What we think: Pacifist blind alley

What we think: Pacifist blind alley

From the Workers Press, February 1, 1972

In preparation for the inter-party talks on Ulster and the completion of a political deal between premiers Jack Lynch and Edward Heath, the British army is carrying out a policy of selective and premeditated provocations.

They are arresting and interning the nationalist and working class opposition’s most militant supporters, while leaving the reformist leaders free to pursue their collaborationist policies.

This is the sinister meaning of the deployment of 2,000 police and troops in Dungannon and Londonderry over the weekend.

In Dungannon on Saturday CS gas and rubber bullets were used extensively to prevent civil rights marchers from breaking Faulkner’s ban on parades.

In Londonderry, the Protestant Loyalists threaten to stop the civil rights marchers if the army doesn’t. At the same time Lynch’s garda [police] obligingly round up IRA Provisionals who only recently escaped from the hell holes of imperialism.

On both sides of the border imperialism and its agencies are working concertedly to isolate and repress the militant opposition to leave the field clear for negotiations to continue towards a "federal solution."

So the pacifist civil rights leaders’ policy and tactics play dangerously into the hands of the army and administration. By separating the issue of civil rights from the vital questions of wages, employment and the issue of forcing the Tories to resign, the NICRA [Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association] leaders are taking their supporters into a blind alley.

Furthermore, by tying the civil rights movement to the objective of a "negotiated political solution" with the Tories in Westminster and Dublin, NICRA leaders perpetuate sectarian divisions and lay the basis for a colossal betrayal of the national struggle in Ireland.

Predictably the NICRA leaders are backed up in this bankrupt policy by the Ulster Stalinists who see in the present crisis an opportunity for implementing their Popular Front policies.

This is the reactionary logic of the so-called "political solution" postulated by Stalinism and petty-bourgeois pacifism in Ulster.

We are not opposed to marches and demonstrations, but we are opposed to a policy which subordinates workers’ militancy to reformist middle-class demands and allows the army to pick off the best leaders at will.

The only way forward for the Ulster and Irish working class is the construction of a Marxist leadership independent of Stalinism and pacifism which will integrate the democratic demands of the oppressed minorities with the struggle to overthrow British imperialism and establish a socialist republic in Ireland and the UK.

The Abandonment of the Fight for Workers' Defense Guards/Committees - A Dangerous Error

The Abandonment of the Fight for Workers' Defense Guards/Committees - A Dangerous Error

History

As the educated Trotskyist will be aware, the demand for Workers' Defense Guards/Committees occupied a central place within The Transitional Program. To quote a large excerpt from that document, from the section titled The Picket Line, Defense Guards/Workers’ Militia and The Arming of the Proletariat: 

"In connection with every strike and street demonstration, it is imperative to propagate the necessity of creating workers’ groups for self-defense. [emphasis added] It is necessary to write this slogan into the program of the revolutionary wing of the trade unions. It is imperative wherever possible, beginning with the youth groups, to organize groups for self-defense, to drill and acquaint them with the use of arms.

A new upsurge of the mass movement should serve not only to increase the number of these units but also to unite them according to neighborhoods, cities, regions. It is necessary to give organized expression to the valid hatred of the workers toward scabs and bands of gangsters and fascists. It is necessary to advance the slogan of a workers’ militia as the one serious guarantee for the inviolability of workers’ organizations, meetings and press. 

Only with the help of such systematic, persistent, indefatigable, courageous agitational and organizational work always on the basis of the experience of the masses themselves, is it possible to root out from their consciousness the traditions of submissiveness and passivity; to train detachments of heroic fighters capable of setting an example to all toilers; to inflict a series of tactical defeats upon the armed thugs of counterrevolution; to raise the self-confidence of the exploited and oppressed; to compromise Fascism in the eyes of the petty bourgeoisie and pave the road for the conquest of power by the proletariat.

Engels defined the state as “bodies of armed men.” The arming of the proletariat is an imperative concomitant element to its struggle for liberation. When the proletariat wills it, it will find the road and the means to arming. In this field, also, leadership falls naturally to the sections of the Fourth International."

Following the publication of The Transitional Program, the demand for Workers' Defense Guards/Committees occupied a significant place within the work of Trotskyists for decades. However, the growth of opportunism within the movement has at various times undermined and distorted this demand. Central texts of the modern Trotskyist movement, such as The Heritage We Defend and How the WRP Betrayed Trotskyism, took up the question of the failures of movements during periods of political backsliding to properly raise or defend this demand. 

Workers League leaflet calling for the organization of defense guards to protect the Poor People's March, 1968

In relation to the SWP in its period of political retreat, David North wrote in The Heritage We Defend that "The SWP did not raise the demand for the formation of defense guards among the black population to fight back against the racist thugs functioning under the protection of the state government." 

In the same book, this time concerning the WRP, North wrote: "When pressed to explain the WRP’s official programmatic call for workers’ defense guards, the News Line reported the following opportunist testimony: 'Mr. Redgrave said that the party called for workers’ defense guards to protect immigrant areas where fascist attacks occurred and the police on the ground were unable to give protection. The police themselves admit they cannot cope with the situation, he said.'

In other words, Redgrave’s testimony presented the workers’ defense guards not as organs of defensive struggle against the violence of the capitalist state and its agents, but as an auxiliary force to supplement an inadequate police force!"

Touching on this same issue in How the WRP Betrayed Trotskyism, North wrote "Redgrave went so far as to suggest that workers’ defense guards were only necessary where there weren’t sufficient police to patrol the areas!"

The demand for workers' defense guards, properly raised, therefore occupied a central place in the Trotskyist movement in the years following major struggles against opportunism. Several examples from ICFI materials available online from between 1986-1992 make this clear concerning the period following the split with the WRP:

Labor Must Act on Iran-Contra Crisis, 1986:

“Mobilize the strength of the labor movement against racist and fascist attacks, establishing workers’ defense guards against Klan and neo-Nazi activities. Abolish the FBI, state and local police, and establish a workers’ militia to defend the working class.”

Workers League 1988 Election Platform: 

"Form Workers’ Defense Committees: Against the armed violence of the capitalist state, the army of hired security thugs, scabs and police, the working class must form its own self-defense groups to protect its picket lines, demonstrations and meetings."

