Trotskyist Bulletin No. 8
AFGHANISTAN & THE LEFT
Document 1.4
The Politics of Chicken Revisited Where Is the ICL
Going?
The following statement by the International Bolshevik
Tendency, published on 2 December 2001, was reprinted in 1917 No. 24, 2002.
Over the past several weeks we have been asked what the
International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT) makes of Workers Vanguards
recent flurry of (sometimes overlapping) polemics against ourselves and the
Internationalist Group (IG) concerning the U.S.-led attack on Afghanistan. Many
leftists have been puzzled by the Spartacist Leagues (SL) open and
unprecedented rejection of the call for defeat of its own
imperialist ruling class. This position clearly represents another step in the
political degeneration of this formerly Trotskyist organization.
The first polemic in the SLs current campaign, aimed at the
IBT, was occasioned by our observation that Workers Vanguard
(WV), like virtually all of the fake-left, had failed to make any
distinction between the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in its treatment of
the 11 September attacks. In our 18 September statement, we had tweaked the
Spartacist League (leading section of the International Communist League [ICL])
by recalling its social-patriotic response to the 1983 bombing of the U.S.
Marines compound in Lebanon:
Marxists oppose terrorism as a strategy for the liberation
of the oppressed because, even in the best case, it substitutes the acts of a
tiny handful for the conscious activity of the working class. But revolutionary
Marxists differentiate between acts aimed at imperialist military targets and
those aimed at innocent civilians. For example, we recognize that the
demolition of the U.S. and French garrisons in Lebanon in 1983 by Islamic
Jihad were defensible blows against imperialist attempts to establish a
military beachhead in the Middle East. Some supposed Marxist organizations
flinched, including the left-posturing Spartacist League/U.S., which issued a
social-patriotic call for saving the surviving U.S. Marines.
We took the view in 1983 that the central issue was the Marines
leaving Lebanonand we did not much care if they walked out or were
carried out in body bags. We feel the same way about the coalition
forces in Afghanistan today. In contrast, the SL specified that it wanted the
Marines out alive. This represented a significant difference, which
is documented in our Trotskyist Bulletin No. 2.
While we picked up the SLs apparent dive on the Pentagon,
the IG, in a statement dated 27 September, raised another criticism:
Nowhere does the [12 September] SL statement call
to defend the countries (notably Afghanistan and Iraq) which were already
targeted by Washington in the first hours after the WTC/Pentagon attack.
This stung the SL, which indignantly replied:
Indeed, as soon as the U.S. imperialists started
raining down bombs on Afghanistan, we raised the call to Defend
Afghanistan against imperialist attack! not only on our front page but
also on our banners and signs at demonstrations and in our interventions at
antiwar meetings. WV, 26 October
The IG responded that one hardly needed to wait until the bombs
started falling to call for Afghanistans defense. But the IG was
stretching it to make this criticism in the first place, as the SLs 12
September statement made clear their opposition to the war aims and
military adventures of the American rulers abroad and included among its
demands U.S. imperialism hands off the world!
SL & the Democrats
A more substantial criticism was raised by the IG in its 25
October statement:
Workers Vanguard joined the WWP and CPUSA
[Workers World Party and Communist Party-USA] in praising black Democratic
Congresswoman Barbara Lee of Oakland, saying that to her credit she
was the only Representative to vote against giving Bush a blank check for
war. Not only does WV not make a single criticism of Lee, it
doesnt mention that even as she voted against the use of
force resolution, the Congresswoman voted for the $40 billion
emergency war credits bill that included a blank check for the CIA!
