Stop the war of destruction against the Palestinians and the Arab masses of Lebanon

Emergency call to the workers and oppressed of the North America, Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia-Pacific

For the defeat of the armies of Olmert and Bush, in Palestine and Iraq!
Stop the UN, NATO and the puppet Lebanese government that are preparing to destroy the Palestinian resistance in Lebanon!

The 28 of June, the military of Olmert armed by Bush began its brutal military assault against the Palestinian people of the Gaza Strip. Two weeks later, it widened the offensive to attack the hundreds of thousands of oppressed Palestinian families who have been concentrated in refugee camps in the south of Lebanon since they were expelled from their nation by the Zionists. Since then, the Zionist army has systematically bombed the Southern zone of Beirut, where Palestinian workers and their families live alongside millions of exploited Arab workers, and has continued to bomb the south of Lebanon, killing hundreds and destroying the infrastructure.

This barbaric Zionist slaughter is no accident. It is an act of vengeance against the Palestinian resistance of the South of Lebanon which in May 2000 began the heroic Palestine revolution. Workers and peasants rose up, disarmed the fascist militias of the Lebanese Maronite-Christian bourgeoisie – the allies of Zionism. They formed workers and peasants militias which drove the Israeli army out of occupied Lebanon. This action opened the heroic revolution of September 2000 in which the oppressed Palestinian workers in historical Palestine confronted Arafat and the collaborationist PLO bourgeoisie, disarming its police and forming their own workers and peasants militias.

The Zionist-Fascist state of Israel, the gendarme of imperialism in the Middle East, wants to finally end the Palestinian question

But it is not enough that the Palestinian masses uprising was defeated by the Israel military in a savage repression in 2002, and that they are now confined in concentration camps in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Because in those camps the workers and peasants are subjected to savage treatment and the resistance continues to grow. Now that indomitable resistance threatens to rise up and spread to the whole Middle East.

The Zionists and their US allies greatest fear is that this resistance will join forces with Hizbollah and the half million Palestinians in the Lebanese camps and threaten not only the Zionist state, but also the newly formed US client regime in Lebanon. Therefore, this war of destruction against the Palestinian people is intended to eliminate the last remaining forces of the Palestine revolution that began in 2000, that is to say, in the only place where the surviving armed Palestinian masses exist - the south of Lebanon. That is the Zionist objective in bombing Lebanon, its people, its infrastructure, its ports and highways.

The victory of the Zionist-imperialistic war against the Palestinian people would leave Lebanon divided and carved up between the imperialist powers and their Zionist gendarme, or transformed into an imperialist protectorate of the UN and NATO – like Bosnia and Kosovo in the Balkans - as a giant concentration camp for half-a-million oppresssed Palestinian workers. For that reason the Lebanese government maintains its army in its barracks, untouched by the Zionist attack so if the Palestinian masses are defeated, it can play the role of “gurka” in the Lebanese protectorate. Thus, the fate of the Lebanese people is indissolubly bound up with the fate of the suffering Palestinian people. Only with the victory of the Palestinian people and the destruction of the Zionist-facist state of Israel, and the defeat of the reactionary Lebanese government and the dismantling of its army by the masses, will the Lebanese nation have a future.

It is clear that there are two opposing trenches in this war of destruction: one is in the trench of the Palestinian people, fighting against for its victory, and for the defeat of the Israelí army and the destruction of the Zionist-facist state of Israel; the other is the trench of the imperialistic powers, the state of Israel and the Arab bourgeoisies who are their junior partners.

Stop the war of destruction against the Palestine people! We can win by arming the masses of Syria, Iran, Jordan and the Middle East, rising up to fight in Southern Lebanon and historical Palestine, so that the Middle East is turned into the tomb of the imperialist and Israeli butchers.

For a proletarian war plan to win the war for the Palestinian people and the masses of the Middle East against the Zionist-imperialist attack

Millions of oppressed workers of the nations of the Middle East struggle to take up arms against Zionism and imperialism in support of the Palestinian people. The national bourgeoisies that are aligned directly with imperialism ferociously repress the mobilizations of their own people, like in Egypt and Jordan. The Syrian and Iranian bourgeoisies have declared their “neutrality”. We must break through this barrier to allow the workers and the oppressed in the region to enter the combat! The workers', peasants, students and anti-imperialist organisations of Syria, of Iran, of Jordan and the Middle East, must form workers’ and peoples’ brigades to go to Lebanon and Palestine to fight against the Zionist state!

Against this war of destruction against the Palestinian people, the first task of the workers and oppressed of the world, is to fight for the military defeat of the army of Olmert and Bush, and for the military victory of the Palestinian masses and of Hizbollah and their allies against the Zionist-fascist state of Israel, and to throw out the imperialist bandits of the UN and NATO who as “peacekeepers” will be the jailers of the enslaved Palestinian and Lebanese people.

• All the workers, peasants, students and anti-imperialist organizations must recognize that Hizbollah and the other forces that fight the Zionist-fascist state are armies in the Palestinian struggle and the heroic Iraqi resistance, and to demand the shipment of arms, equipment, foods and medicines to them.
• It is an urgent task of the world working class, and the duty of the workers of the United States, France and the other imperialistic powers, to strike, boycott, picket and mobilize to stop all shipment of arms and equipment destined for Israel and the Anglo-US troops in Iraq.
• Immediate freedom for more than 10,000 Palestinian workers, women and children who the Zionist-fascist state of Israel keeps locked in jails as hostages!
  

The revolutionaries are in the trench with Hizbollah and all the forces that fight the Zionist-imperialistic attack

We fight for the military victory of Hizbollah and the defeat of the Israel army. We unconditionally support the right of the Palestinian people to defend with all the arms and means at its disposal since it is fighting for its existence. At the same time, we do not support any political program of the bourgeois leadership of the anti-Zionist and anti-imperialsit leadership. We fight to win the leadership of the war for the proletariat, the only class that can carry through to the end the anti-imperialist struggle of the masses and transform Palestine, Iraq and thel Middle East into a new Vietnam and the tomb of the Zionist army and all the imperialist troops.

