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	Workers Vanguard No. 876	15 September 2006

Right-Wing Government Threatens Crackdown

Mexico in Turmoil

Break with López Obrador and the Bourgeois PRD!

Forge an Internationalist Revolutionary Workers Party!

MEXICO CITY, September 11—On September 5, Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute formally declared Felipe Calderón, candidate of the Catholic right-wing National Action Party (PAN), the victor in the hotly contested July 2 presidential election. Calderón supposedly won by a bare 0.58 percent margin over Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) of the bourgeois-populist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), with the candidate of the once-hegemonic Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) running a distant third. Since the election, there have been immense pro-PRD demonstrations protesting Calderón’s dubious victory and demanding a vote-by-vote recount.

The government’s response to the protests clearly shows that Mexico’s rulers are fearful of the social and class discontent that has rocked the country for the past several months. On September 1—the day that the current president, the PAN’s Vicente Fox, was scheduled to deliver his last state of the nation address—the government turned large sections of Mexico City into a militarized zone. Thousands of soldiers and police were mobilized, including those of the PRD city government. Policemen were positioned on bridges over avenues that lead to the Legislative Palace of San Lázaro, and snipers were present on rooftops and even within the Palace itself. All metro stations leading to San Lázaro were closed, while the Legislative Palace was surrounded by metal barriers over two meters high and guarded by soldiers with guns drawn.

The PRD newspaper La Jornada had reported the previous day that federal authorities were forming “dissuasion” groups of some 1,200 people with the goal of carrying out arrests targeting organizations that oppose the PAN government. The article noted that these squads are to be trained by members of the Halcones (Falcons), plainclothes police who carried out a student massacre in 1971.

After the PRD announced that its legislators would attempt to impede Fox from giving his speech, the government prepared to shoot anyone who approached Fox. However, when PRD legislators took over the dais shortly before Fox was to speak, he chose to avoid direct confrontation. In the end, the outgoing president turned in a written copy of his address, marking the first time that a Mexican president has been prevented from presenting his report live before Congress. AMLO has now told his supporters to suspend their protest encampment—which has paralyzed the center of Mexico City for weeks—early on September 16 in order to allow that day’s traditional Independence Day parade of the bloody Mexican military.

While Mexico has a history of massive vote fraud and rigged elections going back generations, PRD leaders and many supporters see in the decision by the Electoral Court a repeat of their bitter experience in the 1988 elections. At that time, as electoral returns indicated a strong showing for populist candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas (who had split from the PRI and would later found the PRD), the government suddenly announced that the computer system had crashed and the PRI candidate was declared the winner. Bitterness among AMLO’s supporters is only deepened by the fact that the current electoral institute was chosen by a process that excluded the PRD.

To impose Calderón at any cost, the PAN is prepared to launch an onslaught against the masses of workers and poor who support the PRD as well as against the PRD itself. The massive mobilization of the armed forces of the state on September 1 represented a mortal danger to the labor movement and left. Any crackdown by the government against the bourgeois PRD would be used to go after the trade unions and left and would represent an attack on everyone’s democratic rights. Despite its political opposition to the PRD, in the event of a military crackdown the Grupo Espartaquista de México, section of the International Communist League, would defend the PRD and its supporters.

Mexican society is becoming even more deeply polarized, with the bourgeoisie itself divided and fearful that discontent—up to now efficiently channelled into support to the PRD—may turn into a social eruption. A pro-AMLO demonstration in Mexico City on July 30 mobilized over two million people in what was the largest political demonstration in this country’s history. The AMLO “mega-encampment” stretches from Mexico City’s Zócalo (central square) down Reforma Avenue, one of the poshest avenues in the whole country.

The exploited and oppressed masses of Mexico have shown that they want to fight, but they currently see the PRD and AMLO as their representatives. The PRD itself is afraid it will lose control of the discontent. With the failure of its immense marches and encampment—as well as hundreds of legal challenges—to impose a full recount, the PRD is now attempting to steer popular anger into a “National Democratic Convention,” which is supposed to result in an alternative “Government of the Republic” with AMLO at its head. The Grupo Espartaquista de México warns that the bourgeois PRD offers no alternative to the struggling and exploited working masses.

The following, translated and abridged from Espartaco No. 26 (September 2006), is based on an August 25 talk by GEM spokesman Sacramento Talavera at the Trotsky Museum in Coyoacán.

