We share, 30 years since the birth of the MST, the words of Alejandro Bodart, Secretary General of our party, who gave the central speech of the event we held on Saturday, December 17, in the auditorium of the Faculty of Social Sciences in the City of Buenos Aires, which was also broadcasted live for the entire country and for all the comrades of the ISL of different countries of the world.
This birthday is a great joy for us. We are celebrating it a little late because it was actually in the middle of the year, but this year was very charged and we did not want to say goodbye without this tribute to all of us. Therefore, I would like to congratulate all those who did their bit to get us this far. To those who are here and to those who are gone, but are in the memory of all of us. Thirty years is a long time. Those of us who have been militating, even for more than 30 years, in shorter periods we have seen organizations grow and disappear. To exist, to be strong and more alive than ever is a great joy and a great pride for us. There are many comrades who have made the construction of the party their life and thanks to that we have an important party. There are many comrades who have collaborated by contributing to a financial campaign or by following us in some campaigns. All of them, in one way or another, have collaborated for us to arrive and be here.
At the table, through the comrades who are here, we want to pay tribute to all the comrades of the different layers of the MST. Some of those who are here were very young when we founded the MST. Celeste was 6 years old, Mariano I think was 9. Besides me, who was 28, I think the oldest was Sergio, who was 18 and started to be a militant right there, when we began to take the first steps. In the table that presides this act there is a little bit the synthesis of the leadership that we were building, which includes older and younger comrades. Because to build a party is to build a leadership. It is to build a work team that can face the different needs. So, I ask you to applaud the comrades who are here, because they are the vanguard of a team that has launched this project, has maintained it and will continue to do so.
The importance of the birth of the MST at a complex time
It was the time of the ’90s, when there was a lot of confusion in the ranks of the left due to a series of events that had taken place. Fundamentally, due to the crisis of “real socialism”, the fall of the Soviet Union. In Germany the capitalist part ended up absorbing the socialist part. It was the time of Thatcher, who defeated the miners in England and together with Reagan launched the capitalist globalization that became known worldwide as neoliberalism. At that time the MST was founded. The confusion that had opened up on the left due to the fact that “socialism” was falling, but since there was no alternative leadership to overcome Stalinism, capitalist restoration was the way out in each of those countries. It entered almost all the ranks of the left, and also entered the organization which preceded the MST, which was the old MAS in Argentina and the old international organization we had built, which was the International Workers League. Two extraordinary works of Nahuel Moreno, but which were affected by this wave of global skepticism. And the truth is that there was a risk of the disappearance of the current that Moreno had formed or, at the most, that it would be transformed into small, very small, very sectarian groups. I believe that the foundation of the MST was a fundamental battle. If we had not fought it, we would not be here today. That is why I think it is very important for us to claim that fight we fought and to claim the foundation of the MST, not only for what we are today, but for the fact of having managed to give continuity to a current that fought for decades to take Trotskyism out of marginality, to take it to the working class.
Today Argentina is a place where much attention is paid to the left and to Trotskyism. Because Trotskyism is the main left-wing force in our country. And if Trotskyism has this weight here, it has to do with the construction of our current, which was not born 30 years ago, it was born almost 80 years ago, but that the MST in a very difficult moment gave the fight so that this historical continuity would continue to exist. And I think it is very important that we are all aware of this. Many of the leaders who led a very skeptical debate inside the old party today are practically not organized and almost none of that has remained. While the MST is more alive than ever, because it knew how to defend the historical banners of our current and, at the same time, also knew how to move forward without dogmatism, without sectarianism, without opportunism, and we continue building and reworking.
