Date: Fri, 28 Mar 1997 01:56:41 -0500
Subject: M-G: Revolutionary regroupment or centrist alchemy? (Part 1)


Revolutionary regroupment or centrist alchemy?

The imperialist triumphalism over the counterrevolutionary
destruction of the bureaucratically deformed workers states
in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has impacted
widely on those who claimed to adhere to the programme and
principles of revolutionary Marxism. As the world's ruling
classes pronounce the "death of communism", much of the left
is rapidly repudiating even any pretence of Leninism as they
seek "regroupment" in larger reformist organisations together
with social democrats, ex-Stalinists,Greens, other so-called
"progressives" and even capitalist forces.

Cliff Slaughter's Workers Revolutionary Party, one of the
degeneration products of Gerry Healy's organisation of the
same name, has liquidated itself. The Slaughterites are now
seeking to form a broad church encompassing "envionmental
and justice campaigning organisations, all socialist grpoups,
the Labour Party and the trade unions". Militant Labour has
recently decided that its name was far too "radical" and has
opted for the more "palatable" name of the Socialist Party. The
"United Secretariat of the Fourth International" (USec), which
for years falsely laid claim to being the continuation of
Trotsky's revolutionary Fourth International, is in a state of
near-terminal collapse.

In France, the former "star" section of the USec is casting
about for an electoral alliance with the French Communist
Party, and the petty-bougeois Greens. In Italy, Usec members
have joined all manner of other groups in liquidating into Ri-
fondazione Comunista (RC). An offshoot of the old Italian
Communist Party, RC serves as a left prop for the Italian
popular-front government that is enforcing vicious capitalist
austerity and racist attacks on immigrants.

Posturing as an alternative to this wholesale liquidation
is the Leninist-Trotskyist Tendency (LTT), who are hosting a
conference on "revolutionary regroupment" aimed at picking
up disaffected groups from the disintegrating USec. The
particular cosumation of this intention is to be a fusion with
the ex-Usec members now in the Committee for Revolutionary
Regroupment as well as with elements of the Liason Committee
of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International
(LCMRCI), a split from Workers Power's "international"
tendency of roughly the same name  with a few less initials.

A joint statement issued by the LTT and LCMRI declares
"the two tendencies agreed that it is neccessary to attempt a
discussion and regroupment process with all forces that are in
favour of a Leninist-Trotskyist international opposed to
centrism" (Workers News no 58, October/November 1996).
Yet the coming together of these tendencies has nothing to do
with "revolutionary regroupment". Rather, this fusion is a
rotten bloc predicated on papering over political differences.
At the same time, it is a genuine right-centrist "regroupment"
based on a shared record of championing the forces of anti-
Soviet reaction in the pivotal events leading to the counterrev-
olutionary destruction of the bureaucratically deformed
workers states in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The
variouis opportunist appetites of the different components find
recouncilation in a common perspective of tailing Labourite
/Third world nationalist forces.

Revolutionary regroupment-the fight for a Leninist party..

Revolutionary regroupment-the struggle to win subjec-
tively revolutionary elements from reformist and centrist
organisations to the programme and party of Leninism-is
indeed vital and driven home with renewed urgency today as
the question of forging a genuinely revolutionary international-
ist leadership of of the world's working class is starkly posed. In
the aftermath of the destruction of the Soviet Union, the ruling
classes are waging a ruthless offensive against the working
class, ripping up any and all social programmes while fanning
the flames of racist reaction to make immigrants the scapegoat
for increased unemployment and misery. As they seek to
increase their competitive edge against their imperialist rivals,
the international bougeoisies are bringing the world closer to
obliteration in interimperialist World war III.

Across Western europe, the working class has fought back
in some of the largest and most militant battles in years; yet,
for the first time since the Paris Commune, the masses of
workers in struggle do not identify their immediate felt needs
with the ideals of socialism or the programme of proletarian
revolution. As we of the International Communist League
wrote in our international "perspectives and tasks memoran-
dum" in January 1996.

