TOWARD THE SOCIALIST REVOLUTION
The following article, announcing the founding of the Fracción Socialista Revolucionaria, appeared in the June 1975 issue of Revolución Socialista. The Fracción Socialista Revolucionaria (FSR - Revolutionary Socialist Faction) is a recently formed revolufionary organization, It results from a split of threeFourths of the members of the Círculo Camilo Torres (CCT - Camilo Torres Circle), who found it difficult to carry out activity among the students, workers, and peasants within the CCT.
The FSR emerges at a time when the historical conditions of the period are marked by a rise of mass struggles nationally and internationally: Internationally, the class struggle is sharpening considerably. It is the hour of the Vietnamese revolutionaries, the situation in Portugal, the workers struggles in Europe, the economic crisis of capitalism, and the crisis of bourgeois leadership. In Panama all this is combined with the inability either of the revisionism and reformism of the Communist parties or of foquismo (the heritage of petty-bourgeois romanticism, which reduces the Cuban experience to its purely military aspect) to offer a response capable of giving leadership to the explosions of class struggle. Nationally, bourgeois reformism, which has been govering since 1968, attempts to calm down the existing class struggle through Bonapartism and a policy of anti-imperialist demagogy, while at the same time allowing capitalism to penetrate to the very depths of every pore of our society. The historic struggle of our people to recover their major natural resource, the canal, has been diverted from its real goal, with the regime proposing national and not social recovery. The peasant movement has also been diverted from its major struggles, in the name of carrying out a fake agrarian reform. Through lending support to fascistic sectors (the leadership of the national student federation), the government has tried to mire the student movement in confusion, thus preventing it from coming forward to carry out its most important political action in the history of our country. As for the working class, although organizationally fragmented and subject to the iron ideological control of the bourgeoisie and reformism, it is now exerting pressure on the bureaucracy and is seeking to resist the deterioration of its material conditions and to preserve its rights. The FR emerges as a necessity posed by the class struggle for the construction of an organization capable of lending coherence to the socialist alternative. Ideologically, this means a realignment that breaks with the heritage of petty-bourgeois romanticism and differentiates itself from the revisionism of the Communist parties and their practices of reform and conciliation. The FSR proposed the convergence of various advanced groups, militants, and cadres of the working class into the nucleus of a party. There is a prevalent nation among some sectors that the formation of so many leftist organizations is bad, that this foments division, that there are not sufficient differences to justify such a situation. These views are widespread, especially among the petty bourgeoisie. These opinions are based on the failure to understand that the existence of different political organizations is a consequence of the division of society into classes and does not at all depend on the good or ill will of individuals.
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Thus, the root of the differences on tactics, strategy, and programmatic conceptions lies in the class struggle. Many differences that at first glance appear to be matters of nuance actually have deep implications. The experience of Chile offers a complete range of exumples in this respect. How should the misnamed middle class be dealt with? How to struggle against the liberal revolution? These problems were resolved in a reformist and not revolutionary manner, from the standpoint of the petty bourgeoisie and not the proletariat. The result is well known: Imperialism and the bourgeoisie found propitious ground for preparing the massacre of the Chilean working class and revolutionary movement. Those who say that what is needed in Panama is a democratic revolution and not a socialist revolution exhibit total ignorance of the reality of the country. They assert that the problems facing the masses in Panama derive more from the deficiency of capitalist development and the obstacles erected by feudal and semifeudal structures than from the very effects of the bourgeois system of exploitation and domination that exists in out country. Those who propose a bourgeois-democratic revolution suppose that imperialism is an external phenomenon against which all classes of the nation, all the people, must struggle. They fail to realize that imperialism is solidly linked to the internal structure of the country and is associated with the bourgeoisie. They ignore the fact that in Panama, as in any country in Latin America, the struggle against imperialism is inevitably linked to the struggle against the "national" bourgeoisie. The FSR maintains that the class that is the decisive force in the process of revolutionary transformation is the working class. It is the struggle for the destruction of the capitalist economic system that is on the agenda. What is serious about the positions of democratic revolution is that they reflect themselves in political attitudes within the workers movement and other sector, attitudes which advocate conciliation with the bourgeoisie (national unity). In order to resolve the economic and social problems and build socialism, it is first of all necessary to construct a political power that concretizes workers democracy. That is what the bourgeoisie and imperialism oppose. The FSR calls for a struggle against capitalism and imperialism and their objective allies, reformism and opportunism. The people will crush the CIA, CONEP, CAPACI Military bases out! Socialist revolution or caricature of revolution! Panama, June 26, 1975 40
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