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

 

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.

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

For many years now, the Namibian Workers Advice Centre has been run from the Windhoek home of Erica and Hewat Beukes.
They have been forced to fight a legal battle over many years to defend the premises against legal and financial chicanery. Many homeowners in Namibia have suffered from this evil, but in the case of Erica and Hewat Beukes a further element has been state and political attempts to silence and paralyse their campaigning work.
In the course of the struggle, for example, their access to electricity and water has been illegally cut off.
Now they are involved in a legal appeal which could secure their title to the premises. They need to raise money to finance the technical costs of the court case.
Their detailed request for support is below. Please help with as much as you can.

•••

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

Appeal
Erica is the leader joint committee for truth and justice by the committee of parents former PLAN Fighters.
The committee is fighting for an international enquiry into mass murder of Namibians in Exile.
She is also the director of the workers advice centre which was established in 1991.
The workers advice centre fight against the onslaught on workers rights all levels including the derogation of legal rights in labour legislation by corporate lawyers.
Hewat is the leader of the Workers Revolutionary Party which fights to arm the working class through organisation and building their own political party.
Both have been involved leaders in the struggle for independence and self-determination.
In 1974 they established a clandestine socialist youth organisation.
Erica and Hewat have faced continual persecution by the Namibian State over the past 31 years.
The target was their livelihood.
In 2005 the organised criminal First National Bank illegally sold their residence in the name of the South West Africa Building Society (SWABOU) with which they held the bond.
This was part of the scams conducted by the FNB through the courts of Namibia in which they stole the R3,7 billion homeloan book of the SWABOU, deregistered the building society without the knowledge of the members and the bondholders.
Court cases proliferated as corrupt judges through corrupt judgments protected the bank.
The State and the bank used the municipality and the courts to cut all services to Erica and Hewat. In 2005 they cut water and in 2017 the Chief Justice gave a judgment which he concocted from smear campaigns and pure fabrications to find that Erica and Hewat had no right to water and electricity. The pre-paid electricity had been cut too.
On 25 March 2021, a judge gave the final judgment on the house dispute rejecting the application of Erica and Hewat .The judgment did not make sense, but they were forced to lodge an appeal after they came to hear of the judgment on 21 May 2021.
We ask that socialists and working class fighters respond to our financial appeal. We need N$56,000 for the appeal record of which we need 30% deposit urgently. Comrade Hewat will defend the case in person in the Supreme Court. Thus, costs for legal representation will not be required.
We may need a further N$25,000 for legal costs for legal expertise. This will be pressing very shortly
The residence over time has become a centre for working class struggles around the country. In 1986 the house was bombed. In post-colonial Namibia it has become a target for harassment, intimidation and ejectment.
Its very defence is part of the struggle of the working class in this country.

Jacobus Josob
Secretary General

Rehire Namibia Mineworker Union Rossing Leaders President Xi-Jinping! Rally At SF Chinese Consulate

https://youtu.be/kjLdDEnONqo

Trade unionists and workers spoke out at the San Francisco Chinese Consulate on February 12, 2021 to demand that the Chinese government rehired the fired Namibia Mineworker Union Rossing branch. The Chinese National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) which is controlled by the government has illegally fired the NMU Rossing union executive committee in September. They also recently fired a newly elected chairperson in an effort to completely destroy the union. Speakers also opposed the US imperialist encirclement of China but said that internationalists must back the struggle of not only the Namibian workers but all workers around the world whether they work for Chinese companies or other US and European capitalists companies. The rally took place before the labor arbitration hearing that is being held in Namibia on February 15, 2021 to decide on their discharges.

Additional media: Namibia Mine Workers Union Rossing Leaders Report On CNNC & Letter To Chinese President Xi-Jinping https://youtu.be/oNoaMxLiC9U

The Mineworkers Union of Namibia (MUN) Rossing Branch & The Struggle of The Namibian Working Class https://youtu.be/1LCD5ZuAgvc

Namibian Rössing Mine Workers Face Covid-19 & Attacks From State Owned China National Uranium Corporation Limited (CNUC) https://youtu.be/pHsDDqy_WPU

Namibia Rössing, union in wage deadlock https://www.namibian.com.na/198882/archive-read/Rössing-union-in-wage-deadlock

China and Namibia Rössing Workers on Collision Course https://www.facebook.com/informantenam/posts/3090166147716991/

Namibia MUN claims China National Nuclear Corporation is falling short of its Rossing promises https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nLuFIxwcIM&feature=emb_logo https://www.nbc.na/news/mun-claims-china-national-nuclear-corporation-falling-short-its-rossing-promises.29304