 "The ICL exists today in a period in world history, one
 conditioned by the collossal defeats for the proletariat with
 capitalist counterrevolution in the former Soviet Union and
 across East europe, and the potential for simular defeats looming
 in Cuba,China, Vietnam, and North Korea. As Trotskyist
 internationalists, we fight against capitalist counterrevolution.
 Lacking historical precedents as a guide, Marxist programmatic
 clarity is essential as a compass. As revlutionary Trotskyists we
 are, still the party of the Russian Revlution. This defines not
 only or mainly our unique Soviet defensism, which today has
 few points of application, but charts our fight for genuine
 communism today: to pursue the class struggle to workers'
 victory with their power implanted in workers councils across
the world-the necessary condition to begin the elimination of
the economic exploitation and social oppression within the
human species and the transition to a stateless, socialist so-
ciety....Struggle with contending parties and currents within
the class is essential for the ascendancy of a clear, defined and
organised revolutionary vanguard party."

Since our inception we have understood that revolutionary
regroupment is a crucial element to forging a Leninist  interna-
tional party, requiring both patient and intransigent polemical
struggle and work such as united-front actions in which the
political viewpoints and strategies of different organisations
are tested in action. The purpose of such a struggle is to split
subjectively revolutionary elements from reformist and centrist
organisations and lay the basis for fusion into a common,
principled organisation based on the programme of revolutionary
Marxism.

This was the method of the Communist International of
Lenin and Trotsky, which established "21 Conditions" for
admission, based on sharp programmatic points designed to
draw a clear distinction between revolutionaries and centrists
or reformists. This was carried forward by Trotsky in his
struggle to found and build the Fourth International through
merciless battle against the Stalinists, the Social Democrats
and also against centrist pretenders to revolutionary politics,
whom he described as "revolutionary in words, reformist in
deeds".

Our international tendency was built through a process of
revolutionary regroupment, largely with cadre from the United
Secretariat in the 1970s. The programmatic basis for regroup-
ment with such leftward-moving elements was outlined in the
following draft declaration written by these former USec cadre
in the late 1970s:

. "No political or electoral support to popular fronts;for
  conditional opposition to workers parties in open or implicit
  class-collaborationist coalitions;

. Uphold the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution; for
  proletarian leadership of the national/social struggle;

. For military support to petty-bougeois nationalist forces
  fighting imperialism, but absolutely no political support to
  such forces; for Trotskyist parties in every country.

. For unconditional defense of all the deformed/degenerated
  workers states against imperialism; for political revolution
  against the bureaucracies; no political support to competing
  Stalinist cliques and factions;

. Against violence within the workers movement.

. For Communist fractions in the unions, based on the Tran-
  sitional Program;

. For the Communist tactic of the united front from above; for
  the tactic of regroupment to unite subjective revolutionists
  in the vanguard party; for intransigent exposure of centrism;
 
. Rejection of the claims of ostensibly Trotskyist Internation-
  als to speak for the Fourth International, destroyed by
  Pabloism in 1951-1953.

. For the reforginging of a democratic-centralist Fourth Interna-
  tional which will stop at nothing short of the dictatorship of
  the proleatariat."
 
  -Spartacist (English edition) no 27-28, Winter 1979-80

This declaration was printed in the document for the first
international conference of our tendency which was held in
1979, on the eve of the full-fledged outbreak of imperialist
anti-Soviet Cold War II. As we noted there: "The trotskyist
position of unconditional defense of the gains of the October
Revolution will have the same cutting edge as our opposition
to the popular front in West Europe and Chile had in the
previous period."

We fought intransigently for the defense of the Soviet
Union and the other deformed workers states against imperial-
ist attack and internal counterrevolution. As Trotskyists, we
understood that the fight for workers to seize power from the
anti-revolutionary Stalinists usupers of the Russian Revolution
was the only real defense of the gains of the revolution as part
of a struggle for world socialist revolution. Meanwhile, every
variety of self-described Leninist groups and "internationals",
including the LTT conference's "regroupers", fought neither
for defense of the deformed workers states nor for political
revolution. Rather they took up the cause of imperialist-
inspred counterrevolutionary forces.

