ILWP Books vol 6                               50p

Moscow should denounce reactionaries in the CP movement as well as anti-communist Trots

1. Break with popular-front revisionism in France, Chile,etc, and World Marxist Review.
2. Palestinian CP's reformism reflects badly on Moscow.
3. West CPs can never return to revolutionary Marxism. Proletarian dictatorship the only basis for unity, not Allende's parliamentary disaster. Sandinistas and FMLN get it right, taking power first.
4. Lenin's tactics expose renewed Chilean popular front, and CP's Iran catastrophe.
5. CP and NCP refuse to learn Allende lesson.
6. Stunts like KAL 007 expose Moscow's false friends.
7. Lenin trounces Redgrave's bogus anti-stalinism, and counter-revolutionary treachery against Cuba.
8. New Jewel feud shatters fake 'solidarity' with Grenada.
9. Evidence against Castro's view of Bishop.
10. Revolution's fairweather supporters desert at violence.
11. Castro's wild accusations against New Jewel Movement.
12. Moscow's silence damaging to its revolutionary leadership,
13. Degenerate CPGB bullies.

1  -----------------------------------------------

Moscow should end the delay in declaring an unbridgeable gulf between revolutionary Leninism and the reformist capitulation to bourgeois ideology by the Communist Parties in West Europe.

The world socialist revolution is being damaged by the confusing semblance of comradely relations continuing between the socialist camp and such outright reactionaries as Georges Marchais and the French CP.

Diplomatic relations with as many Western bourgeois parties as possible remains good revolutionary Leninist peaceful-coexistence tactics for the Soviet Government, including the Labour Party e.g., and the French CP coalition partners in the Mitterand imperialist government.  (Books vol 4)

But the confusion that Marchais and Co have anything to do with socialism, or are anything but out-and-out class collaborators with the capitalist state of the French imperialist bourgeoisie, - the clear implication of the continuing 'comradely' inter-party relations between the CPSU and the CPF, - seriously and shamefully miseducates the international working class. 

Identical charges could be laid over the continuing 'fraternal' links between the CPSU and the anti-Leninist Communist Parties of Italy, Spain, Britain, etc, etc,  etc, much of whose reformist class collaborationism frequently now degenerates into open anti-Sovietism and anti-communism. 

Nothing could more ludicrously illustrate the fraud of these joke 'Communist' parties than the French CP's support for French imperialism having its own nuclear arsenal. Marchais's pretence that the CP's support for the French imperialist government, including support for its atomic weapons, does not include support for their being targeted on the Soviet Union is the most obviously specious humbug,  and in any case alters nothing in the CRIMINAL general support for the French imperialist state and its incurable warmongering-arms race nature,  - no different from every capitalist-imperialist regime in history, - past, present,  and future.

The more widespread ideological danger from this general CP opportunism in the capitalist countries, with a potentially murderous cost to the socialist camp (in its deadly battle against imperialist subversion and Cold War encirclement,) is seen in their lining up with Reagan, Thatcher and the Pope behind the Solidarity counter-revolution in Poland. (See ILWP Books vol 3)

But the worst aspect of this covering-up of outright class hostility to Leninism by these petty-bourgeois Western CPs is the attempt in the recent World Marxist Review discussion on "Hegemony in the ongoing class struggle" following the Prague 'International Scientific Seminar' on "The Problem of Hegemony and Power, State and Society" to dress up this reactionary pseuds-corner garbage as anything remotely connected with Lenin.
                                  
A piece by Yuri Krasin, a Soviet professor, for example (In WMR No 2 1983) ,  attempted to make out a general academic case for 'communist' participation in a bourgeois government,  but carefully without debating the actual concrete examples of the betrayal by the French CP (and the Chilean CP before it) of abandoning revolutionary politics in order to tail-end capitalist state regimes which in reality can NEVER cease being potential butchers of the working class, or door-openers for such butchery, - and in Chile became just that. 

This grotesque retreat from Marxism is presented by Krasin as having actually been approved by Lenin,   - a monstrous, lying, distortion consciously dictated by a CLASS mentality, hostile to the material reality of the Soviet proletarian dictatorship and the interests of the socialist camp, and influenced by cosmopolitan bourgeois ideology.

Following up the armchair-socialist wind-baggery about "hegemony" used as a substitute for discussing working class taking of power (in the course of which an Austrian CP contribution declares with farcical spinelessness "A frontal assault on the concentrated unweakened state power of the monopolies is unsuitable in my country as a method of struggle"),  Krasin claims there is a "peaceful way to socialism" containing "parallel and closely interrelated actions in the struggle for hegemony and for power."

“Along this path the working class will have the possibility to win some positions in the power structure,  and establish transitory types of revolutionary-democratic authority where it already holds important, if not dominant,  positions.

As early as at these intermediate stages it will have the possibility of making some use of the levers of state administration to win ever larger sections of the population to socialism. This will give the masses substantially greater opportunities for acquiring the political experience vital to adopting socialist aims.

We speak of 'transitory types of social transformations' and, correspondingly, of 'transitory types of power' in keeping with the Lenin heritage. Just before the socialist resolution in Russia, Lenin wrote an article "The impending catastrophe and how to combat it" in which he dealt with the highest forms of capitalist development and coined the term 'revolutionary-democratic state'. 

This authority is called revolutionary because it operates with revolutionary methods, and democratic because it implements changes of a transitory nature.  

To use Lenin's words, this is "'still not socialism" but it is "no longer capitalism".

Bourgeois reformists and Social Democrats frequently seek to sidetrack the Communists into integration in the capitalist system. It is unquestionably possible to avoid this integration and,  at the same time,  use the levers of power in the interests of the working class. This is a contradiction but it is part of the political reality of capitalism as the balance of strength changes in favour of the working class.

Communist participation not only in government but also in the work of various state institutions can,  in principle,  help to promote the development of the class struggle if its aim is a broad assault on the power of capital. Of course it would be impossible to participate in a non-socialist government without abiding by definite rules of the game. But even within this framework there are possibilities for accumulating and mustering forces to break through the system in keeping with the interests of the working class, to mobilise the masses for profound revolutionary changes embracing the political superstructure and the whole of civil society.....

The prospect for a broad assault on the power of capital has been theoretically expressed in the anti-monopoly democracy concept elaborated by the communist movement. ... a growing escalation of profound democratic changes... .through several stages.  Their boundaries within the integral process of approach and transition to radical revolutionary changes may, of course, be blurred on account of the speed of the process....

If we accept the need for transitory forms of social changes and transitory types of power, we should always remember that since they are transitory they are projected not only into the future but also into the past. Consequently it is necessary to be prepared for transitory forms that are burdened by reality and are not always pleasant to us,  not always consistent with our desire. In particular,  speaking of the prospects for anti -monopoly democracy we should be prepared to see the entire process of the establishment and development of such democracy bearing the stamp of the identity of social democracy. ...”

This last obscure paragraph would appear to be an admission by Krasin that he now sees no essential difference between reformism and his 'communist movement' which he pretends is still Leninist.

First to extricate Lenin from this foul revisionist swamp from which the screams of thousands of cruelly betrayed and massacred Chilean workers can still be heard. Every line and comma of "The impending catastrophe" - and everything else Lenin wrote in this period - bristles with the exact OPPOSITE meaning to the poisonous slander that the crass, cretinous Krasin tries to slime it with.

It is an absolute DISTORTION to imply that Lenin's discussion of transitional measures towards socialism under a genuinely revolutionary-democratic state had anything to do with the foul counter-revolutionary class-collaboration with the capitalist state by the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries (prior to the establishment of proletarian dictatorship by the Bolsheviks) or CPF now.

The passage quoted by Krasin is, on the contrary, Lenin's proof that IF working class power was established via the Soviets, and IF the bourgeois power was overthrown, then even simple practicable steps of state monopoly capitalism already being introduced by all the imperialist powers including Russia would inevitably become steps towards socialism. It was port of an important polemic to destroy the Menshevik and SRs nonsense that the revolution, having already overthrown the autocracy, could not advance further because Russia was 'not ready' for steps towards socialism.

The argument in full, excerpted below, is equally devastating of the French and Chilean CPs' recent participation in bourgeois governments (as of the Spanish CP's equally disastrous pre-war 'popular front' coalition with the hopelessly incompetent and treacherous bourgeois republic which opened the door to fascism, just as the Chilean CP's daft repeat of this mistake did in 1973) as of the Menshevik and SR 'Marxist' revisionists it was originally aimed at. 

Lenin wrote:

“The workers and peasants, organised in unions, by nationalising the banks, making the use of cheques legally compulsory for all rich persons, abolishing commercial secrecy,  imposing confiscation of property as a penalty for concealment of incomes, etc, might with extreme ease make control both effective and universal,  - control, that is, over the rich...

But this is hampered by the fear of infringing the privileges of the bourgeoisie and destroying the 'coalition' with them. For unless truly revolutionary measures are adopted and compulsion is very seriously resorted to, the capitalists will not submit to any control, will not make known their budgets....

This requires a revolutionary dictatorship of the democracy, headed by the revolutionary proletariat; that is,  it requires that the democracy should become revolutionary IN FACT. That is the crux of the matter. But that is just what is not wanted by our Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks who are deceiving the people by displaying the flag of 'revolutionary democracy' while they are in fact supporting the reactionary-bureaucratic policy of the bourgeoisie...

A current objection in the bourgeois,  SR, and Menshevik press is a reactionary defence of backward capitalism.... It seems to say that we are not ripe for socialism, that it is too early to 'introduce' socialism, that our revolution is a bourgeois revolution and therefore we must be the menials of the bourgeoisie...

The pseudo-Marxist lackeys of the bourgeoisie (Mensheviks)...who argue in this way do not understand what imperialism is, what capitalist monopoly is, what the state is, and what revolutionary democracy is. For anyone who understands this is bound to admit that there can be no advance except towards socialism...

What the German Plekhanovs (Scheidemann, Lensch,  etc) call 'war-time socialism' is in fact war-time state-monopoly capitalism, or, to put it more simply and clearly, war-time penal servitude for the workers and war-time protection for capitalist profits.

Now try to substitute for the Junker-capitalist state and for the landowner-capitalist state, a REVOLUTIONARY-DEMOCRATIC state,  i. e. a state which in a revolutionary way abolished all privileges and does not fear to introduce the fullest democracy in a revolutionary way. You will find that, given a really revolutionary-democratic state, state-monopoly capitalism inevitably and unavoidably implies a step, and more than one step, towards socialism..,

Either we have to be revolutionary democrats in fact, in which case we must not fear to take steps towards socialism. Or we fear to take steps towards socialism, condemn them in the Plekhanov, Dan or Chernov way, by arguing that our revolution is a bourgeois revolution, that socialism cannot be 'introduced' etc, in which case we inevitably sink to the level of Kerensky, Milyukov and Kornilov, i.e. we suppress in a reactionary-bureaucratic way the 'revolutionary-democratic' aspirations of the workers and peasants. "There is no middle course. " And therein lies the fundamental contradiction of our revolution....

Imperialist war is the eve of socialist revolution. And this not only because the horrors of the war give rise to proletarian revolt - (no revolt can bring about socialism unless the economic conditions for socialism are ripe) - but because state-monopoly capitalism is a complete material preparation for socialism, the threshold of socialism, a rung on the ladder of history between which and the rung called socialism there are no intermediate rungs...

Our SRs and Mensheviks approach socialism in a doctrinaire way...they picture socialism as some remote,  unknown and dim future. But socialism is now outlined directly, practically, by every important measure that constitutes a forward step on the basis of this modern capitalism.. .universal labour conscription is a step forward on the basis of modern monopoly capitalism, a step towards the regulation of economic life as a whole, in accordance with a certain general plan,  a step towards the economy of national labour and towards the prevention of its senseless wastage by capitalism. 

In Germany it is the landowners and capitalists who are introducing universal labour conscription,  and therefore it inevitably becomes war-time penal servitude for the workers. 

But take the same institution and think over its significance in a revolutionary-democratic state. Universal labour conscription, introduced and regulated and directed by the Soviets of Workers,  Soldiers and Peasants Deputies, will still not be socialism, but it will no longer be capitalism. It will be a tremendous step towards socialism, a step from which, if complete democracy is preserved, there can no longer be any retreat back to capitalism, without unparalleled violence being committed against the masses...

If instead of the 'coalition' with the bourgeoisie which is hampering every measure of control and sabotaging production, the SRs and Mensheviks had in April effected the transfer of power to the Soviets and had directed their efforts not to playing at 'ministerial leapfrog', not to bureaucratically occupying, side by side with the Cadets, ministerial and deputy-ministerial and similar posts,  but to guiding the workers and peasants in their control over the capitalists, Russia would now be a country completely transformed economically with the land in the hands of the peasants and with the banks nationalise...

We continue to wage an imperialist war in the interests of the capitalists, in alliance with the imperialists...The war will remain an unjust,  reactionary and predatory war on Russia's part as long as she does not propose a just peace and does not break with imperialism.  The social character of the war,  its true meaning,  is not determined by the position of the enemy troops (as the SRs and Mensheviks think, stooping to the vulgarity of an ignorant yokel.) What determines this character is the policy of which the war is a continuation ('war is the  continuation of politics'), the class that is waging the war, and the aims for which it is waging this war...

[Apply Lenin's reasoning to French CP support for French nuclear armaments in a capitalist-imperialist state.]

Our SRs and Mensheviks have assumed the reactionary function of keeping the peasants under the influence of the bourgeoisie and leading them to a coalition with the bourgeoisie and not with the proletariat.

The masses are learning rapidly from the experience of the revolution. And the reactionary policy of the SRs and Mensheviks is meeting with failure: they have been beaten in the Soviets of both Petrograd and Moscow. A 'left' opposition is growing in both petty-bourgeois-democratic parties...who incline towards an alliance with the proletariat and reject an alliance (coalition) with the bourgeoisie...

The SRs and Mensheviks are trying to draw the petty bourgeoisie into an alliance with the bourgeoisie. That is the whole meaning of their 'coalition' .. In the 6 months of the revolution, this policy has suffered a complete fiasco.

The Cadets are full of malicious glee.  The revolution, they say,  has suffered a fiasco; the revolution has been unable to cope  either with the war or with economic dislocation. That is not true. It is the Cadets, and the SRs and Mensheviks who have suffered a fiasco, for this alliance has ruled Russia for 6 months, only to increase economic dislocation, and confuse and aggravate the military situation.

The more complete the fiasco of the alliance of the bourgeoisie and the SRs and Mensheviks, the sooner the people will learn their lesson and the more easily they will find the correct way out, namely, the alliance of the peasant poor (the majority of the peasantry) and the proletariat.”'

The same afternoon that Lenin wrote that last line of "The impending catastrophe" (September 14),  he wrote an article in the Bolshevik paper "Rabochy Put" again stressing that the struggle for class power between proletarian dictatorship and bourgeois dictatorship was the DECISIVE question, plus the need to destroy the capitalist state machine, - against which the conflict over all other issues could alone be properly conducted. Once again,  many of the excerpts below are aimed directly at the modern class-collaboration betrayals of the French and Chilean CPs and their Krasin apologists (all, incidentally, with far fewer historical claims to genuine 'Marxist' achievements to their names than Plekhanov, Martov, and other Mensheviks had who similarly deluded themselves that they were 'communists'.)

“'Power to the Soviets' means radically reshaping the entire old state apparatus, that bureaucratic apparatus which hampers everything democratic. It means removing this apparatus and substituting for it a new, popular one, i.e. a truly democratic apparatus of Soviets, i.e. the organised and armed majority of the people, - the workers, soldiers, and peasants.....

To make this difference clearer and more comprehensible, it is worth recalling a valuable admission made some time ago by the paper of the SRs 'Dyelo Naroda'.  It wrote that even in those ministries which were in the hands of socialist Ministers (this was written during the notorious coalition with the Cadets, when some Mensheviks and SRs were ministers), the entire administrative apparatus had remained unchanged, and hampered work...

The entire history of the bourgeois-parliamentary...countries shows that a change of ministers means very little, for the real work of administration is in the hands of an enormous army of officials. This army, however,  is  undemocratic through and through. It is connected by thousands and millions of threads with the landowners and the bourgeoisie and is completely dependent on them.  This army is surrounded by an atmosphere of bourgeois relations, and breathes nothing but this atmosphere. It is set in its ways,   petrified, stagnant, and is powerless to break free of this atmosphere. It can only think, feel, or act in the old way...

It is the greatest delusion, the greatest self-deception,  and a deception of the people, to attempt by means of this state apparatus to carry out such reforms as the abolition of landed estates without compensation, or the grain monopoly,  etc. This apparatus...is absolutely incapable of carrying out reforms which would even seriously curtail or limit the rights of capital,  the rights of 'sacred private property',  much less abolish those rights.  That is why it always happens, under all sorts of 'coalition' cabinets that include 'socialists', that these socialists, even when individuals among them are perfectly honest,  in reality turn out to be either a useless ornament of or a screen for the bourgeois government, a sort of lightning conductor to divert the people's indignation from the government, a tool for the government to deceive the people...

So it has been and so it will be as long as the bourgeois system exists and as long as the old bourgeois, bureaucratic state apparatus remains intact.”

Nothing has happened from that day to this to prove Lenin wrong,  and no amount of lying revisionist garbage from the World Marxist Review, the French CP, the Chilean CP,  etc, will do so either.

The Chilean CP is already at it again, putting out a joint statement in the
name of Luis Corvalan plus Clodomiro Almeyda and Andres Pascal Allende of the Socialist Unity and MIR (Revolutionary Left) about the crisis for Pinochet which shamefully fails to call for the arming of the people, or the transfer of state power to popular organisations, or for the destruction of the existing state apparatus which under Salvador Allende's coalition with the Communist Party was the instrument for disarming the working class in 1973 and handing them over trussed and betrayed to the Pinochet butchers. 

Krasin's imbecilities in the World Marxist Review will help Corvalan drag the Chilean CP back into another disastrous coalition with the bourgeoisie upon the overthrow of Pinochet, which will then lead to another "greatest delusion, greatest self-deception, and deception of the people" on the tragically-betrayed working class of Chile,   - unless a Leninist party can be built to give Bolshevik leadership away from this new brewing up of a Menshevik-SR catastrophe, - via proletarian dictatorship.

It is impermissible for the revolutionary socialists to betray, mislead, and confuse the working class by approving or participating in any government before bourgeois state power has been overthrown. Even in the Bolsheviks' final tactical 100-to-l shot of resurrecting the 'all power to the Soviets' slogan (after General Kornilov's end-August coup failure) in an attempt to force the Mensheviks and SRs to use the Soviets to take over state power,  Lenin was adamant on this.

A petty-bourgeois Menshevik and SR government via the Soviets would have been the closest thing possible to the overthrow of the bourgeoisie without actually becoming working class state power. But Lenin still REJECTED UTTERLY any thought that the Bolsheviks could lend their name to any such half-way-house Soviet government, and destroy at a stroke their vital standing in the eyes of the proletarian masses as the uncompromising champions of all-out REVOLUTION and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

On September 1 (just a week before writing "The impending catastrophe") Lenin wrote an appeal for the Bolshevik paper "On compromises" addressed to the Mensheviks and SRs describing "an opportunity that is extremely rare in history and extremely valuable, an opportunity that only occurs once in a while." This was for the peaceful transfer of power to a Menshevik/SR Soviet government following the collapse of the rightwing bourgeoisie with the failure of the Kornilov rebellion. Lenin in fact added a published postscript before the article had been printed which said the opportunity for such a peaceful transfer to a petty-bourgeois Soviet regime had ALREADY disappeared because of the bourgeoisie's rapid regrouping around Kerensky. But he wanted his tactical thoughts published anyway.

The compromise would have been for the Bolsheviks to stop agitating for the immediate revolutionary transfer of power to a working class dictatorship if the Mensheviks and SRs would take over state authority through the Soviets. The Bolsheviks would then take their chances of winning proletarian power THROUGH open democratic struggle inside the Soviets.

In Lenin's own word (in the pre-postscript part of the appeal), it is the AUTOMATIC uncompromisingly REVOLUTIONARY assumptions he makes in passing which expose the anti-Leninist revisionist treachery of Krasin, the World Marxist Review, the French, Chilean, and other Western CPs.

Lenin declared:

“The compromise would amount to the following. The Bolsheviks, without making any claim to participate in the government - which is impossible for the internationalists unless a dictatorship of the proletariat and the poor peasants has been realised - would refrain from demanding the immediate transfer of power to the proletariat and the poor peasants and from employing revolutionary methods of fighting for this demand. A condition that is self-evident and not new to the SRs and Mensheviks would be complete freedom of propaganda. 

...The Mensheviks and SRs, being the government bloc, would then agree (assuming that the compromise had been reached) to form a government wholly and exclusively responsible to the Soviets, the latter taking over all power locally as well. This would constitute the 'new' condition. I think the Bolsheviks would advance no other conditions, trusting that the revolution would proceed peacefully, and party strife in the Soviets would be peacefully overcome thanks to really complete freedom of propaganda and to the immediate establishment of a new democracy in the composition of the Soviets (new elections) and in their functioning.

Perhaps this is already impossible? Perhaps. But if there is even one chance in a hundred, the attempt at realising this opportunity is still worth while.”

The underlined section's clear-cut refusal to compromise the socialist revolution with bourgeois power is in a separate world from the stinking revisionism of Krasin and the World Marxist Review which seeks just such a compromise, lying that "along this path the working class will...win some positions in the power structure and establish transitory types of revolutionary-democratic authority. ... at these intermediate stages...making use use of the levers of state administration."

This is a LIE. It is petty-bourgeois compromisers, not the working class, who will reap the wretched benefits of coalition with the bourgeois state power. The working class will be sold out, - as they were by the SRs and Menshevik 'Marxists', by the Chilean CP 'communists', and as they are being by the French CP 'communists'. 

For Krasin and the World Marxist Review then to grotesquely distort Lenin and say: "We speak of 'transitory types of social transformations' and of 'transitory types of power' in keeping with the Lenin heritage" is a serious FALSIFICATION and a scandalous stain on Moscow and the socialist camp. It should be rectified immediately.

Krasin's WMR idiocies also degenerately revise Leninism in pretending that 'transitory forms of social changes' - i. e. reforms in non-pretentious language - can be achieved by 'democracy bearing the stamp of the identity of social democracy' - i.e. by reformism. This is an anti-Marxist LIE. Reforms are achieved ONLY as the result of the determination of the international working class to fight for the REVOLUTIONARY overthrow of imperialism, - as most schoolchildren in the USSR could hopefully tell 'Professor' Krasin from a mere smattering of acquaintance with Leninism.

It is equally fraudulent to talk of "profound anti-monopoly changes" due to reformism under capitalism. WHERE?. Another "deception of the people", in Lenin's words.

