https://iclfi.org/pubs/pamphlets/lfi-debate/perm-rev
Contents
Presentation by Anna Mili for the ICL
How to Make a Revolution in Oppressed Nations
I want to be clear about something. This debate is not a historical review of permanent revolution, but an inseparable part of the struggle to forge the Fourth International today. The fundamental question in relation to the nations of the world oppressed by the imperialist bourgeoisie is that the only solution in order to bring about national and social emancipation is workers revolution. And the only way this can be achieved is by forging communist parties to lead this struggle to success. I think that by posing the question this way, both organizations can claim some form of agreement.
But for Marxists, the question is not just preaching revolution. What is fundamental is how workers revolution will be achieved. What are the tasks of revolutionaries in the oppressed world—as well as in the imperialist countries—to advance this struggle, starting from day-to-day struggles and connecting them to the ultimate goal? For this to happen, the proletarian vanguard must put at the epicenter of its strategy the struggle for the national liberation of the oppressed nations from world imperialism, and not skip over the just national aspirations of the masses, ignoring them or even denouncing them as an obstacle to revolutionary class struggle and socialist revolution. And here lies our difference with the LFI. So, the focus of this presentation is going to be precisely that. How to advance the struggle for socialist revolution in the neocolonial world.
The Basis of Oppression and the Material Reality of the Neocolonial World
To understand why the fight for national liberation is the motor force for revolution in an oppressed country it is crucial to understand the material reality in these countries. So, let me give you a picture of where I come from. Greece fought against the Ottoman Empire to establish an independent state, only to find itself under the yoke of three “protecting powers.” The war of independence brought the Greek people not freedom but the dictatorial rule of Bavarian princes, imposed by the British, French and Russian ruling classes. In an astonishing irony with the Troika of our day, an International Finance Commission took charge and controlled Greek finances, stripping Greece of its sovereign powers. One financial bankruptcy followed another, and really very little remained for the masses. Later in World War I, the imperialists blockaded Athens, starving the population and forcing Greece to enter the war. In World War II, the country was occupied by three forces: Italy, Germany and Bulgaria. The Nazi occupation was among the most brutal in Europe. When the Nazis left, the British first and then the U.S. took over, crushing the revolution. In 1967, a military dictatorship backed by the U.S. ruled the country for seven years.
And in our epoch—the epoch of the hegemony of the U.S.—the main hegemonic power, together with Germany, strangles the country through the “peaceful,” the liberal—plunder of finance capital. The workers fought tooth and nail against the imperialists from 2008 to 2015: endless general strikes, massive, militant. The masses directly confronted the imperialists and their Greek lackeys, demanding their liberation from imperialist bondage. The latest example: After a train crash last February, caused by the destruction of the railways by privatization, 57 people died, and a mass political strike took place against the imperialists and the government. From privatization of education, healthcare and ports, the closing of industry, attacks on workers’ rights and overthrowing the government in 2011 to a huge debt on the shoulders of the masses, the imperialists dictate and control every aspect of the political and economic life of the country, keeping it poor, underdeveloped and in a state of destitution. This is what the material reality of Greece looks like; and, taking into consideration whatever differences there are in each country, this is the living picture for all the neocolonial world.
Grounding our method in this materialist understanding, it is not hard to identify that the main enemy of the proletariat in oppressed nations is imperialism, not the national bourgeoisie. This is illustrated clearly in the struggles of the proletariat. Historically, class struggle in Greece is defined and pushed forward by the struggles of the proletariat and the broader masses of the oppressed against imperialist subjugation. It is this oppression and national humiliation that moves the masses. Their just national aspirations, their powerful anti-imperialist sentiment, their yearning for peace and a better life against the humiliation imposed by the imperialists give the proletariat’s struggles for the most basic demands an explosive character and are powerful weapons which need to be taken up by the proletarian vanguard to defeat imperialism and bring national and social liberation to the masses. As Trotsky wrote:
“Really to arouse the workers and peasants against imperialism is possible only by connecting their basic and most profound life interests with the cause of the country’s liberation.”
The Role of the Bourgeoisie in the Neocolonial World
But in its struggle for its liberation, there is an obstacle, the national bourgeoisie. To understand its role—why and how it is an obstacle—it is necessary to show its material position. This is determined by combined and uneven development. The decisive forces in oppressed countries are the imperialists and the proletariat, not the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is standing weak and trapped between the two, incapable of playing an independent role and forced to maneuver between the two. Seeking to resolve the democratic questions and develop the country to strengthen its position as a ruling class, it has to rely either on the imperialists, or on the proletariat to resist the imperialists. It is in the latter case when the bourgeoisie can take progressive measures like nationalizations that the bourgeoisie promotes illusions they can lead the struggle against imperialist subjugation.
At the same time, as a propertied class it is conscious that any independent struggle of the proletariat against the imperialists threatens its own class rule. This is why it has to maintain itself at the head of the national liberation struggle. Because of its ties to private property and in order to secure its class interests, in the end it suppresses the proletariat, betrays the anti-imperialist struggle and sides with the imperialists. Only by using this method is it possible to show why the bourgeoisie is a reactionary class and why the proletariat is the only class capable of liberating the nation from imperialism, resolving the democratic tasks under the dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasantry. The national bourgeoisie is the main political obstacle but not the main force to defeat.
The Two Poles in the Workers Movement
In response to the bourgeoisie, two non-revolutionary poles in the workers movement have developed historically in Greece and in the world. One consists in supporting the bourgeoisie under the pretext of fighting against imperialism. This trend views the bourgeoisie as the force that can bring freedom to the oppressed people, reflecting the right-wing expression of opportunism. A good example is the Greek Stalinists, who in the 1940s—in the name of fighting fascism—betrayed the heroic struggle of the workers and peasants, subordinating them to the Greek bourgeoisie and the “progressive” imperialists.