* * *

In the lead-up to the elections, we wrote in Espartaco No. 25 (Spring 2006):

“We Marxists of the Grupo Espartaquista de México say: not one vote to the bourgeois parties! No party or candidate represents the interests of the workers. The PRD, the PRI and the PAN, along with the smaller parties with their own candidates, are all bourgeois parties whose goal, independent of their conjunctural differences, is the perpetuation of the current system of exploitation, misery, injustice and social inequality.”

As revolutionary Marxists, we defend tooth and nail the masses’ democratic rights, such as universal suffrage, from a class perspective. We also understand that in countries of belated capitalist development, like Mexico, democratic struggles of the masses are a motor force for socialist revolution. That there was fraud isn’t a secret to anyone, but we do not know who won the election. Certainly, we do not oppose a vote-by-vote recount, but we are not joining the current PRD campaign, whose objective is to put López Obrador in power.

We live in a society divided into two fundamental classes, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, with mutually irreconcilable interests. Our goal is socialist revolution: the overthrow of the bourgeois order and the building of workers power, expropriating the capitalists and planning the economy to lay the basis for the eradication of poverty and oppression. The basic precondition for victory is the struggle for the political independence of the proletariat from the bourgeoisie and the building of the working class’s own revolutionary party.

This past March and April, miners carried out work stoppages throughout the country, the most important of which was in the Sicartsa steel plant in the port of Lázaro Cárdenas following the tragedy of Pasta de Conchos [where 65 miners died in an explosion]. The miners were protesting the government’s removal of their leader and the imposition of a new leader more to the taste of Fox and his neo-Cristeros [referring to the 1920s reactionary clerical Cristero rebellion]. The government intervention was surely due to the fact that the miners union, in addition to having carried out many strikes and work stoppages over the last five years, was one of the few groupings within the Congress of Labor [main corporatist union federation affiliated with the PRI] that opposed the anti-worker “Abascal Law,” a reform of the Federal Labor Law.

The Federal Preventive Police, on orders from the PAN, and the Michoacán state police, under PRD governor Lázaro Cárdenas Batel—grandson of [1930s nationalist president] General Lázaro Cárdenas del Río—tried to break the Sicartsa strike. Fighting heroically, the workers succeeded in repelling the attack and maintained their strike for more than four months, at the cost of two workers dead.

This powerful strike, which caused immense losses for the bosses, was the most important workers’ struggle in many years and demonstrates why communists base our strategy on the industrial proletariat, which has the power to bring the entire economy to a stop. Finally, the strike ended in victory on August 21 when the workers forced the bosses to concede, in addition to a wage increase, payment of all lost wages, the dropping of all charges against all the trade unionists and the recognition of Gómez Urrutia as their union leader, among other things. The workers of Sicartsa brought the bosses to their knees and gave the state itself a black eye!

Some six weeks before the presidential elections, the teachers in Local 22 of the SNTE [National Union of Education Workers] in Oaxaca began a militant strike demanding pay raises. They also resisted a police attack on July 14 and successfully kept up their strike and an encampment in the main plaza of the city. In August, the state government, headed by the PRI hangman Ulises Ruiz, brutally escalated its terror campaign, assassinating two fighters for social justice who supported the teachers and arresting and/or kidnapping and torturing various others. The defense organizations set up by the teachers and their allies—organized in the so-called Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca and the Teachers’ Police of Oaxaca—successfully beat back several police attacks and infiltrations and apprehended several perpetrators of the murderous attacks.

The peasants of the town of Atenco also battled against the police on May 4, although in the end police forces were able to take the town, savagely beating peasants and raping at least seven women. In a police attack the previous day, a youth of only 14, Javier Cortés Santiago, was killed, and, after over a month in a coma, Alexis Benhumea, a student of economics, Russian and dance, died. On August 16, some 5,000 workers in the health sector [in Oaxaca] started an indefinite strike, also demanding wage increases and supporting the teachers. On August 18 in Oaxaca, there was a 24-hour “civic strike” by 80,000 unionized workers. The Oaxaca teachers called for a “punishment vote” against the PRI and the PAN. Their main demand today is the removal of Ulises Ruiz and the “disappearance of powers” in the state (which essentially means the Senate of the Republic would designate an interim governor until a new one is elected). Of course, this PRI hangman should be thrown out.