The World Capitalist Crisis and the Tasks of the Fourth International, 1988:

"Even the specific “transitional” demands which Trotsky proposed—the sliding scale of wages and hours, factory committees, abolition of business secrets and workers’ control of industry, expropriation of private banks and nationalization of the banking industry, the formation of workers’ defense guards, the establishment of a workers’ and farmers’ government—retain their vitality as practical levers for the revolutionary mobilization of the working class." [emphasis added]

On the Assassination of L.W Panditha, 1988: 

“Without delay, the working class must build its own militia against the bourgeoisie’s, not to defend the bourgeoisie or the bourgeois state, when it is preparing the counterrevolution and discarding bourgeois democracy. A workers’ defense militia should be formed to defend the organizations of the working class, its newspapers, and all the gains of the working class in the previous period.”

The Case of Patrick Slaughter, 1988:

“In other words, workers should deal with trash like Brown and Slaughter by building defense guards that will acquaint their faces with the pavement and send them on their way.”

Long Live the Memory of Comrade R.A. Pitawala!, 1988:

"The only way forward for the working class is to form its own defense committees to safeguard its organizations and protect its meetings, demonstrations and leaders. A catastrophe threatens the working class unless it repudiates the parliamentary cretinism of its reformist leadership and undertakes practical measures to organize its own defense."

Repression and the State in Sri Lanka, 1990:

“This urgently raises the issue of forming defense committees and defense squads under the leadership of the working class, involving the rural poor and the youth for self-defense. It is of prime importance that these defense committees organize their own independent investigations into the murderous conspiracies and activities of the state forces and the goon squads in order to raise the consciousness of the masses about the necessity of fighting for the overthrow of the capitalist state.

The demand for arming the workers must be raised within every working class organization”

Petty-Bourgeois Radicalism and the Working Class, 1992: 

“As far as racism and xenophobia are concerned, we are also for concrete action, but we place no trust in a government and state which provide a breeding ground for the brown plague. We call instead on the working class itself to become active and to build defense committees.”

Modern Day

Of the material available on WSWS as of the time of writing, founded in 1998, since 1992 the demand for some similar kind of "defense committees" appears to us to have been raised only eight times, and only on a few occasions in which it is clearly used in the same manner as Trotsky used it.

One instance, which also appears to be the only time in which workers' "guards" are called for, is a recent statement from 19 May 2022, Sri Lankan workers and rural poor must mobilize against the Rajapakse-Wickremesinghe austerity agenda! There it was said: "Defense committees and guards must be established in the face of government-organized goon squads." 

Two recent articles concerning Chile raised the idea of "defense-committees" in connection with the fight against fascism and authoritarianism, for example the article Chilean government mobilizes police and military on anniversary of social revolt from 18 October 2020 which said: "What must be prepared is the fight to establish a workers’ government where delegations of factory committees, neighborhood committees, production and distribution committees, communications and civil-defense committees composed of workers and youth take the lead."

Another article, Political issues in the struggle against the threat of fascism and dictatorship in Greece from 28 September 2013 said that "It is necessary to form self-defense committees in neighborhoods and factories to protect workers and immigrants from the fascist gangs and their police accomplices, and prepare strike action."

Of the remaining material we found, the demand is raised, not for workers' defense committees in general, but specifically "immigrant defense committees." The nature of these committees is not specified, and since the SEPs have formed "defense committees in support of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning around the globe" which are clearly of a different nature than those discussed by Trotsky in connection to the arming of the working class, the mere invocation of the words "defense committees" in combination is not at all necessarily an application of the ideas that Trotsky fought for.

From the usages above, the exceptions that prove the rule - namely that the demand for workers' defense committees/guards has been all but abandoned - we can determine the limited circumstances in which these rare instances are manifest: Only when the forces of fascism and authoritarianism have already mobilized their own goons.

This is approaching the positions expressed by the WRP as criticized in How the WRP Betrayed Trotskyism: "The possibility of resorting to arms was limited to struggle against the fascist state - that is, until after the defeat of the proletariat."

Similar positions to that adopted in practice by the modern ICFI were subjected to withering criticism by Trotsky, including for example in Whither France? against l’Humanité: "At the present time, according to this paper, it is inadmissible to advance a slogan which is only opportune 'in a full revolutionary crisis.' It is dangerous to load your rifle, says the 'too-prudent' hunter so long as the game remains invisible. But when the game puts in an appearance it is a little too late to load the rifle. Do the strategists of l’Humanité really think that in 'the full revolutionary crisis' they will be able without any preparation to mobilize and arm the proletariat? To secure a large quantity of arms, one needs a certain quantity on hand. One needs military cadres. One needs the invincible desire of the masses to secure arms. One needs uninterrupted preparatory work not only in the gymnasiums but in indissoluble connection with the daily struggle of the masses. This means:

It is necessary immediately to build the militia and at the same time to carry on propaganda for the general armament of the revolutionary workers and peasants."

As one member of the SEP put it in describing attitudes amongst elements of the present-day leadership: "You mention the need to approach the subject, crickets. You call the secretary and talk to him, he politely deflects and crickets. There's not even a desire to approach the topic."

The virtual abandonment of this critical demand by the Trotskyist movement is part of a generalized turn towards opportunism that has been underway in the 21st century, reflecting the growth of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois social and ideological influence within the movement. This opportunism can only be defeated through the fight for genuine proletarian internationalism!

 

Lessons of the 1973 coup in Chile

 

1973: Lessons of the 1973 coup in Chilehttps://t.co/YNeFrwxhel

— ICFI (1953) Supporters (@1953Icfi) December 12, 2022

Life of a Marxist revolutionary

Life of a Marxist revolutionary (Leon Trotsky)

Reprinted from Asian Marxist Review, edited by Nick Beams, Wije Dias and others 

EARLY LIFE 

TROTSKY was born Lev Davidovitch Bronstein, the son of a Jewish farmer, in the village of Yanovka in the southern Ukraine, in 1879. 

In 1896 Trotsky’s schooling took him to Nikolayev where he joined a group of radical students distributing anti-Tsarist tracts to peasants. 

By 1897, at the age of 18, Trotsky had become a Marxist and led the formation of a Social Democratic working man’s association together with the woman who was to become his wife, Alexandra Lvovna Sokolovskaya. 

The Southern Russian Workers Union distributed leaflets and a newspaper "Our Cause" until the group was broken by the police in January 1898. 

