Showing posts with label Brazil; Trotsky. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brazil; Trotsky. Show all posts
Friday, October 03, 2014
Saturday, August 20, 2011
The August uprising of the poor and nationally and racially oppressed in Britain: What would a revolutionary organisation have done?
By Michael Pröbsting, Revolutionary Communist Organisation for Liberation (RKOB), 18.8.2011
The uprising of the poor, of the black and migrant people in Britain between the 6th and the 10th of August was a “historic moment” in the country’s history as the black civil right activist Darcus Howe and a number of other people have accurately put it. It was a “historic moment” which ended up in defeat. Why? Because the existing leadership of the workers movement and the oppressed communities betrayed the struggle, left it alone and in most cases denounced it. The most urgent task in the coming period is to build a new revolutionary party which can give future uprisings a perspective to win and to build a socialist society.
Our organisation, the Revolutionary Communist Organisation for Liberation (RKOB), has explained its analysis and perspectives for the uprising in the statement from 10th of August (“These are not "riots" – this is an uprising of the poor in the cities of Britain! The strategic task: From the uprising to the revolution!”, ) Based in Austria, the RKOB sent a delegation to Britain to follow the events on the ground, get involved with the activists and get a better understanding of the situation and the tasks following from it. Given the complete failure of the left in Britain to intervene in the uprising and to take a revolutionary position we will elaborate in this statement concretely what in our opinion a revolutionary organisation should have done in this situation.
1. This uprising is often wrongly characterised only as “riots”. This makes it easier for the Tory government and the bureaucrats in the workers movement to criminalise this uprising, to declare that looting was its main focus. A revolutionary organisation in Britain would have said from the beginning that this uprising is in its essence a spontaneous rebellion of the lower strata of the working class and of the racially and nationally oppressed minorities against the police repression and the poverty of the capitalist system. It would have declared that these so called “riots” are in essence a form of class struggle. Of course a form of class struggle with all its weaknesses, its raw and unorganised features, but a form of justified and progressive class struggle nevertheless. It would have explained that while certainly criminal acts happened in the context of the uprising this was in no way its essential character. It would therefore have sharply denounced all those non-revolutionary forces who associate this uprising with the “lumpenproletariat”, who slander it as “cancer” (e.g. IMT/Socialist Appeal), who “is appalled at the current rioting” and reject the uprising as “only damaging for the communities in which working-class people live” (CWI/Socialist Party) or who are vague about the motivation of this uprising (“Some are motivated by hatred of the police and rage at this society – others by the promise of raiding local shops for goods – some by both.”, LFI/Workers Power)
2. Recognising the character of the uprising as a form of class struggle of the lower and oppressed strata of the working class, a revolutionary organisation would have immediately after the beginning of this spontaneous rebellion issued a public call to support and join the uprising. It would have criticised all those reformist and centrist forces which restrict themselves to merely explain why the poor and oppressed take the streets, to explain why this is understandable or who only call for abstract solidarity without raising a finger for practical participation and support for the uprising. A revolutionary organisation would have worked on the basis of the Marxist approach of the founder of the Fourth International, Leon Trotsky, when he explained the abyss which divides Bolshevism and centrism (taking the example of the German centrist Ledebour) in their attitude to the struggle of the oppressed:
"Nevertheless, Ledebour’s position even on this question does not leave the precincts of centrism. Ledebour demands that a battle be waged against colonial oppression; he is ready to vote in parliament against colonial credits; he is ready to take upon himself a fearless defense of the victims of a crushed colonial insurrection. But Ledebour will not participate in preparing a colonial insurrection. Such work he considers putschism, adventurism, Bolshevism. And therein is the whole gist of the matter.
What characterizes Bolshevism on the national question is that in its attitude toward oppressed nations, even the most backward, it considers them not only the object but also the subject of politics. Bolshevism does not confine itself to recognizing their “right” to self-determination and to parliamentary protests against the trampling upon of this right. Bolshevism penetrates into the midst of the oppressed nations; it raises them up against their oppressors; it ties up their struggle with the struggle of the proletariat in capitalist countries; it instructs the oppressed Chinese, Hindus, or Arabs in the art of insurrection and it assumes full responsibility for this work in the face of civilized executioners. Here only does Bolshevism begin, that is, revolutionary Marxism in action. Everything that does not step over this boundary remains centrism" (Leon Trotsky: What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat, 1932)
3. As a consequence a revolutionary organisation would not have only called to join the uprising but would have mobilised its members and supporters as much as possible to actually go to the areas of the struggle (Tottenham, Brixton etc.) and to play an active role in the resistance against the police. It would have denounced all those who speak only about solidarity in words but in practise don’t join the class struggle as it is - typical for centrist cowards and windbags. At the same time it would also have sent its supporters to other working class areas not yet affected by the uprising to call for solidarity, to counter the bourgeois lies against the riots etc. It would have sent delegations to trade unions, to the various organisations of the workers movement to urge them to join the struggle, to organise solidarity actions etc. – in short to call for a united front campaign.
4. A revolutionary organisation would have intervened by disseminating revolutionary ideas to help raise the activist’s consciousness from spontaneous outrage and hatred against the system to a political class consciousness. For this it would have distributed leaflet and made agitation and propaganda for the central tasks. Revolutionaries would not have called only for the “right of self-defence” but would have called for building organised workers and oppressed self-defence units now. It would have called for the organisations of the labour movement to come and help build these self-defence organisations. It would have called for councils of action, i.e. mass assemblies in the communities, to discuss the most urgent tasks and elect delegates to coordinate and build a movement of the workers and oppressed. It would have called for spreading the struggle nation-wide by calling the workers movement to join and link the struggle against the police repression and poverty with the movement against the cuts. The perspective would have been a general strike against the cuts, against racism and for the overthrow of the Tory government.
5. A revolutionary organisation would have tried to organise the resistance to drive out the police and to stop acts of vandalism. It would have explained that looting is no solution. It would have argued that the task of workers and oppressed self-defence units is to prevent acts of vandalism, of looting small shops etc.
6. A revolutionary organisation would have issued public appeals for the organisation and the activists of the workers movement to come to Tottenham, Brixton, Birmingham etc and to help organising the struggle. It would have applied the united front tactic to spread the struggle, to organise solidarity, to call for the defence against the police repression.
7. A revolutionary organisation would have called to spread the struggle and to link it with the perspective of struggle against cuts etc and for a general strike. Not at some time later when the bureaucrats might be ready to prepare and build another of their impotent one-day actions but in the concrete situation of the uprising. To call for a link with the struggle against the cuts not at the same time while the riots take place but one, two or three months later (as the IST/SWP, CWI/SP, IMT/SA, LFI/WP etc. did) is a schematic, passive, non-revolutionary approach to an explosive situation of class struggle. It is a refusal to understand the revolutionary dynamic of the class struggle and the call for the activist of the uprising to subordinate to the plans of the labour bureaucrats and their one-day actions.
