Between the end of 1996 and December 1998 the LCMRCI engaged in regroupment discussions with Workers' Voice (US) the Workers' International League (WIL) and a breakaway from the WIL, Workers' Fight. The following documents relate to these discussions.

Reply to Workers' Voice.  (July 1997)
The Dissolution of the International Workers League.  (December 1998)
Polemic with Workers Fight: Against Zionism. (December 1998)

(2) Polemics against the LRCI.

In the 4 years since the LCMRCI split with the LRCI we have published many critiques of the further rightward movement of the League. Here we reprint the most recent.

New Twists, New LRCI. (December 1997)
Workers' Power's Adventure in the Socialist Labour Party. ( February 1998)
Trotskyism vs Centrism in Kosovo. (April 1998)
10 years of the LRCI. (October 1999)
 

(3) Joint statements with other tendencies.

 We reprint recent joint statements made with the International Bolshevik League (Brazil) and the Revolutionary Workers Party (Argentina).

30 Years after the Murder of Che Guevara  (December 1997)
For the Military Victory of Yugoslavia  (March 24 1999)
Colombia: A New Vietnam (August 5 1999)
For the Withdrawal of Russia from Chechyna and Daguestan (October 16 1999)
Ecuador: A Revolutionary Situation with an uncertain future (January 23 2000)
 
 

Over a few months from the end of 1996 to mid 1997 the LCMRCI engaged in regroupment talks with Worker Voice (WOVO). These talks collapsed because of fundamental differences in method that became increasingly clear in disputes over Bosia, Congo and the British Labour Party in particular. The following document is the final reponse from the LCMRCI mainly in reply to a long letter from Dov, a leader of WOVO, who wrote a strong attack on us obviously designed to bring an end to the fusion talks.

In July we received two letters from WoVo. A letter signed by Log from Detroit on behalf of the group raised many polemic arguments but it concluded: "There is still a large amount of programmatic agreement between the LCMRCI and WoVo. Therefore, we should continue our joint activity and polemics within the context of theCommittee for a Trotskyist International. The CTI is the necessary forum to have these battles to rebuild Marxism as a living tool for the working class."

Few days letter c. Dave in New Zealand received a personal lettersent from WoVo's most important leader in which he wrote that the LCMRCI is in process of degeneration and that it is becoming "right centrist". Even more, we were accused of having the same method as the "right wing centrist" Workers Power and in Congo we take an "almost a criminal position". The creation of a new body, such as the CTI, is to create a pole of attraction to theTrotskyist left and bring about programmatic convergence. Theinternational current that you chose to prioritise to create the CTI is the LCMRCI. However, there is a strong contradiction in your position.

On one hand the official letter from Detroit said that you consider that: "The LCMRCI was a solidly left wing split from the LRCI", and today, despite some differences which exist, you insisted that:"There is still a large amount of programmatic agreement between the LCMRCI and WoVo. Therefore, we should continue our joint activity and polemics within the context of the CTI." On the other hand, the letter from the Bay area characterised us as a group which "has not broken *at all* from the LRCI's method" and as a non-serious amalgam moving towards reformism.

Why on earth would WoVo or some of its leaders like to create a joint committee with people that are not only centrists but are moving to the right and have "almost criminal" positions? Could you explain to us that contradiction? Does it reflect different points of view in your organisations, or it is simply an irresponsible way of dealing with a serious regroupment process?

In this letter we try to deal with WoVo's contradictory method and we will link them with its political oscillations. We will not enter the road of intrigue and personal letters and, instead, open the road for a clear and open political discussion.

Loyal methods

When you have a regroupment process you need to have some kind of loyalty between your partners. That is the best way of dealing with political differences and in building bridges. In London we were very hospitable to c. L. Every week there were constant e-mails and phone calls with your centre in Detroit. We were very grateful to one of your comrades in Detroit who helped us in the technical production of our journal and in our web site. Every time that you sent us a letter we replied more quickly than you did to ours. When you needed to produce a WoVo supplement in Spanish you asked for our help and we did the job in less than 24 hours. We introduced your comrades to several contacts all around South and Central America. The last Internationalist Bulletin contained 4 articles from WoVo and your last paper have one of our articles. Your Spanish supplement is based in our writings or translations. The only documents which you published in your web site apart from the ones from WoVo are from us.

When L was in London she never raised any important difference. On the contrary, she asked our opinion on the possibility that WoVo could join the LCMRCI. We were very seriously discussing that proposal and many of us supported that idea. We opened our internal debates to WoVo with the aim of showing our strengths and weakness to you and trying to create a broader framework of trust and consultation. In our previous letter we said to you that we opened our internal discussions to you as the best way of developing closer political relations. We asked you to do the same but you did not do so and we could not understand your internal debates and internal evolution. But instead of responding positively to our willingness for more open relations, c. Dov answered us with disloyalty and intrigue. He didn't send a letter to the LCMRCI explaining his views. He sent a personal letter to one of our comrades asking him to stand against JV whom he characterised as a "hardened centrist" and the "indisputable leader" of the LCmrci.

In c. Dov's letter assertions are not substantiated, allegations are unsupported by evidence and the whole thing is wrapped up in pretentious verbiage about the LCMRCI's inability to function according to Dov's pre-conceived idea of a functioning Marxist international. Underlined, of course with insults directed towards two of the LC's leading comrades. According to Dov, Jaime is crippled by bureaucratic powers that in turn holds sway over all comrades within the LC. Furthermore Dave is presented as a dupe and a person who mechanically applies the categories of Marx's Capital without taking any account of contemporary reality. Dov complains to Dave that "you do not fight Jaime's method. You prefer to remain silent and adapt to him. We are very disappointed that you hide behind Jaime's shadow...His positions and the method seem to dominate in the LCmrci on all the important questions. This is highly disturbing to us."

If c. Dov wants to criticise our leading comrades the honest way is to do it in an open comradely way, face to face. But he didn't make a fraternal criticism and instead transformed one of our comrades into a sort of evil person guilty of terrible crimes: he has not broken with the LRCI which has criminal positions against working class revolutionary politics, and whose "method consisted of unprincipled petty-bourgeois maneuvering", etc. Instead of criticising our current for its ideas, c. Dov misrepresented our positions and demonized one person. He didn't deal directly with the whole LCMRCI, or to Jaime, but behind our backs. C. Dov despises our entire current as the puppets of one rotten individual. For him it is "highly disturbing" that there is nobody that will stand against Jaime that WoVo can influence.

For c. Dov "the LCMRCI is not a serious international", comrade Dave and the CWG are "shadows" of an obscure person, and the Latin American groups are national-isolated minded people who are not concerned with what is happening in the world movement. For him "it seems that the Latin American comrades are cut off from the discussions within the Trotskyist movement and even from the CWG."

In short, for c. Dov the LCMRCI is a right-wing centrist grouping (i.e moving towards counter-revolutionary reformism) and a non-serious ort of cult based on "shadows" and nationalists "trotskyists" hich don't even discuss among the national sections. The logical consequence is to produce a rupture with them. It seems completely opportunistic to try to build any kind of committee with such degenerate people or reproducing their materials in your paper and web site.

What is the LCMRCI?

The LCMRCI is a very tiny current. We are the product of around four years fighting in the same international tendency for similar policies. Usually twice a year leading comrades from Bolivia, Peru and New Zealand met and held similar positions. We were the left opposition in the LRCI. We achieved a high degree of collaboration and trust between us and relative political homogenisation. That is what explains the fact that our current can still exist and develop itself.

No other so-call trotskyist international current started as geographically dispersed as us. Usually all the international tendencies are created around one mother section and/or a group of countries which have many linguistic, cultural, historical, socio-political or geographic links. An international based in neighbouring countries allows more frequent joint meetings and a better understanding of the politics of their respective countries.

The LCMRCI doesn't have a mother section. Our groups are dispersed in areas that are not only thousands of miles apart but which also don't have very much in common. We have comrades in the Western Pacific, in the Andes and in western Europe. In New Zealand we have a relatively stable democracy with big reformist workers parties. In the Andes we have semi-democracies with strong military presence (in Peru the army and paramilitary can do what they want, and in Bolivia Banzer, the former dictator, has returned to power), instead of mass reformist organisations there are open neo-liberal formations, the situation is not stable and the workers movement has a tradition of armed confrontations and many general strikes. The political scene and opponents on the right and left are quite different. The comrades in the both extremes of the Pacific speak different languages and mostly read different books. It is very difficult to find news about the Andes on the British or New Zealand media. It is very difficult to organise international meetings or to establish a leadership that can meet regularly. Most of our comrades live in poor countries with an average wage of less than US$300 per month.

Despite all these terrible limitations, we managed to survive the Harvey witch-hunts and his attempts to demoralise, divide or corrupt us. Most importantly we managed to start to develop as an international current. We produced a lot of documents in which we developed a common method against the LRCI's right wing leadership. We have produced articles, pamphlets or resolutions dealing with most of the important aspects of the world's class struggle. The documents that we printed on Rwanda, Zaire, Bosnia, Somalia, Albania and other international hot spots are particularly well researched.

The LCMRCI has less than two years of existence. In that short time we produced joint resolutions on Central Africa, Albania, Peru, Europe, Iraq, Palestine, etc. We also published a regular newsletter with more than one thousand readers in the Internet. Our comrades in New Zealand publish a 20 page bi-monthly which carries analysis of the situation in Timor, New Guinea, Bougainville, Korea, Hong Kong and other important questions in the Pacific. Our comrades in Bolivia produced a paper every 1 or 2 months which also carries international analysis (especially of their continent). In Peru our group is active and is increasing its participation in our internal debates and in making progress inside a new union of socialist circles. In Britain our comrades constantly produced articles and adopted positions on the elections, the SLP, the national question, etc.

Instead of being cut off from the international debate our Latin American comrades had a lot of interest and participation in it. Before we broke with the LRCI the Latin Americans discussed a book and long documents in which there was an analysis of the world situation of all the international hot points, in which we compared our method with that of Harvey. We participated in the resolutions and in the joint declarations with the WIL/LTT. All the letters that WoVo sends to us are distributed to all our groups and the official letters that we send to you usually receive contributions from comrades in the three continents in which we have members.

The comrades from WoVo have to recognise that, despite all their virtues, they are a current with comrades in the USA only with a very limited following of the international discussions which are held in Spanish, French, Portuguese or German. The international discussions with which WoVo is famililar are mainly limited to one section of the international trotskyist milieu. WoVo, like us, can follow the press and discuss with groups like the WIL/LTT, ITC, ITO, LRP, LRCI and other currents which are active in the Anglo-speaking wealthy democracies. The LCMRCI, in addition, is able to follow the press of other international currents, which have more roots in the class and in the workers struggles, but who operate in countries which were never part of the British empire. We have a limited discussion with former comrades and supporters of the LRCI in the Germanic countries and we have small coverage of the discussions in the French speaking countries.

However, we have a lot of discussion and exchanges in Spanish and Portuguese. Comrades from Poder Obrero Bolivia travelled abroad to discuss with the Brazilian LBI and MEP, the PBCI, the LSR/LM, the PTS and the CITO. A delegation of the PTS travelled more than once to Bolivia and discussed with our comrades. Our Bolivian comrades are very well known in their national left for the tremendous importance that they give to following world events and international debates. Comrades from the LBI travelled to visit us and they regularly print our materials in their press. Altamira, the leader of one of the two largest "trotskyists" currents in South America, visited us in Britain and then immediately travelled to Bolivia where he was the leading figure of the congress of the OT/POR. In La Paz our comrades made a lively intervention at that event. They produced a document criticising the international record and positions of Altamirism that had some repercussions outside that country.

In Peru the LCMRCI comrades are engaged in a series of discussions with other circles and, despite the terrible repression, they are quite active in our international discussions. With them we have lively debates on Bosnia, Congo, our orientation towards reformism and direct exchanges are made between them and the comrades in New Zealand and Europe. In addition, there were some PO polemic letters which appeared in papers from Socialist Review (the journal of the biggest Anglo-speaking left party who usually reproduce writings from organisations which have some importance or respect) to Weekly Worker. In February 'Que Hacer' (one of the most important Peruvian political journals) acknowledged our influence and participation in the international left discussions when it reported that in the international debates between the MRTA and SL supporters there was another active grouping call Poder Obrero.

We don't think we are an international, an even less a serious one. We are only a handful of comrades dispersed in three different regions who are trying to survive the reactionary period and the degeneration of our original international tendency. We don't have the material requisites for creating a demo-centralist tendency and we are trying to develop with mutual consultation and consensus. We don't have a significant implantation in the class. However, we are not groups of intellectuals who only see the class struggle sitting in their libraries. Our comrades in the Andes have had a lot of experience in strikes and street battles, even leading them. In the LRCI they were the only people who had addressed thousands of industrial workers in struggle and achieved leading positions.

Poder Obrero Bolivia was born in the general strikes that shook Bolivia in the revolutionary crisis of 1985 and all it members were extremely active in the massive march to La Paz that could have overthrown the neo-liberal regime in 1986. The only place in which the LRCI managed to lead a national union (even a small one) and to have permanent delegates in the national trade union congress was Bolivia. The biggest public meeting ever organised by the LRCI in Britain was made by one of our comrades around the last state of emergency in Bolivia.

Our group in New Zealand, instead of being a shadow entity without personality, is a very lively group. Since the split we managed to print 17 copies of Class Struggle and the nucleus of the group published more than one hundred issues of earlier papers beginning in 1981. We have a militant tradition and the comrade disqualified as a "shadow" is one of the few leaders of the far left who has published a Marxist book which gained him notoriety in academic circles.

Instead of being cut off from the international debates, the LCMRCI has had a lot of participation and impact in them relative to its small size. A barometer of that impact can be seen in the level of response that we have had. Publications from the PO (Argentina) to the SWP (UK) reproduced writings from us. Some international currents produced special issues of their publications or even special pamphlets to defend most of our positions (like the RIL-ITC, the WIL-LTT and the LBI did) or to attack us. The LRCI dedicated an entire issue of its official journal to attack us. Lora published a special pamphlet. The Spartacists, who often fire on the currents which are having some impact, have written several long articles attacking us. On the Internet we even have an unofficial Spartacist web site, part of which is dedicated to a struggle against us.

We are not satisfied with what we are. We would like to have an international secretariat instead of relying on consensus between sections.

The Latin American comrades, which c. Dov despises for being national-centred and puppets, are comrades with a lot of experience in class struggle and in resisting repression. For comrades that live in the imperialist country that plunders Latin America, it is important to reject any temptation towards arrogance against comrades from the poor semi-colonies. Our comrades in the Andes have to work in many jobs and sometimes more than 12 hours per days including weekends. Most of them have to feed their families or children. In addition, there is significant repression. Despite these problems they managed to participate in the international life of the LCMRCI and in international discussions.

C. Jaime whom c. Dov is trying to transform into a sort of perverse soul doesn't live near our main sections. For at least 5 years while in the LRCI, the members of the LCMRCI met nearly twice a year and fought inside the same international tendency around similar lines. We are not an inconsistent amalgam that anybody could join. The reason why the LCMRCI shares the same positions on Congo and Labour is because we share a same method. C. Dov doesn't want to see all of that. Instead we are the target of terrible accusations. Nobody, apart from the LRCI and the Loraists, have used so much abusive language against us as c.Dov. The LRCI and Lora say openly that they are our enemies and seek our destruction. However, c. Dov tried to appear as our friend who was in a fusion process with us.

WoVo and us

Since before we founded the LCMRCI all of our leading members had a relatively good attitude towards WoVo. Our comrades started to struggle together around similar issues which led to the exclusion of the RTT (forerunner of WoVo) from the LRCI in 1991. Immediately after the August 1991 coup in Moscow 1991, Poder Obrero Peru made a critique of the LRCI's resolution on that question. POP disagreed with the line of proposing a united front with the capitalist parties for defending their freedoms and the bourgeois parliament. Later we received the long documents which comrade Dov wrote about that point. These papers were summarised and translated into Spanish. Two weeks before the LRCI's second world congress (December 91-January 92) the International Secretariat bureaucratically broke links with the RTT and forbade their attendance at the congress. This inflamed the congress' atmosphere. A motion of POP and POB censoring the IS for that anti-democratic behaviour was backed by 45% of the congress' votes. The 3 comrades from the New Zealand delegation supported the motion but didn't have the right to vote. If we count the RTT, the British Tendency led by Brian (who was one of the first LCMRCI members), the Latin Americans (one quarter of the congress) and the left oppositionists from Britain, Germany and Austria, it might have been possible to defeat the right wing on that question.

None of the resolutions on the international or Latin American situation were passed. The congress only adopted two internal documents in which the left opposition was able to insert many things that the leadership didn't want. After that congress Harvey made his own career by transforming us into the scapegoats for everything, and trying to unite the European members against the left and the opposition from the semi-colonies. One of the first bureaucratic manoeuvres was to prevent the attendance of comrade Dov and the RTT at the congress followed by the Stalinist resolution that forbade any LRCI member from having any contact with any RTT affiliate or supporter.

In mid-92 we challenged that rule at the first real post-congress IEC. The IEC passed a resolution condemning the International Secretariat for its ban. Yet despite the ban, Poder Obrero Peru re-printed an article of the RTT in its paper. Comrade Jaime, who is the demon created in Dov's letter, was the comrade who most defended the RTT-WoVo. He decided to travel to one city in December 92 with the sole aim of discussing with comrade Dov. In the Platform for a Left Opposition of all the Andeans, there is one section attacking the International Secretariat for its bureaucratic exclusion of the RTT-WoVo. During our battle inside the LRCI we always attempted to maintain contacts with WoVo. Before the split, for example, some of our comrades who were not officially LRCI members, started a written discussion with WoVo.

In the four years that we fought inside the LRCI we made many mistakes. It is possible that we were wrong to try to avoid a split. Perhaps we should have challenged the IS bureaucratic rules more strongly or created a faction in 1992. However, we were inexperienced in building an international tendency and fragmented in very isolated corners of the globe.

Whatever mistakes we made, the RTT also made at least two mistakes during that time. First, the RTT used unnecessary sharp language before the second congress giving the IS the pretext to exclude them from the congress. Second, which was not a tactic error, was the RTT's shift towards a fusion with the Italian Voce Operaria's ILCC.

When the RTT-WoVo broke with the LRCI it appeared to be the champion of the Trotskyist Manifesto against its leadership's revisions. However, the RTT-WoVo then began a fusion process with a current which had opposing views to that document and to healthy trotskyism. WoVo agreed with the LRCI theses that all the fragments of the Fourth International capitulated to centrism after 51, yet the ILCC supported the "anti-Pabloite" International Committee. The IC critically supported the MNR during the Bolivian revolution and were deep entryists into Labour and Peronism.

In 1990-91 the RTT-WoVo agreed with the LRCI's analysis of the Degenerated Revolutions which is completely different from the "anti-Pabloite" tradition which VO/ILCC adhered to. The IC tradition and VO/ILCC have the position that the Stalinists parties that overthrew the bourgeoisie in the East were forces that broke with counter-revolution and became Jacobins establishing deformed workers states. On the contrary, we said that the Stalinists parties never ceased to have that counter-revolutionary character, that in the process of overthrowing the capitalists they remained enemies suppressing workers council revolution.

Therefore they established Degenerated Workers States without any initial period in which these states had a relatively healthy or reformed character. The difference is in the approach to the radical Stalinist and petite bourgeois parties. The IC tradition, based on that schema, adapts to these movements while at the same time adopting a sectarian attitude towards the moderate mass Stalinist or Social Democratic parties. VO/ILCC reflects this conception when they are seeking to unite with Stalinist and Nationalist forces (like the Yugoslav Titoist groups or the Ceylonese JVP), or when they endorse Guevara, while at the same time they have a sectarian attitude towards mass reformism.

The ILCC rejected the Anti Imperialist United Front. VO, on the one hand, didn't defend Argentina against the UK in the Malvinas war. On the other hand, it supported Hussein when he attacked the Kurds, despite his use of poison gas against women and children. VO didn't have a Leninist tactic towards mass reformist parties. On the other hand, they capitulated to "left" Stalinist formations but they adopted an abstentionist position towards mass social democratic parties. VO didn't identify openly as a Trotskyist organisation. Its symbol was and still is Che Guevara, the left Castro-Stalinist leader who persecuted trotskyists, made popular fronts and organised armed guerrillas behind the working class.

After we broke with the LRCI (end of 95) the ILCC saluted our split as a "proletarian" one. We were invited to a congress in Vienna in December 95. We said that we would go but that we first wanted to know what criteria were used to select the participants. We discovered that the ILCC wanted to build a communist international tendency with people like the JVP in Sri Lanka who killed workers activists and Tamil people, Yugoslav Stalinists, the Lora sect and even with a thief from Lima. We contacted c. Dov and explained that a conference like that was wrong. Initially WoVo defended the possibility of regroupment discussions with Lora. We characterise Lora's party as a sect which has called for an immediate armed insurrection over the last 16 years, which rejects the transitional method, the united front and democratic demands, and advocates a popular front for making an anti-imperialist revolution including the Bolivian army! Some months later WoVo agreed with our rejection of the lumpen clique in Lima and of the wrong method of the ILCC's reproachment.

In 1996 WoVo broke with the ILCC characterising it as pro-Stalinist. We considered WoVo's split with the ILCC as a progressive move. Today, WoVo comrades agree that it was a mistake to join the ILCC. Building on this agreement, we tried to+ intersect with you and to continue the process that the LRCI's leadership aborted with its bureaucratic methods in 1991.

In December one of our comrades travelled to San Francisco and had several days fruitful discussion with you. In February one of your comrades travelled to London to discuss with us. In March and April we thought that our relations were being strengthened. We knew that we had differences over Bosnia. We had agreement on the principle of defence of the Serbs against imperialism. However, the ILCC always defended Serbia from the start of the war, despite its ethnic cleansing, and considered it to be the last European workers’ state. WoVo had also a pro-Serbian position since the beginning of the war and wrote that the only right of self-determination that it was possible to fight for was that of the Serbs and not for the Muslims and Croats because they had become oppressor nations. Obviously neither the LCMRCI nor WoVo then saw these differences as creating a barrier to regroupment.

We were planning to reply to WoVo on the question of Bosnia. However, the discussion moved to other issues. WoVo "discovered" that it had more important differences with us on Congo and the Labour Party. This shift was produced immediately after one comrade that we had recruited broke with us and approached WoVo. Despite the difference on Bosnia we though it would had been possible to work together and later widen the LCMRCI so that all of us could be in the same liaison committee. A first move in that direction was to try to produce a joint resolution on the most important international flash point - Congo. You asked us not to involve the LTT or any other current in the writing of that document, and we accepted your condition. Nevertheless, as we tried to make our first joint resolution you demanded that we fully endorse your line on dual defeatism. When we said that we cannot support that line but that we could agree on a class independent position against Mobutu and Kabila, you replied that it was not possible to do so.

In his letter c. Dov said that: "WoVo almost broke its back writing a very detailed document on Bosnia for the February Conference in London. ... Almost five months have passed since we distributed this document. The LCMRCI has not written us a single word in reply." We also wrote our own documents on the same question which you didn't reply to. However, the main reason we couldn't concentrate on a debate on that topic is because the axis of the debate moved to the Congo and the Labour Party. The LCMRCI spent much time and energy in responding quickly to all the letters that we received on those subjects to the virtual exclusion of exchanges with other groups.

In late December we received a letter in which comrade Dov wrote: "We apologize for taking such a long time to answer your letter of September 20. We are going through a transition from being an organization based in one region of the U.S. to one based in two major regions. It takes a lot of our energy and resources to transform our organization in a healthy way." Comrades, you have diffuclties in communicating between two cities inside a wealthy country. You have to imagine all the troubles that we have to communicate between different countries, with different languages and with completely different cultural and political traditions. Nevertheless, normally we never delayed two months in answering your letters. Often we reply a week or less. This time it has taken us two months to reply to your two most recent letters because we had to involve all our comrades in a discussion of all the issues you raised at as time when many of them have been busy. In reality we have always "almost broke our backs" writing fraternal exchanges with you.

However, it seems that WoVo seems incapable of maintaining a high level fraternal debate. We are concerned that Dov is attempting to rail-road bureaucratic measures upon the LCMRCI. For instance if Dov "broke his back in an attempt to finish a document on Bosnia for the February conference" we see no relation to this statement and the LCMRCI. The Bosnia document was NOT commissioned for us and indeed was not a demand placed upon Wovo as Dov's letter tries to imply.

We are very disillusioned with the way you discuss. It is not a question of political differences, it is the way in which you deal with them. You ignore most of our arguments and you heavily distort our positions with the aim of creating a false enemy and a false polemic. Instead of discussing facts and being open-minded we receive very strong insults. To write that the comrades who you want to fuse with are right-wing centrists and criminals, reflects very badly on you. It shows an incapacity for normal Bolshevik debate. As we said before it is completely inconsistent to try to fuse or to maintain fraternal relations with people who you label with such hostile characterisations.

The letter from Detroit proposed to deepen the discussions and to move quickly to the formation of an stable joint Committee. But c. Dov's letter began and ended with threats of a rupture. It started with the following words: "I am writing you this personal letter in an attempt to salvage the relationship between WoVo and the LCMRCI." The letter finished with an ultimatum: "I truly believe that unless the LCMRCI makes a sober assessment of the entire historical method of Workers' Power, it will be lost for us as a potential regroupment partner. We are afraid that the LCMRCI will deepen Workers Power's roots that seem lately to grow wild under the LCMRCI's feet".

Dov's letter is a demonisation of our comrades and current and a call for an split. How could you want to produce a reaprochment process with ultimatums? Dov's letter basically says: unless you break with the Jaime/WP/LCMRCI method, you "will be lost for us as a potential regroupment partner." However, ALL, absolutely ALL the differences that WoVo are now condemning were always present since the beginning of our discussions. C. Dov is again making the same mistake that he made in 1991-92 when he couldn't make a block with us against Harvey inside the LRCI. First, he reacts in a very temperamental way and uses many insults. Second, he is making WoVo shift in a completely different direction.

Right wing centrists?

C. Dov wrote: "WoVo is very disappointed with the LCMRCI. We thought that you were really breaking from the LRCI's politics. You did for a short time. But now the LCMRCI is moving back to right centrism, that is, the LCMRCI is embracing the bad method of the LRCI as illustrated by the question of the Labour Party and Zaire". Here c. Dov claims that the differences over Labour and Zaire-Congo are the conclusive proof that we are returning to the same right wing centrist swamp as Workers Power. This is not serious. Our positions on Labour and Congo were published in our press before we started mutual visits and discussion. Our line on Congo was printed in early December 1996 (Class Struggle # 13, December 96/January 97) and continued to be exactly the same through all the civil war. When a comrade from the CWG (NZ) travelled to San Francisco in December 1996 and when a comrade from WoVo travelled to London in February 1997, WoVo never raised a single criticism of it.

On the tactics towards labour and reformism we always had the same position. Our comrades in Britain fought against Workers Power's orientation in the 1994 conference because it ignored Labour and refused to do any work inside it. One of our main criticisms of Workers Power in the UK is that it argued for a vote for Labour but opposed working alongside the left activists who were trying to stop Blair becoming the party leader and abolishing the union links and clause 4. In our two Internationalist Bulletins and in Class Struggle (NZ) we printed articles with that orientation. Our method is not only applied in Britain. We called for a vote for Labour in New Zealand, despite the fact that this party applied neo-liberal measures against the workers when they were in power. We did so because most of the workers still consider it as their party and have illusions that they could force it to defend their class interests against right wing attacks. In Bolivia Poder Obrero called for a vote to the United Left in the last general election. In Peru Poder Obrero usually called for a vote for the bourgeois workers parties of the United Left.

We don't have any written record that WoVo disagreed with the LRCI's electoral method. The differences were raised mostly around the question of the Iran-Iraq war and the relations with bourgeois forces inside the Stalinist states. WoVo didn't question the M/LRCI's Electoral Theses or the Theses on Reformism. Nor did it make any amendment on these issues to the Trotskyist Manifesto which codified the positions of those documents. As we said in our previous letter, when one of your leading comrades was in London she didn't raise a single criticism of our tactic regarding the British election. Your comrades in Detroit helped us in the layout of our articles which argued that line. C. Liza told to us when she returned from visiting us that she supported our general line in the British elections. We knew that c. Dov had some doubts and he wrote us a letter explaining them and asking for a reply. However, WoVo officially did not publish a different electoral position until one of our comrades left the group over his disagreement with our position, and after the election results of May 1. Comrades of WoVo, you can disagree with our position but you cannot claim that we have change our line. If you are honest you have to recognise that you always knew what our position on the Labour Party was, and that the ones changing their position regarding Labour are you.

Congo

On Congo, comrade Dov wrote: "From reading the CWG's press and Jaime's writing it is obvious that there is no clear agreement between the CWG and Jaime on Zaire/Congo. The CWG hesitates to give Kabila critical support. But, once again, you do not stand up to Jaime" who "gave Kabila critical support on the basis that he represents the illusions of the masses in "democracy". This is the LRCI's method point blank."_ "Zaire was a big test for us on whether the LCMRCI had really broken from the opportunism of the LRCI. The answer is no." "The fact that the LCMRCI did not even support bourgeois democratic forces in Zaire, but pure Bonaparts allied with US imperialism, pushes the LCMRCI *deeply into the opportunist camp*. Unless you honestly reassess your position you *will degenerate very rapidly*. Remember how fast did the LRCI moved to the right after they refused to reassess their support to Yeltsin ... the LCMRCI's call for a military alliance with Bonapartist dictatorial army tied the imperialism without connection with the masses. This is almost a *criminal position *. ... His [Jaime's] support to Kabila is based on the imperialist propaganda that Kabila is fighting for a "democratic" bourgeois formation against the Mobutu dictatorship. With his critical support to Kabila, Jaime keeps the imperialist propaganda alive, even after the imperialists have abandoned it; that is, he still supported Kabila (before Kabila took power) the "Democrat" when the newspapers have started to spill the truth about his dictatorship."

In the passages quoted above, C. Dov is making more false allegations. First, there is no contradiction between comrade Jaime and the CWG on this question. ALL the articles on Congo that were published in Class Struggle were co-drafted by c. Jaime. Second, nobody in the LCMRCI ever gave critical support to Kabila. We demand that c. Dov show us any single quote where we hold such a bizarre position and that we do not " even support bourgeois democratic forces in Zaire, but pure Bonaparts allied with US imperialism". We demand that he give any single proof that we have the positions that he attributes to us. If not, he should send an apology to us and to his own comrades for spreading unfounded allegations and creating barriers between WoVo and the LCMRCI. We are told that we have a completely different position to the one that appeared in our papers. We are told that we are supporting Kabila like WP supported Yeltsin, that this is an "almost a criminal position" that "pushes the LCMRCI deeply into the opportunist camp" and that the LCMRCI "will degenerate very rapidly".

C. Dov will never find any quote in support of his false allegations. The LCMRCI made one of the best researched and well-informed analysis on the Trotskyist left of what was happening in Central Africa. We ALWAYS denounced Kabila as a pro-imperialist would-be-dictator which the workers and peasants have to fight, by arming themselves and organising against him. Not only that we denounced the fake leftists who were backing him. We are accused of having the same position as the LRCI despite the fact that we published a one page article in Class Struggle (June 97) attacking them precisely because we rejected the call for military support to Kabila.

Against what c. Dov said we said, we can clearly show what we REALLY said. When the Zaire-Congo civil war erupted we wrote in Class Struggle 13 (December 96/January 97, "Civil War in Zaire"): "The workers and poor peasants of central Africa have the solution in their hands. They should critically participate in mass demonstrations and uprisings against the Mobutu regime in Zaire and the Rwandan and Ugandan regimes. But they need to organise themselves against the leaders of the rebel movements who are trying to become the new bourgeoisie. These new rulers will maintain the right of imperialism to continue to super-exploit the region, and continue the historic pattern of poverty, starvation and new massacres against the toilers or other ethnic communities. The tragedy in central Africa is that dictators based on one ethnic group can be replaced by another elite. The main social problems caused by imperialism's dominance and super-exploitation arises from the forms of backward semi-colonial economies, intermingled with old pre-capitalist social relations. What is needed to overcome these backward pressures is the independent activity of the working class. The multi-ethnic wage workers from the mines, rural states and urban industries should unite in powerful rank and file controlled unions and councils which should have their own self-defence committees. Only such united and independent workers organisations can lead the masses of small, impoverished farmers in the struggle for democracy and on the road towards socialism."

Half a year later, when Kabila was winning the war, we argued the same line in Class Struggle 15 (April/May 1997, "Who is Kabila and who is behind him?"): "Kabila is not raising any anti-imperialist or democratic task. Zaire is a backward semi-colonial country in which the most elementary democratic tasks have to be resolved. The imposition of a democratic bourgeois system with human rights, the self-determination of its nations, the expulsion of imperialism and the achievement of national sovereignty over its own resources and territory and the elimination of the landlords, are essential tasks which are NOT part of his programme. For revolutionary Marxists only the working class can achieve this demand in a process of permanent revolution which means that it has to combine the fulfilment of that democratic aims with proper socialist tasks and the internationalising of the revolution. ... Kabila's forces are not like the Sandinistas, a limited nationalist petite bourgeois movement which raised some anti-imperialist or democratic demands. It is an army which is financed and armed by USA and its puppets in the region, and, instead of attacking the landlords and the multinationals, it is trying to show its willingness to protect their interests in a better way than Mobutu. ... The west knows that the fight between Mobutu and Kabila is between two dictators.

However, Kabila is presented as a more honest leader who could impose a less corrupt,anti-popular and pro-US strong rule... Kabila won't touch the interests of any of these multi-nationals. Kabila was well received by Mukamba, an all-powerful chief of the MIBA (Societe Miniere de Bukwanga) which controls most of the diamond production in Mbuji-Maji. De Beer, who controls the world's industrial diamond market, is dealing with Kabila and other businessmen from Canada, USA, South Africa and Belgium [who] travelled to make deals with him. For them Kabila can give more stability and profits because he can provide a more stable and less corrupt administration. In early April Joseph Martin, director of the AMF (a mineral field multinational), said "I firmly believe Kabila is going to make a better Zaire without corruption." (The Independent, 8-4-97).

Kabila is not bringing any kind of multi-party democracy. "They are banned all opposition parties in occupied territory ... There are strong signs they may be considering introducing a no-party political system modelled in neighbouring Uganda's." (Financial Times, 3-4-97). "In areas already occupied by the insurgents they are showing distinctly authoritarian tendencies, with re-education camps and summary executions." (The Guardian, 4-4-97). Kabila says that he is now opposed to convening elections because he first wants to sack Mobutu and to establish order. Later he will convene the kind of fake elections which are the norm in Uganda. No party can exist or stand candidate[s] and only local no-party candidates can stand and without challenging the rule of the dictator.

He is not bringing self-determination. On the contrary, Kabila is showing contempt for hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees in Zaire. He harassed and expelled them or he has denied any humanitarian assistance to them. His army is not based on guerrilla forces which are rooted in land-hungry peasants. His army includes many Tutsi, a tiny ethnic minority in Zaire. He has very well trained and armed apparatus with a good and modern communication system and is led by many officers from the Rwandan and Ugandan army. ... Many US advisors are fighting alongside him like Mobutu is employing Serb and Western European mercenaries.

In Class Struggle 16 (June/July 1997 "The New world order for Central Africa") we elaborate on Kabila's links with the "Museveni international"): "The Economist", the main journal of conservatism and British imperialism, is welcoming Kabila and asking him to don't deal with Mobutu but to expel him from power as soon as possible. The US model is now Museveni, the Uganda's Pinochet." "With Museveni as its godfather, this realignment of Africa's old order tends to be Anglophone in its international voice, pro-American in its diplomacy and obeisant to Adam Smith in its economics. As the old-style Big Men are being pushed aside, so is the influence of France.' (Time). "In Zaire the working class is a minority but with a very important weight in the population...The proletariat has to make an alliance with the poor people in the cities and in the countryside. This is the only class which could lead a radical transformation of the society."

In another draft resolution on the Congo that WoVo received, we reiterated these positions: "Kabila and Tshisekedi are disputing who will replace the dictator. *The working class has to heavily mistrust both of them. They are part of the enemy class* However, they can not adopt a neutral position. We have to be with the workers, students, unemployed and peasants who are trying to overthrow Mobutu but without giving any kind of political support to these bourgeois would-be-dictators. We need to participate in the pro-democracy mass actions and trying to organise workers and poor councils and militias. The proletariat needs to be the champion for a constituent assembly and in the fight for consistent democracy became the leader of the oppressed. *We can not support the demand for a victory of Kabila*. He will impose a new dictatorship which will persecute opponents and nationalities and will establish a pro-US neo-liberal agenda. We can't advocate now a pure dual defeatist position. We don't have now a war between two imperialist proxy armies. We are experiencing the disintegration of one of the worst dictatorships in the region and the proletariat, without supporting the reactionary opposition, have to take advantage of the situation."

These quotes from our public documents make it clear that the LCMRCI NEVER EVER called for any kind of support for Kabila. We called the workers "to heavily mistrust" him and to arm and organise against him because he would "impose a new dictatorship which would persecute opponents and nationalities and [will] establish a pro-US neo-liberal agenda".

Dual defeatism !?! Smashing the uprising or defeating the bourgeois opposition.

If comrade Dov wants to criticise our position let him do so. He doesn't have to invent another position and put it into our mouth. The real differences are not between the revolutionary trotskyists of WoVo who opposed Kabila and the right wing opportunists of the LCMRCI who supported him. WoVo and the LCMRCI AGREED in characterising Kabila as a bourgeois and pro-US and IN PROPOSING A CLASS OPOSITION AGAINST HIM. The differences arise in other point.

WoVo proposed a dual defeatist position in the war between Mobutu and Kabila. The LCMRCI is consistent in the position that it put forward at the beginning of the civil war: Revolutionaries "should critically participate in mass demonstrations and uprisings against Mobutu regime in Zaire and the Rwandan and Ugandan regimes. But they need to organise themselves against the leaders of the rebel movements who are trying to become the new bourgeoisie... would maintain the right of imperialism to continue to super-exploit the region, and continue the historic pattern of poverty, starvation and new massacres against the toilers or other ethnic communities."

In opposing the dual defeatist position in Congo, we sent a letter to WoVo in which we put a lot of examples of how revolutionaries have to operate in the middle of the confrontation between reactionary bourgeois movements. For a third of a century Zaire was ruled by one of the most corrupt and abusive dictatorships. One of the countries most rich in natural resources had one of the most impoverished people. The autocrat had a personal fortune larger that the foreign debt. He was the main pillar of the CIA anti-Communist block against Lumumba, the MPLA, the FRELIMO and all the anti-imperialists movements in Black Africa. The downfall of the dictatorship of the largest non-Arab African state is an extra-ordinary thing for all the peoples of the black continent. The masses had to participate in the overthrow of such a dictatorship but without giving any political support to the bourgeois opposition.

C. Dov used the example of Spain in which it is quite clear that Marxists have to side with the popular front against fascism. However, most of the inter-bourgeois wars are not a polarisation between two such clear extremes. During the Tsars rule in Russia the Bolsheviks didn't put an equal mark between the monarchy and the bourgeois imperialist constitutional opposition. They didn't raise the demand "down the Tsar and the Duma" and dual defeatism in any confrontation between them. The Bolsheviks made many co-ordinations with the Cadets without making a front with them. We mentioned many more cases. In Paraguay, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina or Ecuador revolutionaries didn't remain neutral in the mass demonstrations organised by the pro-imperialist democratic opposition against right wing dictatorships. Without making any political block or united front with the bourgeois opposition we participated in every anti-dictatorial mass demonstrations with the aim of overthrowing the liberals and opening the road to working class demands, militias and soviet bodies.

