Anti-Capitalism or Stalinism in Nepal?

From Class Struggle 50 May-June 2003

Backed by the US and the UK, the government of Nepal is trying to end a decades-long political crisis by winning international support and aid for its efforts to crush or co-opt internal political opponents. Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world, with 42 percent of the population below the poverty line, according to official figures. Per capita income is $250 and 36 percent of the population consume less than the minimum daily calorie requirement. About 60 percent of adults are illiterate, while for women the rate is 70 percent. Life expectancy is 58.1 years and the infant mortality rate is 75 per thousand births.

Since 1996 guerrillas of the Communist Party-Maoist (CPM) have fought an on-again, off-again war with the Nepalese government, which is run by a King with the help of a weak parliament. In all, an estimated 7,200 people have died in the fighting. Supported by UK military advisers and US cash, the Nepalese government has been guilty of numerous breaches of the human rights of the workers and poor peasants who form the base of the CPM’s support(1).

Myth vs Reality

Here in New Zealand, the Anti-Capitalist Alliance has written extensively about the situation in Nepal, and is holding a series of public meetings on the issue(2). It is certainly true that, with war in the Middle East and turmoil in Latin America, not enough attention has been given by the left to events in Nepal. However, the message the ACA is spreading about Nepal seriously misrepresents political events in that country. According to the ACA, the CPM is leading the Nepalese workers and peasants to an anti-capitalist revolution. Here are some excerpts from ACA leaflets and articles:

“People’s War (PW) in Nepal, which was initiated in February 1996 under the leadership of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) has been developing in leaps and bounds. The fire of revolution, which initially sparked in a few districts in Western Nepal, has swept all over the country...The reality is that the Nepalese people are in the process of building their own people’s government while attacking the old state power. ..The above affirms the truth of the dictum penned by Mao Tse-Tung, ‘Political power grows from the barrel of a gun’. To truly win political power the masses must take action and overthrow the old society. This is what is happening in Nepal”

Sounds great, right? Well, yeah, except that getting rid of capitalism is not actually high on the CPM’s list of priorities. When we say this, we’re not relying on rumours, or merely making a prediction – the CPM itself has repeatedly made it very clear that it is fighting for a capitalist, not anti-capitalist, Nepal.

The leaders of the CPM want to see a Nepal dominated by Nepalese rather than foreign capitalists. Like Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka/Tamil Elam, they are keen to sell out the struggle of their rank and file members in return for places in a capitalist government. The CPM’s military campaign is designed only to force the Nepalese ruling class to allow their leaders into the circle of power. When the Nepalese ruling class installed a new Prime Minister called Deuba in office in 2000, the CPM hailed it as ‘a great advance’ and a ‘victory over reaction’, called off its armed struggle, and appealed to ‘all parties’ to form a government of national unity.

The CPM only restarted its war after S 11, when the Nepalese ruling class was emboldened to try to crush it as a ‘terrorist’ force. Now the CPM has organised another ceasefire with the Nepalese government, and is trying to bargain its way into a government. To show just how bad the politics of the CPM are, we will quote from an interview that its deputy leader Baburam Bhattarai gave last year to the Washington Times (14/12). Commenting on international interest in the conflict in Nepal, Bhattarai noted that:

“It is good that the international community is now awakened by the ever-intensifying civil war in Nepal, and is showing concern for its just and logical conclusion...Our own preference would be to settle the problem internally without any external interference. But if the complexities of the situation, particularly Nepal's specific geostrategic positioning between two superstates, India and China, so dictate, then we would not mind facilitation or mediation of some genuinely neutral international organizations”

Bhattarai is saying that the CPM would like to come to an agreeable deal with Nepal’s capitalists on its won, but that if it is absolutely necessary outside capitalists can help to reach a settlement. Bhattarai’s faith in the existence of ‘neutral’ international capitalist organisations does not exactly mark him out as a revolutionary. Just like Stalin, the CPM hopes to use Europe and the UN as counterweights to US imperialism. Bhattarai goes on to say that:

“We have time and again made it clear that we will have diplomatic and friendly relations with all the countries of the world on the basis of five principles (Panchsheel) of peaceful coexistence — namely mutual respect for each other's sovereignty and national integrity, non-interference in each other's internal affairs, equality, mutual benefit and peaceful coexistence. Given the specific geostrategic position of the country sandwiched between the two huge and hostile states of India and China, we will strive to maintain friendly and equidistant relations with the two immediate neighbors. It is just ridiculous to presume that a state of Nepal's size and strength can inflict by design any harm to giant India”

Bhattarai is talking of friendly relations with a state that has for decades fought and repressed its own Maoist guerrillas. So much for socialist internationalism and spreading revolution. Bhattarai goes on to lay out his party’s politicalprogramme:

“Of course, the basic thrust of our economic development policy would be self-reliance and abolition of dependency, which has plagued the country's economy for long. For this we intend to restructure our economic relations with foreign countries and multilateral institutions in a friendly and cooperative manner...Please note that we are not pressing for a "communist republic" but a bourgeois democratic republic.”

