Statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International
Part Six
I. On the national question
Nationalism is the cornerstone of Spartacist's attitude toward the backward countries, just as it is in relation to the class struggle in the advanced capitalist ones. And, just as in the US it extols the supposed revolutionary capacities of the trade unions, in those nations historically oppressed by imperialism it attributes similar potential to bourgeois nationalism and petty-bourgeois guerrillaism.
Before dealing with the arguments made in its attack on the perspective of the International Committee, it is worth noting that, as with trade unionism, Spartacist has made an apparent political about-face on the national question.
For decades the Spartacist League was distinguished by its indifference toward the masses in the oppressed countries, and it repeatedly adopted positions which, despite their ultra-left verbiage, lined the organization up with the US State Department.
In 1967, when Israel seized the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Sinai and the Golan Heights in the Six-Day War, the Spartacists described the assault by the US-backed Israeli military against the semi-colonial Arab states of Egypt, Jordan and Syria as a "futile and reactionary conflict of rival nationalisms and their mystical ideologies." Nearly a decade later, when the Lebanese civil war broke out, it adopted a similar "plague on both your houses" position in relation to the conflict which pitted the Palestine Liberation Organization and its allies in the Lebanese National Movement against the Maronite ruling class and its fascist Phalange militia. Spartacist described the struggle as "mutual communal terror."
With the outbreak of war between Britain and Argentina over the Malvinas islands in 1982, Spartacist once again saw no reason to defend an oppressed nation confronting the onslaught of imperialism. The group declared that it could "only look forward to the spectacle of these two hated right-wing regimes sinking each others' fleets on the high seas," adding, "it's a good thing if they grind up their respective military machines." Spartacist did not have long to wait. In the one-sided conflict which followed, hundreds of Argentine sailors went to their deaths in the sinking of the Belgrano and many more ill-equipped and untrained conscripts were massacred by British commandos.
Now, in their attack on the perspective of the International Committee of the Fourth International, the Spartacists present themselves as the champion of national liberation and "self-determination". Curiously, their line on the national movements has shifted precisely under conditions in which the inability of these movements to give any expression to the aspirations of the oppressed masses has been demonstrated by a whole series of world historical events.
For good reason, Spartacist makes no concrete evaluation of any of these movements. As with its fantasy about the AFL-CIO calling a general strike in support of the New York City building workers, the group is reduced to imagining "what if." In the course of its argument that the national state stands as the omnipotent power in the affairs of world capitalism, it declares the following: "Let us imagine that a left-nationalist government comes to power in Mexico and repudiates the country's foreign debt. Will the IMF's army invade Mexico and install a puppet regime? Will the IMF's navy blockade Mexico's ports? Will the IMF agents confiscate the assets of the Mexican government?"1
The simplest answer to these musings is of course, no; it doesn't have to do any of those things. It would simply cut off Mexico's access to credit.
More fundamentally, however, this passage demonstrates how Spartacist's false theoretical conceptions are bound up with a politically bankrupt orientation. It never occurs to this organization to ask itself why such a "left-nationalist government" exists nowhere in the world today.
Indeed all of the old bourgeois nationalist governments have jettisoned their economic nationalism. Policies based on import substitution and the development of national industry have long since given way to IMF-supervised "structural adjustment" programs aimed at attracting globally mobile capital to invest in the given backward country. In Mexico, the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, the longest-reigning bourgeois nationalist movement in the world, is one of the best examples of this fundamental shift. But the same essential path has been pursued by every one of the old nationalist movements, from the Peronists in Argentina, to the Congress Party in India, the Nasserites in Egypt and the various states created through the decolonization of Africa.
A similar though even starker evolution is to be found within the second wave of national liberation movements, those which espoused the "armed struggle" and relied on the aid of the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy from the 1960s to the 1980s. Every single one of them -- the Palestine Liberation Organization, the African National Congress, the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, the FMLN in El Salvador -- has abandoned the radical anti-imperialist rhetoric which they put forward as recently as a decade ago. All of them have accepted imperialist-imposed settlements and embraced the policies of "free market" capitalism, abandoning in the process the most basic rights of the masses that they purported to represent.
How does Spartacist explain this phenomenon? As with its approach to everything else in political life, it is not a matter of finding an objective basis, rooted in the process of production, but rather attributing this evolution of the nationalist movements to the subjective failings and "betrayals" of their leaderships.
Yet, the very universality of this turn makes clear that it is the outcome of the objective character of the national movements and their relations with global capital. The role of opportunist organizations like Spartacist is to cover up the class nature of these movements and the inevitable catastrophes that their policies produce.
The transformation of the bourgeois nationalist regimes and movements is bound up with the development of capitalism. The great national movements of the 18th and 19th centuries broke down feudal particularism, creating broader economic and social entities, which corresponded to the essential needs of capitalist production. In particular they established national markets, bound together by common law and language.
