Zizek is NOT the vanguard in Egypt

Typical of liberal intellectuals, Zizek thinks that the great historic events such as the revolution in Egypt are cultural events, sparked by great ideas, in particular the ones that he himself propagates, or that other historic figures embody in their exceptional capacity to 'seize the time' and lead the masses to liberation.

This is a variation on the petty bourgeois infatuation with great leaders sucking up the will of the masses and projecting it like a halo. But great historical events like revolutions are not the acts of superior individuals, reducing the masses to mere amplifiers. Great historical events are enactments of the masses mobilised behind great ideas, yes, but ideas that express their urgently felt needs such as liberty, equality, fraternity, the call signs of the French Revolution, or land, bread and peace the famous rallying cries of the Russian Revolution in 1917.

But the call signs of the bourgeoisie are far from universal. Liberty, equality, fraternity, became the property of the bourgeoisie and was denied to all others. Napoleon notoriously reversed his emancipation of the Haitian slaves. The material conditions for the realisation of these ideas do not exist in capitalist society. One class exploits another and so renders it unfree. So while liberal intellectuals see themselves are the carriers of these noble principles they cannot change the material conditions sufficient to realise them.

The Bolsheviks succeeded in revolutionising these social conditions by overthrowing both the Tsarist aristocracy and the weak bourgeosie that were barriers to change, and making a socialist revolution. For the first time in history the promise of the French Revolution was fulfilled universally, if briefly, in the Soviet Union. But this did not happen as Zizek thinks because the genius Lenin was able to momentarily substitute for the working class and 'seize the time'.

Lenin was not an isolated intellectual but a leader of a revolutionary Marxist party that built its program for Russia on the lessons of all previous victories and defeats of the working class right back to the Paris Commune of 1871. The ideas were drawn from those lessons, but they were not capable of magically transforming the material reality. They could only operate in conditions where the working class could actively intervene to transform the social relations.

These conditions arose out of the crisis of capitalism during the First World War, and the suffering of the masses of Russia at war with Germany. The only class that could rescue the universal promise of the French Revolution and make this real for all, was the starving working class. Because it was workers who produced the main wealth, its alone was the universal class with the capacity to lead the poor peasant producers, to fulfill the bourgeois revolution as a socialist revolution that would open the way to a classless society.

In Egypt, the realisation of the principles of the French revolution - Liberty, Equality, Fraternity - cannot be won unless the working class driven by the need for Liberty, Bread and Land, becomes conscious of its role as the universal class and leads a popular revolution that takes power and socialises capitalist property. For this to happen, the working class has to grasp its historic mission and overthrow not only both US imperialism and its Israel outpost, but also the Egyptian bourgeoisie. It does not need 'great men' or 'great women' who stand above the crowd acting out its 'will', it needs to form councils and militias united in a democratic commune, and elect leaders with the task of taking the revolution to victory, in the same way that the Bolsheviks were elected by the majority of the workers to lead the Russian revolution to victory.

South Africa: Prepare for an indefinite General Strike!

Prepare for Power!

We reprint the call of the South African WIVL to prepare for an indefinite general strike in South Africa. We have major differences with the WIVLs politics and its ultra-left objectivist perspectives, in particular its syndicalism which does not tell South African workers that a general strike is a political strike that must take state power or suffer defeat. For this reason it is not enough to talk about the need for workers power in the abstract. A call for a general strike must be accompanied by a call for the formation of national strike committees and defence committees such as the WIVL makes. But the purpose of these workers organs arising out of a general strike must be spelt out. It is to take state power and replace the capitalist regime with a workers and poor farmers government. The general strike does not take power by some objective, automatic process. Without the intervention of a revolutionary party and a program for a revolutionary seizure of power, the general strike will be defeated and the counter-revolution imposed on the masses. Preparation for a general strike must be also be the preparation for power! With this important proviso we endorse its call for the preparation for a general strike and for workers occupations.
 

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The Imperialist attack on the public sector strike is an attack on the whole working class 

The state does not want to move from its 7% wage offer because it is spearheading the general attack by the imperialists to lower all the wages of the workers; the wage settlement in the public sector will set a precedent for the entire working class. The imperialists, who are the ones that really control the economy (the mines, the banks, motor sector companies, the food monopolies, etc), want to lower the wages and conditions of the entire working class.  Last year, when Zuma unilaterally declared that public sector wage increase this year would be 7%, not a single SACP or Cosatu leader raised any objection; in other words, they agreed with this sentiment. 

All over the world, the trade union and Stalinist leaders have led the masses into defeat: In Greece, they have had 8 general stayaways this year alone, but the KKE, the Greek Communist Party and the union leaders refuse to remove the government that has handed over the tax income from import and export and the state lottery, directly into the hands of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase; in Spain, France, Germany, the USA, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, etc the union leaders have allowed millions of workers to be dismissed and have allowed, despite the willingness of the masses to fight, wages and conditions of workers to be cut. We have a chance to change the pattern of defeats of the working class; already there are trends in the working class around the world, turning to open resistance, building their own fighting organizations, going over the heads of the traditional leaderships, breaking with the bourgeois parties and taking the revolutionary road. 

The industrial workers in Bolivia are demanding that their union federation break from supporting the Bolivarian bourgeois government of Morales, that their union leadership be expelled and that the path be taken of class resistance against the government; the working class in Kyrgyzstan organized themselves, disarmed the police and overran the government building; the workers and small peasants of Madagascar expelled the US puppet Ravalomanana and the army came over to the side of the working class, kicking out their generals and openly claiming that they were with the masses; the metal workers of Tonghua and Linzhou occupied their factory and the main highways, stopping the planned retrenchment of 20 000 of the 25 000 workers in a privatization exercise by the Chinese government.

The ANC-SACP government is an agent of imperialism

The  ANC-SACP government has committed to spend over 4 years, R320bn, just in interest payments, to the international banks, for the electricity scam; in addition to this the international banks and their agents will gain R1 trillion (R1000 bn) from the scam electricity ‘build’ scheme. The first payment from any state revenue is handed by the ANC-SACP government, to the international banks (the imperialists); one of the main imperialist gangsters, that has bankrupted Greece through high rates of interest, JP Morgan Chase, is based within the office of Eskom to oversee the loans. Money that could and should have gone to hospitals for free and adequate health care, for free, liberatory education, for adequate housing, for a living wage for the public sector employees, is going into the coffers of the international gangsters, the imperialists. It is a lie to say that the increase of 1.6% to pay 8,6% will mean less employees, less services; the state has long been cutting down on teachers, health expenses, on housing- all they are doing is continuing the trend of being an absolute servant of imperialism, at the expense of hunger, death and starvation of the masses. The money for the increase is a tiny fraction of what imperialism gets every year; besides the Eskom scam, the imperialists, like Anglo American, Old Mutual, Liberty Life, Rembrandt, Sanlam, repatriate over R200 bn per annum to the imperialist centres; it has been the conscious policy of the state to increase the tax burden of the working class and the lower middle class and decrease the taxes of the rich, the capitalists and the upper middle class.

The world capitalist economy is in stagnation; the lack of productive growth, overall, means that the capitalists increasingly cut workers benefits and conditions, to increase their levels of profit; the imperialists increasingly turn to speculation in food, energy, housing prices, to artificially drive up prices and thereby increase profits. The ANC-SACP and Cosatu leaders are all working together with the imperialists to put the burden of the capitalist crisis onto the backs of the working class. The Cosatu leaders have failed to carry out the workers’ mandate for a general strike against the high price of electricity. The ANC-SACP leader Gwede Mantashe has promised to turn the battle into a defeat like the British miners strike of the 1980’s. The recent SACP CEC meeting of 27-29 Aug 2010 was already a meeting of the government (a significant part of cabinet) and Cosatu leaders. For the first time, 13 days into the strike, the SACP has verbally come out in ‘support’ of the strike, hardly a vanguard role.

Turn Thursday 2^nd September into the start of an indefinite general strike

The municipal workers are already taking solidarity action, region by region; the mine workers, chemical, energy, paper, and now the commercial and catering workers have all indicated they will come out on Thursday 2^nd September, on a solidarity strike; Gauteng and Eastern Cape are poised to come out on regional strikes as well; workers have forced the Cosatu CEC to make the unprecedented call for all sectors to come out on solidarity strikes on the 2^nd September; such notice will lay the basis for the start of an indefinite general strike. However, the focus of the Cosatu and SACP leaders are on negotiations with the government, with the SACP spearheading the betrayal of the strike. The SACP does not come out in support of solidarity strikes; they do not even condemn the brutality of the police against strikers; the pictures of male policemen on top of a female Nehawu striker leaves them cold; we will expose below just how the SACP plans to betray the strike.

Steps to take to ensure that there is a total shutdown on Thursday 2^nd September:

1. Do not trust the Cosatu and SACP leaders; any proposed settlement must be discussed in mass meetings of strikers;
2. Depend on your own strike structures; this means setting up strike committees at every workplace, in the towns and cities, irrespective of union affiliation, or whether the workplace is unionized or not, including workers that are unionized and workers that are not unionized; In very industrial area or street where workplaces are situated, such strike committees need to be set up; strike committees should be set up in every working class area, uniting employed workers with the unemployed, local and immigrant workers; in the areas we stay, soldiers should form part of the strike committees; at area and regional and national level we should ensure that delegates of employed, unemployed, students, soldiers, immigrant workers all join together in our common strike committees to give direction to the strike of 2^nd September and to prepare to take the strike beyond Thursday, indefinitely. There should be regular mass meetings of strikers so that delegates can be subject to instant recall. At all schools we need to call for urgent joint parent teacher student meetings to give support to the strike of 2^nd September and beyond, and to take over the schools and to run education programmes on imperialism, how it functions and how the state acts as its agent.
3. In particular we call on workers in CEPPWAWU, Giwusa, Ocgawu to form a united front to take over the entire petroleum sector, including Sasol; we call on all the mineworkers to form a united front to take over all the mines; we call on all workers in the commercial and catering sector to form an united front to take over all the supermarkets; we call for all transport workers to take over their transport and provide it for free to the strikers to move about
4. Workers should ensure that the action of Thursday 2^nd September is of the form of an occupation of the workplaces, not a stayaway. Stayaways are part of the tradition of the SACP and designed to protect the capitalists from workers taking over the factories and to turn workers militancy merely into a pressure tool so that the system of exploitation is not challenged and the way opened for the ANC-SACP to take the lead of a negotiated sellout that incorporates the leadership into the capitalist apparatus while the masses remain in chains.
5. Due to actions of the state in the strike with its harsh, fascistic crackdown on strikers, preparation for the strike of Thursday 2^nd September must include workers right to form self-defence committees, supported by the soldiers. We call on the soldiers to take up their place alongside the workers, with the same call as the soldiers of Madagascar: “We are with the masses, we are the people, we support their demands”.
6. We call for all strikers to hold regional summits and a national summit of delegates of workers, unemployed, students, soldiers, immigrants to plan and direct the unfolding general strike. We should invite delegates from workers and poor peasants from Zimbabwe, Madagascar, Swaziland, Lesotho to participate in the regional and national worker summits. We call to invite worker delegates from the entire Southern African region, plundered daily by (mainly) French and US-UK imperialism.