C. Dov usually raises his disagreement with the LRCI when it supported Iran against Iraq in the 1980 war. However, he never raised any criticisms of the LRCI when it didn't call for the defeat of both the Shah and the mass opposition led by the mullahs. During the 1979 Iranian uprising the Spartacists adopted an abstentionist and dual defeatist position in the confrontation between the monarch and the masses led by the clergy. The LRCI correctly said that the main enemy was the monarchy and that we had to actively participate in the insurrection aiming to overthrow the mullahs and to extend and radicalise the workers committees (shoras). Again, during the Philippine's uprising revolutionaries could not have supported the pro-US Aquino. However, it was an obligation to participate in all the mass pro-democracy demonstration against Marcos' dictatorship.

A more contemporary and more directly relevant example is South Africa. Mandela's popular support was the result of an unfinished democratic revolution. But clearly Mandela was and is the agent of imperialism. Imperialism forced the ruling class to modernise South Africa. This is consistent with the development of capitalism and in the interests of imperialism. Mandela was their modernising agent. Did we advocate that the black supporters of Mandela turn their guns against Mandela as well as the Apartheid regime? No, we fought alongside the masses that had illusions in Mandela against Apartheid. But at the same time we warned workers and peasants not to trust Mandela, not to disarm and dissolve into the South African army, because this would make it easy for him to lock them into an imperialist popular front.

C. Dov didn't reply to our arguments. He only said that we propose "to form united fronts with bourgeois parties in Latin America which are in conflict with the military apparatus. [Jaime] took this method straight to Zaire." Again c. Dov attacks us without giving any evidence that we are proposing a united front with the bourgeois pro-imperialist opposition in Latin America or Zaire-Congo. He will never find any quotation in support of his view because one of the reasons why we broke with the Harveyites was our rejection of political fronts with the pro-imperialist bourgeois. An anti-imperialist or workers united front is a tactic which is used by revolutionaries to constantly demand that the mass workers and peasants parties break with the ruling class, to fight for the agrarian, anti-imperialist or class demands, and to create councils and militias. We cannot demand that the pro-imperialist bourgeois democratic opposition break with the capitalists or imperialists, because they are part of it.

However, when the democratic bourgeois pro-imperialist opposition try to appeal to the masses to organise mass demonstrations or uprisings against right wing corrupt dictatorships, revolutionaries cannot remain neutral. The victory over Pinochet, Marcos, Mobutu, Garcia Meza and other autocrats would give confidence to the toilers of that country and internationally to advance further their own demands and organisation. The consolidation of such dictatorships by the smashing of uprisings against them, would demoralise the oppressed and create more difficult conditions for the workers to organise and mobilise themselves.

We know that behind his pro-democracy rhetoric Kabila wants to be a bonapartist dictator. In Iran Khomeini managed to become a terrible autocrat. However, if revolutionaries had advocated dual defeatism during the 1979 uprising they would have been isolated from the masses and helped Khomeini to do this job even better. The best way to avoid a Khomeini scenario is to be extremely active during the revolution and to try to put in contradictions the masses with the regime showing that all the anti-dictatorial rhetoric is demagogy. In Congo, Kabila would had been in a more difficult position if a revolutionary mass party had advocated that the masses arm themselves and expropriate the Mobutist ruling class. If Congolese revolutionaries, instead of trying to intersect with the masses, had put an equal sign between the uprising and the corrupt Mobutu army, they would have done Kabila a big favour. They would have been isolated from the popular masses and allowed Kabila to dominate the fight against Mobutu and contain any independent workers and peasant movement.

For c. Dov, this problem doesn't arise because "the masses in the Congo had fewer illusions in Kabila than the masses in Rwanda had in the FPR (at least the majority of the Tutsi supported the FPR). If anything, the Kabila regime in the Congo is less democratic than the FPR's regime in Rwanda." Once more this c. arrives at conclusions without giving any evidence about the real difference between the wars in Rwanda and in Zaire. In Rwanda there was a war between the former Tutsi ruling elite against the Hutu. Tutsis and Hutus are not different nationalities but different social castes.

Tutsi means rich cattle-owners while Hutu means peasant. The RPF [FPR] made an invasion which was resisted by the bulk of the population but it achieved victory helped by the army of Musiveni's Tutsi dominated Uganda. In Congo Kabila's movement is not based upon a former rich social caste whose rebellion is resisted by the population. On the contrary, Kabila won, despite it have very few resources, because there was no opposition to him. When Kabila's forces were advancing the Zairian army didn't confront them, instead they plundered the civil population. Most of the population looked upon Kabila's rebellion as liberation from a hated dictatorship.

The RPF was so "popular" that when it took power a quarter of the Rwandans left the country preferring to live in the most inhuman and plague-infested "refugee camps". The RPF victory led to massacre against the Hutu and to even more massacres against the same community in neighbouring Burundi when the Tutsi elite remains in power against 85% of the local Hutu population. That is why the RPF invasion was not in any way progressive. In a war between Rwanda and Zaire-Congo revolutionaries have to advocate dual defeatism. However, when the worst dictatorship in central Africa was being overthrown by a popular-backed rebellion, it would be very sectarian to remain in a neutral abstention. Kabila is a pro-imperialist who wants to be a dictator and who has forbidden public meetings and opposition parties. That is why it was impossible to support him. It is true that his Tutsi troops massacred Hutu and that most Rwandan refugees were obliged to leave the country, but Kabila's victory didn't produce any mass exodus of Congolese refugees and pogroms against the majorities.

Kabila was not a true democrat, said WoVo. Yes, we agree and we always said so. However, he tried to appear as a democrat and to be the champion of the anti-dictatorial uprising. Instead of adopting a comfortable position outside the masses, it was important to be with the toilers and their illusions with the aim of trying to advance their level of consciousness and organisation. For WoVo the objective situation in Zaire is one of an inter-imperialist struggle between Mobutu and Kabila's imperialist backers, and there is nothing progressive at all about the anti-dictatorial rebellion led by Kabila. It would be nice if the world was so simple, and everything ran along such clear class lines. We could simply say which side we were on and a draw a hard and fast class line in the ground. But things are not so simple. While objectively it is a war between two bourgeois factions, when one side promises to remove a dictatorship and install a democracy, revolutionaries cannot be indifferent. Why? Because while we know that democracy is also a bourgeois dictatorship in the abstract, in the concrete this is not always evident. Therefore it is a question of which transitional demands and revolutionary tactics can be used to win workers from their illusions in bourgeois democracy.

As Marx and Engels stated in the Communist Manifesto, communists are distinguished from the working class only inasmuch as they represent the international and historical interests of the "movement as a whole". So in Zaire we have no choice but to intersect the popular support for Kabila by calling for independent militia and councils and putting up our transtional programme to represent the international and historic interests of workers everywhere. This will help prove that Kabila's democratic promises to unite Zaire-Congo, remove corruption and install a Constituent Assembly, when put to the test, are hollow. Kabila is put to the test not by waiting for events to unfold objectively, but by actively putting him under pressure from the subjective, conscious will of the organised working class, and in the process creating the independent worker and peasant organisations capable of taking power.

WoVo forget their own words on dialectics and method when they critique the LCMRCI as non-dialectical in our analysis of objective and subjective factors in Zaire-Congo. WoVo begin their critique by separating out the subjective and objective factors to deal with them as formal logic would, not as a dialectical unity. They say that objective reality is primary; and give primacy to the intervention of their own imperialist nation the US state, which has used Uganda to train Tutsi troops some of whom are now fighting for Kabila. The subjective illusions of the workers and peasants of Zaire-Congo are however just written off: not investigated as to whether the popular support for Kabila MAY have been transformed into part of the objective reality as food or shelter for the troops.

We do not write off the "subjective illusions" of the masses as of no consequence. The LCMRCI see these "subjective" illusions as part of the workers and peasants struggles against a dictatorship and for democracy, and therefore contributing to the objective reality. Because of this interaction between the subjective and objective, it is the duty of the revolutionary vanguard in intervene in this concrete reality with practical transitional demands to turn that subjective support of the masses for democracy into the best objective factor that a marxist group could hope for - an independently organised and armed militia of workers and peasants.

For WV to crassly shove us in the same bag as the LRCI is crazy. The LRCI gives military support to "democratic" pro-imperialism, not to expose and overthrow it, but because it genuinely thinks that imperialism can deliver a kind of democratic alternative to dictatorship - bourgeois or stalinist- that will advance the workers struggle. In Rwanda it gave military support to the RPF to stop "genocide". It was not adapting to mass support in Rwanda behind the RPF since this was mainly the Tutsi elite, but adapting to public opinion in the West. This is the same adaptation that led us to break with the LRCI over Bosnia. In Zaire the LRCI's position is still to back the RPF intervention behind Kabila's rebels against Mobutu's dictatorship. This is the method of Menshevism not Bolshevism, because it argues that bourgeois democracy will allow the creation of the pre-conditions for socialism, such as a working class, which for WP do not yet exist, and which need democracy in order that they be can be built. This is Menshevism and social imperialism.

On the contrary our position is Bolshevik, which is to say that through the concrete analysis of a concrete situation we recognise the reality of the appeal of Kabila's democratic claims, including the completion of the democratic uprising brought to a halt by Mobutu over 30 years ago. We therefore intervene to actively expose and overthrow him. And despite the backwardness of Zaire-Congo our programme is for permanent revolution today because it does not depend on the situation in Zaire-Congo alone, but rather the whole of Africa and the imperialist countries.

In assessing the situation in each country we need to examine the concrete reality carefully and not jump to conclusions from historical abstract schemas in which objective factors are separated from subjective factors. The struggle in Zaire-Congo was not the same as South Africa with a massive popular struggle behind a modernising wing of the bourgeoisie, nor was it a straight out fight between two reactionary bourgeois factions as in Rwanda. In Zaire-Congo it is the political backwardness of the country that gives this conflict between a reactionary dictatorship and a modernising bourgeois fraction its character.

There is not the mass support for Kabila that there was for Mandela but nor is Kabila a retrograde bourgeois Old Man the equal of Mobutu. This is why Kabila's backing draws less upon workers and poor peasants than in SA, and yet does not depend entirely upon a tribal ethnic cleansing elite as in Rwanda. This is clear from the fact that despite the leading role of the Tutsi in Kabila's army, he still gained popular support. That is why we advocated that Mobutu was the main danger and that we need to transform the military rebellion into a mass uprising, and that we want that workers and peasants size the lands and companies and took the arms, so they later could overthrow Kabila. As we argue above, only by these means can we intervene in the concrete struggle to transform the objective reality. By that means we can build the political and military class base for permanent revolution inside Zaire-Congo and outside.

Just as we never saw Mandela's victory as a necessary democratic stage to create the pre-conditions for socialism, but part of a wider African revolution, it is not a question of what happens in Zaire-Congo alone but rather the whole of Africa. Our transitional programme for permanent revolution embodies the principles of the Communist Manfesto because it expresses the international and historic interest of all the world’s workers. Thus the downfall of Mobutu de-stabilises the rest of the African dictatorships including Kenya where Moi is under attack by opponents who celebrate Kabila's rebellion as an example to be followed. The mobilisation of growing numbers of workers, peasants and intellectuals around unfulfilled democratic demands in Central and Southern Africa will lead to the creation of conditions for permanent revolution in the whole of the region.

For us the key of the solution of the Central African problems is the revolutionary working class. However, the proletariat doesn't yet have a high level of independent self-organisation or consciousness. It has yet to realise the basic freedoms of the bourgeois democratic revolution. Its most elemental and first demands are for the overthrow of the dictatorship. The achievement of that goal would mean a victory for workers and would raise their morale and confidence. In the struggle against the dictatorship the workers would make strikes and occupations and would discover for themselves the limitations and betrayals of the bourgeois democrats and Kabilists.

WoVo ignores such transitional struggles. From the USA they demand that the politically backward Congolese workers advocate the defeat of Kabila as well as Mobutu because they are the same. That would not help the toilers to awake. On the contrary, it would isolate revolutionaries and serve reaction. Where does WoVo's method lead it? Its so-called dialectic leads it to reject an active intervention by revolutionaries in the anti-dictatorial uprising because its leaders are backed by imperialism. Workers and peasants are called on to organise separately and independently of Kabila but then to shoot at Kabila as well as Mobutu. The absurdity of this position becomes immediately clear when we remember that at one point Kabila called for a Constituent Assembly. So this would be like Lenin and the Bolsheviks saying to the soviets in February 1917 shoot the Tsar AND the Duma/Provisional Government or in August shoot Kornilov AND Kerensky!

WoVo's method which denies the existence of workers and peasants with democratic illusions in semi-colonies in which the bourgeois fractions are under the influence of US imperialism, has no means of intersecting these struggles and transforming the consciousness of workers and peasants. Ironically, this means that such consciousness which is necessarily part of the "objective" situation becomes subject to fatalistic laws of history, or more concretely the class interests of the national bourgeoisie and the imperialist ruling classes, unopposed by the intervention of the revolutionary party with a transitional method and programme. WoVo's failure to understand the transitional method leaves it standing on the sidelines as a sectarian group, pronouncing on the international and historical interests of the world proletariat as abstract and passive propaganda. In this is shares with the other currents of Spartacism a method that separates the subjective from the objective reality, which leads by default to an abstention from concrete struggles, and to the liquidation of the vanguard militant party.

In summary, our line is for active participation in the upheaval. We don't want a battle between two elites. We want to transform the anti-dictatorial discontent into a mass revolutionary insurrection that leads to land, factory and mine seizures and workers and peasant councils and militias. US Marxists should be neutral in the confrontation between Democrats and Republicans because all are the same. However, in a war between one of the worst Black African dictatorship and a national upheaval led by a former Castro-Maoist who wants to be a new liberal dictator, we need to try to overthrow the dictatorship first. WoVo's line is to be neutral in that struggle. In the name of purity they repeat the errors of Spartacist abstentionism.

The conflict of opposite methodologies on the National Question.

The points in dispute with WoVo show that it has a highly contradictory position. WoVo tries to reconcile two irreconcilable methods. Your group was very much influenced by the LRCI of the very late 1980s. Your first journal powerfully reflects that influence. Comrades from Workers Power travelled to San Francisco to help you in producing International Trotskyist and in consolidating the group. You accepted the LRCI major programmatical documents, including the Trotskyist Manifesto, for which you proposed some amendments. However, your group was before that part of the Bolshevik Tendency (after being part of Healism and later Morenoism) and, after your bureaucratic exclusion from the LRCI, you fused with another split from the Spartacists (VOs ILCC). Your positions show the influence of the many different currents you have been part of. In particular it shows the contradictory influence of the healthy elements of the LRCI and the Spartacist breakaway groups. As we saw before your present line on Labour and Congo is very similar than the Spartacists and IBT, and quite different of what you said some years ago.

We will try to show how these contradictory methodologies emerge on the national question. When we tried to make a joint resolution on Congo we raised the demand for self-determination of the different nations of that multi-national and very heterogeneous state. You said that you couldn't support that demand because you were not sure about the character of those nations. It seems that you are in favour of self-determination of a nation only when it is fighting against imperialism. That shows a sectarian method that contradicts your position in 1990-91. Our differences on Bosnia are also linked with your contradictions on the national question. We will try to explain.

In the summer of 1990 comrade Dov participated in a LRCI International Executive Committee. He voted in favour of the LRCI's general line on Lithuania. In that conflict the LRCI was against the intervention of Soviet troops and for self-determination of the Lithuanian people. Comrade Dov and the rest of the League agreed that the Russian occupation was not designed to prevent capitalist restoration and that it would push the Baltic workers into the hands of reactionary nationalists. That is why it was necessary to fight against Moscow's tanks without supporting the nationalist Sajudis. Later some comrades who founded the LCMRCI criticised Workers Power because it shifted to the right when it proposed that the imperialist powers assist the Sajudis government against the USSR. Nevertheless, what we want to stress is the fact that the RTT (today WoVo) supported the LRCI line.

Some months later there was another important event which put the national question on the agenda. Iraq invaded Kuwait, the US bombed Iraq and the Kurds made an armed uprising against Hussein. In that conflict the LRCI line was for a dual defeatism in the Iraq-Kuwait two-day war but to call for the victory of Iraq against imperialism. When the Kurds rebelled against Hussein we defended them against the dictatorship that massacred this oppressed people. Inside the LRCI we discussed some variations in that tactic as applied by WP and the Ast. However, the RTT/WoVo agreed in general with that line. In late 1992 the RTT moved towards Voce Operaia who had the completely opposite position. They didn't defend the Kurdish people against Hussein's massacres because they believed that they were US tools. It is true that Talabani and Barzani, the Kurdish leaders, were asking Western support against Hussein. However, Hussein was also previously armed by the imperialists and he killed tens or hundreds of thousands of Kurds.

The Kurds are the biggest nation without their own state or autonomous region. Divided between five countries they were massacred by all the biggest Islamic powers in the fertile crescent. Hussein dropped poison gases against Kurdish cities killing women, the elderly and children. Revolutionaries have to defend the right of the Kurds to self-determination including the right to secede and to unite in one single state. We said that the 20-24 million Kurds would only have truly national liberation when the ruling classes in the area were overthrown and replaced by a socialist federation of the middle east which would allow all oppressed communities (Armenians, Assirians etc.) to be free from persecution and discrimination. After Hussein was defeated the Kurdish people tried to take advantage of the situation and they rebelled against the oldest dictatorship that was crushing them.

Revolutionaries didn't support the Talabanis or Barzanis and neither did they make blocks with them. They should oppose any imperialist intervention and defend Iraq, despite Hussein being in power, against US planes. However, Marxists have to be part also of the Kurdish uprising with the aim of developing independent councils and militias. That was the best way of trying to prevent the pro-imperialists from leading the Kurdish masses. VO equalised the masses with the leader. Its condemnation of Talabani and Barzani led them to condemn the entire people. With that false premise they ended up tailing Hussein's mass murders.

VO doesn't understand how important it is for Marxists to defend the right to self-determination. If we don't do so, the people's discontent will be manipulated by nationalist reaction. VO was very keen on inviting the Sri Lankan JVP to be part of the ILCC's international conference for a new communist international. This shows a great alienation from Marxism and its conception of the national question. In Sri Lanka the Tamil, a Hindu people, constituted around one sixth of the population. They are the majority in the east coast but they are oppressed and their right for self-determination is denied. The JVP is an army that uses Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism against the Tamils. The JVP, originally, like Kabila, was a Guevarist insurgent army. Today it is a force that commit crimes against the unions, the left, and especially the Tamil.

VO doesn't realise how important it is in Sri Lanka to defend the Tamils against Sinhala chauvinism and to unconditionally defend their right to secede. On the contrary, they want to make a common international party with one of the worst Tamil-killing armed groups.

In Eastern Europe VO had a tendency to side with the Conservative bureaucrats in transition to becoming capitalists when they crushed their own republics desire for self-determination. VO put so many conditions on a nation before they would support self-determination that, even in the case of Argentina, they refused to defend it against UK imperialism in the Malvinas war.

On Yugoslavia WoVo didn't apply the method that you and we used together in relation to Lithuania, but you adapted to VO's method. VO said that Serbia was the last workers’ state in Europe and it was necessary to defend it against all the formerYugoslav nations.

Former Yugoslavia

If WoVo was consistent with the same method that you and we used for the Baltics in 1990-91 today you would have a different line than the one that you shared with the ILCC regarding Yugoslavia. You would have argued that revolutionaries could not support the Croatian or Slovenian nationalists but neither could they support the Yugoslav invasion, which has to be opposed. The Yugoslav army didn't want to stop capitalist restoration; they wanted to protect a state dominated by Greater Serbia with the aim of facilitating a better capitalist restoration. If you didn't defend the Croatian and Slovenian workers against Belgrade's tanks you would have pushed them into the hands of reaction. Like Trotsky in Ukraine, and you and we in Lithuania in 90,our demands would have to be for independent workers council republics and voluntary unity with the rest of the states of the region in a socialist federation.

In your long document on Bosnia you wrote: "As Yugoslavia was breaking up it was necessary to oppose the independence and right of self-determination for all the emerging "nations," including the right for a capitalist Serbia." In 1990 Yugoslavia was by far the most advanced restorationist workers’ state in all Europe. It had a huge foreign debt while the state monopoly over foreign trade and centralised planned economy was heavily eroded by many features of a market economy. In 1990 WoVo correctly didn't adopt an abstentionist position on Lithuania and neither did it defend the unity of the USSR. It recognised that the overwhelming majority of the Lithuanians wanted to secede and that if you sided with Soviet intervention you would alienate them. The most important thing was to develop working class organisation and consciousness. To support the intervention of a state apparatus that didn't want to defend the workers’ state but to force upon Lithuania a united process of restoration, would be criminal.

Your present line differs from the one that you had in 1990-91 and is based on VO's method. In your document on Bosnia your line is that the only nation in former Yugoslavia where revolutionaries could support the right for self-determination was the Serbs: "It was necessary to critically defend the right of the Serbs to secede from the new oppressive state in Bosnia." For you Croatia and Bosnia "forced these (Serb) minorities to integrate into the social system of Islamic fundamentalism and semi-fascist Ustasism as oppressed, second-class citizens. That was the social reality of the new nationalist, restorationist ministates. The new ruling classes (including the Serbs) could, only through the extreme of nationalism combined with barbaric ethnic cleansing, sustain themselves and overcome the natural instincts of the masses for solidarity and against the creation of small states. At this point, when Yugoslavia was no longer a workers' state, it was our obligation to defend the Serbs' right to secede, and not to belong to the new bourgeois nationalist ministates as oppressed, second-class citizens. When Croatia and Bosnia denied the right of the Serbs to secede they became the oppressors. Thus, the Leninist understanding of self-determination did not apply to Croatia and Bosnia, but to the Serb minorities in these new states, who were forced to incorporate into these states against their will."

You said that you would defend the rights of the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia to secede and to have their own states or to unite with the rest of Serbia. However, you denied the same right to the Croat and Muslims. They didn't have the right of secession or autonomy in Serb-dominated and bourgeoisYugoslavia. Why not? You said that it was because Croatia and Bosnia were reactionary states. However, Serbia was also reactionary. It was another "new nationalist, restorationist mini-state". What happened to the Croat, Muslim or Albanian minorities in that bourgeois state? Why don't you advocate the same right for them? Why don't you say that: "it was our obligation to defend their right to secede, and not to belong to the new bourgeois nationalist ministates as oppressed, second-class citizens?" Or "When Serbia denied the right of the Croats, Muslims or Albanians to secede, they became the oppressors."?

When you fought against the LRCI leadership you criticised the demand that they raised in favour of the unconditional right of secession for all the Soviet nations. You pointed out that it would mean that they defended Russia's right to also split. In the former USSR there are around 25 million Russians who lived outside Russia and who constitute the majority in many areas of Moldavia, Ukraine, the Baltic, Central Asia, or Chechenia. As far as we know you didn't say that the only nations whose national rights we defend in the former USSR are the Russians because the other nation states are led by pro-imperialist and capitalist states who are oppressing the Russians. In fact, in the Baltic the Russians were under a new apartheid regime. So, why are you applying that method to former Yugoslavia? Yugoslavia was not a workers state. Belgrade's president was a rich businessman who has a chain of pharmacies in the USA. The workers suffered a lot. They had the world's worst hyperinflation in the last four decades. The economy was very much dominated by the market and the Marks. There were private banks and companies. The industries were not under a central plan, and each one (despite its co-operative technocratic-ruled self-management) could operate using market mechanisms.

Great Serbian nationalism was even worse than Great Soviet patriotism. The Serbs, Croats and Slavic Muslims speak the same language and are the same race. Their main difference is in cultural-religious backgrounds. So, every nationalism among those peoples had to accentuate distinguishing cultural or religious features. Serbian nationalism has strong links with the Orthodox Church and is very hostile to the Muslim and Catholic peoples. Like the Zionist obsession with Jerusalem and the holy land, Serb nationalism is obsessed with Kosovo. This country, despite the fact that 90% of its population is Albanian, is regarded by Serbs as a Serb homeland. Every year the Serb establishment commemorates on massive scale the Kosovo battle in which the Serb nobility was crushed by the Ottomans. Serb nationalists regard the "Turkish" Islamised peoples (Albanians and Bosniaks) in a similar way to that which Zionists regard Arab Palestinians.

It was the Serbs who ethnically cleansed many areas of Croats and Muslims. Hundreds of thousands of non-Serbs were expelled from their home villages while their houses and institutions were burned. The Serbs made a war of national xenophobia, expansion and territorial purification. It was not a war to defend a Workers’ state against capitalism. The Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia had a strong Chetnik racist ideological component. It was Milosevik's administration that started to use Great Serbian nationalism as a way of dividing workers along ethnic lines and to prepare for a reactionary capitalist restoration. It was he who cancelled the limited degree of autonomy gained by Kosovo and Voivodina under Tito. Like other rulers who use the phantoms of the Jews, the Gypsies or the Blacks, he promoted fierce racial hatred against the Albanians. He tried to unite the Serbian classes against the common enemy who were the peoples that wanted to liberate historical Kosovo from Serbia. He opened a Pandoras box. Croat, Macedonian, Bosnian and Slovenian pro-independence sentiments were incited by his Great Serbian chauvinism.

Kosovo is Europe's poorest country. It is a traditional Albanian area that was divided from the rest of Albania by the Serbian kingdom and later by Tito. Yugoslavia means the country of the Southern Slavs. However, the Albanians are not Slavs, and despite being the largest minority in what it remains of Yugoslavia (with around 1/7 of its population) they have no real national rights. They are considered as a kind of alien people who are not Slav, who want to reunite with neighbouring Albania and who were linked with the Turks. The Kosovo Albanians are the most marginalised and oppressed people in all of former Yugoslavia, and probably in all Europe. They have the highest rates of unemployment. Their culture and language is under attack. They don't have any autonomy.

WoVos' document on Bosnia is very long. However, in all its 25 000 words there is not a single mention of Kosovo and the Albanians oppressed by the Serbs. A document on the situation in Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia and former Yugoslavia surely cannot ignore the two million oppressed Kosovo-Albanians. If you deny the right of the Albanians to self-determination this would mean that you have adapted to Chetnik chauvinism. But if you support their rights there is no reason why you should not apply the same method to the national rights of Slovenes, Croats, Macedonians or Muslims.

We didn't support the nationalist independence movements and regimes in Croatia and Slovenia. We fought against the transformation of Yugoslavia into a new capitalist state in a united or divided form. We opposed the Yugoslav army's entry into Croatia and Slovenia against the will of the working class because it would alienate the only class that could stop restoration, and because the Yugoslav State apparatus was committed to restoration. We opposed the forcible maintenance of Croatia and Slovenia inside Serbia, but also the enclaves inside the new states in which the Serbs were the majority and who did not want to remain isolated.

We don't make an absolute rule the right to self-determination. We rejected Harvey's revisions in the Trotskyist Manifesto. In many circumstances, like in Georgia 1921 or in Eastern Europe during the 2 World War, it was permissible to subordinate national self-determination to the defence of a workers state. However, in former Yugoslavia like in the former USSR that was not the case. The federal army was not defending post-capitalist relations against capitalist secessionists. They were defending a project of forcible union at the expense of the wishes of entire nations with the aim of advancing capitalist restoration.

WoVo is in a very difficult situation. The ILCC could invent a new reality and say that Serbia was the only remaining workers’ state in Europe and, for that reason, it was a class question to defend it against any other nation. However, you admit that this was wrong and that Serbia was also a reactionary capitalist state. So, why is that the Serbs from Croatia and Bosnia are the only ones who have the right to secede from their own bourgeois incipient states while the Croat, Albanians, Muslims, Macedonians and Slovenians (who are the majority of the Yugoslav population and working class) don't have the right to secede from another incipient reactionary bourgeois state?

Perhaps you can argue it is because of the question of imperialism. You can say that imperialism backed Croatia and Bosnia against Serbia. However, that is only partly true. It was German imperialism which backed Croatian and Bosnian independence because it wanted to rebuild its traditional Germanic influence in the former Austro-Hungarian lands and "Mittle Europa". The US, France and the UK initially were against the division of Yugoslavia. They wanted a united capitalist state that could guarantee the payment of the multi-million foreign debt and which could avoid a fratricidal conflict that might destabilise the region. Historically Belgrade, Paris and London had many links against Berlin. The US was keen to support one of its citizens who had become the president of Yugoslavia. Later western imperialism would distance itself from Serbia.

In your document you adapted to Serbian nationalism in trying to present its working class as much better than the other proletariats of former Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe: "the working class in Serbia still retained a strong Titoist tradition. While it was not consciously fighting for the preservation of the workers' state (like the rest of the working class in Eastern Europe, it was demoralized about the prospects for socialism), it was the only working class in Eastern Europe that regularly struck against privatization and fast-track capitalism." But it is wrong to suggest that the only eastern European working class which "struck against privatization and fast-track capitalism" is in Serbia. If we suggest that in all of Eastern Europe the proletariat of a small country like Serbia was the only one to resist fast track capitalism we are adopting a pessimistic approach. It is not the reality. From Poland to Albania and Russia there were many strikes and demonstrations against privatisations. We can see what happened in the last months. In Russia hundreds of thousands demonstrated against Yeltsinite economic measures and in Albania there was a spontaneous insurrection against fast track restoration.

The discontent against fast track restoration is not led by forces with a clear socialist programme. The former Stalinists, re-named as "socialists" or "left democrats", are leading the opposition and in some places they have won the elections. What we need to say is that the working class by instinct is rejecting fast track restoration, however, it doesn't have a real alternative (lack of revolutionary leadership). The Eastern European toilers were won to the idea that the market and parliament were progressive steps. They fought against the worst aspect of restoration without questioning the shift towards the market. It was, and is still a confused consciousness.

The Serbian working class represents less than 5% of the eastern European proletariat and a half or less of the former Yugoslavian proletariat. Why is such a tiny percentage of the entire working class in half of Europe resisting, and the great majority not? What special quality has the Serbian working class? It is true that many Serbian workers have Titoist ideas, but we can say also that many eastern European workers had illusions in other Stalinist leaders. In Russia it is quite common to see pictures of Stalin and Lenin in massive demonstrations. The biggest party in Eastern Europe is the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. In Poland, Lithuania, Hungary and other countries the "Socialists" have regained political power.

One of the reasons why the Serb working class was one of the first to confront restoration is because Yugoslavia was the European country which had experienced the most advanced capitalist restoration country in the 1980s. Under Tito, Yugoslavia didn't have a state monopoly of foreign trade and there was no centralised planned economy. There was a sort of market system with self-managed companies, which allowed huge differences between central companies and subsidiary companies, and between enterprises and republics. This explains why the restoration of capitalism produced so many ethnic and nationalist explosions. Yugoslavia was the eastern European country with the most links with the IMF and the most open to hard Western currencies. It received a lot of marks from the tourist industry and because it was the only country in which a large proportion of its population worked in the west and sent back foreign currency to their families.

In Serbia the "Socialists" started the most aggressive restoration process in the late 1980s. The "Socialist" party ideology promoted Great Serbian chauvinism against the Muslim peoples (Albanians and Bosniaks). The ethnic nationalism was promoted by the bureaucracies with the aim of diverting working class protest into nationalist channels. In no other European country was the proletariat poisoned with so much xenophobia as in the former Yugoslavia. In summary, to say that the Serbian working class was the vanguard of the European proletariat was wrong for factual and methodological reasons. Ideologically the Serbian workers were tied to a variant of Chauvinistic and xenophobic National-Stalinism. This position regarding the supremacy of Serb proletariat over other working classes in former Yugoslavia and eastern Europe reflects an adaptation to the Great Serbian nationalist-stalinist traditions on the part of the ILCC. VO was very keen to invite three Serbian Stalinist parties to their conferences for a new international.

Contradictions

In your own way when you try to conciliate with VO's method you completely distort reality. You asked: "Could the Muslims in Bosnia have the right to self-determination, in the Leninist sense, as an oppressor nation connected to imperialism?" The Bosnian Muslims are the European nation that suffered most after the 2nd World War. Most of them had to leave their villages and lost their homes. Their cultural centres and institutions, mosques and houses were burned. There are only 2 million Bosniaks but hundred of thousands were killed, raped, injured or tortured. They didn't rule Bosnia and they couldn't oppress the Serbs. They were the ones that suffered first from ethnic cleansing. How on earth could you call them as an "oppressor nation"?

It is true that Izetbegovic was a tool of western imperialism. However, it is not possible to condemn an entire people (and a very cleansed one) because of its regime. We didn't support the Bosnian Muslim side during the war. In the Bosnian war we didn't support any side because all of them were in favour of ethnically dominated bourgeois mini-states. We advocated that the workers of all the communities should unite to expel their own ruling elite and imperialism. We were in favour of the defence of any nation attacked by imperialism.

You said: "Thus, the right of the Croats and the Muslims to self-determination, that is, for independent capitalist states, completely contradicts the elementary Leninist criteria for self-determination, since these were not progressive cases of oppressed capitalist states (or peoples) fighting imperialism (the North of Ireland, for example), or fighting oppression by a stronger capitalist state. The right of self-determination cannot apply to nations whose essential feature in becoming independent national states is the destruction of the historic gains of the masses, the restoration of the old ruling classes, and the revival of the most backward parts of the old system the masses previously overthrew (after the Second World War). The right of self-determination cannot apply to the creation of the oppressive, semi-fascist system in Croatia and a fundamentalist Muslim Bosnia linked to nationalism and barbarism, and manipulated by imperialism. Our attitude toward a capitalist Serbia is not different. We would oppose the creation of a capitalist Serbia that oppresses others on the ashes of the workers' state."

This paragraph shows many more contradictions. For you the right to self-determination can only be applied to "oppressed capitalist states (or peoples) fighting imperialism (the North of Ireland, for example), or fighting oppression by a stronger capitalist state." In your polemic against the LRCI you quoted Lenin's position on the separation of Norway from Sweden. Lenin didn't advocate secession but he asked the Swedish workers to defend that right. The best way to develop an international class unity is when the workers from an existing state are the champions of the right of self-determination of the other nations who want to secede from that state. Norway was not an oppressed nation and it was not fighting against imperialism. In fact, Norway became an independent monarchy and a minor imperialist power. With your conception you would deny the right to self-determination to Quebeq, Scotland, Wales and most western European nations.

In Scotland, today, around 70% to 80% of the population want devolution of power to its parliament, taken away in the 1707 Act of Union. The most radical section fighting for that autonomy is the working class. The Scottish proletarians believe that the best way to stop more Poll Tax, privatisation and anti-welfare attacks is to diminish the powers of Westminster. They are not entirely correct.

However, behind such illusions there are some progressive elements. Revolutionaries have to fight for unconditional right for self-determination for Scotland, even if it is NOT a nation which is fighting against imperialism or which is " fighting oppression by a stronger capitalist state."

In Burma, Cashmere, Sudan and other states in Africa, there are mass separatist movements who are seeking secession or autonomy for their own nationalities. Most of these armed organisations are led by reactionaries seeking support from imperialism or neighbouring countries. In Southern Sudan, for example, the majority of the population who have a different history, race, language and religion from the Arabised Muslim north, have been fighting for decades against Khartoum. Sudan is ruled by a fundamentalist regime with some similarities to Iran and which is not well accepted by imperialism. The Southern Christian and Animists were heavily massacred and they have defied many Islamic laws (some of them against the women). They suffered starvation in times of droughts.

Revolutionaries have to unconditionally support the right of self-determination of these peoples against the north. However, the actual leaders of the Southern uprising are connected with Musevenis Uganda, Kabilas Congo and western imperialism. If you would follow the same method that you have in 1990-91 you would defend these peoples rights without backing their leaders. However, you would deny that rights if you would follow VOs ILCC premise that only defends the national rights of "oppressed capitalist states (or peoples) fighting imperialism (the North of Ireland, for example), or fighting oppression by a stronger capitalist state."

What would be your position on Kurdistan? Probably in the north of Kurdistan you would defend the PKK’s fight for an independent Kurdistan against NATO-member Turkey, but in the south VO didn’t defend the Kurds against Iraq because of the pro-imperialist credential of their leaders.

When you say: "the right to self-determination, that is, for independent capitalist states" you are making a big mistake. The right to self-determination is not equal to the right to create a bourgeois state. Trotsky championed the right to self-determination for Ukraine but he did so by raising the demand for a socialist soviet united independent Ukraine. When the Albanian, Croat, Slovenian, Macedonian, Muslim or Hungarian Yugoslavs are afraid of Great Serbian chauvinism and expressed their non-conformity with Belgrade's chauvinism, hyperinflation, unemployment and abuses, in a nationalist form, we would be utter sectarians to condemn them. On the contrary, we need to intersect with them. We must be the champions of their self-determination at the same time that we oppose the creation of small capitalist states. The best way of fighting against the new bourgeois nationalists is to show to the workers that the real communists can defend their national rights with the strategy of creating independent council republics and a voluntary regional socialist federation.

It is true that Croatia has a reactionary chauvinist regime. However, WoVo tries to link it with some fascistic past history in order to conciliate better with the non-fascist Great Serbs. "From 1990 through today, Croatia has been nothing more than a reflection of what it was in the 1940s, an extreme nationalist semi-fascist dictatorship, willing to exterminate hundreds of thousands for the sake of ethnic purity and total loyalty to the Ustase regime." In 1940 Croatia was a Nazi state that exterminated probably one million Serbs, Gypsies, Jews and anti-fascists. In the 1990s it was not a one-party state and neither did it have a terrorist SS apparatus. The post-1990 Croatia as a semi-parliamentarian and Bonapartist rule based on a limited multi-party system. In 1997 it is quite difficult to say which army made more ethnic cleansing, rapes and concentration camps: the Serbs or the Croats. It is certainly true that before the mid-1995 Croat assault on Krajina, the Serb nationalist army committed more ethnic cleansing than the "semi-fascist" Croatians.

WoVo's long document is full of contradictions. WoVo said that it is against the self-determination of all Yugoslav nations because all of them tried to restore capitalism. However, elsewhere it argues that Serbia is the only nation with a right to secede. You wrote: "When the Serbs were denied their right of self-determination, it was necessary to defend them against their forced assimilation into the Muslim and Ustase states. But when the Serbs reversed the situation by linking their fight for self-determination to the project of nationalist Great Serbia, the defense of the rights of the Serbs to self-determination was no longer the main feature."

The Serbs were denied their right to secede from Bosnia and Croatia since the beginning of the new states (early 1992). It means that when the war broke out between the Serbs and Croats and later between Serbs and Muslim and Croats, you supported the Serb side. However, you said that you only supported them until they began to expand and create a Greater Serbia. When this happened what did you advocate for the Muslims and Croats? Did you start to defend the Muslims and Croats against the Serbs?

You only defend the national rights of the dominant nation in former Yugoslavia while you deny the rights of the other minorities. When a nation is suppressing other nations right it is becoming an oppressor. However, even when the Great Serbian nationalists were massacring the non-Serb communities you still defended the rights of the Serbs, but you don’t anymore consider that it was "the main feature".

The Serbs nationalists ALWAYS had a project for Greater Serbia at the expense of other nation's rights. Why didn't you ALSO advocate the defeat of that reactionary nationalism from the beginning of the war? Elsewhere you state: "At the initial stage of the war a capitalist, chauvinist Serbia was the main goal of the Serbs' battles. Therefore, we had to raise the defense of Muslim areas against the emerging chauvinist Serbia as one of the main struggles of the war." Here you contradict your earlier position to say that at the initial stage of the war the main issue was NOT the defence of Serb self-determination against Muslim and Croat oppression, but the protection of Muslim areas against "capitalistic, chauvinistic Serbia".

In another part of your document you have yet another position: " We defended the rights of the Muslims not to live under the Serb republic of Pale or the boots of the Chetniks; we opposed the annexation of Muslim areas for the sake of building a nationalist Serb state; and we defended the rights of the Muslims to belong to the Bosnian Muslim state (if that was what they wanted) even though it was a reactionary bourgeois state." Before you opposed national self-determination for the Muslims and called for the victory of the Serbian forces against them, now you call for the defence of the Muslim areas and for the right of the Muslims secede from under the Serb yoke and " to belong to the Bosnian Muslim state."

