Date: Sun, 13 Jul 1997 03:02:51 -0400
From: malecki-AT-algonet.se (Robert Malecki)
Subject: M-G: COCKROACH! #74 (Revolutionary regroupment) 


COCKROACH! #74 (Revolutionary regroupment)

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1. Revolutionary regroupment
   or centrist alchemy? (part 4)

2. A major Stalinist defeat & social pressures...

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The slogan of the "anti-imperialist front" issued out
of a disoriented discussion at the Fourth Congress of the CI.
It was seized on and perverted by Stalin to justify his policy of
political liquidation of the Chinese Communist Party into the
bourgeois-nationalist Kuomintang og Chaing Kai-Skek, which
led to the massacre of tens of thousands of Communists and
militant workers in Shanghai in 1927.

A more recent application of the "anti-imperiakist united
front" was the suppport given by the left, including the fore-
bears of the LCMRCI, the LTT and the CRR, to the Ayatollah
Khomeini's Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1978-79. The
bloody outcome of this "movement" has long been completely
apparent: the jailing and execution of countless numbers of
leftists, the reimposition of the veil and the brutal persecution of
women, workers and national minorities. Yet, at the same time,we
were unique in demanding: "Down with the Shah! Down with
the Mullahs! For workers revolution in Iran!".

While their support for Khomeini is smething rarely
mentioned today, Workers Power and (John D.s) LCMRCI
continue to boast of their call for military support for General
Galteri's Argentina in the Falklands/Malvinas war. Even after
splitting with Workers Power, (John D's) group appprovingly
noted that in 1981 Workers Power "had the courage to agitate
for the victory of Argentina in the war that was fought by its
'own' British Imperialism". The Spartacist League/Britain
fought for revolutionary defeatism on both sides. Raising the
call "Sink Thacther! Sink the Junta!" we argued that the best
possible outcome would be if the nilitary machines of both
governments were ground up.

As we noted in our phamplet "Workers Power's phoney
international splinters over Balkan betrayal" (November
1995):

 "Argentina was not a semi-colony nor was this war against
 imperialist aggrandisement. Britain went to war with the
 Argentine bourgeoisie over a desolate piece of land hundreds of
 miles from the Argentine mainland, which had had no Argentine
 population for over 150 years. As for theoil fields around the
 Malvinas, the Argentine and British governments are cheerfully
 divvying up the potential proceeds in friendly New York
 confabs,
 "Workers Power's' line of military support for General Galteri's
 Argentina may not have had fatal consequences in Britain, but
 in Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America it was a criminal
 betrayal which bplstered national chauvinism against proletarian
 class struggle."

Of course, there can bespecific united-front actions of an
anti-imperialist character between proletarian revolutionaries
and bougeois or petty-bourgeois nationalist forces. For
example, revolutionists supported Nasser's Eygpt when it ar-
tempted to take over the Suez Canal out of imperialist hands in
1956. Our international tendency, particully our American
section, campaigned to raise money for the embattled petty-
bourgeois nationalists Sandinista government in Nicaragua in
the 1980s against the US-backed contra war. Our slogan was
"Defend,complete,extend the Nicaraguan Revolution!." But
this is a far cry from the LCMRCI's idea of an "anti-imperialist
united front" which means political support for "Third World"
nationalist regimes.

A touching faith in the capitalist state..

John D.s) LCMRCI support for an "anti-imperialist
united front" is completed by their revisionist conception
of the capitalist state. Their documents raise the call for
"penetration of the army and the military police, creating
communist cells and committees of soldiers and military
policemen". Ludicrously implying that the savagely brutal
military police in Bolivia can be won to the side of the
working class. (John D.s) line is anti-marxist and potentially
suicidal. He purposefully obsures the difference between
soldiers in a conscript army, who are used as cannon fodder in
the capitalist bosses war and the police (including military)
who voluntarily hire themselves out as the capitalists armed
thugs.

Under conditions of great social struggle and revolutionary
ferment, it becomes possible and indeed vitally neccessary to
split the army along class lines, and to organise workers and
soldiers councils. But it is an elementary point of Marxism that
the racist, strike-breaking cops are deadly enemies of the
workers movement, which must be swept away completely in
the course of workers revolution.

