Debate With IBT: Permanent Revolution in SA

https://iclfi.org/pubs/aba/3/ibt

Comrades of the International Bolshevik Tendency castigate our programmatic reorientation as capitulation to bourgeois nationalism. Raising up our old programme, declaring it a respectable programmatic approximation for a revolution in South Africa, they hold it up as a paragon of permanent revolution. You insist upon sterile abstractions and formulas instead of facing up to the concrete class dynamics behind the balance of class forces in the country. Well, comrades, our tendency is very glad that we shed that revisionist programme, which in practice ceded the leadership of the liberation struggle to the black nationalists, at our re-founding conference two years ago.

You comrades prefer that programme because it allows you to remain in the sidelines, shouting platitudes about class struggle while dismissing national-democratic revolution or anti-imperialist struggle as diversion from socialism. While this disdain for competing with the nationalists for leadership of the liberation struggle allows you to retain your purity, in reality it is the nationalists who gain all the prestige, and become default leaders of this struggle. Marxists on the other hand are seen as having nothing to offer. This is something we know very well. It is not unusual to hear that Marxists have nothing to offer in regard to racial oppression in this country.

Yes, you acknowledge that the “national struggle is key to revolution in the neo-colonies”, but what you leave unanswered is how will the working class lead a fight for this just cause. To the unsuspecting eye, the IBT’s acknowledgement may point to the connection between the bourgeois-democratic tasks confronting the proletariat and the socialist measures it will implement in order to protect itself against bourgeois counter-revolution. This orthodox sleight of hand seeks to hide that when it comes to South Africa you erect a wall between the democratic tasks and socialist tasks by counter-posing class struggle to a fight for national liberation. In the end your acknowledgement is exposed as not only empty and hollow but a centrist cover for reactionary implications of your line, which states, for instance, “that the real struggle is not national-democratic or even anti-imperialist but anti-capitalist—a class-struggle orientation that targets not just the imperialists but their bourgeois-nationalist lackeys” (IBT presentation by Barbara Dorn, see Spartacist Letters).

Indeed, we know the practical consequences of this so-called class-struggle orientation. Witness for example your pro-US-imperialist declaration lambasting as “meaningless” our call to defend South Africa against Trump’s trade war and the pernicious lie of white genocide peddled by the “Orange League” racists (AfriForum, Solidarity, etc.), the beneficiaries of apartheid! Furthermore, your separating bourgeois democratic tasks from socialist tasks is not only stagist but a capitulation to the bourgeoisie. Why do we need permanent revolution when the imperialist-backed Randlords and their black front men have somehow resolved the democratic tasks? Such is the implication of your method, comrades!

What is bizarre is that you brand our perspective, which advocates for a fusion of the fight for national liberation and the fight for socialist revolution, as stagist. You complain that such an approach complicates drawing of a class line—or, to quote from comrade Barbara’s presentation, “makes it difficult to distinguish yourselves from the nationalists”. It may seem to you that it is a capitulation to black nationalism to make the South African working class aware that attainment of its historic objective fates it to be leader of the national liberation struggle. We, on the other hand, understand very well that social emancipation cannot happen without national liberation. The most basic thing about fighting for working-class leadership of the national liberation struggle through class-struggle methods (i.e., an independent proletarian strategy), of course, is that it allows us to expose how the nationalists hold up and betray the fight for national liberation. The thing is not to, as you imply, “out-nationalist the nationalists” but to demonstrate the limits of the petty-bourgeois nationalist tops and their methods.

As Trotsky said in his 1935 letter to his South African comrades—which comrade Barbara’s presentation seems to polemicise against, I might add:

“The Bolshevik-Leninists unmask before the native masses the inability of the Congress [meaning the ANC] to achieve the realization of even its own demands, because of its superficial, conciliatory policy.”

When the ANC was selling out from the mid 80s onwards, there was no Marxist party to exploit this. The SACP was busy consolidating the ANC’s hold on the black working class, and the workerists were exposed as having no answer to the national question.

Look at the EFF today. That party emerged precisely because of the ANC’s betrayal—and the left, because of its disdain of the national question, has not been able to provide an answer to its growth. In fact there are two ways in which the left has responded to the EFF, which both reject fusion of national liberation struggle with class struggle. One, you get sucked into it; and two, like most of the left in this country, you stand aside and look forward to the future where the black proletariat will have dropped its illusions about national liberation, thus allowing pure class struggle to predominate.

You go on to argue that Marxists including yourselves raise democratic demands that nationalists also raise, which may lead to shifting temporary blocs with nationalists. In a word anti-imperialist united front. Yet when it comes to us this tactic mysteriously morphs into a “strategic bloc” with the bourgeoisie wherein the working class liquidates into nationalism. You can’t have your cake and still eat it, comrades of the IBT. What you want is the convenience of shouting your support for the democratic demands from the sidelines. For you this is drawing a hard class line, but in reality it is surrendering leadership of the liberation struggle to the nationalists without a fight.