In an earlier period, the national liberation struggles in the oppressed countries had a similar economic imperative. As long as productive capital remained organized largely within the nation-state framework, there existed a significant objective basis for the conflict between the national bourgeoisie in these countries and imperialism. The national bourgeoisie sought to cast off imperialist domination in order to gain control of the national market and undertake the exploitation of its "own" working class.
With this aim it sought to mobilize the popular masses behind it -- India and China providing the classic examples of such struggles. It found itself compelled to raise democratic demands and even adopt a socialist coloration, all the while working to prevent the struggle from challenging capitalist private property.
II. Globalization and the "new nationalism"
The unprecedented global integration of capitalist production has vastly diminished the significance of these national markets in comparison to the global market to which production is more and more directed. Instead of seeking the expulsion of imperialist capital and the development of national industries, the old bourgeois nationalist regimes are carrying out austerity and privatization programs aimed at attracting globally mobile capital with cheap labor and conditions of unrestricted exploitation. At the same time, the national bourgeoisie have linked their fate directly to the world markets, exporting ever-increasing amounts of their own capital to global financial centers like Wall Street.
The new global economic relations have also provided an objective impulse for a new type of nationalist movement, seeking the dismemberment of existing states. Globally-mobile capital has given smaller territories the ability to link themselves directly to the world market. Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan have become the new models of development. A small coastal enclave, possessing adequate transportation links, infrastructure and a supply of cheap labor may prove a more attractive base for multinational capital than a larger country with a less productive hinterland.
At the same time IMF austerity programs which mandate the dismantling of national development schemes and destruction of limited social welfare programs have turned central governments in the oppressed countries into bill collectors for the foreign banks. Rival ruling cliques in regions possessing natural resources or industries which are being siphoned off to pay the foreign debt see in separatism the possibility of eliminating the middle man and striking a more profitable arrangement by dealing directly with foreign capital themselves.
In India and China, the national movement posed the progressive task of unifying disparate peoples in a common struggle against imperialism-- a task which proved unrealizable under the leadership of the national bourgeoisie. This new form of nationalism promotes separatism along ethnic, linguistic and religious lines, with the aim of dividing up existing states for the benefit of local exploiters. Such movements have nothing to do with a struggle against imperialism, nor do they in any sense embody the democratic aspirations of the masses of oppressed. They serve to divide the working class and divert the class struggle into ethno-communal warfare.
The International Committee opposes this type of bourgeois separatism. For this reason Spartacist has accused it of "social chauvinism" as well as "passive acceptance of imperialist oppression and exploitation of backward countries." Most of its charges are repeated from a series of articles which appeared in Workers Vanguard in 1995, under the headline "David North 'abolishes' the right to self-determination."
Contrary to Spartacist's hysterical assertions, the national secretary of the SEP in the US has no more "abolished" the rights of oppressed peoples than he has "embraced" the long dead Karl Kautsky. The International Committee's real crime, in the eyes of Spartacist, is to make a fresh examination of the Marxist attitude toward the national question in general, and the formula "right of self-determination" in particular, in light of the changes in the forms of capitalist production and the concrete experience of the working class and the oppressed masses over the course of the 20th century.
This, Spartacist maintains, is impermissible. It rejects a dialectical materialist analysis in favor of a purely scholastic approach, searching through the writings of Lenin and Trotsky to find quotations, ripped out of context, to justify its ongoing adaptation to bourgeois nationalism. In this, as in many other respects, the Spartacist League only apes the retrograde methods pioneered by Stalinism. The thrust of Spartacist's indictment is that the Socialist Equality Party fails to ritualistically repeat the formulations put forward by Lenin in 1913.
In Lenin's defense, however, it should first be stated that even 80 years ago his position had nothing to do with the support for national separatism now espoused by Spartacist and so many other groups representing the middle class left.
For Lenin, the right to national self-determination had one meaning and one meaning only -- the right to form a separate, independent state. He repeatedly insisted that this right had for the Bolshevik Party a "negative" connotation. That is, in recognizing this right, the Bolsheviks did not advocate national separatism as a preferred course of action. Rather, the right was inserted into the program to make it clear that the party opposed the Tsarist regime's use of military force to compel an oppressed nationality to remain within the borders of the Russian empire.
Lenin insisted that it was necessary to recognize the right of self-determination in order to win the confidence of the oppressed nationalities in the leadership of the working class. At the same time, he fought all manifestations of national separatist influence on the working class itself, insisting on the political independence and unity of the workers throughout the Russian empire under the leadership of a common all-Russian party.
Spartacist and other middle class leftists who espouse national separatism today start from a diametrically opposed perspective. Their aim is not to win the confidence of the oppressed in the working class and a socialist solution to the conditions created by capitalism. To the extent that these groups themselves ever had any confidence in the working class and socialism, they abandoned it long ago. They promote national separatism as a more "realistic" means of opposing imperialism. They try to invest it with a non-existent revolutionary potential in order to better subordinate the working class politically to the nationalist movements.
