Today the South African and Palestinian masses are the most oppressed and persecuted peoples in the world - oppression carried out by imperialism and its regional 'relaying stations', the apartheid regime and the Zionist state.
International Viewpoint 24 February 1986 International Viewpoint 24 February 1986
Given the military might of these two states, it is not at all certain that these masses have a prospect of revolutionary victory in the short or medium their heroic struggle, such an analysis only increases our duty to build solidarity with them. Even if we were to consider their struggle defensive' (a formulation as meaningformulations respect to other sections of the world proletariat and its allies) this duty would remain as imperative as ever. We can even say it would become even more necessary - just as was solidarity the Chilean masses in 1973 with the victims of the Argentinian dictatorship in 1976.
The motives inspiring our solidafundamentally internationalist in the social of the term. people that tolerates the oppression will never accomplish its liberation. This applies of the world without an ongoing, unrelenting strug.
nationalist, chauvinist, and xenophobic crowning that struggle with political success), the proletarian revolution will be a thousand times more difficult in any country of the world.
also convinced that the practice of class collaboration, of 'solidabourgeoisie' is one of the main subjective obstac les blocking the proletarian revolution in the imperialist countries (and also to a growing extent in the semi-industrialised dependent countries). Such only be successfully eliminated if it is replaced by the solidarity of workers against the bosses, irrespective of their nationality, race, ethnic origins etc. ness of the masses comes from experience of action more than from propameetings, education etc. The most effective way of fostering internationalist consciousness is to get involved in internationalist actions. International solidarity action, because of its continuity, is obviously especially important. For the try our best to encourage the involvement of the organised workers' movement, particularly the trade unions, in these solidarity movements.
So for us internationalist duty is not a task separate and apart from world revolutionary strategy, including in the imperialist countries, it can take on particular forms and conjunctural importance such a time in the national and international class struggle. It is an integral part of the overall strategy. To give it up or even to underestimate it is not just morally objectionable. It deals a mortal blow to the long-term preparation of consistent revolutionary class struggle in each country, with the imperialist countries such an essentially political notion of proletarian internationalism, of the necessary solidarity workers and oppressed on a world scale, only has a coherent basis if it is based in a materialist way on the community of interests of the workers of all countries. We can see immediately how any rigid idea of 'labour aristocracy fostered by colonial superprofits' becomes erected into a serious obstacle for permanent solidarity work with the struggle of the masses in the semi-colonial and dependent countries.
You cannot have it both Either the famous 'labour aristocracy' only represents a small minority which can be effectively neutralised by political action: struggle for the united racy, increasingly advanced forms of advanced forms of mass self-organisation. In this case it does not form an imperialist solidarity inside the working class, providing the revolutionary vanguard carries out its tasks and does not commit sectarian this case, this 'aristocracy' can in no way explain the reformists' persistent influence over the broad masses.
aristocracy represents the basis of the mass influence countries. But this 'labour aristocracy' has material interests opposed to the well-paid workers - beginning 11
in the Third World. So solidarity action these workers and oppressed masses of the Third World will be limited to a small minority motivated essentially by moral considerations in opposition to its own material interests. Through the false notion of 'colonial superprofits as explanation reformism, class collaboration and mass nationalism in the imperialist countries, the third worldists put themselves union bureaucrats and the Stalinist and social-democratic politicians, even if they do so with quite different policonclusions and with the intentions in the world (but as everybody knows, the way to hell is often paved with the best intentions). workers of the imperialist countries have no interest in solidarity with the peoples. They would also have an recommending expulsion of immigrant times of crisis. They Boumedienne and Castro meet in El Hadjar, 1972 (DR) sation of the Third World and forming a 'protectionist bloc' with their own bosses. Percy and Lorimer obviously do not go so far in their line of reasoning. But the third-worldist logic is likely to drag them in that direction. On the other hand our logic contends that the working masses of the imperinterests at all. Thus they can be won over to the broadest and most systematic internationalist solidarity. The strategy of Permanent Revolution
The Australian SWP, following the example of the SWP of the United States, had begun to revise the revolutionary Marxist programme by attacking the of the permanent revolution. Developed forms of this revision can be found in the July 1984 congress resolution of the Australian organisation. We find this again in Lorimer's report to the August 1985 National Committee.
