In Defence of Permanent Revolution

Revolutionary greetings to you all. I am pleased to give a talk at this International Centenary Conference on Lenin, Leninism, Africa and the World. I am from Spartacist South Africa, a section of the International Communist League-Fourth Internationalist. We are fighting to build a revolutionary party in the manner that Lenin cohered the Bolsheviks, as a programmatically steeled apparatus capable of leading a struggle for social and national emancipation.

As a matter of fact, we just had our Eighth International Conference, where we produced a programme to reforge the Fourth International and for leading an anti-imperialist fight by counterposing to the nationalists a revolutionary communist leadership for the national liberation struggle. This is a fundamental break with our previous programme, which fought against nationalism and Stalinism on the false basis of dismissing the national liberation struggle as a diversion from socialism (see “In Defense of Permanent Revolution—For Communist Leadership of the Anti-Imperialist Struggle!” in Spartacist No. 68). To win the masses away from the nationalists, communists must push forward the national-democratic and anti-imperialist struggles, showing at every stage that breaking with nationalism is a necessary condition for victory. We very much would appreciate the chance to discuss with others who also want to build such a revolutionary party.

Imperialism is characterised by the division of the world between a large number of oppressed countries and a handful of oppressor countries that are economically and militarily dominant. In 1916 Lenin called imperialism the monopoly stage of capitalism, describing a situation where territories of the world have been divided up for possession by a small group of monopolies. Lenin’s greatest contribution was to forge a vanguard party of the working class capable of leading the struggle against imperialism, against all oppression—along the road to finally liquidating capitalist rule. As he understood, such a struggle begins nationally but must culminate with power in the hands of the working class worldwide.

Consistent with this understanding, today our reality is characterised by the hegemony of US imperialism. While this hegemony is in decline, the mass of the world population is still subjugated through the export of finance capital. Other great powers take part in this, but they still get their dictates from Uncle Sam. The days of colonial empires, with their unbridled and voracious plunder of their subjects, may be gone. But they have yielded their place to the pillage of the same countries, which are formally independent but are in fact neocolonies or dependent states held in bondage by the economic and military blackmail of the so-called great powers. All of the countries in this continent belong to this category.

This imperialist pillage of dependent countries is the central reason for their underdevelopment and for obstructing national and cultural development. In the countries of the so-called Third World, despite their relative differences, it is not the national bourgeoisie but the imperialists who control and dictate every aspect of economic and political life. Resistance to national humiliation, as well as aspirations for land, democracy and economic development, gives the demands of the workers and peasants an explosive character. But achieving these demands requires confronting imperialist subjugation at every step. Naturally the question is how to wage such a struggle.

In Africa we have a whole history of independence movements and struggles for national liberation. But despite heroic self-sacrifice and deprivations suffered by fighters throughout that period, the former colonial masters, with the US at the top, still call the shots. This is because the national bourgeoisie that stood at the head of these movements, while at times struggling to break free from imperialism, is incapable of overcoming its subordination to the imperialists. As I will get to in terms of South Africa shortly, yesterday’s aspirant nationalist petty bourgeoisie today acts as black front men for white monopoly capital: the Randlords and the imperialists.

So then, what force must we look to in order to defeat the imperialists? This was shown by Lenin in practice, in the October Revolution. The only way to carry out the burning democratic tasks in Russia, such as land to the tiller, self-determination for those oppressed by the czarist prison house of peoples and liberation from imperialist dictates, was for the proletariat to seize power with the support of the peasantry. When Lenin arrived in Russia from exile and issued his April Theses, his first task was to rearm the Bolsheviks, whose central leaders were then conciliating the Mensheviks. The Mensheviks, for their part, believed that since the central tasks of the revolution were bourgeois-democratic, it was obligatory to subordinate the proletariat and the peasants to the liberal bourgeoisie. The first thing Lenin insisted on was an immediate break with the bourgeoisie—No support to the Provisional Government! All power to the soviets! It was this programme that led Trotsky to join the Bolsheviks and help Lenin lead the October Revolution, the greatest defeat ever suffered by imperialism.