III. Lenin's conditional attitude toward self-determination
The extremely conditional form in which Lenin invoked the right to self-determination was spelled out in his 1913 work on the subject. The fact that he did not endow this right with some eternal or universal significance was made clear by the way in which he distinguished between three different categories of countries.
"First," he wrote, were: "the advanced capitalist countries of Western Europe and the United States. In these countries progressive bourgeois national movements came to an end long ago."2
When Lenin wrote "long ago", he was referring to the period, less than half a century since the unification of Germany and the defeat of the Confederacy in the American Civil War, that had brought an end to the era of bourgeois revolution, and consequently to the applicability of the right of nations to self-determination, in these areas of the globe.
Nearly twice as many years divide our own period from that of Lenin, and the changes relating to the national question have been even more sweeping and worldwide in their scope. One only has to consider the second and third categories of nations, those in which Lenin said that the slogan of self-determination still had validity in 1913.
The second category, Lenin wrote, consisted of "Eastern Europe: Austria, the Balkans and particularly Russia. Here it was the twentieth century that particularly developed the bourgeois-democratic national movements and intensified the national struggle. The task of the proletariat in these countries, both in completing their bourgeois-democratic reforms, and rendering assistance to the socialist revolution in other countries, cannot be carried out without championing the right of nations to self-determination."3
This area of the globe has seen perhaps the greatest revolutionary upheavals of the 20th century, including the October Revolution in Russia. The rise of new national separatist movements in the former Soviet Union, the Balkans and Eastern Europe is bound up with the drive to restore capitalism throughout the region.
It cannot be claimed that the ethno-nationalist movements that have arisen in these countries are "bourgeois-democratic national movements". or are somehow related to the task of completing "bourgeois-democratic reforms." Promoted and led in large part by former Stalinist bureaucrats, these movements seek to carve out ethnically homogeneous territories by means of persecution, mass expulsions and slaughter. They express the social interests of unscrupulous cliques of aspiring native capitalists who desire their own direct link with world finance capital.
In a third category Lenin placed "the semi-colonial countries, such as China, Persia and Turkey, and all the colonies, which have a combined population of 1,000 million." In these areas, he stated, "the bourgeois-democratic movements either have hardly begun, or have still a long way to go." He stressed the obligation of socialists to demand "the unconditional and immediate liberation of the colonies without compensation", a demand which he said, "signifies nothing else than the right to self-determination."4
Especially in this third category, the post-World War II period has seen vast changes. Africa, Asia and the Middle East, which in Lenin's day were under colonial rule, have, with the exception of a handful of territories, long since gained political independence. Nationalist movements have ruled in many of these countries for up to half a century. Indeed, it is the disintegration of the original nationalist projects which has spawned the new separatist movements seeking to divide up existing states in the former colonial countries.
It has often been the case in the history of the Marxist movement that formulations and slogans which had a progressive and revolutionary content in one period take on an entirely different meaning in another. National self-determination presents just such a case.
The right to self-determination has come to mean something very different from the way in which Lenin defined it more than eighty years ago. It is not only the Marxists who have advanced the right to self-determination, but the national bourgeoisie in the backward countries and the imperialists themselves. From the end of World War I on, this "right" has been invoked by one or another imperialist power to justify schemes aimed at the partition of existing territories.
Invoking the "right to self-determination" today is universally understood as the advocacy of national separation and the creation of a new state. The "negative" sense given to this right by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who opposed bourgeois separatism, has been obscured by the widespread utilization of this slogan by imperialism, the bourgeois nationalists and their advocates within the middle class left. As we shall see, Spartacist itself equates this "right" with support for national separatism.
IV. Where Spartacist champions self-determination
The Workers Vanguard articles denounced the International Committee specifically for failing to invoke this right in four separate areas: Bosnia, the Indian states of Kashmir and Punjab, Quebec and Sri Lanka. Let us consider the content of this demand in each of these concrete cases.
What are the consequences of proclaiming the right of "self-determination" in Bosnia? That should by now be abundantly clear. Such a demand serves not to win the confidence of the working class in a socialist perspective, but only legitimizes the bloody activities of the rival ethnic nationalist leaderships.
Spartacist fails to make clear to whose self-determination it is precisely referring. Is it Bosnia as a whole, or the Moslems, Croats and Serbs who live in this territory? And, if one takes the Marxist conception of the right to self-determination seriously, i.e. the right to establish an independent state, how is this to be realized in Bosnia? History has already provided the answer. The formation of separate independent states based on ethnic or religious identity in the former Yugoslavia can be achieved only through the extermination or expulsion of entire populations.
This was why the Marxist movement, beginning in the late 19th century, developed the demand for a socialist federation of the Balkans as a means not of carving out new territories, but rather, overcoming the national divisions which mired the region in backwardness and violence. Together with the rest of the middle class left, Spartacist rejects such a socialist and working class solution to the crisis in the region.