Bhattarai isn’t lying when he denies plans for communism. He and the CPM have nothing to say about the seizing of property and capital by the workers and peasants of Nepal and the establishment of a planned economy. Seizing US-owned factories and farms wouldn’t be ‘friendly’, so it’s not an option. Bhattarai’s vision is of a national capitalism in Nepal, not of socialism. The CPM has not taken control of private businesses in the so-called ‘red zones’ of Nepal it controls. It merely taxes these businesses, like any good capitalist government would. Since Bhattarai’s interview the CPM has moved even further to the right, giving up even its demand for a republic in Nepal. It is now prepared to put up with a constitutional monarchy. Some revolution.

What’s behind the CPM’s Sellout Politics?

The CPM won’t challenge capitalism in Nepal because its leadership is made up of Stalinists. Their political heroes are Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot (Bhattarai actually makes a point of defending Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime in the interview quoted above). The CPM even features a picture of Stalin on the cover of its official magazine, The Worker. The party leaders agree with Mao’s assessment of Stalin as ‘a great Marxist-Leninist’ and employ the ‘two-stage’ strategy Stalin laid down for revolution in the semi-colonial world. According to Stalin, the semi-colonial world had to become capitalist before it could be socialist.

Socialists had to make political alliances with local capitalists to oppose the foreign capitalists, and then allow local capitalists to take the lead in any post-colonial government. Stalin used his theory of two-stage revolution to make deals with Western imperialist governments. He would order local communists to work for ‘national capitalism’ not socialism, and grateful imperialists would make concessions which strengthened his regime in the USSR.

Stalin’s two-stage strategy was opposed by Trotsky, who pointed out that the October revolution had happened only because Russian revolutionaries had not made a political alliance with the local capitalists who took power after the February revolution. Trotsky argued that revolutionaries should make only a ‘military bloc’ with their local capitalists to get rid of foreign capitalists. In other words, they should aim their fire in the same direction as the local capitalists in the fight against imperialism, but keep their independence and be ready to get rid of the local capitalists when the foreign capitalists were defeated. Only by overthrowing capitalism can Third World nations break out of the global grid of capitalism and establish a planned economy aimed at meeting people’s needs, not the needs of the global marketplace.

The ‘national capitalism’ that the two-stage strategy brought about in many postcolonial countries has proven Trotsky to be right – in country after country, national capitalism has meant neo-colonial economies still dependent on the West and overseen by corrupt and brutal dictators bankrolled by the West(3).

Still lost in the Congo?

So why is a group calling itself the Anti Capitalist Alliance giving good PR to Stalinists who want to bring national capitalism to Nepal? The ACA has quite rightly been a staunch critic of leftists who thought that the UN or European Union could provide a progressive ‘solution’ to the crises in Iraq and Palestine.

Why doesn’t the ACA criticise the CPM’s appeals to the UN, European Union, and other ‘neutral international organisations’? The ACA has pioneered the view that left reformism is finished in New Zealand because there is no ‘material base’ for it – in other words, because New Zealand is too poor to payfor left-wing reforms. How then can the ACA support the CPM’s reformist capitalist programme in Nepal, one of the poorest countries in the world?

In Auckland, the ACA consists of the Workers Party, a group which shares the Stalinist politics of the leadership of the Communist Party-Maoist in Nepal. In his booklet Apostles of Treachery, Workers Party founder and chief ideologue Ray Nunes summed up the party’s thinking:

‘Let us put it in the form of a simple equation: Stalinism = communism, therefore Hate Stalin = Hate communism’ (pg 41)

Like the Nepalese Stalinists, the Workers Party is strongly influenced by Shining Path, the Peruvian group which modelled its politics on Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, and seriously disorganised the fight against US-backed governments in Peru in the 1980s and 90s.