The other pole is a reaction to the first. On this side of the room [points to the LFI] and with the correct impulse of fighting against the national bourgeoisie, it rejects the anti-imperialist struggle altogether under the pretext of “class independence.” This is the expression of “left wing” opportunism—sectarianism. A good example is the Greek Trotskyists, who in the 1940s—in the name of pure class struggle and socialist revolution—denied any kind of national oppression. Ironically, today the two have flipped positions. The Trotskyists support the national bourgeoisie under the pretext of fighting imperialism, and the Stalinists reject the anti-imperialist struggle in the name of class independence.
Both trends are an obstacle to forging a Marxist pole in the neocolonies; and as two sides of the same coin, both end up leaving the national liberation struggle and the leadership of the masses in the hands of the national bourgeoisie. Both poles strengthen the grip of the nationalists on the masses, betraying both the national and social emancipation struggles.
The only revolutionary policy for the neocolonies is a Marxist pole: on that side of the room [points to the ICL], a party which fights for the national liberation of the oppressed peoples of the world, armed with the Leninist principle of class independence as the only way to smash the nationalists, take the lead and direct the anti-imperialist struggle to its final conclusion, workers revolution. I want to insist: the only way to break the hold on the masses is to compete with the national bourgeoisie. This is not a new program invented by the ICL, comrades. It is an application of the Comintern’s Second and Fourth Congresses. I challenge the LFI to prove that the Comintern’s program, which generalized the experience of the October Revolution, was class-collaborationist and to publicly condemn it. The “Theses on the Eastern Question” is on the lit table, and everybody should read it and make their own conclusions.
The LFI Again Chooses Sectarianism
The LFI falls into the second of the two trends described above. It doesn’t deny that the neocolonial world is oppressed by imperialism, but this only speaks against it. Recognizing this oppression by imperialism—and even having orthodox formulations against it—in a sense is more deceitful since it masks its opportunism with left formulas preaching class struggle and revolution. However, what you will not find is how you will make one.
Both organizations agree that it is essential to combat nationalism. The question is: How? We see the national aspirations of the masses as the motor force, as the heart of the revolution, which must be channeled and pushed forward through the revolutionary veins of the proletarian vanguard, made to beat harder and sweep away the arteriosclerotic and diseased body of capitalism. The LFI sees the national aspirations of the masses as something that needs to be suppressed, held back or even dropped, clogging the arteries, stopping the heart of the revolution, depriving it of breath. This is our difference! By rejecting the force which moves millions of oppressed into class struggle and ultimately socialist revolution, the LFI capitulates to the same force that it wants to combat, the nationalists, leaving the anti-imperialist struggle in their hands.
The LFI creates a false dilemma by contrasting the struggle against imperialist subjugation and the struggle for the overthrow of the national bourgeoisie. But every struggle that arouses the proletariat against the imperialists is a real step forward on the road to social liberation. The revolutionary struggle to break the imperialist yoke does not weaken but rather strengthens the political differentiation of classes. When the exploited masses stand on their feet confronting the imperialists, it inevitably pushes the national bourgeoisie into an open bloc with the latter. To fight against imperialism, one must necessarily fight against the national bourgeoisie. The essence of permanent revolution and the tasks of communists consist not in rejecting the masses’ aspirations nor in the separation of class struggle and democratic demands but in the fusion of the democratic and socialist struggles under the communist banner. This is the epitome of the Transitional Program, the bridge to, or the stages of, the revolutionary class struggle.
Let’s apply the LFI’s method in the U.S. By its approach—class struggle rather than democratic demands—the black masses should drop their struggle for black liberation and fight only against their class oppression. But we all know, including the LFI, that you cannot even start to talk about class struggle in the U.S. separate from the struggle for black liberation. The fight for black liberation is inseparable from the struggle for workers revolution in the U.S. Taking this back to the neocolonies, the fight for national liberation is inseparable from the struggle for workers revolution. But no, for the LFI that is a capitulation to nationalism.
What does the LFI’s position mean for the proletariat in the imperialist centers? The task for communists in the U.S. is to champion the national liberation struggles of the oppressed people. Only if the proletariat of the West fights for this principle will it manage to break the mistrust of the workers of the oppressed world and open the road for the revolutionary unity of the world proletariat. The LFI’s position divides the world proletariat because it is not rallying the oppressed people to fight against imperialist enslavement, but tells them to temper their national aspirations. With this, any talk of building an international that fights imperialism is a fraud.
LFI: From Sectarianism to Social-Chauvinism
The LFI’s program—and I am very happy to talk about the anti-imperialist united front—came out in practice during the Greek referendum in 2015. Brutal austerity by the EU/IMF had impoverished the Greek masses for years. The imperialists were pushing for more austerity. The masses were fighting back. Syriza, the leading party of the bourgeoisie in the government, was squeezed between the two and called for a referendum. The question was simple: Do you accept the austerity package of the EU/IMF or not? Syriza hoped that the masses would vote “yes,” aiming to have a popular mandate for the new austerity package, capitulating more to the imperialists and avoiding confrontation with the masses.
The imperialists were blackmailing the workers, shutting the banks to force them to accept the austerity and prevent them from voting “no.” But the Greek proletariat is well known for its courage and self-sacrifice. The LFI has a lot to learn from them. The blackmail by the imperialists and the bourgeoisie only drove the masses to massively reject the austerity package, saying to the imperialists go to hell!
As communists, we knew that Syriza would betray. The question was: Are you, like the LFI, going to stand on the sidelines, saying we don’t have a side and calling on the workers to abstain and “occupy the ports!!” instead or are you going with the masses in the struggle? Voting “no” was the only principled position: taking a stand against imperialism, using it as a weapon to push forward the struggle and exposing in the process before the masses who had illusions in Syriza every vacillation, capitulation and betrayal of the bourgeoisie. Syriza’s betrayal was a golden opportunity to push forward a general offensive against all the masses’ oppressors, foreign and local. That is the essence of the anti-imperialist united front.