Spartacist goes on to state that the SEP is "against the right of self-determination for Kashmir, the Punjab and other nations locked into the prison house of peoples that is the Indian bourgeois state."
This use of the term "prison house of nations" in regard to India is dubious to say the least. The phrase is appropriated from an earlier epoch when it was used to describe the old Tsarist empire in which conquered nationalities were repressed and denied basic rights.
India, however, emerged as the abortive outcome of the national struggle. There was in fact no Indian nationality, language or ethnic identity. The struggle for independence from Britain involved the progressive goal of uniting the vast territory and its inhabitants, breaking down their division into some 500 princely states.
This task, however, could not be completed under the leadership of the national bourgeoisie and its political instrument the Indian Congress. The result was India's partition along religious lines, with the creation of Muslim Pakistan and the vast pogroms and expulsions that accompanied it.
Marxists indicted the Indian Congress not for having failed to create scores of separate ethnically-based nation states, but rather for its inability to carry through the struggle against colonialism and effect a genuinely democratic unification.
Fifty years after independence, the whole nationalist project in India is in an advanced state of disintegration. The Congress Party and every section of the Indian bourgeoisie has renounced the old national development programs in favor of integration into the world market. Barriers to foreign capital are being thrown down and industries denationalized.
The result is growing social inequality and regional economic disparities. These are the driving forces both of the new national separatist movements that have broken out throughout the subcontinent as well as the growth of Hindu chauvinism expressed in the rise of the BJP movement.
In both Kashmir and the Punjab, the national separatist movements are based upon religion. In Punjab the national separatists demand the creation of Khalistan, a state which would exclude the large non-Sikh population that inhabits the region. In Kashmir it is the demand for Moslem rule. Kashmiri nationalism is closely bound up with the continuing conflict between India and Pakistan. Pakistani military intelligence exercises a considerable control over the most active of the armed groups in the area which call for a jihad, or holy war, aimed at joining Kashmir with Pakistan.
As with all of these movements, the Kashmiri separatist agitation has won popular support by diverting social unrest and demands along religious and ethno-chauvinist lines. The rise of Kashmiri separatism was fueled by the growth of an educated middle class in the region, with no corresponding growth in employment. The result has been an increasingly intense competition for posts in government, education, etc. The demand that these positions should go to the majority Moslem population has been coupled with anti-Pandit (Hindu) agitation resulting in the expulsion of nearly a quarter million Hindus from the region. The cycle of armed guerrilla actions and government repression has subjected wide layers of the population to state violence, further fueling separatist sentiments.
Even in Lenin's day, the Marxist movement drew a sharp distinction between what it saw as legitimate nationalist movements and those which based themselves on religion. The Communist International specifically opposed the Pan-Islamic movements of the day as reactionary and warned against imperialism's fomenting of conflicts between "national-religious sects." For Spartacist and other petty-bourgeois ex-radicals, this distinction no longer applies. By endorsing Kashmiri and Punjabi self-determination, it is endowing a national-religious conflict with a supposedly democratic and revolutionary content.
The central question here is, how does the revolutionary party of the working class respond to the breakup of the old bourgeois nationalist movements? Are the masses in these countries to advance their interests through new separatist movements based on fragments of the states created through decolonization and founded on religious particularism?
We categorically reject such a perspective. Such statelets will provide no way forward for the working class and the oppressed masses in India or anywhere else. At best they will create profits for a thin layer of the privileged classes if they are able to create a free enterprise zone and cut their own deals with transnational capital. For the masses they hold out the prospect only of ethnic bloodbaths and intensified exploitation.
V. Promoting Quebéois nationalism
The next area where the SEP is condemned for failing to uphold the right of self-determination is Quebec. Here we are dealing with one of the advanced capitalist countries, where, as Lenin said even in 1913, the bourgeois national movements, and therefore the applicability of the right of self-determination, had come to an end "long ago."
Nonetheless, new national separatist movements have emerged not only in Quebec, but in other parts of the advanced capitalist world: Scotland, Belgium, and Italy for example. Spartacist, like the rest of the petty-bourgeois left, has adapted itself to this development.
What is the objective content of these movements, irrespective of the particular political views of their leaderships? Are they bound up with a struggle against imperialism, and do they embody the democratic aspirations of the masses to free themselves from oppression?
The case of Quebec is representative. Quebec separatism arises out of the conflicting interests of different sections of the bourgeoisie under conditions of the continuing regional fracturing of Canada. Economic relations between separate Canadian regions and foreign markets, particularly the US, are today greater than between the regions themselves. Sections of the Quebec bourgeoisie see a more advantageous relation with US capitalism through separation.
The demands of global economy come into sharp conflict with the outmoded nation-state form of Canada. The issue posed is whether this conflict will be resolved from above, through the bourgeoisie's fomenting of Anglo chauvinism on the one hand and Quebec separatism on the other, or from below by the united struggle of the North American working class to put an end to capitalism?
