Bolshevik-Leninists fuse, Revolutionary Regroupment splits

Dear Comrades,

This letter aims to outline what our key political differences are, and to pursue further discussion and struggle towards resolving them. BL [Bolshevik-Leninist]has undergone a lot of political development over the past few months, and it is clear there is also confusion amongst RR comrades on what exactly our positions currently are and why we have them. It is for this reason we think it is extremely important to have something detailed in writing for RR and ABRI comrades so that you can develop a deeper understanding of our reorientation.

Briefly on our account of the ICL [International Communist League]. RR has characterised the ICL as “highly degenerate political adversaries in terms of internal regime and program”. This is a charge that we completely disagree with. Since our invitation to their international conference, we have been given the opportunity to peer into their internal life both through documents and in person. We have found their internal life to be vibrant and healthy, not bureaucratic and certainly not the “depoliticized obedience cult” as described by I/BT. Far from having held onto wrong positions due to “prestige politics”, the ICL has investigated positions that they have held not just since the 90s but from the very start and even preceding the Spartacist tendency. Spartacist #68 is a testament to this. As for their program, BL stands with full agreement with the ICL’s reorientation, and regard their renewed program as our own.

On relations with the ICL, we want to be clear and upfront. During and after our recent united front actions with the SLA [Spartacist League of Australia] it has become clear that since SLA’s and BL’s reorientation we have been intervening on a common program, and as such are pursuing fusion with them. As said in RR’s programmatic manifesto “Organise an International Marxist Proletarian Nucleus!”, we believe that “if there is sufficient closeness between organizations in the context of a united front, Marxists would seek to direct the discussion towards a merger or regroupment, without this preventing the joint struggle in the front with other groups from continuing”. A BL-SLA fusion would be a gain for revolutionary regroupment in Australia and internationally. We understand that RR does not have this perspective of ICL fusion. That being said, we are still interested in pursuing discussions with RR and ABRI and seek to maintain fraternal relations with both groups after fusion. BL seeks to improve relations between all three groups, with this letter being a step towards that but further BL-RR-ABRI discussions being another—alongside our offer to fly to Brazil to discuss these burning political questions. To both improve relations with RR-ABRI as well as pursuing a fusion with SLA we are planning to have a joint BL-SLA fusion conference in Australia at the start of March and both ABRI and RR are invited to attend and participate. We sincerely hope you do so.

As for our political reorientation, it should be said that first and foremost the most significant and underlying change within BL politically is in our conception of the question of revolutionary leadership. To explain this, it is necessary to start with an overview analysis of our history and development. When BL was formed, we were not really a group in the proper sense of the word, explicitly dubbing ourselves a “collection of individuals” in reflection of this fact. That is, we recognised that we were not functioning as the Marxist nucleus we strove to create. This was for a myriad of reasons, us being scattered geographically for example, but ultimately it centred around the point that we were not intervening as an active revolutionary factor in Australia. That fact has been true for the bulk of our existence. While at the time we thought this was mostly an organisational question to be organically resolved, as we approached forming a more geographically cohered group it became more and more clear that BL’s transition from a “collection of individuals” to a Marxist nucleus had to be much more than drafting some organisational guidelines and setting up a dues system.

A Marxist nucleus cannot mean simply rocking up to events and rallies with abstractly correct Marxist doctrine, growing like an amoeba until we one day become big enough to become an actual revolutionary factor. No, that is not being revolutionary; that is being a glorified discussion circle. That is what BL has been damned to for most of our existence, a fact that was consciously acknowledged but which the steps to break from were unclear, confused and seen as largely organisational in nature. This style of existence was reflected in our propaganda, which while containing plenty of abstractly correct points consistently failed to be a tool for revolutionary action—the central point of Marxism.

A clear example of this was our “Safety or Profit?” article. Documenting the tragic death of a young worker, this document was the epitome of radlib journalism. It detailed the complete negligence of the bosses, while making the correct point that capitalism is the root cause for his death. But what did we put forward concretely? In response to union misleadership we “counterpose a program of breaking with the ALP and building direct worker power by expanding union/worker control and oversight over production and safety processes”. That is all fine and dandy, but beyond abstract phrases how did anything written actually build and motivate a program of breaking with the ALP and fighting for revolution? In truth, it did not. Well wishes for a break with Laborism (and calling for revolution) are not the same as struggling to actually break workers from Laborism in the fight for revolutionary leadership. What the article amounted to was whingeing that the bureaucracy isn’t doing enough to take care of the working class. The entire article is a complete capitulation to left laborism, with some words against Labor thrown in at the end as if we could say some magic words and a spell would be cast transforming it into an instrument for revolutionary intervention. When it came down to it, in the here and now, we posed no revolutionary road on how to best advance the interests of the working class.

