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

The Greatest Danger is Sectarianism by Balazs Nagy

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

Introduction: On a certain political behaviour

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so, we have come full circle…

Dialectical development against Sectarian paralysis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And a little later:

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

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

Comment would be superfluous.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On democratic centralism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Balazs Nagy,

February-April 1995

 

Statement of the Workers International Faction – 19th July 1998

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Balazs Nagy – on behalf of the Workers International Faction

Mirek was a comrade in the truest sense of the word; a fighter side by side with us for a socialist future for the human race.

He was a convinced and profoundly thoughtful Marxist. His theoretical stature towered above that of others because he was highly intelligent, very thorough and took Marxism very seriously indeed. He was never satisfied with superficial or half-baked formulations of it.

Mirek also possessed a wry, dry and self-deprecating sense of humour which showed deep appreciation of the contradictions that arise in life and which moreover enabled him to reveal defects in another person’s reasoning without massaging his own ego. This is something that we will especially miss.

Mirek came into contact with us UK Trotskyists as a militant of the Group of Opposition and Continuity of the Fourth International (GOCQI), in the late 1980s. Having just dealt with an abusive leadership in the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, we were looking for contacts with activists around the world who had gone through experiences parallel to ours and who had similar ideas to ours about the way ahead.

Comrades like Balazs Nagy, Miroslav, Radoslav Pavlovic and Janos Borovi had paid the price of resisting Stalinist rule in their home countries. They had been forced to leave behind families and comrades and go into exile or face death or imprisonment. Based on their own experiences and difficulties in the Trotskyist movement, they joined with the insurgent Workers Revolutionary Party members and contacts in Namibia, South Africa and Latin America to set up the Workers’ International to Rebuild the Fourth International in 1990.

The GOCQI, including Mirek, quickly showed their theoretical mettle, contributing powerfully to the theoretical publications which prepared for the new foundation.

But the development of the new international collided with the collapse of the workers’ states in the USSR and Eastern Europe and the Thatcher-Regan onslaught on all the things workers had gained in the class struggle. This was also a development which sought – where it could – to drive back the movements against imperialist oppression around the world and to corrupt them where it could not.

The workers’ movement in western Europe and North America was undermined by de-industrialisation and re-location of industries, automation and the introduction of new technologies and the political collapse of Communist and Socialist parties.

Significant numbers of our already small group left, in some cases abandoning the very idea of an organised Marxist International, in others abandoning political activity completely.

Mirek stood out against the quitters, but for a while was unable to contribute personally to the struggle of the Workers’ International.

Nevertheless, physically isolated as he was from other comrades, Mirek instinctively sought out footholds in the revolutionary Marxist movement and in the struggles of industrial workers. He worked within these circles to encourage the study of fundamental questions of Marxism, in particular political economy, and he deliberately participated in the shop-floor organisation of Daimler-Benz trade unionists.

The international situation for Marxists became extremely gloomy. The first big break in the clouds was the determined struggle of the platinum miners at Marikana in South Africa, followed by a widespread mass-movement of workers in a large number of industries and trades for a big increase in wages. Twenty years after the end of apartheid and the rise to power of the African National Congress in South Africa, the deliberate murder of 35 strikers at Marikana by the South African Police acting under the instructions of the mine-owners with the collusion of ANC ministers marked the outbreak of a political crisis which faced revolutionary Marxists with a serious challenge.

It also brought Mirek back into activity in the Workers International. Together, we fought for the understanding that the way forward after Marikana is work towards the establishment of a socialist party of the country’s working class, and that this could not be achieved by isolated sectarian groups, however courageous and devoted. The decisions and resolutions of the December 2013 Special Congress of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) sketched the plans for the re-foundation of the country’s working-class movement, and Workers International pledged its support for this process.

Meanwhile the leading comrades of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party of Namibia, founded in 1989, had been working for years through the Workers Advice Centre in Windhoek providing legal advice and representation to individuals and groups suffering abuses at the hands of employers and government. They had placed themselves in an excellent position to take forward new (or newly-resumed) mass struggles, such as:

• the campaign of former TCL miners for their stolen pensions
• various ethnic groups defending their land
• the matter of wholesale miss-appropriation of the assets of the former TLC in the course of official bankruptcy of the company.
• the question of whether German compensation for imperialist oppression, land-theft and atrocities during the occupation of “South-West Africa” would go to the victims’ communities or be stolen by government ministers,
• the campaign for a real reckoning over the crimes of South West Africa Peoples’ Organisation (SWAPO) during the liberation struggle,
• against the theft of people’s homes through legal chicanery
• Stood in the 2014 election and won two Assembly seats
• new industrial struggles such as that of the fishery workers.
• This meant that by late 2015, the WRP of Namibia was able to convene a conference with over 100 delegates to re-launch the party

Mirek devoted himself to assisting the development of the WRP of Namibia, spending considerable time in the country and brimming with advice to assist its development, both practical and theoretical.

Mirek did all he could to bring a lifetime’s experience of political struggle to bear fruitfully in the training of a new generation of political leaders in the continent of Africa. In the process, he designed a series of lectures to try to explain Marxism and the Fourth International to members of a party which contained representatives of pretty well all the ethnic groupings in the country, from bushmen to descendants of German settlers, and certainly all the oppressed groups, rural or urban.

The precious outcome is a pamphlet: Why we must rebuild the Fourth International, which will undoubtedly play a major role in the political training of new generations. It is written in a very straightforward style, using everyday language in a way that makes complex questions easier to understand and does not set up the author as some sort of ivory-tower intellectual.

In a movement which has no lack of flamboyant, even abrasive, characters, Mirek was exceptional for his gentleness (not without firmness!) towards all and for the modesty and simplicity with which he wrote and spoke.

Back in Europe, Mirek keenly followed political event in online discussions. Topics included how Marxists should react to the discussion around mass migration and a sharp intervention on the outcome of the UK referendum on leaving the EU.

Mirek engaged in a lengthy online discussion earlier this year on the question of Catalonian independence.

He was keen to write-up his own experiences of the development of events in Czechoslovakia before and during the “Prague Spring” of 1968, and we were hoping to provide him with an opportunity to talk about this at an event in the UK on the fiftieth anniversary.

Sadly, things turned out otherwise. We were utterly shocked by news of Mirek’s death.

We pass on our condolences to Adrien and the rest of the family – Mirek was enormously proud of his son and his grandson – and also to Senta, who has been his companion and bedrock for so many years and whose companionship clearly meant so much to him.

We join with many rank-and-file IG Metall trade unionists, activists in the political movement in the Trotskyist left in Germany, the UK and elsewhere, and above all many Namibians in treasuring what he was worth and mourn his loss.

[twocolumns]Table of Contents:

1. The question posed
2. Productive forces and modes of production
3. Capitalism and democracy
4. The red flag and the hammer
5. The sickle
6. The number four: the International
7. The Manifesto
8. The first and the second Internationals

9. The failure of the Second International
10. Russian Revolution and Bolshevism
11. Third International
12. Stalinist bureaucracy
13. Left opposition and Fourth International
14. The fate of the Fourth International
15. The defeat of 1989-1991
16. Turn to new workers parties
17. The International that must be built
18. References to literature mentioned
[/twocolumns]
1. The question posed

The Namibian working class – all the active elements in it – is now creating its own party. This party will represent workers and other exploited people in the parliament and soon also in the local authorities. This is already an important step. It will make workers more confident to fight for their demands.

Several movements of working class resistance against capitalist exploitation now converge under the banner of the Workers Revolutionary Party in order to fight together and achieve important partial improvements.

For instance, banks in cahoots with SWAPO officials have stolen the pensions of former press-ganged SWATF recruits and of miners who worked for the now bankrupt TCL corporation. The thieves must be forced to give back what they stole and be punished! The Southern Peoples have long been oppressed. Their legitimate demands which will enable a real development for them must be satisfied. These are just two examples, but there are many. In fact every oppressed section of society has legitimate demands and for each one there is only one party with which they can hope to achieve their satisfaction: the WRP.

However, a lasting improvement of the material situation of the working class requires a fundamental change in the whole society. All the groups and individuals who are now becoming part of the WRP have already understood that. And they expect the WRP as their party to arm itself with a programme that will allow them to achieve such a fundamental change.

All over the world we live under a regime, capitalism, where a tiny minority appropriates and accumulates the lion’s share of the wealth that the vast majority, the toiling classes, produce. But that is not all. The capitalists only allow the toilers to produce anything at all if the products can generate private profit for capitalists. This puts a straitjacket on production of wealth. That straitjacket is becoming ever tighter, as can be seen from the growing number of unemployed.

All these unemployed workers and young could be producing useful things for their own needs and those of others. But not under capitalism. Modern means of production could assure that the vital needs of everybody in the world are satisfied and his or her individual personality can develop freely and fully. Instead, we live in a world where a tiny minority swims in abundance and the vast majority lives in ever-worsening poverty.

Capitalism has entered a phase of final decline, its death throes, where capitalists find it ever more difficult to serve their purpose in life, the core principle of capital: making profit in order to increase capital. And since production of useful things for the needs of working people is allowed only under the condition that such production serves to increase capital, those needs are ever less satisfied.

The systematic theft of public money and resources, the theft of pensions and other assets of the working class is not limited to Namibia, it is endemic in all of Africa and common also in other parts of the world. A feature of capitalism since its beginning is that its ruling class is composed of an increasing number of criminals who do not respect their own stated sacred principle of private property. In the death agony of their regime they are pushed ever more to open theft and fraud as their opportunities to make legal (according to their own laws) profit diminish.

So the real, historic task is not just to correct the worst abuses of capitalism, the corruption, the oppression of nations or races, the oppression of women. It is not just to stop the ever-worsening wars and the deterioration of the environment which threatens to destroy the conditions of life itself. It is not even just to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor.

All these can be achieved only if the working class is able to produce wealth directly both for its collective needs (like, for instance, railroads, hospitals and schools) and for its individual needs (like bread and medicine). Workers themselves must achieve that situation, nobody can do it in their place. They need to seize the private property of the capitalists, take over factories and other facilities, machines, and raw materials. Workers need to become the collective owner of all these means of production. Then they need to use them to organise production for their own needs as a class and for the needs of all other working people. To accomplish that, the corrupt SWAPO state in this country, like all other capitalist states, must be replaced with a state that belongs to the working class and is fully under its command. Only a radically new state composed of organised workers themselves from bottom to top can be fully a workers’ state.

Only such a workers’ state can start cleaning up the material and moral mess created by capitalism and building a new society: socialism and communism.

We build the Workers Revolutionary Party under a red flag with an emblem that consists of a hammer, a sickle and the number four. All the elements of that symbol express the foundations of our programme.

Before I get to the main question – why the number four – I need to mention the meanings of the other elements of our flag. Each of them needs to be examined in greater depth than we will be able to do this time. In fact everything we will talk about in this short pamphlet needs deeper consideration. So I hope that there will be many more education initiatives and that every present or future member of the WRP will get a chance to deepen his or her understanding of all of our programme.

2. Productive forces and modes of production

Humans are very special beings. Other life forms just adapt to the conditions that nature offers for their life. Humans produce the conditions of their own life by working in cooperation. They possess productive forces: the tools and the collective knowledge needed to produce all they need, food, shelter, medicine and nowadays also roads, books, bibles, aeroplanes and computers. Workers themselves are of course the main productive force. People beg the heavenly Father to give us this day our daily bread, but everybody knows that there would be no daily bread without the work and the cooperation of farmers, millers and bakers.

Humanity went through several stages of development of its productive forces. At the beginning, producers lived in small groups that owned their means of production and shared the products. This was the time when the community had just enough tools and knowledge to survive, but only if everybody worked for it all day. Such communities still live in some regions of Namibia. Anybody who wants to talk to such a community must bring enough food to feed everybody while they are talking, because during that time they can’t be searching for food, as they would do normally.

But people invent ever better tools and eventually, starting with some areas of the world like the Middle East, they were able to produce more than they needed to survive. This is when the big separation became possible. Some could stop working and have leisure to think and rule. The others worked to maintain both themselves and the rulers. Society became divided into classes, and the first “class society” was born. Each class had a very different position in production than the other. Some classes ruled and organised production, others were the actual producers. Human society was turned around completely. The result of this first social revolution was that the original equality of all people was replaced by inequality. At the same time, the division of work between man and woman developed into a domination of woman by man.

Further developments brought several successive types of class society. For instance, the mode of production of the ancient Roman republic and later the Roman empire divided society fundamentally into slaves and slave owners. This was replaced with the feudal mode of production, where the ruling class were the feudal lords, the owners of land. With the land, they also owned the peasant population settled on that land. Each type of society corresponded to a specific degree of development of the productive forces, each was based on a distinct mode of production, and each was brought about by a social revolution that had to destroy the previous society.

3. Capitalism and democracy

Finally, the development of industry and the democratic revolutions of the 17th and 18th century brought a type of society whose members are all traders, people who buy and sell goods for money. Those who have no money are not fully members of human society. The only way to cooperate in this society is by buying and selling privately produced goods. Where this type of society is fully realised, all its members are equal (as traders) and therefore also have equal rights in the eyes of the law. This equality in the eyes of the law is, as we know, a democratic ideal. Its highest expression is political democracy in which the people, by means of individual votes, choose their government. In most countries this ideal is not fully realised and in countries like Namibia it is mostly an empty pretence.

But for all its formal equality, even where it does exist, this society generates profound and increasing social, that is real, inequality. The reason is that it separates producers from their means of production. The baker, for instance, no longer owns his kneading trough. He or she works in a huge bread-producing factory that belongs to somebody else, the capitalist. While the worker works, he or she has no freedom at all. In exchange for a wage, every worker must surrender his or her freedom for the whole working day and must follow orders given by the capitalist or usually a lieutenant of the capitalist. In summary, the worker becomes a slave under the dictatorship of the capitalist for the duration of every working day.

The capitalist starts with some money. With that money he buys means of production and labour power. Having bought them, he becomes the owner of both. The product of labour – bread in our example – therefore also belongs to the capitalist, although he did not make it – and this is what he sells. As a result, he gets more money than he had at start. The difference is called the profit. Then he uses most of the money he now has to buy more means of production and more labour power, in order to produce even more products and sell those, again with a profit. So the capitalist accumulates enormous wealth. This seemingly self-increasing wealth is called capital.

Of course it is the workers who produce capital, all of it. The capitalists only owns and therefore commands it. But he cannot do with it as he pleases. In fact, any capitalist who does not do his best to increase his capital, will be overtaken by other capitalists. So in fact it is the capital that commands the capitalist, telling him what to do in order to increase the capital. So, in effect, workers are being bossed around by the accumulated results of their own work!

Being owners of the whole product of the society, capitalists form the upper class. This type of society is therefore called capitalism. Capitalists are often called “bourgeois”. That is a word borrowed from the French. Originally, it meant simply inhabitant of a town. That is where the capitalists developed. Accordingly, the class of capitalists is often called the “bourgeoisie”.

Capitalism with rule of law equal for all and with democratic rights and freedoms is much better for the working class than capitalist rule without them. In a democracy, the working class can organise openly in trade unions and parties. Without it, working class organisations become illegal and have to go underground.

But among all its rights and freedoms, the only one which this regime enforces ruthlessly is the right of capitalists to own the means of production, that is the right to exploit the working class. This right of the capitalists takes precedence over all other rights and freedoms. This democracy is therefore not just “democracy” for all people. It is limited, bourgeois democracy. Its essence is the dictatorship of the capitalists. So this democracy is only the best form of a bad thing: the dictatorship of the capitalists.

4. The red flag and the hammer

The hammer symbolises our class, the working class.

But what exactly is the working class? It is not all toilers. It is the class of those who need to buy their means of subsistence – food, shelter, education, health care – for money, in order to live and raise children, but own nothing that they could sell – except one thing: their own capacity to work, their labour power! This class is also called the proletariat and wage-workers are called proletarians. That word is very old and meant originally people whose only wealth consisted of their children.

Labour power (the capacity to work) is a very special commodity. The worker goes to the factory and surrenders eight hours or more of his daily life to the capitalist. The capitalist pays the value of that labour power as a daily wage to the worker. That value is determined by that of all the products needed to sustain workers’ life and reproduce their labour power, not only for the next day or month, but also to enable them to have children, the next generation of workers.

The capitalist consumes the worker’s labour power by employing him or her to do actual work – and there something strange happens: that work produces much more value than that of the worker’s wage. This is why the owner of the bakery can sell the bread produced by the bakers at a higher price than the sum of the prices of the flour needed to make the dough, the electricity needed to bake it, the amortisation of all the machines and buildings and the wages of the bakers. The profit of the capitalist comes from this difference. This is the basis of capitalist exploitation. We owe this discovery to Karl Marx.