If you support the Bosnian Muslim’s right "not to live under the Serb republic of Pale or the boots of the Chetniks" and "to belong to the Bosnian Muslim state (if that was what they wanted)" that means that you support the Bosnian Muslim’s right for self-determination and secession.

You wrote that in autumn 1992 "The Serbs' refusal to belong to the new capitalist Bosnia started the war". The Serbs refused to be part of an independent bourgeois state of Bosnia-Herzegovina while the Muslims and Croats refused to be part of the Serb bourgeois state. The Bosnian war was reactionary since the beginning. There was not any single side who defended post-capitalist relations against a bourgeois side. All were led by warlords and proto-capitalists.

Bosnia was never a country divided along ethnic boundaries. In every village there were citizens that shared the same language and race but whose grandparents were from different religions. There was no possibility of creating a Serb state in parts of Bosnia without smashing the rights of the other nations. Many of the areas initially captured by the Serbs were places in which the Serbs were only the first minority or in which the other nations were that majority but they were in the middle of the road. There was not a continuously Serbian, Muslim or Croat territory. The pockets in which the Muslims were the majority were dispersed in the Northwest and in different "islands" in central and eastern Bosnia. The Croats were the majority in western Herszegovina, some towns in central and in Northeast Bosnia. The Serbs were the majority in several areas in Western and Eastern Bosnia and in eastern Herzegovina.

Since the beginning of the war, every side was CONDEMNED to annex villages and areas in which the other ethnic groups were the largest ones. Bosnia was so inter-mixed that it was impossible to divide without appealing to ethnic hatred and massive expulsions. In a war in which all sides were committed to communal violence it was not possible to take sides. However, WoVo supported the Serb side who had ANNEXIONIST and ETHNIC CLEANSING aims since the first moment of the war.

How is possible to reconcile your initial defence of the Serbs with a claim that you "opposed the annexation of Muslim areas for the sake of building a nationalist Serb state"? If you opposed Serb annexionism it meant that you should had been against the Serbs since the very first moment of the war. If you supported the rights of the Muslims to belong to their own state you should have defend them when Sarajevo, Srebenica, Tuzla and other Muslim-dominated areas were assaulted.

However, the confusion is not over. In another place you say: "At the initial stage of the war, before the imperialists intervened decisively on the side of the Muslims, a main feature of the Serb struggle was not anti-imperialism but the creation of capitalist Serbia. Therefore, it was incorrect to support the Serbs as they were successfully capturing most of Bosnia. It was correct to fight for revolutionary defeatism on both sides." This is yet another position to the ones we saw before: At the beginning of the Bosnian war "when the Serbs were denied their right of self-determination, it was necessary to defend them against their forced assimilation into the Muslim and Ustase states." "At the initial stage of the war a capitalist, chauvinist Serbia was the main goal of the Serbs' battles. Therefore, we had to raise the defense of Muslim areas against the emerging chauvinist Serbia."

In summary, "at the initial stage of the war" you have all the three possible positions: you defended the Serbs against the Muslims, you defended the Muslims areas against the Serbs, you advocated dual defeatism.

During the war we had a clear line. We were for the defence of the planned economy through a political revolution. We opposed a capitalist restoration maintaining a united Yugoslavia or by dismembering Yugoslavia and the creation of small semi-colonies. We opposed the creation of new proto-capitalist states in Croatia, Bosnia and Slovenia. However, we defended every nation that wanted to secede from capitalistic and chauvinistic Serbia. We proposed the right for every nation to self-determination. We advocated independent workers republics and a socialist federation. We advocated the defence of every community against ethnic cleansing by means of the fraternisation of the workers from all the ethnic groups against their rulers and imperialism, and for a socialist federation. We defended the Serbs against any imperialist attack.

WoVo doesn't have a clear line. The method that you applied in the Baltics would have led you to have similar positions to ours. However, you tailed VO's position for Serbia against Croatia, Slovenia and the Bosnian Muslims. Nevertheless, you wanted to keep your distance from the ILCC position. You started to reject the idea that Serbia was the last workers’ state in Europe and to be more open to the idea of opposing the chetniks and protecting the Muslim communities against genocide. However, in that aim you didn't want to fully break with the ILCC method. The consequence is a mishmash of methods. You ended advocating at the same time dual defeatism, the defence of the Serbs against the Muslims, and the defence the Muslim communities against the Serbs.

Labour: Wovo's record

On the question of Labour, WoVo is moving to a new sectarian position that is completely different from the one that it had before. When we started our discussion you seemed to be open to our approach and you only made some observations. Even more, your leading c. L who was in London said that she agreed in general with Workers Struggle's [WS] electoral line which was for voting Labour and SLP/SP candidates. Then you suddenly changed and now you argue that to advocate a critical vote for Labour pushes the LCMRCI into the opportunist camp. It is important to consult our record of these discussions. First we will see who was the one that changed, and later we will deal with the arguments in dispute.

In the first issue of International Trotskyist, you correctly made a series of good criticisms to the method of your previous group (the Bolshevik Tendency). You wrote: "The sectarianism of the SL was reflected in other areas of the BT's politics. The BT would give, for example, a mass social democratic or Stalinist party critical support only when the party pretends to "stand for the independent interests of the workers" (see In Defence of the Trotskyist Program by the Bolshevik Tendency p.30). It is clear that the BT did not break from the standard SL position of giving critical support to a reformist party, only when it stands on a program that defends the independence of the working class - which of course is ... almost never! Whille we did not discuss this question in the fusion discussion (since critical support to a reformist party is not really applicable to the US), the LTT did not read anything written about it by the BT.".

"We believe that the BT is absolutely wrong on this question. In fact, by using the sectarian methodology of the SL, the BT will never have a tactic to split the working class base from the bourgeois leadership of a reformist party. Contrary to the useless sectarian abstention of the BT and the SL, Trotsky made it clear in the 30's (particularly in regard the ILP tactics towards the Labour party) that the most significant criteria for critical support of a mass reformist party in most cases is not its programme, but the fact that it is based on the working class. This is because the organic connection of the working class to the reformist party gives rise to illusions among workers that this party will defend their interests. Revolutionaries must support the reformist party's bid for power in order to expose the pro-bourgeois leadership in the eyes of millions of workers, as long as the workers believe that the reformist party can be pushed to carry out pro-working class actions even if the reformist party does not have a programme which the sectarians can safely support". (International Trotskyist No 1 Summer1990) .

The LCMRCI endorses this critique of the BT. We apply the same method in our electoral tactics in Britain, New Zealand, Peru and Bolivia. So in 1990 you rejected the Spartacists/BT method of supporting a reformist party only when it has an "anti-capitalist" programme. However, today you are reverting to the same method of your former group: the BT. Why is this? In 1992-93 WoVo entered Voce Operaia's ILCC which has a completely different approach towards reformism. Their sections were opposed to giving critical support to the mass reformist parties in their own countries. In Italy VO's electoral slogan was "Marx, our candidate is not standing". For that reason they advocated a blank vote in the only imperialist country in which there was a massive Communist Party with around 30% of the votes and where there were great illusions amongst the workers that it could be the first CP to win a national election. Nor did VO advocate critical support for Democrazia Proletaria, a significant "far left" and centrist coalition. Its slogan flirted with idea that it is possible to vote only for real Marxist candidates.

At the end of 1996 c. Dov sent us a very fraternal letter in which he raised some questions and made some observations. While he admitted that it might be possible to vote Labour, he insisted that we should call for a vote for all SLP candidates: "even if it is correct to give Labour critical support, we believe in the places where the SLP runs candidates against the Labour Party, it is your duty to give the SLP critical support against Labour." Workers Struggle's official line was to vote for Labour and for the SLP and SP candidates where they have some weight in the communities. The main criticism that c. Dov made was to say that WS "is wrong to give critical support to the Labour Party *at the expense* of critical support to the SLP. A small propaganda group cannot win over the members of the Labour Party." He insisted that, for a small propaganda circle, we were more likely to win members of the SLP.

This is mainly a tactical question. In the UK there are around 650 constituencies and only one candidate can be selected under the first-pass-the-post [FPP] system in each constituency. In the last election Labour stood candidates in all the constituencies of Great Britain, the SLP stood in 54 and the SP/SSA in around 35. Labour obtained 44% of the votes (more than 13 million) and around 60% of the MPs. The SLP obtained 55,000 votes (less than 0.2% nationally and less than 2% as an average in the constituencies in which they stood). The SP/SSA obtained around 20,000 votes.

The initial line of c. Dov was for advocating a vote for the SLP in the 54 constituencies where they stood (less than 9% of all in the UK) and probably for Labour in the rest. This was a minor variant of our general line. WS is only a very tiny current and its line was very propagandistic. WS could have advocated a vote for Labour or Socialists which would mean, what comrade Dov wanted, to vote Labour but also to vote for Socialist candidates in the few places in which they stood.

WS had a more algebraic position because it is a small current with few links with the class. The majority of WS were not in favour of giving support to ALL the SLP and SP candidates because some of them were Greens or members of an homophobic and heavily anti-trotskyist Stalinist cult (EPSR) with no roots in the communities. Many of these candidates only achieved 200 or 300 votes and it was not seem to have a point of being associated with them when tens of thousands of workers in those constituencies were around the Labour party.

In his first letter c. Dov was very open to our positions: "Jaime does a good job presenting Trotsky's method for giving critical support to the Labour Party. We agree with the general method of giving the Labor Party critical support in order to expose it in power, and then destroy it as an obstacle for the class struggle. Jaime says that many young workers have not seen the Labor Party in power, since it has been out of power since 1979. Jaime may have a point." An important point that c. Dov raised was the issue of anti-capitalist llusions.

He was not convinced that Labour was promising any "anti-capitalists" reforms and thought that people would vote for it merely because they wanted to kick out the Tories. He thought that the SLP votes had more anti-capitalist illusions and that it was more important to address that milieu. "Workers' Voice is against giving the Labour Party critical support *if* the workers plan to vote for it as a lesser evil party. Only when the workers plan to vote for Labour because they have illusions that they can force it to support the working class struggle, and propel it to implement anti-capitalist "reforms", is it correct to give the Labour Party critical support."

We replied that in Britain, due to the enormous retreat in class consciousness, militancy and organisation, Labour was not under the influence of a mass movement with anti-capitalist demands. In their first attempts at recovering from the terrible Tory attacks (the worst the proletariat experienced since the end of the war) the workers had illusions that they could stop more Conservative attacks by putting their historical party into office. At the end, comrade Dov concluded: "But, of course, for us these are tactical questions that has to be resolved by a revolutionary party in Britain, not from the U.S. We are not in daily contact with British workers, and we are open to learning what the workers think about the direction of the Labour Party. But we don't think that the tactic of critical support can be determined by intellectual speculation by British leftists either. Only a revolutionary party that has members in the factories and unions can accurately determine the state of mind of the workers. Such a party must have many members who are connected with the struggles and life of the workers on a daily basis, and who know the contradictory state of mind of the workers. As you correctly pointed out, Workers' Power never had such members."

Despite any possible disagreements WoVo didn't consider the electoral tactic it as a central issue. You considered it to be mainly a tactical question in which you were unable to arrive at a definitive position because you were not in the UK and you were not a revolutionary party with mass influence. This was a not correct way of adopting a political line. Even a small force should try to adopt a tactic to Britain. However, you first transform your initial modest "cautions" into a central question of life or death.

Turning point.

The LCMRCI also considers the electoral question as mainly a tactical issue. We are trying to build a section in the UK and we are quite open to discussion and debate. In December 96 two founding members of the LCMRCI co-founded the circle "Workers Struggle" with other two comrades: one who came from What Next and the other from the SLP. The group didn't have an homogeneous position on Labour and we were quite open in the possibility of allowing a discussion on that question in our publications. One of the new comrades was active in the SLP. He was a former member of WP who was around the CPGB periphery. He agreed with most of our positions but he had a different view on Labour. He had a similar position to the CPGB on that question. He considered that a critical vote for Labour was not possible since the early 1920s because the masses didn't believe that Labour could introduce socialism. For him Trotsky was wrong in advocating a critical vote for Labour in the 1930s. He said that Labour was an open bourgeois party and at one time he thought that this qualitative change happened in the twenties. This was an important methodological difference but we thought that it could be possible to work with this comrade, to influence him and to establish a group with him. He said that he was willing to accept the majority line in favour of a critical vote for Labour and he advocated a quick fusion with the WIL.

However, a few days after the elections he decided that he couldn't complete the tasks given him by the group. He had been put in charge of editing the paper but then decided to boycott its production and distribution, despite the fact that we offered him a space to put his own personal position. To our surprise, he chose the pages of the Communist Party's Weekly Worker to publicly attack us. He didn't want to meet any of us, and he even avoided comrades who travelled from outside London to see him. In every serious group these actions would be considered a terrible breach of discipline and loyalty.

Our experience with that comrade was not the best. In thirty years of activity in the far left he has been incapable of developing a stable relation with any group or other comrade. He has many good qualities but all his energies are wasted on politics influenced by subjective impressions and ‘single issue’ campaigns. In the five months that he was in WS he showed a constant incapacity to work collectively and had frequently shifting positions. We realised that he had important methodological differences with genuine Trotskyism that came from the influence of the CPGB.

The CPGB is an ex-Stalinist group that nonetheless has some positive characteristics such as being relatively open-minded. However it advocates a democratic revolution and Federal Republic for Britain. This stageist and Menshevik strategy is linked with a non-Bolshevik view of party building. It wants to build a big and open multi-faction federal party in which all left currents (from hard-line Stalinists through to Trotskyists) unite. The CPGB wants a bourgeois democratic republic and for that reason they need an amorphous hyper-democratic lax party. Because of its programmatic proximity with the Labour left they often employ ultra-left tactics. To oppose calling for a vote for Labour since the early 20s and to vote for "Yes" in the Welsh and Scottish referenda is an expression of a method which combines a stageist strategy with ultra-revolutionary postures.

We opened our internal debate to WoVo. C. Liza said that she agreed with our electoral line and, when this comrade left, she said that B's behaviour was not Bolshevik and that she would do everything to influence him to return to our group. You promised us that you would show us the written discussions with that comrade and you would report to us, but you didn't do it. WoVo had a completely different attitude towards us. It never opened its internal debate to us. We never received your internal documents. WoVo had its national conference in June. We were not invited to that event and neither did we receive any of the discussion papers. However, B, the comrade which left the group and whom we introduced to WoVo some months ago, travelled to visit you when you were having your congress. You said to us that he was not allowed to participate in your internal debates. Nevertheless, he was around, discussing with you and influencing the debate. Instead of trying to show to our former member that his attitude was not Bolshevik and trying to get him to restore some links with us, you did exactly the opposite. This comrade is now even more hostile to us and he doesn't want to cooperative with us in any activity.

C. Dov's letter uses verbal information received from that c. B, but he didn't ask us to give our own version. Even more, WoVo adopted a very aggressive attitude towards us. We would be happy if you managed to train this comrade and could collaborate with him in the same democratic centralist organisation. We doubt that you will be able to do so. When this comrade abandoned our current you made a very soft criticism of his behaviour and no political critique at all from his positions. Then you became very aggressive with us because of our line on the 1 May British election, which none of you rejected before it.

However, you didn't write any critique of the conception of this comrade who is very critical of Trotsky's methods regarding Labour and the ILP in the 1930s. Today you may agree on a single issue: it was not possible to vote for Labour in the last election. However, you arrived at this agreement by using different methods. C. B believed that Trotsky and his followers were wrong in advocate a vote for Labour after the early 1920s and he regards Labour as a capitalist party. But you admitted that Labour is still a bourgeois workers party (albeit a one in a process of major bourgeoisification) and that it was possible to vote for it.

Dialogue with the deaf.

When two currents are in a healthy debate it is important to be open-minded and to develop a dialogue. If somebody makes a good point it is important to answer it and to accept it. However your method is not like that. You tend to ignore the arguments, and, what is even more disappointing, to distort the point of view of the others, with the aim to insult them. We wrote you a very detailed letter on the Labour Party. YOU DID NOT REPLY TO THE MAJORITY OF ITS POINTS. You didn't explain why you changed your positions, or why we were not to be allowed to participate in your debate on that question. You didn't explain why you have a contradictory position in the US and the UK.

In the US you are part of the Labor Party. This is a very small organisation behind union bureaucrats that have a capitalist programme and vote for Clinton's Democrats. The British Labour Party has far more weight in the class and the unions and stands candidates against the traditional bourgeois parties (Liberals and Conservatives). In the US you would critically vote for a Labor candidate even if it s/he is a corrupt bureaucrat who doesn't have a very different programme from the Clintonites. Why? Because you know that the US never had a mass Workers party and that it would be a formidable step forward if the proletariat launched a mass party, even if it is not a revolutionary one. The British Labour Party is the model for the US one. If you want to fight to break the small Labor Party away from the Democrats, you need to unite that struggle with the one that is being fought in Britain by the thousands of activists who want to stop the transformation of Labour into a new democratic party. How can you fight to transform the US Labor Party into an independent mass working class party if you are renouncing the fight amongst the militants of the biggest mass workers party in the imperialist world to stop it becoming a new Clintonite capitalist party?

In your statement on the British election in your last paper you wrote: "Blair took pro-capitalist measures that even Thatcher would not have dared to take." In our previous letter on Labour we explained to you that Thatcher made the worst attacks on workers since the end of the war. She defeated many strikes and imposed vicious anti-union laws. She started the programme of privatisation and liquidated most of the nationalised industries and led to the closure of most of the pits. She attacked immigrants, unemployment benefits and welfare like never before. To write that New Labour is doing even worst things than Thatcher is a very serious allegation. It is evidence to support the position that New Labour has completed its transition from a bourgeois workers party and is now a new Tory formation. But you didn't show any evidence of that. You repeat your same method: you make very strong allegations but don't give any proof supporting them.

It is true that New Labour gave the Bank of England control over interest rates. This is a right wing move, but is in line with other social democratic parties e.g. in Germany. Today Labour is trying to impose L 1,000 fees for every college student. We don't deny that these are neo-liberal measures, however these actions don't have yet the significance of the terrible Tories attacks.

Indeed Labour are making some changes that the Tories would never dare to make. They are lowering the age of consent for gays and lesbians. They are devolving national assemblies to Wales and Scotland, after centuries of centralised rule. In your last letter you give no importance to these progressive political changes. They are significant, as Britain is the most centralised imperialist state and the only one that never had any revolution or radical transformations for centuries. A Scottish parliament would not transform capitalism. However, its achievement is a by-product of the working class and poor peoples actions against the poll tax and "Great British" capitalists. North of the border, elements of class discontent are being expressed in a deformed way as a nationalist rejection of the ruling class in London.

For you these changes don't have significance at all. In your official letter you said "that's the kind of "radical reform" a Thatcherite can appreciate. So much for Blair feeling pressured by the working class!". Since Scotland joined the United Kingdom in 1707 it lost its parliament. The Scottish workers movement fought for decades for a national assembly. The Thatcherites were the most fierce enemies of Scottish home rule. Scotland’s Secretary is appointed by the English Prime Minister. Blair tried to weaken Labour's position on Scotland by dropping the demand for a Scottish assembly and replacing it with the proposal for a referendum. He made that move to conciliate with Great British chauvinism and Conservatism. But the Scottish workers, TUC and Labour combined to force the party to support devolution. On 11 September it is quite likely that no less than 60% or 70% of the Scottish people will vote for the devolution of their assembly after nearly 300 years of centralised rule from London. Devolution will not destroy or threaten capitalism. Far from it, however, it is a democratic demand that the workers fight for, and which only sectarians can reject.

Before the election you argued that Labour was still a Bourgeois Workers party in transition to a pure capitalist party (which is our characterisation). However, after the elections, you now see New Labour as closer to the end of that transition to a pure capitalist party like the US Democrats. "The elections de facto resolve the old contradictions of the bourgeois workers' party. The Labour Party is now becoming (that does not mean that the process is over) a pure bourgeois party, whose connection to the class and unions is not fundamentally different than the connection of the Democratic Party to the unions in the U.S. The British and the world bourgeoisie are applauding Blair and the Labour Party as the best Tory party that they have had for a long time." Surely if the elections did "de facto resolve the old contradictions" it means that Labour is no longer a workers-based party which serves capital and that it is pure and simply a capitalist party. You clearly say it is a becoming capitalist party, like the US democrats. But explain to us how on earth an election process, and some days in government, can finish the process of transformation of the largest workers party in the imperialist world into a pure capitalist party without any working class character?

You say that the class character of the Labour party qualitatively changed and the class contradiction was resolved without the class, the unions and the party's left making any fightback? You should not play with words. If Labour is a capitalist party you should clearly say so. That conclusion needs evidence which you have not given. New Labour and the US democrats may have some similarities in many of their positions. However, they are quite different parties. The Democrats were created by one section of the ruling class. It was always a party of multinationals, businessmen and southern racist big owners who adopted more liberal views able to attract more blacks, gay and lesbian and trade union leaders. Labour, however, was created by the unions and it was always identified with the working class poor. It is a party that uses class and socialist rhetoric and which introduced social democratic reforms such as the welfare state. Because of its bourgeois working class character, Labour was able to implement many reforms that the Democrats could never do.

British Labour and the US Democrats have a completely different relation with the unions. The unions are still the most important contributors to the Labour party funds. The overwhelmingly majority of Labour MPs are unionised. Half of the Labour conference delegates are elected by unions and in the other half there are a lot of unionists who are elected by their local committees. In the US the unions are merely an appendix and a decorative apparatus which have no real influence on the party. For you: "Blair took pro-capitalist measures that even Thatcher would not have dared to take. The working class remained silent. We have not seen any big explosions inside the Labour Party." This another way of distorting reality. You don't start from what is happening. Your analysis is based in your own imagination. You over-exaggerate Blair's attacks and later you conclude the working class and the Labour rank and file is not responding. All of that shows that Labour is a capitalist party and that workers didn't have any class illusions in Labour. This is nonsense.

If the "working class remained silent" and there are not "any big explosions inside the Labour Party" then why don't you question your point of departure (that Labour is doing the worst attacks ever)? You are ignoring what is happening inside the class and Labour. The trade unions are making a big pressure on Labour to implement a national minimum wage, which is very likely to be implemented, although the amount is in dispute. The TUC and the Scottish TUC are adopting many resolutions on that issue. A recent British Airways strike confronted one of Labour's best managerial friends, and it was not defeated. We sent you some quotes from the imperialist media in which they showed concern about a left block inside Labour. Since we did so, the clashes with left-wingers have not diminished. For example, in recent days around 40 labour MPs wanted to propose cuts in the expenditure of Trident. This would release founds from a nuclear project into housing and welfare.

Under Blair's leadership Labour is trying to discipline their left MPs. Hattersley, a prominent Labour figure (who was never part of the left) is defending the dissidents. For Blair it is quite important to develop a big construction project at the Thames in commemoration of the Millennium. The left is getting some support inside the party to oppose the way it is being built and the links that are being established with the former Tory advertising company.

Blair is trying to implement a tough new bureaucratic constitution and the left is opposing it. Livingstone, who was a very prominent figure as leader of the former Greater London Council, is threatening to split. Inside Labour there are many left publications. Some of them are connected with entryist groups (Workers Liberty, Socialist Appeal, Socialist Action) and others reflects labourite trends (LLB, Tribune). There are also socialist labourite conferences. Most of the class activists are members of Labour (through individual or associate affiliation).

You completely ignore all of these questions. From the US you create your own picture: Labour is a new capitalist party in formation and the British workers and Labourite reformist left didn't fight back. You believe that Labour is a new Tory party. The Tories are the traditional party of the ruling class. Its agenda is quite different than the Labourites. The Conservatives want to maintain and reinforce a centralist Unite Kingdom. Labour has opened a dialogue with Sin Feinn (IRA's legal associated party) and is granting devolution to Scotland and Wales. It is quite possible that the structure of Britain will change in the following years. It could become a sort of federation with autonomous countries, with the possibility of reducing or even withdrawing its influence over Northern Ireland. Labour is willing to return power to the councils and to restore the Greater London Council. Two major political reforms are on the agenda: to diminish the power of the House of Lords, and to probably move towards proportional representation. This programme would mean the biggest transformation of British political structure in decades and probably in this century.

The Conservatives also wanted to continue to privatise other state companies. Labour has promised to stop the de-nationalisation of NHS and most of the remaining public enterprises. The Conservatives are moving to a hostile attitude towards the European monetary union and are adopting a nationalist project critical to the EU. By contrast Labour is a Europe-oriented party. The biggest difference is still that of social class. The Tories are the party of the rich capitalists and the wealthy middle class which are centred in Southern England and which have a strong "Great British" imperialist agenda. Labour social base is still in the industrial areas and suburbs. While there are many new capitalists and technocrats who want to transform Labour into a new Liberal party, you have not produced any evidence that it is anything but still the party of the labour movement.

Your analysis is not based on real facts. You tend to over-exaggerate the influence of Tory exodus into Labour and the former Labourite exodus into the SLP. You made a big issue when a second rank Tory> figure, Howarth, joined Labour. C. Dov wrote that the SLP is a party of thousands of activists who have broken with Labour and taken its best elements. But the SLP has less than 1,000 and probably no more than 500 active members. It is smaller than the SWP or the SP. It is closer in number of members and votes to the WWP in the USA. The great majority of the Labour left didn't break with Scargill. The SLP is mainly made up of activists who were in other left currents or who broke with Labour many years ago. No union and none of the 40 or 50 left Labour MPs left the party. The overwhelming majority of the Labour left is still now around Labour. Scargill is not attracting very many activists from labour because of its bureaucratic constitution and its sectarian attitude towards the rest of the left (from the Labour left to the Trotskyite left). C. Dov doesn't understand the idea of ALSO addressing that milieu. In summary, he over-stresses the importance of the SLP at the expense of the Labour left, the SWP and the SP.

Return to Bolshevik Tendency method.

As we have seen WoVo has a completely different picture of what is happening than the reality. In his first letter on the subject, c. Dov appeared very modest and he concluded that nobody was able to have a precise line on the question of Labour because none were a revolutionary party with mass influence. However, he changed his initial modest attitude and tried to construct a completely different scene than the real world. A bourgeois workers party which has a class contradiction became transformed into a new capitalist party in formation. A right wing reformist social democratic government was transformed into a Tory reactionary administration that carried out even worse attacks on workers than Thatcher. Labour is presented as a new bourgeois party gaining from a mass exodus from the Tories and losing lots of dissidents who left to create the SLP. The Labour left is either ignored or minimised. All of this results from a sectarian method that distorts reality to fit it into a pre-conceived schema.

The core of WoVo's method is based on the idea that a critical vote for a mass reformist party is only permitted when that party raises anti-capitalist and socialist demands, and when the communists are a mass party. With such conditions it seems it would be impossible to give a critical vote for any mass reformist party anywhere on the planet. In his first letter, comrade Dov wrote: "Critical support by a small propaganda group without roots in the class does not make a difference in the concrete world. The disillusioned workers will not pay much attention to such an organization." "In general, when Lenin and the Third International developed the tactic of critical support to social democratic parties, they never had in mind small propaganda groups giving such critical support. They had in mind mass revolutionary parties, or at least strong revolutionary parties with thousands of members. Only when you have strong influence in the working class, can you use the tactic of critical support in a meaningful way. A strong revolutionary party cannot expose the Labour Party in power simply by telling the workers "we warn you that the Labour Party will betray you, but we want to go along with you through the experience".

Here c. Dov is proposing a different conception of party building than the one proposed by Lenin and Trotsky. For him a small propaganda group should not advocate a critical vote for a mass reformist party. It would be better to be around smaller and marginal leftish formations, like the SLP. The Bolsheviks, on the contrary, tried to intersect with the broader masses. A revolutionary group, whatever its size, has to relate to the activists who have illusions in the mass reformist organisation. WoVo's method is similar to the Spartacists and the IBT. In Britain the Sparts are parasites on other left groups producing a lot of polemics, while the IBT is a parasite on Scargill's bureaucracy.

As we showed above in your polemic with the BT in 1990 you had a correct position regarding the question of voting for reformist parties. You correctly attacked the "standard SL position of giving critical support to a reformist party, only when it stands on a program that defends the independence of the working class - which of course is ... almost never!" "Contrary to the useless sectarian abstention of the BT and the SL, Trotsky made it clear in the 30's (particularly in regard the ILP tactics towards the Labour party) that the most significant criteria for critical support of a mass reformist party in most cases is not its programme, but the fact that it is based on the working class. This is because the organic connection of the working class to the reformist party gives rise to illusions among workers that this party will defend their interests."

However, today you are retreating to similar Spartacist-like positions that you attacked in 1990. We explained to you that Lenin and Trotsky always advocated a vote for Labour since its foundation at the beginning of this century. Moreover, Lenin was in favour of allowing Labour to enter the Socialist International. Labour, in the early 1900s, was not a socialist or anti-capitalist party. Even worse, it was an appendix of the largest bourgeois party in power - the Liberals. Using the sectarian criteria that we can give critical electoral support to workers party only when it raises anti-capitalist or socialist demands would mean that we could not give electoral support to any European party. Even more telling to your argument, this tactic would not have applied to most of the Socialist parties during the pre-first world war First International.

Transforming bourgeois democratic tasks into anti-capitalist and Socialist ones.

We tried to show you that the Bolshevik's electoral campaigns were not based on any anti-capitalist demands. During the Tsar's rule the Bolshevik's main slogans were for eight hours work, for a constituent assembly and for land for the peasants. These were bourgeois democratic tasks. Moreover, until April 17, 1917, the Bolsheviks were not in favour of a socialist revolution in Russia. When we wrote: "The Bolsheviks didn't make their electoral campaigns, or even take power, having socialism as their main slogan", WoVo replied: " In the history of centrism, it would be a challenge to find a paragraph more confused, ahistorical, and opportunistic then this one. It is an attempt to portray the demands that the Bolsheviks put forward as minimal ones."

WoVo's official letter spent more than one thousand words trying to demolish our point but they couldn't prove that we were wrong. WoVo agreed that the Bolshevik's "main demands were, land, bread, and peace..." The official letter said that the LCMRCI "writes that: `they (the Bolsheviks) had an anti-capitalist perspective but their most popular demands were not socialist or anti-capitalist: They were revolutionary bourgeois democratic demands'". WoVo concluded: "In this historic context, what the LCMRCI refers to as revolutionary bourgeois democratic demands, were, in reality, demands that prepared the masses to make proletarian revolution. They were socialist, anti-capitalist demands."

But this is just another distortion of reality to fit into a pre-elaborated schema. A democratic bourgeois demand that prepares the ground for a proletarian revolution is not necessarily a Socialist revolutionary demand. This way of think is not only a challenge to dialectics but also of formal logic.

Never did any Marxist write that "land, bread, and peace" were socialist demands. The elimination of the feudal and semi-feudal landowners is a task of the bourgeois democratic revolution. The end of imperialist war and the achievement of peace is a demand that doesn't destroy capitalism. For Trotsky permanent revolution means that the proletariat must resolve all the bourgeois democratic tasks with its own methods and combine them with its own socialist tasks. For Marxists the socialist tasks are those that are linked with the expropriation of the capitalist class and the socialisation of the means of production. Land and Peace were bourgeois demands which the provisional Government was incapable of fulfilling, and which the proletarian party had to fight for in order to win the broader masses to its socialist perspectives. In the struggle for those demands the Bolsheviks posed key transitional demands (like workers control, all power to the soviets) which formed a bridge between democratic and anti-capitalist tasks.

WoVos idea that the democratic bourgeois demands of the Russian revolution were socialist demands and that the "demands that prepared the masses to make proletarian revolutionwere socialist, anti-capitalist demands" is leading WoVo to confuse its understanding of revolutions.

In 1905 the Russian revolution started on bloody Sunday when the workers marched behind a pope (who also was linked with the police) asking the "Great father" Tsar to give some concessions. Their demands were not socialist at all. However, the struggle for them opened the way to raising more radical and transitional demands and for adopting proletarian methods of struggle.

On 9 April 1952 one section of the Bolivian army made a failed coup against a reactionary regime. The masses irrupted onto the scene demanding democratic rights. A very important demand was the re-constitution of the MNR President and overthrowing him before he could establish his own government. When the proletariat moved itself and started to fight with its own mass methods, it created the opportunity for more radical demands and ways of organising. After they overthrew of the junta the workers disarmed the army and created militias and a dual power body (the COB) as well as demanding the expropriation of the big mines under workers control.

WoVo has two choices. They can say that initial minimal demands (which prepare the ground for a proletarian revolution) are socialist ones. In that case, the proposal for a Tsar that grant better wages and fewer hours of work, or the opposition to the re-installation of an ex-Nazi supporter as Bolivian president, can be the same as revolutionary socialist demands. But if you equate minimal demands with socialist demands or deny the anti-capitalist character of such socialist aims you have to revise your entire conception of socialism.

Your method also makes you disregard a potential revolution that does not enter into your pre-elaborated fixed schema. In Congo, because the uprising didn’t raise any anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist demand you condemned not only the leadership (which is correct) but also the insurrections movement (which is very wrong).

In your official letter you say: "In their polemic with WoVo, the LCMRCI take their method to its logical opportunist extreme. They reinvent the Bolshevik Party as a party that only put forward minimal demands. The LCMRCI even claims that "Land, Bread, and Peace" and "An Eight Hour Work Day" were not anti-capitalist demands. In fact, given the situation in Russia, they were calls for the masses to prepare themselves for proletarian revolution." First, we never said that the Bolsheviks were a party that raised purely minimal demands. We said that their main demands were bourgeois democratic ones, especially before 1917 (something that is irrefutable). Second, the eight-hour day is not all an anti-capitalist demand. Today in most imperialist countries there are laws that protect such a conquest. Even more, in some places, workers are only working 35 hours per week (six hours per day). Lenin said that in Russia the bourgeois democratic tasks could be fulfilled by a "bourgeois revolution without and against the bourgeoisie." The Bolshevik revolution fulfiled the democratic tasks in combination with socialist and anti-capitalist tasks.

WoVo has not been able to reply to our argument. We proved to them that their conception would have meant "no vote" to the Bolsheviks, especially during the Tsardom, because they didn't raise anti-capitalist demands. WoVo made a long and boring exposition about Bolshevik history which answer our argument and which concluded with a unfortunate phrase. What the Marxists call democratic tasks, WoVo has decided to transform into anti-capitalist and socialist tasks!

Propaganda bloc?

We want to reply to another point about c. Dov's method. In his "personal" letter he said: "Another example [of the LCMRCI's opportunism] is the attitude toward a broad united left electoral front. We criticized Jaime for arguing for a left electoral front in Britain which includes the SLP, SWP, the Socialist Party etc. We said that this is an opportunistic propaganda bloc between left groups that disguise the political differences between them (to use Trotsky's words)." Again these allegations are not substantiated by evidence. Moreover, this is the first time that we heard WoVo's objection. If c. Dov believed that WS, or comrade Jaime was implementing a "propaganda block" why didn't he put it in writing before? Why he didn't he communicate these criticisms to c. Jaime or to WS? Why didn’t c. Liza say absolutely nothing about it when she was living with Jaime for two weeks? What are the grounds for that attack? Why you are against making "a left electoral front in Britain which includes the SLP, SWP the Socialist Party etc."?

Here is another contradiction in your position. If you believe that Labour is an emerging capitalist party you should demand of the unions and the left that they split with Labour and put up their own candidates. You should advocate an electoral front of the SLP, the SWP, the SP and the left. In Britain the SWP and the SP are far bigger than the SLP. They have many more members, working class roots and implantation. The SLP publishes a paper every 2 months while these parties have weekly papers. They have better organisation and more branches dispersed throughout the UK, while the SLP is mainly an England based and relatively disorganised party. In all the recent demonstrations it was possible to see dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of placards from the SWP or SP, while the SLP were almost absent. The SP obtained 20,000 votes standing half of the number of candidates that the SLP did. Moreover, its main candidates got a better electoral average than Scargill and any SLP candidate. The SWP have around 10,000 members. The Anti Nazi march and festival which they organised in Brockwell Park drew a quarter-million people. Nevertheless the SWP don't stand their own candidates and its line was to advocate a vote for Labour or Socialists.

If WoVo really believes that Labour is near to becoming a capitalist Democrat party, why don't you demand that the biggest party of the British left (the SWP) breaks with Labour and stands candidates in alliance with the rest of the left? The SP and the SWP are centrist parties while the SLP is a reformist organisation (a small bourgeois workers party). The SP and the SLP are self-claimed Trotskyists with opportunist policies who argue for an international socialist revolution and for the destruction of the capitalist state. The SLP has the Old Labour programme and is for the maintenance of a reformed capitalist state under a "Great British" nationalist protectionist administration. A broad electoral front which included the SLP, the SP and the SWP would be in the position of attracting many activists and workers, and of standing candidates in at least 100 or 150 constituencies and maybe gaining at least 100 000 votes. It could be a pole of attraction against Blair. If WoVo thinks that Labour is the new US-type Democratic Party, why then do you oppose to such a an electoral alliance, and why do you ignore the SP and recognise only the SLP?

Anyway WS didn't argue in favour of a broader socialist front. We argued for a critical vote for Labour and for the Socialists candidates with some roots in working class communities. Our comrades inside the SLP fought against Scargill's sectarianism against the left and for opening the party to the left. When Scargill tried to launch candidates against the SP we said that this was ridiculous and that both organisations should try to reach an electoral agreement.

WoVo proposed a vote for some and not all Labour candidates: "We would advocate critical support of a LP candidate only if the workers felt that the candidate could oppose the bourgeois direction in which Blair was pushing it. In this way we could interact with these workers, warning them that their candidate would not save the LP unless he took an active fight within it to either reverse its direction, or, more likely, split it. Only a candidate with such a base could warrant critical support now." In fact, it was not possible to find any Labour candidate which fulfilled those requirements and the conclusion is obvious: "However, given Blairs hegemonic control over the LP, we feel that such a possibility is unlikely."

This is a completely un-dialectical way of relating to reality. In a popular front you can call for a vote for the workers parties against their capitalist allies because you are calling on the reformists and centrists to break with the bourgeoisie. In Labour it is not possible to apply the same tactic. First, because all the candidates are in the same party and second because it is a reformist WORKERS party. We can call on workers not to vote for individual capitalists who are running on the Labour ticket. But we cannot ask workers not to vote for a right wing union bureaucrat, and vote for a left wing lawyer from the same organisation.

There was no Labour candidate who stood officially against Blair's programme for many reasons. First, because if you are the official candidate of a party you must publicly defend its adopted programme (even if you can disagree with it). Second, because in Britain there is the bitter experience of the 1983 election in which Labour lost against Thatcher because of its public divisions. The labourite left and the unions (wrongly) decided not to reveal their differences with Blair during the electoral campaign because they didn't want to help the Conservatives to win the election. The Tories were divided and they wanted to preserve an appearance of unity to take advantage of Tory disunity. Third, in Britain you don't have any kind of national electoral district (like in the US and many other countries) and everybody votes for their own MP in their own small constituency. There was no chance that the left activists could vote for a radical Labourite because s/he would stand in a constituency with less than 100,000 electors and on the official manifesto.

Fourth, in Britain millions of workers voted Labour despite their mistrust of Blair, because they wanted to get rid off the Tories, to return Labour to office and to put their demands on the new government. For example, after the election, TV interviewed a miner who said that he voted Labour despite Blair because he thought that if Blair failed to heed the workers the labour movement would fight to remove Blair and replace him with a new leader and Prime Minister. So many of the subjective anti-bourgeois workers that WoVo are trying to find were involved in the vote-for-Labour. They didn't believe that Labour was a lesser-evil capitalist party. They believed that they could push their historical party into a position where it would have to defend their interests.

Fifth, many Labour candidates have the same hopes and illusions. Before the campaign Tony Benn was very critical of New labour. He proclaimed that he wanted a socialist Britain and a new (fifth) international which would unite Trotskyists and left labourites against the right-wingers. Corbyn was nearly expelled from the party because he supported the Irish republican struggle. Many labourite candidates openly rejected Blair's neo-liberal programme and stood for re-nationalisation of privatised companies. Scargill's programme is exactly the same as that of many left Labourites who wanted to remain in the party, win the election, and try to regain control over the party organisation.

