Cyber Nuts and Democrats (2001)

Workers Vanguard No. 754, 16 March 2001

Cyber Nuts and Democrats

Letter

8 December 2000

Dear ICL,

While reading the articles posted on David North’s “World Socialist Web Site,” one can’t help but detect a change in position before and after the U.S. presidential election. Before the election their position seemed to be that both major parties were equally reactionary. Now with all of what’s been happening since, they have stated that the extreme right wing which controls George W. Bush would implement the most sweeping attacks on the working class in history should Bush ultimately prevail. If this is the case why did they not take this position before the election? They seem to think that because the vote was so close, the reactionaries are now seizing the opportunity to steal the election and create a free market police state. If Bush had won decisively I guess he would still be a “compassionate conservative.”

There is no doubt in my mind that the Republicans used intimidation and fraud to assure a Bush victory in Florida. And the articles on the WSWS have been illuminating in exposing this fact. But consistency in positions seems to be lacking.

I would be interested to know what [you] think, not so much about the Northites but about the whole election circus.

In Struggle, Timothy L.


WV Replies: Timothy L. might have missed it, but we dealt with the election circus in our article “White House Scramble” (WV No. 746, 17 November 2000). As for David North’s Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and World Socialist Web Site, this gang will say anything one day and the opposite the next if it appears to suit their immediate opportunist appetites. The one consistent feature of their pronouncements is that they reflect, albeit often in quite weird ways, mainstream liberal public opinion.

When U.S. imperialism launched a wave of terror bombing against Iraq in December 1998, North echoed the patriotism being whipped up by invoking films like Patton and Saving Private Ryan in order to salute the military commanders of U.S. imperialism in World War ll because “they, at least, led their armies against an enemy fully capable of fighting back” (19 December 1998). Respectfully debating professional anti-Communist Ronald Radosh, who had published an article praising McCarthyism, North sent a letter to the New York Times (22 October 1998) obscenely claiming that the Trotskyists had been there first, writing: “Before the cold war, anti-Stalinism was associated principally with the Socialist left — above all with Trotskyists.”

Before last year’s presidential elections, the SEP bizarrely claimed that both capitalist parties had displayed “populist trappings” (3 October 2000) and wrote that Al Gore had adopted the “posture of a populist opponent of powerful corporate interests.” But their subsequent material is positively surreal, arguing that the Florida ballot flap showed “that the attack on the principle of popular sovereignty raised the specter of authoritarian and dictatorial forms of rule” (8 December 2000). In a speech posted a few days later, North talked of “a political crisis so immense, so fundamental” as to “call into question the whole governmental structure.” North took us to task for stating the obvious: “The Gore-Bush feud is at this point more like a tempest in a teapot than a political crisis for the bourgeoisie.” He continued, in truly demented fashion (his italics): “The beginning of a revolutionary crisis in the very bastion of world capitalism — and that is the essential significance of the present developments — has introduced into the world situation a factor of extraordinary and almost incalculable magnitude.”

Cynical crisis-mongering has long been the stock in trade of these political bandits. Like the rest of the fake left, albeit with their own outlandish twist, the Northites used the turmoil around the elections to give backhanded support to the Democrats. The SEP’s Web postings are filled with paeans to the supposed “traditions of American democracy” being trampled underfoot by Bush, the Supreme Court et al. In his speech, Ncrth even makes an explicit analogy to the “irrepressible conflict” with the South= slaveholders on the eve of the C.vil War — ironic indeed coming from an cut- fit which has echoed the racists in opposing defense of affirmative action, among other things.

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As for David North’s Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and World Socialist Web Site, this gang will say anything one day and the opposite the next if it appears to suit their immediate opportunist appetites. The one consistent feature of their pronouncements is that they reflect, albeit often in quite weird ways, mainstream liberal public opinion.
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When North was labor editor of the now-departed and unlamented Bulletin in 1972, he enthused over a “developing break between the labor movement and the Democratic Party” based on his “exclusive interview” with anti- Communist Steelworkers bureaucrat I. W. Abel (Bulletin, 24 July 1972). This was at a time when the Cold War AFL-CIO labor bureaucracy under George Meany stood to the right of significant sections of the ruling class on the burning question of the Vietnam War. North reprinted excerpts from a speech to the AFL-CIO convention in which Abel “broke” with Democratic “peace” candidate George McGovern, meticulously editing slit Abel’s endorsement of McGovern’s right- wing Democratic Party rival. North & Co. advanced a “labor party” platform in that period even Meany might have embraced, saying nothing about either the war or the struggle for black rights!

In 1993, the Northites cynically pointed to the pro-capitalist policies of the labor tops in order to write off the trade unions entirely as workers organizations. Today, they chastise the labor tops for not fighting hard enough against the “extreme right-wing elements that control the Republican Party” (“AFL-CIO Rally in Tallahassee: Unions Offer No Strategy to Fight Denial of Voting Rights,” 8 December 2000).

Bush & Co. are plenty right-wing, but stealing an election is as Americas as apple pie — hardly a sign that this imperialist ruling class is about to dispense with the stability of bourgeois democratic rule. As we wrote in response to the bleating of the reformists for “real democracy”: “This is capitalist democracy, which is nothing but a screen for the iron dictatorship of capital.”

How David North Embraces Karl Kautsky 3 (1999)

From Spartacist Pamphlet: Imperialism, the “Global Economy” and Labor Reformism (September 1999)

How David North Embraces Karl Kautsky

The “Global Economy” and Labor Reformism
(Part 3)

The IMF and World Bank - Brutal Imperialist Debt Collectors

The view that “transnational” corporations transcend the nation-state system leads to the notion that certain international economic agencies, like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have now become a kind of world capitalist government. In a 1992 speech IC leader David North contends:

“Not even at the height of its glory did the British Empire possess even a fraction of the power over its colonial subjects that the modern institutions of world imperialism – such as the World Bank, the IMF, GATT and the EC-routinely exercise over the supposedly independent states of Latin America,Asia, Africa and the Middle East.”
– Capital, Labor and the Nation-State (1992)

The idea that the World Bank and IMF exercise greater power over the workers and peasants of India and Pakistan than did the British colonial army and police is pacifistic nonsense.

No less absurd is the idea that these institutions are powers unto themselves, independent of the imperialist nation-states. The IMF and World Bank act in the Third World (and now in the former Soviet bloc) as brutal debt collection agencies, using blackmail to force through the imposition of draconian austerity policies on the working masses and peasants of the semicolonial countries. But these international agencies act at the behest and in the interests of the major capitalist powers, not autonomously of them and certainly not above them.

The policies and, indeed, very existence of the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organization, European Union (formerly the European Community) et al. are based on compromises among rival imperialist bourgeoisies represented by their national capitalist states. Both the IMF and World Bank were conceived at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference and, as an article in Monthly Review (September 1995) noted, “ultimately reflected the interests of the world’s overwhelmingly dominant power at that time – the United States.” But that has changed with the waning of U.S. imperialism’s hegemonic position.

For example, last year the U.S. proposed that the IMF and World Bank write off a large part of the money owed them by especially poor countries like Uganda. Washington officials argue that this is necessary to free up government funds for spending on infrastructure, for tax breaks to encourage new private investment, etc. However, Germany and Japan for months blocked the U.S. plan and succeeded in watering down any substantial debt reduction by the IMF/World Bank. As the growing conflicts between the major imperialist powers reach a certain point, institutions like the IMF and World Bank will be reduced to empty shells, stripped of their present financial resources and political influence. A glimpse of this came in 1995, when Tokyo and Berlin openly challenged Washington’s demand that $30 billion in IMF funds be used to bail out (U.S. banks in) Mexico.

“Ultra-Imperialism,” from Kautsky to North

The current authority exercised by the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organization et al. derives from the power of the imperialist states for which they function as agents. Let us imagine that a left-nationalist government comes to power in Mexico and repudiates that country’s foreign debt. Will the IMF’s army invade Mexico and install a puppet regime? Will the IMF’s navy blockade Mexico’s ports? Will IMF agents confiscate the assets of the Mexican government held in other countries? No, since the IMF has no army, no navy and no agents empowered to confiscate any property anywhere. A Mexican government which repudiated its foreign debt would face economic sanctions and potential military action by the U.S. and other imperialist states.

Basically, the Northites have reinvented the doctrine of “ultra-imperialism” expounded by Karl Kautsky before and during World War I. The core of Kautsky’s theory, quoted by Lenin in his 1916 pamphlet Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, went as follows:

“Cannot the present imperialist policy be supplanted by a new, ultra-imperialist policy, which will introduce the common exploitation of the world by internationally united finance capital in place of the mutual rivalries of national finance capital? Such a phase of capitalism is at any rate conceivable.”

For the International Committee, such a new phase of capitalism is not merely conceivable but is now here. To be sure, North & Co. do not deny a tendency toward imperialist war. But they do so by counterposing “transnational” corporations to reactionary nation-states. Corporations like IBM, Siemens and Toshiba are supposedly striving for a transnational capitalist order but are obstructed by the bad, old, obsolete nation-state system. On the contrary, the root cause of imperialist wars does not lie in the nation-state system as such, much less in nationalist and chauvinist ideology and demagogy. The imperialist nation-state is the fundamental political instrument by which transnational corporations, to use the Northites’ favored term, struggle to expand their markets and spheres of exploitation.

As Lenin wrote in opposition to Kautsky’s theory of “ultraimperialism”:

“The only conceivable basis under capitalism for the division of spheres of influence, interests, colonies, etc., is a calculation of the strength of those participating, their general economic, financial, military strength, etc. And the strength of these participants in the division does not change to an equal degree, for the even development of different undertakings, trusts, branches of industry, or countries is impossible under capitalism....

“Therefore, in the realities of the capitalist system, and not in the banal philistine fantasies of English parsons, or of the German ‘Marxist’ Kautsky, ‘inter-imperialist’ or ‘ultra-imperialist’ alliances, no matter what form they may assume, whether of one imperialist coalition against another, or of a general alliance embracing all the imperialist powers, are inevitably nothing more than a ‘truce’ in periods between wars. Peaceful alliances prepare the ground for wars, and in their turn grow out of wars.” [emphasis in original]

Spelling out the reformist implications of Kautsky’s theory, Lenin added: “It is a most reactionary method of consoling the masses with hopes of permanent peace being possible under capitalism.” Not surprisingly, Kautsky was to be a vehement opponent of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat which was erected by it to replace the rule of capital.

No less inherently reformist and anti-revolutionary is the contemporary Northite version of “ultra-imperialism.” If, to believe North, the competition among different imperialist powers has been subsumed by supra-national agencies, then the traditional Marxist position in inter-imperialist conflicts – that the main enemy is at home – is clearly “outmoded.” When it comes to the national and colonial questions, as we will see, North & Co. rival the worst social-chauvinists of Lenin’s day.

The U.S. Imperialist State and the Exploitation of Mexico
The central role of the imperialist state in what is currently termed the “globalization” of world capitalism is especially clear in the case of Mexico, U.S. imperialism’s most important neocolony. One-fifth of all industrial plant and equipment owned by U.S. corporations in Third World countries is now located in Mexico. Over the past 15 years, the actions of the U.S. government have been crucial in promoting and protecting American investment in that country. Among other things; this has meant an increasingly open role by U.S. imperialism in aiding and arming the Mexican government’s bloody repression against combative worker and peasant struggles (see “U.S. Hands Off Mexico!” WV No. 658, 27 December 1996).

Following the frenzied over-borrowing during the oil-price boom of the 1970s, in 1982 the Mexican government announced that it could not meet the scheduled interest payment on its foreign debt. The U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve Bank immediately took over the “rescheduling” of Mexico's debts and those of other Latin American countries. This entailed the subsidization by the U.S government, via Mexico, of the major Wall Street banks. Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, an arch-“free marketeer,” wrote at the time:

“In the past five years the commercial banks have received large net transfers from the debtor countries, while the official creditors, including the creditor governments and the multilateral institutions, have made large net transfers to the debtor. Operationally, it can be argued that the official creditors are indeed ‘bailing out the banks’.”
– Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 4 (1986)

In the early and mid-1980s, American corporate investment in Mexico was effectively zero. In fact, the movement of capital across the Rio Grande (Rio Bravo) was in the other direction. Wealthy Mexicans were smuggling out billions and parking their money in Wall Street banks, U.S. corporate stocks and bonds, and Texas and California real estate. The turnaround in the Mexican and, more generally, Latin,American debt crisis came with the 1989 Brady Plan, named after then U.S. treasury secretary Nicholas Brady. This plan transformed the short-term bank debt of Latin American countries into long-term bonds guaranteed by the U.S. Treasury. In return, Washington levered open the Latin American economies to unimpeded exploitation by U.S. finance and industrial capital.

