Lukacs, Gramsci, Zizek and the Leninist Party

Gramsci has long been held by some self-proclaiming Trotskyists as a revolutionary figure who  complements Trotsky. This was always an attempt to assimilate Trotskyism to neo-Stalinism, Eurocommunism and Maoism, as currents within Euro Marxism. Today it is a more global attack on Trotsky and Lenin to boost the appeal of Menshevism when capitalism faces a terminal crisis that raises the spectre of revolution. Lukacs on the other hand, is less in favour with self-proclaiming Trotskyists because of his open capitulation to Stalin. 

Yet as we will see on the most important question of the vanguard party, Gramsci submitted to Stalinism whilst Lukacs never abandoned his position. Lukacs was a defender of Bolshevism against Menshevism and therefore against the influence of Gramsci in the formation of Euro Marxism. Here we will examine Lukacs on dialectics to critique the Euro-Marxism that falls short of a Leninist-Trotskyist standpoint.

For Lukacs the Hungarian Revolution was an abortion. A popular front of communists with social democrats, lacking a Leninist party, and with no successful German revolution to back it up. Lukacs (in History…) and his later defence of it (‘A Defense…’) argued that it was possible that the Hungarian revolution could have deepened as part of the European revolution, throwing out the social democrats and arming the workers, and so on. But the vanguard party was missing everywhere in Europe so ultimately the revolution was doomed.

Despite his theoretical brilliance and commitment to Marxism, Lukacs’ political life fleshes out Marx’s famous dictum that philosophers interpret the world but (in the absence of an international vanguard party) cannot change it. His devotion to Lenin and the Leninist Party, while second to none, didn’t survive the degeneration of the revolution. In that sense we cannot discount the implications of Lukacs’ capitulation to Stalinism.

Yet, the Bolshevik revolution proved his analysis of the necessity of the proletarian party as the class-conscious subject of history, correct, and made him the equal of the leading Bolsheviks. Then, when that party degenerated under Stalin into the instrument of the bureaucracy, Lukacs was again proven correct, but in the negative. So Lukacs was with Lenin and Trotsky, that without the democratic centralist party, organised as an international to make the revolution global, revolution was doomed to defeat.

When Zizek claims (in his post-face to ‘A Defence…’) that Lukacs' view of the party was to ‘fill the gap’ (lack) between objective and subjective reality, he was incorrect. There is a world of difference between Zizek’s voluntarist Lenin as the messianic figure above the party who wills the revolutionary ‘event’ (act) into being, and Lukacs’ conception of the democratic centralist party being the proletarian ‘subject’ as the class-for-itself.

If Lukacs held onto his Leninist position on the vanguard party despite his practical capitulation to Stalinism, Gramsci actively adapted to Stalinism on the question of the Party and program. Gramsci covered the bureaucratisation of the party with his theory of intellectuals. Traditional intellectuals served the ruling class while organic intellectuals served the revolutionary class. But in practice the party served the bureaucracy and its program therefore served the interests of the bureaucracy.

Communist Parties henceforth followed the line of the Third International, that in each country the international revolution had to be subordinated to Soviet foreign policy. The program of building socialism in one country, the SU, translated into a two-stage theory of revolution elsewhere. Gramsci disguised the Stalinist stage theory as a tactical question. In backward countries such as Russia the party could mount a ‘war of maneuver’. In the advanced European countries the necessary tactic was the ‘war of position’ – a euphemism for the democratic revolution.  In fact both tactics were variants of the popular front between the working class and the democratic bourgeoisie to build alliances with the SU.

In reality Gramsci rejects Lenin and Trotsky’s view (shared by Lukacs) that the German, Hungarian and other revolutions failed because they did not apply the Bolshevik model of an international permanent revolution. With this theory, Gramsci provided the theoretical cover for Menshevik stageism and the Eurocommunist rejection of Bolshevism which was already present in the Second International, and Kautskyism.  It gave rise to a Euro Marxism from Kautsky to Althusser and Zizek.

In fact, Zizek’s idealist take on the subject-object split resolved by a messianic leader such as Lenin, is a play on the Euro-Marxist tradition of Menshevik objectivism. It takes Euro-Marxism to its anti-Marxist extreme as it accompanied the decline and fall of Soviet world in the 1980s and 1990s. Zizek returns to Lukacs, like Derrida returns to Marx, (see ‘St Jacques…’) to ‘praise him’ and turn him into  a post-modernist who in the end has no faith in the proletariat to complete its historic mission but must turn to a messianic leap of faith.

If we trace the origins and evolution of Euro-Marxism we can easily see the influence of Gramsci. What begins as the degeneration of the vanguard party from democratic centralism to bureaucratic centralism is actually the programmatic victory of Menshevism over Bolshevism. The party no longer represents the proletariat-for-itself, but the petty bourgeois/bureaucratic intelligentsia-for-itself.

On the other hand, there is no doubt Lukacs follows Lenin and Trotsky on the Party and program as overcoming one-sided objectivism and subjectivism that must be resolved dialectically by the democratic centralist international communist party. The Bolshevik Party, led by Lenin and Trotsky and their successors in the ILO and the Fourth International tested theory in practice to develop revolutionary class consciousness. While Gramsci reified the Leninist party as a bureaucratized “intellectual” vanguard, Lukacs never changed his view that the party was the revolutionary subject, the class-in-itself, capable of changing objective reality.

Lukacs failure was to capitulate to Stalin and his unreconstructed Menshevism and not to publicly defend his conception of class-for-itself. The bureaucratic party now dictated the consciousness of the working masses. For that crime Lukacs’ revolutionary past was written off retrospectively as tainted by his Stalinist retreat.

Yet it was Gramsci who actively served Stalin against Trotsky. He opposed the International Left Opposition in the Chinese Revolution. That betrayal alone condemns those today who want to rescue Gramsci as a revolutionary. Trotsky was always willing to enter practical agreements with centrists to win them to the ILO, but never with those who had embraced Stalinism and Menshevism. For in that capitulation the Lessons of October are lost.