While this particular article is an obvious example, it is by no means the only one. BL was consistently in the framework of trying to be “not opportunist” rather than trying to advance the struggle of the working class, a path which necessarily means struggling for revolutionary leadership and smashing the fundamental roadblocks of the working class, most acutely the social-chauvinists and their opportunist left cover. Even at the time there was something deemed wrong with this article, although our attempts to determine what was wrong wound up completely confused.

A future article was planned to actually be used for revolutionary intervention, which we did not produce and could not have without realising what was wrong with the earlier one and our framework more broadly. The problem wasn’t that it lacked another sentence or two denouncing the Laborite bureaucracy more vehemently, it also wasn’t that what was said was not formally correct. The problem with the article and our framework as a whole was that it was not driven by the question of struggling for revolutionary leadership, to break workers from Laborism. This was seen as something that could be addressed with some additional words tacked on rather than it needing to be the guiding framework behind Marxist work and campaigns.

A similar case was repeated with one of our comrades’ plans to intervene in a rally led by liberal activists in response to growing reaction against trans people. BL comrades recognised that there was a rotten polarisation, fostered by anti-trans rightists and the pro-trans liberals for their own interests. We recognised that we had to cut across such an axis and hoist a revolutionary pole, but we lacked the program for it. Our solutions for what to intervene with wavered from grand sounding declarations (calling for revolution/break with the liberal leadership); to accepting this leadership in the here and now with demands that were perfectly in line with what the liberals were calling for (free trans health care on demand, defeat the right wing reaction against trans people, etc); to sectarian denouncing of the protests as liberal while standing aside and refusing to intervene and actually break anyone from said liberalism. Our planned intervention could be little more than a “Marxist”/labour wing under liberal leadership of the protests. This was our political situation at the end of 2022 and start of 2023. A group entering the left with confusion compounding on confusion with unclear reasons for even existing let alone developing.

With us cohering as a group proper (establishing a small nucleus in Melbourne at the start of 2023) the question of our place in the left and the workers movement cropped up more and more. In the face of a weak, scattered and hostile left, we responded with sterile rigidity. The SLA rebounding and IG/LFI potentially popping up as a group in Australia meant our position on the left felt increasingly precarious and our potential to grow and develop in such an environment felt stunted. The political differences between BL and RR, already built on weak organisational bonds and a shallow and untested basis of programmatic agreement, accentuated and culminated in the first exchange of polemics. We say this here so we can be absolutely clear. We do not defend the original documents produced. They were confused, sterile, and above all not revolutionary. In our struggle to break from our non-revolutionary past, we must recognise its manifestations in all its forms. This also includes all of our previous articles which were all written in this framework, including the ones translated and approved by RR comrades. This is a serious break not just of the positions that you disapproved which had come to the fore at the start of this year, but of our shared positions in the years before that which were also written in such a framework. The political differences developed since then have centred around this question.

RR’s failure to centre the question of revolutionary leadership manifested differently from BL’s, but it is a political fault that was shared between BL and RR until recently. The question must be: at every step of the way, what is needed to advance the workers movement and how do we demonstrate that fighting for the proletariat as an independent force under revolutionary leadership is needed to do so? To understand why we have undergone such rapid political changes in the past few months it must be recognised that they were precipitated above all by breaking with the centrist politics of BL’s history as a tendency—to transition from a discussion circle to a revolutionary organisation deserving of the name Bolshevik-Leninist. In this regard BL’s joint work with the SLA has helped immensely, and has marked a qualitative break with our old framework.

1) A defence of BL’s revolutionary interventions

In stark contrast to our old program, BL in the past months has fought to be a revolutionary factor in Australia. Our two statements published in the past few months have been modest steps forwards to actually struggling to advance the workers movement today.

