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TRFI Statement

The World Situation and the Tasks of Revolutionaries

We are within a historical period characterized by a tendency to the decomposition of imperialism and a process of capitalist assimilation of the former worker states. The crisis of the nation-states, of Bonapartism as a historical process and the relation with social revolution are part of our analysis to understand the contradictions of the period.

The imperialist policy, even in its weakness, proposes an idea of a new deal between capital and labor, within the historical conflict between social productive forces and relations of production of capitalism; aiming at breaking up the post-war pacts and the institutions created during the previous period and defining a new class balance within the states, in view of the level of the world crisis. This political intervention of imperialism, in the development of the laws of capital, unfailingly produces effects on the social relations of production.

The worsening of the crisis has produced a rupture in the inter-state balances, increasing their economic antagonisms, generating a greater trade war between the US and China, the fall of oil prices, conflicts between countries within the EU and fierce competition for health inputs in the midst of the pandemic. If an armed confrontation develops between China and India, an international conflict would open up and change the world situation.

The coronavirus pandemic exposed the capitalist system and its forms of domination. It reveals the consequences of the advance of capitalism on nature in an anarchic way. The pandemic sharpens and accelerates the trends of the 2008 crisis, leading for sure to a recession with tendencies to a world depression. It is important to understand that, although it is a continuity of the crisis of the last decade, this continuity is not necessarily linear; there can be quality jumps in the general state of imperialist capitalism, which consequences will be seen in the medium and long term.

The global crisis process would no longer be a stage of stagnation (relationship between short booms and crises), but rather a trend towards a decline in productive forces. The relationship of rupture - restoration in the definition of equilibrium is mediated by class struggle. If the proletariat does not intervene in a revolutionary way, capitalism will seek to restore itself by unloading the crisis onto the workers. That is why every step towards the reconstruction of equilibrium means an increase in the exploitation of our class. Every effort by the bourgeoisie to restore the balance of production, distribution and finances of the state fatally compromises the unstable class balance.

In the face of the pandemic, we can say that we are witnessing a reactionary rehearsal of the capitalist system, in the midst of a broader historical process of decomposition. It is a great experiment of class conciliation, of patrioterism. In the face of an anarchic leadership, such as the capitalist system, which depends on its armed states to guarantee the reproduction of capital, we fight for a conscious collective leadership, which prepares the stages of the dictatorship of the proletariat, since the current system generates the material conditions and social forms for the economic reconstruction of society.

State centralization can only be reactionary. Quarantine as a state policy is to save capital. We could say that quarantine is a preventive policy to protect great capitalists and their class, disorganizing our class with the complicity of union bureaucracy, to preserve their decomposing states, strengthening the military bureaucratic apparatus to discipline the masses.

The crisis of US imperialism

The radicalized processes that took place in the USA after George Floyd's murder by the police, and which expressed a political crisis in the heart of imperialism, have not been yet resolved. Unlike other processes seeking justice in general, the movement after the murder focused on the role of police forces, forcing both Republicans and Democrats to come up with a series of reforms to try to contain the movement. One very important element is that Trump was unable to stop the process by means of repression and even when he proposed the deployment of the Army, high commands refused, further weakening Trump's authority.

The debate that opened up around the auxiliary forces of Bonapartism, which are the armed forces, in this case the police, calls into question the whole structure of a bourgeois state. Because of the crisis, an ideological discussion was already developing, which was accelerated by the pandemic, regarding the very foundations of the capitalist system and its supposed freedom, and an internal debate in the US between union or federation of states regarding how to act in the face of this pandemic. There are emblematic cases such as Seattle, where a sector of the city is considered to be a police-free zone.

The labor movement had been carrying out isolated actions, such as wildcat strikes in the midst of the attack during the pandemic, and acted in a diluted manner in the first moments of the protests after the assassination. But we must point out that the dockworkers' strike on June 19, the date that commemorates the end of slavery, was a very strong strike. This shows that a combative sector of the American working class with a lot of history has begun to break through in an organized way. It is very important that sectors of the industrial movement come out to the struggle, because the US has entered an industrial crisis due to the stop of exports in the face of the pandemic and the trade war with China.

The political and economic crisis opened in the US forces revolutionaries to make their best efforts in order to try to intervene in this conjuncture, in which the imperialist country par excellence is going through a process of acute class struggle, where we Trotskyists have to deploy our transitional program to unite the American proletariat and the world proletariat in the fight for socialism.

The negro question was a great debate in the ranks of Trotskyism. Trotsky posed not only the discussion of self-determination, but we had to fight to show the white proletariat that the US was not our state and thus seek unity with the black proletariat.

The dissolution of the police force is a very important debate within the workers' movement and those who struggle. Is vital the political struggle against reformist visions and against centrism, that consider that the police should organize in unions. In the US, some of those who mobilized, raised the slogan that the police unions in the AFL CIO should be disbanded. Conlutas in Brazil affiliated them and the CTA in Argentina, too. From the TRFI we say: get the police unions out of the central unions! Just as we fight for the non-payment of the foreign debt, as an anti-imperialist measure.

In this scenario of world crisis, pandemic and political crisis in the main imperialist powers, we call for the reorganization of the forces of Trotskyism that still maintain the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat, in order to develop a vanguard within our class and help the ongoing struggles to succeed, in the perspective of the reconstruction of the Fourth International.

From TRFI we had been supporting the need for a Latin American Conference, in the midst of the class struggle processes that were taking place in the region. The acceleration of the crisis imposes the call for an International Conference that aims to address the crisis of revolutionary leadership in the heat of the convulsive world situation.