of opportunism goes hand in hand with an infatuation for the narrowest forms of practical activity….
“Consequently, however much we may try to ‘lend the economic struggle a political character,’ we shall never be able to develop the political consciousness of the workers (to the level of Social-Democratic political consciousness) by keeping within the framework of the economic struggle, for that framework is too narrow….
“Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of relationships of all classes and strata to the state and the government, the sphere of the interrelations between all classes. For that reason, the reply to the question as to what must be done to bring political knowledge to the workers cannot be merely the answer with which, in the majority of cases, the practical workers, especially those inclined towards Economism, mostly content themselves, namely: ‘To go among the workers.’ To bring political knowledge to the workers the Social-Democrats must go among all classes of the population; they must dispatch units of their army in all directions.”
LM’s stubborn trade-union narrowness is a travesty of Leninism. A fraction of communist workers in the trade unions cannot substitute itself for the party and its propaganda. The Communist International outlined important political reasons for a division of labor between union and party formations. While fighting for leadership within the unions, communists seek to build the strongest possible unity of the working class against the capitalist exploiters. The task of the communist vanguard, however, is to sharpen the differences between competing political tendencies in order to bring the workers to communist consciousness and assemble the cadre, through splits and regroupments, in a Leninist party whose purpose is to lead the workers to state power. As one ICL comrade summed up in a discussion with Luta Metalúrgica, “Profintern = Unity; Comintern = Split.” (The Profintern was the Red International of Labor Unions associated with the Communist International of Lenin and Trotsky.)
Instead, LM partakes of the opportunist practices of the Brazilian fake “left” where each contender typically measures its strength by the number of unions it controls. Thus political program is blunted in the service of trade-union opportunism, and the unity of the union as a class defense organization is compromised by sectarian maneuvers in which the workforce is divided into competing union formations controlled by different political parties. As Trotsky wrote in “Communism and Syndicalism” (October 1929), “The question of the relationships between the party, which represents the proletariat as it should be, and the trade unions, which represent the proletariat as it is, is the most fundamental question of revolutionary Marxism.”
LM carries with it the baggage of its experience in centrist politics and trade-union maneuvers. Through the period of fraternal relations, LM encountered something in the ICL which their prior political experience could not have prepared them for. For the ICL, a political program is not socialist camouflage or an abstraction to be belied in practice, but a guide to communist intervention in all spheres of life.
For Revolutionary Regroupment, Not Centrist Conciliationism!
The dissolution of fraternal relations with Luta Metalúrgica is also a political consequence of the defection of our former comrades Norden and Negrete. Unfortunately for LM, it was these very comrades who for a long period of time served as the ICL’s links to LM. As fraternal relations moved forward through patient pursuit of political debates and common work on the ground led by comrades who better represented the ICL, Norden and Negrete capitulated to LM’s former posture and attempted to blunt the ICL’s intervention at crucial junctures.
But the real harm done to LM by Norden and Negrete came right from the inception of fraternal relations. Our international tendency has been built through splits and fusions with other leftward moving formations. That is why we emulate Lenin’s Bolsheviks in devoting so much attention to polemics as we seek to win over those subjectively revolutionary militants who are in or around our fake-Trotskyist competitors. Substantive programmatic agreement tested in practice through exemplary interventions and involvement in mass struggles, vigorous internal debate, rigorous cadre education: these are the methods of Bolshevik party building.
In contrast, with Norden and Negrete at the helm of our party work in Latin America, the approach to Luta Metalúrgica had more in common with oily bourgeois diplomats than Leninist internationalists. Both egomaniacs and facile pens, Negrete and Norden each later acknowledged that they personally wrote the Declaration of Fraternal Relations themselves! This document presumed and portrayed a broad, deep and synthetic programmatic agreement that simply did not exist. Moreover, fraternal relations was clearly viewed not as a substantive process to achieve a real transformation and the crystallization of a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard, but rather as “press release Trotskyism” for external consumption. The declaration was immediately released into print before the International Executive Committee had even discussed it or voted on it!