Unfortunately, while the Zionist forces bomb and massacre the Palestinians, Hizbollah refuses to arm the Palestinians in the south of the Lebanon, in the same way that Hamas and El Fatah refuses to arm them in historical Palestine. Hizbollah does not call for the overthrow of the pro-imperialistic and pro-Zionist government of national unity in Lebanon, headed by prime minister Fuad Siniora. It does not call for the Lebanese masses to march to the barracks and disarm the Lebanese army that serves imperialism and Zionism, nor to arm themselves and to put themselves under the military command of the Palestine resistance. It does not call on Syria and Iran to use its troops to defeat the Zionist-imperialistic attack. It does not call on the Iraqi resistance and the masses of Middle East to rise up and fight against imperialism and Zionism, and to attack its property and interests in the region.

It is necessary to fight for the proletarian leadership of to war

The war can only be won by arming all the Palestinians in the south of Lebanon, and the Lebanese workers that want to fight the Zionists and their ally the pro-imperialistic Lebanese government. While the bourgeois and the rich middle-class of the Lebanon want the Palestinians defeated, and remain largely untouched by the bombing, many of the workers and oppressed people of Lebanon whose houses have been bombed and destroyed have joined the Palestinian resstance in the camps in the south, asking for weapons to fight the Israeli attacks. Even the imperialistic press has had to acknowledge that for every Palestinian combatant who has fallen in battle, ten Palestinians and Lebanese rise up in their place.

• In order to win to war, then, it is necessary to form workers and peasants militias, and to call on the masses to march on the barracks of the Lebanese army and to take them by force.
• It is necessary to call on the rank and file soldiers to mutiny, to dismiss the officers, to disarm them, and to form soldiers committees which ensure that the arms are distributed into the hands of the workers and peasants militias.
• It is necessary to arm all the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, creating workers and peasants militias, coordinated and centralized with their brothers and sisters of Lebanon! It is necessary to call on the Palestinian masses of Jordan to rise and join the war, removing the servile monarchy which is the ally of Bush and Olmert.
• It is necessary to strike where it more hurts the enemy most: its property and its profits, by expropriating without compensation and under workers control, all the properties and interests of the Zionists and US imperialism and all the imperialist powers in Lebanon.
  

To win the war we must call on the oppressed Shiite masses of Iraq to break with their collaborationist bourgeoisie and and join the resistance against the imperialist troops

That is the best way to stop the destruction of the Palestinian resistance! If the Shiite masses of Iraq are added to the resistance, the collaborationist government of the protectorate would fall. Breaking with their bourgeois leaders, the Shiite workers and oppressed could declare that Iraq, the south of the Lebanon and historical Palestine, are three fronts in the same battle in a single war against imperialism and its Zionist gendarme. The main command of the Zionist attack in the hands of Bush and Condoleeza Rice would quickly collapse without the collaboration of the Shiite bourgeoisie propping up the the “Iraqi government”.

It is necessary to call on the working class and the oppressed of Syria and Iran to break all subordination to those cowardly bourgeoisies that allow the massacre of the Palestinian masses to continue, arming the masses and creating workers and peasants militias. We have to call on all the workers of the Middle East to break all subordination to their bourgeoisies, to strike to paralyze the oil fields, refineries and oil pipelines in the region. We have to unite all the forces into one anti-imperialist fight against the Zionist-facist state of Israel, to defeat the “oil wars” of imperialism, its Zionist gendarme, and their junior partners, the national bourgeoisies.

Revolution or counterrevolution – the historical alternative for the worlds workers

Imperialism can only keep its Zionist gendarme and impose a counter-revolutionary Iraqi protectorate by making a fascist attack on the Palestinian and Arab masses. The suffering Palestinians can only win this war and their historical liberation, by beaking all political ties to the bourgeoisie, and transforming the war against the Zionist state and imperialism into the struggle for a workers and peasants revolution in Palestine, Lebanon and the whole Middle East.

Only with the victory of the workers and peasants revolution in the Middle East will it be able to destroy the Zionist-fascist state of Israel and create a secular, democratic and non-racist Palestinian state, based on a workers and peasants’ government of the armed, independent Palestinian masses. Only in this way can the working class and the oppressed of the region advance towards a Federation of Worker-Peasant Republics of the Middle East, the only road to end the oppression, super-exploitation, plunder, wars and massacres of imperialism and its junior partners the national bourgeoisies.

If the counter revolutionary war against the Palestinian people is victorious, US imperialism will be strengthened to smash the Iraqi resistance and to advance its war plans against Iran. It will be be able to redouble its offensive in Latin America, and to revive its attacks against its own working class. That is why the war in the Middle East can strongly influence the fate of the Iraqi resistance, of Iran, and the world working class. For that reason, the struggle of the Palestinians, the Iraqi masses and of the wider masses of the Middle East, is a fight that the world proletariat must take up as its own fight.

The key to the victory of the Palestinian masses, and those of Iraq and the whole Middle East, is in the hands of the proletariat in the imperialistic countries. Most important, there is the US working class that has re-emerged onto the stage of history with its struggle against the war in Iraq, its support for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, and most critically, the militant struggle of millions of Latin American migrant workers against the the slave labour traffic.

Down with Bush! For generalised strike action to defeat the Israeli troops in Palestine and Lebanon, the US troops in Iraq, and to destroy the Zionist-fascist State of Israel

Entering this struggle, the North American working class could quickly form a united front with the Palestinian masses who today are being killed in this war of destruction. Taking a clear class and internationalist stand it would decisively strengthen the capacity of the Palestinian masses, and that of all the Middle East, to break all subordination to their own bourgeoisies, and to put the proletariat in the leadership of the war against the Zionist state and against the Yankee troops who occupy Iraq.

The heroic French youth rebelled last November. Like their Palestinian brothers and sisters, they are enslaved, persecuted, and confined to virtual “ghettos”. They are part of the millions of African and Middle East immigrant workers who are treated like pariahs in France, and who Chirac and Sarkozy want to expel from the schools and deport. To support their Palestinian brothers and sisters, we call on the young workers and the immigrant workers to again take to the streets in all the cities of France with the slogan: “Every night we will make Paris a Bagdad!” We call on them to build international workers brigades to fight in the trenches of the Palestinian camps of south Lebanon and historical Palestine!

