New Progressive International or old center-left project?
By Alejandro Bodart
In the portals of various media, the launch of a new Progressive International is announced that would be promoted by intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, various actors, Known activists and political leaders. Actually, The initiative is not new and, as we will see, neither are the proposals it promotes or the characters that make it up. The creation of this diffuse organization dates from December 2018 and its promoters were the US Democratic Senator Berni Sanders and the former Greek Minister of Economy of Syriza Yannis Varoufakis.
Your stated goals would be"Promote union, coordination and mobilization of activists, associations, unions, social movements in the face of the advance of authoritarianism (1)”. And they say aspire to a world "democratic, decolonized, egalitarian, released, solidary, sustainable, ecological, peaceful, postcapitalist, prosperous and plural (2)”.This compendium of good intentions would become its programmatic bases. Quite poor if we consider that they are presented pompously as anew international. For more details we will have to wait, if the pandemic allows them, to their next September meeting in Iceland, where Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir is part of the move. But I recommend not to get too illusions.
The generality and superficiality of the objectives and proposals are a very important first piece of information about the nothing new nature of the discourse of this "new" organization., that looks like two drops of water to center-left projects that have been born and ended without pain or glory in the recent past. And if this were insufficient to finish closing a characterization, it is enough to analyze who are the members of its strategic direction.
Tell me who your friends are and I'll tell you who you are
Let's start with Fernando Haddad, last candidate for president of the PT of Brazil, former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa and Álvaro García Linera, former vice president of Bolivia. All of them were part of "progressive governments" that did not cause any fundamental change in the economic and social structure of their countries., who remained capitalist and dependent, with very high percentages of poverty, a growing deterioration of all public and fundamental rights of workers in decline, which led them to wear and tear and opened the door for right-wingers like Jair Bolsonaro to come to power in their countries, Lenin Moreno o Jeanine Áñez. Some of them declare themselves defenders of the Welfare State and claim to defend public health, but when they ruled they deteriorated it to pay external debts. How to believe them that they defend ecology when they deepened extractive and polluting models to guarantee extraordinary profits to corporations.
How to trust characters like Congressman Giorgio Jackson to aspire to a more democratic world, leader of the Democratic Revolution and the Chilean Broad Front, who when the Piñera government and the reactionary regime inherited from Pinochet were about to fall in a revolutionary way, he and his party agreed with them and came to their defense, turning its back on the mobilized people and victims of brutal repression. Or in Alicia Castro, union leader of the Argentine CGT bureaucratic, deputy at the time for the Alliance that brought De la Rúa to power, that in his fall he murdered dozens of popular fighters.
We could talk about the Brazilian Celso Amorín, minister and ambassador of several neoliberal governments, by Elizabeth Gómez Alcorta, current minister of the Peronist president Alberto Fernández, that since he took office last December to date he paid more than 5.000 millions of dollars in interest on an illegitimate and fraudulent debt while the country lacks the resources to face the pandemic and respond to the most basic economic needs of the majority of the population.
We can say the same about Berni Sanders, who knew how to arouse great expectations by talking about socialism in the heart of the empire and raising some proposals felt by the population, like universal health insurance in a country where those who have no money can die without medical care. His recent support for Joe Biden, candidate of the yanky economic establishment, a racist and misogynist leader of the imperialist Democratic Party, exempts me from further comments.
ThisProgressive International no measure will come out to end external debts, nationalize banking and foreign trade under social control, reverse privatizations, carry out deep agrarian reforms or impose progressive and permanent taxes on the rich. They are defenders of the private property of companies and banks and their model of freedom is exhausted in the farce of bourgeois democracy, to which at most they propose to expand a little. They want to give a human face to a capitalist system that is impossible to humanize and is becoming more and more brutal.. Because of all this from the hand of these people it will not be possible, beyond the good intentions of some, eliminate poverty, achieve equality and prosperity for all who proclaim. To achieve that and much more, the only viable project is socialism on a world scale, as proposed by the LIS, our revolutionary international organization.
- From its official website https://progressive.international
- Idem anterior.
