Letters

Reactionary statelet

James Tait (Weekly Worker 118) takes me to task for not answering his criticism of my position on Bosnia which he made in Weekly Worker 108. As both sides of the argument were in front of the readers of the paper I felt no need to intervene. My letter in No 118 was a copy of the letter I sent to Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!, included because readers only had the benefit of his assertion.

While it is true that ‘Bosniacs’, as James says, include “Serb, Croat, Jewish and mixed muslims”, muslims do dominate. The 1990 election results in Bosnia paralleled ethnic divisions so closely that they were ironically referred to as ‘a census’. The fact that Serbs in Bosnia have just been defeated after a vicious civil war, and the Croats are taking advantage of the peace to establish Croatian rule in the areas they dominate, indicates that ethnic divisions are just as deep in Bosnia as elsewhere in ex-Yugoslavia. It is not an island of multi-ethnic harmony in a sea of hate, but a reactionary capitalist statelet that exists only because of foreign meddling.

The comrade’s letter shies away from answering my main points: namely, that he explains the link between self-determination and ethnic cleansing, which he claims is inevitable; and secondly explains how supporting a bourgeois regime helps the cause of the working class. Action is fine but not when it helps reactionaries.

Phil Kent
Brent

Nato ‘peace’

The National Assembly on the war in ex-Yugoslavia in Milan was a success. About 150 comrades from the Organizzazione Communista Internazionalista, trade union delegates, local groups and the Partito della Rifondazione Communista attended.

From abroad we received greetings from Novi Most, trade unionists in the German union IG Metall, the Chicago Committee for a Revolutionary Party, as well as yourselves.

The most important characteristics of the meeting were:

1. a deep agreement that the only possible way out of the war is the proletarian revolutionary one; 2. the presence at the meeting of two political groups from ex-Yugoslavia which support the reconstitution of Yugoslavia; 3. the militant and proletarian character of the meeting.

The meeting gave strong support to escalate denunciation of the imperialist responsibilities of the war and of the anti-proletarian character of the ‘peace’ (definitely a temporary one).

We are working to build opposition against the ‘neo-colonial’ occupation of ex-Yugoslavia by the Nato army, and above all against the presence of Italian soldiers (always remembering that the first enemy is at home, and it is our bourgeoisie) and to begin to weave stronger and stronger unitarian threads with the ex-Yugoslavian proletariat.

Organizzazione Comunista Internazionalista
Italy

WP twists and turns ...

In the report of the meeting on the LRCI in Weekly Worker 121 my intervention was condensed too much, so I need to clear up some of my positions.

I criticised the Workers Power group because its leadership changed its line so many times on Bosnia. First they were against all sides; next they called for the conquest of all Bosnia by the muslims; later they said that if the muslims reconquered Bosnia it would mean oppression of the Serbs and Croats - therefore they should only reconquer the land where they were in the majority before the war (less than 20% of Bosnia).

On July 21 1992 the LRCI said: “If Croatia or the Bosnian government join an imperialist-backed onslaught against Serbia, then we would abandon the position of ‘defeat on all sides’ in favour of the military victory of Serbia against these countries.”

In August the Croat army in alliance with the muslim government and armed and supported by Nato-ethnically cleansed Krajina. WP called for the military victory of the muslim-Croat federation and demanded imperialism send planes, missiles, tanks and men to support their allies! They said that imperialist bombs could have some progressive aspect.

The LRCI has had many contradictions. In 1990 it supported the Soviet army intervention in Azerbaijan and some months later it called on imperialism to support the Lithuanian pro-capitalist government against Moscow.

In 1981 WP was against the Communist Party coup d’etat in Poland. In 1991 it called for the defence of the Russian bourgeois parties and parliament. In 1991 it was against any kind of joint parliament between western and eastern Germany because it would mean that imperialism would eat the degenerated workers’ state. But later the LRCI leadership said we should have advocated a common constituent assembly in a single Germany. In 1992 the LRCI said that they would not defend the Communist Party demonstrations against Yeltsin’s capitalist repression, but at the same time the LRCI organised a red-brown united front behind great Serbian monarchists. One year later the LRCI advocated a vote for the Russian CP that one year before was characterised as the “fascist” faction of the bureaucracy.