8. Today after the defeat of the uprising two things are urgent. First, to organise a broad defence campaign against the police repression. Secondly, to draw the lessons, to spread these lessons amongst the activists and to organise the most militant and politically conscious amongst lower strata of the proletariat, the migrants and the black community in a revolutionary, Bolshevik force.
9. Organising a broad defence campaign means to call for a united front of the organisations of the labour movement and the migrant and black communities. Demands must be raised for an independent inquiry of the police murder of Mark Duggan by the workers movement and the migrant and black communities. Release of all those arrested in connection with the uprising, no criminal prosecution, no cuts in the social and communal services! Down with the “stop and search” operations of the police! Build for an indefinite general strike against the cuts, against police repression and to bring down the Tory government! The police and state forces will not behave better in the future – build workers and oppressed self-defence units! For a working class government based on councils of action of the workers, black and migrant communities!
10. At the same time it is essential to understand the central lessons of the uprising and to spread them. The most important lesson is to recognise the huge crisis of leadership of the working class and the oppressed. The uprising of the poor, the black and the migrant people was completely spontaneous and lacked the involvement of any organised structures. It was unorganised because the organised workers movement and the established community leaders betrayed the struggle. They betrayed it by refusing any participation and in most cases even denounced the uprising. The trade union leadership calls only for limited and belated one-day actions. The reformist and centrist left adapted to the bureaucracy and didn’t participate itself in the uprising. It prefers to leave the poor and oppressed alone instead of acting alone and independent of the bureaucracy in the uprising.
11. Understanding the lessons of the August uprising means also to recognise the isolation of the British left and labour movement from the poor and the nationally and racially oppressed. This is not an unexpected situation but the expression of the many decades long isolation of workers movement and the left from these masses of the middle and lower strata of the proletariat. Unfortunately their structures and influential forces are dominated by the middle class and the labour aristocracy. The ignorance of the uprising by this reformist and centrist left is therefore not an accident but the result of their aristocratism. It is now high time to understand the danger of this and the need to overcome this as soon as possible. One step to overcome this was to join the ranks of the struggle of the oppressed. But who has done this? Building the revolutionary organisation in Britain in the coming period is impossible without learning these lessons and recognising the historic failure of the reformist and centrist left in the past.
12. A small revolutionary organisation would most likely not have made a difference to the outcome of the uprising. An organisation of one, two or five dozen activists is under normal circumstances too small to decide the fate of an uprising of the masses. But it could have made a major step in gaining experience, spreading revolutionary ideas and organising activists from the oppressed communities and also made steps in building roots in the community. It is highly urgent to correct the mistakes of the past and build a truly revolutionary, Bolshevik organisation in Britain now. The Revolutionary Communist Organisation for Liberation (RKOB) wants to collaborate with all those who share such an outlook.
Tuesday, August 02, 2011
The Lesson of Spain by Leon Trotsky
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The Officers’ Corps—The Role of the People’s Front—The Workers’ Revolution
EUROPE has become a harsh and terrible school for the proletariat. In one country after another events have unfolded, which exacting great and bloody sacrifices from the workers, have up to the present moment ended in victory for the enemies of the proletariat (Italy, Germany, Austria). The policy of the old labour parties clearly shows how impossible it is for them to lead the proletariat, how incapable they are of preparing for victory.
At the present time, while this is being written, the civil war in Spain has not yet terminated. The workers of the entire world feverishly await the news of the victory of the Spanish proletariat. If this victory, as we firmly hope, is won it will be necessary to say: the workers have triumphed this time in spite of the fact that their leadership did everything to bring about their defeat. All the greater honour and glory to the Spanish working class!
In Spain the Socialists and Communists belong to the People’s Front which already betrayed the revolution once, but which, thanks to the workers and peasants, once again attained victory and in February created a “Republican” government. Six months afterwards the “Republican” army took the field against the people. Thus it became clear that the People’s Front government had maintained the military caste with the people’s money, furnished them with authority, power and arms, gave them command over young workers and peasants, thereby facilitating the preparations for a crushing attack on the workers and peasants.
People’s Front Curbs Social Revolution
More than that: even now, in the midst of civil war, the People’s, Front government does everything in its power to make victory doubly difficult. A civil war is waged, as everybody knows, not only with military but also with political weapons. From a purely military point of view, the Spanish revolution is much weaker than its enemy. Its strength lies in its ability to rouse the great masses to action. It can even take the army away from its reactionary officers. To accomplish this it is only necessary seriously and courageously to advance the program of the socialist revolution.
It is necessary to proclaim that, from now on, the land, the factories and shops will pass from the capitalists into the hands of the people. It is necessary to move at once toward the realization of this program in those provinces where the workers are in power. The Fascist army could not resist the influence of such a program for twenty-four hours; the soldiers would tie their officers hand and foot and hand them over to the nearest headquarters of the workers’ militia. But the bourgeois ministers cannot accept such a program. Curbing the social revolution, they compel the workers and peasants to spill ten times as much of their own blood in the civil war. And to crown everything, these gentlemen expect to disarm the workers again after the victory and to force them to respect the sacred laws of private property. Such is the true essence of the policy of the People’s Front. Everything else is pure humbug, phrases and lies!
Many supporters of the People’s Front now shake their heads reproachfully at the rulers of Madrid! Why didn’t they foresee all this? Why didn’t they purge the army in time? Why didn’t they take the necessary measures? More than anywhere else, these criticisms are being voiced in France, where, however, the policy of the leaders of the People’s Front is in no way to be distinguished from the policy of their Spanish colleagues. In spite of the harsh lesson of Spain, one can say in advance that the Leon Blum government will accomplish no serious purge of the army. Why? Because the workers’ organizations remain in a coalition with the Radicals and consequently are the prisoners of the bourgeoisie.
People’s Militia Must Replace Officers’ Corps
It is naive to complain that the Spanish republicans or the socialists or the communists forsaw nothing, let something slip. It is not at all a question of the perspicacity of this or that minister or leader, but of the general direction of the policy. The workers’ party which enters into a political alliance with the radical bourgeoisie, by that fact alone renounces the struggle against capitalist militarism. Bourgeois domination, that is to say, the maintenance of private property of the means of production, is inconceivable without the support of the exploiters by the armed forces. The officers’ corps represents the guard of capital. Without this guard the bourgeoisie could not maintain itself for a single day. The selection of the individuals, their education and training make the officers as a distinctive group uncompromising enemies of socialism. Isolated exceptions change nothing. That is how things stand in all bourgeois countries. The danger lies not in the military braggarts and demagogues who openly appear as fascist; incomparably more menacing is the fact that at the approach of the proletarian revolution the officers’ corps becomes the executioner of the proletariat. To eliminate four or five hundred reactionary agitators from the army means to leave everything basically as it was before. The officers’ corps in which is concentrated the centuries-old tradition of enslaving the people must be dissolved, broken, crushed in its entirety, root and branch. It is necessary to replace the troops in the barracks commanded by the officers’ caste with the people’s militia, that is, with the democratic organization of the armed workers and peasants. There is no other solution. But such an army is incompatible with the domination of exploiters big and small. Can the republicans agree to such a measure? Not at all. The People’s Front government, that is to say, the government of the coalition of the workers with the bourgeoisie, is in its very essence a government of capitulation to the bureaucracy and the officers. Such is the great lesson of the events in Spain, now being paid for with thousands of human lives.
