Comrade Balazs Nagy wrote “The Greatest Danger is Sectarianism” between February and April 1995, and asked comrades in London to check his English. He then went to Hungary, On his return he was sent the anglicised version for final approval but, owing to a French postal workers’ strike it took six weeks to reach him. In the meantime an unfinished version of the document was distributed at the WRP (Britain) Central Committee meeting on 8 May. Copies of the completed text were sent out on 21 June to members of the International Executive Committee to avoid any further delay before its final production in this:
The Workers International to Rebuild the Fourth International: International Internal Bulletin, Volume Four, Number Six, 19 July 1995

The Greatest Danger is Sectarianism by Balazs Nagy

There were many valuable lessons to be learned from the last Congress of the Workers Revolutionary Party (Britain) on 11-12 February 1995. Here, however, I take only one of them which, in my opinion, has to be laid bare and analysed because of its decisive importance for the whole International. As all the participants of the congress witnessed, there is a tendency which does not want or dare to define itself politically as such, but on every occasion loudly expresses its ‘criticisms’. It would be wrong to consider that this is a problem only for the WRP. On an international level it is impossible to remain silent. As I said at the congress, we have to engage in an international process of clarification. I would like to contribute to this clarification with the following remarks.

Introduction: On a certain political behaviour

Above all let us look at see three major facts of the congress which, in their stark reality cannot be avoided and, still less, denied. Therefore they must be fully understood.

The first one, well observed by everybody, is that certain comrades, particularly cde. Simon Pirani and cde. Janos Borovi, fought for more than a year against the orientation towards a new party outlined proposed by cde. Cliff Slaughter and supported by the majority of the Executive Committee of Workers International and of the WRP. All members know of and have read the various documents written by these comrades struggling against this proposed line.

The second fact is that now, surprisingly, all these comrades suddenly agreed with the very same orientation presented to the congress. (Simon alone presented some amendments beforehand which were accepted by cde. Slaughter.) All the others voted for this orientation without any discussion, without any effort (or claim) to present their arguments against it. They just gave up! In his notes about the congress (13 February 1995) cde. Slaughter wrote that ‘… Janos polemicised for months in 1994 against what he [cde. Slaughter] wrote on the significance of the collapse of Stalinism and on the question of the new party … If Janos had changed his mind, good. But why? What are the lessons to be learned from this salutary exercise of changing one’s mind? And having changed your mind why not fight to enthuse the party and the new forces with the conclusion to which you have fought your way, instead of complaining, as Janos did, that “the discussion is too nice” and we must voice the criticisms and weaknesses. This is not the way to build the International but to destroy it.

Thirdly, as cde. Slaughter pointed out (above) instead of defending their line at the Congress – a line which during the year was opposed to the proposal – these comrades advanced all kinds of criticisms directed against the international ‘leadership’ (forgetting that the main critic, cde. Borovi, also belongs to this leadership) – criticisms which very often did not have the slightest relationship to the principal matter being discussed. In his notes, cde. Slaughter says that Janos’s interventions ‘were directed largely to showing the weaknesses, faults, “lack of centralisation”, etc. of the International’ and characterising such an attitude, cde. Slaughter added: ‘This is a farce, though not very amusing.’

The congress had to fulfil its task. It did so thanks to its ability to avoid this diversionary trap. But it would be a great error to think that we can go ahead tacitly agreeing to this kind of political behaviour and its motivation. Without a careful examination and clarification of what happened we are in danger of breaking up the party in the very near future.

It goes without saying that we can all change our minds. It is indeed a sign of personal development. So, for example, cde. Borovi cannot be criticised because he abruptly fell into line with cde. Slaughter and expressed his agreement with the proposed transformation of tie party, however conditional that agreement may be. However, such a conversion requires a condition which is even more important. For we are a political party – as Trotsky said the ‘vanguard of the vanguard’ – and not a kind of discussion circle. One of the differences is that the members of the latter can proclaim everything which passes through their heads as being an eternal truth and so can be ready to change their minds afterwards without difficulty. In the party, however, we have to put forward our ideas and comments seriously and with responsibility for the whole. Precisely for this reason, we cannot get rid of them by waging a magic wand when they cease to serve our purpose. Mistaken thoughts and opinions must be overcome critically.

To overcome the erroneous or false ideas would have meant at least two things. First, that cde. Borovi should have expressed clearly exactly what his previous opinion was, as opposed to that of the proposal. Second, that he should have explained and analysed why he changed his previous ideas or withdrew them, and how he arrived at the same conclusion as the proposed resolution (which he had previously attacked). This is the only possible method of seeing if there really is a common understanding. Any other way – in particular that of simply giving up the previous position without any mention – indicates that there is only a temporary retreat motivated by tactical considerations – but the essential suspicion, if not opposition, remains so that it can be raised again on the first possible occasion

In practice, after the Congress we could see that cde. Borovi was still on the same ground (look at his suspicious attitude towards the Bosnian trade-union delegation which determined his previous opposition). But before making a closer examination of it, let us consider this real avalanche of criticisms developed by cde. Borovi and others, with a seriousness equal to the passion with which they were presented.

In his notes comrade Slaughter rightly says, that all Janos’s interventions ‘were directed largely to showing the weaknesses, faults, lack of centralisation, etc. of the International. Why?’ And: ‘it is impossible to know what Janos meant by his first sentences: “The discussion is too nice. There are differences on the new party.” He did not say what these differences are …’ Let me answer this question. Because, after his quarrelsome statement, Janos deliberately abandoned the political discussion, dangerous for him in the given circumstances, choosing the ground of frivolous criticisms – ground which is always easy, requires no theoretical or political arguments, and on some occasions can play to the gallery.

So he tried to change the whole discussion. It can be said that he did not intend to replace an important discussion involving the problems of the new party by one on the methods of the international leadership. Yet, as everybody knows, in politics we don’t discuss intentions. Anyway, this method in itself, regardless of intentions, has nothing to do with the working-class movement. It was always typically petty bourgeois behaviour. Let us remind ourselves of Trotsky’s fight against petty bourgeois opposition in the American SWP in 1939-40. At the end of this article I will return to these problems. But even now, here, I must stress that ‘In Defence of Marxism’ remains an invaluable text for understanding the ‘criticist’ tendency appearing now in our party life, as well as its relative popularity, not only among those who have some tendency towards petty bourgeois behaviour, but also among those who approach the new tasks with all kinds of sectarian apprehension and conservatism. ‘In Defence of Marxism’ is of valuable assistance for us to better understand these tasks themselves.

Concerning the method of discussion, cde. Borovi and also cde. Pirani could study with great profit this warning of Trotsky: comrades dissatisfied with the “regime” (of the party) have had in my opinion a false political attitude. The regime must be an instrument for correct policy and not for false. When the incorrectness of their policy becomes clear then its protagonists are often tempted to say that not this special issue is decisive but the general regime. During the development of the Left Opposition and the Fourth International we opposed such substitutions hundreds of times. When Vereecken or Sneevliet or even Molinier were beaten on all their points of difference, they declared that the genuine trouble with the Fourth International is not this or that decision but the bad regime.; (A letter to Sherman Stanley, ‘In Defence of Marxism’, London, New Park Publications, 1971, p. 44).

This was exactly the way these comrades suddenly abandoned their defence of their policy opposed to the new party orientation. A political line was irremediably lost, and they replaced this line by an attack against the organisational weaknesses and even ‘bureaucratisation’ of the international leadership. How strikingly like all sectarians! And what a dangerous similarity with the Shachtmanite petty bourgeois opposition!

All of us witnessed at the congress this diversion of the discussion by cde. Borovi. He picked some real or supposed weaknesses of our work at this very difficult moment for the International (bad methods, insufficient centralisation, but also bureaucraticism, etc.) demonstrating not only his great dismay in view of the horrific fact that – what a shame comrades! – the International didn’t even elect a delegation to the congress!! (When and how, cde. Borovi?) Fortunately the congress didn’t follow him onto this unprincipled terrain. But a group was formed more or less spontaneously on that basis. Cde. Borovi appeared as its leader and led these comrades away from politics towards an unprincipled criticism. Some of them went even further than the leader himself. The members of this heterogeneous group, thanks to Borovi, perhaps thought that they were waging a real fight against – bureaucratism (!) by raising personal observations. Unfortunately, this is not the case. That is why a lengthy treatment of these problems is necessary, and also in order to help them to make a real clarification.

Does the grip of Stalinism over the working class still exist?

I didn’t openly participate in the discussion which lasted more than one year on the proposal to form a new party. So certain comrades thought, as l saw even at the congress, that I agreed with cde. Borovi. While expressing my difference with him, I should also explain my silence.

When he started his crusade against comrade Slaughter’s proposal, I was surprised. First of all because of its hostile, aggressive and pretentious tone. Instead of trying to clarify the intentions of this proposal, to make its content clearer, or to ask for explanations, to propose corrections, etc. He immediately developed a wholesale attack on the entire project as well as on its theoretical and political foundations. So, his aim was not to make the subject clearer for him and for others in order to measure its real content and meaning. No, he was at once resolutely against with considerable, hostile opposition.

My surprise was even greater because, some years ago, when I proposed to go forward in Hungary towards the preparation of a workers’ party with all the activists around us, not only had he expressed no objection, but he took part in the work to try to bring this about. Yet between this attempt and the ‘new party’ orientation in Britain there is no difference in kind. And, knowing his limited preparation for such a battle, I was amazed at his great confidence in his position. (This confidence came a cropper in the light of cde. Slaughter’s first answer to him – International Internal Bulletin, 26 March 1994.)

For all these reasons, not willing to give more importance to the dispute, I was convinced that this ‘misunderstanding’ – although a disturbing one – would be quickly resolved. I was wrong. Then I had to go to Hungary for several months. When cde. Borovi came there I told him that I totally disagreed with his criticisms. In the meantime comrade Slaughter, cde. Geoff Pilling and others replied to the criticisms and answered the attacks delivered by cde. Pirani and more and more – cde. Borovi. I do not intend to repeat these answers, but will simply underline some aspects of them which are, in my opinion, the most important ones because I observe that these answers have had no effect on a certain mode of thinking and acting – at least in cde. Borovi’s case. On the contrary, these comrades, especially cde. Borovi develop their criticisms, their false political arguments; they carry on handing out lessons and advice to everybody.

Comrade Slaughter’s proposal is based on a theoretical analysis of the situation – more exactly, on the new conditions in the international class struggle. Many, comrades sincerely think that there is a common understanding in the party – a complete agreement, concerning our appreciation of the objective situation. But is it true that we all agree on the characterisation of the situation? The fight waged against the proposals shows that there is an important disagreement with a group of comrades precisely on the main theoretical source of the proposal for the ‘new party’. That is why the theoretical rearming of the party is the principal requirement needed to carry out the tum now required.

In fact the dispute starts at the point of the different estimations and significance given to the collapse of Stalinism. Cde. Borovi vigorously denied – and still does – that the collapse of Stalinism would mean its end. This contention is not simply the expression of hesitation or fear in the face of an unequivocal, definite conclusion which often frightens hesitant people lacking self-confidence in their observations of knowledge. Yet comrade Slaughter tried to explain the fundamental change in the situation as a result of this collapse, its concrete meaning in relation to the situation. To no avail. Cde. Borovi affirmed, in February 1994 that: ‘… the grip of Stalinism on the working class still exists, under different form, with a modified content’. (J. Borovi: Some reflections on ‘The end of Stalinism’…) And today, in his amendments to the Constitutive Points of Declaration for the LIT-WI Liaison Committee, in February 1995, he proposes to delete from the characterisation of the situation after the collapse of Stalinism, the formulation: these are new and favourable conditions’ etc. by the following neutral one: ‘… .an entirely new, unprecedented and contradictory situation. Leaving aside a purely linguistic or semantic analysis of the vague and empty content of ‘entirely new’, or ‘unprecedented’ – the words are there only in order to ‘prove’ the author’s readiness to recognise a situation as being effectively new – let us notice that they have no real significance at all concerning the distinctive nature of that situation, its definite character. If you affirm, on the one hand, that Stalinism has collapsed and, on the other, that its grip ‘on the working class still exists, under different forms, with a modified content’ -– then the whole affirmation says nothing; it is not worth mentioning. Still less, if you don’t even analyse exactly what is meant by these abstract formulations like ‘different form’ and ‘modified content’.

Cde. Borovi characterises the present situation as ‘contradictory’. But all situations are always and everywhere ‘contradictory’. So, believing that he is saying something very dialectical’, he simply states the obvious. Apparently cde. Borovi considers all contradictions to be dialectical ones and also that contradiction in dialectics excludes the definite character of things and developments. But clearly, in reality, this is not the case. All developments, like that of Stalinism, or more exactly of our investigation, its relation to the historical crisis of the revolutionary leadership of the working class, being always contradictory, go through moments when their previous characteristics change qualitatively.

These leaps in dialectical development do not at all mean that all the features of the previous situation, all its manifestations, facts and phenomena disappear without trace. A great number of elements of the previous conditions continue to exist and even to some degree influence the situation after this qualitative change, its ‘disappearance’, the intensity of which depends on the concrete circumstances of the change itself. It is well known, for example, that after the qualitative change of feudal society into capitalist society, the remnants of the former lived on for a long time with greater or lesser intensity. This fact was used by the Stalinist representatives of ‘Marxism’ to characterise east-European so-called ‘Prussian-type’ capitalism as if it were a semi-feudal society: this in order to support ‘theoretically’ their orientation towards capitalist democracy in opposition to socialism. (The famous ‘theory’ of ‘two stages’.)

The same kind of reasoning still governs today the way of thinking of those who claim to be Trotskyists, but, in the past, considered that the Soviet Union and the deformed workers’ states state-capitalist countries because of the continued existence of the law of value, that of the wage-earning system, etc. Instead of characterising this clearly as a transitional society and not a capitalist society, a hesitating but shameful ‘state-capitalist’ author would perhaps have described it as an ‘entirely’ new, and ‘unprecedented’ and ‘contradictory’ society…

But let us go back to Stalinism. Borovi does not see the recent change as a qualitative one – namely the historical end of Stalinism. In opposition to this characterisation he puts forward a view from which he expurgates all notions of qualitative change. In his picture of the world, Stalinism is still alive in ‘different forms’. Pointing to France, to the new parties in general, to China, to Vietnam, to Cuba etc. there is for him only a quantitative change: Stalinism is now weaker than before, its crisis is deeper.

Thus he does not seem to understand that its collapse is not just a fall; a kind of defeat which could be reversed; a break-up into bits that could not be put back together again. The reason for his blindness is seemingly his limited knowledge of the real nature of Stalinism.

He considers Stalinism as if it were an independent political current which can be analysed in itself. It is true, he says, that for this or that reason it now becomes weaker but, given the fact that here or there it retains some important positions, we cannot speak of its end. That kind of reasoning, consequently, presupposes also the independence of the Soviet bureaucracy, the social basis of Stalinism.

However, Trotsky wrote in ‘Revolution Betrayed’ (for e.g. in the chapter: ‘Social Reasons of Thermidor’) that already from the beginning the bureaucracy was a ‘bourgeois organ of the working class’. Later on, this ‘bourgeois organ’ emancipated itself from the masses and became an ‘autonomous factor’ in defence of its privileges. Its function was (is) to settle the explosive contradictions of the transitional society according to its own privileged interests which, naturally, led (leads) towards the re-establishment of capitalism. By its bourgeois nature, by its social function – not only by its counter-revolutionary policy and methods – the Stalinist bureaucracy is this ‘mechanism of transmission’ of the world bourgeoisie’s pressure of which Trotsky speaks ‘In Defence of Marxism’. But at the same time, and in opposition to bureaucracy – like the reformist bureaucracy in the trade unions – the Stalinist bureaucracy cannot be separated from the historical conquests of the October Revolution. It was its parasitic nature which gave it its strength, power and privileges from these conquests. For this reason, i.e. in order to keep its power, this bureaucracy defended, in its own way and with its own methods, the gains of the October Revolution. But, like all parasites – I repeat – at the same time it constituted the mortal enemy of those gains.

Precisely this exclusive position enabled Stalinism to assume its counter-revolutionary role inside the Soviet Union and the deformed workers’ states, as well as on a world scale as the major factor of the bourgeois order in the world-wide class struggle. On several occasions Trotsky explained that the Communist (Stalinist) International and its parties took their influence and prestige from the fact that the working class considered them to be the genuine guardian, continuator and successor of the October Revolution. This was the basis of Stalinism’s overwhelming strength in the international working-class movement, strength which was used to defend bourgeois society.

Therefore it is impossible to understand and analyse Stalinism in itself in this or that country, in its specific national form, as if it could be independent from the world bourgeoisie and from the conquests of the October Revolution. We can understand its nature, function and role only in its intimate relationship to the world bourgeoisie and, on the other side, in its parasitical relation to the October Revolution.

Once these objective conditions of Stalinism have radically changed, as is now the case with the ex-workers’ states, or it is separated from these specific relationships, Stalinism no longer exists. Even less if you give it an independence, and want to characterise it according to some superficial and external appearances. It is precisely by using this method that cde. Borovi arrives at the monstrous declaration that ‘Stalinism… is a bureaucratic degeneration of a new current of the working class: the Bolshevism.…’!?!

Trotsky found it necessary to write a whole pamphlet against such a perfidious assertion based on superficial formalism. In 1937 he wrote in ‘Stalinism against Bolshevism’: ‘… in a formal sense Stalinism did issue from Bolshevism. Even today the Moscow bureaucracy continues to call itself the Bolshevik party. It is simply using the old label of Bolshevism the better to fool the masses. So much the more pitiful are these theoreticians who take the shell for the kernel and the appearance for the reality’. Thus, characterising cde. Borovi’s method a long time ago, he went on: ‘The present purge draws between Bolshevism and Stalinism not simply a bloody line but a whole river of blood’, and (the annihilation of Bolsheviks and youth) ‘…shows not only a political but a thoroughly physical incompatibility between Bolshevism and Stalinism. How can this be ignored?’

How, cde. Borovi? By using a method which doesn’t enable one to understand the class nature of Stalinism.

The collapse of this latter means a qualitative change: it marks the end of this whole counter-revolutionary system. The transformation of degenerated and deformed workers’ states – even if capitalism has not yet succeeded – deprived Stalinism, as the parasite on these states, of its fertile soil – even more so because Stalinism was their foremost gravedigger.

The growing discontent and various movements of the masses under conditions of increased bourgeois pressure, transmitted and even managed by the bureaucracy, destroyed not only its dictatorship but also, in the absence of a strong Fourth International, the workers’ nature of the Soviet Union – even its existence as such – and of the great majority of these states. In these circumstances the Stalinist bureaucracy could no longer exist: this whole process also caused its explosion. The decisive element here is the fate of the soviet bureaucracy because its direct relation to the gains of the October Revolution, and therefore its prevailing place in the international safety-device of the world bourgeoisie, were the determining factor of Stalinism. By its explosion the whole of international Stalinism was not only profoundly weakened or shaken, but finished. Even in the countries in which the bureaucracy still has complete power, it cannot be characterised as Stalinist: its relationship to the gains of the October Revolution or an extension of it has radically changed, since it is no longer their defender but rather their conscious enemy.

What is even more important: the collapse of Stalinism, its end, means that the world bourgeoisie has lost the main pillar of its order, one that nobody can rebuild. Here also is a qualitative change – in this sense too we see the end of Stalinism. No other, still existing bureaucracy in power – even as mighty as the Chinese bureaucracy – can replace this system. Rather all of them are the remnants of Stalinism (which has ended, but nobody says that it has completely disappeared!) – condemned in the more-or-less near future to the same explosion which finished Stalinism generally. At the international level they do not have any position, influence or the possibility of making any impression on the working-class movement, of establishing a grip over it. Speaking of ‘grip’, let us remind ourselves of cde. Borovi’s words: ‘… the grip of Stalinism on the working class still exists’. But in the light of our previous analysis the first thing we can say is that Stalinism no longer has this grip and the second is that in this or that country, if such a grip still exists, it is only the fragmentary residue of a recently powerful international ideology, policy and apparatus, a whole system of control over the international working class – which has now ended.

In the main, the question is to know on what ground we consider the separated and isolated states and parties. If we consider them in themselves and/or judge them from external appearances, we could certainly say that Stalinism is not finished. With such a view one could also foresee a rebirth of international Stalinism (after all China has nearly 1,000 million inhabitants). But only on the ground that Stalinism is finished can we understand these states (parties) as remnants of a historically finished system, marching towards an unavoidable explosion and transformation.

Thus cde. Borovi doesn’t see a qualitative change in the conditions of the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the working class, which has been brought about by the end of Stalinism. The immediate political consequence of this false understanding is the strengthening of a wrong conception of our programme, a conception which is already in itself erroneous. He strongly insists that ‘Bolshevism against Stalinism’ – this has been the essence of the Fourth International. Is it still true today? Comrade Slaughter suggests an answer: ‘no. I do not agree with this. I think there is an urgent necessity to launch a debate on this question.’ And later: ‘…the rebuilding of the Fourth International proceeds in the fight, Bolshevism against dispersed, weakened Stalinism in deadly crisis.’ (J. Borovi in his above-quoted text, emphasis in the original.) Does he want to debate this question? Then let us proceed to debate.

The essence of the Fourth International was never constituted by the antagonism between Bolshevism and Stalinism – sharp and important as that certainly was. The Fourth International always defined itself in relation to the international class struggle between world imperialism and the proletariat. Only on this basis and in this framework did the Fourth International oppose and confront Stalinism, as it opposed and confronted all other counter-revolutionary or petty bourgeois comments and organisations – even if Stalinism was the most important one of these organisations. It is enough to study the Transitional Programme. Its very title eloquently states: the tasks of the Fourth International in relation to the death agony of capitalism. Although the fight against Stalinism and Reformism is always present in the pages of this programme, it never assumed such a central, quite exclusive place as cde. Borovi imagines. There is only one chapter on the Soviet Union, which today has become obsolete, and this is understandable. The main problems of humanity – even if it is true that ‘the historical crisis of humanity is reduced to that of the revolutionary leadership’ – is how to solve the terrible alternative: socialism or barbarism. From this point of view the crucial question of leadership is put forward as the most essential basis of the class struggle, and not as in itself an opposition between Bolshevism and Stalinism. To put it another way: to solve the crisis of leadership we have to develop Marxist policy and organisation for the emancipation of the whole working class. As Trotsky pointed out in his discussion with the American comrades on the Transitional Programme: ‘although it is ‘only’ an ‘action programme’ it is, nevertheless, a scientific one ‘… based on an objective analysis of the objective situation’.

There is no reference at all to Stalinism in the overwhelming sense that cde. Borovi attributes to it. The Fourth International never determined its fight in relation to Stalinism, never adapted its ‘essence’ (in cde. Borovi’s words) to changes in that fight. Here we have another example of an over-estimation of Stalinism, as if it were a mighty, objective and independent force and not an appendage of the world bourgeoisie grown out of an isolated, backward workers’ state.

While on the one hand cde. Borovi establishes a direct relationship between Bolshevism and Stalinism – this latter is a degenerated Bolshevism – on the other hand he now dissolves the essence of the whole Fourth International into a fight against Stalinism. How could anyone understand this? Such a totally confused picture is the natural result of his metaphysical and formalist method of thinking.

All these obscure, uncertain and contradictory (non-dialectical!) beliefs and solemn but entirely untrue proclamations on Stalinism involve very dangerous, direct, political consequences. The first one is almost an obsession: for if the essence of the Fourth International is the fight against Stalinism, it must be vital for it to have this enemy, albeit in its deadly crisis. This view overestimates Stalinism and, by the way, underestimates the revolutionary readiness and capacity of the proletariat. The second immediate political result is carelessness, a blindness towards the objective situation, which includes the condition of the international class struggle. Effectively, cde. Borovi embraces both consequences. They motivate his hostility towards the ‘new party’ orientation as well as his general tendency to sectarianism. Consequently, according to him – and let me draw attention to his own formulations – the present-day situation has the following characteristics:

(a). ‘… the reconstruction of the Fourth International still remains the fight against Stalinism and in the framework of what remains from Stalinism’ [Let me say that this ‘what remains’ hardly corresponds to a ‘grip’ over the working class! _ B.N.]

(b) Then (criticising cde. Slaughter’s analysis on the new forces of the working class) he says: “… the problem is that actually I do not see such a real movement for a new workers’ party’. Later, he repeats this: ‘Where are these workers who “see their struggles not as a thing in itself but as a moment of the socialist revolution?” (J. Borovi: Once more on the “new party” – emphasis in the original.)

And so, we have come full circle…

Dialectical development against Sectarian paralysis

The end of Stalinism deprived the world bourgeoisie of its principal support. The whole counter-revolutionary edifice, based on the international class collaboration provided by Stalinism, has now collapsed. This happened despite the great efforts of the bourgeoisie, as was seen by its attempts to help preserve Gorbachev’s regime and Yugoslavian ‘unity’. Later, it openly claimed to stand for a new world order – which could not be anything else but a move towards chaos and barbarism – revealing that their attempt to restore Stalinism, or to replace it, is unsuccessful.

But if you affirm that Stalinism still has its grip over the working class; or even if it is simply in a ‘deadly’ or ‘unprecedented crisis’, the meaning of this whole change completely escapes one’s notice. For it prevents anybody from grasping that the collapse of Stalinism aggravates the crisis of the world bourgeoisie and stops one from understanding the character and depth of this crisis. Yet the increasing crisis of imperialism, and its present aggravation has not only an economic character flowing from its economic contradictions. Those who don’t see the end of Stalinism cannot grasp that now, having lost its main pillar, the social and political crisis of world imperialism is greatly aggravated. It has become a deeper and more generalised political crisis. The content of this deepening is that in the worldwide relation of class forces a shift has taken place in favour of the international proletariat. This objectively positive character of the change remains completely hidden and unknown to those who ignore its qualitative nature.

Unfortunately cde. Borovi cannot see this aggravated crisis of imperialism because he denies that Stalinism is dead. So he refuses to acknowledge this positive shift in international class relationships in favour of the working class. This is why he is so sceptical about the ‘new forces’ of workers and youth whose appearance is understood by comrade Slaughter. It is this deep scepticism that is behind cde. Borovi’s underestimation of the revolutionary spontaneity and capacity of the working class and, at the same time, leads him to overestimate the bureaucracy’s strength. This scepticism leads also to a distortion of the real relationship between the classes.

Of course this objective change, this favourable shift, doesn’t exclude the fact that at the same time enormous difficulties remain or even arise in the subjective conditions, precisely because international class consciousness lags behind the situation. This is the great contradiction of today’s class struggle. We have seen how cde. Borovi likes to invoke the present situation as a ‘contradictory’ one, opposing this empty formulation to a concrete characterisation. But after having uttered his pompous words, he is not really interested in positively identifying the genuinely opposed elements in such a contradiction. At the very most, he simply mentions, in a banal way, some ‘opposites’ whose gradual evolution are not (and cannot be a new product of a dialectical development of the dynamic of reality but remain only the simple regular succession of already-existing ‘factors’. Thus the living contradictions of reality are turned into repeated banalities. Or, to put it another way: the crisis of imperialism is ‘deeper’; Stalinism is in a ‘deadly’ crisis, the situation is ‘contradictory’ because of Stalinism’s grip over the working class. But it is not even clear what are the contradictions in cde. Borovi’s ‘contradictory situation’ other than some sterile, contrasting facts.

So, instead of understanding that we should turn openly towards the working class, cde. Borovi insists upon the dangers of such a turn as if we were in a square bristling with bayonets, surrounded by massive hostile forces. In place of new forces’ he suspiciously detects only inappropriate, adverse or even alien elements. ‘Where are these new forces?’ – this is his repeated question. Thus he came close to seeing an adversary in the trade union delegation from Tuzla – whose tour in France and Britain proved a considerable success, and has made a contribution to strengthening the international solidarity of the working class. But for a while cde. Borovi was paralysed by the fact that members of this Tuzla delegation declared themselves in favour of the ‘market economy’.

But in the countries recently liberated from the domination of the Stalinist bureaucracy everybody is more or less for the ‘market economy’. In the consciousness of workers, peasants and intellectuals the state ownership and the planned economy became identical to hateful Stalinism, while the ‘market economy’ means for them everything which the working class obtained in the most advanced countries – known as the gains of the ‘welfare state’: high wages (in comparison to those in Eastern countries), social gains, democratic rights. Only on the basis of painful experiences do the masses in the ex-Soviet Union and Easter Europe now begin to recognise the real content of the market economy. Even so, many people still think that in their countries a kind of ‘savage capitalism’ is developing and they reject this in favour of a really good’ one. In my polemic against Garmendia’s position, two years ago, I tried to explain this contradiction – one expression of the low level of class consciousness due to past Stalinist domination – but obviously cde. Borovi didn’t understand any of this and in his pragmatic everyday work in Hungary he tried to adapt his sectarian view to reality. But how can we convince these people except by working in close contact with them engaged in a common fight on a principled basis? How to separate them from bourgeois ideas and policies? …Exactly how?. … There is no answer from the Sectarians.

This sectarian behaviour is unable to define any alternative to the ‘new party’ orientation. In actual fact, those who cannot see the favourable situation created by the death of Stalinism, and so also do not see the ‘new forces’ appearing in this situation, are condemned to paralysis, to conservative behaviour. They cannot oppose any other line to that of the ‘new party’ orientation. The sectarians, like cde. Borovi and cde. Pirani, even if they are speaking of an ‘entirely new’ situation of a deeper crisis of Stalinism, are totally powerless in drawing any adequate conclusion from their own analysis of the situation. cde. Borovi already clearly formulated this dead-end in his first paper: ‘We have to change, we are in the process to change. The discussion is not on that. But how and what to change? In my opinion these changes go today through the type of fight we have with the convoy and not by a proposal for a vague “new party”

Is there any need to comment? Let me here make only one point, to which I shall return. Stripped of any alternative orientation, the Sectarians are reduced to paralysis and negative criticisms.

The metaphysical way of thinking which sustains this sectarianism distorts our strategic line: that the reconstruction of the Fourth International proceeds through that of the working-class movement and that the latter is possible only through the reconstruction of the Fourth International. Here we have a dialectical relationship between the working-class movement and its Marxist vanguard as well as of their inter-dependent development. The ‘new party’ orientation in Britain, as I understand it, is an attempt to apply our strategy concretely in this country by a dialectically unified – i.e contradictory – answer to the present stage of development and that of our party. It is possible to launch and achieve the new party precisely because of the present favourable conditions brought about by the end of Stalinism. The ‘new party’ line corresponds precisely to this new situation aiming as it does to raise the consciousness of the working class concretely at a higher, a political level, so that the contradiction can be overcome, resolved at a higher level. (In Hegel’s expression: ‘aufhebung’.)

But for a sectarian it is enough to repeat from time to time our strategic line which, in this manner, becomes an empty formulation. Thus cde. Borovi doesn’t establish any bridge between this general truth as a method and a goal, on the one hand, and the present-day situation, on the other. It seems that for him this reconstruction is not a dialectical process going through various stages but only a kind of sudden transformation, a single act. Or at least if a process were involved it would be valid for the workers’ movement but not for the party. Even in this case we are asked by cde. Borovi to wait for a time when the workers themselves will ask us massively to create a new workers’ party. Please don’t do anything before the rank and file ask you to, is his erudite warning.

It is quite embarrassing to recall that not such a long time ago – for example at the time of the second congress of Workers International – cde Borovi was ready to consider a ‘new party’ in Britain. Now, it’s got to be one thing or the other: either he doesn’t take it seriously, or he thinks of it as if it only involves a change of name. Perhaps for him the party, as the highest expression of working-class consciousness is already in existence; it needs only a gradual increase in its numbers, in its capacity and its influence, changing its name accordingly. Obviously he never understood it as a fusion of the vanguard of the class with the ‘vanguard of the vanguard’. These two ‘vanguards’ – assuming they actually have a place on the sectarians’ map – must have their separate lives until the point is reached where members of the ‘less developed one’ reach the level of the ‘more developed’, as a natural product of the equally natural expansion of the latter. This over-simplified, schematic and mechanical view, one that so often goes hand-in-hand with sectarianism, simply neglects … life. Theoretically, it separates the development of the workers’ movement from that of the party – in our main orientation both are bound together in unity – by conceding that the first may be a dialectical one but the second has to pass through only a gradual evolution.

Let us suppose, however, that cde. Borovi is against the ‘new party’ orientation because, as he occasionally says, the conditions are not yet ripe for it. Yet he never examines these conditions seriously, neither the problems of the objective development of the class struggle, nor those of the unions, parties and the mass movements. Instead of such analysis which would at least show a certain seriousness, he launches the question: ‘where are these new forces who want such a new party?’ This theatrical question put forward evidently as a serious argument against such a fantastic proposal as a new party, lacking any support of the ‘rank and file’! … but cde. Borovi has no chance: he finds himself against the opinion of Trotsky, who already had to answer precisely the same question in relation to his proposal concerning a Labour Party in the USA in 1938. In a second discussion on this matter with several leaders of American SWP (31st May 1938), Trotsky replied to some comrades who said that there was no proof for any wide backing for such a Labour Party.

‘I cannot judge whether sentiment for a labor party exists or not because I have no personal observations or impressions; but I do not find it decisive as to what degree the leaders of the trade unions or the rank and file are ready or inclined to build a political party… We can measure the mood by action only if the slogan is put on the agenda. But what we can say is that the objective situation is absolutely decisive.’ (Trotsky, The Transitional Programme for the Socialist Revolution Pathfinder, New York, 1975, p. 163.

And a little later:

‘I say here what I said about the whole programme of transitional demands. The problem is not the mood of the masses but the objective situation, and our job is to confront the backward material of the masses with the tasks that are determined by objective facts and not by psychology. The same is absolutely correct for this specific question on the labor party. If the class struggle is not crushed, replaced by demoralisation, then the movement must find a new channel, and this channel is political. That is the fundamental argument in favor of this slogan.

‘We claim to have Marxism or scientific socialism. What does “scientific socialism” signify in reality? It signifies that the party which represents this social science departs, as every science, not from subjective wishes, tendencies, or moods but from objective facts, from the material situation of the different classes and with demands adequate to the objective situation, and only after this can we adapt these demands and slogans to the given mentality of the masses. But to begin with this mentality as the fundamental fact would signify not a scientific but a conjunctural, demagogic, or adventuristic policy.’ (ibid, pp. 163-64).

Comment would be superfluous.

Let us note only that here too, as in the question of Stalinism, cde. Borovi starts from everyday facts in their vulgar immediacy. I shall return later to this dull pragmatism. But now we have to summarise briefly, the main elements of those objective conditions which determine the orientation towards a ‘new party’.

It is usually taken for granted today that world imperialism and specifically its British section is in a deep crisis which even in the recent period of so-called economic growth or recovery not only remains unable to overcome its fundamental crisis and resolve the great evils flowing from it, but this alleged recovery itself became the generator of this self-same crisis. This means that instead of a general boom, we will have to face (in the more or less near future) an aggravation of the crisis, an exacerbation of economic and social contradictions. The spread of barbarism in the form of the savage war of extermination in ex-Yugoslavia, or in Chechnya, in Rwanda and Burundi, etc., the spread of fascism everywhere, or the bourgeoisie’s permanent inability to unify Europe where almost each step made by it for this purpose transforms itself into that of its disintegration, indicates clearly this universal trend. In these conditions, as Trotsky said, the trade unions ‘… on the basis of declining capitalism (already in 1938 in the USA!) … are constrained to turn towards political action’

Today even more, when Stalinism is dead, its British party too is decimated. This aggravates the general crisis, for the workers’ movement cannot be domesticated as before by this counter-revolutionary force. Besides, the Labour Party bureaucracy, adapting itself more and more to the ruling class, tries to free itself from all its ‘constraints’ which – even formally – link it to the working class, and to socialism. The Soviet bureaucracy and its peers ‘liberated’ themselves from the ‘constraints’ of the workers’ state. By doing so, they have lost their Stalinist ‘soul’. The Labour bureaucracy risks the same fate: the final cutting of the last, weak and slender thread which links it to the working class.

Here we have to examine the discussion on the famous ‘Clause Four’ which is developing in Britain and in the pages of Workers Press. Its importance lies less in the discussion itself but more in the broader perspective of the class struggle, the above-mentioned move of the parties and unions, the gathering together of the working class. Concerning this problem too, cde. Slaughter tried to explain in Workers Press, what is at stake in the Labour leaders’ aim of removing Clause Four for nationalisation from the party programme. In the discussion on these explanations and on the party’s move for the defence of Clause Four we can observe a whole range of views and conceptions: from sincere worry of some comrades and workers, as for example cde. Nick Brown, about a possible slide towards the Labour bureaucracy, to nonsensical sectarian rantings. What a pity that comrades Pirani and Borovi didn’t give their verdict on this important question by a comprehensive explanation!

Be that as it may, the sectarians don’t understand the meaning of nationalisation, its relation to the class struggle. Or if they do understand it intellectually, in practice they deliberately position themselves outside of it as ‘fine’ observers in their splendid isolation. But the workers cannot isolate themselves from the class struggle: they have to take part for or against nationalisation, ie. for or against the suppression of Clause Four. Certainly our nationalisation programme is completely different from that of the Labour Party and all other bureaucracies. We reject the payment of any compensation and buying back. What is much more important, our nationalisation will be, must be, carried out, not by the state apparatus, but by the workers themselves in and through their mobilisation, through their committees or councils! Nevertheless, all nationalisations weaken the bourgeois class, or at least are the expression of its weakness. Even if the ruling class recovers it by its own state which nationalises, the class enemy accedes to partial nationalisations only in order to save what it considers to be essential: state power: So nationalisation is above all a class question, however its is carried out. The high compensation paid for eventually unprofitable branches of enterprises do not change the class character of nationalisation. Such compensation only makes it easier for the bourgeoisie to accept this temporary retreat in exchange for a greater loss. In Workers Press (1 April) Terry Brotherstone put this question in an even finer context. He explained how Clause Four was the result of a compromise between the working class and its reformist leaders, who acted on behalf of the ruling class.

If nationalisation is not a class question how can we understand Thatcher’s privatisation programme and the whole liberal wave in her tracks all over the world? It is so profoundly a class question that it stands higher than the limits of a single party. Opposing the defence of the nationalisation programme, the sectarians reveal themselves as neutral observers in the fight against it, if they reject the extension of this struggle.

Of course, they reply, everybody should wage a battle against privatisation, but, they continue, nobody should be allowed to confuse our party with that of the Labour bureaucracy. Yet without in any way making such a confusion, if some bureaucrats are ready to defend nationalisation, why on earth should we not fight alongside even them? Only obstinate sectarians can reject such a fight.

Some comrades, like cde. Nick Brown, are honestly perturbed that a struggle in defence of Clause Four could raise illusions about the bureaucracy’s or the Labour Party’s capacity for genuine socialist, working-class policies. Raising this problem, Nick is absolutely right: such an opportunist danger exists (coming precisely from sectarians who, at the first sign of self-adapting bureaucrats, surrender in front of them and declare that a victory has been won.) But a timorous opinion based on illusions puts a brake in practice on the fight for the new party – even unwillingly – which objectively helps the sectarians, independently of the enormous gap between them and every disturbed party member. On the other hand, far from creating illusions, defence of Clause Four helps to disillusion all those workers who have such illusions. We do know that nobody can prevent the Labour Party from having a more and more bourgeois policy. But the great mass of workers inside and outside the Labour party are not yet convinced of this. Our task is not to get lost in vain and futile quarrels with them on this problem, but to undertake a common fight and go together in order to help them to emancipate themselves from the treacherous Labour bureaucracy’s leadership. They will be convinced only in that way.