The Workers Party believes in a two-stage strategy to revolution in the Third World, and has a long history of supporting ‘national capitalist’ regimes there. They praised the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe, for instance, as an exponent of ‘African socialism’.

Back in 1997 the Workers Party launched a heated attack on our group for publishing an article criticising Laurent Kabila, the rebel leader then about to take power in Zaire/the Congo. Written in collaboration with comrades in Europe and South America, our article argued that Kabila was a would-be national capitalist who wanted to exploit rather than liberate his country, and should therefore be given no political support. For the Workers Party, Kabila was leading ‘something close to a peoples’ war’, and his coming to power would be ‘excellent news for the African peoples and indeed for those of all countries’(4).

The years since 1997 have shown how wrong the Workers Party was about Kabila, who was such a popular leader that one of his own bodyguards assassinated him. Today Kabila’s son rules the Congo, which remains an impoverished semi-colony dominated by the US. Why won’t the Workers Party and the Anti Capitalist Alliance learn from history?

From sellout to repression

It is the bankruptcy of the Stalinist political programme that makes the repressive features of Stalinism necessary. Bankrupt politics can’t be defended in open debate – that’s why Stalinist parties ban factions and open debate, and Stalinist governments build labour camps. In the 1980s and early 90s in Peru Shining Path massacred thousands of members of other leftist groups and trends, justifying its actions with the slogan ‘We cannot have the victory of two revolutions’. Our group has comrades in Peru who struggled to survive in the atmosphere of terror Shining Path and the US-backed government of Peru together created.

The Workers Party gave verbal support to the Shining Path’s campaign of repression. When Shining Path rivals the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement were holed up in the Japanese embassy in Lima, surrounded by government troops, the Workers Party used its paper not to support them, but to condemn them as ‘counter-revolutionaries’. In Nepal, the Communist Party-Maoist uses typical Stalinist tactics to suppress dissent. Since the beginning of its guerrilla war, it has killed 29 teachers who belonged to a union sympathetic to the government.

So much for revolutionaries winning debates in the labour movement with the force of their ideas. In 2000, some CPM members in the Jajarkot area of Nepal organised a faction to oppose the efforts of their leadership to make a peace deal establishing national capitalism with the Nepalese government. The CPM suppressed this faction, as well as a senior leader of the organisation who took its side.

It is difficult to get reliable information out of Nepal, but it seems safe to assume that resistance to the Stalinist leadership continues inside the CPM. After all, the needs of the rank and file of the party are completely at odds with the national capitalist strategy of the leadership.

No solidarity with Stalinism

There is no doubt that the workers and peasants in the CPM are fighting a heroic struggle in Nepal. But the Stalinist leaders of the CPM only undermine that struggle with their plans to negotiate a ‘national capitalist’ future for Nepal. The Anti Capitalist Alliance is right to raise the issue of solidarity with Nepal on the New Zealand left, but it is undermining its own good work by giving uncritical support to the Stalinist leaders of the CPM. The ACA should not repeat the mistakes of the Communist Parties of the 1930s and 40s, who cuddled up to Stalin when he was busy undermining the cause of socialism.

Solidarity with Nepal means opposition to Stalinism. We thank comrades on the Indian subcontinent for supplying some of the information given above.

Because we believe that this an important issue which needs to be debated openly, we offer the Anti Capitalist Alliance space in our paperClass Struggle to reply to the arguments made above.

Footnotes

1 The CPM maintains a number of websites. One of the biggest can be found at http://www.insof.org/

2 The Anti Capitalist Alliance website can be found at http://anticapitalists.tk/

3 For a proper introduction to Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, check out http://www.workerspower.com/wpglobal/LDTch2.html

4 See the articles ‘Kabila Foils Imperialists’ and ‘Stupidity Incarnate!’ in the April and June 1997 issues of The Spark. For an online attack by the Workers Party on our group, see ‘Trotskyists Rival Capitalists with Big Lie Campaign [against Stalin]’, http://home.clear.net.nz/pages/wpnz/raytrotsky1295.htm

CHINA RETURNS TO CAPITALISM

We follow up our report last issue of the NZ/Hong Kong trade and investment deal with a statement of our position on capitalist restoration in China. We recognise that when the 14^th Party Congress voted to introduce ‘market socialism’ in 1992 this put the revival of the market and the profit motive on th3e agenda. However the intention to restore capitalism is not the same as doing so. In fact it has taken another ten years to overcome the plan and re-introduce the law of value as the determining influence on the economy. Today we can say that joining the WTO has completed the process of restoration to the point where the market now dominates the plan. The class nature of the Chinese state is now capitalist.