Our relations with LM in this regard contrasted sharply with our relations with the Japanese Rekken group. A 1986 agreement establishing fraternal relations was a modest document focused on the party question which included certain concrete tasks such as translating into Japanese selected fundamental documents of our tendency. This document was only made public a year later (see Spartacist [English Edition] No. 41-42, Winter 1987-88) after a period of testing demonstrated that the agreement was real.
The methods of Negrete and Norden have more in common with our centrist opponents like Workers Power, whose “international” is built with the same phony methods. Lofty statements are written for public consumption and to create an umbrella of “orthodoxy” to shield the very alien political practices carried out on the ground. Moreover, Norden’s ability to spin out voluminous statements in multiple languages from a remote international center while ignoring the real problems (disgustingly patronized by Negrete as “cultural differences”) gave Luta Metalúrgica the false notion that the ICL was a federated combination, not a genuinely democratic-centralist international tendency. The ICL is not dominated by big sections with the smaller ones reduced to the status of mere onlookers, nor is the work of any one section its own national property. Rather, our internationally determined priorities are keenly followed and discussed by the cadre throughout the tendency.
Rather than recruit LM to Trotskyism, Norden and Negrete hoped to reel in LM as a showcase Latin American section whose “base” in the unions they could brag about in international propaganda. Unfortunately for the comrades of Luta Metalúrgica, their adventure with Negrete and Norden came late in the stage of Norden’s degenerative Pabloite disease. A motion voted by the International Secretariat at its 11 May meeting noted in part, “Norden and Negrete’s attempt to blunt the necessary sharp political fights with LQB/LM in Brazil manifests the same centrist appetites exposed in Norden’s conciliation of the German KPF. Norden and Negrete’s false fight against ‘syndicalism’ in the LQB/LM was designed to alibi LM’s trade-union opportunism which was most egregiously revealed in the elementary question of opposition to the encroachments of the bourgeois state on the labor movement.” A study of fraternal relations with LM prior to the January IEC meeting is a textbook case in how not to build a communist international.
Normally on the road to a healthy fusion, the groups that are fusing let down their guard and become more candid and generally open as their common political purpose begins to render their separate organizational structures increasingly redundant. Negrete and Norden kept LM isolated from internal discussions within the ICL, conveniently and especially regarding the fights with Norden over Germany. In an attempt to advance candid discussions and spur LM to adopt Bolshevik organizational norms, which were wholly lacking, we proposed an exchange of internal minutes of our leading party bodies. But the nascent process of internal differentiation within the group, combined with the political opposition of the individuals who were previously their main links to the ICL, and the growing conflict between LM’s professed aims and its actual work, inculcated an organizationally protective reflex. The exchange of internal documentation was refused by LM, and they drew a hard line on maintaining their opportunist course in the unions.
As a group consisting mainly of advanced workers and political autodidacts which was primarily defined by empirical opposition to the popular front on its own national terrain, and as former leaders of mass workers’ organizations at the local level, it was difficult for LM subjectively and conceptually to transform themselves into a propaganda group. In the best-case scenario, it would take a substantial time to assimilate our methods of work as a Trotskyist fighting propaganda group. But we were very prepared to try, including allocating our limited cadre and financial resources to work in Brazil. It was our sense that this group had the potential to forge a vanguard cadre of communist workers, something seen only a few times before in the history of the Trotskyist movement, as with the Belgian miners or Minneapolis Teamsters in the 1930s. As we wrote to LM in March:
“Lenin’s Bolshevik Party was built through the fusion of ‘declassed’ intellectuals and the most advanced layers of the proletariat. The practice of the various centrist organizations in Brazil, and not only there, is the antithesis of Leninism. Theirs are two-tiered parties in which a layer of petty-bourgeois intellectuals, posturing as the ‘great thinkers,’ lord it over the working-class members. This is simply a reflection of their opportunist politics which seek not to advance the consciousness of the proletariat but rather cater to backwardness and the influence of their ‘own’ bourgeoisie. The comrades of LM represent the vanguard elements of the proletariat. You comrades must become the nucleus of a Trotskyist party in Brazil. We wish to assist this political transformation.”
