In the last 25 years, the situation of the class struggle in the Latin American continent has undergone important changes that merit a profound study by the Communist and Workers’ Parties. This study has as its starting point the changes in the process of accumulation of capital, its implications for the working class, the changes that have occurred within the parties of the bourgeois system, and the role of the parties of the working class to preserve their political independence in pursuit of their own interests and historical mission. 

The crisis of the traditional bourgeois parties, the irruption of Latin American and Caribbean “progressivism” at the end and beginning of the century, the transformation of trade relations, where the People's Republic of China has become the main economic partner of the Latin American and Caribbean region, the weakening and transformation of the political, economic and military hegemony of the USA in the continent, the resurgence of ultra-liberal and nationalist currents that are shown as the false opposite pole of progressivism that has become the new continental social democracy, are all concrete facts that have radically transformed the reality of the class struggle in the region compared to the last century.

However, despite all the water that has flowed under the bridge of continental history, there are many workers and labor parties in the region that continue to reproduce a strategy and discourse, as if the same conditions of 30 years ago were maintained. 

Everything is simplified to the theory of the “principal enemy”. This is based on the premise of the omnipotent hegemony of US imperialism over the weak Latin American and Caribbean countries, which, with the support of a local bourgeoisie of sepoy lackeys, restricts the free development and independence of these nations. From this analysis, it is concluded that the only valid strategy for the continental working class is to promote broad multi-class alliances of nationalist and patriotic content, to confront the domination of the supposed “principal enemy” and its internal sepoys, where the interests and program of the working class are pushed aside, sacrificed or postponed in function of an abstract general interest of the “homeland”.

But the ideological investment does not end here. It becomes more complex when the tendency to sharpen competition between capital forces in the world unity leads to the strengthening of capitalist poles that compete and confront the traditional monopolistic capital (United States - European Union), and this capitalist competition is interpreted as the emergence of a “progressive” world pole that when clashing with the hegemony of the “principal enemy”, is considered useful for the interest of “humanity”. Then, the strategy of subordination of the working class to social democratic parties within the countries - today called “progressive” - also extends to the support of one of the capitalist poles that fiercely competes for the control of markets, raw materials and trade routes. 

From this analysis emanates the overvaluation of the role of progressive governments and other powers, such as Russia, China and Iran, as a supposed antagonistic pole to this principal enemy to be defeated: US-European imperialism, feeding the illusion of a new and fairer world order that will arise from the victory of some capitalists over others within the same system of exploitation of man by man.

Likewise, positions arise that do not differentiate between the particularities of the processes of national accumulation, equating the interests and plans of domination of capitalist states with unequal levels of development. 

Leaving aside the opportunist illusion about the existence of “good” and “bad” capitalist states, which ignores the inexorable laws of the process of accumulation of capital, Marxist-Leninist Parties cannot lose sight of the contradictions between bourgeois power on a global scale and how these must be exploited by the working class in the world class struggle. The experience of the Bolshevik revolution leaves many lessons in this regard. 

The cycle of the process of capital accumulation in countries where exports of raw materials and mineral products are predominant, has an expansive phase which corresponds to the period of high prices of the raw materials they export, that is, the moment of greatest appropriation of relative rent, and has a crisis phase that coincides with the contraction of the appropriated rent as a consequence of the period of low prices of its export commodities.

Historically, the struggle between the different fractions of the bourgeoisie and the landowning class for the control of state political power, through their parties, has been marked by the preponderance of two programmatic projects: on the one hand liberalism, which since the 1980s gained strength with neoliberal theories and today returns with renewed impetus with the so-called “libertarian” movement, which advocates essentially the same thing with different language: the “end of state interventionism” and full “freedom” of action of private capital as a condition for the alleged “prosperity”. The ultraliberals see state intervention as an external agent alien to the process of accumulation and hindering it, maintaining that the freedom of movement of capital and the capacity of self-regulation of the capitalist system is the natural order of human social metabolism and the panacea of progress. 