When in 1991 the Soviet Union succumbed to 75 years of bourgeois encirclement and bureaucratic mismanagement, the attempt by the Yananev ‘hardline’ coup plotters to kidnap Gorbachev gave Boris Yeltsin the pretext he needed to seize power and fast-forward the ‘shock treatment’ restoration process. Both Yeltsin and Yananev were restorationists, but Yananev and Co wanted to avoid the breakup of the SU and keep the Communist Party in power overseeing a ‘slow track’ transition to capitalism so their clique could become the new bourgeoisie.

The defeat of their botched plot allowed Yeltsin to eliminate his rivals, begin the breakup of the SU and ban the CP. Within a year Yeltsin had implemented World Bank plans to demolish the workers’ plan, privatise key sectors of the economy and to open up Russia to foreign investment and trade. Between the seizure of power and the restoration of capitalism less than a year had elapsed.

In China that same year, 1992, the 14^th Party Congress took the decisive turn towards ‘market socialism’. In China there was no major section of the bureaucracy pushing for a fast track restoration. The plan would be phased out over the next decade as the economy was progressively freed up to capital investment.

By taking the ‘slow track’ to restoration the ruling party hoped that it could convert itself into the new national bourgeoisie without a Soviet-type social upheaval. But while the intention to restore capitalism clearly indicated that the bureaucracy was committed to restoring capitalism, it was insufficient to constitute a transformation in the class character of the state. The bureaucracy could not ‘will’ the market into existence overnight. It took another ten years before the bureaucracy could replace the plan with the market.

The point where a new class comes to power is easier to determine when a decisive revolutionary overturn occurs as in October 1917 in Russia, 1945 in Eastern Europe, or 1949 in China. Each of these overturns saw a new class take power by force of arms. In each case the armed workers or the Red Army took state power. If the bourgeoisie was allowed to continue production for profit this was to accumulate capital for use in the transition to a socialist state.

In each case, the new workers state operated a form of ‘state capitalism’. But as Lenin explained, this was ‘capitalism’ dominated by a ‘workers state’. That is, the market was subordinated to the plan. Only when the bourgeoisie refused to cooperate or began to threaten counter-revolution, was ‘capitalist’ property eliminated. However, in Yugoslavia, as the capitalist world allowed a form of private ownership to persist indefinitely, elements of capitalist production for profit remained part of the workers’ state.

Just as a workers’ revolution can coexist with some ‘capitalist’ social relations such as the New Economic Policy in the SU in the 1920s, the route back to capitalist restoration will usually begin with ‘market reforms’ as the bureaucracy attempts to stimulate the planned economy and defend their privileges.

. What is fundamental is the essence of property relations as either production for profit or production for use. The class nature of the state is determined by the social relations it reproduces. Therefore the change in class rule is given by the state’s actual reproduction of social relations of production for profit or for use.

In a DWS the turnover from a degenerate workers’ state into a restored capitalist state involves the transformation of the bureaucracy from a parasitic caste into a new class. As a caste the bureaucracy has usurped workers power and rules the state in order to preserve workers property as long as it can derive privileges from it.

But once the plan ceases to generate privileges the bureaucracy is forced to convert itself into a bourgeoisie. But if cannot do this by wishful thinking. It does not become a new bourgeoisie until it has destroyed the dominance of the plan and substituted the law of value. Thus the conversion of the bureaucracy into a bourgeois class comes only when it has been successful in restoring the dominance of the market.

In China, therefore, the change in the class nature of the state could only occur at the point where the state successfully introduced the law of value to re-value planned production in terms of market value. It took the Chinese bureaucracy a decade from 1992 to act on its intention to overturn planned production for use and restore capitalist production for profit.

. The decisive point of the turnover is the penetration of the law of value to the extent that ‘value’ is no longer determined by ‘use-value’ but by international ‘exchange-value’. In our view this became the reality when China joined the WTO agreeing to abide by its rules of free trade and investment.

For a Socialist Revolution in China!
Defend China against Imperialism!

Class Struggle No 40 August-September 2001

30 years after the murder of Che Guevara: Make One, Two, Many Workers' States!

Declaration of Bolshevik Current for the Fourth International (BCFI) translated from Luta Operaria, journal of Liga Bolchevique Internacionalista_ #22, october of 1997)

---

Introduction by LCMRCI.