 Proposed demands for the general strike:

1. 8.6% increase, R1000 housing allowance; equalization of medical aid benefits;
2. limit the salaries of managers. MP’s and government ministers to that of an average skilled worker;
3. the right of instant recall of any representative, be they councilor, MP, Minister
4. equal pay for equal work (including immigrant workers)
5. share all the work among all who can work, without loss of pay;
6. wages should increase when prices increase;
7. Expropriate all imperialist assets, the mines and banks, without compensation, place them under workers control;
8. Expropriate the entire food sector, from the farms, to the food manufacturers to the giant retailers, without compensation, and place them under workers control;
9. expropriate the private health care sector, without compensation, place under workers control; this will open the doors to free quality health care for all;
10. renationalize, without compensation, all sectors that have been privatized, including the coal, iron ore and steel sectors;
11. Down with the brutal, antiworker regimes of Swaziland and Lesotho; we call on all workers in Zimbabwe, in Swaziland and Lesotho to join in the general strike; for the setting up of strike committees in Zimbabwe, Swaziland and Lesotho, which are nothing but slave camps for imperialism; the very same imperialism that keeps the working class in South Africa in chains; Down with the anti-worker regimes across Africa.

For a general strike, not a stayaway; beware of a sellout by the SACP and Cosatu leaders

At the heart of the call for stayaways is the Stalinist notion of a 2-stage revolution- fighting for democracy first (a period of capitalism) and then at some distant future to begin the fight for workers to take power; in other words, the first stage involves putting into power a capitalist government, that opens up a period of capitalism, apparently extending (deepening) the democratic demands, and at some undefined moment the workers fight to take power; in other words workers should not take power now but depend on the black capitalists of the ANC to drive the process of a ‘developmental’ state; that is, the means of production (mines, banks, farms) should remain in the hands of the imperialists, like Anglo American and a few shares handed out to the black bourgeoisie as their junior partners; the bottom line is that we are asked by the SACP to put the struggle for democratic demands into the hands of the black middle and capitalist class of the ANC. Why the SACP calls stayaways is that they do not want the working class to take over the factories and mines as we still, according to them, need a period of capitalism. They use workers as pressure tools to beg from imperialism to allow them to be the new managers to control the working class.

Why the SACP promotes stayaways is to atomise and isolate the strikers so that it is easier for the leadership to sellout the struggle; a stayaway opens workers to victimization as they are now isolated individuals instead of being a united mass; a stayway demobilizes that masses instead of posing a united stance against the capitalists; a stayaway opens the door for scab labour to be used by the bosses; a strike is a contest for power- a strike/occupation would confront the bosses with a united mass at each workplace- the question of the who the real power is is placed on the agenda- ie the power of the workers who produce the wealth, or the parasitic capitalists who rule through the brute force of state power; if workers stay at home it gives the bosses strength; they have the capacity to wait out the strike. 

A stayaway is a self-imposed lockout, a pacifist tactic, always tipping the struggle ultimately in the favour of the capitalists and therefore the imperialists. A general strike/occupation immediately poses the question of strike and factory committees; from here grows the basis for workers power. That is why the SACP so violently opposes real strikes and at best will only support stayaways to tire out the masses and then reach a settlement that keeps the working class in various levels of slavery.

Has the past 16 years provided houses for all? The ANC-SACP have maintained the level of homelessness that has allowed the banks to push up house prices by the highest percentage in the world (about 400% over the past 5 years). They do not support mass action to fight the electricity price increase but support only ‘negotiation’- see where that has left us? As a result of the SACP the banks have increased their customers by over 2 million and they fleece us with high bank fees every month.

In the current public sector strike they blame the strikers for abandoning patients; but they forget that the years of collapse and privatization of the public health system has abandoned patients every day; the private hospitals, always half empty, abandon patients every day because they do not have the money; the private hospitals are making a huge profit as strike-breakers but the SACP are silent on this; instead they now want the National Health Insurance (NHI) to become part of the strike settlement.  

This must be opposed at all costs. The NHI will tax workers a further 10% (?) and workers may be able to go to private clinics; after the few hours or perhaps a day or so, when the credit runs out, the patient will be abandoned; the private clinics will just hike their fees like they always do, and rake in billions extra profits; under the guise of  ‘health for all’, it will really be further privatization of health care; the SACP are acting in the service of the imperialist banks that own the private hospital groups. A similar scheme in the USA has excluded 36 million workers from health care benefits but the monopolies have entrenched their control over health. 

The SACP does not condemn the police brutality; under such conditions it can only mean that they support the actions of the state against the strikers and that they support the strike-breaking actions of the state in the schools and hospitals.The main concern of the SACP is the capitalist notion of tying the increase to ‘enhanced productivity. 

What is even more damning is that the SACP favours a ‘moratorium’ on the salary levels in the upper levels of government; in other words, the SACP supports the current R1,6 million packages that the ministers get; this is nothing but the upper layer of the SACP clinging to their capitalist privileges and BMW’s. 

The SACP talks about a ‘People’s bank’ but this is just a vague phrase to disguise the reality: the capitalist banks will be left untouched; the construction companies, the cement, the brick manufacturers, the best land, are all in the hands of the imperialists; all housing is really hostage to the imperialist banks; this is just another phrase to allow another section of the ANC-SACP to become instant millionaires over the backs of the masses. Any serious effort at housing would nationalize the construction and housing sector as well as the banks.

In the most recent strikes: in the municipal strikes the ANC could not even equalize all the wages of the workers in this sector- workers had to strike against the government to force this basic demand- which has not been achieved; in the transport strike, the ANC opposed the equalization of maternity benefits of managers and workers- this demand has not been achieved; in the current strike, the ANC cannot even grant a minimal increase of 8.6% nor even equalize the medical aid benefits. In all cases the might of the police has been used to bash the strikers.

In short, the ANC-SACP has become the instrument of holding back the struggle for even the most basic democratic demands of the masses. At the same time, the only reliable force to drive these basic demands is the working class! That is why the centre of the indefinite general strike has to be the achievement of the basic democratic demands which can only be accomplished by the working class in power- no other class will stand up for this.

• Break with the pacifism of the SACP and Cosatu leaders!   
• Break with the bourgeoisie! Break with the ANC-SACP! 
• Beware of the CDL (Conference of the Democratic left) which is made up of the SACP leaders who try to build a false ‘anti-capitalist’ party as a new means of controlling the masses for imperialism! Forward to working class power!   
• Forward to an internationalist, revolutionary working class party! 
• Forward to an organizing committee for the refounding of the Fourth International! Forward to the federation of Socialist, Workers states of Southern Africa!

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Shaheed Mahomed,Workers International Vanguard League. South African section of
International Leninist Trotskyist Fraction.
ph 0822020617, ph [27] 21 4476777, fax 0865486048
workersinternational@gmail.com  web www.workersinternational.org.za

Affiliated to the International Leninist Trotskyist Fraction integrated by
Liga Trotskista Internacionalista , (LTI) de Bolivia
Fraccion Trotskista , (FT) de Brasil
Partido Obrero Internactionaista- CI (POI-CI) , de Chile
Liga Obrera Internacionalista- CI (LOI-CI) Argentina
Liga Trotskista Internacionalista- (LTI)Peru
Workers International Vanguard League (WIVL) South Africa
Internationalist Revolutionary League-FI Zimbabwe

Draft Balance Sheet on CWGs relations with the LOICI 2002-2010

Communist Workers' Group trajectory

The CWG was formed in 1995 after we split from the League for a Revolutionary Communist International (LRCI) over that tendency refusing to condemn the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1994. We joined the LRCI as the Communist Left in 1992, despite our differences over political economy and the restoration of capitalism, in the belief that the LRCI was moving left in the 1980s. In 1994 we formed a minority faction in the LRCI around the tendency of the leadership to adapt to British social imperialism. We argued that the LRCI had formed a popular front with Yeltsin on the basis that bourgeois democracy was more progressive than the Stalinist bureaucratic regime. This was clearly an adaptation to British social imperialism. This was confirmed with the LRCI backed the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1994. We were bureaucratically expelled from the LRCI in 1995 (labelled a secret Proletarian Faction), and together with the Latin American sections of the LRCI, Workers’ Power Bolivia (POB) and Workers Power Peru (POP), formed the Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International (LCMRCI or CEMICOR in Spanish).

In the split document of the Proletarian Faction we traced the left centrist move of the LRCI in the late 1980s and its right centrist swing in response to capitalist restoration to the absence of the Fourth International as a revolutionary organisation. The LRCI began as a split from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1975 and its leadership was always centred on London in Workers’ Power (Britain). They never completely broke from its ‘3rd camp’ state capitalist position on the USSR. Bourgeois democracy was always more progressive than the Stalinist regimes, so bourgeois democracy was the route to the defence of workers property. The basic Cliffite position reflected the failure of the Fourth International under Trotsky to survive WW2 as a healthy international party. In the imperialist countries it adapted to imperialism (what we call imperio-centrism) and in the semi-colonial and colonial world it adapted to bourgeois nationalism (national Trotskyism). In the Imperialist countries the Trotskyists adapted to their respective imperialists and, after a brief period of disorientation during which the new workers states and onset of the post-war boom were assimilated, all then settled for Stalinism and democratic imperialism as objectively progressive forces to be tailed by international Trotskyism.

What made this liquidationist counter-revolution permanent after WW 2 was the imperio-centrist subordination of the colonial and semi-colonial sections in any attempt to re-found the collapsed International. Pushed from the left by the imperio-centrist Trotskyist sections, Stalinist and democratic imperialist forces would pressure imperialism to the left without any need for the independent action of semi-colonial Trotskyists. This isolated the Trotskyist sections in the colonial and semi-colonial countries where they oscillated between making popular fronts with the national bourgeoisies with illusions in democratic imperialism, and forming adventurist armed militias in isolation of the working class. When the nationalist militia overthrew Batista in 1959, the refusal of the US to deal with the insurrectionists forced them into the arms of the Soviet Union. This confirmed the liquidationist posture of post-war Trotskyism in tailing democratic imperialism and Stalinism. 

The CWG in 1995 concluded that any regroupment of healthy Trotskyist forces to build a new, Fifth International would have to take place initially in the semi-colonies, and in particular since the CEMICOR was based in Latin America, in the fight to overcome and defeat Latin American ‘national Trotskyism’.

Forming the Collective in 2002

Despite its existence as a propaganda fraction internationally that continued to take positions on all the major struggles and signed joint statements with other tendencies, the CEMICOR did not advance the struggle in Peru or Bolivia on the ground. Nevertheless we continued to recognise the potential of Latin American Trotskyism to break from national Trotskyism against the history of betrayals and liquidations by imperio-centrist Trotskyism that go back to WW2 and the role of the SWP (US) in Latin America and the Pabloites in Europe.

Thus we recognised the deficiencies of Morenoism were the product of the liquidation of the 4th International which led to attempts by Moreno to latch onto a number of equally degenerate imperio-centrist currents. Before we formed the Collective, the most recent lash up was the attempt by the imperio-centrist LRCI to fuse with the national Trotskyist PTS (Socialist Workers Party– a 1988 split from the Moreno MAS) following the loss of its Latin American sections, POB and POP who came with the CWG, to form the CEMICOR. CEMICOR's critique of the LRCI’s attempt at fusion with the PTS condemned this as a 'rotten bloc' but also recognised that despite its failure to break completely with Morenoism, the PTS was to the left of the LRCI.

