File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9708, message 329


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


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