When peace activist
Bruce Hubbard was arrested on October 30 a story of the US government heavying
the NZ government began to unravel. Six months after he had sent an email to the
US Embassy protesting the US attack on Iraq, condemning the use of napalm
against babies in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the 72 US interventions against
democratic regimes since World War 11, Hubbard was charged under the
Telecommunications Act for sending an email that had “offended” a female
employee of the Embassy. His case continues…
On the surface this was a bizarre case not only
because of the time lapse, but because the information in his email was widely
known and circulated in the media and over the internet. And Uncle Sam’s
embassies have been inundated with emails, protests, flag burnings and even
demolition in recent years by those protesting US imperialism. Even if the
message was somewhat garbled or wrong in parts, it was clear what its point was,
Hubbard was joining the millions around the world in condemning the US as the
biggest terrorist organisation in the world.
1913 Strike
Betrayed
On Monday the 24th of
November rank and file members of UNITE union and their supporters picketed the
Comrades and Cossacks conference and exhibition at Auckland University of
Technology. The 20 or so picketers objected to the way union bosses and the
police were co-sponsoring this 'commemoration' of the 1913 General Strike, an
event which saw state violence against workers on a scale never equaled in the
rest of New Zealand history.
Comrades and Cossacks had as its centrepiece the release of
new police research on the 1913 strike. In a press release promoting the event,
academic Cath Casey, police ‘strategic analyst’ Cathie Collinson and police
spokeswoman Catherine Gardner described the research as a contribution to “The
international review of police of models of reservism”. An article in Auckland's
Central Leader paper quoted Cathie
Collinson "This is a crucial piece of research because we need to know what
works for different policing styles." The Central Leader stated that Casey and
Collinson are visiting various police forces and research institutes around the
world to “further their understanding of policing methods”.
The General Strike of 1913 has much to
teach the student of policing. Anxious about the growing appeal of the
12,000-strong and openly revolutionary ‘Red’ Federation of Labour, the Massey
government of the day mobilised all the forces at its disposal to defeat the
wharfies and miners who spearheaded the strike. As the police patrolled with
long batons and the army set up machine gun posts in the large cities, thousands
of farmers were turned into ‘special’ police, and put to work attacking workers
and working the waterfront.
Comrades and Cossacks comes at a time when ‘anti-terrorism’
legislation is giving the New Zealand state sweeping new repressive powers, and
the New Zealand police are aggressively persecuting opponents of New Zealand’s
part in the US’s War of Terror. The lockup of Ahmed Zaoui and the persecution of
anti-war activists like Bruce Hubbard (see article), Jarrod Phillips and Paul
Hopkinson gives the talk of Collinson and Casey a chilling ring.
Comrades and Cossacks has caused
a furore amongst unionists and left activists around the country. In an attempt
to defuse complaints, exhibition supporter and Alliance leader Mike Treen e-
mailed Global Peace and Justice Auckland (GPJA) members to tell them that
'Comrades and Cossacks' was not sponsored by the police. In fact, as an angry
GPJA member pointed out in a reply to Treen, the police logo was plastered all
over the promotional material for the exhibition.
UNITE leader and Alliance member Matt
McCarten e-mailed GPJA members to tell them that UNITE's rank and file members
were 'ignorant', and were only planning to picket the exhibition because they
wanted to 'suppress working class history'.
On the day a number of the unionists
who had been scheduled to appear at the exhibition did not turn up. Others
walked out in solidarity with the picketers. About a dozen uniformed police
attended the exhibition, and there was a police presence outside to stop the
picketers gaining access. Matt McCarten emerged from the exhibition dressed in a
business suit and flanked by two well-built cops, and proceeded to abuse the
picketers, shouting 'you're not real workers - go away!'. After being confronted by angry picketers McCarten
retreated behind the boys in blue, with whom he joked and chatted before
disappearing back into the exhibition.
In the aftermath of this furore, UNITE
members around the country are holding the Unite leadership to account at a
number of AGMs. The Alliance also faces an embarrassing internal debate now that
key members of the Alliance ‘left’ like former Trotskyists Mike Treen and Len
Richards who would like to see the Alliance become a ‘Socialist Alliance’ have
been associated with the Exhibition.
The involvement of Alliance leaders
in Comrades and Cossacks is no surprise. After all, from 1999 to 2002 the
party helped to run a capitalist state, as the junior partner in a Labour-led
government. Alliance MPs voted for the anti-strike provisions of the Employment
Relations Act, for the denial of summer dole to students, and for the
participation of New Zealand troops in the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. The
Alliance’s social democratic ideology made its leaders believe they could
reconcile the interests of bosses and workers by taming the capitalist state.
When the interests of workers and bosses inevitably collided, they chose the
interests of the bosses, and used the state against workers.
The Anderton-instigated split and the electoral
disaster of 2002 have made some Alliance members reconsider their ideas, but the
leaders of the party have continued on the old path. Ex-MPs and their staffers
have moved from government into the bureaucracy of the trade union movement and
have merely promoted a slightly more activist-orientated, ‘left’ version of the
same old social democracy. These bureaucrats played a leading role in Auckland’s
anti-war movement, helping to ensure that the movement stuck to lobbying the
Labour government to act against the war rather than mobilising workers and
their supporters to take direct action against US government and military
facilities in New Zealand.
Recent support for the racist cabotage campaign (see
article) and for the ANZAC-led occupation of the Solomons shows that Alliance
party policy is still based in a misplaced faith in the common interests of New Zealand workers and New Zealand
capitalists. Comrades and
Cossacks only symbolises the bankruptcy of the party’s social democratic
politics. Alliance members should learn from history, dump social democracy for
revolutionary socialism, and get rid of Beehive retreads like McCarten and
Treen.
We need a real Socialist Alliance that pushes
workers’ direct action in New Zealand and links up with and learns from with the
revolutionary movements shaking South America. Socialist groups already in existence
can show Alliance members the way forward by forming a nationwide United Front
to campaign on burning issues and show the revolutionary alternative to the
discredited ideology of social democracy. It’s time to rediscover the militant
labour heritage of 1913, and the revolutionary Marxist heritage of 1917.
WHEN
COMRADES
BECOME
COSSACKS
We,
rank and file members of the Auckland Community UNITE union, condemn the
co-sponsorship and participation of UNITE in this Exhibition, "COSSACKS AND
COMRADES", commemorating the 90th anniversary of the 1913 Waterfront Dispute,
jointly sponsored by Auckland University of Technology and the NZ Police.
The
UNITE workers' union, along with the National Distribution Union, Meatworkers
Union, Maritime Union (Auckland Branch local 13), Dairy Workers' Union, and the
Trade Union History Project, are listed as co-sponsors, alongside the NZ Police.
This
is an act of open class collaboration on the part of these union officials
betraying all those comrades who fought and died in every struggle in our
history.
The
police, and the mounted police `specials', known as `Cossacks', were used to
smash the general strike in Auckland in November 1913. Police, or scab workers acting under
police protection, shot and killed Frederick George Evans during the Waihi
miners’ lockout less than a year earlier.
The
Police Commissioner at the time said: "one mounted man is worth three on
foot".
The
union officials who lend their unions’ names to this Exhibition are
collaborating in a police project to improve policing
methods.
Could
it be said, that, today the police no longer need to recruit `Cossacks' to deal
with industrial disputes, because they have already recruited some union
leaders? Today the Police
Commissioner could state with some satisfaction that: "one collaborating union
official is worth 100 Cossacks".
When
workers stand on the same platform as the police have the Comrades not become
Cossacks?
Leaflet
issued by 6 rank & file members of the Auckland Community UNITE local. 23
November 2003
Defending
1913
One
of the worst aspects of Alliance leader and Unite official Matt McCarten's
attemptsto defend his co-sponsorship of the Comrades and Cossacks Exhibition has
been his distortion of the facts of the history of the General Strike. McCarten wrote in an email that was
forwarded from the GPJA (Global Peace and Justice)
list:
"The
role of the cops is a very interesting one. The police have seconded Sherwood
Young, a well-known police historian to assist. He will also speak at the
Exhibition on the police role (1pm and 7pm on Wednesday 26). The police role in
the dispute is misunderstood by many (including me). In fact at the time the
Head of police in Auckland refused have anything to do with the 'specials'. He
was viewed as sympathetic to the strikers and had told union leaders that the
police would not harass their pickets. Consequently Massey's government replaced
him. The specials were in fact organised by the army, not the police."
McCarten's
method is to run together two quite distinct facts in such a way as to suggest a
non-existent
connection between them. McCarten makes the unjustified suggestion that the
training of specials by the army in some places was caused by police objections
to government policy. By avoiding mentioning that the regular police worked
alongside the specials,McCarten gives the impression
that the police were virtually uninvolved in the smashing of the General Strike.
Here's
a variation of McCarten's argument often seen in the British media over the past
few months:
'The
British soldiers in Iraq are generally less gung ho and more friendly and open
to the Iraqis than the Americans, who have done most of the fighting and killing
since the country was liberated.'
The
Brits use this to reassure themselves of their moral superiority to the
Americans, but there's no causal connection from their less gung ho attitude to
the amount of killing they've done. In fact, there's a causal connection the
other way - they were able for a time at least to be more 'friendly' - to avoid
waving guns at everyone and sweltering in body armour and tanks and so on -
because they were away from the centres of Iraqi
resistance.
Back
to 1913: the evidence for the cops' role in defeating the strike is
overwhelming. Credible if not
correct arguments can be made about whether the cops' actions were right
or not, whether they were necessary or not, and so on ad infinitum - but the
facts which are the raw material for these arguments cannot simply be wished
away because the increasingly pathetic Mr McCarten wants to get a bit of free PR
by hobnobbing with the force that is harassing anti-war activists like Bruce
Hubbard and Paul Hopkinson and keeping Ahmed Zaoui away from his
kids.
McCarten
did not tell the readers of his e mail that the police were involved in
organising specials in some towns, Greymouth for instance. And where the police
were not involved in organising the specials the reasons had nothing to do with
moral conscience. It’s true that a single senior policeman, Auckland’s
Superintendent Mitchell, was transferred to Dunedin because he had argued that
the raising of specials was ‘premature’. But the specials were organised by the
army in many centres because of the army was better able to deal with the
logistical difficulties.
McCarten
tried to hide the fact that the police worked alongside specials for the
duration of the strike. Some of the atmosphere that the mounted and ‘regular’
police together created comes through in this passage from the autobiography Red
Fed Joseph Melling:
“...our
quiet strike here went the same way as the Waihi strike had. Police by the score
– mostly mounted - were imported, and the scabs and owners began to organise
potential strike-breakers, and these were escorted to work by a guard of both
mounted and foot police. It was one such body of police and scabs, ostensibly
going to work on the afternoon shift, that suddenly darted across the road when
abreast the union office and attacked it. Bill Wood and one or two others were
in the office were in the office and offered some resistance, but the odds
against them were hopeless [the office was trashed]...
From
the general strike until the mine explosion [43 miners were killed in an
explosion caused by employer negligence in Ralph's mine under Huntly in
September 1914], a reign of terror existed in Huntly. After the invasion of the
police the scabs got the idea they could do as they liked. The scab secretary's
brother burned down the Union office but nothing could be done about it. Men
were afraid to be seen speaking to one another. There were spies
everywhere...'
Melling’s
book is hard to find today, but Marxist historian Len Richardson’s Coal,
Community and Class is an excellent in-print corrective to the distortions of
Comrades and Cossacks. When we consider Matt McCarten’s misrepresentations of
both the 1913 Strike and the picket of the Comrades and Cossacks event we can
see just who it is that is guilty of wanting the 'suppression of working class
history'.
MUNZ AND HELEN CLARK: ‘POKING FUN’ OR KISSING
BUTT?
Waterfront Re-union
The last issue of Class Struggle featured an
article drawing attention to the Maritime Union of New Zealand’s use of George
Bush and Helen Clark on a poster promoting its cabotage campaign. Cabotage is a
system that would see the restriction of
shipping services between New Zealand ports to New Zealand-operated and crewed
ships. The Maritime Union and New Zealand shipping bosses want the government to
intervene to get rid of the foreign-owned ships and foreign workers currently
operating in New Zealand waters. Under cabotage non-New Zealand workers will only be
allowed to take up jobs in New Zealand coastal waters if no New Zealand
seafarers are available for those jobs. In practice, this would mean that the
vast majority of foreign seafarers currently employed working ships in New
Zealand waters would lose their jobs to New Zealand
workers.
MUNZ PR man Victor Billot reacted angrily to the
article, using the indymedia news service to accuse us of being
humourless old commies who couldn’t see that MUNZ was actually ‘poking fun’ at
Helen Clark and George Bush. Billot defended Cabotage and condemned us for
criticising the leadership ‘of one of New Zealand’s few militant workers’
organisations’.
Presumably Victor would argue that September’s issue
of Port News, the magazine of the Auckland branch of MUNZ, is also an
attempt to ‘poke fun’ at Helen Clark. Well, we’re sorry Vic, but once again we
don’t get the joke! September’s Port News features a glossy cover shot of
a beaming Helen standing with executives of MUNZ and a couple of rank and file
members. Labour Ministers Judith Tizard and John ‘scrap the dole!’ Tamihere
feature in a smaller cover photo. In his editorial, MUNZ’s Auckland secretary
Terry Ryan explains that the photos were taken at the ‘annual Waterfront reunion
held at the Point Chevalier RSA on the 15th of June’. Ryan’s words
are worth quoting at length:
“The enormous workload and time constraints involved
in a country’s governance are all-consuming, with every person or organisation
wanting an ear or a piece of one’s time. Therefore it was genuinely appreciated,
and meaningful, to have the Prime Minister, Helen Clark, take time out of her
busy schedule to spend a few hours with old friends at the annual Waterfront
reunion.”