The ICL in a number of articles has stressed that the objective of the anti-imperialist united front is not only to take a stand against imperialism but to show in struggle how nationalism is an obstacle to liberation from imperialism. It is important to note, comrades, that in our context nationalism of the black masses arose in response to imperialist subjugation and white domination. This progressive aspect of it, if you will, expresses opposition to oppression—and any communist worth their salt is duty bound to champion this legitimate aspiration. And this includes using it as a lever to advance a revolutionary struggle against both imperialism and white domination. True enough, nationalism has reactionary quality to it—a point that in our old programme we perpetually hammered to dismiss the progressive aspirations of the black masses. For you this is a third point in a list of exhibits (which I will get to in a moment) that proves the political adaptation to bourgeois nationalism which you have charged us with.

In regard to the first exhibit, our support to the Freedom Charter, this is where your rigid separation of democratic and socialist revolution shows its ugly head. You write: “As you say, the ANC has already betrayed the Freedom Charter. Do we need to go through that again?”

It is as if the fact of the ANC betraying the Freedom Charter takes it off the agenda. Granted, some of the demands listed in the Freedom Charter are dated, particularly the demand for universal suffrage. But that radical bourgeois programme continues to animate the oppressed in this country, particularly the black masses. It has inspired the seven cardinal pillars of the EFF, and the Stalinists (both the SACP and the SRWP) continue to call for its radical implementation. This is because the colonial and apartheid structure of the economy remains intact, shown by the fact that the means of production remain concentrated in white hands. The negotiated settlement spawned neo-apartheid, where as you very well know the legal and rigid segregation was dispensed with but the economic roots of capitalism in this country—i.e., super-exploitation of black labour—remain untouched. This explains the persistence of the racial hierarchy.

The struggle to implement the Freedom Charter invokes a struggle against white monopoly capital (the imperialists and the Randlords), just as with the EFF’s seven cardinal pillars today. Participation of revolutionary communists in this struggle is absolutely imperative. Not only because it gives us an opportunity to intervene in the fight with class-struggle methods and the programme of permanent revolution, thereby exposing the petty-bourgeois nationalist tops’ utter incapacity to realise the implementation of their own programme. But also because it is the only way we can use their vacillations and capitulations to fight for proletarian leadership of the struggle.

To you, this is leading the working class away from the fight for socialism. You recommend instead that our task ought to be “to break any supportable concrete democratic and economic demands from the constraints of a bourgeois program or bourgeois organizations and present them as part of a transitional program for workers’ power”. How this will be done we are not told. Nonetheless, distorting Trotsky’s Transitional Programme will not do. This is what he explained in that pamphlet: “It is impossible merely to reject the democratic programme; it is imperative that in the struggle the masses outgrow it.”

Second exhibit: for dropping our opposition to nation building, you charge us with a ludicrous claim that we want to develop national culture in South Africa. Attributing to us the New Unity Movement’s position on self-determination [opposing the right of self-determination for national minorities in countries oppressed by imperialism] is nothing but a species of your imagination, I should add. Today it is common place to note that with the advent of the imperialist epoch, the nation state became reactionary. This truism however applies first of all to imperialist powers. In oppressed nations, the national liberation struggle still plays a progressive role provided it is directed against imperialism.

What does it mean to oppose nation building in South Africa? South Africa is not a nation. It is a colonially-derived state made up of diverse peoples forcibly integrated into the same political economy with whites on top and blacks at the bottom. First and foremost, nation building brings to mind the question of the colonially-drawn 1910 borders that had nothing to do with the peoples of the region and everything to do with not only economic, but geopolitical, interests of the colonial masters. Opposing nation building means accepting the squalor and imperialist-imposed underdevelopment (economic backwardness) that predominates in the former Bantustans. Perhaps most importantly, it means standing against the black masses’ just aspiration to unite in struggle against their enforced division, which ultimately puts you in the same camp as the actually dominant people—the white ruling class with the imperialists standing behind them. (Today this is a position taken by the Zulu monarch and some Khoi and San Chiefs who have allied with AfriForum to oppose expropriation of land without compensation.) The handful of black bourgeois, whom you seem to think are consolidated as a class and play an independent role, are in reality connected and subordinated to both the Randlords and the imperialists.