In the 26 October WV, the SL sniffed that it is not
indifferent to cracks in the bourgeois edifice. Fair enough,
Leninists should not be indifferent to such things, but neither should they
give the left wing of the twin parties of racism and imperialist war a free
pass. The 9 November issue of WV finally introduced an orthodox caveat
into its previously uncritical treatment of Lee:
The black Democrats and oppositional trade-union
tops are positioning themselves to get ahead of and contain the increasing
discontents that the capitalist rulers war at home and abroad, coming
amid a deepening recession and the enduring character of racist oppression,
will generate among working people and minorities. Selling themselves as the
friends of labor and blacks is the longstanding card played by the Democrats,
which is why they are historically the preferred party of the bourgeoisie when
it comes to mobilizing the population for war. WV, 9
November
The friendly treatment of Barbara Lee is not the first time the
Spartacist League has exhibited softness on the Democrats. In 1984, the SL
offered to send a dozen defense guards to the Democratic National Convention to
protect them against Reagan reaction and the entirely imaginary
danger of ultrarightist assault against...the Convention itself.
Workers Vanguard absurdly claimed that:
a fitting historical model for Reagans
exploitation of a terror scare to smash political opposition can be
found in the 1933 Reichstag...fire, which was...exploited by [the Nazis] to
repress political dissidence and consolidate the Third Reich.
WV No. 358, 6 July 1984
The SLs offer to defend the Democrats against the real
instigators and perpetuators of political disruption and violence, against the
Watergaters [i.e., Republicans] and Cold Warriors echoed the unite
to stop the right popular-frontist rhetoric of the Communist Party. In an
11 July 1984 letter, the External Tendency of the iSt (forerunner of the IBT)
commented:
The real instigators and perpetuators of
political disruption and violence are just as much a part of the
Democratic party as the Republican. (Ever heard of [Democrat and
arch-segregationist] Lester Maddox? What about [Ku Klux Klan leader and
Democrat Party member] Tom Metzger!) Not a dimes worth of
difference, remember? reprinted in
ET Bulletin No. 4, May 1985
In the 1960s and 70s the SL often used the expression that, from
the standpoint of the working class, there is not a dimes worth of
difference between the Republican and Democratic parties. In its 31
August 1984 issue, WV explicitly repudiated this, and wrote:
Anyone but a blind man can see there is more than a dimes
worth of difference between Mondale and Reagan....
Duck and Cover: SL Abandons Defeatism
In addition to chastising the SL for its softness on the Democrats
and for its tardiness in explicitly calling for the defense of Afghanistan and
Iraq, the IGs 27 September statement leveled a third criticism, one which
we initially regarded as overreaching: For that matter, it [the SL]
doesnt even call to defeat the mounting war drive, only to
oppose it. We had noticed that the initial statement from the
SL Political Bureau proudly recalled how:
in the face of the U.S.-led NATO onslaught against
Serbia two years ago, which destroyed the entire infrastructure of that
country, we raised the banner: Defeat U.S. imperialism through workers
revolution! Defend Serbia! WV, 14 September
We therefore considered it quibbling to interpret the SLs
statement that it opposed this latest imperialist military
aggression as some sort of rejection of a call to defeat it.
We were caught by surprise when, instead of brusquely dismissing
the IGs criticism, the SL replied:
From a Marxist perspective, however, there is no
way to defeat the inevitable drive toward war by the capitalists
short of their being expelled from power through victorious workers
revolution.... WV, 26 October
This showed that the IG was on to something. The inherent
historical tendency for capitalist competition to lead to war cannot be
eradicated, but particular imperialist campaigns can be aborted through
determined popular resistancei.e., class struggle. The SLs
dismissal of the possibility of defeating a particular war
drive short of socialist revolution is of a piece with its maximalist
objections to calling for a general strike unless a mass
revolutionary party is already in place to lead it. By counterposing
building the revolutionary party to calling for a generalized,
working-class response to a generalized attack by the bosses, the SL engages in
the sort of scholastic passivity it vehemently denounced a quarter
of a century ago when it was still a revolutionary organization. (see:
1917 No. 20 In Defense of Tactics) The SLs current
counterposition of a hypothetical workers revolution to the
necessity to stand clearly for the defeat of their own imperialist rulers is
cut from the same cloth.