But to make this possible workers in the imperialistic powers will have to break with their union bureaucracies and the privileged layers of workers who are the support base for the World Social Forum whose leaders are in the camp of the imperialist bourgeoisies

• Break the US working class from the imperialist butchers of the Democratic Party and the “lobby” of the Zionist bourgeoisie!
• Enough of workers kneeling at the feet of the French imperialist Fifth Republic!
• Break with the labour bureaucracies and workers aristocracies in the World Social Forum, that want to make the workers capitulate to the French and German imperialists calls for “peace” so that the imperialist mecenaries of the UN can take over the task of smashing the Palestinian resistance!

The workers and oppressed peoples of Latin America have much to learn from the sufffering of the Palestinian people, and the situation of the masses in the Middle East. They face the same subordination of the working class to the national bourgeoisies. The fate of the Palestinian and Iraqi peoples at the moment is the same fate that awaits the exploited of Latin America if they allow Castro, Chávez, Evo Morales, Lula, Kirchner and Bachelet, counter-revolutionary leaders of the World Social Forum, to make them kneel before the national bourgeoisies. Just like the Middle East, they use class collaboration to deceive the masses, to disorganise their ranks, and strangle their rebellions, while at the same time they use their military to attack the workers vanguard and prepare for more reactionary attacks to smash the proletarian revolution.

Break all ties to the bourgeoisie! Unite with our Palestinian class brothers and sisters of the Middle East in one fight against imperialism and its Zionist gendarme

The FLT calls for the widest unity of action to organize mobilizations, demonstrations and other actions support the fight of the Palestinian and Iraqian masses, and to face imperialism, Zionism and UN mercenaries.

For that reason, we make an emergency call to all workers organizations, peasants, students and anti-imperialists of the world:

• Take to the streets, surround the Zionist and Yankee embassies and call for the military defeat of the barbaric armies of Olmert
  
• Unite to fight for the defeat of Bush’s army in Iraq
  
• Unite for the victory of the Palestinian and Iraqi masses
  
• Oppose the plan of NATO and the imperialist mercenaries of the UN
  
• Supply arms to the Palestinian people and all the forces that face the Zionist-facist state of Israel

For an International Conference of principled Trotskyists and revolutionary workers organisations

Again, for the second time in the 21st century, the burning Palestinian question has been made the center of the world struggle. This is not accidental: the long fight of the Palestinian workers and peasants for their national liberation, to defeat the Zionist invader and to recover their historical territory, has played a central role in the working class and socialist revolution in Middle East.

The present war of destruction being met by the indomitable resistance of the Palestinian and Lebanese masses, sends out a red alert that we must regroup, on a worldwide basis, all the healthy forces of Fourth International and all the revolutionary workers organizations who refuse to follow the class collaborationist politics of the World Social Forum and the fake Trotskyists. Against the Stalinists who have long gone into the camp of counter-revolution, and the ex-Trotskyists who have dragged the flag of Trotskyism in the mud so that it does not fly in the Middle East today, there are healthy and revolutionary forces that are fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Palestinian people, raising a revolutionary program to transform the war into the beginning of the workers and peasants revolution in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and the whole Middle East, and capable of leading the rebellion of the working class in the imperialist powers against those who collaborate with ‘democratic’ imperialism.

The revolutionaries of the Leninist-Trotskyist Fraction (FLT) call on all groups and organizations everywhere in the world who are on the side of the Palestianian and Lebanese people in this war, to convene an International Conference of principled Trotskyists and the revolutionary workers organizations. We put forward this declaration and the revolutionary program it embodies, as a basis for an international campaign in support to the Palestinian people, and the regrouping of revolutionary internationalists of the world. There is no time to lose!

24 July 2006
International Coordinating Secretariat of the Leninist-Trotskyist Fraction:
Internationalist Red October (ORI), of Bolivia
Trotskyist Internationalist League (LTI), of Peru
LOI (CI) - Workers Democracy, of Argentina
Trotskist Fraction (FT), of Brazil
Internationalist Workers Party (POI-CI), of Chile
Communist Workers Group (CWG), of New Zealand cwg006@yahoo.com
[This version Translated, Abridged and Edited by Communist Workers Group]

Stop the Genocidal Attack of the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel against the Palestinian People!

By The Leninist Trotskyist Fraction

• Down with the plan of the ‘Two states’ and the ‘Road Map’ imposed by the imperialists, the Zionist state and the Arab bourgeoisies that imposes the final solution of apartheid enslavement of the Palestinian people!
• For the destruction of the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel!
• Only a workers and peasants government of the self-organised and armed Palestinian masses can guarantee a secular, democratic and non-racist Palestinian State!
• For a Federation of Worker-peasant Republics of the Middle East!

From the 28 of June, the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel, has begun a new military offensive against the Palestinian workers and people. With the pretext of “freeing” an Israeli soldier who was captured by one of the Palestinian militias, it has surrounded and invaded the Gaza Strip –a territory of 400 square kilometers with a population of one-and-a-half million people –with tanks, ships, planes, artillery and troops. It has launched a massive artillery bombardment and against the Palestinian people, already killing 54 of them –including 9 children –by the end of June.

With this offensive, imperialism and its Zionist policeman aims a new counter-revolutionary blow at the Palestinian and Middle Eastern masses, and in particular at the heroic resistance of the Iraqi masses who are fighting a war of resistance against the US army and who every day send back to the US more dead soldiers in body bags.

The Iraqi resistance to the imperialist invaders, and the resistance of the Palestinian people to the occupation of the Zionist state, is the one and the same fight of all workers and oppressed peoples of the Middle East!


The situation of the oppressed people of is already a catastrophe and getting worse: the electrical power stations and the bridges were destroyed and all access roads closed. With a temperatures above 40°, the people do not have water, light, food, medicines, fuel, etc. One out of three new-born children dies for lack of basic medicines. Without power the hospitals cannot perform operations or maintain blood supplies or medicines, etc.