‘WHAT IS TO BE DONE’ 

AT HIS trial in 1900 Trotsky and the rest of the organisation’s leaders were sentenced to four years exile in Siberia. 

In 1902 he and Alexandra received a copy of Lenin’s "What is to be Done" and heard of the newspaper Iskra, which had as its aim the creation of an all-Russian centralised organisation of professional revolutionaries.

They decided that he should leave his family behind and escape to make contact with Lenin. For his trek across Russia he used the name of Trotsky, one of his former jailers. 

BOLSHEVISM AND MENSHEVISM 

TROTSKY met Lenin in London in 1902 and began working for Iskra. At the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party the party split over Lenin’s insistence that membership be restricted to those who "personally participate in one of its organisations." 

Trotsky sided with Lenin over the dissolution of the autonomous groups in the party but bitterly opposed his next move to remove the "softs" of the Mensheviks from the editorial board of Iskra. 

However Trotsky did not remain with the Mensheviks. In April 1904 he left the Menshevik-run Iskra and resigned from their party later in the year. 

THE 1905 REVOLUTION 

1905 opened with disastrous defeats for Tsarism in the war with Japan and mounting struggles by the working class at home. 

By October the first Soviet (Council) of Workers’ Delegates was formed in St Petersburg and Trotsky rapidly became its first chairman. 

After 50 days the Soviet was rounded up in mass arrests and Trotsky was imprisoned once more. In a tumultuous trial Trotsky was found not guilty of insurrection but deported for life to Siberia. 

On the way Trotsky again escaped and went into exile in Vienna with his second wife Natalya. He remained there through the years of reaction until 1914. 

FROM ZIMMERWALD TO PETROGRAD 

THE betrayal of the European Social Democratic parties in urging the working class in their respective countries to support their own capitalist classes in war meant the death of the Second International for the purposes of revolution. 

In September 1915, 38 delegates including Lenin and Trotsky met in the Swiss village of Zimmerwald and issued a Manifesto calling for workers to "enter the lists for your own cause...by means of irreconcilable working class struggle."

At the outbreak of the Russian revolution in February 1917 Trotsky was in the US where he had been deported by the Spanish government. He departed for Russia on March 27, arriving in the country on May 17, one month after Lenin. 

THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION 

TROTSKY immediately announced his complete support for the Bolshevik Party and worked to bring his Petrograd organisation into a fusion with them. On July 23 Trotsky was arrested by the Provisional Government following the defeat of the July uprising by the working class.

During his imprisonment he had been elected to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party and later in September he became the president of the Petrograd Soviet. 

Trotsky led the Military Revolutionary Committee which organised the insurrection and on October 25 he announced the overthrow of the Provisional Government. 

CIVIL WAR 

1918 opened with the young revolution facing the combined threat of counter-revolution and invasion organised by the imperialist allies. 

For two years, as the leader of the Red Army, Trotsky lived on the famous train which became his headquarters, travelling along the 21 fronts held by the armies under his command. From a Red Guard of 7000 a Red Army of five million was built, despite invasion and starvation. 

WITH LENIN AGAINST STALIN 

THE devastation of the Russian economy forced the introduction of the New Economic Policy which made major concessions to the old capitalist class and the wealthy peasants. 

Sections of the capitalist class wanted to go even further with the removal of the mononopoly on foreign trade. Stalin and the majority of the Central Committee supported them. 

Lenin, now ill, formed a bloc with Trotsky to reverse the decision and warned against the growing power of the bureaucracy in the party led by Stalin. 

Before his death in January 1924 Lenin broke off all personal relations with Stalin and, in his last Testament, demanded Stalin's removal from the post of General Secfetary. 

THE STRUGGLE AGAINST BUREAUCRACY 

IN October 1923 Trotsky led the formation of the Left Opposition against the ruling triumvirate of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev. The bureaucracy replied by opening up the campaign against "Trotskyism." 

In 1924 Stalin announced his theory of "socialism in a single country" which became the bureaucracy’s justification for a compromise with imperialism. 

In May 1925 Trotsky was appointed to serve on the Supreme Economic Council where he fought for rapid industrialisation and economic planning, against the opposition of Stalin. 

In 1926 Trotsky alone voted against the decision by the Executive of the Communist International to admit the future butcher of the Chinese revolution, Chiang Kai-shek, as a member. 

On November 14, 1927, Trotsky was expelled from the party and in January 1928 exiled to central Asia. Trotsky refused to renounce political activity and in January 1929 he was served with an order of deportation from the Soviet Union. 

FROM EXILE TO THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL 

EXILED in Prinkipo, Turkey, Trotsky wrote the three volume "History of the Russian Revolution" and organised the international Left Opposition with the assistance of his son Leon Sedov. 

The betrayal of the German revolution by the German Communist Party in allowing Hitler to come to power convinced him that the Third International, following the Second, was dead for the purposes of revolution and that it was necessary to form a new international, the Fourth International. 

The Fourth International was established in September 1938 despite the unprecedented persecution of the Trotskyists by imperialism and Stalinism and despite the scepticism of those who started from the appearance of the weakness of Trotsky’s forces, and not from the historic crisis of world capitalism. 

STRUCK DOWN BY STALIN’S ASSASSIN 

AFTER the Stalinists organised his deportation from Turkey, France and Norway, Trotsky set sail for his last exile in Coyoacan, Mexico in De- cember 1936. 

The Moscow Trials were at their height with Trotsky the central figure accused of counter-revolution along with all the other leaders of the October revolution. 

He organised the independent Dewey Commission which described the Trials as a frame-up and cleared Trotsky’s name in December 1937. 

In February 1938 Trotsky’s son Leon Sedov was murdered in a Paris hospital in a conspiracy organised by Stalin’s agent Marc Zborowski. 

On August 20, 1940, Trotsky was assassinated in his study by the GPU agent Ramon Mercader, one of the many agents infiltrated into the Trotskyist movement.

The YSA. How it began

 

https://t.co/kQhWCwpFw1

The YSA. How it began

— ICFI (1953) Supporters (@1953Icfi) November 11, 2022

Snippet from The Bulletin

Snippet from The Bulletin

         The all-pervading cynicism is then reflected in the snide way the very fundamentals of our movement are treated. Foley refers to our struggle for Marxist philosophy as "'the Healyites' much celebrated 'method.'" In similar fashion his mentor Joseph Hansen writes: "The 'principles' to which the SLL leaders adhere should not be overlooked in seeking to understand why they follow courses that sometimes seem irrational. From the ultra-left sectarian viewpoint of the SLL, students bear an original taint - they are 'petty bourgeois,' not 'proletarian.' An influx of students would confront the SLL with the danger of having the class composition of the membership 'watered down'"! 