The IG reports:
We have learned that the ICL had an internal
discussion on slogans in which it decided not to call to defeat imperialism in
the war. This was no doubt at least partly in response to our special issue of
The Internationalist (27 September) prominently headlined Defeat
the U.S./NATO War Drive! The Internationalist,
Fall 2001
We suspect the ICL leaders were motivated by something other than
a desire to distinguish themselves from the IG. Several times in the past, the
SL has exhibited a cowardly reflex in situations where it feared incurring the
displeasure of its own ruling class.
The first instance was the call to save the Marines in Lebanon. A
few years later, in January 1986, when the destruction of the space shuttle
Challenger aborted a top-secret military mission, WV, taking its
cue from the tearful accounts in the bourgeois media, volunteered:
What we feel toward the astronauts is no more and
no less than for any people who die in tragic circumstances such as the nine
poor Salvadorans who were killed by a fire in a Washington, D.C. basement
apartment two days before. Workers Vanguard, 14 February
1986
As we pointed out at the time, revolutionaries feel a great deal
more sympathy for impoverished refugees from a right-wing terrorist regime than
for the professional military cadres of imperialism. (see: 1917 No. 2,
Challenger: No Disaster for the Working Class) For reasons of
personal prestige and organizational equilibrium (see: 1917 No. 20,
Willful Blindness), the IG stands by the SLs earlier
flinches, but it is pulling no punches this time:
The real explanation for their [the SLs] line
is duck and cover, and its political content is economist social
pacifism. op cit.
The IG cites Lenin in Socialism and War:
A revolutionary class cannot but wish for the
defeat of its government in a reactionary war, and cannot fail to see that the
latters military reverses must facilitate its overthrow; and in a
war of Morocco against France, or of India against Britain, any socialist
would wish the oppressed, dependent and unequal states victory over the
oppressor, slave-holding and predatory Great Powers.
Ibid.
The essential issue posed for the left by the attack on
Afghanistan is which side to takeshould we favor the victory or the
defeat of our rulers? Two years ago, when NATO bombs began to fall on Belgrade,
the SL answered that question clearly: Defend Serbia! Defeat U.S./NATO
imperialism! For workers revolution! (WV, 16 April 1999). Why
should its answer be different today?
Tactics & Propaganda Groups
The SL leadership is attempting to cover its retreat from openly
calling for the defeat of imperialism in Afghanistan by pretending that it is
all just a matter of tactics.
At bottom, the IG deliberately muddles the question
of a military defeat in a particular war with the proletarian defeat of
ones bourgeoisie through socialist revolution. The latter is the program
animating any truly revolutionary party in peacetime as in wartime. The slogans
used to proceed toward that endto lead the working masses from their
current level of consciousness to the seizure of state powerare, however,
necessarily conjunctural. WV, 9 November
This is followed by a discussion of Bolshevik tactics in the
months preceding the struggle for power in October 1917. The slogans necessary
to mobilize the masses for power are indeed conjunctural, but for
the foreseeable future the SL, as a very small propaganda group (albeit larger
than the IBT or IG), is not likely to be confronted with the problem of
directing the seizure of power. No left group in the U.S. (or in most other
imperialist countries) is currently able to directly influence millions, or
even thousands, of working people. It is simply comical to suggest that by
dropping the call for the defeat of this imperialist adventure the SL somehow
advances a step closer to making a bid for state power.
Then there is the absurdity of calling for the defense of
Afghanistan while refusing to call for the defeat of the U.S. and its
allies. One can be defeatist on both sides in a conflict, but to be
defensist on one side, one must necessarily be
defeatist on the other.
From Ethiopia to Afghanistan: Defeat Imperialist Aggression!
The IG pointed to the impact of Algerias long war of
independence on the political climate of France.