Here we get back to the new party. Not only are the moves in both these cases exactly the same, but the themes, the content are organisationally linked, they complement one another. We propose to all disillusioned workers and Labour Party members, even ‘bureaucrats’! to form a new party which achieves the aim that cannot be imposed on the Labour leadership.

As a whole, our commitment to a new party is a general orientation. It is an axis. The fight waged around it and for it arranges all our interventions in the class struggle. It links one to the other: the struggle towards and in the unions, towards (eventually in) the Labour Party, towards the ex-Communist Party members, etc. as well as unmasking the centrist leaderships by winning their honest members. This tactic is at the same time our overall strategy in Britain – perhaps also elsewhere – over the coming months or years for reconstructing the Fourth International.

The most important, decisive problem concerning the new party is, without doubt, its programme (an action programme for us, the programme of this new party) and its international character. For this reason the most urgent and considerable task seems to me to be the working out of such an action programme incorporating the experiences and lessons as well as the aims of all struggles waged in a more or less separated way (against pit closures, WAB, against racism and fascism, in defence of various pensions and rights etc. etc.) ending up with the workers’ government, the natural purpose of the new party. An overall discussion must follow with all those who will join with us, in the new party. And it seems to me consistent with such a programme that the new party belongs to the Workers International which is itself a stage in the movement towards the reconstruction of the Fourth International. It is true that all these tremendous moves based on the crisis of imperialism and the end of Stalinism disorientate and confuse the working class. But at the same time, and this is much more important, they force it to free itself from the treacherous bureaucracy’s leadership – and oblige us to take this leadership.

A gigantic world-wide re-grouping of the working class is taking place under generally favourable conditions. Despite the great delay and dangers resulting from its unadapted, delayed consciousness, the decisive side in this contradiction is the first one! We have to base our policy on this situation, taking our inspiration from (and on the basis of) this colossal move for the conquest of leadership of this proletariat. In these historically decisive circumstances the principal danger is the conservative, narrow-minded sectarianism which, willingly or unwillingly, under the cover of defending sterile ‘principles’, tries to isolate us from this movement, or at least condemns us to drag behind it. If we measure accurately today’s objective and subjective conditions, we cannot escape from the duty of drawing adequate conclusions from it, to bring an overall answer to it. The turn towards a new party in Britain is a correct answer that corresponds to that situation.

But the sectarians have no answer. They put forward only their pointless and pretentious, stupid and negative criticisms. Thus cde. Borovi who – together with cde. Pirani – doesn’t even know what Stalinism is, as we have seen on several occasions, including his reaction to the Liaison Committee’s document. Nor is cde. Borovi familiar with our history. It seems he is writing a great deal, without: reading anything. So he doesn’t seem either to study Lenin’s arguments against sectarians in Left Wing Communism or at the Second Congress of the Comintern. Trotsky’s explanations against the sectarians of the entry tactic in the 1930s are equally unknown to him, as well as the whole discussion on the Labour Party for the USA in 1938. How could we reach any other conclusion after reading his astonishing howlers against cde. Slaughters explanations? Cde. Borovi and cde. Pirani want to teach everybody, without learning anything. Strange ambitions!

For a class policy against ultimatism, dim ‘workerism’ and empty boastfulness

I have already quoted above cde. Borovi’s odd proposal: instead of preparing a new party, it would be better to organise convoys for Bosnia. This only alternative opposed to the ‘new party orientation is in itself lamentable. In the first place these are complementary and not opposed activities. Second, and mainly because our international campaign is opposed here to a general, party-building orientation which includes and politically centralises all campaigns. This doesn’t perturb cde. Borovi who uses the WAB campaign – reduced here to its final organisational form, the convoy – as a means of dissolving the highest political expression of the development of class struggle. But if we are at this point, we must also speak of the convoys. This is of the utmost importance, because it throws a light on an important feature of the sectarian’s political action.

In accordance with his attacks on the new party orientation, last summer cde. Borovi proposed an important resolution to the International Secretariat concerning our Bosnian campaign. Its importance was underlined by cde. Borovi himself who did not hesitate to qualify it as a new stage in our campaign. So, it had to be taken seriously and discussed thoroughly also by the IEC. If cde. Borovi really thought that the rules of democratic centralist functioning of leadership must be observed – as he proclaims on every occasion against the leadership (of which he is a member!) – he would have asked for a wide-ranging discussion. Instead of such a democratic manner – to which in other respects he is always vehemently referring against cde. Dot Gibson – he put forward his proposal, surprising the Secretariat, who voted for this apparently very ‘worker-oriented’, ‘workers’ democracy’ resolution. It was this hasty, thoughtless hurry, concerning such an important matter, that I immediately criticised. Then cde. Borovi urged the IS to transform this resolution into reality. But some comrades of the IEC were against it. I myself found it quite absurd. Cde. Bob Myers, principally responsible for the whole Bosnian campaign, was against it, characterising cde. Borovi’s resolution as a sectarian one. How to neglect his opinion? In this case cde. Borovi was not so anxious about the ‘democratic functioning’ of leadership. Why this excitation and hurry to implement this so-called ‘new stage’ . . . . when several members of the IEC, including the comrade mainly responsible of the campaign, were against it?

Before answering this interesting question let us examine the resolution itself. It maintained, in substance, that given the great importance of the black market we cannot have confidence that the union bureaucrats will avoid it, assuming that they are not directly involved in it. Therefore the distribution of goods delivered by Workers Aid must be put under workers’ control. So the principal task, from today onwards would be the organisation of workers’ control in Tuzla in a straight line by the Workers Aid convoy. Thus the latter’s whole activity would reach a ‘new stage’ by the immediate organisation of the Tuzla workers.

At first sight this idea is a very confused one. Obviously cde. Borovi doesn’t understand what Marxists call workers’ control. It seems that he has never understood that at a certain (high) level of mass mobilisation the working class tends to organise, and effectively settle its control over production and distribution by its own elected organs that spring up in and during the very same mobilisation. The belief that anyone could replace this class mobilisation and its instruments by some individuals reveals not only a silly aberration but also a very dangerous view. On what class-political basis should we select these individuals, separated in this context from the class struggle, without even knowing their language? Must those who shout the loudest be co-opted? If not, who else? Here we see a serious perversion of the very idea of workers’ control, and the great risk that it will be discredited in the eyes of the working class. By the same act, intervening in the day-to-day fight from the outside, we would have substituted ourselves for the Bosnian revolutionaries.

More important is that an appeal for such ‘workers’ control’ and its organisation would have meant that the convoys, indeed the whole WAB campaign impose stringent conditions on their international solidarity Cde. Borovi’s proposal implied that we are only too ready to help you, Tuzla workers, provided that you break away from your leaders (the bureaucrats!) and create, with us, your ‘workers’ control’. This is an ultimatum to the workers of Tuzla, linking elementary workers’ solidarity to an important condition: they must change their leaders! How shameful! Cde. Borovi doesn’t understand that we don’t place conditions on our solidarity and help for oppressed peoples led even by petty-bourgeois leaders or governments. He should read the whole Marxist literature on this subject. Here for example is what Trotsky wrote on the conflict between Ethiopia and Italy, (17th July 1935):

‘Far too little attention is paid to the Italo-Ethiopian conflict by our sections, especially by the French section. This question is highly important, first for its own sake, and second from the standpoint of the tum by the Comintern. Of course, we are for the defeat of Italy and the victory of Ethiopia, and therefore we must do everything possible to hinder by all available means support to Italian imperialism by the other imperialist powers, and at the same facilitate the delivery of armaments, etc. to Ethiopia as best we can.

‘However, we want to stress the point that this fight is directed not against fascism, but against imperialism. When war is involved, for us it is not a question of who is “better,” the Negus or Mussolini; it is a question of the relationship of classes and the fight of an underdeveloped nation for independence against imperialism’ (L. D. Trotsky, The Italo-Ethiopian Conflict’ Writings, 1935-36, New York, Pathfinder, p.41.)

Trotsky wanted to send weapons even to the Negus without calling the soldiers to organise a so-called ‘soldiers’ committee’! I think Trotsky was right against cde. Borovi’s ultimatism, so I follow Trotsky and criticise cde. Borovi. Look at Trotsky’s articles in which he unconditionally defended Mexico in 1938, including its ‘courageous president’ Cardenas who nationalised the oil industry against British imperialism. Trotsky did so without putting conditions on the way and methods of this nationalisation. (These articles are highlighted today by the odious blackmail of the American bourgeoisie offering its financial ‘support’ to Mexico on condition that the oil industry be leased back to it. Cde. Borovi’s comparison to the approach of the Bolsheviks to Kerensky at the time of Kornilov’s attack is of no relevance whatsoever, as his own long quotation from Trotsky’s work proves. (J. Borovi’s letter to IS, 29 January 1995.) It only puts cde. Borovi in a ridiculous position.

On the other hand, in his hurry cde. Borovi didn’t see that we are part of this campaign. A decisive one, but only a part of it, in which we organise together with various organisations and individuals. Among them we find many unions which participate with their leaders (awful bureaucrats, according to cde. Borovi), We cannot impose on them this so- called ‘new stage’ of the campaign, that so exercises cde. Borovi’s brains. Here too we have to deal with the same ultimatism which we observe in relation to the Tuzla workers. Yet, given their common basis, ultimatism is a consistent expression of sectarianism in action. Both have a view and behaviour which ignores all mediations between the starting point and the final one – as we have seen in the ‘new party’ question. They know only the straight line and the colours black and white, thus excluding all dialectical intermediary situations as well as the colour grey. They are both equally nurtured by a harmful political impatience towards classes and individuals

But above all, this would-be ‘new stage’ resolution was intended, even unwillingly, to change the political line of the Workers Aid to Bosnia campaign. According to provide the necessary material help, we wanted to restore workers’ international solidarity as one of the principal elements of class consciousness almost entirely destroyed mainly by the Stalinist but also the Reformist leaderships. We undertook this common international action which links workers of capitalist countries to those who, cut off from them in the past, are emerging from long Stalinist domination, thus re-establishing a real internationalism, for so long stifled by Stalinism. We decided to reconstruct this international workers’ solidarity as political and moral support for the Tuzla workers to defend their country – and all ex-Yugoslav peoples – against the Stalino-nationalist and fascist Serbian forces and their imperialist UN-NATO masters. We wanted to call the international working class to rise up as a class against world imperialism and fascism as the only real help and solution for Bosnia, the whole ex-Yugoslavia and the Balkans.

We worked patiently for this goal and we had some important, although very uneven and partial successes: among Bosnian workers, international youth, workers, intellectuals and also some unions. At the time of the visit of a union delegation from Tuzla in France and Britain we were able to mobilise important sectors of workers and their unions. Finally, we are preparing for July a considerable international working-class convoy in which the unions are directly involved, even its preparation is taken in hand by them. This is something we could not say two years, or even six months ago.

This extraordinary political development was directly threatened by cde. Borovi’s ‘new stage’ torpedo. His resolution would have changed the axis of the campaign: from the construction of international class solidarity into a local organisational fight. He cannot say that this so-called ‘workers’ control’ would have been only a complementary action. Cde. Borovi insisted upon the high significance of his proposal. In fact it was intended to replace our campaign. Its achievement would have certainly prevented the organisation of a trip by any union delegation from Tuzla! Such an adventure would have opposed some Tuzla workers to their union leaders not on the most important political basis but on a secondary, humanitarian aid one. It would have opposed also the union leaders (bureaucrats.!) in all countries (nevertheless called on for help by cde. Borovi – among others) to this ‘workers’ control’ which would have stood up against their fellow-‘bureaucrats’ in Tuzla. In these conditions how could we address allworkers – including their elected leaders!” – and try to reconstruct international workers’ solidarity?? Clearly, this resolution threatened to break the united front opposed to fascism and imperialism. It’s enough to put these two orientations side by side to reject cde. Borovi’s line.

That was how the IEC reacted – by withdrawing it. Its first decision at the 26-27 November 1994 meeting was: ‘The main line of the Workers Aid for Bosnia report was agreed unanimously. This supersedes the International Secretariat’s resolution, “For a New Stage in the Fight of Workers Aid for Bosnia”’. This was the end of cde. Borovi’s resolution. But not the end of its history …

Let me add some remarks on an important feature of cde. Borovi’s ultimatist line in close relation to his opposition to the ‘new party’ orientation. This is his insistence on the necessity of addressing ‘real’ workers, the ‘rank-and- file’, on the antagonism between ‘ordinary workers’ and their leaders, between organised workers and the supposed ‘true’, ‘immaculate’ ones. Reading this is like reading Gorter, leader of international sectarianism during the early years of the Third International. I recommend Cde. Borovi and cde. Pirani read him – and also Lenin’s Left Wing Communism…’ Because the sectarians were always particularly attracted by ‘true’ workers against frightful bureaucrats or petty-bourgeois intellectuals. They are fascinated by ‘true’ workers, the best elements for them being those who in their majority are not yet contaminated by an organisation. If they deign to look for the organised ones, they fall into downright rank-and-fileism. We can see it in its palpable expression when cde. Cde. Borovi asks how many rank-and-file workers are for a new party, making his approval of it dependent on this ‘voice of people’, or when he is looking for ‘real’ workers in the streets of Tuzla to organise his ‘workers’ control’.

The main trouble with this ‘workerism’ flowing directly from a pragmatic approach – and it was always so in the history of the workers’ movement – is that it encourages workers to desert the mass organisations led by bureaucrats, more exactly, to avoid the everyday as well as the long-term fight against them, leaving the masses under their leadership, bearing in mind that a vehement hue and cry or even valid but fruitless assertions are hardly enough to defeat them. Such sectarian ‘workerism’ or ‘rank-and-fileism’ is in fact an abdication from the struggle against them, only a fig leaf to conceal opportunism towards the very same bureaucrats.

Last August cde. Pavlovic also criticised the French Workers Aid, asking the question: “lurking sectarianism in Workers Aid?’ He noticed that this majority (of French Workers Aid accuses Olivia of activism and ‘forgetting’ (?) the proletarian line (workers’ control!). because of her collection of money from the teachers’ union for a Bosnian school! He remarked that: ‘…even our own comrade Janos was against giving merchandise to the school heads and other bureaucrats!’ Afterwards cde. Borovi rejected this critique saying that it ‘… constituted the “foundation” of the polemics against a so-called line of workers’ control … I would like to know on what basis… the comrades can prove the existence of this so-called “line”?’ It is interesting that he raises the question of ‘workers’ control’ by defending it, in relation to sectarianism. As to the question that if ‘the comrades can prove the existence of this so-called “line”?’ I consider that even on the one issue of ‘workers’ control’ the preceding pages constitute a proof of the existence of another line, whether ode. Borovi is conscious of it or not. We have had many discussions in the leadership and at meetings at which cde. Borovi always protests against ‘accusations’ about his ‘so-called different line’. Since then, he himself declared, for example at the WRP congress, that ‘two conceptions’ exist. Anyway, if he didn’t see in the past or doesn’t see it now, it is no proof of his clear-sightedness on this question

As mentioned above, the great majority of the IC (in November 1994) voted for the Report on Bosnia, prepared by cde. Myers, in opposition to the resolution on ‘workers’ control’ previously voted, wrongly, by the IS. Two months later (29 January 1995) cde. Borovi wrote a letter – in many respects a very interesting letter to the Secretariat. It deserves a long analysis but, unfortunately, I can here pay attention to only some aspects of it.

In this letter he attacked the Secretariat, in reality cde Dot Gibson, because among other things ‘… I have not been consulted if I agree or not with the manner the IEC has been presented by the IS.’ Obviously this comrade waited for a request presented by cde. Dot Gibson to him [cde. Borovi] asking his permission to draft this document. Reading this, you think you are dreaming! Apparently he is unable to discern the difference between the party and a discussion club. Should I explain that such outgrowth of personality – not to say selfishness – is not exactly what we know as salutary modesty in our ranks? Anyway, the striking fact is that he rejected the majority’s decision and continued, not only to maintain his opinion, to which he has a right, but to agitate, jumping at all occasions (or without occasion) to attack the majority decision, preventing the comrades from working, creating suspicions and tensions. The worst thing is that he believed that he was fighting whereas in fact he was doing the opposite

Then he explains in his letter how and why he doesn’t accept the resolution of the IEC which ‘supersedes’ the IS (his) resolution. His argumentation is highly enlightening. We learn in it that ‘…for me the problem is that we don’t have an orientation on WABand we lost a very precious time (and money) with very few results. This is the problem. The following weeks events show how this method of working is fruitless’ (emphasis in original). As we know, the ‘following weeks’ were not exactly ‘fruitless’ because they prepared the Tuzla union delegation’s visit with its great success. I didn’t see, after this visit, when and how cde. Borovi corrected his ‘fruitless’ prophecy? He passed it over, as usual.

Everybody should note also in his words the continuous fight for the application of our line brought only the loss of ‘precious time (and money) with very few results’. Here is an impressive example of what I meant above by political impatience. (Cde. Borovi then wrote an enthusiastic article on this union delegation’s visit (horrible bureaucrats!) to France, which is in striking contradiction to his resolution and previous battles. If, as it is a little bit understandable, he doesn’t say anything in this article on how and why he changed his mind, the elementary honesty would have inspired him to advise the IS on this important change. Or should cde. Borovi have two different lines: one for inner-party discussions and another for the public? This kind of schizophrenia cannot be accepted, previous mistakes – creating some trouble – must be clearly stated.)

The most astonishing (underlined) statement is that, according to him, we ‘don’t have an orientation on WAB’! Evidently he regards our political line as useless claptrap, a line that arouses no feeling in him because, perhaps, it cannot be immediately converted into a direct organisational action with ‘real’ workers. More than one year’s work – in which he actively participated – was not enough for cde. Borovi to discover our political line in relation to Bosnia. Referring to our resolution he goes farther by writing in his letter: ‘What is this “main line”, which is still not written two months after the November IEC? Does the comrades really think that we can “supersede” a resolution of the IS by an unwritten “main line”?’ Is it necessary to add anything to this astounding question? One can only shrug one’s shoulders… Probably for this reason he was, so to speak, obliged in this ‘vacuum’ to propose his resolution …with the aim to deepen the independent apparition [appearance?] of the WI in Bosnia’. Undoubtedly such a ‘deepening’ would have been not only ‘independent’ but quite opposite to all others. Cde. Borovi does not yet understand that we can and must deepen this ‘independent apparition’ [appearance?] first of all politically, on the ground of the international working-class solidarity opposed to nationalists, fascists, Serbian (and other) forces and their imperialist supporters, as well as all those bourgeois (and bureaucrats) who are (or who are moving to) their side! That is the sense of what Marx and Engels wrote: ‘The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of the movement.’ In the movement and not outside of it, or opposed to it!

After the majority resolution cde. Borovi continued to be agitated at every moment for his rejected resolution, as if the majority decision were non-existent, because his Highness found it wrong! A curious conception of democratic centralism … But how to convince him? Everybody can read all documents written by him (and he writes much) but nobody can find anywhere even half a page which could be considered as a reflection or as the expression of some doubts, mediations in response to the arguments developed by other comrades. In most cases he doesn’t deign to answer on the precise problem – which makes it very difficult to discuss. After a painful and fruitless discussion at the November 1994 session of the IEC he wrote a quarrelsome letter, but never showed any sign of having considered the arguments opposed to his resolution. One cannot think of any other reason for this behaviour than an unbridled belief that he must always be right. What else could motivate cde. Borovi’s arrogance – an arrogance which is so manifest in all of his letters, so evident in his discussions, one that sometimes reaches an unbearable degree, as we saw at the last WRP congress or at the last session of the IEC. Moderation or restraint certainly will not suffocate him. Here is the reason why he was in such a hurry to pass his resolution into reality, while neglecting cde. Myers’ opinion, without a proper discussion by the IEC on this matter.

His papers and letters contain plenty of criticisms, advice and lessons given to comrades: it’s no good forming a new party in Britain; how to build the WRP; how to strengthen this party’s work; Workers Press is no good; how to improve it, and so on and so forth. In general all advice must be welcomed. But groundless criticism and pretentious lessons become unbearable arrogance if one looks at the teacher’s own record. Over the long years he has been in France as a member of the international leadership, we have never had the chance to read a single word of cde. Borovi on the following very important subjects: What are the conditions of party-building in France? How should we orientate the building of the party in France, along what kind of strategic line? How can we launch, even a small and limited paper in France? How to recruit new members for the Wl and to grow beyond our (two?) comrades in France? And, without making mischief, I could also add: how to prepare ‘workers’ control’ – precisely in France? He never wrote anything, neither has he proposed or said a single word concerning party-building in France! Isn’t it a somewhat inadequate achievement for so worried a party-builder – in Britain and Tuzla?… When cde. Dot Gibson wrote to him in reply to his criticism on the supposed paralysis of the leadership concerning Bosnia, that ‘There is nothing to stop you sending in a report, political explanation and discussion piece’, cde. Borovi answered: ‘This is not serious’… I repeat: is it necessary to comment?

Unfortunately, the pretension and arrogance know no bounds; they exceed every limit, venturing in all unknown lands. That is how cde. Borovi made his excursion into political economy. How surprised I was to discover a letter to Workers Press with his critical remarks on cde Pilling’s article on world economy. What had got into him? I asked myself, being well aware of his unpreparedness on this question. It is as if I had written, for example, a treatise on marine biology. Having read these critical notes (Workers Press 21 January 1995), I felt embarrassed for him. It would be hard to commit more errors in so short a letter.

Cde. Bob Archer, then cde. Pilling himself, finally Richard Farnetti (author of a very useful and interesting book on the decline of British economy: Le declin de l’economic britannique de Victoria a Thatcher, Paris, 1991 pp. 354) have already answered Borovi’s pitiful letter. I agree with them and don’t want to repeat their observations. So, let me make only a few comments.

First of all, the strange move of comrade Borovi. Cde. Pilling is, as everybody knows, an outstanding Marxist economist having important contributions on his record in the form of many books and articles on political economy and economic history. But we don’t know cde. Borovi’s books or articles on economy. And for good reason! Of course one cannot know everything This is not a crime, not even a mistake. But if cde. Borovi, reading cde. Pilling’s article, had some doubts and would have wanted to establish the truth on this subject, and did not wish to discuss merely for discussion’s sake, or to prove his personal capacity in the eyes of the public, he would have done what everybody on such occasions would have done: written a letter to cde. Pilling asking him for more clarification. Choosing the path of public criticism in Workers Press, cde. Borovi unavoidably appeared as a teacher or corrector in a field he doesn’t know. At the same time, he exposed himself to harsh, even ferocious criticisms. But who is responsible for that?

The second comment concerns the method of discussion. Cde. Borovi ‘appreciates’ cde. Pilling’s article, then declares its ‘one-sidedness’ and introduces Lenin’s polemics against Kautsky’s opinion (more exactly what cde. Borovi thinks to be Kautsky’s opinion.) He never criticises cde. Pilling directly. He is ‘only’ speaking in the same short letter of cde. Pilling’s ‘one-sidedness’ and Kautsky’s faults. Nobody could say that he attacks cde. Pilling directly. Even less, because he allows that ‘Perhaps‘ he evokes’..the old Kautskyist theory’ with its reformist and ex-Stalinist defenders. By the way: there are no Stalinists any more?) This method must be condemned. It avoids direct confrontation of ideas while linking a comrade to the worst opportunist by an ‘innocent’ insinuation.

Thirdly, cde. Borovi is heavily mistaken about the subject of the article. Obviously he supposes it is an article about international speculation and not what is today called the ‘globalisation’ of capitalism of which speculation is only an aspect.

He is even more mistaken about the axis of Lenin’s criticism on Kautsky and this latter’s real opinion. The main dispute between them was not about a supposed ultra-imperialism without national conflicts (Kautsky), against which Lenin would have opposed an absolute inability of capitalism ‘… to emancipate itself from national boundaries’. Lenin opposed Kautsky because this latter tried to eliminate the inner contradictions of imperialism, dreaming about a peaceful capitalism not ‘simply’ between strong and weak nations, as cde Borovi thinks, but first of all between monopolies which, in their competition are not determined by national boundaries (even if these borders are obstacles for them.) Cde. Borovi’s misunderstanding about what Lenin (and Kautsky) really said leads him to overestimate the national limitations of capitalism. He writes: ‘… it is not the speculators or the multinationals which predominate but the fight of the national bourgeoisie of each imperialist country for a new division of the markets’. But what really determines the drive of these national bourgeoisies? Certainly not a national feeling, neither some ‘national’ monopolies. The move for the European unification and its failure by the bourgeoisie are determined by the complex development, concentration and fight of the monopolies (most of them international) and not the nations’ contradictory tendencies. If this fight takes the form of national oppositions, one cannot take for the content what is only the form. Briefly, cde. Borovi doesn’t see the international concentration and centralisation of capital with its inner contradictions but only nations fighting against each another. In reality, he doesn’t agree with the analysis of globalisation, i.e. the growing concentration and centralisation at a world level, which seems to him to be one-sided. He opposes the inner contradictions (but only in their national form) to counterbalance globalisation’s ‘one-sidedness’. This is the same anti-dialectical view that we have seen concerning Stalinism’s end which he wanted to replace with the phrase ‘contradictory situation’. It is not surprising that he was able to write in his letter of 29 January: ‘In this discussion the IC could hear, from a warm supporter of the (Bob Myers) resolution the incredible affirmation: Dialectic is one-sided‘. (Underlined by cde. Borovi.) All these things are far from flattering for our teacher’s knowledge of economics or of dialectics.

Moreover, cde. Borovi didn’t understand cde. Pilling’s article which concretely points out that this ‘increasing globalisation of capital … far from creating the conditions for a smoothly operating world economy, as some day-dreamers hope, was itself a response to the intensifying contradictions of the capitalist world economy.’ (Workers Press, 17 December 1994) Analysing the globalisation development, which cde. Borovi seems to deny or neglect, cde. Pilling very clearly states on several occasions in the same article that ‘imperialism, in its own way, unites world economy while at the same time breaking it up’.

So, against what and whom exactly is cde. Borovi quarrelling?

It is difficult to give an answer because he never replied to his critics. He didn’t react to cde. Archer’s valuable remarks on the world-wide character of imperialist economy. After cde. Pilling’s observations noting also the non-scientific, non-Marxist feature of his criticism, cde. Borovi sent an angry letter (Workers Press 18 March 1995) protesting against cde. Pilling’s description of his method. But not a single word on the matter of the discussion! He promises only that ‘I’ll try to contribute to this discussion in the future too.’ When? I am really curious to know. Even more now after R. Farnetti’s letter (Workers Press 1 April 1995) when, instead of a reply he ran to cry on cde. Slaughter’s shoulder, complaining that Workers Press gives space to a letter which accuses a party member to be “nearly a slanderer”! How awful!

But where is the answer to the many criticisms on the subject of his letter? Once again there is no answer at all. Here, solemnly, in front of all comrades I challenge him to answer his critics. Please, give a straight answer on the matter without humming and hawing about ‘insults’. Will cde. Borovi reply, perhaps, that I push him and sharpen contradictions?…

On democratic centralism

It is absolutely necessary, finally, to deal with democratic centralism as a substantial and organic part of Marxist theory. Being a vital element of the character of the party, it is at the crossroads of theory and practice, just at the point where both turn into unity in and through the party. The well-known fact that cde Borovi and cde. Pirani as well as some of those who follow them are evoking it constantly requires also some clarification.

Their papers and letters are, in the name of democratic centralism, full of virulent and harsh criticisms of the bad methods of the leadership, its wrong functioning, the lack of democracy (?), ‘unjustified attacks’ (?) on them, etc., etc. Very often these criticisms exceed the limits which can be accepted in the party. In fact, as everybody can notice, they are concentrated on heavy attacks against cde. Dot Gibson. As a matter of fact, she is the real target, behind this often anonymous and mysterious word ‘leadership’ – of which, in any case the most active censors are full members. If one examines this fact more closely, one rapidly discovers that – what a coincidence! – as Secretary of Workers International elected by the IEC, she is at the centre where the everyday fight for alldecisions and resolutions of Workers International, is concentrated, where Workers International really lives as an international organisation. In many respects this is true also of the WRP. She is put in charge of leading the fight to carry these resolutions into reality; for establishing their respective place in the entire activity of the party; to improve them on the basis of experiences accumulated in the same fight; to represent the leadership inside and outside the party; thus to convince all comrades not only of the correctness of decisions – eventually enriching them – but also of the absolute necessity, urgency and readiness of doing everything in order to fulfil them – a really immense and all-sided theoretical and practical task. If we consider – as we must – the great disparity between our aims and organisational, financial capacities (lack of money and material resources, very limited number of experienced cadres, etc.) we are obliged to recognise that cde. Gibson carried out this difficult task without any noticeable fault. And this is a real performance given the extremely hard conditions of the still prolonged crisis of the Fourth International with its (sometimes) heavy legacy. That cde. Gibson makes mistakes? … What a completely new and illuminating discovery!

Now, from the time of its foundation the WI and its leadership tried to establish and improve the centralisation of our International. Several times the leadership discussed its necessity, asserted it in verbal and written forms. Since the very existence of the party as well as its development depend on – besides its programme – the centralisation of its work and fight, nobody never contested this necessity. Precisely for this reason, after the 2nd congress the IEC wanting to strengthen this centralisation elected a Secretary in the person of cde. Dot Gibson.

Ever since then she has been in a real crossfire of attacks. And this is not an accident, given the great, sometimes unconscious, resistance to centralisation. Everybody has read – or must read – these letters and papers in which she is accused of being non-democratic, aggressive, arbitrary, irresponsible – and that’s not all! In his above-cited letter cde. Borovi attacks the leadership (?) for almost everything, even for the absence of sessions of IEC (he very well knows about our lack of money!!): ‘where is the leadership…? … why the party, the WRP, the IS leadership avoid its responsibility?’ All this accusative questioning because cde. Gibson wrote to him that the Tuzla delegation visit is the affair of the ITUSC comrades. Obviously cde. Borovi is not interested about whether she could convince the ITUSC comrades, nor is he interested in the real difficulties. The important thing being here to launch a heavy attack! When cde. Gibson tried to convince cde. Pirani to come to the rare sessions of the IEC, the always missing cde. Pirani (who nevertheless always attacks the bad functioning of the leadership!) she received an unspeakable answer. Cde. Pirani arrogantly asked in it: who do you think you are? It is understandable that in such an atmosphere other comrades having some inclination to confound democratic centralism with all kinds of criticism, follow these leaders. Cde. Rex Dunn, for example, didn’t hesitate to speak of her behaviour as ‘bureaucratically heavy-handed’ and ‘manipulative’. He rectified these accusations in his letter of 23 March 1995 by saying that ‘on reflection, this was too subjective’. Perhaps?… Surely! As are those accusations which he still holds to: “arbitrary’ and ‘abuse of power.’

The first important circumstance here is not only the would-be ‘impersonal’ character of these attacks hidden behind the ‘neutral’ word ‘leadership’, or even the directly formulated attacks of a personal nature. The fact is that they were, and are, systematically developed at just the time we decided to strengthen the centralisation of the International. Each time when cde. Gibson stresses the necessity for centralisation – and thus the necessity for discipline – she is attacked not for this but because of her ‘aggressiveness’, ‘lack of democracy’, even ‘bureaucratism’, etc. And inversely, each time these attacks are developed in the name of democratic centralism there is nothing said or written for centralisation, absolutely nothing but everything for some kind of unlimited so-called democracy which is in reality taken here only as an individual attribute.

Yet party democracy – if we, arbitrarily, tackle it without its necessary counterpart, centralisation – is a totality of rules, moods and methods by and in which the party lives and moves; defines its political line, elects and removes its leadership, regulates and controls the discussions, assures the rights of declared tendencies or minorities. It has nothing to do with criticisms voiced by persons here and there on every occasion and at all times. Asking the right to this is an individualism which has its place in many petty bourgeois circles but not in a workers’ party. Unless your fight for ‘party democracy’ doesn’t attack a real (or supposed) arbitrariness or insult in the conduct of party discussions (dismissing papers, non-publication of internal bulletins, etc.), in the election of leadership, or prevents the formation of declared oppositions, etc., in summary acts against the rules – your criticisms express only individual feelings and resentments or hostilities and antipathies. It has nothing to do with party democracy, even less with democratic centralism.

It is quite understandable that many comrades have some difficulties in understanding this. There are various reasons for it, not the least being the hard emancipation from the legacy of previous (Healyite, Lambertist, or other) leadership’s bureaucratic centralist methods wanting at the same time to smash also the individual character of comrades. But this individual character of all human beings cannot be confused with petty bourgeois individualism. The resistance to the Healyite methods required a fight for real, not formalist, democracy. In and after this fight every kind of expression appeared a democratic action and all moves for centralisation became suspicious. The famous ‘stick’ has been bent too much to one side … something that arose from the need [missing Ed,]all those problems in a healthy way only by mental reflection. But the time is now ripe for us to accelerate the process of settling these problems, while the whole of our present fight for clarification provides the necessary material for overcoming them in a positive way. Far from being a tragic, disastrous event, on the contrary, this fight constitutes a salutary clarification. It takes place at a moment when, given its immense tasks, the party is obliged to clarify these until-now unresolved problems if it wants to go forward and not be thrown back. If our political analysis is correct, we are just at the crossroads.

So let us get back to the question of centralisation without which there can be no party democracy. It requires, once the political line is fixed, a ‘complete unity in action’ under the conduct of the leadership in a disciplined way. This disciplined unity means that, yes, cde. Dot Gibson, as Secretary, has the full right to lead comrades, even giving orders to the recalcitrant ones, even more outside the party, and all of us must carry them out with great discipline – if they correspond to the political line of the party and aim at the accomplishment of resolutions and decisions. Naturally, everybody has the right to protest if the leadership (leader) goes beyond these limits, or uses inadmissible means.

But put aside obviously alien methods (beating, etc.) every individual protest must be carefully examined. In our present case all criticisms against comrade cde. Dot Gibson are put forward by comrades who, by accident, have an opposed political opinion to the majority resolutions and, consequently, that of cde. Dot Gibson on all important problems under discussion (the end of Stalinism, the ‘new party’ question, ‘workers control’ in Tuzla, democratic centralism, the accomplishment or reject(ion? SB) of tasks, etc.). I draw the attention of all members of our International to the following facts: cde. Dot Gibson is struggling for the centralisation – and she is attacked in the name of ‘democracy’ which appears, in reality, as a petty-bourgeois individualism; she wages a sharp fight for the leadership’s decisions, for the accomplishment of the tasks – and she is attacked also in the name of democracy to ‘freedom’ of opinion and even freedom of action (?!) refusing to execute them or choosing them arbitrarily. What a strange coincidence! Let me quote once more Trotsky’s words: ‘The regime (in the party) must be the instrument for correct policy and not for false’, In Defence of Marxism, quoted above.)

But the essential characteristic of all this cry for democracy is that the comrades, surprisingly, don’t give any explanation of such – according to them – dangerous bureaucratism or deviation of the leadership or of its Secretary. They don’t try at all to characterise such a bureaucraticism or deviation and examine what it represents politically, what social forces could constitute its basis. Such a careful analysis, self-evident for Marxists, doesn’t even cross their mind. They find the supposed non-democratic, bureaucratic manners as the result of personal faults and shortcomings, just as party democracy appears to them as if it were a collection of personal rights.

Here we have a curious separation of form from content, unusual and hardly permissible for Marxists, even a complete disappearance of the content. Concerning their own action, the comrades repeatedly declare that the criticisms are only remarks or proposals designed to improve the functioning of the leadership, its methods, including cde. Dot Gibson’s work, her behaviour (??), etc. Clearly, these comrades don’t yet understand that a Marxist criticism has to examine the framework and the social ground of the criticised leadership’s (cde. Dot Gibson’s) methods, a method that goes farther than endlessly repeated and thus futile, empty and superficial labellings. Then on this ground it has to develop a different conception of leadership opposed to the supposed wrong one. Finally, one should fight for the leadership or change it in the case of those criticised. This is how Marxists have always acted, that is what we learn from Lenin and Trotsky, from the whole history of the workers’ movement – not only of our party! Because the form (democracy) is nonsense without its corresponding content. If the comrades don’t want or dare to define this, they have to cease their senseless criticisms. Otherwise their anti-dialectical approach takes its revenge as already it did it. So their criticism appears as it really is: unprincipled and systematic petty-bourgeois denigration which would destroy – even unwillingly – all centralisation, consequently, the whole party. Unfortunately I am not exaggerating here.

Let us remind ourselves how Trotsky tackled such problems in relation to the American SWP. In his ‘Open Letter to Bumham’ (7 January 1940) he wrote about the methods of the Burnham-Schachtman minority which are very similar to those of cde. Borovi and cde. Pirani:

‘you … seek an ideal party democracy which would secure forever and for everybody the possibility of saying and doing whatever popped into his head, and which would insure the party against bureaucratic degeneration. You overlook a trifle, namely, that the party is not an arena for the assertion of free individuality, but an instrument of the proletarian revolution… You do not see that our American section is not sick from too much centralism – it is laughable even to talk about it – but from a monstrous abuse and distortion of democracy on the part of petty-bourgeois elements.’ Then he explained: ‘A worker spends his day at the factory. At the meetings he is interested in learning the most important things: the correct evaluation of the situation and the political conclusions… petty-bourgeois… elements… vegetate in an artificial and shut-in environment. They have ample time to dabble in politics or its substitute. They pick out faults, exchange all sorts of titbits and gossip concerning happenings among the party tops’. They always locate a leader who initiates them into all the ‘secrets’. Discussion is their native element. No amount of democracy is ever enough for them. For their war of words they seek the fourth dimension. They became jittery, they revolve in a vicious circle, and they quench their thirst with salt water. Do you want to know the organisational programme of the opposition? It consists of a mad hunt for the fourth dimension of party democracy. In practice this means burying politics beneath discussion; and burying centralism beneath the anarchy of the intellectual circles. When a few thousand workers join the party, they will call the petty-bourgeois anarchists severely to order. The sooner, the better.’ (Trotsky’ In Defence of Marxism’ Merit Publishers, New York, 1965, p 92).

For more than two years, cde. Borovi and cde. Pirani have repeated that they make criticisms about various questions in order to improve the party’s line and work, its functioning. When other comrades invite them to clarify their position by uniting its obviously connected various elements (criticisms on the ‘end of Stalinism’, on the ‘new party’, on Workers Press, on the ‘functioning of the party’, ‘for workers’ control’ in Tuzla, etc.) into a coherent and declared political line – as a democratic centralist settlement and cast of mind must do, which everybody quite naturally expects – they cry out against such violations of their rights and personality! Nevertheless, cde. Borovi himself has spoken of ‘two conceptions’, several times he complained because of the existence of ‘two lines’ on ‘workers’ control’ in Tuzla. Yet they react almost hysterically when other comrades ask them to define their line, to declare a tendency in order to establish an organised and regulated discussion. Their answer IS invariably: ‘don’t push me’, ‘nobody can be forced to form a tendency’, wailing the incredible complaint that ‘one, sharpens the contradictions when they dare to formulate criticisms’. This is unbelievably childish behaviour, alien to a workers’ party.

In any case, who initiated the sharp attacks on the ‘end of Stalinism’, on the project of a new party presented by cde Slaughter? Who multiplied the sometimes violent attacks on the leadership, on cde. Dot Gibson’s work, methods and psychology’ (!)?