          We take questions of principle seriously and proceed at all times from them. We begin with the division between the working class and the capitalist class fighting for the construction of a working class party, made up of workers, deeply rooted in the working class. It is not a question of original taints or sins but of the objective class character of students. It is not even a matter of their recruitment to the party - which is essential - but whether the party bases itself and its perspective on the working class or the middle classes. This is a principled question.

Abandoning Working Class Youth - A Manifestation of the Turn Towards the Middle-class

Abandoning Working Class Youth - A Manifestation of the Turn Towards the Middle-class

An examination of the history of the ICFI and its approach to the youth exposes the approach of the modern ICFI as having less and less to do with a genuine Trotskyist approach to youth. In the history of the ICFI, mass youth organizing has occupied a place of central importance. The significance attached to organizing working class youth on a mass scale was manifested in the organization of "Young Socialists" around the world. 

The "Young Socialists" played an important role in the history of the ICFI. In contrast to all of the revisionist tendencies, the ICFI had considered the building of a cadre amongst working class youth essential to the building of revolutionary parties and the fight for world socialist revolution. The approach of the ICFI towards building a youth movement was rooted in the Transitional Program written by Leon Trotsky: 

"The Fourth International pays particular attention to the young generation of the proletariat. All of its policies strive to inspire the youth with belief in its own strength and in the future. Only the fresh enthusiasm and aggressive spirit of the youth can guarantee the preliminary successes in the struggle; only these successes can return the best elements of the older generation to the road of revolution. Thus it was thus it will be.

Opportunist organizations by their very nature concentrate their chief attention on the top layers of the working class and therefore ignore both the youth and the women workers. The decay of capitalism, however, deals its heaviest blows to the woman as a wage earner and as a housewife. The sections of the Fourth International should seek bases of support among the most exploited layers of the working class..."

On the basis of this perspective towards the working class youth, the ICFI was able to win control of the Labour Party (UK) youth organization, which after being expelled by the Labour bureaucracy became the independent Young Socialists, affiliated with the British section of the ICFI.

The approach of the ICFI towards building a youth movement, focused on disadvantaged and working class youth "in the neighborhoods," highschools, etc rather than solely on college students, drew the ire of petty-bourgeois and revisionist groups internationally, including groups such as the Spartacist League. Expressing their real attitude towards the working class, the Spartacists wrote condescendingly that the members of the Young Socialists in the United States were "overwhelmingly ghettoized black and Spanish-speaking youth, a generation or two removed from rural isolation and poverty, very heavily chronically unemployed, in a country with no political class consciousness and themselves with so little access to the labor movement that economic class consciousness often appears as a privilege of older white workers." Retreating from the difficulties involved in finding a road to the most oppressed layers of young workers, they claimed that "a nationalist or Maoist rhetoric corresponds far more closely to the ideological proclivities of American raw ghetto youth." Some of these tendencies have already paid the price for their error, and hardly exist anymore.

However, the youth organizing of the ICFI provided a vehicle for outstanding youth leaders who contributed, such as Chris Talbot, Julie Hyland, Ernst Schwarz, Tom Henehan and D'artagnan Collier to name a few, to rise into positions of leadership within the Trotskyist movement. Furthermore the youth organized through these efforts would prove to be a bulwark against opportunism. In opposition to the later cynicism of the WRP, the youth cadre assembled by the ICFI took the theoretical capital of the movement's struggles for genuine Trotskyism seriously. The primary theoretician of the ICFI during the split with the WRP, David North, was introduced to the Young Socialists in Connecticut on campus alongside another major leader of the modern ICFI, Bill Van Auken. 

As the revisionists who viciously attacked the approach of the ICFI adapted themselves to the petty-bourgeois radicalism of the late 1960s and early 1970s they rediscovered the importance of the youth - middle class youth, to be precise. These youth were praised as some sort of new vanguard that would allow for bypassing the struggle to win over the working class.

Internationally, the Young Socialists actively engaged in intense political, theoretical and educational projects aimed at bringing Marxism to a younger generation of workers. In the UK, the paper of the Young Socialists reached a circulation of more than 10,000. In Germany, more than 50 Young Socialist branches held meetings each week. Throughout the 1970s and the 1980s the Young Socialists in the United States played a leading role in various important campaigns, such as the fight for the release of 26-year-old Gary Tyler, a 26-year-old black youth from Louisiana who was falsely accused of murder. Tens of thousands of copies of The Frameup of Gary Tyler, a pamphlet published by The Young Socialists, were sold throughout its three printings. Hundreds of thousands of workers and young people signed a petition after the Young Socialists organized support for Gary on an international scale among the working class. 

Young Socialists march through Harlem in support of Gary Tyler, December 1976

        In the aftermath of the heinous assassination of Tom Henehan, Young Socialists fought vigorously to bring his killers to justice. The campaigns organized by Young Socialists found a powerful response amongst youth in the United States, Britain, Germany and throughout the world. 

In the split with the WRP, the ICFI found the strongest support amongst the British Young Socialists. The modern leadership of the ICFI, acutely aware of the role historically played by youth in resisting opportunist shifts, have steadily abandoned the goal of organizing the most oppressed layers of young people. 

The ultimate fate of the Young Socialist movements affiliated with the ICFI is unclear to this author, but by the second half of the 90s the ICFI had responded to the difficulties of that decade by abandoning its earlier perspectives of finding a way towards the working class youth. Instead, it reoriented itself in favor of a turn exclusively towards students on campus, particularly those of a middle class background, with the formation of the "Students for Social Equality," later the "International Students for Social Equality" and, in an attempt to deflect attention from its exclusively student focused orientation, the "International Youth and Students for Social Equality." This name change did not indicate any real turn away from the campuses. While many of the best elements among working class youth pursue tertiary education, the IYSSE is not a movement rooted in more working class based community colleges, trade schools, etc. but draws its sustenance from University's out of reach to the majority of young proletarians. Further, the meetings of the ICFI are almost exclusively held in the campus environment, alienating the working class public.