Class Struggle 137 Winter June-August 2021

Class Struggle 137 Winter 2021 by dbedggood

Stop escalating war drive between China and US!

 

 

The reviving of Trump’s ‘China Virus’ scare by Biden with no conclusive evidence is a political ruse to escalate the cold war with ‘communist’ China. ‘China Virus’ is cold war 2.0 code for ‘Red Menace’ the global threat to democracy and human rights. Every aspect of global politics is determined ultimately by the growing contest between the two main imperialist blocs - the US/EU and China/Russia over hegemonic control of the global economy. The main driver of this heightened competition is the global struggle between the rise of China and the decline of the US measured in economic growth and political and military power. To win each bloc must mobilise its proxies and rally its working masses to arms and victory over its rival. 

Every hotspot, or regime change in the world, is underwritten by this inter-imperialist rivalry. In Palestine, Israel wants US backing to smash Hamas, the tool of Iran, the regional ally of China/Russia. In Burma (renamed Myanmar by the military), the military coup leaders are puppets of China. In India, the US is pressuring the fascist Modi regime to break relations with China. In Ukraine there is a stalemate between the US/EU backed regime and the Russian annexed Crimea and Russian backed breakaway Donbass region. In Venezuela, Brazil, and South Africa, all members of the BRICS, the ruling class is divided in its subservience to the two blocs. In Australia, New Zealand and Samoa, Chinese interests are being resisted by US backed political forces. The list goes on as the two main blocs are vying for control of as many countries as they can to defend or extend their sphere of influence.

China Virus 2.0

In reviving the “China Virus” of Trump, Biden seeks two objectives. First, to rally support for his drive to stop China from overtaking the US as the hegemonic global power.  Second, to blind workers to the fundamental causes of SARS Covid 2, the climate change emergency that is disrupting habitats and causing viruses to jump species.  Even if the virus escaped the lab, its origins are outside the lab in the breakdown of the natural environment. Moreover, if workers question the real causes, they will end up blaming the Capitalocene – the epoch of the rise and decline of capitalism destroying nature. That would open the road to mutinies against imperialist wars and fuel the socialist revolution. Therefore, to avoid another ‘weapons of mass destruction” farrago, expect Biden to double down with his 90-day report to produce the ‘proof’ that China deliberately released the Virus to destroy the West and become the new hegemonic power. 

Meanwhile, 90 days gives the intelligence and research apparatus of the US the time to build a clinching case to justify war. It also creates the opportunity to push the other issues to build a ring of military support around China. Netanyahu has engineered US backing for isolating the Arab state rulers from the Palestinian masses, and advancing his cause to destroy Iran’s influence in the region. Free vaccines to India would push Modi and the Quad into a military build-up against China in South Asia. Myanmar will become a human rights cause celebre in search of a candidate for a colour revolution. Australia, deputy dog for the US in the region, will foam at the mouth to put its ships into the South China Sea to agitate for democracy and freedom of movement. Japan and DRK are already tied to their US bases in readiness. In Samoa the standoff between the longstanding Government which has negotiated a major new port with China, against a newly created opposition demanding power to cancel the deal, feigns to be a fight over democracy and the constitution, and not over which imperialist power will call the shots. 

Uyghurs, democracy and human rights

Regarding China itself, the surveillance sources of US imperialism, its ability to dictate the ‘news’ agenda, and its ability to rely on subservient, chauvinist, neo-Stalinist left hackery, are mobilised to brand China as a Red dictatorship and an abuser of the human rights of the Uyghurs. Of course, as a capitalist and rising imperialist power, it would be strange if China was not anti-democracy and anti-human rights. China is no worse, maybe better, than every other imperialist power in history, most certainly the USA. Not only that, most of these powers had a hand in oppressing China since the 19th century, tried to smash the peasant-based national revolution, and then isolated it to force an opening of its borders. Finally, failing to subjugate it once more as a colony, when China rose again as an imperialist power, these former oppressors have the hypocrisy to claim the moral high ground on democracy and human rights. 

As revolutionary Marxists we oppose all abuses of bourgeois democracy and human rights, including those of China. We are for the self-determination of Hong Kong, but we oppose the role of the US in dividing Hong Kong workers from mainland Chinese workers. We are for the self-determination of the Taiwanese indigenous peoples, pushed aside by the retreating KMT following the 1949 revolution. China asserts its territorial rights to both Hong Kong, formerly occupied by Britain, and Taiwan, now an armed outpost of the US.  We also fight for the right to self-determination of the Uyghurs, Tibetans and all other oppressed minorities. But self-determination from Hong Kong to Tibet will fail, short of a Chinese socialist revolution to overthrow the Red Bourgeoisie and to create a Workers’ and Farmers’ Government. That in turn would not be possible short of the victory of the world revolution that overthrows all the imperialist powers and their lackeys and replaces them with a world federation of socialist republics.

For the World Revolution!

To be clear we oppose any war between imperialist powers as we do all their proxy wars. This would be a world war in which the allies on all sides are dragged into the war. A war between the US and its allies, and China and its allies, would end human civilisation much more abruptly than global warming. To avoid a real holocaust, workers in every country must build an international united front to intervene with its armed forces in support of all anti-imperialist struggles, against both the imperialist enemy and the national bourgeois enemy. Such United Fronts exist in a rudimentary form, as in workers' blockades of arms and munitions to Israel, armed solidarity with the Syrian Revolution, and the international XR movement when and if it goes beyond civil disobedience to organised workers’ actions. This level is a step towards the internationalism required for a global workers united front. But that can only come out of a new world leadership composed of a revolutionary party and program that does not capitulate to either the US/EU bloc or the China/Russia bloc.

