(From the Brazilian Section of the LCFI)
International anti-fascist and anti-imperialist forums and the need for permanent united front organizations.
The Brazilian Chapter of the Anti-Fascist International, organized in several Brazilian cities such as Brasília, São Paulo, Campinas, and Rio de Janeiro, is one of the many national chapters created by the World Meeting of the Anti-Fascist International , which brought together 1,100 delegates representing 76 countries in Caracas on November 28, 2024.
The event in the Venezuelan capital was not the first of its kind; however, it was one of the largest and the only one that generated national chapters, regular, active, and permanent anti-fascist and anti-imperialist united fronts, expressions of organized international collective resistance to the current Nazi escalation of imperialism, Zionism, and their national satellites. These expressions of workers’ organizations and the world left have held important forums in the last four years.
The first such major international anti-imperialist and anti-fascist activity took place in Paris in 2022: the Anti-Imperialist Platform , also known as the World Anti-Imperialist Platform (WAI). From the outset, the Emancipation of Labor Group has supported this international movement. The Liaison Committee for the Fourth International (LCFI) and Marxist Speak Out—the latter formed from the unity of organizations across five continents that defended Russia against NATO in the 2022 Ukraine War—also endorsed the Paris Platform Declaration .
In 2023, the First International Anti-Fascist Forum was held in Minsk, Belarus, with the participation of 50 countries. The Minsk Forum was born precisely in response to the return of Nazism in Europe, when, following the Euromaidan coup d’état of 2014, openly Nazi parties returned to power for the first time on that continent since Hitler’s defeat in 1945.
In 2025, the Second International Anti-Fascist Forum took place in Moscow, Russia, bringing together 92 countries, almost double the participation of the First Forum, and was hosted by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.
Summary of the “First Conference” in Porto Alegre
Despite the existence of these large and representative previous forums, between March 26 and 29, 2026, a new event was held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, which proclaimed itself the “First International Anti-Fascist Conference,” apparently to mark its discontinuity with previous political and organizational developments. The Porto Alegre Conference did not prioritize the construction of permanent united fronts among its participants. The main resolution was to vaguely indicate a desire to hold a future Conference, somewhat in the style of the world Social Forums, but smaller and with less institutional support. After the event, each person continues on their own, in their atomized, electoral campaigns, to combat an increasingly violent and audacious fascism against all workers and the oppressed, an instrument of imperialism for the recolonization of the American continent.
The “First Conference” was also the smallest of the forums in terms of the number of international delegations present. According to the organizers themselves, it brought together around 40 countries. Initially, this activity was scheduled to take place in May 2024. The initiative came from a spectrum of the left, dominated by a wing of the PSOL, the Socialist Left Movement (MES). However, the idea was rendered unfeasible that year due to the flooding that hit Rio Grande do Sul and Porto Alegre. This event allowed for some changes to the original idea, with the incorporation of the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB), the Workers’ Party (PT) in Rio Grande do Sul, and the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL). According to the organizers, more than four thousand people participated in the event, with 11 structuring panels and dozens of self-managed panels.
Despite the need to establish the fight against fascism and imperialism—which promoted genocide in Gaza, invaded Venezuela, intensified the blockade against Cuba, and attacked Iran—as the central focus of the debate, the Conference was hampered by the ambiguous character given to the anti-imperialist and anti-fascist struggle by the PSOL party and, to some extent, by the PT party.
The national PT (Workers’ Party) formally supported the activity from afar. Neither members of the party’s national leadership nor those of the federal government participated, as if we didn’t need, in Brazil in 2026, a major conference to organize the fight against fascism and coup-mongering, more turbocharged than ever by the right wing, the far right, the Centrão (center-right bloc), Faria Lima (a financial district in São Paulo), the mainstream media, drug trafficking, evangelical companies, the banking sector, and, above all, the White House itself.
The PT and PSOL parties avoided taking Russia’s side in the anti-imperialist war that this country has been waging since 2022 against NATO, which uses the Nazi government in Kiev as its puppet.
The Brazilian government opposed Venezuela’s entry into BRICS, which would have strengthened solidarity between both countries against the coup attempt threatening both left-wing governments. The PT and PSOL parties opposed defending Venezuela’s sovereignty against external pressure in the last presidential elections, yet another coup attempt by imperialism and its local fascist agents, who have been trying to overthrow Chavismo since 2002. Despite the profound solidarity of Chavismo and Maduro with the PT and Lula against the coup attempts in 2016 and 2018, the PT leadership and Lula’s government had a distinct, almost opposite, policy, not even demanding the release of Maduro and Cilia Flores, kidnapped by the Trump administration on January 3, 2026.