The modern ICFI's turn away from proletarian youth is bound up with a class shift within the ICFI, away from the working class and towards the middle class, that has been gaining momentum throughout the 21st century. We have commented on this class shift and IYSSE before, primarily in reference to the IYSSE's organization along controlled and bureaucratic anti-Trotskyist lines. In its modern form, the youth movement of the ICFI primarily exists as a vehicle for winning over elements from this middle class layer who match the social profile of the middle class faction within the ICFI.  In the process, the modern ICFI has come to resemble its middle-class critics in the 60s and 70s more than a genuinely Trotskyist tendency oriented towards the most oppressed layers of the working class, such as proletarian youth and women. In contrast to this approach, ICFI (1953) supporters seek to revive the declaration of the Transitional Program:

"Down with the bureaucracy and careerism!

Open the road to the youth!

Turn to the woman worker!

These slogans are emblazoned on the banner of the Fourth International."

MAOISM - A BALANCE SHEET

MAOISM

A BALANCE SHEET, By Robert Black 

MAO’S SLAVISH defence of Stalin played into the hands of the Soviet bureaucracy. The Soviet working class, youth and intellectuals hated Stalin as a symbol of repression and mass murder. 

The more Mao praised him, the easier it became for the Kremlin to drive a wedge between the Soviet people and the Chinese Revolution. 

Unable to find a road to the Soviet and East European working class, and menaced more than ever by growing American involvement in SE Asia, the Chinese leaders began to develop the so-called theory of "intermediate zones." 

Mao gave an outline of this theory in a talk with five rightwing members of the Japanese Socialist Party on August 11, 1964: 

"Japan and China must act in unity, co-operate with each other ... As a result of the war Japan came under the domination of American imperialism. American imperialism also  dominates in S Korea, the Philippines, Thailand etc."

  "The United States is reaching out to the western Pacific and SE Asia. It is reaching too far. The United States dominates over Europe, Canada and entire Latin America..."

"All peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America are opposed to imperialism. Imperialism is also opposed by Europe, Canada and other countries. Imperialists too are coming out against imperialists. Is not de Gaulle an example of this?" (Emphasis added.) 

By placing oppressed colonial peoples on the same political level as America’s imperialist rivals, Mao shows how remote he is from Leninism. 

The ideas he developed in this interview can be traced back to Stalin’s "big-power" diplomacy, which tried to play off one group of imperialist states against another (i.e., the 1934-1939 ‘Popular Front’ alliance with the ‘democratic’ imperialists—France, Britain and the US - followed by the Stalin-Hitler pact. 

Turning his back on the working class of the United States, Mao looked to imperialist forces in Japan and W Europe to counter the pressure of American imperialism on China. 

"There are now two intermediate zones in the world. Asia, Africa and Latin America make up the first, and Europe, N America and Oceania the second. Japanese monopoly capital belong to the second zone. Even this monopoly capital is discon- tented with the United States, while some of its representatives openly oppose it..."

"...I do not think that the monopoly capital of Japan will allow the United States to sit on its neck forever. Nothing could be better than for Japan to become completely independ- ent and establish contact with the forces in Asia striving for national independence..." 

The working class as an independent revolutionary force capable of defeating imperialism entirely vanished from Mao’s thinking. 

Instead, he came forward as the supporter of Japanese imperialism, which he cynically presents as a potential ally of national liberation forces in Asia. 

Here indeed is the germ of the policy that we see unfolding today, as Mao moves on from alliance with France and Japan towards the prime goal of his foreign policy since he came to power in 1949 - a long-term settlement with American imperialism. 

Mao had never ruled out the possibility of such an agreement. In its first major statement of differences with the Soviet leaders (‘A Proposal Concerning the General Line of the Inter- national Communist Movement’, March 30, 1963) the Chinese Party said: 

Deal 

"The possibility of banning nuclear weapons does indeed exist. However, if the imperialists are forced to accept an agreement to ban nuclear weapons, it decidedly will not be because of their 'love for humanity', but because of the pressure of people of all countries and for the sake of their own vital interests." 

In other words, peace and disarmament serve the interésts of both the imperialists working class—a line identical to that of Moscow’s. 

The disagreements arose over the degree of "pressure" needed to force a deal with the imperialists. 

The same opportunist policies shaped Mao’s approach [the] national liberation movement, especially in Asia. 

Ignoring the bitter lessons of the Chinese revolution, Mao put forward Stalin’s programme of the "bloc of four classes," in which the national capitalist class became the anchor of an antiimperialist "broad alliance."

Slaves 

         The Chinese CP policy statement of March 30, 1963, stated that in the semi-colonial world:

"Extremely broad sections of the population refuse to be slaves of imperialism. They include not only the workers, peasants, intellectuals and petty bourgeoisie, but also the patriotic national bourgeoisie and even certain kings, princes and aristocrats, who are patriotic." 

On the basis of this Stalinist theory, Mao backed "patriotic bourgeois" leaders like President Sukarno of Indonesia, much as Stalin supported Chiang Kai-shek in China.

Following Peking’s lead, the 3 million-strong Indonesian Party subordinated itself to Sukarno, even though real power lay with his right-wing military leaders. 

When Sukarno tried to oust them by a coup based on an alliance of left-wing generals and a section of the CP leadership, the right wing struck with unbelievable savagery. 

Around 1 million communists were slaughtered in the space of a few months while Sukarno and Mao looked on, powerless to intervene. 

Pogrom 

The "bloc of four classes" had turned into an execution bloc for the Indonesian working class. They paid with their blood for Mao’s adherence to Stalinism. 

And like Stalin, Mao is prepared to overlook this unprecedented pogrom in his anxiety to win more allies in the imperialist camp. 

Negotiations are currently under way between China and Indonesia to restore diplomatic relations severed in 1967, when the Suharto regime began to attack Chinese nationals living in Indonesia.

Mao’s challenge to Moscow began with a dazzling display of leftist fireworks, but it has now spluttered out in a miserable and quite open capitulation to imperialism throughout Asia. 

For all along, Mao never understood the real nature of bureaucracy within a workers’ state. He was therefore unable to fight it effectively either in the Soviet Union - or China.

BOTH MAO TSE-TUNG’S campaigns against bureaucracy ended in ignominious defeat - the "Hundred Flowers" experiment of 1956 and the "Cultural Revolution" of 1966-1968. 