WoVo's method is based on the same mistake that Trotsky pointed out in relation to the ILP. During the 1930s the ILP wanted to differentiate between progressive and regressive Labour candidates on the question of war, and they advocated a vote for the pacifists against the pro-war candidates. Trotsky said that this would only create more confusion because all of them, pacifist or not, are pro-capitalists, and the only reason to vote labour is to expose its bourgois leadership to its worker social base. In conclusion, WoVo doesn't have a Bolshevik or Trotskyist electoral policy for the British election. First they said one thing then later they said another. They said that they were incapable of resolving a line for Britain because they were not rooted in the British proletariat. Then they disregarded their own best advice and adopted a line based upon a subjective perception of facts, which led them to invent a new reality. Today, WoVo's tactic is based in two NO's: NO vote for Labour and NO to a left workers front against Labour. Nothing in concrete.

A question of method

In your official letter you sum up your differences: "Because the masses mobilize against Mobutu, the LCMRCI claims that they have tremendous illusions in Kabila as a liberator. Because the British working class votes overwhelming against the Tories, the LCMRCI claims that they believe Blair will protect them from the neo-liberal offensive." First, we never said that the masses "have tremendous illusions in Kabila as a "liberator" and we never said the British workers "believe Blair will protect them from the neo-liberal offensive." We said that in a context of a battle between a 32-year-old corrupt anti-Communist dictatorship and a "democratic" uprising led by a former Guevarist, it is logical that the masses would have illusions in the rebels. We never said that Blair would stop the neo-liberal offensive. We said that British workers believed that they could force Labour to stop the terrible attacks that the Conservatives were planning.

WoVo link the question of Congo and of the Labour Party together and say that they demonstrate a common methodological trend. We agree with that. There is a methodological difference between our currents. In both cases WoVo is closer to the Spartacists and the BT than with the positions that it held in the first issues of International Trotskyist. Both are key issues. One is related to our attitude towards mass reformist parties. The other is related to our attitude towards anti-dictatorial uprisings. In the countries ruled by parliamentarian systems we agree with WoVo and the Sparts/IBT that we should not vote for any bourgeois party. However, the difference is over how to deal with mass bourgeois workers parties. The Spartacist tradition, which is shared by their dissidents from VO and the IBT, is that we should put so many conditions on such parties that it is almost impossible to vote for them. The LCMRCI has the position that WoVo stood for in its first issue of International Trotskyist and which is also shared by the Trotskyist Manifesto.

However, today you seem to be more influenced by your former partners in the BT and the ILCC. The condition that you put on Labour for giving a critical vote means that you could not advocate a critical vote for any social democratic party in Europe. When the French workers voted for the Socialists/Communists against Chirac you could not try to intersect with them. In Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Denmark, Sweeden, Norway, Poland, Hungary and nearly all Europe you would advocate a "No" vote for the social democrats. In Australia, New Zealand, Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil and any other country with significant right wing mass reformist parties you would advocate abstention.

The issue of Congo is obviously not an isolated question. When you began International Trotskyist you shared the position that in the Iranian, Philippine and South African uprisings the main enemy were the dictatorships and that revolutionaries should participate in the mass anti-dictatorial movements without making a popular front with their bourgeois leaderships. Today you are moving towards Spartacist-type abstentionism. Again, in South Africa we saw a mass anti-apartheid movement led by a pro-US leader (Mandela). We didn't adopt an abstentionist position. We fought with the anti-racist masses without making any front with Mandela. In Burma, today, there is a mass movement against the military that is led by a pro-imperialist woman. We have the same method. Without making any front with the bourgeois opposition we have to be involved in all anti-dictatorial mass actions. Your method would lead you to propose dual defeatism. After the formation of Zaire-Congo it is inevitable that there will be other anti-dictatorial uprisings in black Africa. When a conflict becomes a fratricidal war in which different communities fight over who will oppress the other one (as in Rwanda) we must advocate a revolutionary defeatist position in both sides. However, when the movement assumes a mass anti-dictatorial character, even if it is led by a reactionary and pro-US pseudo-democrat who plans to become a new dictator, we cannot advocate a simple dual defeatism. We need to be with the masses trying to transform the anti-dictatorial uprising into a revolution.

Your method is abstentionist. For you it is of no consequence if the dictatorship crushes the rebellion, or if the rebellion wins. For us, the important question is to open the road for a revolution and for that purpose, instead of being neutral in a conflict, it is necessary to intervene in the mass movement to try to radicalise its demands and forms of organisation.

Regroupment

In his letter comrade Dov is very hard on us over our policy of regroupment. We will try to explain to him and WoVo how we see the process of reproachment. When we left the LRCI our first priority was to unite the CWG (New Zealand) with PO (Peru), PO (Bolivia) and isolated comrades in Europe. After nine months we managed to create the Liaison Committee. We don't think that we are the centre of the re-foundation of the trotskyist international but rather a component of that process, and we want to create a broader committee and regroupment process with other left-moving forces. Different forces have approached us on regroupment from Militant's international through to Altamira's tendency. In Britain the CP suggested we become an open faction inside it. In Bolivia we engaged in some discussions with the Trotskyist Opposition and in Peru with different Socialist circles. Our New Zealand comrades talk periodically to the Australian Communist Left. In Latin America, CITO and the LBI are the closest groups to us and we travelled to discuss with them. In Britain some comrades who left WP started to organise a journal of debate "Results and Prospect" and to try to regroup with individual comrades who came from other traditions. In the Anglo-speaking Trotskyist tradition there are two international currents with some proximity to the LRCI. They are the ITC and the LTT. After our rupture they both approached us.

With the ITC we have many agreements on different aspects of the international class struggle. However, an important barrier between us is their conception of party building. They don't put enough emphasis on programmatic development and stress activism among the socially oppressed. They don't have a policy of regroupment. The LTT also proposed that we enter into a regroupment process. We have some similarities on the character of the world period and the restoration of bourgeois states in the east. An important difference was on Bosnia. However, after some debate some members of the WIL started to rethink their original position and to accept that it was not possible to defend the Muslims after 1994. They were more open-minded and its international tendency (LTT) appeared even more open. We adopted at least five joint resolutions after a very democratic discussion in which different LCMRCI sections, from Peru to Canada and New Zealand, made amendments. In December 96 we had a joint public meeting with the WIL in London which debated the question of regroupment in front of the left.

Up to that point we had not been able to involve WoVo in our reproachment process. WoVo was in the ILCC and its project of making a wider regroupment with left Stalinists, Lora and the JVP. After Dave's visit in December 1996, WoVo put more enthusiasm into the idea of participating in a wider committee with us and the LTT. In February one of your leading comrades travelled to the WIL congress. She tried to involve the LTT, the LCmrci and WoVo in a Committee for a Trotskyist International (CTI). Unfortunately the WIL had a very serious crisis. The wing which advocated a more active orientation and to go forward towards fusion with us was defeated. The WIL supported a coalition of comrades with a strong pro-Labour orientation with conservative comrades who were afraid of any change to the passive routine. That result interrupted the regroupment process with the WIL.

We tried to deepen our links with WoVo. We understand that the idea of creating a broader committee is to make a FORUM in which different tendencies can discuss and debate their policies in internal and public bulletins and collaborate in practical activity. WoVo is a national group and we thought it possible to incorporate you into our Liaison Committee of militants for a revolutionary communist international. Our comrades in London, Auckland and Lima put a lot of effort into that task in collaboration with your comrades in Detroit. However, problems started when you approved a different line on Labour and when you over-exaggerated our differences on Congo.

It is Dov's letter, not us, which is proposing to end relations with us. In his letter c Dov condemns the LCMRCI's policy of regroupment. For him it is completely dominated by one single individual who doesn't "try to achieve a principled agreement with left moving currents within the Trotskyist movement. Rather he is *trying to unite the left and the right of the movement. He was rushing to fusion discussions with the WIL, a very right wing organization. He wanted to include them in the CTI, and he used their delays and unserious attitude toward the CTI to keep the CTI on the back burner."

We will deal with each of these accusations. First, no LCMRCI individual decides on regroupment. All the resolutions adopted with the LTT were adopted with the participation of the LCMRCI comrades from different countries. The role of this one comrade is only that of co-ordination. Our LC doesn't have an international secretariat and it is slow moving when it has to take decisions on serious changes like on the regroupment question. Rather than accepting such a delay, and when he is speaking on questions on which the LCMRCI are agreed, c. Jaime tries to reply to letters as soon as possible. Where the LCMRCI needs to take a decision, c. Jaime will only give his own view or wait until all the sections adopt a common view. Since the formation of the LCMRCI, this procedure is the one we have followed.

It is WoVo that has an erratic position on regroupment. One in which WoVo's official letter encouraging regroupment is contradicted by c. Dov's personal letter threatening rupture. First, you want to make a CTI with the WIL and us. Then only with us. Even later c. Dov says that we are right wing centrists and "almost criminals." Second, c. Dov consider the WIL as "a very right wing organization". So, why did WoVo sent a comrade to the WIL's congress? Why did that c. not say that in front of the WIL? Why do you propose to create the CTI with the WIL? Furthermore, the name CTI was decided in a joint meeting between c. Liza, c. Jaime and 3 members of the WIL's CC.

Third, for you the WIL is a very right wing, but you consider the ITC as something even worse: "The ITC is even more rotten than the WIL...is a reactionary petty bourgeois cult that has very little to do with the workers' movement. ...On the programmatic questions the RWL and the RIL are extremely petty bourgeois and sectoralist" As we have said, we have differences with these two currents. However, we think they are part of the left of the so-called Trotskyist movement. You over-exaggerate the differences and replace serious and scientific characterisations with insults. A "very right wing group" means that such a group is close to counter-revolutionary reformism. A "reactionary petite bourgeois cult" is outside the proletariat and not even part of our class. It would be closer to fascism than communism.

Fourth, c. Dov says that our one comrade who dominates the LCMRCI wants to unite the left and the right of the movement. No. We want to create an organisational framework of debate, political discussion and collaboration with left Trotskyist forces that share a common rejection of the IC and IS tradition; that defend every non-imperialist country against imperialist attacks; that see this world period as one dominated by reaction and capitalist restoration; that defend working class independence against popular fronts and which call for the defence of the surviving workers states against restoration. For example, in Europe there are some moves towards organising a conference with the Austrian dissidents of the LRCI, the LTT, two Swedish groups and one group in France. We would like to involve the ITC, LBI, the CITO and some North American groups, like WoVo.

However, for c. Dov every body is right wing. C. Liza was trying to set up a North American CTI with the Bolshevik Current, the Socialist Revolutionary Group in New York, the Ben Burgis' Marxist Group and very probably the LRP. However, all of these groups are much more qualified to be c. Dov's "right wing centrists". If c. Dov believes that we have an "almost criminal" position on the Congo, he will have to find an even more extreme word to describe the Bolshevik Current position on that conflict. They not only called for a victory to Kabila but they consider his movement as a democratic petit bourgeois one. They also supported Yanayev's coup in 1991. How on earth can it be possible to label us as "almost criminals" while c. Liza sent letters to the Bolshevik Current in Canada saying that WoVo thinks they have many methodological questions in common, and when she wrote to us to say that she was expecting to have a CTI with a Canadian section very soon? Does CTI mean "CRIMINAL Trotskyist Internationalism"?

WoVo regroupment policy has two faces, or maybe it reflects two different approaches towards regroupment in WoVo? Ben Burgis' group and the LRP are not defencists because they are state capitalists. It means that they are more Stalino-phobic and, for that reason, more "right wing centrists" than the LTT. The New York group is very critical of WoVo and they told to us that they stood with the LCMRCI on all the points of the debates, and they agree with us on Congo, Bosnia and Labour. So, they also have to be considered as "right wing centrist" and "almost criminal."

Fifth, for c. Dov: "Now that it has become clear that the WIL will not become part of the CTI, Jaime wants to delay the formation once again, until the RIL joins." This is completely false. We wanted to build a broader committee with as many left forces as it possible. Comrade Dov is the one that doesn't know what to do. On the one hand he accuses us, and by implication every other group which may join a regroupment committee, as right wing and criminals. On the other hand he accuses us of delaying a project in which he doesn't appear to be interested, or which he appears to use only for factional manoeuvres.

Time to Think.

The comrades from WoVo need to re- examine their position on regroupment. The LCMRCI open its doors to a healthy discussion without provocation, insults and manoeuvres. If you don't want to have a loyal relationship you will cut your bridges to any other regroupment process. You need to stop and think what you are doing. All the groups and individuals which are in the LCMRCI were in a left centrist current, like the New Zealand Communist Left and the pro-Lora in the Andes, and then were around the LRCI for 4, 5 or more years until they broke. All of us have, with all our mistakes, a clear and consistent evolution. At the same time that many of us were making that evolution in politics WoVo zigzagged through a range of different realignments. Its initial nucleus was inside Healyism, an ultra-sectarian stalino-phobic and pro-Arab nationalistIC group, and later Morenoism, one of the most right-wing opportunist currents. Then WoVo fused with the IBT, an ex-Spartacist and pro-Stalinist sect. Later they created the RTT in fraternal relations with the LRCI. In late 1991 you appeared to be the best defenders of the LRCI's Trotskyist Manifesto but within one year you had shifted towards a pro-Stalinist group with a completely different program from the TM. You initiated a regroupment process with the ITO that failed and resulted in a split in which you accuse them of being right-wing centrists. In 1996 you broke with the ILCC. In late 1996 you approached us and the LTT for regroupment talks and six months later it seems c. Dov wants to break relations with us.

There is no continuity in your evolution. You seem to shift from one to other direction, from fusing with a current that is on one extreme to a current that is at another pole. C. Dov wants to break with us because he discovered that we have differences on Labour and Congo. However, he FUSED with other currents that had even DEEPER political differences. Healy combined a catastrophist analysis that led him to sectarian self-proclamation, tailing Arab nationalism and adapting to Stalino-phobia. Morenoist strategy is based on camouflaging every bourgeois or reformist mass movement while demanding any popular institution (from a bourgeois parliament to anti-communist restorationists and popular fronts) to take power and make socialism. The IBT didn't defend Argentina or Iran against imperialism and neither the working class against Jaruselski (and later Yanayev) coups. The ILCC didn't defend Argentina against imperialism or the Kurds against Hussein's massacres and they wanted to create an International with Stalinists and the JVP left-killers.

In his letter c. Dov said that we have similar methods to the LRCI. We reject Harvey's LRCI but we accept many positive contributions of Dave Hughes' LRCI in the eighties. At least we have some tradition to defend? What is your tradition? C. Dov seems to had adopted Healy's way of slandering all his opponents with the worst insults and to try to be the champions of "dialectics" which are a strange mixture of contradictions and distortions of reality. From Morenoism he appears to inherit its zigzag method of fusing and splitting with the most diverse currents. From the IBT he maintains a conception of the small propaganda group and similar sectarian positions on Labour and Congo. From the ILCC, WoVo appears to inherit some of its methodological mistakes on Serbia and reformism. On the other hand, many of WoVo's good features come from its early connections with the most healthy period of the LRCI from which you split in a left wing direction.

In some of his polemics, c. Dov makes some good points (like in the debate with the LRCI over the Yeltsin coup). However, he seems politically unstable and incapable of being part of an international. Important political differences are minimised and less important differences are maximised. Many left groups with little connection to the working class suffer from a "splits and fusions" illness. Incapable of penetrating into the masses they spend most of their lives approaching small groups with the aim of launching campaigns of attacks to provoke splits which they can build on. Sometimes this tactic takes an initial flattering approach that exposes internal problems in the target group which can be exploited. The initial flirtation is replaced by the "discovery" of differences, which always existed, but which now can be exaggerated for purely factionalist purposes.

Unfortunately this illness is endemic on the left in the main imperial powers and the Spartacists are not the only example of that. C. Dov seems influenced by this method. Why has c. Dov become hostile to us? Perhaps he doesn't have a fraternal method of resolving differences and he likes to create easy labels. Perhaps he doesn't agree with the regroupment line that was being implemented from Detroit and behind his hostility to us he is reproaching his comrades in Detroit. Perhaps c. Dov is trying to recruit one of our former members. Whatever his reasons, his way of dealing with regroupment will discredit WoVo enormously. After all the propaganda and coverage that they made about us, nobody will believe that WoVo is a serious regroupment partner. We ask the comrades of WoVo to think again about what they are doing.

The LCMRCI remains open to the debate and to a healthy collaboration. We want to build a broader Committee of forces interested in working for a Trotskyist International. However, it is quite opportunistic to try to make a committee with a group that you characterise as right wing centrists and "almost criminal". If these formulations only reflect the opinion of one individual and not WoVo as a whole, you should say so and apologise to us. But if this is the position of WoVo it can only mean that you are not interested in working with us any more. We hope that you read this letter, think about it, and take more seriously your relations with us.

Methodological differences and way forward.

In all the whole of this document we deal with our political differences. We don't use any kind of personal abuse or character assassination. We don't use insults or false accusations. We expose our own views in a calm and militant Marxist way. There exist methodological differences between our currents. The LCMRCI agrees that the LRCI was in its most healthy period in the 1980s, though some of us think that even at that time there was a failure to break decisively with centrism that we need to study and discuss among ourselves. So we are far from perfect. But WoVo doesn't identify with any consistent tradition. In fact, you were an erratic group around very different currents. You never broke completely with these currents and your positions seem to result from juxtapositions of the methods of these highly contradictory traditions.

The result is a series of contradictions, shifts and conflicting positions. On Labour and the Congo we didn't change. We showed that you were the ones that modified your positions. You used arguments from the most healthy period of the LRCI against the Spartacist currents but you also used Spartacists arguments against us. You want to distance yourself from the Spartacist abstentionist petite bourgeois traditions while you adapt to them. Your positions on mass reformist parties and on anti-dictatorial uprisings mean that you would only vote for clear anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist mass parties and that in any conflict in which there is no clear side fighting against imperialism you would advocate its defeat. You put up so many obstacles to the right for self-determination that you not only denied that right to the peoples of former Yugoslavia (except the Serbs) but also for most Europe.

You might try to use the term "dialectics" to try to explain away so many contradictions. But we don't believe that you have demonstrated your method to be "dialectical". Rather "dialectics" reveals itself in the form of your many contradictory positions. Your inability to confront ideas with ideas led you to use abusive language and to distort other comrades’ opinions. Even more dangerous is your tendency to accommodate reality to pre-fixed schemas. Without any evidence you can construct an entirely new world. You can say that Kabila is much less popular than the minority Tutsi dictatorship in Rwanda that is opposed by most of its population. You can distort completely what is happening in Britain. You can say that Labour is at the point of no longer being a bourgeois workers party and that it is a new Tory party making even worse attacks than the old Tories, that Labour has been qualitatively changed by Tory defectors and the defection of left dissidents, and many other claims that we have shown to be false.

You must be the only left group that can say that the Bosnian Muslims are an oppressor nation. Just like you play around with reality, you also play around with characterisations and the fusion process. In a relatively few years you were fusing, or engaged in fusion talks, with nearly all the variants of the International Committee tradition. All of them were called revolutionaries and then shortly afterwards right wing centrists. You were incapable of creating any international framework with any body and you remain a small propaganda group in the most passive and wealthy imperialist power.

Despite everything we have said in this letter we hope that it will be possible to persuade you to re-examine your positions. We always wanted to co-ordinate all the forces that broke with the LRCI to the left. It seems that our methodological differences, and especially the way in which you deal with them, are an obstacle to any fusion at the moment. Nevertheless we would like to continue a high level of co-operation, political discussion and preparation for a joint broader conference and discussion bulletin.

LCMRCI  July 1997

Polemic: The Dissolution of the Workers' International League.

What is behind the Workers Action-Workers Fight dispute? The British Workers International League (WIL), one of the most Left-wing of Trotskyists groups, has been dissolved. While most of the WIL's former members are now outside any group, two of its offspring groups (Workers Action and Workers Fight) are now engaged in a bitter dispute. This article will examine the political achievements of the WIL, the reasons for its collapse, and argue that these, and the problems that the two different groups and individuals are facing today, are consequences of the legacy of Healyism in particular, and of post-war 'orthodox' Trotskyism in general.

The Origins of the WIL.

In 1985 under the pressure of the collapse of the left before Thatcher's neo-liberal offensive, the British
WRP fell apart and the comrades who later set up the WIL supported the wrong side in the split. They
backed Gerry Healy's minority which adapted to Glasnost as a political revolution?

In 1987 they created a new group, the WIL, which was very much influenced by left orthodox trotskyists
currents like Workers Powers, the International Trotskyist Committee and comrades like Al Richardson.

They rejected their former view that the anti-`Pabloite' International Committee was the most progressive
side in the breakdown of the Fourth International in 1953-54. They arrived at the position that in postwar
Eastern Europe, China and Cuba new Degenerated Workers States had been created and that since their
inception new political revolutions were needed against Stalinism.

After the creation of the League for a Revolutionary Communist International (LRCI) in September 1989,
Workers Power and the WIL were engaged in fusion talks. Unfortunately the process was aborted. WP
initially tried to push for a quick unification without previous serious discussions and joint actions which
provoked an early rupture.

In the early 1990s the LRCI ceased to be an orthodox trotskyist group as it revised its programmatic
positions and organisational structure. The WIL adopted a much more orthodox position on the nature of the
world situation and on the character of the transition from degenerate workers states to bourgeois states.
While WP typified the international period as a revolutionary one and for eight years continued to describe
all the countries east of Germany as Moribund Workers States, the WIL arrived at the conclusion that in
Eastern Europe the states that were promoting capitalism were incipient bourgeois states. This meant that
the period was one of an international strategic defeat for workers at the hands of the bourgeois reactionary
forces.

By 1989 Workers Power's had developed an orthodox trotskyist position which led it to propose that
capitalism was the main enemy and, for that reason, it sided with the Stalinist bureaucracies against the
social counter- revolution. Initially WP opposed a common constituent assembly for the two Germanys and
blocked with the Stalinists against the Bourgeois nationalist uprising in Azerbaijan and the Rumanian
student demonstrations led by liberal and monarchists.

However, WP's orthodoxy proved to be shallow. In the early 1990's under pressure from the transition in the
workers states WP adopted an optimistic view of the world period. They viewed the transition in the East
initially as the beginning of a political revolution. This lead to a retreat from revolutionary defencism. WP
started to consider Stalinism as the main enemy so that it was necessary to make united fronts with
bourgeois democrats and nationalists against them. WP ended up supporting a common (bourgeois)
constituent assembly for both China and Germany, a united front with Yeltsin, that the imperialist powers
should give weaponry, money and men to assist their Balkan puppets against the bombed Serbs, etc.

The WIL also had a contradictory position. On the one hand it managed to adopt a more realistic analysis of
the period based on the counter-revolutionary overthrow of the former workers states, however it never
broke completely with Healy's Stalino-phobia. While the WIL saw correctly that the bourgeois
counter-revolution had the initiative and that it was the greatest danger in the East, they did not adopt a
consistent revolutionary defencist view.

In Rumania the WIL supported the monarchist students against the miners who came to Bucharest to
defend their living conditions against the privatisation which were demanded by the university's leaders. In
Poland 81 they think that it was possible to fight for a Solidarnosc government, while we believe that a
Walessa presidency would have been a point of departure for capitalist restoration.

In Azerbaijan, the Baltic and the Balkans the WIL supported all the separatist movements. In that sense they
adopted a more consistent position than WP which in the first case supported the Soviet Army, in the
second, asked Thatcher to give practical support to the Lithuanian bourgeois nationalist government, and in
the third case sided with all possible camps in different moments.

In the former Yugoslavia the WIL supported the self-determination and independence of Croatia and
Bosnia, but it refused to give the same rights to the Serbs who lived in those countries and who were the
majority of the population in a third of Croatia and in two thirds of Bosnia. We did not support the
breakdown of multi-ethnic Yugoslavia in order to create a pro-German and Muslim-nationalist led
multi-ethnic Bosnia which was heavily resisted by its native Serb populations. In the war we called for
inter-ethnic militias and councils against any pogroms, and for transforming the intra-communal war into a
class war which should unite the workers from all nationalities against imperialism and restorationists.

In winter 1994 - when the Croat-Muslim confederation was set up under US, German and EU protection -
the WIL was still calling for the support of the Bosnian forces. In August 95 when the Croat-Muslim block
launched the offensive which led to the entire ethnic cleansing of two historic Serb areas, the WIL's paper
had a cover which called for arming the Bosnians. In that conjuncture we insisted that the worst enemy was
the US and its allies in the region who were backing NATO's worst bombardment ever and the
unprecedented ethnic cleansing of the entire population of a republic (Krajina).

In its last years the WIL openly rejected Marx and Engels’ conception on the national question. They
adopted Rosdolski’s revision on the Marxist position regarding historical and non-historic nations. This is
not an academic debate. In fact, in a period in which liberal-democrats are on the offensive, the
Rosdolski-WIL thesis was that national self-determination was a principle that was universal in the phase of
early capitalism, and against Stalinism. Against Marx, Lenin and Trotsky who always subordinated national
rights to class questions, the WIL adaptation to nationalism led them to unconditionally support every
national movement even when it was led by a proto-bourgeoisie against a Degenerated Workers State.

In Palestine the comrades accepted the right of the Israeli nation to exist, and advanced a bi-national state
solution to the Palestine question. We reject allowing national rights to a religious congregation which is
trying to set up an artificial state on the basis of the expulsion of the native population. The Jewish settlers in
Israel come from different territories, cultures and societies and constitute different communities and not a
single nation. To recognise Israel's national rights would imply the recognition of its right to create a state on
the back of the oppressed Palestinians.

The LTT

The WIL formed a new international current: the Leninist Trotskyist Tendency (LTT). It included groups in
different continents and from very different traditions. The German and Belgian LTT were inside the USec
and the Parity Commission with Lambert and Moreno; the South African CWG were associated with the
International Committee; the Ceylonese WV were part of the Sammarakody/VO grouping; the Canadian
LTG were a new split from the Spartacists; and the Jamaican CWG were a group of comrades against the
PNP. The Swedish AFS are young comrades that were in the USec.

In 1996, when we founded the Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International
(LCMRCI), the WIL sent us a very short letter in which they said that they wanted to discuss with us in order
to create a united tendency that could have sections in all continents. We believed that the WIL and LTT had
some progressive positions and that it might be possible to overcome their limitations. Most of the LTT
groupings were also at the same time trying to discuss with the LRCI, but the arrogant sectarianism of WP's
ruling clique avoided any possible rapprochement.

We started a process of discussions and we elaborated around ten joint resolutions. Nearly all of these
documents were produced by us and one of the current members of WF. Twice we had international public
meetings. The LCMRCI and the LTT were capable of forging a serious pole of attraction that could have
created a framework of political discussion and revolutionary regroupment. The USA Workers Voice group
and the Brazilian Internationalist Bolshevik League (LBI) wanted to also participate in that process. A
Spartacist supporter produced a special web page devoted to attacking this regroupment process.

However, these possibilities were damaged by some negative pressures from inside the WIL. On one
hand, there were many demoralised comrades who were pushing the group to became a very passive and
fatalist club. On the other hand, there were some comrades that were pushing the WIL towards the open
rejection of some positions from Marx or Trotsky.

In the mid-1990s the WIL put a lot of effort in building its own faction inside the British USec section
(Socialist Outlook). However, instead of wining comrades from that milieu towards trotskyism or its
traditional positions, the WIL was being influenced and changed by that milieu. In 1995 the pro-WIL faction
inside Socialist Outlook made an unprincipled block with SO’s right-wing faction in order to win the
leadership. This manoeuvre creates a very serious problem inside the WIL. The comrades who later would
found Workers Fight originally started to question the WIL’s orientation on this point.

The adaptation to SO led the WIL to very Labourite perspectives. The WIL's congress (February 97)
adopted a resolution that referred only to work inside the Labour Party. At that time we said that it was
correct to give critical vote to Labour or to make a faction inside it. But we also said that revolutionaries
should understand that due to Blair's right turn, many activists were trying to develop movements outside a
very right wing reformist party which had very little left internal life. We argued strongly that an orientation
should be made also towards Socialist Labour, the Socialist Alliance and other movements at the left of
Labour.

The pro-Labourite comrades inside the WIL were against any orientation towards the non-Labour milieu.
They made a block with some passive comrades who were afraid of any aggressive intervention in order to
postpone the discussion process with us. In the elections the WIL called for a vote for Labour, Scargill,
Sheridan and Nellis. However, they were against voting for the rest eighty socialist candidates (even in
places where SLP candidates had more votes than Scargill or where they stood with a good performance
against Scargill -like Vauxhall or Cardiff). Later, the same comrades that were against any serious tactical
orientation towards the SLP tried to produce a fusion with SLP's Socialist Perspectives.

After that congress the WIL simply ignored all its previous agreements in favour of joint discussions,
aggregates and statements. They never gave any explanation and they never bother to reply any of our
letters. Workers Voice (US) unexpectedly reversed its attempt to join the LCMRCI and to support our
electoral line, and suddenly adopted the position that Labour had become a bourgeois party. Not long after
this the group disintegrated. Its Detroit branch surprisingly changed its position on the August 1991 coup in
Russia backing the hard-line Stalinists.

During 1997 all the internal contradictions inside the WIL developed to the point where they produced the
dissolution of the organisation. The groups Workers Action and Workers Fight appeared later. However,
neither of these groups contained the majority of the WIL historic membership. Most of these comrades no
longer belong to any organisation. One of the most talented WIL leaders, comrade Bob Pitt, is producing
What Next? a journal which also carries internal discussions amongst the LTT. Another very important WIL
leading cadre, Ian H., left the WIL with other older comrades, attacking its turn towards the USec.

The majority of the international Leninist Trotskyist Tendency does not back either Workers' Action (WA) or
Workers' Fight (WF). The German, Belgium and South African comrades are critical of both groups. None
of them are producing a paper. The South African CWG, which is the largest LTT section, considers that
WA is moving away from Trotsky and towards the right and that WF is producing a trade union paper which
is not a party organ nor a united front bulletin. The Canadian group has dissolved. The Jamaican CWG was
not accepted as a section. The Ceylonese WV is not very integrated. The Swedish group has critically
backed WA.

Workers Action: moving away from Trotskyism

The WIL split happen in a non-serious way. The first issues of Workers Action and Workers FIGHT did not
give a clear account of the reasons of the rupture and still now it is not clear for the vanguard what were the
clear political motives of it. However, following the articles that these comrades published in their own press
and in What Next? it is possible to see their different political evolution. WA is not interested at all in
discussing with any of the groups which participated in the WIL February congress. They are not interested
in building an international liaison committee for re-founding a trotskyist international. In What Next? #8 a
WA comrade said that they want to regroup with non-trotskyist organisations and not necessarily on a
trotskyist basis. In that article and in Workers Action #5, a talented WA comrade wrote that the Transitional
Programme had several errors. It was wrong to characterise the pre-Second World War period as a
pre-Revolutionary one. He supported Gramsci's critiques on Trotsky that he was too voluntarist. He
mentioned that Trotsky was wrong when he repressed Kronstadt or when he did not make a block with
Bukharin's right-wing opposition against Stalin. The `trotskyist movement' had been infested with sects and
is time to accept some heterodox views (like the one formulated by Critique) and many academic Marxists.

Comrade Bob Pitt, the editor of What Next?, in a more honest and consistent way argued that Trotsky's
transitional programme was wrong and that revolutionaries should return to the minimum-maximum
programme. Consequently, he explained that the left could support Livingstone’s (Labour-left) programme.
Workers Action does not share all that views but comrade Pitt is showing the path that they are coming to
progressively follow.

WA is centred in the Labourite milieu and is becoming indistinguishable with Socialist Outlook. It seems
quite likely that it will move away from the LTT corpse and join the USec. Not surprisingly WA is also moving
away from orthodox trotskyism. Their attack on Trotsky's attitude towards Kronstadt and Bukharin is linked
with their pro-democratic position in the former `socialist' block.

For the founding leader of the Red Army capitalist counter-revolution (and not bureaucratic degeneration)
was the main enemy. Trotsky suppressed the anarchist rebellion in Kronstadt because it was demanding
more market concessions to the petite bourgeoisie and a weakening of the proletarian dictatorship. He did
not make a rotten block with Bukharin against Stalin because in the late 1920s the Right opposition
programme was demanding the creation of a rich Kulak class (rural bourgeoisie) and a path towards
capitalism. If the Left Opposition had made a front with the Right against the centre it would had contributed
to undermining the deformed workers state developing the NEPmen and the new agrarian capitalist class.

Trotsky's position against any alliance with the right against Stalinism has been rejected by Mandel,
Moreno, Harvey and all who demanded a block with Yeltsin, Havel, Tudjman or the pro-Western nationalists
and `democrats' against the totalitarian stalinist ruling caste. But assisting the restorationists made the
outcome even worse than the Stalinist tyranny. The destruction of the planned economy and the creation of
a market economy based on massive unemployment, misery, privatisation and destruction of labour
security and social benefits, is a remedy that, even if it is under a parliamentarian regime, is much worse
than the illness. WA has also claimed that some Western Marxists have added more to Marxism that
post-war trotskyism. Gramsci has been cited as one of those Marxists. But Gramsci supported Stalin
against Trotsky and laid the foundations for Euro-Communism. He was against Trotsky's idea of the
transitional demands and building a compact revolutionary party. His position was to build step by step a
cultural and ideological hegemony inside the capitalist state.

WA's rejection on Trotsky's 'voluntarism' is linked with its passivism and fatalism and its mole-like Labourite
approach. WA believes that Trotsky was wrong in describing the late 1930s as a pre-Revolutionary
situation. Yet five years after the Transitional Programme had made that characterisation, the world
experienced a large revolutionary wave. From Berlin and Belgrade to Beijing, capitalism was starting to be
overthrown by one third of mankind. In France, Italy and Greece workers militias and red partisans had
formidable power which they gave up to the `democratic' imperialism.

The fact that a post-war boom replaced the revolutionary years does not mean that the 1940s were one of
the most revolutionary periods in history. If WP is so blind that it is trying to see revolutionary advances in a
period of social counter-revolutions, WA is going in the other way round. They are adopting a fatalistic and
pessimistic approach of history.

In summary, the comrades from WA are becoming the sort of free-thinking pro-labourites around the USec
who are always trying to `discover' new mistakes in Marx, Lenin or Trotsky and new advances made by
'western marxists'. In fact, what they are doing is re-taking the positions of old Mensheviks or centrists.

Workers Fight

The main motive that pushed the WIL's left wing to create WF was its battle against the majority's
adaptation towards the USec and its constant appeals to revise the classics. WF proclaimed that they were
going to defend the transitional programme and the necessity of a regroupment with all the left-oriented
trotskyist forces. In that sense they were in general a progressive split. However, the comrades are still
influenced by the same WIL methods, which they say they are trying to overcome. We can see these in two
aspects: programme and methods of debate.

On the national question WF are quite confused. They are now accept the necessity of defending the Serbs
against NATO bombardments but it still need to overcome its former pro-Bosnian position. In Palestine WF
does not demand the destruction of the Israeli state and if thinks that a revolutionary organisation can print
articles from left-Zionist supporters in their paper. WF supports the CWG in Jamaica despite its wrong vote
for the bourgeois neo-liberal PNP that was already in power making strong austerity attacks on workers
and its advocacy of third-world socialism and autarky.

In Russia, Workers FIGHT #2 proposed the immediate election of a Zyuganov government and later a new
government based in the CPRF left. This is the kind of method that Healy or Moreno used to have
advocating a progressive succession of radical governments, which have to be born on electoral basis. On
the question of Labour it is permissible to promote a revolutionary faction inside but not to have a
permanent advert in the paper advising all WF readers to join Blair's party.

In summary, WF is to the left of WA and is formation was a necessary, albeit insufficient, response to the
passive and post-trotskyist WA dynamic.

The moral debate

In a recent statement comrade Charli Langford from Workers' Action wrote that "the central factor that
caused" the dissolution and split of the WIL was the attitude "that (the minority) took to the sexual
misconduct case that we had to hear and decide on in July 1997." We won’t repeat the details of that
accusation because we don't have enough information on that issue to take a position and we are still
waiting for WF's version. However, even if all the accusations of WA against comrade Steve are true,
nobody has suggested his expulsion from the organisation or from the workers movement. He is not being
accused of rape, betraying a strike, or crossing class lines.

When comrade Steve entered in the WIL in early 1997 he was a strong supporter of the group's pro-Labour
and anti-LCMRCI wing. We rejected his position of forming a `Revolutionary Labour Group' and his position
in favour of accepting an Israeli state and objecting to revolutionary defeatism in the Second World War.
We have many disagreements with the comrade and, if the verdict that was adopted by comrades from the WIL's majority and minority (WA and WF) was correct (something that we don't know), we most probably would have voted with them for a suspension of six-months.

However, it is very opportunistic to try to use this case in order to discredit a new group and avoid a political
debate. Comrade Steve could be criticised by his positions and his moving in and out of different groups,
nevertheless he has proved to be a very energetic comrade who has built very successful campaigns
(solidarity with our Bolivian former comrade Eleuterio Guiterrez, unionisation of supermarket workers, rally
against le Pen, Bosnia Aid, etc.). His dedication to the labour movement produced some significant
tragedies in his own life.

It is very dishonest of the comrades of WA to try to take the opportunity of a possible mistake to liquidate
him. They claimed that this incident would have paralysed the WIL so it was necessary to dissolve the
organisation and to found a new group. But this is not the way in which an organisation which has been in
existence for a decade should liquidate itself. The comrades from Workers Fight correctly denounced this
move as an attempt to prevent further political discussions and to exclude them from the newly re-created
organisation.

We agree. Disputes over personal offences and internal discipline should not be used to avoid political
discussions. They are completely subordinated to the political and programmatical issues, which are in
dispute. WA should debate around them. These personal attacks are also damaging WA's own image. It is
also an expression of its lack of political arguments.

In our brief relation with the WIL we experienced how they often tried to substitute political debates with
manoeuvres and personal intrigues. How do they want to educate the vanguard or new cadres? Do they
think that their readers would be very impressed with these kinds of dirty wars? On the other hand, WF is
also trapped in that subjective web. They are also using personal abuses and adopting a paranoid attitude.
Threatening to use the bourgeois courts against WA is something that is not stopping them and, even
worst, is discrediting WF. There is no reason to call the bourgeois legal system and state to intercede in a
dispute on sexual abuse amongst people that call themselves revolutionaries.

WF should make a statement. If the comrade made a mistake he should confess. If the comrades doesn't
think that he made any mistake and that this is an incident which is being used to discredit WF's editor, they
can appeal to the LTT's control commission or to a moral tribunal amongst the far left or the labour
movement. However, we think that we should concentrate on the political issues, which are under debate.

Conclusion

We are experiencing the death of what it was a progressive left-oriented trotskyist current that came out of
the Healyite disintegration. Interestingly, the LRCI, another left-trotkyist organisation is also moving to the
right. The immediate cause of this regression of both currents is their incapacity to understand the post-89
social counter-revolutions and their adaptation towards the new democratic-liberal wave. If the LRCI is
becoming a cult around Harvey, the LTT is atomising. More decisive is the tendency of all currents of
post-war trotskyism towards liquidating the vanguard party. This makes the tendency to shift away from a
revolutionary politics towards petty bourgeois class interests impossible to reverse unless its root causes in
method and class composition are understood and corrected. The LTT, like the LRCI, reclaimed some of
the elements of orthodox trotskyism in the 1980's, but these were shallow developments that could not
survive the counter-revolutionary defeats of the 1980's and 1990's. WA is moving away from what remains
of the programmatic achievements of the WIL. In that process many former LTT comrades are being
demoralised and the resistance that some comrades are making is insufficient.