There is much more to learn about this. Marx lived in the 19th century at the time when capitalism developed. He lived mostly in the country that pioneered that development, England. Marx wrote several books about capital. The main one is called simply: Capital. I hope that we can have more discussions that make clear to every member of the WRP how exactly capitalist exploitation comes about in this organisation of society which is called the capitalist mode of production – the society we live in.

Wage workers form the principal lower class in society. That class has existed for over 180 years in Europe and for at least 100 years in every country of the world. The capitalist organisation of society constantly produces both classes, the capitalist and the working class. Formal equality of rights cannot hide this increasing social inequality.

As long as it has existed, the working class had to fight against the capitalist class for such conditions of exploitation as allow it to survive. The capitalist’s interest is to increase its profit by paying ever-lower wages, making workers work ever longer hours and always speeding up the pace of work. So capitalists and workers have fundamentally opposed interests. Each class must fight the other. Therefore, never believe a capitalist who pretends that he and his workers “are in the same boat”, as capitalists often say. On the contrary, workers must unite against their own employer and against all capitalists.

If workers don’t unite, each worker remains just an individual trader who trades their labour power. All those worker-traders compete against each other and, even worse than that, they compete against an army of unemployed workers ready to take up any work in any conditions. Disunited workers undercut one another on wages and other working conditions.

So workers must unite, form trade unions and fight collectively for their working conditions simply to prevent capitalists from starving them and from working them to premature death.

In the past and in some countries like Germany, where I live, workers’ organisations were quite successful in this everyday struggle, so there are well-off workers who may possess a house or a car and have enough money to be able to send children to university to let them become skilled workers. But even a house, a car or university education are still only means of reproduction of labour power, be it at a much higher standard than the means available to the inhabitants of the shanties of Windhoek. Even a well-off German worker is therefore still just a wage-worker. He does not belong to the middle classes as some people pretend. He belongs to the same class as a super-exploited Namibian miner because he has the same fundamental interest in defending his working and living conditions against the capitalist class and in replacing the whole capitalist regime by a society without exploitation of human beings by other human beings. Being wage-workers is the solid foundation of workers’ solidarity; regardless of important differences in living standard and even regardless of whether they actually have work at the moment. It does not matter where they live, what skin colour they have, whether they are men or women, which beliefs or faith they hold or which local customs they follow.

Moreover, the capitalist class all over the world has started a huge attack on the living standards, working conditions and rights of the working class with the objective of aligning them with the worst of existing conditions, those of super-exploited workers without rights in many countries of Asia and Africa.

Even in Germany, the past conquests of the working class are threatened and a growing part of the working class sinks into the uncertain existence of contract labour and unemployment. Most unions traditionally unite only the fully employed in the fight for their wages and conditions. They are losing this battle everywhere because of the downward pressure of competition from the growing crowd of defenceless precarious and unemployed workers.

So unions must change in order to unite all layers of the working class. Some unions are becoming conscious of this necessity and as they try to realise it, they also start to realise that they cannot defend the working and living conditions of the working class with any prospect of a lasting success – and keep capitalism. So they must support the struggle to overcome capitalism itself. Workers must unite to defend themselves and fight off the multiform divisions constantly introduced by capitalists. But all experience shows that it is a losing fight unless the unity has the goal of uprooting the whole system of exploitation of humans by humans. This is a political goal which requires workers to form their own political party.

The workers’ party cannot replace unions, which are vital for the everyday struggle. But neither can there be a tight barrier between trade unions and the workers party. The political struggle must be rooted in everyday struggles and many everyday struggles can only be won on the political level. For instance, capitalists more and more often break the resistance of their workforce to a worsening of its conditions by forcing large sections of that workforce out of the enterprise and into a new one, where they do the same work and produce the same things under much worse conditions. Unions have to fight against this so-called “outsourcing”. In some cases they manage to fight off an “outsourcing” attack. But “outsourcing” is a right of capitalists, flowing from the fundamental right to private ownership of enterprises which is guaranteed by all capitalist constitutions. So without a political change, any particular success against “outsourcing” is short-lived.

Since its origins, the most far-sighted elements of the working class have seen beyond the never- ending elementary struggle for survival. They have understood that a definitive liberation of their class was necessary and also possible by overthrowing the capitalist class and its state and making the modern, large-scale means of production the property of all those who work. They have also understood that the only way for workers to become owners of today’s means of production is to own them in common, as the working class. These workers have therefore called themselves “communists” and for a very long time they have organised in international communist associations and parties. Their only difference from the rest of the working class is the clear understanding of this overall aim and that the international unity of the whole working class must take precedence over national or particular interests. In all struggles of their class they have promoted these principles.

The red colour of our flag symbolises the workers’ blood which has been shed in all those struggles over many decades.

5. The sickle

As indicated before, besides the working class, there are other toilers. Some belong to intermediate layers. Some work for a wage but all they do is manage production on behalf of some capitalist. Top level managers have very large “wages” that are in reality parts of the capitalist profit, bribes. Moreover, they own large shares of capital, so they are capitalists. Others administer the top level of the capitalist state on behalf of the capitalist class as a whole in order to maintain the overall conditions for the capitalist regime to persist. All these belong to the capitalist class.

Still other toilers do produce commodities, or work in the distribution of commodities, but not as wage workers. They work, but are different from wage workers in that they possess their means of production or of other work. They are craftsmen and small retailers in cities who still possess their workshops or shops.

Yet others, most important in a country like Namibia, are peasants in the countryside who possess their plot of land.

All these latter classes are often lumped together and called “petty-bourgeois”. That means simply that they may be owners of some means of production or just wish to become owners of some means of production, but those means are so small that they do not constitute capital.

Most of these classes are being squeezed out by large capitalist production. The peasants especially, all over Africa, are being starved, forced off their land and obliged to look for a living in the cities, usually as the lowest layer of the working class.

New urban layers that are intermediary between the capitalist and the working class are still created. Many are self-employed but their social condition differs from that of the working class only in their imagination, where they deem themselves superior to the working class.

The peasantry still exists. Like the working class, the peasantry too must struggle for its living and working conditions.

Some peasants’ land doesn’t provide enough for them to live, or they may have no land any more. They have to work for a wage for richer farmers or in factories. In fact they are already part of the working class. They have the same demands as we have, such as higher wages and better working conditions. Of course we support these demands.

Poor peasants usually want to get enough land to sustain themselves and their families. The working class supports the demand for the expropriation of landlords possessing large amounts of land – and sometimes not even exploiting it. Such land must be distributed especially to landless peasants. They themselves should decide if they want to use these lands collectively as a cooperative or individually.

The life of the poorest layers of peasantry mostly lacks even the one relative freedom which capitalism affords to the urban worker, that of choosing his or her master. Instead, a poor peasant often depends on a powerful, irremovable master, a landlord, a capitalist or, mostly, both. That master appears irremovable because he is supported by a corrupt, autocratic state. This is true even in countries like Namibia, which is formally a republic and a democracy, but its state is not a normal capitalist state. It is a corrupt autocracy like the old kingdoms were, except that the role of the autocrat at the top is taken by anonymous, foreign representatives of imperialist powers, like the bureaucrats of the International Monetary Fund. It is they who make sure that peasants and other poor classes at the bottom of society are forever imprisoned in rotten dependency relations. The whole SWAPO state, including its “parliament”, its president and its “Father of the Nation”, are the local executive apparatus of imperialist (international capitalist) powers that loot the country.

Capitalists exploit peasants by forcing them to sell their products too cheap and by selling the necessary machines and tools to the peasants at too high a price. Banks deny them the necessary credit. This can change only if the “commanding heights” of the economy – big industry and all credit institutions – belong to the working class.

But to the peasantry the question often appears as that of gaining a true democracy, of removing their immediate masters and becoming full citizens equal to others. This is not limited to the peasantry. The working class, especially its lowest layers, are also deprived of their elementary democratic rights by a regime like that of SWAPO in Namibia.

Imperialism foisted a capitalist constitution on Namibia. It made sure that it guarantees the irremovable principle of private ownership of the means of production. This made the constitution undemocratic as it creates a barrier to making land available to those who work on it or need it to live on it and so it maintains peasants and poor people in towns and cities in dependency. By instituting the principle of a “unitarian state” it violates the democratic right of peoples of Namibia, such as, Caprivians, Herreros, Basters and Namas, to self-determination. For example, Caprivians who tried to practice that right have been in prison for 15 years. A real unity can be only voluntary but the peoples concerned were not asked. The whole constitution was concocted by capitalists using a ready-made template elaborated by imperialist powers, acting behind the backs of the people of Namibia. Therefore the immediate demands in any revolution must include that of a Constituent Assembly to install a democracy in a truly independent Namibia.

Since peasants live in small communities disseminated over large distances, it is very difficult for them to organise as a class on their own. Sometimes they do succeed in that. They form a party or an army to push their demands. But very soon they find out that they cannot formulate a programme for the whole of society. So they have to ally themselves with one of the two main urban classes, either with the working class if the working class is able to organise itself and become strong, or with the bourgeoisie.

The latter alliance was the only possibility in the epoch of the great bourgeois revolutions in England and France in the 17th and 18th centuries, when the modern working class had not yet been developed by capitalism. During the French revolution of 1789, activists of the bourgeoisie visited peasants in their villages and helped to write up their demands for independence from aristocratic and ecclesiastic landlords, for equality before the law and for a Constituent Assembly to realise those demands. The bourgeoisie of that epoch had genuinely common interests with the peasantry.

This is nowhere the case today, and has not been for a long time. The bourgeoisie cannot be a genuine ally of the peasantry and where it lures the peasantry into such an alliance, it will betray them. Only the working class can help the peasantry to realise its social and political demands. Only the working class, if it takes power, will be able to offer peasants acceptable conditions for the sale of their products, and credit for the purchase of their tools and machinery. Only the working class can help realise full democracy but the only way to do so is not to stop at formal, limited, bourgeois democracy, which leaves the capitalists in control of society and still running things in their own interests. The working class must carry on to expropriate the capitalists and install a workers’ state. So the Constituent Assembly of all classes in society will necessarily and rapidly give way to the rule of councils of workers and poor peasants.

The hammer and sickle in our emblem symbolises the alliance of the working class with the peasantry in struggle against the capitalist class and against the remnants of old oppressive relations that flourished before capitalism.

But alliance does not mean fusion! We build a party of one class, the working class. This does not mean only that we aim for a party composed mainly of workers. It means above all that its programme is the programme of the working class and any person, worker, peasant or intellectual, who wants to become member, has to accept all of that programme. Moreover this programme stipulates which of the two classes must lead the alliance. That leading class is the working class.

6. The number four: the International

This number stands for the international character of our party. It may seem strange at first that the International can be symbolised by a particular number. There is a powerful reason for it but it can be understood only in connection with the history of all the efforts to build the International. So I am forced to make yet another long detour.

The working class has, since its origins, understood that it is fundamentally an international class. Its fight starts on a national level but can be won only if it becomes international.

It is impossible to achieve socialism in one country. Especially in a small (by population), entirely dependent country, like Namibia. Greece in Europe is another obvious example. But it is in the long run impossible even for a large country or a group of countries. The experience of the USSR shows it.

Because socialism and communism are possible only on the world scale, the social revolution of the working class must be a world revolution. This does not mean that the revolution can happen at the same time everywhere. But the working class itself is international; therefore so must be its party.

What we call the International is not a corrupt club that exists only to concoct or cover hideous plots against the working class and oppressed peoples, like the so called Socialist International to which SWAPO and ANC belong. Neither is it a federation of national groups which pursue their own independent, often conflicting policies and meet only to proclaim a token unity from time to time. There are many of these but often they hide their true nature quite well.

The International the working class needs is one international party. Of course it must have national sections able to decide how to tackle quickly national and local issues as they arise.

As the Communist Manifesto puts it: “Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.”

The International must have an international life involving all members directly, a unified internal discussion process on the most important issues of strategy and tactics, both on international and on national issues.

7. The Manifesto

The efforts of the international working class to organise as such, that is as an international party, have a long history full of rich lessons. The first thing to understand about it is that it was determined by the development of capitalism itself. Capitalism, as I said, produces the working class. During the nineteenth century the capitalist mode of production went from strength to strength and it produced a mighty working class, above all in Europe.

This working class was from the start a danger for the capitalists. In 1848 several revolutions shook Europe. They were all democratic revolutions led by the bourgeoisie. Through them, the bourgeoisie wished to exert political power in the name of the people, instead of leaving it in the hands of emperors, kings and lords. But in the most important country of that time, France, the revolution was, at its highest point, already a workers’ revolution. In all countries of Europe, the working class existed already and threatened not only the kings and aristocrats but also the bourgeoisie. Therefore the bourgeoisie preferred to stop and betray all these revolutions, and renounce political power, rather than risk that this power be contested from below by the working class.

Just before that revolution, in 1847, German workers who had emigrated from the oppressive regimes of that country formed an international association, the League of the Communists. Two young German intellectuals, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, were members of the League and were charged with writing its Manifesto. It was published in February 1848, just before the revolution started.

It was not the first programme of the working class. Previous programmes had already established the goal: a society without exploitation, a society where the means of production are common property of the workers. But these programmes were not scientific. They were projects based on the clever ideas of some inventor who thought out in his head a proposal how society might be organised better. Then he usually submitted his project to influential people of the ruling class, appealing to their supposed benevolence. Such projects go by the Greek name “Utopia”, meaning an imagined organisation of society that exists in “no place”.

Marx’s and Engels’ Manifesto of the Communist Party was the first programme with a scientific underpinning. It made clear that this new form of society, communism, was the necessary next step for humanity not because it was a better idea than the existing society, but because it was a step required by the material productive forces developed by capitalism itself. It made also clear that capitalism was creating a whole class of people, the working class, who had to lead a new social revolution in order to make communism happen. Capitalism itself started a process which would enable this class, through its own movement and education, to rise to this historic task. So everybody should read the Manifesto, it is still our programme! There is no better, more forceful or more beautiful explanation of our overall aims. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/

But of course capitalism has developed further. The situation has changed a lot in the 167 years since the publication of the Manifesto. Our programme has had to be adapted and specified further. Our programme is a living thing that has to evolve.

The League of Communists was only a precursor of the International. The working class itself was not yet fully developed and accordingly the League consisted not of industrial workers as we know them but mostly of skilled craftsmen.

8. The first and the second Internationals

8.1. First International

In 1864, the first real international party of the working class was constituted in London: the International Workingmen’s Association. The police of every state kept them under close surveillance and estimated that they had five million members. But the International itself counted eight million. Many of them were already industrial workers in big factories.

This International played a leading role in the most important revolution of the 19th century, the Paris Commune of 1871 which for the first time in history brought the working class to power, although only in one city. The Commune was defeated and the International did not survive that defeat for long. It split, became weak, and in 1876 it dissolved itself.

But the First International left a legacy on which we build today. Marx and Engels were part of it and they were able to persuade the majority of the other member of their programme and of the scientific foundations of it. It was not easy, they had to have many discussions especially with the anarchists who at the outset had had the majority in the International. Anarchists were communists who thought that it was possible to install communism immediately, without having to build it first. This is because their idea of communism was in fact a return to some long forgotten age of small communes that would function in completely autonomous ways, without the need for any centralisation. This backward-orientated idea ignored the centralised nature of modern industry. Consequently, they saw no problem in replacing the capitalist state immediately by a regime of no government at all. Such a regime is known by the Greek name “anarchy” and that is why this current in the working class are called “anarchists”.

But we know that the working class will have to do the opposite of anarchist notions. It will have to redirect existing industry towards production for human needs and develop it further. That means, among other goals, that the working class will have to establish democratically a plan of development and correct it frequently and democratically according to an honest evaluation of its results. Only through this path of development can real, modern Communism be achieved, an organisation of society where everybody is entitled to the satisfaction of his or her needs and everybody contributes to production according to his or her ability. This presupposes that the productive forces of humanity are so developed that lack of basic means of subsistence will be replaced by their abundance. Only then will the need for the state as the guardian over scarce means of subsistence gradually disappear. The final result will be that there will be no rule of humans over other humans. In this final goal, Marxists and anarchists agree.