In the first line of the above-cited letter, cde. Borovi writes: ‘… we are facing actually [at present] a political crisis’ and then he asserts that the first step must be ‘to recognise the existence of this crisis’. (Emphasis in the original) Saying this, how could this comrade protest against a so legitimate and even obligatory call to declare a tendency? We do indeed recognise that there is a serious problem: how is it that cde. Borovi doesn’t himself feel and recognise his own elementary duty – if he considers himself as a Marxist – to summarise and generalise his criticisms, characterise them and set forth to the party? How can he call on us to recognise a crisis while at the same time he refuses our right to ask him to declare it politically and openly? Why does he refuse to fight for his view by openly organising a tendency? Certainly, nobody can force him and others to do so. But everybody can – and should – have an opinion on such strange behaviour.

If, according to him, there is a crisis, cde. Borovi has to analyse the political outlines as well as its social foundations. One cannot use this severe general characterisation of the situation as if it were only a meaningless word in a lively discourse. But it is remarkable that neither cde. Borovi nor cde. Pirani ever says or writes anything about the political or social characterisation of the leadership’s wrong policy and methods. Remaining true to themselves, they don’t sum up their own criticisms in a comprehensive general explanation and political line. In both cases the spine is cruelly missing, the form is lacking a content and thus unveils itself as an empty shell. Again let us consult Trotsky. In ‘A Petty-Bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist Workers Party’ (In Defence of Marxism, p 60, – at December 1939) he wrote: ‘Before they began their bitter struggle, the leaders of the opposition were obligated to ask themselves this question: What non-proletarian class influence is reflected in the majority of the National Committee? Nevertheless, the opposition has not made the slightest attempt at such a class evaluation of the divergences. It sees only ‘conservatism’, ‘errors’, ‘bad methods’ and similar psychological, intellectual and technical deficiencies. The opposition is not interested in the class nature of the opposition faction just as it is not interested in the class nature of the USSR. (Exactly as cde. Borovi and cde. Pirani are not interested in the class nature of Stalinism.) This fact alone is sufficient to demonstrate the petty-bourgeois character of the opposition, with its tinge of academic pedantry and journalistic impressionism’

Certain comrades might ask: why am I so harsh and intransigent against what seems to them only mistaken opinions and errors? On the contrary, those who are being harsh are cde. Borovi and cde. Pirani. According to the former, we face a political crisis; while in my opinion it is he, cde. Borovi who is in crisis and not as yet the situation. Nevertheless the case is very serious and can develop rapidly into a deep crisis. That’s why I stand up so sharply, since I want to prevent the International from entering a deep crisis; this will need now an uncompromising clarification and fight against not only isolated mistakes and errors but a tendency which, after more than one year’s ‘critical’ activity, begins to crystallise into an international group.

Unlike some comrades, I am convinced that opposed to the turn of the party required by the new situation, these ‘critical’ cdes. prevent the party from moving forward. As Trotsky put it in ‘From a Scratch to Gangrene’ (Ibid p. 144): ‘… with the transition of the party from one period to the next those elements which played a progressive role in the past but who proved incapable of adapting themselves with timeliness to new tasks have drawn closer together in the face of danger and revealed not their positive but almost exclusively their negative traits.’

There is a non-declared but very active tendency to restrain the party from moving forward, which makes serious, concentration more difficult. Those comrades who think that it is possible to convince cdes. Borovi and cde. Pirani mentally, by theoretical or political conversation alone, have a great illusion because we have here a definite (but not self-defined) tendency which has to be fought. In such a situation each concession in the fight for clarification – waged of course in a comradely atmosphere and by correct methods – the slightest conciliatory attitude in order to appease what one cannot pacify, strengthens petty-bourgeois arrogance and gives it the false impression that it is right. No conciliation and compromise with petty-bourgeois views and methods! Still less can we have a kind of Christian tolerance towards this tendency with foolish arguments that severity can break them (?)! The comrades putting forward such “arguments’ should ask themselves if the ‘severity’ of the critics does not break the party or some loyal and devoted comrades? … They have to ask themselves this question!

One of the many proofs of the urgent necessity and harshness of an answer to this question is the constant and regular attacks of cde. Borovi and cde. Pirani on Workers Press. I don’t want, and unfortunately have no space here to analyse in detail the numerous letters and papers in which they don’t criticise but attack our newspaper. Look only at their letters published by the paper! In them cde. Pirani defends cde. Thurley, cde. Borovi and himself: the latter defending himself against our newspaper. While in each case!! they initiated the public attacks in WP on certain comrades. In each case also they defended anti-Marxist opinions, policy or even persons – against the Workers Press ‘and its collaborators’ articles or answers! Everybody can see this. And all comrades are well aware of the fact that always, (I repeat: always) cde. Borovi or cde. Pirani, protesting childishly against ‘attacks in public’, were the very ones who started this kind of correspondence in the paper. At the same time, they never answered the content, the subject of the discussion!! Here too they carefully avoid the discussion, speaking only of ‘bad methods’, ‘insults’, and so on. Once again: in what kind of organisation do they think they’re in?… As Trotsky taught us, this irritation and fright is also very characteristic of this kind of tendency.

Speaking of tendency, it must be said that they protest against this designation. What is worse, their mutual defence in Workers Press and elsewhere lacks any political argument, any line or tendency. They develop only personal criticism against a line, the leadership, cde. Dot Gibson, or Workers Press. But nowhere do they oppose one definite line against another, as Marxists must. Thus their alliance and mutual defence is an unprincipled line; it is not an openly declared political agitation. It has a name in our tradition: this is, an unprincipled clique.

I am calling them an undeclared tendency. They are nervous and furious about this name, as if it were an insult. But I think I have given enough proof – and could have given more – to say that we have in the party an undeclared but very active sectarian-ultimatist political tendency. Its main characteristic is a constant opposition to the analysis of the changed, new world situation and of the new tasks flowing from it. That is why – and not only because by its very nature it is inclined to political paralysis – it attracts the conservative elements in the international which, not recognising its true social and political nature, preach conciliation with the comrades who represent it.

The foregoing pages give plenty of ground for declaring that this tendency reflects a petty bourgeois pressure on the party for [sic] give up its necessary transformation. Without any risk of making a mistake, Trotsky’s words on the Burnham-Shachtman-led opposition remain valid for ‘our’ sectarian-ultimatist tendency too: ‘Like any petty-bourgeois group inside the socialist movement, the present opposition is characterised by the following features: a disdainful attitude toward theory and an inclination toward eclecticism; disrespect for the tradition of their own organisation; anxiety for personal ‘independence’ at the expense of anxiety for objective truth; nervousness instead of consistency; readiness to jump from one position to another; lack of understanding of revolutionary centralism and hostility toward it; and finally, inclination to substitute clique ties and personal relationship for party discipline…’ (A Petty-Bourgeois Opposition, In Defence of Marxism, p. 43.)

The class nature of this tendency is clearly a petty-bourgeois one. Certainly these comrades will protest vehemently against this characterisation. But this is not an insult, since the class nature of this tendency is not determined by their personal natures. Let me cite, once again, Trotsky. In a short article published in the Internal Bulletin of the French Bolshevik-Leninist Group, he wrote (in November 1934, in French): ‘That does not mean to say that the comrades in question are “petty bourgeois”; they can be excellent proletarian revolutionaries, but the best revolutionaries make mistakes, and Marxism always obliges us to seek the social origin of any error; it is a question of the influence of petty bourgeois intellectuals on a proletarian revolutionary.’ (Trotsky Oeuvres. vol. 4, p.255). I can hardly add anything to characterise the petty-bourgeois tendency which appears in our party.

Is that to say that this tendency of, these comrades personally, have no place in the party? Absolutely no! Nobody can oblige them to give up their opinions. They can, as a tendency, fight for it inside the party, according to its rules. Our duty is to convince them. But the petty-bourgeois criticisms must cease immediately because they break the discipline, undermine the authority of leadership, denigrate comrades, especially our Secretary. Everybody can distinguish between such criticisms and a harsh but principled and loyal theoretical political and organisational criticism based on a declared political line.

Balazs Nagy,

February-April 1995

 

Statement of the Workers International Faction – 19th July 1998

NOT a country or a region in the world can escape the effects of the general and gathering crisis of world imperialism.

It is now openly acknowledged that the continuing rescue operations mounted in an effort to salvage crisis-hit South-East Asia cannot continue. Less than three months ago optimistic financial observers were hopeful that the crisis could be isolated, that it would not spread to Japan and China. Today the Japanese yen is falling, accompanied by bank and company collapses. This, together with the free-fall of the currencies of Indonesia and Thailand exert great pressure on China, as Asian competitors undercut both domestic and foreign markets. The Chinese textile industry alone is cutting its workforce by 600,000.

To this must be added the deepening economic panic and chaos in the former Soviet Union as attempts to force the pace of reconstructing capital fail, and foreign fund managers pull out, leading to a 50 per cent decline in Russian stocks in US dollar terms since May this year. World capital, in its panic-stricken efforts to prevent the complete collapse of the Russian system was obliged to make a $22 billion loan, even at the risk of intensifying its own problems.

The knock-on effect of this crisis in Europe and America leads the big banks and industries to seek new mergers, cut costs, drive up productivity, sack workers and prepare for trade war. The picture emerges of a world financial and economic crisis which will make the 1931 crash look like a storm in a teacup. Already there are political repercussions as wide layers of workers and the oppressed are forced to defend their jobs, wages and conditions.

In the former Soviet Union miners, and other workers, including teachers, nurses and doctors take strike actions, calling for the removal of President Yeltsin as he attempts to force the government to implement the conditions required by the IMF in return for loans, which they know will never be repaid. In the US, the strike at General Motors, and the threatened strike of the Teamsters, together with cheap products from Asia undermining the domestic market, last month already produced the sharpest fall in US industrial production for five years.

But the stark reality is that the working class acts defensively in conditions in which, despite its crisis, imperialism has the initiative and imposes the conditions for the struggle. Thanks to the bureaucratic leaderships of the parties which claim to be workers’ parties, and the trade union leaderships, economic fear leads workers to act independently, and even against each other, fearing that they will lose their jobs to others also caught up in world capitalist competition. A recent example of this problem could be seen in the international solidarity campaign mounted by the British, Liverpool dockers in their 28-month struggle against casualisation and anti-trade union laws. The dockers in other countries were prepared to give financial support and organise token work stoppages, but in the main they were too frightened of losing their own jobs to take all-out solidarity strike action.

The chief obstacle in transforming this fear and building the workers’ international offensive against capitalism is the nationalist and pro-capitalist character of the leadership of the trade union and political organisations to which most workers are still attached. The Liverpool dockers found the leadership of the British Transport and General Workers Union and the Labour government united to uphold the state anti-trade-union laws and oppose the dockers’ just fight for reinstatement. They prevented official national and international actions in support of the dockers.

From South Korea, to Nigeria and Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, France, Germany and the United States – in one country after another workers come into struggle on industrial and political questions, but are isolated from their brothers and sisters in other countries, and even from those in other regions and workplaces in the same country. This crisis of leadership can only be overcome by the working class rebuilding its international class independence – its own international party. For seven decades the policy of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the former USSR – ‘socialism in a single country’ and ‘peaceful co-existence’ with capitalism – kept the working class divided and destroyed its international party, enabling imperialism to continue its plunder and pillage of the world’s human and natural resources.

The economic prerequisites for socialism have long existed; the continued existence of imperialism means that despite enormous scientific and technological developments the productive forces stagnate. Under the conditions of the social crisis, imperialism inflicts barbarous attacks on mankind and the environment. Growing unemployment, the degeneration of culture, attacks on democratic rights, the rise of racism, environmental catastrophes, man-made epidemics of killer diseases now threaten present and future generations.

Socialism is necessary, but the interests of the working class can be carried forward only by their own independent Marxist party of social revolution. This was the experience of the working class of Russia when they joined with Lenin and the Bolshevik Party in the victory of the October Revolution in 1917. This was the aim of all those who joined Trotsky and the Left Opposition to found the Fourth International in 1938 in the fight against Stalin and Stalinism’s abandonment of the path of social revolution, which endangered the gains of the October Revolution itself. We now find ourselves at a new historical crossroads, when the collapse of the Stalinist bureaucracy dragging in its wake the whole of the Soviet Union and aggravating the historical crisis of imperialism, poses the question: what to do and how to do it?

The imperialist crisis itself does not resolve the crisis of leadership. What we are witnessing reveals that without the working class building its own international party, reactionary forces of nationalism, racism fascism and class-collaboration divert and even destroy the working class and the oppressed poor. This could be seen in the genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda and also in the unsuccessful and diverted actions of the working class everywhere in the world. At such historical junctures in the class struggle when the working class is faced with the necessity of building its own party, the frightened middle class always propose liquidation of the working class revolutionary party and its principles.

This is now a worldwide trend, which appears also in the international Trotskyist movement, including Workers International. An example of this tendency to abandon the revolutionary party and seek loose alliances of like-minded people to ‘co-ordinate’ the struggles of the working class is the Movement for Socialism. This was initiated by the British members of the Workers International to take forward the reconstruction of the Fourth International. But it has been reduced by the liquidators, led by Cliff Slaughter, to a discussion forum with the aim and purpose of replacing the Workers International itself, logically putting into question the legitimacy of the Fourth International, its programme and its history.

Against this liquidationism, we formed a faction in the Workers International at the November 1997 meeting of the executive committee (IEC), which was divided equally between the two positions. In the democratic traditions of all the Marxist internationals, we expected that the differences would be clarified in discussion and in written documents and resolutions preparing our third congress. Requests (from the faction, from members of the IEC and from sections of the party) to the Secretariat to convene the IEC to prepare the congress, have been met with downright opposition.

Over the past eight months since the IEC meeting members of that committee have been kept in the dark about proposals and decisions of the Secretariat. Minutes, reports and correspondence are not circulated. The Secretariat has disrupted relations with the Workers’ International League (LIT-CI) with whom the Workers International has a Liaison Committee. Finally a draft resolution from Cliff Slaughter has been circulated publicly saying that there should be no third congress. Others on the Secretariat say that a congress should be held, but only to bury the Workers International. We reject this ‘funeral’. In a recent issue of Workers International Press the Secretariat put into question the Workers International as well as its journal without the slightest reference to our opposition. In all these circumstances of the danger of the complete liquidation of Workers International, its third congress and its principles, we have decided to declare our faction publicly as the Workers International Faction, and to take responsibility for organising the third congress.

It will be an open congress. We invite all those who want a working-class international. For us this means the Fourth International, which we want to reconstruct, but we welcome discussion on this and all other questions confronting the working class. We prepare the congress also by producing the monthly newspaper of the Workers International – Workers International Press.

Balazs Nagy – on behalf of the Workers International Faction

The following statement is by the Syndicate of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company (Vahed), a trade union in Greater Tehran. It was translated into English by Sepideh Jodeyri.
(taken from: https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/12/support-for-the-peoples-just-struggle/)

Popular protests and strikes across cities throughout the country have now entered their eleventh day. Despite an intensified security crackdown, the heavy deployment of police and security forces, and widespread violence against protesters, the movement remains broad, dynamic, and diverse. According to reports, protests have taken place at no fewer than 174 locations in 60 cities across 25 provinces, with hundreds of demonstrators arrested. Tragically, at least 35 protesters—including children—have been killed during this period.
From December 2017 to November 2019, and again in September 2022, Iran’s oppressed people have repeatedly taken to the streets to demonstrate their rejection of the prevailing political and economic order and its structures of exploitation and inequality. These movements are not driven by nostalgia for the past, but by the determination to build a future free from the domination of capital—one grounded in freedom, equality, social justice, and human dignity.
While expressing our solidarity with popular struggles against poverty, unemployment, discrimination, and repression, we categorically oppose any return to a past marked by inequality, corruption, and injustice. We believe that genuine liberation can only be achieved through the conscious, organized leadership and participation of the working class and oppressed people themselves—not through the revival of outdated and authoritarian forms of power.
Workers, teachers, retirees, nurses, students, women, and especially young people—despite mass repression, arrests, dismissals, and relentless economic hardship—continue to stand at the forefront of these struggles. In this context, the Syndicate of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company (Vahed) stresses the necessity of sustaining independent, conscious, and organized forms of protest.
We have stated repeatedly, and we reaffirm once again: the path to liberation for workers and the oppressed does not lie in the imposition of leaders from above, nor in reliance on foreign powers, nor through factions within the ruling establishment. It lies in unity, solidarity, and the building of independent organizations in workplaces, communities, and at the national level. We must not allow ourselves to once again become victims of power struggles and the interests of the ruling classes.
The Syndicate also strongly condemns any promotion, justification, or support for military intervention by foreign governments, including the United States and Israel. Such interventions lead not only to the destruction of civil society and the killing of civilians, but also provide further pretexts for repression and violence by the state. Past experience has shown that Western hegemonic powers place no value whatsoever on the freedom, livelihoods, or rights of the Iranian people.
We demand the immediate and unconditional release of all detainees and insist on the identification and prosecution of those responsible for ordering and carrying out the killing of protesters.
Long live freedom, equality, and class solidarity.
The path forward for workers and the oppressed is unity and organization.
-Syndicate of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company (Vahed)
The Syndicate of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company (Vahed) is a significant, independent trade union in Iran, established in 1958, representing thousands of bus drivers in the Greater Tehran area who work primarily for the United Bus Company.

We take pleasure in reproducing the complete version of “An Introduction to Marxist Philosophy” by the late Peter Jefferies (Geoff Pilling). Geoff was a University lecturer and expert on the history of political economy but also a Trotskyist revolutionary and active fighter for the Fourth International. Geoff would have been greatly heartened by the developments taking place in Southern Africa and elsewhere and would have wanted to contribute to the building of the workers movement there.

The text is taken from the pamphlet of the same name published by Keep Left, London, January 1975 and comprises a series of articles that first appeared in Keep Left the weekly paper the Young Socialists (A British Trotskyist organisation – Ed.), Sept. 29, Oct. 6, Oct. 13, Oct. 20, Oct. 27, Nov. 10, Nov.17, Nov.24, Dec. 1, Dec. 8, Dec. 15, 1973. (Corrections to the original appear in [ ] Editor)

Chapter 1. Materialism and Idealism

‘PHILOSOPHY.’ When many members of the Young Socialists see the word they will no doubt think of something which they imagine strange and difficult, something done by ‘wise men’, often with long white beards!

So the first thing to get clear about at the start of this series of short articles is that the study of Marxist philosophy is not at all peculiar or over-difficult.

In fact, it is true to say that everybody has a philosophy, whether they are aware of it or not, whether they have worked it out or not.

For, by philosophy we mean a general conception of the world and the relationship of man and his thinking to this world.

And all of us have such a conception of the world. If this is the case, you might ask, why do we need to study philosophy? Simply because we have to develop a scientific and coherent conception of the world and the changes taking place within it.

For the revolutionary party, this is a vital question. Only if all its activities are guided by such a conception can it carry out its tasks of leading the working class to power and the establshment of socialism — the greatest change ever undertaken by man.

In Marxism lies the highest struggle by man to grasp the nature of the world in the course of his continual struggle to change it.

Hence the urgent need on the part of every Young Socialist to begin a systematic study of Marxism, individually and as part of his or her branch.

Now, in considering philosophy, we can start by saying that throughout history those who have been concerned with philosophy have been divided into two great basic camps.

On the one hand there have been the IDEALISTS.

On the other have been the MATERIALISTS.

Marxism belongs to this second great camp. In fact Marxism has developed materialist philosophy to its highest, most adequate level.

When considering these two basic philosophical outlooks, we come up against an immediate problem which we have to tackle at the start. In ‘ordinary language’ when we call somebody a materialist, we usually mean someone who is interested in money and material possessions, who is greedy, selfish and vain. On the other hand to be called an idealist is to be praised as somebody with high ideals, who puts the interests of others before himself and so on.

It is no accident that these words should be used in this way. Materialist philosophy has always been the object of abuse by the Church and by the ruling class generally. This way of using the word, is as Engels said, nothing but:

‘an unpardonable concession to the traditional philistine prejudice against the word materialism resulting from the long continued defamation by the priests. By the word materialism the philistine understands gluttony, drunkenness, lust of the eye, lust of the flesh, arrogance, cupidity, miserliness, profit hunting and stock exchange swindling — in short all the filthy vices which he himself indulges in private. By the word idealism he understands the belief in virtue, universal philanthropy and in a general way in a “better world” of which he boasts before others’. (Engels, ‘Ludwig Feuerbach’.)

So in considering the use of the terms we have to break from this vulgar understanding of the terms, used by the capitalist class to discredit materialism and Marxism.

In considering idealism and materialism we are considering the two fundamental answers to the question — what is the relationship of ideas to the world?

Materialism recognizes that our ideas are derived from and reflect the material world. Idealism supposes, on the contrary, that everything material, the world, is dependent upon and reflects some idea which is outside the world.

This is the basic opposition between these two conceptions and one which we must keep before us throughout this series and in the reading material which goes with it.

Engels put the matter clearly in his famous pamphlet ‘Ludwig Feuerbach’ from which we have already quoted.

‘The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of modern philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking to being … The answers which philosophers have given to this question have split them into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature and therefore in the last instance assumed world creation in some form or another … comprised the camp of idealism. The others who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism.’

For materialism, therefore, ideas are not something apart from the material world, but reflect the material world and the changes taking place within it.

By ‘material world’ we mean everything in the universe, or matter in its various forms — chemical, physical, biological.

We grasp the nature of this material world only through our five senses — touch, hearing, smell, sight and taste. The material world, acting on our sense organs, produces sensations. If we put our hand in the fire, we have the sensation of pain and take it out.

This ability to experience sensations depends of course on such things as nerves, retina and above all upon the brain. It depends therefore upon material objects. A damage to the brain seriously affects the ability to think; without the retina, sight is impossible.

If we understand this, it is clear that thought is a product of matter. Again we can quote Engels to sum up this basic starting point for materialist philosophy, this time from ‘Anti-Duhring’ (Part 1, Chapter 3):

‘If the question is raised: what, then, are thought and consciousness and whence they come, it becomes apparent that they are products of the human brain and that man himself is a product of nature which has been developed in and along with his environment.’

Or, the same point, this time from ‘Ludwig Feuerbach‘:

‘… Our consciousness and thinking however supra-sensuous are a product of a material bodily organ, the brain. Matter is not a product of mind, but mind itself is merely the product of nature.’

Let us end this opening article in the series by asking the question: Why is it important to grasp the basic point of materialism which we have examined briefly here and to think through every problem and question which we confront in relation to it?

Let us repeat the point once more: materialism understands that the material world exists independently of us and that this independently existing world is the source of all our ideas.

Of course the capitalist class, through their educational system, through the newspapers and television, teach quite the opposite. They teach that ideas are produced by the individual, in isolation from the world. And because of this, everybody is entitled to ‘his own’ ideas. And there is a further implication: if ideas are produced by the individual, in his head, then the world can be changed simply by changing the ideas in our heads.

This is of course the philosophy of individualism. It is idealist because it starts not from the material and social world, but from the individual as something apart from the world.

We will next discuss in more detail the nature of materialism as the Marxist world outlook and the changes which Marx brought to materialism, compared with the earlier versions which existed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Chapter 2. Emergence of Materialism

The first systematic attempt to explain the nature of the universe in a materialist way was made in ancient Greece over two thousand years ago. The Greek materialists saw the world as consisting of hard, impenetrable material particles. They understood all change as arising from nothing but the motion and interaction of such particles.

This theory was revived and developed in modern times. It was however much richer in content than Greek materialism had been. For in the 16th and 17th centuries, scientists and philosophers tried to work out what were the laws of the interaction of these material particles, to present a picture of how all things, from merely physical changes to the life of man itself, were the result of the motion and interaction of the separate parts of matter.

It is important for us to understand that the re-emergence of materialism in this period was a reflection of the rise of the capitalist class in struggle with the old feudal landowning class.

In the feudal period, the Catholic Church — which as the predominant centre of culture and learning — had developed a natural philosophy in which everything in nature was explained in terms of its ‘proper’ place in the system of the universe, in terms of its supposed position of dependence and subordination within that system, and the end or purpose which it existed to serve.

The bourgeois philosophers, such as Bacon, Hobbes and Locke, destroyed these feudal, religious, ideas about nature. Regarding nature as a system of bodies in interaction, and rejecting all the feudal dogmas, they demanded an investigation of nature in order to find out how it really worked.

These investigations went along with the geographical discoveries of the period, the growth of trade and transport, the improvement of machinery and manufacture. The greatest strides of all were made in the mechanical sciences, closely connected as these sciences were with the needs technology.

We can call these early materialist philosophers, mechanical materialists in that they looked upon the world as a giant machine. This was the standpoint of the great physicist, Isaac Newton. For him, like the early Greek materialists, the world consisted of particles moving about in empty space. But in his attempt to explain the precise workings of the universe, Newton was not concerned with the question of its origin and development.

He took for granted that it was a stable piece of machinery — created by God. Not how it originated, how it changed, but how it worked, was the question which pre-occupied him.

Such philosophers and scientists treated the universe rather like a giant watch. It consisted of many parts which fitted neatly together; once it was wound up it worked in a predictable, uniform way which was known exactly to watch makers.

This form of materialism was a great advance in man’s understanding of nature. It represented a great blow against idealism and all religious conceptions of the universe, that is as something created by God.

The materialists of the 16th and 17th centuries tried to extend to the realm of the mind and society the same mechanistic conceptions which they used in their scientific investigations of nature. They sought to include man and his thinking in their mechanical conception of the world.

They regarded man himself as a machine. The doctrine was looked upon as shocking by the Church, an insult to both man and God. But the idea that man is a machine whatever its limitations, was a great advance on the idea that man was a wretched piece of clay, inhabited by an immortal soul — the religious view of man.

But despite these great advances as against idealism and religion, mechanical materialism suffered from a series of grave weaknesses. We shall end this article by considering some of these weaknesses and next week show how the materialism of Marx — dialectical materialism — overcame these deficiencies.

The first question which the mechanical materialists could not answer was this: if the world is like a machine, who started up the machine? And because they could not answer this question they were forced to introduce the notion of a ‘Supreme Being’ as something outside the world who had set it in motion even if this Being no longer interfered with its workings. The mechanical materialists were thus forced back in the direction of God and religion.

Second, while the mechanical materialists recognized change everywhere, because they tried to reduce this change to a series of mechanical interactions — change for them was merely a series of endless repetitions of the same kind of processes.

Just like a machine can only work in a fixed manner, according to how it was made, so the world, for these materialists, worked in a fixed way; nothing new could emerge within it; there could be no development within it. We shall see later how modern materialism (Marxism) has gone beyond this limited conception.

Third, mechanical materialism could never explain the development of man. If human activity and thought was merely a mechanical reflection of the world, the question arose: how do man and thinking actually change? But as Marx was later to show (a question we shall be looking at later) man is not merely a product of the world, but he struggles to change the world, in the course of which he also changes himself.

This failure to understand the relationship between man’s activity, his thinking, and nature, meant that mechanical materialism had no theory of knowledge, i.e. of how man proceeds from error to truth, through the conflict between theory and practice. This, as we shall see, is a decisive question for the proletarian revolution.

In considering the limitations of mechanical materialism we should not fall into the trap of thinking they were a product of the philosophers and scientists concerned. For this would be itself an idealist method. No, the limitations of the mechanical view of the world arose from the limited development of science itself, [despite] the fact that the mechanical sciences had made the greatest advances.

Modern (dialectical) materialism could only arise with the further development of science which by the 19th century had begun to investigate more thoroughly the processes of interconnection and change within nature. It was on the basis of these developments that Marxism, a richer form of materialism was to be established.

Chapter 3. Hegel and Dialectics

Now the home of mechanical materialism in the modern world was England. This English materialism was then taken and extended in France during the 18th century where it became the basis for the ideas which inspired the French Revolution.

But the next great development which occurred in philosophy was to take place in Germany at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century.

It is this development which we must consider in this article and its relationship to Marxism.

Before doing this, we must however say a little about economic and social conditions in the Germany of that period. Compared with France and England, [and] the other great countries of Europe, Germany remained relatively backward. Commerce and capitalism had failed to develop to anything like the extent they had in either France or Britain.

In particular, the bourgeoisie (capitalists) had not taken power as they already had in the seventeenth-century Cromwellian revolution in Britain or in the revolution which began in France in 1789.

Germany, in short, remained a backward, isolated country, still divided into a series of feudal and semi-feudal states.

It was this economic and social backwardness which left a profound mark on German thinking. The great German thinkers of that period had to look abroad for the inspiration for their philosophies and ideas; to France where the bourgeois revolution was taking place and to Britain where the growth of capitalist industry was proceeding with great speed.

But because material change was so slow in their own country, they inevitably tended to see change merely as change in the realm of ideas.

They tended, that is,  to see change in an idealist manner.

(By idealism, we should remember from the first article, we mean the conception that all development starts from the idea; materialist philosophy understands that ideas are a reflection of changes taking place in the material and social world).

As Marx put it, ‘In politics the Germans thought what other nations did. Germany was their theoretical conscience’.

The highest point of this idealist thinking was the work of the great German philosopher, Hegel (1770–1831).

Hegel was an idealist: for him the world started with the Absolute Idea. History, for him, was the working out, the realization of, this Idea. This was clearly an idealist standpoint.

But Hegel’s genius lay in his efforts to understand and grasp how this Absolute Idea developed. For Hegel, unlike the mechanical materialists in England and France, nothing was fixed or static.

Deeply influenced by the profound changes then taking place in France, Hegel insisted that nothing is immobile. Everything existing had to be studied not as it was at any moment but as it had come into being, in its process of development and change. Furthermore, Hegel grasped that everything was not merely the result of past changes, it also carries the germ of the future within it.

But how did change occur? We saw that the early mechanical materialists answered this by seeing movement and change as something external to the thing being investigated. The world was like a machine; it had been set in motion by some ‘first impulse’ (really another name for God).

Hegel understood however that change was not something external to the object, but arose from forces within the object itself. We shall examine this question in some detail in later articles, but at this stage we can only give an example of what we mean.

If we consider ourselves, or indeed any individual, we are a unity of two contradictory forces. For at any one moment in time we are both living and dying. Each moment that passes brings us a moment nearer to death while at the same time extending our life by that same moment.

It is the struggle between these two opposed forces, life and death, which is the source of all the changes taking place continually within us.

And so it is with everything in the universe. Nothing can exist in the material world in a static form. All matter exists in motion. And this motion arises from the struggle of opposites within the material world, including human society.

Hegel grasped that all change took place in this manner. This was his great contribution to philosophy. But as we have already said, Hegel was an idealist; for him these changes occurred within the realm of ideas. The world for him was merely a reflection of these changes. In believing that the world started from the Absolute Idea, Hegel held what was ultimately a religious view of the world. The ‘Absolute Idea’ was in effect merely another name for God.

It was one of Hegel’s most talented followers, Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) who started to consider Hegel’s philosophy from the standpoint of materialism. Feuerbach rejected ‘Absolute Idea’ or ‘Substance’ or any of the metaphysical starting-points, and insisted that man as a natural being was the necessary starting-point of all ideas. He said that his philosophy ‘generates thought from the opposite of thought, from Matter, from existence from the senses’.

In particular, Feuerbach insisted that all the various conceptions of God, including those of Christianity, were created by man himself. Not God had created man, but rather man had created God, in his own image. According to Feuerbach, a truly ‘human’ world would only be created once these false, religious, conceptions of the world were swept away.

But who was to do the sweeping away? Who was to change the world? It was in answering this question that Feuerbach’s weaknesses were most clearly revealed.

For his answer to the question was ‘man’. But what was man? A ‘man’ might be a King, a capitalist, a worker or a peasant. All four have the same organs, the same type of feet, brain, etc. From a biological point of view they are part of the same species. But clearly. there are great differences in their social position and wealth.

These differences arise historically. Feuerbach’s materialism did not extend to man’s own history; i.e. to the struggle in which man makes himself.

In the same way: if we consider ‘man’ in primitive times he is quite different from ‘man’ today. Again we don’t mean in a biological, but in a social sense. Man today lives in quite a different way; he eats different foods, uses quite different tools, and has quite different ideas.

Thus there is no such thing as man in the abstract. Man like everything else, in the universe (of which he is part) is in continual change. This conclusion owed from Hegel’s philosophy.

Feuerbach was a materialist. He saw that man was a product of the material world; all his thoughts, ideas are a reflection of nature.

But man is not merely a passive reflection of nature as Feuerbach thought. Man does not merely react to the world around him — he is in conflict with it. Our ideas of the world, our struggle to understand, arises only in the conflict with it.

Thus, said Marx, change can never be a passive, an easy process. Change arises from struggle. There is no ‘abstract man’ because man, in his fight to survive in the world constantly changes himself, becomes a different man.

Marx, in other words took Hegel’s dialectical method. He grasped that everything (including man) was in continual change and that this change arises from the struggle of opposites within phenomena. But unlike Hegel, Marx was a materialist. Changes in ideas were not the source of changes in the world, but their outcome. The great task was not to ‘re-arrange’ the world in the head, but to change it in practice.’

But if man ‘in the abstract’ cannot change the world, which force was to accomplish this change? This is the next question we shall consider. In doing so we shall outline Marx’s conception of history, historical materialism; and the role of the working class within capitalist society.

Chapter 4. Historical Materialism

The preceding chapters were intended to discuss two important questions: first the nature of philosophical materialism, second the weaknesses of the ‘old’ mechanical materialism.

Marx was not however content merely to criticize the old materialist outlook. Above all he wished to apply the dialectical materialist world outlook to a study of society and its history. He saw his task as one of ‘bringing the science of society … into harmony with the materialist foundations and reconstructing it thereupon’. (Engels, ‘Ludwig Feuerbach.’)

In doing so, Marx arrived at what has since become known as the materialist conception of history or historical materialism. This chapter will be concerned with an introduction to this theory. (At this stage everybody should read and study Marx’s famous Preface to the Critique of Political Economy [1859] in which this theory is outlined.)

What is the basic point in Marx’s approach to the study of history? It is this: that the foundation for man’s existence is to be sought in his continual struggle against nature for food, shelter and clothing. The study of history is a study of the conditions under which this struggle was carried out and the changes in consciousness or thinking to which it gives rise.

Here is how Marx’s life-long friend and collaborator, Engels, put the matter when he spoke at Marx’s graveside in Highgate cemetery in 1883:

‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact … that mankind must first eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art and even the ideas of religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must be explained, instead of vice versa as had hitherto been the case.”

In other words, the study of history does not start from the ideas which men have held at certain times, nor from their ‘motives’ or ‘intentions’ but from the material conditions under which they have lived and worked. To explain changes in ideas we must begin from these real material circumstances.

The next question therefore is this: how does man actually produce these means for his survival? He does so of course, in struggle against nature, of which he is a part. He takes from nature his food, the means for his shelter and so on.

But we could also say that this was true of any other species of animal. A horse feeds on grass, breathes the air etc. So another question must be considered: if all animals, not merely man, are in conflict with nature, what distinguishes man from the rest of the animal world?

It is of course possible to point to many features which distinguish man from the other animals: the size and complexity of his brain; the use of speech; the shape and dexterity of his hand.

But the crucial question for us is this: man actually, in practice, over millions ‘of years, separated himself from the rest of the animals through the use of tools. Man is above all a tool-making and tool-using animal. And it was through the use of tools that man as a species was able to subordinate the rest of the animal world to his needs.

From a physical point of view (strength, speed, sense of vision and smell etc.) man is inferior to many other animals. His superiority arises only from his ability to carry his fight against nature to a higher point than any other animal through the use of tools and equipment.

These tools and equipment, and the struggle to improve them (which gives rise to technology and science) Marxists know as the productive forces.

In primitive times these productive forces consisted (apart from labour itself) of the most simple implements: knives, spears, arrows chipped out of stone. Over thousands of years they have developed into the productive forces of today — atomic power stations, automated production processes, etc.

But how does man actually use these productive forces at different stages in history? We can get a clue to the answer by considering the nature of the productive forces in the world today.

Imagine that you are a steelworker, living in Sheffield. You have been trained in all the skills associated with this job. But how can you actually take part in the activity of steel making? How, that is to say, can you take part in the development of the productive forces?

All the equipment and machinery necessary to produce steel is under the control and ownership of one of the small number of firms that dominate the steel industry in that city. Unless you can get access to this plant, machinery and other equipment you will not be able to use your skills or to take part in the development of the productive forces.

To put the matter concretely: only if one or other of the steel industry employers is willing to employ you for wages, can you, as an individual, take part in the struggle against nature, at least in the sphere of activity for which you have been trained. Now, as any worker knows, the owner of such a steel mill will only employ you if he calculates that he can make a profit out of you. If there is no profit for him there is no job for you.

So we have arrived at the following conclusion from this simple example: in order to develop the productive forces as a steelworker, you have to enter a definite relationship with the employer such that he extracts profit from the use of your ability to work.

In other words, you have to enter into a set of definite social relationships if you are to take part in the development of the productive forces. And you have no choice! How else can you make steel? It can only be made through utilizing the most advanced means of production which are owned and controlled by the capitalist class.

You cannot make steel in your back garden. And even if you could, it would be so insufficient that you would never be able to compete in selling it with that produced in the most up-to-date factories.

It is clear that the productive forces can only be worked through definite social conditions of production which men have to enter into, which exist, ‘independently of their will and consciousness’.

But these social relationships have not always been the same. Like everything else they must be studied not as static ‘things’, but as processes changing over time.

Today, in all the big countries of western Europe, America and Japan, we have capitalist social relations, through which production is carried out. The basic relationship is between the owners of capital, the capitalist class, and those who sell their ability to work (their ‘labour power’ as Marxists call it) as their only means of livelihood. But in the past quite different social relations of production have existed.

Next we shall examine briefly these past forms of society. We shall also consider the problem: why do certain social relations disappear at certain periods of history, often in the most violent fashion, to be replaced by new social relations of production?

Chapter 5. Production Relations

We saw that man’s struggle against nature proceeds through the development and productive forces, from the most primitive at the earliest stages of his existence to the modern machinery and technology of today.

We also concluded that these productive forces can be worked or used only through definite social relations of production.

Now if we look at history it becomes immediately apparent that man has actually conducted his continual battle against nature by means of quite different social relations.

There have been five basic types of society, or modes of production, in history. For the greater part of human history, men lived and worked in primitive communes. Here there was no private property and communism in the distribution of goods prevailed.

The second basic mode of Production to appear was slavery the basic characteristic of which was the fact that the majority of the population were actually owned by the ruling class as slaves. They were provided with’ the minimum of food and shelter to keep them alive; everything they produced over and above this went to the slave owner.

Third we must consider the Asiatic mode of production. This like slave (‘Ancient’) society was one of the forms taken by the break up of communal property. While, like primitive communism, there was an absence of private property, what distinguished these societies was the crucial significance of the means of irrigation in areas such as Egypt.

Fourth, Marx analysed the nature of feudalism. Here the main productive force, apart from labour itself, was the land. The feudal ruling class owned the land. Labour took the predominant form of peasant labour; each peasant had a plot of his ‘own’ land, in return for the use of which he was forced to yield rent to the landowner. The rent might be in kind (goods) or (generally later) in money.

Finally we come to capitalism. Here the predominant feature is the generalized nature of commodity production.

Most activity consists in producing articles for the market, as against production for the immediate needs of the producer which tended to predominate in earlier forms of society. In particular, the ability to work (labour power) itself becomes a commodity.

Under capitalism the great majority of the population live only through their ability to sell their labour power to one or other employer.

These, briefly, are the main modes of production which have existed historically and which Marx lists in the Preface to the ‘Critique of Political Economy’. A word of warning should be issued about them however.