Trotsky’s writings on permanent revolution further explain why the proletariat is the only class that can successfully lead the struggle to defeat imperialism and why the leadership of a communist vanguard is necessary for victory. This is totally relevant to the struggles for national liberation in Africa. As during the independence struggles, when the national bourgeoisie tries to resist foreign capital, it is compelled to some degree to lean on the proletariat and on the entire nation. At the same time, as a propertied class it is conscious that the proletariat represents a menace to its interests, compelling it to lean on the imperialists. By suppressing the only force that can deliver genuine national emancipation and modernisation—the working class allied with the peasantry—the national bourgeoisie not only prevents social revolution but sabotages the anti-imperialist struggle, paving the way for imperialist reaction. Thus, in subjugated countries the first step toward emancipation is to forge revolutionary communist parties to wrest the leadership of the anti-imperialist struggle from the bourgeoisie, fusing the fight for national liberation to the struggle for socialism. This struggle includes engaging in anti-imperialist united fronts with bourgeois forces, through which communists can expose before the masses every vacillation, capitulation and betrayal of the bourgeoisie. The necessary precondition, however, is the political independence of the proletariat from all bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces.

To illuminate this I am going to focus on South Africa. Nowhere was the need for that kind of communist leadership clearer than in the fight to smash apartheid. Today, after three decades of neo-apartheid capitalism administered by the African National Congress, it is clear to advanced workers and broad sections of society that the fight for black liberation was betrayed by the leaders of the Tripartite Alliance: the ANC, COSATU and the SACP. The land remains in the hands of the white minority. Millions of black people are still trapped in the desolate former bantustans. Racial oppression, superexploitation of black labour, mass unemployment, deindustrialisation and lack of services persist and have in many ways gotten worse.

Why did the anti-apartheid struggle end with such a thorough betrayal of the black masses’ aspirations? By the mid-1980s, South Africa had reached a pre-revolutionary situation, directly posing the need for the overthrow of the regime by the masses themselves. The uprising was fueled by the black masses’ unwillingness to tolerate apartheid controls and humiliations such as Bantu education any longer, combined with a revolt against worsening social conditions, from appalling housing to despicable working conditions and starvation wages. This period marked the height of the mass struggle against apartheid.

The driving force behind the upsurge was the black trade-union movement, which had grown enormously in militancy and organisation since the late ‘70s. Conditions in many factories and communities at times approximated what Marxists call dual power. Plant supervisors didn’t dare set foot on the assembly line floor and state-appointed councilors were unable to enforce apartheid laws or collect rates and rents. As one leader of a shop stewards’ committee put it: “The aims were quite political, and it was simply to overthrow the government. ... All these actions, boycotts, stayaways ... [were] directed at that objective.”

But while the black proletariat was the main social force driving the movement forward, the leadership remained in the hands of the nationalist petty-bourgeois ANC. And it was the SACP that played the key role in ensuring this. Its whole orientation and activity in the struggle against white-minority rule was based on rejecting the lessons of the October Revolution and reviving the Menshevik programme. The SACP tirelessly preached that the national democratic revolution in South Africa would have to be led by the ANC. In light of the pressure they faced from the initiative of the black masses during the township revolt, SACP leaders tried to give their class-collaborationist programme a left-wing appearance, which is why you heard a lot of talk about people’s power and fusing class struggle with a fight for national liberation. But this was all done to keep the masses tied to the ANC.

To motivate the strategic alliance with the ANC, SACP leaders argued that after getting rid of apartheid, working-class struggle must be limited in its methods and aims so that it does not threaten the bourgeois aspirations of the black elites while at the same time not undermining the fundamental interests of the working class. As you know, it is impossible to have your cake and still eat it. In reality, this meant tying the hands of the working class, paralysing the mass struggle and abandoning all the methods needed to wage war against imperialism and white domination.