All these contradictions came together with restrictions on internal democracy. In July 1994 comrades in Bolivia submitted a tendency platform. The leadership did not recognise our right to do so and suspended the author and stated that the entire Bolivian section was under threat of expulsion.

Ten years ago the CPGB was the name of a counterrevolutionary and authoritarian bourgeois workers’ party, and WP was a healthy, revolutionary organisation. Now the CPGB is a different organisation that regrouped comrades that came from Stalinist and self-proclaimed Trotskyist backgrounds. The CPGB is a left split from Stalinism that broke with reformist and bourgeois policies but that did not arrive at a Trotskyist (revolutionary Marxist) standpoint. WP is moving to the right and is closing internal democracy.

I do not think that Stalinism is becoming democratic and Trotskyism anti-democratic. I only said that when an organisation moves from Trotskyism to centrism (like WP and LRCI) they become more bureaucratic. An organisation that breaks with Stalinism and starts to open the debate could be more democratic. The members and supporters of the CPGB should continue to re-examine their past. Only consistent Trotskyism is the way towards a revolutionary and healthy democratic centralist party.

José Villa
Expelled from the LRCI

... curb democracy

Thank you for a lively meeting and an opportunity to discuss my differences with the LRCI. I would however like to clarify one question regarding democracy.

I did not say that Trotskyist groups are prone towards undemocratic regimes similar to Stalinist groups. What I said was that under the pressure of political vacillation and the need to get the membership to toe this constant change in political line, WP had become undemocratic. In other words it was political degeneration that led to an undemocratic internal regime, not the other way round.

The second point is that I did not say the LRCI was in favour of the Croats ethnically cleansing Serbs in their offensive against Krajina. They were opposed to this but still continued to support the ‘Bosnian’ (muslim) army’s advance in Krajina and western Bosnia.

Brian Green
London

Activism and theory

Although it may inform it, revolutionary theory does not come from “the experience gained by activists in the course of their everyday struggles”, as suggested by Mick O’Farrell in his letter published in No 121. Revolutionary theory is elaborated by both advanced workers and by non-proletarian intellectuals who have thrown in their lot with the working class.

In his What is to be done? of 1902, Lenin correctly pointed out that theory was introduced into the working class from the outside by bourgeois intellectuals, but he did not assert that this would be a permanent feature. In recognising that different levels of political consciousness existed within the proletariat, as it does in every class, Lenin was stressing the importance of the role of the advanced workers in the elaboration of revolutionary theory as the means to overcome dependence of the class on bourgeois intellectuals.

Far from being in contradiction to the concept of the self-emancipation of the class contained in the Communist Manifesto, it fully accorded with it. In fact, it is the stratum of advanced workers, self-organised as communists into the vanguard party of the proletariat, which actually makes the self-emancipation of the class possible.

Mick O’Farrell writes, “The very idea that there can exist outside of the working class a theoretical centre which knows the interests of the class better than the class itself is a most dangerous concept.”

This is nothing more than an Aunt Sally originally emanating from the utopian outlook of anarcho- and libertarian communism which rejects, or denies in practice, the concept of the leading role of the communist party within the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Comrade O’Farrell is unable to accept that different levels of political consciousness within the working class have a relative permanence. He therefore comes to his own actual, distorted and ‘most dangerous’ conclusion that the class itself is capable of “achieving full political consciousness” under capitalism. But not to recognise that differing levels of political consciousness exist within the class, and thereby to put all workers onto a common denominator, is to denigrate the class and to pronounce it as a class that is incapable of producing its own intelligentsia.

Mick O’Farrell, in fact, has missed the essence of What is to be done? In his work Lenin established the fundamental differences between the “organisation of workers” and the “organisation of revolutionaries” and it is only in that context that we can properly understand the role of the advanced workers as well as the related purpose of the revolutionary paper.

These differences of organisations bear upon the prospect of a ‘radical’ Socialist Labour Party, formed from ‘working class activists’ and ‘partisans of the class’ being advanced by a certain non-revolutionary leader of spontaneity.

But meeting the needs of the advanced workers by their unity still remains as the most urgent and pressing revolutionary task for Marxist-Leninists.

John Sandy
For a Permanent Party Polemic Committee