Our call to chuck AUKUS hawks out of Labor puts front and centre the struggle to clear the obstacles of the working class and to create a revolutionary pole in opposition to the ruling class’ war drive. In Australia, the Labor Party has a stranglehold over the workers movement; every union, from the rightist SDA to the left-posing CFMEU are all programmatically Laborite to the core, and they can only betray. These are things that RR comrades are sure to recognise. Laborites have betrayed the working class again and again, and yet, the working class remains almost completely wedded to this machine. In fact, any dissent to them is consistently funnelled back to them via left talking bureaucrats and their cheerleaders on the left. It is clear as revolutionaries in Australia, our goal must be to smash Laborism as a political force, and to expose the left Laborites and their leftist hangers-on as the central obstacle for the working class to overcome.

This sounds simple enough, but how do we actually break workers from Laborism? Right now, backing AUKUS to Israel, the Australian ruling class and their ruling party in the ALP are marching us towards war and misery. This has created a wave of opposition and ruptures in the unions and the Labor Party. The Labor Party and the union leadership stand exposed, but all of this opposition to Labor’s belligerency is being funnelled into left Laborites and pacifists, who voice their opposition to certain machinations while never advancing more than token measures. We recognise that they do this because their program is subordinated to the interests of the ruling class, and that their allegiance is to their war hawk Laborite brothers far above any of their anti-AUKUS pretences. But it is one thing for us to recognise this and another to struggle to get the working class under their leadership to do the same.

Our call to chuck AUKUS hawks out of Labor struggles to do exactly that. Firstly, it is the most elementary step workers must do to advance the struggle against AUKUS —a bloc with war hawks of course stifles any struggle against a drive to war. It also puts the question point blank to the left Laborites and pacifists: “Do you actually oppose AUKUS or do you value much more your unity with the AUKUS hawks?”, exposing the left Laborites’ opposition to AUKUS as skin deep. Ultimately, even if political pressures forced such a split it would put such left Laborites in a position where their program could be put to the test and exposed as completely impotent. The only road against AUKUS is a revolutionary one, that much is clear. It is our duty to demonstrate it to the working class. This demand doesn’t give an ounce of credence to Laborites, left or right. In fact, it completely exposes them as obstacles for the working class and is above all a call to ferment rank and file rebellion within Labor and the unions against its leadership.

As for entering Labor to follow through with this demand, we see it as purely tactical. It certainly would be the best tactic if one could actually push this through in the belly of the beast, but it has just as much potency if not more when pushed in the unions against the bureaucrats who lead them. To reject this campaign out of some faux principled opposition to the tactics deriving from such a demand would be completely sterile, it would abdicate the struggle to actually fight for revolutionary leadership in the labour movement. We want to smash Laborism, especially when Labor is in power, and especially when they are championing the ugliest social-chauvinist program. We will not be waiting for their program to get more palatable before we struggle to break workers from their misleadership.

Ultimately, RR’s opposition to us entering the Labor Party, “especially when they are in government” is a rejection of the 2nd congress of the Comintern where Lenin argued in favour for communists to not just enter but to outright affiliate with the BLP [British Labour Party]. He did so not on some crude accounting the BLP’s program to be sufficiently left posing enough, or whether they are in government or not, but rather argued in favour of it based on how to best intervene in the working class who were tied to the BLP. To have a criteria to enter Labor whether they are in government or not has much more similarities to BL’s old framework of being “not opportunist” rather than anything to do with Lenin.

Our Anti-Albanese Yes Campaign is cut from the same cloth. The Labor government had created a reactionary polarisation which pitted two forces with common interests against one another. The ALP posed as defenders of Aboriginal people, pitting Aboriginal people and those who supported the Voice against those who were disgusted with the government and the increasing attacks they were waging against the working class. The importance of the call wasn’t to say we were voting yes for establishing an Aboriginal Voice in parliament. Rather it was that it recognised that struggling for the smallest gains for the working class and oppressed requires revolutionary leadership, which in this case entails building a revolutionary pole to smash this liberal axis. An effective struggle cannot be waged with Albanese and his rotten Labor government but only against them. The Voice referendum ultimately suffered a humiliating loss, in large part due to it being seen as little more than a vote of confidence for the Labor government. In the aftermath of such a loss, the country has experienced a right wing shift with rightists on the offensive at the expense of working and Aboriginal people. To overcome the reactionary polarisation that was created and to use that hatred of the government for the service of Australia’s oppressed would have thrown a wrench at both the ALP and the Coalition’s reactionary No campaign. That is why we struggled for an independent, anti-Labor, Yes campaign.