Marxism is not a dogma
Marxism is not a recipe that is already written and one can read it and find a solution to all problems. Marxism is a living science, it permanently needs intervention in the class struggle and a critical spirit to elaborate from reality. We learn not only from our successes, but above all from our mistakes. And we have made many, but we also had the self-critical spirit to learn from our mistakes, to try to improve ourselves, to permanently try to advance. I believe that Morenism was the current that most enriched Marxism, that most enriched the teachings of Lenin and Trotsky after World War II. And it would be a tremendous crime to lose that tradition, because it would imply for the working class and the workers an enormous setback, which would take decades to recover. We have to defend our tradition, our Morenist tradition. Knowing that even today, as it happened to Lenin and Trotsky, there are many currents that attack Morenism with falsehoods, with slanders, as Trotskyism, Leninism, Marxism were permanently attacked. We have to defend him and, at the same time, understand that Moreno died before seeing many of the great changes that were taking place in humanity. He could not see the fall of the Soviet Union which had a very contradictory character and that, while the majority only saw the negative part, we tried with a lot of effort to see the contradiction of that period. A period that also had as one of the fundamental phenomena, the fall of the most monstrous apparatus that had arisen within the working class: Stalinism. And that, therefore, a dark period was not opening up where socialism ceased to be the perspective for humanity, but that it would quickly become clear, as it happened, that what is rotting is the capitalist system and that more than ever the only alternative for humanity is to advance to socialism.
If we do not succeed, capitalism will possibly end up destroying humanity. Look at what is happening today, once again the threat that some Russian oligarch, some Yankee capitalist, will press the button and humanity will disappear. The arms race is growing, the fratricidal wars are growing, the permanent aggression against the only planet we have is growing. And they are not interested in what might happen to future generations. Having maintained firm the conviction and confidence in the working class, confidence in the experience of two centuries of workers’ struggle, confidence in a tradition that showed us the way, I think it was very important to keep us standing, so that we did not give up when everyone told us that the Revolutionary Party was no more to continue fighting with strength, many times against the current, or with the wind against us. But a few years after that period, the sun began to rise again. The validity of socialism as the only alternative to put an end to the catastrophe that, if we do not stop, is looming ahead of us, began to become clear once again. And it was important in that fight we waged at that time, when everyone was telling us we were crazy, to have stood firm. Thanks to that firmness I think we are here today, more alive than ever. The left is growing in our country, the PJ is beginning to collapse, radicalism is no longer an alternative, and all of us who are here are protagonists of a change that we are convinced that, sooner rather than later, will bring us the possibility of the dispute for power. The possibility of changing things, as Celeste says, of turning everything around and that the workers, once and for all, take the reins of our country, take the reins of the world and begin to change history.
The crisis of the old MAS and the founding of the MST
The MST was founded on May 1st 1992 with a rally in Plaza de Mayo in support of the railroad workers who at that time were confronting Menem’s privatization. It was a heroic struggle, which practically paralyzed the country for months and had us as protagonists. It was a hallmark of what our party is, because from then on practically in all the struggles that have unfolded the MST has been doing its part.
From the old MAS we were able to rescue a small group of cadres and militants, but with a lot of political firmness and desire to rebuild what the crisis, at that complex moment, had pushed back. From the old leaders we started with a very small group, very beaten by the crisis, by the mistakes that had been made after Moreno’s death. Big mistakes in spite of the fact that, as it had been said in an event to bid him farewell, Moreno had left solid foundations. But unfortunately the leadership that was left in charge of the old MAS when Moreno died, far from relying on those foundations, through many mistakes, was demolishing them, to the point that the crisis only allowed us to rescue a handful of old leaders. Here we have one of them, Mario Doglio, for whom I request a strong applause, because he is one of the leaders of the old current that is with us. The vanguard of the construction of the old party had to be undertaken by middle-level cadres and a couple of regional leaders who came from the construction of the old MAS. And shortly after founding the new party there began to be many debates among those of us who had left the old party together. In a sense, we had been united by the fear of a liquidationist current that arose within the party. But when we had to start building, through the positive, we realized that in reality we did not all have the same conclusions. Many of the old leaders never assimilated the tremendous errors that had been committed after Moreno’s death and, above all, as they did not assimilate the errors, they did not have the conviction that a new leadership had to be formed because the previous one had exploded. Many discussions and debates began to take place.
The MST in the first years was chaotic, with congresses that many times we did not know if they were going to end. Because a debate began to emerge: the new party had to be logically based on the tradition of our current, but: why was the MAS, the main party of the left in Argentina and in the world, within a few years of having entered into a crisis and with a tremendous division of the leadership, on the verge of almost disappearing? The new cadres were convinced that many mistakes had been made and that it was essential, firstly, to discuss the mistakes so as not to make them again; and, secondly, to learn from those mistakes and gain experience that would help us to move forward. While many of the old leaders actually refused to accept that they had been part of that, and refused to put what had to be put, to form a new leadership, a new team with the cadres who had fought to rescue the majority of the militancy at the head of that team.