Political Program Is Primary
This is a reactionary political period but one nonetheless presenting opportunities for communist intervention and growth of our party which are, however, spread unevenly around the world. Brazil is among the places where there is a lot of ferment among the workers, and among the students, and our commitment to a class-struggle fight against racial oppression and to build a party as a Leninist tribune of the people has enormous appeal. Still, it is a period where the collapse of the Soviet Union has brought the identification of the workers’ class interests with the ideals of socialism to a nadir on the world stage. Rather uniquely on the left, the ICL swims against the stream and insists on the validity of revolutionary Marxism as a program for struggle today.
Indicative of the flawed character of the Declaration of Fraternal Relations was its failure to even mention permanent revolution. Yet this is a key question for Marxists in Latin America! Without a conception of the centrality of the proletariat and the need for a Leninist vanguard to bring the workers to state power as the liberators of all the oppressed in society, the workers will be condemned to repeated cycles of “anti-imperialist united fronts”—i.e., popular-frontist blocs with their own bourgeoisie (surely camouflaged with lots of rhetoric against Yankee imperialism)—and to military coups and unbridled police-state terror.
Regarding the primacy of a correct political program, the ICL noted in its June 11 letter to Luta Metalúrgica:
“The ICL too has had to recognize and remove roadblocks we too created and which would have blocked the road to working-class revolution if we had not recognized our errors. A good and very recent example is the fight with and in our Canadian section to advocate independence for Quebec. If the forces within our organization had failed to block the comrades capitulating to Anglo-chauvinism within our Canadian section, then we would have had to forge a new party to lead the proletarian socialist revolution in Quebec and English-speaking Canada. Instead, very sharp internal debate, organized cadre education, and extensive discussion won the Canadian comrades over to the program that is essential for a Marxist perspective in Canada today….
“The Bolshevik party too encountered many roadblocks, including within the party itself, and Lenin’s writings are filled with urgent polemics to remove the obstacles to revolution which often turned up right in the Bolshevik Party Central Committee. To return to the point that the job of revolutionary Marxists is to have a program that conceptually opens the road to a working-class revolution, it is interesting to note that the Bolsheviks barely made it to the October 1917 Revolution. The Bolsheviks stumbled into the February 1917 revolution with a program which was inadequate for October. Specifically, the Bolsheviks’ concept of the coming Russian Revolution was the errant theory of two-class rule expressed in their program for a ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.’
“The party, led by Lenin and aided by the more radical Petrograd committee, semi-empirically overcame the limitations of this ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ because their political appetite was clearly for proletarian power and that’s what they fought for despite the theoretical ambiguity. But in fact the Bolsheviks never adopted Trotsky’s correct and essential theory of permanent revolution. This theoretical failure, and the failure to explicitly repudiate the ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry,’ then became a conduit for the forces later posturing as the Bolshevik ‘old guard’ (e.g., Stalin) to attack Trotsky, the theory of permanent revolution, and the revolutionary internationalist premises and implications of the Bolshevik Revolution itself. Some fifty years later, and after the ultimate capitulation to imperialism by the Stalinist bureaucracy in giving up proletarian state power, one can bitterly appreciate what a very large roadblock this programmatic error had become over time.”
We do not have Lenin and Trotsky, but we have their experience to assimilate, particularly as a methodology.
We will of course continue to defend LM and its supporters against attacks by the bourgeois state and procapitalist labor bureaucracy. We remain open to common work with this group. We will also continue working to build a Trotskyist organization in Brazil, the nucleus of a revolutionary proletarian party in this strategically important Latin American country. We hope that militants of the LM/LQB will reconsider and reject their present centrist course and on that basis will find their way into the ranks of the ICL.