The Quebec nationalists are in no way opposed to imperialism. On the contrary, they have repeatedly offered guarantees that a separate Quebec would remain Washington's faithful junior partner in both the NATO and NAFTA treaties. In short, Quebec exercising its "self-determination" would mean the creation of a third imperialist state on the North American continent founded on national exclusivism.
As for the social question, the Parti Quebéois (PQ), the political instrument of national separatism, is a party of big business which has spearheaded the assault of the entire Canadian bourgeoisie on the jobs, wages and social conditions of the working class. In the 1995 referendum called by the PQ provincial government on Quebec secession, the party promoted separation on an openly capitalist basis, arguing that national independence would create better conditions for driving down production costs, increasing profits and gaining greater access to markets. The demands of the Quebec nationalists are anti-democratic in character. They seek not equality of language rights, but rather the creation of a unilingual French Quebec.
What Spartacist means by "self-determination" found its clearest expression in this referendum in which it called for a "yes" vote, supporting the PQ's project of creating an independent Quebec.
It is worth noting that the last time that the PQ had called such a referendum, Spartacist, together with the bulk of the middle class left, called for a boycott on the grounds that a "yes" vote would represent an impermissible vote of political confidence in this capitalist party. At the time, Quebec nationalism and even the PQ itself had a far more "left" face than it presents today. But while the PQ has moved drastically to the right, the petty-bourgeois ex-radicals have gone even further and faster, joining a political bloc with the Quebéois bourgeoisie.
What is the effect of such a policy? Within the working class it is utilized as a means of diverting workers from a class response to capitalist exploitation. It presents conditions created by capital in every area of the globe as the supposed result of national oppression, in this case of the Quebéois by English-speaking Canada. Workers are told that they have more in common with French-speaking capitalists than with English-speaking workers in the rest of North America. Support for national separatism plays the same essential role in other advanced capitalist countries such as Britain (i.e., Scottish and Welsh nationalism) and Belgium.
Not accidentally, the Quebec union bureaucracy constitutes one of the principal props of Quebéois nationalism, just as its counterparts in English-speaking Canada constitute a bulwark of Canadian nationalism. Both line up behind their respective sections of the Canadian bourgeoisie in a dispute over privileges and profits which has nothing to do with the needs of working people. And Spartacist, which is oriented to this bureaucracy and shares its opposition to any independent movement of the working class, lines up right behind them.
VI. Sri Lanka and the Tamil question
Finally, there is the question of Sri Lanka and the development of the Tamil national separatist movement under the leadership of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Here the evolution of the national question is intimately bound up with the historical development of the Trotskyist movement itself. Today the Sri Lankan section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, the Socialist Equality Party of Sri Lanka, has the task of uniting the working class, both of the Tamil minority and the Sinhalese majority, in a common struggle for socialism. It is the only party in Sri Lanka which from its origins has waged an intransigent defense of the Tamil minority against national oppression and the racist war waged by the Sinhala bourgeoisie.
The demand for an independent Tamil nation did not arise from some eternal desire of the Tamil people for separation and self-determination. It is the product of the imperialist settlement which granted formal independence to Sri Lanka and, most decisively, the adaptation of the leadership of the working class to that settlement.
In the years immediately following independence, the fight against anti-Tamil discrimination was associated directly with the struggles of the working class and its leadership, the then-Trotskyist Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP). The LSSP posed a proletarian internationalist and socialist alternative to the ethnic chauvinism whipped up by the Sinhala bourgeoisie in an attempt to solidify its position and divert the Sinhalese workers and oppressed.
The nationalist degeneration of the LSSP fundamentally altered this relation between the Tamil question and the workers' movement. The LSSP adapted itself to the nationalist project of the Sinhala bourgeoisie and consequently to Sinhala chauvinism. This turn was consummated in the LSSP's entry into the bourgeois coalition government of 1964 and its support for a chauvinist constitution in 1972.
Tamil national separatism and ultimately the armed struggle of the LTTE were the result. It was a movement of the Tamil petty bourgeoisie based on discouragement in the prospect of a united struggle of the workers and oppressed of Sri Lanka providing a solution to the problems of ethnic and language discrimination.
The character of the Tamil separatist movement led by the LTTE has emerged clearly over the past decade. It is not a movement directed against imperialism, but rather -- as both its support for the Indian intervention in 1987 and its more recent appeals to the Clinton administration demonstrate -- it seeks imperialist intervention in order to further its own particularist demands.
It is not a movement which embodies democratic goals, but is rather ethnic exclusivist in its outlook, waging war on the Sinhalese and Moslem oppressed for the purpose of creating an ethnically homogeneous territory in the North and East of the island. Its terrorist actions in the South have been directed against the Sinhala working class, most notoriously in the 1996 bomb attack on the Central Bank building in Colombo. At the same time it uses armed violence and assassination to suppress any political opposition among the Tamils.
