Fraction Leninist-Trotskyist Founded Founding the Leninist-Trotskyist Fraction

Origins and History

The CWG origins date from 1970 in NZ when a number of students active against the imperialist attack on Vietnam formed the Spartacist League. This group split in 1972 when one group led by Logan and Hannah joined the US Spartacists, while another led by Gager opposed fusion on the basis that the Spartacists had not completed their split from the SWP (US). In an article titled ‘James P Cannonism’ Gager argued that Cannon was a US chauvinist. The Gager group viewed both the International Secretariat and International Committee as having broken from Trotskyism in the early post WW 11 period. They took the position that the 4th International was dead from that time and that a 5th International must be founded. Gager moved to Australia in 1972 and formed the Communist Left of Australia (CLA).

In 1981, a small group of NZ comrades, who had meanwhile established fraternal relations in 1972 with the Revolutionary Communist Group (later Tendency then Party) of Britain, also formed fraternal relations with the CLA and became known as the Communist Left of NZ. We adopted the tradition and program of the CLA. Fundamental to this program was the 5th International position also shared by the RCP (Britain). For us the post-war Trotskyist currents had all abandoned Trotskyism. The cause was ‘empiro-centrism’, the class location of the Trotskyist currents in the imperialist countries were embedded in the labour aristocracy (those privileged layers of workers benefiting from the superprofits of imperialism) which was wedded to the privileges of social imperialism (‘socialism’ at home paid for by imperialism abroad).

Empiro-centrism spawned ‘national Trotskyism’ in the semi-colonies. National Trotskyists joined forces with national bourgeoisies against imperialism instead of going all the way to lead the national revolution to socialist revolution. Thus they were complicit in holding back the complete break from imperialism, thus serving the interests of social imperialism. The Gager group traced this abandonment of Trotskyism back to Cannon’s war-time deviation into US chauvinism (defeat Hitler first) and to Pablo’s view that Tito was an ‘unconscious Trotskyist’ in 1948. If Stalinists could become Trotskyists by some ‘unconscious’ transformation this dispensed with the need of a Trotskyist party and a Trotskyist international. The betrayal of the Bolivian revolution in 1952 by the Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers Party (POR) under the leadership of Lora was the direct result of this process of degeneration.

We drew the conclusion that the way back from the historic defeat of 1952 was to rebuild Trotskyism in the semi-colonies and smash the social roots of the evil twins of empiro-centrism and national Trotskyism in the imperialist heartlands.

In the late 1980s CLNZ broke relations with the RCP (Britain) which had degenerated into a British chauvinist current, and fused with Workers Power (Britain) in 1992. In the discussions preceding fusion, we found WP to be a left moving centrist group that was making a strong break not only from Cliffism (i.e. from state capitalism to orthodox Trotskyism on the question of the ‘workers’ states’) but also from empiro-centrism. In our view the formation of the LCRI in 1990 from the MRCI was made possible by the influence of POB and POP the ex-Lora groups in Bolivia and Peru around Jose Villa. In adopting Villa’s analysis of Lora’s betrayal of the 1952 Bolivian Revolution, WP showed itself capable of learning the lessons of the post-war degeneration and the evil twins of empiro-centrism and ‘national Trotskyism’. For implicit in this lesson was the role of empiro-centrism in engendering the national Trotskyism of the Lora group that entered the popular front MNR Government. Yet, while the Villa group did not draw the conclusion that the 4th was dead, the majority of WP including the CLNZ did so and called for a 5th International.

WPs left moving centrism under the impact of the Villa groups’ break with Lora came to a halt and went into reverse with the collapse of the Stalinist states. WP began a rapid retreat into British or European social imperialism. It supported Yeltsin’s coup in 1991. The reunification of East with West Germany was welcomed. The NATO bombing of Serbian territory of Bosnia in 1994 was welcomed. It seems that whatever the ‘workers’ states were, they were not as progressive as ‘democratic’, preferably British, imperialism. Yeltsin’s ‘democracy’, West Germany’s ‘social democracy’ and NATO’s smart bombs, were better defenders of the ‘workers states’ than any brand of Stalinism. Just as Cannon said that imperialism was better than fascism, WP said that imperialism was better than Stalinism.

CWG, POP and POB split from WP in 1995 to form the CEMICOR (Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International). In desperation, WP entered discussions with the PTS of Argentina in 1996 which came to nothing. CEMICOR produced analyses (including a critique of the PTS –see below), political commentary and three issues of an International Bulletin, largely through the efforts of Jose Villa and the CWG, but POP and POB became inactive. By 2000 Villa had also become politically isolated and demoralised and CEMICOR was more or less defunct. It seemed that the CWG’s vision of building a 5th International in the Latin American semi-colonies was also at an end. We corresponded with the Revolutionary Workers Party (POR) of Argentina and reproduced some political statements with the POR. What we did not yet know was that a split in the PTS in 1998 produced the Workers International League (LOI-CI) in Argentina.