We’re sure that Terry’s right about the ‘enormous
workload’ involved in being Helen Clark. In September alone Helen was busy
coordinating New Zealand assistance to two different US wars, organising Jobs
Jolt attacks on beneficiaries at home, confiscating the foreshore and seabed
from Maori, swinging open the doors of New Zealand to GE, and begging George
Bush for a free trade deal in Bangkok. That’s some schedule.
Helen must be rushed off her feet staying George
Bush’s ‘very, very, very good friend’, but should MUNZ be quite so sympathetic?
Should Terry be giving his ‘old friend’ a pit stop by pouring her a beer at the
Pt Chev RSA, or should MUNZ be working to give Helen some real work to do, by
taking on a Labour Party policy programme that is more at odds with workers’
interests with every passing day? We reckon that MUNZ and other unions should be
taking the fight to Labour over its attacks on beneficiaries, its failure to
scrap the anti-worker provisions in the Employment Relations Act, its
contributions to the US occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the creeping
police state that ‘anti-terrorist’ legislation and aggressive policing of
dissent is creating. Getting workers off the street and off the job over issues
like those is more work than pouring the PM a beer, but it’s more worthwhile
too.
Dissenting Voices
But what would we know? We’re just a bunch of commie
troublemakers right? A look inside September’s Port
News suggests we might not be alone in our dim view of the policies of
MUNZ’s cover girl. Terry Ryan’s ode to the Blairite Witch sounds particularly
flat next to the verses of a reader opposed to the war Clark is helping Bush
fight in Iraq. ‘Down the street flies a missile/And after the commercial
breaks,/We’ll have a shot/Of the Patriot,/And the
number of hits it takes’ writes Gloria Stanford, in a blackly ironic take on the
US conquest of Iraq. You can bet that Helen Clark won’t be whispering Stanford’s
ditty in Bush’s ear at the next APEC summit. As far as Clark is concerned,
Bush’s conquest has been sanctified by a UN Security Council vote and the sixty
New Zealand army engineers stationed near Basra.
Phil Mansor, Secretary of MUNZ’s local 21, provides
another dissenting voice with an article about the Israeli occupation of
Palestine. Mansor puts his case powerfully, asking readers to imagine their
neighbours ‘moving into your backyard, knocking down half your house’ and then
‘building a wall around the two rooms left so you can’t move’. After attacking
the hypocrisy of Bush’s ‘Road Map’, Mansor concludes by calling a spade a spade
and denouncing the Israeli occupation as terrorism.
You won’t find Helen Clark using language like that –
after all, New Zealand under her leadership has actually continued to give
military support to the Israeli government, by maintaining New Zealand’s role in
the Multinational Force and Observers, a US-funded army which patrols the Sinai
Peninsula and helps Sharon seal the southern border of the Gaza Strip. Recently
Sharon sent a force deep into Gaza on a bloody search for tunnels which the
Palestinians have dug to the Sinai Peninsula. It is the MFO which hunts for
these tunnels on the Sinai Peninsula, and which was the ‘silent partner’ in
Sharon’s raid.
Labour’s support for imperialism in Palestine and in
Iraq reflects its domestic agenda. MUNZ’s pro-Cabotage poster has George Bush
telling Clark how wonderful Cabotage is, and Clark promising to copy the US
example and bring the system to New Zealand.
There’s an all too familiar logic to that one.
George Bush’s government has put many
demands on Helen Clark – the prosecution of Bruce Hubbard, repressive
‘anti-terrorist’ legislation modeled on the US’s Patriot Act, support for GE –
and the commander-in-chief has tended to get what he wants. And what Bush wants
is most definitely not what New Zealand workers want.
Honourable
history
Victor Billot actually has half a point when he calls
MUNZ ‘one of New Zealand’s few militant workers’ organisations’. Both the
organisations that merged to form MUNZ have an honourable history of bypassing
the politicians and taking direct action against war and imperialism.
In the 1930s the Waterside Workers Union outraged
bosses and embarrassed the Labour Party by refusing to handle scrap iron being
sent to Japan to make tanks to kill Chinese. In the 1940s the wharfies
campaigned against conscription and the US’s influence over New Zealand foreign
policy. In the 70s and the 80s the wharfies and the Seafarers Union both went on
strike against US nuke ship visits, closing ports and stopping ferries.
Its history like that which
makes current MUNZ policies so disappointing. The union of Jock Barnes and Toby Hill can do better
than photo ops with Helen Clark and Cabotage. The words of protest from Gloria
Stanford and Phil Mansor show that there is still anti-imperialist fight in
MUNZ. We know the people we’d rather see on the cover of Port
News!
A
Real Commemoration!
86
years since the October Revolution
Comrades
and Cossacks contrasted sharply with a real commemoration of working class
history held in Auckland this November. Two weeks before the travesty at AUT
about 35 people gathered at a party organised by the Communist Workers Group to
celebrate the recent revolutionary events in Bolivia and to mark the 86th
anniversary of the October revolution in Russia. Partygoers from across the left
spectrum listened as speakers discussed the bloody and successful struggle to
remove Lozada from office in Bolivia, and $100 was raised for an international
appeal organised by indymedia Bolivia for the families of the victims of the
Bolivian state. The heroes of 1912 and 1913 were remembered too: pictures of
Frederick George Evans were displayed at the party, and one speaker related
Evans’ death and related it to the repression still faced by revolutionaries
today. After singing the Internationale partygoers let off fireworks to
celebrate the continuing relevance of the politics McCarten and the boys in blue
want to bury.
(see Lenin’s ‘Letter to Comrades’ on the eve of the October
Revolution reprinted in this issue)
“For
Sale: WWI era hospital, do up and reap the rewards. Resort
style location.”
State
Cuts Health Spending
By a health sector worker
The closure of Hamner Hospital, also called Queen
Mary Hospital, is something the Labour party promised wouldn’t happen when it
campaigned in 1999 against National’s closures of provincial hospitals. But
under Labour capitalism is continuing to cut the health sector: spending cuts
continue and privatisation rolls on.
Do we need to prove it more clearly to you? Well then, if you need more
evidence of spending cuts and privatisation, we need to “open the books”, and
get all the real information out of the bureaucratic state machine – not the
press releases of this Labour government.
They won’t tell us the hidden truths – and they will be trying to hide
(or justify) the spending cuts.
Open the
books
The contractor is the District Health Board, the source of finances is the tax payer. It is public
money and therefore public services. Ultimately, the funder is the taxpaying
'community' –actually ‘the workers’. On that basis we are entitled to
transparency on contracting and the other details which go into the decision to
award/renew or change a contract. The elected District Health Board members are
supposed to have access to the details of contracts, etc. We should demand that they open the
books. How else would we know if
they were doing their job? We are as a class entitled to the information.
Community Dumping
Where funds saved from closures of hospital services
are not put into providing community services, on the same scale, a cut to
health spending has occurred! And a cut in health spending is a dumping of care
responsibilities onto the community.
In other words, the unpaid labour of workers as a class will go into
meeting those healthcare needs, as best it can. What was paid for and provided to the
working class as a “social wage” is cut and the previously socialised “work”
becomes another unpaid burden on the working class.
When a hospital closes and replacement services are
funded in local communities the trend is that they are cheaper, and use less
skilled labour. Many of us in the
health sector have observed newer residential programmes which have no qualified
staff on site.
As "public servants" we health sector workers will
piss our management off, when we speak out on concerns regarding the quality of
healthcare available, and the consequences of District Health Board decisions.
Too bad. The closure of Hamner is the closure of a
residential treatment programme with an experienced and trained workforce. The consequence was immediately longer
waiting lists at the surviving residential programmes. That will mean more harm occurs while
people out of control with their alcohol or other drug use wait for a
programme.
Health
reforms.
The Labour government’s token reform of the Health
Sector was to bring back elected District Health Boards. These elections are a social democratic
farce. The elections only reproduce
capitalist class relations, with jobs for the ruling class and a few social
democrats who cannot stop capitalism and cuts in the committee room. Worse still, the District Health Boards
are dominated by bureaucrats from previous Health Funding Authorities, some of
whom now working as consultants or as mangers within District Health
Boards.
Those who receive public health services should have
no confidence in the District Health Boards getting accurate information, or the
administrative and funding arms of District Health Boards having the ability to
do anything beyond trying to cut costs. We can pretty sure that at District
Health Board level there is NO knowledge about the quality of services provided
and little knowledge about the quantity, except in terms of the impact of
services on bank balances.
District Health Board ignorance about services means
that service providers could be rewarded with extra contracts for lying and
overstating the quality of service which they provide. In fact the Ministry of
Health has identified that sort of lying as a problem and is trying to find out
if private providers of health services have been providing the services they
are supposed to be. What a damning
indictment of the ignorance of District Health Boards the Ministry of Health
spends so much time praising!
Sold out
Hamner workers experienced the blunt force of
capitalism with its substitution of market forces for human need. Canterbury
District Health Board's ability to sell a piece of prime real estate means that
this piece of real estate will no longer be available to the public health
consumer – to you and me. That fact should be a shame to a Labour Government,
but this government doesn't deserve the name Labour.
This government has organisationally and financially
destroyed a “non-governmental” (so-called) health service provider. The end of Hamner leaves a section of
the workforce without their entitlement of redundancy – that’s an open attack on
some of the workers Labour claims to represent. The laid off workers are having
to wait for receivers to decide if there is any money available to them.
Working class
fight back.
The capitalist class has no need to fight against
cuts to the health sector. They can
always afford to go private. They
could fly overseas for treatment if they needed. Those who work in public health can
stand up as the providers, and speak about the cuts to quality healthcare. Workers need to organise in their unions
and obtain Multi-Employer Collective Agreements (MECA's) which provide them with
greater protection as well as guarantees that any job losses will bring
redundancy or the redeployment of laid off workers.
Weak unions have made the health sector workforce
vulnerable, and wages and conditions have been lost. Adequate wages and conditions will do
more to attract and retain a high quality workforce than professional bodies or
the increased qualifications that big student loans bring.
A strong and organised union was needed at Hamner. It would have been able to invite all former clients, their families and staff to participate in direct action to occupy the site at Hamner, and/or disrupt the sale of the property. It might have been possible to force/shame all the bidders into silence, and/or to force/shame the government into purchasing it off the District Health Board.
Open the books. No cuts to healthcare.
Redundancy or redeploy the
workforce.
Organise in the health sector
unions.
Occupy sites against closure or sell
off.
Hamner is a sign of things to come in the health sector. Since it’s not election year the Clark government has decided Kaitaia hospital will no longer provide emergency surgery after hours. But now, after a round of “community consultation” surgery is cut. More cuts are coming to a town near you. Fight back by rebuilding fighting unions!
Ken Loach Bread and Roses (2000).
This is one of Ken Loach’s better recent films. Set
in Los Angeles it is about the illegal Mexican migrant workers who are employed
as cleaners in LAs high rise corporate towers. As usual Loach hangs the story on a
strong character whose personal strengths and weaknesses signify the
contradictions in the working class as a whole. The feisty Maya (yes, 500 years of
pent-up feistiness) is young, naïve but bright and full of fight. Her sister has
sold her body for years to keep the family alive, but cannot pay for Maya’s
illegal entry because of her sick husband.
Maya outwits the gang member who wants to fuck her in
lieu of payment in a great heartwarming scene. Her sister has to have sex with
the foreman to get her a job in a team of un-documented cleaners. Here Maya gets
involved in the attempt by the Janitors Union to organize the site. She joins up
with a young union organizer but runs into conflict with her sister who is only
concerned to keep her job and informs the gang boss about the union’s plans.
During a confrontation with her sister Maya learns the terrible history of her
sister’s personal sacrifice.
But this does not deter Maya. The workers win the
“bread and roses” in the end by invading Hollywood parties, picketing
fashionable lobbies and blocking intersections – effective tactics for unions
whose workers have little industrial muscle. But Maya meanwhile succumbs to
feelings of guilt over a friends sacking and robs a store to enable him to study
at UCLA law school but pays the price with deportation. One is left with the
feeling however that she’ll be back! And finishing on this note of hope is a
real turn-up for Loach.
Loach’s take on this struggle is good as far as it
goes. He plays on the vulnerability of the workers but at the same time shows
how the ‘Justice for Janitors’ campaign’s clever tactics are successful in
organizing the cleaners. The overall theme is one which lifts Loach above his
more contemplative and pessimistic films like My Name is Joe (1998) and
recent Sweet Sixteen (see review in last Class Struggle) to make a
positive statement about the collective power of organized labour.
The dimension that is missing and which is a constant
absence in Loach’s films is any real substance to his socialist views that there
is more to class struggle than ‘uniting the workers’. The answer is there in the film but it
is left to the viewer to draw his or her own lessons. Maya is never involved to the point of
becoming a leader herself. Her enthusiasm is used by the organizer (and she has
a personal relationship with him) to bring the workers onside. But the union
officials do not allow the workers to control the strikes and Maya’s own life
gets swamped by her personal responsibilities off the job. Despite the union
victory Maya becomes a victim to the multiple pressures of LA existence like
here sister.