The new leadership that is lacking is that of a Trotskyist International rebuilt on the theory and program of the defunct 4th International. For Trotsky, like Marx and Lenin, since the mid-19th century the only progressive way forward for humanity was for the Permanent Revolution led by the Party of class- conscious workers. Today this means a world party with branches in every country with a program to defeat imperialism, its crises and wars, and its national bourgeois comprador allies. To win workers to this program we fight for transitional demands for elementary economic and political rights that capitalism cannot deliver and which can only be won by workers themselves. This drives workers to fight for workers control which brings them up against the state apparatuses, and in defence to form armed communes or councils as a base for a Workers’ and Farmers’ Government. By uniting these struggles internationally as one fight for one revolution, workers can realise the power they have to smash capitalism and open the road to socialism.  

 

INTERNATIONAL WORKERS’ ACTION TO BLOCKADE THE ZIONIST STATE!

 Palestine supporters “block the boat” blockade of Israeli ship at Oakland 2014

Israel is a Zionist settler state colonised by military conquest. It is not a Jewish state. Most Jews around the world do not recognise it as their state. Jews as a minority oppressed people have the right to a nation, but not at the expense of an existing nation, Palestine. The right to a nation’s self-determination cannot be realised by destroying another nation’s self-determination. Moreover, this right should be the expressed will of the majority, not the project of a small section of ultranationalist Zionists who want a national territory to advance their financial interests.

It was this bourgeois nationalist Zionist faction that negotiated with the ruling classes in Germany, Britain, the US, and the bureaucratic Stalinist USSR, to facilitate the migration of Jews to Palestine before and after WW2. That ruling class solidarity between the Zionists and their powerful allies allowed the Zionists to occupy Palestine without facing any serious opposition to decades of expansionary wars against the displaced and oppressed Palestinians.

The solution can only be the national liberation of Palestine from Zionist colonial rule. This will not result from the intervention of any of the great powers. The US/EU powers and their Russia/ China rivals do not want a fight over Palestine. The US/EU already backs Israel as its gendarme in the Middle East. US allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt are concerned to keep their own working masses under control. Russia and China and their allies Iran and Turkey fear popular support for Palestine and the risk of a wider regional revolutionary uprising. And of course, the UN is no more than a fake democratic façade for the imperialist gang.

The question is: how can the Arab and other masses in the region rise up in support of the Palestinian cause of freedom? Some signs that the Arab masses are capable of winning are the new generations of youths who do not respect the narrow bourgeois politics of their national elites including Hamas and Fatah; Arab Israeli youth behind the 1948 Green Line who as second class citizens are standing up for the cause; the Palestinian diaspora in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon are also rising in solidarity. These uprisings expose the fragility of the weak and divided ruling classes of these anti-democratic regimes.

While the Arab Spring has faded and the Syrian revolution left a divided and destroyed nation, the masses are like a smoldering fuse. Serious working-class supporters of Palestine in the big powers should follow the lead of unionists in Livorno, Italy and black the export of munitions to Israel. The dockers in Durban, South Africa (SATAWU) and Oakland, US (ILWU), who both have a history of banning Israeli cargo, plan another ban this weekend refusing to work Zim Line ships. A strong international blockade of Israel would raise the costs of Israel’s Zionist project and further divide the country internally to the point where their international backers withdrew their support and the regime is isolated and weakened.

The Palestinian masses and their Israeli supporters backed by an international workers movement, should join forces to remove their bourgeois nationalist regimes, liberating Palestine and building a workers’ and farmers’ government. A socialist Palestine, as part of a wider union of socialist republics in the region, would see all the old oppressive historic feudal and imperialist borders replaced by a multi-ethnic federation of socialist republics.

Communist Workers Group (Aotearoa/New Zealand) 

Leaflet 20^th May 2021 

https://redrave.blogspot.com/

https://labourheartlands.com/italian-dockers-refuse-to-load-weap

http://www.labournet.net/docks2/1007/blockade1.html

https://www.facebook.com/anna.majavu.5/posts/10165130065040055

NO HALFWAY HOUSE OF NATIONAL LIBERATION CAN DEFEAT IMPERIALISM

Only Permanent Revolution across the MENA can resolve endless slaughter.

 

For an international workers united front to defeat all imperialist 

incursions in MENA and the  Zionist colonial war. 

Netanyahu has staged a provocation in East Jerusalem because his plan to isolate Iran from the Arab states and drive home the Zionist dream of complete occupation of Palestine has been overtaken by two crises. The first is internal, that the Arab revolution is still alive and the Palesinian masses refuse to live that nightmare. He cannot guarantee to form a new government and remain in power without another war. Second, the terminal crisis of capital which sparked the Arab Spring forced the MENA regimes to repress successive waves of uprisings, but failed to restore stability to the region. From Morocco to Iran, the masses are restive and primed to explode. 

Palestine has always been the fuse that kept the cause of the Arab revolution smouldering and Israel, as the US gendarme in MENA, has always stamped down on that fuse. But the world has changed. New imperialist powers, Russia and China, and their regional allies, Turkey and Iran, have shifted the balance of power in MENA and reduced Israel’s significance as chief gendarme. It could be that Netanyahu will make the Zionist project the ditch that Israel will die in and release the power of the masses in MENA. 

Al Monitor reports a new generation of young fighters, millennials that grew up during the period of neo-liberal exhaustion of democracy and the rise of the capitalist dictatorship. This coincides with the rise in the Arab population inside the 1948 border of Israel and the militant confrontations between Zionist reactionaries and Arab militants now occurring..  