Defence of Republic is Defence of Capitalism
The political alliance of the working class leaders with the bourgeoisie is disguised as the defence of the “republic.” The experience of Spain shows what this defence is in actuality. The word “republican,” like the word “democrat,” is a deliberate charlatanism which serves to cover up class contradictions. The bourgeois is a republican so long as the Republic protects private property. And the workers utilize the Republic to overthrow private property. In other words: the Republic loses all its value to the bourgeois the moment it assumes value for the workers. The radical cannot enter into a bloc with workers’ parties without the assurance of support in the officers’ corps. It is no accident that Daladier is at the head of the Ministry of War in France. The French bourgeoisie has entrusted this post to him more than once and he has never betrayed them. Only people of the type of Maurice Paz or Marceau Pivert can believe that Daladier is capable of purging the army of reactionaries and Fascists, in other words, of dissolving the officers’ corps. But no one takes such people seriously.
But here we are interrupted by the exclamation. “How can one dissolve the officers’ corps? Doesn’t this mean destroying the army and leaving the country disarmed in the face of Fascism? Hitler and Mussolini are only waiting for that!” All these arguments are old and familiar. That’s how the Cadets, the S-Rs and the Russian Mensheviks reasoned in 1917, and that’s how the leaders of the Spanish People’s Front reasoned. The Spanish workers half-believed these ratiocinations until they were convinced by experience that the nearest Fascist enemy was to be found in the Spanish Fascist army. Not for nothing did our old friend Karl Liebknecht teach: “The main enemy is in our own country!”
Purging Army of Fascists An Illusion
L’Humanite tearfully begs that the army be purged of Fascists. But what is this plea worth? When you vote credits for the maintenance of the officers’ corps, when you enter into an alliance with Daladier and through him with finance capital, confide the army to Daladier—and at the same time demand that this entirely capitalist army serve the “people” and not capital—then you have either become a complete idiot or else you are consciously deceiving the working masses.
“But we’ve got to have an army,” repeat the socialist and communist leaders, “because we must defend our democracy and with it the Soviet Union against Hitler!” After the lesson of Spain it is not difficult to foresee the consequences of this policy for democracy as well as for the Soviet Union. Once they have found a favorable moment, the officers’ corps, hand in hand with the dissolved Fascist leagues, will assume the offensive against the working masses, and, if victorious, will crush the miserable remnants of bourgeois democracy and extend their hands to Hitler for a common struggle against the U.S.S.R.
The articles appearing in Populaire and L’Humanite on the events in Spain fill one with rage and disgust. These people learn nothing. They do not want to learn. They consciously shut their eyes to the facts. The principal lesson for them is that it is necessary at all costs to maintain the “unity” of the People’s Front, that is to say, unity with the bourgeoisie and friendship with Daladier.
Daladier and the Generals
Unquestionably Daladier is a great “democrat.” But can one doubt for a moment that side by side with the official work in Blum’s ministry, he is working unofficially in the general staff of the officers’ corps? There one finds serious people who look facts in the face, who do not get drunk on hollow rhetoric the way Blum does. These people are prepared for every eventuality. No doubt Daladier and the military leaders are coming to an understanding with respect to the necessary measures to take in case the workers take the road toward revolution. To be sure the generals are of their own accord far ahead of Daladier. And among themselves the generals say: “Let’s support Daladier until we are through with the workers and then we will put a stronger man in his place.” At the same time the socialist and communist leaders repeat from day to day: “Our friend Daladier.” The worker ought to reply to them: “Tell me who your friends are and I will tell you who you are.” People who entrust the army to that old agent of capital, Daladier, are unworthy of the workers’ confidence.
Certainly, the Spanish proletariat like the French proletariat, does not want to remain disarmed before Mussolini and Hitler. But to defend themselves against these enemies it is first necessary to crush the enemy in one’s own country. It is impossible to overthrow the bourgeoisie without crushing the officers’ corps. It is impossible to crush the officers’ corp without overthrowing the bourgeoisie. In every victorious counter-revolution, the officers have played the decisive role. Every victorious revolution, that had a profound social character destroyed the old officers’ corps. This was the case in the Great French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, and this was the case in the October Revolution in 1917. To decide on such a measure one must stop crawling on one’s knees before the Radical bourgeoisie. A genuine alliance of workers and peasants must lie created against the bourgeoisie, including the Radicals. One must have confidence in the strength, initiative and courage of the proletariat and the proletariat will know how to bring the soldier over to its side. This will be a genuine and not a fake alliance of workers, peasants and soldiers. This very alliance is being created and tempered right now in the fire of civil war in Spain. The victory of the people means the end of the People’s Front and the beginning of Soviet Spain. The victorious social revolution in Spain will inevitably spread out over the rest of Europe. For the Fascist hangmen of Italy and Germany it will be incomparably more terrible than all the diplomatic pacts and all the military alliances.
July 30, 1936
Monday, June 20, 2011
AFTER WISCONSIN, WHICH ROAD FORWARD: CLASS INDEPENDENCE OR CLASS COLLABORATION?
PREPARE FOR A GENERAL STRIKE, OR CARRY WATER FOR THE DEMOCRATS THROUGH 2012?
Our unions' leaderships are not prepared to fight and win in the current economic crisis. They lack an analysis of the nature of the crisis and are therefore incapable of mapping a road forward. They have buried themselves so far inside the corporate Democratic Party that they can.t see they are feeding the hand that bites us! They believe their own mythology that corporate capitalism can be run in a “moral” manner, and that rational pressure exerted in the traditional manner can resolve the crisis in the interest of the working class. Not only are they mistaken at every step in the road, but their strategy and tactics are leading the working class to defeat and preventing the independent political action needed for the working class to defend and advance our own historic interests. After serving as a tool of class peace for so many decades, these leaders do not know how to respond to the objective fact that the bosses have declared class war on us, and this is a fight to the death!
WHAT THE LABOR TOPS DON’T WANT WORKERS TO KNOW
Labor leaders bemoan the decline of the “middle class,” but the real crime is that they went along with academic sociology and the TV culture which for decades has told workers they are not a “working class,” defined by their social/economic relationship to the means of production, but rather a “middle class” defined by income level and the culture of consumerism. In the face of the economic decline of the American empire and the realignment of economic power toward a rising China, the “middle class” expectations of the American labor movement are no longer affordable in a “profit first” driven economy. Our expectations have burst the limits of capitalism! This objective fact leaves the labor tops with nothing to offer workers today!