She could have avoided this trap only by developing
her political consciousness beyond that of militant unionism, and that would
have required a commitment to revolutionary politics. But that would have been
another film! The closest we get to Maya’s story being continued today comes not
from Los Angeles or from Chiapas, but from the other end of the continent, in
the videos made of the Argentina revolution and workers’ factory
occupations.
As the US-led occupation faces
increasing problems the international left is debating how to help free Iraq
from imperialism. The position of the CWG and its allies overseas is that the
international labour movement should give aid to workers’ organisations
resisting the US, because it is the Iraqi working class which alone has the
ability to defeat the occupation. Many on the left disagree, and are developing
political illusions in the Islamist and ex-Baathist forces which represent the
Iraqi capitalist classes. The argument for aid to working class Iraqi
organisations is complicated by the fact that the most important Iraqi
revolutionary group, the Worker Communist Party of Iraq, is pursuing some very
bad policies. In this exchange from an international e-list, a CWG member
answers an attack on the WCPI, and puts the argument for critical
support for this group,
and for permanent revolution in Iraq.
Dear Comrade S, This is the part of the debate where I bow out, mainly owing to my utter contempt for the Worker Communist Party of Iraq. I remember
well, a few years ago, when I was introduced to them. I was newer
(obviously) at the practice and theory of Marxism and revolution and extremely eager to get my hands on, as you say, genuine non first
world socialist thinking. I discovered that Mansoor Hekmat (the
recently deceased icon of the WCPI) was actually a Londoner; the WCPI
(which "I" must always be qualified; Iran been used by these folks as well), despite what your friend says, have no real base in these
countries. This is not entirely their fault, under both Saddam and
the Mullahs respectively there has been no opening to function. (PS
the CPI have been refused membership in the ruling council, so they
aren't part of it, though they applied and were rejected).
Nonetheless, they operate in a fantasy world. They also are among the worst sort of sectarians and exemplify why we must discard the
notion of a central command somewhere in an 'international' party or
amalgam of parties. In Canada, just before the bombing of Iraq, they
took to the streets with slogans calling for the overthrow of Saddam
Hussein. On International Women’s Day, they took to the streets with calls for the overthrow of the Islamic republic. The Canadian and
North American states do not need such encouragement—who the Hell is that demand targeting? It only means that yet more 'revolutionaries'
in this county are doing the bidding of the imperialists, sorry to
say.
After the 9-11 attacks, both WCPI's demanded that they wanted to join the anti-war coalitions. Their price was that we elevate
denunciations of Islam and call for secular socialist state
formations to the top of our demands, along with our calls for
peaceful solutions based on international law, and this was in a
coalition that included religious groups, moderate Muslim forces and
the like.
Considering many of them as individuals have been tortured at the hands of the Mullahs or at the hands of Saddam, I accept their human
disposition to have a visceral contempt for anything that smacks of
going easy on Saddam Hussein. However, they also are currently more
concerned with making certain Baathists are 'removed from their
influence' over all spheres of Iraqi life, schools, police, etc.
Fighting the imperialist occupation to them is secondary, or at least not clearly primary. However, as Trotsky said (since you like him) if
'democratic Britain attacked 'fascist' Brazil, we would side with Brazil'.
Ironically, though I'm no Trot, I'm upholding that basic principle and the Hekmatian bunch are simply opportunistically doing whatever
the flavour of the month is. I'm not interested in anything they have
to say, their political experience has been one that makes the
Islamists in Iraq currently look far more principled-- not an easy task at all… They are not the genuine voice of anything but
themselves.
Dear Comrade M, I think your comments on the Worker Communist Party and the situation in Iraq contain some serious factual errors. I'm not for a moment
suggesting that these inaccuracies are deliberate, but I think they
are worth challenging, partly because they reflect what I think are
problems with your general political perspective.
You say that I was wrong to claim that the Iraqi Communist Party went into the Governing Council, but the party itself has confirmed
joining the Council. Here is an excerpt from an interview an Iraqi
Communist Party central committee member gave in July, and which the party has posted on its official website:
"After properly and carefully evaluating the grave situation in the aftermath of war, which is truly a national catastrophe, the Party
leadership decided to accept the invitation to join the Governing
Council....It must be emphasised that the party's aim has not changed: to ensure that the Iraqi people exercise their right to
determine their political future with their own free will, and to
bring about a speedy end to occupation, restoring Iraq's national
sovereignty and independence, and building a free and democratic
federal Iraq. This will be the main criterion for evaluating and
judging the Governing Council." [full text at
http://www.iraqcp.org/framse1/0030721Interviewsalam.htm I think your claim that the Worker Communist Party does not have a 'real base' in Iraq is also untrue. A Communist Workers Group of New Zealand member recently traveled to the Middle East to meet some members of the WCPI. Unfortunately he couldn't get into Iraq, but he
did have a chance to talk to Iraqi communists (most of them
pro-Governing Council and thus hostile to the WCPI) who had recently
spent time in the country. He got the strong impression that the WCPI
was a force to be reckoned with on the ground in Iraq.
When I put this comrade's information together with the wealth of information on the WCPI's website and the reports that have made it
to left news sites like indymedia and in some cases even into the
bourgeois media, then I find it hard not to believe that the WCPI as
well as the Organisation for Women's Freedom in Iraq and the
Unemployed Workers' Union are not organisations of some size playing a significant role in the Iraqi left and workers' movement.
Consider some of these reports: "A Forum Organized by the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq at General Railway Company in Baghdad. On September 9, 2003, the OWFI organized a forum at the General Railway Company in Baghdad, which has over 11,000 employees all over Iraq. Two hundred employees attended the forum, which was
chaired by Yanar Muhammad, the head of the OWFI, and Layla Muhammad,
the activist who returned from Australia to join the struggle of
women in Iraq..."
"Hundreds of toilers from al-Huda suburb in Baghdad join the Worker-communist Party of Iraq. Al-Huda is a residential suburb in the center of Baghdad where hundreds of homeless families live. The
inhabitants of this area are deprived of the basic requirements of
making a living. On top of that they are pressured by the USA
administration and local police to evict the area. Two weeks ago, the
police forces attacked people in this area and arrested 8 of them.
They went to all parties and institutions seeking their release, with no yield. When the Organisation of Baghdad of the Worker- communist
Party of Iraq learned about their situation, it decided to involve and solve their problem. The CWP Iraq was able to release the
arrestees..."
"The Worker-communist Party of Iraq’s Forces Clash with a Crime Gang in Baghdad. On September 19, 2003, while patrolling the neighborhood
where the office of the Worker Communist Party of Iraq is located on
Al-Rashid Street in Baghdad, the Party’s forces clashed with an armed gang. While shooting at the security guards protecting the
governmental buildings in the area and injuring one man, the gang
intended to loot shops and governmental buildings. Under heavy fire,
the gang was forced to escape the area..."
"The Workers’ Council of the North Oil Company Leads a Protest against Police misconduct. On September 21, 2003, the workers of the
North Oil Company in Kirkuk organised a protest demonstration against the abusive conduct of the Police toward the company’s employees.
.Muhammad Raadi Oraybi, an activist from the Northern Oil Company’s workers council, was detained for 6 hours for standing against the
despotic practices of the police. Raadi’s arrest sparked off a
protest action in which more 400 workers took part..." From the
English-language section of the WCPI's site (http://www.wpiraq.org/english/) More recently the WCPI has been involved in an important strike by armed workers at the Brickworks at Nahrawhan near Baghdad (see report
below)
You try to use Trotsky's hypothetical war between Brazil and Britain to criticise the WCPI's call for the overthrow of the Iranian
theocracy and (in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq) the regime of
Saddam, but nothing Trotsky said can be used to justify political support for either regime.
Using a hypothetical extreme example to challenge his audience, Trotsky said that in the event of a war between near-fascist Brazil and bourgeois democratic Britain workers around the world should
prefer the military victory of Brazil, because Brazil was a
semi-colonial country whose government was ultimately a product of
imperialism, Britain was the world's number one imperialist power,
and a victory for Brazil would weaken imperialism.
But Trotsky never for a moment suggested that workers anywhere should give a modicum of political support to the government of Brazil, or
to any other national bourgeois government or party anywhere in the
semi-colonial world. Trotsky said that workers should aim their guns
in the same direction as the Brazilian bourgeoisie so that they could
defeat this bourgeoisie in the process of defeating imperialism.
Defeating the imperialists and defeating the local capitalists were not two distinct 'stages' - they were telescoped into a single task.
Trotsky's whole politics was built on his theory of combined and uneven development, which had as one of its corollaries the argument
that capitalist classes in the colonial and semi-colonial world were
too weak to stand up to imperialism. Colonies and semi-colonies could
only be broken out of the circuit of global capitalism by socialist
revolution. Brazil vs Britain was a hypothetical case, but Trotsky
and his followers put his argument into practice during both the
Russian and Spanish revolutions.
In 1917, for instance, Trotsky refused to give any political support to the national bourgeois Kerensky government established after the
February revolution (before the war Russia was regarded by the Bolsheviks as an imperialist country, but by 1917 it was surely effectively a semi-colony of the West).
When White Russians in the service of imperialism attempted a coup to get rid of Kerensky's government the Bolsheviks gave Kerensky
military support -pointed their guns in the same direction as the
Kerensky government's - without abandoning their call for the overthrow of this government by the workers. Only months after
crushing the White coup they crushed Kerensky's government and put
the soviets into power.
I'm sorry to go on at such length about Trotsky and 1917, but I think it's important that Trotsky's strategy of permanent revolution is
distinguished from the strategy which you appear to support and which
he rejected, which is that of political support for and a political
alliance with national bourgeois parties and governments
The WCPI is right to call for the overthrow of the Islamic regime in Iran by the workers of Iran. The WCPI is talking, after all, about a
brutal dictatorship that condemns half its population to a medieval
existence as third-class citizens, and has locked up or simply
executed tens of thousands of leftists and trade unionists. Who would
want to support the continued existence of such a regime?
Even the Stalinist left, which was deeply implicated in the coming to power of the Islamists, now calls for the overthrow of the regime.
Third Worldist politics have led you to adopt a position which no leftist organisation inside the real Third World country of Iran
would today touch with a barge pole.
The situation is no different when we turn to Iraq. In my experience, the Iraqis living in Auckland simultaneously wanted to overthrow
Saddam and opposed the US invasion. There was no contradiction here – it was well-understood that US imperialism had put Saddam into power
in the first place, and had kept him in power by collaborating with
him to defeat the workers' uprisings that believe it or not saw
soviets established in parts of Iraq after the First Gulf War. It was
also understood that Saddam's rotting regime was completely incapable
of stopping the US - only the mobilisation of the people who despised
Saddam could defeat the US. Where the WCPI goes wrong is in refusing to give any support at all to Third World capitalists resisting imperialism militarily. I quote
from a recent CWG leaflet:
"The Worker-Communist Party condemns Islamist and Baathist fighters against the US as no better than the US itself. But by taking this
attitude, the Party turns its back on tens of thousands of young
workers who fight under the leadership of local capitalists. If US
troops are shooting into a crowd, the people in the crowd have the
right to shoot back, even if they happen to be Muslims. If a US
chopper is shooting up an Iraqi village, an Iraqi has the right to
shoot it down, even if he belongs to the Baath Party. The rank and
file of the resistance has to be won from its rotten leadership, not
condemned for the policies of that leadership.
The bankruptcy of the Worker Communist Party’s position was shown after the US invasion in March – the Party refused to support the
resistance to invasion and, desperate for some sort of ‘solution’,
ended up calling on the UN to intervene to save Iraq."
I agree with you that the WCPI has a too-extreme attitude to Muslim groups in the anti-war movement, but I think you are quite wrong when
you argue that the flaws in the WCPI's position 'exemplify why we
must discard the notion of a central command somewhere in an
'international' party or amalgam of parties'. On the contrary, the WCPI is a screaming example of the need for an international party which can bring comrades from different regions
together to analyse and criticise each other's positions.
The WCPI is a prisoner of Iraqi history: it was formed as a reaction to the stagist politics of the Stalinist Iraqi Communist Party, but
its founders never got a handle on the reasons for the political
degeneracy of the ICP. In the 1970s they saw the ICP (encouraged by
Moscow, Castro etc) go into government with Saddam, and were rightly disgusted. But they wrongly concluded that the ICP's Stalinist
politics of political alliances with the national bourgeoisie was the
logical consequence of Leninism and 1917, and so they threw
Bolshevism out with the bathwater and went for ultra-leftism instead. Because of the isolation of Iraq and the immense power of the ICP-Moscow propaganda machine, the WCPI's founders never had access to the original rejection of stagism which Lenin and Trotsky made in
1917. They equated Stalinism and Bolshevism. The WCPI went into exile in Western countries where the self-described Trotskyist groups had
mostly long since abandoned the theory of permanent revolution (it's
no coincidence the WCPI is polemicising against a Cliffite group).
It's not surprising the exiles didn't see much to alter their impression of Bolshevism.
But the WCPI's mistakes could potentially have been avoided by the criticism of groups that were still
loyal to the politics of 1917. Now the WCPI's membership in the
global anti-war movement provides the ideal opportunity for us to
simultaneously work with them and criticise them in an effort to
improve their politics. That's the idea behind our attempt to get
international solidarity with the WCPI and the organisations it has
founded going.