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If, to believe North, the competition among different imperialist powers has been subsumed by supra-national agencies, then the traditional Marxist position in inter-imperialist conflicts – that the main enemy is at home – is clearly “outmoded.”
___________________________________________________________________________

The Brady Plan opened the way for a massive American investment boom in Mexico. U.S. banks, mutual funds, insurance companies and corporations which engaged in manufacturing and services assumed that any money they placed south of the border would be fully protected by the fiscal resources and, ultimately, the political/military might of the U.S. capitalist state. The increasing weight of American capital in Mexico laid the basis for and was, in turn, reinforced by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which came into effect on New Year’s Day 1994.

Among its other disastrous consequences, NAFTA meant the economic destruction of millions of Mexican peasant smallholders who could not compete with the much cheaper and better-quality produce, centrally corn, imported from the highly mechanized farms of the American Midwest. Thus, the day that NAFTA came into effect saw a major peasant uprising led by the nationalist-populist Zapatista Army of National Liberation in the impoverished southern Mexican state of Chiapas. The bloody suppression of this uprising by the Mexican army was actively aided by Washington. In the first months of 1994, the Pentagon provided the Mexican army with an additional 3,000 military vehicles, including armored personnel carriers with water cannon, jeeps, trucks and tanks. At the same time, hundreds of U.S. troops were sent to Guatemala in the region bordering Chiapas (see “Pentagon Beefs Up Mexican Repression,” WV No. 604, 5 August 1994).

The sudden and unexpected Zapatista uprising exposed the fragility of the bourgeois order in Mexico, not least to the ever-wary eyes of foreign investors. Furthermore, the Mexican investment boom had reached a point of speculative frenzy. Prices on the Bolsa (stock exchange) bore no relation to actual or prospective profits. The Mexican government could not service its massively expanded foreign debt without devaluing the peso, which it did in December 1994, thereby precipitating a full-fledged financial panic. By year’s end, foreign, mainly U.S., investors had liquidated and withdrawn $23 billion in Mexican assets, more than twice the total value of U.S. direct manufacturing investment in Mexico at the beginning of 1994.

The financial panic was halted only when the U.S. government came up with a $50 billion “rescue package” – $20 billion directly from the U.S. Treasury, the balance from the IMF and the Bank for International Settlements (known as the central bankers’ central bank). Mexican finance minister Guillermo Ortiz later told American journalist Thomas Friedman that if Washington had not acted when and on the scale it did, “We would have had to declare a moratorium on debt repayments.” German and Japanese capitalists were displeased, to say the least, that no small amount of their money was being used to bail out U.S. banks, mutual funds and insurance companies. The German (and also the British) representative in the IMF took the unprecedented step of abstaining on the vote for the Mexican loan package, while Japan only grudgingly voted in favor. And the next time around, the German and Japanese representatives might vote against.

The Mexican financial crisis totally disproves the Northite theory of a new era of globally integrated capitalist production transcending the nation-state system. At the first sign of political unrest and financial overextension, American “transnationals” dumped every Mexican asset they could and repatriated their money back to their own nation-state, the U.S. of A. The flood of pesos into dollars was stanched only when the U.S. government, acting both directly and indirectly, vastly augmented the short-term financial resources available to the Mexican government. And the Mexican financial crisis both exposed and intensified the conflicts of interest among the major imperialist powers: the U.S., Germany and Japan.

Against Capitalist Imperialism For Permanent Revolution!

From its inception, capitalism has been a global system marked by conflicts among competing nation-states. The rise of the bourgeoisies in West Europe to wealth and power was directly linked to the conquest and colonization of more backward regions of the world – the Spaniards and Portuguese in Central and South America, the French in North America and the Caribbean, the British in North America, the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent. A central characteristic of mercantile imperialism in the 16th-18th centuries was the attempt by the leading colonial powers to insulate their colonies and themselves from the world market by legal prohibitions and sanctions against trade other than between colony and “mother country.”

Economic development during the era of mercantile capitalism laid the basis for the industrial revolution pioneered by Britain in the early 19th century. Marx and Engels initially believed that industrial capitalism would be extended more or less uniformly on a worldwide basis. The founders of scientific socialism were by no means blind or indifferent to the monumental crimes committed by the Western powers against the indigenous peoples of Asia, Africa and the Americas. But they viewed such crimes as a historical overhead cost for the modernization of these backward regions. In an 1853 article, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” Marx wrote:

“England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating-the annihilation of the old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia....
“Modern industry, resulting from the railway system, will dissolve the hereditary division of labor, upon which rest theIndian castes, those decisive impediments to Indian progress and Indian power.”

This projection was not borne out by the actual course of development. While the Western bourgeoisies introduced certain elements of modem industrial technology (e.g., railroads) into their colonies and semi-colonies, the overall effect of capitalist imperialism was to arrest the social and economic development of backward countries. Thus, British colonial rule deliberately perpetuated and utilized traditional reactionary institutions such as the caste system in India and tribalism in sub-Saharan Africa.

Moreover, the economic development which was introduced under European colonial rule had a deformed character. Thus, the British built the railways in India only from the hinterland to the ports to facilitate trade with the imperialist metropolis. The rail lines did not connect the different regions of the Indian subcontinent. By contrast, railway construction in the United States during the same period was a prime factor in the economic and social integration of the American nation-state.

By the late 19th century, Marx and Engels had become champions of colonial independence and recognized that the modernization of Asia, Africa and Latin America could take place only within the context of a world socialist order. Thus, Engels wrote to Karl Kautsky in 1882:

“India will perhaps, indeed very probably, make a revolution and as a proletariat in process of self-emancipation cannot conduct any colonial wars, it would have to be allowed to run its course; it would not pass off without all sorts of destruction, of course, but that sort of thing is inseparable from all revolutions. The same might also take place elsewhere, e.g., in Algeria and Egypt, and would certainly be the best thing for us. We shall have enough to do at home. Once Europe is reorganized, and North America, that will furnish such colossal power and such an example that the semi-civilized countries will of themselves follow in their wake; economic needs, if anything, will see to that. But as to what social and political phases these countries will then have to pass through before they likewise arrive at socialist organization, I think we today can advance only rather idle hypotheses.” [emphasis in original]

In the 1880s, at the beginning of the era of modern capitalist imperialism, it was understandable that Marx and Engels assumed that proletarian socialist revolution would first take place in the advanced capitalist countries and that the socialist transformation of the more backward regions would gradually follow in consequence. However, imperialist domination and exploitation strengthened the bourgeois order in West Europe and North America, not least by infecting the working class in these countries with the ideology of national chauvinism and racism. As Lenin pointed out in his 1916 pamphlet, imperialist super-profits derived from the colonial world made it “economically possible to bribe the upper strata of the proletariat” in the advanced countries, providing a material basis for opportunism and social-chauvinism.

At the same time, imperialism tended to destabilize the traditional social order in backward countries, generating contradictions which Trotsky termed “combined and uneven development.” A sizable industrial proletariat, working with modern technology, emerged alongside the mass of impoverished peasants still subject to feudal-derived forms of exploitation. The day-to-day struggle against capitalist any pre-capitalist forms of exploitation was organically intertwined with, and reinforced by, the struggle for national independence.

Recognizing the international contradictions brought about by the era of modem imperialism, Leon Trotsky challenged the hitherto accepted sequencing of the world socialist revolution from the advanced to the backward countries. It was now possible that the proletariat of a backward country, leading the peasant masses in the struggle against feudal-derived exploitation and foreign imperialist domination, could come to power in advance of the workers of West Europe and North America. Such revolutions would severely weaken the bourgeois order in the imperialist centers while giving a powerful impetus to the revolutionary consciousness of the workers in the advanced capitalist countries.

Trotsky first developed this concept of “permanent revolution” at the beginning of the century specifically with regard to tsarist Russia, and it was validated by life itself in the Bolshevik October Revolution of 1917. In the late 1920s, in light of the experience of the defeated Chinese Revolution of 1925-27, Trotsky generalized the theory and program of permanent revolution to what is now called the Third World. Thus the section on “Backward Countries and the Program of Transitional Demands” in the 1938 Transitional Program states:

“The central tasks of the colonial and semicolonial countries are the agrarian revolution, i.e., liquidation of feudal heritages, and national independence, i.e., the overthrow of the imperialist yoke. Both tasks are closely linked with each other....
“The general trend of revolutionary development in all backward countries can be determined by the formula of the permanent revolution in the sense definitely imparted to it by the three revolutions in Russia (1905, February 1917, October 1917).” [emphasis in original]

David North vs. Permanent Revolution

As clearly stated in the Transitional Program, Trotsky and the Fourth International he founded regarded the struggle for national independence in backward countries as an integral and important component of the world socialist revolution. The Northites now maintain that in the supposedly new era of “globalized” capitalist production, national independence has become impossible and, indeed, reactionary. In a 1992 lecture, “Permanent Revolution and the National Question Today,” North pontificated:

“To the extent that Marxists attributed a progressive content to national liberation movements, it was because they were in some way identified with overcoming of imperialist domination and the legacy of backwardness, tribal and caste distinctions....
“That content is hardly to be found in any of the movements which presently claim to champion ‘national liberation.’ At any rate, whatever the subjective aims of different movements, the liberation of mankind cannot be advanced in this era of global economic integration by establishing new national states.”
– Fourth International (Winter-Spring 1994)

We have previously discussed at some length the Northites’ opposition to the democratic right of national self-determination (see “David North ‘Abolishes’ the Right to Self-Determination:” WV Nos. 626 and 627, 28 July and 25 August 1995). What we want to emphasize here is that their position amounts to passive acceptance of imperialist oppression and exploitation of backward countries.

This can be seen very clearly in the case of Mexico. NAFTA represents a qualitative extension and institutionalization of the exploitation of Mexico by Wall Street. When NAFTA was first proposed in 1991, the Mexican, U.S. and Canadian sections of the International Communist League issued a joint declaration headlined, “Stop U.S. 'Free Trade' Rape of Mexico!” The fight against NAFTA, we maintained, “is a battle against American imperialist domination of Mexico” (WV No. 530, 5 July 1991).

What of the Northites’ attitude toward NAFTA? From a superficial reading of their press, one might assume they are implacably hostile to it. In their International Workers Bulletin (11 April 1994), they stated, quite accurately, that NAFTA “effectively puts the entire Mexican economy at the service of the needs of US transnationals and the Wall Street financial institutions, providing low-wage labor, inexpensive natural resources and vast tracts of land for them to exploit and a huge market for American manufactured goods.” Some months later, they wrote that “NAFTA means nothing more than the economic recolonization of Mexico” (IWB, 16 January 1995). This is actually an overstatement, since Mexico had already been an economic neocolony of U.S. imperialism for decades before NAFTA.

Yet the Northites have never opposed what they themselves call the “economic recolonization” of Mexico, either before NAFTA was implemented or even when its bloody consequences could be seen in the corpses of hundreds of impoverished Indian peasants in Chiapas. A few months before NAFTA came into effect, a political line statement in IWB (20 September 1993) declared: “American workers must not line up behind either side in the capitalist debate over NAFTA,, but must adopt an independent class standpoint which is based on the genuine, i.e., international, interests of the working class.”

What the Northites meant by “an independent class standpoint” was “neutrality” toward the intensified exploitation and domination of Mexico by U.S. imperialism. In fact, there was no debate within the American capitalist class, aside from a few maverick bourgeois pseudo-populists like Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan who opposed NAFTA from a chauvinist standpoint, as did the AFL-CIO bureaucracy. The large majority of the American imperialist bourgeoisie supported and still supports NAFTA wholeheartedly. More fundamentally, the Northites treat imperialist subjugation of backward countries as simply a matter of “debate” within the capitalist class. By this logic they should in retrospect not have opposed the Vietnam War, since this generated a real debate – indeed, a sharp division – within the U.S. ruling class. In short, North & Co. did not and do not support the actual struggles of the Mexican working people against NAFTA and its effects.

One has only to look at the Northites’ attitude toward the Chiapas peasant uprising of early 1994. This unexpected leftist-led revolt gripped the world’s attention. But not the Northites’. The self-described “weekly socialist newsjournal” of the American Northites ran one article on the Chiapas uprising during the period when it was convulsing Mexico and causing no small concern to U.S. “transnational” corporations and banks. This article, “Mexican Government Massacres Hundreds” (IWB, 10 January 1994), was simply a piece of descriptive journalism which raised no programmatic demands whatsoever. The Northites did not call for the defense of the peasant uprising against the Mexican neocolonial bourgeois state. They did not call for the withdrawal of the Mexican army from Chiapas. They did not call for the release of Zapatista militants and peasant supporters imprisoned and often tortured by the Mexican army and police. They did not call for a halt to U.S. arms shipments and other aid to the Mexican military. And, of course, they did not call for the abrogation of NAFTA, one of the key demands of the uprising.