There is no doubt that unlike Stalin, Mao despised rank and privileges within the Chinese Party and state machinery. He correctly saw them as conduits for alien class pressures on the revolutionary movement. 

In a country as backward and poverty-ridden as China, even the most modest material comforts can have a corrupting influence on those who enjoy them.

As in the Soviet Union, a section of the Party leadership reacted against the privations of the pre-revolutionary years and the struggle for power, and began to settle down to a routine, bureaucratic existence as ruling party and state functionaries. 

Insofar as Mao leaned on the working class and youth to counter this conservative layer, he represented a left tendency in the Chinese Party leadership. 

It is this fact of Mao’s political make-up that has enabled revisionists to present him as some sort of left alternative to Stalinism. 

In fact Mao has always had a highly ambivalent attitude to bureaucracy. Like Khrushchev, he waited for Stalin to die before suggesting that "mistakes" had been made in the last years of the Kremlin dictator’s life. 

But unlike Khrushchev, Mao could not claim’ that his silence was imposed on him by sheer terror. 

Criticism 

In the wake of Khrushchev’s 1956 "secret speech" about Stalin’s crimes, Mao launched his "Hundred Flowers" campaign, in which workers, peasants, students and intellectuals were encouraged to say what they really thought about the Chinese Communist Party and government. 

Criticism - both left and right - rained down on Mao’s head. Capitalist and landlord elements called for the restoration of free trade, workers for the right to strike, and intellectuals for the right to interpret Marxism in their own way. 

After six weeks Mao called a halt, declaring most of the flowers to be "poisonous weeds." 

The bureaucratic lid was clamped firmly down on China, smothering - but not overcoming - all the contradictions that had been allowed to emerge during Mao’s brief campaign against bureaucracy. 

Rather than call on the working class to fight the pro-capitalist elements, Mao swung back to the Party bureaucracy and the army. 

Then came Mao’s violent reaction against the Hungarian workers’ revolution of 1956, which sought to replace the Stalinist bureaucracy by democratically-elected workers’ councils. 

Here it was not a case of pressure on the bureaucracy guided from above (as in the Cultural Revolution), but its physical destruction by the independent action of the working class. 

Mao recoiled in horror from such a prospect, and called on the Kremlin leaders to show no mercy towards the Hungarian workers, whom Peking slandered as "fascists" and "counterrevolutionaries." 

Mao crossed the Rubicon when he backed Khrushchev’s counter-revolution in Hungary. His subsequent calls for Soviet and East European workers to overthrow their bureaucratic rulers naturally fell on deaf ears, especially when linked to a nostalgic yearning for the happy years of Stalin. 

The gulf between Mao and the workers of the Soviet bloc widened even more when Peking began to claim that capitalism had been restored in the Soviet Union, and that it was fast turning into what Mao called "social imperialism."

By saying that everything had been lost under Khrushchev, Mao was in fact rejecting any defence of the Soviet Union. 

It was bracketed with America as an imperialist power, which (unlike Japanese, British or French imperialism) had to be fought by workers everywhere. 

Mao’s last and most determined fight against bureaucracy was of course his "Cultural Revolution."

Again leaning on the masses - principally students and youth - he summoned them in their millions to "bombar the Party headquarters" and drive those "taking the capitalist road" from their Party positions. 

Liu Shao-chi, who stood very close to Mao in the early years of power, had apparently gathered around him a group of consérvative party officials, trade union leaders and factory managers who were calling for an end to the dispute with the Soviet Union and a more moderate foreign policy generally.

They saw this as the only way to end China’s economic backwardness, the price for Soviet and imperialist economic aid being support for the status quo internationally, and the cultivation of a technical and managerial bureaucratic élite inside China. 

For two years the struggle ebbed and flowed between Mao and his Red Guards and the bureaucracy, with the army playing the role of arbiter when conflicts erupted into violent pitchéd battles, as at Wuhan. 

Red Guards began to link up with workers and developed their own anti-bureaucratic programme independently of Mao’s directives. 

According to numerous accounts reaching the West, some groups even called for the removal of Mao himself. They were dealt with ruthlessly by the army, acting under Mao’s orders. 

The youthful revolt was also playing havoc with the economy, as Red Guards. swarmed into factories to engage workers in passionate arguments about the goals of the Cultural Revolution. 

Gently at first, then with increasing severity, Mao began to apply the brakes. And as he swung the helm over to the right, towards bureaucrats patiently awaiting reinstatement in their old jobs, the working class in France, Italy and Britain took the offensive against imperialism.

In his fight against bureaucracy, Mao used weapons forged by Stalinism. He tried to combat bureaucracy as a purely national product, and not as the reflection of imperialist pressures on a workers’ state dominated by a. backward peasant population emerging from centuries of economic, cultural and political oppression. 

A bitter opponent of Trotskyism, he turned savagely on its Chinese supporters after 1949. Scores were killed despite their unconditional support’ for the gains of the revolution. Of all his betrayals, this was Mao’s greatest, because he murdered precisely those communists theoretically equipped to combat the growth of bureaucracy within a workers’ state. 

The solution of China’s basic problems still lies along the road of international revolution, which means the overthrow of imperialism in its citadels of political power and economic wealth.

CHINA's present support for President Yahya Khan is the climax of an opportunist, Stalinist policy dating back to the Sino-Indian border dispute of 1962. 

When it became clear that the Indian government was staging border incidents with the full backing of imperialism and the connivance of the Soviet bureaucracy, Mao had two alternatives. 

Either turn to the masses of the Indian sub-continent and encourage a revolutionary defence of China through a struggle against the Indian and Pakistani regimes, or indulge in back-stage diplomatic manoeuvring. 

Mao revealed his fundamental agreement with Stalin’s theory of "socialism in one country" by opting decisively for the second course. 

When Peking began its turn towards the Ayub Khan regime, Pakistan was a cornerstone of two anti-communist imperialist alliances - the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO). 

Pakistan’s slavish dependence on US imperialism was reflected in Ayub Khan’s support for the American war against Vietnam. 

Nevertheless, in February 1964, Chinese Prime Minister Chou En-lai visited Pakistan, publicly declaring his support for Kashmiri independence, while remaining silent about the equally just struggle of the East Bengalis for self-determination.