The important thing to understand is that whoever governs, capitalism is a system based on the exploitation of labor and the systematic repression of workers and the oppressed by the bourgeois state. The capitalist state is essentially special bodies of armed men—the police, the army, the prisons and the courts—whose purpose is to defend the interests of the capitalists. The bourgeois state cannot be reformed; it is necessary to destroy it through socialist revolution and replace it with a workers state.

These convulsive outbreaks of struggle, ideologically dominated by the PRD, show the generalized and long-contained anger among workers and the poor after two decades of privatizations and massive layoffs; chronic massive unemployment; devastation of the countryside, which has led to mass emigration; constant anti-union attacks; cost-of-living increases coupled with qualitatively lower wages, etc. Fed up with Fox and his cronies and their starvation policies, great masses of workers and the poor population in general support the PRD, hoping that it will represent them from the heights of state power. But the PRD is a bosses’ party. Its differences with the PAN lie in how to better administer the system of capitalist exploitation. The objective of this party is to channel discontent within the sterile bounds of the ballot box.

The PAN is certainly the representative of the most reactionary wing of the bourgeoisie. But precisely because of its obscurantist ideology, the PAN does have a lot of support among diverse sectors of the population, especially in the North and West of the country. In cities like Monterrey and Guadalajara, enormous sectors of the petty bourgeoisie and, in fact, the most backward layers of the working class identify with this party, as do peasants in the Bajío and Los Altos of Jalisco, heartland of the Cristiada, to mention a few examples.

This shouldn’t surprise anybody in such an overwhelmingly Catholic country. Although sections of the PRD try to pose as “friends” of the oppressed, undoubtedly the majority of those who support the PRD also identify, in one degree or another, with some of the reactionary Catholic values that the PAN prominently pushes. Overall, what attracts large numbers of workers and the poor to the PRD—and to AMLO in particular—is their policy of greater state intervention in the economy and their nationalist rhetoric, in contrast to “free market” beliefs and outright servility to the imperialists on the part of the PAN and sectors of the PRI.

The Trap of Bourgeois Populism

We live in a period historically conditioned by the counterrevolutionary destruction of the USSR. The Soviet Union was the product of the first, and until today only, successful workers revolution. Despite its Stalinist bureaucratic degeneration, the USSR continued to embody the gains of the October Revolution of 1917. The restoration of capitalism in the counterrevolution of 1991-92 marked a world-historic defeat for the working class. The counterrevolution eliminated the powerful counterweight that the USSR represented to imperialist rapaciousness on a global scale and led to an enormous retrogression in the consciousness of the proletariat. Thus, the masses of workers and radicalized students who take part in defensive struggles no longer identify with the ideals of communism.

The history of Third World countries beginning with the 20th century oscillates between rightist regimes (often police dictatorships) that push economic starvation policies for the benefit above all of the imperialists, and “populist” regimes that introduce certain minimal democratic reforms and grant meager concessions to the workers. Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky analyzed this phenomenon, in the case of Mexico in particular, in his 1939 article “Nationalized Industry and Workers’ Management,” in which he explained:

“In the industrially backward countries foreign capital plays a decisive role. Hence the relative weakness of the national bourgeoisie in relation to the national proletariat. This creates special conditions of state power. The government veers between foreign and domestic capital, between the weak national bourgeoisie and the relatively powerful proletariat. This gives the government a Bonapartist character of a distinctive character. It raises itself, so to speak, above classes. Actually, it can govern either by making itself the instrument of foreign capitalism and holding the proletariat in the chains of a police dictatorship, or by maneuvering with the proletariat and even going so far as to make concessions to it, thus gaining the possibility of a certain freedom toward the foreign capitalists. The present policy [of the Mexican government of Lázaro Cárdenas] is in the second stage; its greatest conquests are the expropriations of the railroads and the oil industries.”

Thus, the PRD is what we call a bourgeois nationalist-populist party, similar to the PRM [Party of the Mexican Revolution] of Lázaro Cárdenas, predecessor of the PRI. In fact, the goal of the PRD is nothing more than to return to the “golden years” of the PRI, although, since it faces an international situation much more disadvantageous (above all the counterrevolution in the USSR), it is obvious that its policies are even more stingy than the policies of its predecessor more than 60 years ago.