Of course, today there are few leftists around who don't
bewill the consequences of the counterrevolutions they helped
forment together with the pro-imperialist social democrats and
their bourgeois masters. Capitalist counterrevolution has led
to the drastic impoverishment of the Soviet/Eastern European
masses and brutal "ethinic cleansing". This comes alongside
the imperialist "New World Order" with its reactionary
triunphalism and brutal anti-working-class attacks and the
desperate situation of the "Third World" in a "unipolar" post-
Soviet world. In an issue of its theoretical journal In defense
of Marxism (no 3, June 1995) titled "The Marxist Theory of
the State and the Collapse of Stalinism", the LTT writes;

 "The collapse of Stalinism thoughout eastern Europe and the
 ex-Soviet Union between 1989-91 is the most important
 development in world politics in the past half century. It has
 resulted a major shift in the nternational balance of power,
 and unleashed in its wake wars, economic crisis and upheaval
 throughout the region."

Easy to say now. But let's look at where the LTT, the
LCMRCI and their "regroupment" partners stood at every
crucial juncture when the defense of the Soviet Union was
urgently posed.

Afghanistan-the opening shots of Cold War II..

In December 1979 the Soviet Army intervened in Afghani-
stan in support of the modernising nationalist PDPA regime
against Islamic reactionaries and to protect the Soviet Union's
crucial southern flank against imperialist incursion. This
signalled the opening shots of imperialist Cold War II. In the
biggest CIA operation in history, over US=A72 billion of
equipment was supplied to the Afghan mujahedin, who were
also armed with munitions from Thacther's Britain. While
recognising that the Kremlin bureaucracy had only reluctantly
intervened in order to stabilize a client state, we nonetheless
also understood that it was only the Soviet military interven-
tion which offered the possibility of opening the road to
emancipation for the hideously oppressed people of Afghani-
stan, particully women. The International Communist
League (then international Spartacist Tendency) declared: "Hail
Red Army in Afghanistan! Extend social gains of the October
Revolution to Afghan peoples!"

The forebears of the LTT were cadre in Gerry Healy's
Workers Revolutionary Party which screamed bloody murder
over the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. After emerging
>from the implosion of Healy's outfit in the mid-1980s and
forming the Workers International League (WIL), they
continued to denounce the Soviet Army's presence in Afghani-
stan. Even while admitting the potential for a social transfor-
mation opened up by the Red Army intervention, the WIL
nonetheless denounced it as "completely inadmissable (sic)
even if it is intended as a means of extending nationalised
property relations" (Workers News no 8,April 1988)!

The LCMRCI continues to uphold the position taken by
Workers Power in response to the Soviet intervention in
Afghanistan as a "big revolutionary step forward". While
Workers Power finally recognised the Soviet Union as a
degenerated workers state, as opposed to "state capitalist", its
position on Afghanistan was an extreme example of centrist
shilly-shallying. On the one hand, they declared "we oppose
the invasion of Afghanistan". On the other hand, they declared
it would be "tactically wrong for revolutionaries...to demand
the immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops". In other words,
for Workers Power Soviet defencism was reduced to a "tacti-
cal" question.

In 1989 the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan
by Gorbachev's Kremlin regime, with the futile aim of trying
to appease imperialism, was the direct precursor to the
counterrevolutions that engulfed Eastern Europe and the
Soviet Union itself. Though the Partisan Defense Committee,
we offered to organise international brigades to help fight the
CIA-backed mujahhedin cut-throats in the city of Jalalabad.
This purposal was aimed not only at providing concrete
military assistance. It was also premised on the understanding
that such an international brigade could futher the struggle for
political revolution in the Soviet Union, against the traitorous
Stalinist bureaucrats, among soldiers and officers who had
believed in the internationalist implications of their involve-
ment in Afghanistan.

Solidarnosc counterrevolution in Poland...

Following Afghanistan, the rallying cry of the imperialist
drive to overturn the gains of the October Revolution was
"Solidarity with Solidarnosc!" When Solidarnosc emerged out
of a mass strike movement of the Polish working class in
August 1980, we noted that insofar as the strikes enhanced the
workers capacity to struggle for proletarian political revolu-
tion against the Stalinist bureaucracy--which had mortgaged
the economy to the IMF bankers and conciliated the Chatholic
church and small-holding peasantry while lording it over the
working class--revolutionaries could support it. At the same
time we warned that "only a blind man could fail to see the
gross influence of the Chatholic church and pro-Western
sentiments among striking workers" (Fight clerical
reaction! For proletarian political revolution! Polish workers
move", Spartacist Britain no 25, September 1980).