In sharpest contrast, our international tendency actively mobilized in defense of the Chiapas uprising from a proletarian socialist standpoint. In the U.S., the Spartacist League joined in solidarity rallies outside the Mexican consulates in New York City and San Francisco. Our comrades of the Grupo Espartaquista de Mexico (GEM) participated in a mammoth anti-government protest in Mexico City. A statement issued by the GEM, and published in the Mexico City daily El Dia, declared:

“As a Marxist revolutionary organization, the GEM emphasizes to those who seek to fight against capitalism and imperialism, that it is the power of the working class, and not rural guerrilla warfare, which if organized behind the program of international socialist revolution can defeat NAFTA and mobilize the dispossessed peasants and all the oppressed against the misery andbarbarity of the capitalist system. In the face of repression in Chiapas, it is an urgent duty for the working class to defend thecourageous Indian insurgents and all the victims of bourgeois repression.”
–translated in WV No. 592 (21 January 1994)

The very different responses of the ICL and North’s IC toward the Chiapas uprising reflected our adherence and their opposition to the perspective of permanent revolution. By the beginning of the 20th century, tsarist Russia had become the weak link in the European imperialist system. In a parallel way, Mexico has now become the weak link in the American imperialist order in its Western hemispheric base.

For World Socialist Revolution - Reforge Trotsky’s Fourth International!

The massive inroads of American capital – at all levels – have fatally undermined the nationalist-corporatist economic structure upon which the political hegemony of the long-ruling Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has rested. A popular upheaval in Mexico, toppling the neocolonial PRI regime, would have a powerful radicalizing effect on the millions of Hispanic workers in the U.S., many of whom retain strong family ties to Mexico or Central America. As we stated in “Mexico and Permanent Revolution,” published in the first issue of Espartaco (Winter 1990-91), journal of the GEM:

“The Mexican workers revolution will succeed where the bourgeois revolutions failed, because it will and must be internationalist from the beginning. It must come to the aid of theheroically struggling working people of Central America andextend to the north, in common struggle with the workers andoppressed in the very entrails of the imperialist monster.... This is the goal toward which the Grupo Espartaquista de Mexico is working as part of the International Communist League in the fight to reforge the Fourth International as the world party of socialist revolution.”
– WV No. 518 (18 January 1991)

Whereas we recognize that the Mexican proletariat, leading the rural toilers and urban poor, could strike the first decisive blow against American capitalist imperialism, the Northites maintain that Mexican workers are powerless to move forward unless and until a socialist revolution is on the order of the day in the United States. In a sense, North & Co. have recreated and adopted the Stalinist caricature of Trotskyism, that international socialist revolution means simultaneous revolutions in all major capitalist countries, both advanced and backward. At the time of the Mexican financial crisis in early 1995, the IWB (16 January 1995) wrote: “The events in Mexico demonstrate once again that the only way forward for the working class in the oppressed countries is to unite with their class brothers and sisters in the imperialist centers in a common struggle for the overthrow of capitalist exploitation and the establishment of socialism.” But what do the Northites tell the Mexican workers to do until the mass of workers in the U.S. move to overthrow the capitalist system? The answer is effectively nothing.

By counterposing an abstract conception of socialist internationalism to the actual struggles of the workers, rural toilers and oppressed peoples, the Northite tendency inexorably puts forward a defeatist line toward those struggles. In practice, the Northites oppose socialist revolution both in the U.S. and Mexico, as elsewhere.

Five years ago, as he announced the death of the Soviet Union and of the trade unions in the West, David North effectively proclaimed himself and his IC to be the leadership of the international proletariat. Yet while declaring themselves to be "clearly recognized as the only Trotskyist tendency," the Northites have transformed themselves into "Socialist Equality" parties whose program even at face value is profoundly reformist. Thus, a central aspect of the U.S. SEP’s election platform last November was the stale, old reformist proposal to promote greater equality by “revising” the bourgeoisie’s tax codes. At the same time, the SEP demonstrated its sneering approach to any struggle for social equality by highlighting its opposition to affirmative action programs for minorities and women.

Indeed, while the Northites’ open rejection of the right to self-determination may be a new innovation, getting there was not a very big step. They have long dismissed racial and other forms of oppression born of capitalism as somehow irrelevant to the “class struggle” – by which they meant the pursuit of a crude workerist adaptation to the Cold War labor bureaucrats. Their call on the AFL-CIO tops to form a "labor party" in the early 1970s – raised at the height of the Vietnam antiwar protests and militant struggles for black freedom – took up neither opposition to the imperialist war nor the fight for black liberation.

As we concluded in our article on the IC’s denial of the right of national self-determination (WV No, 627, 25 August 1995):

“The ICFI’s ‘theories’ are nothing but cowardly rationalizations for sneering at the struggle against chauvinist oppression, and for writing off the economic defense organizations of the working class, in order to boost their own petty advantage. The Northites’ policies are those of poseurs seeking a niche as spoilers. Otherwise, they are utterly devoid of, and antithetical to, a program which can lead the international working class and oppressed to a socialist victory over their exploiters.”

How David North Embraces Karl Kautsky 2 (1999)

From Spartacist Pamphlet: Imperialism, the “Global Economy” and Labor Reformism (September 1999)

How David North Embraces Karl Kautsky

The “Global Economy” and Labor Reformism
(Part 2)

Economic “Globalization”: Myths and Realities

An article in the recent special issue of the Nation (15 July 1996) devoted to the question of “globalization” begins with the portentous statement “Economic globalization involves arguably the most fundamental redesign and centralization of the planet's political and economic arrangements since the Industrial Revolution.” Similarly, Australian Northite leader Nick Beams asserts that “globalization refers to the internationalization of the circuit of productive capital” and that this constitutes a “qualitative transformation” of the world capitalist system (International Workers Bulletin, 15 July 1996).

In fact, the history of industrial capitalism was marked by a previous shift, far more profound than the present one, in the geographical distribution of production. The Industrial Revolution began in England and Scotland in the early 19th century and then spread by mid-century to France and the Low Countries (Belgium and Holland). In the late 19th century, the “New Industrializing Countries” of the day were Germany, the United States and Japan.

Writing in the 1890s, Friedrich Engels noted that Germany, which at the time of the 1848 Revolution was economically dominated by peasant agriculture and small-scale artisan manufacturing, had become “an industrial country of the first rank.” During the same period the United States, too, became an industrial country of the first rank. American industrial development was heavily dependent on investment by British capital, especially in the key sector of railway construction. Following the overthrow of the feudal order with the Meiji Restoration of the 1860s, Japan deliberately emulated the advanced capitalist countries of the West, beginning by exporting light manufactures produced by cheap unskilled labor. Tsarist Russia also experienced rapid industrial growth between the 1890s and World War I, largely financed by West European, especially French, capital.

By the beginning of the 20th century, however, the existing advanced capitalist (i.e., imperialist) countries had achieved such dominance over more backward regions that they were able to arrest the development of new rival industrial powers. Hence the present global division between the so-called First World and the Third World.

Since the Northite International Committee maintains that world capitalism has recently undergone a “qualitative transformation,” one would expect this ostensibly Marxist organization to substantiate their analysis with a comprehensive study of the relevant economic data. For example, Lenin’s 1916 work, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, contains pages of statistical tables illuminating and substantiating its analysis on all aspects. By contrast, the writings and speeches on “globalization” by North and his henchmen are devoid of even cursory data on trends in global production, investment and trade. Their 1993 pamphlet, The Globalization of Capitalist Production & the International Tasks of the Working Class, contains not a single statistical table or graph.

A few basic and easily accessible statistics debunk the notion of a qualitative transformation of world capitalism. Western/Japanese investment in the so-called Newly Industrializing Countries totaled some $100 billion in 1993, a peak year. Yet this record amount was only 3 percent of total capital investment in North America, West Europe and Japan. In other words, the imperialist bourgeoisies still invest more that 30 times as much in their own “First World” as in the Third World. American capitalists invest 9 cents in Canada and West Europe and just 5 cents in the entire rest of the world for every dollar they expend on productive assets in the United States.

Why, then, all the hullabaloo about economic “globalization”? For the past few decades, and especially since the destruction of the Soviet Union, the world capitalist economy has in certain respects been returning to the norms of the pre1914 imperialist order. To maintain a sense of perspective, one should understand that only in the early 1970s did the ratio of world trade to global production once again reach the level it had attained in 1914, on the eve of the first imperialist world war. Yet the current theoreticians of “globalization” rarely if ever mention Lenin’s seminal study of the rise of the imperialist system, to which they add little or nothing, save confusion. As we noted in an earlier article (“David North ‘Abolishes’ the Right to Self-Determination,” Part One, WV No. 626, 28 July 1995):

“The idea of an ‘era of global economic integration’ which North presents as if it were yet another of his unique ‘theoretical breakthroughs’ has been known to the Marxist movement for over a century now. It’s otherwise known as imperialism!”

The term “globalization” refers to certain significant quantitative changes in the contemporary structure of world production and trade. In 1970, 85 percent of all exports (in value terms) from Africa, Latin America and Asian countries other than Japan consisted of agricultural produce, oil, mineral ores and other primary products. Since then exports of manufactured goods from Third World countries have increased by an average rate of 15 percent a year in real terms and now make up well over half the value of their total exports. Much of this industrial , output is financed and organized by Western/Japanese corporations either directly or through local subcontractors, licensees, etc. However, the growth of internationally competitive manufactures in East Asia and Latin America is reversible and cannot continue at anything close to the rate of increase of the past few decades. That is a political, economic and, indeed, mathematical certainty.

There’s a saying in American business circles: there are liars, damn liars and statisticians. One can always select and present statistics to be deliberately misleading. One of the most common ways of doing this is to show dramatic percentage increases from a low initial base and then to project similar percentage increases into the future. For example, a worker making $5 an hour who gets a dollar raise has received a 20 percent increase while a worker making $13 an hour who gets a dollar raise has received an 8 percent increase. But the second worker is still vastly better off than the first. And the low-wage worker well knows he is not going to keep getting a 20 percent raise every year for the next ten years.

However, much writing and discussion on the world economy – by both bourgeois ideologues and leftist intellectuals – is based on this kind of fallacious methodology. For example, between 1950 and the mid-1970s Japan’s national output grew at an average annual rate two to three times greater than that of the U.S. In the 1970s, big-name American intellectuals wrote well-publicized books – e.g., Herman Kahn’s The Emerging Japanese Superstate, Ezra Vogel’s Japan as Number One – predicting that Japan would overtake the United States as the world’s leading capitalist economic power by the end of the century. Not long after these books. came out, the Japanese growth rate sharply decelerated and during the past decade Japan’s economy has been stagnant. Today, Japan’s national output is still less than half that of the U.S.

The current apocalyptic vision of economic “globalization” is based on the same faulty premises as the “Japan will be number one” literature of the 1970s. For example, between 1985 and 1994 China’s share of world exports of footwear went from 1.5 percent to 15.5 percent, an increase of 1,000 percent. If one projects the same increase for the next ten years, China will account for 150 percent of world trade in footwear, a mathematical impossibility. In another example, investment in plant and equipment by Western/Japanese corporations in backward countries, now including East Europe and the ex-USSR, increased last year by 13 percent. But it is wrong to assume this trend will continue indefinitely into the future.

The Development of Modern Imperialism

To understand the actual significance and limits of the recent changes in the world economy, it is necessary to view these changes In a broad historical perspective. In his 1916 pamphlet, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin described modern imperialism as that epoch of capitalism marked by the export of capital and the division of the world into “spheres of influence” by a few major advanced capitalist states. The two key institutions of the pre-1914 imperialist order were colonialism and the gold standard.

Particularly Britain and France, but also other West European countries, the United States and Japan exercised direct state power over hundreds of millions of toilers throughout the world. British plantation owners in India did not have to worry that the Indian government would impose high taxes on their property or enact laws favorable to labor since the government in India was their government. Compared to British India, foreign investment in China in the pre-1914 era was relatively slight, because the country was beset by political disorder and was an arena of conflict among a number of rival imperialist powers.

At the same time, the gold standard assured a degree of financial integration among the advanced capitalist countries which has never been matched since. Exchange rates between currencies were fixed, there were few or no restrictions on the international movement of capital, and real interest rates were stable and closely linked in the major financial capitals –London, Paris, New York. British holders of American railway bonds did not have to worry, that their assets would be devalued by hyperinflation or by the depreciation of the dollar against the pound.

Under these conditions the globalization of capital flourished as never before or since, as can be shown with the following few statistics for Britain and France (taken from Herbert Feis, Europe – The World’s Banker 1870-1914 [1964]). The income derived by British capitalists from their foreign assets increased from 4 percent of total British national income in the 1880s to 7 percent by 1903 to almost 10 percent on the eve of World War I in 1914. Foreign investments were concentrated in Britain’s own colonies (especially India, South Africa, Canada and Australia) as well as in the United States and, to a lesser extent; Argentina. By 1914, total productive assets held by British capitalists outside Britain amounted to well over one quarter of the capital stock within Britain itself!

While the globalization of pre-1914 British capitalism was historically unique, the role of foreign investment for French capitalism in this period likewise greatly exceeded that of any present-day imperialist country. Between 1909 and 1913, almost 5 percent of French national income was derived from French investments abroad (mainly in Russia, Turkey; the Balkans and France’s own African and Asian colonies). By 1914, the total value of French long-term foreign investment (45 billion francs) amounted to 15 percent of the productive wealth within France (295 billion francs).

