Ecuador: LET US PUT THE TRADE UNION MOVEMENT OF A NEW TYPE AT THE FOREFRONT AGAINST REVISIONISM AND OPPORTUNISM

We hereby share an unofficial translation of a statement by the Defense Front of Workers’ Rights in Imbabura.

We have closed a year of struggles. We had advances and setbacks, as occurs in every class struggle, especially in the trade union field, where revisionism usually concentrates its greatest strength. However, that has not prevented us from advancing in organization, consciousness, and combat. The balance is positive, despite the difficulties. We have taken steps in building a new trade union center and strengthening our organizations. Even when we faced setbacks in the leadership of some general unions, we kept the initiative, defended positions, and kept the grassroots work firm.

Our greatest achievement was to mobilize when other sectors did not, either out of fear or because they are riding on putrid revisionism. We must not forget, beyond what the opportunist leadership of CONAIE says, that the trade union movement of Imbabura set the pace for the popular indigenous uprising. It was our decision, our leadership, and our participation that allowed, for the first time, that struggle not to be confined only to the indigenous, but to receive a significant contribution from trade unionists. Although we did not always act formally as unions, we were on the front line, fighting alongside the peasantry and working class to give a class character to the people’s struggles.

This year, 2026, presents us with greater challenges. We must combat imperialism and redouble efforts to fuel a firm anti-imperialist struggle, without vacillations. But we must also fight against the bureaucratic, exploitative, and country-selling regime of Noboa. We will do it because it is our class responsibility. And, furthermore, we have the challenge of elevating the economistic struggle to a political struggle, because trade unionism that limits itself to wages, demands, and procedures ends up domesticated by the State and bourgeois legality. As Marx taught, the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself, and that emancipation is not reduced to partial reforms: it requires organization, political independence, and sustained combat. And as Mao insisted, the correct line does not arise from empty slogans, but from linking action with the masses and transforming dispersed force into organized force, capable of moving from immediate resistance to the real dispute over the country’s course.

Let us make the ideological dispersion and demobilization promoted by revisionism and electoral opportunism a motivation to gain coherence, discipline, and clarity in tasks. Let the working class, the proletariat, be at the forefront of the people’s struggles. Let the proletariat assume the role that corresponds to it: to convert the economic struggle into a political struggle, to organize resistance, and to raise proletarian leadership.

STRENGTHEN THE TRADE UNION MOVEMENT OF A NEW TYPE!

THE PROLETARIAN LEADERSHIP OF THE POPULAR AND ANTI-IMPERIALIST MOVEMENT IS EVERYTHING. WITHOUT THAT LEADERSHIP, IT IS NOTHING!