For the construction of a revolutionary socialist alternative
For more than a year Impulso Socialista -IS- (section of the International Socialist League, ISL, in Colombia) and the Grupo de Trabajadores Socialistas -GTS- have been acting jointly in the face of national political events and promoting the international tasks and campaigns of the International Socialist League. GTS participated as a guest at the World Congress of the ISL in December 2021. We have solidified our unity of action, while furthering our organizational unity. To culminate this process we will soon hold our unification congress.
In the heat of the struggle
The meeting between our two organizations has taken place in the midst of the rise of the class struggle in our country and internationally. Impulso Socialista is a group that emerged during the vigorous university strike of 2018, which succeeded in forcing the government of Iván Duque to increase the budget for public higher education. They quickly linked up with the ISL and participated in its founding congress in 2019, in which an international agenda was approved, in addition to an analysis of the global situation and its prospects, along with resolutions on various aspects of the global reality.
This new organization was born as a response to the need to unify revolutionaries coming from a variety of traditions and countries of the five continents, who are the vanguard in the struggle being waged by the peoples against the permanent offensive of the capitalists and imperialism, in the midst of the worsening of the economic crisis and its brutal social, political, military and environmental effects. Meanwhile in Colombia we are living through the national strike of 2019, the radical youth uprising in Bogota in 2020 and, above all, the massive social explosion of 2021; struggles that have provoked a break in the national situation, whose effect on the political terrain has been the “progressive” government of the Pacto Historico, a government of class collaboration of a broad sector of the reformist left with the most rotten part of the bourgeois establishment.
Youth and tradition
This convergence of revolutionaries counts, to begin with, on the youthful energy of Impulso Socialista and the international project of the ISL. The Grupo de Trabajadores Socialistas, for its part, brings an important component of tradition. Several of its members, workers in the educational sector, and other comrades, have been part of the historic current of Trotskyist revolutionary socialism that was consolidated during the 1970s in Colombia, as part of the international current led by the Argentine revolutionary Nahuel Moreno, exiled during those years in our country. GTS claims all that theoretical, programmatic, political and methodological legacy accumulated over almost half a century of struggle for the construction of a national and international Leninist party and its precedent, the Fourth International founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938.
Perhaps the main lesson left by the Morenista current in Colombia was the imperious need to fuse the socialist program with the working class, in order to overcome the chronic crisis of revolutionary leadership, intervening in the struggles of the industrial workers and wage earners in general. Despite the ups and downs experienced in that hard task, the persistence of comrades of decades of revolutionary struggle are an invaluable asset in the face of the period of class struggle underway, in which the political tactics will be tested against the Petro government, the promotion of the revolutionary socialist program and the construction of a new organization that will be presented as a reference for workers, youth and women fighters.
A program against barbarism
The recurrent crises of capitalism have aggravated all the problems of humanity. To the daily confrontation between wage earners and capitalists over the distribution of social wealth, exacerbated by the current economic crisis, has been added in an explosive way the resistance of women against oppression and macho violence, which coincides with the struggles of sex-gender identities, discriminated against and marginalized. That is why promoting the struggles for the emancipation and liberation of women from a revolutionary perspective is a fundamental part of the program of our new organization. In the same way we must respond to the demands of the generation of young people to whom capitalism only offers precarious living and working conditions and the most absurd alienation.
But capitalism and imperialism not only generate economic exploitation, oppression and discrimination, but also degrade the conditions of life on our planet to the extreme, provoking an unprecedented environmental catastrophe and heralding the imminence of new pandemics. Hence the importance of the struggle for the reconstruction of the environment as a fundamental part of the socialist program, while promoting harmonious relations with nature.
As the chronic crisis of the system deepens, the capitalists are also pushing us into the barbarism of war. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the aggressive intervention of NATO, led by U.S. imperialism, have been a turning point in the world situation which, added to the effects of the pandemic, has unleashed greater suffering for the workers of the world. That perspective will not be conjured with the reactionary utopia of a supposed “human and green capitalism” in which imperialism and semi-colonial countries, exploited and exploiters, oppressors and oppressed, democrats and fascists, depredation and nature, coexist peacefully.
The only way out left for humanity is the one offered by the working class which, in its struggle for its emancipation, will be able to free society as a whole from the burden of class division and national frontiers. Only then “the Earth will be the beautiful paradise of humanity”, as poetically states “The Internationale”, hymn of the workers of the world.
Internationalist socialists
Our unified organization does not present itself as “the party of the Colombian socialist revolution”. We are deeply convinced that, outside of us, there are hundreds or thousands of workers, women and youth who struggle for a revolutionary transformation of capitalist society.
The collapse of the countries that, throughout the 20th century, were known as socialist, was the failure of the totalitarian project of the Stalinist bureaucracy and its nationalist conception of “building socialism in a single country”. That failure distorted before the workers of the world the concept of socialism. One of the tasks facing revolutionaries today is to take stock of that failure and reestablish the true conception of socialism with workers’ democracy, revolutionary internationalist socialism. From there, beyond building a national organization, our objective is to build a section of a revolutionary international, which, from the International Socialist League, is posed as a pole of revolutionary agglutination, which will cement the road towards an international which groups all the revolutionaries of the world, following the example of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Moreno himself.
Our method
This world party can only be built with a workers’ democratic method, which respects the inevitable differences of analysis, characterizations, tactical proposals, political slogans, which may arise among the militants and the sections of the international. Only democratic discussion and unified collective action allows us to test our orientations and the evaluation and overcoming of our errors. No leader can consider himself above the organization, a nefarious method which, with the disgusting “cult of personality”, sponsored by Stalinism, corrupted for decades the workers’ movement and its parties.
It is also a fundamental part of our method of construction a strong working class and revolutionary moral base that prevents the decomposition of capitalist society from weakening militant relations or justifying the bureaucratic control of the leading organizations or individuals over the whole organization or the persecution of critics and dissidents. Only full guarantees for the frank expression of differences allow the democratic definition of orientations and their collective evaluation and correction.
Our common action, the joint elaboration of our program and statutes, as well as the collective analysis of the national situation, which has allowed us to position ourselves in front of the main facts of the class struggle and to intervene in it, is the basis of confidence on which we will soon unify our organizations. We invite those who have accompanied us in this process and those who follow our positions, to join this revolutionary socialist internationalist project.
Impulso Socialista – Grupo de Trabajadores Socialistas December 10, 2022