The international economic crisis has not been resolved. Billions were thrown at banks and none of it trickled down to jobs. Rather the big banks, speculators and corporate elite used it for personal bonuses, to continue speculative trading and to “rationalize” their companies, increasing capital expenditure and cutting employees to assure returns for stockholders. As American workers. wage packages (wages, COLAS, pensions and healthcare) are slashed in an “employer's market” here at home, across the world in China workers. wages are rising under the pressure of a working class which holds, on average, 435 strikes a day. Businesses, The Economist tells us, are seeking to set a price point in their purchase of labor power (the commodity that workers sell) on the international market, before they can bring jobs back to the USA. But even the most optimistic economists predict that lowering American wages would not bring back enough industrial manufacturing, or even service jobs, to put the 12-20% unemployed back to work, much less to preserve the much vaunted “middle class” lifestyle. The result is a marginalized youth, black and Latino population with no prospects for inclusion in the productive economy, and a prison industrial complex housing two million prisoners who are disproportionately people of color, and overwhelmingly come from the poorest layers of the working class.
As the crisis heads into what is termed a “double dip” recession, imperialism has its tentacles spread thin. Three wars, responsible for countless tens of thousands of civilian deaths, are being run by the Democrats, while covert actions and drone strikes cross more borders than Wikileaks can keep up with. The workers of North Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and China are attacking their governments and taking massive strike and protest actions. With the collapse in the bailouts of Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and the potential downgrading of the USA's bond rating by Moodys, it is clear the big bosses of the world economy see no way out except imposing massive austerity measures, which they expect the trade union leaders, the Social Democrats, the Labor Parties, and, in the USA, the Democratic Party to administer. And the class traitors at the head of our unions are following right along – witness SEIU Local 1000's endorsement of Governor Brown's regressive tax plans in California.
The bosses. current strategy translates into attacks on all workers. The halving of UAW auto workers. pay has set a new lower wage standard for American industrial and manufacturing work. The increase in class sizes and tuition for students, the cuts in public services, the gutting of public health and other essential governmental services and the scapegoating of the public worker have become standard measures across the nation. The attack on the last and largest bastion of the American labor movement, the public employee sector, is an all-out class war launched by big capitalists with the intention of imposing a historic defeat on the American working class.
In order for market forces (remember the free hand of the market) to drive American workers' compensation down to the price point where capital can rationally invest here again, the market demands gutting of defined benefit pension plans, driving down public sector wages, cutting the social wage (government benefits), and shifting the burden of the crisis further onto the backs of the poor, workers, and the oppressed. The market requires the destruction of the unions and any organizations that organize the working class, the poor, and the oppressed. Today.s union leaderships are not prepared for this onslaught. In fact, these class collaborators act in diametric opposition to the interests of the working class; they are doing everything they can to stop us from organizing independently of the bosses. political parties, from launching solidarity actions, and from striking at all – let along building for the widespread, indefinite general strikes that will ultimately be needed to confront the bosses. attacks.
A FAILED STRATEGY FOR LABOR
In the period of the expansion of the US Empire during and after WWII, the labor tops made peace with the American ruling class. Under the threat of rising working class rank and file militancy in the 1930s (the rise of the CIO; general strikes in Minneapolis and San Francisco), Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act – much lauded as a victory for workers, as it guarantees the right to organize, but the actual purpose of which was to corral the working class into reliance on a state structure rather than our own self activity. The NLRA was followed quickly by anti-labor laws such as the Taft-Hartley Act, which constrains labor by making it illegal to offer solidarity to other workers in the form of strike action. Today we see the result: the MUNI rank and file rejected a sell out contract, only to have the “impartial” arbitrator impose it over their objection. If workers in the Bay Area can be stripped of the right to collective bargaining without a fight, it exposes the role of the sell-out labor leaders, which is to constrain the working class during the imposition of austerity. We need to shut down the entire Bay Area transportation grid to defend our MUNI drivers, but solidarity strikes are against the Taft-Hartley law and the craven leadership uses that law to keep the rank and file in line.
As long as the preeminent position of US imperialism brought home super-profits after WWII, infrastructure, education, technology and industry (particularly the military-industrial complex) created a high demand for labor. Rising wages increasingly came with labor peace, enabling the labor bureaucracy to transform itself into a self-perpetuating dues collection agency that acted in its own interests, abandoning class conflict for the “rational” road of arbitration, lawsuits, legislation, and buying politicians.
This worked well for about 25 years, but the laws of capitalist economics precluded the fantasies of the labor bureaucracy from enduring. As the economy changed and wages started to stagnate in the early 1970s, the illusion began to evaporate. There never was a “middle class”; we had been workers all along, and we could pay for the new consumerist culture of a “middle class American dream” only by sending the women of the household to work, by taking second jobs, and by incurring debt in the form of student loans, credit cards, and second mortgages against our houses. Now all these stopgaps are running out, and the explosion of the speculative stock market and inflated housing bubble economy is gutting the standard of living of the American working class. Wages have been flat or declining for decades; we work more hours than before; we have less vacation; we are less secure, and all the money has floated to the top 0.01% while we are scrounging to hold on to a declining paycheck. The labor bureaucracy was not prepared for this! They still cling to their failed strategy of class collaboration with the Democrats, reliance on the courts, and lobbying legislators to “tax the rich.”
This strategy is not just a mistake. Rather, the union tops are doing their job, as defined for them by the bosses. legal system. They will do everything possible to keep workers from taking strike action, and from mounting solidarity actions with workers with workers in other unions, counties, districts, states or nations. The labor bosses see the upsurge in rank-and-file militancy as a threat, which they can only contain by corraling it into electoral politics. Thus, the popular sentiment for a general strike in Wisconsin was diffused into a recall campaign, which prevents immediate militant action, and steers workers into placing faith and hope in the Democrats rather than in our own self-organized mass actions. Thus, the AFL-CIO forbids any mention of opposition to foreign wars as they prepare to rally the troops for the 2012 electoral cycle.
HOW TO PREPARE FOR A GENERAL STRIKE
The current crop of union leaders is not going to prepare for a general strike. Instead, they spend most of our dues dollars selling concessionary contracts to the members, while giving the rest to lobbyists and lawyers, leaving our strike funds dry and our membership unorganized, frustrated, and demoralized. For the working class to avoid the historic defeat the Koch brothers have planned for us, we must first take back control of our unions! New militant rank and file leaders not afraid to confront Taft-Hartley through strike action must rise in the ranks to replace the functionaries and careerists who sap our dues while shedding crocodile tears about their inability to mobilize the membership and bring home the bacon.
Effective strike action and general strikes cannot be organized unless we first either take over our unions, or else build new unions and other workers. organizations with a new leadership. Our current union misleaders' attitude is that they are only responsible to act in the interest of the dues-paying membership – not the future members, not the unorganized workers, not the unemployed, and certainly not the workers of the world, oppressed, exploited and brutalized as we are by Wall Street and the military industrial war machine. But our class can only survive and win if we take up the old Knights of Labor slogan: An Injury to One Is an Injury to All! Solidarity is our only power, and the ability to strike in the historic interest of the class is our strongest weapon. When the leaders of today's unions spurn these tools of the international working class, they act as the agents of the ruling class in our organizations, and must be driven out and replaced. That means we need rank-and-file class struggle caucuses to promote a new militant leadership, to fight for working class independence, and to build a fighting workers/labor party that unites the entire working class and all our allies nationally and internationally to strike as one against the rule of the exploiters and build a movement for workers' power and workers' ownership of the means of production.