2) Lockdowns

RR comrades have voiced opposition to our support of the “Down with Lockdowns” call and our break from “Workers lockdowns”. Why was this call so important in the context of the pandemic? Why couldn’t we just call for lockdowns in the same vein as any other safety measure, say vaccinations? To put it simply, the fight for the working class to advance itself as an independent force during the pandemic necessarily required to break the bourgeois “national unity” campaign which was the ideological core of the lockdowns. Unlike vaccinations, lockdowns were a measure of the capitalists against the proletariat. Under lockdowns, the capitalists forced the working class to stay indoors through the means of the police and army, completely stifling class struggle. It was not some neutral means of safety but a weapon held by the class enemy to bludgeon their opponents.

The bourgeois (to varying degrees) were indeed suppressing COVID-19, but they were doing it through enforcing their interests at the expense of the working class. The response for revolutionaries thus is not to egg the capitalists on to perfect their means of stopping COVID-19, against the proletariat. No, the response had to be to struggle for the working class to stand on its two feet, and thus to fight against the ruling class, their rule and their methods of defending their rule. The proletariat has their own means of defending themselves, fighting for their safety by struggling for their own interests, at the expense of the capitalists’ rule and property; acting to take control of safety in workplaces, struggling for public works programs to alleviate conditions spreading the pandemic, seizing the spacious and unoccupied luxury buildings owned by real estate speculators and using that property for socially useful purposes such as COVID safe schools, etc.

To demonstrate this to the working class, our task as revolutionaries is to drive a wedge between this propaganda of “national unity,” abstract concepts of “public health” based on a “de-classed” science, and shared trans-class interests in “saving lives”. This cannot be achieved with the call for “workers lockdowns” or by treating lockdowns as another tool in the toolbox of defence against COVID-19. To take on the ruling class, their response and their propaganda head-on was the central task that had to be done to advance the struggle of the workers movement during the pandemic. Therein lies the complete vitality of the “Down with Lockdowns” call.

Not confronting this key question at the critical moment when it was strangling the workers movement avoided the necessary struggle for the working class to fight against the capitalists. And that is exactly what BL and RR did. The lockdowns did not exist as an abstract idea, they existed as a real measure by the ruling class (and in the deformed workers states, the ruling bureaucracy) against the workers. Anyone hearing BL’s former line for “workers lockdowns” would be unlikely to understand it as anything more than the working class enforcing the same reactionary measures, or as a call for them to be implemented more humanely with additional welfare schemes. Instead of smashing this reactionary “national unity”, we tried to patch it up with Marxist sounding flair.

As for RR, given the different manifestation of the pandemic in Brazil, with the lack of any serious attempt at a lockdown by Bolsonaro, the relevance of the call to smash lockdowns also manifested differently. Where it is relevant is in the positive program communists ought to have put forward in such a situation. What was needed was to pose the necessary independent tasks of the working class which go against the reactionary call for lockdowns. Instead, RR like BL treated the lockdowns like any other health measure joining in with the cry of liberals who were calling for the capitalists to dole out lockdowns against the working class.

This can also be seen in our defence of the CPC’s (and other ruling bureaucracies’) lockdowns against the working class, giving their reactionary and often brutal measures a complete whitewash as something to be replicated and spread. Instead of struggling to break the bureaucracy’s hold in China, Cuba or Vietnam we instead accepted their gag order as a necessary and progressive measure.

3) Ukraine

On Ukraine, RR states that their “perspective is that of the proletarian revolution in Europe and Russia, the only one that can actually end the threats of war and begin to demolish the military alliance of the imperialist powers” (“O prolongado conflito na Ucrânia: guerra maquiada da OTAN contra a Rússia” via online translation). Those are fine words which we are the last to dispute in importance. But RR’s position calling for military victory [to Russia] completely flies in the face of such a perspective. The only way to unite the working class of both Russia and Ukraine—to struggle for revolution and smash imperialism in the region (and beyond)—is ultimately for both Russian and Ukrainian workers to turn the guns around and overthrow their respective regimes. Calling for Russian military victory does absolutely none of that.