Now let us look at comparable figures for the United States at present. In 1994, total income derived from the foreign assets of American capitalists, both direct investment and stock and bond holdings, was $167 billion. That amounted to slightly less than 2percent of the U.S. gross domestic product of $6.7 trillion. The current total value of American direct foreign investment is about one trillion dollars, slightly less than 10 percent of the $10.5 trillion in privately owned industrial assets (plant and equipment) within the United States. In the case of Japan, the relative weight of foreign investment is even less than it is in the U.S., and in the case of Germany it is substantially less.

World War I and the Russian Revolution

As the above figures indicate, World War I and the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia brought about a profound and long-lasting disruption of the world capitalist economy. To begin with, the war killed off the gold standard. All combatants financed their huge, unprecedented military expenditures by printing money while imposing tight controls over all international transactions. When the war ended in 1918, price levels in the major capitalist countries bore no relation whatsoever to either prewar foreign-exchange parities or real purchasing power.

An attempt to resurrect the gold standard in the mid-1920s was buried under the wreckage of the Great Depression of the 1930s. That decade saw the collapse of world trade, the rise of “beggar thy neighbor” trade protectionism, the widespread use of foreign-exchange controls (especially in Nazi Germany) and the establishment of regional economic blocs dominated by a single imperialist power (e.g., Japan’s “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere”).

Added to the effects of the Great Depression and intensifying interimperialist conflict were the consequences of the Russian Revolution. Not only had a major country been ripped out of the sphere of capitalist exploitation, but the imperialist bourgeoisies were now imbued with a fear of “red revolution” elsewhere; especially in backward countries where social and political conditions were manifestly unstable. The huge losses suffered by French financiers and other holders of Russian tsarist bonds cast a long shadow over world capital markets in the 1920s and ‘30s. Lending to semicolonial countries like China and Mexico was inhibited by the perceived danger of revolutionary turmoil and left-wing governments which would repudiate the country’s foreign debt. The only significant foreign investment in China during the interwar period was undertaken by the Japanese in Manchuria – after they had conquered and occupied this region in 1931.

From World War II to the Cold War

The struggle of the major capitalist powers to redivide markets and spheres of exploitation led in 1939-41, as it had in 1914, to an interimperialist world war, though this time one in which a chief combatant was a (degenerated) workers state, the Soviet Union. (Thus, while taking a defeatist position toward all the imperialist powers in World War II, as in the previous world war, revolutionary Marxists called for unconditional military defense of the USSR.) The outcome of the Second World War perpetuated and deepened the disruption and segmentation of the world economy. By defeating its main imperialist rivals, Germany and Japan, the United States became the hegemonic capitalist power. But the global hegemony of American imperialism was blocked by the Soviet Union, which had emerged from the war as the second-strongest state in the world: From East Asia to West Europe to South America, the course of economic developments between 1945 and 1991 was integrally connected with the Cold War.

In West Europe and also Japan, the devastation of the war combined with the leftward radicalization of the working class militated against a return to the “free trade” and “free market” policies of the pre-1914 era. Except for the U.S., all major advanced capitalist countries engaged in a high degree of state intervention in economic activity during the first phase of the postwar period. Almost all foreign-exchange transactions in West Europe were subject to strict government regulation and bureaucratic approval The pound, franc and deutschmark did not become “freely” convertible until the late 1950s.

Currency convertibility is a basic economic precondition for large-scale foreign investment in manufacturing and services, since the revenue generated from these activities is usually denominated in the currency of the country in which the investments take place. The oil extracted by Exxon in Saudi Arabia is sold on the world market for dollars. But the automobiles produced by General Motors in Germany are sold to Germans for deutschmarks. Thus, it was only in the 1960s – after the introduction of convertibility gave them the option of repatriating their profits – that American corporations bought out or built industrial plants in West Europe on a significant scale. The total value of U.S. direct investment in manufacturing in West Europe went from $3.8 billion in 1960 to $12.3 billion (discounting for inflation) by the end of the decade.

It was, however, in the economically backward regions of the world that the postwar period saw the most radical political changes affecting the international movement of capital. In the course of defeating the Nazi Wehrmacht, the Soviet Red Army occupied East Europe. Over the next few years, under the hostile pressure of American imperialism, these countries were transformed, bureaucratically from above, into “people’s democracies” – i.e., deformed workers states structurally similar to the Stalinized Soviet Union, based on planned, collectivized economies, the state monopoly of foreign trade, etc.

Bureaucratically deformed workers states also emerged in China, North Korea and Vietnam, as a result of indigenous, peasant-based social revolutions led by Stalinists. It was above all fear of war with the Soviet Union which prevented Washington from using its nuclear weapons against Mao’s China during the Korean War in the early 1950s and a few years later against the Viet Minh forces which were defeating the French colonial army in Indochina. A large part of the world was thus removed from the sphere of capitalist exploitation, although still subject to the powerful political, economic and military pressures of imperialism.

At the same time, radical political changes also took place in those economically backward countries which remained within the sphere of capitalist exploitation. The weakening of the West European imperialist, states caused by World War II combined with the radicalization of the colonial masses led to the “decolonization” of much of Asia, the Near East and Africa. State power in these regions now passed into the hands of indigenous bourgeoisies, who sought to pursue their own national interests within a global context dominated by international finance capital.

Despite some CIA-organized coups (e.g., against Mossadeq in Iran in 1953), the ability of U.S. imperialism to control the governments of the former colonial and semicolonial countries was. limited by the countervailing power of the. Soviet Union. Moscow’s backing allowed bourgeois-nationalist regimes like Nasser's Egypt, Nehru and Indira Gandhi’s India and Saddam Hussein's Iraq to exercise a degree of political and economic independence of the imperialist powers which they could not have attained on the basis of their own national economic. resources.

During the 1960s, Soviet funds and engineers helped build the Aswan High Dam – one of the largest in the world – in Nasser’s Egypt. By the early ‘70s, the USSR had become the largest market for India's exports, while Moscow provided the New Delhi regime with over 60 percent of its imports of military hardware. At the same time, Western and Japanese corporations were discouraged from investing in countries like Egypt and India for fear of punitive taxation, restrictions on the repatriation of profits and the possibility of nationalization without adequate compensation. The 1960s and ‘70s thus marked the heyday of economic nationalism and statified capitalism in what was then called the “Afro-Asian bloc.” But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was no longer even a partial counterweight to Western/Japanese imperialist domination in the Third World. The 1991 Gulf War signaled that, without the protection of the USSR, those bourgeois-nationalist regimes which flouted the dictates of Washington would be subjected to the devastating power of the Pentagon war machine.

However, even with the relatively greater room for maneuver they had when the Soviet Union still existed, the bourgeois-nationalist regimes in the Third World did not and could not chart a course truly independent of imperialism, nor could they bring about the economic and social modernization of their countries. Despite their “non-aligned” posture and even “socialist” rhetoric, the semicolonial bourgeoisies remained tied to the imperialist bourgeoisies by a thousand strings, subordinated and subservient to the power of the imperialist world market. Thus, India’s exports remained concentrated, as in the colonial era, in light manufactures produced by unskilled labor. Egypt remained economically dependent on the export of cotton (as well as tolls from the Suez Canal), Ba'athist Iraq and Qaddafi’s Libya on the vicissitudes of the world oil market controlled by the “Seven Sisters” monopolies. And Algeria under the radical-nationalist FLN regime relied heavily on money sent back by Algerians working in France. Only through the revolutionary overthrow of the local bourgeoisies, as part of a perspective of world socialist revolution reaching into the imperialist centers, can these countries achieve true independence from imperialism.

The End of the “American Century”

What is now termed economic “globalization” was rooted in the recovery of Germany and Japanese capitalism from their devastation and defeat in World War II. By the 1960s, German and Japanese manufactured goods were making huge inroads into world markets, including the American market. The competitive position of U.S. imperialism was further weakened in this period by the inflationary pressures generated by its long, losing colonial war in Vietnam. America's large, permanent balance-of-trade deficits, especially with Japan, fatally undermined the use of the dollar as the global medium of exchange and store of value – the international monetary system, originally set up at the 1944 conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. Nixon's August 1971 devaluation of the dollar in terms of gold, and the subsequent recourse to fluctuating exchange rates, signaled the end of the short-lived “American Century” of U.S. imperialist hegemony in the capitalist world.

The weakened competitive position of U.S. capitalism was further exposed by the large losses experienced by corporate. America during the 1974-75 world economic downturn. The American bourgeoisie responded with a concerted drive to increase the rate of exploitation. An anti-labor offensive was marked by “giveback” contracts, two-tier wage systems for younger workers and outright, union-busting. Unionized plants in the Midwest and North, which paid relatively high wages, were shut down as production was shifted to the “open shop” South and Southwest.

At the same time, American industrial capital undertook a major expansion in East Asia and Latin America. Between 1977 and 1994, there was a five-fold increase in manufacturing plant and equipment owned directly by U.S. corporations in Third World countries, from $11 billion to $52 billion (in real terms, discounted for inflation). Japanese industrialists soon followed their American competitors in going offshore. By the mid-1980s, Matsushita was producing many of its TV sets and air conditioners in Malaysia, Yamaha its sporting goods in Taiwan, Minebea its miniature ball bearings in Singapore and Thailand, TDK its magnetic tapes in Taiwan and South Korea, etc.

Nonetheless, investment by Western and Japanese corporations in neocolonial countries was still inhibited by the uncertainties of the Cold War. A popular uprising or even an election or military coup could suddenly bring about a left nationalist regime backed by Moscow. For example, in 1979 a revolution in Nicaragua toppled Washington's puppet dictator Somoza and brought to power the radical petty-bourgeois nationalist Sandinistas. At the same time, a major leftist insurgency was raging in neighboring El Salvador. Thus, even Yankee imperialism's own “backyard” was not secure for Wall Street banks and the Fortune 500 corporations.

Economic “Globalization” and Capitalist Counterrevolution

A fundamental political condition for the present triumph of capitalist “globalization” was the retreat of Soviet global power under Gorbachev, the disintegration of the Moscow Stalinist bureaucracy and the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92. It was no accident that the electoral overthrow of the Sandinista regime in 1990, capping a contra war armed and organized by Washington, coincided with the beginning of a massive investment boom by U.S. banks and corporations in Mexico. At the same time, capitalist counterrevolution in the former Soviet sphere has opened up a new, huge sphere for exploitation, especially for German imperialism. A few' years ago, a spokesman for German industry exulted: “Right on our own doorstep in Eastern Europe, we have for the first time a vast pool of cheap and highly trained labor.”

During Cold War II in the 1980s North’s IC joined in the imperialist anti-Soviet chorus along with other pseudo-Trotskyists like the United Secretariat of the late Ernest Mandel, as well as mainstream social democrats and Eurocommunists. Having done all within their means to promote counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and East Europe, the Northites now proclaim that the restoration of capitalism there – a historic defeat for the international proletariat – was objectively determined. Their 1993 pamphlet, The Globalization of Capitalist Production & the International Tasks of the Working Class, informs us: “The collapse of the Soviet Union was only the first major political convulsion produced by the transformation of the forms of production. The qualitative advances ,in the integration of world economy dealt the final blow to the autarchic national policies of the Stalinist regime.”

By their own terms, for the Northites the Soviet working class simply did not exist as even a potential factor in deciding the fate of the Soviet Union. The IC has effectively repudiated the Trotskyist program of proletarian political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy as even a historical possibility in this supposedly new era of “globalized” capitalism. The 1938 Transitional Program, written when the Soviet Union was relatively far more economically backward and geographically, isolated than in the 1980s, stated, “either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers' state, will overthrow the new form of property and plunge the country back into capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism.”

What did Trotsky mean here about opening “the way to socialism”? Wouldn't a Russian-centered Soviet workers state, even if administered on the basis of proletarian democracy and governed by a genuinely communist vanguard party, still be surrounded by hostile and economically more advanced capitalist states? Yes, of course. However, the overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucracy by the Soviet working class, under the banner of proletarian internationalism, would have reawakened and inspired revolutionary fervor among the workers, rural toilers and oppressed peoples throughout the capitalist world. And a communist government of the USSR would have provided invaluable political, economic and, if necessary, military support for proletarian revolutions in capitalist states, including the imperialist powers.

For Proletarian Political Revolution In China!

As against all the various pretenders to Trotskyism, not least North’s IC, our tendency unambiguously and consistently called for unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union and the deformed workers states against imperialism and internal counterrevolution, as we do today in regard to the remaining deformed workers states – Cuba, China, North Korea and Vietnam. The International Communist League mobilized all the limited resources at our command during the political turmoil in the East German (DDR) deformed workers state in 1989-90, fighting for proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy which, in league with West German imperialism and its Social Democratic lackeys, pushed for a capitalist reunification of Germany. Uniquely, the ICL opposed capitalist Anschluss (annexation) down the line, calling instead for a “Red Germany of Workers Councils” as part of a Socialist United States of Europe.