Hatred 

Mao's support for national-liberation struggles was entirely subordinated to his big-power foreign policy. 

Ayub Khan was pretending to back the Kashmiri independence movement to embarrass India, while E Bengal’s struggle for nationhood could only triumph in bitter conflict with the Khan regime. 

So who was and who was not an oppressed nation varied according to Mao’s current diplomatic allies. 

Pakistan’s rulers were grateful for Peking's backing. It enabled Khan to present his regime as anti-imperialist, and caused enormous political confusion among left-wing groups that looked to China for leadership. 

It also worried the Americans, who increased their military support for Khan to counter the new Chinese influence in Pakistan.

To reassure his imperialist patrons, Khan declared Pakistan's continued support for the Vietnam war at a May 1965 SEATO conference in London, his Foreign Minister, Bhutto, signing a statement accusing Ho Chi Minh of invading S Vietnam.

Peking moved even closer to Ayub Khan during the Indo-Pakistan war of September 1965. Mao openly backed one pro-imperialist regime against another, purely on the basis of his own opportunist foreign policy. Workers and peasants in Pakistan were told by China to fight and die for a regime that oppressed, exploited and persecuted them, denying the masses even the right to vote. Soon the Chinese leaders were boosting the Ayub Khan regime as a staunch opponent of imperialism, despite the SEATO and CENTO membership it has maintained to this day.

Chang Chieh, vice-president of the China-Pakistan Friendship Association, commemorated Pakistan’s national day by declaring in March 1966: "After the independence of Pakistan, the Pakistani people under the leadership of President Ayub Khan have scored in, the last few years delightful achievements..."

Khan had more "delightful achievements" in store for Pakistan’s workers and peasants, when in November 1968 he turned his army and police loose against strikers and demonstrators fighting to overthrow the military regime.

But right up to the removal of Ayub Khan, the Mao leadership continued to portray him as a militant anti-imperialist. Speaking at Lahore in March 1966, Chinese Foreign Minister Chen Yi stated: 

"Under the leadership of President Mohammed Ayub Khan, the Pakistani people united as one and filled with a common hatred towards the enemy, triumphed over the enemy..."

Mao’s envoy was referring to the war against India. 

Giving Ayub Khan a "left" face went on at all levels. In October 1966, a Chinese trade union delegation arrived in Pakistan, where strikes were always met with vicious police and army repressions. 

This did not stop the delegation’s leader, Wang Chieh, praising the Khan regime for its economic achievements. 

He even went so far as to observe that Pakistani workers "were imbibed with a spirit of self-reliance and were determined to strengthen the economy of their [sic!] country.” 

Only a few months later, Khan was calling out his army to crush a militant strike of railway workers. One train was driven over strikers laying across the tracks.

Completely unmoved, Mao continued to heap praise on strike-breaker Ayub. He was anti-Indian, and that was all that mattered.

Ironically, the anti-Ayub revolt exploded while his successor, Yahya Khan, was in Peking.

Chinese bureaucrats drank toasts to Yahya Khan while his troops shot down unarmed workers and students in the streets of East Bengal and West Pakistan.

Mao must have been delighted when he heard that Yahya Khan was to replace the discredited and demoralized Ayub after his "retirement" in March 1969.

Yahya Khan, butcher of Bengal, had already proved his readiness to collaborate in Mao’s diplomatic horse-trading. It was, after all, the best possible insurance against a left-wing uprising in Pakistan. 

Yahya Khan was able to push back the revolutionary tide, but only for a time. By autumn 1970, with Pakistan’s first-ever general elections drawing near, all East Bengal was in political ferment. 

The time had clearly come for Yahya Khan to stake everything on Peking. A state visit to China was hurriedly arranged and Khan arrived in Peking to a hero's welcome on November 10. 

Hangman 

New China News Agency described Mao’s reception for the future hangman of Bengal:

"Several hundred thousand revolutionary people in the Chinese capital gathered at the airport and lined the streets to ive -a warm welcome to the istinguished guests from China’s friendly neighbour..." 

"Peking was alive with warm expressions of the unity and friendship between the people of China and Pakistan..." 

"Huge streamers that hung from tall buildings flanking the streets read: 'A warm welcome to you, President Yahya Khan.' 

Echoing Mao’s highly selective line on national liberation, the welcoming crowds chanted: 

"We resolutely support the Kashmiri people in their struggle for the right of national self- determination..." Naturally, nobody dared chant any slogans in support of Bengal self-determination. 

It would have been undiplomatic, to say the least. For Khan had come to Peking specifically to prepare his repressions against East Bengal. 

An official Chinese report on talks between Khan and Chou En-lai indicated how close the two regimes were: 

"The President and the Chinese Prime Minister reviewed the international situation. They noted with satisfaction that there are no problems between Pakistan and China and their friendship and co-operation are developing very satisfactorily and to their mutual benefit." 

"They also noted that Pakistan and China had a proximity of views on the many issues concerning the world today..."

The climax of Khan’s visit came when the Sandhurst-groomed military dictator was received by Chairman Mao. National China News Agency described the scene in suitably reverent tones: 

"Our great leader Chairman Mao greeted President Yahya Khan- and other distinguished Pakistan guests at the entrance to the hall, and warmly shook hands with them..."

"The distinguished Pakistan guests clapped their hands warmly to greet Chairman Mao; Chairman Mao waved to them in acknowledgement and posed with them for pictures...” 

Khan’s triumphal visit was rounded off with the inevitable banquet, while in East Bengal, untold numbers of peasants were starving to death as Khan’s regime held up aid sent after the cyclone disaster.

THE JOINT communiqué issued as Yahya Khan set Pakistan after his November 1970 talks with Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai, is worth recalling in view of the subsequent developments in East Bengal. A key section reads: 

"Premier Chou President Yahya Khan held talks in a very sincere and friendly atmosphere on important international issues, further development of friendly relations and co-operation between China and Pakistan and other questions of common interest. Both sides were highly satisfied with the results of the talks."

Once again, great stress was placed on the Kashmir question, but nothing was said about Bengal. There was no mention either of national-liberation struggles in Indo-China.

Khan had no intention of upsetting his American backers more than was necessary. 

(Khan was at that time negotiating a new arms agreement with President Nixon. Some Asian observers thought the Peking trip was designed to twist the Americans’ arm!) 

