From August 24 to 29 the international youth camp of the ISL took place in Turkey. The event was a school of political education and affirmation of principles, orientation and strategy. A delegation of the Argentine MST intervened in the event. With this article, we complement the SEP´s report on the initiative.
The incredible Sea of Marmara as a backdrop. This watercourse that divides (according to the bourgeoisie, and unites according to us, the socialists) Europe and Asia. Very close to the Gallipoli Peninsula, where the British Army received a harsh beating in the First World War. At the union facility of a leftist workers’ federation, a conquest of the working class ascent in the end of the 1970s in Turkey, in the wake of the French May and the anti-imperialist struggle against the US invasion in Vietnam. With the SEP and its active militant youth in Istanbul, Ankara and other regions as organizers and hosts, with the participation of the leadership of the youth of The Struggle of Pakistan, the SOL of the Spanish State and our MST, we built an initiative of intense political exchange, collective learning, human cohesion and an impeccable militant organization. The debates were marked by the strategy and reaffirmation of principles and, at the same time, the richness of internationalism when it is practised in the intervention in the class struggle and not in a declarative way. Reports by the SEP on the political situation in Turkey, international panels with the Pakistani representative, a conference focused on Argentina that we were in charge of and several other activities, completed a camp that was a party of politicization. In the end, as the best closing possible of the five intense days of debate, we marched to a mountainous zone nearby to raise the anti-extractivism and eco-socialist banner that is part of the program, the campaigns and one of the struggles that the International Socialist League raises. A great political experience and a triumph of the entire ISL.
War against scepticism, struggle for internationalism
One of the main ideological battle to take up in the working class and student vanguard is the struggle against the venom of “it´s not possible”. At this point, that false ideology has spread to every country under lightly updated versions but essentially supported by the same pillars:
- The working class is no longer the subject of revolutionary change, the axis of social and political antagonisms are identities and oppressions, not the class struggle and exploitation.
- The struggle for the social revolution is not on the table, the right is strong and active. The correlation of force is not strong enough for that strategy.
- The insurrectionary organization, that prepares to activate, with its orientation, the struggle for working class power and the dismantling of the capitalist state, to transitionally build another one that reinforces socialist transformation in the country and acts as a lever for the international development of the revolution, is also lost.
Therefore, in the conferences and workshops, we discussed how to oppose that ideological scheme of the organized reaction of the bourgeoisie with our anti-capitalist and socialist platform for the world revolution. Thus reaffirming that the world has never been as “proletarized”, that is, that the idea that the “working class no longer exist as such” is of an indefensible incoherence, because the pure statistics prove an enormous transfer toward wage earning of the immense majority of humanity. Beginning with the massive proletarization of the peasantry in two giants: China and India. At the same time, as a response to the reformist and anti-working class current of identity politics, we raise an integral conception that includes the struggle against every kind of oppression in the framework of a global strategy of class struggle with workers as the main subject of the entirety of those attacked by capital internationally. In the end, the struggle for the validity of socialism as a necessity against capitalist decadence, also requires the vindication of a type of militant party, of the working class, for the insurrection, focused on mass mobilization, based on a real and healthy democratic centralism and deeply internationalist. Against the scepticism that is typical in periods of polarization, the intended confusion and the impatience of the middle class. More than ever, our strategy is our north. The camp also served as a theoretical-political reinforcement for the ideological battle in the vanguard.
The revolutionary youth and the perspectives of the ISL
There is an objective world process of response of the youth to the different manifestations of capitalist dispossession. The yellow vests in France cornered the “white hope” of the European bourgeoisie, Macron, with young workers among their main activists. The rebellions in North Africa, Sudan and Algeria, are also promoted by that social sector. The gigantic international wave of the women’s movement that, despite its unevenness according to each region, has the youth at the front. The process of defense of the free unions in Eastern Europe, Ukraine and Belarus, also has the working youth as promoter. In the United States, the militant movement that grows in the democrat left, despite the limits of its leadership´s program, is an impressive symptom in the heart of the empire. In the socio-environmental movement, that gets stronger and grows questioning the capitalist depredation of the environment, has high school students as its vanguard and is getting ready for a world climate strike on September 27. The struggle, under conditions of hard repression by authoritarian regimes as in Turkey or Pakistan, has the youth leading the dynamic construction of organization like the SEP and The Struggle. This means: in a stage marked by the polarization of the correlation of forces, in this process of struggle against capital and its logic of destruction of working people and nature, the action of a youth vanguard that looks for references is spreading, questioning the system of the 1%, and is every day closer to the radical program and the ideas of internationalist socialism.
The intervention of ISL sections in those struggles, the ideological struggle for the positions of the revolutionary Marxism, the militant organization for the training of professionals of the world revolution, that is our bet and orientation. Events like the one that took place in Turkey are part of our roadmap. To continue growing, to build in collective debate and learning. As revolutionaries without dogmatisms and with our minds open to new phenomena, without revealed truths or bureaucratic personalisms; and at the same time rooted in the historical principles of the working class, socialism and internationalism to work to strengthen parties with mass influence so workers and the oppressed of the world can govern. That is our perspective, more optimist of the will than ever, though conscious of the contradictions and with the revolutionary passion we have always had. We aim for everything, because the sky is to be taken by storm without asking for permission.
Mariano Rosa