The vast majority of Palestinian workers are unemployed. The Zionist State in the last months cut from 88,000 to 11,000 the ‘work permits’ that allow Palestinian workers to be exploited in Israeli and imperialist factories in occupied Palestine. Thousands of workers risk their life every day leaving Gaza and the Transjordan without permits to work for food to feed their children. But today no worker can leave to work.

The Zionist army also entered Ramallah, in the Transjordan, bombing dependencies and detaining almost 100 civil employees of the “Palestinian government” –the so-called ‘Palestinian National Authority’ –accusing them of being ‘criminals’, ‘terrorists’, etc.

This is the true face of the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel, artificially created in 1948 by means of the military occupation of the territory of the nation of Palestine, the expulsion of its inhabitants, their systematic extermination and displacement on the assumption of an historic ‘Biblical right’, and maintained since then by Anglo-Yankee imperialism as its police force to keep the Palestinian and Middle Eastern masses subservient to the imperialistic powers and their demand for oil!

The new fascist offensive aims to smash all resistance and impose an apartheid state of Palestine

The Palestinian masses, with its nation under occupation, condemned to live as prisoners in their own land, are prisoners in “ghettos” and concentration camps that are no better than the Warsaw ghetto of the Nazis. This new military offensive is the continuation of the defeat of the huge revolution that the Palestinian people began in September 2000. It aims to complete that defeat, with the reimposition of fascist barbarism by the Zionist invaders on the nation they have occupied for more than half a century.

At the same time, it is the response of US and British imperialism to the refusal of the Palestinian resistance to accept defeat of their revolution. Not one day has passed since 2002 when there has not been demonstrations –against the apartheid wall in Transjordan, against the confinement of the people in ‘Bantustans’ and concentration camps surrounded by the Zionist army and the fascist colonies, against the recurrent massacres and murders of the Zionist army –and struggles to liberate more than 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners in the Zionist jails, including over 500 women and children.

If the military offensive of the army of Olmert and Bush is victorious, then immediately we will see the imposition of the ‘Road Map’ to complete the formation of a “Palestinian state”, separated from an Israeli state, and consisting of small strips of barren, over-populated territory, without infrastructure and water, isolated from one another, behind walls like in Transjordan, and surrounded by the Israeli army and the fascist colonies.

If they succeed in this offensive, imperialism and its Zionist agent will be more confident of being able to finally smash the heroic resistance of the Iraqi masses, of advancing the US government plans to attack Iran, and also to intensify its attacks against the workers of the United States and the European imperialist powers.

There is no middle road when facing the life and death struggle of the Palestinian people who have been fighting to throw out the Zionist occupants of their land for more than half a century: one is unconditionally with the Palestinian people, or one is in the trench of the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel, and the imperialists Bush, Chirac, the UN and the other bandits.

• Stop the genocidal attack of the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel against the Palestinian people!
• Immediate and unconditional freedom to 10,000 or more Palestinian fighters in Zionist jails!
  

Cynically, the world bourgeois media worry about the fate of the Israeli soldier taken prisoner, while it couldn’t care less about the deaths and the suffering inflicted on the millions of oppressed Palestinians that try to defend their land from the occupiers. As revolutionary Trotskyists we defend the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to defend themselves and to fight against the Israeli occupying troops with any means at their disposal. The right to fight to defeat the Zionist invader and to destroy the Zionist state, is an inalienable democratic-revolutionary right of the Palestinian people.

The Palestine bourgeoisie of Al Fatah and Hamas: prison guards of the enslaved Palestinian people

At the same time, we say very clearly that the long suffering of the Palestinian people will only end with the destruction of the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel. This will not be won under the leadership of the Palestinian bourgeoisie. No, on the contrary, it will be necessary for the working class and the exploited people to break all ties to the national bourgeoisie.

The Palestine bourgeoisie has betrayed the historic struggle of the Palestinian people for its national liberation and has become the prison guard of its own people, first by signing the Oslo Agreement and today by supporting the ‘Road Map’ that fulfils the goals of the Oslo Agreement.

In 1993, by signing the Oslo agreements the PLO and Al Fatah, headed then by Yasser Arafat, openly renounced the struggle for the destruction of the State of Israel, recognizing its ‘right to exist’, and accepting the plan to create the fiction of a ‘Palestinian state’ coexisting by its side. Those agreements introduced the farce of the “Palestinian territories” under the so-called government of the Palestinian National Authority and its police, as prison guards of their own people as slaves confined to ghettos and concentration camps.

It was against that new system of control that the masses revolted in September of 2000, starting the heroic Palestine revolution. The oppressed workers rose up, took the police stations from the ‘Palestinian National Authority’, disarmed the PNA police and formed their own workers and peasants militias in the towns and camps. Breaking from their own bourgeois police guard and arming themselves, the Palestinian workers and peasants immediately raised to a higher level, the struggle for national liberation, and opened the road to the destruction of the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel.

To smash that revolutionary upsurge, the Zionist state sent in the army to disarm the masses while at the same time protecting the bourgeois leadership of Palestine by locking up Yasser Arafat and his cabinet in Ramallah. To ensure that Arafat kept the revolutionary masses in check, the Zionist state rearmed the Palestine bourgeoisie channelling billions of “international aid” for that purpose, and setting up the Palestinian bourgeoisie as junior partners in some businesses i.e the company that supplies the cement for the wall around Transjordan belongs to a Palestinian group) to control its own people behind the apartheid Wall. The brigades of Al Aqsa and Al Fatah, and then the brigades of Ezzedine Al Kassam of Hamas, at once began to repress the workers and peasants militias proving that they were in fact the new “Palestine” police whose task was to suppress the revolutionary masses.

Because it openly attacked the Palestinian people the bourgeois leadership of Al Fatah was widely discredited in the eyes of the masses. This is why another bourgeois fraction, represented by Hamas (the fraction of the commercial bourgeoisie, related to the bourgeoisie of the Bazaar of Iran) replaced Al Fatah as the leadership of the “Palestinian Territories’. It was this fraction represented by Hamas, that won the legislative elections last February, and formed the new government chosing the Prime Minister and cabinet, while Al Fatah is now represented only by the President Abu Mazen.