This criticism of revisionism within the communist movement has nothing in common, of course, with Trotskyism's "everything is rotten" betrayal of the Soviet Revolution.

The three latest books by the International Leninist Workers Party all expose Trotskyism far more effectively than anything published by any other opponents of these 'ultra-left' anti-Soviet anti-communist reactionaries. Indeed it is the West European proponents of the "anti-monopoly democracy concept elaborated by the communist movement" who stand right in the Trotskyist-Reagan-Thatcher-CIA camp of counter-revolution in supporting Solidarity in Poland (see same ILWP publications).

The ILWP's stand is a Leninist criticism of conservative revisionism in the communist movement. It develops the polemic with CP revisionism elaborated in Bulletins 196 & 197 on the question of Palestine, for example, and in the three above-mentioned publications on the retreat from proletarian dictatorship in Poland, for example, due to confused revisionist inability  to understand Lenin's international revolutionary perspectives.

All other political groups in Britain have proved incapable of engaging in a sensible polemic with the ILWP on these and other matters. But these questions require urgent discussion in the international workers movement. Silence on these matters would be another "great deception of the people".   (Bulletin 200)

2 ------------------------------------------------

Shamefully among those critical of the 'rejectionist' policy, put forward by the anti-Arafat revolt in the PLO led by Abu Mousa, is the Palestinian Communist Party.

Substituting revisionist idealism for Marxism, the PCP has long declared its general sympathy with the Arafat line of 'realistic' capitulation to Zionist aggression, differing only on how great a concession to make to this immigrant Western colonialism.

A recent statement (World Marxist Review, No 2,1983) for example, dismisses rejectionists as "carrying on the struggle to attain an unrealistic goal, which they formulate as 'liberation of the whole of Palestine'. It also specifically opposes the idea "that the newly formed state (West Bank and Gaza) should be used as a basis for carrying on the struggle to attain an unrealistic goal" (complete liberation).

As well as revealingly belittling the rejectionist position by describing it within quotation marks as though it was wholly unreal, the PCP spells out its unscientific approach to class struggle, (which it describes as 'realistic' but which reeks of defeatist-subjectivism.)

Opting for the ludicrous, West Bank and Gaza Strip, divided mini-state as a PERMANENT solution (less than 20% of Palestine for the MAJORITY Palestinian nation) but feigning to differ from the Reagan-Arafat plan by loudly proclaiming a "principled" refusal to accept Jordanian joint-sovereignty over this handkerchief-sized 'state', the PCP declares:

"On the part of the Palestinians, this sacrifice is a contribution to the efforts to surmount the crisis which has gripped the Arab national liberation movement ."

The crisis is caused by the domination of the area by the imperialist-capitalist slump and the aggressive political instability of Zionist colonialism within that general decay of capitalism.

The obvious logical solution, let alone the Leninist-revolutionary solution, would be to destroy the agencies of imperialist-capitalist slump-decay in the region.

The PCP's solution? GIVE IN to Zionist aggression and try to live contentedly on the 20% crumbs of Palestine which have been offered by the Reagan plan, (an 'offer' which in reality stands not the slightest chance of implementation with or without the farcical proposal of co-participation by King Hussein, a feudal monarch.)

The PCP's capitulation to subjectivist-defeatism goes on: 

"It (the sacrifice) is designed to help beat back the ever fiercer attacks of imperialism and Zionism."

Arafat has been peddling this 'negotiating' stance for 10 years, secretly discussing all kinds of possible 'sacrifices' with his Saudi Arabian and Washington backers. And what did it achieve? Its unrealistic and unscientific idealism, believing that warmongering crisis-ridden imperialism can be reasoned with as a permanent solution  to the international class struggle, - encouraged the Zionists to launch the bloodbath in the Lebanon, the most humiliating and catastrophic setback for Arab bourgeois nationalism for a generation, (which hopefully and deservedly will bring Arafat's downfall.)

Certainly the Bolsheviks signed the humiliating Brest-Litovsk capitulation to German imperialism. But Lenin repeated again, and again, and again (see ILWP Books vol 4 on Lenin's revolutionary peace tactics) that warmongering imperialist aggression would INEVITABLY have to return to attacking the USSR sooner or later. And the Soviet Union was entirely turned over to preparing for the day when that attack would return. It came as anticipated, once again through German militarism, the most aggressive vehicle of world imperialism. And only by finally SMASHING and GAINING SUPERIORITY over German imperialism in the 1941-1945 war was the endless threat of more and worse Brest capitulations finally extinguished for the USSR from that particular source.

The Palestine people's national (and unavoidably socialist) future cannot possibly coexist alongside the KNOWN and UNALTERABLE pattern of Zionist imperialist aggression, no more than the weaker Soviet Union could alongside aggressive German imperialist militarism. 

It is not a question of the character or intentions of German or Zionist imperialism in the two comparable historical periods. They only differ from the rest of the world bourgeoisie by being more successful. It is a question of such aggressively successful bourgeoisies coming to the forefront in the 20th century when the dominant positions in the capitalist world's markets and institutions were already monopolised by others. Lebensraum to the east was all that was left for German imperialist militarism. Lebensraum over 'Biblical' Israel (and beyond) is all that is left for aggressive Zionist militarism, deliberately created by the West to be just such a PERMANENT scourge of any possible revolutionary socialist flourishing of Arab nationalism.

Zionism's insatiable colonial domineering (and its related crisis-ridden decay) will eventually, of course, help create the very conditions that will finally produce the Arab socialist revolution.

But the bourgeoisie will NEVER see it that way. Their insoluble general crisis will ALWAYS drive the imperialist bourgeoisie towards more and more violence against the socialist and national liberation movements.

Only DEFEATING imperialism by socialist revolution will finally resolve the international class struggle and the problem of imperialist warmongering. This was Lenin's firm, repeated view, which in no way conflicted with Lenin's diplomatic tactic of genuinely struggling for peaceful coexistence between the two world systems. (See ILWP Books vol 4).

Tactical retreats can become necessary at any time, as the Palestinians have bitterly discovered. 

But to translate this into a "principled" acceptance of 20% of Palestine as a PERMANENT solution for the people of Palestine (alongside UNDEFEATED Zionist colonialism) is idealist nonsense. 

The PCP goes on: 

"It (this sacrifice) is simultaneously a step hoping to strengthen world peace, which is bound to benefit from the elimination of the most dangerous seat of tension that could at any moment flare into an international conflict." 

But that is EXACTLY what the PCP's "sacrifice" FAILS to achieve. 

Where is there any "elimination" of this permanent 'seat of tension' when 80% of the land of Palestine belonging to the 4-million-strong stateless nation of Palestine, remains under colonial domination by the West, and in the very same circumstances (of imperialist aggression exploiting colonial weakness) which have produced non-stop warmongering tension PERMANENTLY in the area going all the way back to the 1940s and before, with some of the worst taking place within the last 12 months following yet more Palestinian retreats and "sacrifices"?

Ten years 'sacrificing' retreats by Arafat and the withdrawal from Beirut, far from bringing peace, have encouraged Zionist aggressiveness to a new fever pitch of sturmfuehrer blitzkrieg annexationism, as seen in Hebron in the last few days.

Zionist imperialism is well on the way to the full colonisation of the West Bank and Gaza. Expropriations of Arab land and water rights are being stepped up daily. And the more that some sections of Palestinian nationalism are prepared to negotiate for this 20%crust of the Palestinian homeland as the FINAL SETTLEMENT of the Palestinian nation's claim, the more will 'Biblical Israel' fanaticism strengthen within Zionism, - ensuring that even this miserable 'sacrifice' of accepting just 20% of Palestine will NEVER be granted.

And when further retreats on the Palestinian people's rightful return to settle in ALL of Palestine have been conceded and the entire West Bank is under permanent SETTLED Zionist control, would even that capitulation,  - the end of the Palestinian nation, - bring peace? Not the slightest chance. For then the great drive would immediately start for the Jewish resettlement of 'Biblical' Transjordan.

Nor can this perspective be fudged by simply casting speculative and irresponsible doubt about 'whether Begin will last that long', or 'whether the aggressive greed of the Gush Emunim might not peter out', etc. It is the UNCHANGEABLE nature of crisis-ridden imperialist economic colonialism which drives the settlement and annexation process forward, - MATERIAL causes, not ideas in the head.

An advanced Western bourgeois colony forcibly implanted in the heart of the far less advanced bourgeois nationalist Arab homelands cannot possibly proceed other than by ever-increasing DOMINATION of the region, - by all and every means.

To back up its idealist ignoring of material reality of the international class struggle, the PCP falls into the classical conservative-reformist trap of condemning some Palestine resistance tactics in terms of 'offended' world bourgeois public opinion, only barely refraining from shouting "murdering terrorists" themselves alongside the cynical gutter capitalist press.

Rejectionism is described as a "harmful tendency.... putting forward unrealistic extremist slogans and staging reckless acts which harm our people's struggle and give world opinion the wrong impression about the substance of its just cause."

Such is the IDEOLOGICAL reformist degeneration from Leninism of the PCP.

Lenin's approach to terrorism was ENTIRELY DIFFERENT,  sympathising greatly with the heroic blows struck against the enemy but convinced that the development of a mass party of revolutionary theory would be able to lead a widespread political mobilisation of the proletariat which would far more decisively bring down reaction. The PCP, on the other hand, shows a poor grasp of Leninism on every question. Which would make ANY criticism by it of terrorism extremely suspect.

And its specific criticism of terrorism reprinted above in fact shows the most lamentable influence of crass BOURGEOIS public opinion, the plaything of the Reagan-Thatcher international 'free' press campaign farcically to make 'terrorism' the scapegoat and CAUSE of the world's problems instead of the reality that terrorism is the heroic/tragic CONSEQUENCE of imperialism's domination. The PCP comes shamefully close to blaming terrorism as the cause of Palestine's difficulties instead of the other way around.

In 1899 in "A draft programme of our party", Lenin wrote:

"The means of struggle should be...agitation, revolutionary organisation, transition at a suitable moment to determined attack, not rejecting IN PRINCIPLE (original emphasis) even terror....

The programme should leave the question of means open,  allowing the choice of means to the militant organisations and to Party congresses that determine the tactics of the Party...

Questions of tactics will be discussed by the Party newspaper as they arise and will be eventually decided at Party congresses.

The same applies to the question of terror. The Social-Democrats (the term used for Marxists in that period) must imperatively undertake the discussion of this question,   - of course from the standpoint of tactics and not of principle, - because the growth of the movement leads of its own accord, spontaneously, to more frequent cases of the killing of spies and to greater, more impassioned indignation in the ranks of the workers and socialists who see ever greater numbers of their comrades being tortured to death in solitary confinement and at places of exile.

In order to leave nothing unsaid, we will make the reservation that, in our own personal opinion, terror is NOT advisable as a means of struggle AT THE PRESENT MOMENT, that the Party (as a party) must renounce it (until there occurs a change of circumstances that might lead to a change of tactics) and concentrate ALL ITS ENERGY on organisation and regular delivery of literature.”

In May 1901 in "Where to Begin", Lenin wrote:

In principle we have never rejected, and cannot reject, terror.  Terror is one of the forms of military action that may be perfectly suitable and even essential at a definite juncture in the battle, given a definite state of the troops and the existence of definite conditions.

But the important point is that terror, at the present time,  is by no means suggested as an operation for the army in the field, an operation closely connected with and integrated into the entire system of struggle, but as an independent form of occasional attack unrelated to any army.

Without a central body and with the weakness of local revolutionary organisations, this in fact is all that terror can be. We therefore declare emphatically that under the present conditions, such a means of struggle is inopportune and unsuitable; that it diverts the most active fighters from their real task, the task which is most important from the standpoint of the interests of the movement as a whole; and that it disorganises the forces, not of the government, but of the revolution."

Even at this point, Lenin is in no way disagreeing with the tactics of terror as in the reformist-bourgeois PCP's hostility to terrorism as "reckless acts" which "harm our people's struggle" and "give world opinion the wrong impression". Lenin's criticism is purely a tactical one made AMONG REVOLUTIONARIES about the best use to which Marxist cadres can be put in the matter of securing the downfall of reaction. The PCP, on the other hand, oppose terror within the framework of a programme which is seeking the CONSOLIDATION of reaction PERMANENTLY over 80% of Palestinian territory. 

Lenin immediately elaborates on precisely this point:

"We need but recall the recent events. With our own eyes we saw that the mass of workers and 'common people' of the towns pressed forward in struggle, while the revolutionaries lacked a staff of leaders and organisers. Under such conditions, is there not the danger that, as the most energetic revolutionaries go over to terror, the fighting contingents, in whom alone it is possible to place serious reliance, will be weakened? Is there not the danger of rupturing the contact between the revolutionary organisations and the disunited masses of the discontented, the protesting, and the disposed-to-struggle, who are weak precisely because they are disunited?

Yet it is this contact that is the sole guarantee of our success. Far be it from us to deny the significance of heroic individual blows, but it is our duty to sound a vigorous warning against becoming infatuated with terror, against taking it to be the chief and basic means of struggle, as so many people strongly incline to do at present. Terror can never be a regular military operation; at best it can only serve as one of the methods employed in a decisive assault."

The PCP's defeatist idealism, proceeding from their own subjective fears rather than from objective reality, - reaches its most abject depths when the PCP declares: 

"The Lebanese war, which involved the monstrous massacre of Palestinians, showed once again how unrealistic the 'rejection tendency' slogans are."

This stands reality completely on its head. The Lebanese massacre—blitzkrieg showed 'once again' the exact OPPOSITE,  - namely how 'unrealistic' is ANY proposal for permanent coexistence with Zionist colonialism, (- let alone the total capitulation to imperialist aggression which the PCP proposes,-) - which would ultimately be absolutely FATAL for the Palestinian people as a nation.

With the most astonishing heartlessness and opportunism, the PCP then goes on to say that: 

"Most of them (of the rejection tendency) come from areas incorporated in Israel (i.e, in the areas of Palestine annexed and colonised in the infamous United Nations partition and the 1948 first 'Israeli' war of aggressive conquest).

For them, the slogan of establishing an independent Palestinian state on the territories occupied in 1967 (the second 'Israeli' war of conquest) does not provide an immediate solution of the problem of a return to hearth and   home."

The qualification 'no immediate solution' is an appalling sleight-of-hand here. The PCP's statement categorically declares that there can NEVER be any thought, now, of ever driving Zionist imperialism out of its 1947 UN colony bequest or its 1948 military aggression which seized MORE THAN HALF of the minority crumbs of Palestine that had been left to the Arabs by the UN.

The PCP goes on: 

"But the bestial butchery perpetrated by the Israeli criminals and their agents, the Lebanese fascists, has driven home the fact that the Palestinians have a vital need for their own state as a reliable refuge against fresh persecutions and massacres."

In the first place, of course, the idea of a Gaza and West Bank mini-state (or anywhere else, come to that) being ever a "safe refuge" for the 4-million exiled Palestinian nation all the time imperialism lasts, is a fraudulent   defeat-ridden illusion.

Zionism's entire strategy, ever since the imperialist-dominated UN first handed over
56% of the territory of Palestine in November 1947 to the new representative of Western colonialism, - has been for the DESTRUCTION of the Palestinians as a nation; for without that, the Zionists could never rest content that their allotment under the rotten UN decision would remain theirs for all time. The Lebanon massacre-blitzkrieg and the speeded-up forcible settlement in the last 12 months of the 1967 conquests is proof of that UNCHANGING strategy, if proof were really needed.

Even if the Leninist view of imperialism's incurable warmongering crisis is rejected and the PCP's revisionism is accepted that the Zionists can be persuaded to be reasonable and non-aggressive towards the Palestinians if sufficiently humiliating retreats are made, simple bourgeois-idealist logic still works against the PCP's perspective.

It would take just a couple of acts of individual terror from the embittered and despairing Palestinian masses, crowded into the unviable Gaza and West Bank mini-state,   for the Zionists to prepare to lash out and impose their law-and-order diktat once again, just as they have done into the Lebanon without any justification whatever. Or is the PCP preparing to go all the way in reformist capitulation to the Thatcher-Reagan 'destroy terrorism' lobby and brutally police the terrorists itself, as the British reformist Labour Party did in imposing the police-military dictatorship on the occupied, north of Ireland?

Secondly, it is grossly misleading to imply that the 'rejection tendency' has no interest in acquiring at least half-a-loaf to start with (Gaza and the West Bank) as a 'refuge' from which to redouble the fight to liberate the rest of Palestine. That is exactly the 'rejectionist' position, (as the PCP acknowledges elsewhere by attacking this very notion as, once again, being 'unrealistic' (see above).

Thirdly, the PCP holds completely anti-Leninist views on how such reforms as a Gaza-West Bank mini-state are achieved anyway. Marx and Lenin always made it clear that reforms are only gained as a result of the fight for all-out triumph of the complete revolution, - in this case as a result of the all-out revolutionary struggle for the COMPLETE liberation of the WHOLE of Palestine from Zionist colonialism. Those who just aim for reforms merely get in the way of the revolution and play into the hands of reaction, Marxism-Leninism clearly teaches.

The PCP dishonestly plays with words again in the next sentence, - deceitfully and fraudulently describing this 'refuge' as "the shortest and most realistic way (for the Palestinians) to the land of their native country from which they had fled."

But not, of course, for those Palestinians who fled in terror from the 56% of Palestine first handed over to the Zionist murder gangs, or those who fled from a further 24% of Palestine immediately annexed with the utmost brutality by the new imperialist colonialism in the 1948 war of conquest. There is no question, for the PCP, of any of them every going back to 'hearth and home', although nothing is said on this point at this stage. Presumably, theirs is to be the 'sacrifice',  although once again this is unstated.

The PCP concludes with a long, unconvincing rigmarole 'proving' that their refusal to boycott West Bank local Arab elections held under the jackboot of occupying Zionist     colonialism was a 'triumph' of 'Marxist-Leninist' tactics.

From a distance, it looks much more like another disastrous reformist retreat from a Leninist revolutionary strategy. 

Many bourgeois Arab nationalist activities on the West Bank have had more than a trace of collaboration about them, and it is hardly surprising that several of the local Palestinian mayors have come out FOR Arafat and AGAINST the rejectionist challenge to his reformist capitulation to imperialist pressure.

The PCP also makes great play of opposing the 'over-conciliatory' wing of the PLO resulting from "some strata of the Palestinian bourgeoisie beginning to lose their patience and steadfastness......entertaining illusions about US 'solutions' and the proposed Jordanian role. But significantly it makes no criticism of Arafat directly despite all this verbiage.

This WMR statement by the PCP looks like an advanced condition of incurable reformist-revisionism, depressingly similar to the utterly bankrupt and doomed CPs in most of West Europe, especially Britain, Italy, Spain, and France. 

It is doubly significant that the PCP's whole anti-Leninist line should have such close historical lineage with one of the old Moscow leadership's more notorious retreats from revolutionary understanding when it gave in to the rotten
imperialist aggressive swindle and the bankrupt illusions of the 1947 partition-'settlement' of the Palestinian question. 

It is time for the revived revolutionary understanding in Moscow now to denounce that infamous 1947 UN imperialist sell-out of the Palestinian people to Western colonialism.             (Bulletin 197)

3 -------------------------------------------------

The revisionism within the official 'communist' movement and the 'left' in general in the West seeks in all situations to undermine the socialist revolution via the subterfuge of demanding the 'broadest possible anti-monopoly alliance'.

In Britain, the hordes of centrist and trotskyist 'communist' groups hopefully heap their anti-dialectical bourgeois illusions on the left wing of the Labour Party "steadily winning the battle for democratisation and a truly socialist programme".

This complacent comfortable middle class dream is a million miles away from Marxism-Leninism's understanding of the insoluble antagonistic contradictions between the interests of the working class and ALL reformism, 'left' and right, in a period of terminal capitalist crisis, which can only expose Labour's irrelevance and end in all-out revolutionary confrontation.

In Chile, for example, these anti-dialectical centrist illusions, which had their original disastrous expression in Allende's CP-backed 'parliamentary road to socialism' which led only to Pinochet's torture chambers and death camps, now reappear in calls for 'left unity' which would seek to overthrow the dictatorship but leave the capitalist state which created it intact.

A joint declaration by the general secretaries of the CP, Allende's Socialist Party, and the MIR (Revolutionary Left) claims that their 'left unity' will achieve "justice, democracy, and social progress" by such measures as "democratising the state" and "democratising the armed forces".

This nonsense is supported by the World Marxist Review, journal of the official international CP alliance, which pretends that 'parliamentary road' revisionism is everywhere containing imperialism through 'anti-monopoly democracy', and taking steps towards working class socialist power via coalition seats in bourgeois governments, (as in France, and as in Chile under Allende). 

In the ILWP Bulletin 200, the WMR's foul attempts to describe these criminal class compromises as 'Leninist' policies was refuted with extensive quotes from Lenin specifically and vehemently denouncing such compromises. Bulletin 200 also noted how revisionist collaboration to avoid proletarian dictatorship had opened the door in Chile under Allende to the subsequent fascist butchery from the undemolished capitalist state machinery.

Since then, the full enormity of the French CP's class collaboration with the imperialist state in Mitterand's "socialist coalition" government has been brought home by Paris's monstrous military intervention against the popular revolution in Chad, helping out CIA propaganda for Reagan's even more criminal armed aggression plans to wipe out Ghadafi's anti-imperialist regime in Libya. This vicious conspiracy against national liberation elements of the world socialist revolution underlines Lenin's understanding that revisionist petty bourgeois parties, masquerading as 'lefts' and 'Marxists', are themselves potential butchers of the working class, and not just coalition dupes who open the door to such savagery by the imperialist state.

It only confirms the thoroughly rotten pro-imperialist history of the French CP which on several occasions actively assisted the French capitalist state to wage war against the Vietnamese and Algerian national liberation struggles, and which consistently supports French imperialism's nuclear armoury which is part of NATO's warmongering arms race against the Soviet Union and the world socialist revolution.

Moscow undermines its own heroic and historic stance in helping protect the world socialist revolution and national liberation struggle by its failure to denounce the anti-Leninist imbecilities of the World Marxist Review, and the rotten reactionariness of the French Communist Party's policies (as of those of most of the West European CPs who are incurably corrupted with revisionism).

The same anti-dialectical degeneracy is still in evidence here as in the Western left's illusion of steady progress to socialism through reformist coalition 'pressure',- both arising out of a failure to grasp that the long postwar capitalist boom was a very misleading temporary phenomenal and nothing like the 'permanent solution' to catastrophic economic crisis within the West which bourgeois ideological influences constantly (and successfully) trumpeted. Moscow will be dragged back from its revisionist illusions by the effect on the socialist camp's material interests of the sharpening aggressive contradictions within imperialism, and the rapid expansion of the world socialist revolution.

