THE ANTI-CAPITALIST AND ECOSOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE, BEYOND THE ELECTORAL PROCESS
Manifesto of the XIV National Congress of the PRT
On March 29 and 30, the XIV National Congress of the PRT (Revolutionary Workers Party), the Mexican Section of the Fourth International, met. The sovereign national assembly, militant of the PRT, was held in the Sierra Norte de Puebla to analyze the national political situation and our tasks, but also to update our perspective as a revolutionary party. There we ratify that we are a party for a revolutionary project of today’s society, that is to say, anti-capitalist and therefore ecosocialist, which does not determine its activity according to an electoral campaign, because a true radical transformation of the capitalist and patriarchal system is required, which knows that this can only be possible with the irruption of the masses taking their historical and social destiny into their hands.
Our political tradition has historical antecedents in the struggles of the working class internationally against imperialism and in the organized participation from below in the struggles of our people. We are a socialist left that has not renounced its ideals of equality, justice and freedom, that continues to fight for a truly democratic society, without exploitation or oppression of any kind, that guarantees a dignified life for all workers, with a workers’ and peasants’ government, of conscious and collectively organized women and men.
The dominant politics in the current spheres of power is marked by cynicism, pragmatism, opportunism and unprincipled chameleonism, by corruption and attacks, defamation, slander, legal warfare or the use of the legal apparatus to persecute opponents, and by the rule of money and individualism in party politics. sometimes disguised as “citizen” or “new politics.”
The empire of bourgeois neoliberalism in politics would like to limit all political options to two camps, to two parties or blocs of parties, but within the system, that is, excluding from the binary system the option proper to the working classes and therefore to the revolutionary left. Wanting to assimilate and manipulate the historical figures of the left and their symbols and proposals, but emptying their radical content. There are those who falsely flaunt themselves with a radical and Trotskyist past, forgetting that a central point of the Trotskyist project is a party with class independence from any bourgeois party, from any project of the system of privileges and exploitation against which we were born fighting since the mobilizations of 1968, in the era of the PRI of Díaz Ordaz and Echeverría.
Enough of others speaking in the name of communism and Trotskyism to distort their content and their political proposal. The XIV National Congress of the PRT says its word and its proposal in the midst of this prevailing political and ideological confusion.
IN THE FACE OF THE ONGOING ECOSOCIAL COLLAPSE: ECOSOCIALISM OR EXTINCTION
The civilizational crisis of capitalism determines the conjuncture we are currently experiencing. This crisis is multidimensional because several recurrent crises converge, intersect and feed back into it: economic, productive, financial, food, health, migratory, political, climatic, war, cultural, and human relations. The productive forces of capitalism are becoming more and more destructive forces. We are facing not only the crisis of a civilization that is decomposing and in which barbarism is advancing, but a crisis that has two aspects that open up the possibility of the extinction of humanity and life on Earth in the short term:
The first is that of inter-imperialist wars, with confrontations that could escalate to nuclear wars that would mean the end of life on our planet. The risk is not only from the war in Ukraine, but also from Israel’s war of occupation and genocide against Palestine. The possibility of moving quickly from regional wars to new world wars, but with nuclear weapons, which would be catastrophic.
The second strand refers to the ongoing planetary eco-social collapse, determined by the increasing intoxication of the environment, global and accelerated ecocide, the exceeding of six of the nine planetary boundaries that allow life on Earth as we know it, including the one corresponding to climate change resulting from the rise in planetary temperature. They are factors that feed off each other and accelerate, advancing not in a linear and predictable way, but by untimely leaps, so that they only allow the definitions of possible scenarios, all of them catastrophic in the short term.
This should not lead us to the search for individual solutions, for supposed humanizations of capitalism, such as green capitalism, or to abandonment due to despair, but to the political struggle for the perspective of ecosocialism. This is the civilizational alternative that aims to ensure a dignified and equal life for all human beings, as well as to save and care for nature of which we are an indissoluble part, with collective and democratic management by the associated workers of the society/nature metabolism, so as to preserve the integrity and restore the balance of ecosystems damaged by capitalist dynamics. True, the minimum program is already revolutionary in the face of the ongoing eco-social collapse. In the face of climate change, changing the system is the alternative, it is necessary to end capitalism to avoid the end of humanity.
