Socialist Workers League (USA) – Bolshevik Militant Tendency (Argentina) – Frente Comunista dos Trabalhadores (Brazil) – Sections of the Secretariat of the Americas of the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International
2. SWL, FCT and TMB understand that only the organized proletariat can be trusted to crush Trumpism and they have no illusions in any bloc or support for the imperialist military measures of the Democratic Party. They do not believe that the coup plotters of the Democratic Party, who carried out coups against oppressed peoples, are the best allies of the US workers to combat Trump’s coups. They do not defend the “democracy of the rich imperialists” nor its decadent institutions that deliberate all the evils of big capital on the oppressed peoples of the world and the workers of the United States. This nation was built on the pillars of slave oppression and patriarchy. The Democratic Party is a structural and historical component of that state. Until the 1930s, the Democratic Party was the wing of the bipartisanship that best represented southern historical slavery (1). Therefore, the Democrats have neither strength nor interest in destroying the supremacist wing, nor in eradicating its tradition that is part of the Democratic tradition itself, but only in attenuating them and using them as justification to expand their political power. We advocate a political uprising (far beyond the social or racial) of the indigenous, Latino, Afro-descendant and exploited masses, Muslims, oppressed whites against the carnage promoted by the corporations of all their governmental agents.
3. Thus, we have public differences with the British TF-SF comrades who also make up the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International (LCFI). To our knowledge, comrades make a series of successive and combined mistakes on Trump’s failed coup that prevented us from signing a common statement.
4. The British comrades are in favour of a military bloc with the Democrats and invoke the institutions of the imperialist state machinery against Trumpism, making a false analogy between Spain in 1936 and the United States in 2021, since in both situations it would be present a fascist attack on a bourgeois parliamentary regime in an imperialist country. However, this is a false analogy because it minimizes the fact that in Spain, in opposition to Franco’s fascist imperialist side, there was a popular front, the main component of which is a mass party of the working class, its trade unions and its trade union centres. Therefore, what threatened the Franco regime was proletarian democracy and not just a bourgeois parliament. Defending proletarian democracy against a fascist coup has nothing to do with defending imperialist “democracy” against a fascist coup.
“Defense of Republic is Defense of Capitalism
The political alliance of the working class leaders with the bourgeoisie is disguised as the defense of the “republic.” The experience of Spain shows what this defense is in actuality. The word “republican,” like the word “democrat,” is a deliberate charlatanism which serves to cover up class contradictions. The bourgeois is a republican so long as the Republic protects private property. And the workers utilize the Republic to overthrow private property. In other words: the Republic loses all its value to the bourgeois the moment it assumes value for the workers. The radical cannot enter into a bloc with workers’ parties without the assurance of support in the officers’ corps. It is no accident that Daladier is at the head of the Ministry of War in France. The French bourgeoisie has entrusted this post to him more than once and he has never betrayed them. Only people of the type of Maurice Paz or Marceau Pivert can believe that Daladier is capable of purging the army of reactionaries and Fascists, in other words, of dissolving the officers’ corps. But no one takes such people seriously.
But here we are interrupted by the exclamation. “How can one dissolve the officers’ corps? Doesn’t this mean destroying the army and leaving the country disarmed in the face of Fascism? Hitler and Mussolini are only waiting for that!” All these arguments are old and familiar. That’s how the Cadets, the S-Rs and the Russian Mensheviks reasoned in 1917, and that’s how the leaders of the Spanish People’s Front reasoned. The Spanish workers half-believed these ratiocinations until they were convinced by experience that the nearest Fascist enemy was to be found in the Spanish Fascist army. Not for nothing did our old friend Karl Liebknecht teach: “The main enemy is in our own country!”
Purging Army of Fascists An Illusion
L’Humanite cries pleading for the army to be purged of fascists. But what good is this appeal? When you vote for maintenance credits, when you enter into an alliance with Daladier and, through him, with financial capital, you entrust the army to Daladier – and at the same time demand that this entirely capitalist army serve “the people” and not the capital, then you either became a complete idiot or are you consciously deceiving the working masses. “León Trotsky, The Lesson of Spain, July 30, 1936
5. Due to this error, the TF-SF induces another: in this analogy, despite denying it, the position of the TF then induces the false belief, embellishment that the United States Democratic Party of 2021 would be something similar to a mass party. From the working class, which is completely false and creates illusions in the hard core of world imperialism. The LCFI Secretariat for the Americas does not agree with the unity of action or military bloc with the Democratic Party, even if it is “critical” or without any formal political support. No front with Biden who as Obama’s deputy promoted and was a direct beneficiary of the neo-Nazi coup in Ukraine! We defend the defeatism of both wings of imperialism, like Lenin in the First World War, to transform the intra-imperialist war into class warfare.
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