We have only been able to give the simplest outlines of their major features; there were, for example, necessarily many differences between the different types of slave or feudal economy which existed in various parts of the world.

Second, we should not see a mechanical relationship between these ‘stages’ in the way that the Stalinists have always presented the question. Not all societies need necessarily go through all the stages in a ‘straight line’ way: great ‘leaps’ can and do take place in historical development. But we cannot at this point examine this question in detail.

The basic point which we must grasp about the various modes of production which have existed is this: they are all identical in that in each of them, ‘labour’ ‘means of production’ combine to serve man’s needs. The difference between them is how this combination takes place.

Each of them produced a surplus over and above what was required to meet immediate needs (apart from primitive communism where the productive forces had developed only to the point where these immediate needs alone could be met) but each society extracted this surplus from the producer in a different manner.

Under feudalism, for example, the peasant gives directly to the feudal landowner a certain proportion of his output or time which is fixed by law and custom. Under capitalism the worker is, from a legal standpoint ‘free’; he can choose whether to work or not.

Of course from the economic standpoint he has no choice. His only means of livelihood is through the sale of his labour power and he can only work the means of production by selling this ability to work to an owner of capital. And it is through the ownership of this capital that the employer is able to extract a surplus from the working class in the form of surplus value.

Now the question arises: why does one mode of production at certain decisive points of history give way to another, higher form? Is this merely the result of accident? Does it depend on the will or intentions of men? Marxists answer both these. questions with an emphatic ‘no’.

The overthrow of one mode of production and its replacement by another takes place under definite material circumstances not determined by men, circumstances which Marxists must study.

What are these circumstances? Briefly periods when the productive forces developed within the old society come into greater and greater conflict with the existing social relations of that society. At such periods, a revolutionary class are called upon to overthrow these old social relations and replace them with new ones in which the development of the forces of production can once more be continued.

Let us ask a concrete question: why did a revolution take place in England during the seventeenth century. Why was the old feudal ruling class overthrown and replaced by the capitalist (bourgeois) class?

To understand this great period in history we must start from the development of capitalist production relations within the old feudal society.

From as early as the thirteenth century, capitalist forms of production were beginning to emerge within the feudal society, particularly within the towns. But capitalism developed it came increasingly into opposition from the King and the great feudal landowners.

These landowners depended for their wealth and privileges upon agricultural labour. These stood opposed to the transfer of labour from the countryside into the towns. So a struggle developed over the control of this labour supply: was it to be used on the land or in the towns?

This was only one of a series of growing conflicts between the two classes. The monarchy depended heavily, for example, upon the sale of patent and monopoly rights to favoured businessmen. Yet the sale of such rights, while it enhanced the declining revenue of the monarchy and the Court, also restricted activities of many businessmen and merchants who wanted to engage in production and trade.

In the period prior to 1640, this clash grew in intensity. It was only finally resolved with the violent overthrow of the King and a scrapping of the old feudal state and the laws that went with it and their replacement by a new legal code within which capitalism was given every encouragement to develop.

The Civil War of the seventeenth century was the precondition for the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century which saw the rapid development of the productive forces within the framework of capitalism.

The Cromwellian revolution was therefore no accident. It was a revolution made necessary and possible only on the basis of the fundamental crisis of feudal economy and society.

Revolution requires great sacrifice and courage and determination as shown in Cromwell’s army; but his courage and determination is only decisive and powerful because of the great material forces operating in such periods.

How does this conception of history (the materialist conception) relate to the struggle for socialism today?

Chapter 6. Scientific Socialism

This question can best be answered by looking at the fundamental difference between Marxism and all pre-Marxist conceptions of socialism.

Many writers before Marx had been deeply moved by the horrific conditions in which the working class had sunk during the industrial revolution. Utopian Socialists* such as Robert Owen contrasted the tremendous potential of the productive forces and machinery which the industrial revolution had produced with the grinding poverty of the tens of thousands who worked in the new textile and factory system of Lancashire, the West Riding of Yorkshire and elsewhere.

They came to the conclusion that socialism was the only way in which this contradiction could be overcome. It was only when social conditions were fundamentally altered that men themselves changed.

But the question was: who was to carry out this change? It was here that the weakness of socialist theory before Marx was most clearly evident.

Outstanding thinkers saw that the working class was an oppressed and an exploited class; what they were unable to grasp was the revolutionary nature of the working class.

So they tended to see socialism as arising through a mere appeal to reason. Robert Owen, for example, tried to establish a series of socialist communities in Britain and later in America. Convinced by the clear reasonableness of socialism as against the obvious brutality of the capitalist system, he was shocked when he found that his appeal to the ruling class for funds for such communities fell on deaf ears.

Marx and Engels however, understood that socialism was not merely a good idea. The conditions for a classless society, based on the common ownership of the means of production, had been made possible only on the basis of the productive forces developed by capitalism.

Socialism requires the development of the productive forces to a point where the basic needs of everybody in society can be satisfied. Only under such conditions does the basis of class and class divisions begin to disappear.

Capitalism, through the rapid expansion of industry had alone made such a society possible. The idea of socialism was therefore a product of a definite period of history, the late 18C and early 19C.

But Marx and Engels went further than this. They showed how the fundamental contradictions of capitalism actually prepared the way for socialism.

What were these contradictions? In the first place, capitalism tends enormously to socialize production. It breaks down the narrow, local nature of production, and through the growth of the markets and the division of labour, draws ever increasing numbers into its orbit.

Eventually capitalism creates a world market and a world division of labour. At the same time, in glaring contradiction to this is the increasingly private ownership of the means of the production whereby all the wealth of capitalist society is created, and the private appropriation of the products.

The ownership of all the major industries and financial institutions tends to become ever more concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.

Second, within each factory or even branch of industry in any one country, production becomes increasingly ‘planned’. The most modern techniques — time and motion study, ergonomics, computers, etc. — are employed to increase the rate of exploitation and rationalize production.

Yet, each of these highly planned units, is part of a system of production, capitalism, which is incapable of rational planning. Capitalism is production for profit. Each capitalist struggles for the maximum profit as against his rivals.

Agreement between them can only be temporary and in any case highly unstable. The struggle for profit leads periodically to vicious trade wars in which the weaker capitalists are driven out of business or are taken over by their stronger competitors.

Finally, as we have already said, capitalism brings into being a world market. But in opposition to this world market, stand the nation states. So the planning of resources on a world scale is impossible: each capitalist class starts, inevitably from its own needs and interests, not from the needs of this world economy. The struggle between the capitalist powers leads to trade, financial and eventually military conflict, as it has done in two world wars this century.

But the greatest of all the contradictions which capitalism created was that between the capitalist class itself and the working class. The working class was itself a product of capital; the growth of industry from the time of industrial revolution onwards. Capitalism brought into bits opposite: a class which nothing to sell but its ability to work, with nothing to lose but its chains, as the ‘Communist Manifesto’ says.

It is this struggle between the capitalist class and the working class which provides the basis for the struggle for socialism. The class struggle is objective; it arises not through the intentions of men, good or bad, but from the contradictory position which the two classes have in society as the owners and the non-owners of the means of production.

What Marxism grasped, as against all previous theories of socialism, was that this struggle could only end through the establishment of the rule (dictatorship) of the working class over the rest of society. It was this dictatorship, achieved through the smashing of the capitalist state, which would provide the basis for the building of a socialist society.

We shall return to some of these questions later.

Chapter 7. Past and Present

In this chapter we want to look more closely at the relationship between the past and the present.

The past and the present constitute a unity. This is the case because the present is a continuation, an outgrowth of the past. This is true of each individual: he or she is a product of the whole of their past development. What they are today, is the outcome of everything that has happened to them in the past. The present therefore contains within it the past.

The process of moving from the concrete (the present) into the abstract (the past) is the path taken by all knowledge. All knowledge starts with living perception. This living perception is then posited onto our knowledge derived from the past.

The past and the present therefore constitute a unity and conflict of opposites.

Let us consider the relationship between them a little more closely and consider in particular the question: how do we grasp the relationship between them? This will give us the clue to the answer to a further question: ‘why do we bother to study the past if we have said that it is necessarily dead and abstract?

In order to answer both these questions we need to remember the basic point which has run through this series: the fact that materialists understand that existence determines consciousness. We can think only because we exist. Thought did not come before life, but, on the contrary, thinking is a product of life.

Now if we keep this in mind, we can see that when thinking about any event or sequence of events in the past, we can do so only by starting from the present. We cannot first move into the past and then ‘work up to’ the present, as it were. No; we can think about anything, including the past, only because we exist in the present. We can think of the English Civil War of the seventeenth century only because we are alive today. Our thought about that war therefore moves from 1973 back to 1640.

In other words, while historical development moves forward, from 1640 to 1973, the reflection of this process in thought is always in contradiction to that movement. History moves forward from the past to the present; thought always moves from the present to the past. Again we have here a unity and conflict of opposites. Consciousness and historical development are united in that thought is always a reflection of historical change; but they are also opposites in that the movement of history is always in the opposite direction to that of our thinking.

On one point we must be clear: all thinkers must move from the present into the past. Marxists are by no means unique in this respect. For everybody, idealists or materialists, must move from the living present into the abstract past.

The idealist of course is unaware that his thought must take this path; he imagines that it is possible to move in thought from the past to the present. Marxism is, however, conscious that thought can only develop in this contradictory manner.

Why must the revolutionary party pay great attention to the past? We have already explained that the past and present are a unity of opposites. The past is contained, ‘lives on’, in this sense in the present. The working class enters a period of great crisis in its relations with the capitalist class and its state, as we do today, with its past history tied firmly to it.

It cannot escape from its past. A period of great crisis ‘re-activates’ this past, brings to the surface many of the historical experiences which may appear to have been forgotten, experiences which have lain dormant over many generations.

As an example, we can take the recent fine on the engineers’ union. This represents a return to the famous Taff Vale case at the beginning of this century (1901) in which heavy fines were imposed by the Court against the railwaymen’s union, fines which in effect removed the right to strike.

When we study this event, we do so because we know that it was the source of a great political development in the working class. Many workers realized that militancy, by itself, was inadequate to defend the unions; they were forced to take political action and create a new Party, the Labour Party (which was established in 1906) to carry through this defence.

This same, fundamental lesson, is also very much alive today. The attacks on the unions cannot be defeated except under a new political leadership. In fighting to build this new leadership through the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, we are fighting very much in line with the historical developments and experiences of the British working class: we can only effectively understand the significance of past historical developments by starting with the present problems and difficulties of the working class. Once again we are obliged to move from the present into the past to find our answers.

Why is it crucial that we train ourselves to understand historical development from this standpoint? Because it is only in this way that the Party can fight to resolve the crisis of leadership in the working class.

To illustrate this point let us take another current example. The great difference between the Workers Revolutionary Party and all revisionist groups is that we have continually insisted that every struggle today involves a political struggle against the Tory government. This the revisionists deny.

For them the struggle consists in building up the ‘militancy’ of the working class and ignoring entirely the question of leadership within the working class. First, they say, we must build up militant trade unionism, only later should we introduce politics. ‘The working class is not ready for revolutionary politics’ is their constant cry.

How do these ideas relate to what we have said about the materialist study of history? Firstly, workers do not become ‘interested’ in political questions from individual choice, as the revisionist thinks. The worker is forced to turn to politics because his basic organization, his union, is under political attack from. the Tory government. He has no choice. Ideas are not the product of the desires or intentions of men, but of the development of the class struggle. This we have already established in earlier articles. Anybody who argues that the working class is not ready for politics today is thus an idealist.

Second, in coming into this struggle, workers will in no sense first form trade unions, build them up, and eventually turn to politics, as the revisionist pretends. No: the crisis facing the working class today is above all a political crisis; all new layers of workers entering the fight are drawn into it because of this political crisis.

It is in no way a case therefore of such new layers having to go through all the previous stages of development of earlier generations of workers in some sort of gradual, steady, way. Today’s great political and economic crisis will force many workers to leap over these previous stages. It is only by starting from the present crisis that we can grasp how and why these leaps are possible and necessary.

Chapter 8. Theory and Practice

We explained that in the study of the past we always start with the present and move backwards into the past.

We further explained that in so doing we were moving from the concrete (the present) into the abstract (the past).

This process is the path taken by all knowledge. All knowledge starts with living perception. This living perception is then posited onto our knowledge derived from the past.

In this way, we struggle to abstract what is new in the situation and take this new knowledge into our practice. It is here; in practice, that the correctness of our abstraction of this new knowledge is actually tested out.

Let, us say, for example, we are studying the development of a strike. In considering this strike, we relate it to the struggle of the unions against the Tory government, understanding that all such struggles are now political in content.

In considering this particular strike we are, therefore, comparing it with our knowledge of the stage reached in the class struggle as a whole; we are seeking all the time to see what is new in this strike.

It might be, for example, the fact that it leads the government to declare a State of Emergency. From this we would learn that the government are now prepared for a showdown with the trade unions.

It is this new knowledge that we would take into practice, warning the working class as a whole of the dangers involved and fighting to recruit as many workers as possible into the movement.

What is involved in this process of thinking, or cognition? It is this: that Marxist theory develops only in the struggle in which in our practice we seek to posit each new living development upon our body of abstract knowledge (this Marxists refer to as a negation).

It is only out of this struggle between living perception and abstract theory that new knowledge (which we call the negation of the negation) is won and once again through struggle, new; living perceptions are posited onto our new extended, richer body of knowledge (which we refer to as the negation of the negation).

What we must stress here is that knowledge cannot be derived merely from the abstract study of books. Of course we are in no sense opposed to the study of books. But we must try always to grasp that knowledge is derived only through struggle.

It is only when we are driven to find answers to the problems which the working class face that our reading of books takes on any vitality and real meaning.

In other words, the best readers are always those who are the best fighters.

This the idealist rejects. He thinks that ideas are the product of the mind. He eliminates the process of continual struggle through which knowledge has been gained by man.

The knowledge.of the individual, is not his ‘own’ in that it is the product the outcome, of man’s struggle against nature over thousands of years. And this struggle has gone through many phases and stages, some of great advance and progress, some of great difficulty. Knowledge, which reflects this struggle against nature also develops in the same, contradictory manner.

This is a vital question for every Young Socialist in the struggle to develop the movement. Young people will come to Marxism not in a set, preconceived manner.

They will obey no set schema or pattern. On the contrary. Workers and youth are drawn into the struggle against capitalism spontaneously; they do not take up the fight against the Tory government and the employers because Marxists are around to tell them that this is what they must do. The class struggle, we must never forget, is objective, independent of our will and consciousness.

So the starting point for all new layers of youth and workers, is a militant, spontaneous one. What therefore, is the task of the Party in developing this struggle and how does this relate to what we have already said about the path of cognition?

We must continually posit these new, spontaneous, developments in the class struggle (which do not, we repeat, emerge according to plan) onto our body of abstract knowledge, Marxism.

We have to take up the immediate, concrete problems which these new forces have — jobs, housing, increased cost of living etc. — and through our practice, in building the Party, show that these problems can only be resolved in the struggle to take power.

It is in this way that we develop these new forces and take up the fight against the limitations of their spontaneous, immediate, understanding of the struggle. At the same time, this is the only way in which the Party can extend and deepen its knowledge of the changes in the class struggle.

It is, we repeat, only through taking our theory into practice that we can develop Marxism.

Chapter 9. Why a Revolutionary Party?

The first question we must ask ourselves is this: why does the working class need a revolutionary party based on the theory of Marxism to take it to power and establish socialism?

To answer this question we first need to say something more about the nature of the working class. The working class came into being, as we have already seen in earlier articles, as a result of the development of [Sic —text missing Ed.]

Every expansion of capitalist industry in the 18C and 19C brought with it the growth of the working class. At first it was a disorganized force — a ‘rabble’ as the ruling class contemptuously called it. But it learned in the course of its bitter fight against the employers and the government the need to organize into unions.

It was through the unions that the working class fought for higher wages, improved conditions, shorter hours, etc.

But however militant, trade unionism always operates within the limits of capitalist society. It always accepts, implicitly that capitalism will remain: it is concerned only with the distribution of wealth between the classes within existing society.

In this sense, if workers merely see the need for unions, but do not grasp the necessity to prepare for the overthrow of capitalism, they remain dominated by the ideas of the capitalist class. It was for this reason that Lenin described trade union consciousness as ‘bourgeois consciousness’.

What distinguishes the working class as a revolutionary force is that it is without property. The working class has nothing to sell but its ability to work, its labour power. Its situation is quite unlike that of the capitalist class during the period when it was preparing to take power in the 17C revolution.

For a long period before 1640 it built up its wealth and property in the towns; not only this but it created its own institutions: schools, universities, scientific establishments etc. During the course of this long development it was able to establish its own ideological independence of the capitalist class.

For the working class, this is not possible. Socialism does not emerge steadily within capitalism, as did capitalism within feudalism. The working class is not merely exploited economically but is also dominated ideologically by capitalism.

Revolutionary consciousness does not arise spontaneously and automatically from within the working class. Such consciousness has to be brought from outside the immediate experience of the working class in a struggle by the revolutionary party against the limited militancy of the working class.

It is here that the YS and the Workers Revolutionary Party are in absolute conflict with all brands of rank-and-fileism. These theories worship the spontaneous militancy of the working class but reject completely the need to struggle against the spontaneous consciousness through the building of the Party.

Such theories are absolutely idealist in nature. They glorify the militancy of the working class, but deliberately avoid the great crisis of leadership in the class.

The task of the Party is not simply to tail-end the consciousness of the working class but all stages to develop it this consciousness. The revolutionary party and the working class are united in that the Party’s aim is to prepare the working class to take power. And no other social force other than the working class can carry out this task.

But the Party and the class are also in conflict with each other. The Party starts, not from the immediate thinking of workers on any issue, as do the exponents of syndicalist rank-and-fileism; it starts from the relationship of all classes to the state. It takes this understanding into conflict with the immediate consciousness of the working class.

At the same time, because the Party and the working class form a unity and conflict of opposites, the problems and difficulties of the working class, as well as its strengths, find their reflection inside the Party.

It is therefore absolutely necessary that the Party carries out the maximum possible discussion on its programme, its tactics and strategy.

Chapter 10. Democratic Centralism

The Workers Revolutionary Party is based on the principles of democratic centralism.

It was the leader of the Russian Revolution, Lenin, who first grasped the necessity for a Party based on this principle. In the period at the turn of the present century, Russia was experiencing great changes.

Industry was developing rapidly, financed by foreign capital from France and other European countries. The growth of industry brought with it a growth in the working class. It was essential that the relatively small Marxist movement make a turn to this working class.

Until this point, the revolutionary movement had been confined to a small ‘circle like’ existence. It had organized workers into discussion and reading circles in which the basic ideas of Marxism were explained by revolutionary intellectuals such as Plekhanov. But the rapid expansion of the working class demanded great changes
.
Now the revolutionary movement was called upon to carry its ideas into practice amongst this new layer of workers. In order to do this, said Lenin, the Party had to change the form of its organization.

Its abstract theoretical ideas, explained brilliantly by the older generation of Russian Marxists, had now to be developed and enriched through the building of a Party.

In conflict with this older group, Lenin insisted on the need for a disciplined Party in which the duties and responsibilities of each individual member were clearly defined.

Why the need for such centralism and discipline? For Lenin, discipline was never merely a thing in itself. The task of the Party was to take ‘each new living development’ within the struggle between the classes and posit this onto its body of theoretical knowledge.

It was from this process that new knowledge could be won which had then to be taken once more into the practice of the Party.

Only if the Party could in the most centralized manner carry policies into practice could the struggle between theory and practice take place. It has been on this point of, Party organization that the liberal has always clashed with revolutionary Marxism.

For the liberal the ‘freedom of the individual’ stands above everything else. He rejects ‘discipline’ as an infringement of his freedom. But as we have already seen, such conceptions of freedom are idealistic.

The individual is a product of the social relations through which the fight against nature can alone proceed. Freedom consists not in imagining that one is separate from these social relations, but of recognizing their necessity.

For Lenin and the leaders of the Bolshevik Party discipline was necessary within the Party if it was to carry its theory into practice. It was from this standpoint that today we fight for the construction of such a Party.

At the same time the Party had to be based upon the widest possible democracy within its ranks. Policy and tactics had to be decided by the membership as a whole. Anybody differing from the leadership on any question had the right to fight for his position within the Party. And the rights of minorities were to be safeguarded through the constitution of the Party.

Again this was not a matter of democracy for the sake of democracy. As we explained last week, the Party and the working class constitute a unity of opposites.

The Party is in continual conflict with the limited, spontaneous militancy of the working class. But at the same time it reflects the working class, its problems and its strength

Therefore all major fundamental differences within the Party are ultimately a reflection of the class struggle. A leadership of the Party cannot therefore suppress such differences in a bureaucratic manner.

On the contrary, all Party differences have to be fought out in the most determined manner possible. Only in this way can it grasp the real nature of developments within the working class movement.

The manner in which the Party is organized is therefore not the result of accident or the mere whim of Lenin. The Party, combines the highest degree of centralism and discipline in action with the widest possible democracy and discussion within its own ranks.

All disagreements and differences must be argued out within the Party, but once a decision is taken, then the minority must loyally carry out the line of the majority in practice while still having the full right to argue for its position and turn the minority into the majority.

In this sense the Party is a unity of these two opposites — democracy and centralism.

It is on this principle that the Workers Revolutionary Party is organized. It is only through such a Party that the struggle to carry theory into practice, the highest point of Marxism, can take place.

Chapter 11. Marxism and Religion

AT THE end of this series we want to reply to a number of points which have been raised in letters about the series. Many of these letters have touched directly or indirectly on the question of religion. So this final chapter will deal with the basis of the Marxist attitude to religion.

The essence of all religion, whatever its particular form is that it believes that there is some force outside the material or natural world. The world,according to religion, develops in accordance with the ‘will’, ‘intention’ or ‘design’ of this super-natural force.

The religious conception of the world is therefore directly opposed to the materialist world outlook. Materialism starts from the understanding that there is nothing existing outside the material world.

It rejects completely all ‘explanations’ of this world which derive or start from any notion of ‘spirit’ or ‘God’.
But the question now arises: where does the idea of God or religion itself come from? What is its basis? Here it is very important that we adopt a materialist outlook in answering this question.

It would be very wrong merely to dismiss religion as being based on stupidity. For this would not enable us to understand why it has been such a powerful force in history.

To grasp the nature of religion we must, as in all problems, start from man’s struggle against nature. Religion is above all an expression of man’s ignorance in the face of his struggle to overcome nature. Not understanding the laws which governed the development of nature, man was forced to invent, in fantastic form, ‘explanations’ for these laws. The forces which he could not understand were transferred to a being outside the world, God.

In other words, religion is rooted in ignorance. Science and religion have always, throughout their history been in conflict against each other.

For the aim of science is always to discover the real nature of the universe and the laws which govern its operation. Implicitly it stands opposed to any religious conception of the universe.

But religion must also be understood from another standpoint. In all societies except those based on the primitive commune, the fight against nature takes the form of the struggle between classes.

Man does not confront nature collectively, in a unified manner, but in a society divided into classes. Religion is one of the means through which the ruling class, at each period of history, has sought to oppress the exploited class or classes.

It is for this reason that Marxists start uncompromisingly from the standpoint of aetheism [Sic]. The Revolutionary Party has the duty to educate all the Party members as materialists and to fight idealism in all its forms. There can be no compromise with religion within the Revolutionary Party.

At the same time, however, we must also see that religion cannot be destroyed as a social force merely in the realm of argument or propaganda.

To think so would itself bean idealist attitude to religion. This is the mistake which all rationalists make. They believe that religion is ‘unreasonable’ and can be defeated merely if enough correct arguments are marshalled against it.

What such a position ignores is that religion has a definite social basis. It cannot be overthrown merely ‘in the head’. Religion will only finally disappear when social and economic conditions are created will make it superfluous or unnecessary.

Such conditions will achieved only within a socialist society. Because man’s struggle against nature will become increasingly conscious and because the class divisions which presently dominate society will gradually be eliminated and the basis for religion will also disappear.

Once the working class take power, religion will become a private matter. All state support for religion — which under capitalism is considerable — will be immediately withdrawn as will all religious teaching in schools. But religion cannot be destroyed merely by force or persecution.

That is why the attitude of the Stalinists towards religion within the Soviet Union is basically wrong and reactionary. The fact that religious feeling still survives and thrives testifies above all to the fact that economically and culturally Russia has not been raised to anything approaching the level of socialism as the advocates of ‘socialism in one country’ falsely claim.

The struggle to break the youth from religion is a vital part of the work of the Young Socialists and we recommend all those who followed this series should read Lenin ‘On Religion’, Marx and Engels ‘On Religion’ and Trotsky ‘Young People Study Politics’ (New Park Publications).

Appendix

WITH each of the articles in the series a question was posed. The answer will not be found directly from the chapter but a study of the section and the reading which goes with it should enable all readers to attempt an answer. The questions relate to Chapters 1 to 10.

1. In what way do all religious views of the world necessarily imply an idealist standpoint?

2. ‘The Materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing and that, therefore, changed men are produced by changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that circumstances are changed precisely by men and that the educator must himself be educated.’ What does Marx mean by this statement (from the ‘Theses on Fuerbach’) and how does it relate to the weakness of mechanical materialism?

3. ‘In making history man makes himself.’ What did Marx mean by this statement?

4. ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.’ What does Marx mean by this statement (from the preface to ‘The Critique of Political Economy’)? Why does it contain the basic point in the materialist conception of history?

5. Do revolutions ever occur by accident? What do you understand by this statement: ‘Revolutions only occur on a definite material basis’?

6. Why is the struggle for socialism based on the contradictions of capitalism? How does this conception of socialism relate to the materialist theory of knowledge discussed earlier?

7. What do you think Marx meant when he said that we must enter history backwards?

8. How does new knowledge develop? How do we test the correctness of our ideas?

9. Why can the working class take power only under the leadership of the revolutionary party?

10. What do we mean by democratic centralism? Why is the revolutionary party organized in this way?

Reading List:

Communist Manifesto. Marx and Engels.
Ludwig Fuerbach. Engels.
Preface to ‘The Critique of Political Economy’. Marx.
Socialism, Utopian and Scientific. Engels. (This pamphlet is part of ‘Anti-Duhring’.)
The German Ideology. Marx and Engels.
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Lenin ( Vol. 14 Collected Works.)
Vol. 38 Lenin’s Collected Works. Philosophical Notebooks.

Understanding the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of China: reflections on a posting
A fellow member of my trade union asked my opinion of an online article by a British socialist, John Ross: The historical significance of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of China – Learning from China .
This union colleague and I have worked together over quite a few years as part of a grouping in a teachers’ union here in England which aims to build the union at its base and in its leadership. This group has had considerable success and our union is now well-placed and playing a significant role in the re-awakening of organised resistance by the UK working class to the effects of the economic crisis This work is earning significant support from wide sections of the community. We are also known throughout our union for the emphasis we lay on international solidarity issues.
Several of the better-led trade unions here are organising resistance to attacks on wages, living standards, access to public service and welfare entitlements on the part of finance capital, employers and the current UK government. In the process we are standing up for the interests of the broader community. This is not an isolated trend. There are similar struggles across North America, the Caribbean and in southern Africa, for example.
It is worth stressing this because the topic under discussion – the current state of the Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC) and its role in world economy and politics – is not a matter of abstract interest or of concern just for political nerds. The posting by John Ross under discussion here is a very explicit attempt to establish a dominant position for the PRC and the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) and its policies in the workers’ and progressive movement across the world. The role of the PRC and CPC is undoubtedly having an impact among workers, activists and trade unionists here and elsewhere who are striving to renew their own outlook, political consciousness and understanding of their place in the world.
Instead of forming fighting solidarity with workers’ movements around the world, we see the Chinese government forming cosy relationships with regimes which practice exploitation, bow down to trans-national corporations and very often deny basic rights to their own citizens.