Hamas demagogically won the elections by promising to be for the destruction of the State of Israel, manipulating therefore the feeling and the aspirations of the vast majority of the Palestinian people. But as soon as it became the Government, Hamas offered a ‘truce’ to the Israeli state for 10 years. That is, it guaranteed the existence and survival of Israel by undertaking the task of policing its own people. This proves yet again, that the liberation of the Palestinian people can only be won by the working class leading the poor peasantry, and destroying the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel.

Hamas has already renounced the historical fight for the destruction of the State of Israel. But it has tried to convince the Israeli state that the best way to control the Palestinian people is to pretend that it still fights for the destruction of the State of Israel. With those arguments, Hamas tried to get the Zionist state to release the “international aid” to the Palestinian government and to give it the withheld taxes.

But the Zionist bourgeoisie – backed by US imperialism – rejected this deal with Hamas. They want to see all the fractions of the Palestine bourgeoisie on their knees before Israel. So while the prison guards fight among themselves, the Zionist state sends in its military forces to make clear who commands the jail.


Only the working class of Palestine and the whole Middle East can destroy the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel and defeat the imperialist troops in Iraq and complete the national liberation of these countries


The undefeated Palestinian people have suffered more than half a century of massacres and betrayals, because the leaders of the national liberation struggle are the national bourgeoisie. The Palestine bourgeoisie, like all national bourgeoisies, are the junior partners of imperialism. They would prefer going to prison like the Hamas leadership today, and that its people got killed, than arming the masses. It knows that if the Palestinian people were armed not only would they destroy the state of Israel, but as already happened in 2000, they would destroy the national bourgeoisies power and private property. Therefore, it hides the weapons so that the masses cannot get them, and forces them to face the murderous attacks of the fifth biggest army in the world –armed to the teeth by imperialism –with empty hands.

The only way then, that the Palestinian masses can face the Zionist military offensive, is to break all political subordination to their own bourgeoisie, and take the leadership of the national liberation struggle into their own hands. They must form workers and peasants militias and arm the Palestinian people and fight for the destruction of the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel. Otherwise the blood of their martyrs will again be used by the Palestinian bourgeoisie as small change in its negotiations with imperialism and the Zionist state.

In that way, the masses of occupied Palestine should unite in struggle with the millions of Palestinians expelled from their land by Zionism and who now live in Lebanon and Jordan. The heroic masses that resist in Gaza and Transjordan, have a powerful rearguard in the millions of Palestinians who live in the south of Lebanon where their militia forced the Israeli army to retreat in June 2000 in a first engagement of the coming Palestinian revolution! There are many battalions able to confront the Israeli army on the East Bank of the Jordan River, in Jordan, where almost half the population is Palestinian.

• Break with the bourgeoisie of Al Fatah, Hamas, Hizbollah, etc., so that the Palestinian masses can be armed to defeat the Zionist offensive and open the road to the destruction of the State of Israel!
• Break with Hizbollah so that the Palestinian masses in Lebanon can engage the Zionist state with their armed forces!
• Break with the Jordanian bourgeoisie - whose monarchy is responsible for terrible massacres against the Palestinian people-, to allow the Palestinian masses of Jordan to split the Jordanian army and unite with its brothers and sisters in occupied Palestine!
• Build workers and peasants militias to take the leadership of the national liberation struggle, and retake the road of the revolution of 2000 that leads to the victory over imperialism!
• For a workers and peasants revolution capable of destroying the state of Israel, and creating a secular, democratic and nonracist Palestinian State where the workers and exploited people of all religions can coexist peacefully!
  

Re-entering the road to revolution, the Palestinian working class can lead a united struggle in the Middle East to defeat the imperialist troops in Iraq, stop any attack on Iran, and win a new Vietnam war that buries in the sands of the desert both imperialism and its Zionist policeman.


Stop the ‘oil wars’ of the imperialists and their national bourgeois junior partners!


The national bourgeoisies of the Middle East states, “condemn” the new Zionist offensive, but do not move a finger to support the Palestinian people. This is because these bourgeoisies are the junior partners of imperialism in plundering the oil of the region and the superexploitation and oppression of their own workers. Such is the case with the Iranian bourgeoisie and French imperialism; the Iraqi bourgeoisie –both Sunni and Shiite – and US and British imperialism.

Those national bourgeois regimes –from North Africa, to Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran –are exploiting and repressing hundreds of millions of poor workers and peasants who live in the most extreme poverty and misery, while under their feet are the greatest oil reserves in the world. They also get their share of the profits from the million of workers who move from country to country to work in oil wells living in squalid camps and guarded by the mercenaries of the oil companies.

The bloody occupation of Iraq, the warlike threats against Iran, and the Zionist offensive against the Palestinian people, are all part of the “oil wars” of the imperialist powers and the national bourgeoisies of the region. For that reason, the Egyptian bourgeoisie sent 2500 police to the border with Gaza to guarantee that no Palestinians can escape to Egyptian territory. The Syrian bourgeoisie, although equipped with artillery, allowed Israeli planes to fly over Damascus in a clear military threat, but did no more than verbally “repudiate” that action. The Iranian bourgeoisie, that constantly threatens a “mother of all battles” against the state of Israel and imperialism, does nothing but request that the UN Security Council meets…that same den of imperialist thieves that imposes sanctions against Iran for its nuclear development!

Only the working class can stop these “oil wars”, because it has no class interest that ties it to imperialism, only chains to break. The most urgent task is to unite the ranks of the working class of the whole Middle East, so it can use the most powerful “missile” of all against imperialism and its bourgeoisies agents: to attack its private property and its super profits with a generalised struggle to expropriate the imperialistic oil monopolies, and the nationalization without compensation and under working control of the oil and gas wealth in all the Arab nations, and the whole Middle East.


One world working class, one fight! The destruction of the State of Israel and the defeat of the imperialistic troops in Iraq are the tasks of the workers and the oppressed peoples of the Middle East and the world

In order to be able to go in aid of their Palestinian brothers and sisters the workers of the Middle East must break all the links that tie them to their own native bourgeoisies.