At the end of the day, the WCPI and the work it is doing in Iraq are surely important enough to deserve solidarity and assistance, even if
the arguments get nowhere. It is surely perverse for a socialist of
your obvious sincerity to have friendly words for Mugabe and Mahathir
but 'utter contempt' for a socialist organisation on the frontline of
the resistance to US imperialism.
Report
on Condition of the Working Class in Iraq
Tuesday 21 Oct 2003 author: Ewa in Baghdad ([email protected])
…The Daurra Oil Refinery Trade Union was rig-voted into existence 2
weeks ago (as two workers told us, far from the plant sat in the safety of a
barbed wire and concrete block surrounded Karrada hotel). Not only is it
welcomed by the boss, but it is also recognized by the General Confederation of
Iraqi Worker Trades a “body of revamped (or not, no-one will tell) unions, some
still allegedly led by former Baathists, and currently controlled by the
Communist Party of Iraq. The union is recognized 'unofficially' by the Ministry
of Oil and the CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority]. This is an anomaly, seeing
as neither the Confederation nor any trade union in Iraq has been officially
recognized by the Occupation Authorities because officially, in law, they do not
exist.
Representatives at the Confederation’s squatted, simple, deskless, and
almost chair-less office in the middle of Alawi Hilla Bus Garage, Baghdad, told
us they'd submitted requests for recognition to the CPA three times but to no
avail. Furthermore, the CPA (referred to from here on as the Occupation
Authorities), deny the existence of workers in Iraq full-stop, just as their
predecessors did.
In 1987, the Baath passed a law which banned strikes and officially
deleted the existence of 'workers' in Iraq, redefining them as 'civil servants'
i.e. employees of the state. Trade unions were no longer necessary, the
socialist state was taking care of workers' rights so what need was there to
create unions or strike? The CPA has deliberately opted not to repeal this law,
leaving workers in a legal and industrial identity limbo - just the way a newly
asserting itself regime likes it…
…From the militancy absorbent and struggle-co-opting phony union of
Daurra to the autonomous Nahrawhan Brick Factory Union, organized 2 months ago
with the help of an activist from the Worker Communist Party. Members Fahed
Owada, Shahel Ghatta, Farhan Hassan and Nizar Abdel Hussein risked their jobs to
come and speak to us about their ongoing struggle. Nahrawahn, 30km east of
Baghdad, is a complex of 150 factories, employing 15,000 workers, housing
approximately 7,500, and churning out thousands of bricks daily. Men, women and
children are employed there, working 14 hour days for 3000 to 750 (child wage)
per day - approximately $1.50 to 60c per day –the equivalent of the price of a
melon smoothie at Baghdad's gleaming mercenary and petrol yuppie frequenting
Hamra Hotel, 20 falafel sandwiches, a 30min taxi ride to and from Baghdad Jadeed
to Kharadda Dakhil, 4 cans of Pepsi or a weeks worth of bread, just bread, for a
family.
Entire families are employed at Nahrawhan, ages 6 to 60 being represented
in the workforce. 7,500 workers live on site in dire Boss rented accommodation.
There are no health benefits, no holiday pay and no medical aid for injuries.
Boys under 14 load up trucks with bricks, setting them in neat order. Boys aged
14-up work retrieving the bricks from the factory's 30m tall, 15m wide, 750 degree raging furnace.
Those who enter the hell protect themselves with their own clothing –no
fireproof suits or overalls are provided. They wear 2 sets of underwear, 2
shirts, jumpers, two sets of trousers, a shirt and a keefayah around the head, 4
or 5 pairs of socks, and gloves made from old punctured tire inner tubes. Those
emerging usually drop to the ground on normal-air impact. Hands placed in warm
water are cooled cold instantly.
Black oil powers the furnace, 'the worst kind' we are told, wafting
chemical dioxides throughout the factory. Respiratory illnesses are common, as
are preventable accidents. One man lost seven children last year when a part of
the oven collapsed on top of them. As he was from a powerful tribe, he was
compensated commensurately ($900,000) by the owner. Those from weaker families
are not so fortunate. A 24-year-old woman sleeping on her break during the
nightshift was overcome by gas and died. The factory owner told her father “it’s
not my problem, it’s yours”…
…On Saturday October 11th, 75% of the workforce decided enough was enough
and went on strike. 300-400 workers marched to the owner’s office and demanded
social security, retirement payment, onsite medical aid facilities, contracts
and a rise in wages. The owner had no idea that a union had been formed and told
them, 'Fine, strike, go, I will dismiss you, others will come to take your
place'.
The workers responded by going to their homes, bringing out their guns
and spontaneously forming an armed picket line. Manned with machineguns and
kalishnikovs, workers guarded their factory and defended their strike from
demolition by scab labour. The owner, overpowered, ended up granting the workers
a rise of 500 dinars –US 25c, and agreed to enter into negotiations regarding
social and health benefits. The strike was regarded all round as a massive
success.
The unionized workers, empowered by their victory,
have ideas about improving their conditions and keeping the owners in check.
'The Union must control the fuel in the ovens. Then the factory owner will obey
us', says Farhan. 'Each factory has its own share of gasoline from the
government. If we co-operate with the ministry of oil and the owner breaks
health and safety rules then the ministry must stop his supply of oil'. Whether
the Ministry will be willing to recognize an independent and militant union such
as the Nahrawhan brick makers and take their side when there appear to be no
laws whatsoever guaranteeing the rights of safety of workers in Iraq is
debatable.
'We know that we will be sacked when we return to
Nahrawhan' says Farhan, 'But we are willing to risk
this for the rights of the other workers'. One thing is certain though.
Undercurrents of resistance, solidarity, autonomous organizing and a rejection
of Occupation, ex-Baathist boss or unionist imposed authority are alive and
striking in Iraq right now and they need support urgently.
Further
information available at  http://www.wpiraq.org/english/
Full text at Independent Media Center
http://www.sydney.indymedia.org:8080/
Bolivia:
Popular Front or Permanent Revolution?
Revolution is a laboratory of ideas, and the ultimate test of isms, so it’s no surprise that the revolutionary events shaking
several South American countries are testing and in some cases
splitting all of the currents of the left. In an article written
shortly after the overthrow of the Lozada regime, the Bolivian
anarchist organisation Quilombo Libertaro laid out its roadmap
for revolution. Here we reproduce some criticisms a CWG member
made of Quilombo Libertaro’s article when it appeared on the
indymedia website. Quimbo Libertaro’s article can be read in full
at
http://www.indymedia.org.nz/front.php3?article_id=11913&group=webcast.
The position of Quimbo Libertaro is essentially no different to that of the Stalinist and Maoist outfits that still
have much influence in South America and which constitute the
left wing of the World Social Forum there. They contrast very
sharply with the arguments of the Poder Bolivia Obrero, the CWG's
sister group in Bolivia, and show again, eighty years after the
confrontation between Trotsky and Stalin, the crucial
significance for the global left of the argument between
permanent revolution and stagism - between 'socialist revolution
by the workers' vs 'revolution by stages in a cross-class
alliance'.
Consider the call for "MAXIMUM CONSENSUS with all the social and political forces from the people’s and opposition
side". What this means in practice is a Popular Front, ie a
continued alliance of the workers and peasants with 'progressive'
Bolivian capitalists who have for reasons of their own - usually inability to compete in the global economy - backed the
anti-Lozada protests. 'Maximum consensus' actually means
revolutionaries compromising with the reactionary beliefs
promoted by these Bolivian capitalists - for instance, the rabid
anti-Chilean sentiments that have been a feature of protests in
some places. Support for a 'UN solution' to the crisis is another
backward idea which has its basis in the Bolivian bourgeoisie and
middle classes.
Having a Popular Front and looking for 'consensus' with the bosses means abandoning any hope of making a socialist
revolution in Bolivia. After all, the bosses aren't going to
agree to occupying their own factories and mines, are they? And
they aren't going to agree to solidarity with the workers of
Chile and other South America countries, are they, when they see these countries as their rivals?
Socialising the Bolivian economy would mean setting up workers' and peasants' councils - soviets - that ran society on
the basis of direct democracy. Poder Obrero argues that it is
these bodies which revolutionaries should be trying to organise.
Steps were taken during the campaign against Lozada when Neighbourhood Assemblies and strike committees were formed. But you can't set up a workers' council in partnership with your
boss. That's why those who argue for a Popular Front ignore the
need for soviets and argue instead for a Constituent Assembly:
"To accept the Constituent Assembly, but grounded in a model of the COB from the times of its foundation, horizontal and
grass-roots participation, where all the citizens sectors have
their say."
A Constituent Assembly is the highest form of capitalist democracy - it has broad powers to write or rewrite constitutions
and it can even have recallable members. But it is still a
capitalist parliament, based on capitalist property relations. It
has no power to socialise property. A Constituent Assembly has
often been used as a ruse by ruling classes desperate to get
revolutionary workers off their backs - the anarchists themselves
cite the Constituent Assembly which was set up in 1971 in
Bolivia, and will noticeably failed to do anything to change the structure of Bolivian society.
Perhaps aware of the bankruptcy of their position, the anarchists try to fudge on the nature of the Constituent
Assembly, suggesting that it could have some of the virtues of soviets - that it could be 'horizontal and grass-roots', for
instance. This is an old and extremely dishonest argument - it
goes back at least to the German revolution of 1918-19, when
social democratic guru Karl Kautsky reacted to the formation of
soviets in Germany by suggesting that a capitalist parliament
could continue to exist alongside them, as a 'moderating'
influence.
Like the Bolivian anarchists, Kautsky wanted to find a consensus between 'progressive' bosses and workers. But
revolutions happen because of the incompatibility of the
interests of capital and labour. The CWG's sister group Poder
Bolivia Obrero argues that if the US invaded Bolivia it would be right for Bolivian workers to make a 'military bloc' with any
bosses who wanted to resist, keeping their organisational
independence and pointing their guns in the same direction, but
that for revolutionary workers to surrender their organisational
independence and water down their ideas in a Popular Front with
their bosses is suicidal.
Here are some excerpts from a statement drafted by the CWG and seven other organisations and distributed in Bolivia by Poder Obrero which show the alternative to the Popular Frontism of the World Social Forum and its anarchist fellow travelers:
"The only way...to stop the plundering of gas and the natural resources of the country, and to win bread, work, land,
living wages, and the right to cultivate coca, is to open up a
victorious revolution with the general strike and road blockages,
taking control of the factories, the banks, the transport...
To carry this decisive combat forward, the United National Leadership, the COB and all the workers’ and peasants’ organizations that take part in it must fight for the dissolution
and disarmament of the police and the army and the construction
and centralization of workers’ and peasants’ armed militia..
…a true workers’ and peasants’ parliament - opposed to the power of the exploiters - would become an organization
respected by all the masses in struggle, and with an enormous
authority to guarantee the construction of workers’ and peasants’
militias, to advance workers’ and peasants’ control over
production and distribution...
...the road confronting the Bolivian masses today, the one that Fidel Castro imposes, along with the union bureaucracies
of the continent, the leaders of the organizations the peasant’
unions, and all the reformist leaders of the World Social Forum,
is one of deals and class collaboration with pro-imperialistic
popular fronts like that of Lula in Brazil, of colonel Gutiérrez
in Ecuador, and President Lagos in Chile; or with the supposed
"anti-neoliberal" governments like the one of Kirchner in Argentina, all servile lackeys of Bush and the IMF; or with the bourgeois nationalist governments, like the one of Chávez in
Venezuela, which use the masses’ fight to blackmail concessions from imperialism, only to turn on the workers as soon as they
threaten to erupt into revolution..."
(See full text below) Our view is that despite all their self-differentiating rhetoric (we're not like those reds with their authoritarian
complexes etc), anarchists cannot escape the hoary old choice
between stagism and permanent revolution as strategies for
revolution in the Third World. As revolutionary situations have
opened up across South America anarchists have jumped into either
one camp or the other (consider Venezuela, where many are siding
with the Stalinists and taking a completely uncritical, stagist
approach to Chavez, or Argentina, where the Libertarian Socialist
Organisation has a position of revolution without stages very similar to that of the CWG's sister group Workers Democracy).
Of course, a lot of 'Trotskyists' have jumped the wrong way, and some are now helping prop up the governments of Lula and
Chavez and using stagist arguments in self-defence. The CWG and
similar groups use the label 'left Trotskyist' to distinguish
ourselves from these groups (represented in NZ, of course, by the
Socialist Workers) which we acknowledge give Trotskyism an awful name. In the same way, healthy 'left' anarchist groups should
criticise those anarchists who have fallen for Popular Fronts and
stagism.
The recent uprising in
Bolivia in the last months has taken the world’s centre stage. The workers and
peasants rose up in their tens of thousands and forced the hated President
‘Goni’ to flee to Miami. But the revolution was stopped halfway by the leaders
of the peasants’ and workers organizations’ who made deals with Goni’s
replacement, another US stooge, Mesa.
The leaflet below was a joint statement published during the recent
uprising in Bolivia before the resignation of Goni in October? It raises the
central question of the necessity for a nationwide workers’ congress to prepare
for a Workers’ and Peasant’s Government.
These demands were reprinted in the paper of our fraternal group
Poder Obrero of
Bolivia at the height of the struggle in
September.
Long
live the heroic revolutionary and anti-imperialist struggle of the Bolivian
workers and peasants!
Long live the general
strike with road blockages across all the
nation!
For a workers’ and
peasants’ government of the United National Leadership, the COB and of all the
workers’ and peasants’ organizations that take part in it, based on the workers’
and peasants’ militia and on the self-organization of the workers and the
people!