We have to do our best to arrive at a sober and objective grasp of these matters but we are hampered by the prevalence on all sides of biased propaganda, misinformation and downright lies blaring out on huge variety of available media.
An offer accepted
Since the article in question is comparatively short and available online, there is no point picking out lengthy quotations from it in this response. The article starts by listing the considerable economic achievements of the PRC since the adoption of the policy of “Reform and Opening Up”, following contacts between US and Chinese leaders in the 1970s. Statistics and graphs are presented to back the assertion that the development of the PRC in the period since then has done more to eliminate poverty than any previous process of industrial development (the British industrial revolution, the US after 1865, the Pacific Tigers after World War II …).
There can be no denying this! However, the article also claims that it was made possible by a development of Marxism-Leninism on the part of the CPC leadership. Many will find the references to Marxism-Leninism a bit outlandish. One of the advantages of Marxism, in my view, is that it encourages us to look behind headline statistics to find the social relations and tendencies underlying them. For John Ross, in contrast, it is a matter of uncritically extrapolating a rising graph: China was a low-income country; it has become a middle-income country; it will therefore in time inevitably become a high-income country. He ascribes this success to the persistent wisdom of the CPC leadership. Any real statistician (“Marxist-Leninist” or not) would think twice about such an approach.
Indeed, the trajectory he traces started at a specific point of economic globalisation in the 1970s. There was a specific relationship of forces at the time, which deserves some attention. US capitalism had emerged as the main power in world economy after 1945, and had assumed the leadership of capitalism around the world. This was a mixed blessing for the US! Besides successful revolutions in China and Yugoslavia, the USSR had by the end of the war made huge territorial gains in Eastern Europe. Colonies like India and Indonesia were achieving independence, while other colonies and semi-colonies across the world were also involved in independence struggles. To try to staunch any further progress of this sort, and to adjust to new circumstances, the rulers of the US had to build up buffer states in Western Europe. This involved big concessions to the working class there and back home in terms of jobs, living standards and social benefits. They also had to restore the Japanese economy and build up the economy of South Korea in order to confront and contain the PRC.
By the late 1960s, these allies in Western Europe and Japan were turning into significant competitors for US business. Meanwhile the US faced a military defeat in Vietnam. Later, in the early 1980s, the US suffered the ignominious failure of its attempts to rescue her Iranian embassy staff in the fiasco of Operation Eagle Claw.
How did US imperialism react? Of course, we know that they never for an instant relaxed their military efforts utterly brutally to assert world leadership. We should not, however, forget their economic and diplomatic efforts in the same direction.
There had been a post-war boom based on “reconstruction” of areas devastated by war, but it was beginning to peter out by the mid-1960s. Starting in the 1960s and increasing as domestic contradictions grew in Western capitalist economies, investment and industrial activity was switched to “emerging economies”, first of all in southern Europe, and then in Turkey, Africa, South America and all the while in Asia. Labour was cheap and plentiful in those parts.
In the process, traditional areas of industry and of working-class activity were run down. This pulled the rug from under powerful working-class struggles to defend jobs, wages and conditions and the social benefits that they had gained. The emergence of the “rust belt” in the US, the defeat of the British miners and many other workers in metallurgy, manufacturing, construction, seafaring, printing and the docks here was the background for the “opportunities” thus offered to “emerging economies”. Effectively, imperialism managed to set workers in different parts of the world against each other. Ross refers to this globalisation process as “socialisation”, but it was also the exact opposite of genuine socialisation.
The exponential growth in international finance was a necessary part of this process. In this sphere, also, “in Marxist terms” the struggle between workers and employers over the creation and sharing-out of value is expressed in the series of crises in banking and finance which are a feature of world economy and of all national economies.
Under US President Nixon, an offer was made to the CPC leadership to become part of the “offshoring”. “Reform and Opening-Up” represents the CPC’s eventual acceptance of this offer. Now it is dressed up as an historic development of Marxism-Leninism, but at root it was a deal with imperialism which had a savage impact on workers and their organisations in the USA and western Europe.
Class relations in China
There has indeed been a colossal development of the productive forces in the PRC, but at the cost of reinforcing or even re-creating historically-outdated capitalist social relations. The last 50 years have brought the world’s largest working-class into being, but also a very powerful and ambitious capitalist class.
Ross’s graphs shine no light on the distribution of wealth in boomtime China. A comparatively small number became extremely rich, while a large middle-class also grew. Meanwhile, a huge mass of the rural poor was sucked into the new industries as a working class. This working class is highly exploited, working long hours under extremely oppressive conditions. Reliable statistics are hard to come by, but by any standard workers’ wages and conditions in China lag far behind those in the old industrial countries. According to a World Bank report, wages in China as a share of GDP declined from 53 per cent in l998 to 41.4% in 2005, as compared with 57 per cent in the US. While Chinese legislation officially forbids over-work and super-exploitation of labour, these abuses, actually, seem to flourish unchecked. Independent trade unions run by their members are not tolerated. Campaigners who support workers’ rights suffer brutal state repression. Workers who do not enjoy settled status are denied access to housing and other benefits. You can look at one report describing conditions at What You Need to Know About Labor Conditions in China – RELEVANT (relevantmagazine.com) . If you suspect that this US-based material is deliberately biased, you can also look at this 2009 report: https://www.waronwant.org/news-analysis/sweatshops-china .
Since Ross refers rather freely to Marxism-Leninism, it is worth recalling how Marx reacted to the expansion of capitalism in Britain in the period referred to in his article. Marx said this at the foundation of the International Workingmen’s Association – the First International:
“It is a great fact that the misery of the working masses has not diminished from 1848 to 1864, and yet this period is unrivaled for the development of its industry and the growth of its commerce. In 1850 a moderate organ of the British middle class, of more than average information, predicted that if the exports and imports of England were to rise 50 per cent, English pauperism would sink to zero. Alas! On April 7, 1864, the Chancellor of the Exchequer delighted his parliamentary audience by the statement that the total import and export of England had grown in 1863 ‘to 443,955,000 pounds! That astonishing sum about three times the trade of the comparatively recent epoch of 1843!’
And what, Marx asks, was the impact of all this on poverty? He quotes “the Sixth Report on Public Health, published by order of Parliament in the course of the present year. What did the doctor discover? That the silk weavers, the needlewomen, the kid glovers, the stock weavers, and so forth, received on an average, not even the distress pittance of the cotton operatives, not even the amount of carbon and nitrogen ‘just sufficient to avert starvation diseases’. ‘Moreover:’ — we quote from the report — ‘as regards the examined families of the agricultural population, it appeared that more than a fifth were with less than the estimated sufficiency of carbonaceous food, that more than one-third were with less than the estimated sufficiency of nitrogeneous food, and that in three counties (Berkshire, Oxfordshire, and Somersetshire) insufficiency of nitrogeneous food was the average diet’. (Address to the International Workingmen’s Association, Marxist Internet Archive).
Marx continues:
“These are painful reflections, especially when it is remembered that the poverty to which they advert is not the deserved poverty of idleness; in all cases it is the poverty of working populations. Indeed the work which obtains the scanty pittance of food is for the most part excessively prolonged. The report brings out the strange and rather unexpected fact: ‘That of the division of the United Kingdom … the agricultural population of England,’ the richest division, ‘is considerably the worst fed’; but that even the agricultural laborers of Berkshire, Oxfordshire, and Somersetshire fare better than great numbers of skilled indoor operatives of the East of London. Such are the official statements published by order of Parliament in 1864 … at a time when the Chancellor of the Exchequer told the House of Commons that ‘the average condition of the British laborer has improved in a degree we know to be extraordinary and unexampled in the history of any country or any age’.”
Not a good look
Chinese entrepreneurs and workers take the social relations described above with them when they settle abroad, for example in southern Africa. A typical report is this protest from the Zimbabwe Diamond Miners’ Union: https://newsofthesouth.com/zimbabwe-diamond-and-allied-minerals-workers-union-zdamwu-press-statement-over-the-shooting-of-employees-at-redeem-mine-in-the-midlands-province/. They claim that two members of the union were actually shot when they went to see Chinese managers about unpaid wages.
The Rossing uranium mine in Namibia saw a terrific struggle against exploitation by western mining interests when the country was ruled by apartheid South Africa. Liverpool dockers and other trade unionists boycotted the movement of ore from this mine. Workers won a battle for union recognition and decent conditions. When Rio Tinto sold the mine to the China National Nuclear Corporation a few years ago, promises were made about continued recognition of the Miners Union of Namibia (MUN) and agreements at the site. However, since then the entire local site leadership of the MUN has been sacked and workers’ rights are under attack.
Trade unionists at Piraeus, near Athens, complain that after much of the port (and large parts of the town around it) were taken over by the Chinese company COSCO, they found the culture of the new management showed absolutely no understanding of industrial participation and workers’ rights. This account of a strike over a death at work in the port highlights lack of consultation over health and safety issues and the dangers involved in “back-to-back” shift working: Piraeus Port Workers Announce 48 Hour Strike Over Workplace Safety After Death Of Colleague (greekcitytimes.com).
Workers at a Chinese-owned copper mine in eastern Serbia held a protest on January 12 to demand higher wages and improved working conditions. Several hundred workers at Zijin Bor Copper, located in the town of Bor, participated in the protest, calling for the Chinese company to respect the laws of Serbia and its Serbian workers.
Protester Srecko Karadzic told RFE/RL that he took part because of working conditions and because wages have not kept up with inflation.
“Insufficient respect for workers, insufficient respect for wages and standards,” he said. “Everything is more expensive, and wages are the same.”
Goran Nikolic, who also works at Zijin, told RFE/RL that the workers are intimidated and said there are lists of workers who protest. These workers are then transferred to other workplaces, making others afraid, he said.
A final point on Ross’s statistics: He evokes historic periods of capitalist growth, but stops short at mentioning what happened next. At the end of the nineteenth century, Britain’s dominance of world trade came under attack from newcomers such as Germany, Japan and the US, and this led to two world wars. The US is still top of the tree at the moment, and has been for nearly a century, but she is clearly struggling and flailing around economically and militarily. Japan and Germany are no longer the “miracle economies” that they were forty years ago. Chinese strategists are famous for taking the “long view”. If the system of imperialism continues, how could the amazing economic growth of China’ business economy and influence not lead to further convulsions and wars, as did the arrival of previous new claimants to imperial power? China obviously has the right (as should Venezuela and Cuba too) to engage in world trade without sanctions or boycotts. But China now engages in world trade as an industrial, trading and financial rival to the US and Europe. Without a profound shift in social relations and economy across the world, a shift in which the working class comes forward as the leading force able to remodel society, events must follow the same trajectory as they did in 1914 and 1939.
Marxism-Leninism: A miracle-cure?
Here it becomes necessary to quote more extensively from John Ross’s posting:
“If the achievements of the CPC in improving the conditions of human beings are unparalleled the question is then obviously how was this achieved, what made it possible? This leads to an accurate measure of the achievements of the CPC in ideas, in theory.
“As is well known the CPC was founded under the impact of the 1917 Russian revolution, the first successful socialist revolution – which took place in an imperialist country. This fact, and the ideas of Marxism-Leninism which were learnt from these events, was on the one hand an immense initial advantage for China – as these were the world’s most advanced economic, social and political ideas, the practicality and success of which had been proved by the 1917 revolution. But simultaneously, because these ideas were international, and not specifically developed for China, the CPC then had to undertake a long historical process of the “Sinicization” of Marxism – to integrate the analyses of Marxism, developed not only in a different country but in a different continent, with an understanding of China’s specific reality.
“This led to mistakes by the CPC in its early period. As Xi Jinping noted: ‘The young Communist Party of China once simply applied the general principles of Marxism-Leninism on the proletarian revolution and copied the experience of the Russian October Revolution in the urban armed uprisings, without fully considering China’s national conditions and the reality of the Chinese revolution, causing the Chinese revolution to suffer serious setbacks.’
“This, and other major errors, resulted in the defeat of the urban based Chinese revolutionary wave in 1927. It was following this defeat that Mao Zedong progressively took undisputed leadership of the CPC. Mao Zedong’s new strategy centred on a rural based revolution and victoriously culminated in the creation of the PRC in 1949.”
Where to begin? For one thing, the Russian revolution could never be reduced to just “urban armed uprisings”. In both 1905 and 1917, military defeats for the Russian Empire led to revolts in the army, whose rank-and-file consisted mainly of peasants. These played a highly significant role in the mass movements which in 1917 culminated in the establishment of a soviet government. The Bolsheviks were extremely aware of movements in the countryside and debated the issue carefully and continually.
The political training of the newly-formed Communist party of China and its leaders fell upon the Communist International (CI), which was established at an international congress in 1919. There can be no real understanding of the historical period evoked without some consideration of the role and ultimate fate of this body. Its aim was to share all the experiences of the revolutionary movement around the world and assist in the development of strategy and tactics. Naturally, the Russian revolutionary leaders had terrific authority in this, but the Bolsheviks devoted the same careful analytical attention to developments in other parts of the world as they had previously to social developments in the Russian Empire.
The Comintern Second Congress (1920) spent a considerable amount of time discussing the revolution in developing countries. It is particularly important for what happened later in China that they weighed extremely carefully what role the various social classes might play in the struggle against imperialism and the prospects for socialism. The Indian delegate M.N. Roy and the Korean Bolshevik Pak Chin-sun submitted theses to this Congress which dealt in some detail with these matters. Pak Chin-sun in particular explored social relations in the East and possible developments:
“The acute economic crisis in Asia, which is inevitable at the moment of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and the imperialist great powers’ barbaric policy in the colonies have created favourable conditions for revolution there. This policy has aroused strong nationalist tendencies in the East. Granted, the first stage of the revolution in the East will be the victory of the liberal bourgeoisie and the nationalist intellectuals, nevertheless, we must begin now to prepare our forces for the second stage by drawing from the depths of the peasant masses, enslaved by the feudal regime, organised forces to carry out an agrarian revolution in Asia as soon as possible. The industrial proletariat in Asia, excluding Japan, is too weak for us to entertain any serious hopes of an early communist revolution, but the victory of the agrarian revolution is certain if we are able to master the immediate tasks of the great and bloody struggle”.
He points out:
“The question now is, what forces are propelling the revolution in the East? The majority of the former nobility, the liberal bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, which represent the intellectual forces of the revolution in Asia, have learned from the long years of struggle against foreign subjugation and from a process of agonising mental struggle. They have understood that the rebirth of the East is not possible except through the rule of the broad toiling masses”.
Pak Chin-sun added: “Two opposite roads lie open to Asia’s nationalists: the one leading to personal prosperity, based on the perpetual suffering and gradual degeneration of the great masses of the people; the other leading to the social revolution …”
“Certainly, even in the revolutionary milieu there are also elements that unite with us, internationalists, only to attain national political liberation … But should the revolution one day require it, we will know how to turn our arms against the ‘allies’ of yesterday”. (See Riddell [ed], Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite. Volume II of The Communist International in Lenin’s Time, Pathfinder 1991 pp 860 and 861”.
The Communist Party of China was established in 1922. While it grew very quickly, it was also pitched very quickly into massive and dramatic struggles. The political training of its leadership was a major duty of the Communist International. However, at the same time the most powerful force in the CI, the Russian (after 1922 Soviet) leadership was undergoing a rapid degeneration into a party-state bureaucracy, not without determined resistance from the genuine followers of Lenin. In the course of this struggle, the developing bureaucracy adopted anti-Communist measures such as suppressing discussion among the party membership, intimidating and harassing opponents. It also increasingly developed the cult of the infallible leader. All of this it imposed on the national parties affiliated to the CI. It also abused its position in the CI to bolster its own domestic situation, rather than to advance effective policies in each member Communist Party. (One of the most disgraceful aspects of the CPC 20th Congress is the full-on return to the personality cult and exceptional powers granted to a single individual, Xi, directly copying the degeneration in the Soviet Union in the 10 years after the Russian revolution.)
China was in a profound crisis in the 1920s. The revolution against the Qing dynasty and the age-old social relations of the Chinese empire had broken out in 1911. This movement struggled to establish itself and at the same time to confront foreign imperialist inroads. The national movement which crystallised in Sun Yat-sen’s Guo Min Dang (KMT) was unable to establish a new national government. Large swathes of the country were controlled by local warlords.
In the mid-1920s, the CI and the CPC provided enormous practical support to the KMT’s military campaign to defeat the warlords (“the Northern Expedition”).
Unfortunately, they convinced themselves and others that the bourgeois-dominated KMT (run after Sun Yat-sen’s death by Chiang Kai-shek) would continue to be the vehicle for social progress in China for a considerable time, and that it was dominated by a left-wing sympathetic to the masses of workers and peasants. This was the “line” passed down from Stalin and Bukharin.
But it turned out that the social conflicts in China could not be contained in that way. Workers and peasants responded massively to the campaign in their own way. In response, the right wing of the KMT rallied its forces, side-lined the weak KMT Left and inflicted serious defeats on the movement in Canton in 1926 and in Shanghai in 1927.
The veteran Communist Peng-Shu-tse described events in this way:
“Thus, even though the CCP led the Shanghai workers in an armed insurrection on March 21, 1927, which succeeded in destroying the control of the Northern warlords and occupying Shanghai (except for the foreign concessions), with armed workers organised to maintain peace and order, they could not establish a revolutionary regime based on the working class. Such a regime would have initiated a dictatorship against the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie and, in particular, would have opposed and defeated the coup plotted by Chiang Kai-shek’s bandit gang. They could not do this because it would destroy ‘KMT-CCP collaboration’, obstruct the line of a ‘bloc of four classes’ and especially disrupt the business of Chiang Kai-shek’s Northern Expedition. Even though the CCP had taken Shanghai and gained the support of the entire working class and a majority of the lower petty-bourgeoisie, along with the sympathy of a section of the soldiers, in order to adhere to the Comintern’s policy of a ‘coalition government of four classes,’ the CCP could do nothing but establish a Shanghai provisional government in collaboration with the bourgeoisie. Those representatives of the bourgeoisie ‘elected’ to serve in the provisional government used sabotage and opposition, under Chiang Kai-shek’s direction, to paralyse the government and prepare the way for Chiang’s next coup.”
Understandably Peng continues: “Under these circumstances, the CCP slipped into a period of exceptional distress and dilemma.” (Peng Shu-tse, introduction to Leon Trotsky on China, Pathfinder, 1976, pp 64 and 65). It was not that the principles of Marxism-Leninism were abstract truisms which requires translation from some Olympian height into the particular circumstances of each separate country: in fact it was Stalin who imposed a political “line” in China in defiance of the views of Marx and especially Lenin. This line, of subordinating the workers and peasants to the Guo Min Dang, disoriented the movement and led to a serious defeat. The leaders of the USSR after Lenin’s death did try to impose “one size fits all” political lines on Communist Parties around the world. This was clear in the sectarian policies of the “Third Period” after 1928, and the switch to “Popular Front” alliances after 1933. Stalin’s Marxist opponents insisted that the general features of world politics are expressed in different proportions in each country, demanding political solutions appropriate to local conditions, and sharp awareness of developing events and changes; but their voices were stifled.
“Under these circumstance”, Mao’s turn to the countryside was more a pragmatic adjustment to a catastrophic situation than an original development of Marxist theory. (It is true that he learned enough to take future Soviet advice with a pinch of salt!).
How fundamental a principle was the turn to rural guerrilla warfare? For fifty years after the establishment of the PRC, leftist forces around the world have tried to emulate Mao’s success through guerrilla warfare. There have been inspiring and determined struggles. Huge sacrifices have been made in the East, in Africa and in Central and South America. However, as we stand today, the results are mostly very disappointing. From Algeria to Zimbabwe, through the entire alphabet in Africa, states which have won independence at least in part through guerrilla struggles have ended up run by local kleptocracies where hints and clues of some sort of socialism are increasingly rare and the main “growth” has been in the oversees bank accounts of the autocratic rulers.
Cuba is an exception. But even the Cuban government now spends a lot of its time helping former guerrilla movements, as in Colombia, to make peace deals with the capitalist client states they have been fighting for 50 years. The balance sheet of half a century of imitating the Maoism of the 1930s and 1940s is this: that many of the imitators have spent the last two decades or more trying to disentangle themselves from it.
And now, while Ross celebrates the “Marxism-Leninism” of Mao, Xi urges supporters around the world to collaborate with the local capitalists. He proposes the exact same mistake that was inflicted on the young CPC by Stalin in the mid 1920s.
As the apartheid regime was being taken apart in the early 1990s, Nelson Mandela assured trade unionists there that the country’s wealth would be nationalised. At the same time the advice he actually adopted – from the Chinese – was to leave foreign multi-national corporations in charge of extracting and processing the country’s minerals.
What sort of “Marxism-Leninism”?
Ross contrasts the ultimate failure of the USSR to the heady successes of the PRC, against the background of a rather terse account of 20th Century economic history:
“…the great crisis of the 1930s, which culminated in the Second World War itself, was dominated by two economic features. First domestic investment collapsed, second international trade and investment radically declined. Expressed in Marxist terms, therefore, from 1929 to World War II socialisation of labour was drastically reduced, leading to the prediction of a huge recline in production – which duly occurred”.
What “socialisation” meant for Lenin we shall see in a moment. Ross’s bald account of the events in world economy since 1929 could figure in any account (by a “Marxist-Leninist” or any moderately well-informed economist). For Ross, imperialism is a matter of different policies followed at different times by imperialist powers: now low-investment, leading to falling world trade, autarky and mass unemployment; at another time lively investment, especially internationally, leading to growing production and expanding trade. The decisions of those in charge, for Ross, do not flow from the very nature of imperialism as a stage in capitalist society, blundering from crisis to crisis. Following his approach, one might wish that world leaders had set up the WTO and the World Bank in the early 1930s, and avoided all the unpleasantness that followed!
The actual Lenin had a very different understanding of imperialism:
“From all that has been said above on the economic essence of imperialism, it follows that it must be characterised as capitalism in transition, or, more precisely, as dying capitalism. It is very instructive in this connection to note that the bourgeois economists, in describing the newest capitalism, currently employ terms like ‘interlocking’, ‘absence of isolation,’ etc; banks are ‘enterprises which, by their functions and course of development, are not purely private business enterprises; more and more they are growing out of the sphere of purely business regulation’. And the same Riesser who spoke these last words, declares in all seriousness that the ‘prophecy’ of the Marxists concerning ‘socialisation’ ‘has not been realised’.
“What then, is the meaning of this word ‘interlocking? … When a big enterprise becomes a gigantic one, and, working on the basis of exactly computed mass data, systematically organises the supply of primary raw materials to the extent of two-thirds or three-fourths of all that is necessary for tens of millions of people; when those raw materials are transported to the most suitable places of production, sometimes hundreds or thousands of miles from each other, in a systematic and organised manner; when one centre controls all the successive stages of working up the raw materials right up to the manufacture of numerous varieties of finished articles; when these products are distributed according to a single plan among tens and hundreds of millions of consumers … then it becomes evident that we have socialisation of production going on before our eyes, and not mere ‘interlocking’; that private business relations, and private property relations, constitute a shell which is no longer suitable to its contents, a shell which must inevitably begin to decay if its removal is postponed by artificial means; a shell which may continue in a state of decay for a comparatively long period (particularly if the cure of the opportunist abscess is protracted), but which will inevitably be removed.” (Lenin: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism”).
Whatever “socialisation” means for Ross, in Leninist terms it refers to the revolt of the productive forces against the relations of production, or as Marx said:
“The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder.” (Marx, Capital vol. I).
For Lenin “private business relations, and private property relations, constitute a shell which may continue in a state of decay for a comparatively long period (particularly is the cure of the opportunist abscess is protracted), but which will inevitably be removed”. The CPC leadership has “improved” and “developed” this Marxist-Leninist conception to the point of vastly expanding the “opportunist abscess”.
Ross’s article on the significance of the CPC 12th Congress, and his version of the history of that party, present Marxism-Leninism in terms which considerably confuse the matter.
Bob Archer
February 2023

 

The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa is not just any old union. It was built by black industrial workers fighting exploitation by multinationals keen to use the repressive, racist apartheid regime to secure super-profits. It was built with support and advice from Marxist activists. These workers asserted themselves as an independent revolutionary force, quickly grasped the core ideas of socialism, and fearlessly fought to bring down the whole apartheid system. They established workers’ democracy as the working principle of their union.

The settlement which ended apartheid rule in the early 1990s cheated these militant workers of the opportunity to take the road to a socialist South Africa. An alliance between the African National Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Confederation of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) not only dropped any socialist policy (such as nationalising the mining and metal-refining industries, returning the land to the toilers who work it, etc.); it actually forged ahead with a policy of widespread selling-off of public utilities. At the same time, the leaders of this alliance neglected no opportunity to enrich themselves.

For over 20 years, the triple alliance was actually able to ride out any working-class opposition which was provoked as a succession of government policy initiatives failed to provide progress in jobs, welfare and living conditions or in mass black access to education and agricultural land.

Working-class resistance was reflected in internal wrangles within the alliance and the regular-rapid turnover in national Presidents, with Thabo Mbeki replaced by Jacob Zuma and Zuma in turn replaced by the former miners’ union leader, Cyril Ramaphosa. Each successive incumbent became mired in accusations of corruption and incompetence.

Working-class resistance broke out into the open in the middle of 2012 with the shooting by the South African Police Service of thirty-four striking miners at Marikana and the subsequent wave of industrial militancy.

Correctly identifying this as a pivotal moment in the class struggle in South Africa, NUMSA convened a Special Congress in December 2013 which undertook a serious campaign to re-establish a socialist and internationalist workers’ movement. The decisions of this Special Congress are summarised at What Numsa decided in December 2013 – wirfi (workersinternational.info).

These Special Congress decisions amounted to a carefully considered understanding of a way forward to revive the workers’ movement, workers’ democratic organisation and workers’ political power as a class.

However, progress along the lines sketched out at the Special Congress has been far from smooth. Old mistakes and embedded illusions have persisted in the very leadership of this trade union. This leadership is quick to point out the failings of post-apartheid rule but has never really taken on board any analysis of the real lessons of these failures. They have therefore neglected many of the decisions of the December 2013 Special Congress and taken the union in quite a different direction from the one chosen by delegates.

Differences over these matters have led to a crisis within the trade union. This came to a head over preparations for the 11^thNational Congress of the Union slated to start on 25 July 2022. An opposition group of political activists alleged serious abuses of democratic process by the national leadership of General Secretary Irvin Jim in the course of local and regional gatherings to discuss policies and select and mandate delegates. Leading figures in this opposition – all elected office bearers at various levels within the union – went to court and obtained a ruling that the Congress should not go ahead. The majority of the national leadership of the union nevertheless went ahead with the Congress. They obtained a ruling from another court that some slight last-minute changes they made were adequate to meet the terms of the previous injunction.

A Secretariat Report to the NUMSA NEC Meeting held on 28 and 28 October 2022 reveals at some length the attitude, orientation and methods of the current NUMSA leadership. This Secretariat Report makes no direct or systematic attempt to defend this leadership against any of the charges made against it. It is nevertheless worth studying, as it reveals some very basic weaknesses and problematic attitudes in that leadership, as well as underhand ways of dealing with political problems. The underlying roots of the problems in the leadership of the union, the reasons why an opposition had to arise and challenge this leadership can be traced and identified by analysing aspects of this Secretariat Report. This present article delves into some of this.

A dishonest slander

The report comes, in effect, from the office of the General Secretary of the union, Irvin Jim. It is a robust and obstinate attempt to justify the current leadership of the union, but it does not provide any systematic analysis of the crisis in the union and the soil out of which it grew. In the places where it does deal with that background, the report actually reveals the author’s own political weaknesses and mistakes, but by then a far murkier objective has been attempted.

From the very start of the report, the opposition within the union is repeatedly described as “individuals”. It is never referred to as what it actually is: a strong and rooted trend which is an organic part of NUMSA’s history and a source of the union’s strength.

The word “individual” has a very specific weight in a workers’ organisation, especially one allegedly guided by Marxism. To describe opponents systematically and repeatedly as “individuals” is to place them outside of and at odds with the collective of a workers’ organisation. This is doubly deceptive here since all the “individuals” involved have been fighting consistently for nothing more that the collective rights of the working-class membership of the union, enshrined in its constitution and methods. Their complaints have all related to breaches of the constitution and departure from the methods of workers’ democracy on the part of the Irvin Jim leadership.

The opposition has produced various statements, submissions and appeals which present a devastating picture of financial chicanery, abuses and constitutional breaches on the part of the union leadership. The Secretariat Report brazenly reproduces a number of these with barely any comment or analysis and certainly no detailed rebuttal. The only “argument” involved is the kind of subliminal propaganda that the advertising industry has mastered. The unspoken but clear message is: “How dare these ‘individuals’ raise their voices at all! What insolence on their part! What saboteurs and wreckers!”.

As the Secretariat Report goes on, the “individuals” become, bit by bit, a “group of individuals”, and a little later “a group of individuals inside the union”, but working insidiously to undermine it; a “group of individuals” who are feted in various media outlets (and therefore obviously work hand-in-glove with the class enemy), and so on.

One hundred pages later, the Report works itself up into a climax. The opposition becomes “a loud hailer for anti-NUMSA right-wingers, speaking rubbish about NUMSA and believing that they could change NUMSA policies and constitutional decisions through some Cape Town television studio called ‘Workers World Media’.” It goes on: “To be blunt we have allowed ourselves as the union through our good heart and generosity to be abused by a tiny, loony, racist white left that has no relationship with the working class as a result of being open to everyone who claim to advance the interests of the working class”. (The opposition justifiably points out that they are fighting FOR the carrying out of the decisions of the 2013 Special Congress and that the NUMSA leadership has abandoned these decisions and gone off in a different direction. The accusation of racism a vile slander).

All this abuse is piled on in order to avoid addressing the very serious accusations of wrongdoiny which are detailed in the various opposition documents actually copied into the Report. It is all very well to brag about “NUMSA policies and constitutional decisions”, but pointless unless you actually address the reality of the complaints about branch-stacking meetings with unelected “delegates”, sending thugs to disorganise union meetings and so forth.

The slander comes to a spittle-laden climax: “it is important to raise everybody’s level of consciousness about NUMSA as an organisation and refocus our energies towards what NUMSA has always been, a preparatory school for class struggles and fighting against the system of capitalism in pursuit of socialism”. This is bound up with “characterising and deepening our understanding about the forces that have consistently plunged the organisation, putting it under siege and causing instability. Part of such a struggle has to do with being firm and not being liberal and being prepared to call a spade a spade” (My emphasis – BA).

What an insult to the very concepts of “consciousness”, “class struggles”, “fighting capitalism” and “pursuit of socialism”! The Secretariat Reportimpliesthat the opposition is guilty of treachery and malice, but utters not a singlepoliticalword or idea in characterising that opposition.

In fact, the Secretariat Report has no political answer to the charges raised by the opposition within the union. The Report is reduced to name-calling in a style that would have made old Andrey Vyshinsky proud – that lying, slandering and cold-bloodedly murderous prosecutor at the notorious Moscow Trials in the 1930s. “A preparatory school for class struggles and fighting against the system of capitalism in pursuit of socialism” is indeed what a trade union can and should be. However, while the methods and conceptions of the Irvin Jim leadership remain Stalinist, that leadership will train and educate not class-conscious proletarian fighters, but sheep with no mind of their own, bleating the meaningless phrases inculcated into them by their leaders.

There is also no direct reply to the allegations that the business interests attached to the union are not serving their intended functions and are instead used for the benefit of individual leaders and to buy influence among union members. Instead, the Report announces that “We can report to the NEC that we have met the necessary compliance and we have made a submission to the Department of Employment and Labour and have committed to respond to the pack of lies championed by faceless people who speak on the basis of anonymity, when clearly their mission is to destroy NUMSA and put it under administration”. So, there is the promise to “respond” to the Department of Employment and Labour, but no proper response to the union delegates and members!

At the same time, the Report announces there will be special training for local and regional officials of the union to keep systematic minutes and financial records, as if they were to blame for the alleged abuses.

Stalinism a counter-revolutionary force in the working class

From out of the tomb, Stalinism extends a ghostly hand whose touch threatens to wither the promising green shoots of a working-class revival. The current leadership of NUMSA is making a hash of the course of action established at the union’s Special Congress in December 2013 because it does not grasp the problems presented to the working class by the bureaucratic, mechanical and authoritarian methods and conceptions bred under Stalin’s rule in the USSR. These are the methods and conceptions which shaped the character of the SACP-ANC-Cosatu alliance which assumed rule over South Africa after 1990. Even three decades after the collapse of the USSR these methods and conceptions still have a remarkable grip on the workers’ movement.

The Bolshevik Party built and led by Lenin engaged in a dogged and profound struggle to master theoretical problems in order to provide clear, correct and reliable guidance to workers and the broader masses at every evolving stage in their struggle. That struggle itself presents a constantly shifting and changing picture as different social forces square off against each other. For the Bolsheviks, loyalty to Marxist theory was not at all a slavish and silent subservience to a line imposed from above. Even working under conditions of illegality and the risk of imprisonment, exile and death, Bolsheviks arrived at their political policies and practices in a process of discussion. Those who claim to be Marxist leaders had to – and still must – justify that assertion by honestly accounting for the outcomes of the policies they propose. This is not “liberalism” but a necessary attribute of revolutionary organisation.

A very different relationship between party leaders and strategy and tactics took root after Lenin’s death. Once a bureaucracy had usurped state power in the Soviet Union, and extended its grip over the Communist Parties around the world, policies and tactics became subordinate to the needs of the Soviet leadership at any given time. It was in this process that workers became accustomed, under duress, to adopting uncritically whatever the Party Line might be at any given moment, however much that line contradicted the Party Line the day before and the day after. The methods and practices of purges, frame-up trials and the Gulag had their impact in parties and trade unions run by supporters of the Russian (and later Chinese) leadership across the world.

We have room here for just a few examples of the problems caused by the bureaucratic approach: Finding reliable allies for revolutionary Communists workers in their struggles (and knowing exactly how reliable they are and for how long) is a question of immense importance for our movement. Under Lenin, the Communist International developed the tactic of the United Front in order to overcome the grip of reformist socialist parties on the working class. However, in the hands of the new leadership in Russia in the mid-1920s, the tactic of the United Front became a reckless reliance upon agreements with the more radical trade union leaders in Britain and with Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist Guo Min Dang in China, fighting the warlords who dominated large parts of the country. What should have been necessary temporary alliances were kept going even as the right wing of the Guo Min Dang slaughtered Chinese Communist workers in their thousands and the British TUC leaders closed down the 1926 General Strike after 9 days.

At the same time, the Soviet government was prolonging far beyond its shelf-life the “New Economic Policy” which had been adopted as a necessary but temporary path to economic recovery after the terrible destruction inflicted upon Russia during World War I and the civil war following the revolution.

By the end of the 1920s, the richer peasants in the USSR were starting to stir up opposition to the Soviet state in the countryside. Faced with setbacks to its policies at home and abroad, the bureaucracy turned to its notorious “class against class” policies of the so-called “Third Period”. The world revolution was proclaimed to be imminent. Reformist socialists were all denounced as traitors and as “twins” of fascism. War was declared on the entire Soviet peasantry in the form of the murderous forced collectivisation of agriculture. Communist workers in many countries around the world isolated themselves from other members of their own class by adopting a string of sectarian practices and actions.

Policy zig-zags

The “Third Period”, described above, made any united resistance to fascism by socialist and communist workers impossible and led directly to the defeat of the German working class in 1933 at the hand of the Nazis. The response of the Soviet bureaucracy was to switch abruptly to a policy of alliances with “democratic” capitalist states and “popular fronts” with the reformist socialist and radical bourgeois politicians who had so recently been denounced as “twins” of fascism.

Even in the early 1920s, the Stalinist-leadership of the Communist movement had already abandoned any hope of the revolution spreading around the world. Communist policy internationally was reduced to any initiative that might strengthen the hand of the bureaucracy in its grip on its home territory in the USSR and its negotiations with Western capitalist governments. Stalinism had at times a radical, demagogic face and at times a face turned towards the democratic bourgeoisie (or even, at times, to German Nazism). What it never really had was a genuinely revolutionary Marxist conception of really revolutionary tactics.

Each switch to a new “line” led to the expulsion or resignation of some in the party who had believed too firmly in the previous one. Where the Soviet leadership held sway, that could lead to imprisonment and death. The question for those who found themselves in that position was and is: do they understand the political roots of the degeneration which hit them? Many have not. This seems to be particularly the case with Irvin Jim. He split noisily with other members of the South African Communist Party nearly ten years ago over the obvious failures of the South African ANC government. Now he seems to be keen to patch up differences, and looks to the possibility of working with the SACP on the issues which he raises in the Secretariat Report.

His split was not thought through to the end. The Secretariat Report reveals massive illusions in the revolutionary potential of the SACP and its traditions. It refers to the 1969 Morogoro conference of the ANC, called to deal with frustration in the ranks of the SACP and Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the movement. Chris Hani and others had been suspended for voicing their radical criticism of the passivity of the ANC. At the conference, the protests of Hani and others were headed off with revolutionary-sounding bluster from Joe Slovo, the very Slovo whose rhetoric is quoted approvingly in the NUMSA Secretariat Report to the October 2022 National Executive Committee. Back in 1969, the suspended activists trooped tamely back into the ANC, which adopted aStrategy and Tactics of the African National Congress document, drafted by Slovo.

While acknowledging generally “an international context of transition to the socialist system”, the text of Strategy and Tactics of the African National Congressemphasises: “We in South Africa are part of the zone in which national liberation is the chief content of the struggle”. It emphasises the obstacles to national liberation throughout southern Africa at that time (1969), and insists that “The strategy and tactics of our revolution require for their formulation and understanding a full appreciation of the interlocking and interweaving of international, African and Southern African developments which play on our situation”. Thus, the struggle of the masses in the colonies of the time is severed from the movement of the working class in the imperialist powers of the day and firmly placed under the control of middle-class black liberation leaders. Diplomatic and strategic considerations which are said to be beyond the grasp of ordinary workers and activists mean that only “the leadership” is equipped to judge what strategy and tactics are appropriate.

The section which refers to “Unending Resistance to White Domination” hails the “emergence and development of the primary organisation of the liberation movement – the African National Congress”, as well as groups representing “the Coloured and the Indians” and “the creation of economic and political organisations – the South African Communist Party and trade unions which reflected the special aims and aspirations of the newly developed and doubly oppressed working class”. This whole schema conceals the fact that “unending resistance” on the part of the black middle-class and tribal leaders not only experienced long periods of slumber, but also had a different aim and social content from that of black worker, which are relegated to “special aims and aspirations”.

There follows very extensive logic-chopping about an “armed struggle” which barely ever got off the ground in South Africa itself. Slovo here is anxious to defend the ANC against accusations that “they were not really revolutionary or that it was only in the early ‘60s that they began to appreciate the correct strategy … in other words was its policy not a revolutionary one?” Clearly, critical voices in the SACP had said something very much along these lines. Slovo’s answer is to explain that “radical changes are brought about not by imaginary forces but by those whose outlook and readiness to act is very much influenced by historically determined factors”. He goes on: “To ignore the real situation and to play about with imaginary forces, concepts and ideals is to invite failure. The art of revolutionary leadership consists in providing leadership to the masses and not just to its most advanced elements; it consists of setting a pace which accords with the objective conditions and the real possibilities at hand”. (Strategy and Tactics of the African National Congress, 1969)

The problem with all these wise words is that the decision about what “objective conditions and the real possibilities at hand” really are, what tactics might be appropriate, and when, is left to the “political leadership” which has already been vested in the African National Congress, and the ANC is what Lenin used to call a ‘bourgeois nationalist” movement with its own aims and objectives quite different from those of black workers. Stalinist policy (as expressed by Joe Slovo) had already walled-off “national liberation” struggles from the struggles of workers in developed capitalist countries and now it placed the struggles of workers in colonial countries (as mere “special aims and interests”) under the control of a movement expressing the aspirations of a black elite.

And today the result of that is notorious. Thirty years of ANC rule in South Africa have brought all the abuses for the working class that the 2013 Special Congress statements and resolutions and even the current Secretariat Report detail. But the response of the Secretariat Report is to evoke the voice of Chris Hani, who tamely submitted to the terms ofStrategy and Tactics of the African National Congress and returned to the Stalinist fold. One is justified in suspecting that, despite all the bluster, that is exactly what the current leadership of NUMSA is planning to do.

Despite the sharp break with the ANC-SACP-COSATU alliance in 2012-13, the current leadership of NUMSA never broke, as a whole, with the Stalinist politics in which that alliance was rooted. The Secretariat Report flays the ANC rhetorically:

“ … the ANC for more than two decades squandered and missed what an opportunity given its revolutionary history of class struggle as the only guarantee for fundamental change”.

And:

“At the back of the country’s minerals what the ANC failed to do was to champion manufacturing and industrialisation through a job-led industrial strategy”.

And:

“the African majority has remained economically marginalised pursuing this campaign to influence the ANC …”.

And, most tellingly about the illusions this leadership of NUMSA still harbours about the whole historic policy of alliance with the ANC:

“This means in our country that racism and apartheid in our country’s economy has continued by other means in that the African majority has remained economically marginalized, landless, and disposed. In pursuing this campaign to influence the ANC which must be understood in its proper context that we were not calling on the ANC to adopt a new revolutionary line, we were simply calling on the ANC to stick to its liberation vision which can be characterised as the true essence of the national democratic revolution as the ANC once claimed it was pursuing. During such a difficult phase when we were being purged by the ANC led alliance, constituted by the ANC, SACP and COSATU, before they expelled us in 2014 we consistently reminded them of the following quote from the Morogoro Conference in 1969. Of course, we knew that Chris Hani, for doing the same, was viciously punished for agitating for convening of the Morogoro Conference of 1969 through the infamous memo which he was extremely hated for penning it which led to him being sentenced to jail for 6 months. Below is what we consistently reminded them of: ‘In our country – more than in any other part of the oppressed world – it is inconceivable for liberation to have meaning without a return of the wealth of the land to the people as a whole. It is therefore a fundamental feature of our strategy that victory must embrace more than formal political democracy. To allow existing economic forces to retain their interests intact, is to feed the root of racial supremacy, and does not represent even the shadow of liberation. Our drive towards national emancipation is, therefore, in a very real way bound up with economic emancipation.’ Morogoro Conference 1969”

And yet, in the face of the SACP and ANC leadership at Morogoro, this same Chris Hani could not put any content into the fine words about “the return of the wealth of the land to the people as a whole”. He backed down and was accepted back into the fold, as a tame sheep. And that was just an anticipation of the treachery of the ANC, the SACP, and their various backers and patrons at the beginning of the 1990s

After more than sixty years, is it not time to draw the lesson that not only the ANC, but the SACP too, is a busted flush? The SACP never took forward any serious fight of the working class in South Africa that challenged the ANC. The reasons for that lie deeply embedded in the political culture inculcated by Stalinism. The workers’ movement needs to actually draw out the lessons of its own history, overcome Stalinism in theory and practice, and on the basis of that re-assessment take a genuinely revolutionary road. The illusions peddled by the Secretariat Report show that nothing essential has been learned from history by the current leadership of NUMSA. No talk of “vanguarding ourselves” has any value; all bragging about “consciousness” is but “a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal”, empty noise unless the speaker can understand and deal with the essential nature of Stalinism and its break with Leninism.

Back in 2012 and 2013, NUMSA correctly aligned itself with the growing working-class opposition to the Alliance of ANC, SACP and the union confederation COSATU. Within COSATU, NUMSA pressed for a break with the alliance, stood their ground and only moved to set up the new trade union federation (SAFTU) when they were expelled from COSATU for their principled stance. Now that COSATU too has been pushed by the working class to pass a motion of no confidence in the ANC, the vacillating top leadership of NUMSA seeks reconciliation with the very same political forces from which it was forced to break in 2013.

Now, unity of the workers’ movement in practice is a fundamentally vital issue in the struggle, if we are to talk seriously about strategy and tactics that can lead to victory. NUMSA and SAFTU should indeed be exploring how to find unity in action with trade unions still affiliated to COSATU, and even with supporters of the SACP. At best, this could lead to serious gains for genuinely revolutionary socialists, and at worst (if COSATU etc. will not join or later back out) it will clarify in the eyes of wider groups of workers who they can trust and who they cannot trust.

What kind of organisation?

The real problem with the hand which the NUMSA leadership extends to the SACP is the conception of working-class revolutionary organisation which the current NUMSA leadership appears to have brought with it from its days in the SACP. We saw earlier that at the outcome of the Morogoro conference, Hani and Slovo both joined in the chorus that the leadership knows best and that the “individual” must accept that the “leadership” is the true and correct voice of the rank-and-file members. Irvin Jim appears to be stuck in the same place

In Lenin’s hands, strategy and tactics were, first of all, connected with genuine commitment to the revolutionary role of the working class. It is with that aim in mind that it becomes vital to actually know and understand reality as it changes and develops. The “line” – the strategy and tactics of the revolutionary party – was for Lenin grounded in an unyielding determination to bring theoretical knowledge to bear in order to guide the struggle for socialism, not in a bureaucratic desire to protect one’s own power and privileges. Strategy and tactics had to provide the party members, the working class and the masses, with an opportunity to test and judge party policies and decisions. Working-class organisations such as leading and local party committees, trades union workplace groups, branches and districts should not be there just to rubber-stamp leadership decisions but to provide an arena for debate. Support for a particular party and leadership should be based on the test of experience and cannot be imposed by rhetoric and shouted assertions. Strategy and tactics should help equip workers with the consciousness needed to abolish capitalism.

Political education

At the heart of the NUMSA October 2022 Secretariat Report are empty words, dressed up with rhetorical references to really significant matters and torn-out-of-context. At one point the Secretariat Report makes a fleeting allusion to Lenin’s little book What Is To Be Done?.Interestingly, this reference comes just before a long series of reports on NUMSA successes in negotiations with employers, as the Secretariat Report lulls the delegates present with encouraging reports, assuring them that industrial matters are not being neglected and that the union leadership is doing a good job in defending members interests.

Anybody who has actually studied the pamphlet in question, What Is To Be Done?,will know that in this early work Lenin expressed his concern about “only trade-unionism”. At the time Lenin was a leading member of a party that belonged to the Second (Socialist) International. He had learned from the revolutionary leaders of the Second International (whom he respected in their best days) like Kautsky and Plekhanov that in their experience (based largely in western Europe) the opposition to revolutionary politics within the movement, the reformist wing of the socialist party, rested largely upon leading trade-unionists. In What Is To Be Done?Lenin goes to great lengths to argue that the backbone of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party he was helping to set up under extremely oppressive conditions in Tsarist Russia should be provided by resolute and competent “professional” revolutionaries totally dedicated to that vocation, rather than trade union officials. However, he never expected workers to automatically and passively accept every “line” that was handed down. He also insisted that workers should always be encouraged to set their sights much higher than immediate (and of course essential) questions of wages and conditions and focus on how they can make their political strength and influence felt. In What IsTo Be DoneLenin frequently expressed contempt for theoreticians who believed that revolutionary class-consciousness arises in the humdrum daily struggle over wages and conditions, without a sharp and conscious struggle for socialist theory. And a real struggle for socialist theory involves a lot more than passively and uncritically absorbing teachings from above.

We must say a word about the way, since the Russian Revolution and the establishment of the Communist International, that this pamphlet (What Is To Be Done?) has been misused and abused by both Stalinist and bourgeois thinkers. Mistaken ideas about this have had an influence on all parts of the workers’ and socialist movement. The idea has been spread that, without actually earning it and just by virtue of their position, self-proclaimed Communist leaders deserve the right to act like petty dictators, to silence opponents in their own ranks and in the wider working class where they have influence, and to decree and impose this or that strategy, tactic or policy without letting the rank-and file have any say.

This certainly did not reflect Lenin’s own thinking, and in 1920 when he published another pamphlet, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder), he used the opportunity to correct the impression and explain that Communist leaders can only enjoy the support of the masses to the extent that these masses can see out of their own experience that the leaders’ proposals and programmes make sense.

The Secretariat Report talks a lot about “being the vanguard”, “vanguarding ourselves” and “political consciousness”. It even starts with a quotation of several paragraphs from the Communist Manifestowritten in 1847 by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, the foundation text of the Marxist movement. This long quotation seems to have been placed here purely for show. It seems to be asserting: “We are Communists and we support and uphold the movement that Marx and Engels started”.

In the Secretariat Report there is plenty of rhetoric along the following lines:

“38. The current ANC leadership led by President Ramaphosa and all of them previously failed to understand what does not need to be researched, it is a simple understanding which is understood by everybody that political power without economic power is an empty shell. Regardless of our political party logos, representing black African majority for the liberation struggle. We as revolutionary forces without pursuing an economic struggle where we must affirm into ownership and control the majority of the South African people, who are black and African, we must forget about total emancipation of our people. We must forget about the struggle for socialism. We must forget about winning the battle against crime, corruption, poverty, unemployment and inequalities as the continuing racist capitalist system in our country, as all over the world capitalism will continue to breed all these social ills. The future is socialism!”

For all the talk about “vanguarding ourselves” and “consciousness”, the Secretariat Report deliberately showcases the thoroughly discreditable attitude to party building of Chairman Mao. Here, the NUMSA leadership finds a tradition that they can accept and which buttresses their position. This Response to the NUMSA Secretariat Report has said quite a lot about Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, because the understanding of “consciousness” and “vanguard” which the leadership of NUMSA presents in the Secretariat Report is quite different from that of Lenin and his comrades.

The current NUMSA leadership has no ammunition with which to attack the actual politics and struggle of the opposition, The Secretariat Report says not a word of real analysis about the abuses about which the opposition complain. It has nothing to say about the actual policies and tactics of building a working-class movement that were adopted at the 2013 Special Congress of NUMSA. The Secretariat Report can list the shortcomings of the South African government and the problems faced by the masses, but the only practical proposals put forward are to seek closer relations with the SACP and COSATU leaders and to pursue a purge of the opposition. With this in mind, the Report evokes the memory of Mao Tse-tung:

“Again, there is no better person than Commissar Mao Tse Tung who articulates the importance of organisational discipline, which is extremely important to a revolutionary, red union that is in the trenches for the struggle for socialism.”

Let us just spend a moment on the nonsense of a “red Union”. The idea of “red unions” was put forward by the Stalinists during the Third Period zig-zag to the ultra-left. Communists, acting hastily, have often enough courted both sacking by their bosses and disciplinary action and expulsion from established trade unions led by reformists, with the result that they could often become isolated from the main movement of their class. During the period from 1929 to 1933, in the expectation of immediate revolutionary struggles and the line of “class against class” Communist workers were encouraged by the Communist International to act extremely provocatively, initiate actions in isolation from the main membership of their unions and set up independent, communist-led minority trade unions. Experience taught serious Communists that this created a serious obstacle to them gaining the support of the majority of class-conscious workers.

It is astonishing enough that the Secretariat Report abuses the opposition in NUMSA in the same breath as both “loony” left and “right-wingers”. It is impermissible that this Report itself revives the ultra-left nonsense of “red unions”.

