(Bolivia, Europe, New Zealand, Peru)

Contents

BOLIVIA: LESSONS OF THE GENERAL STRIKE.

THE MASSES DEFEAT A COUP D'ETAT IN PARAGUAY

FOR THE COORDINATION OF THE GENERAL STRIKE OF BOLIVIA AND
PARAGUAY - (joint declaration PO Bolivia/ Socialist Labour of Paraguay)

HANDS OFF CHINA!

ANOTHER ROTTEN BLOC! Workers' Power/LRCI and PTS Argentina fusion talks.
 
 

On 21 April marked the end of the indefinite general strike launched by the COB (Bolivian Trade Union Council) fiveweeks ago. This was the third approximately one-month-long general strike in two years. On 5 March the COB launched a one-day general strike. On 12 the COB organised a national hunger strike of union leaders. On 18 March the COB began the indefinite general strike. In Bolivia the minimum living family wage is L. 300 (US$500) and the official minimum wage is only L. 30 (45 US$). The government only offered an increase of 8%. This increase was lower than the 1995 inflation which was 12,5%. The COB demanded an increase of at least 200%. Another big issue is the question of the privatisations. The people are very angry with the de-nationalisation of the railways (ENFE) and the Bolivian airlines (LAB). Now, President Sanchez de Losada, is trying to privatise the biggest company in Bolivian: YPFB (Gasand oil). YPFB produced more than half of Bolivian exports. The great majority of the population is against this because they are afraid that the oil prices will increase and that the company that generates half of Bolivian exports will benefitonly multi-nationals.

Between 1982 and 1986 Bolivia lived under a revolutionary period. Its high point were the March general strike (in which the miners took La Paz for 2 weeks) and the September five-week general strike in which the new MNR (Nationalist Revolutionary Movement) government managed to divide the wage workers from the small owners and imposed the beginning of the neo-liberal counter-reforms. In August 1986 a general strike with a 15,000 strong march from Oruro to La Paz was defeated by the army. Since then a new period of reactionary demo-liberal offensive began.

The MNR was the party that made the 1952 "revolution" that brought land reform, the nationalisation of the mines and universal suffrage. In 1985 it returned to power and, like all the bourgeois nationalist regimes, it became now a direct agent of "Thatcherist" policies. Then in 1989 the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), [a Castroite guerrillaist party founded in 1971, took power in alliance with the ADN of general Banzer (the Bolivian "Pinochet" between 1971 and 1978). The MIR-ADN continued all the neo-liberal policies. In 1993 the MNR again returned to power in alliance with the indian nationalists (MRTKL) and the MBL (the Bolivian section of the Castro-Lula-Aristides Sao Paulo Forum's international).

The new MNR president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada is the man that destroyed the biggest state company (COMIBOL) that controlled the majority of the big tin mines and that was the main company for decades in Bolivia. Sanchez' company (COMSUR) bought many former COMIBOL pits and now is the biggest private tin mining company. Sanchez programme is based in 3 "terrible laws":

[1] "capitalisation" of all the state companies (to sell the majority of the shares to foreign capitals);

[2] education counter-reform (to destroy the powerful teachers' union and the university's economic autonomy, to promote private education and to give all the schools to poor city councils);and

[3] "popular participation" (to give money for public works to the peasant communities and popular districts with the aim to destroy the unions and to divide the peasants against the teachers and public workers).

The last law has some popular support. The teachers and students managed to avoid the worst aspect of the educative counter-reform but not all. The government managed to sell 50% of the shares of the telephone company (except in the largest cities because the biggest civic strike stopped it) and the great majority of all the big state companies.

The strike.