To advance the slogan of "self-determination for the Tamil people" in Sri Lanka today has, from a practical political standpoint, only one meaning. It is to support the national separatist project of the LTTE and to tell the Tamil workers and oppressed that the creation of a state by this movement will somehow create more favorable conditions for the masses and for the development of the struggle for socialism in Sri Lanka.
The International Committee and its Sri Lankan section categorically reject this perspective. It warns the Tamil people that the establishment of a Tamil Eelam state will not solve any of their problems. Any regime formed by the LTTE will be completely subordinate to imperialism and will impose dictatorial and exploitative conditions which are as bad, or worse, than what presently exists under the Sinhalese bourgeoisie. The realization of the LTTE's aims would represent not "independence" or "liberation" for the masses, but rather the carving out of a new free trade zone in the North to enrich transnational capital and a thin layer of the Tamil bourgeoisie.
The Sri Lankan Socialist Equality Party maintains a standpoint of unconditional defeatism in relation to the war of the Sinhalese state against the Tamils. It has stood alone in opposing all use of military violence to maintain the authority of this regime in the North and East.
The Sri Lankan Trotskyists, however, reject the attempt by middle class leftists to subordinate this struggle to support for the national separatist project of the LTTE. Instead it fights to unite the Sinhalese and Tamil workers and oppressed on a socialist and internationalist program. In opposition to both the Sri Lankan state and to the perspective of establishing a Tamil capitalist statelet in the North and East, it fights for a Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka and Tamil Eelam.
The fundamental issue which arises in regard to the national question is this: on what basis will the great questions facing mankind -- oppression, social inequality, the threat of war -- be resolved? More than 80 years ago Trotsky warned that none of these problems could be solved within the national framework, or on the basis of carving out new national states. The First World War already demonstrated that the productive forces themselves were in irreconcilable conflict with that framework. How much more true is this warning today, with the advent of globally-coordinated production and the export of productive capital all over the world?
Spartacist asserts that "Trotsky and the Fourth International he founded regarded the struggle for national independence in backward countries as an integral and important component of the world socialist revolution. The Northites now maintain that in the supposedly new era of 'globalized' capitalist production, national independence has become impossible and, indeed, reactionary..."5
Trotsky was never, as Spartacist portrays him, an unwavering enthusiast of petty-bourgeois national movements, nor an unconditional defender of national sovereignty. He rejected any fetishistic attitude toward national struggles, and insisted that "national independence" was a political chimera in the imperialist epoch.
In the 1934 manifesto War and the Fourth International, he wrote: "It must be clearly understood beforehand that the belated revolutions in Asia and Africa are incapable of opening up a new epoch of renaissance for the national state. The liberation of the colonies will merely be a gigantic episode in the world socialist revolution, just as the belated democratic overturn in Russia, which was also a semi-colonial country, was only the introduction to the socialist revolution... The national problem merges everywhere with the social. Only the conquest of power by the world proletariat can assure a real and lasting freedom of development for all the nations of our planet."6
And, in 1940, while declaring its support for the struggles of India, China and the other colonial countries for independence, the Fourth International warned that in these oppressed countries: "belated national states can no longer count upon an independent democratic development. Surrounded by decaying capitalism and enmeshed in the imperialist contradictions, the independence of a backward state inevitably will be semi-fictitious and the political regime, under the influence of internal class contradictions and external pressure, will unavoidably fall into dictatorship against the people."7
In another statement Trotsky again stressed that there was no possibility for an end to imperialist domination outside of the world socialist revolution: "The hopes of liberation of the colonial peoples are therefore bound up even more decisively than before with the emancipation of the workers of the whole world. The colonies shall be freed politically, economically and culturally, only when the workers of the advanced countries put an end to capitalist rule and set out together with the backward peoples to reorganize world economy on a new level, gearing it to social needs and not monopoly profits."8
VII. The Mexican crisis: Marxism vs. petty-bourgeois nationalism
The Spartacists directly oppose this perspective. Much of their attack on the Socialist Equality Party centers on the 1994-1995 crisis in Mexico and the refusal of the SEP to subordinate itself to petty-bourgeois nationalism in general and the Zapatista rebellion, led by Subcomandante Marcos, in particular.
Thus, it attacks a statement published in The International Workers Bulletin which declared: "The events in Mexico demonstrate once again that the only way forward for the working class in the oppressed countries is to unite with their class brothers and sisters in the imperialist centers in a common struggle for the overthrow of capitalist exploitation and the establishment of socialism."9
In reply Spartacist writes: "But what do the Northites tell the Mexican workers to do until the mass of workers in the US move to overthrow the capitalist system? The answer is effectively nothing. By counterposing an abstract conception of socialist internationalism to the actual struggles of the workers, rural toilers and oppressed peoples, the Northite tendency inexorably puts forward a defeatist line toward these struggles..."10
This line of argumentation is the hallmark of the middle class ex-radical opportunists. The working class is not immediately engaged in revolutionary struggle and therefore the perspective of socialist internationalism is "abstract" and unrealizable. A more "concrete" solution must be found in the "actual struggles" of other class forces.