As must be obvious to you by now, an alliance along the lines advocated by the Stalinists is certainly going to lead to the betrayal of the needs of both the proletariat and the black masses, including the petty bourgeoisie. And this is just what happened with the negotiated settlement that ended formal apartheid. I am sure many of you who follow South Africa are aware of the famous call raised by the liberation movement in the 1980s to “make the country ungovernable”. While it became a clarion call for the masses to struggle against the hated white oppressors, it did absolutely nothing to connect this anger with the urgent task of preparing a popular insurrection. This was deliberate: by simply impelling the masses to rise up without any clear direction, the ANC sought to exhaust their energy while leaving the fate of the uprising—how, exactly, the apartheid rulers were going to be removed—in the hands of the petty-bourgeois tops. The cynical calculation at work was frankly admitted by Thabo Mbeki, who is credited with inventing that slogan. In March 1986 he told the London Observer: “We are not talking of overthrowing the government but of turning so many people against it that it would be forced to do what Ian Smith did”—i.e., accept an imperialist-brokered deal like the Lancaster House Agreement in Zimbabwe.

This treacherous doublespeak was designed to intersect the growing worries of imperialists and Randlords over the prospect of social revolution and the continuing profitability of capitalism under apartheid. This led key sections of the capitalists to pursue a deal with the ANC. And for that to happen, the township revolt had to be tamped down or arrested. But the ANC leadership lacked the organisational means to directly subdue the masses. To do that, they relied on the leaders of COSATU and the SACP. By smothering and paralysing the revolutionary initiative of the masses, the SACP and the labour bureaucracy aided the ANC in constraining the power of the working class at every stage, acting as the central obstacle to national and social emancipation.

Above all, what was needed to advance the fight for national liberation was to smash this reactionary alliance. For this to happen, an intervention of a genuinely communist pole waging a sharp struggle to split the SACP over the demand to break the strategic alliance with the ANC was required. This fight for revolutionary leadership would have drawn the dividing line between reform and revolution. A communist pole needed to put clearly before every SACP and COSATU militant the fact that their leaders’ alliance with the ANC was the main obstacle hindering the realisation of the masses’ most deeply felt aspirations. It needed to drive home the fact that maintaining this alliance meant turning every demand in the Freedom Charter—from universal suffrage to reclaiming the land and mineral wealth of the country—into a bargaining chip in the imperialists’ rigged game. And it had to counterpose a way to defeat this monstrous betrayal and break the shackles holding back the struggle: agitating in every strike and in every other struggle to break with the ANC and fight for an SACP/COSATU government to implement the Freedom Charter on the rubble of the Botha regime.

Objectively, the conditions were favourable for such an intervention. From 1986 on, COSATU militants increasingly took central responsibility for organising the mass struggle and the ANC had not yet consolidated its influence over the working class. And the workers seized on this to give the mass struggle their own class imprint, carrying out siyalala (sleep-in) strikes across Gauteng Province, building industrial area committees to link townships to the factories and take the lead in reviving the mass movement, and coming up with innovations like train committees to circumvent the state of emergency. NUMSA (National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa), a left-led union and then an affiliate of COSATU, issued resolutions calling for working-class leadership of the national democratic struggle while adding a convenient caveat that this must be left to the COSATU leadership, which as we know had ordained the ANC as the undisputed leader of the liberation struggle.

Regardless of their criticisms of the ANC, leaders of NUMSA and other left-wing affiliates of COSATU fundamentally opposed a political split in the workers movement. This meant that they could not raise a programme to fight for revolutionary proletarian leadership of the liberation struggle. The subordination of the labour movement to the petty bourgeoisie is not a strange thing in the independence movement. In fact it is a pattern throughout the African continent. The strategic task for the workers movement remains to fuse the national and class struggles by fighting for revolutionary communist leadership in opposition to the petty-bourgeois nationalists.

This is the chief lesson of the anti-apartheid struggle, and it retains its full force today. In South Africa, the black masses’ aspirations for land, for national liberation, for a society that can fulfill the needs of the majority, can only be realised by expropriating the Randlords. And that means leading the lower strata of the black petty bourgeois as well as the urban and rural masses in struggle against our common oppressor, white monopoly capital. But this is possible only on the basis of an independent working-class party and policy. As Leon Trotsky said in a letter to his South African comrades in 1935, “The historical weapon of national liberation can be only the class struggle.”

Thank you.