The drive to build for a general strike must be pursued in conjunction with the democratization of the unions and/or the formation of new workers' organizations. As the current leaders continue to mislead the masses, workers' frustration will rise, and the opportunity to form class struggle rank-and-file caucuses that can challenge for power will grow. To win, these caucuses must advance strategy, tactics, and demands that unite the entire working class, and forge independence, and must prepare for and take united strike actions.
Demands such as no concessions, no take aways, and pay me my COLA are of immediate concern. Demands such as jobs for all and 30 hours work for 40 hours pay can unite labor with the unemployed and those on furloughs and reduced hours. Demands for universal health care, not handouts to the insurance companies, will unite the organized with the underinsured. Demands to nationalize the banks and major industries under workers' control to provide immediate access to capital for job creation offer solution to the crisis of market control. Demands to end imperialist interventions abroad can unite our organizations with the workers across the planet who struggle against the same corporate criminals who are crushing us!
These demands cannot be won by the current leaders, but can be when we take back and rebuild rank and file workers democracy. The fight to defend the working class from the bosses’ class war requires that labor must clean its own house! Drive out the functionaries, imperialists, corporatists, and class collaborators! Then we can remake our unions into a militant organizing force in the fight for the historic interest of the working class!
“[T]he sections of the Fourth International should always strive not only to renew the top leadership of the trade unions, boldly and resolutely in critical moments advancing new militant leaders in place of routine functionaries and careerists, but also to create in all possible instances independent militant organizations corresponding more closely to the tasks of mass struggle against bourgeois society; and, if necessary, not flinching even in the face of a direct break with the conservative apparatus of the trade unions. If it be criminal to turn one.s back on mass organizations for the sake of fostering sectarian factions, it is no less so passively to tolerate subordination of the revolutionary mass movement to the control of openly reactionary or disguised conservative ('progressive') bureaucratic cliques. Trade unions are not ends in themselves; they are but means along the road to proletarian revolution.” Leon Trotsky, The Transitional Program (1938)
Humanist Workers for Revolutionary Socialism
www.HumanistsForRevolutionarySocialism.org •
hw4rs@yahoo.com
June 17, 2011 http://www.facebook.com/pages/HumanistsforRevolutionarySocialism/8013446 Labor Donated
Wednesday, June 01, 2011
Zionism: A road map to Hell
A Zionist Youth
Having been raised in a Zionist household, going to Hebrew school, buying memorial trees in Israel as a youth for my grandparents as they passed away, being taught that the whole world hates us and that Israel is our only safe refuge, being hated as a Jew-boy by my Catholic home town co-youth for "killing their lord", being finally accepted in 1967 when Israel showed it "had some balls" (meaning mine must also be hanging to the floor) . I have experience with anti-Semitism in the concrete form of boots in the ribs and a metal lunch box smashed against this "faggot-Jew-boy's" face, so the Zionist claim that Israel was our last refuge and that the world hates us was my experience as a youth growing up in 1960's American suburbia. Since then I have seen and fought with American flag waving swastika wearing jackbooted Nazi thugs in the streets of San Francisco, Walnut Creek, Boston and Berkeley so I know in a way only bruised knuckles and the taste of blood can teach one of what I speak.
A seminal part of my training as a Zionist youth was that Israel was "a land without people-for a people without land" we could point to Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) who visited the area and claimed it empty barren, unclean and uninhabited. So why shouldn't it be ours?
And just this last weekend, as we listened to and discussed the Prime Minister's tongue lashing of Obama for stepping out of line on the 1967 borders issue, my father reminded me of Mark Twain's observations in Innocents Abroad. But what is rarely mentioned about Mark Twains trip is: “ Palestine’s arable land is only 17% of its total area”, that “Mark Twain visited in the middle of the hot Mediterranean summer”, and that “Mark Twain’s visit was brief by all accounts, and only encompassed the areas that were cited in the Bible.” Indeed Twain’s comments about Greece were quite similar to those about the Holy Land; one could get an impression that Greece also was abandoned to the ghosts of Zeus and Hera.
The Israeli hero in 1967 was General Moshe Dayan a man of impeccable Zionist credentials. Lets hear what he has to say about how Israel was settled. “Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist, not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either.”
Well that contradicts the rhetoric (and the Zionist youth training received at Hebrew school and Hebrew summer camp where we sang the Hatikva); so there were people there? Who the hell were they and what were they doing there? How did we get rid of them? Could this be true? Not possible, we are the dispossessed coming home not them. So I found the book Righteous Victims by Benny Morris a highly regarded Zionist historian.
Morris draws his own subjective pro-Israel conclusions but his book is full of powerful historic observations:
"Most of the settlers who came in the First and Second Aliyot lived, at least for a time, as illegal residents. They entered as tourists or pilgrims and overstayed their permits, or they entered illegally." p.41
"A land without people for a people without a land" was the Zionist slogan-originating, curiously, not with Herzl or one of the forebears, but in Lord Shaftebury's memoirs, in 1854, and recycled by the Zionist writer Israel Zangwill in an article in 1901. Ahad Ha'Am, a leading Eastern European essayist, opened many Jewish eyes when he wrote in 1891, after a three month visit to Palestine: "We abroad are used to believing that Eretz Yisrael is now almost totally desolate, a desert that is not sowed....But in truth that is not the case. Throughout the country it is difficult to find fields that are not sowed. Only sand dunes and stony mountains...are not cultivated." p.42
But the arriving Jews had multiple problems as the Zionist project commenced. Yitzhak Epstein a Palestinian Jew came to Basel to address a Zionist gathering in 1905: "He had been troubled by the eviction of the Druze tenant farmers at Medulla in 1896. For the time, he said, there was no "Arab movement in the national or political sense in Palestine," but, he implied, one might develop in the not-so-distant future: "Among the difficult questions connected to the idea of the renaissance of our people on its soil there is one which is equal to all others: the question of our relations with the Arabs... We have forgotten one small matter: There is in our beloved land an entire nation, which has occupied it for hundreds of years and has never thought to leave it"" (p. 57 Morris)
How did the newly arriving Jews (the olim) see the local population? "...as primitive, dishonest, fatalistic, lazy, savage-much as European colonists viewed the natives elsewhere in Asia or Africa." (pg43 Morris)
Not to belabor the point but even today's historians of Zionism cannot deny the primary source documentation. The founding of Israel was based on a lie sold to Jews across Europe who were being persecuted and the land of milk and honey sounded like heaven in the face of pogroms of the East and the Nazi onslaught and genocide that would follow; even if the concept of a land of “milk and honey” contradicts the concept of a barren, desolate untended expanse.
Were there people there? Yes. The McCarthy (Columbia U. press 1990 The Population of Palestine) showed the Non Jewish population in 1877 to have been 426,908 or 97% of the population at the time 13,942 or 3% were Jewish by 1946, 60 some odd years after the Zionist project began there were 1,339,763 Non-Jewish Palestinians or 69% of the population and 602,586 or 31% were Jews. In the post 1949 era the Jewish population in the area swelled immediately outnumbering the Palestinian.
