Date: Wed, 3 Apr 1996 10:24:44 +0200
Subject: Responsibility for slaughter in Indonesia


We've been here before (on M1):

>Ken Howard:
>
>>The debacles of the PKI in Indonesia,the CCP in Phillipines, the
>>Naxalites in India, all who followed the "peoples war line" to the
>>exclusion of mass work led to the needless slaughter of hundreds of
>>thousands if not millions of people.
>
>Rahul:
>
>I'm sure you don't mean it this way, but this sounds like an article I once
>read in the Wall Street Journal which somehow implied without saying it
>that it was the PKI in Indonesia who slaughtered people. Suharto,
>Marcos-Aquino, and Indira Gandhi, and the states they represent, bear the
>primary responsibility for the "needless slaughter," correct?

The dialectical position is that the actual slaughter (the positive side of
the dialectical event, so to speak) was carried out by the reactionary
states, whereas the enabling of the slaughter was the responsibility of the
treacherous leadership of the working class provided by Mao and his
fellow-Stalinists (the negative aspect). It was the same kind of thing in
Germany in the thirties with the rise of Nazism. Without the dereliction of
the Stalinist Comintern (still riding on the revolutionary reputation of
October, whereas the Social Democrats had no such revolutionary
pretensions), the Nazis would never have been in a position to butcher the
class organizations. This leads me to place the *primary* responsibility
with the treacherous class leadership.

As I wrote earlier:

>It is this perspective of active responsibility for organizing and leading
>the working class to removing capitalism and initiating socialism that led
>the founders of the IV International to place the following declaration -
>as a fanfare no one could miss - at the very start of the Transitional
>Programme:
>
>        The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a
>        historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat.
>
>The victory of October was the responsibility of the Bolshevik party under
>the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky. What would a defeat have been? The
>responsibility shifts to Kerensky all of a sudden? No, a defeat in October
>would have been honourable, of course, but one where the responsibility of
>the revolutionary leadership, just as in the case of the Paris Commune,
>would have had to be analysed by Marxists to discover its historical and
>political lessons for the revolutionary party.


Cheers,

Hugh




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