AFTER A SIX-YEAR TERM OF ANTI-NEOLIBERAL RHETORIC, WE CONTINUE TO FIGHT AGAINST NEOLIBERALISM
The crisis, triggered by the pandemic in 2020, coincided with the beginning of the López Obrador (AMLO) government in Mexico. This crisis added complications and political polarizations to the experience of this government and the new political regime. Because it is a government, unlike the previous ones, which was not imposed by fraud, it has enjoyed electoral legitimacy from the beginning, but also popular support that it has managed to maintain until the end of the six-year term. That legitimacy and support have been the basis for the development of an ideological vision that has become hegemonic, which, in the popular imagination, after so many years of struggle against the neoliberal governments of the PRI and the PAN and the militarization initiated by Felipe Calderón, generated the illusion that it would really be the end of neoliberalism and the return of soldiers to the barracks as AMLO had said in the campaign. This illusion was reinforced by AMLO’s declaration that neoliberalism was ending with his government and that his was different from previous ones. But neoliberalism does not end with a decree, even less so when neoliberal governments for more than 30 years have woven an institutional framework that cannot be ended with a gesture, with partial reforms or with the fight against corruption. Neoliberalism is not limited to corruption; Corruption is part of the system itself and its logic of privatization and therefore of capitalist dispossession and exploitation.
AMLO’s government and its probable prolongation in the next one with Claudia Scheinbaum, is characterized by being located in the wave of self-styled “progressivisms” in Latin America. The discrediting of neoliberalism and its crisis of legitimacy after decades was reflected in the emergence of political currents in Latin America, since the beginning of the 21st century, that enunciate an anti-neoliberal discourse, with which they propose themselves as a way out within the system itself. Some analysts called them post-neoliberal, “Citizens’ Revolution,” or simply “progressive” to distance themselves from the perspective of socialist revolution. That is why they resort to the Bonapartist expedient of pretending to place themselves above the social classes, although their commitment to the neoliberal structure maintains them as bourgeois states. In the first wave of “progressive” governments, they quickly showed their limitations, as they could not put an end to neoliberalism as they declared and even, in some cases, became involved in corruption. We have called AMLO’s government, which was fraudulent in 2006 and 2012, a “late progressivism” because it arrives in 2018, in the second wave of Latin American “progressivisms” already worn out by their experience in government and by the end of the prices of oil and other raw materials that allowed them to finance their social programs.
The main contradiction of Latin America’s “progressivisms” is essentially shared by AMLO’s government: anti-neoliberal discourse with welfare-based policies, but maintenance of the central lines of neoliberalism. That is why he insists on affirming that everyone is happy with his economic policy, because the increases in minimum wages (and social welfare programs) are functional to capitalism, because as never before, the profits of the capitalists are extraordinary. Despite welfare, social inequality is maintained and increases at the top, as shown by the existence of Mexican capitalists among the richest in the world.
At the end of the six-year term, two paradigmatic cases show the contradiction of López Obrador’s “progressivism.” The struggle of the CNTE against Peña Nieto’s education reform and the struggle of the movement for the 43 disappeared of Ayotzinapa. In both cases, the President has admitted that the objectives of these struggles will not be resolved. He has told the CNTE that there is no longer enough time to repeal Peña Nieto’s neoliberal education reform. In fact, both in the case of Ayotzinapa (and, in general, in the case of the disappeared politicians), and in the case of the problem of violence, there is indeed a turnaround. The creation of the National Guard, despite what was initially announced that it would be civilian in nature, is a continuation and deepening of the logic of militarization that began with Calderón. Confronted with this reality, AMLO had to admit that he had changed his mind.
