Date: Thu, 10 Apr 1997 10:07:58 1200+
Subject: M-G: Cockroach and LCMRCI 





> >
> >Bob Maleki recently made an attack against Workers Struggle 
> >[LCMRCI] in Britain.  He objected to WS `critical support' for the 
> >Labour party. PO  has already made a reply to Cockroach > which shows 
> >how Bob is taking the side of the Spartacists on this question, even 
> >though the Spartacists are clearly sectarian on this and a  number of 
> >questions.  This comes as a surprise to me because Bob has said many 
> >times that the Spartacists "get no free ride" from him.  On a number of
> > questions Bob has showed his ability to arrive at his politics without 
> >following dogmatically the Sparts line. One example is Afghanistan.
> >
> >For example,  Bob has  said on Afghanistan he would not "give political 
> >support" to the Red Army in 1980. Yet the Spartacists "Hail the Red Army"
> >does just that because it credits the Red Army with being able to 
> >introduce workers property at the point of a gun. When Lenin argued 
> >in support of the first invasion of Poland in 1919 it was in the 
> >context of  European revolutionary situation. The Red Army invasion 
> >of Poland was calculated to spark off revolutionary upsurges in 
> >Poland and in the West. The fact that it failed is not the point.
> >It was a good tactic which did not come off.
> >
> >However, when the Red Army invaded Poland in 1939 
> >as an "insurance policy" against Hitler there was no question of 
> >expanding the revolution by the point of a gun, but of defending the 
> >gains of October from Germany.  Trotsky said that the Red Army 
> >expropriation of the bourgeoisie had to be critically supported in 
> >the defence of  workers property in the SU, despite the bureaucracy, by 
> >means of a tactical military bloc only with them. But strategically, 
> >the expropriation by the Red Army and not the Polish workers set back 
> >the revolution internationally because it put the defence of workers 
> >property by bureaucratic methods before proletarian methods. The 
> >only way that workers property in the SU could be defended 
> >strategically was by proletarian methods, social revolution in the West, 
> >and political revolution in the SU. 
> >
> >When we come to Afghanistan,  there was no immediate threat posed to 
> >the workers property in the SU. The Red Army was propping up a 
> >friendly radical bourgeois government on its border without 
> >expropriating the bourgeoisie such as it was. The position of the  
> >Spartacists, that the Red Army was defending by bureaucratic methods 
> >the gains of October by invading Afghanistan, was therefore NOT the 
> >case. Afghanistan 1980 was not Poland 1939.  Therefore there was no 
> >question of tactically blocking militarily with the Red Army against the 
> >bourgeoisie to defend workers property. 
> >
> >But worse than this, the Spartacist position  "hail the Red Army" 
> >i.e. gave political support to the bureaucratic methods of the Red 
> >Army in invading Afghanistan. That is, it elevated an  unsupportable 
> >tactic into an unsupportable strategy! What this shows is the total 
> >lack of dialectics in the Spartacists method. That they can blithely 
> >re-write Trotsky on the defence of the Soviet Union and turn the Red 
> >Army into the strategic defender of the gains of October!
> >
> >You might argue that in the absence of a workers movement in 
> >Afghanistan, the Red Army was the best substitute against the 
> >reactionary Clan bosses. Yes,  but this is an unrelated tactical question 
> >of blocking with a progressive government in an impoverished 
> >semi-colony against imperialist backed tribal warlords.  This means 
> >that the Red Army was no more than a tactical ally in defending an
> > oppressed country against an imperialist proxy war, much like we
> >gave critical support to the Cubans in Angola in the 1960's. This had to 
> >be done by politically exposing the bureaucratic methods of the Red 
> >Army not by covering for them.  Hence we critically blocked with the 
> >Red army once in Afghanistan against the imperialist backed Clans, 
> >and condemned the Red Army when it withdrew from this war.
> >
> >It was absolutely clear that the Spartacists meant to cover for the 
> >Red Army in Afghanistan  because they took exactly the same approach 
> >in Poland in 1980 when there was a strong working class movement, this 
> >time fighting the bureaucracy.  The corrrect position had to be that 
> >of strategically  mobilising the workers independently of the 
> >bureaucracy and of the Solidarity leadership, and only tactically blocking with 
> >the bureaucracy  against imperialism and its agents.  
> >
> >In Poland, the bureaucracy was making deals with imperialism already in 
> >1980, so the question of blocking with it against imperialism did not arise. 
> >It is true that the Solidarity leadership was anti-communist and wanted to 
> >restore capitalism. Revolutionaries had to be  against the Solidarity 
> >leadership and for a bloc with the bureaucracy against them. 
> >
> > But the mass of the workers in the unions were not "anti-communist"  and only 
> >wanted decent wages etc. By blocking with Jarulzelski against the workers, 
> >the Spartacists sided with a bureaucratic defence of workers property with tanks, 
> >against a working class defence of workers property. They backed the wrong side 
> >in the defence of workers property and suppressed the only strategic  force 
> >that was capable of removing the bureaucracy and putting state 
> >property under workers  control. From that point on, the collapse of 
> >the East European degenerate workers states, and the SU,  into a 
> >counter-revolution,  rather than a political revolution, was made much
 more likely,
> > 
> >The Spartacists positions on these key turning points in the history 
> >of the DWS's were abstentionist and liquidationist.  The label 
> >Stalinophile is only a surface description of the underlying method 
> >which leads this tendency to put its faith in the bureaucracy to defend 
> >workers property,  even against the demands of workers on strike for 
> >higher wages. What is much more important is the method which leads a 
> >group to liquidate itself as a vanguard and to attribute to some petty 
> >bourgeois/bureaucratic force an historically progressive role.
> >
> >This is exactly what the Spartacists blame the the United Secretariat 
> >[Pabloites]  for doing, but the truth is that they too, like all the other
> > branches of post-war Trotskyism have succumbed to a fatalism which 
> >worships objective processes and renders the role of the vanguard as a 
> >sort of literary footnote to history. To understand this chronic 
> >lapse into fatalism it is necessary to retrace the origins and early 
> >development of the 4 International before, during and after the 
> >Second World War.
> >
> >To summarise what will have to be another post, post-war Trotskyism 
> >was unable to develop into a world party because of its collapse due 
> >to internal and external pressures during the war. After the war, it 
> >was unable to adjust to the changed situation, and fatalistically 
> >succumbed to objective forces. The Spartacists come out of this no 
> >better than anyone else. In fact worse in the sense that they seem 
> >incapable of rethinking their past. 
> >
>
> >
> >Dave Bedggood
> >
> 
> -----------------End of Original Message-----------------
> 
> -------------------------------------
> E-mail: global-AT-uk.pi.net
> Date: 09/04/97
> Time: 12:47:26
> 
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