Netanyahu, facing possible jailing for corruption and a loss of political power, has clamped down on the political rights of Israeli Arabs. His main rivals are led by Benny Gantz, defence minister in the caretaker government overseeing the bombardment of Gaza. This has tied Gantz’ hands in a war cabinet and set back the formation of a new coalition government including Arab parties. Moreover, the spread of the current resistance inside Israel’s 1948 borders makes the two-state solution even more a reactionary dystopia. Even so, this development is isolated from the Palestinian struggle, which itself is subordinated to the national interests of the bourgeois factions of Hamas and Fatah. The sidelining of Fatah in the West Bank strengthens the Hamas leadership of the national struggle to the West Bank. The form of the political program of the Palestine struggle becomes more Islamic than secular, but in its essence it remains nationalist. 

ISRAEL AS THE US GENDARME

Trump’s administration backed Netanyahu’s aggressive plan to expand the settlements, destroy Hamas and build support for a war with Iran. But the election of Biden had put a question mark over that plan. Netanyahu’s ability to hold onto power by building an alliance with Arab states against Iran has backfired as Biden opens negotiations with Iran over nuclear weapons. The Gendarme no longer has a crime scene and needs to create one. Assaulting the Al-Aqsa mosque during Ramadan provoked immediate mass resistance designed to force Hamas into another war; this put Biden’s support for a war to destroy Iran and its proxy Hamas, the main threats to Israel’s existence as the US gendarme in MENA, to the test. Given Biden’s form as a self-confessed Zionist, it was not long before Netanyahu got the backing he wanted. (Ha aretz, “Biden: I Don't Believe Israel Has Significantly Overreacted to Gaza Rocket Fire”)

The recognition of Jerusalem as the capitol of the Zionist state and the opening of the US embassy there was a bipartisan move by the US imperialist state, not an isolated action of the Trump regime. This is a bloc of right wing Christian Zionists whose belief that the return of the messiah will only come when Israel controls Jerusalem. Then the rapture will come and elevate all the Christians and condemn the non-believers to damnation. But this reactionary theocratic bullshit is just a dog whistle to the evangelicals’ cover being used by the historically anti-semitic western imperialism and tolerated by AIPAC who know full well they are in bed with Jew hating anti-semitic zealots. 

The bipartisan approval of the capitol move was a green light to the Zionists that the US is supporting the displacement of Palestinians, the continued isolation of Palestinians and the starvation of Gaza. The US gives on average 3 billion dollars a year to the Zionist military project - this is a bipartisan agreement uniting everyone from Trump to Cheney to Biden and Harris. The US media alongside BBC echoes the Biden/Netanyahu talking point that the Zionists have the right to “Cast Lead”, “Mow the Lawn'' and kill civilians trapped in the largest open air prison in the world indiscriminately.

A PRE-REVOLUTIONARY SITUATION? 

Yes, the workers and farmers are rising to fight a new war. The Israeli ruling class is divided, but it is not divided on the question of defence of Israel, so counter-revolution looms large. Racist anti-Arab mobs have mobilized in the streets inside the Green line attacking Palestinians indiscriminately -- the chant “kill the Arabs” is hauntingly reminiscent of the current Proud Boy’s meme 6MWE (six million wasn’t enough.) Netanyahu will go for the nuclear option rather than go to jail. How far he needs to go to stay in power and get backing for his war on Iran, depends not upon whether the UN or US broker a peace deal (of course they will try),  but whether he can force a ceasefire on Hamas on his terms.  That will depend on Hamas retaining control over the leadership of the resistance and keeping it chained to the “anti-imperialist” popular front two-state solution. 

It will take the emergence of a revolutionary Trotskyist internationalist party challenging the nationalist leadership and program with a transitional program for permanent revolution, to open up a pre-revolutionary situation. Therefore, rather than use the term ‘pre-revolutionary’ situation to describe any uprising that objectively challenges capitalist rule, we argue that this term can only have meaning if it includes the existence of the subjective factor in revolution - a  healthy internationalist Trotskyist party and program. We need that party to grasp the situation in Palestine and MENA, to expose the counter-revolutionary political programs put forward by most of the left to sellout the revolution, and to win support for that vanguard party and transitional program to lead the fight for the permanent revolution.  

It is not only Fatah and Hamas that have used military adventures to negotiate a two state solution, most of the so-called revolutionary left is stuck in the same groove. Much of the so-called revolutionary left is busy sucking up to the two-stage, two state, (or bi-state) line in Palestine and the whole of MENA.  For example the League for the Fifth International (LFI) talks about the bi-national state in which Israelis and Palestinians peacefully coexist:

“Red Flag calls for the establishment of a bi-national state based on full legal equality for all, the right of return for Palestinians expelled during Israel’s colonialist wars, and supports Palestinian struggles such as the Boycott, Divest, Sanction movement.” (LFI, “Halt Israeli aggression in Gaza and  Jerusalem”)

We have criticised the LFI in the past for adapting to social imperialism. Specifically British imperialism. But its stand on Palestine adapts to US imperialism because it sows illusions in the self-determination of Palestine being resolved by the national democratic revolution without the defeat of the Zionist and Palestinian national bourgeoisies and their imperialist masters. 

An analogous pipedream is  proposed by the CWI, the Taafe-ist Committee for a Workers’ International: In fact it is neither a call for an international nor a call for international workers unity. It is the 2-state wine in a new bottle. Take a look!

“With workers’ parties, Palestinian and Israeli, adopting a programme for a socialist Palestine alongside a socialist Israel – as part of a socialist confederation of the Middle East – it will be possible to lay the basis for bringing the capitalist nightmare of cycles of death and destruction to an end.

…..

For an independent, democratic socialist Palestinian state, alongside a democratic socialist Israel, with two capitals in Jerusalem and guaranteed democratic rights for all minorities, as part of the struggle for a socialist Middle East” (CWI, “Conflict in Jerusalem widens across Israeli cities and to war on Gaza”)

Similarly the International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT) claims that Jews have national rights in Palestine because they have ‘interpenetrated’ with Arabs. This confuses Jewish national (democratic) rights with Zionist ultra-nationalism. Jews and Palestinians do not have “competing territorial and national claims” in Palestine. The existence of Israel results from the rape of Palestine. Get a load of this pseudo-Trotskyism! The Zionist project was explicitly rejected by Trotsky!

