Date: Wed, 27 Nov 96 20:02:56    
Subject: M-G: The crisis of the LRCI


The crisis of the LRCI

The huge crisis of the international left urges the constitution of a
revolutionary Trotskyist pole of attraction. Unfortunately, the LRCI
has ceased to be that. Incapable of understanding the new period the
LRCI will be transformed from a healthy organisation to a confused
sect if it does not radically change course. The LRCI thought that the
social counter-revolutions in the east opened political revolutions
and a world revolutionary period. Instead of defending the workers'
states and conquests against democratic counter-revolution, they
adapted to it.
 In the workers' states they called for democratic united fronts with
 imperialist parties to establish 
parliamentary regimes. For them all the countries east of Germany,
even after seven years of open anti- communist capitalist regimes -
where financial institutions and big industries are being privatised
and a market economy reintroduced - are still workers' states. The
LRCI say that in most semi-colonies the working class itself is
disappearing while they endorse the PTS characterisation of world
situation ... which is that we are seeing a huge workers' offensive
and a pre- revolutionary global situation! They describe Bolivia, the
only country in the planet which has had at least around one general
strike every year for the last 15 years and more than 100 days of
general strikes in the last two years, as the country which has
suffered a strategic defeat similar to the destruction of the first
workers' state. At the same time they can deny the strategic defeats
in the 'socialist states'.  
 Despite the fact that they characterise Serbia as a workers' state
 they called for their defeat by a 
massive NATO attack ever while asking their own imperialist powers to
send arms and men to back their anti-Serb allies. On the national
question they are adapting to centralist tendencies inside the
imperialist countries. They oppose independence for Quebec, they
condemn the Basque national movement as 'completely reactionary', and they 
oppose any kind of national concession to Scotland despite the fact that 80% 
of its population are for some degree of autonomy. At the same time they 
adopted a liberal attitude to the national question in the non-imperialist 
countries.
They advocated the fragmentation of most of the semi-colonies as the
starting point of the permanent revolution, when the experiences of
Liberia, Lebanon, central Africa, etc. are showing that this could
start a process of  horrific genocide. In the workers' states they
declare their willingness to support every racial- religious group if
they want to secede and restore a capitalist state. They adapt to the
public opinion inside the imperialist world. They are against the
fragmentation of their own states but sympathise with the neo- liberal
atomisation of the rest of the world. In Rwanda they tailed the
liberal media which supported the Anglophile Tutsi elite army which
cleansed two million Hutus. In 1990 they supported the Soviet Army
invasion on Azerbaijan while they asked their own imperialist powers
to help the Lithuanians (who were popular in the non-Islamic west)
against Moscow. In 1981 Workers Power correctly opposed the Jaruselski
Stalinist coup in Poland without making any block with the church and
the capitalist parties. Nevertheless, ten years later the LRCI called
for a united front behind Yeltsin and the capitalist parties to defend
the bourgeois parliament. In 1990 they had an opposite line in Rumania
and they supported the Stalinist repression of a democratic student
demonstration which had less connections with imperialism than
Yeltsin. Workers Power was in its first five years a state-capitalist
group. In 1980 it decided to shift towards Trotsky's theories and to
critically support the USSR in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, Keith
Harvey's tendency, now dominating the LRCI, opposed that shift. He
considered the medievalist CIA-backed Afghan bands as a 'national
liberation movement' which should be actively supported against soviet
'expansionism'. He still thinks that in 1927 a bourgeois
counter-revolution smashed the workers state and that all the
post-capitalist countries where purged bourgeois states. For him the
workers' states is only an economic category because politically all
of them were bourgeois states since 1927.. That formalistic approach
justifies making united fronts with the bourgeois democrats with the
aim of destroying totalitarianism. For him it is better to have a
parliamentary liberal regime rather than a Communist Party
dictatorship. Today Harvey is the great leader and anybody who still
wants to consistently defend the positions of Dave Hughes (the
architect of the left turn in the early 1980s, now  deceased ) will be
purged. In Britain Workers Power shifts its policies towards the SLP
in nearly every issue of their paper. At the beginning they
electorally supported all Labour Party candidates against the SLP.
They do no work in the Labour Party but are now trying to influence
the creation of a faction inside the SLP which calls for 'more SLP
candidates'. 
 When the Latin American and New Zealand sections tried to create a
 tendency the LRCI answer was to 
deny opposition rights, to suspend members, to threaten the entire
opposition with expulsion and to forbid the use of electronic mail
communications.The LRCI is no longer interested in revolutionary
regoupment. They say that they have the only revolutionary programme
and that every fusion should be around it. In fact, the LRCI
leadership can change the programme whenever they wish. For example,
the LRCI programme said that in the workers' states it is not possible
to advocate a united front with bourgeois parties but the leadership
called for fronts with and behind monarchists, nationalists and
capitalist forces. No group can sustain these incredible political
contra-dictions for long without degenerating into a cult. The LRCI
can only  reassert its previous politically healthy dynamic by forging
a new leadership either from its own resources or, more realistically,
by revolutionary regroupment. There is no indication yet on the part
of the current leadership of any willingness to do this.




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