In the context of generalized misery, the PRD’s minimal concessions to the workers and poor, as well as its criticisms of Fox’s servility to the imperialists, are a source of great illusions among the workers. But the PRD cannot fulfill its promises; nor does it want to. It cannot break with the imperialists; nor does it want to. This party doesn’t even oppose NAFTA—that treaty of imperialist looting of Mexico—but rather only wants to “renegotiate” it. Even though he talks about opposing the privatization of the energy sector, AMLO has declared, using intentionally confusing language, that he does not oppose the participation of national private capital in that sector.

It is no coincidence that Carlos Slim, the third-richest man in the world, publicly supported the PRD. The participation of the PRD in continual anti-union attacks in the DF [Mexico City Federal District], especially against the SUTGDF [municipal workers union] and the metro union, in the police breaking of the UNAM [National Autonomous University of Mexico] student strike in 1999, in the murderous repression in Lázaro Cárdenas and in Atenco, in the assassinations of Zapatista activists that the EZLN has documented, etc., are not isolated occurrences. They are a reflection of the PRD’s bourgeois and therefore inherently anti-worker nature.

As we wrote in a 7 April 2005 leaflet opposing the desafuero [stripping of immunity] of AMLO without giving him one iota of political support, if he achieves the presidency, “the very support he has among the workers movement would put him in a much better position to push forward the privatization of the electric and oil industries, which the ineffectual Fox has not been able to impose” [see “Mexico: Down With Fox’s Attack on Mayor López Obrador!” WV No. 846, 15 April 2005]. Even the meager concessions that exist, like subsidies to the elderly and single mothers, will be reversed tomorrow, when the bourgeois populists deem it prudent to expand their “republican austerity.”

The Permanent Revolution

The deeply felt democratic sentiments of the Mexican masses, like national emancipation and political democracy, cannot be satisfied under capitalism. No “progressive” wing of the bourgeoisie exists in the era of imperialist decay that is capable of breaking with the imperialists. Revolutionary Marxists, basing ourselves on the Trotskyist perspective of permanent revolution, do not have a democratic program distinct from a socialist one. In the struggle for democratic demands, we counterpose the proletariat to the bourgeoisie for the simple fact that these demands are only realizable under the dictatorship of the proletariat and, in fact, these struggles are a motor force for socialist revolution. The dictatorship of the proletariat would lay the basis for socialism—which is based on generalized abundance—and for the emancipation of all the oppressed: women, poor peasants, homosexuals, indigenous peoples.

Why is the hegemony of the working class necessary? It is true that all the poor struggle, at one point or another, against particular depredations of capitalism. But peasants, for example, struggle for land, to sell their products at the highest possible price and the lowest cost of production, etc. In the exceptional cases in which they triumph, they become small producers who exploit labor. Their objective interest is thus in the private ownership of the land. Isolated from the working class, their struggles, however just they might be, will not go beyond the framework of capitalism.

In contrast, the working class does not struggle to obtain markets for the boss, nor to make them more “profitable.” It fights collectively against the bosses for better salaries, benefits and working conditions. The workers have nothing but their own labor power on which to subsist, and they collectively produce the wealth of society. Therefore, as a class they have no objective interest in maintaining private property, and their strategic position in modern industry gives them the immense social power to paralyze the entire economy. In addition, the working class shares interests on the world level. Thus the working class is the only class with the objective interest to destroy capitalism across national borders, and its emancipation from the chains of capitalism carries the seed of the emancipation of humanity as a whole.

However, the economic struggle of the working class, in itself, does not go beyond the framework of capitalism, but is limited to struggles against individual bosses to renegotiate the terms of capitalist exploitation. Thus trade-union consciousness is still bourgeois consciousness. It is necessary to introduce into the working class revolutionary consciousness: the understanding of its own historic mission for universal emancipation. For that, a Leninist-Trotskyist party is needed which, armed with the historic experience of the class struggle, would combat the ideological influence of the bourgeoisie on the proletariat and would direct the masses in overturning the capitalist state.

For revolutionaries in Mexico, it is of utmost importance to combat the ideology of bourgeois nationalism: the myth of “unity” between the exploited and the exploiters of the same nationality and the consequent chauvinist hatred of foreigners, as if beyond the Río Bravo social classes did not exist. The future of a workers’ Mexico depends, in a very immediate sense, on the support of our class brothers and sisters in the U.S., especially the doubly oppressed black masses.