Marxism prevailed but anarchism persisted, especially in Italy and in Spain. Much later, during the workers revolution in Spain, in 1936-1937, it got an opportunity to make political proposals to the working class in order to defeat fascism and overthrow capitalism. Anarchists saw that their conceptions were not workable, and they had then no better idea than to become part of a government of the capitalists in Barcelona in 1937 and so to help protect the capitalist state against the insurrection of the workers, whom they helped to disarm and demobilise. This final lesson about anarchism can and should be studied in the works of Leon Trotsky and other Marxists who participated in that revolution.

Through its participation in the Paris Commune of 1871 the International gained a very important insight: the revolution of the working class cannot use the old state of the capitalists and just fill its parliament, its government and other organs with workers. To that extent, the International agreed with the anarchists. But the International under Marx’s guidance drew a positive lesson completely opposite to the notions of the anarchists. Namely, the working class must install an entirely new, workers’ state in order to start building communism.

Dutifully, Marx and Engels acknowledged this lesson. They did not change the Communist Manifesto which by that time had become a historic document, but all subsequent programmes of the working class had to include that lesson.

This example of Marx and Engels teaches us another important lesson. Their teaching cannot be considered as finished. We must develop it on the basis of experiences of the working class. We must acknowledge inaccuracies and errors, in order to be able to correct them, like Marx and Engels did in their lifetimes.

8.2. Second International

In 1889 the Second International was founded. This was an immense advance because it was based on mass revolutionary workers parties in Germany, in France, the Austrian empire and in many other countries. They were called socialist or social-democratic parties. But they were revolutionary parties, quite unlike most of the parties that use the same names today.

These parties were linked to trade unions. In most cases the parties promoted or founded the unions, like in Germany and France. In Great Britain, it was the unions who came, a bit later, to the conclusion that they needed a political wing and so they founded a Labour Party. The Second International led great, victorious struggles, for instance for the eight hour working day or for the universal right to vote. It gave its support to the struggle of working class women for equal rights with men and so contributed mightily to the first advances in that field. Among other conquests, it established the First of May as the international day of struggle of the working class.

These material conquests of millions of workers in the developed countries could never have been achieved if the working class had limited itself to purely “economic”, day-to-day struggle.

What made them possible was that the Second International allowed them to understand and adopt the programme of scientific socialism and communism.

In other words it was a Marxist International which educated millions of workers as Marxists.

But there were flaws.

Its leading members tended to forget the most important lesson from the experience of the First International – the one about the state! The Marxism of the majority of the leaders of the Second International was not quite the original teaching of Marx and Engels. It was distorted in that its revolutionary consequences seemed far away and abstract.

8.3. Imperialism and its impact on the Second International

During this period of rise of capitalism in Europe and also in the United States of America, the whole world was increasingly subjected to capitalist conditions of exploitation. Capitalist exploitation was introduced into huge countries, like Russia, India and China and to whole continents like Africa, through colonisation.

Most people in the Second International saw the enormous exploitation of the colonies by their colonial masters and protested against it. But they also expected progress to come out of it. Many thought that colonies and other latecomers to capitalism would soon follow a similar path of glorious capitalist development as Great Britain, France, Germany, the USA and Japan had done.

In fact world capitalism entered a new stage: imperialism. This is the highest stage of capitalist development. In it, a new entity emerged: finance capital. This results from the merger of financial institutions (such as banks and other money lenders and money makers) and industrial capital under the leadership of the money lenders. Finance capital dominates over all smaller capitals, limits them or squeezes them out. Imperialist countries export goods and capital and exploit natural resources, including cheap labour, from the rest of the world. This is called the imperialist relationship. For instance, Great Britain had an imperialist relationship with India and later also with South Africa, among others. Germany was able to establish an imperialist relationship with South-West Africa. Around the beginning of the twentieth century it became apparent that the imperialist relationship in general did not allow the dependent countries to develop. This is still the case, even though most colonies liberated themselves politically. The imperialist relationship persists. Under it, Africa’s natural resources are being plundered as savagely as in previous periods. Its masses are descending into horrible poverty, and are subjected to barbaric dictatorships and barbaric wars. Capitalism itself has become an absolute barrier to the development of humanity, which means to the development of its productive forces. Therefore the imperialist stage is the last stage of capitalism.

All humanity is faced with the choice between passing to a new, socialist and communist mode of production, or a long descent into ever more barbaric conditions of life. This alternative was already formulated by Friedrich Engels in 1878 and then again in the middle of the first world war by the Polish comrade Rosa Luxemburg who wrote: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism”. All subsequent history has confirmed this prediction. Both world wars and fascism represented huge outbreaks of barbarism.

After the destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991, which (especially in its beginning) had represented the hope for a socialist future, we are already experiencing an acceleration of the worldwide descent into ever-deeper barbarism. For over a hundred years the working class has been trying to make the transition to socialism. In the present period of a new rise of the working class we have perhaps the last opportunity to do it. But already some revolutions in the Middle-East, and in northern Africa have been defeated. This has favoured yet another big slide into barbarism not just there, but also, in Central Africa for example. Europe is also sliding rapidly into mass poverty, authoritarian rule and wars. So we do not have much time. The working class must now learn quickly and act, or perish.

In the late 19th century, capitalism was still in its ascending phase. A thin layer of relatively well off workers developed at that time in the leading capitalist countries of Europe and a little later also in the USA. They had won relatively high wages and good working conditions. The capitalists of these countries were able to afford these conditions to some of “their” workers due to the extra profits they were making by exploiting the rest of the world, especially colonies. This thin layer is called the “labour aristocracy”. The labour aristocracy had an enormous influence on the parties of the Second International. A bureaucracy expressing the contentedness of the labour aristocracy developed inside these parties and in the unions. This was (and still is) a layer of leaders who did not object to others talking about the social revolution in some far future. Sometimes they themselves made such Sunday speeches. The socialist revolution was the so called “maximum” programme of social-democracy. Words are cheap. But in everyday life they were content with what they had and wanted to keep capitalism, with some improvements. Such improvements, like the eight-hour working day, were called “reforms” and they were the contents of the so called “minimum” programme. The people who limited the movement to the minimum programme were (and still are) called reformists.

But there was a strong left wing in the Second International around such people as Rosa Luxemburg in Germany and the Russian Vladimir Ulyanov. Ulyanov had to hide from the police of his country and therefore adopted another name: Nikolai Lenin. Later he became known as Vladimir Lenin.

Unfortunately, the left wing was not well organised. That was a big mistake because the reformists held the leadership of most of the parties of the International. Only in one country did the left wing organise strongly. That was Russia. The left there called themselves “Bolsheviks”. Bolsheviks organised themselves into a faction and shortly before the world war that faction became in fact a party independent of the reformists who were called “Mensheviks”. I omit the explanation of those strange names because the origin of the names is rather accidental. The origin of the Russian factions themselves is not accidental. I’ll come back to it.

9. The failure of the Second International

In 1914 the first world war started. The world as prey of imperialist powers had become too small for their expansion. The main imperialist powers of that time: Great Britain, France, Japan, Russia and the United States allied themselves on one side, Germany, Austria and the Ottoman empire (Turkey) on the other side. Each alliance tried to win a greater share of colonies as markets for its goods, sources for its raw materials and targets for profitable investment.

During the war, in 1916, Lenin published a pamphlet to explain to workers what imperialism is and why it is the highest and last stage of capitalism. The title of the pamphlet declares this insight. It is called: “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism”. Members of the WRP should study this pamphlet, too, it is still valid. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/

Millions of workers killed each other in this war in the interests of “their” capitalists. The international working class could have prevented this. That would have required defying the marching orders, calling a general strike and taking power in every country. Before the war, congresses of the Second International had decided to call a general strike in the event of a war. But its reformist leadership had not prepared it at all for such an eventuality. When it came to doing it, they did the contrary: each national party took the side of its own capitalists. The Second International collapsed. Its leaders went over to the capitalist enemy.

The left had to do under terrible war conditions what it had failed to do in peacetime: organise. It started to propagate the idea of a new, Third International.

10. Russian Revolution and Bolshevism

Then, after three years of terrible suffering during the war, the Russian working class overthrew the old rotten imperial state of the Tsar in February 1917. Unfortunately, the Russian bourgeoisie was able to take power. In only a few months it completely revealed its reactionary character by refusing to stop the war or to distribute land to the peasant masses. In October, the working class led the masses to get rid of the bourgeoisie and install a completely new, workers’ state. It was based on workers’ councils in the cities and on councils of poor peasants in the countryside. These councils decided everything in Russia. One of the first thing they did was to stop the war unilaterally, nationalise all the land, hand it to poor peasants for long-term use, and expropriate the whole capitalist class. Because the Russian word for “council” is “soviet”, the new state was called the “soviet state”. The Soviets immediately held a congress, and appointed a new government. Lenin became the head of the new state, and another well-known revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, was charged with forming a completely new army, the Red Army. The capitalist governments of 14 countries sent armies to destroy the republic of workers’ councils in Russia and reintroduce a dictatorship of the capitalists. They fomented a civil war. But all these enemies were defeated by the new revolutionary army.

We speak of the Russian revolution but in fact it was victorious in a much larger area than Russia. It included most of the countries of the old Empire of the Tsars; for instance, Ukraine, several large countries of central Asia and smaller countries in the Caucasus region. All these countries soon federated to form the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR. When it was founded, this Union was not strong because of coercion exerted by its largest member, Soviet Russia on the other republics, but precisely because it was a free Union. The Bolshevik Party and the Third International under Lenin’s leadership made the right of self-determination of all peoples, up to and including their right to separation, into a principle.

For the first time in history, the working class of a whole country, and a very large one at that, was able to get rid of the rule of the capitalists, install its own state and start with the practical realisation of the socialist programme. The imperialist war, the intervention of the 14 states and the civil war left the country exhausted. Almost all industry, railways and other infrastructure were destroyed. As in other countries, it was the working class — who else? – which had to rebuild the country. But in Russia it could do it on a completely different basis. It no longer worked for capitalist profit. It worked for its own needs. That was the main achievement of the revolution in Russia. This conquest brought social advances, like a free health service, free access to education and many others. Superficially, these social conquests resemble some partial conquests later achieved by the working class of some capitalist countries, like Great Britain. But in reality they were socialist conquests because they set the whole working class of a huge country on the path to build socialism. That path could not be followed to its end without an international revolution. There can be no socialism in one country. But the international working class was encouraged to follow the Russian example. Rightly, the international working class considered the Russian revolution and its socialist conquests as its own and the Russian working class considered its state as just the first success of the world revolution.

In 1991, after 74 years, the October Revolution was finally defeated. The USSR collapsed under the pressure of imperialism, because of its isolation. That was due to an enormous delay in the world revolution, itself due to a series of defeats and betrayals over many years. Capitalists, their politicians, their press, their historians and other ideologists heap slanders on the achievements of the October Revolution. But these achievements will never be forgotten. The working class will always learn from them.

Many books have been written about the October revolution. Leon Trotsky himself wrote one, “The History of the Russian Revolution”. Everybody should read that book and we should discuss all the rich lessons of the Russian revolution as part of the building of the WRP and formation of its members. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/

Here just a few of the main points about the Russian Revolution.

The victory of the Russian October revolution was only possible because there was a well organised party of dedicated and well educated workers who understood what Capitalism-Imperialism is, the concrete situation of the masses in Russia and were able to act in unity to propose the socialist revolution to the masses as the way out of their plight. In other words, the Bolshevik party was a genuine Marxist workers party.

Here is where I have to come back to its origin in 1903, because such a party is the necessary condition for the working class to be able to take power even today. So we must look carefully at the only example of such a party in history.

The Russian social-democratic party really formed only at its second congress which had to be held outside Russia in Brussels, then in London, because of police repression. At the congress, suddenly there appeared a difference about the conditions of membership. Mensheviks thought that party members should be those who accepted the party programme and supported it by regular personal assistance under the direction of one of the party’s organisations. Bolsheviks, with Lenin, demanded that members “recognise the Party Programme and support it by material means and by personal participation in one of the party’s organisations”. So Lenin and his followers in the party required a much more serious engagement of party members than the others, but was that so important? Everybody, including Lenin, was surprised that the two factions could not unite because of such a seemingly small detail. After all, both factions were followers of Marx’s school of scientific socialism/communism. But later history proved that the difference was indeed fundamental. In fact, the laxness of the Mensheviks in this question was just the beginning of the influence of petty-bourgeois ideas. Later, this became apparent, as the Mensheviks became a particular kind of reformist. In 1917 the socialist revolution became an immediate task and the Mensheviks refused to accomplish it.

We are against petty-bourgeois laxness. The conditions of membership in the Workers International and in its Namibian section, the Workers Revolutionary party, are those written down by Lenin: “recognise the Party Programme and support it by material means and by personal participation in one of the party’s organisations”. We want to build a fighting organisation with a clear shape, not a soft cloud. There is much more to be learnt from the history of the Bolshevik party and members of the WRP should study that history.

Another point: the October Revolution was only the first victory of the international, world revolution. The Bolsheviks understood that, the masses in Russia understood that; and what is more, very soon the majority of the working class of the world understood that! Old parties of the Second International began to break up because workers, their members, wanted to imitate Russia. Outright revolutions broke out in Germany and Hungary. In several other countries, there were revolutionary movements.

During most of the war, the Third International was the proclaimed aim of a small minority of courageous opponents to that war. After the October Revolution, in 1919, the Third International was actually founded. In several important countries, big chunks of the old social democratic parties demanded to be part of the new International. In Germany, France, Italy and Czechoslovakia it was even the majority in those parties!

11. Third International

The Third International had a huge task on its hands. In the epoch of imperialism, the world revolution has become the immediate task. But the leaders of the working class were not up to that task. Even the leadership of those parties who were sincerely in favour of the revolution were not up to it.

Some of them continued to preach socialism in Sunday speeches but in everyday life they remained reformists. They remained prisoners of the distorted version of Marx’s teachings that was current in the Second International. Already in 1917, Lenin published a pamphlet to correct that, above all to refresh and develop the lesson drawn by Marx from the Paris Commune, that the working class cannot take over the bourgeois state but must sweep it away and install a new, workers’ state. The title of the pamphlet is “The State and Revolution”. It should be read and understood by every member of the WRP. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/

In order to make clear how different it was from its predecessor, the Second International (which called itself socialist), the Third returned to the old name used in Marx’s and Engels’ time: “communist”. It called itself the Communist International. Russians at that time liked abbreviations a lot and called it simply the “Comintern”.

Other factions of the Comintern ignored the fact that the socialist revolution must be an act of the whole working class. They were so impatient that they started minority actions all of which ended in disaster. They called themselves “left-wing communists”. They wrote up whole theories that communists need not bother to go into bourgeois parliaments or work with workers in trade unions because of their rotten leadership.

In fact, both factions operated with the old notions of a minimum programme and a maximum programme. For both there was no connection, no bridge between the two programmes and so some stuck to the minimum programme and ignored the maximum programme, while others did the opposite.

The true task of the communists is to raise the level of comprehension of the whole of the working class until that class becomes capable of taking power into its hands. That requires a programme that combines both the minimum (reforms) and the maximum (revolution). It must contain intermediate, transitional demands that lead from reform to revolution and in the process help the masses to acquire experiences with struggle and draw the right lessons from them.

In 1920, Comrade Lenin published a whole book to explain that and to criticise the “left-wing communists”. It is called ‘“Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder’, and is yet another very important book that every member should read. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/

So the situation was that the new, imperialist epoch required a completely new approach to struggle. But none of the new communist parties was prepared for it. Despite their best intentions, all were still fraught with conceptions and habits acquired in the calmer previous epoch of rising capitalism. All parties except one: the Russian party of the Bolsheviks. That party, because of the peculiar conditions of Russia, had understood what was required for a revolution to succeed. Indeed, it was the party that had led the October Revolution to victory. But it is important to know that even that party had followed a line of supporting its own bourgeoisie at the beginning of the year 1917. Fortunately it had a very good leader, Lenin. Lenin had formed the party and the party had formed him and many other thoughtful revolutionaries. The party listened to Lenin and so was able to rearm itself to become the leading party of the revolutionary process that was already taking place.

In effect, the whole Third International needed to start a political formation of millions of socialists (who now called themselves communists) to rearm them theoretically and politically. Only in this way could they become really fit for the period of imperialism and of world revolution. They could not simply learn what to do by reading books and taking classes, they had to learn by doing. During the process many mistakes were made which had to be theoretically understood and practically corrected.