With regard to Ayotzinapa, the six-year term will end without resolving the case, because when the investigation ran into the army, no further progress was made. And justifying the armed forces, the President himself has dared to point to the movement of the 43, relatives, lawyers and friends as manipulated by the right. The case is more serious because at the same time this government has given more power to the armed forces, the army and the navy, by granting them positions within the state apparatus that were previously headed by civilians. But, in addition, these are positions and institutions where they will manage resources of state-owned enterprises. A new political regime implies a rearrangement of hegemonic sectors of the ruling class. In the case of Mexico, in the new regime in the process of consolidation, an already characteristic feature of this new form of political domination will be the fact that part of these hegemonic sectors in the new regime will be the armed forces, as administrators and representatives of state enterprises.
The government also denounces feminism as manipulated by the right. The absurd accusation does not understand that anti-capitalist feminism has been fighting the patriarchal structure since before the AMLO government and that it will have to continue to do so after this government. The fight against high levels of femicidal violence and for the right to decide indicate this. It is not an electoral movement or manoeuvre, but an anti-system one and it is not reduced to vulgar manoeuvres, although at election time all parties opportunistically talk about it being women’s time. The fact that for the first time the two presidential candidates are women confirms that parity and affirmative action of women in public office is not a guarantee of feminist consciousness.
The government’s discourse, trying to disqualify the main current struggles as if they were right-wing maneuvers, ignores the fact that these movements have been going on for some time and are not conjunctural in the face of this government. We have been fighting for the politically disappeared since the time of Echeverría with the emblematic figure of Rosario Ibarra, when many of the current government officials were in Echeverría’s PRI or in the successive PAN and PRI governments.
The government says that it has launched a “Fourth Transformation” that has put an end to neoliberalism, but has maintained the economic structures (trade treaties and obligations, notably the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, continuation of NAFTA) and policies (in the state apparatus) that are properly neoliberal, limiting itself to disputing energy rent for its policies of individualized social assistance. denying collective social organizations and to promote infrastructure projects. As for the dispute over energy rents, it does so through partial reforms, instead of radically repealing Peña Nieto’s neoliberal energy reform as a whole and with the renationalization of the electricity industry. Or without touching the payment of the public debt, in a relevant way the payment of the service and debt by FOBAPROA. The suspension of the payment of the public debt would be the radical measure that would allow the financing of all social programs and more.
The other common thread with the “progressive” governments of the region is the continuation of neo-state extractivism, totally insensitive to the serious eco-social problem of the plundering of natural resources, which is related to the enormous wave of violence that covers our country, caused by powerful criminal groups in collusion with businessmen, politicians and the military. Violence and criminal groups at the service of extractivism and the development of capitalism in the countryside. Going to the causes of violence cannot be limited to giving scholarships to young people to serve as free labor for businessmen, but has to do with cutting short the capitalist interests of extractive companies, generally foreign, and the other businesses that develop in the countryside with the protection of hitmen and private armed gangs and collusion with politicians and the armed forces.
All this shows that there has not been a “Fourth Transformation” in this six-year term. A revolutionary transformation would imply the organized participation of the masses and a questioning of the neoliberal and capitalist institutional scaffolding as a whole, by means of a new Constituent Assembly and a new Constitution. Instead, AMLO’s government applies a plebiscitary democracy that limits the participation of the masses to voting among options of the system, and at the same time, combats social organizations and autonomous collective movements by disqualifying them as corrupt or manipulated by the right. A new Constituent Assembly could have been convened at the highest point of rupture with the PRI and the PAN, when the 30 million votes of 2018. Instead, partial reforms that did not attack the core of neoliberalism and advanced individualized welfare policies were favored. When on February 5, 2024, AMLO proposed his 20 reform initiatives, 18 of them constitutional, he imposed them as the center of his government program on Morena’s candidate, Claudia Scheinbaum, who accepted them and committed to them. They say that the idea is to recover the social character of the 1917 Constitution. However, some of these proposals are reactionary, such as maintaining the role of the armed forces, and others are also debatable, but if we really wanted to recover the character of the 17th in this era, what would be conducive would be a new Constituent Assembly for a new Constitution and not continue with partial reforms. In short, the problem is that a “Fourth Transformation” would have to be revolutionary in the current context, that is, anti-capitalist. And for this, a party different from Morena is required, which is multi-class but with capitalist hegemony, an electoralist instrument (not a party for the struggle) marked by the careerist and bureaucratic dispute for positions, now experiencing a new wave of accommodating defectors from the PRI, the PAN, the PRD and other parties. That is to say, an anti-capitalist, ecosocialist and also feminist, democratic and internationalist party is required.