And during the terminal crisis of Stalinist rule in the USSR, our tendency actively intervened in the Soviet Union with the program and perspective of proletarian political revolution to “open the way to socialism.” The counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union was no more objectively inevitable in 1991-92 than in 1941, when the USSR was invaded by Nazi Germany. The direction taken by Russia, the Ukraine and other Soviet republics when the Kremlin bureaucracy disintegrated under Gorbachev, while conditioned by the pressures of the world capitalist market, was determined by the struggle of living social and political forces. A decisive factor in the outcome was a retrogression in the political consciousness of the Soviet working class brought about by three generations of Stalinism in power. Widespread apathy and cynicism as well as, to a certain degree, illusions in Western-type bourgeois democracy among the masses allowed the ascendancy of the counterrevolutionary forces centered around Boris Yeltsin in Russia and around anti-Soviet nationalists in the non-Russian republics.

In the case of the USSR, the Northites maintain that the capitalist counterrevolution which actually did take place was inevitable. In the case of China, they maintain that a capitalist counterrevolution has already taken place when it has not yet occurred. A major article in their Fourth International (Winter-Spring 1994), titled "The Political Background of the Restoration of Capitalism in China," asserts:

“The state which issued from the Chinese Revolution no longer defends or maintains the limited gains won by the workers and peasants in 1949....
“The Chinese state is not, even in the most distorted sense, an instrument for the defense of the working class.... The state defends the interests of the bureaucracy as a privileged social layer: increasingly linked to the rising capitalist class and, through them, the interests of imperialism itself.”

Despite the significant inroads made by capital, both domestic and foreign, over the past several years, the People's Republic of China remains a bureaucratically deformed workers state. The author of the article quoted above, one Martin McLaughlin, is here plagiarizing without attribution the Maoist doctrine of “capitalist roadism" and applying it to Mao's one-time chief rival within the Beijing Stalinist regime, Deng Xiaoping. Significantly but predictably, not once is the Trotskyist program of proletarian political revolution mentioned in this lengthy article, which purports to cover the entire history of China in the 20th century.

In contrast, a “Perspectives and Tasks Memorandum” adopted by our international tendency in January 1996 states:

“The next period is likely to see the breakdown and terminal crisis of Stalinist rule in China as powerful elements in the bureaucracy, directly tied to offshore Chinese capital and actively supported by Western and Japanese imperialism, continue to drive toward capitalist restoration. The Chinese working class, although heretofore limited by police repression to actions at individual workplaces, has in recent years exhibited massive discontent with the social degradation, insecurities and blatant inequalities generated by Deng’s ‘market socialist’ program. The rural economy has experienced the rise of a class of relatively wealthy peasant smallholders while an estimated 100 million landless peasants have flooded into the cities. We can thus foresee monumental class battles leading either to proletarian political revolution or capitalist counterrevolution in the most populous nation on earth.”

“Transnational” Corporations and Imperialist States: Antagonists or Partners?

A central element in the theory of a new “globalized” capitalist economy is that transnational corporations have supplanted nation-states as the dominant institutions in world power politics. In his latest book, Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order (1994), leading American left-liberal intellectual Richard J. Barnet maintains:

“The architects and managers of these space-age business enterprises understand that the balance of power in world politics has shifted in recent years from territorially bound governments to companies that can roam the world. As the hopes and pretensions of government shrink almost everywhere, these imperial corporations are occupying public space and exerting a more profound influence over the lives of ever larger numbers of people.”

A more extreme version of the same thesis is presented by another American rad-lib intellectual, David Korten, in his 1995 book, When Corporations Rule the World. The current view of the International Committee is essentially similar, as North stated in a 1992 speech:

“Under the aegis of imperialism, the globalization of production collides against the nation-state form within which capitalist rule is rooted.... “The web of alliances being formed by various transnational corporations, such as Toshiba, IBM and Siemens, expresses the organic drive of the productive forces to organize themselves on a world scale. But the other side of the same process is the growing antagonism among nation-states and the eruption of various forms of national and communal conflict.”
– Capital, Labor and the Nation-State (1992)

Transnational corporations are here counterposed to imperialist nation-states. Moreover, the former are presented as (relatively) progressive, since they serve as agents of global economic integration, while the latter are viewed as reactionary and obsolete. North’s statement is diametrically counterposed to what Lenin argues in his Imperialism. In particular, North’s view of the capitalists as an international class flies in the face of the Marxist understanding that the bourgeoisie cannot transcend national interests (for further discussion, see “On Bourgeois Class Consciousness,” Spartacist No. 24, Autumn 1977).

In the Barnet/Korten/North view, corporations like IBM, Siemens and Toshiba are devoted solely to maximizing their profits on a global scale; their directors and stockholders supposedly don't care whether their actions strengthen or weaken the American; German and Japanese bourgeois states. This view expresses a liberal idealist outlook since it implicitly assumes that capitalists do not need state power – i.e., armed bodies of men – to protect their property against challenges from both the exploited classes and rival capitalists. in other countries. Wall Street bankers and the CEOs of the Fortune 500 corporations understand (as Richard Barnet and David North apparently do not) that Mexican and South Korean workers are not devout believers in the sanctity of private property. Replying to similar arguments at the time, notably by German Social Democrat Karl Kautsky, Lenin in his 1916 study of imperialism quoted the German economist Schulze-Gaevemitz:

“Great Britain grants loans to Egypt, Japan, China and South America. Her navy plays here the part of bailiff in case of necessity. Great Britain’s political power protects her from the indignation of her debtors.”

The same applies to the U.S., Germany and Japan, whose armed forces are prepared to act as “bailiff in case of necessity.” Whether undertaken by corporations, banks or other financial institutions, foreign investment depends on the political, economic and military power of the states controlled by the owners of these capitalist enterprises.

North & Co. have not yet revised or repudiated the position that the Republican and Democratic parties represent the interests of the American bourgeoisie. Why then do the political leaders of these parties continue to expend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on the U.S. armed forces? Even an old-fashioned liberal like Russell Baker has observed: “The era of big government is over except for the Pentagon” (New York Times, 24 September 1996). That’s because the Pentagon provides and organizes the security guards, so to speak, to protect the property of American capitalists in other countries. Citibank and Exxon are no more independent of, much less antagonistic to, the American imperialist state than Barings Bank and Royal Dutch Shell were independent of the British imperialist state in the pre-1914 era.

Indeed, if the recent merger announcement by Boeing and McDonnell Douglas demonstrates anything, it is that “multinational” corporations – especially so in strategic industries like electronics and aerospace – are very much rooted in their own nation-states. This monopolistic merger is aimed not only at reinforcing the U.S. aerospace and weapons industry but at increasing its competitive edge against rivals like the West European Airbus conglomerate.

How David North Embraces Karl Kautsky 1 (1999)

From Spartacist Pamphlet: Imperialism, the “Global Economy” and Labor Reformism (September 1999)

How David North Embraces Karl Kautsky

The “Global Economy” and Labor Reformism
(Part 1)

Over the past couple of years, a flood of books and articles have announced or analyzed what a column in the Washington Post (16 February 1996) called “this structurally new and still imperfectly understood creature known as the global economy.” Whether they hail it or condemn it, mainstream bourgeois economists and leftist ideologues alike argue that the transfer of production operations by “multinational“ corporations from North America, West Europe and Japan to the so-called “Third World” in recent years represents a profound, structural change in the world capitalist system. The liberal Nation devoted a special issue to “globalization” last July. The labor reformists who publish Workers' World News (January-February 1996) speak of “a fundamental change as deep as the industrial revolution of the last century.” An essay on the “global economy” by sociologist Ulrich Beck in the principal German news weekly, Der Spiegel (13 May 1996), which reflects the skepticism of a section of the German bourgeoisie toward European “economic integration,” warns that “we are racing toward a capitalism without labor,” claiming, “What is at issue is political freedom and democracy in Europe.”

Though not all of the more cataclysmic predictions associated with “globalization” are universally accepted, a common theme in this literature is that the possibility of successful defensive struggles by the working class against the attacks of a particular capitalist government or employer is becoming a thing of the past. In a remarkable intellectual convergence, spokesmen for Wall Street, liberal and radical ideologues, labor bureaucrats in the U.S. and Europe and a group which claims to be a revolutionary Marxist (i.e., Trotskyist) international organization have all joined together to proclaim that “globalization” has rendered trade unions around the world powerless to affect wages, benefits and working conditions.

“Unions Threatened by Global Economy,” crows the Wall Street Journal (25 March 1996). The editors of the Wall Street Journal also maintain that present-day capitalism has resolved the problem of the trade cycle. Meanwhile, union leaders have seized on “globalization” as the latest alibi for selling out or avoiding struggles that can, in fact, be won. From the American Midwest to the German Ruhr, labor officials are telling their workers: “If you don't accept a freeze or even a cut in wages and benefits, the bosses will close down your plant and shift production to India or Mexico.” Joining in this defeatist refrain is the so-called International Committee of the Fourth International (IC) led by one David North, which not only denies any possibility of successful trade-union struggle but rejects trade unions altogether – except nonexistent unions to be run by North & Co. – as workers organizations of any kind.

The idea that the capitalist market economy is “global,” that banks and corporations seek out those (low wage) countries where they can get the highest return on their investments, that, indeed, the internationalization of finance capital is a dominant feature of the contemporary profit system, is hardly new. Writing just over 80, years ago, Russian Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin noted in his 1916 work, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, that “the twentieth century marks the turning-point from the old capitalism to the new, from the domination of capital in general to the domination of finance capital.” In a summary definition, he explained.

“Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.”

Lenin not only analyzed the economic workings of the imperialist system, he exposed the bourgeois economists who served as its apologists and the reformist and centrist pretenders to Marxism who sought to downplay the significance of this new stage of capitalist development in order to deny the urgent need for socialist revolution. Lenin took particular aim at the German Social Democrat Karl Kautsky, whose hypothesis of a unitary world “ultra-imperialism” sought to mask the growing contradictions of the capitalist system and Kautsky's own role as lawyer for the “social-chauvinist” and “social imperialist” lieutenants of the German bourgeoisie.

For Lenin, imperialism signified the epoch of “wars and revolutions.” Indeed, the pamphlet was written in the midst of the first inter-imperialist world war, as the major capitalist powers sent millions of young men to die in a bloody scramble to redivide markets, spheres of influence and colonial possessions. And little more than a year after his pamphlet was completed, Lenin's Bolsheviks led the workers of Russia to power in the first victorious proletarian revolution in history, smashing the capitalist state, sweeping out the bankers, bosses and landlords and setting an example to workers around the world.

What is striking in surveying the current literature on “globalization” is the extent to which all the liberal and reformist apologetics and nostrums currently being put forward were already taken up, exposed and demolished by Lenin eight decades ago. While certain quantitative changes have taken place in the world capitalist economy in the last decade or so, much of the current hoopla about “globalization” is a reflection not of any profound new economic transformation but rather of a profound political defeat, the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet bureaucratically degenerated workers state. In its wake, the reformist and centrist left has bought into imperialist triumphalism over the supposed “death of communism.”

The late Michael Harrington, a leading ideologue of American social democracy, defined his political program as “the left wing of the possible.” With the collapse of the Soviet Union and intensifying inter-imperialist rivalries, the American, West European and Japanese bourgeoisies are engaging in an all-sided offensive against the working class and ethnic minorities. Consequently, the labor bureaucracies in these countries now maintain that the left wing of the possible has moved far to the right. This reformist outlook has been taken to its logical conclusion by the Northites: categorical defeatism toward all working-class struggles in this period.

Not coincidentally, North's obituary on the trade unions came in the same speech in which he proclaimed “The End of the USSR” (Bulletin, 10 January 1992). Though wont to denounce all its political opponents as “petty-bourgeois radicals,” North's IC marches in ideological lockstep not only with the petty-bourgeois left and the labor bureaucracies but with bourgeois liberals and worse. Having for years joined with the ‘AFL-CIA’ tops in promoting every counterrevolutionary force aimed at destroying the Soviet workers state, North's tendency seized on the death of the Soviet Union as a justification to apologize for outright scabbing. At the same time, they have embraced a latter-day variant of Kautsky’s ultra-imperialism, using this as an excuse to spit on the struggles of oppressed nations and the colonial and semicolonial peoples enslaved by the imperialist bourgeoisies. Pointing to “vast changes in world economic and political relations,” the IC today openly rejects the right of national self-determination.

“Globalization” and Northite Defeatism

“Globalization” is but a new variation on an old theme. In the 1950s and early '60s, the term “automation” was invested with the same apocalyptic, earth-shaking consequences. Liberal intellectuals predicted that the industrial working class would in large part be replaced by robots and other machinery. One conclusion was that trade unions were becoming or would become obsolete. After all, you can't unionize industrial robots. At the same time, labor bureaucrats told their ranks that if they pushed the level of wages and benefits too high, they would lose their jobs through automation.