The 30th aniversary of the death of Ernesto "Che" Guevara is a very important issue for revolutionaries world-wide. In many countries he is associated with anti-imperialist rebellion. However, Trotskyists are very critical of him. On the one hand we defend his heroism against the bourgeoisie, but on the other hand we need to counterpose the strategy of permanent revolution against his left-wing variant of Stalinism.

We are reproducing an article from Lutta Operaria, paper of the International Bolshevik League. This is a Brazilian group of the Bolshevik Current for the Fourth International, a current which includes the Bolshevik Party of Argentina. Comrades of the Latin American sections of the LCMRCI (CEMICOR) had been in discussion with both groups for many years. In 1991 one of our comrades was the first foreign militant to visit the Argentinian Bolsheviks. Comrades from the LCMRCI have been in Brazil and Argentina discussion with them and also attended the founding conference of their international current.

The first article from another group published in Lutta Operaria was the declaration of our split from the LRCI. Some months ago a leader of the Brazilian group visited us and later one of our comrades was with them participating in their intervention in a union congress and in the preparation of land seizures.

We have many agreements especially with the Brazilian Bolsheviks on the question of the defence of every workers state and oppressed nation against imperialism and of the Polish workers and other anti-Stalinist non-bourgeois movements in the east against bureaucratic repression. Nevertheless, we have important differences on the attitude towards the Moscow Coup in 1991 and on the characterisation of an 'anti-capitalist' wing of the bureaucracy. Yet,we have a relationship which includes practical collaborations and mutual respect. We reprint the article below in that spirit.

However, it is important to mention that there are two points where it would appear that we are not in agreement. One is how we characterise the Cuban Revolution and the other is about the left-Stalinist character of Che.

Character of the Cuban Revolution.

In the 'Fourth Internationalist movement' there was a discussion in the early 1960's about the nature of the Cuban revolution. The International Committee (IC) refused to believe that Castro had expropriated the bourgeoisie and created a Degenerated Workers' State. The United Secretariat (USec), created in 1963, believed that Castro was pushed by the masses to create a workers' state which has some deformations. If the IC advocated a social revolution against the Castroite capitalist state, the USec thought that no political revolution was on the agenda because Che and Castro were revolutionaries who only needed some Trotskyist advice to correct their orientation.

We think that both are wrong. We think that post-revolutionary Cuba was a Degenerated Workers' State which needed straight away a new political revolution to pave the way for socialism. Castro and Che didn't lead a revolution based on workers' councils and militias. In 1959 they replaced Batista with a new bourgeois popular front regime. Under the pressure of the masses, the threats of Washington, and under the auspices of the Soviet Union (interested in creating a base close to the US), Castro and Che moved against the bourgeoisie and expropriated it.

However, the new state was quite different to the one that Lenin and Trotsky built in 1917. It was not based on workers' councils, on a workers' party or the attempt to promote workers' parties and revolutions outside the small island. Cuba joined the COMECON and copied the bureaucratic totalitarian rule of the Soviet Bloc. The planned economy was distorted by a new oligarchy interested in maintaining its national privileges against any workers' revolution. The only way to regenerate the state was through a new political revolution that would put all the power in the hands of workers' councils led by an internationalist revolutionary party.

Therefore, we don't use the term deformed workers' state in relation to Cuba because it could be confused with the Pablo-Mandelite conception that it was a revolutionary state with some deformations that only needed some reforms to make healthy.

Che as a Left-Stalinist.

We also think that Che never broke with Stalinism. He was always against building working class councils and militias, and even any form of workers' political party. He died in Bolivia, the country which had the most militant proletariat in all Latin America, without having any participation in the workers' movement. The Bolivian toilers have a very strong tradition of combative and prolonged general strikes, factory and mine armed occupations, armed battles with the army and very strong and massive organisations. The only working class in the West that was able to destroy by itself "their" national bourgeois army was the Bolivian one in 1952. Yet Guavara didn't participate at all in any of the actions or organisations of the miners, factory workers and even the peasant organisations.

Guavara's strategy was opposed to the one advocated by Trotsky in his book The Permanent Revolution. Che talked about a socialist revolution (which was more progressive than the traditional Stalinist Stageist theory). However, he never called for a PROLETARIAN revolution. His idea of a 'socialist' revolution was a multi-class upheaval controlled by an elite guerrilla army. He thought that a volutarist armed elite based in the rural and urban petite bourgeoisie could undermine the official army and could press other sections of the reformist and nationalist forces to create a new popular front with them.