But those CP layers WITHIN the capitalist countries which have made their peace with bourgeois democracy are now irrevocably on the side of counter-revolution in the international class struggle once it is pushed to the sharpest extremes.

Already at this relatively early stage of sharpening antagonism between bourgeois democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat, many Western CPs have openly adopted anti-Soviet positions (on Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Poland, Sakharov, etc). These irreconcilable class differences can only become incomparably more bitter and more widespread as the collapsing 'free' world's anti-communist propaganda stunts and military provocations grow more and more hysterical and outrageous.

The factual evidence increases daily, for example, that Solidarity in Poland was nothing but an enormously costly and lavishly organised subversion of the Polish workers state by the CIA and the Vatican, (which nearly bankrupted itself in the process through its secret funding via Roberto Calvi's crooked Banco Ambrosiano dealings and other Mafia freemasonry graft, and which has now embarked on a series of sensational murders to cover up its traces of international political warmongering.)

But the Western CP revisionists are unreachably beyond reason on such issues. They are now so corrupted by bourgeois propaganda illusions about 'free trade unions', 'pluralistic democracy', 'individual liberty', and 'cultural freedom', - and so embarrassed and appalled by any mention of the dictatorship of the proletariat, - that many are more hysterically anti-communist, anti-Soviet, and anti-revolutionary than Mrs Thatcher's maiden aunt.

Such revisionist CP circles in the West have made a once-and-for-all CLASS break with proletarian revolution and Leninist dictatorship. The Italian CP, for example, is now convinced that the entire Soviet revolution has been a disastrously bad example for workers in the West and has no relevance at all to future European 'socialism'.

But Moscow's own grasp of Leninism is so patchy that it still hopes for some sort of recovery by the Italian CP from these bankrupt idiocies, as by the other equally anti-Leninist Western CP degenerates. It would be as easy to recruit Thatcher or Pinochet to Marxism-Leninism.

Weak grasp of Leninist theory also lies behind the confusion that a popular-front approach to socialist revolution is no different from the apparent popular-front success of the Nicaraguan revolution's approach to socialism, or the Democratic Front's negotiating stance on behalf of the Salvadorean guerrilla alliance.

But there can be no comparison between tactics possible AFTER the authority of the Leninist leadership and its perspectives for revolutionary dictatorship have been established, and the tactics necessary to achieve that leadership and rout all the revisionist, reformist, centrist, and 'left' confusion-mongers BEFORE there can be any hope of establishing such authority.

The popular-front jockeying in Chile is another way of selling out the socialist revolution because of 'parliamentary road to socialism' illusions on the WMR and Western CP models, exactly as already achieved once by the Allende-CP government in 1970-1973. The broad left unity in Nicaragua and El Salvador, on the other hand, is the way to complete the socialist revolution following the unassailable seizure of power by the armed masses (dictatorship of the proletariat) in Nicaragua as a whole and in the liberated areas of El Salvador,- both of which have become the unchallengeable authoritative perspective for those countries' futures.

The key difference is precisely the unchallenged Leninist revolutionary leadership established at the core of the Sandinista movement long before power was taken, and likewise in the FMLN guerrilla alliance.

The authority of these vanguard political groups was established precisely in opposition to the old reformist rubbish of CP revisionism, Socialist Party reformism and 'leftism', and the whole discredited nonsense of popular-frontism, the essence of 'parliamentary road to socialism' illusions.

The founder and inspiration of the Salvadorean FMLN, Cayetano Carpio, explained this in his historic statement to the Cuban press in 1980.

'If there hadn't arisen a stubborn majority within the Communist Party of El Salvador and the organisations influenced by it which blocked at all costs the advance towards the political-military strategy that the people needed for moving towards new stages of struggle, no need would have arisen to create a revolutionary organisation such as the Farabundo Marti People's Liberation Forces (the FPL which is at the heart of the FMLN)....It was necessary to wage within the CP and ether organisations an ideological struggle that took many years.  It began virtually with the victory of the Cuban Revolution, when the most clear-sighted people in those organisations began to feel that a dogmatic line could not lead the revolutionary process into the new stages that were required.... The most clear-sighted people had to withdraw from the organisations to which they had virtually devoted their lives...it was necessary  to create more effective instruments of struggle for the people.... I resigned as general secretary of the Communist Party of El Salvador when it became evident that it wasn't possible to get the Party to understand the need for a political-military strategy,  i.e. an overall revolutionary strategy,  and that this had to be demonstrated to our people in practice...

Once the correctness of the political-military strategy was demonstrated in practice, when it was clear it could no longer be denied, the different honest forces in the country could find in the new organisation a point of contact on a new basis....

In other words, after it was demonstrated that revolutionary struggle was, and is, the only course, then and only then was it possible to seek other paths in the direction of greater unity...'

In other words, Cayetano's FM-FPL first established itself in ten years of heroic revolutionary struggle as the undisputed leaders of the Salvadorean masses, and then it was possible to seek even broader unity around the irresistible progress of the revolutionary war. The Democratic Front, drawing in ever-wider sections of the Salvadorean people opposed to the collapsing and increasingly tyrannical military dictatorship, has in effect been established AFTER the acknowledged, unchallengeable triumph of the armed masses, organised by the Leninist vanguard party, as the leading force now and henceforth of El Salvador society.

In other words, the dictatorship of the proletariat has already been established in the liberated areas where economic, social, and medical reorganisation of a revolutionary kind are run by the people under the protection of the armed masses, exactly as outlined in the FPL's brilliant analysis of proletarian dictatorship in its June 1976 statement on strategy.

Therefore there is no possible comparison between the hopeless popular-front reformist stumbling around of the 'united left' in Chile where the authority of a Leninist revolutionary vanguard and its strategy of rule through the armed masses (proletarian dictatorship) has far from been established, - and the Democratic Front in El Salvador in what is in a sense already a post-revolution situation (in that the form and organisational leadership of the victory over the dictatorship has already been decided beyond any challenge now.) 

Carpio described this process. 

'We set out to create the conditions which, in turn, created the Marxist working class party, - with the masses, the guerrilla forces, the army, the militia, with a people in arms, a people struggling for their immediate demands...

With the growth of our influence among the masses, a base began to arise for the development of the guerrillas, and, with the mounting militancy of the masses, a broad base for popular violence began to take shape that led to the setting up of mass self-defence corps and the people's militia .. And clearly all this in turn helped to create the conditions and the need for a political vanguard organised as a Party. ...

Without a Party it was impossible to direct such a ramified movement. We needed to adopt the structure and essence of a Marxist party of the working class. It was and is impossible to direct such a ramified popular movement without the Party.'

In hailing the expansion of the FPL's influence to establish the FMLN and Democratic Front, Carpio made it clear that the Leninist dictatorship strategy remained the unchallengeable essence of the Salvadorean revolution.

'In reaching the conviction that there is no more room for demagogic solutions...when no one can claim any more that there is any solution other than armed struggle combined with all the other forms of people's struggle, there has been a rise in the level of awareness of all the organisations that want the happiness and well-being of our people.  It is on that higher basis that coordination has been put forward as the start to the process of revolutionary unity....

We who have realised that popular revolution is the only solution also realise that we must forge close unity to transform the popular movement into an uncontainable torrent that will sweep away oppression and exploitation.

The revolutionary organisations and we who lead them are absolutely determined to consolidate, bolster and develop that unity, to raise it to increasingly higher stages, notwithstanding the difficulties that may present themselves in the process.

If we have demonstrated that our people are capable of confronting all the offensives of imperialism and the ruling classes so far, we will also be capable of demonstrating that we are sufficiently mature as to succeed in solving any problem that may turn up on the road to unity of the revolutionary and popular forces...

The time is not so far off when we will build a people's revolutionary government...the people are marching forward, and there is no force capable of defeating them. No one and nothing will stop the liberation process of the Salvadorean people...

These steps toward unity are firm, conscientious ones. In addition, we are determined to carry the process to its last consequences...Stages and channels must be established that will lead to the formation of a single bloc of unity, first on the basis of the political-military organisations and finally the democratic organisations.'

In finding room in this way for anti-imperialist social democrats and even progressive Christian Democrats opposed to the Salvadorean tyranny, Carpio's perspective shows the Salvadorean revolution plotting the same path to unassailable armed people's power (proletarian dictatorship), defended by the broadest-possible anti-imperialist coalition, that the Leninist core of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua successfully accomplished.

In this perspective, the Sandinistas and the FMLN are firmly in step with Leninism which also sought to establish the broadest-possible anti-imperialist unity as soon as armed people's power (proletarian dictatorship) was unassailably established inside Russia, - recruiting White officers to run the Red Army, bourgeois experts and administrators, anarchists and left SRs and others to the government, handing land to capitalist farmers as well as poor peasants, and giving the running and ownership of much of industry over to monopoly industrialists and imperialist concessionaires fully six years AFTER the revolution in order to maximise the stability of the Soviet regime in the face of imperialist encirclement, preparing the ground for the socialist leap forward later.

From the middle class 'ultra-left' (Trotskyism), the Sandinistas and the FMLN, are jeered at for their 'betrayal', just as these petty bourgeois Western armchair socialists have jeered at every successful socialist revolution in history.

This shallow bourgeois impressionism is then used differently in other contexts to enable the 'ultra-lefts' to back the right wing in circumstances such as the Chilean moves to re-establish the disastrous popular front.

What unites such tendencies is something very fundamental they all share - their middle class anti-Leninism. The notion of 'broad unity' as an end in itself in the period prior to the establishment of an unassailable Marxist revolutionary leadership and the perspective of rule by the armed masses (proletarian dictatorship), is ludicrous anti-Leninist nonsense. 

It is only on correct revolutionary theory and practice that unity can be agreed. The aim of all Leninist tactics PRIOR to the establishment of the unchallengeable authority of Bolshevik perspectives is to expose and destroy the revisionist, reformist, and centrist confusion-mongers, not to unite with them.

In view of their own unchallengeable authority within the FMLN and the FSLN, the revolutionary Leninist leaderships in Salvador and Nicaragua can be as diplomatic as they like now in the face of US imperialist aggression's seeking for an excuse to wipe them out, - playing up the Democratic Front aspect of their work and playing down the proletarian dictatorship and socialist rhetoric. But for any one to try to argue that the armed masses are not in power in Nicaragua and the liberated areas of El Salvador, and that socialist society is not the inevitable outcome and aim of their revolutions, - is imbecile subjectivism, being used only to back up anti-Leninist stances in other situations.

Lenin could have been describing modern revolutionary Nicaragua in June 1919 when he wrote in the foreword of the publication of his 'Deception of the people' speech at the Adult Education Congress on May 19 that:

'The dictatorship of the proletariat is a specific form of class alliance between the proletariat, the vanguard of the working people, and the numerous non-proletarian strata of the working people (petty bourgeoisie, small proprietors, the peasantry, the intelligentsia, etc) or the majority of these strata, - an alliance against capital, an alliance whose aim is the complete overthrow of capital, complete suppression of the resistance offered by the bourgeoisie as well as of attempts at restoration on its part, an alliance for the final establishment and consolidation of socialism. It is a specific kind of alliance which takes shape in a specific situation, namely amidst fierce civil war; it is an alliance between firm supporters of socialism and its vacillating allies,  sometimes 'neutrals' (in which case instead of an agreement on struggle the alliance becomes an agreement on neutrality); an alliance between economically, politically, socially, and spiritually different classes. Only the corrupt heroes of the corrupt Berne or yellow International,  people like Kautsky, Martov and Co, can evade examination of the concrete forms, conditions, and tasks of this alliance by resorting to platitudes about 'freedom, 'equality', and 'unity of labour democracy', that is, by snatching fragments from the ideological baggage of the era of commodity economy.'

Lenin's target on that occasion was a different type of confusion-monger, but his description is useful to rout those who would distort the reality of the Nicaraguan revolution for other confusionist aims.

It is equally useless for reformists to pretend that the Salvadorean revolution has made great progress without calling for proletarian dictatorship. The FPL's June 1976 statement on strategy talks of very little else, quoting the above Lenin passage, and describing how

"the dictatorship of the proletariat in El Salvador must in the beginning assume the form of a popular revolutionary dictatorship under the hegemony of the working class which will be exercised through a revolutionary government of workers and peasants...The destruction of the military and administrative apparatus of the bourgeois state is the prior condition for the true victory of the revolution...This means the people in arms, organised in their own army for their defence. This is the only way to guarantee the total dismantling of the bourgeois armed organisations that have been organised and trained to defend the exploiters."

Exactly the policy that would appeal just as much to the masses in Chile following the brutalities of the Pinochet dictatorship. No room at all in the FPL's perspective for the wretched class-collaborationist retreat with the petty bourgeois CP and SP parties of calling for the 'democratisation' of the armed forces in Chile, and the 'democratisation' of the state machine.

Nor did Carpio in his famous 1980 statement on the unassailable triumph of the revolutionary leadership and the moves towards the broader Democratic Front hide what the essence of a People's Revolutionary Government would be, despite his concession (technically correct) that it would not be immediately socialist.

"The PRG will rest upon the armed and organised people...only the people in arms can guarantee the advance of the process towards socialism."

For the Democratic Front's programme, Carpio included the following declared aims:

"The legislative assembly and the executive and judicial branches will be dissolved, as well as all government and state organs at the service of the oligarchy...The organisation of the masses will be institutionalised; the people's power organs and bodies to defend the revolution will be set up.... The reactionary army will be dissolved at once, and the People's Revolutionary Army set up... "

Not a word of arming the masses, setting up people's Soviets, disbanding the capitalist state or its standing army appears in the joint CP-SP-MIR statement on Chile's perspectives.

Anything perpetuating reformist illusions of 'socialist' triumph through 'left unity' based on watering down any revolutionary programme is a blow against the socialist revolution everywhere and does nothing to overcome the anti-Leninist confusion still rife within parts of the 'official' communist movement. (Bulletin 203)

4  ------------------------------------------------

The first requirement in working out the policy, strategy, and tactics of the revolutionary party is to correctly analyse the historical epoch and the precise stages being reached in the specific class struggle being dealt with.

In Chile for example the crisis for world imperialism has left its Chilean representative, the Pinochet dictatorship, economically and politically and morally bankrupt.

But behind the inevitably highly visible catastrophes for the class-abrasive and internationally aggressive 'monetarist' policies of the Reagan-Thatcher imperialist circles, there is also the insoluble economic crisis for the capitalist system in general.

The joint Chilean Communist Party/ Socialist Party/ Revolutionary Left (MIR) statement not only fails specifically to describe both the international and the domestic ramifications of the world capitalist crisis (not even mentioning it), but even implies that a sensible future is possible for Chile without a single mention or hint of getting rid of capitalism. Socialism is not discussed at all, least of all any notion of a socialist future for Chile. It declares:

'No formula for reshuffling based on preserving the big monopoly-finance groups, the repressive fascist military circles, and the interference of North American imperialism will allow any solution to our country's profound economic, social, and political crisis...The left must oppose any conciliation with the fundamental enemies of our people. We are fighting to open the way for a new regime truly popular and democratic because only a regime of this character can guarantee that the crisis is resolved in favour of the great national majority. 

The parties of the Chilean left are more and more coming together on the contents of a popular and democratic programme of transformation to confront the crisis and face up to the construction of a renewed democracy to replace the uprooted dictatorship. 

Radical democratisation of society and the state; elimination of the monopoly structure to allow the reorganisation of the Chilean economy in the popular and national interest; democratisation of the armed forces and dissolution of the repressive apparatus; an end to imperialist intervention; defence of the national interest; - these are the essential historic tasks for which we, the worker and popular forces, fight.

The requirements for struggling for the complete fulfilment of this democratic perspective must guide our conduct today and throughout this whole period of struggle of our people' (emphasis added).

And so on at great length about the desirability of 'left unity' and 'renewed democracy' with the immediate obvious aim of uprooting the dictatorship,  but otherwise completely in the abstract.

This is not a revolutionary programme but only an appalling muddle and confusion which can only seriously disorient the Chilean working class.

The situation, in certain limited aspects, is remarkably similar to that which faced the Bolsheviks in February 1917 with the first crumbling of the Tsarist dictatorship.

Of all the VITAL lessons on Marxist understanding and tactics contained in the four volumes (23 to 26) of Lenin's collected works covering the period of the two revolutions in 1917, none is more crucial to absorb than his first and most dramatic conclusion on the character of the epoch and the specific class struggle in Russia, - namely that capitalism could not resolve the crisis despite the autocracy's overthrow and that therefore the revolution should continue, overthrowing all bourgeois regimes installed in place of Tsardom, until the working class itself could take power. And on this Marxist analysis of the situation (revolutionary theory), Lenin fought for an absolute SPLIT with the parties of the so-called 'left', - the 'Marxist' Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries.

Lenin's very first comment on the revolutionary news from Russia,  his unpublished Draft Theses of March 4 1917, declared:

'The new government cannot give the peoples of Russia either peace, bread, or full freedom. The working class must therefore continue its fight for socialism and peace, utilising for this purpose the new situation and explaining it as widely as possible among the masses.... By its silence on these vital issues the new government reveals its capitalist and landlord nature.

'Only a workers government that relies, first, on the overwhelming majority of the peasant population, the farm labourers and poor peasants, and, second, on an alliance with the revolutionary workers of all countries in the war, can give the people peace, bread, and full freedom.

'The revolutionary proletariat can therefore only regard the revolution of March 1 as its initial, and by no means complete, victory on its momentous path. It cannot but set itself the task of continuing the fight for a democratic republic and socialism.

'To do that, the proletariat and the RSDLP must above all utilise the relative and partial freedom the new government is introducing,  and which can be guaranteed and extended only by continued,  persistent and persevering revolutionary struggle.

'The truth about the present government and its real attitude on pressing issues must be made known to all working people in town and country.... Soviets of workers deputies must be organised, the workers must be armed. Proletarian organisations must be extended to the... rural areas. In particular there must be a separate class organisation for farm labourers.

'Only by making the truth known to the widest masses of the population, only by organising them,  can we guarantee full victory in the next stage of the revolution and the winning of power by a workers government.

'Fulfilment of this task.. .requires the revolutionary proletarian party to be ideologically and organisationally independent. It must remain true to internationalism and not succumb to the false bourgeois phraseology meant to dupe the people by talk of defending the nation'....

'For that reason we cannot consent to any blocs or alliances or even agreements with the defencists among the workers.... Those agreements would not only inject an element of falseness in the minds of the masses, making them dependent on the Russian imperialist bourgeoisie,  but would also weaken and undermine the leading role of the proletariat...' (Emphases added).

And in his first published words on the crumbling of the dictatorship two days later, a telegram to the Bolsheviks leaving for Russia, the message in full declared just this:

'Our tactics:- no trust in and no support of the new government; Kerensky is especially suspect; arming of the proletariat is the only guarantee; immediate elections to the Petrograd City Council; no rapprochement with other parties.' (Emphasis added).

And a day later in the first of his 'Letters from afar',  Lenin spelt it out even more bluntly:

'We have obtained a 'coalition', a 'national' (i. e. adapted. ... for fooling the people) 'parliamentary' government... . 

'He who says that the workers must support the new government in the interests of the struggle against tsarist reaction.. .is a traitor to the workers, a traitor to the cause of the proletariat....

'No, if there is to be a real struggle against the tsarist monarchy,  if freedom is to be guaranteed in fact and not merely in words, in the glib promises of Milyukov and Kerensky, the workers must NOT support the new government; the government must 'support' the workers'. For the only GUARANTEE of freedom and of the complete destruction of tsarism lies in ARMING THE PROLETARIAT, in strengthening,  extending and developing the role,  significance and power of the Soviet of workers deputies.

'All the rest is mere phrase-mongering and lies, self-deception on the part of the politicians of the liberal and radical camp, fraudulent trickery....

'Ours is a bourgeois revolution, THEREFORE the workers must support the bourgeoisie, say the... (Mensheviks) as Plekhanov said yesterday.

'Ours is a bourgeois revolution, we Marxists say, THEREFORE the workers must open the eyes of the people to the deception practised by the bourgeois politicians, teach them to put no faith in words, to defend entirely on their OWN strength, their OWN organisation, their OWN unity, and their own WEAPONS..'

And in the Fifth letter, Lenin summarised the tasks to be proclaimed by the potential workers and peasants Soviet government to replace the useless bourgeoisie, including:

'It must smash, completely eliminate, the old state machine, the army, the police force, and bureaucracy (officialdom) that is common to ALL bourgeois states. .. . ONLY such a government, of such a class composition (revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry) and such organs of government (proletarian militia) will be capable of successfully carrying out the extremely difficult and absolutely urgent chief task of the moment...'' (March 26,1917).

An unusual, complicating factor the Bolsheviks were facing, of course, was the continuation of the imperialist World War I by the provisional government.

But the ESSENCE of the class struggle remains the same then as now in the revolutionary situations breaking out all over the imperialist world: - the general crisis of the capitalist system was then (expressed as war) as now (expressed as US imperialism trying to prop up one tottering tyranny after another) the inability of the bourgeoisie to rule in any other way because of the insoluble depths of the system's contradictions.

If parliamentary bourgeois rule could provide stable government, the imperialist system would have allowed it to survive beyond 1973 in Chile instead of replacing it by fascist-military dictatorship.

But the general crisis of world class relations is now so seriously unfavourable to capitalism that no real fascist movement could be built in Chile. Despite US imperialist aid, the military regime is now back to square one, where the Allende victory came in. Only this time in conditions where the masses in Chile know from bitter experience that even 'left' parliamentary democracy can solve NOTHING in the conditions of the general world capitalist crisis.

Thus any government which replaces the dictatorship, - unless it be a full-blooded workers and peasants revolutionary government pronouncing socialism as its aim,   - can only be a temporary regime of unstable and incurable crisis.

That is "the truth about the present" which "must be made known to all working people in town and country" according   to Lenin's understanding of revolutionary tactics.

"Only by making the truth known to the widest masses of the population...can we guarantee full victory in the next stage of the revolution and the winning of power by a workers government."

The joint CP/SP/MIR statement does the exact opposite in Chile. It obscures the truth of capitalism's crisis and the need for the socialist revolution as the ONLY POSSIBLE solution in the interests of the working masses.

Excuses put forward by some MIR supporters that the statement does not reflect the MIR's real position but is a "mere tactic" only make matters worse.

Putting the party's name to an important statement on the perspectives of struggle in Chile which is KNOWN to be a complete mis-analysis escalates the problem from theoretical backwardness to one of deliberately misleading opportunism.

Such 'tactics' may owe much to Machiavelli but are completely alien to Marxism, and will surely rapidly destroy the MIR's credibility with the REVOLUTIONARY proletariat in Chile if persisted in.

Tactics are part of the analysis of the overall movement of class forces, viewed with the purpose of securing the maximum advantage at any particular time for finally when the circumstances are ripe, achieving the goal of working class power. As part of that analysis, tactical moves obviously cannot contain anything which is a WRONG and MISLEADING analysis.

