Colombia election: capitalist contradictions on display

The intensification of dishonest propaganda that the bosses sell to the international working class is a symptom of the breakdown of capitalism and the sharpening of contradictions between classes. There is an increase in violence and exploitation where our oppressors use different tricks to control the masses of workers in the countryside and the city. This is evident in the desperate push to get behind their corrupt electoral system, with workers and students being offered to “choose” to their exploiters who will repress them under the farce of “representative democracy.”

Politicians at different levels of government, such as governors and mayors, aspire in Colombia to control the mass of profits derived from exploitation of natural resources and the labor of the increasingly impoverished workers. All electoral parties base their campaigns on lies rather than solutions and proposals, while attacking and belittling anyone who does not follow them. They bring to light mismanagement of public treasuries, the criminal records of their opponents and the constant violation of the bourgeois constitution by their peers.

Capitalism bases its development on the laws of profit. The ruling classes pull their leaders from wealthy capitalist elites and protect those leaders through the armed might of the state as well as drug trafficking mafias. The social democracy that fights for a “friendlier” capitalism always falls into the same patterns of misery and exploitation. Meanwhile, workers remain chained to this electoral circus, which blocks our path to fight for revolution. Only the destruction of the wage system and its racist state through the communist revolution will allow the working class to free itself from oppression, nationalism, racism, sexism and bloody imperialist bosses' wars.

Capitalism needs the electoral circus to make us believe that voting will help reform the profit system and address the needs of workers. This is why the bosses find populist candidates who divert and pacify thousands of skeptical workers and students who are tired of the endless violence perpetrated during the governments of Uribe, Duque and Santos as well as the failures of leaders like liberals Gustavo Petro and Claudia López.

We workers can’t continue believing the lies of any of these mafia factions, who seek to build their fascist state power to better disarm and control the anger of our class. During the marches for and against the reforms proposed by the current “government of change,” our work is focused on talking with relatives and friends in the streets, universities and workplaces about the traps and false promises of these reformists.

To this end, we are attending sit-ins, forums and rallies, sharing our newspaper Desafío, which condemns this corrupt electoral farce and declares that our class enemies will not be defeated by voting! We stand by our political line that only by building our mass Progressive Labor Party (PLP) will we be able to demolish them with revolutionary violent struggle, building a dictatorship of the international working class.

For this we repeat our call not to vote and instead organize around the PLP and its revolutionary communist political leadership. We must continually fight alongside our fellow workers because it is only the working class that has the numbers and historical potential to lead society. We fight to win more workers, soldiers and students to the need to destroy this warmongering system, responsible for all the unemployment, misery, poor health, environmental crises and generalized violence that we suffer daily.