The other project that presents itself as its antagonist is statist social-democratic progressivism, which has become a new version of the famous Keynesian “Welfare State”. Personified initially by the traditional social democratic parties, today it is taken up as a banner by the new progressive parties that call themselves the “new left”. Their approach is essentially based on the defense of state intervention in the regulation of the economy and the illusory idea that capitalism can be humanized through laws that seek a “fair distribution of wealth”. 

The Latin American bourgeois political system has been characterized by an alternation in governments of these two forms of managing capital, represented by different parties, which throughout history have changed names and characters, maintaining their essential content: to be the two faces of the same process of capitalist accumulation.

However much the social-democratic, progressive and liberal parties may strive to present themselves as enemy and irreconcilable forms of management. Some of them show themselves as the purity of capitalism, and accuse the others of being “socialists and communists”, while the other side proclaim themselves as the new “anti-imperialist” left, pro-social and workers' rights, the reality shows that both political forces are branches that emanate from the same vein. They are concrete forms through which global capital and the continental bourgeoisie realize their needs and interests. 

The two supposedly antagonistic poles are in reality two political forms of management adopted by the process of capital accumulation in most Latin American countries. In the expansive phase of the cycle of commodity prices and debt expansion, a quantity of resources enters the economy that strengthens the proposal of social democrats and progressives for greater state intervention and public spending, while in the phase of crisis and contraction of the economic cycle, the proposals of the liberal parties for privatizations, reduction of spending, and anti-popular and anti-worker reforms gain strength.

However, it is important to emphasize that historical experience shows that not always the alternation in government between progressive bourgeois parties and/or conservative liberals corresponds to the phase of the capitalist economic cycle that strengthens their original programmatic proposals. Examples abound of how the social democratic and “progressive” parties have also been a very efficient force at the service of the bourgeoisie to execute the most aggressive plans of capital in the crisis phase, that is to say, to implement the shock programs of privatizations, dismantling of the state apparatus and destruction of labor and social rights. The explanation is that these parties, due to their populist base, tend to be more effective in the implementation of the adjustment programs, since they have the capacity to control and demobilize important sectors of the working class and the popular movement. 

This fact does not represent an anomaly, contradiction, deviation or betrayal on the part of the so-called progressive parties, it is part of their nature as parties of the bourgeois system, and the confirmation that these two poles, not only are not antagonistic, but complement each other, in their condition of guarantors of the interests of the capitalists and the bourgeois state.

The first thing to note is that the phenomenon of progressivism is not new in the region. Most of the traditional social democratic parties such as the Socialist Party in Chile, Peronism in Argentina, the PRI in Mexico, the APRA in Peru, etc., emerged under a populist program very similar to the new progressivism that emerged at the end of the last century. Many of these parties even claimed to be anti-imperialist, pro-national liberation and even socialist forces. Later, due to their bourgeois nature, all these organizations derived into the traditional social-democratic parties at the service of the system we know today.

The emergence and destiny of modern progressivism is not very different from traditional Latin American social democracy. At the beginning they burst in with an anti-imperialist, Latin Americanist, pro-independence and social justice discourse. It was the crisis of the traditional social democratic parties, and their subordination to the neoliberal Washington Consensus, which wreaked havoc in Latin American societies, causing poverty and inequality indexes to soar. Thus, the first progressive wave emerged with a very broad alliance of forces in which working class parties participated. 

The central programmatic approach was to halt the advance of the neoliberal model in the region, supported by US imperialism. As an alternative, an independent Latin American integration agenda was proposed, and finally, a program of social content to rescue rights suppressed during the neoliberal period.

With their ideological and political nuances, the first progressive governments in the region were those of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Lula in Brazil, Evo Morales in Bolivia, and Peronist Kirchnerism in Argentina.

When the global crisis of 2007 broke out, progressivism was already beginning to show signs of exhaustion due to its own class limits, the contradictions of its populist program, and its inability to fulfill the popular aspirations that brought it to positions of government. The promised revolutionary transformations of the dependent economic base of Latin American and Caribbean countries never happened. The progressive parties in government advanced in consolidating powerful economic groups, which reaffirmed their character as bourgeois parties at the service of the system.

With the first political crisis of continental “progressivism”, the traditional conservative parties and new political formations of the bourgeoisie returned to government positions by electoral means, from where they deepened the adjustment programs that the parties of progressivism had already been applying at the end of their governments, as a response to the economic crisis. 