Before he was in Bolivia he tried to organise a guerrila war with Kabila in the Congo. Like in the Andes he never thought it necessary to participate in the organisation and mobilisation of workers and peasants. He always tried to build a small heroic army in the mountains to harrass the army of the national bourgeoisie and create the conditions for a broader popular front.

Despite his friction with Moscow and with Castro, Guevara never broke with Stalinism. He was one of the main leaders in the creation of a new bureaucratised workers' state in Cuba and he endorsed (albeit with some criticism) the Stalinist models in the USSR and China. He participated in the repression of the small Fourth-Internationalist Workers' Revolutionary Party in Cuba. In 1959 he was in favour of a bourgeois candidate as Cuban President and later he supported different bourgeois regimes in Latin America. Guevara was quite friendly with the Brazilian governments before the military coup in 1964. Like Castro in Chile during the early 1970's, Guevara at no time called on the Brazilian workers to organise independently and against Goulart, Quadros, Brizola or other Brazilian bourgeois nationalists.

Cuba promoted guerrilla movements in Latin America as a way of undermining the regimes which supported the US blockade of the island. In the countries which were not hostile towards La Habana, Castro and Guevara were not keen to support guerrilla movements. When the Latin American regimes started to have good relations with Cuba, Castro helped them by asking the armed groups to moderate their policies or to reintegrate into the bourgeois armies.

LRCI centrist confusion.

In the last Trotskyist International, Keith Harvey published a long article on Guevara. In that article he revised the previous position of the LRCI formulated by Dave Hughes. He put the position that Guevara was a progressive centrist who was breaking with Stalinism. This position is a concession to Mandel and Moreno. Guevara had some differences with Moscow and he had some sypathies with Mao, who at that time was promoting a more hostile attitude towards US imperialism and "peaceful coexistence", and organising the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution".

According to The Degenerated Revolution - the original programmatic document of the LRCI now being rejected by Harvey - Mao, Tito and any other Stalinists who entered into conflict with Moscow and attacked their own bourgeoisie, were not any kind of centrists. They were described as "disobedient Stalinists" who adopted an autonomous policy towards the Kremlin in making new politically counter-revolutionary Degenerated Workers' States.

Despite the claim of some of his associates, like the Peruvian Morenoite Ricardo Napuri, that Guevara was reading some of Trotsky's books, Che never adopted any kind of strategy towards the workers' movement. A centrist is someone who oscillates between Stalinism and the workers' revolution. Guevara never flirted, even in a deformed way, with any idea of a revolution organised or based in the industrial proletariat.

The central question.

This methodological question is important for revolutionaries in Latin America and other oppressed nations. The Sandinistas or the FMLN in the 1980's, or the Colombian Coordinadora Simon Bolivar, or the Peruvian Shining Path, were never centrists. They were always a mixture of Stalinism and petite bourgeois nationalism. Like all guerrilla movements based in the rural or uban petite bourgeoisie they rejected the need for working class independence, councils, militias and revolution.

The proletariat has to defnd such petite bourgeois movements against imperialism, but also has to defend its own interests and aims against such movements. These guerrilla movement can and do attack workers' organisations. Because its violence doesn't come from or express the class interests of wage-workers it can be used against them. It is not possible to create a workers semi-state by means of a guerrilla strategy. If these armed groups are not destroyed, they can negotiate their future integration into the system. If they take power, they can maintain capitalism, or in the most radical and actually improbable circumstances, they can create new non-capitalist bureaucratic collectivised regimes.

Our sections in Latin America are fighting to build WORKERS parties for an internationalist revolution based upon workers' and peasants' councils and militias. Our strategy is in direct opposition to the one advocated by Guevarist, Maoist or other left variants of Stalinism They are in favour of petite bourgeois armed elites that will undermine the workers' organisations and that sooner or later are condemned to create new popular fronts.

So we don't think that Guevarism or Maoism are capable of fighting for the creation of "one, two, three or more workerss' states". Guevara could talk about developing new Vietnams (anti-Imperialist war scenarios). However, his strategy was incapable of building healthy workers' states and was not even a guarantee for the overthrowing of a military junta. In fact, 3 years after his death, the Bolivian workers made a massive general strike which smashed a right wing military coup and opened the way towards the creation of a semi-soviet Popular Assembly.

Full text:

---