Today, it is intellectually fashionable to explain the sharp deterioration in the living standards of American working people over the past generation as a result of “globalization,” especially the transfer of production by major U.S. corporations (“multinationals” or “transnationals”) to low-wage countries in East Asia and Latin America. Speaking in Rome a few years ago, the dean of liberal American economists, Paul Samuelson, predicted: “As the billions of people who live in East Asia and Latin America qualify for good, modern jobs, the half billion Europeans and North Americans who used to tower over the rest of the world will find their upward progress in living standards encountering tough resistance.” In his 1991 The Work of Nations, former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich wrote that “Americans are becoming part of an international labor market, encompassing Asia, Africa, Latin America, and, increasingly, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.” “Top U.S. Exports Continue to Be Jobs,” moans the AFL-CIO News (5 August 1996), official organ of the American labor bureaucracy.

“Runaway shops,” “outsourcing” and the transfer of production to low-wage areas like the U.S. South and Mexico and other semicolonial countries have indeed led to a sharp decline in unionized manufacturing jobs, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest. But instead of seeking to organize international class struggle against attacks on jobs and unions, the AFL-CIO bureaucracy polices the labor movement on behalf of the U.S. capitalist rulers while trying to shift the blame for layoffs here on workers abroad.

The views expressed above by Samuelson, Reich and the pro-capitalist AFL-CIO tops have become the central ideological theme of the Northite tendency. In a speech in Detroit in 1992, North stated:

“The collapse of the old organizations of the working class is, fundamentally, the product of specific historic and economic conditions. Understanding these conditions does not mean that we absolve the leaders of these organizations of responsibility for what has happened. Rather, it enables us to recognize that the rottenness of the leaders is itself only a subjective manifestation of an objective process....
“The global integration of capitalist production under the aegis of massive transnational corporations and the terminal crisis of the nation-state system have shattered the basic geo-economic foundation upon which the activities of the old organizations of the working class have been based. Nationally-based labor organizations are simply incapable of seriously challenging internationally-organized corporations.” [our emphasis]
– Capital, Labor and the Nation-State (1992)

Despite North's disclaimer, his notion of “globalization” and its effects does absolve the labor bureaucracy of responsibility for the decline of the trade-union movement and the degradation of the working class. It is no accident that North's views are also expressed, in almost identical language, by spokesmen for the union bureaucracy. Thus, the general secretary of the International Union of Food and Allied Workers' Associations, Dan Gallin, argues.

“Nation states are becoming irrelevant.... National governments no longer control the flow of financial capital. So they can no longer control their own economies. This in turn weakens the power of national democratic pressures from labour parties and trade unions.”
– the Workers' World News (January-February 1996)

Gallin, who is at least more intellectually honest than North, openly argues for a popular-frontist perspective of “building a broad-based people's movement” to counter the effects of “globalization.”

But neither does North denounce the union misleaders for not mobilizing the economic power of the workers movement and popular political support against the capitalist offensive. Instead he asserts that the trade unions as such have been made impotent by objective changes in the world economy. This position is stated even more clearly and categorically by Nick Beams, head of the Australian section of North's International Committee: “To the extent that the extraction of surplus value from the working class still took place within the confines of a given state, it was possible to apply pressure to capital via the national state for reforms and concessions to the working class. This was the program of the trade union and labor bureaucracies. That is no longer possible” (International Workers Bulletin [IWB], 15 July 1996). In other words, the Northites maintain it is no longer possible for the working class to defend itself against the predations of capital through strikes or other actions, regardless of the tactics and policies pursued.

This position is radically false and, if accepted, can only foster demoralization and defeatism within the working class. In none of the major strikes which marked the decline and defeat of the American labor movement in the 1980s – the PATCO air traffic controllers, Greyhound bus drivers, Phelps-Dodge copper miners, Eastern Airlines machinists, Hormel meatpackers – did foreign competition or the operations of multinationals abroad play any significant role. Greyhound, Eastern Airlines and Hormel extract almost all of their surplus value from labor within the confines of the American state.

To be sure, there have also been major labor struggles recently against large corporations which are critically dependent on international trade and foreign Outsourcing, notably the two-month-long strike at Boeing aircraft in late 1995. In this case, the strike was actually starting to hurt Boeing when the leaders of the Machinists union called it off for minimal gains while, at the same time, fomenting anti-Asian chauvinism and protectionism.

For a Class-Struggle Perspective!

The decline of the American labor movement is not fundamentally caused by the objective effects of “globalization” but by the defeatist and treacherous policies of the AFL-CIO misleaders. As we wrote right after the defeat of the Greyhound strike.

“No decisive gain of labor was ever won in a courtroom or by an act of Congress. Everything the workers movement has won of value has been achieved by mobilizing the ranks of labor in hard-fought struggle, on the picket lines, in plant occupations. What counts is power. The strength of the unions lies in their numbers, their militancy, their organization and discipline and their relation to the decisive means of production in modern capitalist society. The bosses are winning because the power of labor, its strength to decisively cripple the enemy, has not been brought to bear.”
– “Labor's Gotta Play Hardball to Win,” WV supplement (March 1984)

The AFL-CIO bureaucracy plays by the bosses’ rules in all strikes, including in the service sector where foreign competition is nonexistent. Consider the strike by janitors and other building workers in New York City last winter. As usual the union tops insisted on porous picket lines. As a consequence an estimated 15,000 scabs replaced the striking workers and office buildings operated more or less as usual. But let us imagine what would have happened if the organized labor movement had sought to mobilize New York City's working people and appealed to the dispossessed population of the ghettos and barrios to actively support the heavily minority and immigrant building workers.

Dozens and hundreds of strikers and other workers-union and non-union-along with black and Hispanic youth could have surrounded every major office building in the city and prevented anyone from entering. David North to the contrary, the CEOs of American multinationals would not have responded by closing their New York headquarters and running their operations out of New Delhi or Mexico City. Rather the cops would have attacked and tried to break the picket lines, arresting militant workers and their supporters. The outcome would then have been determined by the ability of the New York City labor movement to organize effective actions backed by popular support especially in the black and Hispanic communities. A one-day transit strike, for example, might have convinced the powers that be in the world's financial capital to impose a deal on the real estate barons favorable to the building workers.

To take an international example, the defeat of the 1984-85 British miners strike by the Conservative government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher opened the way to a crippling assault on all trade unions in Britain. The year-long miners’ struggle was far and away the most significant class battle in West Europe in the 1980s. While the importation of foreign coal did play a role in that strike, the key factor in its defeat was the refusal of the Labour Party and Trades Union Congress tops to countenance joint strike action by other sectors of the British working class, even as workers from France to South Africa expressed their solidarity with the British miners by halting scab coal shipments and raising financial support.

Seeking to limit union struggle to what is acceptable to the capitalist rulers, the reformist labor misleaders generally eschew any possibility of real international proletarian solidarity. Typical of this is the leadership of the United Auto Workers (UAW), potentially still one of the most powerful industrial unions in the U.S. Instead of promoting organizing efforts in the American South and in the Mexican maquiladora industrial belt south of the U.S. border, the UAW tops respond. to “outsourcing” and “runaway shops” by shoving one concession after another down their members' throats while appealing to Washington for protectionist measures. Far from seeking coordinated strike action with Canadian and Mexican workers during last fall's contract negotiations with the Big Three, whose operations throughout North America are now fully integrated, the UAW bureaucracy openly denounced a strike by GM workers in Canada, seeing that as counterposed to its efforts to get Democrat Clinton re-elected.

The existence of “multinationals” simply underscores the historic need for an internationalist class-struggle perspective that transcends parochial, nationally limited trade unionism. Indeed, one of the reasons for the establishment of the First International founded by Karl Marx was to organize trade-union solidarity between workers in Britain and continental Europe.

There are, of course, limits to what can be gained through trade-union struggle, however militant. As their labor costs rise beyond a certain point, capitalists will respond by retrenching (i.e., shutting down less-profitable operations), introducing new labor-saving technology as well as shifting some operations to low-wage countries. The labor bureaucracy points to the ability of the capitalists to counter union gains by such means in order to argue that the workers must accept existing, or even worse, conditions without a fight, while laying the blame on workers in other countries for “stealing American jobs.” As revolutionary Marxists, we point to the limitations of trade-unionism to argue for the need to overthrow the capitalist system of exploitation. As Marx wrote over a century ago.

“Trade Unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital.... They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class, that is to say, the ultimate abolition of the wages system.”
– Value, Price and Profit (1867)

The Northites now openly repudiate this basic Marxist position. They maintain that trade unions can no longer function as centers of resistance to the predations of capital, and they counterpose a socialist transformation to the defense of the workers' interests within capitalism. According to the wisdom of Nick Beams: “In order to defend even the most minimal conditions-the simple and most ordinary demands-the working class is confronted with the necessity of overthrowing the social relations based on capital and wage labor determined by the capitalist market through which the appropriation of surplus value takes place” (IWB, 1 July 1996).

At first glance, this may seem like a terribly revolutionary position. In fact, it indicates a defeatist and abstentionist attitude toward the actual struggles of the working class, without which all talk of overthrowing the social relations based on capital and wage labor is empty rhetoric. As Leon Trotsky wrote: “The triumph of the proletarian revolution on a world scale is the end-product of multiple movements, campaigns and battles, and not at all a ready-made precondition for solving all questions automatically” (“Independence of the Ukraine and Sectarian Muddleheads,” July 1939).

The mass of workers can achieve socialist consciousness only through the intervention of a revolutionary party in the proletariat's day-to-day struggles. This is a central theme of the 1938 Transitional Program, the founding program of Trotsky's Fourth International.

“The Bolshevik-Leninist stands in the front-line trenches of all kinds of struggles, even when they involve only the most modest material interests or democratic rights of the working class. He takes active part in the mass trade unions for the purpose of strengthening them and raising their spirit of militancy.... Only on the basis of such work within the trade unions is successful struggle possible against the reformists....Sectarian attempts to build or preserve small 'revolutionary' unions, as a second edition of the party, signify in actuality the renouncing of the struggle for the leadership of the working class.”

The Latest Posture of Political Bandits

For years, North’s Workers League agitated for the racist, pro-imperialist, rabidly anti-Communist Meany/Kirkland bureaucracy of the AFL-CIO to form a “labor party.” Now the North gang not only denounces the AFL-CIO tops as reactionary but likens the unions to a “company union or a scab organization.” Having recently rechristened themselves the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), the Northites now declare.

“Workers must face the fact that the AFL-CIO is a failed organization that will not respond to the workers' demands. Workers need democratically-controlled unions, committed to defending their interests without compromise. Such unions can only be established-as the industrial arms of a mass political party of the working class, and this party can only be built in ruthless struggle against the trade union bureaucracy. This is the perspective fought for by the Socialist Equality Party.”
-IWB (15 July 1996)

The nonexistent “industrial arms” of a nonexistent mass workers party are here supposed to replace the actual mass economic organizations of the U.S. working class.

If North, Beams & Co. were honest and courageous politicians, however misguided, they would call on American workers to leave the AFL-CIO en masse, Australian workers to leave the Australian Council of Trade Unions, British workers to leave the Trades Union Congress, etc. According to the Northites, not only have the unions become reactionary but also strikes: “Even when the bureaucracy calls a strike, it does so for the purpose of more effectively demoralizing and defeating the workers” (The Globalization of Capitalist Production & the International Tasks of the Working Class [September 1993]). If that is the case, then the Northites should tell the workers never to go out on strike and should give no support to strikes that do occur. Given its line, there is no reason for the Socialist Equality Party to oppose scabbing.

In fact, following the sellout of a 17-month-long UAW strike at Caterpillar in 1995 which saw widespread scabbing, North's International Workers Bulletin (18 December 1995) openly apologized for strikebreaking: putting the word “scabs” in quotation marks, sympathetically “explaining” that “the large majority of the 4,000 union members who returned to work were not right-wing or anti-union,” and attacking the union tops from the right for “diverting the anger of strikers towards the ‘scabs,’ i.e., those union members who decided to cross picket lines.” Around the same time, North's British acolytes made themselves notorious among striking Liverpool dockers by denouncing international labor solidarity with their struggle. A scurrilous article, “Dockers Must Reject Fake Internationalism” (International Worker, 2 December 1995), attacked as a “fraud” plans by international longshore unions, which were implemented that same month, to refuse to handle ships loaded by scabs in Liverpool (see “David North, ‘Socialist’ Apologist for Scabbing,” WV No. 637, 19 January 1996).

Yet in their platform for a recent parliamentary by-election campaign, the British SEP had the gall to insist that “Workers in Britain must seek the support of workers overseas” (International Worker, 30 November 1996). These are political charlatans who always speak, out of both sides of their mouths. On one side, they denounce the unions as “failed organizations,” thereby seeking to appeal to workers fed up with the bureaucracy’s endless sellouts and angry and frustrated over falling living standards. On the other side, they try to make themselves look good by posing as sympathetic to workers engaged in struggle.

