While the apparent struggle between “progressives” and liberals permeates the continental political scene, the Latin American and Caribbean working class faces the harsh reality of the advance of capital over its rights, regardless of the political force that governs. The deep crisis of capital accumulation processes in the region imposes a tendency towards the destruction of labor rights, deregulation of the labor market, and dismantling of historical social conquests, raising the levels of social inequality and consolidating the migratory phenomenon of millions of Latin American workers.
In this complex picture, the most beneficial situation for capital, and therefore the most unfavorable for the workers, is that these do not constitute a political force independent of the parties of the bourgeoisie with the ability to fight under its own class program against the onslaught of capital imposed through the new bourgeois bipartisanship.
When the problem of the validity of the Communist Party in the continental revolution is raised, as the vanguard organization of the working class, the question of the working class as a historical subject is put on the table, and the necessity of its organization and independent political action as an inescapable condition of the socialist revolution.
The profound ideological crisis generated in the international communist movement after the triumph of the counterrevolution in the USSR has at its center this essential question. Since then, the necessity of the socialist revolution began to be seen as an impossible objective, which resulted in the deterioration of the political intervention of the parties in the organization of the class struggle of the workers and the overvaluation of fragmented social struggles stripped of class character.
The de-proletarianization of the workers' parties, together with the adoption of a strategy of struggle of “anti-capitalist resistance” without class content, has had a negative impact on the political capacity of the workers to recognize themselves as a social class in their own right, and to be able to unite and fight for their own interests and objectives against their class enemy.
Today we see how many Communist and Workers’ Parties, not only do not have the capacity to discern the bourgeois character of the political forces that make up progressivism, but choose to sacrifice the political independence of the party and the working class and subordinate it to the capitalist interests embodied by these social-democratic parties under the ideological narratives of “anti-imperialist resistance”, the “lesser evil” and “geopolitical interest”.
The workers' parties, being ideological prey to this false antagonism, which in terms of progressivism is synthesized in the blackmail of “humanity or barbarism” or “imperialism or independence”, not only leave the working class orphaned of alternatives, but contribute to the objective of the bourgeois class to disarticulate all the revolutionary and transforming political potential that encloses the independent struggle of the working class as historical subject of capitalist society.
This dangerous process of trying to neutralize the revolutionary potential of the working class by subordinating it to the program of progressive social democracy, has a couple of additional harmful consequences for the workers. The first is that by justifying the anti-worker and anti-popular policies of the governments of progressivism, covering up the bourgeois nature of their administration with arguments of ideological manipulation such as the “principal enemy” or “the geopolitical interest”, what it contributes is to generate more frustration and confusion in the popular sectors and the working class, facilitating the way for the influence of extreme right wing ideologies to turn the consciousness of the working masses reactionary.
A more serious problem that generates this uncritical compliance with progressivism, in the same terms of the Sao Paulo Forum, is the weakening of proletarian internationalism, that is, the ability of the global working class to strengthen ties, to unite and articulate their forces around a common strategy of struggle against the class enemy on a global scale.
The indispensable internationalism among Latin American workers has been replaced by solidarity with the nation-states represented by progressive governments. In this way, the workers who struggle within these countries against the anti-popular adjustment programs of these governments, not only lack the international solidarity of some workers' parties of other countries that prioritize solidarity with these capitalist states over solidarity with their class brothers and sisters, but they are also often the object of their attacks and ideological disqualifications in the name of a false “anti-imperialism” with which they try to cover up their support for an oppressive capitalist state.
Communist Party of Venezuela, The false antagonism between “progressives” and liberals, and the validity of the vanguard role of the communist party in the Latin American and Caribbean revolution