Who owned the land?
At first the Jewish National fund bought up land from the Ottoman land lords from whom the local Palestinians rented eking out a serf like existence. Of course some land was wholly owned by the locals. But we know that land ownership is really just a question of power relations over property distribution. The Ottoman empire had no more right to the land of the local people whom they controlled than say the Tsar had to the land on which the serfs worked or the Southern Slave Plantation owners had to "their" land. Those working the land and dispossessed are the fountain from which the democratic revolution for land redistribution springs, just as it upset the ancien regime across Europe the land question is the national question and it had yet to be resolved in the land which the Zionists were buying from the landlord empire which (if it were to remain) would have faced the wrath of the rising Arab national revolution. Instead the Jewish National Fund bought the problem of the unresolved tasks of the democratic revolution in Palestine which would ultimately be directed at who ever got left holding the bag, the Ottoman were defeated, the English knew when it was time to release the hot potato and the Zionist project outpaced the advance of the nationalist consciousness and organization of the Arabs. Thus the juggernaut!
Remember Epstein at the Basel meeting in 1905, he "...took the Zionists severely to task for purchasing land from effendis and then pushing out the poor tenants, and he asserted, provocatively , that Palestine in fact belonged to both peoples: "We are making a great psychological error with regard to a great, assertive and jealous people. While we feel a deep love for the land and our forefathers, we forget that the nation who lives in it today has a sensitive heart and a loving soul. The Arab, like every man, is tied to his native land with strong bonds." (Morris, p. 57)
Either this was a "land without people - for a people without land" or as the numbers and the land transfer records show, the land was colonized by many illegal immigrants who then found a way to bring in their families and friends buying up land from the landlord class of a dying and soon to be vanquished empire, you can't have it both ways.
The record will show that in the early years the Jewish immigrants were not fit or capable of doing the strenuous work in the land they came to own. Even on the early socialist kibbutz much of the manual work would be done by hiring the very Arab workers who had lost their land. Has it occurred to the Zionist that the modern conflict between the Jew and the Arab in historic Palestine/Erez Yisrael has a material basis in the dispossession of the land, first by purchase then by driving a people off their land? Of course not, it is impossible for one who derives the benefit of an oppressive act of annexation and subjugation to see it as anything other than justified.
What the Zionists did not want to see is the universal truth that when an entire people progressively loose their land, are changed from a self sustaining farming people into a class of workers for hire with nothing to sell but their labor power, when their families are driven apart and half are forced into refugee status for generations, human beings will resist, fight back and will continue to do so until they are treated justly or you can terrorize them into total submission. These are the objective facts, one can go into subjective apoplexy reading this but all rational people agree on what the historic record is. Over sixty years ago some 600-700,000 Palestinians, by no fault of their own, became refugees when they lost their land, and as General Dayan reminded us, their villages were bulldozed right off the map. Historic maps with demarcated Jewish and Palestinian Territories are exactly what Dayan wanted to erase from history. I guarantee if you went to Hebrew school like I did you were never shown maps like these.
The question of the occupied territory
For Zionists like my father there are no Palestinians, the land was empty when "we" arrived; there is already a Palestinian State which is Jordan; the early Jewish fighters were not illegal immigrants and terrorists illegally attacking the British mandate, they were freedom fighters; if there are refugees it is the fault of the other Arab nations for goading the refugees into voluntarily fleeing; we bought the land fair and square and when they attacked us we created defensive boarders (it just happens that we control the water, and have cut up the Palestinian contiguous areas into Bantustans); the wall is necessary and when they stop sending over bombers there will be no need for it and all the defensive border checks, road blocks and such. That these population control mechanisms take place all over the West Bank can not be denied yet the true Zionist denies that this is an occupation.
So the question is who is actually terrorizing whom, what are the real consequences of the armed conflict between the occupied and the occupier.
Looking at statistics on the death of civilians the numbers from B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights group and and Remember These Children, examining fatal violence between the Palestinians and the Israelis has shown it has been disproportionate. Since Sept 29, 2000 until Oct 2010 at least 6,430 Palestinians and 1,084 Israelis have been killed. Among children 124 killed were Israeli while 1,452 were Palestinian. Of the civilians killed 731 are Israeli while 3,535+ are the cited as Palestinian dead. Where did the people die? 54.1% of the Israelis killed were killed on their own territory while 98.9% of the Palestinians killed were killed in their own area, the occupied territories. Conversely 45.9% of the Israelis who were killed were killed on others' land while 1.1% of the Palestinians killed were killed on others' land. These numbers are revealing of the nature of the conflict and the brutality under which the Palestinian people suffer and other innocents suffer. Until the rights of the Palestinian people are attained there can be no peace. You can not dispossess a people and keep them in refugee camps on your borders, oppressed, exploited, and expect there to be peace.
After saying all this to close without pointing to a solution would be disrespectful to the reader. So although that is a major discussion in and of it self what follows is the short version.
What is to be Done?
There can be no peace while historic Palestine is occupied and the refugees are denied the right of return. Democracy can not exist for the Jews in the area and be denied the Arabs. The Zionist state is a dependent state and sub imperialist acting as a foot hold in the middle east for Western/US/UK imperialism. It is not the much touted “Democracy” that we (US Imperialism) love; it is the real estate as it applies to military security in particular of oil routes. The entire power of imperialism is thus arrayed at keeping the Palestinian subjugated hence the annual billions of tax funding going to the Zionist military.
Behind the Palestinian conundrum is what is facing imperialism today across the Near and Middle East, the unresolved tasks of the national revolution of the Arab people issues of national independence from imperialist (IMF/World Bank, JP Morgan) control, land distribution, democracy, freedom, the right to a job, and other economic rights are today inspiring the Arab people more than Al-Qaeda ever could. But the national capitalist class of these countries and in Palestine are too weak and too dependent on imperialism’s finance and market to carry out the tasks which in Europe and North America were carried out by an emerging and growing capitalist class between 1680’s and 1880’s. Therefore the tasks of the Democratic-Bourgeois revolution will fall to the working class to resolve.
It is the workers’ revolution which can secure freedom for Palestine and ensure the Jewish workers and the Jewish people safety within and integrated and multi-ethnic secular democratic workers’ state. Jews who accept the Palestinians’ right to return and who join in making the workers’ revolution will build a democratic workers’ state which recognizes the cultural and religious rights of all while providing economic planning by the working classes to assure economic justice which is the only way to end the blood between the sons and daughters of Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael; a family broken asunder by first slave relations then the Roman imperium and ultimately by today’s super power US imperialism. If the Jewish workers in historic Palestine cannot break from their capitalist overlords and ally themselves with the Palestinian right to Self Determination and fight for a democratic workers state they allow the continuation of the siege mentality of Zionist colonialism, and peace will not be possible.