In the last ten years the MNR and the MIR-ADN governments launched four "state of emergency" (state of siege) in which hundreds of union leaders were put in jail and the rights of strike and constitutional rights were suspended. This year the strike was made at the time of an international conference of the Rio's group and the European Union in Bolivia. The government preferred a semi-militarised La Paz without launching an official state of siege. In the last five weeks Bolivia has been shaken by the biggest demonstrations in years. Every day La Paz and other cities were paralised by demonstrations and blockades. The people were not afraid of the police and constantly the demonstrators beat the policemen. Thousand used ynamite and slings against the repression. On 26 March the repression killed one person. On 28 March tens of thousands organised a 12 kilometers march to La Paz. On 2 April private transport was completely paralised and thousands destroyed or burned several cars and wagons of the new privatised Railway company.

Nevertheless, the general strike did not defeat the government. At the end Sanchez de Losada added only 1% more to the wage increase of the 8% that he offered. The government said that it will liberate all union prisoners except the COB's number3, Lucio Gonzales, who has been in prison since early 1996 under the false accusation of the participation in a MRTA's kidnapping of a businesman. The government postponed the "capitalisation" of YPFB to July. While the strike didn't win a victory is was also not a serious defeat. Workers gained some ground. The workers developed more radical methods of fighting and the government is weaker.

Why didn't the strike win?

The government said that the "capitalisation" of YPFB was the"mother of the battles". If the COB wanted to stop that privatisation it was necessary to prepare a serious battle. The bureaucracy started the "mother of the battles" with a national hunger strike of more than 200 unionleaders on 12 March. The hunger strike is a defensive tactic that might be used when you or your relatives are in jail. But when you are trying to defeat the government's neo-liberal plan and to increase wages this measure is completely ineffective. The majority of the Bolivians live in a permanent involuntary hunger strike with little wages and food. The hunger strike couldn't defeat the government. Instead of puting hundred of thousand of militants in isolated rooms without food, they should have organised street meetings, blockades and pickets, and pressed all the unions to enter the strike. One week later the COB launched a general strike.

A total general strike means that transport, the banks, telecommunications, post office and production should stop completely. Nevertheless, the COB only managed to stop the schools, the state universities, the health sector, the state mines and a few companies. It was an indefinite general strike but mainly of the service sector. The streetsellers and the pensioners played a significant role in the daily demonstrations. Nevertheless the strike didn't managed to stop the majority of the national production.

In some isolated days several cities were completely paralised because the transport and the civic committees decided to launch regional stoppages. In Beni, on 24 of April, the streets were empty and the students formed a "civic police" to replace the police.

The Oil workers are a privileged workers aristocracy that in the past constantly broke general strikes. Nevertheless, this year they started to fight. But the oil union should have made its task the occupation of the oilfields. They didn't prepare for the strike and the army broke them. Had the oil union managed to stop the production of gas the strike could have had a big impact in damaging the economy.

The peasants in 1979 were able to blockade the cities and to stop the introduction of rural goods. In this strike the peasant unions made sevral blockade (especially around Cochabamba, the biggest peasant department in which the peasants are fighting for the legalisation of the coca production). Nevertheless, the majority of the peasants didn't participate in the strike.

The factory unions, instead of organising a general stoppage with factory occupations, said that only their leaders would enter in a hunger strike and that the workers should make blockades in their lunch/breakfast hours. Therefore the strategic mining companies (like Inti Raymi, ENAF and COMSUR) were not paralysed by mass strikes.

The teachers, student and the population created self-defence pickets that were able to beat the repression at several times. What was needed was to develop and centralise such bodies. The COB didn't do that.

A general strike means that it is necessary to create new workers' power bodies and leaderships. The COB should have launched people's councils and assemblies with the popular districts, transport and all the industry sectors to organise and direct the strike. These bodies would must have delegates elected and recallable by rank and file assemblies. The same principles have to be applied to a national strike committee. This body has to lead the strike under the control of the rank and file. Without rank and file control of the strike, the bureaucracy was able to authorise the different unions to deal separately with the government and in the end they betrayed the strike.

The left.