We urge all the former LTT comrades to discuss with the LCMRCI in order to overcome the causes of the
degeneration of postwar trotskyism and build a new revolutionary international. We also demand WA to
stop its dirty war against WF and that WF should abandon its threat to use the bourgeois courts. Both
groups should renounce subjective disputes and discuss in the front of the class and the vanguard their
REAL political differences so that they can be judged in the court of the class struggle.

John Stone December 1998

By John Stone

Israel has just celebrated its 50th anniversary. The 'peace settlements' have pushed the PLO leadership, Egypt and Jordan to recognise Israel. It seems that Syria and other Arab states will do the same. There are almost 4 million Jews in the State of Israel and many elements of a Hebrew-speaking nation. Is it the time to abandon our demand for the destruction of the Israeli state and its replacement with a secular, multi-ethnic, democratic and Soviet Palestine, and to advocate a united front with the PLO and the Zionist left in order to achieve a bi-national state or a two-state solution to the Arab- Israeli conflict? This article will examine the programmatic positions of the most left-wing Zionists. We will explain what the Marxist position on the Palestine question must be and why we cannot recognise any national rights of Israel.

Left Zionism's backward evolution.

In the early years of the Communist International, Poalei Zion (Workers Zion) participated as observers in
some of its activity. This current tried to fuse Marxism with Jewish nationalism. For them the Jews where a
nation without a territory. In order to make a socialist revolution the Jews needed first to create its own state
and multi-class society.

Poalei Zion initially accepted the possibility of a bi-national Arab-Hebrew state but later they backed the
division of Palestine and the creation of a pure Jewish state. Poalei Zion became one of the pillars of the
MAPAM, which achieved around one fifth of the votes in the first Israeli elections. The MAPAM initially
combined Marxist and Leninist phraseology with its active integration in the Hagana (Israeli army), the
Histadrut (Israeli anti-Palestinian corporate union) and the Labour Zionist cabinets. They built many kibutzim
and they believed that these islands of rural collectivism where the seeds of socialism.

MAPAM survived as the left wing of Zionism and many Labour governments. It backed Israel in all its wars
against the Arabs. In the late 1940s the MAPAM capitalised on the pro-Moscow sentiment that was created
all over the world resulting from Hitler's defeat and Stalin’s backing the creation of Israel. Before the
creation of the Israeli state many thought that the Jews where in general an oppressed people despite that
the Zionists wanted to transform them into colonial settlers against the Arab native population. However,
Israel became an oppressor whose existence was based in the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of
native Palestinians, and the founding of a US pillar against all the anti- imperialist movements in the Middle
East.

A "Marxist" movement that adapts to forms of third-world nationalism can survive with some radical
proposals. However, a socialist movement that became an apologist of an expansionist and colonialist
power would become more and more reactionary. Moving to the right MAPAM was loosing its initial roots
and became confused with the pragmatic Zionists.

Around ten years ago MAPAM, Shilumit Aroni's Ratz and Shinui created Meretz, a political front that in
1997 became officially a united party. Ratz was a movement in favour of constitutional rights and Shinui was
an ultra-liberal organisation committed to Thatcherite economics in a context of liberal concessions to the
Palestinians. The Shinui believed that the best way to develop an open `free market' was to allow Israel to
be a county at peace with its neighbours and with the capacity to export capital to them.

On February 1997 the founding convention of the new Meretz Party adopted its `Basic Principles'. In it there
is no mention of the struggle against imperialism or for socialism and for a working class based party.
MAPAM simply abandoned any class reference. Meretz proclaimed the combination of `the values of
enlightened liberalism and democratic socialism'. A few countries had already experienced the fusion
between their political extremes on economic issues. Just as it is impossible to fuse oppressive
nationalism with any form of socialism, nor is it possible to combine Thatcherite economics with any form of
progressive economic reforms. The former Zionist collectivists abandoned their initial goals and accepted
a neo-liberal agenda.

MAPAM gave up all its former demands for state intervention and rural collective expansions. Now it
accepts neo-conservative economics. `Initiative, profitability, and fair competition between all sections of
the economy will be facilitated'. Meretz is in favour of privatising some of the companies that the `left
Zionists' put under public ownership. They only oppose privatisation of natural monopolies, education,
postal service and the welfare state. The rest, transport, communications, industries, arm production, etc.
could be sold.

For an exclusionist state

In all of its Basic Principles Meretz does not mention the struggle against anti-Semitism. The main purpose
of Zionism is to "struggle against assimilation which threatens the existence of the Jewish people in the
Diaspora". Assimilation means that Jews should abandon their religious-cultural values and became
assimilated into the nations in which they live. They want to stop that process. In places in which the Jewish
workers are struggling alongside their own class brothers and sisters against the bosses, they want to
divide the workers. The Jews have abandoned other workers to migrate to Israel in order to help Zionist
capitalists to build their own state.

"The Zionist objective of the State of Israel is to provide an open door for any Jew. Aliya [mass Jewish
emigration to Israel] is also a source of reinforcement for the State of Israel. Meretez sees Aliya to Israel,
with the goal of gathering the majority of the Jewish people in the state".

Meretz wants to move the majority of the fifteen million Jews all over the planet to Israel. Eight million Jews
in Israel would be a strong basis for maintaining a state. Its aim is doubly reactionary. On the one hand they
try to dislocate many Jews (some of which were the basis of many socialist and progressive movements in
their own countries) from their own homelands and to divide the working classes. On the other hand they
want to use the Jewish as colonial tools to consolidate a state founded on the expulsion of its native
population.

Regarding the Arabs, Meretz is the most `heretical' of all the Zionists. It is in favour of granting the right to
create a weak state in a minority of their former lands for `the Palestinian Arab people, which has lived in
this land for generations and which is now beginning to realise its right to national self-determination'. The
ones who are starting `to realise its right to national self-determination' are, precisely, Meretz. The
Palestinians fought for their own state in the 1947-48 wars and even before (like in the 1936 upheavals). It
was the Zionists who destroyed their aspirations.

In which territories will Meretz grant a Palestinian state? "In a context of the permanent settlement, Israel will
be obliged to vacate most of the territories occupied during to the Six Day War." Before the mass
expulsions of Palestinians after the creation of Israel, two thirds of Palestine where inhabited by Arabs. In
1947 the UN resolved to divide that land in around two halves. In 1947 Israel managed to conquer around
40% of the Palestinian half. Therefore the territories that Israel occupied after 1967 represents a small
fraction of Palestine.

For the left Zionists the Palestinians should accept not only the loss of the majority of their land but also of
some of the post-1967 occupied territories as well as their historically claimed capital. For the Palestinians
Jerusalem is their capital. For the Christian and Islamic Arabs it is one of their holy cities where they were
the majority of its population from the beginning of the first millennium until 1948. Until 1967 Eastern
Jerusalem (where is the historical city) was in Arab hands. Since then the Zionists have tried to buy Arab
land or to expel Palestinians. For Meretz "Jerusalem, Israel's capital, will never again be divided."

First the Zionists expelled the Palestinians. Next its left wing `discovered' that they want national rights.
Now, its most radical wing is prepared to concede a sort of independent Bantustan for them. For Meretz the
new Palestinian State should occupy less than a half of that half of Palestine that the UN undemocratically
resolved to give them in 1947. The Palestinians should give up 100% of Jerusalem and at least 75% of the
land in which they where the majority of the population when the British left 50 years ago.

The new Palestinian State should not have a contiguous territory and between its two main areas (Gaza
and the West Bank) Israel should be allowed to maintain a heavily guarded territory. The Palestinian State
not only would have to accept the ethnic cleansing of its own people by Israel but also to be an impotent and
unarmed scattered country surrounded and patrolled by Middle East's main Nuclear Power.

Meretz is also in favour of keeping and developing the strength and superiority of the Israel army: "The
protective might provided by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is the main guarantee for Israel's security,
even in an era of peace. The strength of the IDF and its technological and personal superiority over all the
other armies in the region must be ensured."

Israel a reactionary military machine

Israel has one of the most reactionary military machines. It destroyed the Palestinian State in 1948 and led
to millions of Palestinians being forced to live in the worst humanitarian conditions. Israel sided with France
and the UK against Nasser's nationalisation of the Suez Canal. It invaded Egypt in 1956,19 67 and 1973;
Jordan and Syria in 1967 and 1973. It helped the Kingdom of Jordan's bloody repression of the
Palestinians in 1970. It occupied southern Lebanon in the 1980s.

It unconditionally supported every US and NATO reactionary movements against any regime that has had
clashes with imperialism in the Middle East (Libya, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, etc.). It backed Turkey against the
Kurds, the largest nation without a state. It was one of the main enemies of all the de-colonising and
anti-imperialist movements through the entire planet. It legalised torture and killed many Arab children in the
Intifada and in its terrorist bombing and incursions into Lebanon. It helped the anti-`terrorist' commands in
Somoza's Nicaragua and in Peru. And what does it mean to "ensure" IDF's "superiority"? Perhaps to
develop more nuclear and bio-chemical weapons which can be used to make a holocaust that could be a
thousand times more devastating than Der Yasin?

In a country that has a very strong Jewish colonialist-fundamentalist camp, Meretz appeared as the most
extreme Zionist force concerning civic rights. In the state of Israel every Jew who was born in any other part
of the globe can have citizenship automatically. However, a Palestinian whose family inhabited that land for
centuries, is a second class citizen and does not have the right to return to the land or home from which
he/she was expelled in 1948 or 1967.

No Palestinian occupies any leading position in any Israeli government, the state or the army. Who decides
who is a Jew? It is not a secular entity or even any Jewish religious congregation. That right is in the hands
of the most orthodox and archaic rabbinate. This is such a reactionary body, that even the US Conservative
Jews are to its left. The State of Israel does not have a constitution because it is based on a Jewish
religious code.

Meretz 'radicalism' is limited to "the separation of religious institutions from the institutions of the state".
Israel should be "governed by the rule of law, rather than by the rule of the Halakha." Nevertheless, Meretz
vindicates that "Jewish heritage and the Jewish legal core are a cornerstone of our national culture and a
source of inspiration in our lives and in creativity".

As we saw, Meretz' programme does not have any reference to the working class. It has very reactionary
goals. It wants to keep a Jewish identity based in elements of Jewish religion. It tries to separate
progressive Jews from their non-Jewish compatriots and to transform them into colonial settlers,
dispossessing a native population. It wants to maintain a purely Jewish exclusionist state. It has a
neo-liberal anti-working class economic programme. It differs from the hard-liners only in the sense that it is
prepared to soften the rabbinical influence on the state institutions and allow Palestinian 'self-determination'
in the form of a fragmented and powerless 'independent' Bantustan.

The peace accords, instead of pushing 'socialist Zionists' to the left, are causing a backward evolution
towards neo-liberalism and reaction. Despite the possibility of organising common demonstrations and
actions with them against the colonialist settlers and hard-liners, it is impossible to make any kind of
anti-imperialist united front with currents that are advocating an imperialist and segregationist solution to the
Palestinian question.

Zionism has no single progressive aspect

The doctrine of Zionism was created by Theodor Hertzl. He wanted to convince the Tsar and all the great
powers that the best solution to the `Jewish question' was to provide the Jews with a state. Instead of being
persecuted, the Jews could `expand ‘Western civilisation'’ against `barbarians'. Hertzl offered his services
to transform the Jews into a colonialist tool against native peoples.

When Zionism was born (one century ago) hundreds of thousands of Jews were very active in the labour
and anti-capitalist movement and many socialists were Jews (as was Marx, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Zinoviev,
Kamenev etc). Zionism was also used to divide the Jew workers from their fellow classmates. If Marxists
advocate the unity of all the workers of all nations and communities against the capitalists, the Zionists
advocated the unity of the Jewish workers with and behind the capitalist Jews and their imperialist
associates against other peoples. The Zionist emigration to Palestine had a reactionary goal. Jewish
capitalists, unions and co-operatives excluded the natives from their ranks. Arab lands where purchased
and given to Jewish colonial settlers. The Arab population felt that they were being driven away from a new
colonialist movement.

After the holocaust the imperialist powers and the USSR where prepared to give the Jews a state in
Palestine. In 1947 the UN partitioned British Palestine and created two states. In its war against its
neighbours, Israel captured many Arab lands and the rest of the Palestinian lands where taken by Egypt
and the Transjordan kingdom (since then it became Jordan). Comprising less than 10% of the world's
Jewish population Israel was created as the homeland for all the Jews. The Jewish minority in Palestine
(most of them where settlers born in Europe) took most of the country. Zionism managed to transform a
persecuted people into Western colonialists. Zionism did not end with anti-Semitism. On the contrary, it
produced the expulsion of most of the Jews from the Arab world (a region which had a much less
anti-Jewish traditions than the West). Zionism became another form of anti-Semitism. A new state was
created expelling and oppressing a Semitic people (the Palestinian Arabs).

Marxists need to address the Israeli Jewish working class. A big difference that we have with the Arab
nationalists and fundamentalists is that they don't want to create a bridge or form an alliance with the Jewish
proletariat. We should support the Hebrew workers struggles for better wages and labour conditions,
against privatisation and for de-militarisation and civic rights.

However, we need to understand that imperialism can create communal privileges amongst one ethnic
section of the working class against another section. In South Africa and Northern Ireland the White or
Unionist workers achieved better social conditions than the Black and Republican workers. Some of the
most reactionary terrorist forces where recruited amongst that layer of privileged workers.

We need to address the most oppressed sections of the proletariat. The anti-Unionists in the six counties
and the Black workers in South Africa are the vanguard of the anti-imperialist movement. The actions of
these layers should influence workers from the privileged communities. The only way to win the workers
from the oppressor states is to win them to solidarity with the most oppressed sections of society and to
show them that, instead of maintaining their privileges, they need to fight together with all the working class
against their common enemies: the capitalists.

Marxists are champions of the right of self-determination for every nation. However, we can deny such rights
in some concrete circumstances, like when the national right of one community would clash with the rights of
another community. In Northern Ireland and South that would mean an attack on the oppressed population.
The same principle we apply to Israel. The Africa we are against the right of the Protestant Unionists and
the Afrikaners to form their own states because, like the Israeli nation, they would have their inception in the
oppression of the native population.

A society created around discrimination

While the Boers and Ulster Protestants can show that they were the majority of the population of some part
of their lands for many centuries and that they had some historical-territorial continuity, the Israeli Jews only
started to arrive to Palestine in this century. They arrived from all the corners of the planet. The Jews from
Western or Eastern Europe, Yemen, Mesopotamia, Maghreb, Central Asia, Kurdistan, the Caucasus,
South Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, Australasia, India or Ethiopia had different histories, cultures,
histories, traditions, religious practices, languages and races. Some of them evolved in a near complete
isolation from other Jewish communities. There are tens or even hundreds of different Jewish religious
congregations. The only thing that unites all of them is their common belief in the first Testament and in a
common vindication of the old Jerusalem faith.

Hebrew, a 'dead' classical language only used for religious rituals and education, was modernised and
transformed into the new `national' language. In order to develop Hebrew, Zionists undermined Ladino, the
traditional Jewish mother tongue of the Jews in the Ottoman empire based in old Spanish, and Yiddish, the
traditional European Jewish language based in old German. The Bolsheviks, on the contrary, massively
promoted Yiddish Publications, Higher Education institutions, schools and even set up a territory
(Birobidjan) for the development of the Yiddish culture and language.

Arabic was the language spoken by the overwhelmingly majority of the population in Palestine until 1948.
Around half of the Jews that came to Israel after 1948 came from Oriental countries where most of them had
Arabic as their mother tongue. Like all discriminatory society Israel had a system based in different levels of
privileges. The Arabs are the most oppressed. Among the Jews, Oriental Jews are oppressed by
Azkanazim Jews of European origins. The Black Jews (Falasha) suffer racism and discrimination. The
Chief rabbinate does not fully recognise Falasha as having Jewish status. They are a sort of inferior Jew.

Israeli society is also divided amongst religious believers. The most orthodox minority (like the small
Naturei Carta) is against the Israeli state because they think that a Jewish state could only be created with a
Messiah and that the actual one tries to eliminate the Jewish traditional community in order to create a
modern secularised state. The majority of the orthodox (the `crows') wants a fundamentalist Talmudic and
segregationist state. They even attack non-orthodox Jews when they drive cars on the Sabbaths (holy
Saturdays) or when they see women with `improper' clothes. Many Israelis wants a modern and secularised
life.

Most nation-states were created claiming the continuity of a people that lived in the assigned territory for
many centuries. Most of the nations, despite having an official religion, adopted some secular and
non-confessional legal basis. Pakistan was divided from India around religious allegiances. However, most
of the people that inhabited Pakistan where the native population. In India Marxists are against the creation
of Khalistan. A Sikh state could be based in a community that is the majority of the population of certain
parts of the Punjab. However, it would be created under religious and segregationist/communalist basis
and would became a reactionary tool against the most secularised Sikhs and the Indian population.

The Israeli nation cannot offer any territorial-historic continuity. Until the last century less than 5% or even 1%
of Palestine where Jews. The Jews which arrived in that land had different histories and they and their
immediate ancestors lived mainly in other countries or continents. Their only territorial claim to that land was
that of descent from the old Israelis who inhabited that land 2,000 years ago. The Welsh, Gaelic and
Bretons could claim Britain and even most of Western Europe because the Celts where the majority of the
population 2,000 years ago. Different regions in the Balkans and Eastern Europe could have been claimed
by Albanians, Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians, Macedonians, Germans, Hungarians, Turks or Polish because
only one century ago they used to be the majority of the population. With this kind of territorial claims the
Canaanites or the Philistines, who inhabited Palestine before the Jews -as the Bible related- bloody
invaded them, could have better claims. In fact, The Palestinians can claim to be the direct descendants of
them.

A Jewish state can be created only around some religious allegiances because that is the only thing in
common that all Jews share. A secular state would mean a republic based on a constitution in which every
citizen has equal rights. In the Bolshevik Soviet Union, Jews, who were only 2% of the people, were allowed
to lead the Red Army, the two main Soviets and the ruling International Party. Would an Israeli entity allow an
Arab to become Prime Minister, mayor of Jerusalem or chief of the army? This is impossible because the
state is founded on religious segregation. A Jewish state in a territory that was populated by a
heterogeneous Jewish minority for less than half a century and founded on the expulsion/oppression of its
native population, can only survive by means of its Apartheid character.

Can we recognise the right of a Jewish nation?

Palestinians (and progressive Jews) should not recognise the right of Israel to exist. A two-state solution
would imply that the Palestinians must renounce most of their lands from which they were pushed in the last
five decades.

In Argentina, Australia and the USA the native population was largely wiped out and new modern White
settler nations where created on the basis of massive European emigration. We cannot demand that these
big countries should be given back to their original peoples. The indigenous populations where reduced to
few hundreds of thousands. On the other side tens of millions now constitute industrialised societies. In
these countries we defend the First Nations rights to use their mother tongue in their education and every
day life, to have lands and even to achieve self-government in the areas that remain under their control.

Palestine does not offer the same scenario. The Zionists could not annihilate large chunks of the local
population. There are more than four million Palestinians living under Israeli control or in neighbouring
countries. The Palestinian working class and intelligentsia are among the Middle East's most enlightened
and militant ones. Palestinian fighters are at the forefront of the region's anti-imperialist struggles.
Palestinian demonstrations are a major source of inspiration especially for the hundreds of millions of Arab
and Muslim masses.

The idea that the Arabs have to accept the colonist entity as a nation with the right to have its own state, is a
demand to surrender made by the most pro-imperialist wings of the ruling classes. The left-wing
Palestinians are resisting that capitulation. If the Arab left came to terms with Israel it would reinforce the
Islamic fundamentalist attempt to monopolise the anti-Zionist Arab sentiment. That would be a colossal
tragedy.

A bi-national Israeli/Arab State would be an unworkable contradiction. Palestine is the historical
denomination of a territory. It does not have an exclusive, segregationist or religious connotation. Christians
and Muslims, and even some non-Zionist Jews, also use that name. Israel means by its name the desire to
create a separate and pure Jewish communalist state. It is possible to talk about a bi-national or bi-lingual
country in Belgium or Wales. In these places different linguistic-cultural communities developed alongside
each other without any strong degree of discrimination.

In Spain, Iran, the Andes, India and other countries it is possible to argue in favour of the right of
self-determination for all its components or even for a multi-national federation. Basque, Kurds, Quechuas,
Tamils are oppressed nationalities which had historical roots in territories in which they were the majority of
the population for centuries.

A bi-national Israeli-Palestinian state would not be based on the equality of both communities. The Arabs
have the worst jobs and not have the same rights as the Zionists. Israel and Aliya are inseparable. Israel
needs to grant citizenship to every Jew no matter if he/she was born in Argentina or Australia and has never
been before in the country. Israel provides housing, jobs and benefits to theJewish emigrants while the Arab
native population are denied their rights to return to their lands or homes and they cannot have important
positions in the state, the police or the army.

Marxists oppose Aliya. We are, of course, in favour of free frontiers and against people's displacement. We
want open borders for all the Jews, Gypsies and other peoples who suffer discrimination. However, we
have to oppose colonialist emigration. We opposed the French or Italian attempts to resettle poor peasants
or workers as colonial tools in Northern Africa. We rejected the Rabat's kingdom mass march on Western
Sahara because they wanted to solve a land problem in Morocco at the expenses of the Sarahui local
population. A democratic secular Palestine should welcome citizens from all countries but they could not
accept émigrés that try to create a segregationist state at the expense of the original people.

In Ecuador the Council of Indian Nations (CONAI) demand that this state should accept its multi-national
character. The achievement of that goal would imply a great conquest for all the Indian peoples. In Palestine
the native population is not fighting to be considered just one of several cultural and national components of
the state. Israel is, by definition, based in a Jewish supremacist and segregationist platform and in the
necessity to ethnically cleanse Palestine. The Palestinians are claiming their land back. Their historical aim
was to refuse to recognise the state that deprived them of their lands and citizenship.

We are not in favour of a bi-cultural Northern Ireland or of a bi-national White/Black South Africa. It does not
mean that we are in favour of a clerical Catholic all-Ireland or for expelling all the Whites from South Africa. It
means that the former privileged community has to accept that they should stop considering the rest of the
population as inferior and to accept that they should be an equal minority.

We are for the destruction of a purely Jewish segregationist and confessional state. But that does not mean
that we want to drive all Jews into the sea or to support yet another genocide. We want to convince as many
Jews as we can that the best thing for them is to unite with the Arab workers in order to create a secular
non-religious and non-racist egalitarian republic.

The communists promoted the Yiddish culture and they designated a territory for Jewish colonisation. The
Jews did not arrive in Birobidjan as a racist segregationist colonist who tried to exclude the native peoples.
They coexisted peacefully with the locals. Today, for example, Birobidjan's Slav majority is very keen in
maintaining the Jewish identity of that country as a means of attracting investment, technology and people.

In countries where the Jews constituted a compact oppressed majority in some territories (like the Falasha
in Ethiopia) it was possible to advocate their right of self-determination, including autonomy or separation.
However that right could not be extended to a group of people that wants to come into a new country to
ethnically cleanse the local population.

Zionism needs to trample on the rich cultural and linguistic traditions of the Arab, Ladino, Yiddish, Falasha
and other Jewish communities in order to create a new Hebrew oppressive nation which is forged in
bloodiest battles against the Arab natives. We need to emphasise the fact that the Israeli Jew community is,
in fact, a multi-ethnic amalgam. Zionists try to unite them against a common enemy: the native Arab
peoples. We should not help them in doing that.

We need to defend many of these communities against the Zionists attempts to deny some of their most
progressive traditions (like the Yiddish working class movements) and its discriminatory conditions in Israel.
Begin and Likud tried to use the Oriental Jew resentment against the Azkenazim in a reactionary way: trying
to transform them into the most patriotic anti-Arab pro-Israeli force. We should address the oriental Jews
explaining that their enemies are not the Arab neighbours or natives but the capitalists and Zionists.

A socialist, secular, multi-ethnic Republic.

Our demand is for a socialist, secular, multi-ethnic and democratic Palestinian republic. In that country there
live scores of communities: non-religious Jews and Arabs, secularised Russian-speaking Jews,
Ladino-speaking Jews, Yiddish-speaking Jews, Arab-speaking Jews, Hebrew-speakers; non-Talmudic
Jews (Samaritans, Falasha, Karaite), as well as Hasidic and non-Hasidic Jews; various Christian
congregations (Armenians, Copts, Catholics (Roman and Orthodox); Maronnites, Protestants, etc.);
Muslims (Shias, Sunni, etc.); Druses, Bedouins, Bahai, etc.

All these communities should have equal rights. No single community should impose its own religion onto
the state. A secular constitution with a secular civic code should regulate their activities. There would not be
special treatment for those of the same religion that come from other countries. Palestinians should have
the right to return.

A democratic multi-ethnic Palestine could only be achieved as a result of a socialist revolution based on
workers councils and militias. It would also be part of a Socialist Federation of the Middle East. In that
context not only Palestinians would have the right to return but also Arab Jews would have the right to return
to Syria, Morocco, Iraq and other Arab countries. Kurds, Assyrian and other nationalities would achieve
self-determination and equal rights.

LCMRCI December 1998
 
 

John Stone of the Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International LCMRCI)discusses the continuing theoretical decline of the Workers Power group.

The Workers Power-dominated League for a Revolutionary Communist International (LRCI) made more U-turns at its fourth congress in August. Like New Labour is trying to became an old liberal party, the New LRCI is going to the right becoming another old sect. It radically changed its line on two central programmatical issues.

The first concerned the nature of the post-Stalinist states. Until last July the LRCI had claimed that all the countries east of Germany were moribund workers' states and now they are saying that at east eight of them are capitalist.

The second was about the key question of the state: "At the Fourth Congress, the former minority position secured a narrow majority. The Congress adopted the view that the bureaucratic Stalinist overturns took place without the smashing of the bourgeois form of state apparatus" (Workers Power, September).

WP readers and sympathisers had never before been informed of the existence of these two wings, an omission which shows a great contempt for them. This article will discuss first the origin of the two positions and goes on to deal with the two major programmatical shifts.

Workers Power was expelled from the International Socialists in 1975. In its first five years it remained state capitalist. When the USSR invaded Afghanistan, WP was shaken. Dave Hughes' line of critical military block with the 'left' government and the USSR against the reactionary clerical Mujahedin won acceptance. Keith Harvey defended a line closed to Tony Cliff's and characterised the CIA-founded bands as a "national liberation movement" and supported them in order to smash "soviet expansionism". The two wings were on the opposite sides of the barricades over the question which started the second Cold War. A decade later the fundamentalists which Harvey supported won the Afghan war and imposed a medieval regime.

This debate was linked to the nature of the Stalinist countries. Hughes showed that the former idea that they were a form of bourgeois state Was completely wrong. Under his direction the group wrote in 1981-82 its programmatic pillar, The Degenerated Revolution (TDR). WP turned towards orthodox Trotskyism and enriched it with the idea that in eastern Europe, east Asia and Cuba the Stalinists, without ceasing to be a counter-revolutionary force in opposition to a revolution of workers' councils, smashed the capitalist state and created a new bureaucratised workers' state which needed a new political revolution.

Harvey did not want to break with anti-defencism and adopted a hybrid position between Cliff and Trotsky. Along with Cliff he claimed the state was bourgeois, while with Trotsky he said the economy was not bourgeois. This mish-mash serves to prepare the idea that the Stalinist states were brutal bourgeois dictatorships and that bourgeois democracy would therefore be progressive by comparison.

The defeat of the anti-defencists paved the road towards the transformation of WP into a healthy current, capable of becoming a pole of attraction for groups in Europe and in the Pacific. If Harvey would had won it would had been impossible to win any of these groups and to create the LRCI. WP would have disintegrated or been transformed into another Stalino-phobic sect.

In 1979-80 the launch of the second Cold War pushed WP to the left. A decade later, when imperialism won that confrontation and most of the Left shifted towards the right, WP was unable to resist that pressure. Harvey, who had accumulated power inside the apparatus, decided to push WP back to Stalino-phobia. For years the comrades from the semi-colonial sections Were his strongest opposition. After 1995, when he managed to exclude and expel them, nobody was able to seriously oppose him.

After its last congress the LRCI is a qualitatively different creature from the one that was founded in 1989. The LRCI was born with a clear revolutionary defencist strategy. It defended any oppressed nation and workers' state against imperialism. With Harvey's revisions the New LRCI refused to defend Haiti and the Serbs against US and Nato troops. From 1989 openly capitalist regimes were imposed throughout the former Soviet bloc, but the LRCI was one of the few international currents which did not want to face reality, claiming that remained a form of a workers' state. The only exception was the obvious case of the GDR, which in 1991 was completely swallowed up by imperialist Germany.

The Manifesto of the Fourth Congress of the LRCI now claims that since 1989, "after four years or more capitalism has finally been restored in the Baltic states, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia and the Czech and Slovak republics" (my emphasis).

If the LRCI now accepts that four years after the 1989 events capitalism was restored in many of these countries, it is clear that it has to accept that at least since 1993 it was completely wrong in maintaining that these were some sort of proletarian dictatorships.

Comrades who set up the Proletarian Faction and later the LCMRCI fought inside the LRCI, rejecting the notion that these states remained workers' states of any kind. They were ostracised or expelled. LRCI leaders do not want to give to the LCMRCI any credit allow it even restricted articipation in their discussions.

The LRCI believed that the post-Trotsky Fourth International became centrist between 1948 and 1951, and the roots of that deviation are based on the fact that it failed to quickly recognise the new states in post-war
eastern Europe as degenerated workers' states. However, the scale of the LRCI's confusion is even greater. It delayed, according to its own admission, at least four years before realising the class reverse in the same states.

In 1982 Workers Power adopted TDR. In that book it clearly stated: "We define the class nature of the state, not by its form (which for all states can vary tremendously), nor even by the specific features of its apparatus, but by the economic regime, the mode of production that it defends."

For Trotsky proletarian property relations were based on a nationalised and centrally planned economy in which the bourgeoisie was not allowed to retain its property, there was state monopoly of foreign trade, banking and big industry, and money could not be used to buy private lands or the means of production.

Consequently, when the state machinery no longer defends these post-capitalist relations and when it openly advocates the free market, we can no longer talk of any form of proletarian dictatorship(even a degenerated one). New incipient bourgeois states were created when openly anti-socialist regimes were set up in the east, and they started a process of capitalist accumulation.

According to Trotsky and TDR, it is not possible to talk about any Form of proletarian dictatorship when such states are ruled by DIRECT agents of the emerging bourgeoisie and imperialism. That is the case in all the states in eastern Europe and the former USSR. Only in Cuba and the Far East can we talk of degenerated workers' states - they are making heavy concessions to multinationals, but still maintain the planned economy and the rule of the bureaucratic caste.

For Harvey there is no great distinction between a bourgeois and a Degenerated Workers' State. The only major difference is a purely economic one. For many years Harvey characterised all the eastern European states as 'moribund workers' states'. A moribund state is a decadent one in which the economy is in rapid decline. However, in many of these states, after the introduction of capitalist incentives, the economy was growing at a higher rate than in any other European country. How it was possible to continue considering them moribund if they have a booming economy?

Harvey, who is an empiricist, was pressed to recognised that the most successful post-Stalinist countries could not longer be described as any form of moribund workers' state. However, he continues to apply without any serious basis the 'moribund' characterisation to half of eastern Europe and to 12 of the former 15 Soviet republics.

Harvey believed that the overthrow of the Stalinist regimes would open up a world revolutionary period of even greater intensity than the one created after the World War II. However, since the late 1940s capitalism has been overthrown in countries whose population makes up one third of humanity. These revolutions weakened imperialism and threw up better conditions for the liberation movements in the colonies and for working class advance in the west.

After 1989, far from seeing social revolutions, we have experienced the worst social counter-revolutions. How can the LRCI continue talking of a World revolutionary period in which the most important conquest in human history (the workers' state) is being liquidated?

For Trotsky and TDR the consequence of characterising a state as a Degenerated Workers' State is the struggle to regenerate it through a Political Revolution which maintains the nationalised and planned economy, while overthrowing bureaucratic rule. It also could imposes an obligation to side with the hated bureaucracy against the forces of an even worse enemy: internal and external social counter-revolution. For Harvey the Degenerate Workers' State is only a label which does not oblige him to adopt any particular policy in consequence.

For example, the LRCI even now claims Serbia is a workers' state and, to be consistent, it ought to have defended it against the slightest imperialist attack. However, when Nato launched it worst attack ever against Serbia, the LRCI said that it could not defend it , and even more, it asked the imperialist powers to give arms and men to support their regional puppets.

For Harvey it is possible to continue talking about a form of workers' state which is ruled even by ultra-reactionaries and private millionaires. The LRCI characterised Republika Srpska forces as fascist, but said that it remained a form of workers' state. In Albania the LRCI said that the bourgeoisie was in power and that the task of the revolution was to expropriate it. In that case it is no longer possible to talk about political revolution (which only aims to regenerate the state), but of a social revolution to eliminate the ruling class. We ought to be talking about an Albanian bourgeois state that must be smashed.

The last LRCI congress resolved to reject TDR. According to the new theory it adopted, no eastern state ever ceased to be bourgeois, and in the USSR a bourgeois counter-revolution took place in 1927. For Harvey the post-war social revolutions, instead of smashing the bourgeois states, purged and improved them. Harvey appears to believe in a bourgeois state that is capable of expropriating the bourgeoisie and later returns its property. The relation between the capitalist state and its ruling class is not like a man and his shirt. Anyone could take off their shirt and remain the same. The relation between the bourgeois state and the bourgeoisie is like a person's flesh and blood: it is impossible to live without them.

Bernstein and the reformists had the idea that the bourgeois state was capable of replacing the bourgeoisie. Lenin combated that revision. A state which smashed the bourgeoisie could not longer be described as bourgeois.

For Harvey if a commune-style semi-state does not exist, there is a bourgeois state. With that idealistic view he should be attacking Lenin, not Stalin, for overthrowing the workers' state. That is the position advocated by Wolforth - the man from whom Harvey admits he took his theory. It was Lenin who dissolved factions, diminished soviet democracy, hired tens of thousands of tsarist officials and functionaries, created a vertical army and imposed the party's dictatorship. Wolforth said that Lenin should have convened pluralist elections a là Nicaragua and, even if he had lost to the right, that at least would have prevented the outcome of Stalinism.

If a bourgeois counter-revolution was imposed in the USSR in 1927, as Harvey says, it means that everything Trotsky did after his expulsion was completely wrong. Trotsky said that Stalinism did not become a counter-revolutionary force until 1935. Up to 1933 Trotsky tried to regenerate the Communist International and he set up the international Left Opposition. If Harvey had any degree of consistency, he would have to say that Trotsky was wrong and that the whole basis of the Fourth International was a cracked pillar. He should not have fought inside Comintern or the CPSU.

Today the LRCI contains a big contradiction. On the one hand it hailed the replacement of the bureaucracy by openly capitalist regimes, and on the other hand it now accepts that these represented a "historical defeat".

In the imperialist heartland the LRCI always votes for social democracy, even when it is in power for years attacking the workers. It says that it is important to be with the workers' reformist organisations against the right. However, in the workers' states it sided with capitalist parties against the bureaucrats who had some parasitic allegiance to the post-capitalist relations.

The worst problem is Harvey's attitude towards bourgeois democracy. For Trotsky and Hughes it was preferable to have any form of workers' state - even under the totalitarian terrorist, Stalin - rather than a bourgeois parliamentary democracy. For Harvey, Stalin imposed a fascistic regime in a non-capitalist bourgeois state. It would have been better to have had a bourgeois democratic regime than an authoritarian one. That idea led Harvey to theorise the necessity of building a united front with all the pro-imperialist parties in the east to impose bourgeois democracy. The new parliamentary regimes were the best way to win popular support for the final destruction of the post-capitalist states.

In 1989 revolutionaries should have been with the workers in the upheavals against Stalinist rule. However, at every moment they needed to say that the worst enemy was capitalist restoration and that it was impossible to make any bloc with the restorationists. Harvey's theories result from a desire to accommodate to post-Cold War public opinion inside the imperialist democracies. When most of the international left is saying that authoritarianism and not imperialism is the main enemy, the LRCI, instead of fighting that trend, adapts to it.

State capitalism and Orthodox theories are at least consistent theories. If you call the Stalinists rules as Degenerated Workers State you would call for its defence against capitalism and you would consider its overthrown as opening an international reaction. If you think that they were capitalist you should not defend them and celebrates its downfall. Harvey's theories don't have any consistency. They are like trying to mate a bird with a mammal. This feathered four-leg monster is an impossible creature.

The Harveyite New LRCI confuses political revolution with social revolution and mistakes social counter-revolution with pro-democracy revolution. For the LRCI there is no distinction between the state in bourgeois and a Stalinist countries. The bourgeois state can apparently expropriate the bourgeoisie.

The LRCI characterises the present period as a revolutionary one, but this is based on its incompatible opposite: a counter-revolutionary situation.

In London Tony Blair is destroying the reformist nature of the Labour Party created by Keir Hardy. In the same city the revolutionary international inspired by Hughes is being transformed into an eclectic and inconsistent sect by Keith Harvey.

Reprinted from Class Struggle No 19 December 1997-January 1998

Socialist Labour Party.

During the recent Socialist Labour Party  (SLP) congress, "Socialist Labour Action"  (SLA) was the first faction to leave. It is now back in Workers Power. Their rupture happened unnoticed by the rest of the membership. During the congress SLA didn’t organise a single fringe meeting, a bookstall or a paper-sale. Of all the oppositionists in the SLP, the SLA was the one which produced the largest bulletin for the congress. However, in around 30 pages they didn’t put forward any motions or suggestions for debate. All where re-printings of old material. During the congress there was a 70-strong meeting of all the oppositions. The SLA only intervened to put forward one single idea: that everybody should immediately leave the party. Nobody took them seriously.

In its January paper, Workers' Power, WP "says (to the SLP left) that the time has come for a sharp reassessment of what they have achieved". We ask this same question of WP members. The WP intervention inside the SLP was the biggest entryist intervention in its history. It resulted in a fiasco. The WP members who joined the SLP, are now leaving it without winning a single person to WP. These comrades wasted at least a year and much energy for almost nothing. Even more, half of the comrades who were members of WP before joining the SLP have not rejoined WP. Instead of achieving something, WP has discredited itself not only amongst the SLP left-wingers, but it seems some of those who were former members.

In December 1995 WP argued that "thousands of trade unionists ... need a strong, well organised socialist voice and an organisation to organise and lead their resistance. That is why WP welcomes Arthur Scargill’s call for discussions on the left to consider the establishment of an SLP." WP committed itself to building a "revolutionary SLP". Consistent with that position WP should have advocated an offensive tactic towards that trade union milieu and pushed for an active intervention in the process of creation of the SLP.

When the SLP was launched some ‘left’ organisations (like the FISC, CPGB, RDG, IBT, ILWP, etc.) decided to intervene in it. WP was larger than all of them put together. In addition it had a much stronger national structure. During the 1980s it was the most theoretically productive and more programmatically consistent left group.

A decisive intervention in the SLP from its inception could have made WP the dominant force on its left, and able to offer leadership to the left opposition which was about one third of the party’s membership. For hundreds of activists who joined the SLP trying to build a combative alternative to Labour, WP could have become a pole of attraction and a defiant force against the leading bureaucracy. It could have led the SLP contingents on demonstrations and also a tenth or more of its branches. It could have created a lobby of many candidates around its own programmatic ideas.

WP could have developed a similar line to that formulated by Trotsky towards the ILP in the 1930s: intervening in it and opposing a revolutionary transitional programme to Scargill’s little-England nationalism and reformism, demanding that the SLP adopt a united front policy towards Labour. To actively intervene inside the SLP is not the same as dissolving the organisation or ceasing to publish its paper and journals. A group of comrades could have remained officially outside the SLP being in charge of doing all the external work while a disciplined contingent was doing entryist work  inside it. The CPGB, a group much smaller than WP, participated in the SLP without ceasing to print its weekly paper.