The French defeat at the hands of the Algerian
independence fighters culminating in 1962 demoralized the French bourgeoisie
and helped lead to the worker-student revolt of 1968, which posed the first
potentially revolutionary crisis in Europe in years. The
Internationalist, Fall 2001
WV replied: In reality, the eight-year-long colonial
war in Algeria bears no resemblance to what is happening in Afghanistan
today. What the two situations have in common is that both involve a
struggle between imperialists and the oppressed. In such cases revolutionaries
favor the defeat of the imperialists. The SL introduces another analogy:
Mussolinis 1935 invasion of Ethiopia:
In calling on the working class to defend
Afghanistan against U.S. imperialism, we apply the same Leninist principle of
siding with backward countries against imperialist attack. That said, the U.S.
war against Afghanistan is in important ways different from the Italian
invasion of Ethiopia, which was aimed at realizing Italys longstanding
intention to colonize that country. The U.S. does not aim at an occupation of
Afghanistanat least not at this pointalthough now that theyre
in Central Asia the imperialists will grab what they can. In attacking
Afghanistan, the U.S. seeks vengeance for the insult to its imperial
might.
The question of whether the U.S. intends to occupy some or all of
Afghanistan or its neighbors, or how long it intends to remain, or what
military tactics it intends to employ, does not change the fact that
revolutionaries want to see the imperialist aggressors defeated.
WVs assertion that it is spurious to make an analogy
between colonial wars and neo-colonial ones is entirely illegitimate:
The IGs spurious analogy with colonial wars
notwithstanding, it seems currently unlikely that the U.S. will launch a
significant land invasion of Afghanistan....
Washingtons most likely variant at this time is for
continued, incessant and purposeless bombing for which the Taliban has no
possible military redress. Again, this was not the case in the 1935
Italo-Ethiopian war. Italy was a second-rate imperialist power riven by sharp
class contradictions and constrained in its intentions by its bigger
imperialist rivals. Although in the upshot Italy was victorious after a
seven-month-long ground war, it was not unreasonable for the then-Trotskyist
U.S. Socialist Workers Party to project a possible military victory by
Ethiopia.
Instead of a clear and forthright statement of their new
revisionist position, the WV scribes employ hints and innuendo, leaving
their readers to work it out for themselves. But the implication is clear: in
Ethiopia in the 1930s, unlike in Afghanistan today, it was
reasonable to call for the military defeat of the imperialist
aggressor, but today the U.S.-led coalition is so strong that it is
unreasonable to imagine its defeat. Therefore, the SL suggests, it
would be a mistake to advocate a defeatist position. This is the logic that
leads down the path to the left wing of the possible.
WV quotes the Trotskyists of 1935 on the potential impact
of an Italian defeat in Ethiopia:
The whole European system of alliances and states
would fall apart. The proletariat in Germany, Austria, Spain, on the Balkans,
and not least of all in France, would receive an enormous impulsion; the face
of Europe would be altered. That lies in the direct class interests of the
international proletariat. But still more. A defeat of Italy in Africa, a
victory of Ethiopia, might deliver the imperialist bandits a terrific blow in
Africa. Questions of the Italo-Ethiopian War,
New International, October 1935
But, according to the Spartacist League:
None of these factors currently constrain the U.S.,
although, to be sure, the war will exacerbate tensions among the imperialist
powers, and its price in misery at home may awaken class combativity in the
American proletariat. WV, 9 November
In fact, many of the projections made by the New
International in 1935 are entirely applicable to the current situation. A
defeat for the U.S.-led coalition would, as the SL admits, sharpen
tensions among the imperialist powers while undermining their
ability to attack their own workers. The awakening of class combativity
in the American proletariat could itself be a factor of inestimable
importance in world politics. A setback in Afghanistan would certainly also
deliver the imperialist bandits a terrific blow in the
strategically vital Middle East, and potentially destabilize the regimes most
closely identified with the U.S., including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
Hindsight is of course 20/20. During the same week the WV
article was published, we were holding public meetings in Toronto where we
speculated that the Taliban might be dug in well enough to survive a prolonged
U.S. bombardment. As things turned out, the U.S. aerial attack proved more
successful than either we or the SL had anticipated.
If the imperialist coalition is compelled to deploy significant
numbers of ground troops to finish off the Taliban and its allies in its
Pashtun base area, it seems conceivable that the Islamist guerrillas could
prolong the conflict long enough, and inflict enough casualties on the U.S.
forces, to dampen domestic support for the campaign. This would be a best
case outcome, and at this point it cannot be entirely excluded.