Namibia Rössing uranium mine union members face dismissal by Chinese owners https://www.namibian.com.na/203896/archive-read/Rössing-union-members-face-dismissal

Swapo, what is ‘Socialism with a Namibian Character’? https://www.namibian.com.na/183845/archive-read/Letter-of-the-Week–Swapo-what-is-Socialism-with-a-Namibian-Character

Namibia says China can buy Rio’s uranium stake if it respects laws https://www.reuters.com/article/us-rio-tinto-namibia-china/namibia-says-china-can-buy-rios-uranium-stake-if-it-respects-laws-idUSKCN1SZ0UR

Anatomy of a Bribe & Fish Rot Files https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FJ1TB0nwHs

Production of Labor Video Project www.laborvideo.org

Press statement by the Rössing Nine

Comradely greetings to all our comrades, workers, brothers and sisters around the world.

Rössing Uranium Ltd has been producing and exporting uranium oxide from Namibia to nuclear power utilities around the world since its inception in 1976 and the union movement got into focus, so much so that the struggle spilled back from South Africa back into Namibia. In 1978 the labour movement (union) was born at Rössing Uranium Mine when the oppressors tried to brutally suppress but did not succeed and they jailed the leaders under Administrative General (AG) proclamation 26.

The repression continued but failed to suppress the rising working-class movement. In 1984 the workers won the rights to organise the union movement and register trade unions. The culmination of those rights were contained in the 1992 Labour Act (Legislation), the pinnacle of labour rights in Namibia. The problem is while as the Namibian working class succeeded in winning these significant union and labour rights as was enshrined in the 1992 Labour Act and the 1990 Democratic Constitution of Namibia, the multinational corporation came down with a vengeance to nullify the unions and labour rights in its entirety.

The mechanisms used against the union movement and working-class rights were among others: privatisation, Labour judicial corruption, the return of the labour-hire through outsourcing, formalisation of labour-hire companies, etc. One of the reasons which facilitated the derogation of rights was the co-option of working-class leaderships into state structures. Endemic corruption furthered the historic weakness in the struggle of the working class in that it failed to create a working-class leadership in its own name and for its own interest.

The historic significance of this struggle is that it pointed the workers to the end-goal by showing everyone the indispensability and the power of the working class, through the 1971 to 1972 general strike that brought the entire nation to a standstill and inspired the South African working class to rise up since 1973 until South Africa overthrew Apartheid in 1994,

The Mineworkers Union of Namibia (MUN) was formalised in 1986. The Mineworkers Union of Namibia (MUN) Rössing branch signed the first ever recognition agreement in Namibia on the 14^thNovember 1988 that governs the relationship between the Mineworkers Union of Namibia (MUN) and Rössing Uranium Ltd., which is still in existence to date.

Under Rio Tinto as a majority shareholder in Rössing Uranium Ltd., as employees we were part of the greater Rio Tinto and labour relations were based on the existing laws. Although we had our difference, we still mutually coexisted and the Rio Tinto respected and complied with legislation, the internal policies and agreements. Rio Tinto understood the role of the union with regards to the Supreme Law of Namibia and Labour Act 11 of 2007.

This all started to change when Rio Tinto sold all its shares in Rössing Uranium Ltd. to China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) in July 2019. The CNNC management used every opportunity to suppress and threaten union rights by demanding to renegotiate among others the following agreements to less favourable agreements:

1. Procedural (Recognition) Agreement of 14 November 1988
2. Performance and Conduct Procedure (Disciplinary Code)
3. Recruitment Policy
4. Retrenchment Package Agreement
5. 5 Conditions of employment

• Leave Days
• Sick Leave days
• Commutation system

6. Salary scales and structures
7. Medical Aid Provider

Their renegotiation attempts failed and this culminated in grave attacks on the Branch Executive Committee. Among the attacks are the exclusive unprocedural correspondences between the General secretary of MUN (Eben Zarondo) in which the Chinese General Manager instructed him to discipline the Branch Executive Committee, and when he failed to find any grounds or faults, CNNC Rössing Uranium Ltd. took the matter in their hands by unlawfully and illegally dismissing the Branch Executive Committee.

Between July and September 202, the management unlawfully and illegally suspended, charged and dismissed the Nine Executive Committee Members in their individual employment positions on witch-hunt and unfounded allegations against MUN (Mineworkers Union of Namibia) of allegedly leaking confidential information about the illegal employment of the 4 Chinese nationals in management to the media, breaching employment contracts, bringing the company’s name into disrepute and dishonesty.