Nevertheless, WP didn’t follow that course. Just a few weeks later WP decided to make its first U-turn. In its March 96 paper, WP characterised the SLP as: "Britain’s newest reformist sect" and ruled out any intervention in it. Then, after the first SLP congress (May 96), WP again changed its mind about its prospects and decided to make another U-turn. In it’s June paper it said that the SLP is not completely a reformist party, that it is in process of definition and that revolutionaries could win that battle: "The founding conference indicated that the SLP is a party that remains in the process of formation … with a small but significant minority clearly seeking revolutionary policies and answers, one thing is certain: the struggle for the political soul of the SLP has only just begun."

The logical conclusion then should had been to make a very serious and active intervention in the SLP. Some weeks later WP’s youth organisation ("Revolution") applied to join the SLP. During mid 1996 many long-standing WP cadres surprisingly appeared in the SLP branches claiming that they had left their previous organisation and that they would be the best activists in building the SLP.

The quantity and the quality of the SLPers which came from WP was impressive. Now, when WP is calling on their former members who joined the SLP to return to WP, there is no reason to continue to protect these comrades against the witch-hunts by keeping information about them secret.

By mid-1996 at least a dozen cadres which were trained for many years by WP were inside the SLP. One was a founding WP member and another three were, or had been, members of the LRCI’s national or international executive committees. Some of them had differences with WP but most of them where loyal to it. If these comrades had worked together they could have created a bigger and more nationally organised block than any other current attracting tens of SLP members. A tendency around concrete issues could also have promoted a broader pro-democracy coalition.

Nevertheless, WP adopted a very sectarian and confused position. It instructed its supporters inside the SLP not to associate with any other comrade, even with former WP members, who where not under the guidance of its Central Committee. WP created a very exclusionist faction, Socialist Labour Action, which was open only to comrades who were politically loyal to the WPleadership. It was closed to rank and file SLP members and to other SLP members who were former WP members.

The SLA was so sectarian that it refused to take any responsibility for building a broader opposition. Inside the SLP there were four oppositionist broader fronts: the ‘Revolutionary Platform’, the ‘Left Network’, the ‘Campaign for a Democratic SLP’ and the ‘Democratic Platform’. WP instructed their supporters to either boycott these fronts or to refuse to enter into the leaderships.

In mid 1996, the Revolutionary Platform had its first conference with around 25 or 30 delegates. In that meeting comrades who split with WP over political differences managed to influence its programme and to replace the demand for a "federal republic" with that of a "socialist workers republic". Nevertheless, WP instructed their supporters not to attend that meeting, even to put forward their positions.

WP supporters attended the meetings of the Left Network and the CD/SLP but they refused to take any responsible role. In the LN one of the WP supporters was commissioned to produce a united front bulletin. He came to the next meeting with a bulletin produced by WP supporters and reflecting only WP policies. Instead of being presented as a LN bulletin, it was launched as the SLA bulletin. At the most recent LN and CD/SLP national aggregates the SLA was almost unanimously condemned for printing leaflets in which they identified SLP oppositionists as members of other organisations. According to Scargill’s constitution any person who was identified as a supporter of other group could be automatically expelled from the party.

To complete the sorry record of WP's "intervention" in the opposition groups, the SLA didn't participate in the Democratic Platform which fought to defend the oppositionists from Scargill’s bureaucratic expulsions and branches from being closed down. They didn't even come to the meeting of the combined SLP oppositions on 10 January this year.

WP’s sectarian approach was not due just to its members confusion and lack of confidence in themselves. WP didn’t have a consistent and clear position on the SLP. It shifted radically from one position to another. At ome point the group was selling a monthly paper (WP) which characterised the SLP as an unchangeable counter-revolutionary Stalinist sect while the theoretical journal (Trotskyist International) was writing that the SLP was a progressive phenomenon and that it was necessary to influence its development. The confusion become even more bizzare when WP supporters outside and inside the SLP had entirely contradictory lines. Outside the SLP, WP was calling for its destruction and for voting for the Blairites against the SLP candidates, while inside the SLP, WP supporters were calling for votes for SLP candidates against New Labour.

WP made the correct point that as long than Labour is the mass party of the working class (albeit with an imperialist programme) it was important to elect this party into power in order to expose its nature and intervene in its milieu. However, at the same time, WP didn’t want to see that the extreme right-turn of the Blairite leadership was forcing thousands of activists to turn against new Labour.

If WP was really serious and wanted to intervene in the SLP (and also in the SP and the SWP) it had to relate to the militants who were trying to create a class alternative to the Blairite "neo-conservatism". In that sense a revolutionary organisation had to advocate as well as critical support for new Labour, also a critical vote for representative socialist candidates and for socialist electoral alliances. This doesn’t mean a propaganda block but rather a left united front around specific demands against cuts and privatisations and for the defence of the proletariat’s living conditions and conquests.

However, WP’s tactic towards the SLP was not at all related to what was in the interests of the working class, but rather the interests of its own organisation. Richard Brenner, a WP leader, wrote that: "A revolutionary party would therefore call for a vote for Labour in all constituencies where it is unable to stand." (Weekly Worker 145). WP could vote for the SLP only "if we find it possible to join [the SLP] as a revolutionary organisation with full rights". (Weekly Worker 143) This meant that WP, who never stood one of their own candidates in more than two decades of existence, would always vote for Labour even against any possible significant emerging left force. The only way in which it would give a vote for the SLP was not on the basis of its ideas or weight in the class or the activists, but on the basis of whether or not WP were free to put forward its own ideas.

WP’s tactic towards the SLP can be summarised in the ultimatum: as long as you don’t allow us to join you as an independent party we will support the Blairites against you and we will sabotage your organisation.

WP’s electoral tactics had a devastating contradiction. On the one hand it advocated a vote only for Labour. In its "Where We Stand" column WP says "we are for the building of a revolutionary tendency in the Labour Party", though in fact WP doesn’t do any work inside Labour. On the other hand, it sent more than 10% of its cadres into a party to which it refused to give any kind of electoral support.

In the three places in which the SLA had any influence (Leicester, Cardiff and Vauxhall) WP’s policies destroyed all the work that their SLA supporters had been doing.

In Leicester, the SLA was firmly opposed to any electoral compromise with Militant Labour towards the council elections in late 1996. Revolutionaries inside the SLP should have argued that the best way SLP could stand candidates was by making coalitions with the rest of the left and the combative trade-unionists. It was the SLP right-wing which opposed any block with ML and the left because they didn’t want to appear too "radical" to the union bureaucrats which they tried to recruit.

In that election the SLP achieved 8% and ML 12%. The two forces combined could have got 20% and seriously contested New Labour. Such a result would have had a positive outcome for the left inside the SLP and opened it up to a broader party of the left. In its sectarianism against ML the SLA campaigned for a pure Socialist Labour ticket led by a member of the Stalinist and homophobic EPSR. In the May general election the SLP nominated the same EPSR candidate for a Leicester constituency. This time the SLA editor decided to do a U-turn, and breaking party discipline, call for a vote for New Labour against the local SLP candidate.

In Vauxhall the branch was "voided" [expelled] but courageously fought on with its own resources to contest the general election. In no other constituency did WP have more activists yet it decided to campaign for a Blairite against that rebel branch. The SLA secretary was unanimously censured by the branch for openly supporting an organisation which called for the defeat of the rebel candidate. he became very isolated in her branch and the party.

In Cardiff WP "wholeheartedly" supported the SLP candidate Terry Burns during the general election while in the rest of the country they voted for new Labour. It was the first time in 22 years of existence that WP had advocated a non-critical vote for any candidate. They claimed that Burns stood under the WP programme. However, Burns said that his party and his programme was Scargill’s and he advocated the opposite line to WP, voting "Yes" in the Welsh referendum and advocating a "no"vote for Labour. Since May, the same Cardiff SLP branch and Burns stood in a council election. This time, inexplicably, WP called for a vote for the government against Burns.

There were also other twists in WP’s policies. Traditionally WP has called for a critical vote for Labour non-bourgeois candidates and also for left candidates (like Sheridan or Nellis) who had some roots in the working class. In May 97 WP rejected their previous position when it campaigned for a bourgeois formerTory minister who was running on the Blairite ticket against Scargill!

These disastrous zigzags and contradictions discredited the SLA. Their demoralised supporters didn’t want to appear in the SLP opposition movements. Desperately WP instructed them to provoke their own expulsion. SLA comrades asked the SLP members to expel their Stalinist counter-revolutionary leadership and publicly attacked Scargill. Despite this provocation, the SLP didn’t expell the SLA.

Today, the SLA said that they are returning to a democratic group. However, WP is no longer a healthy organisation. The bizarre and damaging zigzags that we saw on the SLP question have also occurred on Scotland and Wales, on former Yugoslavia, on the state question, on the character of the period, on Eastern Europe, on every important issue. Its internal regime is no better than that of Scargill. Its own oppositionists are suspended or expelled without the right of defence or appeal. WP is becoming an intolerant sect whose members have to be "loyal" to their leaderships U-turns.

Reprinted from Class Struggle No 20, February-March 1998
 

In the Albanian and Kosovo uprising the LCMRCI (of which the Communist Workers Group is a member) the LRCI (Workers Power) and most of the international left took the side of the Albanian masses. However, we departed from different methods and arrived at different tactics. The LRCI which currently can’t differentiate between a bourgeois and a workers state is adopting a centrist strategy capitulating to the imperialist puppets in the region.

Confusion

The LRCI long statement on Kosovo has considerable information in it. However, in all its 3,000 words there is not one word on how they characterise the class nature of Yugoslavia, the Kosovo Republic which they are supporting, Albania, Macedonia or any of the countries which are involved in that conflict. This has to be, precisely, the point of departure of \every Marxist.

The LRCI until last July characterised all the ex-"socialist" countries east of Germany as types of workers states. Since August they are claiming that the eight most prosperous of them are already capitalist ones. None of the Balkan countries are included in that category; so we have to conclude that the LRCI is still describing them as a degenerated form of a proletarian dictatorship. In every conflict involving any type of workers state, Trotskyists are obliged to call for the defence of them and the nationalised planned economy against internal and external counter-revolution.

However, not even these slogans are present in the LRCI's long declaration. It is in favour of NATO out of the region, but doesn't demand that the workers should arm themselves to expel NATO arms in hands. Nowhere does it raise the demand for defending Yugoslavia against the terrible blockade (which is already destroying the economy and causing hundreds of thousands of and deaths) or against any possible new imperialist attack.

The LRCI characterised the Kosovo Liberation Army and the Party of Albanian National Unity as "revolutionary petite bourgeois" which should to be critically supported. In a capitalist state the revolutionary petite bourgeois movements are set up to fight against imperialism and the ruling oligarchy. In a workers state only a movement that is committed to the defence of the post- capitalist relations could be considered as revolutionary", and usually the independent petite bourgeois parties (even the radical ones), when they are not subordinated to the idea of preserving or regenerating the class nature of that state, become counter-revolutionary agents of its capitalist destruction.

The LRCI wrote that "the bourgeois traitor Rugova demands that Kosovo should become an UN-protectorate with NATO troops." If a pro-imperialist bourgeois is presiding in a republic inside a so-called workers state, the only Marxist conclusion is to adopt a class line and stand for the defence of that bureaucratised workers state against a NATO separatist and neo-colonialist puppet. However, the LRCI is asking the same super-powers to establish "immediate diplomatic recognition of the "Republic of Kosovo""

What is the class character of that republic? If it is led by a pro-NATO bourgeoisie (as the LRCI claims) why does the LRCI limit its strategy to the goal of achieving a bourgeois state? In no part of the long document is there raised the demand for a worker republic or a new state based in workers councils and militias.

The LRCI doesn't call for a workers and peasant government. Instead, "Given the lack of any soviet-like organs (the people committees in the South of Albania no longer exist) in the region and the democratic illusions of the masses we call for a revolutionary Constitutional Assembly in Kosovo of the Albanian workers and peasants."

When Trotskyists raise the demand for a constituent assembly they are calling for the most democratic body of the bourgeois state-dictatorship with the idea of mobilising the masses in order to build soviets. The LRCI puts forward that demand trying to mix soviets with parliament (like the Second and a half international) in one single body: a revolutionary bourgeois parliament led by workers and peasants. This is another form of the parliamentary road to socialism. To confuse the situation more, the LRCI is calling for a parliament in what they call a workers state. While such a body could be progressive in a capitalist society, in a workers state (like in Russia after October 1917) it would be the forefront of the social counter-revolution.

All of the LRCI's politics in this region shows that it is becoming every day a more confused organisation of increasingly petite bourgeois democrats.

Two methods

The LCMRCI, in contrast, has a different approach. We think that Yugoslavia like all the Eastern European countries became incipient bourgeois states when the state apparatus ceased to protect (even in an ultra-degenerated and conciliatory way) the nationalised planned economy and the state monopoly over finances, foreign trade and industry. When a new anti-Communist ideological, juridical and repressive super-structure (that is what the state is it) is imposed with the aim of transforming money (which in the workers state was mainly a mean of accounting and cash used to buy living expenses) into real money (capable of creating and reproducing capital and buying for private accumulation lands, companies and work force) and allowing the conditions for the creation of a new property-owner ruling class, we can no longer call that state a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

When there was a workers state we called for its defence against external and internal reaction. The New LRCI, by contrast, could not distinguish the difference between a workers state and a bourgeois one and in all circumstances was in favour of united front with capitalist parties against Stalinism.

Today we are in favour of the unconditional right of Kosovo to secede from bourgeois Yugoslavia and to unite with Albania and even for free democratic elections and constituent assemblies in many Balkan countries to broaden the political debate. At the same time that we defend the Albanians in Kosovo and Macedonia against state repression we also are willing to defend Serbia in any conflict with imperialism. We applied the same method in Iraq when we defended the Kurds against Hussein's massacres while we sided with that dictator against the US bombs.

The LRCI opposes defending Yugoslavia against imperialism. It doesn't want to expose the devastating consequences of imperialism's blockade and the ethnic cleansing that more than one million Serbs suffered. When NATO launched its worst attack ever, in 1995, the LRCI refused to defend the Serbs. They demanded that imperialism "Send heavy artillery, tanks and planes to the Bosnian army" and "tanks and heavy artillery, and yes if possible planes and Scud missiles" and even "international volunteers" to support their Bosnian proxies. They said: "Far from condemning the B-H forces because they are carrying US weapons revolutionaries should demand the maximum necessary arms to the B-H forces. Unfortunately those with the arms are generally imperialist countries or third world dictatorships."

When the imperialist puppets (Croatia and Bosnia) where whipping out all the population from Krajina and western Bosnia, Workers Power (October 95) demanded of them more resolution in that task: "if they can now surround and annihilate Arkan's fascist volunteers in Western Bosnia that will be a service to the workers of the whole world". These troops not only annihilated the Serb military resistance but expelled one million native inhabitants.

We always defended the Croat and Muslim communities against Great Serb ethnic cleansing (like we defended the Serb civilians against the Croat and Muslim pogroms). We said that the only way to achieve that was, as Trotsky recommended in the 1912-13 Balkan wars, to unite the multi-ethnic proletariat against all their rulers. The LRCI, as we showed in other documents, shifted its position many times during the war.

Today for us the crux of the Kosovo question is the unity of the region's proletariat. For many Albanian nationalists the only way to stop Serbia is to bring NATO troops into Kosova. Precisely, the best way to destroy that reactionary argument is to say that the only way to liberate Kosovo from Milosevic and the even worse imperialists, is to forge a class unity between the Albanian toilers and their class brother and sisters in the rest of Yugoslavia and the Balkans. Nevertheless, that crucial aim is totally missing from the long LRCI resolution.

For Marxists the key in this conflict is not only to achieve the unity of all the workers against their restorationist rulers but also to SEPARATE the workers from any petite bourgeois or bourgeois democrat and nationalist and to build an INTERNATIONAL PARTY. Yet, the LRCI document doesn't even put forward such fundamental ideas. They don't even consider it necessary to call for working class independence and organisation into a party. They don't even bother to analyse what is happening in the Albanian or Serbian workers movement, and even less how to build bridges in between them. There is not even a call for a general strike and a workers party to overthrow Milosevic.

Albania

The LRCI's confusion on Kosovo is linked with its bad position during the Albanian uprising. During those events they produced an article which said: "Before 1989 Albania was a Stalinist state, so it had a state-owned and planned economy, not a capitalist economy." (Revolution #20. No Date) Albania was ruled by Ramiz Alia and his Stalinist Workers Party until 1991. Why in 1989 did it cease to be an Stalinist state? However, the important point is what became of Albania when it was captured by Sali Berisha's anti- Communist "Democrats"? For the LRCI it was not a Stalinist state with a non- capitalist economy. So, what was it?

The article doesn't give us a clue. It advocates a revolution that "could start the job of nationalising all the major industries and banks, owned by Albanian capitalists or foreign bosses." This is not a political revolution aimed to regenerating a workers state. It is a social revolution aimed at smashing the bourgeois ruling class. However, the LRCI doesn't want to recognise that Albania like the rest of rest of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are now restored bourgeois states.

Adding to the confusion it concludes that "This is a mass rising and a REAL democracy that is developing in the South. Albania is split into two powers, a revolutionary democratic one expanding in the South, and the Berisha regime in the North." But what is the class character of this REAL and revolutionary democracy? Another mystery. The Russian soviets were the embryos of the dictatorship of the proletariat struggling against the bourgeois state.

The incapacity of the LRCI to use Marxist categories is an expression of its method which divides everything into democracy and anti-democracy. That is precisely the big trap into which the international left which adapted to the imperialist counter-offensive has fallen. A quarter century ago many in the far left recognised that it was imperialism and capitalism (even in its democratic fashion) which was the main enemy. After "democratic" imperialist victory in the Cold War, most of the left is adapting to the US/EU interventionist policies in favour of democratising the world and labelling as non-democrat any regime that is an obstacle to the increasing global dictatorship of the Multinationals. The LRCI, as we proved in other articles, is adapting to that trend.

The LRCI method in the Balkan conflicts shows that it is becoming an impressionist and pro-bourgeois democratic sect. There is no difference between a workers state and a bourgeois state. They admit the possibility that a workers state could be ruled by "fascists" (like Bosnian Serbia) or by a capitalist class (Albania). They equate the tactics which are valid in a bourgeois state, with the distinct (and sometimes opposite ones) which are required in a workers state. They don't differentiate between a social revolution (which wants to smash the ruling class) and a political revolution (which tries to reorient the state). Even more they confuse a social counter-revolution (like the one that destroyed the degenerated Workers States in the east) with political revolutions.

The LRCI's resolution on Kosovo, like its article on Albania, and the sixteen- page long resolution on the Bosnian war (adopted in July 95) have in common the same method. They are against defending Yugoslavia against imperialist attacks because of the undemocratic nature of its regime. They don't raise the necessity of a workers party and a proletarian dictatorship.

Reprinted from Class Struggle, No 21 April-May 1998
 
 

By Jose Villa.
 

In commemoration of the ten years since the foundation of the LRCI recently wrote an article (Workers Power July-August 1999) which reveals how deformed this organisation has become. In it there is no balance sheet of the LRCI’s intervention inside the workers movement or its programmatic achievements. It’s only enemies seem to be the ‘Stalino-philes’. Yet Moribund Stalinism and the currents that adapt to it are not the main enemies of a working class which is facing the terrible imperialist global offensive that is destroying the workers’ states and the main conquests of the labour movement. The article is dominated by an obsession with the Bolivian, New Zealand and Peruvian sections which broke with the LRCI in 1995. These are the comrades who most strongly defended the League's original programme.It would appear that for the LRCI’s leaders their greatest achievement in the last ten years was to get rid off Villa and the comrades from the 'Third World’.Here we examine how the LRCI was created and how it degenerated
 

On August 4 1989, exactly 75 years to the day after the collapse of the Second International, the LRCI was founded in Coventry. The new organisation's aim was to overcome the bankruptcy of the Third and Fourth internationals. It adopted a very serious programme and democratic centralist structures. It launched a call for international revolutionary regroupment aiming to create a pole of attraction of the orthodox trotskyist left. Unfortunately what was then the most advanced international tendency set up in the 1980s could not understand the new post-Cold War period. It became extremely confused and entered into a series of crises.

As a revolutionary force, the Fourth International did not survive the end of the Second World War. Democratic imperialism and Stalinism mutilated the post-war revolutionary upheavals. Trotskyists could not understand the new phenomenon of the bureaucratic revolutions in Eastern Europe and Asia. The anti-defencists thought that because they were not based in workers councils they had not smashed the bourgeois state but merely established another form of class exploitation. The majority of the Fourth International recognised that these revolutions expropriated capitalism and the bourgeoisie established nationalised planned economies. In that sense they recognised that they were deformed workers states, and that they could be reoriented through reforms. This led to a global adaptation towards the Stalinist and petit bourgeois movements that it believed could become revolutionary tools.

In the immediate post-war none of the Trotskyists understood that the new "socialist" states were Degenerated Workers States since their inception and that they needed to be defended against internal and external counter-revolution while, simultaneously, the stalinist bureaucratic caste had to be overthrown by means of a political revolution. Stalinism, even when it smashed the bourgeois state had not renounced its counter-revolutionary opposition to a real and democratic transition towards international socialism.

The Fourth International collapsed when in 1948 it adopted the position that the Yugoslav Stalinists could be reformed, and later applied that same method to other petit bourgeois movements. In the Bolivian Revolution (1952), when Trotskyists had their best chance ever to take power, the whole Fourth International supported the bourgeois nationalist regime and demanded more labour ministers in it. In 1953 the Fourth International was divided between the "Pabloites" and "ex-Pabloites". All of them backed the Menshevik line that betrayed the Bolivian revolution and their only difference was over which counter-revolutionary apparatus they would practice deep entryism (social democracy, nationalism or Stalinism). In the following decades these fragments were atomised.

Workers Power attempts to revive Trotskyism.

Several failed attempts were made by small orthodox trotskyist groups with the aim of restoring and developing the Transitional Programme in the face of such terrible bankruptcy. The last significant one was the LRCI. It was created around very good programmatic positions and international analysis.

In a way this organisation was an attempt to fuse the traditions of the Western European comrades around Workers Power (so rich with important theoretical contributions) with the ones developed in revolutionary crises by the comrades who launched an Andean Workers Trotskyist Fraction. Later on other important traditions come to the LRCI and the most significant one was a long established group in New Zealand.

Workers Power originated inside Cliff's International Socialists and during its first five years (1975-80) it remained as an anti-defencist and state-capitalist group. With the opening of the Second Cold War this group made a radical shift towards orthodox Trotskyism. Under Dave Hughes' influence Workers Power correctly sided with the Afghan popular front government and the USSR against the pro-CIA Mujahedins. It adopted the best book written at that time on the character of the Stalinist states ("The Degenerated Revolution"). It also produced a very good analysis of the "Death Agony of the Fourth International". Around this theoretical framework comrades who were inside other organisations were influenced. In the mid-1980s Workers Power was able to create very small circles around its policies in Ireland, Germany, France and Austria. They set up a Movement for a Revolutionary Communist International that was based on fraternal relations and not a demo-centralist regime.

Andean revolutionaries

In 1985-86 comrades from Peru and Bolivia developed similar conclusions arising from another continent and conditions. They were quite active in the two revolutionary situations that put the so-called Trotskyists to the forefront of the struggles in those years. In Peru the Trotskyites achieved 12% of the votes and were the largest electoral anti-imperialist force during several general strikes.

In Bolivia, when the miners occupied the capital for two weeks in March 1985, the comrades who launched Guía organised daily political schools with hundreds of workers. In September 1985 they were the main opposition in Oruro during the Popular Assembly and the 5 weeks general strike. In August 1986, when 15,000 miners marched to the capital they were extremely active. Thousands of workers listened to them every day and some of their supporters were elected in the leadership of the miners and metallurgical unions.

The Peruvian and Bolivian comrades saw how all the "Fourth Internationals" betrayed so many good possibilities and they adopted a quite radical analysis of the collapse of that international calling for a New International Workers Trotskyist Fraction (FOT). These comrades would maintain very strong links with the workers movement. Poder Obrero Bolivia was once elected in the leadership of the main workers union (Huanuni), it still leads a national union and has delegates in the assemblies and congress of the COB (national trade union congress) and when today have comrades in leading positions in the current wave of strikes that is shaking this country.

In 1986-87 the first discussions started between the MRCI and the FOT. None of the European groups had experience leading unions or mass strikes but their strength was based in their positions and possibilities. The European comrades were very much influenced by the Andean comrades and learned a lot regarding their policies and experiences in the class struggle. The theoretical contributions made by Dave Hughes and the then healthy Workers Power were also quite important in developing the Andean comrades.

LRCI a healthy regroupment

During the 1980s the groups that constituted the LRCI adopted a clear revolutionary profile. We differentiated from the stalinophobic currents like the Morenoites, Lambertists or Cliffites who sided with the Afghan clerical-feudal reaction against the USSR or who fought for a Walessa's Solidarnosc government in Poland. We also demarcated from the Stalino-philes like the Spartacists who hailed the USSR in Afghanistan and Jaruselski's coup against the most militant European workers movement. We sided with the left bourgeois government and the Stalinist army against the medievalist reaction but condemning the reactionary methods of the Soviet invasion and war. We defended the Polish workers committees and unions against Stalinist repression without trying to overthrow the Degenerated Workers State with a pro-church capitalist restorationist Solidarnosc government and without asking for the release of the prisoners of the KPN and other bourgeois parties.

On the question of the struggle against imperialism we differentiated from currents like the Usec or Healyites that capitulated to the PLO, FSLN and other nationalists movements. We also defended Palestine, Argentina, Ireland, Iran and other oppressed nations in their confrontations against imperialism unlike the Cliffites, Militant or the Spartacists who adopted a pro-imperialist neutral and dual defeatist position.

In August 1989 the new international tendency was founded under the name that was proposed by the Latin American delegation. It advocated an international conference of all the left-oriented Trotskyst groups and it tried to become a pole of attraction for all of them.

New Period test of LRCI

However, the LRCI did not understand the new period that opened some months after its congress. The disintegration of the Stalinist dictatorships in Eastern Europe did not lead to working class political revolution but to a multi-class democratic social counter-revolution. Trotsky always wanted to replace the bureaucratic dictatorship of the proletariat with a revolutionary one based in workers councils. However, after 1989 a worse scenario happened and forms of the dictatorship of the incipient local bourgeoisie and the multinationals replaced every form of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Communists had to actively intervene in the mass demonstrations against the Stalinist rule but without making united fronts with the pro-imperialist bourgeois opposition and always considered them as the main enemy. If Stalinism was the *political* counter-revolution inside the Workers State the pro-imperialist "democrats" were organising a vast capitalist ‘social’ counter-revolution.

At the beginning of the post-1989 events the LRCI adopted correct positions. It fought against any type of German unification and against any bourgeois parliament in the East. It fought for workers democracy but it believed that the restoration of bourgeois democracy was even worst than the authoritarian Workers State. In 1990 the LRCI also critically sided with the Stalinists against the Azerbaijani bourgeois independence movement and the pro-imperialist democratic and anti-Communist student demonstration in Rumania.

LRCI bends under Imperialist pressure

However the LRCI was under the extraordinary great pressure of the pro-democracy imperialist media and public opinion. In 1991 it started to radically shift its policies. It proposed to make a united front with the Lithuanian bourgeois restorationist movement Sajudis and to ask the imperialist powers to intervene in the internal affairs of a workers state in order to help them. Trotskyist could not support Gorbachev's repression on the Lithuanian workers because he was not defending the Workers against a counter-revolution but neither could they block with imperialism.

In August 1991 when Yeltsin made its counter-coup that finally dismantled the Soviet Union and created a new Russian bourgeois republic, the LRCI proposed a united front with him and all the non-fascist bourgeois parties. This was a radical departure from the original LRCI's programme that said that revolutionaries should not be in favour of the freedom for bourgeois parties in a workers state, and even worse, make blocks with them. During those events revolutionaries should have opposed the Yanayev coup because it was launched against union rights but without making a block with the social counter-revolution and considering always that the later was the main enemy.

Petty bourgeois tendency in LRCI

The introduction of these new right-wing policies created a big conflict at the second LRCI congress (December 1991) in which the leadership of the League was heavily punished. However, after it they decided to introduce new Revisions to the programme behind the back of the rank and file. The LRCI's thesis that the right of self-determination is a bourgeois concept which can not be mechanically apply to the workers states was replaced by supporting unconditionally the right of every nation or ethnic group to separate from a workers state even when it could lead to capitalist restoration. Harvey tried to introduce the idea that the struggle for bourgeois parliaments and constituent assemblies were progressive in the workers states. He was defeated when he attempted to revise our line on Germany to say that it was wrong to not be in favour of a pan-German constituent assembly in 1989.

Later on it was discovered that in 1991-93 Harvey had been holding secret meetings with an anti-defencist ex-member hostile to the League planning how to move the LRCI backwards to anti-defencist positions, planning to move the LRCI back to some anti-defencist positions. In 1980-81, when Workers Power shifted from state capitalist theories to orthodow trotskyism, Harvey was the main opponent of that turn. Harvey had argued for a third way between Cliff and Trotsky, claiming that a bourgeois counter-revolution had happened in the USSR in 1927 and since then the struggle for bourgeois democratic demands and united fronts with bourgeois anti-Stalinist forces was progressive. He considered the Afghan feudal-clerical Mujahedin to be a legitimate ‘national liberation movement’ which should be supported against ‘soviet expansionism’, and argued that revolutionaries had to join its ranks. After Hughes’s death, Harvey's decided to re-launch a big offensive against the LRCI’s programmatic foundations.

The term "Workers State" remained in the lexicon but only as a category without content. When a bourgeois state nationalised the economy it became a "workers state" and when it heavily privatised the economy it returned to be a normal capitalist state. For Harvey a ‘workers state’ could be ruled for a decade by an anti-Communist regime and have a market economy controlled by private and multinational capitals. In Yugoslavia they even said that a workers’ state was ruled by fascists, even through fascism is a movement that smashes any elements of working class organisation in the interest of financial capital. Until July 1997 the LRCI described all the states east of Germany as 'workers state', and one months later it accepted that eight of them had become bourgeois states. The remaining twenty post-Soviet states are still being characterised as ‘workers states’.

Harvey doesn’t have any serious attitude towards the class characterisation of the states. He narrowed the differences between a bourgeois state and a degenerated workers state. For Harvey one could become the other without destroying the state apparatus. It doesn’t matter what is the class content of the state. In a workers state you defend it against imperialist attacks or internal counter-revolution. The LRCI said that Yugoslavia is the European countries with more features of a Degenerated Workers State but it didn’t defend it against NATO’s bombings (1995) and against the pro-imperialist KLA.

The LRCI was becoming an extremely eclectic current which was trying to conciliate its original revolutionary Trotskyist defencism with the pressure of the Western democratic public opinion and Harvey's anti-defencist theories. That led it to the most bizarre contradictions. It characterised the world situation as a revolutionary period because Stalinism was smashed but also as a counter-revolutionary phase. It confused social and political revolution and both with a democratic social counter-revolution.

In 1992 the LRCI wrote that they would not defend Yanayev's Red-Brown demonstrations against Yeltsin's capitalist repression because they were the Butchenko (fascist) wing of the bureuacracy, and one year later they voted for it in the Presidential elections.

War in Bosnia brings split

In the Balkan wars the LRCI leaders sided with everybody. In the conflict between Serbs and Croats they sided with both camps at the same time. Until November 1992 they opposed the independence of Bosnia and condemned Izetbegovic's Bosnian Muslims as reactionary, ethnic cleansers and pro-imperialists. One month later they decided to support them, and later on to ask imperialism to send weapons money and men for them. In 1992 they organised a common demonstration in Vienna with Great Serb monarchists and year later with Muslim and Albanians who were asking for NATO intervention against the Serbs. They always said that they were willing to defend the Serbs against NATO and its Muslim and Croat allies if imperialism bombed them. However, when it happened they called for a dual defeatist position in those bombardments, for more resolute action by the Muslim-Croat troops who were ethnically cleansing almost one million Serbs, and for imperialism to give tanks, planes and missiles to their local puppets.

In 1995 all the Latin American comrades were expelled because they organised a tendency proposing that the LRCI defend Haiti and the Serbs against imperialist attacks. Immediately after that the LRCI moved towards a fusion process with the PTS who also defended Serbia and Haiti against the USA. The LRCI decided once more to shift its position. In the last Kosovar conflict it called for the defence of the Serbs.

However, it did so in an extremely contradictory way, because it was also for a military victory of the pro-NATO KLA. The LRCI advised the KLA to demand more money and weapons from NATO and to use their massive bombardments to smash the Serbs. It regards and anti-Communist formation that was using US military support to destroy what remained from a workers state as ‘petit bourgeois revolutionaries’- a position that contrasts sharply with the LRCI’s attitude to the Basque nationalist republican ETA, which it denounces as completely reactionary’ and refuses to defend against Spanish imperialist state repression.
 

LRCI's eclectic and impressionistic method

This way of combining the most amazing contradictions is becoming the official LRCI "method" on every single question. In Britain, Workers Power was strongly opposed to any degree of autonomy for Scotland and Wales because it said this threatened the integrity of the United Kingdom that should be preserved as the best way to maintain the unity of the class. Later on they decided to vote Yes for devolution for Scotland but against it for Wales.

On the Socialist Labour Party they zigzagged. Initially they enthusiastically supported it,then later condemned as a Stalinist sect, then some more weeks later send more than 10% of their members into it. Workers Power actively campaigned for New Labour against SLP candidates (including leafleting for an ex-Tory Blairite against Scargill) while its entryists inside the SLP were advocating more SLP candidates. At the end, instead of recruiting people, they lost members in this adventure. For years Workers Power campaigned for right-wing bourgeois workers parties against the far-left in France and Britain. In the last European elections they proposed exactly the opposite line. They called for a vote against the European Socialist Party and United Left in France and Britain but for it in Sweden.

It is possible to go on describinig these inconsistencies but we don't have the space. The important conclusion is that the LRCI is becoming a very erratic and irresponsible sect with the most antagonistic lines and zigzags.

The undemocratic regime

This eclecticism is impossible to maintain without a bureaucratic regime. The organisation is not united around political positions but around personal links and friendships. Is becoming like a social club around a pedantic academic clique who can make the most incredible U-turn at any moment. All the members have to be loyal to those leaders.

Harvey and Stockton changed radically the LRCI’s programme without declared officially a fraction. They created a secret click that manipulated the LRCI through the International Secretariat sanctioning their opponents. Exactly the opposite happened with *all* the comrades that led tendencies inside the LRCI who finally were excluded.

After the League’s first congress, two tendencies emerged in the British section that ended up fusing with the Revolutionary Internationalist League (RIL). One raised differences over work in the gay/lesbian movement, while the other called for a more serious intervention in the industrial working class and criticised Workers Power’s zigzags over the "Victory to Iraq’slogan during the Gulf War. In the first case, instead of discussing the political issues (as the Austrian and Andean comrades demanded), the Workers Power leadership launched a campaign against the RIL over the alleged theft of a computer. The comrade who led the other tendency was suspended and obliged to return all the internal bulletins.

In 1991 Brian Green and eight other comrades in WP launched a tendency proposing that the world period was counter-revolutionary. Brian Green went on to argue that the ex-Stalinist countries had restored capitalism and that it was wrong to continue calling them ‘workers’ states. He wrote a major book on world economy, but the League vetoed its publication. He was removed from every commission and ostracised. Later on, the LRCI forbade members to live in the same house as him.

After August 1991 the US sympathising section, the Revolutionary Trotskyist Tendency (RTT), criticised the LRCI’s leaders for capitulating to Yeltsin during his coup. Two weeks before the LRCI congress in December, without asking the delegates, International Executive Committee (IEC) members or sections, Dave Stockton in the name of the LRCI broke relations with the RTT and vetoed its participation at a congress that came very close to removing the right-wing leadership. LRCI members were forbidden to contact any RTT member or sympathiser.

In 1994 an opposition developed in the Austrian section, comprising half of the Vienna branch and most of the youth. Like the earlier opposition in the British section, they argued that the world period was essentially counter-revolutionary. Instead of efforts being made to integrate this tendency into the leadership, they were under-represented at the LRCI’s congress and were excluded from electing the IEC.

In 1995, when the majority of the New Zealand section created the Proletarian Fraction, the LRCI’s leaders intervened from Europe to suspend its only full-timer and change the leadership that the section had just elected at its national conference. The LRCI reacted with so much hostility to the Proletarian Fraction comrades that they were driven away. LRCI members were instructed to cease contact with the New Zealand dissidents and to show personal letters that they received from them.

In December 1992 all the Latin American members proclaimed a Left Opposition, but were persuaded by the LRCI leaders not to form a faction. The leadership then conducted a series of manoeuvres, attempting to destroy the Peruvian section and to demoralise and divides their adversaries. In 1995 the Latin Americans decided to formally launch a tendency. The Tendency was not recognised, its platform was not translated and all its signers were immediately suspended or sanctioned. The only of the four alternate or full IEC members that was able to come to the IEC meeting (mid-1995) was forbidden to do so, and the comrade who wrote the tendency’s platform was suspended and threatened with expulsion. Villa was suspended twice, and forbidden to discuss with any Latin American group, to receive internal bulletins, to discuss with any Latin American group or to participate in the editorial board of Revolutionary History.

The Left Opposition, including the comrade that put the name of the LRCI, was expelled without the right of defence or even of appeal. Some comrades were even physically assaulted. Nearly all of us were unfoundedly accused of being thieves and other moral charges. This shows an extremely cowardice from a leadership that often uses manoeuvres and slanders because it can not use political arguments. The comrades that defended the principles of the LRCI’s foundation congress in Coventry were send to Coventry.

In 1998-99 an opposition in France was declared, attacking the LRCI’s leadership for advocating a vote for the government and not for the far left. They were suspended and expelled. Members of the League were forbidden to discuss or socialise with them. Good independent thinkers in Vienna, the Midlands and other places were also pushed away.

Instead of allowing the oppositions to discuss their differences openly in their paper or special meetings, an intolerant atmosphere was set up. In the case of the Left Opposition we received the most terrible persecution. Our full-timers were immediately sacked. The Latin American anti-imperialist tendency was not recognised and all the signers were sanctioned or suspended. The Left Opposition, including the comrade that put the name of the LRCI, was expelled without the right of defence or even of appeal. Some comrades were even physically assaulted. Nearly all of us were unfoundedly accused of being thieves and other moral charges. This shows an extremely cowardice from a leadership that often uses manoeuvres and slanders because it can not use political arguments. The comrades that defended the principles of the LRCI’s foundation congress in Coventry were send to Coventry.

Class roots of right opportunism

The LRCI is not a democratic-centralist international. All the power is concentrated in an International Secretariat which is not elected in a congress, it is composed by British full-timers and academics (none of them with the slightest experiences in leading mass demonstrations or revolutionary crises) and have the power to change the programme, statutes, resolutions of the congresses, to break with sympathise sections, to exclude from the organisation entire sections or members of the International Executive Committee (the highest body elected at congresses), or even to change the leadership and policies of the national sections. At the end this his small Secretariat is dominated by one single great leader who could be the treasure, the editor of the journal and the person who does the minutes and edit (change) all the League’s documents.

On 4 August 1995 the Croat army was launching the worst ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. An entire Republic (Serb Krajina) was completely depopulated. Helped by previous NATO bombs and financial, military and logistic help the Croat and Muslim troops reversed the ethnic cleansing. In that significant moments the LRCI decided to consider the people attacked by the worst imperialist attacks as their main enemy. We considered that it meant the final collapse of the organisation and that we need to openly put publicly our own line.

On 1 May 1996 in a mine in the *altiplano* the Liaison Committee of Militant for a Revolutionary Communist International (CEMICOR in Spanish) was founded. It gathered the Bolivian, New Zealand and Peruvian sections and some comrades in Europe who resisted the LRCI's degeneration and collapse.

Our strength is rooted in our positions and our experiences in the class struggles. When the LRCI started to shift to the right the workers movements where we were based were suffering serious defeats. In the case of Peru, after having one of the strongest sections of the LRCI, the imposition of Fujimori's dictatorship and heavy repression severely weakened Poder Obrero.