In late 2000 members of the CWG helped set up the Google group, Salta Solidarity which then became Argentina Solidarity in response to the revolutionary uprisings of that period. Among the contacts we made was Vicente Balvanera of the LOI-CI of Argentina who reported on the uprisings of the piqueteros in Salta. Balvanera left LOI in 2001 and was highly critical of it and full of praise for Altimira’s PO which he had rejoined. As a result of some frank exchanges, CWG was kicked off Argentina Solidarity. But more important, CWG made contact with the LOI-CI and began the collaboration that led to the foundation of the Committee for an International Conference of Principled Trotskyists in December 2002.

The LOI-CI breaks with national Trotskyism

When the CWG (and POP and POB) split from the LRCI in 1995, almost immediately the LRCI began discussions with the PTS in Argentina. CEMICOR criticised the ‘parity committee’ that resulted as an unprincipled bloc. The PTS was an incomplete break from Morenoism holding still to the view that the IC and in particular Moreno had maintained a ‘continuity’ with the Trotskyist program until 1989 and only then, when the greatest betrayal led to the restoration of capitalism in the workers’ states, declared the 4th International in need of ‘regeneration’. The LRCI on the other hand considered the 4th International to be dead in 1951, although its members were split between ‘refound the 4th’ and ‘found the 5th’ positions.

In reality, however both tendencies shared a similar origin. The LRCI had its origin in Cliffism which in rejecting the unconditional defence of the Soviet Union was the most extreme liquidation of Trotskyism into the labour aristocracy in Britain. It moved left towards orthodox Trotskyism in the late 1980s but reversed direction in the early 1990s. The PTS was a split from Moreno’s national Trotskyism, itself a chauvinist mirror image of European and US imperialism. To what extent then, had the PTS remained trapped in national Trotskyism, and more important, to what extent was a break with national Trotskyism the basis of the split of the LOI-CI from the PTS in 1998?

Under the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Bloc from 1989, the LRCI in imperialist Britain began to degenerate back into social imperialism which it justified in terms of ‘reformist resetting’. In Argentina, the PTS under the same pressure of events took a parallel course, reverting to the patriotic national front. The convergence of these two tendencies was expressed in 1995/6 by the formation of an unprincipled international bloc where political differences were buried for the sake of creating a new international tendency dominated by the LRCI. (see CEMICOR article ‘Another Rotten Bloc' in IB No 1)

The struggle of the LOI-CI (then the Trotskyist Proletarian Faction - TPF) inside the PTS was against the degeneration into national Trotskyism and its subordination to social imperialism. It objected to the PTS rightwing leadership’s adoption of the LRCI’s draft document on the world situation without discussion, and the LRCI’s concept of ‘reformist resetting’ In 1998 the TPF was bureaucratically expelled from the PTS and formed the LOI-CI/Workers’ Democracy to defend the program of the PTS before its post-1989 degeneration.

Both the CWG and the LOI were fighting rightward moving tendencies capitulating to the post-1989 defeats of the world working class. Despite our different origins and experience, we did eventually arrive at a common conception of the cause of this capitulation. The CWG originated in a British semi-colony and early took a 5th position because our first international experience was a fight with the Spartacists over the heritage of the SWP (US). By 1974 we had rejected the dominant imperialist based sections of the 4th as degenerate from 1946. Our analysis was that imperialist based Trotskyism had capitulated to the labour aristocracy and bureaucracy. Our experience of the UK imperialist based LRCI in the 1990s confirmed this analysis.

The LOI on the other hand developed out of Morenoism as a national Trotskyist tendency. As mentioned above we see national Trotskyism as the reciprocal semi-colonial ‘evil twin’ of imperio-centrism. It expresses the dominant interest of the imperialist ruling class by trapping the permanent revolution within the stageist schema of the national revolution. It forms patriotic popular fronts with petty bourgeois and ‘progressive’ bourgeois classes against imperialism and justifies this as the ‘anti-imperialist united front. As a result the working class remains trapped and incapable of carrying the national revolution forward to the social revolution.

But the PTS did not break from Moreno’s stalinophobia which included the Stalinists and Castroites as part of the counter-revolutionary imperialist front. In the 1990s this put the PTS into popular front alliances with right wing nationalists like Walesa, the Mujahedines and the Bosnian Muslims, against the Stalinist/imperialist front! When after 1989 the Stalinists restored capitalism and turned into the new bourgeois the PTS welcomed the end of Stalinism as the opening of a new revolutionary period! But like the LRCI, this revolutionary period was covering a rightward retreat into broad left social democracy.

The LOI-CI fought inside the PTS against this rightward movement, in particular against the turn towards social democracy. It opposed the anti-imperialist united front as a form of popular front. Since its expulsion it has taken this fight further. It recognized the roots of the PTS degeneration as ‘national Trotskyism’ which enters popular fronts with the national bourgeoisie, petty bourgeois governments like the MNR in Bolivia in 1952. Today is opposes Chavez’ Bonapartist regime in Venezuela, Morales popular front government in Bolivia etc. Against national Trotskyism that provides a left cover for these popular fronts, the LOI fights for an international regroupment of principled Trotskyists and revolutionary workers organisations to refound the 4th International and fight for the permanent revolution.