To justify this position, RR argues that “We defend Russian military victory at this moment as a concrete way to avoid a greater evil, which is NATO’s victory” (“O prolongado conflito na Ucrânia: guerra maquiada da OTAN contra a Rússia” via online translation) and as a blow to US imperialism. This sounds logical enough; a proxy regime for imperialism against a non-imperialist power. A win for one would be a blow to the other, and blows against imperialism are a good thing. But every act which is a blow against imperialism does not necessarily advance the interests of the working class, and all Leninists understand that the only way to deliver imperialism a coup de grâce is ultimately through workers revolution. Any strategy to struggle against imperialism must centre this. We must ask ourselves, does this position strengthen the international working class, does it advance the class towards revolution? Asking these questions, the call for Russian military victory falls apart.

This war is currently being waged over who controls Ukraine, the Kremlin or the White House. Neither outcome is progressive in the least, and either side winning would not deal a progressive blow against imperialism. Of course in the case of a Ukrainian victory it would only strengthen the imperialist hold over the country. But in the case of a Russian victory, whatever short term blow to imperialism would be completely negated by the cost of Russia being the oppressor of Ukraine. Such a victory would only bolster Zelensky’s proxy regime, which would continue to pose itself as “defenders against Russian aggression”. It would push nations historically oppressed by Russia into the hands of the imperialists, strengthening their encirclement of the country. Ultimately, it would create a perennial thorn against Russia in the form of the nationally oppressed Ukrainians, which would help imperialists fuel conflict to strengthen their position. The only benefactors would be the imperialists.

Even if the conclusion of this war saw NATO broken up this would not necessarily be a gain for the working class. If it was smashed by proletarian revolution, then it would be absolutely a gain. But through Russian victory? Such a breakup would entail little more than a shake up of imperialist alliances. A breakup of NATO in this situation would likely happen in the form of Germany breaking from NATO and entering a bloc with Russia. This would not be in the interests of the working class, in fact it would likely be the start of a new world war. This is no “lesser evil”!

While RR says that they have a perspective of proletarian revolution, in practice their position is a barrier to joint revolutionary struggle between Ukrainian and Russian workers. To call for Russian victory here would be calling for Russian workers to struggle to nationally oppress Ukrainians. It is a call for Ukrainians to support an invading force which promises little more than national oppression. For both Russian and Ukrainian workers, the call for a Russian victory does not rally them for revolution but pushes them into the hands of the regimes for the benefit of imperialism. While RR has some words in favour of revolution, they have surrendered the struggle for revolution in Russia and Ukraine today.

4) Permanent Revolution

RR has voiced opposition to the ICL’s correction on national liberation. But the fact is, in the semi and neo-colonies, to advance the workers movement and to demonstrate the necessity of the working class as an independent fighting force it is imperative to break the proletariat from the hold of the bourgeois nationalists. Without recognising the burning nature of the question of national liberation and championing it like how the ICL (and BL) has now done, there is no breaking the working class from their bourgeois misleaders, there is no revolution. ICL’s old program on national liberation, which RR falls into the same pitfalls as, is an obstacle to any serious struggle in these countries and damns the toiling masses to remain fully wedded to the national bourgeois.

Today, the world is divided into the hands of a small number of imperialists, who dominate every aspect of the political and economic lives of the semi and neo-colonies. It is by subjugating these countries that the imperialists maintain their rule. As such, many of the most basic tasks within these countries (national independence, democracy and modernisation; cancelling of imperialist debts, rolling back of austerity, etc) go against the very core of the imperialist system. It is because of this that achieving these tasks requires a fronton confrontation with imperialism, which the national bourgeois of the oppressed nations are unable and unwilling to wage as doing so would require a revolutionary upheaval of the masses that would threaten their own class interests. This makes the national bourgeois a damned class. They can’t fully repress the working class as they lean on this force to resist foreign capital but they can’t break with imperialism as that would require to rally forces that would threaten their very ability to exploit altogether. The national bourgeois of the colonies are forced to straddle a middle position between the imperialist bourgeois and the proletariat, leaning on either at any moment to defend their own narrow interests—weak in character, they are unable to be the ruling class of even their own nation. This perennially frustrated position of the national bourgeois means that they can never genuinely confront imperialist subjugation, it is a class doomed to betray the struggle of national liberation.

