Lies and generalizations: PO serves Putin and opposes workers’ solidarity

In an article signed by Rafael Santos and published in Prensa Obrera (1), Partido Obrero once again resorts to lies and conflation to attack the MST and the ISL, positions itself in opposition to internationalist workers’ solidarity by railing against the International Solidarity Convoy for Ukraine and, in the process, reaffirms its pro-Putin, half-hearted policy.

By Guillermo Pacagnini

Serial liars

The article, which aims to answer to one previously written by Rubén Tzanoff—a leader of SOL Español and the ISL, for the record, since Santos identifies him as a member of the MST before firing off a barrage of lies and nonsense about the nature of the Convoy and our political stance.

Santos’s first lie is that he claims the initiative is “political support for NATO, ” in solidarity with the “Ukrainian-NATO camp” in the“war it is waging against Putin.” Of course, he provides no evidence to back up such nonsense.

Second lie is that he attacks the ISL by asking, in a misleading way, whether we are going to take part in anti-war actions and “continue demanding that imperialist governments send weapons and bombs and intensify their attacks against Russia.” Once again, no evidence was provided to back up his claims.

The text continues and resorts to a barrage of vulgar generalizations. It attempts to attribute statements to the ISL made by David Acosta personally. David is one of the Convoy’s several coordinators. He refers, among other things, to alleged “military advice directed at the imperialist powers”—statements that have no connection to the Convoy’s official call to action and were taken from a newsletter of the European Solidarity Network. And in an endless ramble, he even mixes in references to “ICE in the U.S.” and “Spain’s persecution of African immigrants in Ceuta and Melilla”… All of these are claims that we do not share and are clearly not part of the ISL politics or program. A haphazard approach, aimed at trying to prove something that is not real.

That modus operandi runs throughout the article, including ridiculous claims such as: “The plan proposed by the Convoy (…) aims to confiscate Russian funds withheld/stolen by the U.S. in order to buy more weapons for Zelensky’s Ukrainian army.”

We must separate the chaff from the wheat in Santos’s statement to get to the heart of his claims. There are two of them: to attack a united-front initiative in solidarity with the people of Ukraine and, once again from a campist standpoint, to reaffirm his solidarity with Putin and the armed aggression against those people.

The Convoy: A Solidarity Initiative for the Ukrainian People

As RT clearly states in its article, the Convoy is a solidarity initiative aimed at unified action to support the people of Ukraine. (2) It brings together activists and labor organizations, social movements, and political groups from various countries, including Ukraine. The goal is to organize an international humanitarian campaign to collect and deliver to the Ukrainian people hospital supplies, electric generators, vehicles, and other necessary materials that can be purchased or received as donations.

As the statement also makes clear, beyond transporting logistical and humanitarian aid, the Convoy aims to become a political action to raise awareness of and strengthen international solidarity with the people under attack by promoting broader participation from workers’ and grassroots organizations in different countries. The ISL has joined this initiative, maintaining our own identity and program, without signing the call-to-action document because it is unilateral—a point we have made explicit, but which the PO’s method of misrepresentation conceals. We reaffirm this in a new publication (3).

And we do so by continuing various internationalist campaigns and actions in support of the Ukrainian people in general and our comrades in the Ukrainian Socialist League (ISL), who are part of the heroic resistance—including comrades who have fallen on the front lines. And the people of Ukraine find themselves in an extremely dire situation due to the destruction of hospitals and energy infrastructure, among other atrocities perpetrated by the aggressor Russian imperialism—a reality that only the insensitivity and political obstinacy of the PO could fail to acknowledge.

An initiative that bears many similarities to the Sumud Global Flotilla, which is based on broad unity of action around two clear points: support for the Palestinian people and rejection of Zionist aggression—despite the significant differences among its members. In that case, the PO ultimately joined the last mission. However, when it comes to this Convoy, why does the PO reject and oppose a united action of internationalist workers’ and popular solidarity? Undoubtedly, the PO’s inherent national-Trotskyism means that its willingness to engage in internationalist campaigns is sporadic, limited, and dictated by its national interests. But, fundamentally, it is the PO’s pro-Putin stance—which serves Putin’s interests perfectly—that has intensified our criticism since the invasion began.

Over-the-top Campism

But the true essence of Santos’s statement lies in its role in supporting Putin’s government. This was also the case at the Athens Conference, where the central demand for the withdrawal of Russian troops and an end to the imperialist invasion was absent from its document. (4) An omission that reveals the PO’s penchant for taking sides, which in this article appears to have been amplified and refined.