The illegal and unlawful employment of the Chinese was exposed by the media to the nation, drawing the attention of immigration control officers to investigate, arrest and detain them and a police case number CR08/08/2020 was registered upon the full establishment that they were indeed illegal and unlawfully working for CNNC Rössing Uranium Limited and for violating the Namibia Immigration Control Act.

The illegal and unlawful employees were then transferred to Narraville Police Station to be held in custody and to be brought before court for prosecution. However, close to midnight that very day, an awful and disgraceful act happened in that, the accused were jail-broken on an instruction from some high-ranking government official. These instructions were illegal and unlawful, as the officials that dispensed the instructions are not part of the justice system, neither are they from the office of the Prosecutor General or the Police and no document or police bail was processed for their release, only instructions from above.

For the mine to dismiss an organ of the union is a compete renunciation of the laws of Namibia. What will be the full social, economic and political implication of this? It will mean that Namibia is not a sovereign state, there is no rule of law, and legal entities in Namibia are without any legal protection.

MUN Rössing Branch is the foundation and torch-bearer of the union movement in Namibia. These attacks on the union movement as expressed in the Chinese National Nuclear Corporation Rössing Uranium Limited situation echoes the capitalist attack on the union movement around the country and around the world.

As leaders of the workers’ movement (union), we will defend the fundamental rights which Namibian workers have fought for more than a century and won,

The sad situation informs the way forward and the basic element of the program is as follows:

• The rebuilding and training of the working-class basic organisations and structures of the union, both national and international
• The rebuilding of national and international solidarity as the means of achieving such workers’ organisations
• The rebuilding and r-affirming of the working-class movements for political power nationally and internationally t avert the onslaught on the rights of workers.

The role of imperialism today as reflected in the Rössing example is to destroy fundamental rights and derogate social, economic and political relations and in particular the proper relations brought to bear on the working class worldwide.

We firmly believe that the only outstanding matter to resolve this increasingly destructive situation is the crisis of leadership in the working-class movement. We dedicate ourselves to work to resolve that crisis by building such a leadership nationally and internationally.

We thank our brothers and sisters who stand in solidarity; the Rössing Uranium Ltd. employees, MUN Walvisbay Salt Refinery, Namibia United Fishermen Association, AR movement, individuals and we further extend gratitude to our brothers and sisters internationally from the USA, UK, Brazil, Japan, Greece, Australia, Argentina and many others.

Your solidarity actions national and around the world is already a major step in realizing our program of action and change.

In solidarity

Injury to one is injury to all

The Struggle Continues

The Nine Dismissed Union Leaders

The process of mass protests against the falsification by dictator Lukashenko of the election results in August this year. These days, we were engaged in supporting the national strike committee and helped organize connections between various striking enterprises.

You ask about the peculiarities of life in Belarus, about what is happening in addition to receptions against the dictatorial regime. Firstly, our president is the main COVID-dissident of Europe and we do not take any measures related to quarantine or restriction of economic activity. Secondly, we have a vicious and quite capitalist dictatorship that is covered by the fake facade of Soviet nostalgia. People who get into our country say “Oh, yes, you have everything as in the Soviet Union” you do not have oligarchs, but in fact this is not so. Although in our country, unlike Russia and Ukraine, large machine building and agricultural enterprises have been preserved, called collective farms “Kolkhoz” but all this is only a sign. These are quite capitalist enterprises. In relation to medium-sized factories and factories, we have quite capitalist privatization, the large Lukashenko clan seeks to maintain control, so they become CoLTD with a controlling stake in the state and managers appointed by the authorities. In agriculture, the so-called collective farms have long been part of large capitalist agrarian holdings.

The situation with the rights of workers and labor legislation is even worse. In Russia and even Ukraine, food after the Maidan was decommunized, things in this area are much better than ours. The working class is practically deprived of the right to a legal strike. And enterprises have a system of individual short-term contracts. That is, when entering the job, he concludes a contract for a year after which he can be fired without explanation and severance pay simply without renewing the contract for the next year. In such conditions, the activities of trade unions are practically meaningless.

In general, President Lukashenko’s dream is to establish a hereditary monarchy covered in fleur of left rhetoric as in North Korea. He has long been preparing his son Kolya as his successor.

As for communication through one type or another of messenger, we still have not used Zoom and I am not sure whether it is possible to use it in Belarus. Some of the messengers, for example, Telegram is banned in our country, since they can be used to organize mass protests. We will try to whether we can legally or illegally use Zoom.

With comradely greetings,

 

Workers International welcomes the success of the international campaign on behalf of  jailed Belarusian activists (see previous post) in securing their release from prison.