Of course, revolutionary struggles will unfold within different countries at different tempos and the revolutionary party must respond to them with concrete policies and programs. There is every potential for a socialist revolution developing in Mexico before it does in the US, though the reverse is also possible.The decisive question is how these developments are understood and on what basis the revolutionary party's response is elaborated.
The class struggle in any country can only be understood to the extent that it is seen within an international context and approached on the basis of an international strategy, founded on the building of the world party of the working class. Spartacist begins exclusively from the confines of the national state framework, and consequently its political line invariably lines up with the class interests of the petty-bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie.
In the case of Mexico, the more "concrete" force discovered by Spartacist was the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). That a petty-bourgeois nationalist tendency like Spartacist should line up with the Zapatistas is only natural. Workers Vanguard writes breathlessly about the events in Chiapas in 1994: "This unexpected leftist-led revolt gripped the world's attention. But not the Northites."11
The article makes no class characterization of this movement, nor does it review the record of similar movements throughout Latin America.
The Latin American workers movement has gone through four decades of experience with guerrillaism. It has paid a terrible price for the perspective that the heroic actions of small groups of armed men, mobilizing sections of the peasantry behind them, can substitute for the conscious socialist struggle of the working class.
Whether it is Comandante Che or Subcomandante Marcos, the bankruptcy of guerrillaism has been well established. Scores of these guerrilla movements cropped up in Central and South America following the Cuban revolution. Regardless of the individual courage of those who join the guerrillas, these organizations do not express the revolutionary socialist struggle of the working class. On the contrary, they are founded on the explicit rejection of a proletarian perspective.
The middle class left's enduring infatuation with this type of movement has a definite class basis. What they see in this form of struggle is the possibility of the petty-bourgeoisie dominating the working class and playing a seemingly independent role. The guerrillaist perspective denies the necessity of turning to the working class and waging the difficult and protracted struggle for the development of socialist consciousness against the existing bureaucracies. Rather, it maintains that petty bourgeois guerrillas can revolutionize society through their own spontaneous activity. The appeal of such an outlook to the former student radicals and middle class protesters in an organization like Spartacist is undeniable.
Thousands of Latin American workers, youth and peasants lost their lives in suicidal adventures organized by these movements. Their principal political effect has been to divert any struggle to resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership in the working class and thereby bolster the grip of the Stalinists and other bureaucratic leaderships that tied the workers movement to the state. Guerrillaism thereby played a key role in paving the way for the right-wing military dictatorships which dominated the continent for decades.
In the more recent period, one after another of these movements has made its accommodation with imperialism. In Venezuela, the former leader of the guerrillas became the minister in charge of implementing IMF austerity policies. In Colombia, the M-19 group gave up the armed struggle in a settlement which provided its leaders with political posts and its members with small business loans. Others have continued an armed struggle driven neither by political program nor ideology, but financial motives, becoming bodyguards for drug traffickers and raising cash through kidnappings and extortion. In Central America all of the guerrilla organizations -- the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, El Salvador's FMLN and the URNG of Guatemala -- accepted settlements which abandoned the demands of the masses, protected the military and police assassins and provided parliamentary seats for the guerrilla leadership.
A careful examination of the politics of such organizations always reveals, behind the scenes, the hand of one or another section of the national bourgeoisie, or even this or that imperialist power. Subcomandante Marcos bases himself not on the independent power of the working class, but on a section of the exploited peasantry. But even more significant is his ability to leverage his support among sections of the bourgeoisie, both within Mexico and internationally.
"Dialogue" between the EZLN and the Mexican state became institutionalized through the formation of definite state institutions. The vague demands of Marcos for democratization, decentralization and an end to corruption were embraced by the petty-bourgeois left, sections of the ruling PRI, and even the right-wing opposition party, the PAN. The "leftist-led revolt" in Chiapas, rather than providing a way forward for Mexico's workers and oppressed, became yet another instrument for settling accounts within the Mexican ruling class.
A similar tendency was expressed in the seizure of the Japanese embassy in Lima by the MRTA guerrillas, an action which also elicited the enthusiastic praise of Spartacist. This action was not aimed at striking a revolutionary blow against capitalism in Peru, but rather at pressuring Japanese imperialism to use its influence with the Fujimori regime in order to soften its policies. It ended in an inevitable debacle.
There has been far too much experience with guerrillaism, far too many defeats and betrayals organized on this basis, for the Marxist movement to take an indulgent attitude toward such organizations. The Trotskyist movement is not at all loath to tell the harsh truth about these types of petty-bourgeois movements. The answer to the problems of the Mexican people will not be found through armed struggles organized on the basis of the peasantry, but rather through the construction of an independent political movement of the working class.