“The only historically progressive solution to this seemingly intractable problem lies through joint Arab/Jewish working-class struggle to smash Zionism from within while seeking to establish a bi-national workers’ state as part of a larger socialist federation of the Middle East. A voluntary socialist federation, led by a class-conscious proletariat rooted in the region’s diverse national, ethnic and religious communities, is the only political framework capable of equitably resolving the competing territorial and national claims. (our emphasis) “  (IBT, “Israel-Palestine: Apartheid, Imperialism & Class”)

The RCIT does not call for a bi-state, but rather for armed struggle, the destruction of the Zionist state and a “democratic and red Palestine.” But it doesn’t make clear that the revolutionary party of the workers and farmers must lead the struggle. Is this an anti-imperialist workers’ front or an anti-imperialist popular front? Get this!:

“We call for the formation of popular assemblies and militias so that the Palestinian people can organize and defend their struggle for liberation! The treacherous Palestinian Administration Mahmoud Abbas must immediately stop its collaboration with the Israeli state and distribute weapons to the people so that they can defend themselves against the Zionist killers.”

“We repeat: As long as the Zionist state exists, the Palestinians will continue suffering from state terrorism! This is why we stand for the socialist perspective of a democratic and red Palestine. We support the struggle for the destruction of the Zionist state and the right to return for all Palestinian refugees.” (RCIT, “The Fourth Gaza War Has Begun! Defend the Palestinian People – Defeat Israel!”)

 

What does a “democratic and red Palestine” mean? Is it shorthand for permanent revolution i.e. to be democratic is to be red? It seems not, as the RCIT does not define the “democratic and red Palestine” as a workers’ and farmers’ state based on the rise to power of the armed workers and peasants councils, does it? Missing are the demands for workers and peasants to arm themselves, to disarm the police and to arm  the workers councils, for Israeli conscripts to mutiny, and to not rely on Fatah, Hamas or the Arab ruling class for arms. 

No better is the proclamation of the Fraccion Leninista-Trotskista Internacionalista (FLTI), a tendency with many militants who are being miseducated in a non-Marxist, non-programmatic method that invites the national bourgeoisie to join the exploited classes in a Palestinian National Assembly! You’ll search their position in vain for the call for a socialist revolution putting the working people in power. And suppose you wish to see their Transitional Program with which to make this revolution. You won’t find theirs! Could it be that they think their call for a workers and peasants government without workers councils or their armed militias suffices for the logic that socialism will automatically be the outcome of this National Assembly? This is a plan for stagism, not the permanent revolution. This is not different from calls for a Constituent Assembly, complete with class enemy representatives.

“For the destruction of the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel! For a free, secular, democratic and non-racist Palestine, which can only be guaranteed by a workers’ and peasants’ government! A Palestinian national assembly of Gaza, the West Bank and all the Diaspora!” (FLTI, July, 2020,  “Stop the offensive of imperialism and its Zionist gendarme on the Palestinian people and the whole Middle East!”)

FOR PERMANENT REVOLUTION!

Stopping the revolution at the bourgeois democratic stage is counter-revolutionary because there is no ‘half-way’ house where the revolution can be put on pause. Either the democratic revolution is completed by the socialist revolution or the revolution retreats under the capitalist counter-revolution. We warn against the illusions of appealing to Fatah and other Arab leaders to arm the struggle. Both Hamas and Fatah are treacherous bourgeois factions that have done deals to keep alive the two-state  solution. This makes the IBT claim that Israel is an ‘apartheid state’ doubly treacherous. It assumes first that Jews have the national right to a state in Palestine, and that a bi-national solution will enable both Palestinians and Israelis to live in peace in a democratic transition to socialism. The ‘end of apartheid’ in South Africa was ‘paused’ on a bourgeois democratic  bi-racial semi-colony still under the heel of imperialism. 

Trotsky stated clearly that while Jews are a people and have a right to national self-determination, this right cannot be won by occupying another nation. Therefore Jews have no right to a state in Palestine. Israel is the only settler colony that came into existence during the period of decolonisation of the former European colonies after WW2. The lessons of decolonisation are clear. Self-determination is not possible for a colony unless it breaks completely free from imperialism. The only way to liberate Palestine is through permanent revolution that breaks from the national bourgeoisie as well from its imperialist masters. Then Palestinians and Israelis would freely choose to live together or apart and to what degree. 

The ongoing Zionist war against Palestine must be recognised as leading the counter-revolution against the Arab Revolution and the revolution in the region as a whole. Not just the revolution  against Israel but the whole Arab ruling class and their imperialist backers, and the regional powers of Iran and Turkey. It is the weapon of permanent counter-revolution against the international permanent revolution! 

In defence of the Palestinian masses we support an anti-imperialist united front for the destruction of the Zionist state, the uniting and arming of the masses from Morocco to Iran, the defeat of the bourgeois lackey regimes, the expropriation of capitalist and imperialist monopolies and the defeat of imperialist invading armies.

We have to smash the popular front politics of the Menshevik left and build a new Trotskyist international party that solves the crisis of leadership by defeating the treacherous national leaderships, uniting the struggle across borders, for the victory of workers and farmers’ governments based on armed workers and farmers councils, united in a federation of MENA socialist republics. 

 

15 May 2021

International Leninist-Trotskyist Tendency

May 1st! International Workers Day!

We say that for workers to live, capitalism must die!

To End Capital’s Terminal Crisis We Must Solve the Crisis of Revolutionary Leadership!