The LFI’s refusal to take a stand with the oppressed—from Manhattan!—on a clear-cut question, “Do you accept or not the austerity measures,” was a grotesque capitulation to the imperialists, like that of the KKE [Communist Party of Greece]. While rejecting the united front against imperialism, the KKE (echoed by the LFI) did not advance class independence, quite the opposite. In the name of “class independence” from the Greek bourgeoisie, it left the mantle of “anti-imperialism” to Syriza, guaranteeing their continued hold on the masses. The LFI, rejecting the Leninist distinction between oppressed and oppressor nations, refused to oppose American and German imperialism, the main oppressors of Greece. This clearly shows that its struggle against imperialist oppression is, like Lenin said, “a dishonest facade, such as we see in the parties of the Second International.” When the LFI’s sectarianism confronted reality, it transformed into social-chauvinism.
So, yes, we would make an anti-imperialist united front with AMLO, Erdogan, Modi—and not only when there is a war, but also in “peaceful” times. After all, “war is a continuation of policy by other means.” The tasks for revolutionaries in peace and in war are essentially the same. Taking a side with the oppressed and struggling to wrest leadership away from the bourgeoisie, to lead the masses to liberation from all their oppressors. And if the LFI thinks—like comrade Negrete—that just by saying in a war, “we have a military side, and we give no political support,” that class independence is guaranteed, then they close their eyes to the naked truth of class struggle. The only way to secure the political independence of the proletarian party is to put forward an independent proletarian perspective in deeds, within the struggle, not standing on the sidelines screaming for revolution.
On the LFI’s accusing the ICL of class collaboration, I will reply with the “Theses on the National and Colonial Questions” at the Second Congress of the Comintern, written by Lenin himself, and again I challenge the LFI to condemn him. He writes:
“The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form.”
A Nice Quote from Comrade Negrete
I want to end with a beautiful quote, a really beautiful quote, that captures powerfully many of the points made in this presentation. It says:
“In Latin America the most powerful and dominant oppressor and exploiter is clearly Yankee imperialism. It is often the direct employer of the workers. Its IMF dictates starvation austerity policy. […] The so-called ‘national’ bourgeoisie is organically the lackey, the servant of the imperialists; their branch-office manager at most. When this or that section of the bourgeoisie uses ‘anti-imperialist’ rhetoric, it is to tighten its grip on the masses, the better to subordinate them in reality to imperialism. The dictators are usually open puppets. […] In these senses imperialism is the dominant, strongest, most resourceful and stable enemy, i.e., the main enemy.” [emphasis added]
I could not have said it better, comrade Negrete. It’s from you, your letter. This is a letter you wrote in 1984, and you were smashed because you touched on fundamental problems with our program. But back then you were thinking as a Marxist, not as a cynical, bitter petty-bourgeois history professor thinking of the past. You were thinking as a Marxist. We urge you to reconsider it in this light and join us.
Presentation by Jan Norden for the LFI
Hands Off Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution!
So what we are discussing here today is how what we have called the born-again International Communist League and the Spartacist League in the United States have abandoned, renounced, denounced and vilified one key plank after another in the revolutionary Trotskyist program that the Spartacist tendency upheld against all manner of opportunists for three decades. We have explained before how the degeneration of the ICL reflected the wave of demoralization of the left set off by the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union, undermined by decades of Stalinist bureaucratic misrule, and of the bureaucratically deformed workers states of the East European Soviet bloc. With its new leadership, the ICL has now reached terminal degeneration, so that it renounces the very program on which it was founded.
As the ICL sank into passive propagandism, abstentionism and ultimately betrayal in the class struggle, capitulating to the bourgeoisie’s “death of communism” lie, those long-time cadres who it expelled in 1996 went on to found the Internationalist Group and two years later joined with comrades in Brazil, France and Mexico to form the League for the Fourth International. While the IG and LFI continue to fight for the revolutionary program the Spartacist tendency stood for, the latter-day ICL, for its part, went into a prolonged crisis, which continues to this day, repeatedly changing leaderships and programmatically gyrating like a top.
Beginning almost immediately after our expulsions, this latter-day ICL began revising and gutting its former program. We’ve already talked about the string of betrayals: abandoning Brazilian Trotskyist workers’ historic 1996 struggle to oust the police from the unions, abandoning the call for Puerto Rican independence, “anti-American” baiting the LFI for calling for the defeat of U.S. imperialism in Afghanistan, supporting the U.S. invasion of Haiti, and that’s only a small part of them. There is a common thread to all these betrayals, and it’s not disorientation because of the 1992 [ICL] conference document. It’s capitulation to U.S. imperialism, which continues today as they refuse to defend Russia in the face of the united imperialist proxy war over Ukraine. You claim that there has always been a unipolar imperialist world. Well, there has been at the present time, and what do you do? You refuse to defend the countries that are being attacked by that united imperialist offensive.
I want to reiterate that, because in discussing the question of permanent revolution, which is the topic of this debate, we are not having an academic discussion. What we have here are counterposed class programs, proletarian internationalist in the case of the LFI vs. bourgeois nationalist for the ICL. So Spartacist No. 68 came out at the beginning of September [2023], where the leaders of the ICL declare that the political organization they have taken over was “deformed at birth” on the central question of permanent revolution, supposedly because of “denial of revolutionary leadership of the national liberation struggle.” According to the new ICL, the Spartacist tendency was some kind of thalidomide baby, a caricature of Trotskyism that betrayed at every turn.