The Bolivian left is in a serious crisis. Its strategy is to try to create a popular front behind the no-neoliberal borugeoisie. Dr. Morales D vila is the leader of the radical left "Workers Tribune" paper. He was a 6 weeks in prision because he accused Sanchez of being a "betrayer of the fatherland". He is leading a National Committee for the Defense of our Natural Resources and National Sovereinty in alliance with Banzer's ADN, the MIR and the bourgeois populist CONDEPA. They also are trying to influence the army that is not happy with the privatisation of the railways to the "Chileans". This is a popular front in which the left is under a programmer of defence of the national capitalist economy with more state production and less privatised companies.

The majority of the left is capitulating to anti-Chilean slogans. Some demonstrations burnt Chilean flags. We are against every private company but we defend the Chilean workers and condemn every expression of national chauvinism. We are demanding a halt to this anti-Chilean campaign and that the COB and the Chilean CUT made a coalition to fight against private companies in both countries. As the left is using anti-Chilean slogans, the government is denouncing constanntly the presence of Peruvian subversives as instigators of several radical demonstrations.

The COB had several leaders that are members of the government coalition. The left that is not in the government (ASD, PCB, PRP, PS-1, ASP, Eje) is trying to rebuild a popular front with sectors of bourgeois nationalism to try to reform the system.

The Lora POR led the La Paz' teachers unions and they became the most important left opposition to the bureaucracy. Nevertheless, the POR are have a Healy-like adventurerist and slander policy.[Healy was the leader the the British Workers Revolutionary Party notorious for his crude methods and personality cult]. The POR say that Bolivia has for the last 15 years been in a revolutionary, pre-insurrectionary situation despite the fact that the majority of the industrial workers didn't paralyse industry and there is no dual power. They said that the demo-liberal government that had only 40 political prisioners (less than Britain) is a fascist dictatorship. They reject the strategy of a workers' council insurrection led by a mass Bolshevik party. For them a spontaneous insurrection had to be led by a party of less than 100 militants in alliance with "Bolivianist" [i.e. nationalist] military officers. The POR is trying to recruit generals and colonels to a programme that proposes!

to build a Bolivianised army with better weapons and wages to defend the fatherland against the foreigners and "gringos". Instead of denouncing the demobilising character of the hunger strikes, the POR tried to organise an water-only hunger strike in which they tried to replace the mass action with the heroic action of supermen.
 
 

Paraguay is one of the centers of the mass resistance in Latin America. On April 22, a few days before the 48 hour general strike called by the three national unions for the 2 and 3 of May, the chief of the army, general Lino Oviedo, launched a coup d'etat. Juan Carlos Wasmosy, the first elected president of Paraguay in decades, decided to ask the chief of the army for his resignation In response Oviedo made a putch.

Thousands occupied the streets to fight against the coup. Neverthelss, Wasmosy made an incredible deal. He made general Oviedo his defence minister! The new chief of the army, general Oscar Diaz Dalmas, declared that was a follower of Oviedo and that he accepted the agreement. This provoked a crisis in his cabinet and massive opposing demonstrations among the masses. Nearly all the cabinet, except the chancellor Luis Maris Ramiarez Boettner, refused to participate in the appointment of Oviedo as defence minister.

The big mass demonstrations pressured the government. Oviedo and Ramiarez had to resign. After this victory the workers have to be confident in their struggle and to have a class independence. They have to create a pole of attraction as a class to the peasants and poor people. All the union and peasant organisation have to create a Struggle National Committee with rank and file delegates. They should demand not only the resignation of Oviedo but the abolition of the officer corps, the cancellation of the external debt and the expropiation of the capitalists. For that reason the workers and peasant organisations have to break with the bourgeoisie and organise popular assemblies, militias and soldiers unions and fight for the power.

Wasmosy and Oviedo are members of the same official party (the Colorados - Colorured) that ruled Paraguay since the time ofthe terrible Nazi-protector dictator Stroessner. The main opponent of Wasmosy, Luis Maria Argasa, decided to remain silent during the coup. General Oviedo now is launching an electoral campaign for the presidential elections of 1998 and he is being supported by the "Democratic" faction of the Coloured party. Vice-president Roberto Seifart, criticised the Wasmosy-Oviedo deal and now is trying tocapitalise the anti-militarist opposition. The toilers should not have trust in any of these wings of the ruling party. They have to create their own and revolutionary party.