But “Commissar” Mao (surely Chair of the Chinese Communist Party was title enough!) is evoked as an authority for a very specific reason. The Report quotes Mao as writing:

“This unity of democracy and centralism, of freedom and discipline, constitutes our democratic centralism. Under this system, the people enjoy extensive democracy and freedom, but at the same time they must keep within the bounds of socialist discipline.”

Now, a trade union is not a political party, still less a revolutionary political party. Its duty is to organise and support workers in their struggles. It should enrol and organise workers without reference to their political, religious or any other affiliations. This union – NUMSA – has decided that a revolutionary political party of the working class is needed, and that is a good decision and the Union already has a road-map towards achieving that goal, without strutting around presenting itself as if it already was that party.

The reason why the union leadership of NUMSA has picked on this quotation from Chairman Mao is, that it purports to give the union leadership powers to act arbitrarily as a handful of National Office Bearers see fit. Under the banner of Chairman Mao, dissidents can be expelled, awkward questions can be silenced and the leaders cannot be challenged. The description of “democratic centralism” quoted above ends with a chilling set of rules:

“We must affirm anew the discipline of the Party, namely:

1. the individual is subordinate to the organisation
2. the minority is subordinate to the majority.
3. the lower level is subordinate to the higher level; and
4. the entire membership is subordinate to the Central Committee.
5. Whoever violates these articles of discipline disrupts Party unity.”

On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, 1957

NUMSA did adopt a series of steps towards reviving the South African working-class movement and providing it with a political leadership. This itself arose in a process of discussion throughout the union. The policy was adopted by a majority of delegates at a Congress in December 2013. Some of us abroad were so enthusiastic about the policy that we travelled to South Africa to see if we could help and get involved. Some of us encouraged workers in struggle across southern Africa to approach NUMSA for comradeship and support. That, for us, represented an international duty. All of this went in vain. The leadership of NUMSA did not follow up on the polices adopted by the membership and has not put into effect the measures that members called for.

Members of trade unions have rights. They have the right to shape the policies of their union. They have the right to expect support from their union when they need it. They have the right to call their leadership to account when it does not carry our democratically-decided policies.

Members of political parties have rights, including members of revolutionary Leninist parties. They also have a duty, when their leaders make mistakes and even commit offences, to protest and insist that things are put right.

We in Workers International know this from bitter experience. Even organisations which were committed to a struggle for revolutionary Marxism have become dictatorial sects, exploiting and abusing individual members. Working out and defending a correct political line is half the battle: it cannot be done without a permanent and devoted struggle to defend the methods and the health of the internal life of the organisation and its connection with the working class.

This is not liberalism. The class struggle requires selfless devotion on the part of conscious political activists – Communists. But these qualities are too easily exploited by proto-bureaucrats to undermine the self-confidence which is also an essential quality in a revolutionary, the determination to stand up on a question of principle.

No leadership can be exempted from the duty genuinely to account for its actions and the proposals which it places before its members and the working class.

Bob Archer

November 2022

The crisis in Numsa:

The lessons and the way forward

“We, the members of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa), firmly commit ourselves to a United South Africa, free of oppression and economic exploitation”

This proud and defiant statement opens the Preamble to the Numsa Constitution, which goes on to assert “that this can only be achieved under the leadership of an organised and united working class”.

The Preamble lists the conditions under which this struggle can be successful, including:

“(a) fight and oppose all forms of discrimination” in the trade union, the workplace and society.

“(c) ensure that all levels of the union are democratically structured and controlled by the members themselves through elected worker committees.”

“(d) encourage democratic worker leadership and organisation in our factories and in all spheres of society.” (“Preamble to the Constitution” at: https://numsa.org.za/numsa-constitution/)

And yet, it seems that this crucial trade union has fallen under the control of a dictatorial and corrupt special-interest clique. Union activists claim that this clique imposes its authority in flagrant breach of the principles expressed in the Preamble to the Union’s Constitution.

They complain about the union-linked “3Sixty Life” insurance scheme which has “been placed under curatorship by the court because it was not having sufficient funds to guarantee pay-outs for Numsa members who are policyholders”.

They mention an auditors’ report “which shows how millions were paid out to people for dubious reasons such as undefined services rendered and monies going to a birthday party for (National Secretary Irvin) Jim and a laptop to his daughter.”

They complain about “disruptions of Regional Congress not supporting the re-election of the same Regional Office Bearers and National Office Bearers”, “the sending in of thugs to disrupt and mess up the Ekhuruleni Regional Executive Committee and Regional Congress” and “the violation of the NUMSA Constitution by suspending 53Shopstewards will-nilly” (“Save Our NUMSA” flyer posted on facebook Lindi Lee WaliWorking Class Friends Of Instimbi Ayigobi).

Numsa’s history of struggle

It was the rise of the working class organised in trade unions like Numsa which forced the imperialists and their racist supporters in South Africa between 1990 and 1994 to abandon apartheid and adopt some of the trappings (if not the substance) of an advanced democracy.

The activists who built Numsa strove to mobilise the whole masses to overthrow imperialism-capitalism as the cause of South Africa’s subjugation. They expressed their stance in the Workers’ Charter (adopted by Numsa in 1987) which explained:

“…the most urgent task facing us as workers, as black workers and as part of the black oppressed, is to use our organised strength both at the point of production and among our communities, to put an end to the race tyranny and to help bring about a united, non-racial, non-sexist democratic South Africa based on one person one vote, as broadly defined in the Freedom Charter.

“That, we see the winning of such a non-racial democracy as part of a continuous process of creating conditions for the building of a socialist society which will be in the interests of all our people; a society free of all exploitation of person by person which alone can complete the liberation objectives in all spheres of social life.”

Foremost among the “conditions for the building of a socialist society” is the matter of revolutionary leadership, an international party through which the masses “can complete the liberation objectives in all spheres of social life”.

The advanced workers who framed this charter could only conceive it being carried out by ensuring “that all levels of the union are democratically structured and controlled by the members themselves through elected worker committees” and encouraging “democratic worker leadership and organisation in our factories and in all spheres of society” as we saw above.

SACP and ANC

The officially-recognised liberation movement for South Africa was dominated politically by an alliance between the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the African National Congress (ANC). The SACP was in turn dominated politically by the line of “peaceful co-existence” between the Soviet bloc and the imperialist world that was promulgated by the USSR under Stalin and his successors. Against the thrust of the “Workers’ Charter”, Stalinists deliberately confined the struggle against colonialism and imperialism to the achievement of national independence and alleged democratic goals, leaving the fight for a socialist society to some unstated time in the future.

Stalinism’s allies in the African National Congress were in turn mainly tribal and middle-class elites and their supporters. They tolerated and even adopted a radical political rhetoric which they never had the slightest intention of following through once they achieved their own, limited class aims.

The SACP-ANC alliance is not and never was under the control of any workers’ democracy. This alliance looked for recognition to bourgeois, indeed imperialist, states and international bodies based in Europe and North America. While the anti-apartheid leaders toured the diplomatic circuit on the one hand, the numbers of young fighters who fled repression in South Africa in the late 1970s to the uMkonto we Sizwe (armed wing of the ANC) camps abroad got short shrift from their own leaders. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up after the end of apartheid found that the use of torture by uMkhonto we Sizwe against their own members in these camps was “routine”, as were executions “without due process”.

At the same time, dissenting voices in the black townships in South Africa were brutally silenced by kangaroo courts and “necklacings”.

Prominent leaders associated with the ANC-SACP alliance, like Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa went on to become Presidents of the country. With cold contempt for the working class and the masses, they set about enriching themselves while their country saw growing poverty, lack of service delivery and general instability. Ramaphosa was able to dislodge and replace Zuma because the latter was so blatantly in the pocket of the Gupta business clan, but Ramaphosa himself was exposed when other, less prominent, thieves made off with large sums in illicit cash that had been concealed in the furniture at his farm.

The whole tradition of the ANC and SACP alliance is one of high-handed contempt for the ordinary workers and their organisations. It was the revolt of workers and young people that made it impossible to carry on with the apartheid regime, but the government of South Africa was eventually passed to the Mbekis, Zumas and Ramaphosas courtesy of the international bodies of imperialism and the mining and other companies which, from Europe and America and elsewhere, still loot the country’s resources and benefit from cheap African labour. Soviet and Chinese leaders also stood as godparents to the new state.

(For a fuller understanding of the history and role of the ANC and its relationship with working-class organisations, see at the end of this article, the appendix The ANC and Numsaby my comrade Hewat Beukes).

Stalinism and Pan-Africanism

Above all, the new liberation leaders of South Africa were trained and brought up in the tradition of Stalinist politics which prevailed in the Soviet Union after Lenin’s death and which explicitly abandoned the international struggle for socialism. In place of that struggle, the leaders of the USSR and the world movement which they brutally dominated looked for “peaceful co-existence” with whatever (capitalist) allies they might find abroad. The specific application of this in colonies and former colonies was to find allies among national elites keen on independence but equally keen on maintaining their privileges.

Organisations like South-West Africa Peoples’ Movement (Swapo) devoted great efforts to achieving recognition at the United Nations and elsewhere as the one and only true liberation fighters, meanwhile deliberately slandering and side-lining the genuine liberation fighters in Namibia.

The roots of bureaucracy

In the 1920s, after the Russian Revolution, in the USSR a social caste came to the fore which usurped the power of the working class exercised through the workers’ and peasants’ soviets and also closed down – often violently – any debate in the Communist Party. Trotsky described and analysed this development in his well-known study, The Revolution Betrayed. What interests us here is what Trotsky says about the character of this bureaucracy and its regime:

“The poverty and cultural backwardness of the masses has again become incarnate in the malignant figure of the ruler with a great club in his hand. The deposed and abused bureaucracy” (i.e. of the old, abolished Tsarist autocracy – BA) “from being a servant of society, has again become its lord. On this road it has attained such a degree of social and moral alienation from the popular masses, that it cannot now permit any control over either its activities or its income” (The Revolution Betrayed, London 1967, p.113).

The men and women who led the Russian Revolution of 1917 were members of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (later re-named the Communist Party). They stood out for their steadfast devotion to the cause in the face of Tsarist brutality and dictatorship. They were equally devoted to training themselves theoretically and practically to guide the working class and broader masses. They frequently had to pay with their lives for their convictions.

But after Lenin’s death and once the new bureaucratic caste administering the new state had usurped workers’ soviet democracy, all these characteristics were turned on their heads. Loyalty to the cause of the working class was replaced by blind loyalty to the Party and ultimately the Party leader. The practical and theoretical discipline required to defeat the Tsarist police state was replaced by unquestioning subservience to allegedly infallible leaders.

Already in 1920, during the Second Congress of the Communist International, Lenin had this to say to certain over-enthusiastic and dogmatic “Left-Communists”:

“…how is the discipline of the revolutionary party of the proletariat maintained? How is it tested? How is it reinforced? First, by the class-consciousness of the proletarian vanguard and by its devotion to the revolution, by its firmness, self-sacrifice and heroism. Secondly by its ability to link itself with, to keep in touch with, and, to a certain degree, if you will, merge itself with the broadest masses of the toilers – primarily with the proletarian, but also with the non-proletarian toiling masses. Thirdly, by the correctness of the political leadership exercised by this vanguard and by the correctness of its political strategy and tactics, provided that the broadest masses become convinced of this correctness by their own experience … Without these conditions all attempts to establish discipline are inevitably transformed into trifling phrase-mongering and empty gestures”. (Left-Wing Communism; An Infantile Disorder).

Here are the most deep-rooted origins of the high-handed arrogance of trade union leaders like Irvin Jim, as of “liberation” leaders like Zuma, Ramaphosa, Nujoma and Geingob. Jim has surrounded himself with a clique bound together by self-interest, and this clique is lashing out at anyone who stands in its way. They expel members of the union, close down regions, disrupt meetings and remove the essential personal protection of “dissident” leaders of the union.

This whole monolithic approach to differences and debate is the creation of Stalinism. First, we must say that political parties of the working class require a different set of mutual obligations between leaders and members from what needs to prevail in trade unions, which by their nature must embrace at least the majority of workers in a particular trade, sector or region, irrespective of their ideology and politics. Workers’ unity in action can only be achieved through the broadest possible discussion and freedom of expression. That is the significance of the passage written by Lenin and quoted above.

Comrades will – or should – know that in building the party which ultimately led the Russian Revolution to victory, Lenin and his supporters laid enormous stress upon the responsibilities a revolutionary party imposes upon its members. They openly broke (in 1903) from others who had a much more relaxed attitude to this very question. Experience showed that the Lenin faction (Bolsheviks) went on to lead the Russian Revolution and the opposing faction (Mensheviks) attempted to strangle it.

Nevertheless, it is wrong and out of place to impose the constitution of a revolutionary political party onto the functioning of a trade union.

Numsa specifically has a well-established tradition of free and open confrontation between different political tendencies.

In any case, in any part of the world any major action by workers is always prepared by a seething low-level but widespread process of argument and debate at the workplace, in the pub, on the terraces of a sporting event or at home and with the wider family and even sometimes in religious congregations. That is the springboard for the official discussions and decisions at workplace meetings, union branches, regional and national executives, etc. Nothing could be further from the mark, by the way, than the accusations in the bourgeois media that this or that trade union leader can “call their members out” on strike at the drop of a hat.

But even in a political party, even a revolutionary party operating under conditions of illegality, as Lenin’s Bolshevik Party did for many years, it is a myth that a “line” elaborated by some “lider maximo” was submissively adopted, passed on and carried out by automatons in the ranks. Unfortunately, it is that very mistaken conception that has since then been accepted as “democratic centralism” in many circles, even among groups who claim to oppose bureaucratic methods.

On top of demanding automatic obedience, would-be bureaucrats in the movement skilfully pick on alleged “bourgeois” traits in members and activists who might raise awkward questions or oppose some nonsensical “line” that is being promulgated. All sorts of sly comments and innuendoes can undermine those who are genuinely trying to build the movement and want to question the “line” that is being handed out. Not infrequently false accusations that this or that person is an “agent” can be used to side-line the person concerned and contribute to an atmosphere of paranoia.

Often, activists are driven into huge and fruitless rounds of activity which turn out to be pointless and lead to demoralisation. Such methods have unfortunately become widespread, and are often sanctified as “Bolshevik”.

This is what Trotsky said about the culture of revolutionary parties in 1936 in The Revolution Betrayed:

“The inner regime of the Bolshevik Party was characterised by the method of democratic centralism. The combination of these two concepts, democracy and centralism, is not in the least contradictory. The party took watchful care not only that its boundaries should always be strictly defined, but that all those who entered these boundaries should enjoy the actual right to define the direction of the party policy. Freedom of criticism and intellectual struggle was an irrevocable content of the party democracy. The present doctrine that Bolshevism does not tolerate factions is a myth of the epoch of decline”. (ibid.pp 94-95).

These profound issues of working-class organisation and leadership may seem to be forgotten details of history. But they assume new significance as the working class around the world awakens after a period of setbacks and defeats to a new round of struggles. It is hard to overstate the scope and significance of these past experiences now, as the economic crisis, openly acknowledged and unresolved for over a decade, lumbers on and both established and “wannabe” imperialist powers square up against each other, beating the drums of war.

One of the very earliest signs of this working-class recovery was the wages struggle of platinum miners at Marikana in 2012, their sharp confrontation with officials of the National Union of Mineworkers of South Africa, the planned and coldly executed murder of striking miners by the South African police and the subsequent mass strike wave. It was within the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa that the most positive response to these events was raised. The subsequent development of that initiative, the different tendencies involved and the methods by which they propose to carry forward the struggle, deserve careful thought and attention. Vital past experiences of the working-class movement need to be revived in the process of educating a new generation of fighters.

The meaning of Marikana

The deliberate killing of 34 miners at the Lonmin platinum mine in Marikana, Rustenberg, North West Province, by the South African Police Service on 16 August 2012, at the instigation of the mine’s UK-based owners and with the agreement of the then South African government minister (and now President), Cyril Ramaphosa, underlined in the most dramatic way possible how correct the Numsa Constitution Preamble was to say that the ending of “oppression and economic exploitation” can only be achieved “under the leadership of an organised and united working class”.

The former, avowedly “Marxist”, and indeed vocal leader in the past of the South African Mineworkers’ Union, Cyril Ramaphosa had been one of that leadership of the African National Congress and South African Communist Party who were prepared to accept an end to Apartheid rule and introduction of “one person one vote” in exchange for abandoning any aim of a socialist South Africa. The state murders at Marikana – and remember that Cyril Ramaphosa explicitly signed off for the police violence – laid bare the profound betrayal of the working class and masses which that settlement represented.

Under a “liberation” regime of African National Congress, South African Communist Party and trade union confederation Cosatu, “independent” South Africa had to try to move forward with economic power still vested chiefly in the great imperialist monopolies and banks which had grown rich by exploiting labour of every country and ethnic background and plundering natural resources around the world.

Political democracy and effective administration on behalf of the people of South Africa has remained a fantasy while political power has been exercised by puppets of these monopolies and banks, by the Ramaphosas, the Zumas and the Mbekes. Such politicians can only function as the boot-lickers and facilitators of imperialist oppression and exploitation.

At the most basic level, they have led a systematic looting of the nation’s wealth and resources for personal gain. At a political level, they very quickly abandoned any progressive policies for the development of the country and instead adopted wholesale the nostrums of the neo-liberal International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other imperialist agencies of world governance. Their venal incompetence has added economic chaos and widespread lawlessness to the existing poverty of the majority.

This was what was at stake in the preceding conflict discussed above between Numsa’s “Workers’ Charter” and the politics of the ANC-SACP.

But as apartheid was dismantled between 1990 and 1994, the issue was fudged. ANC leaders declared that workers’ demands could be accommodated within the scope of the Freedom Charter. They assured trade unionists that, for example, South Africa’s mineral resources now belonged to the people, although in fact, the imperialist monopoly groups kept a grip of the extraction, refining and export of the nation’s wealth, and thus of their enormous profits. Dissenting voices were drowned out in the wave of publicity greeting the new order, and by violence and the threat of violence.

The fudge continued. While the ANC-SACP government moved over more and more clearly to abandon any hope of progressive legislation and towards directly neo-liberal policies, there was opposition from trade unionists. There were angry confrontations, but they were contained within the Tripartite Alliance of ANC-SACP and the union confederation Cosatu.

The real rupture did not emerge until after Marikana, the massacre and the massive wave of strikes across different trades and industries which followed.

Numsa Special National Congress 2013

In the wake of the Marikana massacre, Numsa led a fight within Cosatu to break the trade union federation from the alliance with the SACP and the ANC. For that reason, Numsa was expelled from Cosatu and, alongside a number of other trade unions, established a new South African Federation of Trade Unions” (Saftu). Numsa also worked towards and held a Special National Congress in December 2013 to draw the lessons of the Marikana massacre and chart a new course of independent socialist struggle.

The documents of the Numsa Special National Congress held in December 2013 (after a through debate throughout the trade union) still make compelling reading:

“2.2 The South African Communist Party (SACP) leadership has become embedded in the state and is failing to act as the vanguard of the working class …

For the struggle for socialism, the working class needs a political organisation committed in theory and practice to socialism …

3.2 As Numsa, we must lead in the establishment of a new UNITED FRONT that will coordinate struggles in the workplace and in communities …

3.3 … we must explore the establishment of a MOVEMENT FOR SOCIALISM as the working class needs a political organisation committed in its policies and actions to the establishment of a socialist South Africa”.

Also, the union must: “Commission an international study on the historical formation of working-class parties. As part of this study we need to explore the different type of parties, from mass workers’ parties to vanguard parties. (Quoted in Movement for Socialism! South Africa’s NUMSA points the way”,Workers’ International, 2014, pp 4 and 5)

While the resolutions and documents of the 2013 Special National Congress clearly name and identify the direction of travel of the SACP, ANC and Cosatu leadership, there is no clarity about the treacherous political tradition underlying it – Stalinism. A weakness of the Special National Congress decisions was that they still expressed illusions in the Stalinist politics of the settlement which ended apartheid and the hope that the Freedom Charter might leave a door open for future progress.

The 2013 Congress documents correctly identified how “In many post-colonial and post-revolutionary situations, liberation and revolutionary movements have turned on labour movements that fought alongside them, suppressed them, marginalised them, split them, robbed them of their independence or denied them any meaningful role”. (ibid p.4).

However, under the sub-heading “ANC has abandoned the Freedom Charter and any change in property relations”, the Declaration of the Numsa Special National Congress says:

“The Freedom Charter as the basis of our existence as an alliance, the glue that brought the alliance together, has not found expression in government policies. In fact the ANC no longer adheres to it. The ANC has not only departed from the Freedom Charter, but also from the Morogoro Conference core values and the Reconstruction and Development Plan (RDP).

“The ANC-led government continues to ignore and duck the question of how to fundamentally change property relations in the country”. (ibid. p. 22)

It reads as if most comrades had grasped that the liberation regime in South Africa has not brought the benefits which were promised, but had not yet taken on board the fact that the SACP’s Stalinist politics of an alliance with the bourgeois nationalists had always meant that imperialism-capitalism would stay in the driving seat. The Irvin Jim leadership never resolved the contradiction at the heart of the ANC/SACP/Cosatu alliance, that as a “liberation” regime it acts as a caretaker or “Comprador” (local business agent) on behalf of imperialism.

The policy of Stalinism has lived on even after the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union has gone into the dustbin. The departing gift of the Russian Stalinist bureaucracy to imperialism was to replace apartheid with a group of politicians in charge in South Africa who were very ready to enrich themselves by selling out the masses.

Stalinism’s afterlife

Stalinist rule in the USSR and her satellites collapsed over thirty years ago. It is dead and buried. How are we to explain that Stalinist methods have been reborn at the very head of Numsa, a trade union born in mass workers’ struggles which has consistently been foremost in fighting in a principled way for workers’ interests against all comers?

Since the 1970s. US imperialism had been wooing the Chinese Communist Party government of the People’s Republic of China. Mao and the leaders who followed him gladly facilitated a massive transfer of industry from North America and Western Europe to China. While this has led to spectacular (and desperately needed) economic growth and development in China, it has deeply damaged the ground on which the US and European workers’ movements stood. Whole working-class communities have been undermined, weakened, and demoralised as jobs were transferred abroad. It was a movement which had been underway for decades, but the open door into China has accelerated it massively.

At the same time, attempts by the Soviet bureaucracy to self-reform blew up in their faces. In the early 1990s the Soviet Union fell apart. The oppressed and resentful masses in the Soviet bloc “satellites” seized their chance at independence. Many workers had had their hopes in a socialist society dashed by their experience of nearly five decades of brutal rule from the Kremlin through local satraps. Very quickly they were plunged into economic and political chaos as the old links with the disappearing Soviet Union and Comecon were not immediately or easily replaced by new ones.

On top of the industrial devastation of the old working-class centres came a huge deluge of propaganda against socialism which aimed, especially, to discredit the idea that the working class can play a revolutionary role in the transformation of society. This very idea has been bitterly attacked, and those who upheld it marginalised, not least by many former activists in and around Stalinist parties.

All these conditions have combined to keep a generation or more of workers away from socialist politics. This was reflected in the growth of xenophobia amongst workers, and the domination of left-wing politics by middle-class, university-educated people and moralistic or what are nowadays called “cultural” issues and methods. Indeed, it has been among these layers that such obvious signs of the crisis of capitalism-imperialism as the financial crisis which started in 2008 led to a renewed interest in Marx and Marxism. The unemployed and the poor flocked into the squares across the USA and Europe to demonstrate and protest and shake a fist at the rich, without any practical political programme, while the intelligentsia crowded into the libraries to study and write about, among others, Marx.

In fact, Marxism became the flavour of the month, but mainly in quite restricted academic and student circles. And mostly even these circles were interested in going “beyond capital” in peaceful ways. What has become prominent, and had a significant impact at a policy level, is a warmed-over version of the work of John Maynard Keynes. He and his followers after World War II aimed (1) to curb the tendencies to crisis within imperialist world economy and control business and finance through regulation and (2) through various forms of the “welfare state” to make life tolerable for the working class, at least in the leading imperialist states. Keynesianism fell into disrepute at the end of the post-World War II economic boom in the 1960s. “Supply-side” economists pointed out that many of the safeguards that had been put in place were actually barriers to individual capitalists getting very rich. The new economic doctrines, when put into practice, produced a series of banking and stock exchange crises since the mid-1990s. These have led to public critiques of capitalist economy which have turned away from the fundamental relationships of capitalist society – the exploitation of human labour power in the expanded reproduction of capital and the growing contradiction between the forces of production and the social relations of production. Writers like the widely-acclaimed Thomas Picketty do not trouble their heads about the sourceof capital and its essential nature. Instead, they devote hundreds and thousands of pages to the evils of inequality. They do not consider the class struggle and its outcome, but concentrate on ways to arrange a fairer society without smashing up the furniture. This approach is reflected in some of the most prominent and ambitious socialist leaders – leaders who have a genuine and significant following – like Senator Bernie Sanders in the USA and Labour Members of Parliament John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK.

Meanwhile the passing decades have re-shaped world economy. Parts of the Americas south of the Rio Grande, the Pacific Rim (Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Burma, India and Pakistan), parts of the Middle East (Turkey, Egypt) have considerable industrial bases, and have in some cases become significant financial centres. Russia and her Confederation of Independent States (CIS) partners have become an important source of raw materials, hydrocarbons, and grain (as we know now from painful experience!).

China is now “workshop of the world” with one of the largest economies – second only to the United States. While state power (which includes great power of the economy and banking) lies in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party, this economy is an integral part of world imperialism. For decades it has depended on exploiting the Chinese working class to an extraordinary degree and on selling the products of their labour on the world market. Chinese businesses are now among the biggest and most advanced in the world.

In today’s clash of imperialist rivals, China strives to extend her commercial and economic power in order to engage effectively in competition with the United States and Europe. In the nature of imperialism, behind commerce and diplomacy lurks the threat of war. Imperialist rivals clash over territorial control in order to gain access to raw materials and markets. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Dutch, British and French East India Companies established commercial networks which provided the capital to start the industrial revolution. Although purely commercial at the beginning, these networks soon required the establishment of naval and military bases. Later, these networks hardened into formal colonial empires.

Today, China is starting a similar process based on the “New Silk Road” initiative to set up her own network. Like any imperialist power, China needs pliant customers and willing providers of cheap raw materials in its dependencies around the world, as well as robust logistical links.

In past centuries, Britain extended her imperial rule by “liberating” parts of Latin America from Spanish rule. American imperialism assumed the same mantle of the “liberator” in Cuba and the Philippines in the early twentieth century, and in the name of freedom and democracy supplanted Britain, France and Holland in most of their former colonial possessions after World War II. With remarkably few actual colonies, the USA has been the main colonialist-imperialist power for nearly a century. Now China offers her support to countries chafing under the economic domination of the United States. In all these cases, subject populations need to scrutinise very carefully indeed the credentials of any would-be liberator.

Multipolar World

One feature of imperialism is that formerly insignificant and weak nations have been able relatively quickly to claw their way to a powerful position at the top table among the great powers. In the 19^thCentury, previously quite unimportant nations, like Germany and Japan, were able to hurtle into prominence over a comparatively short period, in mere decades. Of course, they could not achieve this by the tried and tested and time-consuming means of a bourgeois revolution and the achievement of modern democracy, as happened in Britain, Holland, the USA and France.

By-passing a final knock-down, drag ‘em out confrontation between the rising bourgeoisie and the old feudal rulers, Germany and Japan under powerful central governments cherry-picked the aspects of the technical, industrial and political achievements of the earlier capitalist states that would enable them to become great powers, successfully applying the very latest techniques in all these fields. The achievements which had cost the older states centuries to bring about were absorbed in their latest developments and as a massive transfer of knowledge, science and theory. This could only happen under a very tight central control, which is why some Marxists refer to it as the “Prussian” road to capitalist development.

The capitalist class of the USA was playing with fire when they started to provide the People’s Republic of China with access to world markets and specifically the advanced technology on which modern industry is based. Maybe they assumed that the development of capitalism in China would undermine the rule of the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army. To be sure, that state has had to change in significant ways to accommodate the changes in Chinese society since the 1970s.

However, China has followed the real logic of the modern imperialist epoch. The Chinese state made it clear in the way it dealt with the Tiananmen Square protest in 1989 and the re-integration of Hong Kong more recently that there is no intention of introducing any measures of democracy. To succeed in an imperialist world, China has to be able to face down the present great powers of imperialism.

The claim that what the CCP is doing is a sort of extended form of the New Economic Policy adopted in the Soviet Union at the end of the Civil War and the wars of intervention in order to restore a national economy which had been largely destroyed is by the way laughable. A wealthy Chinese bourgeoisie has grown up in the decades since Nixon’s first visit. Rule by the CCP, protection by the CCP and support from the CCP have made this a rich class. Its wealth and privileges are tightly bound up with the Chinese state, and depend on how the Chinese state conducts its diplomatic, economic, and political affairs.

There are indeed inevitable contradictions between the interests of that state and the functioning of those Chinese businesses which, for example, would like to trade their shares in US stock markets. Some big Chinese operators with interests abroad who probably hoped they were too big to push around have been brought sharply to heel by the Chinese government recently. But this does not mean that the CCP is about to abolish capitalism in China anytime soon.

The old imperialist powers confront China militarily, asserting the right to send naval battle groups to patrol China’s home waters. They confront her diplomatically and politically.

China goes ahead modernising her armed forces and building up her trading networks across the world. These are both elements of hard power, reflecting the weight of China’s capitalist economy.

China also deploys soft power, seeking allies and front-men around the world to enhance her image and reputation.

So, money is spent resurrecting the old traditions of Pan-Africanism, anti-colonialism and the Bandung movement of “non-aligned” states. In the past, these were deployed in order to win allies for the USSR, while deflecting genuinely revolutionary movements (which only caused trouble as far as official Communist Parties were concerned). Although the USSR no longer exists, the idea of backing China (supported by Russia) as a rival to US hegemony is put forward and finds fertile soil because so many political careerists with a past in the Stalinist movement resonate to this logic of development without a workers’ revolution. China presents herself as a friend of the local bourgeoisies in the “Global South”, a big sister who will support them against the fatal effects of US imperialism.

What of the masses?

The only problem is the working class and the masses. In China itself, as throughout Asia, Africa and South America, the working class is exploited more ruthlessly and thoroughly than it still is in Europe, North America and Australasia, where there are still remnants of the social gains workers made in the 20^thcentury. The conditions in the rest of the world are such that in many of these countries up to 40 percent of the population are without any access to the means of production – they are unemployed.

Small-scale farming is squeezed out by big agricultural monopolies. The history of imperialism has littered the scene with remnants of national, ethnic and religious groups excluded from modern life. Millions scrape an “informal” living in modern slums. No “radical” alliances with allegedly-progressive capitalists are going to equip these masses with a way forward. Of all the classes in the “global south”, only the working class is a progressive force able to weld all the other oppressed and exploited groups together and point the way forward. This is the real meaning of the 2013 Special National Congress of Numsa and the policies that it adopted, even if that was not completely clear to those who pushed ahead on that.

It was clear at the time that Irvin Jim was not rejecting Stalinist politics; he was merely emphasising – often in a striking way – that the ANC-SACP government was “failing to deliver” for the South African masses. He did not go on to analyse the roots of that failure in the persistent influence of Stalinist conceptions.

So, the promise offered by Numsa’s Special National Congress has been frustrated. Building a United Front and an alliance with the impoverished communities never happened. No “Movement for Socialism” was established. There was no clarification of how a mass workers’ party can be built on revolutionary principles, because along the way towards making international allies, Irvin Jim turned away consistently from any working-class alliances and met up with apostles of “multipolarity” and “a new Bandung” such as Roy Singham. The Socialist Revolutionary Workers’ Party that arose from that encounter and which also brings in some independent “leftists” in South Africa has made zero impact on the masses in South Africa because it has done nothing to overcome the terrible political legacy of Stalinism. Nor have any of the petty-bourgeois socialists who have joined up with it themselves shaken that off, whatever label they identify with politically.

But Numsa members have refused to be limited by the bankrupt leadership of Irvin Jim. As these members of Numsa carry forward their recognised class interests as workers against the current Numsa leadership, they will need to enrich their activity with the theoretical lessons of those revolutionaries who opposed Stalinism at its origins and upheld real Leninism. The Left Opposition in the Communist Party of the USSR, together with its scattered supporters around the world, started the struggle to rescue the real party and international of Lenin. That struggle was later taken forward in the formation of the Fourth International. It is that international which must be rebuilt to that the working class can carry through to the end the struggle for a socialist society.

Bob Archer

9 October 2022

Appendix: The ANC and NUMSA

(from https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/formation-sanncanc)

“The South African Native National Congress (SANNC), later known as the Africa National Congress (ANC) was founded on the 8 January 1912. At SANNC’s inaugural conference, Rev. John Dube was elected as its first president in absentia. The organisation developed out of a situation of racial exclusion and discrimination under the new Union of South Africa. SANNC aspired to unite Africans in the advancement of their political and socio-economic status Contrary to its aim of unity amongst its African constituents, SANNC was restrictive and narrow in its membership. Participation was limited in accordance with class, gender and tribal status.”

The formation of the SANNC/ANC

Bloemfontein is the birth place of the SANNC, which became the ANC in 1923, one of the largest organizations in later years to struggle for freedom and justice in South Africa. Between 1908 and 1909, constitutional discussions towards Union took place which prompted numerous meetings organized by Africans, Coloureds and Indians to protest the Whites-only exclusivity of these constitutional discussions.

In 1909, a group of Black delegates from the four provinces attended the South African Native National Convention (SANNC) in Waaihoek, Bloemfontein, to propose ways of objecting to the draft South African Act, and the Union constitution. The SANNC meeting convened by John Dube and Dr Walter Rubusana decided to send a delegation to London to convince the British government not to accept the Union in its present form. The delegation led by former Prime Minister William Scheiner failed in its aims as White supremacy was entrenched under a unitary state.

On 8 January 1912, several hundred members of South Africa’s educated elite met at Bloemfontein to establish a national organization to protest against racial discrimination and to appeal for equal treatment before the law. The group comprised of South Africa’s most prominent Black citizens: professional men, businessmen, journalist, chieftans, ministers, teachers, clerks, building contractors and labour agents. This meeting was the most significant in the history of Black protest politics as it was the first joint meeting of Black representatives from all four self-governing British colonies and indicated that Blacks were capable of united action.

History of the African National Congress

Although it was not the first African political organization in South Africa, its formation marked a clear break from the past as the focus of Black politics previously centered on electoral activity in the Cape Colony where Blacks with the required property and educational qualifications could vote and stand for office. 

Their voice in politics at the Cape was significant. At the turn of the century Black voters constituted nearly half the electorate in five constituencies, which contributed to the belief that the most effective way of accelerating Black political advancement was to use their vote to influence the election men who would be sympathetic to Black aspirations.  But the years succeeding the Peace of Vereenigning in 1902 witnessed the declining force of this argument. The founding of the SANNC marked the realization in middle-class Black circles of the contention that Black interest could best be promoted by action by Blacks themselves and not through sympathetic intermediaries.

Several reasons contributed to this change in opinion. Some members of the Black elite had hopes raised initially by the defeat of the Republics in the South African War and were bitterly disappointed. Despite expressions of imperial loyalty intermingled with polite phrased reproach at the prevalent discrimination against educated Black men with good character and ability, the British government made it clear that its paramount concern was White unity in South Africa.

Hopes that non-racial Cape franchise would be extended to the defeated republics were rapidly dashed as preparations for the Act of Union indicated that existing rights would not be respected in future. The Act removed the theoretical right of enfranchised Blacks to be elected to parliamentary seats which had existed in the Cape and also provided for the removal of the franchise from Black voters through a two-thirds majority vote of both houses of parliament in joint sessions.

By 1912, Black concern moved further than constitutional issues. The first post-Union administration, responding to the mining industry’s labour demands and the disquiet of White farmers squeezed between capitalist agricultural companies on the one hand and competitive Black peasants on the other, moved swiftly to safeguard its position with these groups. Regulations were introduced, which made breaking a contract a criminal offence. Blacks were also excluded from skilled industrial jobs. The prohibition of rural land ownership by Blacks, or occupation outside the reserves dispossessed many landowners and leasing or tenant-farming relationships between Blacks and Whites were outlawed.

It was therefore made clear that there was more at stake here than just the interests of a small group who through their education at mission stations had come to form an identifiable petty bourgeoisie. The Land Act of 1913 and its complementary labour legislation were the tools used to destroy a whole class of peasant producers, forcing them into already crowded reserves or driving them to seek work as farm labourers and mine workers, and later in the least skilled and most badly paid positions in urban industrial, municipal and domestic employment.

The group of men that assembled at Bloemfontein was well aware of the wider dimensions of the social tragedy being enacted around them. But their particular concern, the fear of any petty bourgeoisie at the time of crisis, was being thrust back into the ranks of the urban and rural poor. The main aim of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC) was to represent the concerns and anxieties of the small professional middle class which was mainly responsible for convening the Bloemfontein meeting.

Its first President was John Dube; a Minister and school headmaster who studied in the USA and was strongly influenced by the American educator and activist Booker T Washington. Pixley ka Isaka Seme, a lawyer and prime mover in organizing the meeting to establish the Congress was appointed Treasurer. The position of Secretary General was occupied by Solomon T Plaaitjie, a court translator, author and newspaper editor who had worked in Kimberly and Johannesburg. These men retained close ties with African aristocracy and the rural chieftaincy, who were conservatives concerned with protecting a moral and social order they correctly perceived to be under attack while at the same time being anxious to promote the general advancement of the Black race in South Africa.

The Congress intended to function as a national forum to discuss the issues which affected them and to act as an organized pressure group. They planned to agitate for changes through the following: peaceful propaganda, the election of Congress sympathizers to legislative bodies through protest and enquiries and finally through passive action or continued movement”

I am sending you this extract from the website “south African history online”, in my opinion a very well researched website.

From it the class nature of the ANC was well established by 1912. Its impetus was the Failed expectations of in specific a tribal royalty. Its history until now simply echoes the basic principle that the class nature of an organisation cannot be changed except by total destruction.

The rise of the working-class mass struggles since 1971 in Namibia and since 1973 in South Africa uncovered the basic reactionary and anti-working-class nature of the tribal petit-bourgeoisie represented by organisations like the ANC and SWAPO. The self-organization of the working class was met with hostility, treachery, and violence. The SWAPO in 1971 distanced itself from the general strike in Namibia by publicly condemning its leaders as irresponsible elements. The emerging leadership of the working class were confronted with severe repression from the side of the South Africans and slander by the tribal nationalists. Since 1976 working class leaders that fled south Africa and Namibia were liquidated physically in exile. Inside South Africa the forms of liquidation were necklacing and summary execution facilitated by the South African state, the latter that operated its official liquidation.

The ANC and SWAPO were vehemently opposed to new working-class organisations that developed since 1976 and earlier. They slandered and ostracized the leaders as collaborators, agents and spies.

The Communist Party that developed out of a severely deformed working class, contradictory struggles, and the indelible influence of Soviet Stalinism became the transmission belt for liberal bourgeois politics into the mass struggles and sustaining the ANC and SWAPO.

The period after 1980 saw the replacement of the leadership of the working-class organisations with tribal nationalists especially in the trade union movement. That explains the rapid and frantic privatization after 1994.

A significant exception was NUMSA, a union of the industrial working class that was well outside the influence of the extremely primitive right wing tribal petit bourgeoisie.