So what is Trotsky’s perspective of permanent revolution? This is not just a phrase about the revolution continuing indefinitely, but a theory based on his evaluation of the class forces in the first Russian Revolution of 1905, which then became the program of the Russian October Revolution of 1917, and which Trotsky later generalized to colonial, semicolonial and other countries of belated capitalist development under imperialist domination. In a nutshell, and I’m quoting here, “The theory of the Permanent Revolution, which is basic to our movement, declares that in the modern world the bourgeois-democratic revolution cannot be completed except through the victory and extension of the proletarian revolution.” I quote this summary because it comes from the 1963 document “Toward Rebirth of the Fourth International,” the founding document of the Spartacist tendency, which we in the LFI uphold and the reborn ICL will surely renounce, sooner or later, as it is incompatible with their present distortion and negation of permanent revolution.
The Spartacist tendency was founded on the authentic program of permanent revolution and upheld it against all the pseudo-Trotskyists like Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel starting in the early 1950s, and a decade later joined by the leaders of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party who abandoned the fight for workers revolution led by a Bolshevik-Leninist vanguard, and instead tailed after non-proletarian forces. Today the ICL under new management—which pulled off what in the business world would be called a hostile takeover with the acquiescence of a demoralized Spartacist old guard—draws its arguments from the various pseudo-Trotskyists, but with an important difference: whereas the Pabloites, Mandelites and so on capitulated to bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalists and populists, this new crop of revisionists actually are “nation-building” nationalists masquerading in Trotskyist garb.
To carry out their cynical operation they have to resort to blatantly falsifying history. We saw this already in their 2017 “Hydra” document where in the name of defending oppressed nations they tried to present their advocacy of discriminatory, anti-democratic language laws as Leninism on the national question, when Lenin emphatically said the opposite, opposing official privileging of any language, including of the oppressed.
On permanent revolution, Spartacist 68 claims that “From 1905 to 1917, there was an essential identity between Trotsky’s permanent revolution and Lenin’s strategic line expressed in the formula of the ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’.” It claims that the different formulas were only “prognoses” and a “nuance,” and that by 1917 Lenin’s “algebraic” slogan was “outlived” and had to be substituted by the more “arithmetic” program of “all power to the Soviets.” In other words, no big deal.
The attempt to pass this off as authentic Trotskyism is rank cynicism. Those of us who were won to Trotskyism away from the “revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the peasantry and the proletariat,” which we called in shorthand the “RDDPP,” anyone who went through that experience instantly spotted this ploy. In the correspondence leading up to this debate, the LFI pointed out that in his 1905 pamphlet Two Tactics of the Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution Lenin stated that his call was explicitly for a “democratic, not a socialist” regime, and how Trotsky in his 1939 essay on “Three Concepts of the Russian Revolution” contrasted his call for permanent revolution both to Lenin’s formula and that of the Mensheviks. So I suggest you can consult those sources.
As for the reborn ICL’s claim that Lenin’s coming over to the programmatic conclusion of Trotsky’s permanent revolution—namely to fight for workers revolution, for the dictatorship of the proletariat—was just a matter of replacing an outdated prognosis, Trotsky wrote at length in his 1930 History of the Russian Revolution, in Chapter 16 on “Rearming the Party,” about the tremendous struggle that took place after Lenin issued his 1917 “April Theses” calling for “all power to the soviets.” This was ferociously resisted by Kamenev, Stalin and the other “Old Bolsheviks” who clung to the old formula, which called for completing “the first stage of a bourgeois revolution.” The point is, had the program of a “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry” not been defeated, there would have been no October Revolution! And that’s what you claim was essentially the same.
So the ICL under new management is lying about differences between Lenin’s program and Trotsky’s leading up to the 1917 Russian Revolution, and when people lie about big issues, it’s for a purpose. The purpose in this case is quite clear, underlined by their embrace of the call for an “anti-imperialist united front”—namely that they want to make political blocs with bourgeois nationalists, from the populist government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico—which they pretend is somehow anti-imperialist, when in fact AMLO is acting as a border guard for the U.S., both under Trump and now Biden—to the African National Congress which presides over the neo-apartheid regime on behalf of international capital. And they also want to make a political bloc, in the name of such a so-called “united front,” with [Greek prime minister Alexis] Tsipras and SYRIZA in Greece.
The new crew at the helm of the ICL try to pretend that they are presenting the real deal even when they are transparently negating Trotsky’s program. Spartacist [68] talks, repeatedly, of “the core of permanent revolution: placing the struggle for national liberation at the center of revolutionary strategy for the neocolonial world.” In another place it says that “the experience of 1917, speaks to the fundamental core of permanent revolution, which is nothing other than the need for communist leadership of the democratic struggle, first and foremost national liberation.” So the essence of the 1917 Russian October Revolution was a democratic struggle for national liberation? What garbage! For what nation? The Russian nation, the Polish nation, the Finnish nation? And the experience of 1917 was essentially a “democratic struggle”? Whatever happened to the proletariat taking power?
The most striking case of a tendency that “revised” permanent revolution was that of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party. In late 1981, Doug Jenness, the editor of the SWP’s newspaper The Militant, published an article, “How Lenin Saw the Russian Revolution” essentially equating permanent revolution with Lenin’s RDDPP, the same sleight-of-hand the ICL is carrying out today. Ernest Mandel replied with a long article stressing the difference between Lenin’s formula from 1905, which foresaw the workers and peasants leading a bourgeois revolution, and Trotsky’s program pointing to workers revolution. Jenness responded with an even longer article in mid-1982 claiming that the October 1917 revolution was actually the RDDPP, not a workers revolution but a democratic revolution. And a few months later SWP leader Jack Barnes came out against permanent revolution altogether in his speech on “Their Trotsky and Ours.”