The forces of clerical reaction and capitalist restoration
emerged triumphant at Solidarnosc first national conference
in September 1981. Recogonising that this "union" was nothing
other than an agency for the Vatican, the CIA and IMF,
when Solidarnosc made a bid for power in December 1981,
we called to "Stop Solidarnosc counterrevevolution!" While
standing militarily with the government of General Jaruzelski
in the defense of the Polish deformed workers state against
capitalist counterrevolution, our call to stop Solidarnosc was
integrally linked to the need to forge an internationalist
Trotskyist party in Poland that could lead a proletarian
political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy. In
contrast, all throughout Europe most "leftists" were wild for
Solidarnosc as the means of diving into the Cold War Social
Democracy-the SPD in Germany, Mitterand's Socialist
Party, the British Labour Party and so on.

The LCMRCI continues to uphold the line taken by
Workers Power at the time, which admitted that all the
dominant tendencies in Solidarnosc were counterrevolutionary
but supported it anyway! The leaders of the LTT were then en-
sconced in Healy's WRP, which was so fulsome in its support
for Solidarnosc that it supplied ammunition to Thacher's
drive to destroy the British miners union. On the eve of the
miners strike the Healyites "leaked" a letter by Arthur Scarghill
which denounced Solidarenosc as "anti-socialist" to the Fleet
Street press who, together with the Cold war TUC tops, used
it for an anti-communist crusade aimed at isolating the miners
union.

After the victory of capitalist counterrevolution in Poland,
the WIL itself enthused: "The unprecedented scale of the
struggle of the Polish working class (in 1981) showed the
writting on the wall for international Stalinism" (Workers
News no 30, April 1991). Not an entirely incorrect statement.
Except it was not the forces of the working class that prevailed
but rather the forces of imperialism in the final unraveling of
the former Stalinist-ruled countries of Eastern Europe and in
the Soviet Union.

Germany 1989: the fight against capitalist Ansluss

With the collapse of the Honecker regime in East Germany
and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the DDR was engulfed
in a developing political revolution. The impulses of the East
German masses were directed not towards capitalist restora-
tion but rather to building what they considered to be a decent
socialist society on the foundations of the DDR's nationalised
economy. This produced an exceptionally open situation for
Trotskyist intervention. The ICL undertook the biggest
sustained mobilisation in the history of our tendency, drawing
upon the personnel and resources of all sections.

In our propaganda, which was circulated in tens of thou-
sands of daily newsheets, we pressed the urgent need to forge
a Leninist-egalitarian party to establish a government of
workers councils (soviets) in the DDR as a springboard to a
unified German workers state based on a perspective of a
Socialist United States of Europe. Although shaped by the
disproportion between our small forces and those of the
Stalinist SED, there was in fact a contest between the ICL
programme of political revolution and the Stalinist programme
of capitulation and counterrevolution.

Our political impact was shown when 250,000 turned out for
the 3 January 1990 united-front demonstration initiated by the
Spartakist Workers Party of Germany in East Berlin's Treptow
Park to protest the fascist desecration of a memorial to Red Army
soldiers who died liberating Germany from the Nazis. The SED
belated joined in building for this protest out of fear of com-
pletely losing its bureaucratic hold over the working class, placing
itself at the head of the demonstration. This united front height-
ened the political fight between the programmes of Stalinism and
revolutionary Trotskyism. For the first time since Trotsky was
driven out of the Soviet Union, Trotskyists spoke to a massive
crowd in a deformed workers state.