28 April, Ramon Aguilar (member of Poder Obrero and  of the Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International).
 
 

Resolution of Poder Obrero (Bolivia) and Socialist LabourParty (Paraguay)
 

The indefinite general strike that is happening in Bolivia and the 48 hours general strike called for 2 and 3 of May in Paraguay had the same enemy: the IMF and its plans of privatisations and adjustments.

The Socialist Labour Party of Paraguay and Workers Power of Bolivia decided to launch a combined campaign for the defence and coordination of both fights. Our organisations assume the compromise to propaganidise both actions and to build solidarity relations between Bolivian and Paraguayan unions.This paralisations are the vanguard of mass resistance in the continent. We have to fight for its victory and to stop the meassures of repression (including a probable state of siege or coup) and the conciliation of labour bureaucracies. We fight under the aim that this struggles should have to be led by strike committees with rank and file elected and recallable leaders and that it have to be create popular assemblies, self-defence pickets and the peasant-worker alliance.

We call the unions in Bolivia and Paraguay to meet, coordinate and to convene the rest of the continental union organisations with the task of launching a continental fight.

action/

Cancellation of the foreign debt and rupture with the IMF!

For the defence of the public companies!

For the re-nationalisation of the privatised companies under workers'control!

Socialist Labour Party (Paraguay)

Poder Obrero (Workers Power) Bolivia

Mid-April 1996
 
 

The dispute between China and Taiwan is a major threat to world peace. Not because "communist" China is the aggressor, but because the US may back a movement by Taiwan towards independence which could lead to open war against China.

Taiwan has always been part of China. It took on a separate existence after the long struggle against the Japanese invaders, and defeat of the Nationalist Chiang Kai Chek and his US allies by the communists in 1951. Since that time the Nationalists continued to regard Taiwan as part of China vowing they would return to the mainland and overthrow the communists. Because Taiwan was a bulwark against communist China it has always been supported by the US. What has changed?

What has changed is that the cold war has ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern European former Stalinist states. After 75 years of attempts to destroy "communism" the imperialist powers have almost succeeded. This leaves China, along with Vietnam, Cuba and North Korea as the surviving "workers" states. However, their existence is under threat as they struggle to avoid the collapse of their economies. This collapse was inevitable given their origin as degenerated workers states. Capitalist property was expropriated by Stalinist bureaucracies which suppressed any independent worker and peasant role. Because workers did not control the planned economy, and the capitalist West isolated these economies from the world economy, their growth was stunted and decline and collapse only a matter of time.

The only way that the stalinist bureaucracies in these countries can survive is to become capitalist themselves. However they are divided on the best road back to capitalism. They do not want to collapse like the fast track "big bang" of Russia and the Eastern European states. This would jeopardise their ability to stay in power. They want a gradual road to restoration which they can control. The Chinese leadership so far has allowed capitalism back into parts of the country, while retaining overall control of the economy through the plan.

The problem is that the world capitalist crisis is forcing the major imperialist powers to step up their attempts to grab chunks of the former and declining workers states. They are using a range of methods to regain control over these economies. One method is to back former Stalinists to impose economic "shock therapy". Then they follow up with financial blackmail, as in Russia, promising loans in return for policies which provide good investments for western capital.

Elsewhere, the break-up is not so peaceful. For example in the former Yugoslavia the stalinist state broke-up into civil war as rival "states" fought to grab as much of the former economy as they could to survive as capitalist mini-states. Here the imperialist powers acted as power brokers in encouraging the breakup and have used the UN or NATO to impose a partition which suits their interests.

China is following a middle course. The leadership is allowing capitalism free reign in selected economic zones while seeking to gain part of the profits that are generated to boost the planned economy. While this suits the interests of the imperialists who are making big profits from cheap Chinese labour and resources, they want more. At the same time they do not want to risk a premature war with Beijing that would undo their investments. One solution is to use Taiwan, which is a bastion of free market capitalism and the sixteenth strongest economy in the world with massive investments on the mainland, as a bargaining chip, to gain further access to China's resources.