What was driving the SWP’s evolution was the desire to join with Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress in South Africa as the anti-apartheid movement was heating up. And we see the same with the ICL today. Like the SWP, the new ICL wants to push to implement the ANC’s Freedom Charter, which was a program for a bourgeois-democratic revolution, although with some fairly radical social measures. Incidentally, the Charter was written by supporters of the Stalinist South African Communist Party (SACP) whose watchword of a “national democratic revolution,” like Lenin’s RDDPP, did not go beyond the bounds of capitalism. And when the reborn ICL calls to implement the Freedom Charter, as their new South African paper does, that is in fact the position of the SACP and the ANC, whose maintenance of superexploitation of black labor was symbolized in the 2012 Marikana massacre [of mine workers]. But where Lenin, with his formula, was fighting for revolution against the bourgeoisie, the South African CP, which you are tailing, is essentially fighting to administer that neo-apartheid capitalist exploitation.
There is much more to be said about the ICL’s new “anti-imperialist” clothes in Mexico. Its call for a “united front” with the government of AMLO [Andrés Manuel López Obrador] and his MORENA party would stand in the way of the necessary struggle to break workers away from this nationalist, but in no way anti-imperialist, government, which is now trying to force the so-called “independent” unions back into the straitjacket of corporatist state control of labor. Once again, as in equating the RDDPP with permanent revolution, the ICL leaders justify this with a subterfuge, conflating Trotsky’s call for independent proletarian support for the expropriation of imperialist-owned oil companies with making a political bloc with the government of Lázaro Cárdenas [president of Mexico from 1934 to 1940], which Trotsky never called for. With its vague talk of national liberation and nation-building, the newborn ICL’s program would be a roadblock to revolution if it had any impact, which luckily it doesn’t. If anyone agreed with the line of El [Antiimperialista], the bourgeois name of their new paper, they would join AMLO’s MORENA party and push from within.
So here, there and just about everywhere, the line of the new ICL—which now repudiates just about everything the Spartacist tendency represented when it fought for the revolutionary program of Trotskyism—would have terrible consequences if carried out in the class struggle. Nowhere is this clearer than over Iran where they denounce the Spartacist tendency’s warnings against leftist support for the 1979 so-called “Islamic revolution.” They take a quotation out of context to pretend that we equated Khomeini with Hitler when its point was that there can be reactionary mass movements. There were some problems with the initial formulations on Iran before we settled on the call for “Down with the shah, No to the mullahs.” But we told the truth about the mullah regime, whereas Spartacist 68 pretends they were leading an anti-imperialist struggle.
That was in fact the line of almost the entire opportunist left, from “Islamic Marxists” to Stalinists to pseudo-Trotskyists. And many acted on this as leftists streamed back to Tehran after spending years in exile to escape the dreaded SAVAK, the secret police of the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Shah Pahlavi. But almost immediately there were extensive arrests of leftists, followed by a wave of tens of thousands jailed in 1981, of whom hundreds, perhaps several thousand, were executed in 1988. The Stalinist Tudeh party, which had led striking oil workers into the arms of Khomeini, was rewarded by having its offices closed and its paper banned in 1979, with mass arrests of over 1,000 Tudeh members in 1982-83, with 45 of them executed as supposed Soviet spies.
Because the then-revolutionary Spartacist tendency was not taken in by the fool’s gold of bourgeois “anti-imperialism” and fought for workers revolution, we were able to warn against the impending slaughter, while the opportunists, as we wrote at the time, “bowed before their executioners.” And from the beginning, while politically opposing the “Islamic republic” we defended Iran against imperialist and Zionist attacks, threats and sanctions, including calling, as we do today, for Iran’s right to have nuclear weapons to deter and defend against the nuclear-armed U.S. and Israeli warmongers.
A couple of final comments: First, the new ICL leaders never knew the Spartacist tendency when it stood for genuine revolutionary Trotskyism—not that this would make a difference, as they are deeply wedded to their nationalist politics. The latter-day ICL they came to know had plenty of imperialist chauvinist aspects to their line—like declaring in Mexico, a U.S. semi-colony, that “the main enemy is at home.” This was never the position of the revolutionary ICL, and in fact that line was cooked up to go after the Internationalist Group in the U.S. and Grupo Internacionalista in Mexico.
Secondly, the Spartacist tendency and ICL, when they stood for revolutionary Trotskyism, told the truth to the masses and fought for proletarian revolution, while the born-again ICL tries to hoodwink them with vague talk of national liberation, copied from the Stalinists who were past masters in pushing this line in order to disguise their refusal to fight for socialist revolution. This was true from Latin America to South [Africa] and Vietnam, where almost the entire left called for national liberation while the SL called for “All Indochina Must Go Communist.” Perhaps you will want to reject that slogan as well, as being “sectarian.”
Leninists and Trotskyists have always been sticklers for programmatic clarity. Seemingly small differences in political formulas can have enormous consequences in the class struggle. As we said earlier, the reborn ICL has done us, and the workers movement, a favor by making clear that they are not, in fact, the heirs of the Spartacist tendency that fought for revolutionary Trotskyism. They are its antithesis. The League for the Fourth International and its national sections today represent the revolutionary political continuity of authentic Trotskyism and Leninism. We have consistently put forward programs for revolutionary internationalist struggle, from picket lines mean don’t cross, to workers strikes against imperialist wars, to calling for defense of Gaza and the Palestinian Arab people coupled with the fight for an Arab-Hebrew Palestinian workers state in a socialist federation of the Middle East.
The new ICL, in contrast, is putting forward one gimmick after another, many a transparent call for class collaboration while others are just nonsensical. So when you see Spartacist on their publications, we counsel caveat emptor—buyer beware.
And in conclusion, let me say: Hands off Trotsky’s permanent revolution!