Many years ago, we characterized the tendency led by the late Gerry Healy, North's mentor, as political bandits whose practices stood in flat contradiction to their professed principles, who say and do today the exact opposite of what they said and did yesterday and would say and do tomorrow. Having abjectly tailed the pro-capitalist union misleaders until a few short years ago, the Northites now turn around and repudiate the unions altogether. But the union bureaucracy was no less reactionary then than it is today – and the same can be said of David North & Co.

During Cold War II, the anti-Soviet war hysteria of the 1980s, the Northites marched in ideological lockstep with the AFL-CIO tops in enthusiastically supporting every pro-imperialist, anti-Communist nationalist movement in and around the Soviet bloc – from the CIA-backed Afghan mujahedin to counterrevolutionary Polish Solidarnosc to the Baltic “captive nations” types. In Britain, Healy/North's IC parlayed its support for Solidarnosc into a provocative witchhunt, in league with the most right-wing forces inside and outside the labor movement, against the militant miners union and its leader, Arthur Scargill. In late 1983, the Healyites instigated an anti-Communist furor over Scargill’s description of Solidarnosc as “anti-socialist,” with the aim of isolating the miners from the rest of the British trade-union movement as they prepared for battle against Thatcher and the Coal Board. And in 1991 North & Co. even condemned the Bush administration for not more aggressively backing the fascist-infested Lithuanian Sajudis, which called for secession from the Soviet Union as part of a drive for capitalist restoration.

When the demand for self-determination served as a “democratic” fig leaf for attacks on the Soviet degenerated workers state, the Northites waxed eloquent about their support to “national rights.” Now they denounce the call for self-determination and claim that national independence has become impossible, indeed reactionary, in a “globalized” economy. Having supported the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union – the greatest defeat for the international proletariat in decades – the Northites have adopted a position of defeatism toward all struggles by the working class and oppressed peoples in the post-Soviet world.

Marx vs. the “Iron Law of Wages“

The Northite view of “globalization“ – i.e., the large-scale shift in production by “multinational” corporations to the Third World – and its effect on the relation between labor and capital is a present-day version of what in the 19th century was called the “iron law of wages.” This was a doctrine that wages could not be permanently raised above a fixed level regardless of the actions – economic and/or political – taken by the working class. While initially developed by British bourgeois economists, the “iron law” was adhered to by almost all of the early socialist and anarchist tendencies-British Owenites, French Proudhonists, German Lassalleans.

It is readily understandable why the ideologists of the bourgeoisie maintained that the existing level of wages was determined by the immutable laws of the capitalist market. Why would leftists who opposed the capitalist system also uphold such a position? Because they believed that the workers could be won to the program of socialism (or, in Proudhon's case, to anarchism) only if they were convinced that it was hopeless to attempt to improve their conditions within capitalism.

There were different versions of how the “iron law” was supposed to operate. The originator of the doctrine, the Reverend Thomas Malthus, asserted that if wages rose above subsistence levels workers would have more children, more of whom would live to maturity. The increase in the supply of labor would therefore drive wages back to the subsistence level. The leftist adherents of the “iron law” generally argued that any increase in money wages would be quickly and fully offset by rising prices. Hence they regarded trade unionism as useless or even injurious to the working class.

Proudhon's last work, The Political Capacity of the Working Class (published posthumously in 1865), was a sustained attack on trade unionism, which had just emerged in France on a significant scale.

“While threatening to strike, some of them [trade unionists], indeed the majority, have demanded an increase in wages, others have demanded a reduction in working hours, and still others both at the same time. Surely they have always known that increased wages and reduced working hours can only lead to a general price increase.”

In opposing strikes, Proudhon made the additional argument that the financial resources of the capitalists were so much greater that the workers could never win.

“Let us imagine that an industrial establishment has a capital of three million and that it employs one thousand workers who one day go on strike. The employer rejects their demands.... After a month the workers have exhausted their funds and will have to resort to the pawnshop. The capitalist will have lost merely a twelfth of his interest and his capital will not have been touched. The match is clearly unequal.”
– Stewart Edwards, ed., Selected Writings of Joseph-Pierre Proudhon (1969)

If one substitutes “transnational corporation” for “industrialestablishment" in the above passage, it accurately represents the current Northite line.

Throughout his life as a revolutionary workers leader, Marx opposed all exponents of the “iron law of wages.” His most comprehensive treatment of this question is his 1865 pamphlet, Value, Price and Profit, a polemical response to an old Owenite socialist, George Weston, who was then a member of the General Council of the First International. Here Marx scientifically demonstrated that an “immense scale of variations is possible” in the rate of exploitation (the ratio of surplus value to the value of wages):

“The fixation of its actual degree is only settled by the continuous struggle between capital and labour, the capitalist constantly tending to reduce wages to their physical minimum while the workingman constantly presses in the opposite direction.
“The matter resolves itself into a question of the respective powers of the combatants.”

Marx's theoretical demolition of the “iron law of wages” was confirmed by the actual experience of the working class as mass trade unions developed in Europe and North America in the late 19th century. By the beginning of the 20th century, the “iron law” had been generally discredited within the workers movement and left. A notable exception was the American socialist Daniel De Leon, who counterposed the overthrow of the capitalist system to trade-union struggles for higher wages and shorter hours.

In line with pre-1914 Social Democratic orthodoxy, the De Leonists regarded the decisive event of the socialist revolution as the electoral victory of their party, the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), over the bourgeois parties. Attached to the SLP was an industrial arm called the Socialist Labor and Trade Alliance, which over time tended to shrink to an artificial, Potemkin village organization consisting entirely of the SLP’s own supporters. Despite the name, the Socialist Labor and Trade Alliance was not a trade union in any sense. It did not advocate, much less engage in, struggles to improve the wages or conditions of the workers. What then was its purpose? Following the expected electoral victory of the SLP, the Socialist Labor and Trade Alliance would “seize and hold” the means of production from the capitalists and subsequently administer the socialist economy.

Third World Wages Mean... Third World Economies

The present posture of the North group parallels the old De Leonist program except that the De Leonists were principled, albeit misguided, socialists. A primary activity of North’s Socialist Equality Patty (SEP, formerly the Workers League), and the other SEPs recently set up by IC sections in Britain and Australia, is running for office in bourgeois elections for various levels of government. They have adopted an, at best, abstentionist position in relation to the struggles of the mass trade-union movement. And at least on paper the Northites now project building something akin to the Socialist Labor and Trade Alliance. According to the 1993 Northite pamphlet, The Globalization of Capitalist Production & the International Tasks of the Working Class:

“Transnational corporations are systematically shifting the most labor intensive aspects of production to impoverished regions, where wages are a fraction of the existing levels in the advanced capitalist countries. Even high-tech and skilled labor can be purchased on the cheap in India, parts of Latin America, eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The inexorable result is a downward leveling of wages and living standards and a relentless assault on past social reforms and legal limitations on the exploitation of labor by capital in the imperialist centers”

As we have indicated earlier, the Northites are here advancing, with a thin veneer of Marxist rhetoric, an argument currently propounded by a wide range of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois liberals. Thus, a recent article in Foreign Affairs (May-June 1996) warns that “inequality, unemployment and endemic poverty” are the “handmaidens” of the “global economy.” And in a special issue of the liberal Nation (15 July 1996), British “Green” spokesmen Colin Hines and Tim Lang assert:

“Globalization unquestionably leads to lower-wage economies. The British economist Adrian Wood has calculated a not insignificant shift of 9 million jobs from North to South [i.e., from the industrialized countries to the Third World] in recent years.... Meanwhile, Britain is advertising itself as a low-wage country to attract industry. The trend is clear.”

The version of the “iron law of wages” pushed by North and others based on the supposed globalization of production is no more valid than the various 19th-century versions. Wages in the advanced capitalist countries are not going to be driven down to anything close to Third World levels for two fundamental reasons: one political, the other economic. As we shall see, increased investment by Western/ Japanese banks and corporations in backward countries, especially in the manufacturing sector, requires the maintenance of strong imperialist states to protect those investments. U.S. capitalists are not going to produce a large part of their steel output in South Korea and Brazil, because they need guaranteed access to this steel in case of war with their imperialist rivals – Germany and Japan – or for military intervention against popular revolutions in former colonial countries, like South Korea and Brazil.

The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848, defines the “executive of the modern State” as “a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” One of the tasks of that executive committee is to ensure that individual capitalists, seeking to maximize their own profits, do not harm the vital interests of the national bourgeoisie as a whole. Thus, a few years ago Washington prevented the management and stockholders of Continental Oil from investing in the modernization of Iranian oil fields, because building up the Iranian economy went against the currently perceived interests of U.S. imperialism. In the next few years, the U.S., Germany and Japan may well impose – against the immediate interests and desires of sections of their own capitalist classes – high levels of trade protectionism, controls of foreign-exchange transactions and strict limits on the inflow and outflow of capital. There is in addition a fundamental economic limitation to the “globalization” of production. Manufacturing wages in East Asia and Latin America have been a small fraction of those, in the advanced capitalist countries for decades. Why then does Siemens still produce most of its electrical machinery in Germany and General Motors most of its autos in North America? Because 15 unskilled workers in Indonesia (earning well under a dollar an hour) cannot replace a skilled machinist in the U.S. (earning $15 an hour) or Germany (earning $25 an hour) in the process of industrial production. The technical-cultural level of the labor force in Europe, North America and Japan is qualitatively higher than in the Third World. Annual expenditure per student for primary and secondary education is over $5,000 in the US., almost $4,000 in Japan, $600 in Latin America and the Caribbean, and $70 in the Indian subcontinent! These vast differences cannot be appreciably narrowed within the framework of the capitalist-imperialist system. The basic premise of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution is that in the imperialist epoch countries of belated capitalist development cannot attain the overall level of economic productivity of the pioneer regions of the bourgeois revolution – West Europe, North America and, later, Japan.

This is the geo-economic basis for the division of the world between imperialist countries and neocolonial countries exploited and oppressed by the former. If India’s labor productivity approximated that of the United States and Japan, India itself would be a major imperialist power, since the numerical size of its industrial labor force (about 30 million workers) is the same as that of the U.S. and 50 percent greater than that of Japan. The Northite notion of “globalization” is in its theoretical essence a repudiation of the Trotskyist understanding of permanent revolution, because it posits a tendency to equalize economic conditions throughout the world by leveling up productivity in the backward capitalist countries and leveling down productivity in the advanced ones. The genuine globalization of production requires an internationally planned socialist economy, which alone can raise the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America to the technical-cultural level of what is now called the First World.

Northites Salute Generals and Finks (1999)

Workers Vanguard No. 710, 5 February 1999

Northites Salute Generals and Finks

Longtime political bandits and renegades from Trotskyism, the Socialist Equality Party (SEP, formerly Workers League) has now descended to actively saluting imperialism’s war chiefs. When Clinton carried out his terror bombing of Iraq in December, the Spartacist League forthrightly declared: “Defend Iraq! Defeat U.S. Imperialism Through Workers Revolution!” In stark contrast, a “World Socialist Web Site” piece by Martin McLaughlin and SEP national secretary David North, dated 19 December 1998, describes the attack as “a shameful chapter in American history” and explicitly counterposes the supposed glories of yesteryear’s imperialist war-making:

“This much is certain: 50 years from now no one will be making films like Patton, The Longest Day or Saving Pvt. Ryan about their exploits.
“One need not agree with the politics of such World War II-era commanders as
Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton, and Nimitz to acknowledge that they, at least, led
their armies against an enemy fully capable of firing back.”

Like a newsreel from Hollywood’s World War II propaganda mill, North and McLaughlin carefully omit the atrocities committed by the U.S. military in that interimperialist war as they list “searing images that profoundly influenced the political consciences of several generations”:

“Next to those produced by the opening of the Nazi death camps, the most unforgettable images were those of the German Luftwaffe raining bombs on defenseless populations....
“The manner in which Japan initiated hostilities – bombing Pearl Harbor without warning – outraged millions. For decades to come, the phrase ‘sneak attack’ was synonymous with the basest form of treachery.”

What happened to the “searing images” of the nightly pounding of German cities by U.S. and British bombers and the firebombing of Dresden? What about the U.S. government rounding up Japanese Americans into concentration camps for the duration of the war? What about the indelible image of the mushroom clouds produced by American atom bombs dropping on already defeated Japan, incinerating Hiroshima and Nagasaki? “Down the memory hole,” as another current hero of the Northites, George Orwell, would have said.

If you’re looking for heroes by the criteria of the SEP why not pick Karl Donitz, admiral of the World War II German submarine fleet. In the First World War, he commanded a submarine that sank. In the next, he lost two sons. The U-boat crews under his command were also heroic, because they kept fighting even when 90 percent were gone. The problem here is that bravery is not a social, or class, criterion. This is made very clear in the movie Das Boot.