Hence the move towards Taiwan's "independence" can be seen as a attempt to play off China's ambition to regain control over Taiwan's capitalist wealth, in return for further foreign investment in China, and ultimately, the restoration of capitalism in the whole country. By this means, Taiwan and the US could concede Taiwan's "independence" in return for further economic concessions in the capitalist enclaves.

For this reason it is unlikely that the US or China, let alone Taiwan, would want a war. They all have too much to lose. However, in the event that war breaks out between China and Taiwan (backed by the US), or in the event that one or more of the capitalist enclaves secedes from China, creating a civil war, it is necessary for workers everywhere to defend China against imperialism, and its seceding mini-states, without giving political support to the bureaucratic regime that rules China.

In any war between China and US imperialism, the defence of China is a defence of the survival of the planned economy which was created by the expropriation of Chinese and foreign capitalists after 1951. The military defeat of China would not only mean the defeat of its political leadership, but also destruction of the surviving planned economy and the rapid restoration of capitalism. That defeat would be a defeat or workers everywhere because it would mean the return of capitalist exploitation to China as a whole, and the strengthening of imperialism world wide.

For unconditional defence of China against imperialism and its Taiwanese stooges!

For political revolution against the Chinese stalinist regime!
 
 

Different self-claimed trotskyists currents are under fusion talks: Militant Labour with USec, LIT with WRP Workers Press.

In January 1996 the League for a Revolutionary Communist International (LRCI), decided to expel Poder Obrero, their Bolivian section, without giving it the chance to appeal or have a political discussion. At the same time it decided to enter in fusion discussions with the Argentinean Workers' Party for Socialism (PTS).

Before the LRCI broke with most of its comrades in the Southern Hemisphere, it had decided to have discussions with several currents. But the PTS was never mentioned at all as a possible target. Immediately after the LRCI leaders suspended or expelled all its Latin American members they decided to rush into the PTS. The first Workers Power (Britain) paper in 1996 printed a joint statement between the PTS and the LRCI. Under the title "Towards a Revolutionary Regroupment!" both currents decided to "evaluate if there is a sufficient basis to form a Liaison Committee".

The origins of Morenoism and the PTS

The PTS comes from Nahuel Moreno's International Workers League (LIT). Moreno was an old Argentinean centrist. In the 1940s he considered that nationalist movements that had confrontations with US were "fascists". In the 1950s he made a 180 degree turn and decided to dissolve his organisation into them. He joined the parties of Peron in Argentina and Belaunde in Peru. In the 1960s Moreno, after siding with Peron's friend Batista against the Cuban revolution, became an open Maoist and Castroite and advocated the substitution of a Bolshevik party and a soviet insurrection strategy by peasants unions and a inter-class people's war and government.

In the 1970s he fused with some social democrats and advocated the creation of Second International-type parties around a strategy of parliamentary "socialist" majority governments. In late 1970s he broke with the United Secretariat and fused with Lambert's International. Like the LRCI, Lambert had abandoned its main Latin American work and, as a way to cover that split, he jumped at Moreno's offer of marriage and created the "Parity Committee". This unprincipled bloc only lasted two years. In 1982 Moreno broke with Lambert and created the LIT. Immediately after he died the LIT started to go into a crisis. The PTS in 1988 was its first split out of more than six resulting ruptures.

The PTS created the LIT's International Faction with two other small groups in Mexico and Chile. The PTS criticised the LIT around two issues. First, the LIT said that the centre of world revolution was in Argentina and the PTS said it was in Eastern Europe. Second, the PTS opposed the re-creation of a popular frontist bloc with the CP. The PTS initially supported the creation of the "Peoples' Front with the Workers' Peronism and the Left" (FREPU) around the CP and some Nationalists, but after it was dissolved, the PTS was against the re-foundation of this alliance.