Lenin explains in his brief review of Bolshevik tactics in "Left-wing communism" (May 1920) that in pre-revolutionary electoral agreements with other workers parties, the Bolsheviks even signed manifestos which did not quite state the Party policy in its entirety, although containing nearly all of it. But this compromise in a bourgeois electorally-dominated period, in order to maximise opposition to the bourgeois authorities, was itself only permissible because there was ample opportunity in other propaganda that was able to be put out simultaneously to explain the Bolsheviks' FULL position. But never is there the remotest suggestion of the Party agreeing to a completely WRONG analysis in order to achieve a tactical conciliation at any time, and certainly unthinkable in such a crucially decisive period as the approaches to a revolutionary situation.

Knowing how to tack and compromise with possible temporary allies in order to take advantage of splits in the bourgeoisie, and try to isolate the main antagonist at
each stage, is the essence of sound Leninist tactics.  But NEVER can this be contemplated at a price of confusing the revolutionary proletariat by jointly putting out an analysis of perspectives which is nonsense.

On a purely practical level, how would the masses ever know which were authentic statements by the revolutionary leadership and which were "merely tactical" documents it had put its name to so as to compromise petty bourgeois confusionists? 

Once the party begins making statements which aren't to be believed, why should the working class believe ANY statement it makes?  And even if, farcically, statements were headlined: "This is a real authentic party statement, to be believed", how is the working class to know if that headline isn't itself just a 'tactic' and not to be taken seriously?

No, the joint CP/SP/MIR document had best be treated as an authentic statement, and be rectified as quickly as possible because it is treacherously and confusingly INCORRECT.

A real revolutionary party would do just that, as Lenin also explains in 'Left-wing communism'; and the Chilean working class would respect it for it. 

The tactic of getting the CP and the SP merely to be seen signing a joint statement with the MIR must be of very dubious value anyway in the approaching revolutionary situation in Chile. It seems far more likely to turn out that the MIR is lending the tottering CP and SP support rather than vice-versa. Either way, it does nothing to establish the crucial Leninist analysis of the INDEPENDENT revolutionary party.

Lenin's united front tactics against the Mensheviks are a brilliant example of how compromise should be used to establish the revolutionary party's authority and expose the betrayals of the class collaborating parties. In calling for 'All power to the Soviets' in the first part of 1917 after the revolution of February,- and then again at the end of August after the defeat of Kornilov but before the capture of all the leading Soviets by the Bolsheviks votes,- Lenin was proposing to support the Mensheviks and the SRs in taking government authority off the bourgeoisie.

This would obviously have meant the overthrow of the provisional government and the passing of authority to the Soviets in which the workers, soldiers, and peasants could dominate affairs by direct democracy. This demonstrated how the Bolsheviks were guided only by the real interests of the working class.

At the same time, the slogan put the Menshseviks and SRs to the test, the majority parties in the Soviets at both periods. Either they carried out the popular demand (benefiting the proletariat) - and got into an immediate stew with their compromising confusion and incompetence. Or else they refused to carry it out, - thereby demonstrating their refusal to break with the bourgeoisie.

The Bolsheviks withdrew that slogan during the summer when the majority Soviet parties had grown so close with the warmongering bourgeois establishment that workers demonstrations were once again being fired upon and revolutionaries clapped in gaol. With so little to choose between petty bourgeois reaction and bourgeois reaction at this stage, Bolshevik opposition was revolutionarily raised against the whole coalition, being differentiated again just briefly at the time of the suppression of the General Kornilov rebellion/putsch.

Writing of this period in 'Left-wing communism', Lenin noted: "It is entirely a matter of knowing how to apply these tactics in order to RAISE, not lower, the general level of proletarian class consciousness, revolutionary spirit,  and ability to fight and win... The changes of tack and compromises were, of course, such as assisted,   boosted, and consolidated the Bolsheviks at the expense of the Mensheviks."

This is a totally different understanding of the tactics for the revolutionary party than the proposal for 'left unity' in Chile by the CP/SP/MIR to "construct a new rule of justice, democracy, and social progress". A much more promising perspective for the working class in Chile is likely to be, for instance, a united front tactic carried out by the revolutionary party calling upon the CP and the SP, still the majority parties among workers, to take the power in Chile through the new spontaneous mass popular organisations of a Soviet type which are now springing up in opposition to the military dictatorship, thereby helping to expose and destroy those parties' influence among the Chilean masses.

All attempts to argue that 'left' or 'democratic' unity must be sought around support for a provisional government replacing Pinochet in "in order to prevent the return of the military dictatorship" again contradict Lenin's tactics in 191 7 (August) for dealing with General Kornilov's rightwing putsch. In his August 30 letter to the central committee, Lenin wrote:

'Even now we must not support Kerensky's government. This is unprincipled. We may be asked: aren't we going to fight against Kornilov? Of course we must! But this is not the same thing; there is a dividing line here which is being stepped over by some Bolsheviks who fall into compromise and allow themselves to be carried away by the course of events.

'We shall fight, we are fighting against Kornilov, just as Kerensky's troops do, but we do not support Kerensky. On the contrary, we expose his weakness. There is the difference,  It is rather a subtle difference, but it is highly essential and must not be forgotten.

'What then constitutes our change of tactics after the Kornilov revolt?

'We are changing the form of our struggle against Kerensky. Without in the least relaxing our hostility towards him, without taking back a single word said against him, without renouncing the task of overthrowing him,  we say that we must take into account the present situation. We shall not overthrow Kerensky right now. We shall approach the
task of fighting against him in a different way, namely, we shall point out to the people (who are fighting against Kornilov) Kerensky's weakness and vacillation.  That has been done in the past as well. Now, however, it has become the all-important thing, and this constitutes the change.

"The change, further, is that the all-important thing now has become the intensification of our campaign for some kind of 'partial demands' to be presented to Kerensky: arrest Milyukov; arm the Petrograd workers; summon the Kronstadt,  Vyborg, and Helsingfors troops to Petrograd; dissolve the Duma; arrest Rodzyankc, legalise the transfer of the landed estates to the peasants; introduce workers control over grain and factories; etc, etc. We must present these demands not only to Kerensky, and not so much to Kerensky, as to the workers, soldiers and peasants who have been carried away by the course of the struggle against Kornilov. We must keep       up their enthusiasm, encourage them to deal with the generals and officers who have declared for Kornilov, urge them to demand the immediate transfer of land to the peasants, suggest to them that it is necessary to arrest Rodzyanko and Milyukov, dissolve the Duma, close down 'Rech' and other bourgeois papers, and institute investigations against them. The 'Left' SRs must be especially urged on in this direction.

'It would be wrong to think that we have moved farther away from the task of the proletariat winning power. No. We have come very close to it, not directly, but from the side. At the moment we must campaign not so much directly against Kerensky as indirectly against him, namely, by demanding a more and more active, truly revolutionary war against Kornilov... . We must relentlessly fight against phrases about the defence of the country, about a united front of revolutionary democrats, about supporting the Provisional Government, etc, etc. since they are just empty phrases. We must say: now is the time for action; the war against Kornilov must be conducted in a revolutionary way, by drawing the masses in, by arousing them, by inflaming them (Kerensky is afraid of the masses, afraid of the people)....'

The 'official' Communist (Tudeh) Party in Iran fell for precisely this mistake of supporting the Khomeini regime "in order to prevent the return of the Shah's dictatorship" and are now paying the catastrophic cost in their slaughtered membership for their class compromising retreat from a consistent REVOLUTIONARY defence of the revolution, as outlined by Lenin above. (Moscow is also paying the price for its complicity in this revisionist Tudeh line with the Khomeini regime now showing more fascist anti-communist determination, domestically and internationally, than even the Shah's regime.)

Commenting on such naivete,  Lenin wrote on September 14,   1917,  in 'From a publicist's diary 'against' Menshevik 'Marxism':

It is no accident that the 'Novaya Zhizn' people sit at the "unity" congress together with Ministers,  with socialists eligible for the cabinet, with the Tseretelis and Skobelevs,  with cabinet members who are comrades of Kerensky, Kornilov,  and Co. No accident at all.  They actually have a common ideological foundation, namely, unreasoning philistine gullibility, (uncritically borrowed from the petty bourgeois environment) in good intentions.  For this gullibility pervades all of Sukhanov's arguments,  as well as all the activities of those defencist Mensheviks who act in good faith. This petty-bourgeois gullibility is the root of the evil in our revolution.. ..

"In all revolutions, the will of the majority of the workers and peasants,  i.e.  undoubtedly the will of the majority of the population, has been for democracy. Nevertheless, the great majority of revolutions have ended with the defeat of democracy.' 

Any satisfied support for a 'democratic' regime (bourgeois)   to replace Pinochet, or even a 'left' regime including the SP and CP, will invite renewed catastrophe in Chile. It was the 'Marxist' government of Allende and the CP which eased the military into power in the first place, bringing General Carlos Prats into the cabinet for "greater stability", thus making General Pinochet's propaganda case for him (that 'even greater stability still' would obviously be an even better solution to the crisis.)

In Iran now as in Chile in 1973,  the working masses pay dearly for the absence of a Leninist leadership. And despite the increasingly successful expansion of the world socialist revolutionary struggle, the masses are likely still to pay again and again in certain circumstances where Western scepticism, cynicism and philistinism (including bourgeois ideology's indirect influence on the 'official' Communist movement) has undermined a real study of Leninism. But without correct revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary practice successfully,  as Lenin insisted.

A profound analysis of Leninism is required by all who would consider themselves revolutionary socialists. But if dialectical materialism has to be reduced to one or two simple lessons,  Lenin's comment in "State and Revolution" (September 1917) should never be forgotten:

'To confine Marxism to the theory of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT.  This is what constitutes the most profound distinction between the Marxist and the ordinary petty bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism should be tested.'

The only real revolutionary solidarity is that which fights to help deepen Leninist understanding, and works ceaselessly to spread the world socialist revolution based on that Leninist understanding.

Lenin's insistence on maintaining the party's ability to lead the revolution to its furthest possible development by staying independent of Provisional Governmental compromise in the period between the completion of the bourgeois revolution (February 1917) and proletarian dictatorship (October) [See Bulletins 203, 204] faced a completely different strategic situation in the 1905 bourgeois-democratic revolution, of course.

Although struggling all the way through to the triumph of the socialist revolution was in noway ruled out in 1905 and remained in the revolutionary party's perspective, Lenin's emphasis correctly concentrated on making certain the bourgeois-democratic revolution was made as thoroughgoing as possible.

As in 1917, the weakness of the Russian capitalist class and the spinelessness of the petty bourgeoisie and the non-Marxist 'lefts' were among the dominating complications, and in 'Two tactics of social-democracy in the democratic revolution', Lenin stated the Party's aim as 'to put a proletarian imprint on the revolution, to carry the revolution to a real and decisive victory not in word but in deed, and to paralyse the 'instability,  half-heartedness, and treachery of the democratic bourgeoisie.'(July 1905). 

To this end, Lenin proposed that in certain favourable circumstances, the Marxist revolutionary party could best take the lead in the revolution and neutralise the weakness of the democratic bourgeoisie by actually participating in a provisional revolutionary government within the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, relying on the armed people;- as well as by organising non-stop revolutionary pressure on the Provisional Government from below.

This perspective was completely opposed to the conservative Menshevik line which ruled out possible participation in a revolutionary government, thereby tacitly conceding leadership of the revolution to the bourgeoisie, a misreading of the balance of class strengths in Russian circumstances. 

As in 1917, the Mensheviks had it wrong, - this time for not having the class vision and strength to lead the democratic revolution, as opposed to 1917 when their cowardly coalition with the 'democratic' forces propped up,  from the front, decadent bourgeois rule and held back the fight for the socialist revolution.) Against Trotsky whose shallow 'ultra-left' opportunist propaganda simply tried to skip over the leading role of the proletariat in the bourgeois-democratic revolution, and to ignore the revolutionary role of the peasantry with his misleading slogan 'No Tsar but a workers government',   Lenin rescued Marx's notion of permanent revolution from Trotsky's middle-class gibberish and explained how in Russia's conditions, the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry (opposed by Trotsky) could grow over into the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The proletariat must carry the democratic revolution to completion,  allying to itself the mass of the peasantry in order to crush by force the resistance of the autocracy and to paralyse the instability of the bourgeoisie. The proletariat must accomplish the Socialist revolution,   allying to itself the mass of the semi-proletarian elements of the population, in order to crush by force the resistance of the bourgeoisie and paralyse the instability of the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie,'

Lenin wrote.

And in September 1905 in his 'Attitude towards the peasant movement', Lenin added:

'From the democratic revolution, we shall at once, and precisely in accordance with the measure of our strength, the strength of the class-conscious and organised proletariat, begin to pass to the socialist revolution. We stand for uninterrupted revolution. We shall not stop half-way.'

But the immediate paramount task in the 1905 revolution was the overthrow of the Tsarist autocracy, - the bourgeois-democratic revolution, the first such development in Russian history. Describing this in 'Two tactics', Lenin said:

'We Marxists should know that there is not, nor can there be, any other path to real freedom for the proletariat and the peasantry than the path of bourgeois freedom and bourgeois progress. We must not forget that there is not,  nor can there be at the present time, any other means of bringing socialism nearer than complete political liberty,  than a democratic republic, than the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. As representatives of the advanced and only revolutionary class,- revolutionary without any reservations, doubts, or looking back, - we must confront the whole of the people with the tasks of the democratic revolution as extensively and boldly as possible and with the utmost initiative.  To disparage these tasks means making a travesty of theoretical Marxism, distorting it in philistine fashion, while in practical politics it means placing the cause of the revolution into the hands of the bourgeoisie, which will inevitably recoil from the task of consistently effecting the revolution.'

Summing up this 1905 difference with the Menshevik and Trotskyite swamp over the need to LEAD the democratic revolution (as opposed to the difference in 1917 which required the Bolsheviks to lead the maturing revolutionary socialist opposition to the coalition compromise seeking to prolong capitalist rule), Lenin characterised his line as:

'One side says: advance the revolution to its consummation despite resistance or passivity on the part of the inconsistent bourgeoisie.

"The other side says: do not think of independently advancing the revolution to completion, for if you do, the inconsistent bourgeoisie will recoil from it.

"Are these not two diametrically opposite paths? Is it not obvious that one set of tactics absolutely excludes the other?, that the first tactics is the only correct tactics of revolutionary Marxism.

But by 1917 (as in Chile today), the working class had developed sufficiently under capitalism, and the bourgeois revolution was sufficiently exhausted, for the final collapse of the farcical autocracy to require a proletarian dictatorship revolution for any real social progress to be made, and for any real end to be put to the torments of the masses under capitalist crisis. The tactics then had to be; independence from the decaying coalition compromise government; for the dictatorship of the proletariat. And the international balance of class forces, the ripeness of the capitalist world crisis, the advance of the world socialist revolution,  and the maturity of the class forces in Chile today create similar conditions. (Bulletins 204 & 206)

5-------------------------------------------------

A grotesque inability to distinguish between a capitalist state and a workers state continues to befog the Communist Party and the 'New' Communist Party.

Both have just published glowing interviews with Mireya Baltra, Labour Minister in the class-collaborating traitor government of Salvador Allende in Chile which disarmed the Chilean working class in 1970-73 and delivered workers bound and gagged into the murderous gaols and torture chambers of the Pinochet fascist-military dictatorship.

Baltra, a CPer in Allende's 'Socialist Unity' coalition of 'Marxist' Socialist Party and Communist Party reformists, continues totally to justify the criminal negligence of the Allende regime in opening the door to fascism and inviting the military butchers in.

The ABC of Marxism-Leninism is the smashing of the capitalist state and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat the moment power has been taken.

The fake-'Marxist' Allende regime literally did the opposite. Allende and the CP themselves brought the generals into the government on the certifiable grounds that the "Chilean military was from a democratic tradition and different to the military anywhere else under capitalism". Simultaneously, the Popular Unity government disarmed the working class areas and some progressive military units, which were aware, - as the whole world was except, apparently, Allende and his CP admirers, - of the plots for a coup being cooked up by the military and the right wing generally, orchestrated by the CIA.

Not only do the British reformist CP and NCP traitors regurgitate Baltra's justification of this criminal Allende class-collaborationism. They also reprint, without a hint of any criticism, Baltra's monstrous attempts to blame the Chilean working class for what happened because they 'agitated' and did not work hard enough for the Chilean capitalist system!

"There were sectors that showed immaturity and opportunism," Baltra declares in sickening justification for the Allende regime's own despicable opportunism in cuddling up to the generals to try to appease the right-wing disruption of the government.

"Certain politicians thought they would gain more votes by encouraging the seizure of small industries. It was stupid. It distorted the programme of Popular Unity and strengthened the opposition.

"The Ministry of Labour was bombed in 1972..., Then another time, some workers took over the ministry. Consciously or unconsciously, that action was just serving the interests of imperialism."

The crucial fact that the Allende-CP regime had left the dominant economic, political, and state power in the hands of the capitalist class gets not a mention by Baltra or the CP-NCP cretins.

Despite effective economic, social, political, and state power remaining unchallenged in the bourgeoisie's grip, the Allende government demanded that the working class make the sacrifices - - for the capitalist system. And Baltra and the NCP/CP still justify this.

"During Allende's government, the role of the trade union movement was quite different... It had to be altered for the new role it was asked to play by the Allende Government because the workers were then in power. (!). Production and productivity was a key debate," she declared.

The factory owners were delighted. For the large parts of the Chilean economy left in private capitalist hands, the Allende regime demanded workers capitulation to speed-up "planning agreements", one of the age-old bits of illusory nonsense of the British Labour Governments in their periodic spells of duty in government on behalf of the British capitalist system, trying to con the working class into 'more productivity', - allegedly for the 'Labour programme' but in reality for the capitalist system and its non-stop international programme of imperialist warmongering.

"Some sections of workers pressed wage demands without realising the political and economic limits on the Popular Unity government, " Baltra went on with clownish naivete. In the 1978-79 'winter of discontent' which brought down the Callaghan Labour Government in Britain so justly, Baltra would have been on Callaghan's side.

"We were stimulating the workers consciousness and initiative on the importance of labour discipline," Baltra added in the same nauseating tone of hypocritical pretence and self-justification used by every reformist traitor from Ramsay MacDonald onwards.

"We were trying to make workers understand that if industry belonged to the workers (!) then we had to make it work better under popular control than it did under capitalism."

Industry belonged, as it still does, to the international imperialist system, and the bankers (local and multi-national) who controlled, then as now, Chile's financial system and capital movements.

All Baltra and the Allende-CP government were doing was act as disciplinarians for the profits of the capitalist system.

With appalling humbug and downright lies, Baltra continued: "Our government was one of sacrifice, responsibility and discipline among workers, - because it was a government of workers, not bosses."

So who ordered the weapons to be taken out of the working class districts of Santiago, making things easy for Pinochet's coup and annihilating carnage against workers.?

Who gave the generals on a plate the exact encouragement and camouflage they needed to prepare and resolve upon their bloodthirsty putsch, which slaughtered workers in their thousands, by inviting them in?

Was it really a "government of workers".?

What infamous lying nonsense. What reactionary anti-Marxist poison.

And the NCP/CP/Baltra stunt does not even end there with a scandalous justification of Allende's criminal betrayal of the working class, lyingly pretending that the workers themselves were responsible for what befell them.

Baltra then goes on to wish the Popular Unity had politically disarmed and demoralised the working class even more in support of capitalist exploitation and subsequent capitalist state butchery.

"Perhaps we in the government showed a certain weakness in that we did not really take a political and ideological offensive among our own working class supporters. We did not set out to win our own people to the political consciousness needed to make the programme work." 

Once again, the working class is blamed for the catastrophic crime of reformist illusions of the Allende-CP idiocy of the 'parliamentary road to socialism', a treacherous sell-out which is exactly the programme of the CP/NCP 'peaceful road' cretins in Britain who suck up to the Labour Party.

The NCP's 'break' from the CP (because of the latter's retreat from revolutionary politics)is a complete fraud. The NCP is as politically, culturally, and ideologically tied to the corrupt, degenerate reformist British labour movement traditions as the CP. It makes a pretence of still believing in the dictatorship of the proletariat, but never in practice talks about it, feeling in their bones that such 'pointless extremism' is completely irrelevant to Britain.

That's exactly what they, the CP, and Allende's CP-Popular Unity said about Chile. Even more alarming, these murderous illusions are all they still put forward for Chile.

As far as this moronic stupidity is concerned, Marx and Lenin lived entirely in vain. But the expanding world socialist revolution and the revived Leninist movement, of which the ILWP is part, will sweep aside these centrist-conservative relics of past boom-time defeatism, opportunism, and hostility to revolutionary theory. (Bulletin 209)

6-------------------------------------------------

Lenin's line was always unmistakably distinct from the middle class pseudo-'Marxist' swamp all round the Bolsheviks.

Similar hordes of petty-bourgeois 'revolutionaries' (revisionist-centrist and Trotskyist) now clamour around the Labour movement in Britain (and other advanced comfortable capitalist states where arm chair 'socialism' and ivory tower 'philosophising' is a fashionable pastime).

But every time the CIA rattles up another big bad anti-Soviet stunt such as the Korean 747 incident, or Solidarnosc, or Afghanistan these phoney 'Marxist-Leninists' are all revealed, without exception, as screaming reformists and anti-communists.

The Goebbels-like idiocies about "Russia's rulers brutal massacre" from opportunist entrist frauds like Socialist Organiser and Militant are one extreme of Trotskyite back-stabbing, graduating all the way down to the Socialist Action 'clean hands' niceties about "the shooting down" of KAL 007 being "an absolute gift to Reagan's anti-communist crusade", - the perennial plea that the real messy world of imperialist aggression against the Soviet Revolution since 1917, — (and the necessary armed Soviet response) would somehow go away and let the real revolutionary achievers like Socialist Action (they have a socialist paradise at 328 Upper Street, N1) get on with the real business of defeating imperialism.

At the other end of the scale, the former apologists for Stalin's theoretical lapses (who threw the baby out with the bathwater on the grand scale when they abandoned Marx's dictatorship of the proletariat by a ludicrous retreat in a vain attempt to get clear of Stalin's mistakes) - the CP and the NCP, - now achieve the worst of all possible worlds by combining Stalinist revisionism with incipient anti-Sovietism.

Still guiltily apologising like mad, instead of fighting for an independent Leninist position to give unconditional support to the Soviet Union while being openly critical of theoretical errors, the CP's Morning Star wrote in pompous pacifist righteousness: "Understandably many pilot organisations have demanded assurances from the Soviet Union that such a fate will not be meted out for any more civilian planes", wholly swallowing the general thrust of foul imperialist slander even while showily expressing 'principled' doubts if the CIA's media story was the whole truth.