But if the LCMRCI does at least maintain a posture about
"arming the masses", Gerry Downing's CRR hysterically
denounces us for upholding the Chartist slogan "for the right
of the citizens to bear arms!" Yet, with true Labour-cretinism,
Downing fukminates about the "consequences of exporting the
US gun-culture along with its horrific murder rate" (Workers
Republic no 2, December 1996). This "little England" parochi-
alism is a racist echo of the American bourgeoisie who "abhor"
the "gun culture" in the black ghettos of the US. If Downing
would really like to know what it is like to be unarmed in
American society, perhaps he could try interviewing Rodney
King who was beaten to within an inch of his life by the highly
armed criminals of the Los Angeles Police Department. On
"British soil", so sacred to the Labourite left, what Downing's
position boils down to is a revognition of the "right" of "Her
Majesty's" state to have an absolute monopoly over weapons.
Here is revealed the anti-revolutionary yellow belly of the
Labourite left.

The fight for a Leninist vanguard party..

We fight to complete the task begun by Lenin and trotsky
when they led the working class to victory in russia in
1917--the fight for new October Revolutions across the
globe. The essence of Trotskyism is the fight for a revolution-
ary leadership to lead the proletariat to power internationally.
As Trotsky wrote in the founding document of the Fourth
International: The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to
the crisis of the revolutionary leadership".

Unlike our centrist and reformist opponents, who wallow
in their opportunism while denying any internal problems, we
strive to be honest and straightforward in assessing our tasks
and the difficulties we face. As we wrote in our international
"Perspectives and tasks memorandum" last year: "Failure to
recognize the period we are in and the neccessary relationship of
our small revolutionary vanguard to the proletariat, and the
absence of the Soviet Union as an active and defining factor in
politics, have led to disorientation and appetite to follow alien
political programs and forces."

An early manifestation within our organisation was the
1994 minority faction of Y Rad and Marie Hayes in our
Canadian section. Frantically seeking to discover forces other
than the proletariat to lead "the struggle", they lauded various
ex-Stalinists formations, like the facist-infested Russian "red-
brown coalition", looked to the Algerian military regime to
combat Islamic fundementalism and called for support to the
bougeois-nationalist African National Coingress in the 1994
South African elections. The penchant for unsavory nation-
alist formations rapidly led them out of our international after
a sharply fought political stuggle. Today, Rad and Hayes
constitute the Canadian section of the LTT.

In their factional struggle inside our organisation, Rad and
Hayes raced on about the supposed "Stalinophobia" of the ICL
charging that we had "joined the anti-communist crusade".
After quitting the ICL, and "regrouping" with the LTT, their
line was the exact opposite. In an article announcing their
adherence to the LTT, they denounced us for "Stalinophilia"
while they retrospectively embraced the cause of anti-Commu-
nist forces like Solidarnosc. But, nowhere was Rad/Hayes
180-degree line-shift more stunning than over Yugoslavia.
>From a position of virtual unconditional support to the Serbs
in te bloody nationalist fratricide in Yugoslavia, they were
now calling for "struggle in defence of the Muslims" against
the Serbs. Such eas evidently the price od admission to WIL's
international.

At the same time, the fact that the LTT weren't bothered by
Rad/Hayes capacity to instantly flip over to positions diamet-
rically counteredposed to those which led them to form a faction
within our organisation speaks volumes about their idea of
"regroupment". far from the struggle for Leninist program-
matic clarity needed to forge a genuiinely de,ocratic-centralist
revolutionary international, the LTT's "regroupment" process
seems to leave more in common with handing out overseas
Wimpy franchises.

For all of the "regroupers" the idea that internal political
struggle is a neccessary component in the fight to perserve the
programme and the purpose of the revolutionary vanguard is
completely foreign. In an article titled "revolutionary Regroup-
ment" (Workers Republic no 2, December 1996) Gerry
Downing of the CRR sneers that the recent political struggle in
the ICL against a revisionist course being pursued by the long-
time editor of Workers Vanguard, Jan norden, was merely an
attempt to "scapegoat" Norden for our surpposed "line change"
on the nature of Stalinism.