For Santos, the essence of the “war between NATO and Russia” is that there is “an imperialist front that wants to impose regime change in Russia, plunder its economic resources, and overexploit more than 100 million Russian workers.”…. With a vivid imagination and completely detached from reality, in addition to claiming that “the war began long before. We can take the Maidan coup in 2014 as a starting point…” (to make Russia appear as the victim?), he resorts to an unusual historical comparison: we must avoid a sort of “Treaty of Versailles” that would impose economic conditions on Russia (sic).

He seeks to denigrate our policy of supporting the people, claiming that war “is not defined by who invaded or fired first.” This is utter nonsense, when it is clearly the Russian army that invaded, occupied, and bombed the country, even destroying hospitals. He is completely ignorant of the entire historical stance of revolutionary Marxism.

Our policy—that of the revolutionaries, which we reaffirmed in the resolution of the Third Congress of the LIS (5)—is comprehensive and in line with the advice of Lenin and Trotsky. It is based on a Marxist analysis that takes into account all aspects of reality—that is, the three parties involved in the conflict. Ukraine, which is a semicolonial country, regardless of the pro-NATO orientation of Zelensky’s bourgeois government. Russia, which—regardless of the debate over its level of development—is an imperialist country, a great power (not a “middle” power). The third party, NATO—which of course has a role in the conflict—is the imperialist military alliance led by the U.S. And a correct analysis takes into account the two processes at play in this war: the invasion by Russia, an aggressor great power, of a semicolony like Ukraine, which is defending itself; and the indirect U.S. imperialist intervention, which of course seeks to bring Russia to heel in the service of the struggle for hegemony and the new order it wishes to impose. Revolutionary politics must respond comprehensively to this dual character: a just war for national sovereignty against the invading power and, at the same time, an inter-imperialist confrontation. Just as it is completely wrong to omit either of these processes, it is especially wrong to ignore the Ukrainian people’s right to self-determination. To promote defeatism is to align oneself with Russian imperialism. The policy of revolutionaries compels us to combine the defense of the Ukrainian people’s right to self-determination with the condemnation of the Russian invasion—demanding the withdrawal of its troops—and the condemnation of U.S. and NATO interference and exploitation of the conflict. And within that framework, we must draw a clear line against the Zelenskyy government, just as our comrades in the LSU/LIS have been doing.

The fact that NATO, in its own interest, supports Ukraine against Russia does not oblige revolutionaries to disregard the Ukrainian people’s right to self-determination. As Lenin pointed out very clearly: “The fact that the struggle for national freedom against one imperialist power may, under certain conditions, be exploited by another ‘great’ power for its own, equally imperialist, ends cannot compel social democracy to renounce its recognition of the right of nations to self-determination.” (6)

Meanwhile, the PO remains mired in its dilemmas, arguing that capitalist restoration was not completed, that there is a bureaucratic caste, and that Russia is merely a “middle power.” Beyond the legitimate debate over the degree of imperialist development—whether it is more regional in nature or dominated by its military aspect—one cannot ignore (as Santos does) that it is the world’s second-largest army (7) that is attacking a semicolonial country and pursuing a clear strategy of annexation.

The “revolutionary solidarity among workers in both countries and the establishment of workers’ governments”—the conclusion of Santos’s statement—becomes nothing more than lip service, pure propaganda within the framework of a regressive policy that is wrong from start to finish.

Heirs of Altamira

It is clear that the leaders of the Partido Obrero, in everything they do, demonstrate not only that they have not strayed in the least from the ideological legacy of their founder, Jorge Altamira, but that in some respects they prove to be his favorite disciples. This is not only due to their alarmist analyses, which lead them to misjudge the current global reality by treating every conflict as a prelude to a third world war. But also because of their unscientific method of taking only one aspect of reality and drawing general conclusions that lead to misguided policies—a line of reasoning shared by sectarians and opportunists and well addressed by Trotsky in his famous debates with the POUM during the Spanish Civil War (8). And this leads him to completely miss the mark when it comes to defining the nature of this war.

But above all, it reveals the Altamirist influence in the method he uses to stir up controversy, resorting to misrepresentation and conflation.

Trotsky asserted that a Marxist is recognized by the way he gathers information, rejecting the habit of those who bend reality to fit a preestablished framework in order to prove the unprovable. He rejected the method of amalgamation, which consists of selecting partial elements of reality, distorting them, arbitrarily piecing them together, and embellishing them in order to prove the unprovable. This is an issue he studied very thoroughly by analyzing the methods of Stalinism, which was an expert at conflating and lumping all revolutionaries and Trotskyists together with agents of imperialism.(9)

The PO has made this method of intrigue and lies a standard tactic for approaching debates and discrediting its opponents.

That is what Santos does in his scandalous article. It would be bad enough if this were merely a journalistic debate. But it is much worse than that, because the aim is to launch a campaign of workers’ and internationalist solidarity with a people subjected to criminal imperialist aggression.