Charles Rachlis
Humanist Workers for Revolutionary Socialism
Saturday, April 09, 2011
END NATO-US INTERVENTION! DEFEAT QADDAFFI! BREAK WITH THE TNC! ARM THE WORKERS AND YOUTH TO DEFEAT IMPERIALISM IN NORTH AFRICA
Class Contradictions in the North African Revolution
Decades of crony capitalism, funded by the flow of petro-dollars to despots, sheiks, reactionary Bathists, and fake socialist regimes alike, have underdeveloped the Maghreb (North Africa) and the Near East. These regimes have held back the “democratic” aspirations of the people and closed book on the Pan-Arab nationalist revolution that appeared to threaten imperialism 30 years ago. Even while posing as anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist, regimes throughout the region have made their peace with both and have become imperialism’s willing pawns. All have done their part to suppress the masses, and in particular the Palestinian revolution, the working class, minorities (tribal and religious), and women. The role of these regimes, today threatened by their own people, has been to maintain the status quo, keeping oil flowing to imperialism’s oil cartels, and dollars and gold flowing back to a small elite concentrated around the inner circles of the dictators, their families, and their military and security organizations.
The aspirations of Pan-Arabism – national independence (from imperialism and Zionism), secular democracy, and social progress – were destined by the weakness of the national bourgeoisie to collapse. Since this occurred, social equilibrium has been enforced by a well-balanced distribution of the carrot and the stick. In Libya, oil wealth allowed a relatively larger portion of “carrots” to be allotted the masses. In Saudi Arabia, extra “carrots” were quickly distributed at the last moment when the monarchy realized that this equilibrium could not withstand the crisis of capitalism and the uprisings of 2011.
The unfulfilled expectations of the masses, the desire for “democratic” freedoms, and the consequences of high unemployment exploded this winter/spring in a revolutionary upsurge whose leading actors were the under-employed youth, students, and workers (both private and public sector), closely followed and joined by the petty bourgeoisie (small business people, shop owners, professionals and academics). Usurpers to the mantle of leadership, like ElBaradei and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or the TNC in Libya, emerged not from the heterogeneous masses who first bared their chests to the bullets of reaction, but only after the initial uprisings, in hope that they would get the nod from imperialism and emerge at the top of the heap.
It is essential to understand that democracy and freedom have different meanings to different social classes. For the workers, basic democratic rights, such as the right to organize and control over one’s conditions of labor, are primary. For the small and large capitalists, bourgeois academics, and intellectuals, the right to exploit labor and participate in the market free from the dictates of crony capitalism, alongside the desire for political, cultural and intellectual freedom, turned them against the regimes. Although each country has its own unique dynamics, these uprisings, which spread across the region in a firestorm of historic consequence unlike anything since 1848, contain the contradictory aspirations of two opposing classes: one consigned forever to be pawns of imperialism, the other burdened with the historic task of defeating it.
These contradictions are subsumed in this re-emergence of the Arab-national revolution, but they can not be resolved by the emergence of “constitutional democracy”. The aspirations of the mass base that ignited the revolution cannot be successfully met if the revolution limits itself to the fight for “freedom and democracy,” as defined by western imperialism and embraced by the petty bourgeoisie, the academics, and wannabe imperialist lackeys like ElBaradei in Egypt and the TNC in Libya.
For imperialism to maintain its financial position, workers must not be permitted to control the conditions of their own labor or the economy, or even be apportioned their proper share of the economic benefit from the natural wealth of these nations. To achieve this end, a willing pawn is required, one who will feign left (advance “political freedom”), but strike to the right (crush the workers’ movements and administer exploitative deals with imperialism).
In Libya, despite the higher GDP and limited gains of women under the “Green Revolution,” the masses, led by unemployed youth and inspired by the events across North Africa, stood up against the repression of Qaddaffi’s brutal regime. The masses no longer believe the lie that Qaddaffi is fighting imperialism and building “Green-Socialism.” Decades of harshly enforced crony capitalism, and Qadaffi’s capitulation to imperialism in 2003, assured that once unleashed, the protests spread across Libya even to Tripoli, where the masses faced an unrelenting violent repression unlike any seen in Tunisia or Egypt. The fantasy of a peaceful “Jasmine” revolution came to an abrupt end. The masses armed to defend themselves from the cruel regime’s commitment to maintaining the status quo – i.e., its deals with imperialism and its hording of wealth at the expense of social programs and political freedom.
In the early days of the Libyan rebellion, two forms of organization emerged: on the one hand, councils of the heterogeneous mass of rebels, organizing in the streets and neighborhoods – embryonic workers’ councils like those we have seen in Tunisia and Egypt – and on the other, a bourgeois council which has now been transformed into the TNC – a rotten menagerie of defectors, monarchists, tribalists, intellectuals and capitalists. As a consequence of decades of repression, these councils are extremely disorganized, and tendencies within them have not fully consolidated. The rapid escalation of military events outpaced the ability of the working and lower classes to self-identify and differentiate from the TNC, particularly since the latter includes military deserters from the regime who appeared to promise sorely needed military leadership, arms, and forces.
The contradiction between the aspirations of the masses and the TNC are reflected most recently in the refusal of the TNC to arm militant youth who stake their lives driving out to the front. Imperialism sees the contradictory nature of the “rebel force” and is having a hard time differentiating who they can trust, hence the hesitancy in sending arms for fear that they fall into the hands of the working masses and unemployed youth.
Libya: A Test of Revolutionary Marxist Method
Recent events in North Africa have caught the Left playing catch-up. Libya in particular has most of the Left stumbling over itself. The contradictions outlined above are quite obvious in the unfolding of events in Egypt and Tunisia, where the workers, democratic militants, and women are already experiencing the reaction of the interim regimes as they try to keep Egypt and Tunisia “safe” for imperialism by preventing workers’ revolution. But in Libya, the left was caught off guard.
Imperialism is intervening in Libya to remove Qaddaffi, a dictator whose brutality has aroused an armed insurrection that threatens to overshoot the US-desired “orderly transition” to bourgeois democracy, and to become a workers revolution. Imperialism’s objective is to replace Qaddaffi with more a “democratic” bourgeois leadership, including ex-Qaddaffi cronies, that can and will keep a lid on the revolution. Both bourgeois factions are appealing to imperialism to be the chosen regime, using the young rebels and the mercenaries as bargaining chips and missile fodder. But Qaddaffi’s shelf life has long since expired, and the TNC has yet to prove its viability. This instability invites an imperialist-dictated partition of the country, a NATO-US “boots on the ground” invasion under the guise of peacekeeping, or both.
Presented with this spectacle – a semi-fascist dictator currently doing imperialism’s bidding, faced off against a second willing pawn waiting in the wings – the Left has floundered. The self-proclaimed Bolsheviks (in the Spartacist family) claim workers have no side. Other spin-offs from the Healyite legacy revive the fantasy that Qaddaffi is defending the gains of the 1969 revolution against Monachist restorationists and agents of imperialism. Both these tendencies reject the righteous indignation of the workers, the poor, and the oppressed, and attribute the uprising entirely to persistent and ever-present imperialist/CIA/MI6 instigation.