The July 1984 congress resolution is greatly confused on this. On the one hand it takes up again the proto-Stalinist (Zinovievist, Bukarinist), Stalinist and post-Stalinist formulations of 'revolution by stages': first a 'national-democratic revolution' and then *a socialist revolution characterised by the expropriation of the bourgeoisie' The authors of the resolution think they are polemicising with Trotsky. But in reality they are polemicising only with Trotsky's positions as 10 caricatured by the first leaders of the
(unfortunately were occasionally taken up and used by dogmatic and sectarian representatives of "Trotskyism' - like the Australian SWP used to be years ago!).
Trotsky or the Fourth International have never put forward the idea that the permanent revolution means that in the underdeveloped countries or even in the imperialist countries the task of eliminating all private ownership of the big means of production is posed from the first day of the of power as the immediate or even the main task. The very term 'permanent revolution' would have no sense at all if this were the case. You would be talking about instantaneous and identical proletarian revolution in The imperialist and Third World coun-
The specificity of the permanent revolution strategy is above all the fact that the solution of the classical tasks of the national-democratic revolution - solution of the agrarian question, solution of the national question, solution of the question of modernisation as a whole - requires the conquest of power by the proletariat supported by the poor peasantry. In other words it requires the dictatorship of the proletariat, the establishment of a workers' state. If we reject the idea of 'revolution by stages' it is not because we deny in any way the primacy of national democratic tasks at the beginning of the process of permanent revolution. Rather it is because we deny categorically the possibility of accomplishing these national-democratic tasks under other forms of government and state power than those of the dictatorship of the proletariat. There is no 'nationaldemocratic stage of the revolution during which the national-democratic can be resolved without the proletariat holding state power. But due to the relentless logic of the class struggle itself, the proletariat cannot power without the beginnings of a growing over of the revolution towards the solution of
That is the second particularity of this strategy. It is in this sense that the revolution is perm. anent': there is no interruption of continuity (in other words there is no possibility of an interlude of a state other than a workers' state) in moving from the solution of national-democratic tasks to the solution of the socialist tasks of the revolution. Obviously the first comes before the second but not in an absolute and total sense and without postponing to a 'second stage' even the beginnings of socialist meas ures. The concrete course of the class struggle and the real social and political relationship of forces determine the pace, the forms and the limits of this growing-over process.
Australian SWP July 1984 congress resolution introduces a confusion by avoiding
The second thesis of "What is the Permanent Revolution" (Trotsky, 1929) makes it crustal clear:
'With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of ther tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses' ("Permanent Revolution", p. 152, New Park edition.) International Viewpoint 24 February 1986
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to out carry cratic tasks in avoids making state, are of accomplishment democratic tasks.
the revolution.
the the tion.
ment' ment that still ference fundamental a relapse theory, alliance sie is said to
'strategic' is confine that party(ies)
the peasant national-demoepoch whether the of the ruling for the the of tasks not provide a for a governwithin functions with this into Menshevik-
The problem.
in the indispensable in countries epoch of, say, 150 years - that the forms still has peasantry result always been the same significant minority everywhere:
the petty bourgeoisie lead asses, can only in general and peasants in particular, if of the revolution have failed in all their attempts to nder the leadership realise their strength and to direct and in the framew economics and politics in their own proi torship of the what-
They have had to follow the way.
of the proletariat the stage of the leadership ser either of the tasks to or the capitalists - there is no middle erms way open to them.? (VI Lenin, Speech as a priority.
onal
Workers,
The task of nati to
Congress of
Transport
March 271921, pp 277-78, Collected nly accomplished by
Works, Vol. 32).
of a volu tion through aside Lenin's teachings, orkers' state.
Since
Brushing of today
'visionaries continue our to hold sway more than sixty of the years adding wild about later, imaginings the 'peasant components' of 'workers governments' that are peasants' and
Do supposed to have been clearly present of the in victorious revolutions the
But twentieth century.
they are incapable of responding to the simple we put to them: so where question were these famous 'peasant ministers' or 'peasant components' in the government that came to power after the
Russian October revolution, in the post-December 1945 Yugoslav govern-
1949 ment, in the post-November the Hanoi
Chinese government, in government after the Geneva agreean
Castro government the ments, in in Cuba, in the Vietnamese government after the fusion between North the
Sandinista
South or in and in Nicaragua? It is quite regime clear we are dealing with a pure and simple mystification of reality.