These unprincipled opportunists reveal themselves in their full cowardly anti-communist colours, of course, in their cringing capitulation to the CIA's better-financed and longer-organised counter-revolutionary stunts like Solidarnosc and Charter 77, outdoing Reagan, the Pope, Shirley Williams, and Frank Chapple in their anti-Leninist fawning before the bourgeois racket of 'free' trade unions (See ILWP Books vol 3 for Lenin's lengthy and detailed argument for communist trade unions).

The NCP's sadly regretful tone in describing the "disaster" which "sacrificed" 269 lives,  and which "must be avenged" by more 'peace preserving' activities, also monumentally misses the real point, -(and not by accident) - that by confidently blasting the spy provocation out of the sky, the Soviet Union had already delivered the best rebuff possible to imperialist aggression, and the best service possible to those struggling to develop a really Leninist revolutionary fight to win peace in the only way possible,   - by overthrowing capitalism.  The decisive factor in winning the majority of activists to the Leninist movement will be confidence that the balance of forces in the international class struggle is swinging towards the dictatorship of the proletariat.  The indomitability of the Soviet workers state's defences and their preparedness to meet imperialist violence with superior violence is a most crucial factor in signalling the worldwide balance in favour of the socialist revolution in the international class war against the bourgeoisie.

The NCP in reality wants none of this, although they would opportunistically never disown it openly.  Their petty bourgeois instincts dread the thought of the final all-out class confrontation to wipe the imperialist bourgeoisie off the face of the earth. The NCP is dying to creep into the Labour Party for a blissfully 'peaceful' life of endless leftist resolution-mongering and the Parliamentary road to oblivion.

By not really being confidently for the destruction of the CIA spy provocation flight against the Soviet Far East defences, the NCP smuggle in the entire wretched ideological rag-bag of pacifism, - the vain wish that the titanic historical problem of whether the socialist revolution will finally smash completely the imperialist states or whether dying capitalism will succeed in dragging human development back to international fascist barbarism once again, - (which is the real direction Reagan-Thatcherism is going in, (as seen in their friend Pinochet's exploits in Chile , and in South Africa, and Namibia, and Zionist -occupied Palestine and Lebanon); will somehow be avoided by more energetic 'peace preserving'.

Other biliously anti-Soviet groups like the Spartacists and the RCG avoid too many pitfalls, usually on CIA stunts like KAL 007 or Solidarnosc's later period of openly counter-revolutionary disruption of the Polish workers state (in favour of Walesa's beloved Swedish and Japanese 'models' of 'democratic capitalism'.) But their line is always one of total Trotskyite aloofness from the USSR's and the socialist camp's real daily struggle, for 66 years now, against the actual material might of imperialism. These hopelessly conceited ivory-tower 'Marxists' support abstract causes only, and rarely understand or give immediate backing to the major practical breakthroughs against imperialism,  especially where these concern the achievements of the Soviet Union and the socialist camp. They prefer their own artificial armchair socialist world of 'pure' revolutionary achievements (which exist nowhere, and never will exist,  except inside their own heads). Thus the RCG could scarcely be bothered to call for Leninist proletarian dictatorship defence of the Polish workers state against the Vatican/CIA's Solidarnosc counter-revolution but about twice (in a year's furious anti-communist stink-stirring throughout the 'free ' world, using Walesa's lying reaction to damage the communist/national liberation movement everywhere.)

And the Spartacists spent 10 months saying the whole world should rise up if the USSR tried intervening against Solidarnosc, before suddenly inexplicably changing their line to a belief that Walesa was a counter-revolutionary CIA stunt after all and deserved putting down by the whole socialist camp (except that these lunatics, like all Trots, won't call it socialism but have invented a completely new mode of production totally unknown to Marxism called 'bureaucratic casteism' which lies somewhere between capitalism and socialism and which miraculously has a new ruling class, despite nevertheless being based on nationalised property and production relations which have completely eliminated the basis for any class ownership.)
And never will the Spartacists say why they were supporting counter-revolution in Poland for 10 months.

None of these anti-Leninist poseurs are capable of facing up to the world as it really is, or bringing forward realistic perspectives for the final overthrow of imperialism. Either they live in a daydream world of 'pure' revolutionary humbug like the Trotskyites. Or else they fumble around still in totally embarrassed confusion about what Stalin's real errors were, like the centrists, and edge away from the dictatorship of the proletariat in the laughable delusion that that was at the root of the mistakes, inevitably ending up on the Labour Party's doorstep pitifully pleading to be let in officially to the 'peaceful' 'Parliamentary' road to perpetual class collaboration, (and joined there by some of the craftier Trots.)

The fight for Leninism is a big challenge in the philistine ignorance of the pragmatic British Labour movement where Marxism is never seriously studied, and least of all Lenin. 

But there is no other way forward but the route of revolutionary theory leading to a mass revolutionary party of successful socialist struggle to overthrow capitalism,  and join the only world socialist camp that actually exists (and is rapidly expanding). (Bulletin 211)

7------------------------------------------------

The wealthy middle class counter-revolutionary clique misleadingly called the WRP continues its well-heeled sabotage of revolutionary Marxism with new slanders against Lenin and the world socialist revolution published after the sect's recent 'congress'.

The theoretical genius of the Russian Revolution, whose Bolshevik Party in a 20-year struggle had smashed the revisionist nonsense of Kautsky, Plekhanov, Trotsky, Martov,  and others to build a conscious mass leadership capable of taking power, has once again been criminally distorted as being incapable of completing the socialist revolution because of theoretical muddle and of needing to turn to Trotsky to help Lenin out of his confusion.

These monstrous lies are one of the bourgeoisie's oldest black propaganda tricks to try to undermine the invincible science of Marxism-Leninism by slyly implying it is inferior to Trotskyism (which in general is nothing but a long record of idealist futility from 1903 to 1940 (and beyond) which has NEVER achieved a single defeat of imperialism and against which (as against all other forms of Menshevism) Lenin had to write volumes of polemics to rout it (see Lenin volumes 9 to 33, or the 400-page summary by Progress Publishers, 1972; and in particular ILWP Books vol 5).)

The Bolshevik course for the dictatorship of the proletariat was mapped out by Lenin the very day after he first received news of the February Revolution in Zurich on March 3 1917.  His 'Draft Theses' immediately characterised the instability of the relations between the provisional bourgeois government and the Soviets which were forming.

He demanded the arming of the proletariat and instructed the Bolshevik Party to refuse all blocks with other 'Marxist' groups who were immediately for compromises with bourgeois power, and to prepare instead for working class power, and the socialist revolution.

On March 7 in the first of his 'Letters from afar', Lenin declared: 

The slogan, the task of the day, at this moment must be:- 'Workers, you have performed miracles of proletarian heroism, the heroism of the people, in the civil war against tsarism. You must perform miracles of organisation,  organisation of the proletariat and of the whole people, to prepare the way for your victory in the second stage of the revolution.

In the second 'Letter from afar' on March 9, Lenin repeated:

Our slogan is:- against the chauvinists,  even if they are revolutionary and republican, - against them and FOR an alliance of the international proletariat for the socialist revolution. 

In the 'Third Letter' on March 11, Lenin wrote: 

The proletariat, if it wants to uphold the gains of the present revolution and proceed further to win peace bread and freedom, must 'smash' to use Marx's expression, this ready-made state machine and substitute a new one for it by merging the police force, the army, and the bureaucracy with the entire armed people... the proletariat must organise and arm all the poor, exploited sections of the population in order that they themselves should take the organs of state power directly into their own hands in order that they themselves should constitute these organs of state power.

On April 8, 1917, in his pamphlet 'Letters on tactics', Lenin wrote:

The first stage.. the passing of state power to the bourgeoisie...the bourgeois,  or the bourgeois-democratic,  revolution in Russia is completed.

But at this point we hear a clamour of protest from people who readily call themselves 'old Bolsheviks'. Didn't we always maintain, they say, that the bourgeois-democratic revolution is completed only by the 'revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry'? Is the agrarian revolution, which is also a bourgeois-democratic revolution, completed?...

My answer is: The Bolshevik slogans and ideas on the whole have been confirmed by history; but concretely things have worked out differently; they are more original, more peculiar,  more variegated...

To ignore or overlook this fact would mean taking after those 'old Bolsheviks' who more than once already have played so regrettable a role in the history of our Party by reiterating formulas senselessly learned by rote instead of studying the specific features of the new and living reality.

The revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry has already become a reality in the Russian revolution, for this formula envisages only a relation of classes, and not a concrete political institution implementing this relation, this cooperation. The Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies, - there you have the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry already accomplished in reality....

Events have moved it from the realm of formulas into the realm of reality, clothed it with flesh and bone, concretised it and thereby modified it.

A new and different task now faces us: to effect a split within this dictatorship between the proletarian elements (the anti-defencist, internationalist, communist elements who stand for a transition to the commune) and the small-proprietor or petty-bourgeois elements (Mensheviks,  Socialist-Revolutionaries and the other revolutionary defencists who are opposed to moving towards the commune and are in favour of supporting the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois government)...

According to the old way of thinking, the rule of the bourgeoisie could and should be followed by the rule of the proletariat and the peasantry, by their dictatorship.

In real life, however, things have already turned out differently; there has been an extremely original, novel and unprecedented interlacing of the one with the other. We have side by side,  existing together, simultaneously, both the rule of the bourgeoisie (the government of Lvov and Guchkov) and a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, which is voluntarily ceding power to the bourgeoisie, voluntarily making itself an appendage of the bourgeoisie.

For it must not be forgotten that actually, in Petrograd, the power is in the hands of the workers and soldiers; the new government is not using and cannot use violence against them because there is no police,  no army standing apart from the people, no officialdom standing all-powerful above the people. This is a fact, the kind of fact that is characteristic of a state of the Paris Commune type. This fact does not fit into the old schemes. One must know how to adapt schemes to facts, instead of reiterating the now meaningless words about a 'dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry' in general.

A Marxist must not abandon the ground of careful analysis of class relations. The bourgeoisie is in power. But is not the mass of the peasants also a bourgeoisie, only of a different social stratum, of a different kind, of a different character? Whence does it follow that this stratum cannot come to power, thus 'completing' the bourgeois-democratic revolution? Why should this be impossible?

This is how the old Bolsheviks often argue. My reply is that it is quite possible. But, in assessing a given situation, a Marxist must proceed not from what is possible but from what is real.

And the reality reveals the fact that freely elected soldiers and peasants deputies are freely joining the second, parallel government, and are freely supplementing, developing and completing it. And, just as freely, they are surrendering power to the bourgeoisie, - a fact which does not in the least 'contravene' the theory of Marxism,  for we have always known and repeatedly pointed out that the bourgeoisie maintains itself in power not only by force but also by virtue of the lack of class-consciousness and organisation, the routinism and downtrodden state of the masses.

In view of this present-day reality, it is simply ridiculous to turn one's back on the fact and talk about 'possibilities'.

Possibly the peasantry may seize all the land and all the power. Far from forgetting this possibility, far from confining myself to the present, I definitely and clearly formulate the agrarian programme, taking into account the new phenomenon, i.e. the deeper cleavage between the agricultural labourers and the poor peasants on the one hand, and the peasant proprietors on the other.

But there is also another possibility; it is possible that the peasants will take the advice of the petty-bourgeois party of the Socialist-Revolutionaries which has yielded to the influence of the bourgeoisie, has adopted a defencist stand and which advises waiting for the Constituent Assembly, although not even the date of its convocation has yet been fixed.....

But are we not in danger of falling into subjectivism, of wanting to arrive at the socialist revolution by skipping the bourgeois-democratic revolution, - which is not yet completed and has not yet exhausted the peasant movement? 

I might be incurring this danger if I said: 'No Tsar, but a workers government' (Trotsky's incorrect slogan before the February 1917 Revolution]. But I did not say that, I said something else. I said that there can be no government (barring a bourgeois government) in Russia other than that of the Soviet of Workers, Agricultural Labourers, Soldiers and Peasants Deputies. I said that power in Russia now can pass from Guchkov and Lvov only to these Soviets. And in these Soviets, as it happens, it is the peasants, the soldiers, i.e. petty bourgeoisie, who preponderate, to use a scientific Marxist term, a class characterisation...

In my theses, I absolutely ensured myself against skipping over the peasant movement which has not outlived itself, or the petty-bourgeois movement in general, against any playing at 'seizure of power' by a workers government, against any kind of Blanquist adventurism; for I pointedly referred to the experience of the Paris Commune. And this experience...  as Marx proved at length in 1871 and Engels in 1891, absolutely excludes Blanquism, absolutely ensures the direct, immediate and unquestionable rule of the majority and the activity of the masses only to the extent that the majority itself acts consciously.

In these theses,  I very definitely reduced the question to one of a struggle for influence within the Soviets of... the direct and immediate organisation of the majority of the people."...

Who knows whether it is still possible at present for a special 'revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry', detached from the bourgeois government, to emerge in Russia? Marxist tactics cannot be based on the unknown.

But if this is still possible, then there is one, and only one, way towards it,  namely an immediate, resolute, and irrevocable separation of the proletarian communist elements from the petty-bourgeois elements...by waging a proletarian class struggle free from the timidity of those petty bourgeois...

To separate the proletarian elements of the Soviets (i.e. the proletarian, communist, party) from the petty-bourgeois elements right now, immediately and irrevocably is to give correct expression to the interests of the movement in either of two possible events: in the event that Russia will yet experience a special 'dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry' independent of the bourgeoisie; and in the event that the petty bourgeoisie will not be able to tear itself away from the bourgeoisie and will oscillate eternally (that is, until socialism is established) between us and it. 
(April 8, 1917)

The Bolsheviks proceeded to win majority power in sufficient of the main Soviets by October to be able to carry out the socialist revolution, exactly in line with Lenin's brilliant analysis of the enormous confusion, within days of the February Revolution and completed before the middle of April.

Trotsky throughout this period was in a British detention camp in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and completely cut off from the Bolshevik struggle to give theoretical leadership to transform the bourgeois-democratic revolution into the socialist revolution. Trotsky did not even arrive back in Russia until mid-May, and any thoughts he might have had were unknown to Leninism and played no role whatever in elaborating the successful Bolshevik perspectives.

No scrap of evidence has ever been produced of Trotsky having any effect on Lenin's thinking, and only political illiterates with absolutely no understanding of Leninism could even daydream such conjectures. Trotsky only jumped on the Bolshevik bandwagon just 8 weeks before the October Revolution and had no influence whatever on Lenin's masterly tactics throughout 1917.

But the millionaire Redgrave press, seeking, like all anti-Soviet bourgeois sources and supporters of the well-bribed CIA agent Lech Walesa; to destroy the Leninist system of strong workers states, - concocts the following historical falsifications in its well-subsidised glossy propaganda. In Newsline 2275, these anti-communist stooges pretend:

After February 1917, Lenin never referred to the 'democratic dictatorship'.

This is an absolute LIE (as proved above) designed to imply by sleight-of-hand that Lenin had it all wrong and only Trotsky was correct, - the absolute OPPOSITE of the truth.

This sly deception further distorts history by claiming that:

If" anyone still insists that "the democratic dictatorship and the bourgeois democratic revolution took place in February 1917,  we are obliged to reply that if this were so then there could not have been a socialist revolution in October 1917.

But that was exactly what Lenin did insist (see above) and then led the October Revolution. So another foul LIE designed to boost the 'permanent' opportunist and 'ultra-left' adventurer Trotsky, (a weak camp-follower who could never have led anything on his own away from Lenin's control and never did) - and to undermine confidence in Leninism.

The criminal falsifications then lyingly allege that Lenin had a "hope" that:

"the peasantry could create a party of their own which would form a coalition with the working class and would constitute a majority in a provisional government. This hope did not materialise and his formula was actualised as 'the dictatorship of the proletariat leaning upon the peasantry' - the formula of Trotsky".

This outrageous NONSENSE of Lenin "hoping" for a peasant-influenced coalition provisional government is fully exploded by the above quotes from Lenin which tell the real story of successful Bolshevik tactics for the socialist revolution, already being carried into party practice by mid-April when the Menshevik Trotsky was still in total isolation in a Canada internment camp and nearly a month's sea journey away from any possible influence on the Russian Revolution. Stalin's subsequent mistaken tactics in the 1920s and 1930s on other revolutionary struggles,  sometimes involving a misuse of Lenin's understanding of the transition from the bourgeois-democratic to the socialist revolution, are no basis for falsely promoting Trotsky's non-existent role in developing the Leninist movement.

Trotsky only jumped on the Bolshevik bandwagon just 8 weeks before the October Revolution and played no role whatever in Lenin's masterly tactics throughout 1917.

Even in his own conceited subjective whinge 'My Life' with which Trotsky sought later to destroy Bolshevism, and which is full of historical distortions playing up his own incidental opportunist role as the starring part but which in reality had no vital effect on the Russian Revolution at all, Trotsky admits pompously:

Lenin had not come over to my point of view, but had developed his own....After the July days, Lenin gave one the sense of a terrific inner concentration under a surface of calm and prosaic simplicity.  The movement that had found its symbol in Kerensky seemed all-powerful in those days. 

Bolshevism seemed nothing more than an 'insignificant group' and officially it was being treated as such. 

[Trotsky is in fact describing his own attitude, carefully concealed. His shallow impressionism was full of contempt for real revolutionary theory, and he only crept into the Bolshevik Party in August when he began to see which way the wind was blowing. He was admitted with his tiny group of 'Inter-regional' waverers at the Sixth Bolshevik Congress, where the political report and the central committee reports were delivered by Stalin in Lenin's enforced absence.]

The party itself did not realize the power it was to have [more lying nonsense] but Lenin was leading it firmly toward its greatest tasks.  I harnessed myself to the work and helped him.

What Trotsky did in fact was to try to sabotage the building of a firm socialist state for the next 10 years (see ILWP Books vol 5 for Lenin's devastating destruction in 1921 of Trotsky's disruptive activities).

Trotsky's kindred petty-bourgeois spirits are still at it as the millionaire Redgrave gang's anti-Lenin falsifications (to undermine the Soviet Union) show. These counter-revolutionary lies get even worse when the same article tries to deny the successful expansion of the world socialist revolution along the path Lenin predicted (see ILWP Books vol 5) through the Third World.

Cuba and Nicaragua, for example, where the whole people are armed to defend their proletarian dictatorship against fascist counter-revolution, financed and organised by Washington, are slandered as being-

subservient to world imperialist economy - as subservient as it was before independence.  This is particularly true of Castro's Cuba whose self-styled 'socialism' is underwritten by massive imperialist loans.

These foul lies which describe "Cuba, the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, and the Salvadorean FMLN" as "bourgeois-nationalists" and "Bonapartist regimes where a section of the bourgeoisie leans upon the working class and peasantry. . . making absolutely sure that the working class cannot politically organise itself independently of the bourgeois state apparatus" are the work of madmen whose bunker mentality is totally cut off from real life.

The most devastating and heroic proletarian revolutions since Russia, China, and Vietnam are now crippling imperialism in central America, driving Washington towards World War III and certain oblivion as it thrashes around trying in vain to stem the tide of advancing communism.

The heroic self-sacrifice and Bolshevik inspiration of the communist revolutions in Cuba, Nicaragua, and El Salvador are the hope of the downtrodden masses throughout
the Americas and far beyond.

But the millionaire Redgraveite press tells worse LIES about these titanic Leninist movements, and with more contempt, than the fascist mouthings of Reagan, Kirkpatrick, and Somoza gangsters - the deadliest enemies of the socialist revolution.

Their imbecile distortions, - as with most of their other anti-Soviet slanders, - rest entirely on the childish sectarian stupidity that to be a real 'socialist' regime, a workers state should have no economic relations whatever with the rest of the (capitalist) world. This idiot 'ultra-leftism' has nothing whatever to do with Lenin's Russian Revolution which not only insisted on trade and diplomatic relations with even the most reactionary imperialist powers,  but even invited imperialist concessionaires back into Soviet Russia to exploit its natural wealth (and labour) in order to help get capital accumulation going for the strengthening of the SOCIALIST STATE. (See ILWP Bocks vol 4)

And all the bourgeois press lies in the world, including the WRP's, will fail to turn these now well-understood and inevitable developments of the world socialist revolution into daft propaganda distortions that will halt the relentless spread of Leninism and the overthrow of the bourgeoisie worldwide, - and all its counter-revolutionary sects from the 'ultra-left' to the 'ultra-right'. (Bulletin 208)

8------------------------------------------------

The anti-Leninist 'left' in Britain quickly disowned the Grenadan socialist revolution upon its leadership upheavals, thus assisting imperialist intervention.

The IMG Trotskyite entrists into the Labour Party are typical of these middle class 'revolutionaries'. Their 'Socialist Action' rag declared the New Jewel revolutionary movement on Grenada untouchable and beyond the pale, virtually setting it up for the international ostracism and extermination that the 'free' world has been itching to impose for four years.

Immediately taking Maurice Bishop's side in the internal New Jewel dispute (as the CIA also laughably did after having tried four times to assassinate Bishop since power was taken in 1979), the IMG/Socialist League treacherously regurgitate "some reports" that Bishop had been starved under arrest for six days, had been "put against a wall and shot" and that there had been "further killings of Bishop supporters," implying some fascist bloodbath.

Armed with lavish funds, CIA disinformation agents have been hard at work on Grenada for four years, stirring up endless destabilising rumours and hysteria. In the absence of any firm evidence whatever of exactly how the leadership dispute unfolded on Grenada, or even of any firm detailed knowledge of precisely what issues split New Jewel, or step-by-step how these differences escalated into organisational factionalism, it is criminal light-mindedness for supposed 'revolutionaries' to help bourgeois propaganda pile murky suspicion upon slanderous innuendo the way IMG/ Socialist Action did.

Playing right along with stock CIA anti-communist propaganda prejudices, IMG was writing before Reagan's blitzkrieg that the anti-Bishop faction had staged a  "putsch", that Bernard Coard may in turn have been "pushed aside by the army leader", that "the shooting of revolutionary leaders is totally unacceptable", and that "despite the paraphernalia of alleged participatory democracy in Grenada, in reality the revolution has been led by a small group of leaders of the New Jewel Movement. This movement has never had a congress; it does not possess the structures of internal democracy in which political disputes can be settled".

This attitude is close to Reagan's "gang of leftist thugs" slanders and reeks of the same petty-bourgeois democracy humbug. It is particularly outrageous hypocrisy coming from the IMG whose middle class 'Marxist' opportunists have contentedly liquidated themselves into the Labour Party which was an infamous imperialist toe-rag and riddled with Mafia-level corruption and anti-democratic bureaucratism even in Lenin's day, and has deteriorated considerably since then, (as a study of rightwing leadership collusion with SDP renegades and TUC barons to wreck Benn's deputy leadership chances and then Labour's Foot-led general election chances would show, e.g.)