• The heroic Iraqi resistance must break with the Shiite and Suni bourgeosies to unite with the Palestinian masses in one fight against imperialism and the state of Israel!
• The Egyptian workers and exploited must break with their oppressive bourgeoisie to demolish the border that separates them from their Palestine brothers and sisters, and provide arms, food and medicines so that they can oppose the Israeli army!
• The workers and exploited people of Iran must break with their national bourgeoisie and send arms, missiles, etc to the Palestinian people!
• Defeat imperialism and expropriate its monopolies, destroy the State of Israel, overthrow the lackey bourgeois regimes, and create worker-peasant governments within a Federation of Workers and Peasant governments of the Middle East!
  

The fight to destroy Zionist-Fascist state of Israel is also a task of the proletariat of the imperialist powers that created Israel, finance it and supply it with arms


The proletariat of the US, Britain, France and other imperialist powers have the key to stop the Zionist offensive and to defeat imperialism in Iraq.

• Paralyse the imperialist war machine and the Zionist war machine by workers boycotts, strikes, mobilizations and pickets.
• Stop all shipments of arms, equipment and provisions to the Zionist State and the occupying armies of Iraq!
• Provide the Palestinian masses and the Iraqi resistance with arms, food and medicines, so they can defeat the imperialists and the Zionists!
  

But to defeat imperialistic powers we have to defeat the labor bureaucracy, the labor aristocracy and the leaders of the World Social Forum that chains the workers and peasants to the popular front with the imperialists

The working class and the exploited of Latin America must take the lead in the defense of the Palestinian people. It’s long struggle for national liberation is the same fight as that of the workers and poor peasants of Latin America to remove the imperialist yoke.

In contrast the World Social Forum leaders like Fidel Castro are demanding that the UN intervene to stop the Zionist offensive in Gaza and return to the ‘Road Map’! Kirchner, Lula, Chavez, Morales and Co., “condemn” the attack of the Zionist army, and plead for “peace”. At the same time they are preparing to sign at the Mercosur meeting on 20 and 21 July, a Free Trade Agreement with the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel, while the Palestinian working class and people are being killed and injured. Down with the FTA with Israel!

Therefore the first condition, for the workers and peasants of Latin America to support the struggle of our class brothers and sisters of Palestine, is to break with the bourgeoisies, their regimes and their governments, and with the union bureaucracies, Castroites, and fake Trotskyists, who are today part of the World Social Forum.


Emergency Call to the world working class

The Leninist Trotskyist Fraction (FLT) calls on the world working class to take up the revolutionary program of struggle for the liberation of the Palestinian people that we have advanced. Take to the streets to fight for the destruction of the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel, and for the defeat of imperialism and the victory of the heroic Iraqi resistance. Surround the US and Israeli embassies everywhere in the world; use stoppages, boycotts, pickets and general strikes to stop the shipment of arms to the Zionist state and the imperialist army in Iraq. Supply arms, equipment, food and medicines to the heroic peoples of Palestine and Iraq that are fighting for their national liberation. The world working class, the only one that can defeat imperialism and its Zionist policeman, must fight side by side with its class brothers and sisters of Palestine, Iraq and the whole Middle East!

• Stop the genocidal attack of the Israeli state and its army against the Palestinian workers and people!
• Immediate and unconditional freedom for the more than 10,000 Palestinian fighters held as hostages in Israeli jails!
• Down with the “Road Map” of the imperialistic butchers, the Zionist state and the Arab bourgeoisies, that would impose an apartheid Palestinian state and enslave the Palestinian people!
• Workers and peasants militias and arms for all Palestinian people so that the proletariat wins the leadership of the national war of liberation against the Zionist occupier!
• For the destruction of the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel!
• Only a workers government of the self organised and armed Palestinian masses can guarantee a secular, democratic and nonracist Palestinian State!
• For a Federation of Workers and Peasants Republics of the Middle East!
• For the military defeat of all the invading troops, and for the victory of the heroic resistance of the Iraqi masses!
• Out with all the imperialist troops from Afghanistan and the Middle East!
• UN and imperialist hands off Iran

July 10, 2006

Venezuela: Congress of the National Union of Workers (UNT) (1)

We reproduce here an edited version of the FLT statement on the recent UNT 2nd Congress held in May.(2) What could have been a major step towards working class independence from Chavez ended in a split between several factions, all competing to be the best Chavistas. Most significant, it is clear that the so-called Trotskyist groups in the leadership of the UNT are not fighting for political independence from Chavez. This confirms our analysis that the fake Trotskyists in Venezuela are acting, as they are in other countries, as the left wing of the popular front in Latin America.

Workers struggle sacrificed to the petrodollar bourgeoisie

Between last May 25-27 at the Army Officer's Club in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, the second congress of the National Union of Workers (UNT)(3), was held. The UNT is the most important workers union in Venezuela with more than 2000 delegates representing a million or more Venezuelan workers.

The resolutions of the 2nd Congress were of crucial importance for the working class not only of Venezuela, but of all Latin America. It offered the possibility of raising an independent working class program against the bourgeois government of Chavez.(4) Such a program would have been a hard blow against the politics of class collaboration which ‘expropriates’ the anti-imperialist struggle of the Venezuelan masses, strangles the Bolivian and Ecuadorian revolutions, and subordinates workers before the bourgeoisie of the whole continent.

But its resolutions, once more, put the masses at the feet of the exploiters and tied the hands of the Venezuelan and Latin American working class. It was also one more confirmation – if such were needed – of the complete bankruptcy of the fake Trotskyists who are “running a race” to see who can be a better Chavez than Chavez himself. Let’s see what happened in the Congress of the UNT and make some conclusions about the role of the fake Trotskyists organisations in Argentina.

“Ten million votes to re-elect Chavez!”

In the Congress, a minority led by Marcela Maspero, broke from the Congress and left the UNT. This sector, dominated by cadres and leaders of the old Bolivariana Force of the Workers (a failed attempt to build a Chavista central Workers Union), and adherents of Chavismo, refused to allow the election of UNT officers in September, arguing that the main priority was the campaign for “ten million votes for Chavez” to win the presidential election in December.