The Party and the leadership
The construction of a revolutionary party goes through a collective construction, but which is synthesized in the construction of a leadership that combines experience and tradition, but at the same time, young blood that aims at the future, that does not fall in love with itself, that permanently aims at having new comrades to refresh it, to help it to continue advancing. This led us, practically since we were formed as a party until almost the end of the 90’s, to tremendous debates until after several crises we managed to stabilize ourselves. In those years, for example, a trendy campaign launched also from the imperialist power plants entered our ranks: horizontalism. The maximum figure that we had managed to build in the MAS and who started with us in the MST, Luis Zamora, began to fight a battle within our party so that we would change the essence of the Leninist party. He had accepted that Leninism was part of the past, that we had to go to another type of functioning, he began to adore Holloway and all the trendy theoreticians of the time. However, the foundations that we had begun to build allowed us to carry that debate forward and that, practically, the party came out one hundred percent firm that we had to continue building the party.
Because, in short, the great debate since the ’90s up to now, through one trend or another, has had to do with skepticism and from there it has been questioned whether it is worthwhile to continue building a Leninist, combative, revolutionary party or not. It has manifested itself in different ways, but always in the end the questioning is the same. There are those who say, for example, “why are we going to dedicate our time to the construction of the revolutionary party, if power is not in prospect for at least the next 50 or 100 years”. And they propose that we dedicate ourselves to something else, to build as a strategy broad parties together with reformist sectors, that we fight to radicalize democracy a little more, to make some kind of reform. We have had many debates of that type also within our ranks. Because the Party is a living organism, which cannot have an armor so that all the debates that take place in real life do not get inside it. The important thing is to have enough antibodies to be able to repel all those false ideologies. These ideologies are created by the enemy, created by capital to destroy the only possibility that humanity has of ever changing things: to build a national and international revolutionary alternative that fights every day against the bureaucracy, against the capitalists, against imperialism. I believe that the MST in these years has shown that it had that strength, and that is why we are here, and that is why we did not yield to any of the fashions, like others who yielded to them.
This debate is tragic. For example, last weekend the French NPA, which had arisen from an initiative of the Mandelist current, of the French Revolutionary Communist League, was finally destroyed. It has just been destroyed because many years ago the leaders of the Unified Secretariat, of Mandelism, subscribed to this new trend that the revolutionary party is not envisaged for a long period of time and that therefore the realistic thing to do was to dedicate themselves to building broad parties, without delimitations, dissolving the revolutionary party if necessary, as they did in France. And then, a very important initiative that came to group 9,000 militants like the NPA, in one of the most important capitalist countries, has just ended up exploding as a result of having accepted this false ideology, which ended up leading them to despise the revolutionary construction in favor of joining a popular-front construction like the NUPES. That is a practical conclusion of where these new trends that try to throw overboard 200 years of construction of the working class lead to. We are part in France of those who are fighting against all this and who have managed to win half of the NPA to continue building a revolutionary party, independent of the bourgeoisie and the pro-imperialist center-left.
Building the MST in the struggles and the working class
We were building our national party, because when we started we were not a national party, essentially we were grouped a little bit in the Capital, in the Province of Buenos Aires, and we had some comrades in the provinces. But we were building a national party from the struggles that were taking place in our country. Because Menemism, which achieved a certain stability for a period of time, shortly after the MST was formed, began to enter into crisis and extraordinary struggles began to take place, mainly in the provinces. You should know that the MST, in its first years, actively participated in the first big struggles of the unemployed, which arose in those towns devastated by Menem’s privatizations. And so we grew stronger in the south, where we played an important role in the first uprisings, then in Jujuy and other provinces. We actively participated in the Santiagueñazo and the different provincial uprisings that were unleashed. We became involved in important workers’ struggles, like the one in Las Heras for example, which allowed us, together with old comrades who had kept the flame burning (and here is our comrade Lucía Sandoval for whom I also ask for a big hug) to build the party in another province.
