31.05.2000

Tailing nationalism

Ian Donovan responds to criticisms on Zimbabwe

Andrew Cutting's letter in last week's Weekly Worker expresses common misconceptions on the left as to the real meaning of internationalism, as well as illusions about the supposedly 'working class' nature of various reactionary but 'left'-talking capitalist regimes (May 26). Such illusions are unfortunately common to both the remnants of 'official' communism, and the more Stalinophile elements of the Trotskyist movement. While I understand that comrade Cutting's background is in the latter milieu, some of his comments makes him sound like the former.

Comrade Cutting accuses me of engaging in a "cheap trick" in simply observing that the land invasions in Zimbabwe over the last couple of months were orchestrated by the Zimbabwean government for its own reactionary reasons. The "cheap trick" that I am apparently engaged in is that I do not ascribe to Mugabe's demagogic land seizure movement some kind of progressive dynamic, on the basis that confused landless peasants in some cases have undoubtedly been drawn behind Mugabe's playing of the 'anti-colonialist' card and even joined in with the war veterans.

But contrary to comrade Cutting, my characterisation of Mugabe's actions as "demagogic" was predicated on the understanding that this was Mugabe's very purpose - to outmanoeuvre the opposition in this way. I plead guilty to not regarding Mugabe's social demagogy as progressive. When Zimbabwe's aspiring Chiang Kai-Shek sends his reactionary militias to murder trade unionists and ordinary farmworkers defending the farms on which they live and work from being burnt out, I see him, and the 100% capitalist regime that he heads, as oppressing the working class and the rural poor, pure and simple.

Comrade Cutting, on the other hand, sees Mugabe as defending "to some extent" the gains of the working class. Based on this apparent illusion, he dismisses my hypothesis that the Mugabe regime could possibly expel the entire white population as a ruse to stay in power as "beneath contempt", and throws in a smidgen of crude race-baiting invective for good measure. He asks: "Who wishes to see the giant Zimbabwean plantations broken up into tiny parcels of land. Who would prevent collectivisation and why?"

Evidently comrade Cutting thinks Mugabe is about to collectivise the farms on behalf of the same working class. In reality, of course, this is not possible at the hands of a capitalist government such as Mugabe's: the whole logic of the current movement - if Mugabe were to press it as far as the expulsion of the white population - points to a barbaric and retrogressive 'solution' to the land question within the framework of the 'indigenous' productive forces, with the links between the more productive sectors and the world economy broken.

Comrade Cutting seems to regard such a programme as a positive virtue, judging by the strange ideological inversions in the later section of his letter. He seems to regard the imposition of autarky by anti-working class regimes such as those of Milosevic and Mugabe as in some way "victories" for the working class, and - incredibly - to have something in common with the Bolsheviks' "breaking the chain of world capitalism at its weakest link". He generalises that, "The CPGB's primary criticism of Mugabe, and Milosevic before him, are that they defend, to some extent, the gains of the working class rather than integrating into the world economy."

Of course, in reality such regimes do not defend the gains of the working class, and do not protect the working class from exploitation at the hands of the globalised economy. What they do is, if anything, restrict the productive forces to a very narrow national framework, stunting their growth and also thereby the growth of the social power and numbers of the proletariat.

Their historical tendency is to subject the working class to varied forms of political despotism and politically enforced forms of robbery and exploitation, subsequently followed by a savage 'free market' onslaught when such autarkic experiments inevitably collapse - usually with the elite becoming the most fervent neophytes of untrammelled neo-liberalism. This perspective, needless to say, has nothing in common with the Bolsheviks' perspective of the proletariat seizing political power as a class and using that political power to promote the spread of world revolution.

The Bolsheviks understood that it was not possible for the working class to avoid "integrating into the world economy", for more than a historical split second at least. As Trotsky explained, "From Marx on, we have been constantly repeating that capitalism cannot cope with the spirit of the new technology to which it has given rise and which tears asunder not only the integument of bourgeois private property rights, but, as the war of 1914-18 has shown, also the national hoops of the bourgeois state. Socialism, however, must not only take over from capitalism the most highly developed productive forces, but must immediately carry them onward, raise them to a high level and give them a state of development such as has been unknown under capitalism.

"The question arises: how then can socialism drive the productive forces back into the boundaries of the national state which they have violently sought to break through under capitalism? Or, perhaps, we ought to abandon the idea of 'unbridled' productive forces for which the national boundaries, and consequently also the boundaries of the theory of socialism in one country, are too narrow, and limit ourselves, let us say, to the curbed and domesticated productive forces: that is, to the technology of economic backwardness.

"If this is the case, then in many branches of industry we should stop making progress right now and decline to a level even lower than our present pitiful technical level which managed to link up bourgeois Russia with the world economy in an inseparable bond and to bring it into the vortex of the imperialist war for an expansion of its territory for the productive forces that had outgrown the state boundaries" (original emphases, L Trotsky The Third International after Lenin London 1974, pp40-41).

Trotsky's observations about the productive forces having outgrown the nation-state are particularly pertinent in today's context also. The immediate threat of another 1914 is absent today; instead what you have is the phenomenon of 'globalisation': that is, attempt by the imperialist bourgeoisies to construct pan-national institutions on the basis of the considerable growth of transnational companies and financial institutions and the continued, and indeed expanding, flowing of the productive forces over national boundaries.

In this context, comrade Cutting accuses the CPGB of considering that workers participating in the amorphous, anarchist-led 'anti-capitalist' movements such as Seattle were "backward" and "nationalist" for worrying "about their jobs". This is frankly silly: it was the nationalist solutions provided by the pro-protectionist bureaucrats and other non-socialist ideologues on offer at Seattle, not the workers' demands for social gains and jobs, that were rightly attacked in this paper as being akin to the utopian and reactionary forms of 'socialism' that Marxists have sought to combat ever since Marx and Engels produced the Communist manifesto. The point being that the only way workers can win in the globalised capitalist economy is by adopting an internationalist perspective and transnational forms of organisation, not by seeking to revive the nationalist reformism that has failed in the past.

Comrade Cutting's illusions in this kind of nationally-based 'socialism' become ridiculous when he attacks my defence of the Zimbabwean social-democratic/popular-frontist opposition against Mugabe. He rants that, "A victory for the MDC can only mean that workers' organisations are crushed as effective forces while public services are demolished. The tone of Donovan's article is reminiscent of the German Communist Party in 1933: 'First Hitler, then us.'"

Thus comrade Cutting directly compares the Movement for Democratic Change with Hitler's Nazis, as enemies of the working class and its organisations. What a ridiculous irony: here I am being accused of third-period Stalinism by someone who characterises an organisation founded by the Zimbabwean Congress of Trade Unions as being comparable to Hitlerism! In other words, comrade Cutting, in his pro-Mugabe fervour, is effectively accusing the ZCTU/MDC, in classic third-period Stalinist fashion, of being 'social fascist', while Mugabe, the murderer of trade unionists, is lauded as defending "to some extent" the gains of the working class!

In reality, the most important gains that the working class have in Zimbabwe are precisely their trade unions. Comrade Cutting, and others with similar illusions, which fundamentally seem to involve the tailing of nationalism in a variety of different forms, should certainly derive food for thought from this absurd reversal of elementary class reality that their ideology (in the Marxist sense of the term - false consciousness) leads.

Nationalism and internationalism are two utterly counterposed perspectives, and those who attempt to reconcile them not only do a disservice to the working class; they often make themselves ridiculous as well.