The leaders of the majority (headed by Orlando Chirino of the UIT(5) to which both factions of the MST in Argentina belong (6) proposed elections in September, but they put as a condition the first resolution had to be… that the UNT and the workers must guarantee first of any other thing 10 million votes for Chavez. Moreover, these leaders denounce in their press a “provocation” by the minority, who set up the ridiculous argument that most of us, the majority delegates don’t support Chavez”. This they say is “a lie”. (Alternativa Socialista N° 431).(7)

Shamelessly, after urging the workers to vote that their main task is to guarantee the re-election of a bourgeois government, they then urged them to vote that “the UNT is a autonomous union, independent of the government”. What do these fake Trotskyists understand by “an independent” union federation? That “the re-election of president Chavez and the independence of the UNT must be simultaneously supported so as to criticize (Chavez) whenever it is necessary…” (ídem).

Imagine that the left groups were leading the Argentinean CGT in 1973 and had launched a campaign for supporting the Peron-Peron slate. (8) What would every class-conscious worker have said? A betrayal of the proletarian cause!. Exactly! The heroic working class militants of the Cordobazo (9), the Vivorazo (10), Sitrac-Sitram (11), the Villazo (12), would have said exactly what we say about the fake Trotskyists: Servants of the bourgeoisie! Enemies of the proletarian revolution!

There is no doubt. Today the fake Trotskyists in Venezuela are the UNT bureaucracy, playing at the same time the role of Stalinism and that of the treacherous union bureaucracies in the other countries of Latin America. Politically they support Chavez, that ally of Kirchner and Repsol.

MAS and PO: working to get ten million “critical” votes… for Chavez

It is impossible to deny that so far, the leaders of the UIT are winning the race to see who is the most “Chavista”. But stepping on their heels are all the other fake Trotskyists, for example the MAS in Argentina and its sister group inside the Venezuelan PRS (the Petare current).

The MAS says it wants to stand “independent worker candidates” but, as the PRS is not legal this “is not possible”. Besides, “most of the workers are politically Chavistas”, and that this cannot be ignored, in so far as “the vote is (something) tactical”. (Socialismo o Barbarie N° 80) (13). For that reason, it ends up calling for a “critical vote”… for Chavez, so that this bourgeois government is re-elected… “critically”.

On the other hand, the PO in Argentina tries to hide it is for “the critical” vote for Chavez. Thus, while it says that voting in the congress of the UNT for “the re-election of Chavez as an strategic policy shows that, despite the differences, the Workers Central Union is under the influence of bourgeois nationalism”, it ends up agreeing with the MAS, in that the vote “is tactical”. Moreover it declares: “it is not a question of our preference for one or another candidate, this is (merely) a tactical issue. It cannot become the main subject matter of a strategic campaign” (Prensa Obrera N° 950, June 15, 2006).(14)

At the end of the day, MAS and PO’s positions could be summarised in a single slogan: “For ten million critical votes… for Chavez”.


PTS: “Spoil your ballot”… sit on the fence, do not face Chavez even in the election

The PTS and its sister group in Venezuela –also a member of the PRS –criticizes those who call for a vote for Chavez as giving in to “bourgeois nationalism”. They prefer to “raise a workers and socialist perspective” by asking people to be very bold, and… spoil their votes.

But the spoiled vote has nothing to do with class politics in the context of bourgeois elections. Moreover, most of the pro-imperialist and pro-coup bourgeois opposition parties and groups will be campaigning for abstention or a blank vote in December elections. The PTS itself already called for a vote for Chavez in the August 2004 referendum; now in order not to appear as openly “Chavista”, it has decided to go for a blank vote. This formula has overall the “virtue” of letting them avoid a confrontation with Chavez. They also reneg on the obligation of telling workers “do not vote for him because he is a bourgeois”.


The politics of class independence in the Venezuelan elections

First we have to expose the deception of “tactical voting” used by the fake Trotskyists. They use this to justify setting up popular fronts or to support “progressive” bourgeois candidates. For revolutionaries, tactics in bourgeois elections are like all tactics, revolutionary tactics. They have to advance the proletarian principles and strategy: in the first place, the elementary principle of class independence. That is to say, it is possible to vote tactically for a workers party or workers candidate, but never for a bourgeois party or candidate.

Second, it is pure deception to call for a ‘tactical vote’ because “there are no conditions” that allow for independent worker candidates in Venezuela, when the UNT exists, a union federation with great authority among the workers! Here was a congress with 2000 worker delegates, one of them could have been chosen as candidate for president. Here is a workers organization which has all the authority to make a campaign for 10 million votes for a UNT worker president and a vice-president from the poor peasants. Such a campaign would have opened the road to a workers and peasants’ government able to break completely with imperialism, solve the land problem and meet the needs of the workers and the exploited people! No doubt that if this resolution had been passed by a show of hands in the congress of workers delegates of the UNT, no legal obstacle could have prevented that campaign for a workers candidacy from going ahead!


An independent working class program

Such a class campaign that raised with clarity a program and an independent workers strategy would had aroused the enormous enthusiasm of the Venezuelan, the Latin America and the United States working class:

• Not even a drop of Venezuelan oil to the US exploiters, slave-traffickers of Latin American immigrants!  No oil to massacre our Iraqi brothers and sisters, and the workers and exploited from New Orleans!
• For the complete re-nationalization, without compensation and under workers control of oil, and the rest of privatized companies!
• Expropriation without compensation of all the large estates and land for distribution among the poor farmers!
• For decent jobs and living wages for all, with the sliding scale of wages and working hours!
• Minimum wage set at the level of the family shopping basket and indexed according to inflation!
• Down with all the anti-strike laws!
• Free quality public Health and Education, on the basis of the expropriation of the private schools and hospitals, the repudiation of the external debt and the application of progressive taxes on the “31 families” (15) and the monopolies!
• A class campaign for a program that calls on the workers and the exploited to vote for a presidential candidate of the UNT, that is, not to vote for Chavez!
  

Who can doubt that this would galvanize the embattled Bolivian working class that has begun to resist Morales repressive government! It would also inspire the Argentinean working class that refuses to accept the miserable wages and work conditions imposed on them by the union bureaucracy. It would motivate the US working class which today begins to wake up only to be told by the WSF to kneel at the feet of the Democratic Party of Clinton and the Kennedys, praised by Chavez!