When Luis Zamora left, we saw the need to build a new spokesperson. It was easy to decide on Vilma, who during the course of those years became a very important leader known by the working class as a legislator, nurse, and a comrade who went back to work after being a legislator.
We were at the forefront in the struggle for Human Rights. When the MST emerged, the laws of Due Obedience and Full Stop, signed by Alfonsín with the support of the PJ and Menem’s pardon, were still in force. In the opening video you saw an image, and there are many images of the MST in its first years accompanying the struggle of the mothers, accompanying the escraches, the first H.I.J.O.S. escraches. But you should also know that, starting with the MST, and Izquierda Unida a few years later, we were the ones who presented in Parliament the law that overturned the impunity laws, which Kirchnerism is trying to appropriate, when in the Chamber of Deputies our comrades fought against the K’s, who wanted a law that would allow the repeal of the laws without opening new trials. And thanks to the fight we gave, together with the mobilized people, we succeeded in overturning those laws and to this day they are tried and the military perpetrators end up in jail. That is why we are proud of all our history, which we are not going to find on C5N or TN. We are not going to find it in any of the media that try to change it and make human rights leaders out of people who went to make money in the worst moments, and who, being lawyers, never presented a habeas corpus. We are proud to have been part of that vanguard, part of all those struggles since the origin of the old MAS and that we continue with the MST.
We have been the vanguard in the struggle for the unity of the left, at the service of building the strongest possible tools to dispute the mass movement and the working class to the PJ and the center-left. Building Izquierda Unida, making an experience with Proyecto Sur, which allowed us to enrich our program and now being in the FITU among many other unitary initiatives.
We have also been one of the currents that most advanced in the debates and understanding of the importance of gender struggles as drivers of the revolutionary struggle and as drivers of the construction of the revolutionary party. It is a debate that even crosses many revolutionary organizations that continue, despite all that has been seen and can be seen, denying the importance of the gender struggle, denying patriarchy, denying feminism. And I am not talking about Stalinist or bourgeois currents, I am talking about currents that call themselves Trotskyist, but that minimize this fundamental battle. And the MST has elaboration, has constancy, and has been a fundamental part of the mobilizations that managed to turn the tide of this patriarchal and clerical regime, and that achieved abortion. There are all the images and all our comrades to testify that they have been the vanguard in each of the struggles, and continue to be so throughout this period.
We are proud to have been the revolutionary socialist current that most advanced in understanding the unity of the struggle of the working class for its emancipation with the need to integrate the socio-environmental struggle. Because the planet is at risk, and it is not enough to fight only for wages or for workers’ control. We must destroy all those industries that end up destroying the environment, and go towards another type of productive model. And we must have what it takes, to get rid of dogmas, to get rid of old recipes, which have proved to be useless.
For all of this we must be proud of what we have built. Because we have built, but we have also left our historical marks that will be useful for the next generations, to not start from scratch in many fights, in many elaborations.
From the beginning we have been present in the most important struggles of our class, the working class. We are very proud, for example, not to go back to history, but simply to the last few years, to have the most dynamic current among the famous front line that took on one of the greatest disasters of capitalism, which was the pandemic. And to have leaders and unions of nurses, of doctors, in the Capital, in the Province of Buenos Aires, in Cordoba and in the provinces. We have fought to install a new trade union model, because the model that must be destroyed in trade unionism is not only that of the rotten bureaucracy of the CGT’s bureaucrats or of the CTA’s liars. Unfortunately the left reproduces bureaucratic methods within the labor movement, and many times delays the possibility of the formation of a new leadership so necessary for our class. And we have had the courage to give that fight. Because we do not fight to have one more label. We fight to educate the working class in the need for it to be self-determined, for it to be the one to solve the problems. It is a strategic battle to be fought with our partners within the Left Front, with whom we have not yet been able to build more than a limited electoral front. It is very difficult for us to intervene unitarily in the class struggle or to wage truly revolutionary fights in the unions. We must be alert, because Stalinism still leaves its mark on many organizations that call themselves anti-Stalinist and it is a battle that we must continue to wage.