At the same time, imperialist subjugation has plunged the toiling masses into the depths of oppression, leaving their most basic demands unresolved. Since the condition of, and every measure doled out against, the proletariat is moulded by the imperialists, the struggle against imperialist oppression is a revolutionary powder keg and remains the most burning question in the neo-colonies. As things stand the masses remain wedded to the national bourgeois who also suffer from imperialist oppression. The working class look to the national bourgeois in the struggle against imperialism, but in defence of their own interests they can only betray. There is no path forward for national liberation but a proletarian one, under the leadership of a revolutionary party willing and able to take on the rotten imperialist order. At the same time, there is no revolution without wresting the proletariat away from the leadership of the bourgeois nationalists who currently have a stranglehold over the working class in the semi and neo-colonies.

There are two trends in the left which attempt to resolve this dilemma, both of them offer no way forward. Firstly there are those who surrender the necessity of the proletariat as an independent fighting force leading the struggle for national liberation, thus liquidating Marxism to tail the national bourgeois. The Pabloites are the classical example, their program keeps the masses under the chains of the national bourgeois, and therefore betrays the struggle for not just communism but national liberation itself. On the other hand there are those who, responding to the former’s tailism, reject the struggle of national liberation, dismissing it as bourgeois and nationalist and a distraction from proletarian revolution. In this camp fell the historic Spartacist League, who lamented on many occasions that “many so-called Marxists believe that the struggle for the ‘national liberation’ of the Arab countries has merged with or even replaced the struggle for socialism in these countries” (“Turn the Guns the Other Way,” 1968).

The latter trend uses plenty of loud denunciations of the national bourgeois as cheap substitution for the actual struggle to intervene against them and fight for revolutionary leadership. By juxtaposing national liberation with socialism, they only keep leadership of the national liberation struggle firmly in the hands of the national bourgeoisie. Abstract denunciations under this framework become little more than cheap attempts to keep oneself “pure” from opportunism, while in practice they keep the masses with anti-imperialist impulses well away, closing off would-be revolutionaries from any serious penetration into the masses and into the oppressed countries as a whole. For all its revolutionary rhetoric, the latter trend betrays the struggle for socialism and national liberation as much as the former. Ultimately both of these trends are obstacles since they abdicate the struggle to intervene and fight for revolutionary leadership, the only possible path for national liberation and socialism.

So what way forward? In competition with the nationalists for leadership of the masses in the struggle for national liberation the only path forwards is to…compete! We must unmask the inability of the nationalists to realise their own most basic demands (let alone complete and genuine national liberation) and demonstrate that the only way forward in the struggle for national liberation today is to march under revolutionary leadership. Only by being the best and most genuine champions of national liberation can we seek to merge that struggle with the struggle for socialism, the only way of wresting leadership from the national bourgeois and breaking the masses from nationalism. This can’t be done with abstractly correct sounding words but only by getting our hands dirty and actually intervening, not as a glorified discussion group but as a revolutionary instrument. Only then can we utilise this powder keg and use the just national aspirations of the masses as the motor force for socialist revolution that it is.

This is the genuine meaning of permanent revolution. Trotsky’s program means the steadfast struggle by Marxists to push forward, in the imperialised periphery, tasks of independence, democracy and development through national liberation to their ultimate achievement in the proletarian conquest of power; “a revolution whose every successive stage is rooted in the preceding one” (Trotsky). Trotsky recognised that in the imperialist epoch the tasks of national liberation can only be won through revolution. Instead of writing either off he fought to combine the two—success in doing so being the only way to achieve either. This is a task as important today as 100 years ago. This is the perspective that the ICL affirmed in Spartacist #68, which BL stands in full agreement with, and which RR has so far rejected outright.

Like much of the bourgeois “pink tide” in Latin America, the PT [Partido dos Trabalhadores] subsumes anti-imperialist sentiment. Through their rhetoric and professed political goals they present to their base as them “standing up” to the US. In Lula’s first term in government he was part of blocking the offensive of the FTAA. Today Lula talks up a “multipolar” world, BRICS cooperation with Russia and China, calls for a new global currency and more. His betrayals hardly need mentioning, and certainly overshadow any gains won under his leadership. But his “anti-imperialist” postures signal to many that Lula/PT are something beyond comprador—not a pawn of but a fighter against the imperialists. The mobilisation of large swaths of people behind the “pink tide” of bourgeois misleaders like Lula, who can only capitulate, is a reaction to the real conditions of imperialist subjugation which workers rightly view as a genuine barrier to social progress, and source of inequality and backwardness.