The Collective and the Liaison Committee

The form that this struggle for regroupment is taking is that of high level united fronts between principled Trotskyists of all currents in which programmatic agreement is the basis of joint action and the development of program, while at the same time programmatic differences are publicly debated. The Collective formed in December 1992 under the immediate impact of the Argentinazo and the US war on terror, began with the collaboration of the LOI-CI, the Group Bolshevik of France, and its sister organisation, Germinal in Spain, and the CWG, Lucha Marxista (Peru), (and a year later) the Poder Obrera Bolivia, all adherents of the defunct CEMICOR. We agreed on a program around the life and death struggles of the Iraq war, the popular front, united front, Leninist party and so on.

The Collective did not go beyond a fraternal federation and despite the high level of programmatic agreement, the BT, LM and POB resented the influence of the LOI in the Collective and accused it of using its funds to create an Argentinean ‘mother’ party and sending its cadres to infiltrate their organisations. These resentments developed into open hostilities and personal attacks on the LOI leadership as Argentinean chauvinist and domineering. In April 2004 these tensions came to a head and a split occurred.

Would a greater degree of democratic centralism have averted the split, or did the split represent an underlying difference over method and program? CWG thinks that the two are necessarily related. LM, BT and Germinal, and POP, read the LOIs drive to regroupment as predatory and sought defence in their national organisations – in the case of BT its residual Franco imperio-centrism, and LM and POB their respective national Trotskyisms. These organisations had failed the test of revolutionary regroupment by means of a dynamic struggle against national chauvinism in both its imperialist and semi-colonial forms. They could not break with the root cause of the degeneration of post-war Trotskyism and formed a propaganda bloc, the Permanent Revolution Collective.

After this split in the Colledive a Liaison Committee arose out of the originators of the Collective, the LOI-CI, the CWG, along with the POR Argentina and its Brazilian fraternal group, the FT, which had begun discussions with the Collective in 2003. It met for the first time in July 2004 when several other Brazilian groups, Marxist Workers Party (POM), Marxist Trench (TM), CCR, and Workers’ Opposition (WO) also took part. Within it, the LOI-CI, CWG and FT soon formed a left pole while the POR Argentina and CRI (Revolutionary Communist International) of France formed a right pole. POM, CCR and WO represented a centre group which since July 2004 has moved left from national Trotskyism around the questions of supporting and defending the Bolivian Revolution inside the Brazilian CONLUTAS. The left pole was prepared to form a fraction in January 2005 but delayed this until December to try to bring the center into agreement with its program. The Founding Documents of the FLT are published separately in the first issue of the Fraction Newspaper,

Long Live the Leninist Trotskyist Fraction and the fight for a new World Party of Socialist Revolution!


From Class Struggle 65 Feb/March 2006

Tsunami - what’s natural about this disaster?

The left has criticized the hypocrisy of imperialist responses to the tsunami. But who has called the disaster capitalist? What would a socialist tsunami look like?

The South Asian tsunami is a ‘natural’ disaster that is just as much the result of capitalism as the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. And just as in Iraq a workers revolution is needed to create an Iraqi socialist republic, so is a South Asian socialist federation of workers’ and peasants governments and a planned regional socialist economy.

The left become liberal humanists
 
Most of the left is horrified that the imperialist states are not going to cancel the debt outright, and call on them to do it. Monbiot’s left liberal line is typical. How come ‘our leaders’ can afford billions to kill people but have to rely on charity when tsunamis strike? The problem must be a bad attitude and need for attitude change.

“…our leaders appear to have lost the ability to distinguish between helping people and killing them. The tone of Blair's New Year message was almost identical to that of his tear-jerking insistence that we understand the Iraqi people must be bombed for their own good. The US marines who have now been dispatched to Sri Lanka to help the rescue operation were, just a few weeks ago, murdering the civilians (for this, remember, is an illegal war), smashing the homes and evicting the entire population of the Iraqi city of Fallujah…While they spend the money we gave them to relieve suffering on slaughtering the poor, the world must rely for disaster relief on the homeless man emptying his pockets. If our leaders were as generous in helping people as they are in killing them, no one would ever go hungry.” 

Workers Power offers an example of so-called Trotskyists picking up the reformist demand "Cancel the debt!"

“Of course it is vital to send money, rescue equipment, medical aid to those in desperate and immediate need. We should do all we can to force our miserly billionaire rulers to cough up everything that is needed to help save the lives of the survivors and restore their homes and livelihoods. But we must also fight to ensure that an early warning system, the equal of that which protects the USA and Japan, is rapidly put in place so that never again does such an event find a population so unprotected. We should redouble the campaign, right up to the G8 meeting this July to demand a total cancellation of the foreign debt of these countries, indeed all the countries of the so-called Global South. The workers and anti-capitalist movement should send aid too, directly to the organizations of the farmers and fishing communities of the region so that the imperialist governments and their tame NGOs do not misuse it to "open up" their economies still more to the multinationals."