There are few of us, due to age problems, who were lucky enough to participate in the great revolution that took place here and ended with the fall of the dictatorship. We were very young at that time. I am talking about 1982. But we are proud as MST to have been able to participate in the second major revolution in Argentina, which was the famous Argentinazo, and to have drawn conclusions. Because that revolutionary process made us draw tremendous conclusions that were very useful for the later continuity of the MST. And above all to draw a conclusion: Marxism, as I said before, is not a dogma. Moreno gave an extraordinary contribution to the theory of the Permanent Revolution, to the theory of the revolution, but he died before new phenomena that changed the stage took place. With the tools he had given us, we had to rework, we had to re-discuss, we had to think. After the Argentinazo we had another crisis, with a group of comrades that those of us who thought this, like me, were practically considered heretics, because they believed that everything had been written. Some of these comrades are in the FIT Unity, in another organization. They believed and still believe that there was nothing to rethink, that there was nothing to elaborate, and that is how they are doing. The MST had the audacity to break the molds when it was necessary to break the molds. And one must know how to break the molds; one must know how to be critical of oneself. He who is not critical of himself, never advances, because he falls in love with himself and falls in love with the mistakes he makes. The only way to advance is to have the courage to know how to assimilate an error when it occurs, and when something does not work, to have the courage to change it and to elaborate, because Marxism is a living science. We could say that, for example, Lenin was a heretic who practically violated everything Marx had thought, because Marx said that revolution could only take place in the most advanced countries. In that sense the Mensheviks were right, who argued that the revolution should not be made in Russia. But if it was not for Lenin and Trotsky, who dared to question what evidently did not work and make the revolution in the most backward country in Europe, revolutionary Marxism would not be what it is today. Moreno had the courage to question some aspects of the theory of the Permanent Revolution, because there are no untouchable saints in Marxism. And we also had the courage to touch many aspects of what Moreno had raised, because evidently the situation had changed. It was not the same a world with Stalinism and with all the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc, than a world where everything had collapsed, where capitalist restoration had started to spread, where we had to think, to question forecasts that had not been given, to elaborate and elaborate. And this, comrades, is very important for the fight we are giving with the International Socialist League, because the International Socialist League could not be built with the old molds of the past. It could be built because we had the audacity to question and rethink many things.
Our seal of origin: internationalism.
I believe that Argentine Trotskyism, formed by Moreno, has created the most internationalist group of militants that currently exists in the world. I have to travel, go to different countries, I see it and I think that is something very important to have it very clear. The MST is a faithful heir of that, because we have decided many times to weaken our construction in order to strengthen the construction of another country, to be able to go to support a struggle that was developing in very distant places. To have the courage to know that without the international we are nothing, that we cannot dispute power, that there is no Trotskyism without the international. Because Trotskyism is internationalism, the socialist revolution is world-wide or it will never be. And to be able to make it, we need to make every effort, even to weaken the national construction. And I believe that the MST has had that courage, and that is why since the IWL broke up, we founded first the CIR and then the UIT. When the latter defected, we tried to regroup the revolutionaries internationally through multiple initiatives and today we are the mainstay of the ISL.
We became fanatics of the Venezuelan Revolution at the beginning of the century and from then on we began to meet comrades from different parts of the world with a common understanding, neither sectarian nor opportunist, while other currents fell into one or another deviation, since one of the great defects of part of the left is to permanently confuse the processes that take place with their leadership. Sectarianism in the ranks of Trotskyism is based on anti-Marxist reasoning. Since at the head of a process there is a bad, reformist or reactionary leadership, the process is useless. Many of these reasonings are present in some allies in the Front that we integrate, and that is why they refused to participate and dispute in the Bolivarian Revolution. They always nitpick at every mobilization, at every revolutionary process, and they care more about not getting stained, not getting into the mud, than participating and responding to the needs of the working class. Which often has bad leaderships, but which makes tremendous efforts to overcome them, to build alternatives in the face of those processes. We are seeing something similar now in relation to the Ukrainian resistance against the Russian invasion, which a part of the left refuses to support because the head of the country is a pro-imperialist like Zelensky.
Opportunism starts from a similar reasoning, but in reverse. When there is a revolutionary process they draw the conclusion that the leadership must be revolutionary and they give in to it.
