XIV Ordinary COR Congress 2020

First published in www.cor-digital.org on Dec 10, 2020.

On December 5^th and 6^th, we held the XIV COR Congress in Buenos Aires with delegates from different regionals and TRFI (TRCI) delegations from COR Chile and LOI Brazil.

The Congress was on-site (not online), since we considered it a duty of the organization to be able to debate, amid the pandemic, the tasks of the revolutionaries and to vote a new leadership. It was important to be able to bring together the delegates of the regionals and the international delegations in order to exchange militant experiences during the pandemic and to discuss the trends on the international and national levels.

Throughout the pandemic period, we managed to keep the cells functioning, with in-person meetings at the regionals and national online meetings, because of the restrictions. This allowed us to further strengthen the organization in the Leninist party concept of legal and illegal work. The holding of the Congress in person was the logical conclusion of our policy as a party.

On both the international and national levels we are going forward in the need to deepen a debate on the aftermath of the pandemic and the world crisis of the capitalist system, what we call a reactionary general rehearsal.

Debate on the international point

In these months, as a result of the pandemic, we have lived through a mass process on a worldwide level where we have seen in a stark way what the capitalist system is and its forms of domination. The appearance of the virus accelerated the contradictions of world crisis and produced an endless number of political crises in the various States and semi-State. It showed the role of the States in saving their health systems, their banks and companies, to the detriment of the living conditions of millions of workers.

We are witnessing a reactionary state control at a historic moment of the decline of the bourgeois States. That temporary historical contradiction crossed this whole period, which we place between imperialist decomposition and the processes of assimilation of the former workers' States.

We discussed the processes of class struggle opened in these months and the action of workers in them. About the conflicts in the former workers' States like Belarus, the crisis in the EU and, centrally, the change of government in the main imperialist power, the US, with the administration replacement with Biden and how the international panorama and the relationship with China will be reconfigured as a central axis. We also analyzed the perspective of eventual debt crises in different countries, in view of the exorbitant debt that the exceptional measures of the pandemic caused.

We analyzed the situation in Latin America and institutional diversion in view of the irruption of the masses, as in Chile, Peru, Ecuador and Venezuela, where the sub-bourgeoisies tried to institutionalize the radicalized processes via elections or constituent assemblies, as in Chile. These events showed the weakness of revolutionary currents to take the lead and at the same time made evident the adaptation of centrism to bourgeois institutions, with their calls to vote for bourgeois candidates, like Arce in Bolivia or Boulos in Brazil. We also noted the appearance of a new generation of youth in Latin America and in large part of the US, who are coming out to fight against the various regimes, without great ties to the past. Still the working class acts in a diluted way in these movements, but it’s essential for revolutionaries to make these unconscious processes conscious.

Debate on the national point

On the national level, we are reinforcing the proposal to push ahead in the struggle to recover what we lost in the pandemic, in view of the brutal attack on our working and living conditions that this government (Alberto Fernandez’s administration) made in alliance with the bourgeois opposition, the big businessmen and the trade union bureaucracy. We must organize against the (structural economic) cut-down and what we call "the IMF protocol," the Fund's guidelines to guarantee the payment of the debt. Pension, labor and tax reforms, plus a devaluation (of the peso) are part of the protocol they want to impose. We defined to promote assemblies, meetings and plenaries of the workers rank and file to impose a general strike.

Some of the resolutions

We voted on several resolutions at the international and national levels and then voted a new leadership.

We resolved to improve our publishing system and to develop a COR construction plan to win over a segment (of activists) that stood out in the pandemic and faced the prevailing statism.

We reinforced the task of promoting a Latin American Conference and an International Conference with the currents that still raise the dictatorship of the proletariat and the reconstruction of the Fourth International.

On December 7, we held a TRFI meeting, where we voted to put out an international online and print newsletter for next year. And prepare the 2^nd TRFI Congress.