The PTS broke with Moreno in 1988 on the question of the political revolution in Eastern Europe. Yet having rejected the illusion that democratic imperialism would save the workers states from Stalinism (the MAS position when it supported Solidarity in Poland), the PTS retained its illusions in a non-existent political revolution as an objective process. It was over this objectivist conception of the political revolution that the Trotskyist Workers Fraction (FPT) formed in the PTS and got expelled in 1998 to form the LOI-CI (Workers International League, Fourth International). The PTS like the LRCI responded to the historic defeat of restoration in East Europe and the USSR by blaming the workers – the so-called ‘crisis of subjectivity’ (for the LRCI the ‘reformist resetting) – while the FPT argued that a political revolution began but was defeated by the Stalinists in the absence of a revolutionary Fourth International. The FPT/LOI-CI blamed the ‘Menshevik centrists’ for betraying the political revolution and this ultimately led towards a re-assessment of the Fourth as ‘reformist’ for the whole post-war period. While the PTS retreated into tactical alliances with other splinters of Morenoism and a common Menshevik program, the LOI-CI took on itself the defence of Bolshevism – revolutionary Trotskyism and the Transitional Program. (Editorial, The Events of 1989. Rudolf Klement, 2000)

Thus the LOI-CI took another step toward a complete break with Morenoism as a form of national Trotskyism. At this time the CWG was unaware of the LOI-CI’s existence. We corresponded with and signed common declarations with several Argentinean and Brazilian groups while in CEMICOR, (notably the POR, the CIOS in Argentina, and the LBI and Trotskyist Fraction in Brazil up to 1999). This activity was largely literary since neither POB nor POP were active by this time. Lucha Marxista was never a member of CEMICOR nor participated in the discussions with these other groups. By 2000 CEMICOR had ceased to function even as a website. The first time that the LOI-CI came to our attention was when we helped form Salta Solidarity a Yahoo Group in 2001 with VB who was at that time a member of LOI-CI. We then entered into correspondence with it and subsequently with the Group Bolshevik (GB) and Lucha Marxista (LM).

The Collective was formed in December 2002 largely due to the efforts of the CWG to bring the LM and the GB together with the LOI-CI. In the heat of the 2001 uprising in Argentina, the LOI-CI was leading the fight for national congresses of employed and unemployed to expose the role of the fake Trotskyists in containing the mass mobilisations of the piqueteros. The members of the Collective had sufficient confidence in the LOI-CI’s determination to break completely from Morenoist zigzags between opportunism and ultra-leftism that they signed a document of 21 points. This confidence was justified as the interventions of the LOI-CI led to frequent threats of violence including firearms by the fake Trotskyist thugs. When a CWG comrade first visited Buenos Aires in December 2002, he was taken directly to the factory occupation at Brukman which was surrounded by the militant vanguard and all the Argentinean left. The LOI-CI fought to win a fraction in that factory in order to challenge the fake Trotskyist attempts to isolate and limit these struggles to legal cooperatives. To this day, the LOI-CI has a fraction in that and in many more ‘recovered’ and militant workplaces, including Zanon the poster child of the fake Trotskyists. Its main demand today remains that of a national congress of all the workers in struggle to unite and coordinate the militant vanguard of employed and unemployed. This program neither ignores the unions nor fetishizes them. It treats the unions as united fronts in which the revolutionary party has to build its cells on the basis of its program.

The main task of the Collective was to regroup healthy Trotskyist elements into a fraction to fight for an international conference on the road to building a new international. It was held that were possible programmatic differences could best be resolved by debate and common practice. This was a method of party building taken over from the PTS and we agreed with it. Unlike the LRCI it did not put up its program as an ultimatum or self-proclaim itself as the only revolutionary force on the planet. After 2002 there were numerous attempts at regroupment with other tendencies to build a new international party with an international centre. In 2003 the POB joined the Collective. Clearly, the LOI-CI was prepared to debate and work with the remnants of the CEMICOR tendency who had broken with Lora in 1985, and with the Group Bolshevik (GB) who had broken with Lambert.

Although a progressive break from the PTS, the LOICI was not yet a complete break with Moreno. It still held to the position that Moreno was in continuity with the healthy Fourth as against the Pabloites. The CWG using Jose Villa’s analysis was able to prove that Moreno had collaborated in the betrayal of the 1952 Bolivian revolution. The process of convincing the comrades took four years, from 2002 to 2006. As part of this critique of Moreno’s position on the popular front in Bolivia in 1952, the LOI-CI then went back to reconsider the legacy of Morenoism and drew the conclusion that both the International Committee (to be formed in 1953) and the International Secretariat (IS) were equally degenerate currents in 1952. To explain this it followed the trail back to the history of the 4th from its founding until after WW2. It arrived at the position that the 4th was liquidated during WW2 with the demise of its international centre. This was a big leap in the LOI-CI program as it clearly saw that the Fourth International as an organisation did not survive the collapse of a centralised leadership that enabled it to coordinate the theory and practice of a revolutionary international. Its new position for the re-founding of the 4th International on the basis of the 1938 Program was now much closer to the CWG 5thist position. In that way the LOI-CI was rejecting any revolutionary organisational continuity between Morenoism and Trotsky.

The 2004 Split in the Collective

Within a year tensions emerged in the Collective and it split in April 2004. In 2006 we wrote:

The Collective did not go beyond a fraternal federation and despite the high level of programmatic agreement, the BT [actually Group Bolshevik], LM and POB resented the influence of the LOI in the Collective and accused it of using its funds to create an Argentinean ‘mother’ party and sending its cadres to infiltrate their organisations. These resentments developed into open hostilities and personal attacks on the LOI leadership as Argentinean chauvinist and domineering. In April 2004 these tensions came to a head and a split occurred. Would a greater degree of democratic centralism have averted the split, or did the split represent an underlying difference over method and program? CWG thinks that the two are necessarily related. LM, BT [i.e. GB] and Germinal, and POP [actually POB], read the LOIs drive to regroupment as predatory and sought defence in their national organisations – in the case of BT [i.e. GB] its residual Franco imperio-centrism, and LM and POB their respective national Trotskyisms. These organisations had failed the test of revolutionary regroupment by means of a dynamic struggle against national chauvinism in both its imperialist and semi-colonial forms. They could not break with the root cause of the degeneration of post-war Trotskyism and formed a propaganda bloc, the Permanent Revolution Collective.

The 2004 split with GB/LM/POB was unnecessary with faults on both sides. The LM leadership was at fault to discipline a comrade for his programmatic differences. The LOICI was at fault in reacting so violently using the terms Stalinism and Polpotism rather than resolve the issue by fraternal methods. The basic principle at stake was the right within the Collective of a LM member to agree to the LOICI program. The LM leadership had the duty to allow the comrade to argue his positions in the Collective. The LOI-CI leadership had a duty to insist that this political difference be resolved within the Collective. Despite attempts by the CWG to resolve the dispute in this way the national Trotskyist habits on all sides led to a split.

As we have noted the comrades who formed the LOI-CI recognised the need to overcome the Morenoist history of national Trotskyism. National Trotskyism in a semi-colony is not the same as national Trotskyism in an imperialist country. In imperialist countries national Trotskyism results from the struggle of one or other imperialist power to liquidate Trotskyism into the social-chauvinist labour aristocracy and labour bureaucracy. We call this ‘imperio-centrism’ to distinguish it from national Trotskyism in the semi-colonies. In the semi-colonial countries national Trotskyism results from isolation from the global working class, especially in the imperialist countries, and the pressure within an oppressed nation is for revolutionaries to join the ‘patriotic bloc’ of classes, or its opposite, ultraleft adventurism or abstentionism, often zigzagging between both. Chauvinism here usually takes the form of the defence of the oppressed from imperialism e.g. anti-Yankee.

The split was tragic because it reflected the as yet incomplete break of both the LOI-CI and the LM and POB with national Trotskyism and national differences that overwhelmed the big leap the Collective had taken to create the conditions to overcome it. Both currents were suspicious of each other’s influence in the Collective, especially over Bolivia. This was expressed in the LM’s attempt to revive the CEMICOR in late 2003 in Bolivia excluding the LOI-CI comrade who accompanied CWG to Bolivia. This was regarded as a hostile act by the LOI-CI. Attempts by CWG to mediate on this question and over the question of RS failed as the two sides dug in. The CWG was left with the decision as to which side to take on the split. Ultimately we did so, on the basis that the LOI-CI was the only revolutionary force in the Collective that had come into existence as the result of a number of revolutionary breaks with national Trotskyism. We think this decision was principled at the time and continue to think so in the light of our experience in the years since.

Liaison Committee of 2004

After the split in the Collective in 2004, the method of the LOI-CI, and its Chilean fraternal group the POI-C (Workers International Party), supported by the CWG, was to continue regrouping by the method of forming Liaison committees for debate and common action. We did so briefly with the Argentinean POR (Revolutionary Workers Party), again under pressure from the CWG, and as a result won its Brazilian partner, the Trotskyist Fraction (FT-ex POR-Lora of Bolivia). The FT now adopted the LOI-CI position on that betrayal to break decisively with POR-Lora. We can say that Bolivia 1952 was the key to that conquest also. The LOI-CI, POI-CI, CWG and FT formed a Liaison Committee to work on other Brazilian groups notably the POM (Marxist Workers’ Party).

Thus our intervention was to fight for resolutions in support of the vanguard of the Bolivian miners against the COB (Bolivian Unions’ Confederation) betrayals, and the POR-Lora ultraleft adaption to Morales MAS, to break the rank and file from the labour bureaucracy that was behind Morales. Despite more than two years of debate and joint actions (e.g. intervention in Conlutas (unions affiliated in a “national co-ordination of struggle”) – note a left bureaucracy split from the CUT (Central Union of Workers) but serving to tie the rank and file to the left social democracy of PSOL (Party of Socialism & Liberty) we failed to win the POM but did recruit some militants to the Liaison Committee.

Leninist Trotskyist Fraction (FLT) formed in 2006

Meanwhile, the comrade who broke from the Lucha Marxista (LM), joined with the LOI-CI comrades to form a group in Bolivia around the mines and universities, and the embryo of a group in Peru. By 2006 the Liaison Committee was ready to take the next step and fuse at a higher level of democratic centralism including the LOI-CI, POI-CI, FT, and the Bolivian and Peruvian groups. This was the Leninist Trotskyist Fraction (FLT) based on a Declaration of 23 points, a call for an international congress of principled Trotskyist groups and other militant organisations, around a basic program of 23 points. We were prepared to meet and discuss with any groups that agreed with all or some of these points. Again, the program is not an ultimatum for discussion and joint action towards regroupment. 

In 2008 we made several decisive 'offensives' to win over other groups. We had been in communication with the Japan Revolutionary Communist League -Revolutionary Marxist Faction (JRCL-RMF) of Japan since 2002 mainly sending letters of greeting to their yearly Antiwar Congress. By the end of 2008 we had exchanged a number of mutually critical letters in which they characterised us as ‘degenerate Trotskyists’ and we them as idealists and pacifists. For the moment the JRCL-RMF was out of the picture. Around the end of 2008 we made contact with Socialist Fight (SF) and arising out of its correspondence with the Workers International Vanguard League (WIVL) of South Africa. While initially informal discussion with SF was promising, the problem of their ‘socialist bi-state’ in Palestine was a major sticking point. This would later become the focus of the hysterical letters from the SCI to SF when it learned that SF was also talking to GB. When the SCI broke off any formal discussion with the SF, no members of the FLTI were allowed to continue with formal discussion.