BUILDING A REVOLUTIONARY PARTY TODAY
The XIV National Congress of the PRT has reaffirmed the need for a radical, anti-capitalist and ecosocialist transformation, whose possibility and viability depends on certain objective historical conditions that are given (the civilizational crisis of capitalism) but also on the existence and organization of a broad anti-capitalist force linked to the struggles of the masses.
It is possible, as has already happened in several Latin American countries, that fed up with neoliberalism, but also with progressive intermediate solutions, there will be new explosions, popular anti-systemic explosions. But as these experiences have also shown, the popular explosion is not enough if at the same time there are not present in the previous struggles and in the crisis, revolutionary militant organizations to overcome the spontaneity towards a radical, fundamental change. That is to say, the objective conditions marked by the capitalist civilizational crisis are not enough if there is not also an ideological struggle to win the masses to an anti-capitalist consciousness. It is necessary to build a counter-hegemonic pole to the current “progressive” consciousness in order to grow into the revolutionary anti-capitalist consciousness.
A great deal of ideological and political confusion prevails in this area. The recomposition of the ruling classes in a new political regime with a discourse supposedly above class interests and rhetorically anti-neoliberal feeds this confusion, which is strengthened by the positions of those who were part of the socialist left and who today, demoralized by what they consider old unviable ideals, embrace a supposedly realistic and institutional perspective. absorbed into the capitalist state.
The PRT is committed to promoting a broad front of social movements and anti-capitalist forces that, while maintaining class independence, fight and resist, whoever governs, until they constitute a broad pole to dispute political power and initiate a real transformation that breaks with capitalism and restarts the interrupted Mexican revolution.
At the assembly of the XIV Congress of the PRT we paid tribute to our dear comrade Rosario Ibarra, who passed away in April 2022. In these terrible years of the pandemic, many comrades have passed away and we pay tribute to them during the Congress. But in relation to our message and commitment, today it is appropriate to rescue the words of our comrade Rosario in her second presidential campaign as a PRT candidate, in 1988, when she said the following on June 22 at the University City of the UNAM:
“We aspire to represent that generation of fighters who don’t give up or sell out… To those who, through their action, opened the way for the formation of mass democratic organizations; to those who took to the streets in 1968 with the portrait of Ernesto Che Guevara and saw in him an example of revolutionary stature” (…) “… we want to represent the heretics, those who were burned on the altars of the Inquisition, those who did not adapt to the grayness of the present reality, those who said ‘and yet it moves’, those who did not allow themselves to be intimidated by repression, nor were they seduced by the siren songs of the establishment; to those who keep alive the subversive flame of ’68 and ’86… We are the reddest part of the red flag, as the great Peruvian poet César Vallejo said. We are the ones who don’t want any more Hiroshimas, Auschwitz, Gulags or Military Camps No. 1. We are the ones who are not satisfied with the present, the ones who fight for socialism. Let the reformists and renegades keep their worn-out present. We fight for the socialist future, firmly supported by a present of struggle. We feel more optimistic than ever, at peace with our inner selves because we stand by our convictions. The same thing will happen to this cult of modernity and the reconciliation of rootless classes as happened to the liberal cult. History will regain morality. The memory of the struggles will break the conciliation of the great unanimous commemorations. Living tradition will confront morbid nostalgia. ‘It is by sowing in the darkness that the dawns germinate’ The future is ours!”
With this spirit inherited from Rosario Ibarra, we continue the tasks of building a revolutionary party in Mexico. It is in this spirit that we call on new generations of militants to join the PRT.
We understand that building a revolutionary party with mass influence is not a linear process. It is necessary to converge with other militant forces convinced of the socialist proposal and the need for an instrument independent of the bourgeois political forces that are hegemonic today.
Without sectarianism, we have tried several times to achieve this convergence, as we did at the time with the call of the Mexican Union of Electricians to build a Political Organization of the People and the Workers. But at the same time that we will try every possibility of building a broad party of the working class , we understand the urgency and necessity of the concrete strengthening of the PRT to help that broader process that has the central challenge in this epoch of maintaining class independence.