This international workers day, revolutionary workers have to confront the question: can we workers organise as a class conscious vanguard and make a revolution in time to end the terminal crisis of capital and prevent the destruction of humanity? We are talking about 10 years. If there is no global revolution in that time we are facing the extinction of humanity. That is what terminal crisis means. The self-destruction of capitalism would be a dystopia, but there is no coming back from extinction. Facing chronic falling profits,(1) climate collapse,(2) and out-of-control pandemics, (3) capitalism cannot save itself from its death drive and threatens to take down humanity with it. We have no choice but socialism or extinction. For workers, and humanity, to survive and live fully in harmony with nature, capitalism has to be overthrown by an international socialist revolution and replaced by a world socialist society.

For workers everywhere, facing intolerable economic suffering, a climate meltdown,  the pandemic raging from mutation to mutation, the disruption of the atmosphere which brings destruction of crops, loss of jobs and lives, we are already facing a mounting life or death crisis. In response many workers and farmers are resisting and fighting back for life and liberty. In every continent the masses are stirring and marching on the streets for democracy – in Syria after a genocidal war the masses still fill the streets marching against Assad. In Myanmar, youth and tribal militias unite to oppose the military regime. In China there are rebellions in Hong Kong and in Uyghur Xinjiang against the Maoist dictatorship. In India, three months of the farmers uprising against the Modi fascist regime now converges with the second wave of Covid mutations.  In Palestine, China, US, South Africa, India, Chile, to name just some, the state forces are stepping up their bloody repression.

These are class struggles for basic bourgeois democratic rights in response to the crackdown by the capitalist ruling classes against workers to squeeze the last ounce of surplus value out of them to restore stagnant profits. Workers who face poverty and death are risking their lives on the streets because they have nothing to lose. But these struggles are still isolated nationally and internationally. If we look at their demands, they are defensive in nature opposing capital stripping them of all their past gains. Their perspective is immediate survival, with no realisation that this is not possible short of revolution. They are held back by a reformist, treacherous left leadership that deflects their struggles away from uniting and mobilising the world working class to that of begging their bourgeois regimes to make reforms.  

Such defensive struggles are the necessary first spontaneous steps as the proletariat stands up to resist capital’s demands. Communists call for the building of united fronts of all oppressed people to strengthen and broaden the struggles nationally and internationally. Yet this international solidarity falls far short of real international class unity. It operates at the level of class-in-itself rather than class-for-itself. Class-in-itself means workers unite at the level of defending the share of wages against profits in the capitalist economy. Lenin called the conception of class struggle over the distribution of income “trade union” consciousness. It means that workers' struggles are limited to defending their income share without the knowledge that they create all the value and therefore all income! Yet they cannot challenge the underlying cause of a widening gap between wages and profits unless they become a “class-for-itself,” conscious of its role as the producers of value. That is, conscious as a class of the underlying exploitation of workers in the sphere of production under fire from capital to pump out every last ounce of surplus value. Short of being a “class-for-itself” the weight of bourgeois ideology hanging around workers’ necks is reinforced by the reformist leaderships in the unions and parliaments who engineer opportunist political betrayals. (4)  

So even while, objectively, inevitably, global capitalism is facing its terminal crisis, this recognition does not automatically awaken workers’ class consciousness to the need for socialist revolution. It follows that workers do not see the crisis of revolutionary leadership as a life and death question. But the facts dictate that we must throw out the rotten, reformist leaderships of our class and create a new leadership that unites the class conscious workers internationally as a class-for-itself.  Such is the precondition for socialist revolution. Therefore, revolutionaries must explain on every occasion why in this period of capital’s terminal crisis, the treacherous leaderships have retreated further from revolution to counter-revolution. Why have they redoubled their efforts to act as the allies and lackeys of the ruling class, trapping workers in a “class-in-itself” reformist consciousness?  

Who are the treacherous reformist currents

The main reformist currents heading workers movements today owe their origin to the early 20th century Social Democratic and Menshevik parties that played a reactionary role against the Bolshevik leadership of the Russian revolution. They opposed socialist revolution arguing it was premature as capitalism hadn’t created the conditions for socialism in Russia. They acted as part of the counter-revolutionary wave that drove the revolution backwards into the Stalinist bureaucracy and into international defeat by fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. Today they are born-again Mensheviks with a program of immediate demands that does not mention the need to overthrow capitalism because they propose to take it over and manage capitalism themselves in the name of ‘socialism’.   

The currents that originated in Menshevism-Stalinism and which continue to play a counter-revolutionary role today are the Castroists, (5) Maoists, (6) anarchists, (7) and Bolivarians. (8) Castroists and Maoists derive directly from Stalinism. Anarchists are hostile to the communist tradition and talk about smashing the state but then act up to join it.  The Bolivarians integrate the Castroists and Maoists, along with a new batch of Mensheviks – the ex-Trotskyists who have broken from Trotsky’s permanent revolution. (9)  So despite their differences in branding they are a tag team representing petty bourgeois and bureaucratic layers in the working class and peasantry who serve as the agents of capital. Their minimum program consists of bourgeois reforms that benefit their class interests, mobilising workers to march on the streets into the dead end of parliament, and treat the working class as no more than film extras in their social media scenarios.

Of all these currents, the Bolivarians are the major barrier to the development of working class consciousness today because they provide a home for all the class traitors. Chavez even gave it a name “The Fifth International''. They pay lip service to a Marxism that Marx would not recognise. Their ‘imperialism of fools’ keeps alive the cold-war cheerleading for Russia and ‘communist’ China against ‘imperialism’. China and Russia are painted as the leaders of the “anti-imperialist united front” because they are characterised as ‘market-socialist’, semi-colonial, sub-imperialist even, but never imperialist states. This allows them to apply the Menshevik-Stalinist method of the popular front that strangles the rise of independent workers struggles on a global scale, preparing the ground for capital’s final solution – fascism.  