On the related question of the FLT’s position on Palestine, it is clear that the 23 point document does not state that the Zionist state is also fascist. This is the position of the FLT majority, not the CWG. Like the tactics around social democracy, it was a difference within the FLT. Similarly, the agreed FLT position on Palestine self-determination is for a socialist Palestine. It is expressed as a “multi-ethnic, secular workers state with a workers and peasants’ government” within a “Middle East Federation of Socialist republics” in the 23 points which is somewhat confusing but a distinct advance on the Moreno stageist revolution in Palestine, and in CWG literature this is explained to mean a “socialist Palestine”.

Contact with the WIVL began with a discussion over Palestine at the time of the Israel attack on Gaza in 2008 and then moved on to the popular front in South Africa. The Triple Alliance is a formation of the African National Congress (ANC), a popular front party that includes bourgeois and petty bourgeois elements, along with the South African Communist Party (SACP), and the Confederation of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). The FLT was able to convince the WIVL comrades that the lessons of the popular front in Bolivia could be applied to South Africa. In the view of the FLT, after being convinced by the CWG, the WIVL was viewed as a ‘healthy’ current and moves were made towards fusion.

A senior cadre from LOI-CI visited South Africa during the elections in April to further our relationship. The WIVL entered into a pre-fusion agreement based on some of the 23 points and then after further discussion fused with the FLT at the July 2009 Congress to form the FLTI. During the congress differences emerged over a Trotskyist program in South Africa, especially around calling for a ‘black revolution’ (a Morenoist position rejected by the WIVL) and the WIVL’s preferred designation of wage labour as ‘slave labour’. But these differences were the basis for ongoing discussion and debate and practical common actions to test the program. It also became clear that the WIVL supported the majority FLTI position on the Zionist state as ‘fascist’.

FLTI founders on China

The one question that became a source of major difference was the character of China. The background to this is important because it leads to a number of developments that led ultimately to the recent crisis in the FLTI around not only China but to a rapid degeneration in method from a healthy fraction, despite its various origins in Morenoism, Spartacism, Loraism and Healyism, into an openly right centrist organisation making huge opportunist leaps covered with ultra-left phrases. This is to say that the healthy evolution of the FLT to break with national Trotskyism in Latin America, when confronted with the problem of entering into major offensives to fuse with large political formations in South Africa and Japan, as well as with the militant HWRS (Humanist Workers for Revolutionary Socialism – United States) with a long history of struggles against degenerated Trotskyism, failed the test, went rapidly into reverse, and all the underlying weaknesses of national Trotskyism re-emerged in the SCI (International secretariat of the FLTI).

In July 2008 a comrade of the CWG wrote a blog post on China, 'Is China the New US?'  This article was reproduced in the first English issue of the International Workers Organiser. 

The article stated that China was developing a capitalist economy that was approaching that of imperialism. While it argued that China was not yet imperialism, the implication was that it was only matter of time. “China may be on the road to displacing the US but will it be as an imperialist China or a socialist China?” Interestingly, no objection to the possibility of China becoming imperialist, or that this would be a break from Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, was raised by the leadership of the FLT. There was no accompanying editorial note to disclaim the position argued in this article. In October 2008 the same comrade wrote another blog article, 'Is Russia Imperialist?' arguing that Russia could be seen as an emerging imperialist based on the application of Lenin’s theory of imperialism.

In March 2009 at the plenary with the SCI, the CWG delegate argued that Russia and China were emerging as imperialist powers on the basis of net foreign direct investment showing an export of finance capital. This position was forcefully attacked by the main LOI-CI leader, CM, as not only factually incorrect (e.g. Gazprom was controlled by the German BASF) but also theoretically impossible since it would mean the development of the forces of production in the epoch of imperialism and the emergence of new imperialist powers where there were already too many. The CWG undertook to do more work to convince the FLT that not only a new imperialism possible, but that it was already the new reality in Russia. Meanwhile the US group Humanist Workers for Revolutionary Socialism (HWRS) had arrived at the conclusion that China was already an emerging imperialist power and approached the FLT to join on the basis of principled agreement with the 23 points document.

The Founding Congress of the FLTI met in Argentina in July 2009. Apart from the small Argentinean NRI (Revolutionary Internationalist Nucleus) and some individuals who also fused at this congress like MT of Brazil, the important groups that fused on the basis of the 23 points and resolutions passed at the congress were the WIVL and HWRS. Apart from other differences that became the basis of pre-congress discussion leading up to the next congress in December, the Congress agreed to make the differences of China the basis of a public ‘theoretical’ discussion. The HWRS presented several lengthy documents in support of its position on China as an emerging imperialist power. Majority and Minority Resolutions spelling out the two positions on China were passed and published in the International Workers Organiser New Series No 1.

At that point it was agreed that there was no pressing programmatic difference since the minority held that China still had a transitional dual character as semi-colony and emerging imperialist power, so that in the event of war with the US, defence of China was probable. But it was obvious from the majority arguments that they saw the minority position as a serious deviation from Marxism and a concession to US imperialism.

Japan Adventure

Thus the FLT having spent 6 years building the fraction, and initially reluctant to approach groups in other continents, was now making a huge leap to fuse with the WIVL and HWRS and projecting itself beyond its Latin American home base into South Africa and North America. Facing a potential crisis and split over China, instead of consolidating this rapid expansion and dealing with the question of China objectively, CM of the SCI made a decision in the middle of the Congress to do a 180 degree shift in our relations to the JRCL-RMF and launch an ‘offensive’ into Asia to make the Chinese revolution hand in hand with the ‘Japanese Trotskyists’. Up to that point we agreed that the JRCL-RMF were idealists and not Leninist- Trotskyists. Now, to prove that China was not imperialist CM would show that the FLTI and the JRCL-RMF could intervene together to make the Chinese revolution. Ironically the JRCL-RMF holds China to be a great power, though it rejects Lenin’s theory of imperialism as irrelevant in today’s ‘changed circumstances’. A leading LOI-CI cadre was selected to go and the trip rapidly planned. As well as being a delegate to the anti-war assembly, they would have discussions with the ranks and the leadership of the JRCL-RMF.

This mission proved to be the one that took the FLTI from a potentially healthy regrouping of Trotskyist groups across three continents, into the realm of fantasy and messianic megalomania. The whole FLTI was now hostage to this foolish venture. The SCI was elected on the basis of the existing LOI-CI leadership, with SM of the WIVL as ‘African Secretary’ and a co-opted member of the SCI. WIVL supported the Majority position on China and the Japanese adventure. The Japanese adventure was a clear indication that CM was out of control.

Crisis of the FLTI

Then followed the SZ affair, that of the ‘bourgeois’ trade union activist SZ in the US. Around September of 2009, an HWRS comrade was talking to a long time labour activist SZ at a Bay Area rally, when the latter asked if HWRS knew of the history of the JRCL-RMF we were ‘fusing’ with, as it had "betrayed" the rail workers in the 1980s. Because the HWRS was new to the FLTI, and because the reports of the Japan trip were about the details of discussions and did not reveal any agreement to do more than exchange documents and read each other’s material, HWRS wrote to the SCI for further information. What happened then was alarming. SCI leaders wrote back condemning HWRS for talking to a bourgeois agent. In doing so, HWRS had revealed themselves to be in danger of Stalinism, i.e. using an enemy of the working class to make accusations against a revolutionary organisation. Not only did they characterise the informer as a bourgeois agent, he was a leader in the Peace and Freedom Party (PFP), which SCI characterised as an 'imperialist' party led by 'Stalinists'. If SZ had any questions about the JRCL-RMF he should demand an international moral tribunal to pass judgement. The SCI concluded that there could be no question of the FLTI questioning the JRCL-RMF as moral charge had come from a bourgeois agent.

There then followed a furious exchange about proletarian morality. The SCI said that the working class moral principle is against any bourgeois intervention in the working class. This applies equally to bourgeois agents such as Stalinists. Information from SZ cannot be used to question the political honour of a proletarian organisation. This is very convenient because anyone can be labelled a Stalinist (or bourgeois) and their political charges, right or wrong, ruled out of court. The HWRS and the CWG argued that for Trotsky moral and political questions cannot be separated. To do so avoids that fact that Stalinist (and bourgeois) morality serves class politics. The point was made forcefully that you cannot read any of the Dewey Commission without being hit over the head by this fact. Without conceding to our argument, but implicitly recognising the absurdity of its position, the SCI then claimed it has asked the JRCL-RMF to create a moral tribunal to pass judgement on its role in the 1980s privatisation of the railways in Japan. The leap into Japan had the SCI landing in a bed of hot coals with nothing but bluster and hysteria to cover its naked feet.

Already of course, the circularity of the SCI position was clear. The HWRS were being attacked as petty bourgeois academics in the Bay Area, unconscious Stalinists, and servants of Obama. By wanting to learn more about the JRCL history the HWRS was now morally on the outside of the working class and could not make any political criticisms of the SCI as supreme arbiters of proletarian morality. From that point on, the SCI began to scapegoat the HWRS, saying its fusion in the FLTI was premature, and that it was a bourgeois agent in the FLTI. Fed up with this slandering, HWRS responded with an analysis of the crisis that was breaking out in the FLTI with a critique of the method of the SCI as a subjective method reflecting its failure to complete the break with Morenoism. The recent events and attacks on the HWRS over the JRCL-RMF were to prevent the collapse of the Japanese adventure. The HWRS were attacked as Stalinists to remove them as critics of the Japanese adventure.

The CWG was involved in this as part of the minority, blocking with the HWRS on these questions. We wrote two critiques of the SCIs position on China showing that they did not see how China was lending support to the populist regimes in Latin America. First, the settlement of the Kraft fight in Argentina happened when the Maoist labour bureaucracy did a deal with the Kirchner regime enabled by a Chinese currency swap trade arrangement. We drew the LOI-CIs attention to China’s attempts to buy out Repsol RPF that would give it the dominant role in oil production in Argentina and an important source of tax revenue in funding social programs in the provinces. We pointed out that in Bolivia the comrades were deluding the miners’ vanguard if they did not explain how the Morales MAS was promising workers jobs from an industrialisation project bankrolled by China. When we criticised the Majority for claiming that the Tonghua struggle where workers killed a privatising manager was evidence of a pre-revolutionary situation in China, CWG was roundly condemned as ignoring the class struggle, suppressing information about strikes in China and India, and abandoning its revolutionary past in the FLT.

Minority Critique of SCI method

The CWG agrees with the HWRS analysis of the recent open degeneration in the FLTI leadership, in particular the SCI and SM of the WIVL as symptomatic of a method that could not meet the challenges of rapid expansion and a global crisis in which the changing role of China would force them to abandon historic schemas and dogmatic positions carried over from Morenoism. This reversion to old habits showed up at the FLTI founding congress in the call for a 'black republic' in South Africa (which the WIVL reject for obvious reasons), and in the concept of Zionism as ‘fascism’. In the end it was confirmed by the vitriolic, confused, contradictory, abusive content of the Majority’s document on China. It is a sad reflection on the limits to the fight of the LOI-CI and the WIVL to break with Morenoism facing the global crisis and the crisis of revolutionary leadership.

However, for the CWG, Morenoism is not a sufficient explanation of the crisis that blew up in the FLTI over China. It is but one expression of semi-colonial national Trotskyism. We argue that it is necessary to see that it (and the Healyite origins of the WIVL) as responses of semi-colonial national Trotskyism to imperialism and the servile pro-imperialist national bourgeoisies. As we have pointed out national Trotskyism was formed in the post-war period of the ascendancy of US imperialism as the world hegemonic power. It was the other side of the coin of ‘imperio-centrist’ Trotskyism that adapted to the chauvinism of the labour aristocracy and bureaucracies in the imperialist countries. The CWG developed the critique of imperio-centrist Trotskyism to account for the exclusion of the semi-colonial sections from the Fourth International and the betrayal of the national revolutions in Indo-China, Bolivia and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). This led to the collapse of the 4th International after the war and the isolation of national Trotskyist currents torn between ultra-leftism and opportunism. 