Out with imperialism and its blood
sucking monopolies from Bolivia and the whole Latin
America!
On Saturday 20th of September, the land of
Bolivia was once again stained with workers’ and peasants’ blood. The army and
police assassins, sent by the US lackey Sánchez de Lozada, irrupted with blood
and fire in the localities of Warisata and Sorata, where workers and peasants
were maintaining a total blockade of roads against the selling of the natural
gas resources to the US, for the right to produce coca and for land for the
peasants. Six more workers and peasants martyrs fell murdered, among them, a
woman and her eight year old daughter; dozens were wounded, imprisoned or
missing.
This new massacre of Sánchez de Lozada’s
-"Goni" - government and the military-backeed regime, under a new agreement with
Yankee imperialism, the gas and oil barons and the officer caste of
the army, was perpetrated the day after tens of thousands of workers and
peasants went into the streets of La Paz, Cochabamba, Oruro and the main cities
of the country, extending the peasants’ road blocks against the extraordinary
plundering of Bolivian gas proposed by imperialism, the oil monopolies and the
government. Once more the Bolivian workers and people rose up shouting the
slogans "the gas is ours and not of the foreigners"; "With the gas and the
coca, the future of our sons". “Out with the
gringos!"
But the massacre of Warisata did not
demoralise the heroic Bolivian workers and peasants. On the contrary, while
taking care of their martyrs, they prepared for battle again. In Warisata, they
organized a workers’ and peasants’ militia to defend their lives from the
assassin army. In Sorata, the people rose up, set fire to the prefecture, the
hotels, the police stations, and the city is in the hands of the insurgent
workers and peasants, who have declared themselves in a "state of civil war".
Thousands of workers and peasants in the province of Omasuyos - where Warisata
and Sorata are - met on September 22 in a general assembly, raising the demands
"Death to Gonzalo Sánchez de
Lozada", "Civil war, civil war", and "the gas is not for
sale", and demanding the head of the ministers of Government and of Defense
and that of Goni himself.
The indefinite road blocks are now all over the
country, leaving La Paz surrounded and forcing the closure of the markets in the
capital city. The CSUTCB (Peasants’ Central trade-union) declared a national
mourning for 30 days with road blockages and peasants’ strike, along with a
peasants’ ‘state of siege’ -which
means that the soldiers and the police officers cannot safely patrol the
peasants’ communities. At the same time, it has called on the workers and
peasants "to occupy the sub-prefectures, municipal offices, and military
posts, so that the Wipala (the flag of the indigenous people) is the only
national flag raised".
Today, the workers and the peasants of Bolivia have
forced their leaderships - the COB, Quispe, Morales - to set up a United
National Leadership of Mobilisations, and to call for a general road blockage
and for the indefinite general strike from September 29th, in the
defense of the gas, for their particular demands which includes the resignation
of the murderous government of Goni and his military
regime.
So, the
workers and the peasants have risen up again, breaking the truce made last
February with the government by the leadership of the COB, Quispe and Evo
Morales - members of the World Social Forum -, a truce that aborted the
revolutionary uprising when the workers and peasants were mobilising against
Goni’s government and his military forces, faced the army in the streets,
threatening to divide it and causing divisions among the officers, and beginning
the Fourth Bolivian revolution, under the battle cry "Rifles, shrapnel, Bolivia
will not be silenced".
Down with Sánchez de
Lozada! Throw the imperialist
pirates out of Bolivia!
Long live the heroic
struggle and the general strike of our Bolivian brothers and sisters, who show
the way for all the Latin American workers and exploited people, breaking the
truces and the pacts imposed by the reformist leaderships grouped in the World
Social Forum, and confronting the imperialist plunderers and their lackey
governments and regimes!
Long live "the war for
the gas" of Bolivian workers and peasants!
Fight Yankee
imperialism, the imperialist oil monopolies, and the servile government that
wants to steal the gas resources!
After having plundered the mineral riches of Bolivia
for decades, after having taken the oil, after having left the country exhausted
and in ruins, and the workers and peasants in misery, this gang of robbers who
are the imperialist oil monopolies, Sánchez de Lozada and the Bolivian
bourgeoisie, are ready to perpetrate a new extraordinary robbery against the
people. The prize is very valuable: Bolivia has enormous gas reserves, valued at
US$80 billion (when the GDP of this country is only US$8 billion), while the
vast majority of the population has to use firewood to cook, and suffers cold
without heating. The government has decreed the selling of the natural gas to an
imperialist consortium (Pacific LNG, a consortium of YPF Repsol, British Gas and
British Petroleum), which will build a gas pipeline to the Chilean port of
Patillos and from there ship the gas to the United States. This business would
make US$1.3 billion dollars of profit per year for 20 years (i.e., US$26 billion
dollars!) for this monopoly and Bolivia will get only US$70 million dollars per
year in royalties (i.e., US$1.4 billion in 20 years!
The same Yankee butchers and their greedy
corporations that invaded and occupied Iraq to get its oil, today want to steal
the Bolivian workers’ and peasants’ gas! How true was the cry of our Bolivian
class brothers and sisters when, during the mobilizations against the war of
Iraq, they shouted: "To Iraq for its oil, to Kollasuyu (indigenous name for
Bolivia) for its gas; Gringos out of Iraq!”
Today, before such blatant robbery, the exemplary
struggle of the workers and the peasants of Bolivia shows once more that they
are not willing to be plundered. They had already shown this in 2000 in Cochabamba
when they rose up against the imperialist monopolies that wanted to steal their
water, and against the government of Banzer; and by opposing with a civil war
the imperialist policy of eradication of the coca; and then last February again
rising up against Goni’s generalised attack on wages ordered by the IMF, almost
overthrowing the regime and forcing it to retreat. It proves once more that the
working class - with its allies the poor peasants - is the only class that does
not have any interest in serving imperialism, and for that reason, it is the
only class capable of carrying the struggle against imperialism to the end,
liberating the oppressed nation from its yoke.
Down with Sánchez de Lozada and the
military-backed regime!
Throw imperialism and its plundering monopolies
out of Bolivia!
For a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government of the
United National Leadership, the COB and all the workers’ and peasants’
organizations that are part of it, based on workers’ and peasants’ militia and
on the independent organizations of the workers and the poor
people!
This gang of
thieves and assassins, massacrers of the people and plunderers of the nation
which is imperialism, its insatiable monopolies, the lackey bourgeoisie and the
government of Goni, wants to steal the wealth of the people by means of blood
and fire, to continue to condemn the people to hunger and misery and reduce
Bolivia to a slave colony.
The only way to
prevent this happening, to stop the plundering of gas and the natural resources
of the country, and to win bread, work, land, living wages, and the right to
cultivate coca, is to open up a victorious revolution with the general strike
and road blockages, taking control of the factories, the banks, the transport,
extending and centralizing the workers’ and peasants’ armed militias, destroying
the West Point caste of army officers, overthrowing the murderous lackey
government of Goni, smashing every
pillar of the regime and expelling imperialism and its monopolies. And then
imposing, on these ruins, a government of the United National Leadership, the
COB and all the workers’ and peasants’ organizations comprising it, based on
workers’ and peasants’ militia and on the independent organizations of the
workers and the poor people.
To carry this
decisive combat forward, the United National Leadership, the COB and all the
workers’ and peasants’ organizations that take part in it must fight for the
dissolution and disarmament of the police and the army and the construction and
centralization of workers’ and peasants’ armed militia. This is the only way to
destroy the army – a key pillar of the military-backed regime and of the state
–at the same time calling upon the rank and file soldiers and the subordinate
officers of the army –sons of workers and peasants –to rebel against the West
Point caste of sepoy officers, to disarm and destroy it, and to organize
themselves in committees of armed soldiers, to coordinate with the workers’ and
peasants’ organizations and to join the general strike, putting their weapons in
the service of the workers’ and peasants’ militia.
By
overthrowing Goni and the military-backed regime and imposing a workers’ and
peasants’ government, that breaks with imperialism and expropriates the
expropriators; by re-nationalizing without payment and under workers’ control
the gas, the oil, the mines, and all the privatized enterprises; by
expropriating imperialism in general and breaking with the IMF, the World Bank
and the IDB (International Development Bank); by imposing the free production
and marketing of the coca, the provision of agricultural machinery, the
canceling of the debts and the granting of cheap credit to the ruined small
producers of the country, through expropriating and nationalising the banks
under workers’ control and the creation of a single official bank; by
nationalizing foreign trade; and by taking every measure to guarantee work,
decent wages, health and education for the people; only in this way will the
Bolivian working class and the peasants be able to finish with the catastrophe,
the plundering and the colonial oppression caused by imperialism, the national
bourgeoisie and the lackey government.
No new truce or pact
with Goni and the gang of plunderers of the people!
For a Workers’ and
Peasants’ National Congress of rank and file mandated delegates, democratically
elected, to organize the decisive combat and to prepare the insurrection to
defeat Goni and the military regime!
After the massacre in Warisata, and
facing the indefinite general strike, the government of Sánchez de Lozada once
more is trying to negotiate sector by sector, trying "to dialogue" with those
organizations that have particular demands, such as the peasants led by Quispe,
and ignoring others such as the COB who demand his resignation. For his part,
Evo Morales declared that the coca producers of Chapare would not join the road
blockages before October 10th because "the executive secretary of
the COB was premature in calling for a national mobilization", and he
criticised Quispe for demanding that the representatives of the government go to
Warisata to negotiate, saying that Quispe and the government "are gambling
with the situation of the country".
No new truce or pact
with the murderous government of Goni and the gang of plunderers of the
people!
It is necessary to stop the unity
created in the struggle of the workers and the peasants from being broken by the
reformist leaderships, and from allowing the energy, the struggle and the blood
of the workers and the peasants to be abused by these leaders to establish new
truces and pacts with the bosses, and, in this way, to save the government and
its military backers. The only way forward for the masses is to create the
widest direct democracy, with a workers’ and peasants’ national Congress of rank
and file delegates who are democratically elected, mandated and recallable, in
the COB and all the workers’ and peasants organizations that are part of the
United National Leadership.
At the same time, in every village,
every city, in every region, it is necessary to set up strike committees with
elected delegates of all the organizations in struggle which become a true
workers’ and peasants’ power. This National Congress, a true workers’ and
peasants’ parliament - opposed to the power of the exploiters - would become an
organization respected by all the masses in struggle, and with an enormous
authority to guarantee the construction of workers’ and peasants’ militias, to
advance workers’ and peasants’ control over production and distribution, to
carry out the expropriation and the nationalisation of the banks under workers’
control, and the formation of a single official bank which releases small ruined
producers from debt and provides cheap credit, as well as the nationalization of
the foreign trade, and to fulfill these tasks by organising a triumphant
insurrection to overthrow Goni and the military-backed regime and then to put in
place a workers’ and peasants’ government that the bureaucratic leaderships of
the trade unions, Stalinism and social democracy cannot do
themselves.
The Bolivian workers and peasants show the way forward for the exploited of the whole Continent to break the collaborators truces and agreements and to confront imperialism and its client regimes!
The fight of the workers and peasants of Bolivia today is the undisputed advance guard of the struggle of the Latin American working class and exploited people to break the truces and pacts that the reformist leaders have imposed on them, tying their hands in the face of imperialism, the employers and the exploiting and repressive client regimes.
This is the road confronting the Bolivian masses today, the one that Fidel Castro imposes, along with the union bureaucracies of the continent, the leaders of the organizations the peasant’ unions, and all the reformist leaders of the World Social Forum. One of deals and class collaboration with pro-imperialistic popular fronts like that of Lula in Brazil, of colonel Gutiérrez in Ecuador, and President Lagos in Chile; or with the supposed "anti-neoliberal" governments like the one of Kirchner in Argentina, all servile lackeys of Bush and the IMF; or with the bourgeois nationalist governments, like the one of Chávez in Venezuela, which use the masses’ fight to blackmail concessions from imperialism, only to turn on the workers as soon as they threaten to erupt into revolution.
The road opened up by the Bolivian workers and peasants, is that of a fight to the end to bring down the government of Goni (Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada) and the military-backed regime – unlike that of FARC in Colombia, which refuses to expropriate a single factory or patch of earth in the territories it controls, and is today preparing to sign a new pact with the murderous government of Uribe and with the blessing of Lula, with the blood of thousand of farmers and city workers killed by the "death squads".
For that reason, this fight of the workers and peasants must open the way to the ‘fourth’ Bolivian revolution, defeating the reformist leaders, overthrowing the government and destroying every pillar of the military-backed regime, including the officer corps, trained in assassination at West Point, and put in place a workers’ and farmers’ government based on the independent, armed organisations of the masses. This fight is inseparable from the struggle of the Ecuadorian workers and peasants to break the truce and the policy of class collaboration of their leaders and regain the revolution that they began in 1997. It is inseparable from the fight of the Argentine revolution, today retreating under the treachery of the union and piquetero bureaucracy and the reformist leaders, to raise once more its head; from that of the Peruvian workers to throw out the truces and agreements which the CGTP and the stalinists have made with Toledo; with that of Brazilian workers and farmers to break the links of the (PT) Workers Party with the popular front government of Lula and Alencar –which imposes the plans of the IMF, beating workers and massacreing farmers –and with the leaders of the CUT (Central Workers Union) and the MST (landless peasants’ movement), and to begin a political fight of masses against the government of Lula, the lackey of Bush.