The necessity of a transitional programme was one major difference between the Second and the Third International. The other was a concrete understanding of the world revolution as a living process. The majority of the Second International had assumed that socialist revolution would be victorious first in one of the countries where the working class was most numerous and powerful because their capitalism was most mature: Great Britain, France or Germany. But the Russian Revolution proved them all wrong. It was victorious in a backward country which had not attained full capitalist development, whose immense majority of toilers were peasants and whose working class was a tiny minority. A country which had not even arrived at the stage of a bourgeois democracy. In the history of Europe, the class “normally” responsible for leading the democratic revolution to overthrow kings and other tyrants, was the bourgeoisie. Yet in Russia the bourgeoisie proved completely incapable of accomplishing that task. The working class had to take power in order to achieve bourgeois democratic rights and freedoms. Then it would not and could not stop at this. It went directly on to expropriate the capitalists and advance towards socialism.

The imperialist relationship between advanced capitalist countries and dependent, backward countries produces this situation where the capitalist class proves incapable of realising its task of installing democracy. So the working class has to take up both the democratic and socialist tasks in one and the same revolution. Leon Trotsky recognised this necessity well before the October Revolution of 1917. For this process of advancing from democratic to socialist revolution in one movement he used the term “permanent revolution” which had already been used by Marx.

Permanent revolution characterises the whole process of the world revolution in our epoch of imperialist relationships. At the time of the growth and enthusiasm of the Third International, Trotsky’s theory was known as such, under this name, only to a minority. But the International was aware of the fact of permanent revolution, if not of the term. It turned towards the dependent, oppressed countries which had been almost completely neglected by the Second International. Communist parties were set up in backward countries such as China.

Unfortunately, all the promising developments of the Third International were stopped after the Comintern’s Fourth Congress in November 1922. Our comrade Balázs Nagy of the Workers International wrote an article which shows the limits of the work of both of the Third International and the Fourth International and how we, Workers International, must take up these unavoidable tasks. The article’s title is “Some Problems of the Fourth International – and the tasks involved in rebuilding it”. I suggest that we read and discuss it in one or more training sessions dedicated to these problems. http://workersinternational.info/2014/08/some-problems-of-the-fourth-international-and-the-tasks-involved-in-rebuilding-it/

The reason the Third International’s work could not be completed is that the Russian revolution remained isolated. The process of German revolution of 1918-1923 ended in a defeat. That happened because the leadership of the German communist party felt uncertain, became indecisive, hesitated and that hesitation of the leadership weakened the whole party of a million members. After that, Capitalism was able to stabilise for several years. It had been shaken by the war and the revolutionary uprisings after the war. But since none of these uprisings had led to the working class taking power in one of the advanced countries, the capitalists prevailed globally.

12. Stalinist bureaucracy

The Russian working class, though victorious, was exhausted by years of war, revolution and civil war. Its international isolation led to the development of an uncontrolled caste of parasites that came to rule the country in the name of the working class. It first appeared through an alliance between the party apparatus of the Bolshevik party and the well-off peasants and other smaller capitalists that the Bolsheviks had to allow because of the international isolation of the revolution. Then the caste consolidated into a real monster that ruled not only in the name of the working class but more and more over the working class and against the working class.

The foundations of the workers’ state installed by the October Revolution still persisted. There was still no capitalist ruling class. Workers still produced for human needs instead of producing for profit, as they must in capitalist countries. But the ruling caste controlled both production and distribution and directed both to satisfy above all its own needs. The whole apparatus of the state no longer consisted of councils (soviets) of workers. Its organs were still called soviets, but they were entirely in the hands of the ruling caste. So it was still a workers’ state but a deeply damaged, degenerated workers’ state.

This ruling caste is known as the Kremlin bureaucracy after the old imperial palace in Moscow from where its leaders ruled the whole country. More frequently, it is called the Stalinist bureaucracy because its leader was an old Bolshevik named Stalin. He was not a remarkable man except that he was an outstanding schemer and able to rule with an iron fist. But the new caste needed no great leader and educator of the working class like Lenin had been (he died in 1924). It needed an unscrupulous dictator and Stalin exactly fitted the job description.

Soon, after 1933, this caste became great friends with the bourgeoisie of France and Great Britain. Then with that of Hitler’s Germany. Then again with that of France, Great Britain and the USA. Stalin and his caste became sworn enemies of the working class of the world. They did not allow the working class of any country to take power. After the 2nd world war, the working classes of Yugoslavia and of China were able accomplish social revolutions in their countries only against the will of the Kremlin.

But at the same time, though this reactionary bureaucracy wanted to be friends with the capitalists abroad, the capitalist were never friends of the workers state, the USSR. Soon after the war, the British and American capitalist “friends” of the Kremlin put so much pressure on the USSR that the Stalinist bureaucracy felt it had to allow the communist parties to carry out social revolutions in several countries of central and eastern Europe. Because of this, some people started to think that this bureaucracy could not be entirely reactionary. They were completely wrong.

In fact, it was the beginning of a period of systematic worldwide collaboration between the Kremlin and the leading imperialist power, the USA. This collaboration had two names, “peaceful coexistence” and “cold war”, but both are wrong. The coexistence was not peaceful, nor was the war always “cold”. The aim was to maintain the rule of imperialism globally. Therefore, all movements of the working class, of other oppressed classes and of oppressed peoples against imperialism had to be terminated and their leaders either corrupted or killed. The real, comprehensive history of this horrible collaboration has yet to be written.

It is of great importance also for southern Africa. It was Henry Kissinger, an envoy of the USA-Imperialism, who orchestrated the reining in of all the bourgeois liberation movements, such as those led by the ANC, SWAPO, MPLA and FRELIMO in the 1970s. This entailed the massacre of leaders and militants whose democratic and socialist goals were incompatible with the continued rule of imperialism in this region. But Kissinger was able to do his bloody work only with the collaboration of the Kremlin bureaucracy. It was all part of the functioning “peaceful coexistence” or “cold war”.

At the time it formed, in the 1920s, the Stalinist bureaucracy took advantage of the great prestige of the USSR among the workers of the world to take over the leadership of the Third International. From 1929 onward, all leaders of the communist parties were hand-picked by Stalin for their obedience to all his directives, sudden turns and whims. Neither Stalin nor these local lieutenants of his were able or willing to get on with the great historic task of the Third International. Instead, they used it as an instrument of pressure in the service of their diplomacy. In 1943 they dissolved it but by then it had been dead for ten years as a workers’ organisation.

With some exceptions, Stalinist parties remained workers’ parties. Apparently, these parties remained “communist”, continued to propagate Marxism as the scientific theory of the working class and above all, defended the heritage of the October Revolution. So millions of workers remained their enthusiastic members because they thought these parties still represented the interests of the working class. But this appearance of Stalinist parties did not agree with their true nature at all. This “Marxism” of the Stalinist bureaucracy propagated “socialism in one country” (the USSR). That was in complete contradiction to the real scientific insights of Marx and Lenin. It was however very suitable for the purposes of the Stalinist bureaucracy whose very existence was based on the isolation of the USSR. But critique and discussion was not allowed in any of these parties and so the real nature of Stalinism has remained undiscovered for the majority of members of the Stalinist parties to this day.

13. Left opposition and Fourth International

The decisive point of no return in this negative development of the Third International was the year 1933. Hitler came to power in Germany. The Stalinist party in Germany had helped to divide the working class and prevent its resistance to Hitler’s fascism. Even after the defeat, the Stalinist Communist International drew no lessons from it. This International, completely dominated by the Stalinist bureaucracy and its international apparatus, was dead for the purposes of the working class.

So the Third International degenerated, was later even formally dissolved and left behind a reactionary international apparatus with its centre in the Kremlin. But this did not happen without resistance. Almost immediately after the Stalinist bureaucracy began its rise in 1923, a Left Opposition arose against this bureaucracy, first in Russia, then internationally, in most parties of the Communist International. Lenin himself gave the first impulse to resist Stalin’s takeover of the Bolshevik party. After his death, it was the other most prominent leader of the October revolution who led the Left Opposition: Leon Trotsky.

The Left Opposition recognised after 1933 that it had to build a new International, the Fourth International. It was proclaimed in 1938 in France on the eve of the second world war. It inherited all the positive experiences and insights of the Third International before its capture and destruction by the Stalinist bureaucracy. These experiences and insights are gathered in the Programme of the Fourth international. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/

It was written by Leon Trotsky after many discussions with other members of the Fourth International. Trotsky conceived it consciously as the programme of the imminent revolution which he predicted to come after the second world war. Its main idea is that capitalism-imperialism attacks the very existence of the working class – the only class in this society capable of opening a positive outcome to the crisis of the whole humanity. But to do so, this class needs a programme of demands leading to this revolution, a programme of transition.

For instance, ever-growing unemployment throws whole layers of the working class, especially the youth, out of the production process, with no hope of ever becoming part of it again. This divides the working class and puts pressure on all working conditions, both wages and working hours, of those who still have work. So on the one side, there are those who are not allowed to work at all, on the other side those who work must work ever longer hours and ever more quickly.

The Programme of the Fourth International seeks the unity of both parts of the working class by demanding the distribution of all available work among all capable hands without loss of wages. On the one hand, this demand must be satisfied in order to stop the destruction of the working class. On the other hand it runs dead against the need of capitalists to make a profit. So it is both indispensable and not realisable under capitalism. It is in fact a demand to overthrow capitalism and start building socialism, but it makes this theoretical necessity accessible as a result of the experience of millions of workers in their practical struggles for their very existence. The programme of transition is a whole system of such demands both economic and political, leading up to the socialist revolution. Those demands cannot be just thought up by a clever person at his or her desk. They originate from the deeply felt needs of the masses, and often are formulated by the masses themselves.

This is the programme of the Workers International adopted at its founding conference in Budapest, 1990. Its full title is “Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International. The Mobilisation of the Masses around Transitional Demands to Prepare the Conquest of Power.”

Every member of the WRP must read and understand our programme.

So this is how the number four in our emblem represents the International. It does not represent an abstract appeal or desire for an International but the engagement to rebuild the Fourth International.

Now the question arises: where is this Fourth International, 77 years after its foundation? Why must it be rebuilt?

14. The fate of the Fourth International

The Fourth International was proclaimed and founded on the eve of the Second World War out of a historic necessity. The Fourth International predicted that this world war would be even more terrible than the first one and that it would be followed by mighty revolutions. The task the International set itself was to build the parties that would lead these workers revolutions to victory over capitalism. These revolutions did take place but it turned out that the International was not ready to lead them.

Sections of the International were part of the resistance against fascism in occupied Europe and promoted the internationalist line in it against the dominant nationalism propagated by all Stalinist parties. But the International ceased to function as a world party. The Stalinists and Fascists assassinated many of its leaders during the war.

The most experienced section of the Fourth International was the soviet section. All of its members knew and used Marx’s scientific method and many had learnt how to apply it in practice in the Russian October Revolution of 1917. So it was mainly this section and its leader, Leon Trotsky, that could teach the other sections all the theoretical and practical knowledge acquired by the Russian communists before and during the October revolution of 1917.

Unfortunately, in the the 30s almost all members of this party were incarcerated in Stalin’s prisons and concentration camps. They organised clandestinely inside the camps, but around 1940 Stalin ordered their physical liquidation and that of Leon Trotsky himself, who lived in exile, in Mexico. Only a few survived and were not liberated until 1953. By this action and by lies and slander, physical violence and murder, Stalin’s international apparatus deliberately isolated the Fourth International from the workers’ movement. This damage inflicted by Stalinism on the Fourth international led to an unhealthy isolation and lack of growth and ultimately led to the emergence of sects acting in the name of the Fourth International but unable to learn the lessons of Leon Trotsky.

So it came about that after the war, the International did not understand its task – which was to lead the revolution. Its leaders had not understood the main lesson of Marxism: that there can be no revolution without the leadership of a revolutionary party. Instead they observed how the revolutionary movements that took place in Italy and in France at the end of the war were led to their defeat by completely counter-revolutionary Stalinist parties. After that, a majority of these leaders declared that the prediction of revolutions was proven wrong and turned their backs completely on the task of building revolutionary parties. They themselves fell under the influence of Stalinism.

However, as a result, there have also been continual efforts by the most conscious elements of the class to resist Stalinism’s dead end diversions of the march towards socialism. That resistance organised itself in 1953 to rebuild the Fourth International. But even inside this resistance the influence of Stalinism was strong and all the stronger for not being conscious. As a result, the movement is now in a state of dispersion with a myriad of sects all claiming the “tradition” of the Fourth International for themselves and all pretending to grow at the expense of other such sects and, most importantly, at the expense of the living movement of the working class, whom they all consider as just building material for their own sect, just like the Stalinist parties did. Most of them have undemocratic internal regimes and this is another aspect of the unconscious influence of Stalinism on them. Marx, Engels, Lenin or Trotsky never favoured such attitudes and behaviour which do not belong in the working class movement.Our organisation, Workers International to Rebuild the Fourth International, was founded in 1990 as the continuation of the ongoing organised effort to overcome these problems. Some of us have been part of it for decades.

To learn more about the crisis of the Fourth International, comrades should study Balázs Nagy’s book “Marxist considerations on the crisis” and his already mentioned article “Some problems…” http://workersinternational.info/2014/08/some-problems-of-the-fourth-international-and-the-tasks-involved-in-rebuilding-it/

15. The defeat of 1989-1991

In 1991, the Stalinist bureaucracy dissolved the Soviet Union. In each of its constituent republics, the national branches of the Stalinist bureaucracy stole most of the state’s assets, in fact anything that could be transformed into capital. The current capitalist classes in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and the other republics formed on the ruins of the USSR originate from this theft. The state founded by Lenin, Trotsky and by millions of revolutionary workers and peasants in 1917 was lost. So were the workers’ states in Central and Eastern Europe, with the same methods (theft) and results. The worst aspect of this bare-faced theft was that the working class was unable to oppose it, because it no longer recognised that these states belonged to the working class. Generations lived under the oppression of the Stalinist bureaucracy in a degenerated workers’ state in the USSR. Similar states in Central and Eastern Europe even came into existence with that oppression and with the deformation of the state. The social revolutions that installed them in 1948-49 were themselves deformed by their Stalinist leadership. In the end, the workers’ nature of these states became unrecognisable even to their rightful owners – the working class. But when these states disappeared, all the other, more palpable socialist conquests also disappeared! Suddenly, state enterprises went bankrupt and stopped paying workers. Unemployment and humiliating poverty appeared, access to health care and education became difficult and so on. Workers fought against some of these consequence but they lacked a party that would unify all these struggles in a mass resistance to the cause – the restoration of capitalism.

This defeat was not only that of the working class of the USSR. The working class of the whole world suffered a historic defeat. Everywhere the capitalist classes were encouraged to deepen their so called neo-liberal “reforms” whose meaning is to increase exploitation in order to save their profits. At the same time, they were able to restrict the rights of the working class to resist through its unions and politically through its parties. Social democratic and Stalinist parties were thrown into disarray and most responded by becoming bourgeois parties and striving to resemble other bourgeois parties as closely as possible, officially renouncing their working class origin. So the working class of most countries was deprived of its own political expression: representation on the political arena and leadership in political struggles.

Imperialism felt triumphant. Its leaders proclaimed socialism dead and the leader of these leaders, George Bush senior, the president of the USA, even proclaimed a capitalist “new world order”. But it became apparent very quickly that capitalism-imperialism had reached a degree of decomposition where the only “order” it had to offer was in fact chaos and increasing barbarism.

In South Africa this negative turn was represented by the transformation of the South African Communist Party into an openly bourgeois party, although recent events there show that sincere communists will resist these reactionary developments.

16. Turn to new workers’ parties

Some of these sincere communists have now recognised the nature of the SACP and were initiators of the turn of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) in December 2013 to start exploring ways to build a new socialist party of the working class and to constitute its true programme. NUMSA is the largest union of South Africa and perhaps of the whole continent. It sets an example to be followed by the working class in the whole world. There is now a new uprising of the working class of the world. There were revolutions in North Africa and the Middle-East, led by inexperienced and unorganised youth. They stalled or were defeated. But the working class in several countries now tries to rebuild its unions and re-found its political parties. NUMSA’s turn in this direction is not isolated, it is only the most decisive part of a worldwide turn.

In Namibia, the working class must participate in NUMSA’s turn but the situation here is different in two ways: there has never been a workers’ party in Namibia and the Namibian working class is now seizing the opportunity to build the Workers Revolutionary Party, section of Workers International to Rebuild the Fourth International, as that much needed and overdue workers’ party.