We draw a very critical balance of post-war Trotskyism, very critical. Because unfortunately post-war Trotskyism, starting with Pabloite revisionism, caused a tremendous atomization of the revolutionary movement. With mini-internationals that began to emerge everywhere, around a party. We fell into a deviation, that of the “mother party”, believing that from a party we can make an international, looking for people who think the same as the mother party, and expelling those who do not think like that. We drew the conclusion that this model, which may have served to keep the flame, so that the teachings of Trotsky and Lenin would not be lost in the dustbin of Stalinism, had come to an end with the death of Stalinism, and we had to look for another one. A model that would allow us revolutionaries to meet again, each one contributing his own tradition. To understand that there are other traditions in the revolutionary movement and that what it is about is to return to the origins, to return to the teachings of the old internationals, which were not made on the basis of a party imposing itself on the rest, but through union, solidarity, frank debate, coexistence with different currents, with nuances. This allowed us to meet comrades from other traditions and begin to build the ISL together.
The old model would never have allowed us to connect with the comrades of Pakistan, who come from another tradition and are a great revolutionary current in Asia, and learn from them, to know that we are not the only ones who in this long struggle have tried to solve the problems of the working class. Or to join with the comrades of Africa, who come from an experience with Stalinism, because Trotskyism did not exist, but who advanced, being very young they broke with Stalinism, they made it a crumb and began to look for, and they looked for us as an alternative. And we do not ask them for blood tests, as other organizations ask them, to see if they are fit to participate in the sect. Or with the currents of revolutionary syndicalism in Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan or Russia. Or with the comrades of Lebanon. Or to relate with the comrades of Australia who, in a conservative country, have just made an extraordinary election. Tonight we are going to participate in a conference that starts at 9 p.m., because there are 14 hours difference, but they are very enthusiastic, and they have prepared a document that is very important for you to know. In this document, they present the long history in the desert that they have had to go through, when everybody told them that they had to give up, that it was not worth it, that it was a conservative, imperialist country, that the working class was never going to change, that it was all aristocratic, but by standing firm, they have just caused an electoral boom and are growing, and are part of a phenomenon that shows the possibilities that exist today in the world. Or having fraternal relations with The Tempest comrades from the United States. That is to say, we could not have done any of this without internationalism, without the clarity that we must dare to change, without the clarity that dogma no longer exists, that we do not have the revealed truth, but we have the will to change things.
Let us continue to struggle and build the party and the ISL.
Comrades, let us not allow ourselves to be fooled by the verse that socialism is utopian. The only utopian thing in humanity is to continue to support this system, which is going to lead us to destruction. The only light of hope for humanity is the only alternative system that exists: socialism. But to reach socialism it is necessary to build a Revolutionary Party. That is why they should be proud to collaborate with the only tool that can allow the world not to fall apart and that future generations can live with dignity, which is to build a party, in this case the MST and at the international level the International Socialist League. Without militancy, without abnegation, it is not possible to build parties. Many comrades said it in the initial videos, the construction of a party demands sacrifices, leaving many personal things aside. Many times capitalist society pressures us to think essentially in ourselves, to stop thinking about the collective and they tell us “do your own thing, you are already grown up, your red student moment is over”.
Comrades; being a militant is worthwhile. Because it is the only truly rewarding activity. Because it is the only activity that allows us collectively to fight so that our children, our grandchildren, ourselves, can enjoy this planet and this life, which is beautiful but there is a system that does not allow us to enjoy it. But we enjoy it in our own way, fighting to destroy this system and build another beautiful one. Therefore, I believe that the best tribute to 30 years is to swear that we will continue fighting, militating, building a national and international party. Discussing everything that needs to be discussed, without dogmas, without any preconceptions, but firm in the conviction that socialism is possible, that the working class is not defeated. And if not, look at the tremendous effort being made by the working class of Iran with a brutal repression, which arose from the murder of a woman, but which has become one of the most important revolutions on the planet. Or the Peruvian people who, without leadership, betrayed twenty times, continue fighting, continue cornering the power. And we saw it in Sri Lanka in that demonstration that swept away everything. Or in each of the rebellions that shake the country month after month. Every day the working class shows us that it does not stop fighting. Let us not stop fighting. Let us fight more than ever. Because if we continue doing what we have done these 30 years, and we redouble our efforts, the future shall be ours.