Historically, the labour movement in Latin America and South Africa has been mainly oppressed by US and British imperialism respectively. With the decline of British imperialism the hegemonic US remains the No 1 enemy as it is driven militarily to protect is spheres of interest from its rivals. Thus while the FLTI majority recognise that the Bolivarians, Stalinists, Castroists and fake Trotskyists try to sell imperialism as a policy that can be democratic and progressive they cannot conceive of the main imperialist enemy today being other than the US. Therefore appeals to democratic imperialism can only be to the Democrats in the US, in particular Obama, (or the EU imperialists). Once Obama is exposed as a ‘bomber’ and no different to Bush (Republicrats!) then there is an objective revolutionary situation at hand and only those who defend Obama as a democratic imperialist block the road to revolution. This is why the Majority turned on the Minority as Obama-ists.

However, what the Majority doesn’t see is that now Obama’s ‘democratic’ credentials have been exposed to the most advanced anti-imperialist workers his place is being taken by China and Hu Jintao. That is why increasingly the popular fronts of the national bourgeoisies, like the Bolivarians in Latin America, the ANC in South Africa, and ZANU-PF/MDC regime in Zimbabwe, along with other national bourgeois regimes, are turning to China to rescue them from US imperialism, painting China in the role of a progressive capitalism, or even socialism. So that rather than an all out fight against all imperialist countries, workers are being called on to put their faith in some form of ‘market socialism’ in China. The almost universal collapse of imperio-centrist Trotskyism into Menshevik cheerleaders for the Bolivarians, and under this influence, pulls behind almost all semi-colonial Trotskyism which remains dominated by degenerated currents, creates a situation in which semi-colonial Trotskyism reproduces its classic form of zigzagging between ultra-leftism and opportunism, sometimes combining both.

This means that the FLTI under its current leadership will remain trapped in a national Trotskyist method. It will be trapped in an objectivist schema of an objective/subjective struggle against US imperialism in which the FLTI acts to expose the agents of US imperialism in the workers movement as ‘stalinoid’. Yet trapped in this schema it cannot see that the working class is not listening to Obama’s siren song, but to the Bolivarian’s siren song of Chinese imperialism as a form ‘21st century socialism’. The SCI says Chavez’ 5th international is a Stalin-Laval agreement. But what the SCI overlooks is that in the original Stalin-Laval agreement, Stalin made an agreement with ‘democratic’ imperialism to fight ‘fascist’ imperialism. This is exactly how the Bolivarian/Castroist/Maoist/fake Trotskyists see it; China is the ‘democratic’ imperialism'/'progressive alternative' ranged against the US as the ‘fascist’ imperialism. The FLTI majority is in danger of being no more than the 5th wheel on Chavez' ‘5th International’. 

In sum what we are dealing with here is the crisis of Marxism, caused by the collapse and liquidation of the 4th International, expressed as the isolation and pressure on semi-colonial Trotskyism which traps it into national Trotskyism torn between the popular front and ultra-left adventurism. The LOI-CI making a break from Morenoism only got so far before being ambushed by a global crisis and the crisis of leadership. The FLTI leadership speaks of this as the race between the revolution and counter-revolution. In this race there is always the temptation to take the short cut to win over left moving forces. The risk is that in making such bold leaps in the absence of a revolutionary international, the venture comes to grief as an adventure. This is what has happened with the FLTI. There is no objective process of revolutionary subjectivity with which the FLTI only has to keep up in order to construct a new international. There are deeply ingrained non-Marxist deviations inside even the most healthy of Trotskyists which results from the liquidation of the international and the loss of dialectics. Dialectics is only possible with the healthy grounding of the international in every corner of the globe in every country and region. Without that, program becomes a frozen corpse and it can neither guide nor learn from events. The question of China has exploded this dead program and opened the road to the return to Marxism, and with it a new revolutionary international.

Overcoming the Crisis of Marxism

The revolutionary program is only as good as the revolutionary party and its Marxist method of uniting theory and practice. National Trotskyism is the reverse side of the coin of imperio-centrist Trotskyism that liquidated the 4th International. National Trotskyism is the deformed Marxism that results from the isolation of Trotskyism in semi-colonial countries. There is no way to overcome this short of building a revolutionary international that can unite theory and practice in the revolutionary program. The FLTI majority program is frozen in a dogmatic Trotskyism and Leninism and turned into an historic schema that can only disarm it in practice. It is necessary to develop Marxism as a dialectical method capable of grasping the complex concrete reality of today. The Minority has begun to do this with its analysis of the emergence of imperialism out of the special conditions of restored capitalism in the worker states. In grasping this multifaceted reality we can advance with a program that is capable of acting as a guide to practice in a world where China’s emergence opens up the prospect of inter-imperialist rivalry, wars, revolutions and counterrevolutions. In our various documents we have explained how the world situation is altered by the emergence of China as an imperialist power. The 23 points that are the basis of the FLT and the FLTI have to be recast in the light of China’s transformation. The severity of the crisis, the mechanisms for making the workers pay for the crisis, the popular front, the Bolivarian project, Palestine, Cuba, the national question, are all now refractions of the global imperialist rivalry now including China. But while such a dialectical method can be defended, unless it becomes a living Marxism embodied in the unity of theory and practice of an international party, it will necessarily degenerate. In the process of building a revolutionary international we need to be on guard against both national Trotskyism and imperio-centrism.

Forward to the revolutionary Marxist international!

FLTI Split between Majority and Minority over China

Dear Comrades,

We acknowledge receipt of the Majority reply to the Minority on China. We note that the FLTI Majority document 'In defence of Marxism' talks about the Minority not as comrades but "these people", "academic chatterboxes", "petty bourgeois servants of Obama" etc. We think that all this crude abusive language is defensive on your part because you cannot convince readers by your arguments that China is a semi-colony owned by Wall St. so you must label us revisionist enemies of the working class.

But that means you must slander us since you cannot prove we are Obamaists from our politics let alone our program. On the contrary the SCI in supporting the PFP to oppose the picket of Nancy Pelosi has chosen to side with Usec, PFP and Obama rather than the Minority. You cannot claim ignorance since the reactionary, dogmatic and arrogant position you took on this picket was explained to you several times.

The FLTI majority is no longer democratic centralist international but bureaucratic centralist. The bureaucratic nature of the SCI was demonstrated a number of times. For example, The SCI never convened a meetings of the IEC, which should happen at least once between Congresses. In addition to that, the SCI kept on changing its own composition, which is a violation of basic democracy in a democratic centralist international. The IEC is the highest body in between Congresses and in a healthy democratic international only the IEC has the authority to change the secretariat. Yet the SCI kept changing the membership of the SCI to fit the factional needs of the majority. By doing it the SCI ceased to represent the FLTI but it represented in a bureaucratic way only the majority. Further proof of this is that the SCI failed to produce an IWO that carries both Majority and Minority positions on China. 

Marxists must look at China and ask "what is it"?  We can agree it is no longer a deformed workers state. Beyond that, "what China is", has to be decided by the Marxist analysis of reality, not by preconceived theories or perspectives. Otherwise how can we pretend to be an embryonic Marxist revolutionary international?

We agree with you that Lenin's theory says that in the imperialist epoch the world is already divided. It can only be redivided by means of war. You then draw the conclusion that China cannot be a new imperialist power since it has not redivided the world by means of war. Lenin never meant to be dogmatic on the re-division of world. The latest crisis is bringing down all the small imperialist forces in Europe. We are clearly seeing a further decline of small imperialist countries such as Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece. China is clearly occupying their places and taking territories that were occupied by other old European countries. We have seen in the past that deep crisis can easily force a change in the order of the imperialist pack. This is what happened in depression of the 1930s that ended with the US taking charge of the imperialist pack.

But for you the question of China was already decided during WW1 -either workers state or semi-colony. Any reality today must conform with the world as it was in WW1. WW2 is just a continuation with some redivision that does not change anything fundamental. Indeed, you say that the restoration of the workers states is really the delayed conclusion of WW2.

It is true that a new imperialism can only arise at the expense of existing imperialisms (and by means of war) but you overlook the fact that the October revolution 'divided' the SU (and subsequently the Deformed Workers States including China) from imperialism by means of war (civil wars and WW1 and WW2). Not as new imperialisms, but as workers states. Of course Lenin did not foresee the restoration of capitalism in the SU and the consequences that might have for imperialism. For him the revolution in the East would intervene, and as part of the international revolution boost the SU.

Trotsky predicted that without a political revolution restoration would result from the stagnation of the bureaucratic rule of the workers states. But there is nothing in Trotsky to say that the re-integration of restored workers states into the capitalist world economy would inevitably make them semi-colonies divided and oppressed by imperialism.

What Lenin could not have foreseen, and what Trotsky would not have excluded was that restoration need not reduce the former workers states to semi-colonies; that the bureaucracy could make the transition to a national bourgeoisie without losing its independence. (Trotsky argued that restoration of capitalism in the SU would make Stalin's regime a "fascist" regime. He did not speculate beyond that.)

China was not defeated in a world war, invaded, occupied and turned into a lackey (like France, Germany and Japan - Germany still has 70 US bases in it). Restoration was forced on the bureaucracy by stagnation and imperialist pressure, but the bureaucracy had to defeat the resistance of the working class. The bureaucracy took responsibility for this counter-revolutionary defeat and as the result was able to convert itself into a new national bourgeoisie without military defeat or occupation.

We can see then, that China emerged from a DWS and was re-incorporated into the global capitalist economy not by means of imperialist war, invasion, occupation and partition but by internal counter-revolution. This has nothing to do with China's 'exceptional' circumstances, and everything to do with its transition from a DWS to restored capitalism. Certain features of the DWS carry over to Chinese capitalism, not as 'Chinese characteristics' but as the characteristics of 'state property' which Trotsky recognised would take the form of state capitalist property.

In fact Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed said that in regard to capitalist restoration that:

“In the sphere of industry, denationalization would begin with the light industries and those producing food. The planning principle would be converted for the transitional period into a series of compromises between state power and individual “corporations” – potential proprietors, that is, among the Soviet captains of industry, the émigré former proprietors and foreign capitalists.” http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch09.htm

This is roughly what the situation is today in China. The heavy industry remained in the state hands and it is slowly being dismantled and given to private corporations primarily Chinese capitalists.

These are the 'exceptional' circumstances that allowed the new bourgeoisie to 'inherit' as state property the means of production of the former DWS as the basis of its political 'independence' from imperialism.

For the Majority this 'independence' is temporary and must lead to semi-colonial domination unless there is a socialist revolution. The theory is decided and the program follows; defend China from imperialism, overthrow the Red bourgeoisie!

How temporary is temporary? The FLTI agrees that capitalism in China was restored between 1989 and 1992. It says in 2008 that China was still poised between a semi-colony and socialist revolution. Now when the Minority affirms that China retained its 'independence' in 1992, the Majority says it lost it in 1979 when the Special Economic Zones were created, and when the Chinese banks went bankrupt in 1991 and were rescued by Wall St. That in fact, China is owned by Wall St and that Chinese workers are in a pre-revolutionary situation today confronting the Red Mandarins, and "Obama's" Red Army, who are the junior partners of Wall St.