Forcing "our" billionaire rulers to cough up “to help save the lives of the survivors and restore their homes and livelihoods" is a pipe dream short of a socialist revolution that does not require death and destruction to make a buck. "Restoring homes and livelihoods" in countries were capitalism has enslaved, robbed and impoverished millions for centuries is to recreate the very social conditions that caused this disaster. The imperialists and their cronies in the third world are not motivated to prevent future disasters but only to prevent revolutions arising out of actual disasters caused by capitalist super-exploitation.

Bosses’ will not pay for disaster prevention in third world

Nor will the bosses agree to their military and scientific early warning systems to be installed unless they can make a profit or at least prevent a revolution. Trillions have been spend on MAD during the Cold War, and billions still spent on satellite spies in the sky. The Pacific Early Warning system is principally to defend the military bases of the US and its rich allies. Natural disaster protection is like social welfare, the bosses are only interested in paying out if there is something in it for them. The fact is that the third world loses many more killed from other preventable disasters – diseases such as aids, starvation, genocide etc – than from tsunamis. Revolutionaries have no business sowing illusions in capitalism which is indifferent to human suffering and destruction.

No one tells the member countries about the "earthquake". However, the US DOES WARN its military base in the area. And from this military base, part of the invasion of Aceh is proceeding with TWO AIRCRAFT CARRIERS and led by the U.S.'s pre-emptive invasion of Iraq leadership. "In a bitter irony, part of this operation is being coordinated out of America's Naval base in Diego Garcia. The US warns its naval base, though fails to warn Indian Ocean rim governments. "...the strike group, with its seven ships, 2,100 Marines and 1,400 sailors aboard, also has four Cobra helicopters..."

The oil rich Aceh area, which like Iraq, was suffering from a civil war making oil extraction difficult. THE AMERICAN NAZI ANSCHLUSS MOVES OUT FROM IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN--INTO ACEH [Anschluss: A political union, especially the one unifying Nazi Germany and Austria in 1938]. READ MORE

It is utopian and criminal for revolutionaries to give any political endorsement to aid that is being used to restore the exploitative and repressive social relations of colonial and semi-colonial capitalism. All bosses’ aid as well as NGO aid is designed to make a profit from reconstruction. Capitalists in Thailand are taking advantage of the displacement of the poor from the beachfronts to seize the land and build giant new tourist complexes. Look at Iraq and the ‘crony corporates’ that are swilling from the oil trough. That’s why the US imperialists and their agents are using the reconstruction to conduct repressive civil wars such as in oil-rich Aceh. The US created its client state in Indonesia by backing the Suharto coup against Sukarno in 1965. A million communists and nationalists died in the pogrom that followed. Shortly after, East Timor was invaded with over 250,000 dead before the UN granted it ‘independence’ in 1999. Now, in cynical disregard of this imperialist history, the US military is using the latest ‘disaster’ as a cover for it’s War On Terror against Islamic liberation movements in Aceh and elsewhere in Indonesia.

‘Workers aid’ is no alternative

Calls for aid to be distributed through the trade unions is no alternative to bosses’ aid, unless the money is controlled by democratic rank and file workers and peasants organizations in the host countries.

The ‘official’ union organizations such as the ICTU, the ACTU in Australia and CTU in New Zealand are all virtually agencies of the capitalist states and are subservient to their bosses’ interests. Revolutionaries have no business promoting the bosses’ sickening ‘humanist’ moralism to rebuild capitalism among the ‘victims’ of the disaster. ‘Their’ morals are not ‘ours’, said Trotsky. It is immoral to recreate the social structures that will see more millions of workers killed by future ‘natural’ disasters.

Workers must challenge the causes of disasters. Like the so-called ‘natural disasters’ of the past three centuries in Asia, such as droughts and famines, tidal waves only kill people in large numbers because their traditional defenses against such disasters have been destroyed by colonialism and imperialism. Large populations dying from ‘El Niño’ droughts in India and China in the 19th century resulted from their forced shift from traditional agriculture where surpluses were stockpiled for such events into cash cropping for export where the surpluses were expropriated by capitalism.

Similarly the millions caught unprotected from floods in river deltas, or from tsunamis on the coastal strips, are the result of displacement of the peasant population and mass migration into rural and urban slums. This is why so many children rushed to the shore to pick up fish exposed when the sea retreated only to be engulfed by the next giant wave.

Workers Control of reconstruction

The aid that is being offered by bosses, by NGOs and by ‘workers’ organizations, will fall far short of what is necessary to create a viable economic base. Nevertheless, basic food, shelter and medical aid are vital to the very survival of hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants. But instead of accepting the bosses’ ‘strings’ attached to this aid, the workers and peasants of the regions suffering damage from the disaster must form reconstruction committees based on workers democracy and demand control over the distribution and use of this aid.