So the working class of Namibia can make an original contribution to the world turn towards new socialist parties of the working class initiated by NUMSA. The main contribution is that these parties must be built as revolutionary parties in the process of rebuilding a world party, the Fourth International. This is a very important contribution not only for Africa, but also for countries at the other end of the imperialist relationship. Especially in Europe, where several of the new parties of the working class that have formed during the last decade are now arriving at a crossroads. Recent events in Ukraine and the Balkans tested their reformist conceptions and proved them wrong. A large international debate has started as working class activists are looking for alternatives.

17. The International that must be built

The defeat of 1991 created a very new situation for the international working class. Its oldest and most experienced section, the European working class, has lost its leading role. It was weakened by deindustrialisation in the old imperialist countries of Great Britain, France and Italy. Its long domination by Stalinist and reformist ideas produced a limited and unsuccessful resistance to the capitalists when they moved industries and diverted investments to countries providing cheap labour on other continents.

Everywhere in the world, the working class became divided into the unemployed, precarious contract workers and the dwindling section still in permanent employment. These sections have been pitted against each other and against workers of foreign origin. Workers became less conscious of their immediate interests as unions (with a few exceptions like Unite in the UK) failed in their task to unite all these parts of the working class. The political consciousness of being one international class with the historical mission to overthrow capitalism and replace it with socialism declined even more.

So, to a large extent, the educational work of the four Internationals (First, Second, Third and Fourth) was undone and has to be recommenced. To some extent, we are back in 1864 when the First International was formed. As then, the working class now needs to form an International with all genuinely working class currents, and Marxists have to do as Marx did: patiently argue for the scientific method and programme.

Some people draw from this the conclusion that we must really build a new edition of the long defunct First International, as if the history of the working class of the last 151 years had not taken place.

Others express the same desire to erase history by wishing to build a Fifth International without even bothering to draw a serious balance-sheet of the so far unsuccessful efforts to build the Fourth International. A prominent representative of these was the late President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, who even called an international conference to debate this idea a few years ago.

Still others go as far as proclaiming that the working class has to build an International without a number. By saying that numbers and labels do not matter, they express the most radical negation not just of the necessity to learn from history, but even of the fact that the working class has a living history. We know that there is no other way than to continue that history by learning its lessons so we can overcome our weaknesses. The number 4 in our emblem symbolises the responsibility we take towards our own history as the working class!

Concretely, all those who reject this approach have in common that they propose some “International” that will – permanently or for the time being – ignore the main theoretical achievements of the Third and Fourth Internationals: the theory of permanent revolution, the need for a programme of transitional demands and the knowledge of the nature of imperialism as the latest stage of capitalism which is the theoretical basis of the first two. By running away from history such people immediately fall into the traps of reformism and Stalinism. They prove the truth of the saying: those who have no past, have no future.

The number 4 in our emblem stands concretely for all these theoretical achievements. These achievements are precisely the main subjects of the great and very positive discussion about the way forward which is now taking place among worker activists in this country, in South Africa, in the USA, in Greece and in many other countries. We would be great fools to drop these achievements by dropping our goal to rebuild the Fourth International.

Even more profoundly, without the political and theoretical achievements of the Third and Fourth Internationals, there would be no material conquests of the working class. All these conquests were, in the last analysis, only won as products or by-products of the struggle for the proletarian revolution. If many of these material conquests have now been destroyed, this has been possible only because the theoretical achievements have been forgotten or falsified by organisations of the working class in a retrograde movement on both fronts, theoretical and practical. But the working class now defends itself. We are part of this resistance. Our task is to inform it with Marx’s, Lenin’s and Trotsky’s school of thought and of workers’ politics.

In conclusion: To fully understand all the symbols of the flag, we have to understand our programme. The programme is not just a collection of demands plus an overall aim. That would just reproduce the old division between a maximum and a minimum programme. Our programme is the summary of what the working class is and how it fights. It summarises the aim of our class, the conclusions it has drawn from its dearly bought experiences, its disappointments in the past and its hopes for the future. This is why the programme cannot be declared finished once and for all. The conditions of working class struggle have changed a lot since 1990 and we need a programme taking into account all those changes. It will be based on the old programme of 1938 but at the same time it will be a new programme. The programme that the WRP of Namibia will elaborate in preparation for and during its special congress will be an important contribution to this new international programme of the Fourth International.

18. References to literature mentioned in the talk

Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/
Vladimir Lenin, “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/
Leon Trotsky, “The History of the Russian Revolution”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/
Vladimir Lenin, “The State and Revolution”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/
Vladimir Lenin, ‘“Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder’
“https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/
Balázs Nagy, “Some Problems of the Fourth International – and the tasks involved in rebuilding it” http://workersinternational.info/2014/08/some-problems-of-the-fourth-international-and-the-tasks-involved-in-rebuilding-it/
Leon Trotsky, Programme of the Fourth International, “The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International. The Mobilization of the Masses around Transitional Demands to Prepare the Conquest of Power.”
“https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/

Theses by Balazs Nagy,  January 2011

Workers International To Rebuild the Fourth International

Biased, fragmentary and very incomplete as the media reports are, some things are clear:

1. These movements are desperately short of revolutionary leadership. The long years of ruthess dictatorship have strangled even the more or less petty-bourgeois parties. There is no sign even of any bourgeois leadership independent of the ruling authorities, apart from groups and individuals tied to the dictators whom the workers have thrown out.

2. We offer the following considerations to Tunisian, Egyptian Libyan and other groups in Europe and by any means available to people in the countries affected. Workers in those countries are in a real state of confusion, not knowing what to do or how to do it. In general what they want is real democracy.

3. Indeed, that is not a bad place to start. But before thinking about what to do and how to do it, first a few words about the general situation. There is no doubt that this is a revolution, or rather several revolutions. Now, a revolution is a whole process, more or less long, and we are just at the start. That is the first thing we must explain to these workers who clearly believe those who tell them that it is already over. They have got rid of the dictators, but these were merely the personification of a whole economic and social system – imperialism — as it exists in these countries. To maintain its domination almost unchanged (in a different form from the old colonial regime the workers long since rejected) imperialism has succeeded, with the help of reformists and the Stalinist bureaucracy, in turning these young independent states into military dictatorships and medieval monarchies by delegating its direct power of oppression to native political regimes. In its first phase the revolution has thrown out the dictators in two countries and started the same battle in many others (Yemen, Libya, Algeria, etc.). But in these first two countries, the revolution is now marking time. The politico-economic regime remains more or less intact and is preparing, at this moment, to demobilise, push back and repress the workers. It dare not go too far in the direction of bloody repression because it is weakened and does not yet feel strong enough. Soldiers would probably refuse to fire on the people. The army’s apparent neutrality, as the fruit of this uncertainty, forces the generals in power to negotiate with the workers over their demands. The situation is a little different in Tunisia but remains essentially the same.

4. In this situation workers should push forward with their desire to achieve democracy. In continuing the revolution in that way and by concretising their demands, they can transform into facts their obvious vigilance and their distrust of the new people on power – both expressed loud and clear not least by their determination to stay put where they mobilised their movements. But all that is very fragile. If they are demobilised, it would certainly mean the first step towards a defeat and the re-installation of a new dictatorship, possibly veiled for a time.

5. We should propose to them that they continue their movement towards real democracy – a battle that is not even half won yet. Progress in this the only guarantee against a turn backwards in the situation: if you do not go forward you are condemned to retreat. The general slogan should be the conquest and strengthening of real democracy based on winning and securing democratic rights, as well as on the organisation of the movement.

6. We can only sketch several essential points of a democratic programme which workers in those countries themselves, their political and trade union organisations, would need to work out in detail.

a. Immediately lift the state of emergency which has been in force for many years in all these countries (in Egypt, the new – military – authorities have only promised to lift it in 6 months time!)

b. Besides that it is important to demand and secure freedom of speech and of the press; freedom of assembly, freedom for workers to organise together democratically and, finally, freedom to demonstrate. At the moment the masses have spontaneously exercised these rights, but it is necessary to guarantee and codify them.

c. Complete and total separation of the church and the state (of all churches)

d. Immediate freedom for all political prisoners (already started in Egypt)

These are the immediate measures that directly flow from the current situation.

Beyond that, it is important to make progress towards complete democratic freedom for the working masses in the towns and the countryside. For this, political democracy must go hand-in-hand with economic democracy.

1. It is vitally important for the life of the country to nationalise the factories, mines and banks, particularly those owned by foreign capital.

2. One fundamental democratic measure is a radical agrarian reform, with the re-distribution of land to the poor farmers and their co-operatives without compensation to the present owners. This is the very bedrock of democracy in the countryside and at the same time it breaks the power of the big landed proprietors who are pillars of support for the dictatorship, as well as of those leaders currently in power. All the generals in Egypt, like Mubarak and his family, are big landed proprietors, and the same is true elsewhere.

3. Democratic rights for workers at their workplace, codified in progressive social legislation (collective bargaining, defined working times, the right to strike, unemployment benefits, etc.)

4. Freedom to form trade unions and trade union rights. At the same time democratisation of existing trade unions, holding fresh elections to renew them..

5. Progressive social legislation for all workers (sickness insurance, laws protecting workers’ housing, etc.)

6. Confiscation of all the material goods of the cronies of dictators already fallen and yet to fall: land, factories, buildings, businesses, wealth stolen from the people and monopolised during the decades of dictatorship.

But the most urgent task of the day, and therefore the main slogan, is – organise working people

1. So that they can make progress towards real democracy, guarantee the freedom which has been won and achieve all their demands, the most determined and conscious and therefore the most active elements must set up their political party, a workers’ party, a sort of Labour Party. The job of this party from the very moment it is set up would be to work out and promote in practice the whole democratic programme, raising it in all workers’ movements.

2. All of these movements in the country should unite in a political process aimed at setting up a new regime in line with the wishes and desires of workers. It would be a terrible mistake to put faith in the promise of elections. The whole country (all the countries), the whole of the working people, have rejected the dictators’ bogus constitution. They need a new one, a constitution of the working people. They need to fix and codify the new order, i.e. the most highly democratic measures, rules and laws, which alone conform to the will of the people and its dynamism. They need also to prevent the possessing class, the pillars of the dictatorship, from cheating the people through a fraudulent electoral farce. Therefore workers need to prepare and hold a Constituent Assembly of the country. It is for the creation of that type of assembly that elections should be held, to select delegates drawn from candidates of the truly democratic parties, first and foremost of the workers’ party.

3. Both to run the the elections – and to make sure they are run properly – and to prepare the Assembly to bring about their demands and under popular supervision, workers urgently need to form local committees of action and supervision in the workplace and in the local areas. In the countryside, one vitally important task for such committees would be to push forward agrarian reform and land re-distribution energetically. Poor farmers and agricultural labourers would form the majority of these committees in the countryside. Everywhere these committees, with the participation of housewives, should keep an eye on prices at markets and in the shops. This is all the more necessary since the international bourgeoisie could strangle and starve the infant workers’ democracy through present and future speculation in cereals and other agricultural products.

4. One extremely important political task for workers and their organisations is a radical and immediate break with national isolation. A main condition for the success of their movement is to bring about an effective and living alliance

   1. with the other peoples engaged in similar movements in North Africa and and the Middle East. The people of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Algeria, can already form permanent contacts and synchronise their demands and activities through their movements and political parties (once the latter have been established).

   2. also with the workers in the countries of Europe and their organisations, demanding their solidarity and collaboration to establish a broad united front against the forces of restoration in their countries and internationally.

5. Separately, I would like to make a particular point about the enormous importance of the following problem: Fraternisation with the army soldiers, especially in Egypt, has already born fruit fruit in the apparent neutrality of the army. But this is very fragile. It is necessary to continue and extend this fraternisation (which is a very important task in the other countries too), with the aim of forming stable contacts so that ultimately, at a stage which cannot be determined from here, soldiers’ committees can be set up, especially since the soldiers are workers in uniform, or very often farmers willing to discuss a programme for the re-distribution of the land.

Here in broad terms and hastily sketched, are a a few points, hints rather, to serve as the basis of an programme for these movements. The determination and the dynamism are there. But about the aims of their struggle and the means available to them almost total confusion reigns. That is where we should at least try to help.

January 2011

By Balazs Nagy  February 2013 (First published in Workers International Journal No. 1)

[threecolumns]It would be very wrong to judge France’s military intervention in Mali on the basis of the deafening and unanimous press and television chorus. They think this act of war was inevitable and celebrate it. It galvanised them unhesitatingly and pompously to laud President Hollande as a great leader — the very same politician they used to dismiss as flabby.

But it would be even worse to put any trust this “leader’s” own pronouncements, or those of his aides and their allies in Europe and across the world.

And yet … you cannot actually blame Hollande and co. directly for the long-drawn-out deterioration in Mali and the region, culminating in the present utter decay. But nor can you exonerate them either, since as loyal inheritors of the whole mess they took it on entirely and without a second thought. And in that specific sense the intervention was indeed as inevitable as the — joyful but perhaps over-optimistic – claims of “victory” and a job well done.

Despite the — to say the least — simplistic presentation of the situation in the Sahara and the Sahel as goodies vs. baddies, reality turns out to be incomparably more complex. Understanding it requires a brief review the more outstanding aspects of the historical development which prepared, shaped and conditioned the political and social scene — and the actors – which led to the current situation.

A glance at history

For a start, the immense revolutionary wave which swept across Europe in the second half and aftermath of World War II generally speaking hit the African continent a dozen or so years later. Within Europe, the leaderships of working class parties did everything they could to channel revolutionary movements into shoring up the bourgeoisie through conventional democracies. In contrast, French (and other) imperialisms had been deeply shaken and weakened by the war and were unable to withstand the colonial peoples’ irresistible independence movement. After a shaky early start, first Tunisia and Morocco (in 1956) and then the Algerian people won independence in 1962 after eight years of gruelling armed struggle. The revolutionary shock wave travelled south, and De Gaulle, more clear-sighted than other leaders of an exhausted possessing class, was forced to accept the obvious need to re-vamp old-style imperialism and grant independence to a series of countries in the region – almost all of them by 1960 (Senegal, Mauretania, Mali, Burkina-Faso, formerly Upper Volta, Niger, Chad, Ivory Coast – Guinea from 1958).

Hopes of a promising new start roused and inspired these countries. Borrowing from Algeria and even Tunisia in their search for a path towards a system leading to socialism, Guinea, Senegal and Mali all chose more or less the same route. After Bourguiba in Tunisia and Ben Bella in Algeria, Sekou Toure in Guinea and Modibo Keita in Mali and their governments carried out a series of nationalisations of property of the colonial power and its nationals. On this basis they initiated a policy of taking charge of their respective countries. Distrustful of the continually obstructive colonial power, they turned squarely towards the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe for desperately needed support and assistance. Senegal, too, worked towards a kind of socialism, but its president L. Senghor, whose attachment to the republican bourgeoisie in France was well-known, rejected the orientation towards the USSR, preferring a kind of panafricanism and so-called “third worldism”. The national struggle, first for independence and then for this take-over by a kind of “anti-feudal” socialism by Modibo Keita in Mali was particularly powerfully nourished by young people, who had previously languished in the kind of semi-slavery affecting a quarter of the population of the Sahel.

But these initial hopes and efforts and fruitful initiatives quickly came to grief on obstacles born of these countries’ extreme poverty and the cruel shortages of resources imposed on them by the former colonial power. On the other hand, the inadequacies and material shortages in the so-called “socialist” countries, trapped in the impoverishing constraints of “socialism in one country” and hampered by an oppressive Stalinism increasingly in debt to its capitalist creditors, meant that they could not provide the necessary assistance even if they had wanted to. Far from it. And so, disappointed and discouraged, most of these Arab and African “socialist reformers” turned back to the former coloniser and towards a policy of oppression. This was all the easier since their origins and education separated them from the working masses, and in any case they could model themselves on how it was done in Eastern Europe. Not everybody can boast the strength of character or consistency of view of a Keita, a Lumumba or a Sangare. Nor is it a co-incidence that these three were all assassinated.

As for the leaders of the powerful workers’ movement of the day in Europe, they did everything they could to bog these movements down in the swamp of deepening degradation, particularly since they everywhere resolutely drew this entire workers movement into the false and fatal path of “parliamentary cretinism” and collaboration with the bourgeoisie.

But from the outset, this bourgeoisie went in completely the opposite direction, determined to maintain and even reinforce its prerogatives and arrangements as a class. Forced to abandon the colonial methods of its imperial system, it adapted to the new situation through the bonapartist rule of De Gaulle. Run in secrecy by his secretary, Jacques Foccart, the General’s shadow organisations worked feverishly to re-organise France’s political, administrative and military networks and adapt them to the new political configuration. And so the wild beast of colonial imperialism clothed itself in the post-colonial lamb’s skin of “co-operation”. And that is how a whole system was forged, the sadly famous “Françafrique” which (under all Presidents!) continued the old imperialist practices under the cover of close collaboration with the African countries and lightly disguised within the forms required by the “independence” of the respective states.