Except the Majority's description of Chinese reality in the last 30 years is a fantasy. For the Majority the facts of China's rapid rise as an capitalist industrial economy, soon to be second only to the US, is an illusion, as China is really no more than a branch of the US domestic economy. The material basis of China's 'independence' evaporated sometime between 1979 and today and China's army, its banks, its factories etc are now part of the US global regime.

The Minority never said that China did not invite FDI to create capitalist export manufacturing. It was a strategy of the Chinese bureaucracy on the road to restoration to create a material base of its transition and its new class 'independence'. Thus the Special Economic Zones did not give US imperialism ownership of China's economy. China processes manufactures and supplies raw material and labor, but the majority of the profits do not go to foreign investors.

In exchange, China has won markets, foreign exchange, and technology transfer. Nor did China's banks go bust and get taken over in 1991. China's big banks are state owned. The state always has more than 50% ownership of each bank, in addition 25% ownership can be in private Chinese hands. Foreign banks cannot have more than 25% ownership of a Chinese bank, and in no case does a single foreign bank have anywhere near 25% ownership. Thus, foreign banks are mainly advisors and administrators of funds and have no significant role independent of China's banks. Therefore, more and more of China's rapid growth is the result of Chinese capital accumulation to the point that over-accumulation has required the export of finance capital.

Why, if the US exports finance capital to China, is it not the case that China exports finance capital to other countries? What are the 'exceptional' circumstances that makes capital accumulation in China a proxy for US capital? The Majority tries to limit 'finance' capital to the US, calling China's FDI 'commercial' capital. It defines finance capital as 'parasitic' without realising that this is already part of the definition of finance capital. That is, finance capital is not just capital that is invested in 'usury' or loans to productive capital, but is a built-in component of productive capital since industrial capital is fused with banking capital. Chinese FDI is no less parasitic than US FDI. 

Imperialist 'parasitism' is the extraction of super-profits due to monopoly prices which include unequal exchange of value i.e. appropriating unpaid values of commodities including labor-power. This appropriated unpaid value is called super profits or 'rent'. Imperialism replaces competitive capitalism, and shifts the competition from the market to competition between imperialist corporations and imperialist states. This does not mean that new technology is unimportant. Instead of allocating capital on the basis of prices of production (i.e high tech labor productivity) monopolies buy up or suppress new technology as part of their rent-seeking. That is, new technology reduces the price of production and therefore increases the potential rent.

Therefore, FDI by both US in China and by China in many other countries, is the export of finance capital (banking capital fused with industrial capital) to gain rent. The US gains rent through unpaid value of Chinese labor-power and unpaid value of Chinese or other Asian raw materials, machine goods etc which they buy to produce the finished commodities. But US (plus Japan etc) FDI does not own more than a small minority share of the productive capacity of the Chinese economy which is typical for cross ownership between imperialist powers.

Chinese capital (state owned and private) which owns the big majority of finance capital in China reaps the same rents when investing finance capital in loans for oil and other raw materials, loans to build infrastructure, investments in ownership of foreign corporations, etc in semi-colonies and other imperialist powers. China does this precisely to gain ownership and control of the production of these commodities to increase superprofits (i.e. the unpaid value component, or rent).

We conclude that to describe China as merely a semi-colony today ignores the reality that China is a major capitalist industrial power expanding rapidly into the global economy. It is not a US sock puppet subordinated to a US imposed division of labor.

Some of the fake Trotskyists are stuck inside historical schemas and explain China's expansion as some mysterious aspect of a surviving Deformed Workers State. We, on the other hand recognise it as capitalism, and the expanded reproduction of Chinese capitalism can only take one form - imperialism.

Does this put us outside the pale of Marxism? Well only if it means we think Chinese imperialism is progressive. You slander us to suggest that we side with US imperialism alongside the Bolivarians, Maoists, Stalinists, Castroists. This is cheap demagogy to bolster your historic schema.

We clearly say over and over again that China is as reactionary as US imperialism. US imperialism is still hegemonic and its defence of its global interests must bring it into collision with an ascendant China. This is why we changed our position of China's dual character in which we could defend it from a direct US attack, to that of an rapidly emerging imperialist rival that could not be defended in any situation. That is why we are for the defeat of both China and US.

How is this different from the Majority? The majority must argue that the defence of China in a war with the US must be won by the Chinese working class fighting US imperialism in a military alliance with Red Mandarins who will use the war to instil Chinese chauvinism in the name of the Fifth international and with the support of the Bolivarian regimes. This could lead to the defeat of the Chinese working class by the Red Mandarins in the name of “socialism” and the Fifth International.

We say wakeup and call for the Chinese workers in a confrontation with the US to turn their guns on their own ruling class, and in every proxy war between the US and China, we say call for the independent struggle of workers and poor peasants led by a revolutionary party for the socialist revolution.

We call on the Majority to reconsider its method of dogmatically reproducing an historical schema based on the world in WW1. Yet have seen no willingness to even consider the theoretical arguments put forward by the Minority. Instead the argument that China has made the transition from DWS to imperialist state is denounced as 'Cliffite', 'Mandelist', cheerleading for Stalinism, Bolivarianism etc etc. The only development of the Majority position since July 2009, is the hysterical escalation in the political characterisation of the Minority from unconscious Stalinists to open enemies of the working class. The logic of such a characterisation is that the Majority must expel the Minority to defend its indefensible 'defense' of Marxism.

The Minority will not be publishing the official Majority document on China in its national papers. We have not published our own Minority document in our national papers.They are fully displayed in good English on our websites. It is the responsibility of the SCI to publish an IWO containing the debate as a duty to the international working class. We will undertake to print and distribute this IWO internationally.

Because the debate over China has revealed fundamental differences in method, in our understanding of imperialism, and in programmatic differences that put us on opposing sides in a war involving the US and China, the CWG and HWRS are breaking from the FLTI and its international center and forming a Liaison Committee to defend the fundamental principles and program contained in the 23 points document of the FLT.

A formal document which puts the position of the Liaison Committee will be written in due course. In it we will defend the 23 points except the existing characterisation of China.We will clarify our understanding of the 23 points and explain them in the context of the world situation in which China plays a significant role. We don’t think that our break with the majority is confined to China. China is rather a symptom that reflects the break of the majority from Marxism and its dialectic method. We explain the majority method in the document The SCI’s Rejection of Dialectics Is Taking the FLTI into the Centrist Swamp which is available at the HWRS website http://www.humanistsforrevolutionarysocialism.org/IFLT_Documents/Critique_of_FLTI.pdf.

In the document we showed the centrist zigzag of the FLTI majority leadership the SCI from ulra-leftism (China is in a revolutionary situation, drop the demand for the Labor party in the US and instead call for a general strike in the entire US, etc.) to opportunism (uncritical alliance with pacifist JRCL-RMF to create a “bridge” to China). We think that the majority is reverting to the old Morenoite method from which the majority leadership originated. This is ultimately what we are breaking from.

Communist Workers Group and Humanist Workers for Revolutionary Socialism

FLTI: Majority on China and World Situation. Part 1

Presentación (in Spanish. English Trans when available).

Presentamos en “Cuadernos de Formación Marxista” N° 2 la
primera parte del Proyecto oficial de documento sobre la situación
mundial y la cuestión china, del Secretariado de Coordinación
Internacional de la Fracción Leninista Trotskista Internacional.

Esta primera parte consta de cuatro capítulos en los que se aborda
la cuestión china desde el punto de vista del caracter de China, en
relación a la riquísima discusión teórico-política con la izquierda
revisionista del marxismo, que plantea que ese ex-estado obrero ha
devenido en potencia imperialista a partir de la restauración
capitalista; izquierda revisionista de la que forma parte una fracción
pública minoritaria de nuestra corriente.

Proximamente, en un anexo de este “Cuaderno...”, se publicará
el Capítulo V, “Conclusiones”, de esta primera parte.

Forman parte de este Proyecto oficial, los documentos “Marxismo
vs. Revisionismo en la lucha de clases en América Latina” de la LTI
de Bolivia y la “Carta del SCI de la FLTI al NOR de Perú - La
Cuestión China”, que fueron publicados en Cuadernos de Formación
Marxista N°1, como “Capítulo IV - Anexos” del “Borrador de
documento de aporte sobre la cuestión china”; y que constituyen el
Capítulo VI, del presente “Proyecto oficial...”, pero que no
reimprimiremos, por el momento, ya que dichos documentos se
mantienen sin emiendas tal como han sido publicados inicialmente.

También forman parte de este Proyecto oficial del SCI, el
“Documento sobre la cuestión Griega”, el “Documento sobre
Madagascar” y el “Documento sobre Argentina”, que serán
publicados próximamente como capítulos VII, VIII y IX,
respectivamente.

Full Text of “Cuadernos de Formación Marxista” N° 2, Pt 1 in Spanish here.

English translation will be posted when ready.

South Africa: SACP hand in glove with Imperialism

  
Ensuring the hegemony of imperialism- (response to the SACP’s “Building working class hegemony on the terrain of the national democratic struggle”)


As world capitalism faces one of its worst crises ever, it has recruited the trade union leadership, the reformists, the fake Trotskyists and the Stalinists (like the SACP) to help contain the proletariat from taking the revolutionary road. There have been revolutionary uprisings to varying degrees, such as in Argentina (2001), Bolivia (2003-2005), Zimbabwe (2008), Greece, Guadaloupe, Madagascar, and now in Tonghua China (where the metalworkers kicked to death their boss when he came to tell them that 25 000 of the 30 000 workers would be retrenched when the State factory was due to be privatized; the workers occupied the factory and the main highways and the state was forced to reverse the privatization). The Obama coup in Honduras shows that while imperialism will use the reformist leadership and the Bolovarians when it suits them, but the depth of the crisis is such that fascistic means will be used to push the capitalist crisis onto the backs of the working class if necessary. The attacks by the ANC on the Abahlali should be seen in this broader context. Uprisings first start at the extremities before spreading to the heartlands- imperialism knows this. Thus on an international scale there is an open allegiance of the forces of imperialism with reformist leaderships within the workers’ movement. (see various articles on our website www.workersinternational.org.za ). 

In South Africa today, the SACP represents the continuity of Stalinism in that they use socialist phraseology to cover their role as the main agency within the workers’ movement to ensure the continued hegemony of imperialism. It follows that a fundamental critique of the SACP’s politics is a necessity for the world proletarian movement. There are also a number of workers and youth who are taken in by this socialist phraseology and it is to them that we direct this critique.

What are the main arguments of the SACP?

1. The current state is not capitalist but ‘developmental’
2. After the achievement of partial democratic gains in 1994, it is still necessary for an alliance of the working class (SACP and Cosatu) with the black middle class and black capitalist class (ANC) to complete the struggle for full democratic programme of the proletarian programme;
3. The ANC leads the alliance in the struggle for the completion of the democratic demands;
4. Deployment of SACP and Cosatu leaders to every level of the state is a key mechanism for ensuring that working class interest are heard and implemented; this is the start of building key aspects of Socialism now.
5. We should not strive to become like the advanced capitalist states (as this would damage the world’s environment) but more like South Korea.
6. They claim to be fighting for a Socialist South Africa;

The state is capitalist not ‘developmental’

The SA economy and in particular all the major means of production, is controlled by imperialism, and in particular through Anglo American, Liberty Life, Old Mutual, Rembrandt and Sanlam- every single one of these companies are controlled by imperialism. For example, the major control of Anglo American is held by JP Morgan Chase bank of the USA; JP Morgan Chase has a significant shareholding of the SA Reserve bank; many of the local goldmines have significant shareholding held by the Bank of New York, etc etc. Whoever controls the means of production, is by definition, the ruling class, in this case, it is imperialism. The state acts in its interest to ensure its hegemony. The hegemony of imperialism is demonstrated by the repatriation of over R200bn in profits each year from SA, while the masses live in abject poverty and in a permanent state of starvation.