The New Jewel Movement actually made a socialist revolution, overthrowing Gairy fascism in a bitter murderous struggle to do it. That could never have been achieved without extraordinarily high levels of revolutionary consciousness, responsibility, sacrifice, and discipline, qualities inseparable from a deep Leninist grasp of what Bolshevik democracy is all about, - a preparedness both to give and to support correct leadership.

The IMG, on the other hand, has no achievements to its name except a long history of sordid sectarian witch-hunts against its own 'dissidents', an appalling opportunist liquidation into the Labour Party, and a philistine unwillingness and incapacity for even the remotest acquaintance with Leninist revolutionary theory, typified in their fawning support for the CIA-Vatican counter-revolution in Poland behind Walesa, - the apostle of peasant capitalism, anti-communism, religious obscurantism, and corruption.

After a lifetime's shallow anti-Sovietism which makes even Thatcher seem broad-minded, the IMG Trots and their American co-thinkers have recently tried an adaptation to the obviously hugely successful and internationally popular Cuban Revolution despite its firm and principled Leninist pro-Sovietism. What a nauseatingly hollow fraud this belated 'conversion'  was can now be seen from the IMG's hysterical abuse against the New Jewel Movement just because there has been a tragic leadership split.

Sneeringly dismissing the Grenadan revolution's organisation of local Soviet democracy, - (an infinitely more developed form of civilisation than British Labour Party racketeering and general election hustling,) - the IMG capitalist-Parliament stooges jeer: 

Once a leadership starts to rely on the professional army, rather than mass democracy, and an armed people's militia, the road becomes open to Bonapartism and military dictatorship....

These events will make it much more difficult to build solidarity with the revolution in the whole of the Caribbean and Central America. 

These treacherous opportunists, (now trying to build a 'left' sanitising cover for one of warmongering imperialism's foulest protagonists, - the murderous British Labour Party which postwar helped US imperialism launch the nuclear Cold War and counter-revolutionary crusade against communism and the national-liberation struggle in Greece,  Malaya, etc, - offered volunteer troops to Vietnam, - helped fascist South Korea in the Korean War, - sold Diego Garcia to the US Air Force, - and re-imposed British imperialist police-military dictatorship on the occupied north of Ireland, - etc, etc, etc, etc, etc,) -- help push Grenada onto US imperialism's chopping block with this slanderous capitulatory hysteria.

Just like all the petty-bourgeois 'left', punch-drunk from CIA anti-communist pounding, the real confused horror of these monstrous 'Marxist' muddle-heads is for the dictatorship of the proletariat. For Lenin it was the essence of Marxism. For these cringing IMG opportunists, it is the nightmare of hostility from their middle class friends, family, colleagues, and neighbours if the dictatorship of the proletariat is so much as mentioned.

It is the central theme of Lenin's greatest and most prolific creativity (vols 24 to 33) and the sole key to understanding the complexities of the international class struggle and the world socialist revolution since Lenin. But these IMG philistines epitomise the hostility to revolutionary theory of the Labour movement aristocracy,  and cannot even bear contemplating the international balance of class forces from the vantage point of proletarian dictatorship versus counter-revolution, Lenin's understanding.

The IMG's hopelessly loose, slipshod, and pretentious bandying of terms like 'professional army', 'mass democracy', 'Bonapartism', and 'military dictatorship', without any attempt to prove or even describe what class characterisation they wish to attach to these categories, criminally irresponsible and dangerously shallow-minded.

Their confused defeatist hysteria about the revolution in the entire Central American region is no less a cowardly ideological retreat from proletarian dictatorship merely because IMG/Socialist Action can now claim 'how right we were to warn of the increased dangers of imperialist intervention'.

Not even half-wits could have been unaware of the hugely increased dangers of US imperialist intervention after the Grenadan leadership dispute led to violent upheaval. But tragic as the split was, and even more tragically handled, the Grenadan comrades did fall out. And even if CIA subversion within New Jewel is proved, the last thing to do is turn one's back on the Grenadan revolutionary leadership in general, the way the intimidated Trotskyists have done in Britain, betraying the revolution, as Trotsky betrayed the Soviet Union.

Socialist Action's shallow ignorant petty bourgeois hysteria about "killings", "shootings as a policy", "military dictatorship", and "Bonapartism" etc, dovetailed perfectly with the 'free' world's Goebbels techniques of complete fabrications about "a total breakdown of law and order on Grenada with murderous lawlessness terrorising the island".

Nothing of the sort happened. All of the important revolutionary socialist developments which have transformed Grenada economically, politically, and socially, remained fully functioning. The progressive development of the island was continuing as usual. The casualties of the leadership upheaval were all borne by the New Jewel Movement itself. No one else suffered, not even the tiny handful of political prisoners, - bourgeois enemies of socialist progress.

What Socialist Action was really turning away from, stampeded by the slanderous propaganda in the 'free' press (the CIA/BBC/ITV/Fleet Street lie machine), is the nature of class power itself, - the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The fatal mistake of all these Trotskyist fake 'revolutionaries' is their ridiculous illusion that errors and crimes committed by proletarian dictatorship regimes can be best avoided by having no proletarian dictatorship at all.

But this treacherous anti-Marxist imbecility is exactly the idealist poison which leads the Labour Party to have always been an integral part of the murderous anti-communist Western alliance throughout its bloody history; and leads the IMG/Socialist League to be a left cover for that continuing Labour Party imperialist role, loyally cooperating with a NATO fascist warmongering machine and a British capitalist Parliament which accepts the butchery of socialist Grenada, the subversion of Nicaragua, the Nazification of El Salvador, the fascist crushing of Chile, the maintenance of scores of other tyrannies like Pinochet's, - and so on.

Just 'protesting' for a 'change' in the system which is the jailer of mankind and the warmongering assassin of all socialist progress on the planet, is idiot pretension.

The IMG's hasty denunciation of the entire revolutionary process in Grenada (just because of a violent leadership upheaval) is their real class position, - petty bourgeois democrats totally hostile to the very notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Never mind that thousands of Grenadans are now being bound and gagged at gun point, with hundreds already butchered by the savage imperialist warmongering assault; and never mind that the real daily living existence of the entire population of Grenada of building socialism is now being systematically dismantled by the US military dictatorship; - the real horror for the Socialist Action is that the New Jewel Movement had too little formal bourgeois democracy.

"However valid the debate, and whoever was more correct, there is no justification whatever for the methods of army putsch. The effects can only be to demoralise the Grenadan masses," Socialist Action goes on, slanderously heaping up the worldwide bourgeois propaganda preparations for the US military blitzkrieg.

"The effects can only be to demoralise the Grenadan masses. Since the political debate had not been taken through any of the mass organisations, it appears very likely that the masses were at least confused about the issues.. ..

"The truth is that the revolution is now in grave danger. Popular confidence in the New Jewel Movement and the People's Revolutionary Government is bound to be shaken.  The role of the army creates major dangers of a military dictatorship being imposed, or at least of the army developing autonomy from the political leadership."

It is self-evidently a pity that the Grenadan socialist revolutionary movement was not better developed, wiser, more talented, more experienced, etc, etc, etc, in a thousand different ways. Perfection in revolutionary leadership would indeed be desirable.

But it is by these empty pronouncements that Socialist Action gives the game away. The difficult reality of revolutionary socialist struggle within the obvious limitations of the Grenadan movement (or any other,  including Lenin's own Bolshevik Party, - including while Lenin himself was alive) - is something these Labour Party stooges want to wash their hands of, immediately something goes wrong.

It is no use the IMG tacking onto the end of their anti-proletarian-dictatorship bleat the pious wish that "defence of the Grenadan revolution against any imperialist
provocation, or any temptation to use these events to intervene, is now a number one task for all socialists".

The effective toleration of US imperialist slaughter of the Grenadan socialist revolution by the 'free' world is already cemented by the confused anti-Marxist drivel of this Socialist Action article, - as it has previously been built up in a thousand earlier articles hostile to the dictatorship of the proletariat in the USSR and the socialist camp.

The ideological hold on the Western workers of reformist, trade union, bourgeois consciousness is what enables warmongering 'free' world imperialism to continue to get away with its bloody crimes in Grenada,  Nicaragua,  Chile, Chad, and elsewhere. One line of Socialist Action calls for socialists to resist the imperialist diktat. But the whole article effectively continues prejudicing people against the clearcut Marxist understanding: - Either the dictatorship of the proletariat; or the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie; there is no third road.

The IMG  pretends that New Jewel 'crimes' were responsible for the US imperialist invasion. But that is exactly the line of the CIA and the capitalist press, and it is nonsense.

The military blitzkrieg was coming anyway, - long prepared by Washington, and even rehearsed at an island off Puerto Rico in front of Eugenia Charles, Edward Seaga, and the other capitalist Caribbean mobsters, - long before there was even any thought of Maurice Bishop being toppled in a leadership upheaval on Grenada.

Imperialism's drive to war and fascism is unavoidable, and inseparably linked to the incurable capitalist economic slump. The only answer to it is socialist revolutionary overthrow of every capitalist state, especially the so-called 'great democracies', whether governed at the time by Tory or Labour (which has never made any difference to British capitalism's participation in international imperialist diktat.)

And the only main guideline for successful socialist development to prevent imperialist counter-revolution is the strongest proletarian dictatorship possible.

Gestures of "nice restraint" towards the defeated international bourgeoisie, such as Salvador Allende repeatedly insisted upon, — (not arming the working class when they demanded it, not dismantling the capitalist state military and secret police hierarchy not even after the first failed June 1973 coup attempt, etc) - and such as the Grenadan revolution offered by leaving the bourgeois Sir Paul Scoon as Governor-General, - are only taken murderous advantage of by imperialist counter-revolution.

The inevitability of armed imperialist counter-revolution is a different question entirely, of course, from the success of warmongering intervention. That is prevented on an overall world scale by the professional armed might of the Soviet state of proletarian dictatorship and the rest of the socialist camp. It is prevented in specific local circumstances by the widest possible involvement of the armed masses in a people's defence militia, and by a determined party of revolutionary leadership.

The 'mass democracy' is the aim of communism, not the way it can be achieved. A plebiscite at any time Lenin was in power would have seen the Bolshevik Party easily defeated, as the Constituent Assembly elections at the end of 1917 in fact did. But Marxist proletarian dictatorship needed only a majority of the advanced working class in the major industrial and political centres to work successfully, as Lenin demonstrated both in theory and practice.

These who don't want such a transformation of history as has happened since 1917 don't want the world transformed to communism at all. For Reagan's guns will prevent it happening any other way. Allende yesterday; Grenada today; Nicaragua tomorrow; and a 'left' Labour Government next week. But the superior armed might and firmer proletarian dictatorship of the Soviet Union and the socialist camp will finally smash the capitalist states' world warmongering course; and the international Leninist movement will overthrow them. Build the ILWP. (Bulletin 213)

9------------------------------------------------

The comrades in Havana have made a number of mistakes in assessing the events on Grenada prior to US imperialism's NAZI blitzkrieg, wrongly putting the blame on the New Jewel Movement leadership when prime minister Maurice Bishop was clearly chiefly responsible for the tragedy.

The self-justifying words of Bishop's own supporters, reading between the lines, now make it obvious that Bishop and his faction tried to impose a military putsch in defiance of the considered decision of the revolutionary party's central committee to replace him as leader by his deputy Bernard Coard.

Perpetually in a minority for more than a year on a whole variety of issues facing the Grenadan revolution, Bishop increasingly defied the party's decisions and tried to use his office as prime minister to impose his own line on the island anyway.

It was this strike-breaking factionalism, - reaching a head in the middle of October and immediately spilling over into outright counter-revolutionary intriguing with outsiders and enemies of the Grenadan revolution, - which finally forced the New Jewel leadership to reluctantly place Bishop under "amateurish house arrest" (even in the words of critics hostile to the NJM.)

Proof of the Bishop faction's guilt in illegally plotting with outside forces is irrefutably provided by their own words. Responsibility of the Bishop faction for the violence which tragically ended the struggle seems equally
clear. 

Bishop's arbitrary and adventurist determination to use his "popularity" (as the revolutionary government's figurehead) to challenge the undoubted authority of the revolutionary party's national leadership, made some kind of discipline inevitable; - first making Coard (instead of Bishop) the official leader of the New Jewel Movement; then suspending Bishop from the Central Committee; and finally placing Bishop under easy house arrest.

If there was a mistake in this disciplining, it was that the NJM was not firm enough, that it far too leniently issued a fairly mild rebuke to their old comrade for what in fact was an extremely dangerous and provocative political course that Bishop was following.

It was a 15-hour meeting of the NJM's 13-man central committee on or about October 14 that finally decided to confine Bishop to his home after reaching a conclusion that Bishop himself was responsible for rumours being spread around the island that Bernard Coard was plotting to murder Bishop. At one stage, Coard and his wife Phyllis, herself a junior minister in the government, had resigned in protest at these rumours.  That meeting also concluded that Bishop "lacked great depth in ideological clarity" and lacked the necessary Leninist qualities for leadership

The previous month, the Central Committee had reviewed Bishop's conduct over the past year, finding him guilty of "one-manism and weak chairmanship and leadership" and characterising Bishop's policies generally as "the easy-to-follow petty bourgeois route".

Bishop was provocatively and illegally freed from house arrest by a crowd of supporters. The myth is deliberately being fostered by the capitalist press (the CIA/BBC/ITV/Fleet Street lie machine) that this was a piece of purely harmless exuberance by 'innocent islanders' without a care in the world who were then viciously and sinisterly fired upon by the 'mad Marxist ideologues'.

The reality is vastly different. The Bishop faction was taking ruthless advantage of the relaxed politics of revolutionary Grenada to set in motion a criminal betrayal of the NJM regime at the hands of international counter-revolution. The Bishop faction's action were very far from a joke.

First, Bishop's press secretary, Don Rojas, on his own later admission, went to the international cable office "on Bishop's instructions" to prepare "appeals for international support" for Bishop against the revolutionary party leadership.

Unison Whiteman, Bishop's closest ally, at the head of the mob, explained to the press that night: 

"We feel that we have to disassociate ourselves from this government and that we have to explain to the people of the country and the world the serious situation and the refusal of the government to deal with it. "

Observing this attempt at mob rule, NJM supporters told the press that Bishop was trying "to set up a one-man show". 

Major Leon Cornwall, Grenada's ambassador to Cuba, angrily told Bishop and the surging mob: "We will get you wherever you go", Rojas admits.

Where the mob did go is the most significant thing of all. Bishop, Whiteman, Rojas, and other factionalising minorityites, - including farmers' leader Fitzroy Bain,  labour chief Vincent Noel, education minister Jacqueline Creft (Bishop's mistress), housing minister Norris Bain, quartermaster to the army Osborn Alexander, and agriculture minister George Louison, -  led the crowd straight to the Fort Rupert armoury, where the soldiers were believed to be sympathetic to Bishop. Their families and other supporters joined the coup leaders there.

On Osborn Alexander's admission, the guns were taken off the guards at Fort Rupert. He claims: "The soldiers on the fort were in full sympathy with the people. They were just there. They didn't do anything."

It is also admitted that "doctors and nurses were summoned from the nearby hospital", - allegedly to "look after Bishop" although there is no evidence whatever that he was ill.

Alexander admits that Bishop then rang round various senior army officers. Again no explanation is given. The reasonable assumption is that Bishop was hoping to stage a fullscale armed coup with forces friendly to him, and was preparing Fort Rupert as his headquarters, including medical personnel to deal with the casualties.

Louison admits that the revolutionary party central committee was still in full command of the situation, and called an emergency meeting at Fort Frederick headquarters to deal with the situation. "The rest of the central committee was under Bernard Coard's complete control", he admits further, trying to put a nasty slant on the clear-thinking, patient, and united majority.

Rojas also admitted that Coard was "the most developed left ideologue in the Grenada revolution, a brilliant man".

Who started the final shoot-out at Fort Rupert, or why, is still not definite from available evidence. But the revolutionary leadership's Military Revolutionary Council which assumed martial law powers to deal with the Bishop coup attempt, stated unequivocally that the Bishop mob was in the process of seizing the Fort and handing out weapons to its faction. The Bishop faction make no attempt to hide the fact that they broke down the gates of Bishop's house to release him initially - from guards who refused to fire on them. And that they then disarmed the guards at Fort Rupert.

Bishop's state of mind is also a curiosity. Although not reported ill, and although resting at home unmolested for a week, his supporters admit that as he emerged from the house to meet them, he fell over. And Annie Bain, wife of the housing minister, offered this curious description of the scene she saw when she went to Fort Rupert to join the rest of the Bishop faction there. 

"I saw Maurice. And Norris was there, and a bottle of alcohol was up in his hand....Unison Whiteman and my husband and Maurice were talking. What I did hear Unison say was that they were waiting on the PA system (loudspeakers) so that Maurice should address the crowd."

In addition to admitting that the Bishop faction was preparing, to appeal "to the world" over the heads of the NJM leadership, Unison Whiteman also admits he confided in the East Caribbean's worst Uncle Tom just hours before their coup attempt, - Washington's chief stooge who let his island be used for the NAZI blitzkrieg invasion, Barbados prime minister Tom Adams. Rushing back from the United Nations on hearing of Bishop's house arrest, Whiteman  was advised to "wait a while" by Adams, and offered political asylum.

Another dubious feature of Bishop's antics was his insistence on formal bourgeois elections on Grenada, rejected by the revolutionary leadership in favour of the vastly superior Soviet democracy in the peoples councils which ran everything on Grenada. Capitalist press comments claim Bishop wanted elections merely to refute the CIA propaganda campaign against Grenada. But since Bishop's unilateral determination on this course, it must be suspected that he was interested (as prime minister and the most visible NJM leader) in getting a "popular" mandate to use factionally against the NJM majority.

The Observer reported from Grenada during the emergency, one of the few reporters on the island from the capitalist press:

In recent weeks, Bishop had been telling any Western journalists he encountered that nothing was more important to him than improving his ties with the Americans.

It also reported: 

"Coard had little time for fuddy-duddy relics like Sir Paul Scoon. Maurice Bishop with his wider vision, knew better. There was advantage in keeping a conventional figleaf in front of their political passions, and Sir Paul Scoon (governor general and Queen's representative) was it.

"What was more, Government House had a fine tennis court,  and Scoon was a keen player. So was Bishop, who lived nearby. At weekends the Marxist prime minister and his carefully non-political Governor-General regularly played a couple of sets together. Bishop often brought along his education minister Jacqueline Creft who lived with him.'

Scoon is now administering the Quisling NAZI dictatorship on behalf of Reagan's fascist military invasion, which is continuing the butchery of scores more revolutionaries every week, with a possible death toll already approaching 1% of the Grenadan population, - (an equivalent of 2 million dead if applied,  say, to the US population,)- a truly massive scale of slaughter. Scoon is about as "non-political" as Adolf Hitler.

The Cuban leadership's October 20 denunciation of the New Jewel Movement, a bad enough move in itself whatever had been understood about the row in Grenada, is a disastrous mistake in the light of the evidence.

Immediately taking Bishop's side without any attempt at establishing the rights and wrongs of the internal struggle or who started the violence, it declared: 

No doctrine, no principle, no opinion calling itself revolutionary, and no internal split can justify such atrocious acts as the physical elimination of Bishop and the prominent group of honest and dignified leaders who died yesterday.

Bishop was one of the political leaders most admired by our people for his talent, simplicity,  sincerity, revolutionary honesty and his proved friendship with our country. He also had a great international reputation.

"We hope that the painful events which have occurred will make all the revolutionaries of Grenada and the world think very deeply and induce the concept that no crime whatsoever may be committed in the name of the Revolution and Freedom.

Dismay at the bloodshed is natural. Totally unjustified is the accusation, - without offering any evidence, - that the Coard faction started the violence. Certainly the Bishop faction obviously got the worst of the violent exchanges, with his street mob fleeing in panic from shooting inside Fort Rupert. But there is still no evidence at all who started firing first, or what were the aims of each faction in the immediate struggle. And the above evidence makes it overwhelmingly clear that in general terms, the Bishop faction was wholly in the wrong in its provocative and illegal behaviour in occupying Fort Rupert in the first place, and in all the other counter-revolutionary acts which accompanied this dangerous move.

Cuba's statement adds, concerning the pre-coup leadership struggle:

The situation remained in a state of deadlock for some days; sometimes it looked as though it could be resolved in an honest, intelligent and peaceful way.

But who was guilty of the change of tone?

And then the Cuban statement adds amazingly: 

It was clear that the people were behind Bishop and wanted his recall.

This is an astonishing capitulation to the values of bourgeois democracy.

In the first place, who was this "clear" to, and how was this instant view of the whole of Grenadan opinion so quickly established? Secondly, which "people" were behind Bishop. Sir Paul Scoon, for example? Did the "people" on the revolutionary movement's central leadership not count? And if the street mob was the decisive factor in Havana's eyes, would the NJM majority putting a bigger mob onto the streets have been deemed more convincing? Since when have plebiscites been so highly regarded by the Leninist movement of revolutionary leadership?

On top of all this, the Cuban statement is clogged with other non-Leninist remarks about how "dignity and respect prevented them discussing the Grenadan leadership's difficulties prior to the bust-up.”

This is nonsense. If political struggles affect the conduct and outcome of the world socialist revolution and the understanding of it by the international mass movement, then it is the absolute duty of any self-respecting Leninist to try to form an opinion about which conflicting line is correct, and to help fight for its triumph.

To take a different example, the movement in Chile is currently under appalling misunderstandings and repeating disastrous blunders concerning the role of Allende in the 1973 catastrophe. It would be criminal for international Leninists who can see the dangers of the movement's continued failure to expose the treacherous mistakes and illusions of Allendeism not to speak up, regardless of whether they are Chileans or not.

Similarly, if Bishop's tactics were as outrageously wrong and factional as they now seem, and if the Cuban comrades were in a position to find this out, it is hopelessly mistaken for them not to have done so.

What is worse, there seems to be an element of hypocrisy in this "dignity and respect" malarky because it certainly did not inhibit the Cubans from speaking out  strongly condemning the NJM majority in this October 20 statement.

Worst of all, when Havana did finally speak out, it seems to have got its facts and political judgements hopelessly wrong.

Revolutionary parties of leadership make revolutions, winning the support of the masses to win the power, as Castro himself proved, and then guiding the masses to the construction of socialism and communism. Leninists should have supported the NJM leadership in the absence of any evidence that it had got things badly wrong, not the undisciplined illegally-behaving defeated faction.

And if Fidel Castro's real reason for not sending reinforcements to Grenada to meet the impending US NAZI blitzkrieg was because it was "impossible and unthinkable after the things that had happened", - as quoted in the capitalist press, - then Havana's mistakes over the Grenadan split were infinitely compounded.