Facing the terminal crisis, the China-Russia led global popular front traps workers in the reformist, opportunist, politics of class-in-itself in the name of national roads to socialism. To imagine that China or Russia has any claim to be a ‘socialist’ or  ‘workers’ state’, or even a semi-colony, thereby qualifying as ‘anti-imperialist’ is deluded. Clearly none of these can account for, in China’s case, GDP growth at an average of 10% for twenty years. Lenin’s theory of imperialism allows us to show that both Russia and China  are today restored capitalist states, driven by the law of value, and producing over-accumulated capital that must be exported across the world to extract super-profits from their newly recruited semi-colonies – that is, as new imperialist states!

Such a transition to imperialism by former degenerated or deformed workers’ states in a time of capital’s decline and decay has to be explained by applying Leninist-Trotskyist theory.  We argue, following Trotsky, that the restoration of capitalism was managed by the former bureaucratic caste in control of the state which converted the centralised economy into state capitalism. This allowed the bureaucracy to act as a new capitalist ruling class managing the transition by retaining accumulated profits and using the Maoist brand to claim the export of capital was not plunder but aid. This ‘win-win’ scenario is used by the Bolivarians to subordinate the national struggles of the oppressed to the two rising imperialist powers that are now competing with the US and EU states to re-divide the world.  Inevitably as this renewed inter-imperialist rivalry between the two blocs leads to more proxy wars that can spill over into world war, the Bolivarians ‘will rally to the flag of the “5th International” alongside their ‘socialist-imperialist” exploiters to defeat their rivals. (10)

Marx, Lenin and Trotsky against the class traitors

We say this is why the terminal crisis of capitalism can only be overcome by resolving the crisis of revolutionary leadership. The treacherous leaderships must be denounced and replaced by a new revolutionary international leadership capable of overthrowing capitalism and building socialism. That leadership must be based on the method and theory of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky to guide the proletariat and its allies to the victory of socialism. The proletariat as a class-in-itself can become a class-for-itself, grasping the continuity of the theory and practice  of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, to understand the objective reality of crisis-ridden capitalism, and the need to act subjectively to overthrow capitalism and build socialism.

For Marx, Lenin and Trotsky the proletarian party is the revolutionary ‘subject’ (active agent) – the class conscious revolutionary vanguard that tests the program in practice as the ‘proletarian scientist’ to see if it works to further the revolution. This requires ‘democracy’, for open and free debate of all party members to enable a majority vote to decide how to put the program to the test. But democracy would be just talk without the necessary ‘centralism’, the unity in action necessary to test the program so that the lessons learned can be clearly evaluated and the program advanced.  Compare the Leninist-Bolshevik  democratic-centralist party with the bureaucratic-centralist party of the Stalinist-Menshevik currents. The reformist program is handed down by petty bourgeois bureaucrats and intellectuals to workers as ‘objects’ (powerless dupes) of history. Of course, the arguments against the Leninist party come from those who fear the rise of the proletariat as the powerful, independent ‘class-for-itself’ class, realising its historic mission in putting an end to capitalism.

The standard Stalinist-Menshevik objection to the Leninist vanguard party dates back to the early 20th century. It is that the party substitutes itself for the proletariat. But compare the proletariat armed as a revolutionary vanguard that wins the support of the majority of workers, with the reformist party led by bureaucrats that substitutes itself for the proletariat in order to serve the enemy classes. In every historic test, victory to the proletariat is the result of whether or not a vanguard party exists. In the one single historic case – Russia – where the vanguard party existed and was battle hardened – it was able to make a victorious revolution and withstand the international invasion and internal counter-revolution for seven years before degenerating under the Stalinist bureaucracy. In that great revolution democratic centralism resolved the crisis of leadership. Everywhere else, workers deluded by Social Democracy, Kautskyism or anarchism,  did not see the need to build the party, or built it too late (as in Weimar Germany) and fell to the counter-revolution. Bureaucratic centralism prevailed. Is it any wonder that the vanguard party is feared and every effort has been made since to defame and sabotage it?

It is clear what we must do. The class conscious proletariat must take the stage to realise its historic mission to end the destruction of nature and allow the embryonic socialism to prevent the history of humanity ending in extinction. The objective reality of the collapse of the ecology we need to survive is imminent. We have little time to do it.  All our energy must be devoted to building a class conscious vanguard as the new world party of socialist revolution grounded in the method and program of Trotsky’s Fourth International, to overthrow the international bourgeoisie,  install Workers’ and Farmers’ Governments in every country and build the United Socialist Republics of the World.

International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency

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(1)The most important law of motion of capitalism for Marx was the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall. For capitalists to compete they had to develop technology to increase the productivity of their workers’ labour power, i.e. the rate of surplus value (s). This created a tendency for rising constant capital (c) – plant, machinery etc., that did not produce value, relative to falling variable capital (the value of labour power that did produce more value than its own value - (s) so that the rate of profit (p) was expressed as  s/c+v. It is the only scientific explanation for the long term “secular fall” in the rate of profit since the 1870s.  https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2020/07/25/a-world-rate-of-profit-a-new-approach/

 

(2)Marx’s ‘metabolic rift’ explains that capitalism must destroy itself by destroying nature. Or, It’s the Capitocene not Anthropocene stupid. https://redrave.blogspot.com/2019/07/extinction-rebellion-xr-represents-new.html 

Why only 10 years to reverse climate catastrophe? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwhW0k8kZiM

(3)The Sars Covid-2 virus infecting humans is caused by capitalist- driven ecological collapse and will likely prove one of many future pandemics unless workers intervene to restore ecological systems and the unity of society and nature. We have to seize every opportunity to wrest power from the bourgeoisie to take control of pandemics through strikes, occupations and the political general strike for a Workers and Farmers Government. https://redrave.blogspot.com/2020/04/workers-unite-historic-task-of-workers.html

 