Therefore, the insurgency in Bolivia today shows that the exploited people of Latin America face a life and death choice: either the victorious workers’ and peasants’ socialist revolution; or new and terrible defeats as the nations of the continent are turned into colonies and protectorates facing unlimited plunder and destruction. For that reason, the workers and peasants uprising in Bolivia depends on the successful struggles of workers for socialist revolution in each country of the continent, overthrowing the bourgeoisie, destroying its armed forces, and imposing workers and peasants governments based on the independent, armed organisations of the workers and the peasants that put an end to the imperialistic yoke and capitalist exploitation, and go on to form a Federation of Workers’ and Peasants’ Republics of Latin America.
But this historical
task will only be advanced if the Latin American proletariat unites with its
important ally, the North American working class, and in particular with its
most exploited and oppressed fractions, the millions of black and latino
workers, exploited and treated like outcasts by the imperialistic bourgeoisie,
discriminated against by the US labour aristocracy and the union bureaucracy of
the AFL-CIO, who therefore suffer the worst working conditions, unemployment,
poverty, as well as persecution and harassment by the police. By uniting with the North American
workers of Latino origin, the working class of Central America and South America
can build unity with the North American working class to weaken imperialism, to
advance the revolution in the United States and assure the victory of the
continental and world-wide proletariat in the struggle for socialism. But this will only be possible if the
working class and the exploited of all the Americas, the United States but also
of Latin America, overcome the dominance of the North American labour
aristocracy and defeat the AFL-CIO union bureaucracy, the labour lieutenants of
Bush and the Yankee imperialist bourgeoisie.
All out
support and solidarity with the heroic fight of our class brothers and sisters
of Bolivia!
The Bolivian workers and
farmers are the leading edge of the fight against imperialism and its client
governments in Latin America. They
show how all the workers and exploited people of the continent can break the
truces and agreements that the reformist leaders have made that tie the hands of
the workers before imperialism, the capitalists and their lackey regimes and
repressive austerity governments, allowing these regimes to remain and go on the
offensive like today in Bolivia. We
cannot allow the masses to continue being massacred by the servant Goni and his
killer army! Their fight is our
fight! Today we must all be
Bolivian!
We call on all the workers,
student organizations and parties that claim to be for the workers and against
imperialism, to immediately act to win support for and solidarity with our class
brothers and sisters of Bolivia, with mobilizations in the streets, picketing of
Bolivian embassies, and the widest unity in action.
Long live the struggle of
the Bolivian workers and peasants!
Down with the government of
Sanchez de Lozada, assassin and exploiter of the Bolivian
people!
Fight imperialism in Latin
America!
The international Trotskyists that signed this
declaration and who fight for the revolutionary program raised here are
committed to initiate actions and to participate in united actions in all every
way possible to build support for and solidarity with the heroic fight of our
Bolivian brothers and sisters.
At the same time, we call on the workers and peasants
of the continent, to demand that the leadership of all the political
organizations in Latin America who speak in name of the working class and the
poor peasants, and of the unions (like the CTA and the organizations of
unemployed people of Argentina; the CUT and the MST of Brazil; the CUT of Chile;
the CGTP of Peru; the CONAIE and the unions of Ecuador; the PIT-CNT of Uruguay,
etc) that they immediately break all agreements with the client governments, and
that they break all ties that subordinate these organizations to the employer's
associations. We call on the labour
movement to immediately create a continental workers’ and peasants’ movement in
support and solidarity with the heroic revolutionary and anti-imperialist fight
of the Bolivian workers and peasants, against the imperialism that destroys the
people of Latin America and against the governments that are their
servants.
We must build a Trotskyist and internationalist revolutionary party, to equip the heroic Bolivian proletariat with the leadership it needs and deserves, and this is the task of the healthy forces of Trotskyist internationalists!
The Bolivian workers and peasants have given us great examples of heroism, of readiness to fight, and of revolutionary will. If they have yet not managed to open the way to the Fourth Bolivian Revolution, it is because of the leaders that they have in front of them, try at each step to prevent it. This life and death situation makes it more urgent and necessary than ever to provide the Bolivian proletariat with a new leadership –a revolutionary, Trotskyist and internationalist party, able to prevent them from sacrificing their forces and having their struggle expropriated once more by the truces, pacts, and class collaborationist alliances with "progressive patrons" and "the patriotic military".
The program of Trotskyism, of Permanent Revolution - defended in the 1940s by the POR (Revolutionary Workers Party) the Bolivian section of the IV International, became flesh and blood when the Theses of Pulacayo were adopted by the Bolivian working class in 1946 as its revolutionary action program - is now more correct than ever and has passed the test of the class struggle. Unfortunately, Pabloism and the revisionism of the IV International became a political influence on the POR and its leadership, preventing it from playing a revolutionary role in the revolution of 1952 and in the revolutionary events of the Bolivian masses in the second half of 20th century.
Therefore, though Trotskyism has passed the test, the currents that call themselves Trotskyist have not. In the three previous incomplete revolutions – in 1952, in 1971 and 1985 – these currents demonstrated all their impotence, renouncing the Theses of Pulacayo, that is to say, the fight for the armament of the masses and the strategy of building Soviets (or independent armed workers and peasants organisations), and instead subordinated themselves to the bureaucracy of the COB, if not directly to bourgeois nationalistic currents like the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) or to allies in "the patriotic military". These are the Pabloite currents that have deprived the Bolivian working class of the revolutionary leadership that it deserved: a revolutionary internationalist Trotskyist party.
Today, at the threshold of a new revolution, the forces that will bring that party into existence are being formed: they are the advanced workers who denounce the leaders who betrayed the Theses of Pulacayo, and who have taken on the task of rebuilding the COB, so that it becomes a proletarian organisation that can lead the peasants and all the exploited people towards a victorious insurrection overthrowing the government and its military backers. They are those workers, the exploited peasants and the heroic women workers who are the driving force of the workers and peasants militias, the assemblies, the strike committees, and the blockades. These, along with the honest Trotskyist militants who oppose the capitulations and betrayals of the General Staffs of the renegade currents of Trotskyism, and who seek a revolutionary way out, are the emerging forces that will create the revolutionary party.
But this party will only be able to make and complete the Bolivian revolution if it joins in the struggle to regroup the forces of a healthy internationalist and principled Trotskyism, if it learns the lessons forged by the acute events of revolution and counterrevolution world-wide, if it adopts the Theses of Pulacayo as a revolutionary internationalist program that sees Bolivia as a link in the Latin American and world-wide revolution, and if it fights against the reformist leaders in Bolivia - the union bureaucracy of the COB, Quispe,, Morales –as an indissoluble part of the wider fight against that new counter-revolutionary international the World Social Forum, and against the renegade Trotskyists that support the WSF.
Only in this way,
mounting an internationalist struggle on the ruins of the revisionist and
liquidationist currents that usurp the flags of Trotskyism in Bolivia, can the
revolutionary internationalist Trotskyist party that the Bolivian working class
needs and deserves be built as a section of the world-wide party of the
socialist revolution. It is the
task of the revolutionary internationalists, on the threshold of the Fourth
Bolivian Revolution, to urgently collaborate to regroup our forces by
campaigning for an International Conference of principled Trotskyists and
internationalist revolutionary workers organizations.
November 7 was the 86th anniversary of the
October Revolution. We reprint here Lenin’s letter to Comrades on the eve of the
insurrection, attacking the arguments of all those currents who opposed the
insurrection, and explaining there was no middle course between revolution and
counter-revolution. It is one of the classics of the revolutionary
Marxist/Bolshevik tradition which retains all its immediacy and importance
today.
Comrades,
We are living in a time that is so critical, events are moving at such incredible speed that a publicist, placed by the will of fate somewhat aside from the mainstream of history, constantly runs the risk either of being late or proving uninformed, especially if some time elapses before his writings appear in print. Although I fully realise this, I must nevertheless address this letter to the Bolsheviks, even at the risk of its not being published at all, for the vacillations against which I deem it my duty to warn in the most decisive manner are of an unprecedented nature and may have a disastrous effect on the Party, the movement of the international proletariat, and the revolution. As for the danger of being too late, I will prevent it by indicating the nature and date of the information I possess.
It was not until Monday morning, October 16, that I saw a comrade who had on the previous day participated in a very important Bolshevik gathering in Petrograd, and who informed me in detail of the discussion. [1] The subject of discussion was that same question of the uprising discussed by the Sunday papers of all political trends. The gathering represented all that is most influential in all branches of Bolshevik work in the capital. Only a most insignificant minority of the gathering, namely, all in all two comrades, took a negative stand. The arguments which those comrades advanced are so weak, they are a manifestation of such an astounding confusion, timidity, and collapse of all the fundamental ideas of Bolshevism and proletarian revolutionary internationalism that it is not easy to discover an explanation for such shameful vacillations. The fact, however, remains, and since the revolutionary party has no right to tolerate vacillations on such a serious question, and since this pair of comrades, who have scattered their principles to the winds, might cause some confusion, it is necessary to analyse their arguments, to expose their vacillations, and to show how shameful they are. The following lines are an attempt to do this.
"We
have no majority among the people, and without this condition the uprising is
hopeless. . .”
People who
can say this are either distorters of the truth or pedants who want an advance
guarantee that throughout the whole country the Bolshevik Party has received
exactly one-half of the votes plus one, this they want at all events, without
taking the least account of the real circumstances of the revolution. History
has never given such a guarantee, and is quite unable to give it in any
revolution. To make such a demand is jeering at the audience, and is nothing but
a cover to hide one's own flight from reality.
For
reality shows us clearly that it was after the July days that the majority of
the people began quickly to go over to the side of the Bolsheviks. This was
demonstrated first by the August 20 elections in Petrograd, even before the
Kornilov revolt, when the Bolshevik vote rose from 20 to 33 per cent in the city
not including the suburbs, and then by the district council elections in Moscow
in September, when the Bolshevik vote rose from 11 to 49.3 per cent (one Moscow
comrade, whom I saw recently, told me that the correct figure is 51 per cent).
This was proved by the new elections to the Soviets. It was proved by the fact
that a majority of the peasant Soviets, their "Avksentyev" central Soviet
notwithstanding, has expressed itself against the coalition. To be against the coalition means in practice to follow the
Bolsheviks. Furthermore, reports from the front prove more frequently and
more definitely that the soldiers are passing en masse over to the side or the
Bolsheviks with ever greater determination, in spite of the malicious slanders
and attacks by the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik leaders, officers,
deputies, etc., etc.
Last, but
not least, the most outstanding fact of present day Russian life is the revolt
of the peasantry. This shows objectively, not by words but by deeds, that the
people are going over to the side of the Bolsheviks. But the fact remains,
notwithstanding the lies of the bourgeois press and its miserable yes-men of the
"vacillating" Novaya Zhizn crowd, who shout about riots and anarchy. The peasant
movement in Tambov Gubernia [2] was an uprising both in the physical and
political sense, an uprising that has yielded such splendid political results
as, in the first place, agreement to transfer the land to the peasants. It is
not for nothing that the Socialist-Revolutionary rabble, including Dyelo Naroda, who are frightened by the
uprising, now scream about the need to transfer the land to the peasants. Here
is a practical demonstration of the correctness of Bolshevism and of its
success. It proved to be impossible to "teach" the Bonapartists and their
lackeys in the Pre-parliament otherwise than by an
uprising.
This is a
fact and facts are stubborn things. And such a factual "argument" in favour of
an uprising is stronger than thousands of "pessimistic" evasions on the part of
confused and frightened politicians.
If the
peasant uprising were not an event of nation-wide political import, the
Socialist-Revolutionary lackeys from the Pre-parliament would not be shouting
about the need to hand over the land to the peasants.
Another
splendid political and revolutionary consequence of the peasant uprising, as
already noted in Rabochy Put, is the delivery of grain to the railway stations
in Tambov Gubernia. Here is another "argument" for you, confused gentlemen,
an argument in favour of the uprising as the only means
to save the country from the famine that is knocking at our door and from a
crisis of unheard-of dimensions. While the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik
betrayers of the people are grumbling, threatening, writing resolutions,
promising to feed the hungry by convening the Constituent Assembly, the people
are beginning to solve the bread problem Bolshevik-fashion, by rebelling against
the landowners, capitalists, and speculators.
Even the
bourgeois press, even Russkaya Volya, was compelled to admit the wonderful
results of such a solution (the only real solution) of the bread problem, by
publishing information to the effect that the railway stations in Tambov
Gubernia were swamped with grain. . . . And this after the peasants had
revolted!
To doubt
now that the majority of the people are following and will follow the Bolsheviks
is shameful vacillation and in practice is the abandoning of all the principles
of proletarian revolutionism, the complete renunciation of
Bolshevism.
"We are
not strong enough to seize power, and the bourgeoisie is not strong enough to
hinder the convening of the Constituent Assembly."
The first
part of this argument is a simple paraphrase of the preceding one. It does not
gain in strength or power of conviction, when the confusion of its authors and
their fear of the bourgeoisie are expressed in terms of pessimism in respect of
the workers and optimism in respect of the bourgeoisie. If the officer cadets
and the Cossacks say that they will fight against the Bolsheviks to the last
drop of blood, this deserves full credence; if, however, the workers and
soldiers at hundreds of meetings express full confidence in the Bolsheviks and
affirm their readiness to defend the transfer of power to the Soviets, then it
is "timely" to recall that voting is one thing and fighting
another!