To escape the trap of the reconstruction of colonial and semi-colonial capitalism, workers, fisherfolk and peasants displaced by the tsunami must demand the collectivization of land and fisheries, and the socialization of industry, the banks, transport and communications, all under workers’ control. Where there are national or civil wars as in Sri Lanka and Aceh, the international workers’ movement must support these armed liberation struggles and their demands for national independence. Revolutionaries must seize this opportunity to propagandize for an end to capitalist disasters and fight for a socialist society.

Socialist disaster prevention

Disasters will never be prevented unless the people fight for and succeed in building a global socialist society. All of the technology and the social wealth that workers have created for centuries which is now stockpiled as the private property and military death machines of the capitalist rulers will be expropriated and converted to the use of the people. The people will decide how much of this wealth should be used to create disaster-prevention systems.

You can be sure that one of the first steps of any socialist plan will be the conversion of capitalist military satellite technology from bosses’ wars to early warning systems of the dangers of potential natural disasters. This will be followed by practical measures to harness nature’s resources for productive rather than destructive purposes. Socialist prevention of disasters will be first and foremost the elimination of the system that profits from the deaths of millions of workers and peasants – in peace and in war, in daily existence and in ongoing disasters –capitalism!

Imperialist hands off South Asia!

Imperialist Troops out of Indonesia!

Self-Determination for Tamil Eelam and Aceh!

For independent workers organizations in control of disaster relief!

From Class Struggle 59 January-February 2005

WHO ON THE LEFT PASSED THE IRAQ TEST?

From Class Struggle 50, May-June 2003
War concentrates politics even as politics concentrates economics. The US/UK attack on Iraq has brought to the surface all the contradictions and deep antagonisms of capitalism today. Who saw the war as the outcome of imperialism in crisis forced to recolonise Iraq to get its oil? Who on the left understood this and took the next step to defend Iraq against imperialism? Those who did are the core of a new revolutionary international. Those who didn’t must be condemned as betrayers of the socialist revolution.

We can dispense with the reformist left who looked to the UN to deal with Iraq. These forces already conceded that the UN had the authority to impose sanctions on Iraq.They wanted a UN backed invasion. In other words they rejected the fundamental revolutionary position that Iraq is an oppressed country and must be unconditionally defended against imperialism. The UN is a ‘den of thieves kitchen’ and represents the deals that the imperialists make to advance their interests.

But the thieves fell out when the US/UK invaded Iraq unilaterally instead of backing the French and German imperialists plan of using the UN to disarm Iraq. So the reformist left championed the ‘peaceful’ imperialists against the US and UK. Thus the reformist left sides with one set of imperialist powers, with just as bad a history of colonial oppression, against another. In the event that the rivalry between these powers turns to open war, these reformist leaders would send their workers to war on the side of their imperialist bosses just as they did in 1914.

There was another more leftwing tendency however, which did not look to the ‘peaceful’ imperialists to deal with Iraq. This is the pacifist left who rejected the UN sanctions on Iraq as much as they rejected a UN backed invasion. They saw that the so-called ‘peaceful’ imperialists opposed the US and UK invasion because that would mean risking their own oil concessions in Iraq. This tendency therefore did not back the UN solution, but instead put their hopes in building a mass movement that would “stop the war”. They even attempted to mobilise workers in unions to take industrial action to prevent the ‘coalition’ military forces from being deployed in Iraq.

They saw that this was a war by the US and UK for oil. It was an attack by a rich and powerful country against a weak and largely defenceless country. Under the pressure of the war on Iraq, when millions marched against the war, and when thousands of Iraqis fought against the invasion, there was a move of some on the left, such as the CPGB, towards a ‘defence of Iraq’ position. But in practice the defence of Iraq was translated into ‘stopping the war’ at home. They said the best way to defend Iraq was to stop the invasion by a combination of sit-ins, marches and strikes. This fell far short of the necessary ‘defence of Iraq’ position of revolutionary Marxists. Why?

To turn the ‘defence of Iraq’ into ‘stopping the war’ at home fails to take the class logic of imperialist war to its necessary conclusion.The defence of Iraq means the ‘defeat’ of the imperialist oppressor not only at home, but also in Iraq. It means a ‘Victory’ to Iraq as an oppressed country.The responsibility of revolutionaries in the imperialist countries is to put their class before their country. They have to mobilise to smash the enemy at home, but they also have to try to smash the enemy wherever it goes to war against an oppressed country. Their duty does not stop at national borders. Class internationalism means that workers have no country.

The crucial test for revolutionaries in this war was to go beyond fighting the ‘enemy at home’ and to join with the oppressed in the trenches of Iraq. This meant entering a military bloc with the national leadership of Iraq, the Ba’athists, for the defence of Iraq. This meant worker volunteers siding with Iraq and being prepared to kill workers in uniform from the same oppressor country as themselves. And it meant doing so with a program that called for the workers to form an independent, armed force that would fight to take the lead in the defence of Iraq away from the Ba’athists and the Clerics.