According to downing, the defection of Norden from our
organisation reflects "acute disappointment at the failure of the
Stalinist (sic) to fulfill the historic role ascribed to them by the
Sparts and defend the nationalized property relations in eastern
Europe and the USSR". There is no question that Norden had
ascribed such a role to the Stalinists. But, if the ICL had
expected the Stalinists to defend the workers states, then why
would we have, for example, mobilised the cadre and resources
of our international in East Germany to fight for a workers
political revolution against the Stalinist betrayers? Indeed, one
of the issues that has Norden denouncing us is that we openly
said that the Stalinists led the counterrevolution in the DDR,
doing everything in their power to supress any insurection by
the working class, because they knew they would be the
targets.

As we wrote in our article "A Shamefaced Defection from
Trotskyism" (Workers Vanguard no 648, 5 July 1996):

 "...we fight for a new October Revolution. But the dispro-
 portion between this purpose and the curent political concious-
 ness of the working class, youth and the left internationally is
 great. Today, even most subjective leftists view as rather esoteric
 the idea that a proletarian revolution, like that siccessfully
 pursued by Lenin's Bolshevik Party in Russia in 1917, is the key
 to the liberation of mankind. This is due in no small measure to
 the crimes of the Stalinists, and the Social Democrats before
 them, who made a mockery of the program and ideals of revolu-
 tionary Marxism."

For Norden the disproportion between that we strive for and
the current conciousness of the working class has become a
yawning, unbridgable abyss. his increasing pessimism about
the ability of our party and its programme to have any impact
in the "New World Order" was reflected in an increasingly
desoerate search for, and accommodation to, social forces
other than the proletariat and to vehicles other than a Leninist
vanguard party to advance the cause of human emacipation.

While declaring that Norden doesn't seem "amenable to
change on the qustion of Stalinism", Downing gives favor-
able mention to Norden's centrist conciliation of
the Luta Metal=FArgica (LM), group, with whom the ICL had
fraternal relations, was cut of the same cloth as the rotten-bloc
"international relations" pursued by CRR,LTT and LCMRCI.
Our relations with LM were guided by Trotsky's call

 "To treat with the greatest attention those groupings that actually
 gravitate to us; patiently and carefully to listen to their critism,
 doubts and vacillations; to help them develop toward Marxism
 not to be frightened by their caprices, threats, ultimatums (centrists
are always capricious and touchy); not to make any concessions
 to them in principle..."
 --"Centrism and the Fourth International" 22 February 1934

After some months of testing through trips to Brazil, letters
addressed to struggle with political problems and differences,
we finally broke fraternal relations with LM when it became
quite apparent that they had elevated their opportunist union
work and positions above the struggle to forge a nucleus od a
Trotskyist party in Brazil. Splits as well as fusions are the
means through which a Leninist party is built. But the idea of
splitting with a group of militant trade-unionists in the name of
programme and principle is completely alien to centrist
manovrers such as Downing, the LTT and LMRCI.

As the Transtional Programme, the founding document of
the Fourth International written in 1938, states:

 "The Fourth International does not search after and does not
 invent panaceas. It takes its stand completely on Marxism as the
 only revolutionary doctrine that enables one to undersyand
 reality, unearth the cause behind the defeats, and conciously
 prepare for cvictory. the Fourth International continues the
 tradition of Bolshevism, which first showed the proletariat how
 to conquer power."

For authentic revolutionaries, political struggle over pro-
gramme is key to building a politically homogeneous and
disciplined international revolutionary party. For groups like
the LTT conference's "regroupers", political programme is the
enemy to be buried as far as possible, in the name of "unity".
But politics has its own logic, and as centrists and reformists
are ever susceptable to the pressures of their own national
ruling classes, international non-aggression pacts will always
blow up in their faces. whatever issues from this lash-up will
be as violently unstable as it is deeply unprincipled.

End...

International Communist League
PO Box 7429
New York, New York 10116
United States
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A major Stalinist defeat & social pressures...

In the exchange between Rahul M and Gary M I quote as a PS, we can see a
clear example of social pressures at work.

