Date: Tue, 26 Aug 1997 11:31:43 +0100 From: Jim <jim-AT-cag1.demon.co.uk> Subject: M-I: LL08135 Jim Hillier: Sunset clauses and concessions to imperialism I apologise to Chris Burford for failing to answer a specific question: namely whether I supported Slovo's "sunset clauses" and the "compromise of allowing the international wing of capitalism its own way in return for the abandonment of the fascistic rul of local apartheid capital." No, Chris, I don't. Not because I am against compromises and concessions in themselves. Sometimes they are necessary. Lenin made concessions to capital, including imperialist capital, in order to rebuild the Soviet economy under NEP. But that was *after* state power had been won. What the ANC/SACP negotiated was concessions before state power hadbeenwon. These concession amounted to the abandonment of the struggle to seize state power in favour of taking power at the head of a reformed bourgeois state. Is Chris really telling me that it is an option for revolutionaries to give imperialism "its own way" in return for a promise from imperialism to abandon fascism? Ho Chi Minh should perhaps have tried this line: it would have saved a lot of bloodshed. What Chris is suggesting is for the revolutionaries to promise to abandon revolution. But in that case, what need has imperialism of fascism in the first place? Fascism *only* arose because the working class threatened capitalist rule. No threat, no need to abandon democratic measures. Apartheid itself would never have been established in 1948 had it not been for the existence of a revolutionary threat. Among its first measures were the Suppression of Communism Act, after all. And one last thing, Chris. Do not, ever, try to justify this kind of capitulation with reference to Gramsci. Read the Prison Notebooks. He specifically ridicules this perspective, which was put forward then by the social democrats. He compared it to a fable about an animal which is hunted for its testacles (!). When it is being hunted, it stops and bites off its own testacles in order to save its skin. Is that really what you would have us do, Chris? For communism Jim -- Jim --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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