This theoretical regression contrasts with the good sense of Fidel Castro despite his pragmatism, does who, not hesitage to affirm a few general theoretical truths that are precisely the Australian SWP now the ones
1965] in rejects:
*But the peasantry is a class which, inciof the uncultured state in because which it is kept and the isolation in needs the revolutionwhich it lives, ary and political leadership of the class and the revolutionary working it for without them intellectuals, after the twenty would not by itself be able to plunge destruction there into the struggle and achieve victory
(The Second Declaration of Havana,
York, fore no
Pathfinder Press, New
20
1979).
Chile ... a socialist revolution
In army.
will be necessary, and I have explained much he why. As an under-developed country, crushed by debt, where broad masses of the population live in the worst and must be struck blows conditions, against the interests of the imperialists, exercising the oligarchy, big industry, the import-
Lenin because as resolves export trade and of the banks, if one
1921 (Trotsky had in wants to get somewhere, if one wants as early as to give something to the peasant and
1905-6):
worker masses of the country.
experience
"To be able to carry out the struggle
- and revolutions all over the world the oligarchy and against confirm this if we take the modern against
11
imperialism, the support of the peasant and worker masses must be won against imperialism And the worker and peasant masses do not give support to any sort of bourgeois revolution, because the workers and peasants will not be prepared to collaborate in the interests of an exploiting class? (Granma, March 20, 1966, our translation and emphasis).
Is it not a little sad that these formulations of Fidel, which reflect the real experience of all the revolutions of the twentieth century, are practically identical to those of 'orthodox Trotskyism' while the ex-Trotskyists of the Australian SWP, on the pretext of 'getting closer to Fidel', are proclaiming these fundathe permanent revolution to be false?
Lorimer's report to the Australian SWP's August 1985 National Committee pushes the confusion even further. On the one hand, in the footsteps of proto-Stalinist, Stalinist and postStalinist falsifiers, he now explicitly attributes to Trotsky and the Fourth International the idea of a simultaneous accomplishment of all the national-democratic and all the socialist tasks of the revolution - in other words the absurd idea according to which it is necessary to totally exproprate the bourgeoisie the day after the seizure of power. Needless to say, you will not find a word in the basic writings of Trotsky (Results and Prospects, The Permanent Revolution, Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution) or in the programmatic documents of the International Left Opposition and the Fourth International to prop up such a thesis. The only thing that Trotsky and revolutionary Marxists have always asserted is that while having taken power to carry out in the immediate period the national democratic tasks of the revo. lution and some political tasks like the peace in 1917, the proletariat could not rebuild a capitalist economy, could not sacrifice its own class interests and could not hold off the taking of certain socialist measures to a later stage. (6) Measures of workers' control were taken by the Bolshevik government as early as November 1917. Are these 'national democratic' or 'socialist tasks'? Not to see the difference between this position and a call for the immediate and simultaneous expropriation of the whole bourgeoisie is only possible for people who are being dishonest.
But apart from this obvious falsification there is a deepening revision of the programme. For Lorimer is now openly talking about the difference between the 'character of the regime' in the two 'stages. The content of his 'stagism' is revealed when he refers to the tactical problem of the 12 in
Uruguay
Frente see
Viewpoint,
No
68,
January ile temporary the tactical
Frente
Amplio certainly possible nt is trap only unrepentant opportdefeats, can and the poor tate obvious existed and ustralian
SWP leaders is whether a ent or govable to pe, he
'nationalrevolution, le result in govrus, historical once and for ical about our of the etness evolution has of victory the and
Vietan vell by as the defeats the
Bolivian,
Chilean, ranian revoluideas are our hers who take misplaced.
It reflects misunderstanding of the a dilemma.
The olace strategic the underdeveloped will remain alternative:
forward on to proletariat or stage. Our led case ou are and
Events have of this ness to emphasise
Marx and the Marxists declared as early as 1848, that the proletarians of all countries had a very clear choice
- either form class-struggle trade independent political parties, or be constantly duped by the big capitalists. History has proved them right. Should we keep silent on on the pretext that the class- struggle trade unions and independent political parties in many countries were formed by non-Marxists?
The opposing social forces on a world scale
The wrong strategic ideas of the
Australian SWP are based on a false vision of world reality. This is summarised in the following formulation taken from the 1984 SWP congress resolution:
'In the present period, the colonial revolution remains the most dynamic sector of the world revolution. The underdeveloped countries, which include the overwhelming majority of humanity, are the area in which the contradictions of the imperialist system are sharpest and capitalism's exploitation is most intense and unbearable' ( The Struggle for Socialism in the Imperialist Epoch, P " 43,
It certainly true that capitalist exploitation is most intense and unbearable in the capitalist underdeveloped countries. Bu that it is most intense and unbearable in the countries defined as developed. Otherwise, what is the significance of the victorious socialist revolution in countries like China, Vietnam, Cuba and Nicaragua?