A whole series of military coups very quickly expressed and made manifest the limits of “independence” in most of the African countries concerned. Even in countries which had been better prepared by a long struggle, the dissident colonels Ben Ali and Boumediene resolutely put an end to the democratic scruples of Bourguiba and Ben Bella. Everywhere the military putschists installed a dictatorship resting on an oversized army and a single party, African regimes corresponding to the “Françafrique” system and symmetrically replicating it. Almost everywhere, independent regimes of the older generation of more radical bourgeois fighters gave way to corrupt regimes of dictators. Where the old guard did stay in power, their degeneration became inevitable.

This series of African countries was independent but had been impoverished and systematically, mercilessly, plundered in the course of the long preceding period of colonial rule. In the way of things, “co-operation” between them and a highly-developed great power like France simply maintained and exacerbated the monstrous economic and social inequality between such “partners”. A hungry wolf in a sheep-fold comes to mind. It is very characteristic that from the end of World War II onwards the straitjacket that was the Franc zone tied the African countries to close dependence on France. On 25 December 1945, a special Franc of the African Financial Community (CFA) was created for use in these countries (including some further south) and its value was set outrageously low by the French government: 1 CFA Franc was only worth 0.02 metropolitan Francs. (N.B. following Sekou Touré of Guinea, Keita of Mali also took his country out of this Franc zone system in 1963. But faced with economic difficulties, he had to re-join it, shortly before he was overthrown).

These decisions to leave were fully justified, since the CFA Franc embodied the crying inequality between these economies — often kept excessively backward — and bourgeois France, one of the most highly-developed countries. Trade imposed by this “benevolent” France provided the latter with agricultural products and raw materials of all kinds at derisory prices, even below world prices which themselves are traditionally low. Conversely, her own industrial products were sold off virtually risk-free at guaranteed high prices on these markets. So this system not only maintained flagrant inequality, but intensified it intolerably. Need we add that this imposed and legalised inequality has continued right up to the present? To be more accurate, it was pushed by the Balladur government (under President Mitterrand in 1994) to the point of an explosion when the CFA Franc was devalued by 50%! The French bourgeoisie carefully retained this shamefully super-exploitative rate when the euro was introduced: in 2011, 1 euro equalled 655.957 Francs CFA. And they insult our ears with fairly stories about the end of imperialism!

In this re-vamped framework of imperialism, these countries were put under pressure – both directly and through successive dictatorships — to abandon dreams of progress. But worse was to come. Within the modified political configuration of the imperialist system, they still had to maintain their traditional role as providers of very cheap agricultural products and raw materials. Open, violent force had been replaced with sly economic constraint. In this sense, these countries objectively contributed, kicking and screaming, to the ability of a thus reinvigorated world bourgeoisie to take on and sustain its “thirty glorious years”. And so the relative “social peace” that prevailed in the course of that expansion secured by that same bourgeoisie’s pact with powerful (reformist and Stalinist) bureaucracies, which kept the workers movement under lock and key, was largely paid for by super-exploitation of the former colonies. It led inevitably to colossal indebtedness on the part of these poor “independent” countries, over which even the bourgeoisie’s various nerve centres shed copious crocodile tears.

Economic, social and political deterioration

The situation got even worse when the bourgeoisie set its neo-liberal agents to work to reduce these debts overall. Starting in the early 1980s, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank forced all the countries concerned to adopt massive “structural adjustments” in the form of drastic budget and expenditure cuts and extensive privatisations in return for “aid” in reducing these debt levels. French (and other) firms bought up a great number of local enterprises for peanuts, while huge companies like Total, Areva and a multitude of others made themselves at home. Catastrophic results quickly followed. (It is a remarkable fact that what is going on in Europe at present is not some novelty arising out of the crisis; the Latin Americans had painful experience of it even before the Africans).

In Africa, too, the first victims were the education and health systems, whose often remarkable initial achievements had been a source of legitimate pride to these young nations. Ever tighter budgetary constraints laid waste to these promising beginnings.

Merciless cuts in expenditure also deprived agriculture — bankrupt state farms as much as independent farmers ruined by lack of access to credit — of all aid. Across Africa, already low rural wages saw a general fall of 30% in those years. Mali’s agriculture, for example, which at the end of the 1980s contributed 67% of the country’s exports through cotton production, saw the latter smashed up and the peasantry crushed. Moreover, from the 1960s onwards a series of terrible droughts hit the whole region, resulting in a regular desert encroachments. The funds needed for big irrigation networks and effective water supplies were cruelly lacking, as were the cheap credits essential for small farmers.

These calamities led on the one hand to the terrible famines which periodically descend on the region and on the other to the massive rural exodus which drives tens and hundreds of thousands of people into the terribly overpopulated slums in the cities. The inhabitants of Nouakchott in Mauretania, extremely poor as they are, describe the slums in “their” shanty-town as “rubbish dumps”. As for famines, the hypocrisy of successive food-aid campaigns launched and supported by the bourgeoisie and beloved of right-thinking petit-bourgeois barely masks neither the formers’ direct responsibility for these disasters and their organic inability to do much about them, nor the latters’ deferential complicity. Having said that, no one would want to prevent good souls from helping the starving, but reality puts us on guard against this rather unreliable substitute which in no way attacks the root of the problem.

Chronic unemployment also affects the whole population, which has undergone geometrical growth in the period in question. By 1989 it exceeded 22% of the active population, including more than half of young people in Algeria, for all that this country is better off than Mali or other countries in the Sahara or the Sahel. A significant proportion of the population has persistently sought a way out of this social catastrophe in emigration. This explains the very high number of Malians (2 million) living in France around 1990, as many as a quarter of the whole population of the country! But vigilant France kept a close watch on the situation, and Charles Pasqua — a worthy successor to “Françafrique’s” organiser Foccart — started forcibly repatriating hundreds of thousands of Africans. His successors, also under all Presidents, have virtually institutionalised this into a regular procedure. Following the regular expulsions organised by Guéant, Manuel Valls has most recently filled an aeroplane with several dozen immigrants. A veil is drawn over how they carry this out. Be that as it may, journalists estimate that there are currently still 120,000 Malians living in France. But who knows exactly how many of these working class pariahs there are who have escaped utter poverty over there only to be hounded and persecuted here for the lack of an all-important piece of paper?

While the people – especially the young – are fleeing the country, businesses large and small, French and other, are settling in there as a kind of Eldorado to exploit the natural wealth of the country and its cheap labour. Apart from the odd kick-back, these businesses repatriate the whole of their profits and operate above the law. According to studies by comrades at Survie (a French NGO founded in 1984 to fight hunger and corruption in the “third world” ), France’s trade surplus with Mali was over 300 million euros in 2010-2012, five times more than the derisory public “aid” she grants to that country!

Alongside these destructive activities went a long drawn-out process of reducing these states to subservience, adapting them more and more to the needs of capitalists in the French “protector”. Metropolitan agents of “Françafrique” carefully guided this convulsive change by remote-control. Enriched local cliques devoured each other in order to establish, in an endless series of coups, which one would seize control of a state which itself was reduced little by little to its repressive apparatus. Having laid its hands on the manna from the “co-operation” community and other so-called “development” loans, the winning group would set out to fulfil its role as a substitute for the former colonial power. As poverty grew in these states, their role was more and more reduced to one essential: securing, preserving and reinforcing power in order to consolidate France’s economic and political position and influence while maintaining a repressive regime against working people. Those currently holding power, such as the puppets Deby (Chad), Compoaré (Burkina Faso) and Touré (Mali) have nothing in common with the independent figures of the first generation of leaders. They are even the opposite of someone like Keita, for example. The most important, if not the only, means they use to achieve their objectives has been and is the army. Now, the rapid overall worsening of the situation has provoked a series of coups in which the impoverished masses’ role of detonator has become increasingly visible, reflecting the economic and social deterioration that has been eating away.

Unpicking the tangled politics of North Africa

Above all we must reject the simplistic way the interventionist power presents the context and conditions in this part of Africa. Even if – and this goes without saying – it is so constantly and noisily parroted in the media that certain political tendencies and individuals, while uttering reservations about “neo-colonial ulterior motives”, nevertheless give this military action guarded support as a necessary “pre-requisite”. These include the French Communist Party parliamentary deputy François Asensi (L’Humanité newspaper 18 January 2013) who swallows the intervention whole but hastens to add: “…France must state clearly her aim to re-build a democratic state”. He actually seems to think that is possible on the basis of this intervention!

Despite all the resounding statements and those who are taken in by them, there is no way that trends and programmes in this region of Africa, or the political formations and groupings to which they give rise, can be reduced to isolated groups of Islamic fanatics on the one hand and loyal government supporters on the other. Reality is much richer and more complicated. Before even attempting to sketch a few lines, with no claim at all to presenting the whole picture, it is enough to describe the interventionists and their accomplices as the famous bull in a china shop, especially given the brutal military aggression and lack of concern for “details” that are innate and natural characteristics of so-called “neo-colonial” imperialism.

As described above, after a very short period of national awakening in the aftermath of World War II, successive economic setbacks in the newly independent countries turned into a sustained social regression. The vast majority of the popular classes (workers, farmers, stock-breeders, pastoralists, etc.) have become considerably poorer, particularly the many peoples and ethnic groups at the bottom of society. Their degradation provided the ground for the astonishing explosion of a whole series of programmes and the most varied social and national movements. It is impossible to list them all here, but in general they rested on previous currents and movements, some of them going back to the nineteenth century. Several great traditions of thought and social movements have remained alive to this very day. In the majority of cases, social and national demands have overlapped inextricably. The roots of some movements are to be found in the distant past.

The European workers’ movement of the twentieth century in particular inspired by example a powerful trade-unionism among workers in these countries, as well as the appearance of labour and communist parties. The present-day UGTT union confederation in Tunisia, which opposes the Salafists, is one of the fruits of this co-operation whose powerful resurgence can be considered as an important opposition factor to the government of religious people, but also of a positive political change. We also know that Sekou Touré of Guinea (secretary of the CGT federation of black Africa in 1948!) rested on the Guinean trade unions for support in the national independence movement and spiced up his conceptions with socialism of a kind. The Algerian independence movement was also in large part influence by the French workers’ movement.

It would therefore be unforgivable to look down on the movements for the social and national liberation of these countries from the heights of some imagined European supremacy. Often centuries-old traditions and a wealth of ancient experience also nourish the struggles of workers and people in Africa and its northern part. These movements exist, despite the extremely difficult situation they are in because they pay the price of the backwardness imposed upon their countries, suffering from isolation and repression which are bound to mark the immediate future of the region.

This social and national situation was essentially what we had in mind when we published the press release from the comrades at “Survie” in issue no. 1 of our journal, expressing the desire to “look at certain important aspects of the rebellion in a different light”. Of course the comrades from “Survie” not only bravely condemn the intervention, but are also well-known for having brought together a mass of precious facts in relation to this part of Africa. But in the indignation which informs their timely and correct condemnation of the intervention, we believe they erred in losing sight, behind the inflated bubble of religious fanatics, of precisely these movements and their national and social base. But that is precisely the direction in which to look for the key to the situation, and a way out, and not at all the “armies” of corrupt regimes or their UN protectors. The “Survie” comrades talk about French intervention as “significant pressure on the Malian authorities” as if the latter actually existed independently of the former. They also say France “must respect UN resolutions as soon as possible”.

But in the first place, rather than acting as “pressure”, French intervention is necessary to save these “authorities”. And not only the Malian authorities, but all the rest in the region, too! The comrades should not just see French (state) authorities, but also those of these countries, these African states, as the agents and representatives of a quite definite social class – the bourgeoisie. With the significant difference that the latter do not exist and act on behalf of their own bourgeoisie, since even the feeble shreds of that native class are merely a subaltern appendix of the metropolitan (and world) bourgeoisie. These states, therefore, exist and act as the local organ of the latter, even though they are endowed with the fig-leaf of independence.

From the 1980s onwards, when the capitalist-imperialist system started moving over to so-called ultra-liberalism, this remarkably intensified the exploitation of these countries and revived all the traditions of struggle, and their direct and indirect heirs started moving. The great liberating risings of 2011 which journalists called “Arab revolutions” are also manifestations of these struggles, at the same time acting as a significant precursor to the European and world revolution that is gestating. The outstanding role of the UGTT union in the Tunisian revolution and the overthrow of the regime – even though it was itself contaminated by the latter – is well known. Less well known, perhaps, is the decisive action the Egyptian working class developed in its revolution, organising strikes and renewing its unions. Today its sporadic but incessant struggles constitute a significant element in defending and advancing that revolution. As for the UGTT, we can all see its decisive participation in the current mobilisation.

While the “Arab spring” is an integral component of the European revolution currently gestating and undeniably contributed to the still stuttering awakening of young people in Europe, it also lived on in the convulsive but still disorganised movements of the despoiled and deracinated masses of that region, of which islamist movements form a large but unfortunately distorted and adulterated part. Be that as it may, certain ancient and modern political movements and organisations have raised their heads again, often inspired by the European workers’ movement of former days, but also by their own old traditions, and – closer to home – by the revolutionary overturns of 2011.

“A people which oppresses another cannot emancipate itself”(Engels)

For centuries the immense Sahara and the Sahel regions of north and west Africa have constantly been disturbed by movements and rebellions of this or that nation or ethnic group living there. Its artificial division into separate countries by colonial powers only served, in the majority of cases, to reinforce national oppression by devastating and wrenching apart ethnic or national units. During independence, some of these peoples, like the Kabyles in Algeria and their Berber relatives, the Touareg in Mali (and more or less everywhere) hoped to achieve national recognition in return for their participation in the anti-colonial struggle. But right from the outset, all of the newly independent states, based on the primacy of the dominant ethnic group (or tribe), refused to allow any concessions at all, still less any form of autonomy, to ethnic or national minorities. This serious defect left a profound scar on the democratic awakening of the bourgeois revolutions which shook these countries, even those who ventured furthest into a kind of proto-socialism. We do not have the space here to examine all these national movements in detail. Nevertheless the most important ones must be mentioned.

Categorically turned down by the new Algerian government, the Kabyle people started a prolonged struggle for autonomy. Not only was this refused from the very start, but the Kabyle people suffered repeated bloody repressions and a national oppression which continues to this very day.

Far away from there, in another region steeped in prolonged national-ethnic struggle, Casamance in Senegal has battled against oppression. The region has been demanding autonomy ever since Senegal achieved independence. However, despite L.Senghor’s evasive promises, it has not been forthcoming. The region went into open armed struggle in the early 1980s, when Senegal was trying to ward off a massive debt crisis (almost 2 million dollars). The cultivation of ground nuts appeared to offer a way out, but when the government assigned land to colonists from the north for this, the inhabitants of Casamance, traditionally rice-growers, revolted. Ever since, cease-fires have alternated with fresh confrontations and the conflict has persisted, particularly since the Senegalese state, exactly like all the others also in its constantly growing poverty, has shown itself less and less able to resolve the situation and has even imposed further burdens on the region.

When one considers the vast Sahara and Sahel territory from the point of view of the many different peoples inhabiting it, what becomes evident is a profound interweaving of the social degradation of the peoples – often linked to sudden changes in their mode of life also imposed by the neglect of nature – and the subordinate or even oppressed character of their ethnic or national lives. History teaches us that those who try to separate them from social difficulties, or with more reason to oppose them, have paid a high price.

For a long time now the nomadic Saharoui of the western Sahara have undergone a veritable calvary. While they struggled for autonomy, Franco’s Spain would not allow them any rights. In 1975, following a call by King Hassan of Morocco, hundreds of thousands joined a “green march” to invade what they thought was “Moroccan Sahara”. In reaction to this the Polisario Front, founded in 1973 by young Saharoui students, proclaimed the “Democratic Arab Saharoui Republic” under Algerian protection. The Algerian and Moroccan armies have confronted each other in a rivalry that has nothing to do with the interests of any peoples whatsoever. Algeria has protected the new Saharoui republic since Spain left in 1976, whereas she has never allowed Kabylia or the Touareg movement the slightest degree of autonomy.