In 1927, Leon Trotsky, the great Russian revolutionary, provided a
description of how fake-revolutionary organizations act under the pressure of
bourgeois war hysteria, one that accurately captures the ICLs recent
behavior:
Opportunism, or radicalism that is turning to
opportunism, always inclines to estimate war as such as an exceptional
phenomenon that it requires the annulment of revolutionary policy and its basic
principles. Centrism reconciles itself to revolutionary methods but does not
believe in them. That is why it is always inclined, at critical moments, to
refer to the peculiarity of the situation, to exceptional
circumstances, and so on, in order to substitute opportunist methods for
revolutionary ones. Such a shift in the policy of centrism or pseudo-radicalism
is of course acutely provoked by the war danger. The
Struggle for Peace and the Anglo-Russian Committee, 16 May 1927
The responsibility of revolutionaries is to put forward the
political program necessary to advance the class struggle. And the necessary
and appropriate response for class-conscious workers in every country in the
imperialist coalition can only be to work for the defeat of their own rulers. A
class-struggle leadership of the workers movement prepared to actively
resist the predatory campaigns of its rulers could be an important factor in
bringing about an imperialist defeat. Upholding this, the only revolutionary
perspective, is the responsibility of the Trotskyist vanguard.
In Iran, which borders Afghanistan, the mullahs grip is
weakening. There have been reports of spontaneous popular protests against the
regime erupting at sporting events. This is usually a symptom of a developing
pre-revolutionary situation. Imperialist aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq
or other Muslim countries could contribute to the outbreak of explosive social
struggles and create fertile conditions for the rapid growth of revolutionary
organizations in the region.
But the demoralized centrists leading the SL see none of this.
Their pessimism is only thinly disguised by bombastic talk of
mobilizing the American working class:
Thus, the call for a U.S. military defeat is, at this
time, illusory and the purest hot air and revolutionary
phrasemongeringand one which derives from forsaking the mobilization of
the U.S. proletariat with the aim of the conquest of state power.
Unlike the IG, the SL is committed to breaking the
American working class and the oppressed from their class-collaborationist
bondage to the Democratic Party and to forging a revolutionary workers party to
overthrow American imperialism through socialist revolution. While the IG waxes
oh-so-revolutionary in the ether of cyberspace, we actually fight for a
proletarian, revolutionary, internationalist perspective on the ground.
WV, 9 November
The SLs on the ground activity amounted to
reading a prepared statement to a crowd of 50 people at a public forum in the
longshore hall in San Francisco on 10 October. The SL statement included a call
for a political struggle within the unions to forge a revolutionary
workers party.... A fine sentiment, but unfortunately more distant today
than it was before the once-revolutionary Spartacist League liquidated its
trade-union work almost 20 years ago in the course of its political
degeneration.
In the late 1970s, SL-supported caucuses were nationally
recognized as the opposition to the pro-capitalist bureaucracy in both the
Communications Workers of America and the International Longshore and Warehouse
Union. SL supporters also had an important toehold in the United Auto Workers.
Since this work was ripped up, the SL has had no influence or real roots in any
sector of the American working class. The External Tendency of the iSt, the
IBTs predecessor, opposed the SLs turn away from union work at the
time (see Declaration of an external tendency of the iSt, 15
October 1982, Stop the Liquidation of the Trade Union Work! 25 June
1983 and Decline of SL-supported Trade Union Work, ET
Bulletin No. 3, May 1984).
WVs distinction between the IG wax[ing]
oh-so-revolutionary on the internet and an SL supporter doing so at a
public meeting is ludicrous. A serious fight for a proletarian,
revolutionary, internationalist perspective on the ground requires more
than the odd speech and a few articles. Such a struggle must begin with a
correct programmatic orientation. In this regard, a critical distinction must
be made between those who take a defeatist position toward their own
imperialist rulers, and professional confusionists who advocate the
defense of the oppressed, but shrink from calling for the
defeat of their oppressors. |