Even if Lula genuinely fought for “multipolarity”, this would still be no path to the actual defeat of the imperialist world system. The “struggle” of the “pink tide” against imperialist subjugation is in fact an attempt by national bourgeoisies to avoid confrontation with imperialism. The whole history of Brazil under the PT shows the bankruptcy and limits to this strategy. But when the imperialists have not forced Lula to push through brutal austerity programs, working Brazilians have experienced poverty reduction programs, economic growth, and an international position nominally beyond a US puppet. All this, again, appears to many workers to contrast with imperialist dependency. However, the PT remains a barrier to the struggle against imperialism and to achieving basic gains for the Brazilian working class. Every minimal victory won under their leadership is predicated on avoiding struggle and is therefore ready to break at the slightest pressure. This is evidenced by the drop in the value of the [Brazilian] real following an unhappy response by international capital markets to Lula’s “re-industrialisation plan”.

RR recognises as much as BL the inevitability of the PT to betray, and that to break workers from them is one of the central tasks for revolutionaries in Brazil. But the question is, how do we do it? In this regard RR falls well within the trend of the historic Spartacists and poses no way forward. RR pens plenty of words against the treachery of PT and the need for revolution, correctly stating many times throughout their articles how “there is no room, both from the point of view of the social structure of a country on the periphery of the capitalist system, and from the point of view of the current global economic situation, for significant improvements in the living conditions of the Brazilian working class without break with capitalism” (“Un debate con el PSOL y otros simpatizantes de Lula” via online translation). But this treatment of imperialism is completely divorced from the day-to-day struggle of the working class in Brazil—as just a question to be settled after revolution. In the meantime, RR argues that to break workers from PT and to struggle for revolution “the only possible path is for us to act to convince the people of the need and viability of the socialist revolution, while we build instruments on the front line of struggle” (“Un debate con el PSOL y otros simpatizantes de Lula” via online translation).

But how do we convince people for the need for revolution? Abstract calls for one do absolutely nothing to break the illusions the Brazilian masses have in Lula. The truth is that RR has posed no path forwards to break the masses from the PT, and thus have no path to winning the working class to the revolutionary road. As a replacement, RR offers little more than formally correct but abstract statements, as if the masses will be convinced of revolution by reading a strong enough denouncement of PT. Revolutionists need to actually intercept their bourgeois program beyond sterile and abstract denunciations of the fact that it is, indeed, bourgeois. We need to champion the struggle of national liberation, to centre and push for the confrontation with imperialism that the bourgeois PT program will never permit. The basic defence, and extension, of existing gains too is continually shown to require such a confrontation. Our task as communists is to show in struggle against the impotence and treachery of the bourgeois nationalists in even this task. Only in doing this can we expose the PT as the barrier to the struggle for national liberation that they are. Only then can we “convince the people of the need and viability of the socialist revolution,” not in words, but in deeds. To do so, and only through doing so, can the construction of an independent proletarian anti-imperialist leadership take place.

RR is absolutely correct in their opposition to PT and its left orbit, and correctly recognise them as roadblocks to the working class. We see this as a positive and correct impulse against the national bourgeois and its left tail. But that does not constitute a revolutionary road in itself. In fact empty denunciations of the national bourgeois fall into the exact same traps as the opportunists who openly tail them. The imperialists maintain their stranglehold over all aspects of the political, economic and cultural life of oppressed countries such as Brazil. The anti-imperialist struggle is key to liberation. If you are not fighting for revolutionary leadership of it then how will you break the masses away from PT to the banner of revolution? If you say you are fighting for leadership of this struggle, then how are you doing it beyond publishing correct sounding but abstract words?

BL hopes that this letter has a clarifying effect. Our forces are small, and the coming period presents increasing crises. Today, regroupment based on a clear revolutionary program is imperative. This letter was written for this purpose. The task to reforge the Fourth International today is a vital one, we ask comrades to seriously think through the questions and criticisms that we have presented.