Following a cease-fire in 1991, Morocco has controlled 80% of this territory, leaving 20% to the Polisario Front. But despotic King Hassan has installed a 2,500km (!) security belt called the “Moroccan Wall”. (This is the nth “wall” built to contain some people to disfigure the world and bring the powerful into disrepute!) As for the new Saharoui Republic, what with recognition by a few countries and rejection by the majority of others – including the UN! – it has no legal existence at all.

The Touregs’ problem is even more complex. Because of the arbitrary and fantastic division of this great region by the great colonial powers, the almost 2 million Touareg find themselves artificially split up between five different countries. They are just one of many peoples who, carved up between several countries, have no right to a legal existence and are often persecuted. When discussing them, one inevitably thinks of the Kurds or the Palestinians in the Middle East. If you want a shameful image of imperialist reality dragged down to the level of simple banality, then look no further. The Basques divided up between the north of Spain and the south of France might have a thing or two to say about this, or the Irish, with the north of their country still under the iron heel of Britain.

On the other hand, the break-up of several multi-national countries and the revival of virulent national feelings also testify to the growing contradiction between capitalism-imperialism and the facts of national existence. (To say nothing of the inability of the Stalinist bureaucracy to solve this problem in the former USSR and its criminal role in the break-up of several multi-national states it used to govern, like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia).

Be that as it may, the Touareg people were among the losers in the post-war anti-imperialist wave of liberation. In a way, their fate contains just about all the problems of the national question in this part of the world in compressed form: — the capitalist nature of the states in which they live and the role played in this by religion, particularly Islam.

It is really remarkable that even the leaders of the first wave of bourgeois-democratic revolution just could not grasp this problem at all. And so as early as 1963 Modibo Keita severely repressed and Touareg revolt in Mali. He was helped by his Algerian colleague Ben Bella, who handed over to him the Touareg leaders who had fled to Algeria. One Touareg author wrote: “The thousands of deaths caused by repression were met with general indifference”.

But we lack the space here to tell the full story of the many rebellions by this people, their lengthy negotiations with this or that state in the region, and the massacres and flights of thousands of their members which punctuate the life of these states which have degenerated into vassals of imperialism.

As a result of general economic decline and collapse and the consequent successive setbacks to the Touaregs’ national struggles, they toughened up their behaviour and adopted a more radical attitude. All states in the area felt the effects of imperialist super-exploitation, but the Touareg people suffered it twice over (and they were not alone in that). Besides the dismantlement of services, there was no investment to assuage sufferings which were made greater by massive unemployment exacerbated as the introduction of lorries and the severity and frequency of drought put an end to caravans. Hundreds of thousands of them fled Mali and lived under extremely precarious conditions in Niger, Mauretania, Algeria, Burkin-Faso, etc.

As we know, after the overthrow of Ghadaffi, who enlisted many of them among his “protectors”, a significant number of these armed men returned to Mali. But this detachment did not start the armed struggle of the already strongly-radicalised Touregs. All they did was to contribute a considerable force to a movement which had been present for a long time but, hardened by serial disappointments, was only waiting for the right opportunity. The extreme fragility of the Malian state, made worse army Captain Sanogo’s attempted coup fell apart, furnished the signal and the opportunity for attack. The “Azawad Liberation Movement”, formed some months previously, allied itself with armed islamist groups to bulk out its numbers. And so they were able quite rapidly to pulverise the Malian army and occupy the north of the country as far as the River Niger.

Of course this was a mistake, but a very understandable one, as the Touareg movement was very contaminated by its own islamist faction. Mistake though it is, this movement as a whole should not be confused with its islamist faction “Ansar Eddine”, even if the latter has undoubtedly pushed the movement a long way in a radical direction. But it should never under any circumstances be identified with it, as French imperialism and it lackeys strive to do.

Contrary to all the claims of the propaganda machine, political islam – even the most radical kind – is not a recent foreign import to Africa. Even in the nineteenth century, locally-based islamists inspired great anti-colonial struggles. Exploited peoples sought refuge and consolation against all kinds of oppression in religion. Since Engels wrote The Peasant War in Germany we have known that religion serves to encourage and stimulate the resistance and struggle of oppressed classes when they are still insufficiently developed or – we may add – when their elder sister, the world working class, is on the back foot constantly.

If Islamism has in recent years – sometimes aggressively—taken the place of secular leaderships of social and national movements, it is a consequence of the considerable weakening and retreat of the international workers’ movement. Over the last fifty years or so, the emphatic way social democratic parties have gone over from being supporters of the bourgeoisie to being its direct and settled political representatives has been one of the most outstanding features of this historic collapse. The other is the destruction of the Soviet Union and the dominant role played by the Stalinist bureaucracy played within it, followed by workers massively deserting communist parties and their inevitable retreat. A whole series of communist and non-communist parties and groups which used to lead social and national struggles have been marginalised across the world as a result. In their place, religious islamist movements have emerged from Afghanistan to Morocco, by way of Palestine, Egypt, Tunisia, etc.

Obviously this “opium of the people” works like any other drug. While bringing temporary consolation and relief, it cannot cure the ailment but poisons the organism even further. The muslim religion (like any other) brings no improvements but on the contrary preserves the backward and desperate situation working people are in, as we see very clearly in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Tunisia, too. Moreover, this religion contain within itself, as the cloud carries the thunderstorm, its radical Salafist wing with its medieval customs. The people of Tunisia have recently started to struggle even more powerfully against this “opium”, as have the people of Egypt. We should also note that there has recently been a significant internal split in the Touareg salafist group “Ansar Eddine”.

The situation is bound to get worse

Only recently forced to accept cuts in its material resources, the French army has become trapped in an inextricable tangle of intertwined difficulties which it cannot overcome. It is no coincidence that Hollande’s European and American allies have very parsimoniously calibrated their own symbolic rather than real “contributions”. They obviously have a better grasp of the implications and extent of their devastating setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are more than happy to let the French bourgeoisie and its puppet Hollande have the more than dubious glory of pulling their shared chestnuts out of the fire. In fact the French “Socialist” Party has suddenly revealed itself to be the advance-guard not just of its “own” bourgeoisie but of world imperialism as a whole. Only recently the US vice-president conferred a metaphorical knighthood on Hollande, confirming him in this role with a lordly “well done!”

Obviously the forward patrols of world imperialism didn’t have a clue what they were getting into. Incredible but true: neither the army nor its political bosses had any idea of what a simmering cauldron they were involving themselves in. Hollande kept saying they only wanted to stay in Mali a few days, then various unpleasant experiences made them change that to “… an indefinite period”. It was brought home to these ardent interventionists that they would have to re-make the state and army, not just in Mali, but more or less across the whole region – a massive task far beyond the capacity of the French state.

The colossal expenditure such an undertaking entails massively exceeds the meagre resources of a French bourgeoisie mired in persistent crisis. There will be a growing contradiction between the no-doubt long-term financial cost of these involvements and their categorical refusal to allow even the slightest relief of the ever-increasing burdens placed on working people. Obviously, the latter will not tolerate the government making them bear not just the cost of the crisis, but also of the considerable expense of patching up the system oppressing their African brothers. If you believe the French Ministry of Defense (and their figures are almost certainly an under-estimate) the cost of the army alone up to 5 February 2013 is 60 million euros.

This will hardly scratch the monumental cost required by a situation of total breakdown. Everything has had to be re-created: all the machinery of administration, not to mention the health and education systems — all far beyond the reach of a French exchequer swamped and riddled by debt.

As for the army itself, it is quite unable to tackle even such priorities as safeguarding the civilian population. Journalists report several massive lynchings perpetrated by the depraved Malian army, protected by its French army “big brother”.

These facts demonstrate not only the hatred and lust for revenge the country’s ruling strata cherish for all Arabo-Berber peoples, but also the appalling values and moral standards of the French army, which must have looked demurely away while these lynchings were being committed, as it did a few years earlier in Rwanda, so as not to notice the massacre of the Tutsi people. And as the Dutch UN Batallion did in former Yugoslavia, which let General Mladic’s soldiers execute 7000 Bosnians in the town of Srebrenica without lifting a finger. Such are the execrable political and ethical standards of both these armies and the UN, swathed in hypocritical high-flown phrases.

There is not the slightest doubt that this intervention will get even more catastrophically bogged down than that in Afghanistan. The inevitable consequence will be that the situation in Europe and internationally will get even worse, with the recrudescence of an even fiercer international class struggle. For what is happening in and around Mali and concretely also in the mobilisation of working people in Tunisia and Egypt prefigures not only a considerable deteriorations in their conditions of life but also, and above all, the mobilisation and emergence on the scene of masses of working people, broadening their activity and toughening up their struggle.

But when one reads the statements of those groups and parties which oppose French intervention, one is struck by their purely declamatory character. Of course given the massive number of dupes, the very fact that they condemn it at all is commendable, and we stand with them. But even when they resolutely condemn the military intervention, they confine themselves to verbal protest. To put it another way, almost all of these organisations (Communist Party, Left Party, Left Front, New Anti-Capitalist Party, etc.) adopt a position more or less clearly opposed to military intervention but steer well clear of stating the orientation or outcome they are for. I.e., these political formations adopt the profoundly negative attitude of rejection. At most, these comrades add a generalisation devoid of meaning, i.e. that what is needed is to solve the (economic, social, national) problems these countries face. This great general truth is hardly brilliant in its originality, so much so that even the government has given up repeating it.

We need a clear orientation!

To tell the truth, most of these organisations and groups do point to what they think is a way forward. They say – indeed, often demand – that military intervention must be left to African states – Mali and her neighbours, under UN patronage. It is quite obvious that they think this would be a suitable solution since (and this is how shallow their thinking is) it would be a better fit with the African ethnic image and the sacrosanct authority of the UN. They are completely unperturbed by the fact that Hollande and his government have spent long months trying to achieve precisely that arrangement.

Such a “solution” amounts more or less to re-establishing the status-quo, i.e. the situation preceding the debacle of the Malian state and army. But trying to apply it without the French army is simply a bad joke, since the preceding state of affairs was precisely what brought about that debacle and ended up with the present disastrous situation. The French army intervened precisely in order to save the apparatus of the Malian state from complete collapse. Despite appearances, it was not directed against those Islamic terrorists. That pretext was blown up by propaganda to keep everybody happy. In truth they did it to shore up a native administrative apparatus in mortal danger — as it happened, from the islamist attack. The delight the population of Mali showed and which was obligingly filmed by French TV was less at the arrival of a foreign French army than at getting rid of a cruel medieval dictatorship. To present it as enthusiasm for the arrival of a foreign army is to indulge in the same degree of mystification as the attempt to interpret the vote against Sarkozy as support for the plans of the Socialist Party.

So the French army stands there nakedly exposed as the only cement that can hold this feeble state together, or any of the others that share the same congenital weaknesses. In that sense it is not only the chief factor in that African Union, but also the only one that can put up any opposition and organise any resistance to its ineluctable decomposition. It is high time for the parties and groups and their leaders who speak in the name of the working class to break with the backward and grotesque way of thinking which takes African states as if they were an emanation of their peoples and formed a group by its nature independent of imperialism. Whereas in reality they form a quite specific – subaltern but essential — part of the mechanism of imperialism’s world system, officially run by the omni-substitute, the UN.

The clear regression in these states in relation to fundamental problems of African society is the logical consequence and obvious indication of the manifest setback to the attempt by the bourgeoisie – even what were at first it most radical elements – to solve elementary tasks of the bourgeois revolution. The way these regimes are currently decomposing is a striking proof from the negative side of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution; specifically, that in our imperialist epoch the bourgeoisie of any country at all – even a backward one – is organically incapable of solving the tasks posed by such a revolution. Every orientation towards a so-called popular front, every policy of alliance with a wing of the bourgeoisie, has led to setbacks. That is the cruel lesson of events.

Thus, in the absence of a clear orientation towards the theory of permanent revolution and its application in order to mobilise the workers of the whole region, a catastrophic situation has got even worse even quicker. Indeed the choice put forward in the past by Rosa Luxemburg and taken up later by Trotsky: Either the working class succeeds in overthrowing capitalism and opening the road to socialism, or humanity will fall back into barbarism — is today an immediate practical question.

In this respect, this part of Africa at least (like the Middle East) is a little ahead of Europe. That continent, too, is from now on confronted with the same direct choice. It is only the many and various reserves at her disposal which still retard the explosive maturing of the same historical dilemma, as well as the general lack of preparedness on the part of the workers’ movement.

The working class in the region of Africa under discussion already has several political organisations, even if they are still weak and enjoy only minority support. But that can change quickly, not to mention the unions which, like the UGTT in Tunisia and in the big cities in the region, are sometimes powerful.

Without going into detail, there are a fair number and variety of organisations which described themselves as Marxist and/or working-class, and they have the capacity to work together for a united struggle in the region. The first pre-condition for such a struggle and for their own development is undoubtedly their ability to take fully into account the orientation offered by the permanent revolution and on that basis work out and apply democratic slogans for revolutionary change.

Revolutionary and working class organisations in Europe can and should do everything they can to help clarify this essential issue. That way they will be able to find their way back to their proper role, making the link with their history and tradition of supporting brothers and sisters in Africa. A precious contribution to this would be to adapt and develop the Fourth International’s Transitional Programme, the only one to express concretely the orientation of permanent revolution. Athough it needs changing in places, as a whole it remains valid. It is the one and only path to solving weighty problems which can at the same time correct wrong orientations and go beyond passive contemplation of events when African activists need clear and active support.[/threecolumns]

Inside this issue:

Workers Revolutionary Party of Namibia:
Report on November 2014 National Assembly elections

South Africa:
Numsa National Treasurer Mphumzi Maqungo speaks to the Australian Workers Union

Marxism:
Historical Materialism: A timely reminder. An extract from a forthcoming book by BALAZS NAGY examines and defends a fundamental aspect of Marxist thought

[threecolumns]Not long ago, Nicolas Sarkozy was unceremoniously bundled out of office. Now he’s back on TV in all his pomp and glory. France’s second channel (chaine 2) is supposed to be a public enterprise run by the state, or successive governments, but in any case at taxpayers’ expense. Now it gives Sarkozy the red carpet treatment. The way they transformed him from a duplicitous agent of the bourgeoisie into a messianic liberator was amazing and shockingly servile. One faithful retainer, Yves Jégo, was moved to comment in astonishment, and with some justice: “It can’t be right to give 45 minutes on a current affairs TV show to a Presidential contender” (Le Monde, 23 September 2014).

Now, it was Sarkozy who appointed the boss of this channel, and the current President, Hollande, was daft enough to keep him in the job. This man virtually prostrated himself in front of Sarkozy, and the simpering nonentity who conducted the interview like a willing stooge more or less got down on all fours. It may not make much sense, but that’s the way things go in this general political climate.

Trials and tribulations of post-war Bonapartism in France

The government of the so-called Socialist Party and its associates ̶ what a lot of people still call “the Left”, is visibly on its last legs. It is too closely tied to moribund capitalism, too definitively compromised in the twilit decadence which drags all down in its gloomy wake.

But, debilitated as it is by this decline, the bourgeoisie still has to do something about the fact that its social-democratic servant is bankrupt and too weak now to face the growing perils. This is what explains the growing strength of fascist organisations and the disproportionate extension of their influence right across the old capitalist countries. But Trotsky warned that between social democracy and fascism there is a whole spectrum of intermediate regimes which the bourgeoisie can use to replace their failed social-democratic business managers without going straight over to fascism, with all the burdens and risks that brings. Fascism is an option they keep on a back burner, ready for use as a last resort, but at the moment they are hoping to get by without it, especially since the memory of the traumas it inflicted is still very much alive. But, above all, the ruling class lives in hope that the virtual vivisection that has been performed on the world working class means they can take refuge in less rigid intermediate regimes which might avoid the brutal shock of fascism. (Indeed, the changes the working class has undergone, the way it has been scattered and physically weakened, and its theoretical and political arms changed and perverted, plus a series of retreats and serious defeats, have disarmed the working class and considerably weakened it in action.)

Under these conditions the capitalists think that, for the moment, a bonapartist regime is the most appropriate political form in which they can secure their position. But even in modern France such a political system is nothing new. The French bourgeoisie originally created this type of regime. They have often had to face bold challenges to their power, and are all the more inclined to rely on this particular crutch because it can easily be used as a massive club. But the bourgeoisie had no easy job trying to dust it off after World War II. De Gaulle had everything it takes to do the job and solidly established the Fifth Republic as the prototype of modern-day bonapartism, but in the end even he got the boot in the aftermath of the powerful 1968 general strike. While he himself paid the price for trying capital’s strong-arm tactics on the working class, the Fifth Republic itself survived the onslaught of the oppressed thanks to the connivance of Stalinists and reformists.