(4)Marxism is a science that reveals the inner workings of capitalism. For Marx, class-in-itself is part of the objective reality of the contradictory social relations of production, wage-labour/capital. These exploitative social relations are misrepresented in bourgeois ideology as equal relations of exchange which then becomes the ideological  basis for opportunist reforms. Therefore understanding Marxism is necessary to enable workers to escape the reification of objectification of bourgeois ideology (class in itself) and become a consciously subjective class-for-itself organised in the democratic centralist vanguard party which tests and develops the revolutionary program in practice.  https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/lukacs3.htm

 

(5)The Castroites and their cheerleaders originated in the Cuban Revolution. The petty bourgeois national revolution led by Fidal Castro was not intended to be a socialist revolution as he tried to negotiate with US imperialism to form an independent republic. When the US rebuffed Castro, and attempted to overthrow his regime in 1961, he turned to the USSR and declared Cuba a socialist republic.  What emerged in Cuba was a deformed workers’ state, deformed at birth, subordinated to the USSR, which from that point acted to undermine the revolution in Latin America and Africa in line with the Stalinist national roads to socialism to win bourgeois allies for building socialism in the USSR. Castro backed populist regimes in Chile where he supported Allende to stop the workers arming. As if to prove that he was a Castroite, Che Guevara snubbed the striking miners in Bolivia to attempt to organise a peasants’ uprising under the noses of the Media Luna landowners in Bolivia where he was captured and executed by the US-backed Barrientos regime. Today Cuba under Raul Castro has overseen the restoration of capitalism in a ‘strategic’ relationship with the People’ s Republic of China, and acted as mentor to the Bolivarian ALBA states in their alliance backed by the PCC. https://livingmarxism.blog/2013/07/16/cuba-sold-out/

(6)The Maoists, unlike the Castroists who accidentally ended up in the Stalinist camp in 1961, were born Stalinists. Mao became a leader of the CCP after its anti-Stalinist leadership in Shanghai was eliminated in 1927 by Chiang Kai Shek on Stalin’s orders. Chiang’s national bourgeois party, the Kuomintang (KMT) was recognised by Stalin as a popular front partner of the CCP  according to his theory of the “Bloc of Four Classes” –  the peasants, workers, intellectuals and national bourgeoisie.  The military bloc formed between the KMT and CCP in 1937 to defeat the  Japanese occupiers succeeded in 1945 and the resulting ‘civil war’ between them was won by the Red Army in 1949.  When the KMT decamped to Taiwan the CCP declared the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. Since the liberation war was won by the CCP with the defeat of the national bourgeoisie, Trotskyists regard the PRC as a ‘deformed workers’ state’ (DWS) from its inception, virtually the same in its form as the then degenerated workers’ state in the USSR. Despite their differences, both followed the policy of ‘socialism in one country’ which called for popular fronts between workers, peasants and the ‘democratic’ bourgeoisie to form ‘peoples’ governments. The PRC produced a number of satellite regimes – DPRK, Vietnam, Kampuchea, Nepal, Balkans etc., where bureaucratic/military regimes based on the petty bourgeois peasants took state power following armed struggles. https://livingmarxism.blog/2016/05/31/china-and-the-socialist-future/

 

(7)Anarchists are the weakest most amorphous section of the petty bourgeois left because they avow to smash every state which includes a workers’ state. Their petty bourgeois individualism means that whenever a political crisis put their ideology to the test as in Russia in the 1920s and Spain in the 1930s, they sided with the bourgeoisie. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/xx/spain01.htm

 

(8)The Bolivarian movement arose in Latin America in the period since 1992 when both the USSR and China restored capitalism. It draws not only on the Stalinist/Menshevik method of the Castroists and Maoists, but on a new batch of Mensheviks who have betrayed Leninism and Trotskyism - the renegade Trotskyists.  These counter-revolutionary tendencies adapt class struggle to bourgeois democracy to advance their petty bourgeois bureaucratic interests as servants of the bourgeoisie.  They revise Marxism to trap the class struggle at the level of distribution, that is, the economism of class-in-itself. Named after Simon Bolivar, who led the first wave of national independence from Spain, France and Portugal in the 18th century, the Bolivarians adopt the method of popular front Governments in which proletarian, petty bourgeois and bourgeois parties participate to break with imperialism and form bourgeois socialist republics. Hence,  Venezuela under Chavez, Ecuador under Correa, Bolivia under Morales, Brazil under Lula and Argentina under the Peronists, were part of the sphere of influence of imperialist Russia and China. https://redrave.blogspot.com/2017/09/where-is-flti-on-russiachina-in.html

 

(9)We define Renegade Trotskyists as those who abandoned materialist dialectics and the 4th International; did not unconditionally defend the Soviet Union; adapted to Menshevism/Stalinism; sold out national revolutions in Bolivia, Vietnam, Chile, etc; sold out to social imperialism, and today sell out to Chinese ‘socialist-imperialism’ by calling for its defence against the imperialists of the US/EU bloc. In other words instead of calling for Chinese and Russian workers to turn their guns on their own ruling class, they call for workers to go to war in the name of defending a bogus  ‘anti-imperialist united front’.  https://livingmarxism.blog/2014/06/25/why-are-russia-and-china-imperialist-powers-and-not-capitalist-semi-colonies/

 

(10) The geopolitics of the global popular front led by Russia and China are evident in Cuba’s restoration as a semi-colony of ‘market-socialist’ China. The BRICS, especially South Africa and Brazil are now semi-colonies of China,  though India is signaling its shift towards the US as a member of the QUAD. Bolivarian Venezuela is the model member of the 5th (Chinese) International. They are cheerleaders for Russia smashing the Syrian revolution and Russia’s annexation in Crimea and intervention in Ukraine. The inter-imperialist rivalry between the two main blocs led by the US and China has been building for a decade or more and today is reaching a flash point inevitably drawing the world’s workers into more wars that can easily spill over into world war. The Permanent Revolution remains the global call sign for revolutionary internationalists to solve the crisis of revolutionary leadership in a world socialist revolution!  https://redrave.blogspot.com/2015/04/russia-china-and-unfinished-permanent.html