The PTS started a process of PARTIAL but INCOMPLETE rupture with Moreno. The PTS retained many things from Moreno. For it the fundamental revisions of Moreno were made in the 1980s, and the LIT "which in the beginning was a regroupment to resist the revisionism's most rough expression was step by step being degenerated after 1983" (Cuadernos de Tribuna de los Trabajadores. No 1. 1995). The PTS has progressive critiques of Moreno's idea to substitute the party for a revolutionary front and about his stageist conception of a "democratic revolution".

Nevertheless, they never criticised Moreno and the LIT for their extreme Stalino-phobic positions. The LIT was created around support for a Walessa-led Solidarnosc government in Poland, and support for the Afghan CIA-backed landlord clerical armed bands against the popular front government and the USSR. The victory of Walessa and the Mujahedines, helped the process of destruction of the workers' states and of advance of capitalist counter-revolution. To cover his Stalino-phobia, Moreno developed the theory of a single counter-revolutionary front which includes US imperialism, Stalinism, Lula (in Brazil) and Castro.

The LRCI always criticised this position because it led to a misunderstanding of serious differences and conflicts between the different counter-revolutionary forces, and because it put Stalinism in the same camp as imperialism. That is why for Moreno every nationalist movement against Stalinists regimes was against imperialism.

The PTS repeated a similar method. The centre of world revolution is in Eastern Europe against the counter-revolutionary world bloc. The PTS refuses to believe that in the former "Socialist bloc" there is a process of social counter-revolution. Instead it believes it is a process of political revolution that is undermining the capitalist "new world order" and that we are living internationally in a much more revolutionary time than in the 1930s crisis. When Yeltsin imposed a capitalist counter-coup and dissolved the USSR the PTS said that it opened up a world revolutionary mass offensive.

Convergence?

The declaration says that "there has been a convergence of programme and perspective during the last years between the two organisations". This is an illusion. In some positions the PTS is to the left to the LRCI. For example, the PTS made a big campaign against the Argentinean Altamira's Workers Party which refused to see US imperialism as the main enemy in Haiti.

The LRCI, taking the opposite view, said that in case of confrontations between a military resistance or guerrilla war against US invasion, it would not defend them against the US. In Cuba and the workers' states the PTS is not in favour of the freedoms for parties that don't defend the gains of the social revolution. The LRCI is not only in favour of freedom for capitalist parties but even in favour of united fronts with them.

In Bosnia the LRCI and the PTS said that they agree in supporting the Muslims. Nevertheless, for many weeks both organisations tried to produce a joint declaration and they failed. The PTS couldn't agree with advocating a dual defeatist position when NATO bombed the Serbs. The PTS supported the Krajina Serbs against Croatia while the LRCI had three positions at the same time and was in favour of asking Croatia to support a "multi-ethnic Bosnia". In Bosnia the PTS always supported the Bosnian Muslims. The LRCI, initially correctly, said that this was a wrong position because every side in the communal war was restorationist and tried to oppress other ethnic groups. They said that they would be prepared to change side only if imperialism supported the Muslims and Croats against the Serbs. When this finally happened, the LRCI reversed its position. The LRCI supported the military victory of the imperialist allies and asked the world powers to send money!

, "international volunteers", "missiles, aircraft, tanks and military trainers" to their Bosnian proxies.

World Revolutionary Period?

The LRCI and PTS claim that they have fundamental agreement in "the characterisation of the process opened up in the years 1989-91" and "a convergent definition on the actual character of the states of Eastern Europe". This is a complete deception. Both currents agreed in FORM that there is a world revolutionary period and that all the former "socialist" countries, with the exception of Eastern Germany, survive as workers' states. Nevertheless, they have serious disagreements in the CONTENT.

For the LRCI this is a revolutionary period because imperialism can no longer develop the productive forces, while for the PTS it is because of the mass revolutionary upsurge. The LRCI has a completely contradictory position. At the same time that it says we have been living, since 1989, in a more revolutionary period that the one that produced the Eastern European, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and Cuban social revolutions, the LRCI considers that we are in a counter-revolutionary "phase".