At the “First Conference” in Porto Alegre, PSOL even held a self-organized event under the name “The Ukrainian people and their working class facing the war of aggression by Putin’s Russia.” The words “people” and “working class” here are mere fanciful camouflages for the defense of NATO policy and its fascist puppet by MES and PSOL (this tendency within PSOL is known for supporting Lava Jato , a coup-plotting policy of imperialism, through lawfare).
In real life, the Ukrainian people have been victims of an artificial fratricidal division, of neo-Nazi oppression by organizations such as the Azov Battalion and the Right Sector, for 12 years. Through the Democratic Party’s Obama-Biden administrations, the US and its allies financed, armed, and organized a fascist coup in Kiev in 2014. These organizations are part of the Vladimir Zelensky dictatorship – whose mandate expired on May 20, 2024, and the arch-corrupt clown of the West continues to wage war to perpetuate himself in power – and claim to be the political heirs of the Nazi collaborationist phalanxes. 14,000 people have been killed since 2014, mostly in the regions where the true industrial and mining working class of eastern Ukraine predominates, in Lugansk and Donetsk (Donbass), which are Russian-speaking. Terrible massacres were committed against the Ukrainian people and working class by NATO agents in the Kiev government, such as the massacre at the Trade Union House on May 2, 2014, resulting in the murder of approximately 42 trade unionists. Thus, behind deceptive, leftist, “popular,” and “working-class” rhetoric, these promoters of the Anti-Fascist Conference propagate the interests of the Kiev fascists, puppets of imperialism. We therefore have a type of anti-fascist who defends fascists.
In turn, the Russian side of the war is criminalized and demonized. However, in its alliance with the peoples of Donbass, the Russian government, supported by China, Iran, and North Korea, is engaged in a war of self-defence and national liberation against the imperialist attack and NATO’s expansionist march towards Eastern Europe. If we criticize the Russian government, it is for having waited too long to defend the Ukrainian people and the working class from the violent Nazi oppression in Kiev, which captures and kidnaps Ukrainian citizens from the west to force them to kill those from the east. In its global totality, this is a struggle between imperialism and the oppressed peoples of the world. Russia and China are not imperialist; they are oppressed by imperialism through sanctions, blockades, and permanent threats; they are the strategic enemy of Western big capital, as we have demonstrated, among other things, in the article ” Russia, China, and Socialism .”
The “Porto Alegre Charter“, the final document of the “First Conference,” reflected less a conjunction of distinct conceptions, which would be natural in a broad, united front forum, and more an ambiguous stitching together that neutralizes the political potential and fighting spirit of many of the delegations present. The central concern of the PSOL (Socialism and Liberty Party) was not the fight against US imperialism and its henchmen, which wants to recolonize the American continent, seize Greenland, attacked Venezuela, the Caribbean, strangle Cuba, attacked Iran—all this only in 2026, and has been doing this to the whole world for centuries—but the abstraction of “imperialisms”: “We fight against all imperialisms and support the struggle of peoples for their self-determination, by all necessary means.” In a rather unsubtle way, it reproduces the G-7 war propaganda that Russia (invaded by Napoleon in the 19th century, by Hitler in the 20th century, surrounded by NATO military bases in the 21st century) is not defending itself but advancing against the supposed self-determination of Ukraine and wants to invade Europe.
The conception of this faction of organizers wasted the anti-fascist and anti-imperialist forces of the “Conference” by demonizing peoples and nations that are our allies in the anti-imperialist struggle and are targets of the very same, by propagating that China is also imperialist, that Iran, Venezuela and Cuba are dictatorships,… trafficking ideological conceptions of the imperialist war propaganda itself into the “Conference” and the forums of the left that need to organize to fight and defeat the Trumpist offensive. An important criticism of the Porto Alegre Charter was made by the president of Cebrapaz, José Reinando Carvalho: “Anti-fascist unity demands strategic clarity and priority in the fight against US imperialism“.
Apparently, with the same intention of marking a break from previous international anti-fascist and anti-imperialist forums, the organizers of the “First Conference” never invited the Brazilian Chapter of the Anti-Fascist International to participate in organizing the Porto Alegre event; at most, we were invited to participate in a panel discussion.
However, without any self-proclamatory or sectarian character, members of the operational staff of the Brazilian Chapter of the Anti-Fascist International registered for and participated in the activity in the capital of Rio Grande do Sul. Comrade Pedro Batista, from the Chapter’s operational staff, participated in one of the structuring panels, a moment that can be accessed in this video: “Pedro Batista, from the Anti-Fascist International, at the Porto Alegre Seminar, 3/27/2026 “.