Proletarian internationalism is not an empty declaration of good intentions, but rather a reflection of the economic reality of imperialism and a political necessity for the proletariat. It is fundamental to combat the racist chauvinism that the capitalist rulers push in Mexico as well as in the U.S. to maintain divisions between black people and the millions of Latin American immigrants, who constitute a human bridge which is key for the proletariat. Therein lies the importance of our campaign for the freedom of Mumia Abu-Jamal, an activist for black rights known as “the voice of the voiceless,” who was sentenced to death in the U.S. in a totally racist frame-up trial. Among many other causes, this fight, in addition to its intrinsic justness, provides a concrete vehicle to combat chauvinism and strengthens the links among the workers of the world.

The IG: Centrists in a Strange World

The 1917 October Revolution—which fully confirmed Trotsky’s permanent revolution—is the fundamental experience for revolutionaries. The sharp contrast between our positions and those of other left groups will help to clarify the content of genuine Trotskyism.

Most self-proclaimed Marxist groups have adapted, in one way or another, to the PRD. The Internationalist Group (IG), formed a decade ago by former Spartacists who defected from Trotskyism, deserves a special mention. The IG lives, as the song goes, in a strange world [a reference to Un Mundo Raro, a popular mariachi song]. Disoriented by counterrevolution in the USSR, the IG has devoted itself to fervently denying that counterrevolution had any significant impact on the consciousness of the working class, essentially holding that nothing has changed in social struggles since the 1970s or even before. This has led them to adapt to alien class forces, seeking shortcuts to the building of a Leninist-Trotskyist party of the workers’ vanguard.

In Mexico, the IG’s politics are characterized by renunciation of the perspective of permanent revolution and by adaptation to the current consciousness of the working class. According to the IG, the main obstacle to workers revolution in Mexico is a phantasmagorical “popular front” around the PRD.

The popular front is not a tactic, but the greatest of crimes, which has led to bloody defeats for the working class. But it is not a synonym for all and every form of class collaboration. It refers to the political subordination of the mass parties of the working class to the capitalists, usually in order to administer the bourgeois state. In Mexico, such a party of the working class has never existed, not even a reformist bourgeois workers party in the style of British Labourism. The Mexican working class has been, since its early stages in the 1920s, tied to the nationalist populist wings of the bourgeoisie, and has not arrived at the understanding of the need for its own party—that is, an elementary class consciousness.

In its most recent publication (El Internacionalista/Edición México, August 2006), the IG focuses a polemic against us on the fact that we opposed the desafuero of López Obrador last year. In deeds, the IG supported Fox’s plans, since it is opposed to “the executive fuero [immunity], which exempts capitalist rulers from being judged for their official acts (as opposed to the parliamentary fuero, which has the purpose [!] of protecting legislators from governmental intimidation).” Thus, according to the IG’s logic, in stripping the populist López Obrador of his fuero, the neo-Cristero Fox was carrying out a truly democratic action!

We do not take a position on such precepts of bourgeois legislation in the abstract, but rather based on the interest of the working class in each concrete case. As we explained in our April 2005 leaflet:

“We communists of the Grupo Espartaquista de México are opposed to the attempt to strip Andrés Manuel López Obrador of his political immunity (a process called desafuero), while giving him no political support. The attempt by Fox and his PRI accomplices to prevent a bourgeois-nationalist candidate from running in the elections is a blow to the democratic rights of the population…. In opposing this desafuero we are defending our class’s right to organize and fight against the capitalist class as a whole.”

The IG’s arguments regarding the fuero itself, abstracted from the real conditions of Fox’s attack, are merely an absurd excuse to justify the fact that they turned their back on the struggle in defense of the democratic rights of the population. The line that they try to present as ultraradical (presumably to adapt to the politics of the UNAM Zapatista student milieu) is in reality profoundly rightist. And it is not a coincidence that the grotesque contortions that they have to make in order to justify their line end up apologizing for Fox himself.