The LRCI leaders in 1994 wrote that the working class in most of the third world countries was in process of destruction. This mixture of economic fatalism with pessimism in the class struggle is reflected in a passive propagandist attitude towards the proletariat. The PTS, on the contrary, condemns every body that could think that we are not under a clear world pre-revolutionary situation. In Latin America, while the PTS is very optimistic about the mass movement, the LRCI said that the workers movement suffered a decade of defeats, whose worst defeat was the strategic one of Bolivia.

The LRCI thinks that in Eastern Europe there are still workers' states because all the capitalist law of value doesn't yet apply to their economies. The PTS considers that the reason why they are not capitalist states is because the workers organisations are growing and that only a violent counter-revolution could destroy them.

Both analyses are wrong. They ignore the fact that a big proportion of these former "socialist" states have for six or seven years openly capitalist regimes that overthrew the state machinery and legal system that defended the planned economy and are destroying the planned economy and promoting private property everywhere. In these countries we have to fight for social revolutions instead of political revolutions.

The LRCI's rightward direction results from its capitulation to the radical-liberal middle class in the imperialist countries who have illusions in "democratic" imperialism. That is why the League rejects its former positions and now rejects Lenin and Trotsky's defencism towards the non-imperialist nations that are in confrontations with imperialism. The PTS trend is to think that Stalinism is part of the same counter-revolutionary camp as imperialism and that both are part of the same "Yalta order". That is why the PTS has a more consistent Stalino-phobic position.

In 1990 in Azerbaijan and Rumania the PTS sided with the nationalists and liberal movements while the LRCI critically supported the Stalinist repression with the aim to prevent these organisations from taking power and overthrowing the planned economy.

On the national question both currents have serious differences. The PTS, like Moreno, is in favour of a "black republic" in South Africa and for a possible black republic even in the USA. The LRCI correctly said that a South African black republic could mean only a black government in a capitalist society.

On electoral tactics the PTS is engaged in an electoral front with the LIT. For the LRCI this could only be an opportunist propaganda bloc. The PTS has the position of advocating "Trotskyist" fronts, while the LRCI preferred to vote for the French Mitterand government after 14 years in power instead of giving critical support to the 1.6 million workers who voted for a self-proclaimed Trotskyist candidate.

The Fourth International (FI).

Both currents recognise that they have a different strategy for building an international party. Nevertheless, this is not a simple disagreement that can be minimised as a minor difference like they are trying to do. The declaration says that "Like the LRCI, the Internationalist Faction insists that the Fourth International adopted clearly centrist positions at its Third Congress in 1951 and was transformed into a centrist movement by 1953." This is not the traditional position of the LRCI which says that the FI became centrist after its 1948 congress and that since 1951 the FI and all its fragments were centrist. The PTS, on the contrary, thinks that the "anti-pabloite" International Committee (IC) was a progressive bloc against revisionism.

The PTS considers that the SWP (USA) made positive contributions in the creation of the IC and later of the Lenin-Trotskyist Faction inside the USec, and that Moreno made also positive steps when he supported the SWP, and when he made new factions against the SWP (USA), Mandel and later Lambert. While the LRCI thinks that the revolutionary continuity was broken in 1951, the PTS thinks that the SWP(USA) and Moreno established a kind of inconsistent continuity.

That is why both currents have irreconcilable differences in their strategies for the construction of the international party. The PTS is promoting the creation of the unification of the trotskyist international left in a "anti-revisionist bloc" of all the forces committed to reconstruct the FI. The LRCI thinks that a new revolutionary international should be created around itself. This is also the first time that the LRCI entered in joint serious fusion discussion with another international current. Usually the LRCI method is to try to approach to a group in order to absorb it or to create a faction inside. Why this rushed marriage?

A three-way liaison?

The Declaration says that both currents agree that "the Trotskyist Manifesto" and "Estrategia Internacional 4-5" are "materials which in general both currents agree to be of a principled character". However, "Estrategia Internacional 4-5" is a document which advocates a "return to the call that the PTS is making towards the MAS with the aim to constitute a Liaison Committee between the two parties as an starting point for the reconstruction of Argentinean trotskyism on a principled basis."