It is fair to quote one last document captured from the New Jewel Movement headquarters by the CIA and released in Washington, - some unattributed notes dated October 21, two days after Bishop's attempted coup, which declared:

It is clear that the Cuban leadership does not know of the dishonesty and lying of MB as well as his wickedness. The Cuban position creates an atmosphere for speedy imperialist intervention.

It would be reassuring and a great service to Leninism if the Cuban comrades would comment again on all these matters, (Bulletin 214)

10---------------------------------------------

The essence of the international class struggle is its inevitable breaking out into violent conflict periodically. 

While always seeking to minimise the violence and maximise the political pressure, - consistent with actually achieving the overthrow of the ruling capitalist class, Marxism-Leninism is a totally revolutionary movement, willing to seize power, and to smash counter-revolution wherever possible by the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The circumstances for such violent conflict are always created by the still-dominant world capitalist system, - the ruling-class international bourgeoisie.

Either it uses its power to impose incurable economic slump conditions via military dictatorship or fascist tyranny, -thus provoking communist revolution as the only way out of their suffering and misery for the proletarian masses, - as happened in Cuba and Nicaragua, for example, and as is now happening in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador as well as other Latin American countries. Or else it organises counter-revolution around deposed reactionary elements such as the rightwing civil war of intervention inflicted on Nicaragua now by the Somocista fascists and mercenaries;  and on Afghanistan by the deposed tribal and feudal khans and mullahs plus their benighted follower, and on Poland by religious backwardness, anti-Soviet fascist-nationalism, and pro-Western fanaticism.

But whenever the endless class war pressures spill over into actual violence, the Trotskyist and CP-centrist 'lefts', - all formally committed to the world socialist revolution's side against international imperialism's anti-communist Cold War crusade, - almost invariably capitulate to bourgeois propaganda, and undermine any militant response to reactionary provocations.

This middle class treachery is characterised by a variety of opportunist features from anti-Soviet prejudice and Labourite Parliamentary careerism to bourgeois pacifism. 

When Maurice Bishop staged his counter-revolutionary putsch against being voted out of his leading position in the New Jewel revolutionary movement leadership by the NJM central committee (after more than a year's unsuccessful efforts to correct his Menshevik weaknesses and rejection of majority decisions), nearly all the anti-Leninist 'left' in Britain from the IMG to the CP immediately adopted a revisionist-compromise position supporting Bishop, capitulating to the pressure of bourgeois propaganda against the Coard faction.

The fact that the Cuban leadership initially made similar mistakes can in no way soften the criticism (see Bulletin 214).

The New Communist Party (the most militant-sounding rightwing revisionists,  pretending to be pro-Soviet but in reality completely reformist), typify this capitulation to Bishop's rightwing provocation behind a phony bourgeois 'horror of violence' declaring: 

With a young revolutionary movement under intense US pressure,  the immature attitudes that might otherwise have been overcome led to the irresponsible act of folly in the killing of Bishop and Whiteman, and the almost inevitable consequence of the US invasion. 

and quoting with approval Cuba's disastrous error of judgement which wrongly backed the Bishop faction against the Coard faction, wrongly blamed the Coard faction for the violence, and wallowed in hopelessly idealist-democratic illusions about the reality of class struggle in claiming: 

No doctrine,  principle, or proclaimed revolutionary position, and no internal split, could justify such brutal procedures as the physical elimination of Bishop and the outstanding group of honest and dignified leaders who were killed. 

Bishop was tragically killed in mob violence which he, Bishop, started by having the gates stormed where he was under house arrest, and then by storming Fort Rupert, disarming the guards in both cases, simultaneously sending off international cables to get help from "world opinion" (an invitation for an invasion of Grenada), and ringing round selected army officers Bishop thought he could win over to his attempted coup.(See 214)

The Cuban statement slithers deceptively from an astonishing automatic assumption that Bishop must be the innocent party in the NJM feuding, to a hypocritical bourgeois-idealist generalisation that "violence can never be justified", which has nothing in it but maximum petty-bourgeois prejudice.

Castro's latest reported remarks (if true) that the defeat of Bishop's attempted coup/re-seizure of political leadership had "destroyed the revolution", and that the US invasion had only "killed a corpse", show up a sad retreat from Leninism's understanding of the vital role played by the leading cadres of the revolutionary party. 

Revolutionary ideas and leadership, - however skilled the role of one or two individuals, - are useless unless a revolutionary party leadership of great strength, breadth, and depth, has been convinced and trained by years of experience to fight for those ideas among the masses. To contemptuously write off the majority of the New Jewel Movement leadership in this way, (many of them with just as good credentials as Bishop in struggling long for socialism on Grenada,) is the most amazing blinkered subjectivism and nothing to do with Marxism-Leninism, - especially in view of the year-long recorded struggle by the NJM leadership to get Bishop to correct his weaknesses and to quit arbitrarily and dangerously defying the majority views of the revolution's central committee.

For the NCP to immediately fall in with Castro's blind spot on this matter reveals their weak middle-class inabilities to fully grasp Leninism, placing them in the same 'left' swamp with every revisionist tendency.

The Solidarnosc "peaceful free trade union" fraud exposed the revisionist 'left' humbug from the Trots to the centrist - Stalinists even more decisively.

The latest comic ' phony war' between the McLennan majority and Costello minority wings of the Communist Party, where the 'Eurocommunist' majority claim they merely support: "the right" for "'free" and "independent" trade unions in East Europe rather than supporting Solidarnosc as such, while the "pro-Moscow" minority "merely" oppose martial law in Poland while also claiming not to support Solidarnosc, - coincides with a revealing admission in the Observer by Fleet Streets; chief 'leftie' champion of Solidarnosc,  Neal Ascherson, whose 'breathtaking' on-the-spot accounts of the "heroic revolutionary socialist" revolt by Walesa and company kept the pro-Solidarity lobby on the British 'left' keyed up for months in 1980-1981-1982.

These tame capitalist press 'lefts' were always careful on the one hand to conceal the rightwing reactionary class content of Walesa's movement, and on the other careful to deny there was any real intention to overthrow the Polish workers state.

Now the mask is off in Ascherson's careless review of a new book by TG Ash on Solidarnosc. 

Writes Ascherson: 

He is obviously very tempted to say, that Solidarity should have gone ahead with the general strike and full-dress confrontation in March 1981, at a moment when the regime's repressive forces were not yet organised. This is what many Poles now believe. But Garton Ash wisely stops short of saying so. Although Solidarity in March was at the peak of its own unity and mass support, it was not politically pre -pared. The aim of supervising the existing regime still held.

So now we know. The real aim of Solidarity all along, out of the mouths of its own 'leftie' supporters in the West, was the overthrow of the Polish socialist state; - Exactly as the ILWP was saying right from the start of Solidarnosc in August 1980 in demanding the firmest reassertion of the Polish dictatorship of the proletariat to crush this counter-revolution as soon as possible.

Ascherson reveals more: 

Confrontation really meant forcing the replacement of that regime by something else.  It was only later that year, as the spreading economic catastrophe and a campaign of government provocation made Solidarity more desperate (and less united) that the union's leadership began to accept that it would have to act as an active political force.

The bourgeoisie was ousted from power in Poland in 1945-46 by the Red Army and the Polish communist movement. Only the waking class can provide an alternative power base. Like every state on the planet, Poland can only be either a bourgeois dictatorship or a proletarian dictatorship.

Poland's socialist state structure and its endless conflicts with the capitalist peasantry and the anti-Marxist Catholic intelligentsia and deposed landed gentry and capitalists, - plus the fervent support for Walesa from the Pope to Reagan and Thatcher, plus the billions for Solidarity activities supplied by the Vatican and the CIA, - make it abundantly clear that Poland was (and is) a proletarian dictatorship,   - and that Walesa and company would have overthrown it in a bloody counter-revolution if given half a chance, and re-established a dictatorship of bourgeois 'parliamentary democracy' capitalism in Poland.

Those who oppose martial law in Poland, just as those who are for the "rights" of Solidarity, are equally on the side of imperialist counter-revolution; and against the dictatorship of the proletariat, - the moment that the fat is really in the fire, violence is breaking out, and "anti-violence" bourgeois propaganda is lashing the feeble 'lefts' of the British labour movement, - (humiliatingly forcing them to turn tail on their supposed "support" for the world socialist revolution at the very vital moment when it is most needed(to stem the CIA-imperialist interventionist bandwagon effect in the West).)

The same treacherous bottling out from forthright approval  of strong action by the socialist camp's defenders was observable throughout the revisionist 'left' when the Soviet air defences correctly shot down the Korean spy plane, deliberately sent into the USSR's most sensitive region in the hope of a "Russians-shoot-down-passenger-plane" sensation to be exploited by the CIA-controlled 'free' press. Only the ILWP commended the Soviet action as being of benefit to the strengthening of the world socialist revolution. All the rest either denounced it or offered lame regrets, apologies, excuses etc, for the 'disaster'.

The innocent deaths were certainly tragic. They always are. But the incident was no 'disaster', but a well-deserved and correctly firm rebuff to more imperialist provocations.

Behind all this nervousness about revolutionary  violence lies the most appalling deceitfulness by the entire 'left' swamp outside the Leninist movement. They kid themselves that violence is 'unnecessary', than an insistence on 'democratic' progress can finally disarm the imperialist bourgeoisie and force through a 'peaceful' road to socialism. Or alternatively they accept in words that there must be a revolutionary overthrow of capitalist state violence and a firm dictatorship of the proletariat to put down counter-revolution and help spread the socialist camp until dominant world imperialist power is finally overwhelmed, - but in practice deny to the Soviet Union and the socialist camp any support at all for building powerful workers states precisely to withstand imperialist subversion, economic sabotage, and counter-revolutionary intrigue.

And in reality, the entire 'left' swamp swallows buckets of counter-revolutionary violence, both actual and potential, without batting an eyelid.

Solidarnosc again provides unmistakable proof of this. To this day, these 'lefts' from the 'Militant' and WRP to the CP refuse to expose the warmongering-fascist nature of Solidarnosc with its desecration of Lenin statues and Soviet war memorials, its racist hatred of the Russians, its contempt for the anti-imperialist movement in the West, and its worship of Poland's pogrom-ridden Pilsudski-fascist past. 

The murderous putsch planned by Solidarnosc leaders against the Polish workers state and revealed in the Radom tape recordings are ignored (see ILWP Books volume 3), as is the significant emigration of most Solidarnosc refugees to fascist South Africa to join the white master race there.

Ascherson is again revealing, admitting that "popular Polish views (i.e. Solidarnosc's) of the outside world are frankly Thatcherite, - except that so many Poles now regard the invasion of Grenada as a victory in the struggle of light against darkness" - (i.e. they are to the right even of Thatcher).

The “Support Solidarity” spokesman in London, Roman Napets, who approved the US fascist-military wiping out of the Grenadan socialist revolution as being "the removal of a small clique which blocked the progress towards democracy",  and regards people who shout "What about El Salvador" (to American imperialists hypocrisy about the 'suppression of Solidarnosc') as a "lunatic fringe",  confirms that it is anti-communism which is the essence of violence, not communist revolution.

In reality however, the 'left' swamp is perfectly capable of working out itself that the world-domineering imperialist system and its bourgeois ideology cannot possibly continue without inevitably coming into violent conflict with the unavoidable progress of the world socialist revolution. They turn a blind eye to the actual or potential counter-revolutionary violence of the Vatican-CIA -Solidarnosc attempt to overthrow the Polish workers state because they are intimidated by the bourgeois propaganda hullabaloo against proletarian dictatorship violence in support of that state.

This 'left' opportunist swamp despicably takes advantage of the mistakes, difficulties, and weaknesses of, say, the Polish workers state (or the 1978 Afghan revolution; or the majority NJM faction against Bishop in Grenada; or the propaganda clumsiness of the USSR over the Korean spy plane incident; etc, etc) to wash its hands of any responsibility for the world socialist revolution's struggle in those issues. Having never come anywhere near carrying out a socialist revolution of their own, nor with the remotest chance that they ever will, the 'left' swamp, in classic armchair-socialist style, feigns a belief only in 'perfect' transitions to socialism.

But their real concern is solely to avoid the lash of hostile criticism and ridicule from bourgeois-manipulated public opinion in this country. The one thing all the Trots and centrist-Stalinists agree upon is that never will they put themselves in the firing line defending the Soviet Union and the socialist camp over issues like Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, and Solidarnosc. Imperialist violence goes on year in and year out all round the world,  staging counter-revolutions, fascist coups, and openly NAZI blitzkriegs, as on tiny socialist Grenada. The 'left' swamp protests noisily - but stays firmly within the 'free' world charade and has no intention of ever denouncing it and declaring allegiance to the one real world socialist revolution, - the Soviet-led socialist camp. But let there be the slightest brief policing skirmishes carried out by the dictatorship of the proletariat against counter-revolutionary dissidence and disruption, - which is all that the Solidarnosc, Afghanistan, Czechoslovakia and Hungary incidents have amounted to, - and the 'left' swamp disowns any responsibility whatever for the world socialist revolution.

Their terror of the bourgeois propaganda backlash is now so great, - their cringing fear of making a really revolutionary challenge to their comfortable 'democratic' environment, - that they rush in screamingly to denounce "violence" the instant that the CIA propaganda machine distorts some rightwing move such as the Korean spy plane stunt, or the Maurice Bishop coup attempt, into a horror story against "communist evil".

The swamp of fake-'lefts' is rotten with anti-communism. They cannot take up a single issue, from Solidarnosc to the vicious rightwing censorship now operating in British capitalism's 'free' press, radio and television, - without treacherously backing off from the only real choice, - dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or dictatorship of the proletariat, - into a fantasy world of their own imagining where there is 'perfect democratic accountability' and 'perfect freedom for all opinions' in the dishonest and treacherous way that Benn and Loach, etc, put it over.

These 'parliamentary democracy' cretins are fooling themselves and the working class. And their only real achievement is to help the one reality (of bourgeois dictatorial power, hedged round with a few trimmings of 'democratic rights',  etc,) - go on ruling unchallenged, - unchallenged except by the Leninist movement.  

Build the ILWP. (Bulletin 215)

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The Cuban comrades are now suggesting that the Coard-Austin majority faction in the leadership of the New Jewel revolutionary movement were fake ultra-lefts, - agents of US imperialism.

"Look at the history of the revolutionary movement and you will find more than one connection between imperialism and those who take positions that appear to be on the extreme left. Aren't Pol Pot and Ieng Sary, - the ones responsible for the genocide in Kampuchea, - the most loyal allies Yankee imperialism has in South-East Asia at present? In Cuba ever since the Grenadian crisis began, we have called Coard's group, - to give it a name, - the 'Pol Pot' group," Fidel Castro told the huge Havana funeral rally on November 14.

The most glaring of many inconsistencies about this line is to explain why US imperialism took the enormous gamble of staging an extremely costly (in political terms internationally) wrecking invasion against the Grenadan socialist revolution if they had just got their own internal wrecking agents installed? And having 'staged' an invasion to oust their own men, why has US imperialism then detained and brutalised its Coard-Austin 'agents'?. Even stranger, why has US imperialism unleashed a NAZI-psychological warfare campaign on the island with lurid pesters everywhere vilifying Coard and Austin as "the evil communists who tried to kidnap Grenada" while allowing their supposed 'real enemy' Maurice Bishop to be turned into a bourgeois national hero?

Another curiosity is what does Havana know about the Coard-Austin political line? And if it does know something, why does it not discuss this political essence of the Grenadan problem, and expose what it thinks were the Leninist errors in this line?

The odd thing is that Havana has repeatedly insisted, with misplaced sanctimony, that it had never 'stooped so low' as to discuss Grenada's internal problems in the course of its frequent, and recent, meetings with Bishop. If true, this was a piece of non-Leninist nonsense. If not, it is pointless pretence.

Castro stressed again in his November 14 speech the "very close and affectionate links and the many friendly fraternal hours" spent with Bishop, including as recently as October 7, - but again stressing that "nothing was said about the internal dissensions".

Castro then admitted: "Coard's group never had such relations nor such intimacy and trust with us. Actually we did not even know that group existed."

But in that case, firstly,  how does Castro know anything about Coard and Austin's 'Pol Pot plans'?

As already exhaustively analysed in Bulletin 214, the obvious beginnings of needless opportunist violence on Grenada (as little enough as there was of it in any case, - limited to one brief skirmish) - was entirely  due to Bishop, and no one else. Bishop tried arbitrarily to use his power as the well-known prime-minister-figurehead to resist the properly arrived-at majority decisions of the revolutionary movement's leadership for a long period of time,  finally necessitating his house arrest. And then the Bishop faction lawlessly raised a counter-revolutionary mob to storm the guards at Bishop's house where he was under easy-going 'arrest'. And that same Bishop mob, then with Bishop at its head, lawlessly stormed Fort Rupert, once again disarming the guards there. For staging this Bonapartist putsch, the Bishop mob was put down. And there, all violence ceased; and Grenada was quickly back to normal after a few days martial law. Every eye-witness agrees that the country was back to normal immediately prior to the US imperialist invasion. Spreading this 'Pol Pot' rumour about Coard and Austin's political intentions merely plays into the hands of Washington's 'justification' propaganda, just as the anti-Leninist swamp in Britain has done (see Bulletins 213,  214, 215).

There is much more equally inflammatory (and totally unsubstantiated) language in Castro's speech against the Coard-Austin majority, (many with as long standing in the New Jewel Movement as Bishop,) - such as "hyenas.. egged on by imperialism...using the dagger of divisionism.. .conspirators, tools of imperialism. . .the new government of Grenada was morally indefensible",  etc.

Castro's only concrete charges are precisely the issues which the NJM majority insistently properly discussed with Bishop inside the central committee, urging him for over a year to heed their criticism. These matters demand discussion, not sneers.

"Allegedly (   ) revolutionary arguments were used," Castro admits. "Invoking the purest principles of Marxism-Leninism and charging Bishop with practising a cult of personality and drawing away from the Leninist norms and methods of leadership."

To which Castro tries two equally unsatisfactory replies. First he baldly declares, despite the evidence of a year's constant complaints from the majority of the NJM leadership, mostly hardened revolutionaries of very long standing who had known Bishop intimately for nearly 20 years, - that "nothing could be more absurd than to attribute such tendencies to Bishop. It was impossible to imagine anyone more noble, modest and unselfish. He could never have been guilty of being authoritarian. If he had any defect, it was his excessive tolerance and trust."

Circumstantial evidence is all against Castro on this. Why would anyone truly 'modest and unselfish' never have mentioned in hours of 'intimate' discussions with the Cubans such an extremely serious matter of a lack of confidence in his leadership by the majority of the NJM central committee? Surely this smacks of someone who was arrogantly contemptuous of his party's feelings and opinions. 

And why did these curiously close relations exist between Bishop and the Cubans, but the deputy leader of the NJM, and deputy prime-minister, Bernard Coard, and the majority of the NJM leadership were almost totally unknown in Havana? Did Bishop in fact really keep everything to himself, in a one-man leadership,  as his comrades accused him of? If true (and Castro gives no evidence to the contrary), this reflects as badly on Castro as on Bishop. It was very short-sighted for Castro not to insist on getting to know the whole of the NJM leadership. Did they refuse strangely, to become known? Castro does not say so, and it seems scarcely credible. 

On smaller circumstantial points, which common language did Castro (Spanish-speaking) and Bishop (English-speaking) know sufficiently well for them to have talked long enough without interpreters to get to know each other so well; and what leadership work inside the Grenadan government and party did Castro observe so as to form a judgement about Bishop's relationships with his colleagues? 

Castro's second reply to the NJM criticisms of Bishop is to charge the majority with being "a group of extremists drunk on political theory". This is an extraordinary allegation which casts far more doubt on Castro than it does on the NJM majority.

If Coard's majority had "extremist political theories", let us hear about them. And then let us hear those theories being subject to withering Leninist criticism (see Lenin volumes 1 to 45). The essence of Marxism-Leninism is to defeat revisionism by correct revolutionary theory. The mere jibe "extremists drunk on political theory" would indicate anti-Leninism on the part of the jiber.

What is required from the Cuban comrades, (who have had, and still have, incomparable facilities for presenting some more facts about Grenadan political differences,) is their views on Bishop and Coard's attitudes towards the NJM's continued membership of the Second (pro-imperialist) International; Grenada's alliance to the Commonwealth; the continuation of Sir Paul Scoon as Governor-General; relations to US imperialism and the IMF; the mixed economy; the question of parliamentary elections and opposition parties and the dictatorship of the proletariat; etc,  etc. 

Best of all would have been a Cuban contribution to these discussions before disagreements about them drove the NJM into factional conflict. But a contribution now would be better late than never. It is still important to learn some lessons from the different NJM attitudes to these questions, and from how and why it led to such violent factionalising. 

Lenin's Third International discussions with new young communist parties and their factional problems are a model for this kind of work. It is vitally necessary for the world revolutionary movement to return to a Leninist line and Leninist standards in revolutionary theory.

Castro and the Cuban Revolution have already rendered priceless service to overcoming centrist conservatism in the development of the world socialist revolution by Moncada and the capture of power in Cuba, arms in hand, and by the selfless support to the international movement, defying the most vicious US imperialist threats, pressures, subversion, and blockade.

But for overcoming the deadly divisive confusion-mongering by scores of revisionist groups within the oldest capitalist countries in order to spread the socialist revolution there to complete the vanquishing of world imperialism, far more Leninist thinking and understanding is required from Moscow, Havana and everywhere else than has yet been forthcoming with their confusions over Allendeism, CP revisionism (rife in West Europe and Latin America, e.g.), popular frontism, etc, etc (see countless past Bulletins), of which the confusion over Grenadan issues is a continuation. It will certainly be impossible for the revolutionary party to grow in Britain, (e.g.), without such a Leninist development in revolutionary theory. And first responsibility for supplying it rests on the comrades struggling with the fight here. Build the ILWP. (Bulletin 216)

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Crucial in the Bolshevik record of winning the confidence of the masses by correctly explaining what was happening in the confusing revolutionary turmoil in Russia, - and also what was possible as well as what was likely to happen next, - was the party's willingness and determination to give leadership at every turn in every area on every issue. And to build a conscious leadership, it is utterly self-defeating to keep it a secret.

The simple test to discipline against mere self-delusion in struggling to renew Leninism is to get things right, and to constantly closely observe every other political movement to see how they are coping with reality.

The ILWP would like nothing better than for some largescale,  well-established,  star-studded,  academically-erudite, organisationally-dynamic, theoretically-powerful
party to sweep forward and carry out all the revolutionary programme, propaganda, and practical tasks the ILWP is battling to achieve. Throughout its entire existence, the party has pursued every possible avenue, nationally and internationally, seeking political clarifications, liaisons, polemics of any and every kind, towards agreements. Only the more dynamic elements in the world socialist camp, and the current international revolutionary struggle most closely associated with that camp, have come remotely near demonstrating a consistent Leninist grasp of all world events on both sides of the international conflict of class forces, but even then have fallen well short of what is really required.