Mexico's entire history, including the original Zapatista rebellion of 1912-14, clearly demonstrates this. The movements led by Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa embraced masses of armed peasants. While they were able to conquer Mexico City, based as they were upon the parochial concerns of the peasantry, Zapata in the South and Villa in the North, they were incapable of providing an alternative to the existing state. In the end the revolution was suppressed and power consolidated in the hands of the national bourgeoisie.
In terms of its political program and perspectives, Subcomandante Marcos' movement offers nothing new. Its evolution has only demonstrated once again, albeit on a far smaller scale, the inability of the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry to play an independent revolutionary role.
The task before the Mexican working class is the establishment of an independent political party capable of rallying the oppressed rural masses behind it in a socialist revolution. This party must be formed in alliance with and as part of the class movement of the North American and the entire Latin American working class. This requires the building of a section of the International Committee in Mexico.
VIII. The perspective of permanent revolution
Spartacist writes: "In a sense, North & Co. have recreated and adopted the Stalinist caricature of Trotskyism, that international socialist revolution means simultaneous revolutions in all major capitalist countries, both advanced and backward." (emphasis in original).12
A simpler explanation is that Spartacist, in its defense of nationalism, has resurrected the same crude ideological methods employed by Stalinism in attacking Trotskyism and in particular the theory of permanent revolution.
Trotsky developed this conception based on a profound analysis of capitalism's development in Russia and, above all, its relation with the world economy and the world class struggle.
Inherent in the theory of permanent revolution was a dialectical understanding of the combined and uneven development of capitalism. Russia, the most backward of the capitalist countries had, because of its relation to the world market and the penetration of foreign capital, brought into itself the most advanced forms of production and all of the social contradictions of modern capitalism.
Trotsky insisted that only the working class, leading the great mass of peasants and acting as the emancipator of this class, could carry out the tasks of the bourgeois revolution. Once victorious, the working class would have to establish its own dictatorship and embark on socialist measures which challenged the very foundations of bourgeois property.
Against those who dismissed this prognosis on the grounds that such a socialist revolution was impossible within the framework of Russia's backwardness, Trotsky countered that taking isolated Russia as the framework was itself a fundamental error. The shape and fate of the Russian revolution would be determined above all by world conditions and the international class struggle.
A victorious revolution in Russia, he predicted, would send shock waves throughout the world provoking revolutionary struggles by the working class in the advanced capitalist countries. While Russia's backwardness precluded the establishment of socialism within the confines of its isolated national economy, the objective conditions had emerged on a world scale for the liquidation of capitalism as a global system.
The survival of the Russian revolution would depend upon its being answered by victorious proletarian revolutions beyond its borders. Only the socialist revolution in the West could ultimately protect Russia from the threat of capitalist restoration and provide the means for the realization of socialism.
The power of Trotsky's perspective stemmed precisely from its international axis. It started not from the peculiarities of Russia. Rather it comprehended the coming Russian revolution as an original combination of the conditions and features of capitalism as a world system.
The organic incapacity of the Russian bourgeoisie to carry out its own revolution, to secure democracy, agrarian reform and economic development within Russia, was itself a particular expression of a more general phenomenon which remains the fundamental contradiction underlying the crisis of world capitalism today. The forces of production developed by capitalism had, even by the beginning of this century, outgrown the limits of the nation state. The national-state form had already become an intolerable impediment to economic development. Under these conditions it was impossible to resolve the historic problems of Russia, or indeed any area of the globe, on a national basis.
Spartacist's explanation of permanent revolution begins from an entirely different standpoint. It presents this world revolutionary conception merely as a theory, developed by Trotsky in relation to Tsarist Russia and later applied to the "Third World," that revolutions could occur in the backward countries before they developed in the advanced ones.
The conclusions which follow from this nationalist distortion of permanent revolution emerge quite clearly in what Spartacist writes about Mexico. Recalling Lenin's statement that Russia constituted the "weak link" in the imperialist chain, the Workers Vanguard article states that Mexico constitutes such a weak link in the present imperialist order. But while Lenin used this formulation to indicate that the Russian Revolution would be only the beginning of the world socialist revolution, Spartacist advances a very different prognosis:
"A popular upheaval in Mexico, toppling the neocolonial PRI regime, would have a powerful radicalizing effect on the millions of Hispanic workers in the US, many of whom retain strong family ties to Mexico or Central America."13
They foresee not a socialist revolution by the Mexican working class, but rather a "popular upheaval" which would put an end to "the neocolonial PRI regime." The choice of words is not accidental. Lenin and Trotsky correctly predicted that a victorious revolution in Russia would spark revolutionary struggles by the international working class. Spartacist has a very different prediction as to the impact of a similar event in Mexico. It foresees not an international movement of the working class, but rather a radicalization of Hispanic workers in the US alone, by virtue of their "strong family ties" to the region. In other words, it welcomes the prospect that such a revolution would merely strengthen nationalist sentiment among this layer.
Nation, race, ethnicity, these for Spartacist are the "concrete" determinants of political life. Internationalism and the independent struggle of the world working class are nothing more than abstractions.
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