Almost all the revolutionary left failed this test.Its ‘defensist’ position remained one that did not commit Western workers to class internationalism. The IST (SWO in NZ) took the opportunist position that Iraq should be defended by…its own people, which practically means under its existing leaderships. But should, or could, its ‘people’ defend it under such leadership? While the masses overwhelmingly wanted to defend Iraq, they did not have the means to do so.They were subordinated to a national reactionary leadership who disarmed them for fear that they would rise up against the oppressive regime.

That’s why revolutionaries do not sow illusions in clerical or bourgeois leaders being reliable anti-imperialist fighters. Their class interests are to compromise with imperialism not defeat it. Therefore, to call for the ‘people’ of Iraq to defend their country without putting forward any means of freeing the masses from their treacherous leaders, is not to defend Iraq at all.

Others, like Workers Action, took a defensist line that refused a military block with Saddam. They said that there was no “mass progressive nationalist movement” to support against Saddam. This made a united front to defend Iraq impossible. In other words revolutionaries should abstain from the struggle inside Iraq until Saddam was removed and some progressive nationalist movement came into being. How do these ‘revolutionaries’ think this was going to happen?

This is an ultra-left position similar to the Iraqi Workers’ Communist Party that was for the simultaneous defeat of Saddam and the US/UK forces. In effect this meant sitting out the war away from the fighting and waiting until history was ready for them to intervene.This ultraleft position is in reality no different from the opportunist one, imperio-centric, because ‘history’ by default is the victory of ‘democratic’ imperialism, overthrowing the Ba’athist regime and creating the conditions for the bourgeois democratic revolution.

What stopped these ‘revolutionaries’ from making a military bloc with the Ba’athists?The fact is that they are embedded in the racist, chauvinist,labour aristocracy or petty bourgeois layers of the labour movement.They will not side with the oppressed if this means that workers at home see them as unpatriotic or traitors. This means that their ‘internationalism’ is merely a mask for their ‘nationalism’.

In the case of the opportunists, their ‘internationalist’ tasks are defined to mean that they, the imperio-centric working classes alone, can defeat imperialism. Workers Action for example got completely carried away by the anti-war movement. “…we have seen the creation of a phenomenal political power across the globe that can start to challenge US imperialism. The anti-war demonstrations on February 15 have had an enormous impact throughout the world, and have opened up a new era in politics”.(Workers Action, 21, 2003 page 2). Shame this ‘new era’ in politics did not stop the war.

‘Talking up’ the anti-war mobilisation as a ‘serious challenge’ to US imperialism means ‘talking down’ workers going to other countries to kill workers in uniform from their own country and challenging colonial oppression as the material basis of the racism and chauvinism in the labour movement at home. If you cannot even confront racism and chauvinism in the imperialist working classes, how can you defeat imperialism?

The reverse side of this imperialist chauvinism is that it then becomes the national task of workers and peasants in the oppressed countries to resist imperialism. Why? Because that is their right to self-determination.

How, say the opportunists, can these peoples determine their own future if workers from other countries who are regarded as oppressors assert their duty to fight alongside them? Well, it doesn’t occur to these ‘internationalists’ that this is the surest way for workers from imperialist countries to prove that they are not oppressors but genuine internationalists.

In the case of the ultralefts, this is the flip side of the opportunist coin.Refusing to enter a military bloc with Saddam Hussein because he is a dictator is also a capitulation to the same imperialist racism and chauvinism at home that leaves the defence of Iraq to its own people. The fact that many in the IWCP are exiles in the ‘West’ and embedded in the same labour aristocracy as the Western left, underlines their ultraleft position. And it also explains why they then flipped to an opportunist line after the war calling for the UN to create a security force to allow Iraq to make the transition to democracy.For these pseudo communists, democratic imperialism is superior to an Iraqi dictatorship.

This is why in practice these ultra-lefts were prepared to leave the defence of Iraq to the Ba’athists and the clerical leaderships who would capitulate as soon as their class interests were threatened. This is exactly why these leaderships made the compromises they have made with the occupiers in the hope of doing deals with the US/UK to become the new rulers. This shows that, like the opportunists, the ultra-lefts are not serious about workers defending Iraq. They are prepared to leave the self-determination of Iraq to dirty deals between the Iraqi bourgeoisie, the Clerics and the imperialists.

The revolutionary way to fight the imperialist invaders was to mobilise the workers and peasants who were oppressed by the Ba’athists and Clerics to prove that only workers and poor peasants militias could defend Iraq. This meant calling on the Ba’athist and Clerical leaderships to arm the workers and peasants. When it became clear that the leaderships would not do this and instead would look after their own skins, workers could then decide how best to defend Iraq. But these questions of strategy and tactics could not even arise when the ultra-lefts did not offer any leadership to the masses under the oppressive control of the Ba’athists or Clerics.

