File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9801, message 416


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



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