The “progressive” parties thus consolidated themselves as the main political opposition force replacing the weakened traditional social democratic parties, inaugurating a new bipartisan structure in several countries of the region. It is not strange that the return of progressivism to government years later and the victories obtained in other countries such as Chile, Honduras and Colombia, occurred within the framework of very broad alliances in which these traditional social democratic parties participated. These are the cases of the “Frente de Todos” of Kirchnerism in Argentina with the participation of the Peronist Justicialist party, Chile with the “Apruebo Dignidad” alliance with the participation of the traditional social democratic, social Christian and socialist parties, the case of Colombia with the Colombia Humana alliance that grouped the old Liberal Party among others, Lula and all his broad alliance of social democratic and liberal forces in Brazil, among others.

In countries such as Argentina and Ecuador, the application of anti-popular adjustment programs was initiated by the governments of the conservative liberal parties, within the framework of the alternation in the government of the bourgeois system. However, it was not the same in all countries. In the case of Brazil, it was the government of Dilma of the Workers' Party (PT), who initiated the implementation of the anti-popular adjustment before her impeachment by legislative means. In countries such as Venezuela and Bolivia, where there has been no alternation in government, except for the brief period of time that the coup d'état in Bolivia lasted, it was up to the very same “progressive” parties in government to personify the two political forms of capital management: the populist and the neoliberal. 

However, the depth of the capitalist crisis of the weak Latin American economies continues to be such that even with the return of the progressive parties to government, in Argentina and Brazil, for example, they have done nothing more than continue the adjustment programs initiated by their predecessor governments led by the conservative liberal parties, their apparent ideological enemies. This continuity of the adjustment programs by progressivism and their total application in the case of Venezuela confirms how absurd and deceitful the strategy of the Sao Paulo Forum is when it claims that the main struggle in the region is between two models: the neoliberal one embodied by the conservative parties and the social democratic progressive one. 

It is more than demonstrated that both forces are not only not antagonistic - in essence and in a class sense - but that both complement each other as political forms adopted by the movement of capital accumulation in the region. Where even the governments of progressivism do not tremble in personifying the most oppressive forms of capital management.

The example of the PSUV government in Venezuela is perhaps the most evident demonstration of this reality. The PSUV in Venezuela is a force that openly represents the interests of the local bourgeoisie and foreign monopoly capital. Under the mask of a pseudo-left and anti-imperialist discourse, this party and its government carry out the anti-worker and anti-popular adjustment program for the benefit of the most reactionary capitalists of the region. Not even the most openly neoliberal governments in the region have achieved objectives as beneficial to business as the de facto elimination of such elementary rights as wages, social benefits and trade union freedoms - a nefarious legacy that international progressivism silences, and at the very least, justifies, by invoking sanctions and “anti-imperialist” resistance. 

This alternation in the governments of the parties of “progressivism” and its broad base of social democratic alliance on the one hand, and that of the traditional conservative bourgeois parties and the new formations on the other, did not take long to generate a deep crisis of political representation of this new bipartisanship, given the anti-popular character of its politics, the growing corruption and the rise of social inequality. 

As a result of popular weariness and the deepening of the crisis, ultra-liberal political forces have been strengthening, headed by actors such as Milei in Argentina, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Bukele in El Salvador, Maria Corina Machado in Venezuela, etc.

Popular fatigue and frustration with the new bourgeois bipartisanship, added to the lack of independence of the communist and workers' parties in the face of social democratic “progressivism”, has consolidated the electoral and political growth of these ultra-conservative forces, which falsely present themselves as the third way to the progressive-conservative antagonism. 

This “third force” is not very different from the programmatic proposal of the traditional conservative right wing, it only accumulates on the basis of the weariness of the popular masses before the system of coexistence and bipartisan complicity, which has become a deep crisis of political representation of the bourgeois parties in Latin America and the Caribbean. 

“Progressive” social democracy is trying to take advantage of the rise of these reactionary forces to polarize society into two camps: the ultra-liberal parties on the one hand and the defenders of the “welfare state” on the other. That is to say, under this crude ideological blackmail, they seek to consolidate the bipartisanship of the bourgeois political system, trying to frustrate the efforts of the revolutionary parties to deepen a line of independent political action of the working class against the parties of capital.