Apparently, unless these outfits are themselves in the leadership of a rebellion, they view the masses as the mere fodder of history, to be abandoned to their fate. No, comrades, Marxism does not teach an abstentionist internationalism. Marxism as a method for analysis and intervention guides revolutionaries to act in the historic interest of the working class – an impossible task for centrists, who cannot distinguish the revolutionary agents in this struggle from the stooges of imperialism. We in HWRS and the CWG stand in contrast to those on the left who are blind to the class distinction between the bourgeois leadership of the TNC and the working class youth core of the rebels. Instead, we condemn all attempts to co-opt the youth and exclude them from the military action against Qaddaffi’s forces; we advocate the rebellion’s political and military independence from the TNC leadership; and we urge internationalist workers everywhere to come to the aid of and arm the struggle of the youth and the workers. In other words, as Marxists, we stand for the independence of the working class in its armed insurrection, supporting its promise of defeating Qaddaffi; breaking from the TNC’s “alternative” regime, and then – as the revolution requires – joining with other Arab revolutions to defeat imperialism in the Maghreb.
Despite Qaddaffi’s attempts to paint himself as anti-imperialist, his actions long ago proved his interests lie with imperialism and not with the Libyan masses. His attempt to wipe out the popular revolt of the working people, the only class force that can defend what gains remain from 1969 and defeat imperialism, was initiated both on behalf of his imperialist patrons and his gang of crony capitalists. Unlike the “thirdworldist” left (Castro/Chavez), we do not bloc with Qaddaffi militarily against imperialism (though we do advocate that the working class base of Qaddaffi’s forces defect and join the anti-imperialist fighters).
We are for the defeat of imperialist intervention in every nation oppressed/invaded or bombed by imperialism. The main responsibility for this defeat is in the hands of the workers’ movements in the imperialist countries and their allies in NATO. Therefore, we are against the entire social imperialist left who find excuses for intervention, “humanitarian” or not, of an oppressor country, when they perceive it as necessary to defeat semi-fascism or dictatorship in an oppressed country.
Indeed, the social imperialists (like the German Greens who support the NATO bombing) and the “thirdworldists” are in reality two sides of the same coin. Neither puts any faith in the capacity of the semi-colonial masses, and especially the revolutionary youth, to fight for and win the national revolution as a social revolution. They have a pseudo-revolutionary version of the bourgeois civilizing mission. They believe that either the imperialist bourgeoisie, or the national bourgeoisie in the semi-colonies, can play a progressive role. In either case, their analysis ignores and dismisses the agency of the working masses as the only possible progressive subjective factor in history.
The liberal and progressive pacifists, a sorry strain of social imperialism, place their hopes on NATO/US “humanitarian” intervention. But imperialism cares not one whit for the humanitarian needs of civilians. This lesson – apparently lost on these idealists – has been proved over and again by history: Hiroshima, Vietnam, “Shock and Awe,” “Cast Lead,” Rwanda, and even today in the Congo today. But in the case of the present Libyan war, the perceived threat of massacre has given imperialism a chance to both “toot its humanitarian horn” and find a road to consolidation and victory for their pawn of choice (or last resort), the TNC. Both the pacifist interventionists and the sectarian abstentionists, with their grand pronouncements, ignore the independent role of the working class, and are thereby opening the road for the only other “realistic” solution: imperialist intervention.
The Tasks at Hand
To defeat imperialism, Libyan workers and their allies in Tunisia, Egypt, the Middle East, and Europe must give their IMMEDIATE attention to these urgent tasks facing every working class in the region:
1. Independent mass political organization is essential. A body such as an All-Libyan Conference of Workers’ Councils must be formed, with the explicit project of taking sole, unitary political power throughout the country.
2. Underground and exiled workers’ forces should be represented with delegates, so that the population in Qaddaffi-controlled territory will know that it is not the working class that is bargaining with imperialism over a division of Libya into two poverty-stricken semi-colonial, countries! OPPOSE PARTITION! FORWARD TO THE FEDERATED SOCIALIST REPUBLICS OF NORTH AFRICA AND THE NEAR EAST.
3. Workers must found and build a revolutionary Marxist party now, to delineate a programmatic response to the revolutionary crisis, to popularize the program among the masses, and to win the majority of the Workers’ Councils to support its demands and objectives.
4. No to “power sharing” and to “national” or “people’s” fronts. Each of these is a bayonet pointed at the working class! The TNC’s program is civil war in place of class war. This means a thousand kilometers of desert to cross, at a military disadvantage even with on-again/off-again imperialist air support. This is all the TNC has to offer imperialism, and all it can possibly offer in return for imperialism’s support.
5. Without independent political organization, the working class and youth can expect to be ground between two bourgeois millstones – the old goons of Qaddaffi, and the new goons of the TNC – in a war of exhaustion and elimination. Meanwhile, the young fighters’ relatives who are in Qaddaffi’s hands will pay with their lives. It is only an independent workers’ political program that will cause new revolts in Qaddaffi’s rear and advance the workers’ front line to the door of his tent!
6. Victory over imperialism, Qaddaffi ,and the TNC will require an independent military organization subordinate only to the Workers’ Councils. The TNC leadership will attempt to turn its troops on the youth and the workers tomorrow. Should the youth be so fortunate as to bring Qaddaffi’s head back to Bengazi on a plate, the TNC would soon enough fête the heroes with firing squads! Workers must assume that getting the TNC leaders to commit to class warfare is the true mission of the envoys Washington has sent, in place of arms or Libya’s impounded funds. Neither will be released to the workers and the youth! Not by Washington, and not by the French bourgeoisie, who may invade their country to save it from them! Right now, Washington has a shortage of available troops, and the E.U. NATO countries have even bigger money worries. We say to the Libyan workers: You must build your own workers’ army! Only in this way you can persuade them to give up their invasion plans and return to their secret agent plots.
7. All internationalist fighters must appeal immediately to the unions and sympathetic troops of Tunisia and Egypt to send arms of all calibers, and to form up brigades of trained worker-soldiers to come to the aid of the Libyan revolution! Libyan workers must pledge to return the solidarity when their comrades’ own national bourgeoisies try to loose the professional armies on them! Meanwhile, workers in the imperialist countries have an obligation to wage class struggle against every design the exploiters and their smiling “public servants” have upon your lives, labor and national treasure! This is more possible now than it has been at any time since 1946-47. European workers trained in conscript armies have the experience to form up armed internationalist workers brigades and join the revolution! Workers of Europe and the USA: the victory of the North African workers’ revolution depends to a large extent on our ability to arrest imperialism’s bloody death grip!
In an epoch when imperialism is facing an ever-deepening crisis, the interests of the capitalist imperialist class and its semi-colonial agents can only be realized by intensifying reaction and counter-revolution. Only a national revolution that fulfills the tasks of the permanent revolution can defeat the counter-revolution and open the way to socialism – in the Maghreb, in the Near East, and worldwide.
For the workers to live, imperialism must die! Victory to the Libyan and Arab masses!
Defeat US/NATO in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan! Reignite the Palestinian revolution!
Victory to the popular uprisings in Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, and Jordan!
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Statement of Liaison Committee of Humanist Workers for Revolutionary Socialism (USA) and Communist Workers' Group (Aotearoa/NZ)
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