Gary M tells us he's leaving the list. (Threats like this have been two a
penny recently, but let's assume Gary means it.) But the politics of sex
and to a lesser extent the politics of culture have been remarkably
prominent recently, which is just up Gary's street. So why should he leave?

Perhaps the level of personal abuse has increased? But how about this from
Rahul to BodySack back on 1 June last year?

>... you must be
>a loathesome, fucked-up, nasty, subhuman, disgusting piece of shit crawling
>with lice and maggots.

And this was semi-rational in its context -- there had been and were later
much worse examples from the usual crowd round Louis >< P and Adolf-O (of
blessed memory). So I wouldn't say the level of abuse has increased. So why
should Gary leave?

He claims that sanity has left the list when he writes: "Should sanity ever
return to it I might". I think he would be hard pressed to show how
*sanity* has departed from this list with the departure of Adolf-O and his
hangers-on. We have seen the departure of articulate and reasonable
subscribers in the past, but these were mainly academic Marxists revulsed
at the gang-fighting tactics of the Stalinists -- no bike chains, razors or
armoured boots in the drawing room, please (or uzis if you're American).

It's clear that what's happened is that Gary is playing coy -- "I do not
defend Adolfo's current attacks on Zeynep" -- in order to retire with his
"honour" intact, while the substance of Rahul's charge of "cravenly sucking
up to Olaechea for the past year" is ignored.

Gary has a thinner hide than the leaders of our particular bunch of
neo-Stalinists (Doug H and notably Louis P, who's nothing but hide), so he
shows  the world how exposed he feels. And he does feel exposed now the
social pressure constituted by the Stalinists on the list has gone. The
Stalinists provided Gary's "firm ground" and hinterland. He has been
posting more and more about how attracted to the dogma and fetishist
certainty of the Stalinist position he has become over the past few months.

What's happened is that Gary has opted for the Stalinist movement now that
the real Stalinist regimes have deserted him and his fellow-travelling
comrades. He's gone where he feels at home.

Doug and Louis P on the other hand have their own little metropolitan
community of empiricist lefts, they are less exposed than Gary in Brisbane,
and freer to attach themselves to the most promising social force that pops
up to the surface of events (and also of course to drop any social force
that loses its potency or becomes just too embarrassing).

The list has just witnessed a *major defeat for Stalinism*. They scooted
with their tails between their legs. They gave up on making an impression
in an open Marxist forum and retreated to utopian ideological autarky.
They're so pure that not even Rolf Martens is welcome. It would be fun to
subscribe to their list just to watch it self-destruct, the way Left-Unity
self-destructed.

Gary is no longer able to pretend that he is unaffected by this defeat for
Stalinism. It'll be interesting to see if he tries to join Adolf-O's list
and what happens to him there -- if anything ever gets out of that
ideological black hole...

As for social pressures, Bob M's proposal to substitute Yoshie F for Louis
G as a moderator is interesting. Since the list is no democracy, any change
of this kind would represent a clear shift in empiricist perceptions of the
centre of gravity of list membership. If the Stalinist constituency for
which Louis G is a fellow-thinking guarantor evaporates, there is no need
for any guarantees, and Louis can return to simply putting his own personal
views to the list. Further to this, it's interesting that the Trotskyists
feel no apparent need of any guarantors etc -- they feel secure enough in
their political positions!

All these internal list developments are taking place at the same time as
there is an obvious upsurge in revolutionary activity around the world. The
Albanian people arms itself and immediately imperialist Europe feels the
blood clotting in its veins. A petty-bourgeois left nationalist movement
rises towards power in one of the richest and most strategic of African
countries months rather than years after the removal of the apartheid
regime in South Africa. The dead end of sensationalist coup politics is
painfully obvious in Peru. Internationally coordinated strikes hit Europe
(Renault), and the permanent seething of social and class discontent in
Russia is spreading and hotting up. There are riots everywhere (eg
Palestine and Indonesia).

This upsurge will push centrists to the left. It should encourage
revolutionaries to get long-term in their commitment to building an
international party capable of intervening to channel the revolutionary
energy towards replacing the current state dictatorships of the bourgeoisie
with dictatorships of the proletariat.

Hugh
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