None of the currents of the UNT nor of the left in Venezuela want a class program.

The ex-Trotskyists that lead the UNT know well that this is possible. But they want to avoid it at all costs. They have demonstrated, and continue to demonstrate, that they are the faithful subjects of Chavez; self-confessed reformists whose role is to prevent any move towards class independence by the workers, and to make the latter subservient to the “progressive” bourgeois and the “patriotic” military.

We are not then dealing with “a tactical” problem, but one of principles: because what these currents say to the working class is that the liberation of the workers will not be the work of the workers themselves, but of bourgeois leaders like Chávez.

The ex-Trotskyists supporting Chavez are the same tendencies that in Brazil called for a vote for the popular front of Lula-Alencar, and who are now supporting the class collaborationist government in Bolivia. They are the “theoreticians” who preach the need to create “worker parties based on the unions”. But then where they lead a union federation as the UNT in Venezuela, they refuse to put up a workers candidate for the presidential elections!

As Trotsky said, whoever gives even the slightest political support to a bourgeois government, renounces its revolutionary overthrow by the masses. That is, they renounce the workers’, socialist revolution. These servants of Chavez have deserted the proletarian revolution.

International Coordination Secretariat of the Leninist Trotskyist Fraction

Notes

(1) Workers National Union
(2) This statement first appeared in the paper of the Argentine group Workers Democracy.
(3) The UNT was born of the rank and file revolt against the pro-coup, pro-imperialist CTV, the old Workers Central of Venezuela, with a notoriously corrupt and bureaucratic leadership affiliated to Accion Democratica, once the most important bourgeois party, and totally subservient to the establishment.
(4) We say that Chavez is a ‘Bonapartist’ leader of a bourgeois state with a bourgeois constitution, balancing between imperialism, the national bourgeoisie and the working masses. Despite Chavez ‘left’ persona, the Venezuela state defends bourgeois property and ‘nationalised’ property remains that of the bourgeois state.
(5) The UIT is one of the international fractions that came out of the Morenoist LIT-CI after the Argentinean MST split the MAS. The UIT was until recently the international organization of the MST and its “sister” groups.
(6) The MST now has split in two irreconcilable fractions, the fraction”2” (led by Pedro Soranz) has just taken control of the UIT, expelling the fraction “1”.
(7) Socialist Alternative.
(8) CGT: Central General de Trabajadores, or Workers Central Union federation. In 1973 it was led by the Peronist bureaucracy (and most of the second half of the 20th century). In 1973 the Peronist Party made the then president (also a Peronist, but of a somewhat left-leaning wing) resign, so that there could be new elections, and to allow General Peron to run for his third presidency. His wife Isabelita Peron ran as vice-president.
(9) Cordobazo: On May 29, 1969, and as a part of the worldwide revolutionary wave that was sweeping almost every country in Latin America and most of the world, there was a semi-insurrection in Cordoba, Argentina’s second city, and a main industrial center at the time. Having been preceded by very combative and persistent student revolts in several Universites all over the country, the Cordobazo began as a protest against the elimination of the so-called ‘English Saturday’ (any time over the half day was paid as time-and-a-half - 50% more) and ended with the defeat of the police that had been called to repress the demonstrations and marches that the workers the owners of Cordoba had made for two or three days. The police had to quit the city and the army was called to replace it. It is important to remember that in 1969, there was a military dictatorship in charge of the government. The Cordobazo opened way to a revolutionary period in Argentina and Latin America that came to an end with the bloody dictatorships of Videla and Co. in Argentina, Pinochet in Chile, etc.
(10) The Vivorazo was another semi-insurrection some time after the Cordobazo, that put Rosario (the third largest Argentinean city, also a main industrial center and the second port of the country) in the hands of the workers for a time.
(11) Sitrac and Sitram were two factory unions (initially set-up as “yellow” unions by the bosses and the bourgeois government to divide and defeat the auto-workers who were affiliated to the SMATA, or Autoworkers United Union). But they shot themselves in the foot. The young workers of the two most important factories in Cordoba –FIAT Materfer, that manufactured electric motors and electric train wagons, and FIAT Concord, that manufactured big electric motors for power stations, dams, etc.- in 1970 defeated the “yellow” bureaucracy in each factory, united the two unions, creating the SITRAC-SITRAM Union, and immediately called for a “working-class nationwide congress of the rank and file, with mandated delegates of every workplace in the country” to vote a working-class program to find a breakthrough for the crisis-ridden Argentina. The two congresses that were held under the name of “Classism”, convened hundreds of militant delegates. “Classism” as a phenomenon was very important, because up to that time, and from the late forties, the previous generations of workers had been mainly Peronist. Unfortunately most the ‘classist’ vanguard that it created were recruited to the various guerrilla currents inspired in Cuban ‘guerrillasim’ (including fake-Trotskyist ones). There were other centrist currents too, as well as left-Peronists, Stalinists, etc. All of them did their utmost to frustrate the opportunity for the workers to take the country in their hands.
(12) Villazo, a semi-insurrection in Villa Constitucion, one of the industrial towns that form the industrial belt running from Buenos Aires City (with its Great Buenos Aires Area) up to Rosario City, some 400km of factories, steelworks, oil refineries, ports, etc., along the coast of the rivers Parana and Plate. The Villazo was the last and most important semi-insurrection of the industrial workers taking a city and a series of big factories in their hands, before the military coup that put Videla and Co. in power. It was brutally repressed, in spite of the support and sympathy from the Argentine workers and students, thanks to the union bureaucracy leaving it isolated, and the left vacillating and capitulating to the pressure of the Stalinists, the Peronist bureaucracy, etc. The centrists in those years did not want to be labeled “guerrillas”, so they never raised slogans about self-defense, workers’ armed militia, etc., tending to raise mostly economic (unionist) slogans plus abstract socialist propaganda.
(13) Socialism or Barbarism
(14) Workers Press
(15) “31 families”. Name for the richest group of Venezuelan families. They were closely intertwined with imperialist interests for centuries. Most of their members do not even live in Venezuela.