If you
argue like that, of course, you "refute" the possibility of an uprising. But, we
may ask, in what way does this peculiarly orientated "pessimism" with its
peculiar urge differ from a political shift to the side of the
bourgeoisie?
Look at
the facts. Remember the Bolshevik declarations, repeated thousands of times and
now "forgotten" by our pessimists. We have said thousands of times that the
Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies are a force, that they are the
vanguard of the revolution, that they can take power. Thousands of times have we
upbraided the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries for phrase-mongering
about the "plenipotentiary organs of democracy" accompanied by fear to transfer
power to the Soviets.
And what
has the Kornilov revolt proved? It has proved that the Soviets are a real
force.
And, now,
after this has been proved by experience, by facts, we are expected to repudiate
Bolshevism, deny ourselves, and say that we are not strong enough (although the
Soviets of Petrograd and Moscow and a majority of the provincial Soviets are on
the side of the Bolsheviks)! Are these not shameful vacillations? As a matter of
fact, our "pessimists" are abandoning the slogan of "All Power to the Soviets",
though they are afraid to admit it.
How can it
be proved that the bourgeoisie are not strong enough to hinder the calling of
the Constituent Assembly?
If the
Soviets have not the strength to overthrow the bourgeoisie, this means the
latter are strong enough to prevent the convocation of the Constituent Assembly,
for there is nobody else to stop them. To trust the promises
of Kerensky and Co., to trust the resolutions of the servile
Pre-parliament? Is this worthy of a member of a proletarian party and a
revolutionary?
Not only
has the bourgeoisie strength enough to hinder the convocation of the Constituent
Assembly if the present government is not overthrown, but it can also achieve
this result indirectly by surrendering Petrograd to the Germans, laying open the
front, increasing lockouts, and sabotaging deliveries of foodstuffs. It has been
proved by facts that the bourgeoisie have already been partly doing this, which
means that they are capable of doing it to the full extent, if the workers and
soldiers do not overthrow them.
"The
Soviets must be a revolver pointed at the head of the government with the demand
to convene the Constituent Assembly and stop all Kornilovite
plots."
This is
how far one of the two sad pessimists has gone. He had to go that far, for to
reject the uprising is the same as rejecting the slogan "All Power to the
Soviets".
Of course,
a slogan is "not sacred"; we all agree to that. But then why has no one raised
the question of changing this slogan (in the same way as I raised the question
after the July days, CW Vol. 25,"On Slogans", pp. 185-193.) Why be afraid to say
it openly, when the Party, since September, has been discussing the question of
the uprising, which is now the only way to realise the slogan "All Power to the
Soviets".
There is
no way for our sad pessimists to turn. A renunciation of the uprising is a
renunciation of the transfer of power to the Soviets and implies a "transfer" of
all hopes and expectations to the kind bourgeoisie, which has "promised" to
convoke the Constituent Assembly.
Is it so
difficult to understand that once power is in the hands of the Soviets, the
Constituent Assembly and its success are guaranteed? The Bolsheviks have said so
thousands of times and no one has ever attempted to refute it. Everybody has
recognised this "combined type", but to smuggle in a renunciation of the
transfer of power to the Soviets under cover of the words "combined type", to
smuggle it in secretly while fearing to renounce our slogan openly is a matter
for wonder. Is there any parliamentary term to describe
it?
Someone
has very pointedly retorted to our pessimist: "Is it a revolver with no
cartridges?" If so, it means going over directly to the Lieberdans, who have
declared the Soviets a "revolver" thousands of times and have deceived the
people thousands of times. For while they were in control the Soviets proved to
be worthless.
If, however, it is to be a revolver "with cartridges", this cannot
mean anything but technical preparation for an uprising; the cartridges have to
be procured, the revolver has to be loaded and cartridges alone will not be
enough.
Either go
over to the side of the Lieberdans and openly renounce the slogan "All Power to
the Soviets", or start the uprising. There is no middle
course.
"The
bourgeoisie cannot surrender Petrograd to the Germans, although Rodzyanko wants
to, for the fighting is done not by the bourgeoisie, but by our heroic
sailors."
This
argument again reduces itself to the same "optimism" in respect of the
bourgeoisie which is fatally manifested at every step by those who are
pessimistic about the revolutionary forces and capabilities of the
proletariat.
The
fighting is done by the heroic sailors, but this did not prevent two admirals
from disappearing before the capture of Esel!
That is a
fact and facts are stubborn things. The facts prove that admirals are capable of
treachery no less than Kornilov. It is an undisputed fact that Field
Headquarters has not been reformed, and that the commanding staff is Kornilovite
in composition.
If the Kornilovites (with Kerensky at their head, for he is also a Kornilovite) want to surrender Petrograd, they can do it in two or even in three ways.
First, they can, through an act of treachery on the part of the Kornilovite officers, open the northern land front.
Second, they can "agree" on freedom of action for the entire German navy, which is stronger than we are; they can agree both with the German and the British imperialists. Moreover, the admirals who have disappeared may have delivered the plans to the Germans as well.
Third, they can, by means of lockouts, and by sabotaging the delivery of food, bring our troops to complete desperation and impotence.
Not a single one of these three ways can be denied. The facts have proved that the bourgeois-Cossack party of Russia has already knocked at all three doors and has tried to force open each of them.
What follows? It follows that we have no right to wait until the bourgeoisie strangle the revolution.
Experience has proved that Rodzyanko's wishes are no trifle. Rodzyanko is a man of affairs. Rodzyanko is backed by capital. This is beyond dispute. Capital is tremendous strength as long as the proletariat do not have power. For decades, Rodzyanko has faithfully and truly carried out the policies of capital.
What follows? It follows that to vacillate on the question of an uprising as the only means to save the revolution means to sink into that cowardly credulity in the bourgeoisie which is half-Lieberdan, Socialist-Revolutionary-Menshevik and half "peasant-like" unquestioning credulity, against which the Bolsheviks have been battling most of all, fold your idle arms on your empty chest, wait and swear "faith" in the Constituent Assembly until Rodzyanko and Co. have surrendered Petrograd and strangled the revolution, or start an uprising. There is no middle course.
Even the convocation of the Constituent Assembly does not, in itself, change anything, for no "constituting", no voting by any arch-sovereign assembly will have any effect on the famine, or on Wilhelm. Both the convocation and the success of the Constituent Assembly depend upon the transfer of power to the Soviets. This old Bolshevik truth is being proved by reality ever more strikingly and ever more cruelly.
"We are
becoming stronger every day. We can enter the Constituent Assembly as a strong
opposition; why should we stake everything?. .
."
This is
the argument of a philistine who has "read" that the Constituent Assembly is
being called, and who trustingly acquiesces in the most legal, most loyal, most
constitutional course.
It is a
pity, however, that waiting for the Constituent Assembly does not solve either
the question of famine or the question of surrendering Petrograd . This "trifle" is forgotten by the naïve or the
confused or those who have allowed themselves to be
frightened.
The famine
will not wait. The peasant uprising did not wait. The war will not wait. The
admirals who have disappeared did not wait.
Will the
famine agree to wait, because we Bolsheviks proclaim faith in the convocation of
the Constituent Assembly? Will the admirals who have disappeared agree to wait?
Will the Maklakovs and Rodzyankos agree to stop the lockouts and the sabotaging
of grain deliveries, or to denounce the secret treaties with the British and the
German imperialists?
This is
what the arguments of the heroes of "constitutional illusions" and parliamentary
cretinism amount to. The living reality disappears, and what remains is only a
paper dealing with the convocation of the Constituent Assembly; there is nothing
left-but to hold elections.
And blind
people are still wondering why hungry people and soldiers betrayed by generals
and admirals are indifferent to the elections! Oh,
wiseacres!
"There
is really nothing in the international situation that makes it obligatory for us
to act immediately, we would be more likely to damage
the cause of a socialist revolution in the West, if we were to allow ourselves
to be shot. . . ."
This
argument is truly magnificent: Scheidemann "himself", Renaudel "himself" would
not be able to "manipulate" more cleverly the workers' sympathies for the
international socialist revolution!
Just think
of it: under devilishly difficult conditions, having but one Liebknecht (and he
in prison) with no newspapers, with no freedom of assembly, with no Soviets,
with all classes of the population, including every well-to-do peasant,
incredibly hostile to the idea of internationalism, with the imperialist big,
middle, and petty bourgeoisie splendidly organised the Germans, i.e., the German
revolutionary internationalists, the German workers dressed in sailors' jackets,
started a mutiny in the navy with one chance in a hundred of
winning.
But we,
with dozens of papers at our disposal, freedom of assembly, a majority in the
Soviets, we, the best situated proletarian internationalists in the world,
should refuse to support the German revolutionaries by our uprising. We ought to
reason like the Scheidemanns and Renaudels, that it is
most prudent not to revolt, for if we are shot, then the world will lose such
excellent, reasonable, ideal internationalists!
Let us
prove how reasonable we are. Let us pass a resolution of sympathy with the
German insurrectionists, and let us renounce the insurrection in Russia. This
would be genuine, reasonable internationalism. Imagine how fast world
internationalism would blossom forth, if the same wise policy were to triumph
everywhere!
The war
has fatigued and tormented the workers of all countries to the utmost. Outbursts
are becoming frequent in Italy, Germany and Austria. We alone have Soviets of
Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. Let us then keep on waiting. Let us betray the
German internationalists as we are betraying the Russian peasants, who, not by
words but by deeds, by their uprising against the landowners, appeal to us to
rise against Kerensky's government. . . .
Let the
clouds of the imperialist conspiracy of the capitalists of all countries who are
ready to strangle the Russian revolution gather, we shall wait patiently until
we are strangled by the ruble! Instead of attacking the conspirators and
breaking their ranks by a victory of the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers'
Deputies, let us wait for the Constituent Assembly, where all international
plots will be vanquished by voting, provided Kerensky and Rodzyanko
conscientiously convene the Constituent Assembly. Have we any right to doubt the
honesty of Kerensky and Rodzyanko?
"But
'everyone' is against us! We are isolated; the Central Executive Committee, the
Menshevik internationalists, the Novaya Zhizn people, and the Left
Socialist-Revolutionaries have been issuing and will continue to issue appeals
against us!"
A crushing argument. Up to now we have been mercilessly
scourging the vacillators for their vacillations. By so doing, we have won the
sympathies of the people. By so doing, we have won over the Soviets, without
which the uprising could not be safe, quick, and sure. Now let us use the
Soviets which we have won over in order to move into the camp of the
vacillators. What a splendid career for Bolshevism!
The whole
essence of the policy of the Lieberdans and Chernovs, and also of the Left
Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, consists in vacillations. The Left
Socialist-Revolutionaries and Menshevik internationalists have tremendous
political importance as an indication of the fact that the masses are moving to
the left. Two such facts as the passing of some 40 per cent of both Mensheviks
and Socialist-Revolutionaries into the camp of the Left, on the one hand, and
the peasant uprising, on the other, are clearly and obviously
interconnected.
But it is
the very character of this connection that reveals the abysmal spinelessness of
those who have now under taken to whimper over the fact that the Central
Executive Committee, which has rotted away, or the vacillating Left
Socialist-Revolutionaries and Co., have come out against us. For these
vacillations of the petty-bourgeois leader –the Martovs, Kamkovs, Sukhanovs and
Co –have to be compared to the uprising of the peasants. Here is a realistic
political comparison. With whom shall we go? Should it be with the vacillating
handfuls of Petrograd leaders, who have expressed indirectly the leftward swing
of the masses, but who, at every political turn, have sbamefully whimpered,
vacillated, run to ask forgiveness of the Lieberdans, Avksentyevs and Co., or
with those masses that have moved to the left?
Thus, and
only thus, can the question be presented. Because the
peasant uprising has been betrayed by the Martovs, Kamkovs, and Sukhanovs, we,
the workers' party of revolutionary internationalists, are asked to betray it,
too. This is what the policy of blaming the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and
Menshevik internationalists reduces itself to.
But we
have said that to help the vacillating, we must stop vacillating ourselves. Have
those "nice" Left petty-bourgeois democrats not "vacillated" in favour of the
coalition? In the long run we succeeded in making them follow us because we
ourselves did not vacillate. Events have shown we are
right.
These
gentlemen by their vacillations have always held back the revolution; We alone have saved it. Shall we now give up, when the famine
is knocking at the gates of Petrograd and Rodzyanko and Co. are preparing to surrender the city?!
"But we
have not even firm connections with the railwaymen and the postal employees.
Their official representatives are the Plansons. And can we win without the post
office and without railways?"
Yes, yes,
the Plansons here, the Lieberdans there. What confidence have the masses shown
them? Have we not always shown that those leaders betrayed the masses? Did the
masses not turn away from those leaders towards us, both at the elections in
Moscow and at the elections to the Soviets? Or perhaps the mass of railway and
postal employees are not starving! Or do not strike against Kerensky and Co.?
"Did we
have connections with these unions before February 28?" one comrade asked a
pessimist. The latter replied by pointing out that the two revolutions could not
be compared. But this reply only strengthens the position of the one who asked
the question. For it is the Bolsheviks who have spoken
thousands of times about prolonged preparation for the proletarian revolution
against the bourgeoisie (and they have not spoken about it in order to forget
their words when the decisive moment is at hand). The political and
economic life of the unions of postal and telegraph employees and railwaymen is
characterised by the very separation of the proletarian elements of the masses
from the petty-bourgeois and bourgeois upper layer. It is not absolutely
necessary to secure "connections" with one or the other union before hand; what
matters is that only a victory of a proletarian and peasant uprising can satisfy
the masses both of the army of railwaymen and of postal and telegraph
employees.