A natural tendency to sympathise with the socialist camp,  and a healthy hesitancy to over-hastily criticise Moscow in view of the way that history has made a complete fool out of Trotskyism's pronouncement of doom for the Russian Revolution, are inapposite here.

In the contemporary propaganda-dominated, international class struggle, - it is quick, correct, and decisive leadership on current burning issues that is the relevant test. The masses battling imperialism need to know, and deserve to know, exactly what crap the CIA is trying to disrupt the world socialist revolution and national liberation struggle with the very moment it happens. At that point, Moscow's achievement (of major world historic importance) of safeguarding the triumph of the 1917 Revolution is no substitute, for example, for their damaging tongue-tied silence on the issue of the New Jewel Movement split which US imperialism so ludicrously took such criminal, savage advantage of and which Havana made such a disastrous mess of explaining (see Bulletins 213 – 217).

The Bulletin's attempts to understand the Bishop-Coard differences and how the socialist camp should have reacted to the split may well prove deficient, but if Moscow is better informed (as it ought to be), it is doubly negligent of it to have said virtually nothing about this crucially important matter for revolutionary education in the national liberation struggle.

Either through Moscow's ignorance of what was really going on in Grenada, or through some misguided notion of what it is diplomatically advantageous to reveal, the international revolutionary movement was denied some priceless lessons on which class attitudes led to which mistakes and how they might have been avoided over the Grenada question.

At this point, it is relevant to add that such failings go back a very long way into the Soviet leadership's bureaucratic conservative period whose traces are still powerfully at work today, to such an extent that it is proper and necessary for the ILWP to consider, - as it has done, - the possibility that it is the sharp, daily,  frontline, class-war inside the imperialist countries and their satellites that will force the renewal of Leninist standards of political analysis and leadership, at their highest level, - there rather than in Moscow.

The need to provide leadership in such confusing, class-disorienting issues as the NJM crisis, which hit the world revolutionary movement hard, is a matter of life and death for those fighting to survive under imperialist decay, - as in El Salvador, Nicaragua, etc. It should be just as important for Moscow and Havana to understand and explain correctly. But the reality is that they will probably survive anyway without maintaining an advanced Leninist grasp of every revolutionary issue, as has happened throughout the period of bureaucratic conservatism, frequently.

Another example demonstrates even more graphically the vital importance of the struggle to give correct leadership when living under the yoke of imperialism (compared to when uneasily, temporarily coexisting with it in a permanent state of armed truce,) - the renewed problem of Allendeism.

The key to Chile's 1973 tragedy was the failure of any significant group there to call for a decisive break with Allendeism, to declare "no support" for the 'Socialist Unity' coalition as the only way to break the influence of Allende's fatal compromise with the capitalist state.

From the bureaucratic-conservative Communist Party to the Trotskyite MIR, the catastrophic mistake the various groupings made in 1973 in stopping their criticism of Allende short of demanding "no support" for the 'Socialist Unity' government (while nevertheless arming and organising to defeat the military,) - is still being repeated by all of them in the 1983-84 renewal of revolutionary crisis. From the CP to the MIR, they are still sniffing round for a respectable way back to the fatal class-war confusion of popular-front politics, which so disarmed the working class in 1973 and made it a sitting target for Pinochet's fascism,  and which could easily repeat its damaging disorientation in 1984 for a new setback.

The tragedy is that Moscow's lingering bureaucratic conservatism still leads it to confuse the diplomatic requirements of peaceful coexistence (with armed imperialism to make the launching of World War III as difficult as possible) with useless class collaborationism of the Allende popular front kind which only gives fascist warmongering circles around the CIA another victory on a plate thus increasing the drive-to-WWIII dangers.

The crucial 1917 lessons of Leninism of withdrawing the slogan 'all power to the Menshevik and SR-dominated Soviets' at the key moments of counter-revolutionary class collaboration (by these middle class 'Marxists' with military reaction,) - even combining "no support" for the Kerensky regime while mobilising to defeat the Kornilov August putsch, which would have overthrown Kerensky, - would appear to have been utterly forgotten.

The continuing traces of bureaucratic conservatism in Moscow go all the way to their deliberate prolongment of close collaboration with now openly counter-revolutionary CP groups in the West, - which must cause enormous confusion to the world's masses struggling to overthrow the 'democratic' international imperialist system (to which these CPs are now so committed with such fierce reactionary determination, outdoing the Tories in their hatred of revolutionary upheaval such as martial law in Poland and the IRA's national liberation war in Ireland.)

The revolutionary party is bound to erect an unbridgeable barrier between itself and these CP centrist-reformist groups, their left-Labour co-thinkers (Trot and non-Trot),   and the incorrect and misleading sympathy Moscow continues to bestow on such groups. In the correct pursuit of peaceful-coexistence diplomacy, Moscow is obliged to maintain as friendly relations as possible with all political parties in the West, always seeking to disrupt and restrict anti-communist alliances as much as possible. But formally retaining 'comradely communist' links with such reactionary middle class gangs as the British CP, eg., is a grotesque disservice to the international working class and to Leninist theory.  The ILWP would itself betray Leninism if it stopped exposing or trying to correct this failing. 

And it is only on this scientific Marxist basis of always telling the truth to the working class, - the sole final guarantee of successful revolutionary leadership, - that Leninism can ever proceed. When Moscow, in many of its formulations, presents the British CP as the British section of the international revolutionary communist movement, it just is not true. The CPGB represents no such thing. It is an entirely reformist and therefore ultimately reactionary petty-bourgeois clique and nothing else. Moscow's powerful role in leading the socialist camp in its brilliant economic and military defiance of imperialism's non-stop plans and subversive intrigues for nuclear destruction and world military conquest will still survive, despite these theoretical lapses in the more complex class-struggle questions within dying capitalism. But any would-be party of Leninist leadership in Britain or any capitalist country would not survive,  and would not deserve to survive, if it repeated or covered up such mistakes.

The ILWP's independent role is made no less necessary by the appalling record of all the alternative groups to the CPGB's rotten opportunist reformism.

The entire spectrum of groupings from Trot and near-Trot to near-CP and CP  fall into one or more of a number of overlapping sectarian positions which all amount to a retreat from a Leninist understanding of the real world.

Whether trying to sneak into the Labour Party to breathe life into a dying reformist corpse, or collapsing into pacifism or anarchism as opposed to a revolutionary fight to build the dictatorship of the proletariat; or utterly failing to correctly identify even the simplest outlines of the towering Cold War international class struggle between monopoly-capitalist imperialism on one side and the socialist camp and the world socialist revolution and national liberation struggles on the other side -(the overwhelmingly dominant reality of this epoch);- the politics of all these sects (though not necessarily every individual adherent) reveal a subjective crankiness which can never hope to lead anywhere,- except round and round in ever-decreasing circles because of being so out-of-touch with reality.

Take even the most plausible-seeming groups like the RCG, which has quietly dropped the barmier SWP-WRP hysteria about Moscow being secretly in league with Washington (to sell cut the socialist revolution together,) - but only to slither into an equally barmy and unresolved fence-sitting which pretends that Washington's anti-Sovietism and anti-Communism is simply not the main issue; and tries to substitute piecemeal and single-issue questions, (usually of a propagandist nature like racialism or specific colonial freedom struggles,)- for the principal question of history:-the dictatorship of the proletariat and the world socialist camp versus the 'free' world.

To end up arguing, as the RCG do, that Ireland, for example,  is "more important" than the whole issue of anti-Sovietism and anti-communism which has dominated the international class struggle and world politics since 1917, is so barmy that it needs psychoanalysing rather than replying to.

The uncompleted Irish national liberation struggle remains a specific stumbling block for British imperialism in its dying days, - (and more widely for world imperialism because of the embarrassment caused to the 'free' world image by the vicious colonial repression",) - and the undying continuing symbol of reformist-imperialist backwardness of the British labour movement's bourgeois-idealist mentality.  The national liberation struggle is also the possible source of a revolutionary socialist struggle which could have major significance for the whole of West Europe (a perspective of international importance which the ILWP has consistently analysed but which the loud-sounding RCG empty kettle has not grasped, being so dominated by its own subjective defeatism, - the hallmark of the British middle class, - that it could see nothing in the huge sweep of events around the heroic and devastating (for imperialism) hunger strikes except a "defeat" for the IRA/Sinn Fein). (See ILWP Books vol 7).
•	
But none of all this (and much more of significance in the Irish struggle,  also alone chronicled by the ILWP Bulletin but not even seen by the subjective-myopic RCG) elevates Ireland's or any other national liberation struggle above the international conflict of class forces, dominated by the Cold War, of which these struggles are a part.

Anti-Sovietism is the issue, inevitably dominating (and fouling up) the politics of the entire planet, including the class struggle in Ireland, because the international   historical balance of forces has made it so. It was imperialism's failure to defeat the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution which became the watershed of human history, not Britain's inability to totally deny Ireland its freedom in 1921, which was a contributory but subsidiary part of that colossal triumph for the international working class that the Bolshevik Revolution's triumphant defeat of intervention represented. From that moment, the fate of imperialism was sealed for all time, in all countries, including all of Ireland ultimately.

Inevitably, the whole of subsequent human history has been dominated by imperialism's attempts to somehow, at any cost, undo that fateful mistake of allowing the 1917 Revolution to survive, and all the enormous consequences which then followed.

It is, of course, impossible to undo. And in another sense,  it would never have been possible to have prevented 1917 with however much hindsight. For if the world's first socialist revolution and workers' state had not finally triumphed there, then it would only have happened somewhere else at some other time. In general terms, the advance of the world socialist revolution is obviously unstoppable.

What the RCG and other sectarians refuse to accept, however,  is the crucially dominant world-historic fact that it was the Soviet Union which became the inevitably overwhelmingly influential major anti-imperialist force on the planet.

The imperialist system resorted to its desperate gamble of warmongering fascist-militarism (Germany, Japan, Italy, etc in the 1930s) principally to thwart the "Bolshevik menace" as crucial to routing the growing world socialist revolution and national liberation struggles brought on by the slump.

The USSR's crushing of that fascist menace was the principal factor in the dramatic change in the international balance of class forces following World War II which helped the national liberation struggle to so brilliantly smash colonialism in the aftermath.

But once again it was military-revolutionary triumphs closely associated with the Soviet socialist camp which really principally held armed world imperialism at bay in China, Korea, and Vietnam, Laos, and Kampuchea, - routing US imperialism's best efforts, and creating an international climate which made any hope of the colonial West European powers holding the line in Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia,  India, Aden, Cyprus, Gold Coast, Kenya, Mozambique, Congo, Angola, Zimbabwe, etc, etc, - an impossibility.

On a par with these seminal triumphs over imperialist military intervention in China, Korea, and Indo-China were the defeats for CIA-Vatican counter-revolutionary intrigue in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Afghanistan, - once again the major front line against imperialism principally manned by the Soviet socialist camp. The achievements of Cuba, Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique, SWAPO, etc against imperialist subversion come into the same epoch-making category, - and all, once again, principally  associated with the Soviet socialist camp.

Not for nothing has the 'free' world transformed the whole of postwar world politics into one enormous hate campaign and warmongering preparation against the Soviet Union and the socialist camp (but not, incidentally, against Sinn Fein, - in case the RCG's daft comparison has been forgotten, - which is permitted a fair bit of public support in the USA and even a degree of official connivance at that public financial support).

And it is no accident that the 'free' world leader, US imperialism, has finally dropped its mask and launched a new era of open fascist-military blitzkrieg aggression against
Grenada so closely associates with the Soviet socialist camp, - not against Sinn Fein.

For those who live in the real world, the perverted single-issue politics of the leadership of the RCG (not necessarily the membership) can only conceal raving anti-Soviet anti-communism of the most backward middle class sectarian kind.

The ostensibly more 'pro-Soviet' yet still 'revolutionary'  (unlike the official CP) groups like the Sparts, the Leninist faction, the NCP, etc, are no alternative, either to building the ILWP as the only Leninist leadership in sight.

For various reformist or Trotskyist reasons, not a single one of this varied and rapidly-multiplying sector (getting onto the bandwagon) is enthusiastically for the dictatorship of the proletariat in the hands it is actually in, - those of the error-prone conservative bureaucracy, - in Poland, Moscow, or anywhere else. But that is the only basis on which nominal 'support' for the dictatorship of the proletariat amounts to anything more than misleading pretence.

Openly agitating against the socialist camp's leaderships for a raising of the standards of Leninist theory, as the ILWP consistently does, is one thing.

But withholding real support from the proletarian dictatorships except where they can guarantee 100% scores continuously (i.e. never) as the sneaky little 'Leninist' group inside the CPGB does, - is something else entirely.

This cowardly fairweather-friend attitude ranging from the NCP's half-hearted reluctant-terrified 'acceptance' of the Soviet shooting down of the Korean 747 jet; and its damaging, treacherous denunciation of the Coard-Austin NJM leadership (blindly falling into Castro's error due to the NCP's spineless camp-following mentality); to the 'Leninist' group's dread that Solidarnosc can never be prevented from remaining an acute 'embarrassment' by the 'incompetent' Polish state leadership; to the Sparts scurvy hypocritical concealment of the fact that they enthusiastically supported the reactionary ultra-right Solidarnosc counter-revolution for the first ten months of its rotten existence before pretending to become opposed to it in order to maintain political credibility, - (and in fact still barely conceal their degenerate and damaging delusion that Solidarnosc might yet turn itself into some brilliant new Leninist revolutionary leadership (the right-wing crook Walesa and the even more crooked Catholic mafia !!))------all of this is the most hopeless opportunism, servile to the most demoralised and incurable petty-bourgeois mentalities.

Departing from this mealy-mouthed posturing means far from simply endorsing everything Moscow does. Just the opposite. The ILWP remains an outspoken critic of failings within the socialist camp leadership, - as this article among a consistent stream of such articles demonstrates, - and will always be so.

But what is required is constant principled support for the socialist camp against the treacherous machinations of imperialism and against its lethal manipulation of anti-Soviet propaganda in the West.

If the Soviet Union is forced to shoot down a Korean 747, then denounce the imperialist intriguers immediately and explain to the working class how crucially important it is that the USSR should be always be ready, willing, and able to take the most decisive action against imperialism, - the essential basis for holding imperialism's more desperate, counter-revolutionary, fascist-militarist preparations at bay. Worry much more about Moscow's slowness to take the propaganda offensive about the 747 issue than about the possibility of unnecessary and clumsy tactics in dealing with the incident in the first place. Changing tactical grasp and abilities in every locality in the vast socialist camp is the matter of slow development over decades. Giving instant warmhearted support on behalf of workers everywhere to the Moscow leadership for being alert to exactly what fascist-militarist plans imperialism is up to,and for being ready to give a solid rebuff to any and every adventure, is something that can be done immediately with far more important results.

Imposing martial law on Solidarnosc was a matter for instant rejoicing by communists everywhere, not something of 'acute embarrassment' (what a revelation of dyed-in-the-wool illusions in petty-bourgeois 'democracy' that notion contains). The only regret was that it took Warsaw so long to grasp what had to be done. The ILWP Bulletin had been urging this course of action for months previously. The move was a historic necessity in view of the prevailing balance of class war forces in Poland and internationally. At that moment in 1981, it was then not just pointless to stand around hand-wringing at how 'regrettable' it all was, - (as the various bureaucratic-conservative CP factions did in the West ('Leninist' faction, etc), - and how it was to be wished that the Polish workers state leadership had more revolutionary support among the masses so that martial law would not have been necessary for controlling the Solidarnosc counter-revolution.) All the tut-tutting and disowning of the Polish state move was nothing but downright backstabbing treachery to the Polish proletarian dictatorship and the possibilities fa socialism in Poland (the only way a socialist state has ever, - and can ever, - be achieved, as Allende and tens of thousands of butchered Chilean workers, misled by the reformist illusions of CP
bureaucratic conservatism, testify from the grave).

While never abandoning the open fight for far greater Leninist understanding among the Polish workers state leadership (and everywhere else throughout the international socialist revolutionary struggle),- at that critical moment it was vital to crush the Polish counter-revolution there and then, regardless of the temporary propaganda gain this gave to the 'free' world's anti-communist hysteria campaign. 

The CIA-Vatican counter-revolutionary agencies were working full blast to pretend that there existed, - (and to help create), - conditions of chaos and breakdown in Poland to 'justify' direct imperialist military intervention into Poland.

This 'justification' was used to cover US imperialism's destruction of socialist Grenada. It was used against Allende's Chile by the CIA-orchestrated Pinochet coup. 

Progressive regimes in Guatemala and Dominican Republic were crushed by US troops in 1954 and 1967 by the same fraud. The same trick was loosely planned for Hungary in 1956 but firm Soviet action made it impossible. Afghanistan is being similarly destabilised from without and within, but again Soviet action prevented imperialist intervention. Socialist Nicaragua will be the next target, with CIA mercenaries already creating 'chaos' inside the country to 'justify' US invasion.

It was vitally necessary for the interests of the whole of the working masses of the planet, - and for the whole future of socialism which can only be based on the defeat of imperialism, - to halt the anti-socialist intrigues of Western-inspired Solidarnosc and to prevent imperialism going onto the offensive inside Eastern Europe. And there was no choice but to fully support the existing Polish workers state leadership, - with all its past and present failings, - in reasserting the dictatorship of the proletariat at that moment. 

The fainthearted scattered remnants of CP bureaucratic conservatism from the NCP to the 'Leninist' faction and 'Straight Left' have completely misunderstood Lenin's peaceful coexistence strategy to fall helplessly into a Labour-tailing centrist (revolutionary in words but reformist in actual positions taken) version of democratic-reformist illusions.
 
They always end up servilely muting any criticism of Moscow just when they should not be muting it (exactly the same servile way they behave towards the established Labour Party bureaucracy,  especially at election times,  etc), as was seen in the NCP's lickspittle acceptance of Castro's outrageously incorrect assessment of the New Jewel Movement's leadership crisis ; - but cravenly failing to give Moscow enthusiastic and outspoken support precisely when it is most needed, - as over the 747 incident, martial law in Poland, the intervention into Afghanistan, the overthrow of Dubcek's counter-revolution, and the suppression of the Hungary fascist-Catholic plans in 1956.

The absolute minimum demand of the broadest-possible struggle which all supposed 'socialists' should support is that which makes anti-communism the main enemy to be fought. Wherever a blind eye is turned to the foul tentacles of insidious anti-communist propaganda,- (imperialism's main weapon), - the pass is sold to all the faces of capitalist rightwing reaction. But the ILWP alone has correctly identified the fight against anti-Sovietism and anti-communism as the real front line in the battle against imperialism and for socialism. (Bulletin 221)

13-----------------------------------------------

Middle class reformism (which had long ago taken the British Communist Party onto the counter-revolutionary side of the barricades) has now produced the ultimate in doctrinaire bureaucratism.

Its leadership is unbelievably witch-hunting members for daring to READ things not written by the CP executive committee.

Further expulsions are in hand for daring to WRITE things other than what is dictated by the EC.

Finally, senior executives themselves are being expelled for promoting their own (unapproved) candidacy at the last EC elections.

This caricature of communism, which gives ammunition to such bourgeois cynics as Orwell who hated Leninism and the Bolshevik Revolution, is of course the product of the ENEMIES of proletarian dictatorship and the Soviet
Union, not its supporters (the only real democrats).

The British CP wrote the dictatorship of the
proletariat out of its programme in 1977 after long having ceased to support it in reality, - (the socialist camp where such workers states have been established, wiping out the capitalist state). 

The CPGB first openly joined the CIA-Vatican counter-revolution in 1968 when it supported Dubcek's attempts to restore bourgeois (i.e. capitalist) democracy in Czechoslovakia. The loud protestations about 'democratic rights' by the CP against the USSR's restoration of stable workers state power in Czechoslovakia, were always, of course, the most despicable humbug. The CP's real embarrassment, like all the petty bourgeois opportunists who enthused over Dubcek's 'socialism with a human face' claptrap, was at the withering bourgeois propaganda barrage in Britain against the reassertion of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Czechoslovakia.

When it comes to such simple democratic rights as that of the last CPGB Congress delegates to circulate comments to each other and suggestions about how the Congress was going and should go thereafter, the CP now declares that such elementary rights of human communication do not exist, - not even for trusted communist delegates themselves. So for possessing, reading, or circulating Congress briefing documents, - and bags were actually searched at the doors to root out this 'devilish' literature, - total expulsion is now the punishment. The author of a pamphlet discussing problems in the party is also out. And among those expelled for promoting candidates to rival this degenerate leadership is the editor of the CP's paper Morning Star.

This farcical sectarian bullying has nothing whatever to do with Leninism, of course, which stood for the maximum internal discussion to allow correct theory and healthy independent cadre development to become the only viable basis for party unity (see current Bulletin discussion series on this. Following Lenin, the ILWP even encourages published differences, - distinct from material actions to deliberately weaken the party). 

Moscow cannot feel shame enough in still allowing these CPGB middle class reformist hacks to posture as the 'British representatives of the international communist movement'. 

And recalling a past ILWP polemic with the 'Leninist' ginger group inside the CPGB, how does their pompous indignation fare now at the Bulletin having called McLennan & Co 'reformist deadbeats' and 'openly reactionary'?

But even from the point of view of ordinary human rights, these CPGB petty bourgeois dogmatists are closer in spirit to authoritarian opportunism than Marx, - as their co-thinkers in Paris are now proving with the CPF's openly racist policies against Arab immigrants.

It is long overdue for Moscow to speak out openly against the degenerate reformist rubbish masquerading as the 'official communist movement' in the West. (Bulletin 224)

ILWP Books

Vol 1. Manifesto.
Vol 2. The struggle to re-establish Bolshevik traditions.
Vol 3. For a Leninist party and world socialist revolution. Against Solidarnosc, Trotskyism,  and bureaucratic centrism.
Vol 4. For Lenin's line combining world socialist revolution with peaceful coexistence between camps. Against E P Thompson, the Trots, and the reformist/revisionist CPs.
Vol 5. Lenin's arguments for a strong socialist state against Trotsky's 'permanent' counter-revolution.

For more information about the ILWP 
The International Leninist Workers Party started in 1979 due to the sectarian, reformist, or anti-communist political bankruptcy of the entire 'left' of the labour movement (as outlined in the ILWP Manifesto). Regional distribution of Manifesto, ILWP Bulletin,  and ILWP Books renewing the fight for Leninism against Trotskyism, centrism, and Solidarnosc counter-revolution from: London (01 -748-8206); Leicester (0533-539563); Sheffield (0742-337619); Manchester (30 Rochford Ave, Wythenshawe, M22 6HU).

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