Select Floor Interventions
LFI speaker
I’m from Grupo Internacionalista de México. The people’s front is not a tactic, it’s the biggest betrayal. The Spartacist League and the ICL have abandoned this basic understanding—a cornerstone of revolutionary Marxism—with the recovery of the “anti-imperialist united front” policy. Yes, as your program still says, this formula is used by Stalinists and other reformists to form political blocs with the bourgeoisie in colonial and semicolonial countries like Mexico and many, many others.
Do you want to talk about concretes? What would it imply to make a political alliance with López Obrador and Morena in Mexico today? Let’s face it directly. Nowadays, there is a strike by high school teachers in Mexico City. Do you know that? Who are the bosses? The Morena government in the capital. This implies that when the teachers are demonstrating in the streets, Morena, López Obrador and the mayor of Mexico City have a presence in the streets. And you know where? In the batons and the shields of the cops. So, you are calling on the Mexican workers to make a political alliance in the name of anti-imperialism with the bosses of the cops that are trying to break the teachers strike.
This is perfectly concrete. This is not words. So, what should we do? What we revolutionary Marxists do, in this case is fight against the bosses with a program of political independence, of extending the strike to other teachers unions, but mainly to the hard core of the Mexican proletariat.
This is extremely important. What would it imply to make this political alliance with López Obrador in Mexico, whose main political goal is to reconstruct, to rebuild, the corporate system of social control? If you say that you are going to make this alliance, you are disarming the workers in front of this bourgeois politician and his populist bourgeois party. This is not a matter of words. This is a matter of a living struggle nowadays taking place in Mexico.
Which side are you on?
ICL speaker
I am from the Grupo Espartaquista de México. I want to talk about permanent revolution from the Mexican perspective; but for that, one must understand the history of the country. Mexico lost half of its territory to the U.S. It has been invaded several times by the U.S. The IMF imposes austerity and starvation measures on Mexico. The debt is unbearable. U.S. imperialism is the direct employer of most of the workers.
NAFTA and now the USMCA have devastated Mexico, forcing millions to flee to the U.S., and I can keep going. It is crystal clear that the imperialist yoke determines every aspect of the political, economic and cultural life in Mexico. The whole history of the Mexican people has been one of resistance to imperialist plunder. Thus, a struggle for national emancipation is the motor force for a socialist revolution in that country. Or as Trotsky put it, the anti-imperialist struggle is key to liberation.
This is why we in the GEM decided to call our new paper El Antiimperialista. Every IG member knows about this history, but they consciously counterpose socialist revolution to the struggle for national liberation. The IG says that our perspective—and even the name of our paper—is nationalist, as Norden said. To think that it is nationalist to put the struggle against imperialism at the center of our program in the main U.S. semi-colony is not simply a capitulation to U.S. imperialism, but also to the populists by leaving them unchallenged at the head of the masses. The main obstacle now to the struggle for national and social emancipation is López Obrador, one of the most popular heads of state in the world who had sown massive illusions that the bourgeoisie can lead some sort of struggle, or resistance, against imperialist subjugation.
Denying this, as the IG speakers did today, is just disarming. The only way to break the influence of bourgeois nationalism is to push forward the struggle for national liberation to its ultimate consequences, showing how the bourgeoisie betrays the fight against imperialism, exposing before the masses every vacillation and capitulation of AMLO. The question of leadership is posed pointblank.
As Trotsky put it, we are in permanent competition with the national bourgeoisie as the only leadership which is capable of assuring the victory of the masses in the fight against the foreign imperialists. Refusing to do this means leaving the anti-imperialist fight to AMLO. The IG just promotes abstract “unite and fight” liberal internationalism while denouncing the struggle against imperialism as nationalist.
No! Proletarian internationalism between the American proletariat and the Mexican oppressed masses can only be forged through joint struggle against their common enemy, U.S. imperialism. What about our former position on the Malvinas-Falklands war that the IG upholds? British imperialism attacked neocolonial Argentina, and their position is to be for the defeat of both. Another capitulation to imperialism! If Argentina had been victorious, that would have given a mighty impulse to the national and democratic consciousness of the country and would have led to the overthrow of the junta dictatorship.
However, our defective position left the junta at the head of the anti-imperialist sentiment. That is the exact opposite of permanent revolution.
LFI speaker
I was won over to the LFI on the question of permanent revolution in South Africa. Previously, I had been a member of the SWP and YSA. The ICL’s revisions on this question parallel pseudo-Trotskyists in South Africa in the 1980s. They say that they want to implement the Freedom Charter, which they admit, correctly, is a bourgeois document. But they want to implement it. They want to take the place of the ANC and the EFF and lead the nation-building project. This is not permanent revolution. This is a stagist approach, which will lead to and does lead to class collaboration.
In the 1980s in South Africa, there was a very real prospect for proletarian revolution, and the would-be revolutionaries took the position that you are now taking today. So, what we want in the LFI is political independence of the working class and to struggle against the capitalists.
Permanent revolution is not about nation-building. Principally, it’s about solving the democratic tasks that can be solved not under the bourgeoisie, but under the auspices of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Your literature does not say that. What it says is that you want to lead the nation-building struggle, right? It says you want to lead the nation-building struggle and then sometime distant in the future, there will be socialism.
You do mention socialism at the end. You don’t mention the dictatorship of the proletariat nor in the South African case do you mention a black-centered workers state. That has been jettisoned as well. So, the contemporary ICL, their position is not actually that dissimilar from elements of COSATU—the major trade-union federation—and the SACP who to this day say that they want to implement the NDR, the national democratic revolution, which includes the Freedom Charter.
So, what is your fundamental difference? There really is not one, right? There really is not. It’s very difficult reading your literature of the time to see any difference.
ICL speaker
I’m from the British section of the ICL. I’d like to step back a little bit and comment a little bit on the discussion from the two competing groups here, as well as the presentations.