But before advances in the construction of a broad revolutionary party, it is necessary to respond to the difficult situation of the struggles of the working classes today, in trade unionism and strikes, in the struggle for justice for the Ayotzinapa 43 and for the political disappearances denounced by Rosario Ibarra and Eureka since the 1970s and the tens of thousands today. It is necessary to respond to the struggle of anti-capitalist feminism and to the struggles of peoples and communities against ecocidal neoliberal megaprojects, as well as against the violence protected by extractive capitalism of mining companies and other businesses of so-called organized crime.
These central struggles at this time, whose historical demands are not resolved, are pressured to be postponed or submitted to the rhythms and interests of electoral campaigns and candidacies. The response at this level is the one approved by the XIV Congress to promote an alternative social and political pole to the parties of the government, but also an alternative to the parties of the traditional right of the PRI, the PAN and the PRD. An alternative pole of struggle with a program of struggle for before and after the electoral processes independent of the blocs and parties in the campaign. From some of these movements there are already calls for unity in the logic or political line of what we call the alternative pole, but each movement names it in a particular way.
In the federal and local elections of 2024 we note the absence of a true socialist left, the absence of a political party that at the institutional level expresses and represents the interests of the working classes of the city and the countryside. The current electoral system, with its exclusion of working-class parties, prevents the casting of a class vote and condemns people to vote as an individual, as a “citizen”, that is, condemned to choose between options of the system, between parties that, although multi-class in their composition, are determined by the hegemony of the ruling classes.
Even if a new political regime is consolidated and AMLO’s government continues, the constant will be the same. Both the bloc of government parties and the traditional right-wing parties of the PRI, the PAN and the PRD have already demonstrated in practice their government policy, Morena itself is already a party of government.
Claudia Scheinbaum promises to continue this six-year term of what they call 4T (building a second floor, she says), a government that began in 2018 saying that it would end neoliberalism, but that at the end of her six-year term it turns out that some of the same struggles that confronted neoliberalism continue to fight because the neoliberal reforms were not repealed. Obviously, it is clear that we are also opposed to the hypocritical campaign of the right wing of the PRI and the PAN that seeks the return of the old neoliberal oligarchy.
The conflict at the end of the six-year term is taking two parallel courses: that of the electoral campaigns and that of the class struggle. For the working classes, peoples in resistance and the important struggles we have mentioned there is no alternative in the electoral process. The alternative lies outside the electoral process. It is the unity of the struggles, yes, but in an alternative social and political pole to the parties of the government and the parties of the traditional right. A pole with a program of struggle before and after the elections, because whoever governs, rights are defended. Beyond electoral promises and calls to vote, the struggle must continue and not be subordinated to the interests of the parties at stake. Only struggle pays.
Contrary to the media’s versions of what the parties should do, the PRT is built as part of these struggles. This is how we were born in 1976, on the margins of institutionality, as a party for struggle. We will be consistent with this definition.
On September 22, 2019, comrade Guillermo Almeyra, another paradigmatic reference of our party, passed away. Aware of the seriousness of his state of health, on September 20 he wrote: “To get through the weekend and improve my lungs: this could therefore be my last battle.” My Last Battle, that’s the title of his article published on Sunday the 22nd of that month in which he finally passed away. In this article he recapitulates his experiences of struggle and his militant commitment. In the end he concluded by saying: “If I cannot win this difficult battle that I am fighting, let these flags pass to those who follow me in the race. Long live the Mexican workers! Long live proletarian internationalism! Let’s all come together and build an alternative to capitalism!”
The XIV National Congress of the PRT has taken up the banners bequeathed to us by generations of militant comrades who went ahead of us on the road and that comrade Almeyra passed on to us “to continue the race”. Its resolutions and the renewed impetus of the militant struggle of the PRT achieved with this Congress must be equal to the historical challenges of the present and the future.
May 2024.
PRT CENTRAL COMMITTEE
On behalf of the XIV Ordinary National Congress
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