Date: Wed, 21 Jan 1998 09:55:01 -0500 From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu> Subject: Re: M-TH: Re: Actual Leninist parties?? To call the Workers Party of Brazil and the South African Communist Party "Leninist" is total confusion. The main feature of either party has been its break with the Comintern model. Unfortunately, both parties have adapted to the bourgeoisie while breaking with sectarianism. As everybody knows, the pressures on revolutionary parties from the right are enormous in the period of the fall of the Soviet state. Justin's use of the term "Leninist" serves as an epithet more than anything. The true history of the Bolshevik party, which I have been researching on and off for the past four years, has very little in common with the model cooked up by Zinoviev at the 1924 Comintern and which both Trotskyist and Maoist groups understand as legitimate Bolshevism. This model has been a disaster. The attempts of both the Workers Party and the SACP to depart from it are laudable and a few words are in order. One of the first fresh, new formations to emerge in this generally reactionary period was the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), or Workers Party, of Brazil. Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, a worker and a trade union activist, was part of number of workers, intellectuals, Catholic Church priest-activists who saw the need for a new socialist party in Brazil. They thought the CP and SP of Brazil were too ready to compromise with whichever politician on the scene who best represented the forces of the "progressive" wing of the capitalist class. Another ingredient in the formation of the Workers Party was the conscious leadership of ex-Trotskyists who gave the new group badly needed organizational knowledge. This is the best role for Trotskyists around the world today: to dissolve their parties and help to form broader, non-sectarian formations like the Workers Party of Brazil. Lula was born in 1945 in the poor northeastern town of Garanhuns, Pernambuco. He was the youngest of 8 children born to Aristides and Euridice da Silva, subsistence farmers. In 1956, the family moved to Sao Paulo, where they dwelled in one room at the back of a bar. They shared the bathroom with bar customers. At the age of thirteen Lula went to work in a factory that manufactured nuts and bolts. There were 12-hour work shifts at the plant and very little attention paid to the safety and health of the workers. Consequently young Lula lost the little finger of his left hand. Lula, whose older brother was a CP'er, became a union activist in the early 1970's. In 1972, he won election to the Metalworker's Union directory board of Sao Bernando. Three years later, he became president of the union. He won with 92 percent of the vote from the 140,000 members. In the late 1970's, a wave of labor militancy swept Brazil under the impact of IMF-imposed austerity. Lula's union struck the Saab-Scania truck company in May of 1978. It was the first large-scale strike in a decade. Lula spoke to a strike assembly for the first time there. On day one of the strike, workers showed up but refused to operate their machines. The struggle spread to other multinational automobile companies. At the end of the second week, some 80,000 workers were on a sit-down strike. Their strength caught the government by surprise and it could not mobilize the army in time. The strikers won a 24.5 pay increase. This was the background of the formation of the Workers Party. A founding convention on February 10, 1980 launched the party. Lula addressed the 750 attendees, "It's time to finish with the ideological rustiness of those who sit at home reading Marx and Lenin. It's time to move from theory to practice. The Workers Party is not the result of any theory but the result of twenty-four hours of practice." At the Seventh National Conference of the Workers Party in May 1990, the party defended socialism without qualifications. The collapse of bureaucratic socialism throughout the Soviet bloc inspired the document appropriately called "Our Socialism". The party upheld democratic socialism everywhere. The document said, "We denounce the premeditated assassination of hundreds of rural workers in Brazil and the crimes against humanity committed in Bucharest or in Tiananmen Square with the same indignation. Socialism, for the PT, will either be radically or it will not be socialism." In section seven of the document, the Workers Party explained its conception of how to build a revolutionary party. "We wanted to avoid both ideological abstraction, the elitist offense of the traditional Brazilian left, and the frazzled pragmatism of so many other parties. A purely ideological profundity at the summit would serve no purpose unless it corresponded to the real political culture of our party and social rank-and-file. Besides, the leadership also lacked experience that only the patient, continuous, democratic mass struggle could provide." Compare this with James P. Cannon's declaration that his minuscule Trotskyist faction was the "vanguard of the vanguard" in 1930. The Workers Party leadership had already led mass strikes against the bosses, broad struggles for democratic liberties and peasant movements, including the one that took the life of Chico Mendoza, a party member. Yet it says that it lacked experience. This type of modesty coming from forces obviously so capable of leading millions in struggle is truly inspiring. Just three months earlier, in January 1990, Joe Slovo, a leader of the South African Communist Party took a look at socialism's future. Did it have a future after the collapse of Soviet-style communism? He, like the Workers Party, came down strongly in defense of both democracy and socialism. He thinks these issues through in "Has Socialism Failed". Slovo was a Lithuanian Jew by origin and led the African National Congress guerrilla army "Spear of the People". Slovo died of cancer shortly before Mandela's historic election victory. The SACP had also gone through a profound reevaluation of the whole question of "vanguard" politics and had reached conclusions similar to the Brazilian Workers Party. In a section entitled "The Party as a Vanguard and Inner- Party Democracy", Slovo put forward a set of ideas that are refreshingly non-sectarian. "We have always believed (and we continue to do so) that it is indispensable for the working class to have an independent political instrument which safeguards its role in the democratic revolution and which leads it towards an eventual classless society. But such leadership must be won rather than imposed. Our claim to represent the historic aspirations of the workers does not give us an absolute right to lead them or to exercise control over society as a whole in their name. Our new programme asserts that a communist party does not earn the title of vanguard merely by proclaiming it. Nor does its claim to be the upholder of Marxism give it a monopoly of political wisdom or a natural right to exclusive control of the struggle. We can only earn our place as a vanguard force by superior efforts of leadership and devotion to the cause of liberation and socialism. And we can only win adherence to our ideology by demonstrating its superiority as a theoretical guide to revolutionary practice. The approach to the vanguard concept has not, as we know, always been adhered to in world revolutionary practice and in an earlier period we too were infected by the distortion. But, in our case, the shift which has taken place in our conception of 'vanguard' is by no means a post-Gorbachev phenomenon. The wording on this question in our new programme is taken almost verbatim from our Central Committee's 1970 report on organization." SACP members at this point were central leaders of the African National Congress, a liberation movement that had won the allegiance of black South Africans. The SACP in its own right was popular among the masses. Afrikaner government agents assassinated Chris Hani, another leader of "Spear of the People". Hani was also a member of the CP and popular among the most oppressed of the South African black population. This mass party that had led a liberation struggle to victory and which had a massive working-class base was still modest enough to declare that it was not yet a vanguard. What an interesting phenomenon. The larger a revolutionary party is and the broader its influence, the less need it has to blow its own horn. Contrast this with the bombastic self-aggrandizement of the dozens of tiny Maoist and Trotskyist groups in the United States and Europe. Louis Proyect --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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