The dichotomy in South African politics that arose after 1994 reflected in NUMSA and the ANC must be understood from the foregoing. The attempted expulsion of NUMSA leaders can perhaps be explained by the strengthening of anti-working class policies by Chinese Stalinism. It is an attack against especially the industrial working class, but it is proof that organised working-class politics is still existing in South Africa. The SAFTU seems further proof of that.

The discussion and understanding needed is about Stalinism and its true class nature in relation to working-class politics in South Africa. It cannot be treated as an ideological current in the working class, but a reflection of degeneration and confusion. But, most seriously the expression of capitalist objectives and political destruction within the working-class movement. Its methodology needs to be dissected and understood as alien and against the methodology of Marxism.

Hewat Beukes

October 2022

Comrade Leonardt, a trade-unionist and socialist in Namibia, asked a few days ago for an explanation for the crisis and war in Ukraine.

He speaks for millions of people all over the world, who have been increasingly horrified by the growing savagery of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is right to denounce this appalling brutality on the part of the Russian government and it is right, as many people are now doing, drop their daily routines and make a great effort to support the millions of Ukrainian refugees fleeing their country.

But it is not enough. We have to do our best to understand the driving forces behind this crisis situation, which is a warning to everybody in the world.

The mounting crisis points to a central feature of world politics, economy and diplomacy: the growing rivalry between the established “Western” (or “First World”, to use that repulsive and misleading term) powers and the rising economic, diplomatic and military powers of Russia and China.

Just over a month ago (January 31, 2022) these words were posted on the “LA Progressive” website:

“This moment in history will be remembered for the massive shift in global relations currently underway. On one side stand the forces of peace and multipolarity led by China, Russia and their allies in the Global South. On the other is the forces of empire and conquest spearheaded by the US and its allies. The conflict between these two camps is about much more than competing visions for planetary development. World politics has transitioned from a war between socialism and capitalism to a protracted struggle for the survival of humanity itself”.

(As the US threatens endless war with Russia over Ukraine, confidence in China surges, by Danny Haiphong).

The Russian invasion of independent sovereign Ukraine has literally dropped a bombshell into this type of wishful thinking. Millions of people around the world are deeply shocked and revolted by the cynicism, brutality and lies with which the Russian state has set about destroying an entire people.

Following immediately on the heels of the wordy joint declaration by President Xi (China) and President Putin (Russia) during the 2022 Winter Olympics, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has severely embarrassed the Chinese state. President Xi’s government urgently needs to distract world public attention from its own treatment of the Tibetan and Uighur peoples and to paint in the most appealing colours possible its seizure of Hong Kong, its intention to seize Taiwan, and its broader ambitions around the world, including the Belt and Road Initiative (“The New Silk Road”) to extend Chinese trading, financial and diplomatic relations around the globe.

Where does Modern Imperialism Come From?

Danny Haiphong and those who think like him understand imperialism simplistically as “the forces of empire and conquest” and specifically identify this solely with “the US and its allies”, as if there had never been any other imperialists in modern times. On this point, as on others, Danny Haiphong is putting aside the discoveries of generations of socialist thinkers and activists who have probed beyond the appearance of “empire and conquest” to discern the social and economic driving forces of the phenomenon.

A good starting point is Chapter 31 of volume 1 of Karl Marx’s Capital, which locates the beginnings of “empire and conquest” in the “genesis of the industrial capitalist” in Europe, specifically in Britain. Moreover, a few pages later in his discussion of what colonialism reveals about the inner workings of capital, Marx explains the direction in which the laws of capitalist society push the whole system. He talks about:

“… the action of the immanent laws of capitalist production itself, by the centralisation of capital. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralisation, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the co-operative form of the labour-process, the conscious technical development of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialised labour, the entanglement of all people in the net of the world market, and with this, the International character of the capitalist regime”. (K.Marx, Capitalvol 1, London 1974 pp 714-715.)

In the same passage, Marx explicitly talks about the way forward in:

“… the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself” until “the knell of capitalist private property sounds, the expropriators are expropriated”.

It was upon these conceptions that Lenin based his analysis of capitalism in its imperialist phase during World War I. His quite short and readable book, Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism,is essential reading for anyone who really wants to understand what is going on.

Imperialism is not the result of “bad” or “evil” people (although it certainly spawns monsters), but of the social relations of capitalism. By reproducing these contradictory relations on a world scale, imperialism ushers in not only constant rivalry and war, invasions and annexations, between imperialist powers and also against their victims, but also the epoch of world revolution of the working class to achieve socialism.

What is the “Global South”?

The “Global south” is a confusing euphemism for the huge territories exploited and oppressed in various ways by imperialism over many centuries and still today. The first point to make about these territories is that they have become part of “the entanglement of all people in the net of the world market” and “the international character of the world market”, albeit under very different conditions from those in the imperialist nations.

Imperialist nations (like the USA, UK, EU, Japan, Russia and China) certainly have “allies” in these parts, but these are either “compradors” (businesspeople who facilitate the exploitation of their compatriots by the imperialists) or outright corrupt puppets. There is no “third road” forward in these countries. Not one of them is going to find a peaceful way forward through a peaceful capitalist development. The end of imperialist exploitation can only come when masses of people join the “revolt of the working class” and fight to end the capitalist system. The very few polities that will be able to become imperialist powers themselves (as, for example, Germany and Japan did in the late 19^thcentury, and Russia and China are doing now) will only be able to do so through brutal dictatorship and the ruthless exploitation of their own people and the oppression of other peoples. The rulers of Myanmar present a good example of a bourgeoisie with that type of ambition.

What is Russia? What is China?

What can Russia and China now bring to the “global south”? These regimes (the Peoples Republic of China and until 1992 the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics) were the products of mass revolutions whose original inspiration was the insights of Marx and Lenin. But for decades their leaders have followed a “capitalist road”. The Chinese government maintains in words an appearance of socialism, and the country is still ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, which maintains a continuing but distant relationship with the actual ideas of Karl Marx. But 30 years ago, the Russian state, the USSR, simply collapsed.

The last “Communist” leaders, Gorbatchev and Yeltsin, threw themselves upon the mercy of the “Western” imperialists. The USSR fell apart. Many national minorities had suffered grievously under Stalinist rule. This was particularly true of the peoples of the Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) and of Ukraine, who demanded autonomy. (It should be remembered that there were also significant number of Russians living in these areas). The huge state-controlled industry and economy of the USSR was “privatised” under conditions which resembled piracy. Gorbatchev and others promised Russian workers that they could join in a “common European home” and enjoy “western” standards of pay and conditions, but the reality was very different. Bandit Russian entrepreneurs fought like jackals with rapacious foreign “investors” over the corpse of the workers’ state. Living-standards plummeted as jobs disappeared and welfare and health services suffered. Life expectancy actually fell in the former USSR.

The “Pacific Rim” financial and monetary crisis of the late 1990s was a body-blow to the fledgling Russian stock market and banking system. The new Russian (bandit) capitalist class lacked the depth of experience and culture of rule of its foreign counterparts and was not able to deal with this situation. With the working class in disarray and leaderless, the only force which could restore a certain amount of order was the old security authorities of the former Soviet Union, and accordingly the kind of electoral dictatorship which we see today was established around the person of what is increasingly looking like President-for-life Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

Putin’s state echoes the brutal barbarity of the Tsarist Empire. The President enjoys wide and unchallengeable powers. The electoral campaigns of opposition politicians encounter novel and inventive obstacles. Serious opponents are shot, poisoned and imprisoned. Personal freedom is curtailed by officially-imposed standards of conformity. Even slightly outrageous behaviour in public is viciously suppressed. The Russian Orthodox Church with all its taboos and prescriptions is the mentor of people’s private lives as well as a source of nationalist fervour. Those like the “Pussy Riot” protestors who took pot-shots at both the patriarchal stupidity of the church and the stifling conformism of the government suffered appalling reprisals. Now, with the invasion of the Ukraine underway, thousands or anti-war demonstrators are brutally arrested and worse, and all independent media outlets are suppressed.

While retaining Communist Party rule, considerable state industries and above all state control of the country’s main banking institutions, the People’s Republic of China some fifty years ago chose a “capitalist road”. US and other Western politicians were at bay against on the one hand a growing independence movement in their (official or unofficial) colonial dependencies and on the other a working class at home determined to preserve the gains it had made in the class struggle and press ahead to make more gains. This struggle of the working-class bit deeply into company profits, while body-bags coming back from Vietnam fuelled a national resistance to imperialist war. Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon looked around for allies – and found them in the Chinese Communist leadership.

The alliance with the Chinese and Russian leaders enabled the USA to broker “independence” deals in the colonies and semi-colonies which left the basic imperialist economic structures in place under new but pliant “liberation” leaders. It enabled the US, British and European capitalist classes to close down industry after industry at “home” and simply pull the rug out from under their “own” working classes, and it meant that the same capitalists could get their products made by Chinese labour in Chinese factories and mines at a fraction of the cost of production “at home”.

By doing this, the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have, over the last forty years, called into being two significant and numerous classes. The first is the now massive Chinese working class, by far the biggest contingent in the world proletariat. The second is the new Chinese entrepreneurial class, the bourgeoisie. For the moment, the CCP has been able to keep the lid on the class struggle between these two classes because for China the economic story of those forty years has been one of almost continuous and massive growth. However, that growth has now stalled. Meanwhile, Chinese businesses have become major players in technical advances and on stock markets around the world. On the other hand, China is now well on the way to projecting her economic power around the world.

No wonder President Xi has taken very public steps to punish high-level corruption, rein in the most powerful business leaders and reassure workers that the next ten years will see improvements in their living standards. “Communist” China has to face the implications of a domestic class struggle just like any nation with a largely capitalist economy dependent on world trade.

China’s Belt and Road initiative has organised logistical, commercial and political arrangements to facilitate the movement of strategic resources, food and raw materials into China and manufactured good out of China. Chinese loans are offered to struggling nations in order to provide the infrastructure that will underpin these arrangements. No doubt, given the moral character of many “liberation” governments, much of this “aid” is understood as a contribution to the President’s retirement fund, but it is still a debt which will have to be repaid one way or another.

When the Chinese state and businesses approach vulnerable foreign territories, their aim is to penetrate into new markets for their products, win new access to raw materials, or gain a strategic or logistical advantage. Like Portugal, Holland and Britain in previous centuries, China establishes trade routes, bases, harbours and transport links around the world as well as investing in foreign countries and buying political influence.

Whatever “allies” China, and to a lesser extent, Russia, do have in these places are in many cases the corrupt and bankrupt local satraps of imperialism dressed up as “liberation” leaders. And China and Russia have played their part in corrupting them.

Many years ago, Russian politicians cut off military aid to the Cuban soldiers who were beating Apartheid South Africa’s forces in Angola. These Soviet politicians stood godfather to the puppet regimes which were established under the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa and South-West Africa People’s Organisation (Swapo) in Namibia at the end of apartheid. Gross forms of discrimination were done away with, while imperialism kept its control of the mineral resources and industry. Poverty, unemployment and oppression is still the lot of the masses there.

After the negotiated withdrawal of the apartheid regime, it was Chinese politicians who persuaded Nelson Mandela to leave the mining industry in South Africa in the hands of capitalist monopolies. They told him that it would be a mistake to take the socialist road. What this meant became evident in 2012 with the massacre of 34 striking miners at the Lonmin owned Marikana platinum mine.

The Chinese government is fostering relationships with some of the most corrupt regimes in Africa, such as Namibia, where the China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) in cahoots with the Swapo government has unlawfully sacked the committee members of the Mineworkers’ Union of Namibia at the Rössing uranium mine. Trade unions were organised in the mine in the days of apartheid in the face of the most evil forms of oppression and exploitation. Most of the labour force was made up of contract labourers provided and disciplined by tribal leaders. Workers endured appalling living and working conditions, but in the end – and with international working-class support – they achieved recognition for their trade union and much improved wages and conditions.

When CNNC bought the mine from Rio Tinto, promises were made that the union and its local executive would continue to be recognised and that there would be no change in workers’ terms and conditions. However, quite soon there were indeed attacks on workers’ health provision and other issues and new middle-management were employed recruited from abroad. The company unilaterally imposed changes in workers’ terms and conditions of employment against the wishes of the workers and their representatives. The local executive of the Mineworkers’ Union of Namibia protested and its officers were unlawfully sacked. They are still in a battle to establish their legal rights to a labour court hearing and to get their jobs back.

The revelations of the “Fishrot” scandal in Namibia heavily implicate Swapo government figures. Foreign interests have bribed ministers and government official to grant fishing quotas above and beyond sustainable levels. The companies which own the fishing fleet have ridden roughshod over crew members’ constitutionally-recognised trade union and health and safety rights. These crew-members, who went out on strike and maintained that strike for several years, were let down by a trade union dominated by Swapo politicians. They were denied access to justice by venal lawyers and corrupt judges.

Thanks to an agreement the government of the People’s Republic of China reached with western imperialist powers during the 1970s, which developed into China’s entry into the world market as a capitalist power herself, the country is now enjoying growing prestige and strength. However, it will inevitably become more and more deeply involved in rivalry and conflict with the established world power, the USA.

The Russian government’s attitude to Ukraine very closely matches the attitude the British ruling class had for many years to Ireland. They thought that Ireland “belonged” to them and that it was part of Great Britain’s “sphere of influence”. It cost the Irish people a great deal of pain and effort to teach them otherwise.

To return to the LA Progressive: It is true that a “massive shift in global relations” is “currently underway”. It is true that there is a “protracted struggle for the survival of humanity itself”. But the points presented in between are a farrago of confusion and deception.

The “shift in global relations” is the emergence of China and Russia as claimants to the role of global imperialist hegemons, challenging the position that the USA has occupied since the mid-20^thcentury.

To dress this “grab for world power” as inspired by “peace and multipolarity” is an enormous misrepresentation of the real world, a misrepresentation which is elaborated as the paragraph goes on. Danny Haiphong asserts that the conflict between socialism and capitalism is a thing of the past. This is the constant message of all enemies of the working class and the constant refrain of all apologists for capitalism. It is a message which disarms workers at the very point that they face the fight for a future.

For nearly two centuries, the movement of the working class to overcome capitalist social relations, which inherently involve oppression, exploitation, war and conquest, has made advances and it has suffered setbacks. The imperialist epoch concentrates all the tensions and contradictions of these social relations and creates the necessity and at the same time the possibility of a socialist revolution. The environmental damage caused by enslavement to the profit motive also makes this revolution essential if humanity is to have a future at all. The key issue is whether the force of progress, the working class, can develop the kind of leadership which can guide that revolution successfully.

Workers International to rebuild the fourth International will work loyally alongside all workers and groups of workers who set about resolving that crisis of leadership.

Bob Archer

10 March 2022

“For about four decades, the west and China engaged with each other economically and diplomatically to the benefit of both. But this era is at an end. The crucial question now is to what extent a process of mutual decoupling can be managed to minimise the economic fallout and avert the risk of conflict.”

(“Averting the risk of a China-US conflict”, Financial Times, 23 December 2021)

During the 1970s, the supposedly Marxist and Communist Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government of China threw a life-line to the crisis-ridden imperialist states of the US and Western Europe. This provided China with access to world markets, modern technology and finance markets. No one can deny that the people of China have a right to all of this. However, the political side of this deal was deeply reactionary, as we will show below. Fifty years down the line, a hugely changed China emerges as a redoubtable rival, within the system of international imperialism, to the powers which have been her quasi-allies for nearly 50 years.

Chinese workers and peasants paid a price for this deal. For almost half a century their underpaid and sweated labour has enriched both a Chinese bourgeoisie and Western finance capital. The price that workers in North America and Europe paid was to undergo a debilitating war of attrition on their class as industry after industry was closed down and “exported”.

Imperialism (capitalism at its highest stage of development) was in an intractable crisis in the 1970s. Throughout North America and Western Europe, a well-organised and confident working class was asserting itself in the workplace and exerting pressure on bourgeois political systems. On the one hand, Soviet troops were stationed in the heart of Europe to the east of the river Elbe, a reminder that the legacy of the Russian Revolution of 1917 still lived, even under a degenerate and corrupt leadership; on the other hand, a post-war generation of workers in the west had grown up under bourgeois governments committed (despite themselves) to full employment and increasing social expenditure on welfare, health, working-class housing, access to justice and educational provision.

Marxism provides an irreplaceable weapon for working-class activists in the shape of Lenin’s 1915 study: Imperialism: The highest stage of capitalism. As far as I know, the best and most systematic attempt to at least sketch out an account of the entanglement of economic, social and political developments in the development of the world since Lenin wrote this is contained in Marxist Considerations on the Crisis by the late Balazs Nagy. Nagy concentrates on the period during and since World War II and has a great detail to say about the situation in the 1970s within which the nefarious alliance between Western imperialism and the leadership of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) came about. Both these works can easily be consulted online by searching the Marxist Internet Archive.

Imperialism in crisis

By the 1970s, an economic boom based on replacing the massive destruction of productive forces during World War II was coming to an end. Part of this boom had involved US capitalists financing growth in Japan, Korea and Western Europe in order to provide a barrier to further expansion of the Soviet bloc and China. However, these clients were now turning into competitors, and they enjoyed the advantages that their work-forces were cheaper and their plant and technique were more modern. Working-class struggles at home, and investment tied up in often ageing plant, made it difficult for UK and US businesses to compete.

A really valuable part of Nagy’s Marxist Considerations is devoted to Marx’s thoughts on what money is, its place in the overall system of capitalism, and how that was reflected in the events of the 1970s.

Imperialism was flailing around in a crisis and the class conflict was heating up. From the early 1960s onwards, increasingly desperate attempts to claw back working-class gains by the employers and their state machines led to ever more bitter class struggles.

These problems, and the growing competition that the established capitalist powers faced from newcomers such as Korea and a resurgent Japan, were reflected in the monetary crisis. After 1944, all the world’s major currencies had been valued by reference to the US Dollar, which itself (and it alone), was anchored in a fixed relationship to gold. But as time passed, this became a burden which the US economy could no longer bear. They could no longer sustain the promise to sell gold to all comers at $35 to the ounce of gold. It fell to President Nixon to take a step into the unknown and break the link between dollars and gold in 1971.

Meanwhile, the masses in the colonial possessions and dependencies of the various capitalist states were fighting for and in many cases winning independence. This threatened the super-profits, which the capitalist states had previously obtained from cheap labour, and their control over valuable sources of raw materials and energy. Where the imperialists could not directly prevent this, they looked for ways to corrupt the new “liberation” regimes and retain what they could of their economic advantages and privileges.

Intensified class struggle

A notable example of the intensified class-struggles in western Europe was provided by the May-June events of 1968 in France, whose impact was felt across Europe and internationally. These events led to an electoral defeat for the “strong man” president Charles de Gaulle. In Britain, Labour governments (under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan), and a Conservative government under Edward Heath, struggled in vain to tame working class militancy.

And all of the contradictions of imperialism were concentrated in the United States, where the Republican President Nixon was grappling with powerful working-class resistance to attempts to claw-back their hard-won gains in wages, working conditions and social rights. Meanwhile the US was losing the war in Vietnam and facing increasingly widespread opposition to the war at home.

It was Nixon’s “fixer”, Henry Kissinger, who lined up a way for his imperialist masters, if not to end their crisis, at least to hold off the collapse of their system. The relationship between President Nixon and his Secretary of State was unusually close and confidential.

From behind the scenes, Kissinger orchestrated the military coup which toppled a left-wing elected government in Chile and murdered President Salvador Allende. 130,000 suspected left-wing activists were rounded up. Thousands were tortured, murdered or simply “disappeared” at the hands of the “Caravan of Death”. At the same time, Kissinger encouraged the government’s “dirty war” against left-wingers in Argentina, where military death-squads kidnaped and murdered activists. He also secured US support for Pakistan’s genocidal war against Bangladesh.

The busy Mr. Kissinger finds allies in Beijing

At the same time, Kissinger had to get the Vietnam war over and off the agenda. His visits to Beijing and Moscow opened the door to the Paris Agreement which achieved that goal. It also opened up a more relaxed relationship with the Soviet Union’s leadership and much closer relations between the US government and the Chinese leadership. A meeting with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in 1971 in Beijing established a growing alliance between the US and Chinese governments and deepened China’s split with the USSR.

By the late 1970s – not without considerable disruption in Chinese society and the political leadership of the CCP – the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was preparing to benefit from the opening up of trade relations with western imperialist partners such as the USA and the UK.

The sheer extent of the “technology transfer” which started then is staggering. Under Deng Xiaoping, a crash programme was started to train 800 000 research scientists in the fields of energy resources, information technology, laser and space technology, high-energy physics and genetics. Plans were laid for 88 new universities. Schools were instructed to identify gifted pupils and prepare and enter them for the highly competitive entrance examinations for these universities. Hundreds of students were dispatched to the US and other countries to catch up with the latest developments in all these fields.

None of this was happening by accident, nor could it have done, given the international relations which had prevailed during the “Cold War”. From 1949 until 1978, Western imperialist countries had inflicted a virtual trade boycott on Russia, Eastern Europe and China – the same policies used today in an attempt to strangle states like Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, who in any way refuse to be dominated by imperialism. This was the other limb of the huge military effort the imperialist states undertake to encircle, isolate and intimidate these countries.

Indeed, no state can survive for long or make real progress towards a socialist society in isolation from world trade, world economy and the international development of industry and science. It was for this very reason that Lenin and the leaders of the Russian Revolution established the Communist International in 1919 in order to lead and organise the world revolution against capitalism/imperialism.

But after Lenin’s death the new leaders who rose to prominence in the USSR undermined the Communist International politically, turning it into a mechanism for imposing their own bureaucratic methods and approaches and Russian-nationalist interests on the Communist Parties around the world. This led to terrible defeats for working class struggles, in particular in China (1926-1927), Germany (1929-1933) and Spain (1936-1939).

By the way, as we will discuss below, not all states that stand up to, resist and even compete with the existing imperialist powers do so on the basis of socialist internationalism. Some nourish their own imperialist ambitions. South Korea and many of the Asian “tigers” we will discuss later had an alliance with US or British imperialism but also advanced their own interests. For example, during the economic and monetary crisis engulfing the Pacific Rim in the late 1990s, many of the “tiger Economies” in the region defied America’s proposed solutions quite robustly. The rulers of Syria and Iran, who are far from being freedom-loving democrats and a very long way away from being socialist revolutionaries, also face and oppose crippling imperialist blockades and boycotts. This does not lend these regimes a progressive social character.

China’s reactionary alliance with western imperialism

In order to win access to world markets, modern technology and sources of vital raw materials and energy, China rulers entered, at a certain level, into a political alliance with Western Imperialism. This alliance freed the hands of capitalists in the USA, Britain, etc., to continue their economic domination of liberated former colonies and dependencies in Africa and South America while handing over governments to often compliant and/or corrupt “independence” regimes, and at the same time enabled these same capitalists to pull the rug out from beneath the feet of their “own” working classes at homeby a massive transfer, or export, of industrial production.

Meanwhile, Western capital has for over a century dreamed of opening up a new area of exploitation in the shape of China’s massive natural and human resources. Rather ageing businesses in the west were able to warm their hands at the fire of China’s industrial development and huge market for consumer goods. The City of London and other finance centres underwent a revival through dealings connected with, for example, selling raw materials like metal ores to China

On 1 January 1979 full diplomatic relations were re-established between the PRC and the USA (the PRC had already ratified a treaty of peace and friendship with Japan). To ram the message home, to make it absolutely clear which side the government of the PRC was taking, the Chinese government at around that time publicly condemned a treaty which the victorious Vietnamese revolutionary government signed with the Soviet government, and denounced Vietnamese efforts to put a stop to Pol Pot’s murderous regime on Cambodia.

Now American manufacturers were able to pull their investments out from the industrial areas of the USA and re-locate their production in China. Back home in the USA, they were hamstrung by trade unions, workers’ rights (limiting the rate of exploitation on the job) and the “on-costs” (“fringe” benefits above and beyond the wage packet) of labour in an advanced capitalist society. American employers (and their British and European counterparts) resented the burden of taxation upon their profits in order to pay for public health, education, sanitation, housing, policing and justice for working-class communities.

China offered a huge reservoir of cheap, adaptable and above all disciplined labour. US and British manufacturers of textiles, clothing and footwear, automobile parts, electronics and novelty goods very quickly shifted their production to China to escape the limitations to profit-making imposed by the US working class. Locally-owned private capitalist concerns also emerged in China as many state industries privatised production and new businesses started up with local capital made accessible by the government via the state-controlled banking system. The key to their success was a consistently-high economic growth rate based on supplying goods to western retailers very cheaply because of the very low wages and very straitened conditions of Chinese workers and the fact that the new Chinese industries could benefit from the latest technical and scientific developments. While the state-controlled Chinese trade unions dominated whatever labour organisation existed, a new breed of business managers was set free to get rich at the expense of workers’ rights and conditions. Much of the labour force was in any case recruited from the countryside, and existed as a disenfranchised semi-illegal population on the fringes of the industrial megacities which sprang up.

Devastated industrial heartlands

Meanwhile, the devastation of whole regions of Europe, and their working-class populations, continued apace. Northern England, the midlands and working-class London; the Scottish midlands; the north of Ireland; the German Ruhrgebiet and the north of France, the US rust belt and the former industrial parts of Chicago, New York, Boston, Baltimore, and many others have been laid waste. Entire industries such as shipbuilding, steelmaking, coal mining, engineering, machine-tool making, bulk chemical production, textile spinning and weaving, have virtually disappeared in these areas. Nothing that governments or employers have done in the last five decades has helped to put the situation right. Is it any wonder that workers in these areas (or rather, very often, the children and grandchildren of actual workers) have in recent years have been misled into voting for (demagogic) politicians who have promised to reverse, the effects of globalisation, “stand up to China” and “Make (X) Great Again! (insert America/Britain/Germany/France etc. in the space provided). These devastating longer-term effects of China’s alliance with the USA (and the character of that alliance) are terrible indeed – and they were completely foreseeable!

Shocking encounter with Chinese employers abroad

Wherever Chinese companies have set up in the West in recent decades, workers have been shocked to discover at first-hand what “labour relations” in modern China really look like. H. Jauch and L. Sakaria paint a bleak picture of the experience of working for Chinese businesses in Namibia:

“Chinese firms have little tradition of unions and organized labour at home. While a detailed survey of labour relations in China is beyond the scope of this paper, we can note that the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) call attention to ‘severe restrictions on trade union rights’, with China not having ratified the core ILO conventions of freedom of association and collective bargaining (ITUC, 2010). In particular, workers are not free to form or join trade unions of their choice, only the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), which is part of the government and party bureaucracy, is recognized in law. In a study comparing labour right in East Asia, China scores at the bottom on both de jure and de facto rights. De facto rights are considered particularly fragile due to weaknesses in terms of political rights and rule of law, with reports of the use of arrests, detention, and violence to harass labour activists and suppress labour rights (Caraway, 2009).” (Chinese investments in Namibia: A labour perspective report,Labour Resource and Research Institute, Namibia (2009).

When the China National Nuclear Corporation bought the Rössing uranium mine in Namibia from Rio Tinto, they guaranteed that workers’ rights and conditions and union recognition would continue as before. The good rights and conditions which workers enjoyed at the mine had been fought for and won in historic struggles against the contract labour system prevalent in South West Africa under South African rule. However, very soon the new management imposed many changes which undermined all these gains, and when the local executive committee of the Miners Union of Namibia tried to object, they were unlawfully sacked and they have a real fight on their hands to assert their legal rights against obstruction by the Namibian state.

Employees of the Chinese-owned Piraeus Container Terminal in Greece have had a similar experience. They report that most of the labour hired to staff this significant investment are not directly employed but “outsourced”. Workers’ collectives and organisations are thus fragmented, with the result that labour regulations and collective bargaining have become “empty shells”.

In 2018, journalist Despina Papageorgiou described how an employee who reported abysmal working conditions in the Chinese part of the port:

“… was allegedly fired for trying to raise concerns about safety violations and promote a workers’ committee He sued COSCO in 2012. Urinating in bottles due to a lack of toilet breaks, horrendous safety conditions, and being called to work at the last minute were among his accusations. Reports verified such accounts. Dock workers addressed an open letter to the Greek president in 2013 voicing similar concerns.

“COSCO employees went on their first-ever strike in July 2014, called by a general assembly. They worked up to 16 hours daily and claimed that work accidents were not registered. Apparently to avoid paying them the proper wage, dozens were registered as ‘figs and raisins packaging workers’. The workers managed to found a union, the Union of Container Handling Workers in Piraeus Port (ENEDEP), in 2014. Through negotiations and strikes, the union achieved improvements like breaks, a minimum daily wage, and minimum monthly wages. Until then, every subcontractor paid workers according to a different wage system. However, daily wages remain fixed—not taking into account weekends and holidays.

“In 2017, shortly after the Chinese took full control of OLP and Pier I, a new OLP General Staff Labour Regulation extended working time from 7.5 hours per day and 37.5 per week to 8 and 40, respectively, while providing for a seven-day work week without extra pay on weekends or holidays, “flexible” forms of labour, and simplified lay-offs. Critics argue this regulation paved the way for extending subcontracting in Pier I.”

At the time of writing, car workers at the Chinese-owned First Automobile Works (FAW) plant in Gqeberha, South Africa, including casual workers, were involved in a struggle for a wage-increase, help with medical costs and full-time employment for all the casual workers. A key issue for the NUMSA union is to get the company to sign up to the Automotive Manufacturers Employers Association and accept collective bargaining. Workers report that the Chinese management constantly renege on verbal promises.

Implications of the Belt and Road Initiative

The Chinese Government has established a China/Pakistan Economic corridor (CPEC) with the government of Pakistan, and the China Overseas Port Holding Company (COPHC) has taken over the operation of the strategic Arabian Sea port of Gwadar in Balochistan on a 40-year lease, monopolising the lion’s share of revenues from the port and the Gwadar Free Zone. The UK Guardiannewspaper (20 August 2021) reported:

“Protests have erupted in Pakistan’s port city Gwadar against a severe shortage of water and electricity and threats to livelihoods, part of a growing backlash against China’s multibillion-dollar belt and road projects in the country.

“This week, demonstrators including fishers and other local workers blocked the roads in Gwadar, a coastal town in Balochistan. They burned tyres, chanted slogans and largely shut down the city, to demand water and electricity and a stop to Chinese trawlers illegally fishing in the nearby waters and then taking the fish to China. Two people were injured when the authorities cracked down on the protesters.”

Asian tigers fore-runners of China’s growth

When they opened their alliance with China in the 1970s, the imperialists had learned from the way capitalism had been adopted by Japan in the second half of the 19^thcentury, and how the “tiger” economies had developed after 1945.

Western capitalism, for its part, had developed in an extended process, spread over many centuries, which involved the emergence of a modern bourgeoisie at war with the structures and ideologies of the feudal middle-ages. They had to fashion from the ground up and in a series of revolutionary convulsions the political and social instruments and structures through which society as a whole could overcome this past. This involved popular revolutions and the establishment of political democracy. The intellectual movement known as The Enlightenment enthroned scientific practices against received dogma and superstition as the basis for reliable knowledge. (Nevertheless, this movement’s roots in bourgeois social relations and practices is revealed, for example, in the justification of African slavery by a number of its prominent luminaries, and their formulation of so-called “scientific” race theories).

Japan, however, entered the process at a much later stage, when capitalism was already morphing into modern imperialism. Rather than a revolutionary bourgeoisie, a tightly-integrated sector of the old ruling class switched to capitalism (not without internal struggles) and simply imported wholesale the best available models offered by the advanced capitalist west.

The late Balazs Nagy explains the process very well in his book Marxist Considerations on the Crisis, and a significant section of that book deals with Japan’s road to capitalism. The working class which provided the labour force in Japan did so under extremely adverse conditions of oppression and exploitation.

And this became the template for the so-called “tiger” economies which arose in South-East Asia after World War II, in particular in South Korea. The essay The Asian Tigers from Independence to Industrialisation(attached as an appendix to this article), which, by the way, makes no academic claim to be more than a useful background reading on the topic, gives a lively account of how authoritarian South-East Asian governments have bulldozed a quite different path to capitalist economic success from the traditional “western” route.

How they Justify all this

The Chinese Communist Party authorities still try to foster around the world, at least among a layer of political, trade union and academic personnel who have roots in former Communist movements, a conviction that the Chinese state is still in some sense pursuing a Communist or a Marxist “line”.

Characteristic arguments along these lines can be found on the Learning from Chinawebsite which publishes articles over the name of the former member of the International Marxist Group in the UK, John Ross. (https://www.learningfromchina.net)

The basic argument they present is that China’s truly unparalleled economic progress in the last 40 years justifies everything and trumps every possible criticism. This is asserted in the same gruff, overbearing and triumphalist tone that trade unionists encounter when their Chinese employers brusquely inform them that they are about to tear up existing collective bargaining procedures and bypass long-established and legally enacted labour rights.

Next, it is argued that the Chinese Communists have learned from the Soviet “mistake” of complete state ownership and control of the economy after 1928, which, it is asserted, was the cause of its failure and the collapse of the USSR in the 1990s (1). Elements of this argument can be found in every bourgeois critique of the USSR and of Communism in general.

Sensing that more needs to be said, Ross goes on to reveal that the author of the 1978 turn of the Chinese leadership was none other than Karl Marx himself! Marx had noted, in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme, that in the early years of its existence, a socialist state would not yet be able to go beyond the wages system, where the level of a worker’s pay is established by the workings of the market.

Only later, once economic planning has brought about a massive improvement in the means of production, could a thoroughly socialist system be introduced, where each person gives according to their abilities to the common stock of goods and services and takes according to their needs.

Ross’s sleight of hand here was to insert the idea that, in that early period, Marx somehow proposed that the (large-scale) means of production should remain in the hands of capitalist owners, as happens now in many cases in the PRC.

Marx proposed no such thing! He devoted several pages of comments to point 3 of the programme which the newly fused German socialist party adopted at the 1875 Gotha congress, but he did not say a word about privately-owned capitalist enterprises surviving at all, let alone as a major economic force. The “defects” he anticipated in “the first phase of a society, as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth-pangs from capitalist society” were connected with the fact that the conceptions of “rights” embodied in the wage system under capitalism will persist for a while even after the abolition of the capitalists.

All in all, the arguments of those ideologues who support the main lines of the policy of the Chinese state amount to three ideas:

1. All those who oppose the Chinese state really back and support the western powers, who are rapacious and brutal imperialists. All we can reply is: No we are not: Workers International has consistently opposed imperialism in every shape and form, whereas the CCP have been in an alliance with the chief imperialists for nearly 50 years!

2. Everything that the Chinese state and various Chinese capitalist enterprises do is justified by the incredible (and they are incredible) achievements of Chinese economy over recent decades. On this, all we can reply is: China as a world power is no less of a danger to the people of the world than Britain or the USA. Imperialism as a system is still as Lenin described it in 1915. The question is, can the working class and the masses organise their forces to overcome this system?

3. “Common Prosperity”: the standard of living of the Chinese working class may be unacceptably low now, say the apologists, but within a few decades the rich and powerful will be forced by a wise and benevolent government to make concessions which will improve the standard of living of the masses. To this, Workers International replies: Marx did indeed write (as Ross solemnly informs us): “Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby”. The “turn” of the CCP leadership in the 1970s has called into being a rich and powerful capitalist class alongside a huge working class. Class divisions and class conflict continued to exist in Soviet Russia after the revolution of 1917, and they clearly continue to exist in China today. After several years of the “New Economic Policy” adopted in Russia as a temporary emergency measure in the early 1920s, the better-off peasants won the leadership of the countryside and felt confident enough to challenge Soviet power itself. The bureaucratic clique which had seized control of the Communist Party ignored frantic warnings from the Left Opposition that an urgent programme of industrialisation was needed to provide the mass of the peasantry with mechanical and technical resources which would have made collectivisation a popular step forward. Nothing was done until the threat became palpable, and what was done (forced collectivisation and chaotic and break-neck industrialisation) was by then a series of grotesque crimes against humanity. How will China fare as the newly-rich bourgeoisie and the newly-numerous working class square up to each other? Promises of moderate improvements in working-class living standards in twenty or thirty years’ time might not be enough to control the situation.

What is China?

Many of us insisted in defining the Soviet Union (when it still existed) as a deformed workers’ state. That definition was based on a precise analysis of the forces involved in the October Revolution, Soviet power, and the subsequent fate of the Soviet Union, the Communist International and the world revolution. We pointed out that the collapse of the Soviet Union, which put an end to the deformed workers state, was in its own way a confirmation of that definition. We still defend the correctness of that definition against those who asserted that the Soviet Union had in its lifetime become a “state capitalist” formation.

A class definition of the Chinese Communist Party, its assumption of power in 1949 and the resulting state and economy is more difficult. The character of the historic Chinese empire does not fit easily into social categories familiar in European history. The first three decades of the life of the CCP involved horrific sacrifice and struggle in the midst of the collapse of the Empire, ruthless foreign intervention and a three-sided civil war with warlords and the Guo Min Dang. The full story of that period and a proper understanding of nature of the county a hundred years ago as that struggle started are minimum requirements for reaching a conclusion on that. Heroic tales (and the real history abounds with tales of resistance, heroism and sacrifice) do not resolve the question.

A look at the history of the People’s Republic of China since 1949 does not establish beyond doubt its credentials as a workers’ state. That is hardly surprising since the population in 1949 consisted so overwhelmingly of peasant farmers. However, the history since then does not demonstrate the actual existence of workers’ power in the state. Because of the Hukou system, large parts of the new working class which has arisen since the 1970s do not enjoy access to education, health provision and housing. The savings to the employers which this provides resemble the super-exploitation of a semi-colonial workforce. For many of these workers, health services are far less than what workers in the UK enjoy and expect. It is more tempting to see a country run by a bureaucracy ruling and remaining in power by dint of an adroit and very often brutally cynical balancing act between opposing forces.

Nearly half a century of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” has produced a very unequal society. The promises made in connection with the policy of “Common Prosperity”, as well as the steps taken to curb conspicuous consumption and wayward behaviour on the part of the newly-rich and celebrities (and to deal with over-extended growth in some sectors) are indications of what the CCP will face more and more in the future.

The People’s Republic of China is clearly integrated into the system of world imperialism. Workers everywhere who come into contact with Chinese businesses or work for them judge them as workers will judge their employers, and their judgement is damning. Chinese companies in China treat workers badly. Chinese pay is low compared with pay in the west. Working conditions are worse. The official unions do not provide a channel of protest, but form a wing of the state. Protest leads to beatings and imprisonment.

The defence of workers’ rights, and of the masses around the world, depends of the construction of an international workers’ party based on Marxism and a confrontation with all imperialist and quasi-imperialist forces which seek to feather their own nests at the expense of the working class and the masses.

Bob Archer, January 2022

Footnote:
1. Posing the problem this way allows Ross to avoid any mention of the very full and detailed debate over the New Economic Policy (NEP) when it was adopted in Soviet Russia in 1921-1922 and subsequently. These were measures to re-establish the bases of an economy torn apart by years of war, revolution and civil war. The Bolsheviks certainly did introduce temporarily a number of market reforms which did enable industry and agriculture to recover – which they started to do. However, the Soviet State retained a large measure of control and, for example, never abandoned its monopoly over foreign trade.

There is not space here to debate the whole matter, but Ross should recall that the Left Opposition (of which he may have some distant memory) understood very well that if the NEP became embedded, and unless the state’s own manufacturing industry could make real planned progress, the social forces that particularly prospered under NEP, the NEPmen traders and the richer peasants, would threaten the existence of the Soviet State itself.