The very notion of a ‘democratic state’ implies a capitalist state. This is supported by Lenin in his State and Revolution, when he wrote:

“A democratic republic is the best possible shell for capitalism, and therefore, once capital has gained control (through the Palchinskys, Chernovs, Tseretelis and Co) of this very best shell, it establishes power so firmly that no change, either of persons, or institutions, or parties in the bourgeois republic can shake it.”

In every bourgeois democracy, even the limited one in SA, the state acts to conceal the rule of the capitalist class and controls the masses through various agencies within the workers’ movement, such as the trade union leadership, bourgeois parties, various brands of left-sounding parties and in our case, the Stalinist SACP. The false notion of a ‘developmental’ state is to hide the partnership of the SACP with imperialism.

The bourgeoisie and petti bourgeoisie are an obstacle to the completion of the democratic demands

The references in the Freedom Charter to the ‘people’ (see our critique of the Freedom Charter), includes in its scope the capitalist and the worker. In this sense it is similar to the programme of the French bourgeoisie in the 1789 revolution, for ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’, but with important differences. The French revolution took place while capitalism was advancing and developing, while the Freedom Charter was developed in the period when capitalism is already in decay. That the Freedom Charter is the programme of the black petti bourgeois is shown by the following statement by Mandela in the June edition of the Liberator magazine in 1956, one year after the adoption of the Charter:

‘Whilst the Charter proclaims democratic changes of a far reaching nature, it is by no means a blueprint for a socialist state, but a programme for the unification of various classes and groupings amongst the people on a democratic basis. Under socialism the workers hold state power. They and the peasants own the means of production, land, the factories and the mills. All production is for use and not for profit. The Charter does not contemplate such profound economic and political changes. Its declaration “The people shall govern!” visualizes the transfer of power not to any single social class but to all the people of the country be they workers, peasants, professional men or petty-bourgeoisie.

            It is true that in demanding the nationalisation of the banks, the gold mines and the land the Charter strikes a fatal blow at the financial and gold-mining monopolies and farming interests that have for centuries plundered the country and condemned its people to servitude. But such a step is absolutely imperative and necessary because the realisation of the Charter is inconceivable, in fact impossible, unless and until these monopolies are first smashed up and the national wealth of the country turned over to the people. The breaking up and democratisation of these monopolies will open up fresh fields for the development of a prosperous Non-European bourgeois class. For the first time in the history of the country the Non-European bourgeoisie will have the opportunity to own in their own name and right mills and factories, and trade and private enterprise will boom and flourish as never before. To destroy these monopolies means the termination of the exploitation of vast sections of the populace by mining kings and land barons and there will be a general rise in living standards of the people. It is precisely because the Charter offers immense opportunities for an overall movement in the material conditions of all classes and groups that it attracts such wide support.’

It follows from this, that placing the ANC as the leadership of the alliance, puts the leadership of the completion of the bourgeois democratic demands, in the hands of the black petti bourgeoisie and black bourgeoisie.

The entire history of Africa has shown that, in this epoch of imperialist decay, the petti bourgeois and bourgeois are incapable of completing even a single democratic demand. The coming to power of all the national liberation movements across Africa, has been on the backs of struggles of the working class and poor peasantry. Every single leadership of the liberation movements in Africa turned their backs on the masses and occupied the role of local ruler on behalf of imperialism; in fact the capitalist world division of labour by imperialism is the reason why Africa has been kept in its position as a provider primarily of unprocessed raw goods and minerals. This is a direct result of the hegemony of world imperialism capitalism over Africa. Any domestic policy that claims to want to develop industry in any way, has to challenge the hegemony of imperialism.

Across Africa, the policy of world Stalinism has been to promote the subjugation of the working class to leadership of the black petti bourgeoisie (see our article on Pan Africanism). This has been one of the key mechanisms for ensuring imperialist hegemony on the continent.

Lenin, writing in 1905 has this to say: ‘ the winning of a democratic republic, will be the complete end of the revolutionism of the bourgeoisie, and even of the petti bourgeoisie’. This is because the bourgeoisie and petti bourgeoisie have a vested interest in maintaining current relations of exploitation. This is the class basis for the ultra-right conservative grouping within the ANC. These are bourgeois and petti bourgeois elements who will defend their privilege at all costs.

Fifteen years of the rise of the black bourgeoisie in SA (alongside a privileged layer of the black petti bourgeoisie) has resulted in not only the maintenance of capitalist inequality but its extension so that SA is today the most unequal society in the world. A few of the elite have become overnight billionaires, while life expectancy for the vast majority of the population has come down to 47 years.

The billionaire minister of Human unsettlement has shares in Group 5, the capitalist company building the Mbombela stadium in Mpumalanga; while Group 5 and other construction monopolies has made billions of profits from building a few stadiums, the number of families without housing has risen from 1,4 million (1994) to 1,8 million (2008); 2 schools were demolished to make way for the Mbombela stadium and they have still not been rebuilt.

The main shareholders of Sasol are imperialist banks such as JP Morgan Chase and others; millions in profits are being siphoned off by Sasol, while they charge the working class (40% of usage in SA) way above their cost of production (at most USD15 per barrel); Empowerment companies, including from CCEPWAWU and Cosatu have shares in Sasol and share in the continued plunder of the rest of the working class.

Virtually every sector of the economy has stakes given to the black bourgeoisie and petti bourgeoisie; with this cover, well over 2 million workers have been retrenched since 1994 (virtually 1 million under the new Polokwane administration). More workers have been dismissed under the regime of the black petti bourgeoisie than in the slave capitalist era before 1994. This shows the collapse of the struggle for democratic demands rather than the black petti bourgeois or bourgeois being able to advance it.

In Lenin’s April Theses (1917) he argued that the regime of the February 1917 revolution, led by the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, were incapable of completing the most pressing democratic demands of the masses, in their case, for land, bread and peace. What was necessary was for the working class to seize power to give effect to these democratic demands- this was the essence of the October revolution in Russia. The working class is the only class that has the interests to complete the democratic tasks posed by the masses.  Africa, by the negative examples, also prove it; the past 15 years of ANC government also prove it. No support for the February government, was the watchword of Lenin, not creating illusions of ‘working class hegemony at all levels of the state’ as the Menshevik SACP CC tries to promote.

The black bourgeoisie and petti bourgeoisie is so interconnected with and tied to imperialism, that to give them the task of completing the struggle for democratic demands, is to strangle, even the democratic revolution.

The SACP leaders quote Engels on the abolition of differences between town and country- but in the Housing question, Engels is clear that such abolition cannot occur under capitalist relations, in other words a revolution, with the working class taking power is required as the first step, not with co-option in the capitalist system that perpetuates the very divergence between town and country. ( “As long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist, it is folly to hope for an isolated solution of the housing question or of any other social question affecting the fate of the workers. The solution lies in the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the appropriation of all the means of life and labour by the working class itself.” End of part 2: Engels – The Housing Question)

But for the working class to contest for power, Communists needs to organized independently of the capitalist state and with a programme against it; Exposure of the state should be the watchword as we fight for our programme of our demands (democratic and socialist). No confidence to the capitalist state! This would be how the April Thesis would be expressed today. This is what some of the rank and file of the SACP were expressing when they were arguing that the SACP contest elections independently of the ANC.

Of course, some far sighted members of the SACP would want to contest elections and become part of bourgeois Cabinets for their own interest, but this does not negate that the discussions on elections are not mere tactical differences, but deep programmatic differences. A river of blood between them.

On the Constitutional illusions promoted by the SACP CC

When examining the views of the SACP CC on their occupying of all levels of the state, it is useful to examine what Lenin wrote in 1917 (Constitutional illusions)

“When lashing the petty-bourgeois “Social-Democrats” of 1848, Marx was particularly severe in his condemnation of their unrestrained use of empty phrases about “the people” and the majority of the people in general. It is well to recall this in examining the second idea, in analysing constitutional illusions about a “majority”.

For the majority in the state to really decide, definite conditions are required, one of which is the firm establishment of a political system, a form of state power, making it possible to decide matters by a majority and guaranteeing the translation of this possibility into reality. That is one thing. Another is that the class composition of this majority and the interrelation of classes inside (and outside) it should enable it to draw the chariot of state concertedly and effectively.”

“If political power in the state is in the hands of a class whose interests coincide with those of the majority, that state can be governed truly in line with the will of the majority. But if political power is in the hands of a class whose interests diverge from those of the majority, any form of majority rule is bound to become deception or suppression of the majority. Every bourgeois republic provides hundreds and thousands of examples of this kind.”

Firstly, the pre-conditions by imperialism for the negotiated settlement to take place was for the protection of private property, or the rule of the capitalist class to continue. The political system thus prevents any guarantee of the rule of the majority; the ANC being a multi-class organization means that their interest diverge from that of the majority. The continued super-profits of imperialism while the masses are in starvation is clear evidence of the rule or rather the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, not of the real will of the majority.

Lenin in his State and Revolution wrote that no amount of tinkering with the system, or occupation of any level of the capitalist state would change its nature, whether it was a constitutional monarchy or the most free bourgeois democracy.

The policy of the SACP CC is to tie the working class to the capitalist state, thereby ensuring the continued imperialist hegemony.

By 2001 to 2007 the number of protests in communities in SA increased dramatically, the SACP and Cosatu leaders realized that the ANC government was suffering from a crisis of legitimacy in the eyes of the masses; the SACP spearheaded the removal of Mbeki and his replacement with another nationalist, this was the essence of the ANC Polokwane conference in 2008, the creation of another illusion that the 1996 ‘class project’ was ending and a pro-worker one was now commencing. Judging from the 2009 election manifesto and the actions of the current regime, the class project of imperialism is continuing- shooting of strikers and protestors, bulldozing of 2 schools in Matafeni township (and refusal to even say when they will be rebuilt) to make way for the Mbombela 2010 stadium; hundreds of thousands of workers retrenched; pushing of the R787bn infrastructure scam (with no programme for housing and electricity for all), etc etc, are all ample evidence of this.

The essence of the programme for ‘working class hegemony’ by engaging all levels of the state, reveals that the path of the SACP to working class hegemony goes through parliament, does not require revolution, and implies a peaceful transition to socialism, and thus in reality gives up on Socialism. Not only this, but the path to Socialism takes place in one country, without having to launch any revolutionary struggle against imperialism capitalism. Contrary to its claims of ‘challenging and transforming the systemic features of capitalism itself’, the SACP justifies to capitulation to imperialism and becomes the conveyor belt for the burden of its crisis to be placed on the backs of the working class.

The programme of the SACP CC advances the interests of imperialism

The ‘national’ democratic revolution has its origins in the struggles of the colonies and semi-colonies against imperialism. The essence of this programme was expropriation or expulsion of imperialism and nationalization of the land so that the peasants and small farmers would have land to farm, etc.

The CPSA/SACP adapted this programme to not be a programme against imperialism but in SA for the ‘black’ nation to be fighting for liberation from the ‘white’ nation. In essence this meant directing all struggles so that the black petti bourgeoisie were incorporated into the existing capitalist system. Thus the SACP promoted the struggle as one being against ‘apartheid’ (separateness) instead of being against slave capitalist relations.