In essence, they argue that the desafuero campaign was merely an intra-bourgeois quarrel in which the working class had no side. The IG asserted, over a year ago, in the most stupid manner: “When the ICL today says it defends democratic rights by supporting the legal immunity of López Obrador [!], when it asserts that the imperialists favor Fox over AMLO, they are repeating the PRD’s electoral propaganda and participating in its campaign” (El Internacionalista, May 2005). It is difficult to think the IG believes its own words. In their new article they assert:

“But if the struggle transcends the framework of the electoral circus, if the capitalist state proclaims a winner by means of a massive fraud, imposing the candidate of a regime that can only maintain itself in power by means of heavy-handed repression, if instead of gigantic pejemarchas [AMLO demos] there are massive protests against actions that point in the direction of a military-police dictatorship, proletarian revolutionaries must call for a proletarian mobilization against the bonapartist threat.”

Toward this end, the IG also calls for “workers’ defense committees” and for the preparation of a “national strike against the murderous government” before what it sees as an imminent “civil war.”

Certainly, the current deep polarization and the division within the bourgeoisie itself poses the threat of generalized repression. It has taken the IG over a year, with demonstrations of millions of people and constant attacks and threats by Fox, to recognize this fact. The point is that the struggle in defense of the democratic rights of the population is not counterposed to the defense of the working class against a bonapartist threat; in reality, they are one and the same. Mexican workers are not indifferent to the result of the present dispute among their rulers. If López Obrador won the election, we communists would defend his democratic right to occupy the post. But we do not join our forces with the PRD political bloc. Instead, we defend democratic rights by proletarian means.

In 1916, Bolshevik G.L. Piatakov (P. Kievsky) rejected the struggle for democratic demands as a deviation from the struggle for socialism. V.I. Lenin replied:

“Capitalism in general, imperialism in particular, transforms democracy into an illusion—and at the same time capitalism generates democratic tendencies among the masses, creates democratic institutions, accentuates the antagonism between imperialism, which repudiates democracy, and the masses which strive toward democracy. Capitalism and imperialism cannot be overthrown through any reforms—not even the most ‘ideal’ democratic reforms—but only through an economic overturn. But the proletariat which has not been educated in a struggle for democracy is incapable of accomplishing an economic overturn.”

—“Lenin’s Reply to P. Kievsky,” printed in The Bolsheviks and the World War, Olga Hess Gankin and H.H. Fisher, eds. (1976)

To dismiss the democratic aspirations of the masses signifies the rejection of permanent revolution and, therefore, of the struggle for socialism. In reality, the supposedly “ultraradical” positions of the IG are a mere device to hide their adaptation to the PRD. Indeed, it takes a lot of chutzpah for the IG to talk about “workers’ defense committees” which, they say, would be the generalization of the struggles of the Sicartsa workers and the Oaxaca teachers: the IG didn’t even defend the miners union in the face of state attack! In line with its adaptation to the PRD, this group holds that the PRI-affiliated unions—like the miners union—are not workers organizations but the “class enemy” (El Internacionalista/Edición México, May 2001), which, by the way, would also extend to the SNTE and its Local 22 in Oaxaca. By a strange coincidence, according to the IG the only workers unions in Mexico are those tied to the PRD.

The IG accuses us, claiming: “The logic of their politics of last year should impel the GEM to join the LTS [Liga de Trabajadores por el Socialismo] and other organizations that follow the current of the ‘anti-fraud’ movement.” “The logic of the politics” of the GEM is dictated by the perspective of permanent revolution. The same cannot be said of the IG. It is not a coincidence that this group has consistently refused, both in 2005 and in 2006, to distribute its propaganda in the immense PRD mobilizations, to which some tens of thousands of workers and youth showed up. The pretentious affirmations of the IG that they and only they have “swum against the stream” in the face of the social polarization that the country is living through are a sad joke. In reality, they are incapable of combatting the workers’ illusions in populism, invoking instead phantasmagorical “popular fronts” and dismissing a large part of the heavy contingents of the proletariat for being affiliated to the wrong bourgeois party.

Mexican society looks like a powder keg about to explode, but here is the fundamental problem: the proletariat is strongly tied ideologically to the bourgeois PRD. It is necessary to intervene in class and social struggles with the program of revolutionary Marxism, struggling to break these ties. Only in this way can a Leninist-Trotskyist party be built in order to lead the working class to power. The task we have committed ourselves to is an enormous one. Breaking the ideological chains that tie the working class to their exploiters will mean many years of hard work. But there is no other road. As a section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), we fight to reforge Trotsky’s Fourth International with no interest, with no goal other than leading the proletariat to the seizure of state power through socialist revolution.