These warnings were ignored by Stalin, Bukharin and others, who urged precisely these forces to “enrich themselves”. But when the warnings from the Left Opposition were borne out, and the Soviet Union was threatened in the late 1920s by a revolt led by the rich peasants (Kulaks), the bureaucracy led by Stalin had to switch in utter panic to a thoroughly military-bureaucratic set of solutions, “liquidating the Kulaks as a class” during a murderous and unspeakably violent “collectivisation” of the peasantry and a development of industry at a breakneck pace which was underpinned by convict labour.

The failure of Soviet economy was not rooted in state planning, but in the weaknesses of bureaucraticstate planning. The twin roots of the failure were the bureaucracy which had seized power in the workers’ state and the lack of access to the world economy.

All these issues are discussed in detail in Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed, which indeed becomes more relevant than ever in today’s world.

Appendix

“Tiger Countries” (The Asian Tigers from Independence to Industrialisation)The Asian Tigers from Independence to Industrialisation

Bruno Marshall Shirleynload PDF

Oct 16 2014 

This content was originally written for an undergraduate or Master’s program. It is published as part of our mission to showcase peer-leading papers written by students during their studies. This work can be used for background reading and research, but should not be cited as an expert source or used in place of scholarly articles/books.

Development, Legitimacy, and the Role of the State: The Asian Tigers from Independence to Industrialisation

Note: Whenever possible Simplified Pinyin has been used throughout for the transliteration of Chinese names and places for its ease of use and predominance in modern literature. As Taiwan typically uses the more archaic Wade-Giles system readers may be unfamiliar with Pinyin names for individuals like Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-Shek in WG) or even Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-Tung in WG), but they have been employed for consistency throughout.

As recently as the early 1960s South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong (the “Asian Tigers”) were considered to be a part of the third world: Harvey and Lee rather unkindly refer to it as “economic backwardness.”[1] Since the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, praise of the “Asian Miracle” has dwindled in academia,[2] yet the Tigers still stand as rare examples of states which have successfully “developed” in a manner no one could have predicted 50 years ago – and at a considerably faster rate than any of our current efforts at third-world development seem to be proceeding. Are there lessons to be learnt from the rapid economic growth of the Tigers, from the 1960s through to the 1990s, and do these have a practical application in contemporary development?

In 1949 Harry Truman introduced the concept of development to the world, identifying it as a key priority of the West in order to maintain peace and prosperity amongst all the people of the world.[3] In the beginnings of the great ideological war against Communism, he took care to articulate that his program of development would be “based on the concept on of democratic fair-dealing.” This vision shapes the nature of development even today, with economic development and state-building more generally predicated on the assumption that if liberal democracy is established then all other aspects of development will naturally follow. We see this in IMF loan conditionality, requiring liberalisation of economies in regions where the government formally had tight control,[4] and even in post-conflict statebuilding exercises, where the end goal is often the establishment of democratic elections.[5]

I will not dispute the value of democracy, but there is a fundamental difference between a thing being good in its own right and a good thing leading to other good things. The examples of the Tigers show us an alternate path to development: a strong central government guiding the economy rapidly forward through distinct stages of development until it reaches full industrialisation. This hypothesis, the “developmental state,” is one that has been argued for by a number of economists for some time now. However if we accept this as a viable method of development two questions remain unanswered: why was it particularly successful in East Asia, and how can we transplant it to other parts of the world in need?

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary: How Economists Think the Garden Grows

Before examining the economic development of the Asian Tigers it is important to identify the theoretical framework in which they might sit. Models for economic development are as varied as there are development economists, but at the risk of sacrificing diversity for ease of analysis we can broadly identify three distinct models. These three models are less cohesive blueprints and more categories of development policy broadly derived from the Neoliberal, Keynesian and Heterodox economic traditions respectively, which for our purposes we can identify as Market-led, Interventionalist and State-led models for economic development.[6]

The Market-led development model is that traditionally pushed by the IMF, advocating market liberalisation following a classical faith in the rationality of market actors.[7] The blame for the failures of some economies and the success of others is placed at the feet of interfering governments, and the removal of tariffs and other barriers to trade liberalisation are seen as an important initial step in the development process.[8] According to advocates of this model for development, a free market will naturally result in development of those industries that are most efficient, described in HOS theory as specialisation in production of goods produced using their relatively-abundant factor (to the world market).[9]

In practical terms, the liberalisation of both the domestic market and international trade is expected to result in semi-sustainable economies relying on export of either raw materials or (in land-scarce, labour-abundant states) perhaps even the product of light industry to balance the import of the machinery and other tools needed for these industries.[10] While critics point out that this leaves high value-added industries controlled by the developed countries of today, with the countries pursuing this model stuck with low-value-added industries like agriculture, resource extraction, and at best light industry, advocates would respond that it is still a clear improvement over the current situation of developing states.[11]

The second model for economic development proposed is what we might call the Interventionalist model. This model broadly follows from the writing of Lord Keynes and his views on the role of government in moderating the errors of the free market when necessary.[12] The Interventionalist development model acknowledges the role of actors in the free market but also the need for government action and intervention in stimulating growth and reducing unemployment.[13] Actors may be rational, but oversight is needed to stabilise output. Chandavarkar, while refuting the existence of a Keynesian model for development, does concede that he presented the first “economic rationale for a central bank as a development agency,”[14] setting the stage for a development model in which both government and market work together to achieve economic growth and ultimately development. The actual policies pursued by the state will be highly reactive and tailored to the needs of the market.

This skepticism regarding the ability of market actors is taken to its logical conclusion in our third model for economic development, the State-led model. This is borne out of the Heterodox tradition, as it refutes a basic principle of classical economics that what is good for the rational actor is good for the economy as a whole. The criticism is hinted at above in the limitations of market-led growth, as rational actors will always focus on the optimal activity available to them at the time of decision making, whereas development should always focus on improving future activities. The clearest way to illustrate this is with an example in the two-factor HOS tradition: given Country A’s high level of industry and skilled labour, and their trading partner Country B’s high level of unskilled labour, the optimum activity for entrepeneurs in B to engage in would be along the lines of light industries or resource extraction. This unfortunately reinforces the imbalance in value-added activities between A and B. For B to develop its industrial base and ultimately engage in higher value-added activities in the future, it would require considerable investment in activities that currently are sub-optimum. As rational actors would never engage in sub-optimum activities, it requires the guidance of the state to invest in those industries which will (hopefully) pay off in future, and therefore develop the economy as a whole.

This model is essentially a reworking of the “developmental state” hypothesis used by commentators to explain the very cases we will be examining, but it has not received much favour as a model for development. Chang and Grabel suggest that this results from the challenge a state-centric development model posed to the Neoliberal establishment, an argument discussed in a later section.[15] As a model, Chang and Grabel suggest the following policies should be pursued by the government seeking development: trade protectionism while new industries are developing, a clear strategy for systemic development of higher-value-added industries, a cautious approach to privitisation and the nationalisation of some industries where appropriate, a relaxed approach to intellectual property law and strict control of both capital and foreign debt.[16]

As we will see below, and unsurprisingly given its origins in analysis of the Asian Tigers themselves, all of the countries under discussion conform to the state-led development model in contrast to the market-led or state-intervention models. However supporters of the market-led and interventionist models would argue that while state-led development may have been effective in East Asia, it is not applicable to other parts of the world.[17] The failures of state-led economies like China under Mao, North Korea and the Soviet Union all indicate that strong states do not necessarily mean strong economies – there must be some other factors missing from past analyses of development in the Asian Tigers that can make the state-led model work.

The Tigers’ Stripes: Case Studies in Succesful State-led Development

South Korea

In 1945 South Korea was finally made independent of Japanese rule, only to immediately be placed under US military occupation.[18] The long-awaited autonomy it achieved was rapidly overshadowed by the Korean War (1950-3) with the North, which destroyed two-thirds of existing production facilities worth some three times the GNP.[19] The long road from these humble origins to its current position in the G20 can be analysed as a systemic movement in four discrete phases, beginning in the Rhee era but mostly taking place under the Park government (both before and after the establishment of yushin government).

The first phase of development constituted recovery from the devastation of the war, with an average of 15.9% of GNP coming from US aid (with a peak of 22.9% in 1957).[20] 64% of investment savings were US-owned, and Import Substitution Industrialisation was adopted with 30% of aid going towards agricultural equipment.[21] Worker’s unions were suppressed by the Rhee government to keep labour cheap.[22] Korean economic growth in this period was highly dependent on US aid and investment savings and vulnerable to intense fluctuations.[23]

The Park coup in 1961 demarcates the second phase of Korean economic development: the development of light industries and export-oriented growth. Having recovered from the war and no longer entirely reliant on US aid to pay for imports, the Korean economy could now begin to utilise its cheap labour force to grow through exportation of light industrial goods. Here we begin to see the first clear departure from the Market-led or even Interventionalist models of growth in the adoption of the First Five-Year Economic Development Plan (1962). This established clear macro-economic growth targets in investment, industrial structure and trade balance, and established trade policy, industrial policy, and macro-economic policy in pursuit of these goals. This was called “guided capitalism,” in which “the state shall either directly participate or indirectly render guidance” to key industries, particularly the labour-intenstive light industries that would lead to rapid export growth.[24]

To return to classical terminology, the optimum activity at this phase in Korean history for an individual actor to participate in would be those same light industries. Unfortunately if this were the case then the Korean economy would have been perpetually stuck in the same phase with no high-value-added industries being developed. Obviously this did not happen. While growth in the early 1960s was fantastic, as high as 10% in some years, the Park government did not see this as a sustainable means of growth. The foreign currency earnt through this explosion of export was reinvested in the advanced technologies and machinery which was necessary to progress to the next stage of development, while tariffs and subsidies were used to shield growing advanced industries from the international market.[25]

This set up the third stage of development, articulated in Park’s second Five-Year Plan: the development of heavy and chemical industries, supported by legislation and key policy instruments.[26] Foreign capital, though still under heavy government restrictions, was sought to help bolster growth and exports grew at almost 39.2% per annum.[27] This phase of development has lasted the longest of any thus far, with export-driven growth from heavy industry carrying Korea forwards until the early nineties. During this period factor input increases, both in capital accumulation and in quality of labour through education, accounted for a massive degree of growth in industrial output, setting up Korea well for the next phase of development.[28]

The 1990s saw a number of significant changes in the South Korean economy and marked the fourth and current phase of development, the push into high tech industry. The World Bank data on high-technology exports sadly only extends as far back as 1988, but even this shows a dramatic change. In 1988 high-technology exports made up only 15% of total export, but this number increases almost by an entire percentile every following year.[29] This international demand for Korean goods, coupled with a dramatic increase in domestic consumption and higher standards of living across society, marked the definite movement of Korea into “successful state” status.

In Korea’s economic history we can identify four discrete phases of development: a period of Import Substitution Industrialisation; the development of light industry and export-led growth while reinvesting in and protecting heavy industry; the development of heavy industry, increases in labour quality through education and permissal of limited degrees of foreign capital; and finally the development of the high-tech industry, the skilled labour required for which stimulating domestic consumption. The second through fourth phase show remarkably steady GDP growth in all but three years: the year of Park’s assassination and the 1997 and 2003 crises.

All of this was driven by the central state with a clear end-goal in mind and a range of effective legislative and policy tools for implementation. Aggressive reinvestment in infrastructure, state-owned industries and clearly communicated economic plans over a long period of time allowed for a progression through distinct phases of development even when reinvestment in the newer phases would have appeared the less optimal to individual market actors.[30] It was this incessant push forward that eventually led to Korea’s development as a fully industrialised and technological economy.

Taiwan

Taiwan shares a similar story to Korea, although at least in economic terms its origins are marginally less humble. Our story again begins at the end of a war, but Taiwan itself was left relatively unscathed by the fighting and still bearing the remnants of Japanese colonial attempts at development: some established agricultural exports in rice, sugar and pineapples, basic food processing plants and a handful of textile factories.[31] Leadership initially adopted a policy of ISI in pursuit of subsistence, but due to bad experiences with inflation on the mainland a more aggressive growth policy was not adopted until the USA threatened to reduce aid in the 1950s.[32] Only then did Jiang and the GMD begin to industrialise along the lines we saw in Korea.

Before this period the primary sector (mainly agriculture and fishery) accounted for nearly a third of GDP before rapidly dropping to just 7% in the industrial explosion, and food processing (the dominant industry on GMD occupation) fell from 47% of manufactory output in the 1950s to just 31% in the industrialised 60s, finally dropping to 12% in the early 1980s (the end of the heavy industry era).[33] Interestingly after the initial boom of light industry (particularly textiles) we would expect to see from from Korea’s experience, light industry remained statistically significant all the way into the 1980s.[34]

Heavy industry was quickly established, in particular steel, electronics and petrochemical, as soon as the state ascertained that domestic and international demand was sufficient.[35] While other state firms were privatised during the development process to encourage foreign investment and expertise, these industries were always seen as essential to reconquest of the mainland and so remained firmly nationalised.[36]

While Yongping Wu points out that small- to mid-sized firms had an important role to play during this phase of development,[37] the state never lost its firm grip over the direction of the economy. A key measure here was control of foreign exchange, limiting the access of private firms to imported materials and serving both to keep up domestic demand for processed raw materials (which was done in state firms and onsold to selected firms) and to reduce capital risk.[38]

Vincent Chang describes the final phase in economic development, to fully-fledged technological state. Once the competitive advantage in labour-intensive products seemed to be slipping (both as a result of a more educated workforce and the rising competition from China in the late 1970s) the state essentially decided to jump before they were pushed: “the export-oriented economic structure… must be upgraded to become more technology- and skill-intensive.”[39] The state’s role in “the inception of pivotal technologies and in the export vigour of Taiwan’s information industry,” as well as in key large-scale industries like semiconductor production was immense,[40] and as in Korea led to the development of a substantive skilled-labour population who with their increased disposable incomes stimulated both domestic consumption and the service industry.

Taiwan followed a similar trajectory to Korea in its progression through four distinct stages of development, though with two exceptions of note: first that light industry played a key role in the economy all the way into the 1980s, and second that leadership did not seek to move beyond the first phase until threatened with aid reductions by the US. The unexpected lack of decline in light industry once heavier industries were developed could perhaps be attributable to the role of small- and mid-sized industries as discussed by Chang – with most heavy industries nationalised but small-scale entrepreneurship tolerated, this is a logical industry to gravitate towards. The second point is by far more significant, and may contain a clue as to the underlying reason that the Asian Tigers successfully developed through state-led, rather than market-led or interventionalist, methods.

The City-States: Singapore and Hong Kong

Singapore was perhaps the most “democratic” of the Tigers in its early life, if in name only: so charismatic was the leadership of Li Guangyao that in the words of a British diplomat “politics disappeared” leaving only an “administrative state.”[41] After reluctantly accepting Singapore’s independence from Malaysia in 1965, Li took control of Singaporean politics in “soft authoritarianism” until his retirement in 2011 and much of Singapore’s success is directly attributed to his personal vision and ability.[42]

Singapore’s development follows a now-familiar path. While not facing the challenges of rebuilding after a war, Singapore stood alone as a modern city-state with too little land to effectively feed its citizens. Food and water had to be provided for by imports, necessitating a quick push towards export-oriented light industries to balance trade.[43] Interestingly Singapore sought to supplement the local lack of technical and managerial knowledge by attracting international firms, albeit in a limited fashion, using their capital and resources to kick-start the light industry that would provide the backbone of Singapore’s economy for the next few decades.[44]

The 1970s saw a dramatic change in the structure of Singapore’s economy, with manufacturing and heavy industry becoming increasingly more of a priority throughout the 1970s and 80s.[45] This was largely in response to the challenge that China’s burgeoning light industry under Deng posed to Singapore’s output, and was pushed forward by the central government through a combination of reinvestment of wages in industry, infrastructure, housing and communications through the Central Provident Fund and an increase in minimum wage, forcing employers to seek more efficient modes of production.[46]

Unlike Taiwan and South Korea, Singapore’s move to the final phase of development was not marked by the establishment of the high-tech industry but rather by fulfillment of Stamford Raffles’ original vision for Singapore as the trading and financial hub of Southeast Asia.[47] Trade, import refinement and finance all require skilled labour, much like high tech industry, and Singapore’s unique geographic position and recent market liberalisation allow this to serve as the high-level industry that cements its position as a fully developed nation, just as high tech industries do for South Korea and Taiwan.

Given today’s liberal markets, and the nominal democracy of Singapore’s modern history, it is tempting to think of Singapore as an example of liberal market-led development in action. However the importance of the Central Providence Fund in establishing the infrastructure needed for heavy industry and the dominant role of Li in both politics and economic direction both suggest that the state was the principal mover in the development of Singapore’s economy, with liberal elements only being introduced in the late phases of development to pave the way to a financial and trade hub.

Hong Kong is similar in many ways to Singapore, although it is notable for being the most consistently laissez-faire (and therefore market-led) of the Tigers. As in Singapore the pressing need to balance trade deficits due to poor agricultural potential led to a rapid development of light industry, but then advocates of market-led development would argue that the next steps through to trade and financial services would have been a logical step for market actors to take, given the proximity to China and the historical nature of Hong Kong as a trade port.[48]

The importance of market actors in the development of Hong Kong cannot be denied, but there are some features of development (glossed over in Neoliberal accounts) that suggest that the state had a not-insignificant role in guiding the economy. In particular Vogel points to the allocation of public funds, with the vast majority diverted to developing the infrastructure that would be required by heavier industries – roads, universities, and most interestingly land development specifically for the use of factories; and all this a good decade before there was any significant market-led demand for these public goods.[49] The state may have left market actors to find their own way, but they were not subtle about putting a map in their hands.

Hong Kong, like Singapore, ended up as a financial centre for its region as well as a major industrial producer – not bad for a former entrepot.[50] It is unusual among the Tigers for having a fairly consistent laissez-faire approach to the market, and is by far the closest to a market-led model of development. However this is not to say that the state had no hand in pushing development forward when the market might have been content to stay in one phase.

When taken into consideration with the other Tigers, we have a clear idea of how their economies developed. In all cases barring to an extent Hong Kong, a strong central state created a long-term plan for development that saw it through from the early days of ISI all the way to the establishment of advanced technological or financial industries. The state was able to implement these plans through a range of policy tools, without considerable domestic challenges and with the ability to adapt the details of the plans to the challenges they encountered along the way. Rather than dwell in any particular phases of development, the Tigers pushed forward, aggressively reinvesting in the infrastructure needed to establish the next phase and protect it from the advantages of the international market until it was ready to shoulder the burden of economic growth. This saw them through, with some variation, from backwards islands, peninsulas, and losers in war, to four of the most powerful economies in East Asia. But can this success be replicated elsewhere?

The Missing Link: Leadership and Legitimacy

We may now have a model for economic development, but this does not not mean that we can easily transplant it to other parts of the world. Other countries, notably the Soviet Union, Maoist China and North Korea, have attempted to lead development from the state with little success. Why was state-led development successful in the Tigers, but not elsewhere? And can we replicate this in other parts of the world?

Advocates of market-led or interventionalist growth would say that we could not. According to them the development of the Tigers, while ultimately successful, was highly idiosyncratic to the East Asian region and cannot be exported elsewhere, the universal alternative obviously being the liberalisation of markets (to the varying degrees required of their models). The most common explanation of the Tiger’s success is that it was in some way due to their shared Confucian culture.[51] Confucianism’s emphasis on social hierarchy and the nation-family, they would say, provides East Asians with the unique outlook required to tolerate the submission of personal economic interest to the state’s long-term goals. Other parts of the world, lacking such an ingrained cultural disposition, would not accept the state’s mandate and frustrate progress.

Beyond the obvious objection that there are still a number of Confucian states in the early stages of development, Chang has considerable disdain for this argument. He describes culture as having a “Jekyll and Hyde” nature, the positives and negatives being called on as needed to justify an argument.[52] The first example he gives here is an account of an Australian businessman touring a Japanese factory in 1915 and concluding that the reason for Japan’s then-backwardsness was due to the inherent cultural laziness of the Japanese people. How times (and cultural stereotypes) have changed. Indeed, when East Asia was still in the early stages of development the blame was placed as firmly on Confucianism as its current success is today. Chang’s response to the culturalist argument is essentially that within any culture or religion an observer can find sufficient characteristics to justify just about any argument that they wish to make, which somewhat undermines the claim that state-led development can only be successful in countries with a certain culture. “No culture,” he concludes, “is either unequivocally good or bad for economic development. Everything depends on what people do with the raw material of their culture.”[53]

If the success of state-led development in East Asia cannot be attributed to their shared culture, then what? I would suggest the missing link here is the legitimacy of these countries’ leaders. All four Tigers had a strong central leadership able to effectively steer the direction of the economy without significant internal challenges, an indication that all enjoyed considerable legitimacy. Most governments today derive their legitimacy from democratic elections – when the Obama administration makes a decision, the decision is made by the people and for the people. Older forms of government have derived their legitimacy from the Divine Right of kings or from Hobbes’s Leviathan, to name a few examples. But from where did the leaders of the Tigers derive their legitimacy?

In all four cases, to varying degrees, the legitimacy (and continued survival) of the leadership rested in some way on the continual economic success that they were able to provide to the people. This meant that the leaders of all four of these countries had considerable motivation to aggressively seek sustainable development, and the fact that legitimacy was based on neither democracy (which can lead to instability and a lack of long-term planning) or ideology (as in the Communist states, binding development to a prescribed course with no room for adaption) allowed them to pursue this sustained development with stability and flexibility, explaining their particular success.

The unity and legitimacy of Korean leadership was based on “forced unity” against the ideological foe of the North.[54] The division was based on ideological grounds, with leaders of both North and South claiming to represent the ideology that was in the people’s best interests, and so the success of either leadership could best be gauged by their subjects by how much better off they appeared to be when compared to their neighbours. Park knew that he was relatively safe from uprising (though apparently not from assassination) because the USA would not tolerate the fall of an anti-Communist regime, meaning that he had considerable stability and the ability to make long-term plans, but he also knew that the best means to maintain legitimacy was by proving ideological superiority over the North by achieving greater economic gains.[55]

Even today, much of Taiwan’s identity is based around its relationship with mainland China, and a recent study concluded that while public identification with the mainland is less clamourous than it was a decade ago, continuous GMD leadership until the 2000 elections meant that the leadership was always committed to their One China policy.[56] This rivalry with the Mainland, shared by both leadership and wider society, provided the legitimisation for continuous GMD rule[57] and again gave a strong economic focus to the regime: they needed a strong economy both to prove superiority over the PRC but more importantly to support the military forces that they needed to pose a challenge to the mainland. This manifested most obviously in the continued nationalisation of the steel, petrochemical, electronics and vehicle manufacturing industries, as all have an obvious military application. Taiwanese leadership needed these industries in particular to have a strong foundation in order to support their claims, both necessitating development and removing the potential obstacles of democractic instability and ideological inflexibility.

The relationship between the economic development of Singapore and Hong Kong and the interests of their respective leaderships is an even more pressing issue of survival: given their tiny size, they simply didn’t have the agricultural basis to survive as independent countries. If they had not industrialised and maintained a position of economic necessity within the region (as trading ports and later as financial centres) then they would not have been able to feed their population. The legitimacy of the leadership here is based simply on continued economic survival of the state, partly mitigated in Hong Kong’s case by its colony status. The legitimacy of its leadership was also tied to its status as a Crown property and it might ultimately have relied on Britain to support it should it have failed to develop successfully – this would account for it being the most laissez-faire of the Tigers. Singapore, sandwiched between its economic rivals of Malaysia and China, had no such fallback and the leadership’s continued rule rested solely on their ability to deliver the economic goods.

In the cases of all four Tigers we see a clear trend in the leadership and the location of its legitimacy – to varying degrees the position of the leadership is sustained and justified by the economic development that they were able to deliver. Because they did not rest their legitimacy upon democracy or ideology, leadership not only had the motivation to aggressively pursue development, it had the ability to do so with stability of government and flexibility of approach. The Tiger approach to development is perhaps best characterised then as “success due to coherent and flexible policies, effective implementation by the state… and political capacity to insulate economic planning from competing interests.”[58]

Putting It Together: Replicating the Tigers’ Success

So how could we replicate the success of the Tigers in other developing states? The crucial element is the leadership. If a state’s has a leadership that in some way derives its legitimacy from economic success, rather than democratic elections or ideological correctness, this will provide it both the motivation and the ability to effectively pursue the long-term and aggressive development progression we saw in the Tigers, with clear transitions through ISI, light industry, heavy industry, and finally into a fourth stage of high tech industry, skilled labour and increased domestic consumption.

The biggest issue facing developing states is that in too many cases the leadership rests its legitimacy not on the economic benefits that it can bring to its subjects but rather on the military forces that it commands and with which it can suppress any dissent.[59] A good number of these states (and too many more besides) likely face a not-unrelated issue that with their position secured by some form of legitimacy leadership is more concerned with the benefits that its position can provide for itself than to the country at large – they might be stable government not bound to inflexible ideologies, but without the motivation of legitimisation they are happy to focus their attention on patronage rather than enacting development policies.

In order to rectify this situation, and to encourage development in states sorely in need of it, some drastic measures must be taken. Statebuilders need to generate in state leaders a pressing urgency to pursue sustained economic development that will make the government stable (non-democratic) flexible (not bound to ideology) and motivated to actively pursue sustainable development progression. Alternate sources of legitimisation, such as military strength, need to be stripped by some means from leaders who show no signs of interest in the long-term economic interests of their state in order to refocus their attentions, while short-term revenue streams that will eventually dwindle need to be limited – extractive industries for instance should have their exports limited to fight the “resource curse” and force consideration of alternate industries.[60]

Here overzealous democratisation poses its own danger, quite apart from any criticism of market liberalisation in developing states. Democracy at best provides a degree of instability in leadership – it is hard to make effective Five Year Plans (as in South Korea) when the government could be radically different as little as three years into the future, let alone long-term plans for development of key strategic industries as in Taiwan. At its worst, democracy provides yet another legitimisation for leaderships primarily concerned with its own benefit and not sufficiently motivated to aggressively push through development plans.[61] Democracy is certainly a good thing and should be a goal of statebuilding, but it is not the only good thing, and it may even provide an obstacle to development – better perhaps to wait until the government is more institutionalised and society is more stable overall than to introduce it too soon.

Ultimately the pattern of economic development achieved by the Asian Tigers is replicable elsewhere in the world, if the key issue of legitimisation and the role of the leadership in development is addressed. However it may require some rethinking of the priorities of statebuilding exercises, and other goals like the establishment of democracy may need to be pushed back in order to maintain the stable, flexible, and economically-motivated leadership that seems to be required for effective state-led development.

Conclusions

Of the three models of development we can identify in literature, it is the state-led model that was successfully employed in the “Asian Miracle” of the Tigers. In contrast to the Neoliberal approach of market liberalisation and faith in the rationality of individual actors, this model describes a strong central state utilising a range of policy tools to aggressively pursue development even against the wishes of market actors. This sees development follow a clear progression through ISI, light industry, heavy and chemical industries, and then finally technological industry, with the export revenue of each stage being used to fund the next and heavy protection from the international market until industries have been sufficiently established.

Rather than being a product of particular cultural values, the success of this model in East Asia can be attributed to the unique pressures placed on the leadership of these states to pursue economic development lest stagnancy threaten their legitimacy. The reliance on economic development for legitimacy rather than democratic elections or ideological justification allowed the East Asian states to have both stability and flexibility in their planning, effectively enacting long-term plans for reinvestment and development while still adapting to the situation of the international economy and any new challenges that might arise (such as China’s development of light industry in competition to Singapore’s). A state-led economy has every chance of failing if they are not sufficiently stable, flexible and motivated to pursue development, as other cases might suggest.

The Asian Tigers provide us with an interesting alternative to the developmental strategies most commonly seen in statebuilding exercises, with their emphasis on liberal values like democracy and market-led growth. Replication of their successes may well be possible, though it will require a dramatic rethinking of our approaches to development economics and our conception of the relationship between a regime’s legitimacy and security.

Bibliography

BHATTACHARJEA, Aditya. “Krugman’s Economics: An Introduction.” Economic and Political Weekly 43:49. 2008.

BANURI, Tariq. “Sustainable Development is the New Economic Paradigm.” Development 56:2. 2013.

CHANDAVARKAR, Anand. “Was Keynes a Development Economist?” Economic and Political Weekly 21:7. 1986.

CHANDRASEKHAR, C.P. “Investment Behaviour, Economies of Scale and Efficiency in an Import-Substituting Regime: A Study of Two Industries.” Economic and Political Weekly 22:19/21. 1987.

CHANG, Ha-Joon. Bad Samaritans. London, UK: Random House. 2007.

CHANG, Ha-Joon, and Ilene GRABEL. Reclaiming Development: An Alternative Economic Policy Manual. New York, USA: Zed Books. 2004.

CHANG, Vincent. “Developing the Information Industry in Taiwan: Entrepreneurial State, Guerilla Capitalists, and Accomodative Technologists.” Pacific Affairs 68:4. 1995-6.

COHEN, Benjamin. “Finance and Security in East Asia.” The Nexus of Economics, Security and International Relations in East Asia. Eds. A. Goldstein and E. Mansfield. California, USA: Stanford University Press. 2012.

COLLIER, Paul. Wars, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places. London, UK: Vintage Books. 2010.

COLLINS, Susan. “Lessons from Korean Economic Growth.” The American Economic Review 80:2. 1990.

DANBY, Colin. “A Two-Factor World: The Heckscher-Ochlin-Samuelson Model.” 1998. http://faculty.washington.edu/danby/bls324/trade/hos.html (accessed 19^th May 2014).

DEPREZ, Johan. “Open-Economy Expectations, Decisions and Equilibria: Applying Keynes’ Aggregate Supply and Demand Model.” Journal of Post Keynesian Economics 19:4. 1997.

ELLICKSON, Robert. “Bringing Culture and Human Frailty to Rational Actors.” Yale Law School Faculty Scholarship Series Paper 461. 1989.

GARRAN, Robert. Tigers Tamed: The End of the Asian Miracle. Hawaii, USA: University of Hawaii Press. 1998.

HARVEY, Charles, and Hyunhoon LEE. “New Regionalism in East Asia: How Does It Relate To The East Asian Development Model?” ASEAN Economic Bulletin 19:2. 2002.

HO, Samuel. “Economics, Economic Bureaucracy and Taiwan’s Economic Development.” Pacific Affairs 60:2. 1987.

HUFF, W.G. “Patterns in the Economic Development of Singapore.” The Journal of Developing Areas 21:3. 1987.

JOHNSON, Chalmers. MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy 1924-1975. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1982.

JOMO, J.S., and Rudiger VON ARNIM. “Trade Theory Status Quo Despite Krugman.” Economic and Political Weekly 43:19. 2008.

KAPUR, Devesh. “The IMF: a Cure or a Curse?” Foreign Policy 111. 1998.

KIM, Chungil. The History of Korea. Conneticut, USA: Greenwood. 2005.

RAINIS, Gustav. “Towards a Model of Development.” In Liberalisation in the Process of Economic Development. Eds. L. Krause and K Kihwan, California, USA: University of California Press. 1991.

SHIN, Dongmyeon. Social and Economic Policies in Korea: Ideas, Networks and Linkages. London, UK: Routledge Cuzon. 2003.

SO, Alvin. “The Economic Success of Hong Kong: Insights from a World-Systems Perspective.” Sociological Perspectives 29:2. 1986.

SOBEL, Richard, William-Arthur HAYNES and Yu ZHENG. “Taiwan Public Opinion Trends, 1998-2009.” Public Opinion Quarterly 74:4. 2010.

SUN, Chen. “The Role of Medium-Term Plans in Development.” In Liberalisation in the Process of Economic Development. Eds. L. Krause and K Kihwan, California, USA: University of California Press. 1991.

TAI, Hung-Chao. “The Oriental Alternative: A Hypothesis on Culture and Economy.” In Confucianism and Economic Development: An Oriental Alternative. Ed. H-C. Tai. DC, USA: The Washington Institute Press. 1989.

TRUMAN, Harry. Inaugural Address. 1949. http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres53.html (accessed 19^th May 2014).

VOGEL, Ezra. Four Little Dragons: The Spread of Industrialisation in East Asia. Massachussets, USA: Harvard University Press. 1991.

WADE, Robert. Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1990.

WEINTHAL, Erika, and Pauline Jones LUONG. “An Alternative Strategy To Manaing Mineral Wealth.” Perspectives on Politics. 2006.

The World Databank. World Bank. 2014. databank.worldbank.org (accessed 20^th May 2014).

WU, Yongping. “Rethinking the Taiwanese Developmental State.” China Quarterly 177. 2004.

XING, Guoxin. “Hu Jintao’s Political Thinking and Legitimacy Building: A Post-Marxist Perspective.” Asian Affairs 36:4. 2009.

ZAKARIA, Fareed. “Culture is Destiny: A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew.” Foreign Affairs 73:2. 1994.

[1]   Charles Harvey and Hyunhoon Lee, “New Regionalism in East Asia: How Does It Relate To The East Asian Development Model?” ASEAN Economic Bulletin 19:2 (2002), 126

[2]   See Robert Garran, Tigers Tamed: The End of the Asian Miracle (Hawaii, USA: University of Hawaii Press, 1998) for a prime example; also Benjamin Cohen, “Finance and Security in East Asia,” in The Nexus of Economics, Security and International Relations in East Asia, eds. A. Goldstein and E. Mansfield (California, USA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 41

[3]   Harry Truman, Inaugural Address (1949), http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres53.html (accessed 19^th May 2014)

[4]   Devesh Kapur, “The IMF: a Cure or a Curse?” Foreign Policy 111 (1998), 115

[5]   Paul Collier, Wars, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places (London, UK: Vintage Books, 2010), 15

[6]   cf. Marglin’s neoclassical, neo-Keynesian and neo-Marxist strands of economic thought analysed in Tariq Banuri, “Sustainable Development is the New Economic Paradigm,” Development 56:2 (2013), 209

[7]   See Gustav Rainis, “Towards a Model of Development,” in Liberalisation in the Process of Economic Development, eds. L. Krause and K Kihwan (California, USA: University of California Press, 1991),78 for analysis of the positive correlation of market liberalisation and good economic performance; Robert Ellickson, “Bringing Culture and Human Frailty to Rational Actors,” Yale Law School Faculty Scholarship Series Paper 461 (1989), 23 for an elegant summary of the rational actor concept.

[8]   Aditya Bhattacharjea, “Krugman’s Economics: An Introduction,” Economic and Political Weekly 43:49 (2008), 27

[9]   Illustrated by Colin Danby, “A Two-Factor World: The Heckscher-Ochlin-Samuelson Model” (1998), http://faculty.washington.edu/danby/bls324/trade/hos.html (accessed 19^th May 2014)

[10] C.P. Chandrasekhar, “Investment Behaviour, Economies of Scale and Efficiency in an Import-Substituting Regime: A Study of Two Industries,” Economic and Political Weekly 22:19/21 (1987), 62

[11] A withering critique is found in K.S. Jomo and Rudiger von Arnim, “Trade Theory Status Quo Despite Krugman,” Economic and Political Weekly 43:19 (2008), 30

[12] Summarised in Johan Deprez, “Open-Economy Expectations, Decisions and Equilibria: Applying Keynes’ Aggregate Supply and Demand Model,” Journal of Post Keynesian Economics 19:4 (1997), 600

[13] Chen Sun, “The Role of Medium-Term Plans in Development,” in Liberalisation in the Process of Economic Development, eds. L. Krause and K Kihwan (California, USA: University of California Press, 1991), 146

[14] Anand Chandavarkar, “Was Keynes a Development Economist?” Economic and Political Weekly 21:7 (1986), 305

[15] Ha-Joon Chang and Ilene Grabel, Reclaiming Development: An Alternative Economic Policy Manual (New York, USA: Zed Books, 2004), 38; cf. Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1924-1975 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982); Robert Wade, Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)

[16] Ibid at 66; 78-9; 90; 101; 114; and 120 respectively

[17] Chang and Grabel, Reclaiming Development, 38

[18] Chungil Kim, The History of Korea (Conneticut, USA: Greenwood, 2005), 144

[19] Dongmyeon Shin, Social and Economic Policies in Korea: Ideas, Networks and Linkages (London, UK: Routledge Cuzon, 2003), 47

[20] Ibid

[21] Ibid, 48

[22] Ibid, 50

[23] Ibid, 51

[24] Ibid, 55

[25] Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans (London, UK: Random House, 2007), 14-15

[26] Shin, Social and Economic Policies, 56-7

[27] Ibid, 57-8

[28] Susan Collins, “Lessons from Korean Economic Growth,” The American Economic Review

WORKERS REVOLUTIONARY PARTY (WRP)

TO REBUILD THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL

A party duly registered in terms of the Electoral laws of the Republic of Namibia

Fax: 088641065 Tel: 061-260647 4479 Dodge Avenue Khomasdal jacobusjosob@gmail.com / ericabeukes@yahoo.co.uk

10 November 2021.

REPORT ON PLC MEETING AT THE ELECTORAL COMMISSION

On 9 November, yesterday, the Political Parties Liaison Committee (PLC) met at the Electoral Commission of Namibia to discuss amongst others, “the way forward”.

“… The Electoral Commission has noted with great concern that most political parties do not comply” with the provisions of the Electoral Act regarding annual audited statements and statements of liabilities and assets. Only one party has submitted statements.

The act provides for sanctions to be implemented by the Electoral Commission in the event the parties do not comply with the act in respect of finances.

“As the custodian of the Act, the Electoral Commission has a legal obligation to ensure that these measures and requirements are implemented.” The Electoral Commission has not enacted these sanctions and appeal to parties to comply.

The WRP represented by SG Jacobus Josob and Political Secretary Hewat Beukes responded as follows: “It is unacceptable that the legislator may be the first violator of the law. This implies that the laws passed by Parliament are done so with mal-intent. It is equally unacceptable that the Electoral Commission confesses and admits to non-compliance with the electoral act of 2014. The sanctions provided therein are not discretionary. They are peremptory(compulsory) upon the Electoral Commission.

If parties did not submit proper annual reports they shall not receive further funds and the sanctions contained not only in the Electoral Act, but in the general law, shall be enforced.

A further issue is that the ECN does not report on the fact that the WRP had not received a single cent of its parliamentary funds. It was denied these funds on the insistence of the USA and the EU and the actions of the Namibian regime. It could not submit audited reports.

This situation has been seized upon and WRP allocations had been stolen from the Treasury. Peter Katjavivi, the Speaker stole N$5 million. The Labour Commissioner and the Labour Court were abused to issue warrants of execution against the WRP for fraudulent claims of more than N$3 million.

On each of these atrocities the WRP objected in writing to the ECN, the National Assembly and to Petrus Damaseb the Judge-President. None replied.

The WRP issue is one issue. The ECN, the courts and the National Assembly work together to create a situation in which the Treasury is being raided at will in general. This lawless situation at the ECN regarding finances of political parties is the ultimate instance of Treasury looting.

A foundational principle of a democracy is freedom of association. Political parties are voluntary associations that register with the ECN by payment and registering their constitutions, their office-bearers and authorised representative. The ECN, the Parliament and the courts ignore the rights of parties and cause confusion, chaos and disruption by ignoring authorised representation and use their own agents to deal with party business, with the object of disabling opposition.

This is a failed State in which the law is alien. No-one denied the WRP’s factual submissions.

The WRP resolved to make a full statement to all parties and the working people on the abuse of law and the looting of Public money from the Treasury.”

Hewat Beukes and Jacobus Josob.