If we subtract and above all China, from countries where the objective remains the colonial revolution, as have to, then the capitalist countries do not represent the 'overwhelming majority anity'. They do not even represent the majority.
even this type of estimation does not have a lot of significance in concrete social and political terms. What the Australian SWP leadership wants to really get over when they use the term 'colonial revolution' in the same way as it is used by third-world. ist ideologues is that the revolution is dominated by social forces other than the proletariat, and characterised by forms of organisation and struggle different from those of the Russian revolution.
This vision of the coming revolution in a certain number of underdeveloped countries is thoroughly false. It does not take into account a key fact: the semi-industrialisation these countries have gone through during the last decades, with the consequence that the proletariat today has a much greater weight in society as a whole than it had in China, Indochina, Cuba, Nicaragua or even in Yugoslavia at the time when these countries went through the decisive phase of their revolutions.
True we are talking about a small number of countries. The big majority of underdeveloped countries remain predominantly agricultural with a preponderantly peasant and 'marginal'
Percy and Lorimer have now discovered that the number of wage workers in the private sector had increased from to 1.5 million in China from 1950 to 1953, ("SWP Discussion Bulletin" November the population. International Viewpoint 24 February 1986
population. But this majority in terms of countries involves a minority (which furthermore is shrinking) of the world population. This minority is declining terms of impact in countries going through a process of semi-industrialisation are among underdeveloped Korea, South Africa, partially India
In all these countries, tion of the proletariat in the populathat is the urban and rural wage earners (and this is the only
Marxist definition proletariat) - is today greater than in Russia during the 1917 (Even in China, 35 per cent of the active population are today wage earners, a higher percentage than that of Russia
1917. The same thing applies to
In most of these countries, notably the three main Latin American coun Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, the population. And that has a key consequence for the world revolution. It is only today that Marx's prediction has been fulfilled - that the proletariat would represent the majority of producers on a world scale, which was far from the reality of 1871, 1917 or even 1950. Today there are about one thousand million wage earners in the world with roughly the following distribution internationally: 140 million in capitalist Europe, 120 million in North America, 130 million in the USSR, 130 million in China, 120 million in India, 180 million in the other dependent semi-industrialised countries, 50 million in
Europe, 50 million in Japan and the rest in other countries. (7)
strategy for world revolution must include this overall analysis of the opposing social forces and their social-political
International Viewpoint 24 February 1986
Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. (DR) nothing to do with a 'Eurocentric' or 'workerist' (in the narrow sense of the term) report incidentally contains a signifion this point. He criticises the resolution adopted at the Eleventh World Congress for having mentioned a growing preponderance working class of the imperialist coun tries in the worldwide class struggle. Such a formulation cannot be found in the resolution he is criticising. latter refers to a growing preponderance of the world proletariat, which we in no way identify with the procountries. The same formulation also used in the Tenth World Congress
If we make an objective, unblinkered and unprejudiced balance of what has actually happened in the last ten years, then the analysis of the Eleventh and Twelfth World Congress resolutions has proved them to be closer to reality than the schemas of the third worldists - not just Iran, Nicaragua and Central America, but also the Portuguese revolution, explosive workers' struggles in Italy, the fall of the dictatorship and the rise of the PT [Partido Trabahadores -Workers Party] in Brazil, the political revolution in Poland with the rise of Solidarnosc and the eruption of mass struggles in South Africa.
When we look at the reality of the in no way underestimate the importanti-imperialist democratic motives and will continue) to inspire those involved in mass struggles in the underdeveloped countries (and even in certain imperialist countries). These motives are still very important. They can even be decisive at certain points in the struggle. The worker-peasant alliance, the explosive nature of the land question and the marginalised urban masses remain key for developing revolutionary strategy, even in coun tries like Brazil, Mexico, South Korea and South Africa where the proletariat is already the absolute majority of the working population.