So, on the one hand, our comrade talked about our tasks. What are the tasks of revolutionaries when it comes to the problem of revolution in the neocolonial countries? That task is to fight for leadership of the national liberation struggle, of the democratic struggles, fusing them together with the socialist struggle, using them as a lever for socialist revolution. And she motivated that liberation for the neocolonies has to put the struggle against imperialism at the heart of the revolutionary strategy.
On the other hand, comrade Norden, you spoke, I don’t know, about many things, but all of it was really defined by sticking to rigid formulas, reading the History of the Russian Revolution as if it was a sacred text. Let me tell you, that book also has a chapter on “The Problem of Nationalities” by the way, which you apparently said was garbage. The problem of nationalities played a fundamental role in the Russian Revolution.
And on the April Theses, it’s not about the formula of what Lenin said or what Trotsky said, but it’s about what the tasks were. Both of them did share an essential identity in that they were both fighting for the proletariat to be the hegemonic force that would lead the revolution.
Now, I just want to conclude by talking very quickly about the slogan “the main enemy is at home.” You call us class-collaborationist, claiming that to struggle against imperialism is class-collaborationist. Now, I would just like us all to conduct a little imaginary experiment. Go to a peasant or a worker in the Third World. Tell them that to fight against imperialism is class-collaborationist. You know what you would be doing? You would be handing them on a platter to the nationalists, thereby reinforcing the hold of the key obstacle to the fight for national liberation, to the fight for socialist revolution.
And that’s what was precisely the problem with our intervention on Iran. We denounced the mullahs. That was correct, but what about the struggle against imperialism? That was what was absent in our entire approach to Iran. What we repudiate about our intervention in Iran is not that we denounced the left. The left did play a criminal role. But we denounce the fact that we did not actually use the aspirations of the Iranian masses to struggle against imperialism to actually show that the mullahs were an obstacle to their aspirations.
And on the anti-imperialist united front, it’s like you guys don’t understand what we’re trying to say. Again, it’s about program. We cited a quote from Trotsky. He said he would make a united front with the devil and his grandmother. Okay, so now was Trotsky being class-collaborationist? You decide, are you slandering Trotsky or us? I don’t know. But in fact, how are you ever going to expose the nationalists if you do not engage in those united fronts in the course of the struggle, exposing their vacillations?
ICL speaker
I’m from Spartacist South Africa. We proudly stand on the radical implementation of the Freedom Charter. And the South African proletariat better lean on that program if it’s to lead a struggle for national liberation and overthrow the Randlords together with their imperialist backers.
What is so objectionable about the Freedom Charter? Is it nationalization of the mines and banks or the general democratic questions that speak to emancipation of women, land reform? Yes, it is not our program. We proudly say that. It is a radical bourgeois program. You comrades act like Lenin did not carry out the Socialist Revolutionaries’ program on the land question. Opposing nation-building in neocolonial or other countries is nothing but a naked capitulation to imperialism.
This refusal to admit that imperialist domination gives rise to national democratic tasks, which the proletariat can leverage in its fight for social emancipation, means counterposing, for the millionth time, a fight for socialist revolution to national liberation. For us in South Africa, you know what that means? Dismissing a fight for black liberation. That puts you squarely in the camp of the racist Randlords. Okay? The white ruling class—that is, white domination.
And when you look at the actual tasks that are posed for the proletariat—or the South African proletariat has to confront in the course of fighting for national liberation—you have to deal with addressing artificial colonial-drawn borders that have nothing to do with the black masses. You have to deal with instituting industrial development. For example, rolling out roads, building, you know, other means of communication to overcome colonial- or imperialist-dictated underdevelopment. And that is nothing short of consolidating a nation, okay?
Even more, consider the land question and the system of chieftaincy. These abject tools of neo-apartheid—loved by all manner of petty-bourgeois nationalists—are an obstacle to expropriation of the land without compensation. You know, they prevent black women from inheriting the lands of their deceased husbands on the pretext of tradition. Do you trust that these tools can be expropriated and swept aside without challenging and competing with the nationalist forces for the leadership of the national liberation struggle by putting forward a proletarian-centered revolutionary strategic fight against imperialism?
Obviously not. Trotsky wrote his South African comrades in the 1930s, imploring them that they must, through proletarian methods, boldly take the solution of the national problem in their hands. It cannot be otherwise. “The historical weapon of the national liberation struggle can be only the class struggle.” That’s what our masthead says.
Summary by Jan Norden
There’s a lot to say and I don’t have enough time. I do want to answer on the question of Greece. The struggle in Greece is not for national liberation, it’s for international socialist revolution together with all the countries in Europe. The Greek Civil War was fought on the program of national liberation by the Stalinists—when it should have been a struggle for international communist revolution—and that program, together with the Stalinists, prevented the struggle for a Balkan socialist federation at the time. There is no separate national bourgeoisie or comprador bourgeoisie in Greece. Greece is a sub-imperialist power. It controls much of the world’s shipping, it is a banking presence in Eastern Europe, and Alex Tsipras proved that there is no separation between the national bourgeoisie and the other bourgeoisies of the imperialist European Union.
On the [2015 Greek] referendum, this was known beforehand, it was perfectly obvious that this was a maneuver by Tsipras to get a “no” vote to bargain with the bankers, after which he would capitulate to them. We called for abstention because this was a ploy, this was a fraud, and you participated in that fraud. We did not just call for abstention, we called for workers action, for occupying the ports, for occupying the hospitals, for shutting down the railroads. That is workers action against the imperialist oppression of the Greek working people and all Greek people through their austerity program. What you did, is you tailed after the bourgeois nationalists.