You don’t need to look very hard at France’s political history since De Gaulle’s humiliating fall from grace to see that French bonapartism, in the shape of the Fifth Republic, has followed a particularly chequered and contradictory path. None of the heirs to the Fifth Republic’s bonapartist institutions has had anything like what De Gaulle had in terms of means, inclination and courage to destroy working-class gains in an open frontal assault. Every single one of them, without exception, has been steeped in the tepid pseudo-democracy of the Fourth Republic, imbued with the long tradition of flabby pacifism, compromise and unprincipled shilly-shallying as a way of evading or bypassing conflicts and difficulties. The majority of them are impregnated to the very marrow of their bones in the spirit of this bourgeois democracy, whose pillar and vital principle is precisely the class collaboration guaranteed by opportunist workers’ leaders.

But above all they were terrified by very lively recollections of the 1968 general strike, especially since, as irremediably civilian bourgeois, their links with the armed forces have been ad hoc and ambiguous. Mitterrand and later others went on the attack, directly and across the board, on the gains working people have made, but it was under the influence of the general international turn to so-called neo-liberal policies, and it was done tangentially and with many reservations and in the shape of a sustained war of attrition. While what they did was already unbearable for the working class, it has still not been enough to satisfy the bourgeoisie.

So the reason why today’s bourgeois politicians and ideologues bitterly reproach their predecessors for not thoroughly dismantling all the working class’s previous achievements and taming that class is explained by the figures who embodied the Fifth Republic after De Gaulle. All his Presidential successors have liked to dress in the bonapartist lion’s clothes, but have turned out to be pretty toothless in practice, even though they were quite prepared to get their claws into working people.

Hollande’s political incoherence makes him look like a marionette with its strings cut

None of the civilian bonapartist Presidents of France have had what it takes to carry out the mission conferred on them by virtue of their office, but the last in line, Hollande has without doubt been the least competent for the job. Of course, his limited abilities, narrow mind-set and penchant for double-talk all mean he finds it hard to take the job on properly, but he is no more stupid or short-sighted than any of the others. Events have gone completely over his head because, as head of the Fifth Republic he has had to strain every nerve to reconcile the policy of class collaboration (normal in bourgeois democracy) with that of open confrontation between the classes (function of the Fifth Republic). And all the while, the stagnation of capitalism in its twilight prevents him from granting any concessions and insistently demands confrontation with the working class.

And so the wider conflict between these two choices faced by the bourgeoisie nowadays is concentrated in the person and policies of François Hollande. The outcome is the way real concessions are turned into broken promises in a series of pseudo-reforms on the one hand, and on the other the harsh daily reality of blows struck against working people, but which the bourgeoisie do not think are harsh enough. Hence the image presented of a government hanging in mid-air and pushed about by whatever wind is blowing at any particular time, as well as an irresistible sense of things finally falling apart.

When you look at the awful state social democracy’s doctrine is in, what is most astonishing is that Hollande cannot somehow shake it off. Where he should give up on trying to square the circle between two bourgeois lines, one of which, class-collaboration, has already lost the battle to contain and calm class conflict, he has merely tried to alter the form within which he attempted to reconcile them. He did this by delegating a big part of his bonapartist task to that Socialist Party mini-Napoleon, Manuel Valls, a man whose own natural inclinations have already converted him from a shamefaced social democrat into a pocket Bonaparte. But despite what a lot of activists on the so-called far left expected, the obviously lame form of bonapartism affected by the Socialist Party only served to intensify the obvious signs that the party itself is falling apart, testimony to the insurmountable difficulties involved in turning this party into a pliable instrument for a reinforced bonapartism without major internal shocks and crises. Every attempt along those lines will just drag it closer to ultimate decay.

This historic collapse of social democracy, which expresses both the increasing severity of capitalism’s crisis and the bankruptcy of one of the counter-measures the bourgeoisie relied on, also gives Sarkozy a second chance. This simple fact exposes Hollande and co.’s social democracy as the midwife of fascism or, more likely, a more homogenous and resolute form of bonapartism.

Sarkozy’s bid to be iron-fisted Bonaparte.

Sarkozy did not beat around the bush. He announced straight off that he was back on the scene as a serious candidate for the role of unbending Bonaparte saviour. He presented his political re-appearance as dispassionate obedience to the requirements of the situation, renouncing any personal ambition and explaining that he was responding to a higher, nay divine, call to help our suffering world. This marked reference to some quasi-mystical obligation as justification for his re-entry into politics and the clear-cut aspiration to be a supreme saviour are sure signs of a would-be Bonaparte. The odd journalist has noticed Sarkozy’s occasional bonapartist tendencies, but none have pointed out that this re-appearance basically means he intends to set up a consistent and decisive bonapartist dictatorship.

Sarkozy’s declared political project also exhibits all other elements of that sort of bonapartism. All the main ingredients of a pure and harsh bonapartism are present, alongside the insistent and repeated evocation of a supreme call to duty on the part of some divine providence.

First of all comes the claim to be acting for the benefit of society as a whole, above classes. Obviously he could not use the word “class” because he has banished it from his vocabulary, but he explicitly stated he wanted to abolish party differences as outdated leftovers and unite everybody behind his flag.

A whole raft of proposals accompanied and filled out this decision to jump over whatever democratic constraints the bourgeoisie itself has been forced to impose on society in order to channel class contradictions. And, in line with his wish to banish differences between parties, Sarkozy again spoke out against organisations which come between the various classes and the authorities, above all independent trades unions. Moreover, as a consistent bonapartist, he was for regular referendums where class votes are short-circuited by plebiscitary consultations with the “whole of society”.

Needless to say, two essential ingredients of properly-established bonapartism were not omitted from his political plans. One is the intensification of overt nationalism, which Sarkozy expressed in his plan to end the Schengen Agreement guaranteeing free movement around the European Union. The other is his decision to establish a political apparatus in the exclusive service of his bonapartism by radically transforming the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) into a homogenous and docile body under his personal control.

And this last point raises the important question: Will this clearly-formulated plan for an integrated, coherent, vigorous and determined bonapartism actually get the upper hand? To answer that, we need to look above all at the working people who are immediately threatened and targeted by this plan.

Workers disarmed in the face of this bourgeois dictatorship

Problems like this usually go straight over the heads of revolutionary and socialist organisations ̶ because of their formalist and sectarian leaderships. To tell the truth, both their revolution and their socialism are no more than vague references to a rosy future; consequently they are quite separate from their day-to-day preoccupations and practical activities. That’s why they see very little importance, or none at all, in the political and tactical changes the bourgeoisie introduce in the political form in which they try rescue their system as the crisis worsens. Even if some of them do draw attention to the danger of bonapartism, as the Lambertist organisation did over De Gaulle’s accession, their politics have never gone beyond defending traditional bourgeois democracy. So their day-by-day struggle has been limited by that framework and their commitment to socialism remained at the level of propaganda ̶ necessary, obviously, but restricted to the realm of ideas. Later they supported Mitterrand against De Gaulle’s bonapartism in the name of this democracy. But as we know and Hollande has proved most recently, this democracy is no more than the antechamber to fascism or, specifically, bonapartism.

Whether or not these organisations actually mention bonapartism today, their slogans in general do not go beyond defending democracy as a whole against the attacks upon it. But the fact that the bourgeoisie is going over to bonapartism, even in a form masked and softened by an remnants of democracy like the Fifth Republic, means that this system is at already at a complete dead-end. So the concrete threat to toughen up the current “soft” bonapartism makes it even more vitally urgent to apply a bold and appropriate programme which can open up a practical and concrete path to socialism. Sarkozy taking the field to stiffen and toughen up the regime is a signal, a warning of the need to formulate such a programme for a socialist alternative publicly and put it into action. It is a challenge, a veritable tocsin calling all Marxists to reply in one voice, despite and independently of whether they belong to separate organisations, overcoming their divisions and clarifying what this alternative means theoretically and practically.

The Left Front has virtually ceased to exist

Sadly, the Front de Gauche (Left Front) stands out for its complete absence from this particularly agitated political situation. What forces it had have already been dissipated by a succession of defeats in recent (municipal and European) elections, just when violent political crises have shaken the supposedly-socialist Parti Socialiste (but also the bourgeois UMP), exposing their internal contradictions and driving forward their decomposition (or explosion). The Left Front’s main components, the Parti de Gauche (Left Party) and Parti Communiste (Communist Party) are following different political trajectories corresponding to each one’s specific character.

Representing a petty-bourgeois layer of a workers’ aristocracy ensconced in local government and the trade union leaderships, the Communist Party is throwing itself into variously-configured alliances, above all involving Hollande’s disappointed elected representatives and officials. The aim of these parliamentary-style manoeuvres is to re-establish good old bourgeois democracy with “fair” class collaboration using the well-known political method of the popular front. And this at the very moment when the great majority of the bourgeoisie, in its insurmountable torments, has gone far beyond this stage, which is both outmoded and tailor-made to shore up its power. Now this reactionary orientation on the CP’s part is dangerous because, outdated though it is, it can still mislead workers (as it did in the past) and channel their anger into an obvious setback. The CP may have willy-nilly had to abjure Stalin, but it would be a serious mistake to ignore that they have not got over their Stalinist conceptions.

The Left Party, meanwhile has been disappointed by its (predictably) poor election results and seems to have backed out of political life completely, just when politics have got agitated and offer a fertile field for determined intervention by an organisation of workers. The party needs some inspiration to lift it from the demoralisation its defeats have caused, but they seem to be intimidated by how harshly reality has treated their rather broadly-drawn and inconsistent policies, and they have retreated into fantasy. Instead of a political programme, they have put forward a propagandist project for a Sixth Republic. But this demand has turned up all on its own, lacking both a head and a tail and completely detached from the concrete reality of struggles, about as appropriate in time and place as an ashtray on a motorcycle.

This demand is quite unexpected because it is on its own and, as it were, asexual. Nevertheless, at first sight it seems to be opposed both to Hollande’s bastardised Fifth Republic and Sarkozy’s project of consolidating this regime by reinforcing and accentuating its bonapartism. But if you look past the sentiments which animate it to what it concretely means as a demand, it turns out that this opposition is an illusory appearance, a mirage, and it does not really conflict with them at all. This Sixth Republic is not solidly located in a concrete programme for changing the whole of society; indeed, Melanchon scrupulously avoids any attempt to describe such a republic, so the vacuous nature of the project inevitably exposes it as an attempt to re-establish the old Fourth Republic. No amount of goodwill can change what this slogan ineluctably means. If it remains as it stands, this policy is condemned to rapid failure in this time of ever-intensifying class struggle.

(One cannot here pass over in silence Jean-Luc Melanchon’s recent book: L’Ere du Peuple [The Age of the People] which marks a new stage in his theoretical and political regression. This is exposed by his explicit shift from being a declared representative of working people to the retrograde and dangerous mythology that exalts the people in general. At the same time he achieves a parallel conversion to a sort of visceral environmentalism, that petit-bourgeois substitute for social struggles and lifebelt for capital. A fuller examination would exceed the scope of this article, but in view of its significance it will be undertaken shortly).

For all that, it would be a premature to reject the Left Party out of hand as a definitively lost cause where working people are concerned. Indeed, it is hard to believe that all its members and activists will blindly follow that sort of renunciation of the class struggle. It will take an internal struggle to decide the organisation’s fate. But in the meantime this party, for now, like all the other far-left organisations, has shut itself out of the current political struggle in which the immediate stakes are capital’s desire to reinforce its power using consistent bonapartism. The Left Party’s general and summary denunciations of capitalism and/or its Fifth Republic are certainly not enough to make good the glaring shortcomings in their activity.

So an initial response to the question posed above, about whether Sarkozy’s bonapartist project can succeed, is this: given the congenital and worsening maladies besetting the political organisations currently available to workers, as summarised above, they are hardly well-placed to prevent this big political shift, unless, of course, there is some unexpected outburst. So the answer depends on the outcome of the internal struggle currently underway between different political segments of the bourgeoisie distributed around the various bourgeois political parties (UMP, centrists, Front National, as well as the Socialist Party). They are in any case (with the temporary exception of the FN) ravaged by struggles between various factions precisely around problems relating to the profound need to transform the bourgeoisie’s regime of political governance.

Bourgeois parties’ deepening internal crises and conflicts

A relatively strong element in the UMP (to whom the various centrist circles can be added) is lining up behind so-called moderate leaders such as Alain Juppé or François Fillon, who express and represent a wing of the bourgeoisie. This element is still attached to the very relative tranquillity of bourgeois democracy based on class collaboration and is alarmed by the uncertainties of a open, brutal social confrontation and the unforeseeable consequences of a fascist or even just a clearly more authoritarian regime. But their weakness from the point of view of the bourgeoisie arises from the situation itself, which is more and more conflictual and intolerant of any such compromise, and which they are no more fit to deal with than the Socialist Party is.

This segment of the political bourgeoisie is on the one hand taken aback by capital’s need to beef up its power (which means they are impotent in the face of fascism) and on the other disarmed when it comes to breaking the resistance of working people (in particular by smashing the unions). It is true their leaders try to outdo one another in demanding even greater social destruction on their patrons’ behalf than that announced and promised by Sarkozy, but this changes nothing fundamental in their positon.

This is why, in order to remain in that body and/or advance their careers, more and more UMP leaders are rallying around Sarkozy, sometimes unexpectedly (Raffarin, De Villepin, Wauquiez, etc.). They are following or expressing the clear majority of the right both inside and outside the UMP who are massively opting for the tough solution to the crisis.

Analysis of the forces at work thus points to Sarkozy as the probable victor in a political competition already underway to provide weakening capitalism with a tougher and more stable government more able to bring it the support it needs.

But life is much richer and more varied than even the best analysis, based as it must be on the available data. Imponderables arising from the multiplicity of human activities could shift and change the picture. However, such activities themselves do not fall from the skies, since they are already rooted in objective facts. We can point to some of them, even if it is impossible to predict precisely what the future will bring.

For a start, even if the bourgeoisie would like for the moment to avoid and spare itself the extra expenses (economic, social and political) incidental to fascism, and would be content just to toughen up its bonapartist regime, it is possible that their calculations could be upset by various factors within even their own ranks which might help the Front National to come to power.

It is also possible that the break-up and decomposition underway in the Socialist Party will provide another candidate for the role of Bonaparte in the person of Manuel Valls, politically converted and personally completely up for this job.

And who can tell with any certainty what the outcome of the various judicial inquiries underway, all threatening Sarkozy, will be. There is not adequate space here to describe in detail how widespread all the corruption among politicians is and explain what it means, nor how lenient bourgeois courts can be where politicians are concerned. However, it is not entirely out of the question that Sarkozy will be found guilty. That would smooth the path for another UMP candidate, or maybe someone from the Front National. In any case, the victor would be the one who offers the strongest guarantees to the bourgeoisie that he or she will tie working people down hand and foot and destroy the gains they have made in order to rescue exhausted capitalism in its death agony.

For the working-class solution! 

Finally, and for that very reason, it is also possible that the masses of working people, including some of their political organisations, will rise in salutary fashion and come on the stage to overturn these machinations and change the situation from top to bottom. That will be much more likely if the activists in these organisations get involved in a decisive and unified struggle for the resolute defence of working people against the bourgeoisie’s many-sided attacks; that would really lay the basis for a rising of that sort, which would be concentrated, and increasingly confirmed, in the struggle between the intensified attacks and resistance on the part of trade unions. Hence the vital importance of working flat out to link these organisations to the workers’ unions and the struggles they are involved in. In any case, such a link is a major requirement of Marxism, as well as a precise measure of all these organisations’ real relationship to this revolutionary theory.

This theory clearly states that they have a duty, and one moreover, which the social context itself urgently requires, to offer a way out, a political programme for this resistance by the trade unions, and to organise to get it successfully on the road. The main axis of this policy necessarily must be to bring the unions to a break with the deceptive conception and rotten practice which demeans them to the level of “social partners” with the bourgeoisie. And at the same time bring them back onto the path of struggle for the emancipation of the working class. In the absence of such an opening, embodied in everyday practice, those organisations which claim to stand for working people and the revolution will fail in their elementary duty and, like a blunt and rusty knife, end up at the rubbish dump. That is the decisive choice today.

Balazs Nagy, November 2014[/threecolumns]

In this issue:
Editorial:
Reinstate NUMSA in COSATU
Bosnia:
‘Dig Deep for DITA’ interview and appeal
Namibia:
WRP Election Manifesto
France:
Beefing up the Bonapartism.