The break with the LRCI's centrist and bureaucratic methods left us with comrades scattered over the globe. Normally an international tendency is created around groups that converge around some geo-political centre. However, between New Zealand, the Andes and several European countries there were not strong links. In New Zealand we maintain a regular bi-monthly paper, we published some issues of Guía and other theoretical publications in English, and in Peru and Bolivia we constantly produce leaflets, bulletins and documents being quite active in the unions.

We have established some new contacts in the imperialist countries. We managed to resist the neo-liberal wave that destroyed our League but we are still incapable for geographic and material reasons of creating a democratic centralist tendency that could meet regularly.

Today the LRCI does not have any significant links with the class in any part of the globe and it is so confused that it cannot attract any new important force. They will fail to succeed in regroupment with any considerable organisation as happening with the Argentinean PTS. They are reducing the range, the periodicity and the quality of their publications. They don't have open meetings and they are incapable of any serious discussion. They recently opened a discussion site on the Internet but only appeal to censorship and moral accusations because they could not answer the slightest criticisms we made of them. In the last ten years Workers Power has lost at least five times more comrades than it recruited. The LRCI has fewer members in its International Executive Committee today than ex-members of that body who are not in the League any more. The LRCI is dying. It could survive as an apparatus for some years on and would win some new people, but it will fail to produce any serious impact or political contribution.

Our small international current produced a joint declaration against NATO with four other South American groups. We need to analyse some of the problems that were present in the LRCI before its constitution. We are open to debate and will respond to any critique made of us. We are committed to discuss with other groups and comrades in the Americas, Australasia and Europe in order to establish a new pole of attraction that could rescue and develop Leninist-Trotskyist principles.

Reprinted from Class Struggle No 29 September-October 1999
 

Declaration of Bolshevik Current for the Fourth International (BCFI) translated from Luta Operaria, journal of Liga Bolchevique Internacionalista_ #22, october of 1997)

The 30th aniversary of the death of Ernesto "Che" Guevara is a very important issue for revolutionaries world-wide. In many countries he is associated with anti-imperialist rebellion. However, Trotskyists are very critical of him. On the one hand we defend his heroism against the bourgeoisie, but on the other hand we need to counterpose the strategy of permanent revolution against his left-wing variant of Stalinism.

We are reproducing an article from Lutta Operaria, paper of the International Bolshevik League. This is a Brazilian group of the Bolshevik Current for the Fourth International, a current which includes the Bolshevik Party of Argentina. Comrades of the Latin American sections of the LCMRCI (CEMICOR) had been in discussion with both groups for many years. In 1991 one of our comrades was the first foreign militant to visit the Argentinian Bolsheviks. Comrades from the LCMRCI have been in Brazil and Argentina discussion with them and also attended the founding conference of their international current.

The first article from another group published in Lutta Operaria was the declaration of our split from the LRCI. Some months ago a leader of the Brazilian group visited us and later one of our comrades was with them participating in their intervention in a union congress and in the preparation of land seizures.

We have many agreements especially with the Brazilian Bolsheviks on the question of the defence of every workers state and oppressed nation against imperialism and of the Polish workers and other anti-Stalinist non-bourgeois movements in the east against bureaucratic repression. Nevertheless, we have important differences on the attitude towards the Moscow Coup in 1991 and on the characterisation of an 'anti-capitalist' wing of the bureaucracy. Yet,we have a relationship which includes practical collaborations and mutual respect. We reprint the article below in that spirit.

However, it is important to mention that there are two points where it would appear that we are not in agreement. One is how we characterise the Cuban Revolution and the other is about the left-Stalinist character of Che.

Character of the Cuban Revolution.

In the 'Fourth Internationalist movement' there was a discussion in the early 1960's about the nature of the Cuban revolution. The International Committee (IC) refused to believe that Castro had expropriated the bourgeoisie and created a Degenerated Workers' State. The United Secretariat (USec), created in 1963, believed that Castro was pushed by the masses to create a workers' state which has some deformations. If the IC advocated a social revolution against the Castroite capitalist state, the USec thought that no political revolution was on the agenda because Che and Castro were revolutionaries who only needed some Trotskyist advice to correct their orientation.

We think that both are wrong. We think that post-revolutionary Cuba was a Degenerated Workers' State which needed straight away a new political revolution to pave the way for socialism. Castro and Che didn't lead a revolution based on workers' councils and militias. In 1959 they replaced Batista with a new bourgeois popular front regime. Under the pressure of the masses, the threats of Washington, and under the auspices of the Soviet Union (interested in creating a base close to the US), Castro and Che moved against the bourgeoisie and expropriated it.

However, the new state was quite different to the one that Lenin and Trotsky built in 1917. It was not based on workers' councils, on a workers' party or the attempt to promote workers' parties and revolutions outside the small island. Cuba joined the COMECON and copied the bureaucratic totalitarian rule of the Soviet Bloc. The planned economy was distorted by a new oligarchy interested in maintaining its national privileges against any workers' revolution. The only way to regenerate the state was through a new political revolution that would put all the power in the hands of workers' councils led by an internationalist revolutionary party.

Therefore, we don't use the term deformed workers' state in relation to Cuba because it could be confused with the Pablo-Mandelite conception that it was a revolutionary state with some deformations that only needed some reforms to make healthy.

Che as a Left-Stalinist.

We also think that Che never broke with Stalinism. He was always against building working class councils and militias, and even any form of workers' political party. He died in Bolivia, the country which had the most militant proletariat in all Latin America, without having any participation in the workers' movement. The Bolivian toilers have a very strong tradition of combative and prolonged general strikes, factory and mine armed occupations, armed battles with the army and very strong and massive organisations. The only working class in the West that was able to destroy by itself "their" national bourgeois army was the Bolivian one in 1952. Yet Guavara didn't participate at all in any of the actions or organisations of the miners, factory workers and even the peasant organisations.

Guavara's strategy was opposed to the one advocated by Trotsky in his book The Permanent Revolution. Che talked about a socialist revolution (which was more progressive than the traditional Stalinist Stageist theory). However, he never called for a PROLETARIAN revolution. His idea of a 'socialist' revolution was a multi-class upheaval controlled by an elite guerrilla army. He thought that a volutarist armed elite based in the rural and urban petite bourgeoisie could undermine the official army and could press other sections of the reformist and nationalist forces to create a new popular front with them.

Before he was in Bolivia he tried to organise a guerrila war with Kabila in the Congo. Like in the Andes he never thought it necessary to participate in the organisation and mobilisation of workers and peasants. He always tried to build a small heroic army in the mountains to harrass the army of the national bourgeoisie and create the conditions for a broader popular front.

Despite his friction with Moscow and with Castro, Guevara never broke with Stalinism. He was one of the main leaders in the creation of a new bureaucratised workers' state in Cuba and he endorsed (albeit with some criticism) the Stalinist models in the USSR and China.  He participated in the repression of the small Fourth-Internationalist Workers' Revolutionary Party in Cuba. In 1959 he was in favour of a bourgeois candidate as Cuban President and later he supported different bourgeois regimes in Latin America. Guevara was quite friendly with the Brazilian governments before the military coup in 1964. Like Castro in Chile during the early 1970's, Guevara at no time called on the Brazilian workers to organise independently and against Goulart, Quadros, Brizola or other Brazilian bourgeois nationalists.

Cuba promoted guerrilla movements in Latin America as a way of undermining the regimes which supported the US blockade of the island. In the countries which were not hostile towards La Habana, Castro and Guevara were not keen to support guerrilla movements. When the Latin American regimes started to have good relations with Cuba, Castro helped them by asking the armed groups to moderate their policies or to reintegrate into the bourgeois armies.

LRCI centrist confusion.

In the last Trotskyist International, Keith Harvey published a long article on Guevara. In that article he revised the previous position of the LRCI formulated by Dave Hughes.  He put the position that Guevara was a progressive centrist who was breaking with Stalinism. This position is a concession to Mandel and Moreno. Guevara had some differences with Moscow and he had some sypathies with Mao, who at that time was promoting a more hostile attitude towards US imperialism and "peaceful coexistence", and organising the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution".

According to The Degenerated Revolution - the original programmatic document of the LRCI now being rejected by Harvey - Mao, Tito and any other Stalinists who enntered into conflict with Moscow and attacked their own bourgeoisie, were not any kind of centrists. They were described as "disobedient Stalinists" who adopted an autonomous policy towards the Kremlin in making new politically counter-revolutionary Degenerated Workers' States.

Despite the claim of some of his associates, like the Peruvian Morenoite Ricardo Napuri, that Guevara was reading some of Trotsky's books, Che never adopted any kind of strategy towards the workers' movement. A centrist is someone who oscillates between Stalinism and the workers' revolution. Guevara never flirted, even in a deformed way, with any idea of a revolution organised or based in the industrial proletariat.

The central question.

This methodological question is important for revolutionaries in Latin America and other oppressed nations. The Sandinistas or the FMLN in the 1980's, or the Colombian Coordinadora Simon Bolivar, or the Peruvian Shining Path, were never centrists. They were always a mixture of Stalinism and petite bourgeois nationalism. Like all guerrilla movements based in the rural or uban petite bourgeoisie they rejected the need for working class independence, councils, militias and revolution.

The proletariat has to defnd such petite bourgeois movements against imperialism, but also has to defend its own interests and aims against such movements. These guerrilla movement can and do attack workers' organisations. Because its violence doesn't come from or express the class interests of wage-workers it can be used against them. It is not possible to create a workers semi-state by means of a guerrilla strategy. If these armed groups are not destroyed, they can negotiate their future integration into the system. If they take power, they can maintain capitalism, or in the most radical and actually improbable circumstances, they can create new non-capitalist bureaucratic collectivised regimes.

Our sections in Latin America are fighting to build WORKERS parties for an internationalist revolution based upon workers' and peasants' councils and militias. Our strategy is in direct opposition to the one advocated by Guevarist, Maoist or other left variants of Stalinism They are in favour of petite bourgeois armed elites that will undermine the workers' organisations and that sooner or later are condemned to create new popular fronts.

So we don't think that Guevarism or Maoism are capable of fighting for the creation of "one, two, three or more workerss' states". Guevara could talk about developing new Vietnams (anti-Imperialist war scenarios). However, his strategy was incapable of building healthy workers' states and was not even a guarantee for the overthrowing of a military junta. In fact, 3 years after his death, the Bolivian workers made a massive general strike which smashed a right wing military coup and opened the way towards the creation of a semi-soviet Popular Assembly.

"One, Two...many workers' states"

1. On an October 8, 1967, Ernesto "Che" Guevara was murdered by the bloody dictatorship of Barrientos in Bolivia. The lackeys of imperialism disappeared his body, cut his hands, and try to erase him from the face of the earth. The cruelty of the exploiters was useless: the memory of the oppressed was stronger. The example set by a man who left behind positions and honors and set forth to another country to give his life for the extension of the revolution, aside from the mistakes he may have made, grows as capitalism pushes the masses onto misery and puts the struggle for socialism on the order of the day.

2. In the final years of his life, Che maintained the necessity of extending the revolution and imposing socialism in Latin America. And he stood by his convictions with his life. Such a consistence must be the ferment of the future revolutionary layers for the workers' parties we need. Yet we who defend the fight for socialist revolution through proletarian dictatorship, while recognizing the subjectively revolutionary disposition of Che Guevara, must not fail to point out the error of his politics at the same time. While defending in Che Guevara the anti-imperialist attitude, we simultaneously point out that the path he defended for revolution in Latin America collided objectively, that is, beyond his conscious thought, with the socialist perspective he claimed to defend.

3. We agree with Che that we have to fight imperialism in the whole planet: "we have to consider that imperialism is a world-wide system, the final stage of capitalism, and that we have to vanquish it in a great world conflagration" (Che Guevara, in "Create one, two, many Vietnams"). We agree with Che that "the local bourgeoisies have exhausted all their power to oppose imperialism -if they ever had any- and now constitute only a tail-end wagon. There are no more changes to do; it's either socialist revolution or a caricature of a revolution" (ibid.). We also agree with Che that "all the countries of this continent are mature for a fight such that, if triumphant, cannot be contented with less than the creation of a socialist type of government"(ibid.). No serious revolutionist can disagree with the three general points made by Che: the necessity of overthrowing capitalism internationally, the incapacity of the "national" bourgeoisie's to play any revolutionary role, and the maturity of the conditions to impose governments which fight for socialism. All of this had already been defined by Lenin in Imperialism, the Higher Stage of Capitalism and confirmed by Trotsky in his Theses on Permanent Revolution -the two most important leaders of the Octoober 1917 revolution.

4. But the Russian Bolsheviks tirelessly fought for several decades in the most important factories of Russia to raise the industrial working class to its historical tasks. They were by their side during the revolution of 1905 and also after its defeat and through the new rise opened in 1910. Through all the tides and ebbs, they tenaciously and patiently fought in order that the most advanced proletarian detachments mobilized their class toward imposing proletarian dictatorship and toward the fight to extend the revolution internationally. When the workers', poor peasants' and soldiers' soviets of 1917 recognized in the Bolshevik program and leadership their own program and party, the bourgeoisie was overthrown. Thus was born the first victorious workers' revolution that showed the road to overthrowing capitalism in the whole world.

5. This was not the road chosen by Che, who defended the thesis of the insurrectional focus the example of which would awaken the oppressed masses. Che tells us that "there are fundamental arguments which, in our opinion, determine the necessity of guerrilla action in the Americas as the axis of the fight" ("Guerrilla War, a Method").

In another writing, Che specifies some of these arguments": "these combats will not be mere street fights with stones against teargas, or peaceful general strikes; nor will it be the fight of an enraged people destroying in two or three days the repressive apparatus of the ruling oligarchy; it will be a long and crude fight, the front line of which will be in the anti-guerrilla shelters, in the cities, in the fighters' houses" ("Make One, Two...").

The opposition drawn by Che between "peaceful general strikes" on the one hand and "guerrilla war" on the other is a sham contradiction, for history had already shown in Russia, and also negatively in Bolivia 1952, that general strikes could also have an insurrectional character and that the proletariat in arms could overthrow the armed detachments of the bourgeoisie and even advance in the construction of a workers' states. If, for Lenin, the work in the factories and soviets was the basic condition to stand by the proletariat in a revolutionary manner and to fight to raise it to its historical tasks, for Che, instead, there could be a shortcut through the decided action of a handful of guerrillas.

Consistently with this perceived road, Che undertook an isolated guerrilla action in Bolivia which was not able to drag after it any fringe of workers or peasants and soon ended into a tragedy. A predictable tragedy, for the Bolivian workers and peasants were still in the middle of an ebb and under the effect of the profound defeat of the 1952 revolution, in which they had been steps short of seizing power, having gone as far as destroying the bourgeois army and imposing the control by armed workers' committees of all the country's major mines and companies.

6. There is obviously a dialectic relation between the ends and the means, and Che Guevara's thought does not escape that implacable logic. His general position for revolution and socialism clashes with his particular methods of onesidedly privileging guerrilla war based on the constitution of an isolated focus awakening the masses with its example. Here, the method distorts the goal. Che calls for following the road of Vietnam, a people that was carrying forward the most ferocious and decided battle against imperialism.

But Che does not mention that the Vietnamese leaders, headed by Ho Chi Minh, tried to reach agreements, including about coalition governments, with the "national" bourgeoisie that Che himself considered to be "exhausted" and counterrevolutionary. The same Vietnamese "national" bourgeoisie ended up actively cooperating with imperialism and mercilessly bombing its own people, in order to safeguard the holy private property of the means of production. It is in such conditions that Ho Chi Minh finds himself forced to fight imperialism out and impose a workers' state -aside from his initial intentions, which did not go beyond a coalition government with assumedly "progressive" bourgeois sectors.

7. Che himself, who had as of 1967 reached the conclusion that all confidence in any sector of the native bourgeoisie was useless, was a leader of the 1959 Cuban revolution, the protagonists of which included sectors of the Cuban bourgeoisie. In the Sierra Maestra call of January 9 of 1958, the Movement 26 of July maintains: "Does anybody think that we, the Sierra Maestra rebels, are not for free elections, a democratic regime, and a constitutional government?" (quoted by Mario Llerena in La revolución insospechada).

Fidel Castro himself admitted, in the crucial days of the Cuban guerrilla war that "our Cuban support comes from all social classes. We even have rich supporters" (interview in Look, 2/4/58, quoted ibid.). It happens that the discredited Batista dictatorship was not only profoundly despised by the masses, but also by most of the capitalists, who regarded it as an obstacle to the march of their business, given the state of permanent social commotion engendered by the regime.

The M26, which Che joined in 1954, was the left wing of the Partido Ortodoxo or "orthodox party," a bourgeois liberal force whose goal was to reestablish a "constitutional democracy" without importantly affecting the ownership of the means of production. That is why the first Cuban president after the 1959 revolution was the bourgeois judge Manuel Urrutia, and he enjoyed Castroist support.

One year after Batista's overthrow, Che still defended the support of the M26 by a sector of the national bourgeoisie: "It happens that this national revolution, fundamentally agrarian, but with the enthusiastic participation of workers and middle-class people and even the support of some industrials, has acquired a continent- and world-wide trascendence" (Che Guevara, "Análisis de la situación cubana, su presente y su futuro").

The development of the fight in itself, and the presence of exceptional conditions, led the Movement 26 of July farther than what it wanted, and finally, by 1961, toward the construction of a workers' state. During the very course of the fight, the major landowners were expropriated and public services were brought under state control. But American imperialism demanded that the new rulers reverted the measures affecting the capitalists' property, and even promoted a military invasion and an economic blockade in that order.

This imperialist pressure collided with the masses' revolutionary aspirations. The clashes between the monopolies' interest and the masses' aspirations had an impact on the M26, making it more radical and causing a purge of bourgeois leaders from its ranks. Only in 1961 did Castro officially defend socialism as the road of the revolution. Che himself admits that the radicalization of the revolution was rather a product of imperalist pressure than of its leaders' social convictions:

"What is to come depends largely on the United States. With the exception of our agrarian reform, which the Cuban people desired and started by itself, all our radical measures have been a direct response to the aggression by the powerful monopolies of which our country is the main exponent. The US pressure on Cuba made necessary the "radicalization" of the revolution. The answer to the question of how far Cuba is going can be deduced from how far the US are going" (Argentinian newspaper La Nación, 6/9/91).

8. Unlike the Russian Bolsheviks, who fought since the beginning for proletarian dictatorship and for socialism, seeking support in the Soviets built by the masses, Castroism turned to the left empirically, as a result of the antagonic pressures from imperialism and from the masses, which caused it to radicalize to the point of starting the construction of a workers' state. But the Cuban workers' state, supported on the expropriation of the factories, lands, and banking, only saw the light two years after Batista's overthrow, since what there was in the first months was attempts at conciliating with the bourgeoisie, as shown by the fact that the first president was Manuel Urrutia, a bourgeois who enjoyed American sympathy.

The Cuban workers' state, unlike the Soviet state of 1917, was born deformed due to the exceptional circumstances that engendered it and to the fact that its leadership had drastically turned from meek bourgeois-democratic goals to profound anti-capitalist measures. While in the Soviet Union, during Lenin's lifetime, the workers' state had its support in the Soviets, from which the masses exercised direct democracy, and was oriented toward fighting for the international extension of the revolution, the same kind of state in Cuba was born without Soviets and even without a fight to extend beyond its frontiers the revolution whence it had arisen. In the 1960's, Castroism promoted the Tricontinental Committee, a Latin American grouping of left organizations which characterized that it was feasible to attain "revolutionary" agreements with "progressive" sectors of the national bourgeoisie, thus repeating the strategy originally used by the M26 in the Sierra Maestra.

By the same time, the Cuban government closed ranks with the USSR bureaucracy, which defended the reactionary strategy of peaceful coexistence with capitalism and refused to support revolutionary processes in the oppressed countries. The government of the Cuban workers' state, which enjoyed enormous confidence from the exploited masses, neither found support in nor promoted soviets. On the contrary, they defended the dictatorship on the masses. Che himself admitted that "the vanguard group is ideologically more advanced than the mass. This latter knows new values, but to an insufficient degree.

While, in the former, a qualitative change takes place that allows them to go to a sacrifice in their more advanced function, the latter are only partially able to see and must be submitted to stimuli and pressure of a certain intensity: that is proletarian dictatorship exercised not only upon the defeated class, but also individually on the triumphant class" ("El Socialismo y el Hombre en Cuba"). Yet, as we have seen, the "vanguard group" in 1958 aspired to no more than restoring the bourgeois constitution of 1940 without affecting the interest of the great capitalists. The masses, instead, had advanced to the expropriation of lands without hesitation, were mobilizing against the monopolies' demands, and felt no doubts about responding to the call of arms when imperialism attempted at defeating the new government at Playa Girón. History had proven that the "vanguard group" had only become radical under the crossfire of imperialist pressure and the masses' aspirations, instead of showing them the path beforehand, as the Russian Bolsheviks did indeed.

9. The radicalization of the government arisen from the 1959 revolution stopped at the local-scale expropriation of the capitalists and did not advance toward the fight to extend the revolution internationally. Castro gradually subordinated himself to the Kremlin's dictates and also deployed a strategy of peaceful coexistence. In Chile, he supported Allende's effectively suicidal illusion of reaching "socialism" without destroying the bourgeois state. In Nicaragua, he supported the policy of conciliation with the bourgeoisie and mixed economy promoted by the Sandinistas, who finally succumbed to the Chamorros. In El Salvador, he defended the negotiation of a mass-influence guerrilla with the genocidal Cristiani government. And even today, through the Forum of Sao Paulo, he issues calls for peace and for a "humanitarian" capitalism.

Che was the exception within that process, for he continued to grow empirically more radical and going farther than his comrades in arms in the Sierra Maestra. When he was still part of the Cuban government, Che strongly ciritized the USSR leadership in a seminary in Algeria on February 24 of 1965, accusing them of not supporting the revolutionary processes in Asia and Africa. From then on, his days in the government were counted. Rather than calling himself to silence and subordinating himself to the Soviet bureaucracy and its "peaceful coexistence," he preferred to march to the Bolivian wilderness after the goal of extending the revolution.

His criticism of the USSR bureaucracy continued through his last writing, "Make One, Two, Many Vietnams," where he accused them of not consistently supporting the anti-imperialist crusade of the Vietnamese people. Such criticism earned him the retaliation of the bureaucracy, which not only made pressure in order that Che leave the Cuban government, but also refused to support him in Bolivia. Widely known is his confrontation with Mario Monje, then-head of the Bolivian Communist Party, which defended in that country the policy of a popular front with sectors of the local bourgeoisie, as Che's journals attest.

10. The empirical evolution of Che, who, as soon as 1967, already theoretically understood that agreements with the national bourgeoisies were impossible and that the only path was the fight for socialism, was interrupted by the fierce military persecution through the Bolivian wilderness promoted by the Barrientos dictatorship and by imperialism, putting an end to his life. Despite that his thought was empirically evolving to the left, he was not able to break with a vanguardist conception overestimating the masses' state of consciousness during the revolutionary process and then underestimating them once in power. The theory that the "advanced group" awakens the masses through the "insurrectional focus" and that, once in power, it exercises an "individual dictatorship on the triumphant class" are the two greatest mistakes of Che, for which he even paid with his life. His handful of fighters, imprisoned and assassinated in Bolivia, tragically showed once again that only under completely exceptional circumstances, as in Cuba, is the fusion possible between an advanced group and the masses. And even in Cuba the exception was double, for that "advanced group" did not at first intend to do a social revolution, but only to restore the bourgeois constitution of 1940.

The pressure of the Soviet bureaucracy to exclude him from Cuban government once again showed that proletarian dictatorship, when not supported in soviet democracy, is left at the mercy of a parasitic caste alien to proletarian interest. Had the workers' state been based on direct democracy, not Che isolately, but the whole state would have fought to extend the revolution, as did the early Soviet Russia, encouraging the formation of the Third International and actively supporting revolutionary processes in the whole world, but always stressing the masses' direct action. Because, in Lenin's thought, guerrilla war is not the central fighting method, but only a complementary aspect, subordinated to the general insurrection of the oppressed masses: "the party of the proletariat cannot consider guerrilla war as the only, or even the principal fighting method. This procedure must be subordinating to the others" (Vladimir Ilich Lenin, "On Guerrilla War.")

11. The figure of Che has grown gigantic for, in spite of his mistakes, he fought to extend the revolution to other countries, and he understood in his unexpectedly final years that socialism, and not an alliance with the national bourgeoisie, was the goal that the masses had to fight for. Che paid his convictions with his life and refused to retire as a servile Kremlin official. It is this attitude that we value and defend, aside from our differences with him. Meanwhile, the strategy of peaceful coexistence of capitalism reigning today in Cuba is, in every respect, the opposite of what Che dreamt of. When Castro says that "the Pope can solve the world's problems better than we" (Argentinian newspaper Clarín, 11/20/96), he leaves in the bourgeoisie's hands the solution to the barbarism and hunger to which capitalism drags millions of humans, and against which Che fought.

Far from fighting for the extension of the revolution, Castroism is now forced to allow the peaceful coexistence with the bourgeoisie into the workers' state itself, through the multiplication of capitalist investment and seriously endangering the conquests of the revolution. The worst of the case is that he still defends the possibility of building "socialism" isolately and in peaceful coexistence with the capitalist world market, which has already proven to be a reactionary utopy that leads to the collapse of the workers' state, as it already happened in the USSR and Eastern Europe, now mastered by social counterrevolution.

We Trotskyists, in spite of our total difference with the strategy promoted by Castroism, unconditionally defend the Cuban workers' state against the external or internal counterrevolution, and maintain the necessity of instoring Soviet democracy and of fighting to extend the revolution internationally, through a political revolution led by a party defending the program of Lenin and Trotsky; as Che said in "Make One, Two, Many Vietnams," "for the development of a true proletarian internationalism, with proletarian armies whose flag and reason to fight is the sacred cause of the redemption of humankind."

Reprinted from Lutte Operaria #22 October 1997

For the Military victory of Yugoslavia!

At this moment, a military alliance headed by the U.S.A., composed of nineteen countries and equipped with the most advanced warlike technology of the planet, triggers an aerial bombing on one of the poorest countries of Europe. A rain of North-American cruise missiles destroys several cities of the Yugoslav Federation (composed of Serbia, Montenegro, Vojvodine and Kosovo).

One does not know yet how many hundreds of Serbs were assassinated by the imperialistic projectiles, but independently of the number of dead, the results of the attack left painful scars in the population, who have been living for more than one decade under the conditions of a semi-colony isolated by a criminal economic international blockade.

The imperialistic front counts on the active collaboration of all the European Social-democratic governments, i.e. the bombers left from bases located in Italy, a country led by premier Massimo D'Alema, formed leader of the Italian Communist Party. The attack, justified by its authors for "humanitarian reasons" also deepens enormously the misery that affects the Serbian masses, as well as the Albanians of Kosovo, destroying what still remains of the Yugoslav economy after one decade of wars.

The first step of the attack was the retirement of an army of 1,400 observers of the Organisation for the Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which since October of 1998 was in the Yugoslav Federation on the pretext of guaranteeing the cease-fire between Serbs and Kosovars.

But in fact it was dedicated to espionage, preparing for better conditions for a NATO attack and the instalment of a military base in the region. A manoeuvre that is already well known and which was applied recently in Iraq by the U.S.A. With this trick, pretending to be engaged in international control, the great powers infiltrate agents to gather information, which is used in a future attack on the inspected country.

Nevertheless, that is not the only similarity between the present conflict and the Yankee's wars against Iraq. As well as with Saddam Hussein, the bourgeois mass media tried to present the enemy, Milosevic, as the greatest Satan of the times, the new Hitler, etc., as they always do in these situations to justify the slaughter of the bombings of the oppressed countries led by dictators.

Moreover, like the Iraqi people, the Serbs live under a criminal economic imperialistic blockade applied by "the democrats" and Social-democrat governments of the U.S.A. and Europe. In addition, the criminal action was decided even though Milosevic had capitulated under the conditions demanded in the negotiations of Paris, accepting the self-determination of Kosovo under the plans imposed by the international capitalist organisations. Clinton and the Social- democrat governments of Europe initiated the bombing because Belgrade did not allow a foreign military intervention of 28 thousand soldiers in its territory.

This demonstrates that the occupation is not a way to guarantee the "peace agreements", but an aim in itself. An objective of NATO is to place a military base within Eastern Europe. For that reason, they granted to Kosovo's people an autonomy under the control of the bayonets of the imperialistic troops for a minimum term of three years. In this period, on top of disarming the Serbian forces of the region of Kosovo, they would also try to disarm the UCK/KLA.

To accept an autonomy controlled by imperialism means for Kosovo's people to be left under conditions of national oppression still worse than those they have today. The aerial bombings that they have undergone in these days in Pristina, the capital of the province of Kosovo, are demonstrations of the true methods that will be applied by imperialism in Kosovo.

In spite of the pro-imperialistic Kosovo leaders, who today call for foreign intervention, the Albanian guerrillas of Kosovo have been a permanent problem for the U.S.A. and the European powers, and have crossed the Yugoslav frontiers determined by the peace agreements.

The fight for Albanian national liberation in Kosovo has inflamed the Albanians of the neighbouring countries, particularly of Albania (which since the popular rising of 1997 lives under another military intervention of the NATO) and Macedonia (where there also exists a significant population of Albanian origin). The Albano-Macedonean press used to idolise the heroic fighters from across the border, and the land is more than ready for the appearance of political demands for Albanian independence more radical than the options represented by the main Albano-Macedonean parties that exist nowadays.(El País, 23/03/99).

Because of that, imperialism knows that military intervention will be neither a calm nor a quick walkover! In fact, they speak about a five-year occupation of NATO troops in the south of the Balkans!.(idem)

The intervention brings an increasing number of confrontations between Washington and Moscow. Although Russia has transformed itself into a semicolony, it still has one of the largest arsenals on the planet. It is also aware that the extension of the military control of the Atlantic Alliance into the Balkans is directed towards the European east with the aim to occupy the space of military and political influence left by the Warsaw Pact. The U.S.A. has been modifying the correlation of forces in its favour in the East, and it is not by chance that three former Degenerate Workers States have entered into the Atlantic Alliance of imperialism.

Worried by the imperialistic advance of the Yankees, the Russian leaders were alarmed by the intensity of the conflict. The first minister Primakov declared that the use of the force "would cause a deep destabilising effect in Yugoslavia, Kosovo, the whole Europe and the entire world".(El País, 23/03/99). Even the minister of Defence, Sergueiev, said that "the bombings, would cause a second Vietnam, but this time, within Europe." (Folha do Sao Paulo, 24/03/99).

However Russian opposition to the attack does not go beyond declarations to the worldwide press. In addition, it does not do it because of humanitarian reasons, but because it feels that the next step of the NATO towards the European east is going into its own border republics, where Russia itself exerts a national oppression.

At this moment, it is necessary to defend unconditionally the Serbian population who is on Yugoslavia's side. If it wins over Yugoslavia, imperialism will be in a better condition to exert its dominion on Europe, to recolonise the European east and to oppress the remaining peoples of the planet.

On the other hand, a defeat of the NATO would give a great impulse to the anti-imperialist fight and to the national liberation of the Balkans, in the heart of east Europe, weakening the Social-democratic governments, who attack the labour and social conquests of the workers. At the same time it would put in trouble the dictatorship of Milosevic.

The leftists that do not support the military victory of Yugoslavia because of the bloodthirsty character of Milosevic should use the same criterion to refuse support to Iraq under the bombings of the U.S.A. Is perhaps Saddam Hussein less bloodthirsty than Milosevic?

The only way to stop the chauvinism of Milosevic is to oppose this new form of oppression in Yugoslavia under the bayonets of imperialism, and to defeat the NATO forces by making an anti-imperialist united front with Yugoslavia.

Freeing the country of imperialism breaks the conditions of oppression that generate the Serbian chauvinism, creating in this way better conditions for getting rid of Milosevic.

Today, refusing to make a military united front with Yugoslavia against the NATO is supporting the imperialistic bombings. There can be no progressive solution in the policy of the Serbian or Kosovar nationalism. Milosevic tries to divert popular discontent with the economic crisis of the country towards chauvinism against the ethnic minorities. The leaders of the Albanians, Rugova and the UCK/KLA, hope to get rid of the Serbian yoke by agreeing to a new oppression and a false autonomy under the control of the NATO.

The Kosovo and Serb masses must not fall in this trap. The Serbian workers cannot win anything with the oppression exerted by the capitalist government of Belgrade on the Kosovo Albanians. They must fight for Albanian self-determination, for the right to separate themselves from Yugoslavia and to join Albania and Macedonia if they wish.

In this form, it is even possible to win the Albanians, who see with distrust the imperialistic manoeuvres, to fight for the expulsion of the NATO from the Balkans. It is necessary to construct the proletarian unity of the masses of the Balkans against mankind's main enemy, imperialism.

It is necessary to forge a revolutionary internationalist party in the region, which would break with the nationalist leaders and would take the way of the proletarian direction to defeat and expel to the NATO and the imperialism from the region; wonder to construct a Federation of Socialist Republic in the Balkans.

We call to all the organisations that fight for the defence of the oppressed peoples to take action with marches and demonstrations of protest in the embassies of the imperialistic powers against the attack of the NATO against Yugoslavia, calling for the immediate recall of all troops and stop to the bombings in the Balkans. It is necessary to unify the fight in defence of the Yugoslav people with the combat against all the NATO and pro-imperialistic governments which support this military attack.

Defeat and expel the Yankee imperialism and the NATO from the Balkans!
Serb, Albanian and all Balkan workers unite against capitalist restoration, ethnic cleansing and imperialism.
For multi-ethnic workers councils and militias.
Self-determination for Kosovo!
For a Socialist Federation of the Balkans!

24th March 1999 (translated from the Spanish)

Internationalist Bolshevik Liaison - LBI (Brazil)

Workers Revolutionary Party - POR (Argentine)

Committee Of Worker and Socialist Initiative - CIOS (Argentina)

Orthodox Trotskyist Group (Brazil)

Trotskyist Faction (Brazil)

Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International - CEMICOR/LCMRCI
 
 

There has been a general strike in Colombia since August 31. Urban workers are uniting in struggle with the guerrilla insurgents. The US is preparing a counter-insurgency war against a popular movement that threatens to destabilise US control of the whole of Latin America. What must communists do in this situation? We reprint the joint statement of a number of Trostskyist tendencies including the LCMRCI/CEMICOR.
 

Unite to Stop imperialist intervention in Colombia!

After ten months of negotiations, the government of Andrés Pastrana and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People's Army (FARC-EP) resolved to establish an "agenda for a dialogue for peace". The agreement was signed just after the Colombian government demilitarised an area of 42,000 sq. kms. localised in San Vicente del Caguán in the south of the country. After the agreement a new gathering of government and FARC representatives has been delayed because of the increasing political polarisation caused by the latest guerrilla offensive, the paramilitary's kidnapping and murdering of peasants, and the threat of an open US imperialist intervention in Colombia.

Recently the Minister of defence resigned accusing the President of conceding too many of FARC's demands. Despite the divisions in the bourgeois government, Pastrana is carrying on the negotiations with the guerrillas. The current attempts to establish a "peace dialogue" are being backed by US imperialism because it is the its preferred method of containing the deep economic and political crisis that is facing the country.

The US State Department warned that in the event that the Colombian situation got out of control, the US would intervene militarily in the region. The US announced that they are going to increase their present number of 240 soldiers and policemen. They are sending General Barry MacCaffray, the DEA director-general, to Colombia to assist in the negotiations and in the training of the army. The US annual military assistance to Colombia is around 289 million dollars, and this will also increase. This is a sort of "bland intervention". The US representative in the Organisation of American States (OAS) proposed that a multinational force of intervention be formed. If the social crisis gets worse an OAS military intervention led by the Argentinean Army, a country whose regime is a US puppet, will move into Colombia with the excuse of fighting narcotraffic.

The US plans military intervention against the guerrillas to combat drug trafficking. While they want to destroy the FARC and stabilise the pro-imperialistic government, they also wish to have the control of the total production and distribution of narcotics in Colombia –today the biggest drug supplier to the North American market. Drug trafficking is a business that mobilises millions of dollars, with the highest rates of profit of the world, but is not controlled by Imperialism, representing a monumental loss of currencies for the US with the exit of illegal dollars from that country.

Colombia, as well as the whole Latin America, is at the epicentre of a crisis that spread quickly from the international financial cracks which appeared in Asia in 1997, almost destroyed Russia and strongly affected the economy of all of the South cone. Since then, the region has become an centre of growing instability, where the most fragile economies like Ecuador, Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, have entered into crisis. Their national governments have become extremely unpopular, despite being recently elected, as it is the case of Andrés Pastrana and the Ecuadorian Jamil Mahuad, both of whom assumed the Presidency in August of 1998.

This capitalist crisis has caused an uprising of the labour and peasants movements in some Latin American countries, with strong demonstrations that threaten to develop into civil wars, like in Ecuador, where daily street protests nearly succeeded in occupying parliament. These fights were momentarily turned aside by a pact of governability between Jamil Mahuad and the rival Patriotic Front. Ecuador is today the mirror of Latin America. With an unemployment rate of nearly 20% and with under-employment that reaches 50% of the population, the economic crisis pushes the masses into a heroic fight, which hits directly the pro-imperialistic government and the rotten institutions of the regime.

This is the dynamic of crisis that marks the political and economical situation of the whole Latin American continent right now. The lack of so-called "economic and political stability" in the region places "the democratic regimes" on the brink of exhaustion and turns Latin America into a real powder barrel that threatens to explode with a domino-effect. Imperialism is aware of this danger, and for that reason threatens a military intervention in Colombia to prevent such an explosion. Since the US feels fortified (after the occupation of Yugoslavia by NATO) to rule as global policeman, it is ready to attack with its extraordinary warlike apparatus any country, town or political force, that refuses to obey its economic-political dictates.

In the particular case of the Colombian crisis, the economic fissures are acute. It experiences the biggest recession in the last 60 years; the Colombian peso, lost 25% of its value against the US$ in the last few months. Popular opposition to Pastrana is at 70% of the population, and economic activity has declined by 5.8% in the first quarter of the year. The government faced a massive general strike of professors, students and workers in May of this year, and now faces the FARC already controlling, or with a strong influence over, around 40% of Colombian territory, with about 15 thousand fighters in the demilitarised area of San Vicente del Caguán, whose border approaches the capital of the country, Bogota.

In order to assess the threat of the FARC, a government commission designated by former President Ernesto Samper to negotiate with the guerrillas, reported: "...the guerrillas operated strongly in 173 municipalities in 1985, but today in little more than 10 years, they have increased their influence in up to 622 municipalities". It concludes that the armed conflict "...in its new forms of expression is superior to the armed capacity of the State and there is no other option to resolve the situation other than dialogue" (Report of the Governmental Commission for Peace, Colombia/97).

In the last days of July, the FARC mounted a military offensive against the army that saw more than 360 killed. The objective of the offensive was, according to the Government, to negotiate better conditions for a peace agreement. Therefore the agenda of the "dialogue of peace" was suspended and the paramilitary groups connected to the army and the Conservative Party, like "United Self-defence of Colombia" began attacking rural villages killing more than 25 and taking 50 hostages.

The Colombian crisis is becoming daily more serious and the focal point of struggle in Latin America, along with the fights taking place in Ecuador. The offensive of the FARC and the threat of an Imperialist intervention make it difficult to reach an agreement between the Government and the guerrillas. The FARC have been in existence for more than 35 years and have a major influence on the Colombian masses. Therefore, the debate on its strategy, its program and its trajectory is fundamental for revolutionary organisations that share the aim of strengthening the anti-imperialist fight and the objective of proletarian revolution in the continent.

The strategy of the FARC: To take power or to reform the bourgeois regime?