Secondly, someone asked about communist leadership in the national liberation movement. We call for socialist revolution to resolve national oppression and the imperialist stranglehold. To pretend that you can have national liberation without socialist revolution is a fraud and a lie that you are hoodwinking people with. The speaker from the British section of the ICL said how can you expose the bourgeois nationalists if you don’t engage in united fronts. We intervene in the struggles against imperialist domination to expose the nationalists.
On the IBT’s [referring to the “International Bolshevik Tendency”] proposal for some kind of a conference, I would say simply, there is no family of Spartacism any more than there is a family of Trotskyism or a family of the left, and you’re not going to build a revolutionary party by a Spartacist family reunion but only by the intransigent struggle for the program that the Spartacist tendency was founded on, which the ICL has now renounced and which the two branches of the BT and IBT fled from at the start of the anti-Soviet Cold War. In terms of the comparison of the trial of Socorro with the trial of Bill Logan: Bill Logan was guilty as charged, Socorro was persecuted.
And on Malvinas, the support of the Argentine nationalist left to the military adventure of the generals is what sank the possibility of workers revolution in Argentina. There was a burgeoning workers movement at that time. The generals called their adventure in order to head it off. The left bought it. And then when it was defeated, a wave of defeatism seized Argentina. And it was because the left supported that war it was the bourgeoisie that profited from the fall of the junta.
Summary by Anna Mili
First of all, comrade Norden, in your presentation you said it will not be an academic debate. But actually, you didn’t point any way forward.
I would like to say something. In “Results and Prospects,” Trotsky wrote that Marxism is above all a method of analysis—not analysis of texts, but analysis of social relations. Your presentation, the majority of it, was basically an analysis of texts. How to prove that you’re not based on material reality? You think that Greece is an imperialist country.
I’m sorry I’m going to say this. But if you actually think—with the key events that I put forward (it’s not all the history of Greece)—that Greece is not oppressed by imperialism and actually rules the world together with the U.S. bourgeoisie, then really you need to drop out of politics or go with the Communist Party of Greece. But I suggest you do the first.
It’s incredible. About Mexico, you should read Trotsky and how he says the revolutionary struggle of Mexico is really to compete with the national bourgeoisie. That’s what he says about Mexico, and actually Trotsky defended the nationalizations of Cárdenas against the imperialists.
I have a quote here about Mexico and Latin America. Trotsky writes in the article “Anti-imperialist Struggle Is the Key to Liberation”: “It is clear to me at any rate that the internal tasks of these countries cannot be resolved without the simultaneous revolutionary struggle against imperialism.” Condemn him, condemn him! About the anti-imperialist united front, it’s only against imperialism, it’s not against the workers. It’s not about the workers supporting the bourgeoisie, but to expose the bourgeoisie, to expose them. About the referendum, ours is a socialist position. I’ll explain what my presentation did and what yours did.
My presentation was Marxist, based on social relations. It gave the material basis for all the oppression, showed a picture of the country, then showed how the proletariat’s struggles reflect that oppression. It showed that this is the motor force for revolution; and in the Civil War in Greece, that’s what happened. But it was under false leadership, class-collaborationist. And the Greek Trotskyists, in reaction to that, they rejected this struggle. They rejected taking a side with ELAS [Greek People’s Liberation Army] against the British. They rejected taking a side with ELAS against the Wehrmacht. And they left the anti-imperialist struggle to the Stalinists and to the national bourgeoisie. And, because of that, we are starting here, now, without a socialist revolution in Greece.
So, what’s your answer? How do you break the masses from nationalism? You said nothing today, nothing. How are you going to actually make a revolution in Greece? How? Nothing on that issue, nothing. Because your “material reality” is not material reality, it’s just ideas, some text from Trotsky, some text from Lenin. But let me tell you why material reality is very important. Okay, you need to draw your tasks. How are you going to draw your tasks? I’ll give you an example.
Everybody here goes to work every day, I think, right? So before they go to work, they open their window, and they see: Is it raining or is it sunny? Should I put my boots on? Should I take an umbrella or should I put on sunglasses? It’s as simple as that, how you draw your tasks as revolutionaries. And then in my presentation, after explaining the struggles of the proletariat, it flows naturally that the national bourgeoisie is the main obstacle to defeat, but the main enemy is imperialism.
And for that reason, because you cannot understand the material reality of combined and uneven development, it is a jingle for you— you cannot understand this: that combined and uneven development determines the role of the bourgeoisie and how illusions spread exactly because of that.
What you reject is the leadership of the anti-imperialist struggle. Why? Because comrade Norden, and this really is the root of opportunism, you believe that the masses cannot break from nationalism under a communist leadership. And it shows how you underestimate the masses and the strength of the proletarian vanguard.
And it shows insecurity about your own program, because you don’t know how to make a revolution in the neocolonies. All shades of opportunism are, in the last analysis, reducible to an incorrect evaluation of the revolutionary forces and potential of the proletariat. This is Trotsky.
The road of refusing to struggle against imperialist subjugation is the road to the Second International. I’ll tell you what the outcome of that is. The main goal of communism, what is it, comrades? World revolution. To reject championing the national liberation struggle is the betrayal of that principle.
If the proletariat of the West refuses to support the neocolonies’ fight for emancipation from imperialism, then there can be no talk of workers revolution. It means that we’ll remain slaves, mere objects, under the imperialist masters, and I challenge you to condemn the Comintern for that. And in the imperialist centers, the workers will be wearing the chains of social-chauvinism. It will strengthen their bondage, so, no workers revolution there either. It’s the road to catastrophe for human civilization.
That’s actually the consequences of your position. And whatever little things you say about the past…. Comrade Norden, I respect your history and everything, but what you put forward today, there is nothing. How do you break the nationalists’ stranglehold? How do you struggle to break workers from nationalism? How would you make a revolution? What is the material reality? The workers in Greece, they have suffered for centuries. Centuries. That’s it.