You argue that our fight for black liberation under the slogan of a Black-Centred Workers Government disappears other oppressed peoples, as it fails to recognise the rights of “different black minorities, such as the Zulu population in Natal, but also those of the Coloureds and Indians”. Putting aside the fact that Zulu separatism has been used as a club against black unity during the struggle against apartheid, as well as the fact that Zulus constitute the largest ethnic group in the country. To say that we fail to recognise the rights of minorities is laughable, especially when you attack us for supporting the Freedom Charter and nation building. All I can say is that comrades of the IBT must read the second clause of the Charter (“All National Groups Shall Have Equal Rights!”). A black-centred workers government, on the other hand, would guarantee an important role and full democratic rights for Coloureds, Indians including other Asians, and those whites who accept a government centrally based on the black working class. Super-exploitation of black labour—the bedrock upon which South African capitalism rests—still conditions the oppression and marginalisation of Coloureds and Indians. Above all, unity among the oppressed and marginalised masses is a product of anti-imperialist struggle—which you comrades refuse to dirty your hands with, given its non-proletarian character.

Third exhibit: In taking issue with exposing our old programme for dismissing the contradiction of black-nationalism, you completely miss the point about both the progressive and reactionary aspects of bourgeois nationalism, as noted above. It goes without saying that nationalism ties the oppressed black masses to the black elites and pits them against their class brothers and sisters in the imperialist centres, against other oppressed groups and all whites. You claim that for us nationalism doesn’t seem to be unambiguously bourgeois, somehow expressing class contradictions. You take issue with our insistence that communists must accentuate the contradictions arising out of the balancing role that nationalists play between the black working masses and white monopoly capital.

To understand the strong hold of nationalism on the black working class you have to look at the overlap of race and class in this country. The black elites, themselves subject to and connected to white monopoly capital (and yes, they include a handful of black capitalists) exploit this hold to further subordinate the black proletariat to their leadership while at the same time fronting for the Randlords and the imperialists. This is the basis of the balancing act of nationalists and petty-bourgeois nationalist tops, which is mired in contradictions that communists must exploit in their fight for revolutionary proletarian leadership of the black masses.

You abuse Trotsky’s quotation from The Third International After Lenin to prove that our critical support to the EFF in the previous elections was unprincipled and helped to sow illusions of the black working masses in its programme. This is false. In fact, our call to vote EFF helped promote a class line against the imperialists, explaining at the same time why the EFF cannot realise its own demands as well as the necessity for alternative strategy based on class-struggle to fight for those demands.

Here is the situation confronting a tiny Trotskyist outfit going into the momentous elections last year. There was no independent working-class representation in the elections and the level of class struggle was and remains low. The SACP had chosen not to participate independently, despite having decided to do so, in order to help the ANC which was slated to lose its majority for the first time since 1994. NUMSA’s SRWP was moribund and AMCU’s Labour Party barely said anything about, let alone against, imperialism. As a matter of fact, their programme was to the right of the EFF. The right-wing DA and the radical-populist EFF were contenders for an alliance with the ANC. The racist white bourgeoisie and imperialists had made it crystal clear that they would be against an EFF victory.

In the minds of workers, the choice was between more austerity in an alliance with the right-wing DA and the EFF’s radical version of the Freedom Charter, the seven cardinal pillars. Objectively, the class line was between the radical demands of the EFF on the one hand and the forces that in one way or another promised to uphold or worsen the status quo. But if you equate the EFF with the Democrats, a party of US imperialism, you are going to be blind to these dynamics. The task we were confronted with in this situation was how to break the most advanced elements from black nationalism and clearly pose the need for an independent working-class party.

Revolutionary Marxist parties have employed a range of tactical agreements to deal with leftward petty-bourgeois nationalist forces, from electoral blocs to entryism. In fact, to bring back Trotsky’s 1935 letter cited above, we can see that he doesn’t rule out temporary alliances with these forces, writing:

“Separate episodic agreements with the Congress, if they are forced by circumstances, are permissible only within the framework of strictly defined practical tasks, with the retention of full and complete independence of our own organization and freedom of political criticism.”

The Bolsheviks under Lenin’s leadership in 1907 entered into a “brief formal political bloc” with the Socialist Revolutionaries. This did not stop them from mercilessly exposing the SRs as petty-bourgeois democrats who have “falsely described themselves as socialists”.

To conclude, in the very text you cite, The Third International After Lenin, Trotsky again reminds us, in a paragraph directly above where you quote, that:

“The sole ‘condition’ for every agreement with the bourgeoisie, for each separate, practical, and expedient agreement adapted to each given case, consists in not allowing either the organizations or the banners to become mixed directly or indirectly for a single day or a single hour; it consists in distinguishing between the Red and the Blue, and in not believing for an instant in the capacity or readiness of the bourgeoisie either to lead a genuine struggle against imperialism or not to obstruct the workers and peasants.”