"There
is not yet any danger at the front either. Even if the soldiers conclude an
armistice themselves, it is still not a calamity."
But the soldiers will not conclude an armistice. For this state power is necessary and that cannot be obtained without an uprising. The soldiers will simply desert. Reports from the front tell that. We must not wait because of the risk of aiding collusion between Rodzyanko and Wilhelm and the risk of complete economic ruin, with the soldiers deserting in masses, once they (being already close to desperation) sink into absolute despair and leave everything to the mercy of fate.
"But if
we take power, and obtain neither an armistice nor a democratic peace, the
soldiers may not be willing to fight a revolutionary war. What then?"
An argument which brings to mind the saying: one fool can ask ten times more questions than ten wise men can answer.
We have never denied the difficulties of those in power during an imperialist war. Nevertheless, we have always preached the dictatorship of the proletariat and the poor peasantry. Shall we renounce this, when the moment to act has arrived?
We have always said that the dictatorship of the proletariat in one country creates gigantic changes in the international situation, in the economic life of the country, in the condition of the army and in its mood, shall we now "forget" all this, and allow ourselves to be frightened by the "difficulties" of the revolution?
"As
everybody reports, the masses are not in a mood that would drive them into the
streets. Among the signs justifying pessimism may be mentioned the greatly
increasing circulate
When people allow themselves to be frightened by the bourgeoisie, all objects and phenomena naturally appear yellow to them. First, they substitute an impressionist, intellectualist criterion for the Marxist criterion of the movement; they substitute subjective impressions of moods for a political analysis of the development of the class struggle and of the course of events in the entire country against the entire international background. They "conveniently" forget, of course, that a firm party line, its unyielding resolve, is also a mood-creating factor, particularly at the sharpest revolutionary moments. It is sometimes very "convenient" for people to forget that the responsible leaders, by their vacillations and by their readiness to burn their yesterday's idols, cause the most unbecoming vacillations in the mood of certain strata of the masses.
Secondly, and this is at present the main thing, in speaking about the mood of the masses, the spineless people forget to add: that "everybody" reports it as a tense and expectant mood; that "everybody" agrees that, called upon by the Soviets for the defence of the Soviets, the workers will rise to a man; that "everybody" agrees that the workers are greatly dissatisfied with the indecision of the centres concerning the "last decisive struggle", the inevitability of which they clearly recognise; that "everybody" unanimously characterises the mood of the broadest masses as close to desperation and points to the anarchy developing therefrom; that "everybody" also recognises that there is among the class-conscious workers a definite unwillingness to go out into the streets only for demonstrations, only for partial struggles, since a general and not a partial struggle is in the air, while the hopelessness of individual strikes, demonstrations and acts to influence the authorities has been seen and is fully realised. And so forth.
If we approach this characterisation of the mass mood from the point of view of the entire development of the class and political struggle and of the entire course of events during the six months of our revolution, it will become clear to us how people frightened by the bourgeoisie are distorting the question. Things are not as they were before April 20-21, June 9, July 3, for then it was a matter of spontaneous excitement which we, as a party, either failed to comprehend (April 20) or held back and shaped into a peaceful demonstration (June 9 and July 3), for we knew very well at that time that the Soviets were not yet ours, that the peasants still trusted the Lieberdan-Chernov and not the Bolshevik course (uprising), that consequently we could not have the majority of the people behind us, and that consequently the uprising would be premature.
At that time the majority of the class-conscious workers did not raise the question of the last decisive struggle at all; not one of all our Party units would have raised it at that time. As for the unenlightened and very broad masses, there was neither a concerted effort nor the resolve born out of despair; there was only a spontaneous excitement with the naïve hope of "influencing" Kerensky and the bourgeoisie by "action", by a demonstration pure and simple.
What is needed for an uprising is not this, but, on the one hand, a conscious, firm and unswerving resolve on the part of the class-conscious elements to fight to the end; and on the other, a mood of despair among the broad masses who feel that nothing can now be saved by half-measures; that you cannot "influence" anybody; that the hungry will "smash everything, destroy everything, even anarchically", if the Bolsheviks are not able to lead them in a decisive battle.
The development of the revolution has in practice brought both the workers and the peasantry to precisely this combination of a tense mood resulting from experience among the class-conscious and a mood of hatred towards those using the lockout weapon and the capitalists that is close to despair among the broadest masses.
We can also understand the "success" on this very soil of the scoundrels of the reactionary press who imitate Bolshevism. The malicious glee of the reactionaries at the approach of a decisive battle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat has been observed in all revolutions without exception; it has always been so, and it is absolutely unavoidable. And if you allow yourselves to be frightened by this circumstance, then you have to renounce not only the uprising but the proletarian revolution in general. For in a capitalist society this revolution cannot mature without being accompanied by malicious glee on the part of the reaction arises and by hopes that they would be able to feather their nest in this way.
The class-conscious workers know perfectly well that the Black Hundreds work hand in hand with the bourgeoisie, and that a decisive victory of the workers (in which the petty bourgeoisie do not believe, which the capitalists are afraid of, which the Black Hundreds sometimes wish for out of sheer malice, convinced as they are that the Bolsheviks cannot retain power)?that this victory will completely crush the Black Hundreds, that the Bolsheviks will be able to retain power firmly and to the greatest advantage of all humanity tortured and tormented by the war.
Indeed, is there anybody in his senses who can doubt that the Rodzyankos and Suvorins are acting in concert, that the roles have been distributed among them?
Has it not been proved by facts that Kerensky acts on Rodzyanko's orders, while the State Printing Press of the Russian Republic (don't laugh!) prints the Black-Hundred speeches of reactionaries in the "Duma" at the expense of the state. Has not this fact been exposed even by the lackeys from Dyelo Naroda, who serve "their own mannikin"? Has not the experience of all elections proved that the Cadet lists were fully supported by Novoye Vremya, which is a venal paper controlled by the "interests" of the tsarist landowners?
Did we not read yesterday that commercial and industrial capitalists (non-partisan capitalists, of course; oh, non-partisan capitalists, to be sure, for the Vikhlayevs and Rakitnikovs, the Gvozdyovs and Nikitins are not in coalition with the Cadets, God forbid!, but with non-partisan commercial and industrial circles!) have donated the goodly sum of 300,000 rubles to the Cadets?
The whole Black-Hundred press, if we look at things from a class and not a sentimental point of view, is a branch of the firm "Ryabushinsky, Milyukov, and Co.". Capitalists buy, on the one hand, the Milyukovs, Zaslavskys, Potresovs, and so on; on the other, the Black Hundreds.
The victory of the proletariat is the only means of putting an end to this most hideous poisoning of the people by the cheap Black-Hundred venom.
Is it any wonder that the crowd, tired out and made wretched by hunger and the prolongation of the war, clutches at the Black-Hundred poison? Can one imagine a capitalist society on the eve of collapse in which the oppressed masses are not desperate? Is there any doubt that the desperation of the masses, a large part of whom are still ignorant, will express itself in the increased consumption of all sorts of poison?
Those who, in arguing about the mood of the masses, blame the masses for their own personal spinelessness, are in a hopeless position. The masses are divided into those who are consciously biding their time and those who unconsciously are ready to sink into despair; but the masses of the oppressed and the hungry are not spineless.
"On the
other hand, the Marxist party cannot reduce the question of an uprising to that
of a military conspiracy. . . ."
Marxism is an extremely profound and many-sided doctrine. It is, therefore, no wonder that scraps of quotations from Marx - especially when the quotations are made inappropriately - can always be found among the "arguments" of those who break with Marxism. Military conspiracy is Blanquism, if it is organised not by a party of a definite class, if its organisers have not analysed the political moment in general and the international situation in particular, if the party has not on its side the sympathy of the majority of the people, as proved by objective acts, if the development of revolutionary events has not brought about a practical refutation of the conciliatory illusions of the petty bourgeoisie, if the majority of the Soviet-type organs of revolutionary struggle that have been recognised as authoritative or have shown themselves to be such in practice have not been won over, if there has not matured a sentiment in the army (if in war-time) against the government that protracts the unjust war against the will of the whole people, if the slogans of the uprising (like "All power to the Soviets" Land to the peasants", or "Immediate offer of a democratic peace to all the belligerent nations, with an immediate abrogation of all secret treaties and secret diplomacy", etc.) have not become widely known and popular, if the advanced workers are not sure of the desperate situation of the masses and of the support of the countryside, a support proved by a serious peasant movement or by an uprising against the landowners and the government that defends the landowners, if the country's economic situation inspires earnest hopes for a favourable solution of the crisis by peaceable and parliamentary means.
This is probably enough.
In my pamphlet entitled: Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power? (I hope it will appear in a day or two), there is a quotation from Marx which really bears upon the question of insurrection and which enumerates the features of insurrection as an "art".
I am ready to wager that if we were to propose to all those chatterers in Russia who are now shouting against a military conspiracy, to open their mouths and explain the difference between the "art" of an insurrection and a military conspiracy that deserves condemnation, they would either repeat what was quoted above or would cover themselves, with shame and would call forth the general ridicule of the workers. Why not try, my dear would-be Marxists! Sing us a song against "military conspiracy"!
[1] A reference to the enlarged Central Committee meeting on October 16 (29), 1917. Lenin remained in hiding in Petrograd and changed the date of the meeting to October 15 (28) in order to conceal his presence at the meeting, for reasons of secrecy he referred to a comrade who had allegedly informed him of the meeting.
[2] The peasant movement in Tambov Gubernia in September 1917 assumed great proportions: the peasants seized tracts of landed estates, destroyed and burned landowners' mansions and confiscated grain stocks. In September, 82 landowners' estates were destroyed in 68 gubernias and regions, including 32 in Tambov Gubernia . Altogether there is a record of 166 peasant manifestations in the gubernia, especially in Kozlov Uyezd. The frightened landowners took their grain to the railway stations in an effort to sell it, so that the railway junctures were literally swamped with grain. The commanding officer of the Moscow Military District sent military units to Tambov Gubernia to crush the peasant uprising, and imposed martial law, but the peasants' revolutionary struggle for land continued to grow in scope.
Written: October 17 (30), 1917
First Published: Published in Rabochy Put Nos. 40, 41
and 42, November 1, 2 and 3 (October 19, 20 and 21), 1917
Source: Lenin’s Collected Works, Progress Publishers,
Moscow, Volume 26, 1972, pp. 195-215. Online Version: Lenin Internet Archive,
November, 2000
Afterword – on Liberal vs Bolshevik
history
What do Liberal Matt McCarten and
Bolshevik Owen Gager have in common? Both look back to 1913 and say they would
have been on the workers’ side of the barricades. But there the similarity ends.
McCarten celebrates the Cossacks and Comrades Exhibition as recording the
end of class struggle. He sees this as one episode in the long history of
labourism in which the NZ state was able to reconcile the interests of
antagonistic classes. That‘s why McCarten says on his recent arrest on a picket
line “even the police said it was about time someone stepped up to fight for the
low-paid”.
There you have it workers and the
police can be on the same side because workers can control the state. For liberal-labourite McCarten, 1913 was
a temporary aberration in the evolution of the social-democratic state.
Anarchist and IWW agitators from ‘overseas’ captured some of the unions, and the
right-wing farmers’ government of Massey captured the state and suppressed the
general strike. No wonder the McCartenites say that neo-liberals ‘hi-jacked’ the
state in the 1980’s. But never mind, the revolution was defeated in 1913 to keep
NZ safe from Bolshevism and workers can recapture the state from the New Right
and their Blairite allies – so vote Liberal, sorry, Labour, sorry, New Labour,
sorry, Alliance, in 2005.
Bolshevik Owen Gager, on the other
hand was one of the first, and the most gifted, of Trotskyists to emerge during
the anti-Vietnam movement in the 1960’s. Gager pioneered the Marxist analysis of
NZ history and in 1962 wrote a thesis on the NZ Labour Movement and War
1914-1918. Gager’s Marxist approach recognized that even in NZ the working
class was a revolutionary class. In the long run it could not be contained by
the capitalist state. Liberal historians, who followed Siegfried’s (Democracy
in NZ, 1902) line that revolution had no place in
NZ because the state could permanently overcome class differences, were proved
wrong. The rise of the Red Feds, Waihi 1912, the general strike of 1913 and the
refusal of militant labour to be co-opted by the Labour Party formed in 1916,
nor by the reactionary climate of imperialist war, meant that a revolutionary
current would survive.
The fact that the 1913 General
Strike forced the bosses to mobilize not only the police, but the army and the
‘Cossacks’ showed how close the situation was to becoming revolutionary. Yet
there was a missing link. What Gager could see was that the failure of the
revolution was not down to the absence of a working class, nor of a homegrown
tradition of militancy, but to the absence of a revolutionary Marxist
leadership. Gager pointedly asks, "where were the
Marxists who could put forward a program suited to NZ society?" There were no
Bolsheviks who could analyse the class position and politics of farmers. So
there were no demands for land and peace that could unite workers with working
farmers against the imperialists and their local semi-colonial
agents.
Unlike McCarten’s liberal ‘history
of the working class’ that consigns it to the museum of failed revolutions,
Gager’s Bolshevik history keeps alive not only workers history, but the history
of revolutionary Marxism and serves as an essential guide for revolutionaries
today.
End