The first centres of Colombian guerrillas arose from the popular insurrection of April 1948 known as "Bogotazo". The defeat of the insurrection, due to the betrayal of its bourgeois leaders connected to the Liberal Party, turned into a farmer resistance movement, which combined the fight against the conservative dictatorship and the struggle for land against the large estate owners.

The Communist Party (PC) influenced most of the guerrilla nuclei and insurgent military forces related to the liberal Party with bourgeois nationalist roots. The PC followed the Stalinist mensheviks, subordinating the fight of the masses to the national bourgeoisie, adopting a policy of "two fields", "democracy versus dictatorship". This fed illusions that "... the liberal guerrilla nuclei advanced from a fight against official violence to raise demands of deep social content" (Commemorative Declaration of the 30 years of the FARC).

Far from realising the PC's plan of establishing an alliance with the national bourgeoisie ito construct a "New Colombia", in 1953 the guerrillas of the Liberal Party ended up laying down their arms and making an agreement with the conservative National Government. This resulted in a brutal offensive against the communist guerrillas and the murder of its main leaders. Thus was repeated in Colombia, due to the class collaborationist policy of Stalinism a massacre of the workers' and farmers' leaders, as happened in Chiang Kai Chek’s China.

The remaining guerrilla nuclei continued to influence some rural zones. In 1964 the government triggered (with US support) through the OSAL (Operation for Security of Latin America) Plan, the "Marquetalia Operation" involving 16,000 troops, helicopters, US attack airplanes and instructors, and was able to impose a defeat on the guerrillas.

To rebuild itself, the guerrilla nuclei held two conferences in 1965 and 1966. In the first one, they debated an agrarian program; in the second, they founded the FARC. In that same period other guerrilla organisations arose: the ELN (National Liberation Army, Castroites) in 1965 and the EPL (People's Liberation Army, Maoists) in 1966. In the next decade the M-19 was formed. Each of these guerrilla groups can be characterised as petit bourgeois armed movements for 'armed reformism'. Their rank and file militants came from the peasantry. Their objective was to create a democratic political space for a bourgeois opposition, fortifying in this way the national economy, without altering the class relations.

In the decade of the 70‘s and 80‘s, with the deepening of the economic crisis, the revolts among the farmers were more intense and the FARC and the other guerrilla groups headed those mobilisations. In 1984 the FARC signed with President Belisario Betancur (1982-1986) "an agreement of cease-fire", where they proposed to become the civil opposition under the name of Unión Patriótica (UP). The UP program declared its intention "…together with other left parties and democratic movements, to fight with he popular masses for the return of normality and democracy; for opposition access to all mass media, the right to organise, and the right to fight and mobilise, in order to create a climate of popular participation in the management of the State" (Programme quoted in the Commemorative Declaration of the 30 years of the FARC-EP).

The result of the peace agreements was the murder of 5,000 popular leaders on the hands of the paramilitary forces of the Army. When the elected parliamentarians belonging to the UP were assassinated in 1987 the FARC broke the truce. In spite of this grim lesson, in 1990 M-19 and a sector of the EPL laid down their arms and joined the bourgeois opposition, securing the M-19‘s leader Navarro Wolf a place in the Government as Minister of Health.

Throughout the 1970's the FARC remained a guerrilla movement with little political influence. In the areas it controlled it protected the narcotics traffickers in return for a "Revolutionary Tax". With these resources the FARC was able to build in many zones a military arsenal almost equal to that of the Colombian Army.

The growth of the FARC in the last years as the most important opposition to the imperialistic Government with increasing influence over extensive farmer zones, is a direct result of the complete integration into the Bourgeois State of both the former guerrilla organisations and the civil and union opposition. The military capitulation of the M-19 and its integration to the civil bourgeois opposition where it co-sponsors attacks on the masses, reinforced to the eyes of the mass movement, mainly of the peasantry, the necessity of an armed fight against the Government.

On the other hand, the Communist Party, the MOIR (Independent and Revolutionary Labour Movement) and the unions (CUT, CTC, FECODE, etc.), have always supported a systematic policy of class collaboration as tools of the traditional bourgeois parties. In the 1998 elections there was no candidate, even a reformist one, linked to the labour movement. The non-existence of a strong party based in the workers mass movement in the cities, and the decomposition of the former guerrillarist left with its complete failure to make an alternative to the bourgeois opposition, left a political vacuum, which was occupied quickly by the FARC.

At the same time that the FARC gained influence with the masses, its political strategy and its program reinforced its character as a guerrilla movement that does not have the objective of destroying the Bourgeois State and of taking the power from the capitalists. Instead the FARC is an army that is used to press for elementary democratic reforms to the bourgeois regime, similar to the EZLN of Mexico. In this sense, the FARC are different from the Central American guerrillas who came to power in the decades of the 70‘s and 80‘s. An example is the FSLN, which in spite of reformist programme, established a new political regime where the institutions of the ‘Somocist’ state were destroyed (Parliament, Justice, Army), giving rise to new political institutions under the control of the FSLN. The new regime led by the Sandinistas (who did not wish to carry out a complete rupture with the bourgeois order) later made major concessions to capital, and collaborated in the reconstruction of the Bourgeois State, before finally returning state power to the parties representing imperialism.

The petit bourgeois's program of the guerrilla, by means of petit bourgeois parliamentary opposition or through the armed fight, is totally unable to take care of the farmers and worker’s demands, and to fight for the revolutionary destruction of the Bourgeois State. So the political platform of the FARC limits itself propping up the swaying bourgeois democracy of Colombia, constituting itself as an auxiliary force of the "patriotic and progressive" sector of the national bourgeoisie. But this policy is both utopian and reactionary since it is impossible to reconcile the interests of the bourgeoisie and their Capitalist State (dominated by Imperialism) with the demands of the masses. This lesson becomes still more evident if we remember the capitulation to the bourgeois state of the FSLN (Nicaragua), the FMLN (El Salvador), as well as the policy of popular fronts in Chile and Spain. These all resulted in major bloody defeats for the labour movement, and the strengthening of the pro-imperialistic bourgeois counter-revolution.

Unite the offensive of the guerrilla and the fight of the masses by the revolutionary overthrow of Pastrana and the Bourgeois and Imperialist rule!

The successive "peace agreements" with the guerrillas allowed the democratic regime to prolong its life until today. The urban labour movement, in spite of two important strikes against the government of Pastrana (teachers and state workers October 98 and May 99 respectively), has been victim of the policy of defeat and class collaboration of the opposition parties (PC, MOIR, and the unions led by them). The guerrillas program is still the same as that of the UP: "The use of dialogue as a possible tool for realising peace with social justice, and the introduction of a series of political, economic, social and structural measures that eliminate the deep social inequalities expressed by the crisis that affects the nation". (Resistencia, February-April/99).

The strategy of the FARC therefore consists of pressuring the bourgeoisie to make some reforms in the political regime by acting as a ‘left’ force in a future bourgeois democratic government. As the Declaration of the International Commission of the FARC-EP/May 1998 reveals: "Any process must have as its first task the creation of a Constituent Assembly that changes the relations in Colombia in favour of the popular sectors". The peace process must: "contribute to the organisation and the fight of the Colombians for a generous and democratic mother country, for the constitution of a government of national reconciliation, and for plural, democratic and patriotic reconstruction" (ídem).

All the programmatic formulations of the FARC are filled with class collaboration. The proletariat and the peasantry, instead of exerting their own dictatorship, are subordinated "democratically" to sectors of the national bourgeoisie. That is the essence of the policy of national reconciliation that the FARC wants to reconstruct on a new bourgeois basis in the Capitalist State.

However, in spite of their clearly reformist program, the economic and political crisis objectively pushes the FARC to be an alternative to the politically bankrupt government of Pastrana, constituting itself as a popular catalyst for hatred of the regime. This starting point is the one that must guide the intervention of the masses and the revolutionaries in the Colombian guerrilla struggle. This is necessary to avoid repeating the tragedies of Nicaragua and El Salvador, where the guerrilla leaders were able to impose historical defeats on the proletariat. Class militants and organizations that call themselves revolutionary, must take part actively in the political defense of the military union with the guerrilla in their actions against the government. At the same time they must raise an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist program; openly breaking with the national bourgeoisie; advocating agrarian reform through the expropiation the large estates, the great factories and multinationals; the nationalisation of the financial system under the control of the masses and repudiating the internal and external debts in open rupture with Imperialism.

Only the labour movement and its political organisations can turn aside the guerrillas from their course of class collaboration and impose a revolutionary program for the Colombian masses that will coordinate the guerrilla offensive in the country with strong mobilisations of masses in the cities. The guerrilla is not immunised from the pressures of the urban labour movement once this is mobilised. The guerrilla offensive based on peasant struggles is drawn to negotiation and class peace dialogue, but it is also responsive to the grave social crisis that forces a more open fight against the national bourgeoisie and Imperialism. The radicalised base of the guerrillas, the rise of the farmer movement, and the big fights of the masses in the cities, make it possible to the FARC to go beyond its immediate objective of finding an agreement with the Government.

In order to stop that happening, the Government tries for negotiation, an agreement with the guerrillas, since a confrontation with the FARC could bring further struggles in the labour movement and the farmers due to the serious social crisis. That is why the dialogues with the guerrillas were intensified during the strike of teachers in May, and promoted by the visit of the President of stock-market of New York, Richard Grasso, to the FARC in its own zone.

The 10 months of initial negotiations with the guerrillas fortified Pastrana, giving him a relative social base to go ahead the pro-imperialistic plan that his predecessor Ernesto Samper was unable to implement. According to the calculations of the Government, a suspension of hostilities would allow for a growth of 4 points in the GDP, reversing the expected negative growth in the economy. This is the reason why important sectors of the bourgeoisie and Imperialism consider the policy of "peace" good for business putting off the imminent economic bankruptcy.

Encouraged by the negotiation with the Government, the guerrillas showed that their interests are completely different from those of the exploited, and operate to weaken the popular masses demands. This policy of the FARC in the middle of the 'fight of professors' produced an enormous confusion among workers, especially when the main leader of the guerrillas, Manuel Marulanda, called for the town to participate actively in the peace process. That was made worse when the guerrillas made no declaration of support to the urban strikers, nor made the demands of these strikers, pre-conditions in their negotiations with the Government.

Far from supporting the strategy of "peace dialogue" between the FARC and the government, and maintaining the isolation between the guerrillas and the mass movement, the workers organisations must coordinate common political actions with the FARC and other guerrilla organisations to bring about the revolutionary overthrow of Pastrana and the bourgeois regime. This call is even more important in the face of the imminent threat of a military intervention of Imperialism directed not only against the narcotics traffickers and the guerrillas, but also to defeat the whole of the labour movement and the popular masses of the country.

It is necessary to support the military offensive of the guerrillas in the sense of placing it in the hands of the labour and farmer movement and mobilising a popular insurrection in all Colombia. The Government of Pastrana negotiates with the guerrillas looking for their unconditional demilitarization, while it carries out the most ferocious of the wars against the conditions of life of the masses (reform to the conditions of work, elimination of the minimum wage, price increase of fuels, cuts in education and health). Its development plan "To change for constructing the peace" approved by Parliament, is designed to make the farmers and workers pay the massive external debt of 35% of the national budget, bringing about the worse social crisis in Colombia's history.

The proletariat defends the petit bourgeois democracy in its fight against reaction and imperialism, but it must do so without trusting in it and knowing that in the end it must attack the proletariat. The FARC and the ELN were not born out of the workers movement and they don't express workers class interests. Their aim is to reconstruct the bourgeois state and defend capitalism. The guerrillas do not want to destroy the bourgeois state. Their aim is to get better conditions by making a deal with the country's bosses. The guerrillas are historically condemned to confront the working class to defend their own class base. We already saw how the M-19 joined forces with the government to suppress strikes and other guerrillas. We saw how the Sandanistas in power repressed workers and peasant organisations.

That is why it is essential to maintain the working class independence and political opposition towards the anti-imperialist petit bourgeois. While we need to make united anti-imperialist united front action with it, at the same time we must organise independently workers, peasant and popular militias and councils.

The proletarian strategy has to be quite different from that of the guerrillas. Our task is to help to create strong, massive and combative organs of workers, peasant and popular power. The mechanisms that the proletariat must use are those of the direct action of the masses, the street demonstrations, the occupations of land and enterprises, and the general strike. While the guerrillas want to subordinate the workers and prevent its independent organisation to facilitate their agreement with the reactionary forces, our aim is to oppose any government of the FARC, or any government based on a coalition between the FARC and the proletariat. The FARC in power would repeat the same experience of Bolivia in 1952 and Nicaragua in 1979.

In the event that the COORDINADORA GUERRILLERA SIMÓN BOLÍVAR became a dual power with the indisputable support of the masses, our policy must be to demand that it to take power, despite the fact that we would not join that government. This would help our task of unmasking them.

We demand that the FARC break with its reform program and its conciliation with the old reactionary order. We demand that it call for the formation of mass organs of workers and peasants power. The urban and rural toilers should build their own militias that are subordinated to the rank and file bodies. We call on the toilers to trust only their own forces and to struggle for their own workers' and peasants' revolution and government (dictatorship of the proletariat). Instead of making a deal with the paramilitaries we need to organise popular self-defence militia to smash them. It is necessary to disarm the paramilitaries and the armed and police forces to impose democracy.

The workers should fight against Pastrana and any other bourgeois regime. They must not allow the replacement of Pastrana with any other reactionary, but instead substitute for the bourgeois state a workers state commanded by the urban and rural poor. For these reasons it is necessary that the Colombian proletariat organises itself and that through its strikes, demonstrations, occupations of workplaces and other direct actions, should become the axis of the struggle against the capitalist system and for the overthrow of the dominant order.

Fight the imperialistic intervention with the revolutionary unity of the masses of the city and the countryside.

Yankee Imperialism, under the pretext of fighting drug trafficking, is using the antiterrorist committee of the O.A.S. to launch a multinational force (commanded by Argentina) in Colombia to attack militarily the FARC and the ELN, if the Government loses control over the situation. The Argentine president Carlos Menem declared "If Colombia requests it, Argentina, because of solidarity, will be there" (Folha of San Pablo 26-7-99). At the same time, the director of the DEA promised President Andrés Pastrana, when he visited a military base, that more resources for the Army and more North American instructors, together with a battalion of 950 men to act in the zones controlled by the FARC would be provided.

The 'war' against drugs is an old imperialist demogogic claim that has been used to justify its interference in the internal affairs of other nations. Drugs are produced in poor countries because the imperialist countries demand it and prevent alternative crops from being produced. Cocaine, which is grown in the Andes, could easily be substituted by other drugs produced elsewhere including the USA. We are for the decriminalisation of drug consumption. We are against all repression of the peasants that produce coca and the cocaine users. The narcotics traffickers should be expropriated and coca production put under workers' control for medical use.

Imperialism, using at the same time the policy of "peace" and military intervention, looks for the best way to continue re-colonising Colombia. For that reason a policy of working class independence is necessary that rejects the attempt of imperialistic intervention and denounces the fraudulent and reactionary character of the current peace accords.

This policy corresponds to the revolutionary organisations who stood unconditionally in the trenches in Yugoslavia when NATO bombed Serbia (military action which was justified by Imperialism with the pretext of defending the autonomy of Kosovo). We must direct all our energies against this possible imperialistic intervention in an oppressed Latin American nation, defending the guerrilla groups from imperialism and its lackeys, despite the political differences that we have with them.

The farmers and the workers of the cities need a strategy opposed to the one defended by the FARC. For that reason, we must fight uncompromisingly against an imperialistic intervention in Colombia, demanding that all the guerrilla groups place all their military and human resources under the service of the revolutionary union between the workers of the fields and the cities, against Imperialism and all its bourgeois agents.

The proletariat needs a revolutionary party.

That party's strategy should be to develop workers direct democracy and mass organisations until they are powerful enough to make a socialist revolution. This revolutionary strategy is clearly opposed to that of the petit bourgeois that aims to reconstruct the capitalist state and which must ally with the bourgeoisie against the workers.

The revolutionary party must be an internationalist party. It should appeal to the international unity of the working classes of all the world including the USA. Its aim must be to smash capitalism and establish a Socialist United States of all the Americas.

We call on all workers and anti-imperialist organisations to make demonstrations against the imperialist intervention in Colombia and to coordinate international strike actions demanding the expulsion of the Yankee troops from Colombia.

5 of August of 1999

Internacionalist Bolshevik Liaisson- LBI (Brasil) Revolutionary Working Party – POR (Argentina) LiaisonCommitteeof Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International(LCMRCI/CEMICOR)
 
 

For the Independence of the Left and the Independence of the People of Causasus from the Russian Federation.

We reprint a draft statement of the Revolutionary Workers Party of Argentina (POR). The CWG is in broad agreement with its analysis of the situation in Chechenia, though we have some differences on the process of capitalist restoration in the ex-USS.

The government of Yeltzin has unleashed a military offensive against Chechenia. This time Russia repeats yet again the war that killed 40,000 people when in 1996 it invaded the separatist republic and which resulted in a major humiliation for Russia when it was forced to withdraw and concede greater autonomy to Chechenia.

Following the earlier disaster, when he suffered an impeachment, Yeltsin now intends to achieve a successful operation in a short time. This involves a destructive ground attack, daily aerial bombings, directed at key economic targets, petrol refinaries, airports, television stations etc. At the same time the Russian population evicted during the military intervention in 1996 will be returned will these movements and those of an estimated 100,000 refugees who have left in desperation for Inguchetia has been subject to a total media ban (Folha de Sao Paulo, 24/09/1990).

Moscow affirmed that the objective of the attack is to destroy the fundamentalist guerillas that are fighting for the creation of an Islamic state of Chechenia and Dagueston. The same people that are responsible for the assaults that caused the deaths of 3000 persons during August and September in Russia. However, Moscow's objective to check the separtist wave that has put the Russian Federation in a major crisis situation, like the major blow to the economies of the the states that formed the the URSS, because of the threat of the removal from its control of the rich regions of the Caucaus, important because of is production and transporation of oil.

The present war has come at the same time as the biggest crisis confronting Yeltzin since he assumed power in the counter-revolution of August 1991 when the the Soviet bureaucratic workers state was destroyed. The chaos and the slow decline which has come from the restoration of capitalism has been aggravated by the financial crash of the last year. "Aided" by the IMF the BIRD and Japan, these creditors are putting pressure on Yeltsin to impose austerity measures to reduce the fiscal deficit. Besides the separatist turbulence, Yeltsin, who's health is extremely debilitated, is also confronted with accusations of corruption and money laundering involving a group of his advisors and friends. All this comes with the impending legislative elections when Yeltsin's opponents can deal him a strong defeat less than a year from the presidential elections, held under the present invalid constitution.

Plundering the People to begin the Primitive Accumulation of Capital.

There is a big contest in the Caucacus for control of the region that has the biggest reserves of oil on the planet. US oil companies have heavily invested in the region surrounding the Caspian Sea. As well as this the fertile soil of the region has become a powder keg about to explode. "Since the collapse of the Soviet regime the Caspian Sea area has seen many wars, attacks on the lives of Presidents , civil wars and many assassinations." (Los Angeles Times, 29/3/98). The new oil pipeline it is hoped will provide the cheapest oil on the world market. However, as yet the pressure towards conflict between US, Europe, Iran, China and Russia has not resulted in war. In fact, the preoccupation to maintain stability of the region is precisely to avoid a major war over the division of the spoils of the Caucacus.

Meanwhile many in the US expect to get concessions now that: "the oil pipeline project includes many big names in the US oil industry: Exxon, Amoco, Chevron, Unocal, Mobil, Arco and Pennzoil. James A Baker, the 3rd, (ex-secretary of State, partner in the law firm, Houston, Baker and Botts, and representative of the major consortium of international oil companies that operate in Azerbadjian), Arthur Hartman (US ex-ambassador to Moscow, presidential adviser of a company that buys Turkestan oil and transports the oil across the Caspian as far as the pipeline in Baku) and Richard Holbrooke (ex-advisor to the Secretary of State, employee of Credit Suisse First Boston, and a powerful player in the financing of the pipelines." (idem). At the same time, the most prominent US political representatives in the "most recent decades now used the 'know how' acquired at the end of the cold war, their knowledge of the ex-USSR, and their relations with the actual political bosses of the Caucasus, to gain access for the big Yankee petroleum companies to exploit oil reserves in the former territories of the workers states.

In terms of total value, "Chechenia played an important role with reserves that in the 1970's provided a third of the Soviet oil consumption (22 million tonnes a year), production which has collapsed with the onset of the war" (O Estado de Sao Paulo, (28/1/97). Moreover, Russia needs the pipelines to Grozny to transport oil from Azerbadjian to the Mediterranean. Any interruption of the oilflow creates big financial losses for the big oil companies. By agreement, 200 million tonnes of oil is transported across Chechenia from the Caspian Sea to the Russian port of Novorissick on the Black Sea, and from there to the Mediterranean. It is fundamental that the primitive accumulation of capital of the new Russian Bourgeoisie will take off only if Moscow refuses to relinquish control over the Republics of the Caucasus and does not tolerate separatist movements.

Under these conditions, Yeltsin who has a habit of forcibly violating the constitution, and has used force several times when the situation was unfavourable (dissolution of the USSR in December 1991; dissolution of Parliament in September 1993; despatch of troops to Chechenia in December 1994), now turns to using the military like armed police, intensified the attacks against the separatists, declared a state of emergency and called a new election. This will serve several purposes for Yeltsin, such as defending himself from the accusations of theft, in 1993 and 1998 of 100's of billions of dollars. The new war also serves his government's campaign to stay in power and to neutralise parliament which is now controlled by nationalists and stalinists, in negotiations with foreign oil companies. A new unconstitutional measure has been announced that allows the prime minister Vladimir Putin to also administer the government of Moscow. Putin is an ex-member of the KGB with responsibility for control of the post office and the Federal Security Service.

Communist Party of the Russian Federation: The Rotten Legacy of Stalinist Communism.

Following the tradition of Stalinist politics which betrayed the proletariat and the non-Russian nationalities, the "communists" of CPRF fit in with the interests of the Russian bourgeoisie, of Yeltsin and imperialism, and refuse to recognise the democratic rights of the Chechen people. The main weapon used against Yeltsin by the Stalinists parliamentarians is the defeat of 1996 in Chechenia. They had begun a process of his impeachment as President of Russia. But this initiative was blocked by the disastrous war in the Causasian province, when he ordered the total withdrawal of the Russian troops from Chechenia and made an agreement with the separatist rebels in the province on condition of special autonomy following the elections of 27/1/97.

After the election of the new authorities of Chechenia, the "communist" delegate Vikton IIyukhin, chief of the Committee of Security of Congress "affirmed that the elections should not be recognised because the majority of the population did not participate in them, referring to the 300,000 refugees who could not vote because of the war" (O Estada de Sao Paulo, 7/0/97). The Russian chauvinists divided their tasks, the restorationist government expelled a good part of the population and the stalinist opposition used their bureaucratic justifications to oppose the volutary independence movement of the Chechen people, using the formality of an irregularity in the ballot.

For the Russian Stalinists, the Russian Federation offers to reach out and protect the autonomous nationalities. In this form, they hypocritically defend the interests of the capitalists, oppressors of the nationalities. In his time Lenin had this to say about the social chauvinists: "The most plausible formulation of the social chauvinist lie, one that is therefore most dangerous to the proletariat, is provided by Kautsky..."National Autonomy", if you please, is enough! The principle question, the one the imperialist bourgeoisie will not permit discussion of, the question of the boundaries of the state that is build upon the oppression of nations, is evaded by Kautsky, who to please the bourgeoisie, has thrown out of the programme what is most essential. The bourgeoisie are ready to promise all the "national equality" you please, so long as the proletariat remain within the framework of legality and "peacefully" submit to them on the question of the state boundaries! Kautsky has formulated the national programme of Social-Democracy [Communism] in a reformist, not revolutionary manner." ("The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination". CW Vol. 21 p411-412).

The Russian social chauvinists also share with the dominant mafia class a xenophiobia against the non-Russian peoples. The same Viktor IIyukhin, well-known for his anti-semitism, is now a tough in-house critic of the government, attributing the wave of terrorism (most of the public attribute this to the Moscow mafia) on the lack of vigilance over the thousands of persons of the Caucasian nationalities who live in Moscow. For the other side, Zuganov blames the jewish minority for the economic crisis of the country. Against the impulse for solidarity of the working class with the nationalities pressing for a method of struggle against the restoration of capitalism, the CPRF is dedicated to the task of poisoning the proletariat with chauvinism and racism, helping the reaction. In this way the Russian "communists" are preparing the road for the defeat of the proletarian resistance, and creating the basis for the emergence and consolidation of a fascist regime in Russia, the explosive coup that will be necessary for the consolidation of capitalist restoration.

The Fundamentalists Treachery against National Self-Determination.

In most of Russia the centrifugal tendencies to break with Yeltsin are all isolated in separatist fronts who pass to be one of the numerous enemies of Moscow. In particular, at this moment standing out among them, is the guerrilla Shamil Bassiev, the most popular in the previous war (1994-1995), and the current leader of the Oriental Front of the Autonomous Republic of Chechenia. Bassiev recently allied with the suni wahhabi militias led by the Jordanian Jatab who is fighting to make Daguestan into a Islamic Independent Republic. At the same time, the guerrilla leader Busco is close to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

In this current situation workers must act to defend the nationalist movements of Chechenia and Daguestan against the oppression of the capitalist government of Russia, revindicating the right of self-determination and the independent states of the peoples of the Caucasus as they wish. On the other hand, no revolutionaries can ignore criticising the terrorist methods used by the Islamic commanders of the separatist guerrillas like Bassiev. Under the reactionary bourgeois ideology of Islam, and its terrorist methods, the guerrilla movement has little to offer the struggle of the Chechen masses who are for national liberation, and pushes the Russian masses into the hands of the Russian racist chauvinism. Instead this impulse weakens the political struggle of the masses for the liberation of Chechenia and Dageustan. First, because it concedes to Yeltsin the justification for the attacks against Chechenia, and creates many distractions that hold back the collapse of the government under the pressure of the Russian proletariat. And secondly, because it reduces the role of the masses (that must conquer liberty on the road to the social revolution) creating feelings of impotence and the belief that there can be salvation in messianic groups. This type of method is in perfect harmony with the reactionary interests of the Islamic fundamentalist leaders that seek to eliminate any class organisations or independence and popular movements.

In this way, the fundamentalist guerrillas weaken the struggle of the national liberation of the peoples of the Caucasus and substitute the end of the negotiation table for that of the real liberation struggle, and the right to secede from the oppressor state for the concession of autonomy inside a federation. Under the Islamic movement the Caucasian masses are exposed to treachery along the same road that the KLA followed when the Albanian Kosovars subordinated their struggle for national liberation to the interests of the imperialists, and allowed an oppression much more reactionary than the Serbian army. Given the ambitions of imperialism over the Causasian region, we can expect similar treachery on the part of the fundamentalist movements that, in Afghanistan, were backed by the CIA against the USSR. In these times, under the mounting pressure coming from the military camp of imperialism, revolutionaries must not renounce the perspective of the right of the national movements to self-determination. At the same time as the struggle for these rights, the proletariat must openly declare that forming national states at this time is no longer historically progressive as a strategic objective. We are against the fragmentation of the peoples and a proliferation of micro states, but we are for the construction of a united Federation of Socialist Republics, and in this case the reconstruction of the USSR. We must strike out on this march with a vision of the unity of the workers around the world.

Unifying the Struggles of the Peoples of the ex-USSR with the objective of a new October Revolution.

Is is possible to realise real autonomy and reverse the disunity of the workers of the Caucasus against the local capitalists, warlords and criminal organisations, and all the imperialist lackeys who are the major exploiters of the labour power of the workers and natural resources of the region. Lenin had much to say on the tasks of the revolutionaries of the national movements and oppressed and saw the primary task as the struggle for national liberation: "...the Social-Democrats of the oppressor nations must demand that the oppressed nations should have the right to secession, for otherwise recognition of equal rights for nations and of international working-class solidarity would in fact be merely empty phrase-mongering, sheer hypocrisy.

On the other hand, the Social-Democrats of the oppressed nations must attach prime significance to the unity and the merging of the workers of the oppressed nations with those of the oppressor nations; otherwise these Social-Democrats will involuntarily become the allies of their own national bourgeoisie, which always betrays the interests of the people and of democracy, and is always ready, in its turn, to annex territory and oppress other nations." (idem. p 409). It is precisely by creating such organisations of the masses that the proletariat can come to power and subordinate the guerrillas in the struggle for the socialist insurrection, expropriating the ruling classes of the region with the methods of the Proletarian Dictatorship.

Similtaneously we are for the practical unity of the Russian workers against the capitalist restoration, for the revolutionary overthrow of Yeltsin's government, and the expropriation of the new bourgeoisie. Our first task must be no confidence in the guerrilla groups, and the construction of an international Bolshevik party of Lenin and Trotsky, capable of organising the combining of the national movements and the unification of the fight for the realisation of democratic tasks for national liberation with the struggle for a new October Revolution and the reconstruction of the USSR.

Revolutionary Workers’ Party, Argentina

16 October 1999.
 

Ecuador:
A revolutionary situation
with an uncertain future.

When the OAS, the U.S. State Department, all the bourgeois governments of Latin America, and the big finance capitalists of Ecuador itself pronounce in unison their repudiation of the "coup d'etat" of Jan. 21, we have indisputable proof that we are dealing with something else entirely.

And this is not only because those who today fulminate about the "defense of the constitutional order" have had a long history of coups and genocides, but also because we are talking about a coup in which the military, instead of repressing the insurrectionary peasant masses, is incorporated into the demonstrations and opening the way to taking the seats of power.

The first duty of revolutionaries, in the face of an event of this magnitude, is to consider all its elements, in order to achieve a correct characterization, a touchstone for correct political intervention.

This objective has a value which goes beyond the situation in Ecuador alone: as we will demonstrate in this article, Ecuador expresses in extreme and anticipatory form, the tendencies of development in all of Latin America.

A Revolutionary Situation

Lenin explained that these types of situation can arise relatively independent of the political consciousness of the exploited and the existence and development of the Revolutionary Party. Revolutionary situations require an extreme aggravation of the economic situation, which has made the existence of the great majority of the nation insupportable. But not this alone: it requires that the exploited develop a generalized mobilization that is independent of the system's institutions and which provokes, through its magnitude, a fissure in the exploiters' regime, posing the question of power at the center of the disputes. "Those at the top can no longer rule in the old way."

History shows that a revolutionary situation does not necessarily result in a triumphant revolution. In a relatively objective formulation, in the irreconcilable clash between the productive forces that can open the way forward, and the old society that limits them, the result is an alternative between revolution and counterrevolution. History also shows that for a triumph, a revolutionary party is also indispensable, in order to lead the masses and to consciously express in its program, actions and organization the instinctive tendencies of the insurrectionary exploited masses.

The Ecuadorian Economic Situation At the Base of the Crisis

With inflation at 60.7% in 1999, combined with a brutal recession (GDP fell 7.5% in the same year compared to the previous year), the masses are suffering 17% unemployment and 62.5% of the population live in poverty conditions. The currency fell 67% in the past year, which provoked the desperate measures of the fallen Pres. Mahuad in dollarizing the entire economy. (Jan. 9, 2000)

Previously, during the months of Sept. & Oct. 1999, the government took a series of measures imposed by their inability to pay: a moratorium on all Brady bonds, which encompasses Eurobonds and public external debt, totalling $13 billion. In March 1999, Mahuad had frozen all bank deposits with the promise that funds could be withdrawn in a year (March 2000). Everything indicates that the degree of the state's bankruptcy and the speculative flight of finance capital have made it impossible to keep this promise.

Let us quote an eloquent columnist from the unquestionably conservative El Comercio in Quito:

"The great majority of Ecuadorians suffer hunger, are surviving on miracles. The basic groceries of a small family now costs 3.5 million sucres. Only a small minority has even this. Nevertheless, the government has consigned more that $200 billion to save its friends and financial helpers. It continues the unconstitutional freezing of the savings and deposits of millions of Ecuadorians. In plain language, this is a cowardly armed robbery perpetrated by President Mahuad and his government, including Miss Armijos, against countless Ecuadorians who candidly trusted in the soundness of the government and the banking system. They now have the cynicism to throw back for 7 or 10 years the savings of these poor people who in their desperation plead with Providence for the justice that has not been done in this unjust and corrupt country." (Humberto Vacas Gomez, in the "Opinions" column, Jan. 22)

And in the same section of the same paper, Raul Vallejo tells us: "In March of 1999 the government decreed an unexplained bank holiday and then froze all deposits. Whoever then had 100 million sucres is owed some $10,000, approximately, if they took on good faith Mahuad's assurances that it would be unfrozen in March 2000. But Mahuad lied: there will be no unfreezing in March of 2000, and the revaluation is a double robbery because the frozen sucrees will have been dollarized at the rate of 25,000 to one, so that whoever had $10,000 in March of 1999, now has only $4,000."

The rest adds that an external factor, relating to the world economy, decisively affected the Ecuadorian situation (in a manner similar to Venezuela): the fall in the international price of a barrel of oil stripped bare the submission of the country to Imperialism, toppling the principal source of revenue for the state.

The remarkable worsening of the economy (which, as can be seen from these testimonies, also affects the petty- and middle- bourgeoisie) is the fundamental engine of the political situation. The capitalist crisis has fissured the bourgeoisie's institutions. Nevertheless, these fissures will not mature quickly enough into a collapse of the regime without the powerful mobilization of the masses.

A Generalized and Independent Mobilization of the Exploited

The Mahuad government, which came to power on the 10th of August 1998, was born as a weak government, not only because of the remarkable economic crisis, but also because of the people's growing loss of belief in the institutions. This weakness was expressed in electoral results in which the president won on the second round with a puny amount of votes and with a very high abstention rate.

Less than a year later, it suffered a decisive defeat, provoked by its intention to increase fuel prices, when a powerful general strike with blockades of the roads paralyzed the country. The taxi drivers in the cities and the indigenous peasants in the rural areas were at the vanguard of this fight. (July 1999)

In the face of the growing uprisings by the masses, the union bureaucracy, in a bloc with sections of the national industrial capitalists and the bourgeois political opposition, started to agitate for Mahuad to resign, in order to allow the masses to let off some steam. (December 1999)

But the mass movement (especially the peasant communities, but also manufacturing sectors and the student movement in the main cities) continues onward, because of the regime's inability to effect an orderly change and to offer concessions that might take off some pressure.

Based on the information we have received it appears that the mass movement is independent in its methods, in its high degree of combativity, and in its rupture with past illusions in the institutions, but it has not defined an ALTERNATIVE GOVERNING PROGRAM.

It seems that what has oriented the masses who are occupying Quito and Guayaquil is a ROUND "NO!" AND REPUDIATION directed at the regime that embodies the impossible socio-economic situation. This limitation of the movement is a result of its lack of programmatic political independence which we consider fundamental in order to understand the events of the 21st and 22nd of January.

A Succession of Provisional Governments With an Uncertain Future

The assumption of the presidency by Gustavo Noboa (Mahuad's vice-president, who is not recognized by Mahuad) is the result of a feverish operation by U.S. Imperialism and the bourgeois establishments of all of Latin America, including Ecuador's, to keep an unsustainable situation within constitutional limits.

Independently of the capitulation of its members, both the Triumvirate and the Junta of National Salvation were the result of the masses in the streets, and ran the risk of being held hostage by the mobilized people. The Junta emerged directly from the struggling masses who took the seats of government. This was related by El Comercio on the 22nd of January: "The Ecuadorian flag stopped flying on the roof of the Legislative Palace at 9:50. At that time a group of peasants raised in its place a huipala (Quechua national standart) and a shamanic standard (a white flag with a mulitcolored spiral in the center) to symbolize the seizure they had begun."

The composition of the Junta expressed the characteristics of the movement that produced it: Colonel Lucio Gutierrez, embodying the break of the chain of command from Mahuad, and expressing at the same time a host of contradicitions within the Armed Forces: on the one hand, its popular and peasant base, and on the other its class function as an expression of the national bourgeoisie.

The maximum leader of the peasants, Antonio Vargas, direct expression of the mobilized indigenous communities. Finally, Carlos Solorzano, former president of the Supreme Court, supposedly embodying the fight against corruption, one of the focuses of the movement.

Between the night of the 21st and dawn on the 22nd a desperate maneuver was made which replaced the Junta with a Triumvirate, which later handed power over to Vice-President Noboa: Colonel Gutierrez had been replaced by General Mendoza, in order to prevent any possibility of a fracture in the armed forces.

The cover of El Comercio on Jan. 22 summed up the operation like this: "At 2:50 this newspaper learned that Gen. Carlos Mendoza retired from the triumvirate that had been presented to the country three hours before. The general explained his participation with Carlos Solsrzano and Antonio Vargas with two reasons: he wanted to avoid a fracture in the Armed Forces and bloodshed in the Plaza of Independence. According to the general, he was of the understanding that, faced with the armed rising of the colonels, it was necessary for someone to sacrifice themselves. As chief of the joint command, he assumed the task. At a moment when the demonstrations outside the Carondelet had dispersed, he called a meeting of the High Command and communicated to them his decision to abandon the triumvirate and to demand its dissolution. Also, he communicated to them his support of the presidential succession and that there would be no more doubt that the Armed Forces had to take the line of respecting constitutionality.

In this way was produced a paradox: the masses overthrew the hated government, but the precarious provisional regime born of their direct action handed over power, through its actions, to the same overthrown government under the cover of replacing Mahuad.

In truth, this maneuver to de-activate the masses and reduce their pressure would have been impossible if the leaders of the Junta had not shown their complicity. One need only observe what they told the masses upon assuming power for a few hours. Colonel Gutierrez made "an appeal to the Church, to the media, to the bosses and bankers, to the pundits, to the workers, women and men who love this noble country with their hearts, to unite and move forward."

For his part, the indigenous peasant leader Antonio Vargas spoke in a triumphant tone, after the masses had returned home: "a revolution has been made without blood." At the end of his speech, Vargas said in the name of the new government: "We will work with the ethics that we call 'amaquilla, amashua, amallulla,' [Quechua words] that will be the watchword of the Ecuadorian state from now on in all instances. It means, don't lie, don't steal, and don't be lazy."

It didn't last long: a few hours later Vargas gave power to the man chosen by the U.S. Embassy, Gustavo Noboa. He is lazy, a liar, and stole victory from his peasant followers.

Perspectives, Dual Power and the Crisis of Revolutionary Leadership

As of the writing of this note, the immediate future of Ecuador remains uncertain. Noboa, as a faithful lackey of Imperialism, has to continue his plans, in other words, to do the same as Mahuad had intended. Yet the masses have not been defeated. We are faced with a usurped victory. The question is how long, given that the new government does not have much room for maneuver, with the straitjacket imposed by the socio-economic situation.

For the masses, the task at hand is to forge the United Front with the objective of building organs of power for workers and peasants, which also encompass the middle and impoverished layers of the cities, and the plebeian sections of the armed forces that, influenced by popular pressure, not only refuse to repress, but also make the way for and join in the mobilization.

The construction of this United Front, of this unity in action, is anti-imperialist, because now more than ever it is clear that it is Ecuador's semi-colonial submission to Imperialism that causes hunger and misery. This conception of the United Front is the way to root out the masses' in nationalism with a bourgeois content, like that of Chavez in Venezuela, which could be embodied by the likes of Mendoza or Gutierrez in Ecuador.

For all this it is inconceivable for the power of workers and peasants to develop without the elaboration of a clear anti-imperialist program, which places at the forefront a pledge of economic measures leading to the confiscation of large-scale bourgeois property, both national and foreign.

We have ignored the intervention of groups or parties that call for proletarian revolution in Ecuador, but from their actions their weakness is evident. In any case, revolutionary situations are the best schools for the forging of parties of this type. They surely exist and with them we will lead toward the forging of the Fourth International.

Gustavo Gamboa, 23 of January 2000

POR Argentina (Revolutionary Workers Party)

Webpage http://www.geocities.com/pormasas/
 

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