Enthusiastic 

Armed with Mao’s political and, if necessary, military backing Yahya Khan returned from Peking to face the December general elections. 

Broadcasting a week before polling day, Khan told his listeners about "the enthusiastic reception accorded to me" while in China, and about his "very useful exchange of views with Chairman Mao Tse-tung and Premier Chou En-lai." 

He then made an observation whose full meaning only became clear three months later: 

"I believe our growing friendship with China is a positive contribution to peace, stability and progress in our region. We appreciate the abiding and sincere interests of the People’s Republic of China in Pakistan’s struggle and development, and are grateful for its generous assistance in economic and other fields..." 

Naturally, the full details of the Khan-Mao-Chou talks have not been revealed. But their political and military implications became obvious in the first days of the fight in East Bengal. 

Denied the use of Indian air-space, West Pakistan troop carriers refuelled in China before landing in Dacca, an arrangement that surely must have been agreed well before the fighting broke out in March 25. 

China’s press and radio blacked out all news of the massacres in East Bengal by Khan’s troops. After all, it was only four months previously that Peking workers had been summoned on to the streets to cheer Yahya Khan as a great ally of the Chinese people! 

When it became obvious that Bengal was not to be subdued by West Pakistan army terror, China began reproducing Khan regime reports of the situation. 

Then, on April 11, the Chinese Communist Party "People’s Daily" came out with an editorial which openly ranged Mao on the side of Yahya Khan. 

Already the leaders of British and American imperialism had declared the massacres in East Bengal to be an "internal affair" of the Pakistan government. Now Peking used this formula to justify their intervention on the side of Khan: 

"The relevant [sic!] measures taken by President Yahya Khan in connection with the present situation in Pakistan are the internal affairs of Pakistan, in which no country should or has the right to interfere..." 

This reactionary principle is used by imperialism to defend right-wing dictatorships in Spain, Greece and South Africa, to name only three examples. 

Presumably, Mao would oppose revolutionaries coming to the aid of popular forces in these countries too. 

Safeguard 

        This treacherous statement of support for Yahya Khan ended: 

"The Pakistan people have the revolutionary tradition of opposing imperialism and colonialism, and have waged unyielding strugsles against aggressors and interantionists from outside."

"The Chinese government and people will, as always, resolutely support the Pakistan government and people in their just struggle for safeguarding national independence and state sovereignty against foreign aggression and interference." 

Ironically, the only "interventionists" crossing into E Bengal from India in the early days of the fighting were Maoist peasant guerrilla leaders from West Bengal Naxalbari province. And they went in to fight for Bangla Desh against Mao’s ally, Yahya Khan. 

Sabotage 

The "People’s Daily" editorial was followed up the next day by a message from Chou En-lai to Khan, declaring once again that "what is happening in Pakistan at present is purely an internal affair of Pakistan."

Chou went further than the "People’s Daily" when he said "It is important to differentiate the broad masses of the people from a handful of persons who want to sabotage the unity of Pakistan." 

In this Maoist topsy-turvey world, 75 million East Bengalis had become "a handful of persons" and the regime repressing them "the broad masses of the people." 

Even Yahya Khan’s propaganda machine could not match this style of lying, and it is no sutprise when the West Pakistan "Morning News" stated in an editorial on April 14: 

"China has, as befits a true friend, spoken out her support in unmistakable terms..." 

Another pro-Khan paper, "The Azad," was equally outspoken in its praise for Peking:

"We extend our heartiest greetings to the Chinese government for their firm support. The way China has come forward with support deserves thanks from all patriotic Pakistanis...” 

So, too, did Peking’s attempts to portray Khan as a hero of the East Bengali people. A new China News Agency report gave the following account of a nonexistent pro-Khan rally in - of all places - Dacca: 

"A huge mass demonstration was held in Dacca, capital of East Pakistan, on April 13 in protest against the Indian government dispatching armed personnel to infiltrate into East Pakistan and interfering in the internal affairs of Pakistan..." 

Peking’s support for Khan went far beyond publishing lying reports about the situation in Bangla Desh. New China News Agency announced that Air Commodore Kamal Ahmad, Commander of the Pakistan Air Force Staff College "arrived in Peking on April 18 and attended a banquet given in his honour by Kuan Jen-nung, Deputy Commander of the Chinese Air Force." 

His arrival in Peking was almost certainly connected with Pakistan’s continued use . of Chinese air space and refuelling stations for planes flying between West Pakistan and East Bengal war zones. 

Attempts by British and other Maoists to present Peking’s support for Khan as a "mistake" are, at best, absurd. 

Treachery 

In most cases, they are a conscious cover for Stalinist treachery. For example, Peking Home Service on April 28 told the Chinese people, who had no means of finding out about the real sitaration in Bengal: 

"Pakistani President Yahya Khan pointed out that there is only one reason behind such open and shameless interference by the Indian government - that is to further aggravate the situation through instigating and materially supporting a handful of peopte to create turmoil..." 

"The barbarous interference in the internal affairs of Pakistan by the Indian expansionists and the two super-powers will definitely lead to their ignominious defeat."

Was it a "mistake" to accuse India, and not Yahya Khan, of barbarism in East Bengal? And to assert, once again, that the upsurge of the Bengali people for national liberation was the work of a "handful of people?" 

For 15 years British Stalinists have bleated about Stalin’s errors. Now the Maoists serve up the same apology for Mao - only with even less chance of fooling anybody.

For this time, the betrayal is right out in the open. 

Mao, the self-appointed champion of the national liberation movement, has ranged himself unashamedly with one of the most merciless butchers of an oppressed people the world has ever seen. 

Cut through all the phrases about revolutionary struggles, "US imperialism and its running dogs" and Soviet "social imperialism" and you are left with a regime that, like Stalin’s and now Brezhnev’s, wants only one thing: 

"Peaceful co-existence" with imperialism, while it enjoys its social and political privileges at home. 

If this demands an open alliance with reaction to strangle revolutionary movements against imperialism, then so be it. 

True to Stalin’s theory of "socialism on one country," Mao subordinates the world struggle for socialism to the preservation of bureaucratic rule in China. 

Stalinism, whether in its Moscow or Peking variants, remains the biggest single counter-revolutionary force within the workers’ movement. 

It must be exposed and destroyed if the working class and semi-colonial peoples are to win their emancipation from imperialist rule.