Even those few groups that formally came out in ‘defence of Iraq’ such as Workers Power, and the International Bolshevik Tendency, did so in an abstract way.Workers Power quoted Trotsky on the “ duty of the international proletariat to aid the oppressed countries and their war against oppressors” but did not specify how that aid should be given.

(“The Left that Fails to Back Iraq” (http://www.workerspower.com/wpglobal/antiwarLeftfails.html)Not even a mention of arms to Iraq, and certainly no call for a military bloc with the Ba’athists.

The IBT, who condemn the Spartacists for ‘flinching’ in the face of charges of ‘treason’ at home, also took a defensist position. But nowhere in their statements on the war is there a call for a military bloc with Saddam, let alone a program for revolutionaries to take the leadership of the anti-imperialist struggle in Iraq (www.bolshevik.org).

We come to the conclusion that to our knowledge no Trotskyist groups other than the Group of 5 who signed the statement on Iraq lived up to their historic and revolutionary responsibility to fight for the defence of Iraq. (http://geocities.com/communistworker/iraq.html)

Who else called for the formation of a military bloc with the Ba’athists, with a program for workers to lead the defence of Iraq and for the formation of a Workers’ and Peasants’ state of Iraq in a Socialist Federation of the Middle East?If they exist and have put forward this position clearly, we want to contact them because they are principled communists.

Those who failed this test must be condemned as imperio-centric misleaders and betrayers of socialism. They are the rotten Stalinist and Trotskyist tendencies with opportunist/ultra-left positions that are a programmatic reflection of their integration into the racist, chauvinist labour aristocracy and petty bourgeoisie in the imperialist countries.

The healthy forces that blocked militarily with Iraq in its defence against imperialism with a program for permanent revolution have shown that they have the method and program to form the core of a new antiwar and anti-imperialist movement and open the way to the formation of a new revolutionary international.

MayDay Leaflet

BOLIVIA: FOR A WORKERS' AND FARMERS' GOVERNMENT!

After fifteen years of neo-liberal 'structural adjustment' the workers and farmers of Cochabamba (Bolivia's third largest city) refused to accept the privatisation of their water supply. They took to the streets, erecting barricades, and were met by the army after a state of emergency was declared by President Banzer on April8. In the struggles with the police and army at least 7 people have died. This insurrection is the latest in along line of mass marches, general strikes and revolutionary actions of the Bolivian labour movement inresponse to the deepening destruction of the economy and their lives by imperialism. Class Struggle's sister organisation Poder Obrero in Bolivia has been at the forefront of this struggle for fifteen years. Below we reprint a report on the current situation in Bolivia in English and Spanish. Then follows a short account of thestruggle for a Workers' and Farmers' Government in Bolivia.

During seven days (4 to April 10) three mobilizations challenged the government of the General Banzer who was forced to impose a state of siege: they were (1) The hunger strikes and mutiny of the Police asking salary increases. (2) The blockade of the city of Cochabamba. (3) The blockade of Roads in the Altiplano.

Mutiny of the Police

Approximately a month ago a group of Police declared a hunger strike in the Plaza 24 of September in the city of Santa Cruz asking for a salary increase. A basic police officer earns less than Bs. 500 ($US 82) a year. To the surprise of the National Command of the Police the group was made to stop the hunger strike and transferred to La Paz, and due to the intervention of Human Rights, the Command could not punish the strikers.
This was followed by a sergeant of police who on April 2 declared a hunger strike for a salary increase, calling also for respect of the human rights of the police (on the part of their superiors), and an increase in life insurance. This strike was built up little by little with support of the wives of police.

Total blockade of Cochabamba

As part of the neoliberal plan of the government handed over to a transnational company (Bechtels) control of Aguas del Tunari and the distribution of the water for the City of Cochabamba and the execution of the Project Misicuni. As with most of these privatised contracts, the water contract signed was disadvantageous for the population besides losing free access to Aguas del Tunari the new owner was interested not in investing a single dollar and the first thing they did was raise the price by 36%.

This contract was made with the complicity of the Civic Committee, that is supposed to defend the interests of Cochabamba. The government planned to approve a "Law of Water" by means of which Aguas del Tunari was now owned absolutely by the new transnational. This move enraged not only the peasants but also the small bourgeoisie of Cochabamba.

Before this happened, a Coordinating Committee (Coordinadora) for the Defense of the Water was formed and called for a blockade of streets and highways on February 3. The government responded with the brutal repression of the demonstrators and blockaders, who held out for for two days of violent confrontations in which many were injured on both sides. Before the gravity of the situation, the Church intervened and the government compromised to revise the contract with Aguas del Tunari.

The Coordinadora was given a time limit of 60 days to negotiate a new contract. However, during the negotiations, the Coordinadora was sold out by the Civic Committee which took over the negotiations with the government.