But the relative weight of the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist motives behind the mass struggles inevitably changes if the proletariat goes from 15-20 per cent to 50-60 per cent of the active population, not to mention those involved in clearly revolutionary systematically within these struggles, then these struggles themselves continually checked and fragmented Any strategy in which the mobilisation of the urban masses, and therefore their self-organisation and self-defence, does not hold the preponderant place in the struggle, is condemned to failure in those countries. What is going on in South Africa is a striking confirmation of this analysis and prognosis. the 'anti-imperialist axis of the world revolution' notion is a schema which, for above all, objective reasons, corresponds less and less to reality, to the actual unfolding of the class struggle Reform or evolution in the bureaucratised workers' states
As we have seen above, the 'antiimperialist axis of the world revoluimplies a subordination of the concerns and struggles of the workers in the bureaucratised workers' states to alleged 'priorities' on a world
This false view of the world revolution includes a wrong perception of social and political reality in these states, parallel to the incorrect conof reality in the underdeveloped countries: particularly its repressive apparatus -army, police in a post-capitalist as the task confronting the workers of an imperialist country like Australia. This is an erroneous and extremely dangerous position.
'In a bureaucratised socialist state, the repressive apparatus has a dual role and character. It is used to defend the social conquests of the proletariat, the new socialist forms of prop
These Tn P ployed in the imperialist countries, the landless agricultural wage labourers in India and the other capitalist countries of the Third World as well as the wage labourof the state farms (sovkhozes) in the USSR and China. This conforms to the Marxist definition of the proletariat.
13
The platform at the twenty-fifth congress of the Soviet Communist Party, March 1976 (DR)
ПАРТИЯ:
ум. ЧЕСТР СОВЕСТЬ ЛЕНИН erty against imperialism, and it is used by the bureaucratic oligarchy to protect its material privileges and monopoly of political power against the working class. The Soviet army for example has not only been used to suppress working-class struggles for socialist democracy as in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, but also to stop capitalist restoration, as in World War II.
"This dual nature of the repressive apparatus of the bureaucratised socialthat one cannot, advance, say that this apparatus as a whole will have to be destroyed for a genuine and radical experience of the Hungarian uprising of 1956 showed, some sections of the repressive apparatus will most probably have to be destroyed - those, such as the secret police that are highly privileged and identify most closely with the bureaucracy against the workers. But this cannot be said the whole repressive This was shown by the Hungarian including the officers, went over to the workers' side against bureaucratic oligarchy. Whether of the state apparatus have to be destroyed will be decided struggle, by in the way of the working class carrying through a radical democratisation. ("The future of the SWP's interna14 tional relations", The SWP and the
International, Pathfinder, Australia, 1985, p 45).
The term 'socialist' state is a theorthat breaks with Lenin and Trotsky. Like the formulasocialism, dear to Stalinists and post-Stalinists, the best propaganda and ideological weapon one can today hand over to capitalism and imperialism. It is the main anti-socialist foil for the immense majority of workers in the imperialist countries, the bureaucratised workers' states and in most of the semi-industdependent countries. reaction can be summed up in a few that's socialism, they can have it!
The formulation, 'dual role of the and confused. It leaves out a decisive aspect of the problem: the dual function of the repressive apparatus never operates in practice at any given an evenhanded, way. When there is direct military aggression against the USSR - more generally in a war situation - the function of the Soviet army to defend the collective ownership of the means of production is evidently predominant. But no honest person can argue that since the imperialists still exist, since the imperialist armies live on and we are in a period of intensive rearmament, then it follows that during the 1956 Hungarian revolution, the 1968 'Prague Spring' or the Polish political revolution in 1980-81, the Soviet armed forces (and the Polish army) had as a dominant function 'the defence of the USSR' against an attempt by imperialism to restore capitalism in the USSR (ie. against an invasion that did not take place and was not on the agenda in the short or medium term). This "threat' was just a mystification, a crude justification of anti-working class repression by the bureaucracy and its apol-
It is therefore much more correct to say that in an open conflict with imperialism the USSR's repressive apparatus defends above all remains of the conquests of October, while in an open conflict with the masses it defends above all the bureaucracy's privileges and monopoly of confusion cluttering up the Australian SWP's argument IS that between the necessity of having a state apparatus under the dictatorship of the proletariat - that is the impossibility of achieving the withering away of the state with a single blow, even today in the USSR following a victorious political revolution -and the corrupt, degenerated, bureaucratised existing state apparatuses, which are hated by the masses. A trade-union apparatus (of a smaller size) will certainly still be necessary International Viewpoint 24 February 1986