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Workers Vanguard No. 964 |
10 September 2010 |
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TROTSKY |
LENIN |
For Proletarian Internationalist Struggle Against U.S. Imperialism! (Quote of the Week)
As emphasized in a document adopted at the founding conference of the Fourth International, communists in the U.S. have a special duty to fight against U.S. imperialism’s military and economic rape of its colonies and neocolonies in Latin America and elsewhere. (The document refers to the Philippines and Hawaii, which were both colonial territories of the U.S. at the time.) In the advanced capitalist countries and in the countries under their boot, the prerequisite for revolutionary struggle to overturn the imperialist order is the political independence of the proletarian vanguard from all bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces.
One of the primary concerns of the United States section of the Fourth International, in the struggle against American imperialism, is the support of all genuinely progressive revolutionary movements directed against American imperialism in Latin America or the Pacific (the Philippines, Hawaii, Samoa, etc.) or against the Wall Street puppet dictatorships in those countries, while preserving its complete organizational and political independence, reserving and exercising the right to organize the working class in a separate movement and the right to present its own independent program as against the petty bourgeois, vacillating, and often treacherous program and activities of the nationalists….
The capitulation of the national bourgeoisie of the Philippines to American imperialist dominance, as well as the attempts by certain sections of the North American bourgeoisie to misuse the sentiment for national independence for their own reactionary ends, reveal the indispensability of proletarian class leadership of the colonial and semicolonial countries as the only assurance that genuine national independence will be fought for seriously and consistently and be achieved. At the same time, the Fourth Internationalists point out that none of the countries of Latin America or the Pacific which are now under the domination of American imperialism to one degree or another, is able either to attain complete freedom from foreign oppression or to retain such freedom for any length of time if it confines its struggle to the efforts of its own self. Only a union of the Latin American peoples, striving towards the goal of a united socialist America and allied in the struggle with the revolutionary proletariat of the United States, would present a force strong enough to contend successfully with North American imperialism.
—“Thesis on the World Role of American Imperialism” (September 1938)
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