The first expression of the Stalinist programme was the alliance of the Chinese Communist party behind the leadership of the bourgeois nationalist Kuomintang against the imperialist forces in the late 1920’s. The Stalinist policy of peaceful ‘coexistence’ with imperialism meant that all struggles outside of the USSR were to be subordinate to continued capitalist rule; thus all alliances were with bourgeois forces and struggles were directed to stay within the capitalist system. This is the political origin of the alliance of the SACP, Cosatu with the ANC.

The programme that the SACP CC propose is consistent with the maintenance of imperialist hegemony. The support of the recent Budget review which is thoroughly capitalist (see our review) is but one example.

We summarise the main points of the SACP CC document:

1. The so-called industrial policy is a hostage to imperialist control- there are no plans to challenge imperialism in any fundamental way; The R787 bn expenditure is nothing but a massive bailout of imperialism, who will benefit from the contracts to build these power stations that are not needed as well as from the maintenance and fueling projects that go together with this- all this in a time when alternatives exist such as hydro-power from the DRC (200 000 MW- enough to double Africa’s capacity) as well as solar power.
2. Even the limited land redistribution of 30%, if it continues at the same pace will take another 60 years at least; instead of abolishing rural and town disparities, only petty handouts are planned for rural areas; no fundamental plan to address the racially segregated areas; no plan for housing for all, not even adequate electricity for all (and not the homelite shack connections that cannot be used for cooking or heating) ;
3. No plans for shorter working day nor of sharing work among all those who can work;
4. The overall structure of capitalist education is not touched but privatization (such as the college system) is promoted; the SACP promotes the myth that a capitalist education is the avenue to a better life for all, while the structure of education reflects the parasitic pyramid of capitalist society and provides a cover for big capital to justify the huge wage disparities in the capitalist market.
5. The SACP document is deafeningly silent on the right of soldiers to be unionized- one of the few gains of the struggle up to now; yet the Cabinet, including SACP and worker ministers have come out against this. The SACP leadership goes further by calling for participation in community policing forums. In the context of a ‘shoot to kill’ culture promoted by the ANC government, the SACP leaders are calling for working class participation in the crackdown on community and worker resistance.
6. There is no programme for the proletarian revolution in Swaziland, Lesotho, Botswana, Namibia, DRC, Angola, Mozambique, etc.
7. The perspective of the SACP CC is nationalist and has no vision of the importance of socialist revolution in the imperialist centres (see Lenin Oct 1920: “We always staked our play on an international revolution and this was unconditionally right…We always emphasized the fact that in one country it is impossible to accomplish such a work as a socialist revolution” and Feb 1921: “We have always repeatedly pointed out that to the workers that the underlying chief task and basic condition of our victory is the propagation of the revolution at least to several of the more advanced countries”.

On the National Health Insurance (NHI): the SACP has been championing this cause. The first question is why should it be an insurance when the promise was made in 1994 for free health care; Despite relating all the disparities of the current health system, the NHI will not take over any private health facilities or Medical Aids- in fact it promises to allow them to continue- this means that, despite the anti-capitalist rhetoric, profiteering will continue in the health sector. What is even worse is that, with all the cutbacks in public spending (already the Cosatu and SACP leaders allowed the President to unilaterally reduce the public sector wage increase from 8% to 7%), there will be little funds to build up the public health sector. Thus the nett effect of the NHI will be an additional tax (say 10%) on workers who do not have medical Aid, and seeing that the public hospitals are overcrowded, there will be a dramatic increase of patients into private clinics, who will treat patients for as long as they have credits. All the private institutions will do is hike their fees continually so their profit levels will be boosted. Leaving the private health sector intact means that the NHI will provide super-profits for them and will be another mechanism to bail out the imperialist banks (who control and profiteer from this sector, such as First Rand, State Street, Sanlam, JP Morgan Chase, RMB, etc). The nett effect will be that instead of only 14 % of the population using the private health clinics, this will be substantially higher, without the guarantee that the quality of care will be adequate, or that patients will be treated until they are well (when their credits run out, the patients would be told to leave). It is significant that the SACP refers uncritically to the June 2009 Obama health plan; in the USA there are over 34 million people excluded from the existing health insurance; Obama’s plan is to reach out to those excluded and smaller businesses, providing another channel for bailing out the imperialist banks that control the health sector (more patients to the private hospitals mean more profits to them- the patients will get a minimum treatment until their credits run out); for example (Pfizer and Johnson &Johnson) the 2 biggest drug companies in the world are in the US and are 60% controlled by banks and other financial institutions (such as State Street, Barclays, Vanguard, Fidelity, Northern Trust, etc). Research in health is dominated by the monopolies, eg, the Lung Institute at UCT is under the wing of German drug company Boeringher Ingelheim, etc etc. Without a plan for jobs for all and housing for all, with all the above considered, both the Obama and ANC-SACP NHI plan are merely bailouts for finance capital. For the rural worker, where there are no private facilities, the NHI would merely mean an extra tax without any improvement in service. There is likely to be a spike in ‘emergency room’ procedures as the private institutions milk the state coffers dry.  A serious health plan would have expropriated the health sector and removed the profit motive from it- placing it under workers’ control. The SACP leadership’s proposal is for a further tax on workers to fill the pockets of finance capital; similar to the Mzantsi campaign which resulted in 3 million more bank accounts for workers who now hand over R30 million in monthly fees to the banking gangsters, for doing virtually nothing.

In short, using progressive sounding phrases, the programme of imperialist domination is being assured by the SACP CC.

The future is South Korea- build it now, says the SACP leaders

The Mensheviks used to quote Marx to hide their reformism. They liked to quote: “ The industrially more developed country shows the less developed only the image of its own future.” They used this quote from Marx to say that all countries have to go through a period of capitalism to become advanced. While the SACP CC also argues that workers should not take power now, that we need a period of capitalist development, but we should not aim to become as developed as the US or UK (as the world environment would not sustain it) but aim to become more like South Korea.

South Korea is a police state, which regularly suppresses the union movement, it is completely under the thumb of US and Japanese imperialism, dependent on it for every bit of technology that it uses. Such is the abandonment of the SACP CC of even the democratic programme, such is their total submission to imperialism.

In South Africa, Zimbabwe, France and elsewhere, imperialism prepares new agencies, under the guise of anti-capitalist parties, to once again control the working class; they realize that as their current alliance partners become discredited by their open collaboration against the working class, they need to prepare the ground to remain in control.

Imperialism moves on the international terrain to counter any revolutionary working class international from taking root, through the counter-revolutionary World Social Forum. There are now new initiatives afoot. In November Chavez hosted several left parties as part of a call for the fifth International- this is one of the insurance policies of imperialism, to use the name of socialism, to once more contain the world working class from once and for all overthrowing world capitalism. Lenin, in his ‘The tasks of Revolutionary Social Democracy in the European war’ (Aug 24 1914), calls for the fight against militarism, recognizing the need for revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie of all countries, against making a fetish of bourgeois parliamentarianism, rejecting class collaboration, rejecting bourgeois chauvinism under the guise of patriotism, and not forgetting for a moment that workers do not have any country. For the achieving of the basic democratic programme, Lenin posed the demands of confiscation of all the landed estates and for an 8 hour day, something that the Chavez’s and his fifth International has failed and will fail to do. These demands are something that the 11^th gathering of Communist parties in India in November,  will also fail to achieve as they pursue their continued co-existence with imperialism.

In opposition to the sliding scale of dismissals and short time imposed by the union leaders and the ‘left’ we must raise the clarion call for the sliding scale of hours and wages (share the work among all who can work, without loss of pay and wages should increase whenever prices increase)- but for this to be taken forward, the Bolshevik fighters need to take the leadership of working class organizations, setting up action committees of struggle, uniting employed and unemployed workers and soldiers, the Stalinist and reformist leaders have to be defeated and removed from leadership of working class organizations of struggle.

The complete submission of the SACP to imperialism is perhaps nowhere more clearly shown when this ‘revolutionary vanguard’ of the workers movement says and does nothing while US imperialism is behind the war for minerals in the DRC and where 5.8 million people have been slaughtered since 1996. At the same time troops from South Africa have been in the DRC, deployed to protect the mining operations of imperialism.  In the DRC the French –US imperialist alliance is combating other imperialist-backed forces over the bones of the masses. US warships frequent SA shores and the SACP does not raise even a whisper against this rising imperialist threat.

What is to be done?

Fifteen years of appealing to the ‘moral and intellectual integrity’ of the middle class and capitalist class in the ANC, has yielded only contempt from them- a failure to fight high food prices, allowing over 2 million workers to be dismissed, a shoot to kill policy, mass homelessness, collapse of already degrading education system, a culture of callous profiteering, etc etc. More of the same is what the current SACP leadership propose.

The Chinese Communist Party has split into 2 fractions, one which wants to still maintain the SOE’s while the other wants to go ahead and privatize them all. The conditions are ripening for a pre-revolutionary situation. In the USA, conditions have never ever been so ripe for the working class to take power; across the world, the objective conditions for proletarian revolution ripen- this is why the onslaught from imperialism grows more desperate by the day.  On a world scale, it is necessary to make a definitive break from Stalinism, in other words, firstly, and we only have to look at the whole of Africa to see that it is true, only the working class can lead the fight for the completion of the bourgeois demands of the proletarian programme; for this basic demand for nationalizing all the land, confiscating all the commercial farms, expropriating all imperialist assets, centralizing the banks into one, all the above under workers control, for the sharing of work among all who can work; the working class needs to take power; but to do this it needs to be organized in its own party, independent of the capitalists and its state. We need to organize in every town and city, in every workplace, committees of action, uniting the employed, unemployed and soldiers, to organize a programme of action in defence of the above programme. We need to call a workers summit which will unite all workers unemployed and soldiers delegates to call for a General strike against the capitalist onslaught. Down with the imperialist ‘developmental state’! This is the path for the dictatorship of the working class, for working class hegemony. Following the April Theses we need a new International, not the fifth of Chavez or the international of the Stalinists but the refounding of the Fourth International. We need a new international conference of Kienthal and Zimmerwald to draw the line internationally, to take the examples of the heroism of the workers of Tonghua, of Madagascar, of Greece, of Guadaloupe, let us unite to make the capitalist pay for their own crisis! The path to completing the democratic demands lies only through the dictatorship of the working class and then indeed, why should we stop at the stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat; we need to unite with our class brothers and sisters around the globe- for the world socialist revolution! This is the path to Socialism and ultimately world Communism! For too long has the heroic struggles of the workers in Mozambique, Angola, DRC, SA, and indeed across Africa, been betrayed by Stalinism! Forward to a federation of Socialist republics of Southern Africa! Forward to a Soviet Africa! Take the path of the Bolsheviks!  This is the clarion call of the International Leninist Trotskyist Fraction.

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affiliated to the International Leninist Trotskyist Fraction integrated by
Liga Trotskista Internacionalista , (LTI) de Bolivia
Fraccion Trotskista , (FT) de Brasil
Partido Obrero Internactionaista- CI (POI-CI) , de Chile
Communist Workers Group (CWG) New Zealand
Liga Obrera Internacionalista- CI (LOI-CI) Argentina
Liga Trotskista Internacionalista- (LTI)Peru
Humanist Workers for Revolutionary Socialism (HWRS) USA
Workers International Vanguard League (WIVL) South Africa

4.12.09