The MAS is the LIT's main section. So it seems that the PTS is not only in favour of a liaison committee with the LRCI but also with the biggest centrist degenerate "fourthist" current in Latin America. A united party with the LIT could only be an unprincipled bloc.

The leaders of LRCI by "unanimity" endorsed that position. How could they declare that "Estrategia Internacional 4-5" is of a "principled character"? Perhaps the LRCI leaders didn't see that phrase, which is a heading of one of its articles, or perhaps they didn't read all that PTS' journal. The PTS read the Trotskyist Manifesto and the majority of the LRCI programmatical documents because for many years the Latin American comrades dedicated very much efforts in translating them.

But there is not single PTS journal translated into English and the LRCI before the agreement didn't translate a single document from that party. How can the IEC members endorsed "unanimously" a document which they could not all read, yet deny the right the right of the Latin Americans members of the LRCI to create a tendency because they didn't translate a document that was adopted after they had already written their platform?

Before the last congress the LRCI's IEC was a body that could contradict the International Secretariat monopolised by British Full-timers and academics. In the IECs usually the Latin American and New Zealand delegates had a bloc that comprise 5 of its 22 members as a left opposition. Now the International Secretariat is achieving its aim to transform it into a sort of rubber stamp. The IEC, can now vote "unanimously" to expel the opposition and "unanimously" back a document which reveals principled differences over how to build an international.

Both currents have a different understanding of what is democratic centralism. The PTS always fought to be readmitted in the LIT as a faction and it is in favour of allowing internal differences to be published outside. The LRCI, on the contrary, doesn't want to tolerate international tendencies. When they were trying to create an international faction, the LRCI leaders suspended one comrade in New Zealand, and later another in Britain. They intervened in the NZ section, labelled its oppositionists a "secret faction", sacked its only full-timer, and removed one leader. The LRCI leaders, instead of recognising the right of the Latin American members to create a tendency and to translate their document, suspended the author of that document, refusing his right to come to an IEC, intervened in the Bolivian section and threatened all those in the tendency with expulsion.

Where are they going?

In the last years several European "Trotskyist" currents tried to create opportunistic rapprochement with different currents that come from Argentinean Morenoism. In 1980, the Lambertist international, after breaking with its main Latin American work, jumped into Moreno and, despite serious differences, they created a "Parity Committee" which only lasted two years. Lambert tried to cover his split and Moreno tried to use this fusion to beat the Usec, which they left. Later, Moreno provoked a factional dispute and recruited all the Lambert's MP's. When the LIT split, the British WRP-Workers Press started a fusion process with the PTS. The WRP-WP, after it created a faction inside the PTS, broke and moved towards a fusion process with the LIT.

The LIRCI, a group around Ramos' Spanish PORE, was created in mid-1970s as a very sectarian organisation who thought that every body else were revisionists and centrists and that they, with only a hundred people in the planet, were the only reconstructed "Fourth International". After they split in mid-85 all its factions started a process of opportunist unification with currents that they previously attacked as "pabloites". Ramos fused with the LIT's right wing.

What will happen with this latest fusion process? Until now the LRCI is using this as a "smoke screen" to cover its internal crisis and the PTS is trying to open a bridge to Europe. When different members inside the LRCI tried to create an international opposition, the LRCI leaders accused them of being an "unprincipled bloc". Yet if both suitors in the current liaison hide their political differences and decide to create a liaison committee this would be a REAL unprincipled bloc.

The LRCI don't have any more a left opposition and it has a leadership that constantly revises its programs and positions from the top. Many things is possible to spec. We asked the LRCI and PTS members to push for a high-political way to deal with the differences. We demand the PTS to take a position about the LRCI splits and about its bureaucratic regime. We demand both organisations to allow us to participate in that debate and to publish our criticism in their internal bulletins.

Reprinted from Class Struggle Journal of the Communist Workers Group/ New Zealand section of the Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International (LCMRCI)