As a result the Coordinadora called for the blockade of streets and highways in the City of Cochabamba and the bordering provinces on April 4. This time the government did not attempt an outright repression of the mobilization and expected that the action of the Coordinadora would collapse by itself. However, after three days of action by the peasants, working, rural and middle classes, barricades were raised blocking access to all the streets and the highways into the city. Cochabamba was totally paralyzed and with that a great part of the country due to its strategic geographical situation as the link between the east with the altiplano and the South with the North of Bolivia. The government decided to negotiate and the Prefect Hugo Galindo informed that the
government had agreed to break the contract with Aguas del Tunari. The masses celebrated, they danced in the streets, but after a few hours it became known that they had been deceived. Banzer announced that Aguas del Tunari would stay, and that the government was going to respect its agreements with the new foreign investors and required the immediate lifting of the blockades in Cochabamba.

Blockade of Roads in the Altiplano

Responding to a call from the Union Confederation Unica of Industrial Peasants of Bolivia, peasants on Monday 3 began a peaceful blockade of the highways given access to the capital city of La Paz. With each day the blockades went grew in strength succeeding in isolating La Paz on Friday 7. The army intervened to raise the barricades. However, as soon as the soldiers went, the peasants returned to block the highways.

The State of Siege.

The growth of the intensity of these three actions began to challenge the state on the Thursday and Friday. Still without announcing officially the State of Siege, the government began to engage in open repression about midnight on Saturday 8. It entered the residences of leaders of the Coordinadora in Cochabamba, and arrested two leaders.

In La Paz it decided to intervene to stop hunger strike of the police sergeant and of the wives of police.
But it made the mistake of using the Special Group of Security, some of whose own wives were hunger strikers. Thus, this battalion itself mutinied, and decided not to come out of its headquarters and asked also for a 30% of salary increase!

By Saturday 8 the situation was made worse for the government which announced the State of Siege at 9 o'clock of the morning. However, in Cochabamba not a single barricade was removed and the population began to be confront the Police and achieved a victory. The Police had to retreat to its headquarters. The army confronted the protesters wounding 8 persons and killing one.

In La Paz, each hour added more police to the hunger strike. Students and workers supported militantly the strikers: doing guard duty at the doors to avoid an army assault and carrying food. The strikers raised their demands from a 30% to a 50% salary increase. In other cities the police gave their support to the strike. The government had to yield.

At the same time, the government recognised by Saturday afternoon that the mobilization of Cochabamba was massive and that it could not weaken it by accusing it of being financed by the narcotraffic or that it was hurting its own cause. The blockades and spontaneous marches in the city grew everywhere, the solidarity of the population of the central city was strong. They prepared food and drinks for the ones that had come from the provinces and the outskirts of the city. Despite the big economic losses caused by the blockade, no person or institution complained. Finally, the Monday 10 the government capitulated to the Coordinadora and accepted its demands: Abandonment of the contract with Aguas del Tunari, approval of the law 2029 with the amendments made by the Coordinadora, and liberation of the detained leaders confined in San Joaquín (In the east of Bolivia and only accessible by airplane).

Today, six days after the declaration of the State of Siege, it cannot be felt in the country. The blockades of roads, although reduced a great deal in intensity, continue in the Department of La Paz. The University has begun you demand a bigger budget and the presence of the police is repressive mainly in the City of La Paz.

Some conclusions

The mobilization of Cochabamba reached levels of a "pre-insurrection". The Coordinadora born in agreement among the meetings of locals, rural and some workers unions, conducted one of the strongest protests since 1985. Workers attended daily the permanent blockades organized in the workers neighborhoods which had some characteristics of proto-soviets. The control of the city was secured and the leaders of the Coordinadora supported the police hunger strikes carried out in the plaza 14 of September. The mobilization against the privatisation of water in Cochabamba was also fortified by the blockades of highways that were made in the remainder of the country.

The Coordinadora achieved what nobody achieved since 1985: to force a retreat by the government in the application of one of its neoliberal laws, and to successfully win total acceptance of its demands. It is clear that the pre-insurrection of Cochabamba, is the result of the economic crisis that is plunging the masses into poverty and marginalised existence. The cost of living increases from day to day and already begins to affect the lives of even the big and small bourgeoisie. This has resulted in an explosion in the number of professionals that have become as never before a small army of idle engineers, lawyers, medical doctors etc.

In protest against the state of siege, the COB (Bolivian Workers Federation) called for a 24 hour national strike for yesterday, Wednesday. This strike passed peacefully. The State of Siege has broken down and most of the protests have almost gone, leaving small blockades and university protests in La Paz. Also challenging the State of Siege are actions in the city of Santa Cruz, and city strikes in Tarija, Oruro and Sucre.

Last night the suspension of the state of siege was being discussed in the parliament. By one a.m Thursday the session had not ratified it. However, there is a general state of tension in the country. The situation is that that the economic crisis can produce more movements as that of Cochabamba and Achacachi.

From Class Struggle No 32, April-May 2000