In this false dilemma between “neo-liberals” and “progressives”, the latter not only proclaim themselves as the legitimate and only parties of the “left”, the popular masses and the working class, but also use all their power to stigmatize every effort from the class-conscious workers movement and the revolutionary parties to build an independent, authentically working class and popular alternative committed to the real interests of the working class. 

The blackmail of social-democratic “progressivism”, on the supposed struggle between “good” and “evil”, does not admit, nor does it respect the political independence of the working class. Whoever does not align himself with its broad multi-class alliance, automatically becomes a collaborator of the extreme right forces and plays into the hands of “imperialism”. From this logic, the working class has no choice but to serve as the caboose of the interests of one pole of the bourgeois parties. 

In this line is inscribed the “Consensus of our America” advocated by the Sao Paulo Forum - an approach that is instrumental to the interests of the bourgeois parties of progressivism, and that unfortunately some communist parties of the region strive to push forward and promote as the only path of struggle for the Latin American workers.

But not only “progressivism” promotes this false polarization, also the ultraliberal parties do the same, but under the fallacious dilemma of freedom or “socialism”. This poses a greater challenge to the parties of the working class, because the failures of the capitalist administrations of the “progressive” governments are blamed on socialism, seeking to exacerbate a reactionary consciousness in the working masses in order to try to distance them from their historical project; the only one that can lead them to their true social emancipation.

Therefore, both “progressives” and ultraliberals, with their strategy of ideological polarization, point towards the same objective, and that represents the only guarantee of perpetuation of bourgeois power; and that is that the working class and its vanguard parties lose all capacity for independent political action against the parties of capital and the bourgeois State. 

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.

Therefore, an important objective achieved by progressivism in favor of bourgeois domination is to raise barriers to the exercise of proletarian internationalism and continental class solidarity. 

As we pointed out in the Political Line approved by the XVI National Congress of the PCV on the ideological crisis of the International Communist Movement:

“... This crisis will only be able to be overcome to the extent that we strengthen our influence in the workers' movement of our countries, combat the reformist and nationalist ideas in the workers' movement, confront all the ideological diversionism spread by the “new left”, which starts from not recognizing the role of the working class as the revolutionary subject, deploy class-conscious political action independent of the interests of the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie; and make the exercise of internationalism and proletarian solidarity permanent. 

“The fundamental problem of the communist and workers’ parties today is synthesized in the following dilemma: to execute a political action that is limited to the struggle for timid reforms that improve conditions of sale and reproduction of the labor force of the working class in the framework of multi-class alliances, or to fulfill the role of organizing and directing the revolutionary potential of the working class to take in their hands the political power and become the leading class of society. The latter is the one that defines the reason for being and existing of a Communist Party as the organized vanguard of the working class as a social class for itself.”

In this sense, it becomes necessary and urgent to create a space of articulation, debate, formation and collective construction of Communist Parties and workers' forces of the continent that understand the importance of recovering the exercise of proletarian internationalism and workers' solidarity for the common struggle of the workers of the continent against the strategy of domination of capital that all the parties of the system personify: social democrats, progressives, liberals, conservatives, libertarians, etc. 

To build a class referent that rescues the independence of the political action of the workers of the continent against the bourgeois parties and the capitalist states, is a vital necessity of the communist movement in the region. 

The crisis of capitalism is deep, we must not allow the workers and the workers' movement to remain captive prey to the reactionary discourse of the ultra-right, to the extent that the collapse of the accumulation process strips the traditional parties of the bourgeois political system. The continental revolution will only be possible if the working class organizes itself and acts independently of the bourgeois power, and prepares to take advantage in a revolutionary sense of the developing crisis. 

The current crisis not only confirms the condition of the working class as the only revolutionary subject of this society, but also the relevance and necessity of the Communist Party, as its form of vanguard political organization, called to ensure its independent organization, class unity and political action according to a program consistent with its immediate interests and historical mission: the revolutionary overcoming of the capitalist mode of production.