>From the platform, Spartakist spokesmen denounced the
forces of capitalist counterrevolution, condemned the "SED
party dictatorship" and called for "workers and soldiers soviets
to power" through socialist revolution in West Germany
combined with proletarian political revolution in the DDR.
The spectre of organised working-class resistance to capitalist
reunification manifested at Treptow alarmed the West german
imperialists and their Social Democratic frontmen, who turned
up the heat in their campaign to stampede the DDR into
reunification. The elections were moved up two months while
the DDR was flooded with Deutschmarks. The SED dis-
avowed the Treptow demonstration and foreswore the Sparta-
kists for denouncing the SPD as the "Trojan horse" of imperi-
alist counterrevolution.

The Stalinists in the Kremlin and the DDR handed over the
East German deformed workers state to imperialism. Two
months later, the parties of West German imperialism swept
the March 1990 East German elections and the DDR was
swallowed up in a reunified capitalist Fourth Reich. In those
elections, the Spartakist Workers Party was the only organisa-
tion to run on a programme of intransigent opposition to
capitalist Anschluss.

The cadre from Workers Power's League for a Revolu-
tionary Communist International (LRCI) who went on to form
LCMRCI subsequently critisised the LRCI's call for "a
constituent assembly for the two Germanys in 1989" noting
that this would subordinate the East German Deformed
Workers State to "the bougeois forces of another capitalist
country and that the East German Degenerated Workers State
could be more easily destroyed by German imperialism".
Nonetheless, defence of the former deformed workers state was
evidently not a question of principle for those who went on to
form LCMRCI as they remained in Workers Power's "interna-
tional" for some years.

Moreover, even to this day the LCMRCI groups have
never disputed LRCI's 1989 call for the withdrawal of the Red
Army from the former DDR. This call was a direct echo of
NATO imperialism's demands. And when Gorbachov acceeded
to the NATO powers and agreed to withdraw troops, it was a
decisive factor in the eventual counterrevolutionary reunifica-
tion. Although on the surface sounding somewhat more
orthodox than Workers Power over the events in East Ger-
many, the LTT/WIL's "Draft Programme of Action" for the
DDR also called for Soviet troops out. Otherwise, the clarion
call of this programme was the slogan, Neither capitalism nor
Stalinism, but a democratically planned socialist economy"
(Workers News no 24, May 1990).

If this sounds like an echo of the Cliffites' slogan "Neither
Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism", it is for
the simple reason that it is derived from the same source, an
imbibing of the "virtues" of "democratic imperialism" dressed
up as "the fight for socialism". As Trotsky noted in a footnote
to a polemic against the POUM in his writings on the Spanish
Revolution, the invocation of "democracy" is the social-
democratic alibi for support to the dictatorship of the bour-
geoisie, as against the fight for workers democracy to be
realised in the revolutionary state power of the proletariat:

 "Socialism cannot be subbordinated to democracy. Socialism (or
 communism) is enough for us. 'Democracy' has nothing to do
 with it. Since then, the October Revolution has vigorously
 demonstrated that the socialist revolution cannot be carried out
 within the framework of democracy. The 'democratic' revolu-
 tion and the socialist revolution are on opposite sides of the
 barricades."
 -"Tasks of the Fourth International in Spain".
  12 April 1936

When it came to the final destruction of the gains of the
October Revolution, the side the LTT, Workers Power and
their sometimes objecting descendants was on the barricades
of Yeltsin's counterrevolution in the name of "democracy".

On the barricades of Yeltsin's counterrevolution

The pivotal point in the destruction of the gains of the
degenerated Soviet workers state was Yeltsin's successful
August 1991 countercoup against the pathetic coup plotters
"State Emergency Committee" (made up of Gorbachov's chief
lieutenants). Insofar as the Committee had a programme, it
was for "perestroika without glasnost", ie bureaucratically
controlled restoration of capitalism. They made no attempt to
suppress Yeltsin and the reactionary scum (fascists, black
marketeers, yuppies) who had mobilised on his barricades, for
fear of offending the Western imperialist powers.

The ICL argued that what was neccessary was a call on
workers to clean out the counterrevolutionary rabble on
Yeltsin's barricades. Such an independent mobilisation of the
workers could have been the spark for a proletarian political
revolution, to oust the crumbling bureaucracy, through a
showdown with the imperialist-backed forces of capitalist
restoration. At the time we noted:

continued in part 2











 




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