One would never know from the Northites that the Trotskyists opposed all the imperialist powers in World War II while calling for the unconditional military defense of the degenerated Soviet workers state. In 1939, James P. Cannon, in the course of his great battle to preserve Trotskyism in the U.S. on the eve of the war, summed up the program of the then-revolutionary Socialist Workers Party (SWP):

“1. The main enemy is in our own coun try – expose and fight the Roosevelt-Hoover combination.
“2. Defend the Soviet Union in spite of Stalin against Stalin.”
– The Strugglefor a Proletarian Party (1943 edition)

Eighteen leaders of the SWP and Minneapolis Teamsters union were sentenced to Sandstone federal penitentiary for opposition to the imperialist war. In a May Day 1945 speech, his first after serving 13 months in prison, Cannon reiterated the revolutionaries ‘ position:

“We said from the very beginning: It isn't a war for democracy against fascism; it isn’t a war for justice and freedom. That is not true. It is a war of imperialist rivals; it is a war for profits to be coined out of the blood of the people of Europe and Asia, and eventually for the enslavement and degradation of the workers here at home....
“What can they show, the masters of the world, but ruined cities, mounds of corpses, and millions of starving people? That is the auspices under which American imperialism enters its day of glory as the master of the world.”
– “The End of the War in Europe;” The Struggle for Socialism in the 'American Century' (1977)

The obscene, gagging patriotism with which North & Co. embrace the military commanders of U.S. imperialism in WWII finds its reflection in alibis for those who served in the postwar anti- Communist crusade. As we commented in “David North’s ‘Left’ McCarthyism” (WV No. 702, 4 December 1998): “The heritage North defends is not that of Trotskyism, which was embodied through the 1950s in the now-reformist SWP, but of anti-Communist renegades like Irving Howe and George Orwell, who spied for His Majesty’s secret service against ‘Soviet totalitarianism’.” Not Surpris ingly, we also find on the SEP Web site a full-blown apologia for Orwell under the byline of eternal toady Fred Mazelis (“George Orwell and the British Foreign Office,” 9 September 1998).

It came out last summer that Orwell, the British author of Animal Farm and 1984 and coiner of the phrase “Big Brother is watching you,” was doing a lit tle watching of his own. In 1949, Orwell turned a list of some 35 people he considered to be in the orbit of the Stalinirds over to a unit of the British Foreign Office set up to disseminate anti-Soviet prop aganda. Rising from Orwell’s snotty comments on “crypto-Communists and fellow travelers” is a nasty whiff of anti- gay and anti-Semitic bigotry. By Charlie Chaplin’s name, Orwell writes “Jewish?” in parentheses. The powerful black American singer and actor Paul Robeson, he charges, is “very anti-white.” Poet Stephen Spender gets the remark, “Very unreliable. Easily influenced. Tendency towards homosexuality.” And on and on.

Yet here Mazelis finds evidence of Orwell’s dignity, opining:

“On one level, Orwell’s action in turn ing over these comments was not the same as those of the political cowards who sought to save their careers during the McCarthyite witch-hunt by ‘naming names’ of prominent figures who had been in or around the Communist Party years earlier. In Orwell’s case, there was no cowardice or personal opportunism involved. He was never a man to curry favor with the establishment, and the political characterizations on his list were by and large similar to sentiments he had expressed publicly.”

If anything, in Orwell’s case it was worse than “cowardice” and “opportunism” Nobody even had to threaten Orwell. There was no subpoena. There was no wrecking of career, no public humiliation in hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, no prison sentence looming. Unlike those who ratted because they couldn’t stand up to the terrorizing witchhunts, Orwell finked voluntarily. Nevertheless, Mazelis posits that “there is no way of knowing exactly where he would have ended up politically if he had lived another two or three decades.”

Well, we have a pretty good idea. After all, “My country, right or left,” Orwell famously commented, and he meant it. During World War II, Orwell spent time in the British Home Guard and put in a good two years, from 1941 to late 1943, broadcasting for the BBC as part of Britain’s propaganda effort toward its restive colonial possession, India. As Clive James puts ,it in his glorification of Orwell in the New Yorker (18 January), Orwell told his Indian audience “that they had a better chance with the British than with the Japanese.” This from one who was formerly a bitter critic of British imperialism in the East. So it’s not illogical that he went that, next, dirty step, sneaking his vindictive comments to his British imperialist masters.

And where will David North’s SEP end up? It’s hard to predict the exact trajectory of such an unsavory and unstable outfit. But as the author of Animal Farm might have put it, “in the end you couldn’t tell the Northites from the pigs.”

D. North's “Left” McCarthyism (1998)

Workers Vanguard No. 702, 4 December 1998

David North’s “Left” McCarthyism

It's not often that the New York Times, liberal mouthpiece mouthpiece for U.S. imperialism, deems letters from ostensible socialists “fit to print.” But the Times (22 October) clearly saw some value in publishing a missive by David North of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP, formerly Workers League). Having ceased publication of his fake-Marxist International Workers Bulletin last year in favor of a pseudo-academic Web site, the national secretary of the now organless SEP descended from cyberspace to engage in polite “debate” with professional anti-Communist Ronald Radosh. Radosh has made a career out of retrying, reconvicting and re-executing Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed as “Soviet spies” in 1953 in an anti-Communist, anti-Semitic witchhunt.

In commenting on a Times (18 October) “Week in Review” piece titled “Rethinking McCarthyism, if Not McCarthy” which cited Radosh, North whines: “Mr. Radosh’s assertion that the debacle of the American Communist Party has discredited the entire Socialist movement is indefensible.” North begs to set the record straight: “In fact, before the cold war, anti-Stalinism was associated principally with the Socialist left — above all with Trotskyists. Long before anti-Stalinism became fashionable among liberals, who had previously embraced ‘popular front’ alliances with the Communist Party, left-wing anti-Stalinists had insisted that the Kremlin’s policies had nothing in common with Marxism or with the Socialist program.”

And North’s SEP has nothing in common with Trotskyism — the Marxism of our time. “With the approval of North,” the SEP Web site assures us, his letter was abridged by the Times to omit even passing references to anti-Communism or the October Revolution of 1917. But even the unabridged version does not so much as hint at the Trotskyist position of unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union when it existed — nor, to be sure, of the remaining deformed workers states (China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam) today — against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution. Nor does North raise a finger in defense of the heroic Rosenbergs in the face of Radosh’s calumnies. Recognizing a kindred spirit, Radosh replied to North in ever so polite terms that McCarthy “gave a bad name to the very legitimate cause of anti-Communism” (New York Times, 24 October). In fact, this aptly captures North’s own view.

North falsely amalgamates revolutionary Trotskyism with that wing of the “socialist movement” which opposed the Bolshevik Revolution and supported its “own” imperialist rulers in World Wars I and II, as well as with the liberals who were the left wing of the post-WWII anti-Communist crusade. He reduces Trotskyism to an anti-Soviet loyalty oath. Polemicizing against North’s forebears in a 1947 article titled “Stalinism and Anti-Stalinism,” James P. Cannon, leader of the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP), wrote at the onset of the Cold War witchhunt:

“We Trotskyists, as everybody knows, are also against Stalinism and have fought it unceasingly and consistently for a very long time. But we have no place in the present ‘all-inclusive’ united front against American Stalinism. The reason for this is that we are anticapitalist. Consequently, we can find no point of agreement with the campaign conducted by the political representative of American capitalism in Washington, with the support of its agents in the labor movement and its lackeys in the literary and academic world. We fight Stalinism from a different standpoint.
“We fight Stalinism not because it is another name for communism, but precisely because of its betrayal of communism and of the interests of the workers in the class struggle.”
— Cannon, The Struggle for Socialism in the American Century (1977)

As Cannon pointed out, the Stalinists paved the way for their own isolation during the red purge by their class betrayals — in league with the social democrats — in the service of U.S. imperialism, from support to Democrat Roosevelt’s “New Deal” coalition in the 1930s to the wartime no-strike pledge. But while fighting for proletarian political revolution against the Kremlin bureaucracy and politically combating the Stalinist syphilis in the labor movement, the Trotskyists rallied to the defense of Stalinist and other militants driven out of the trade unions (of which not a word in North’s letter) by “left-wing anti-Stalinists” like Walter Reuther. The SWP denounced the murder of the Rosenbergs as “a bestial act of capitalist class terrorism intended to help intimidate into silence all who would criticize or oppose Wall Street’s policies abroad or at home.”

The heritage North defends is not that of Trotskyism, which was embodied through the 1950s in the now-reformist SWP, but of anti-Communist renegades like Irving Howe and George Orwell, who spied for His Majesty’s secret service against “Soviet totalitarianism.” During the 1980s Cold War against the Soviet Union, North’s outfit was on the same side as social-democratic witch-hunters like Radosh — cheering CIA-backed mujahedin cutthroats against the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan, marching lockstep toward capitalist counterrevolution with clerical-nationalist Solidarność in Poland, enthusiastically promoting the fascist-infested Sajudis in Lithuania and the rest of the reactionary Baltic “captive nations” trash.

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The kind of respectability North now craves can only come to those who did their bit in aiding the cause of capitalist counterrevolution in the USSR, a historic defeat for the world’s working class.
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North was schooled in the political banditry of Gerry Healy’s International Committee (IC). In 1979, North joined Healy in hailing the execution of 21 members of the Iraqi Communist Party by the bourgeois-nationalist Ba’ath regime, while Healy’s outfit spied on Iraqi oppositionists in Britain. When the flow of petrodollars from various Arab regimes for services rendered dried up, Healy’s outfit imploded and North modestly proclaimed himself leader of the international proletariat.

Shortly before that, in 1983, the IC whipped up an anti-Communist furor against British miners leader Arthur Scargill over his correct denunciation of Polish Solidarność as “anti-socialist.” This crusade, picked up by the capitalist media and right-wing labor misleaders, was aimed at isolating the miners union on the eve of a bitter strike against the Coal Board and the government of Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher. With the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92, North & Co. wrote off the trade-union movement as a whole as a tool of bourgeois rule, while extolling scabs as those who have the insight to recognize the “futility” of union struggles.

North’s own witchhunting credentials are impeccable. Beginning in the mid1970s, he devoted over a decade to the crazed “Security and the Fourth International” campaign launched by the corrupt, thuggish and megalomaniacal Healy with the aim of smearing the SWP leadership (primarily Joseph Hansen) with supposed complicity in Trotsky’s assassination by Stalinist agents in 1940. In the 1980s, North’s outfit virtually prepared the prosecution brief which resulted in the conviction and imprisonment of SWP trade unionist Mark Curtis on frame-up rape charges. Meanwhile, the “Socialist Equality” Party spits on the fight against the oppression of women, blacks, homosexuals and national minorities.

The McCarthyite witchhunt was aimed at preparing the country for war against the Soviet Union and driving the reds out of the unions. The “anti-Stalinist” social democrats embraced by North shared that aim but opposed McCarthy for going “too far” by targeting Cold War liberals as well… It is notable that Radosh’s hatchet job, The Rosenberg File (co-authored by Joyce Milton), was published in the early 1980s to facilitate a new Red Hunt as U.S. imperialism again geared up for war against the Soviet Union (see “Cold War Rad-Libs Embrace FBI Frame-Up: They’re Trying to Kill the Rosen bergs All Over Again,” WV No. 340, 21 October 1983). It is also notable that North’s Workers League never appeared on the FBI’s ADEX list of organizations — including the SL and a range of other groups — to be rounded up in the event of a “national emergency.”

The current grotesque “rehabilitation “ of McCarthyism, seizing on CIA “revelations” that those who were witchhunted and murdered got what they deserved because they were indeed “Soviet spies,” is part of an all-sided attempt to again demonize communism. Even as the bourgeoisie and its mouthpieces proclaim that “Marxism is dead,” they seek to warn off militant workers and radicalized youth from revolutionary politics, aware that the growing gap between the rich and poor and the other enormous contradictions in this society have created seething discontents and are leading to a revival of labor militancy.

The kind of respectability North now craves can only come to those who did their bit in aiding the cause of capitalist counterrevolution in the USSR, a historic defeat for the world’s working class. As Leninists, one of our primary responsibilities is to expose especially the “left” (should North remain so positioned) opponents of proletarian revolution, who today join in seeking to bury the legacy of the October Resolution under a mountain of lies while rehabilitating the bloodsoaked imperialist world order. Indeed, a rapprochement between North and Radosh might well be possible — perhaps even a new joint Web site, “godthatfailed.anticom”.

“ICFI”/Northites: Counterfeit Trotskyists (1997)

From Hate Trotskyism, Hate the Spartacist League No. 11 (October 1997):

David North's ICFI: From Support to Capitalist Counterrevolution in the USSR to Great Russian Chauvinism

Introduction [excerpt]

The “ICFI,” headed by U.S. Workers League lider maximo David North, is one of the decomposition products of the now-infamous Gerry Healy's “international” organization of the same name. We have characterized charlatans like North and the late Healy as political bandits because of their manifest willingness to say literally anything, taking widely divergent political positions to serve their own convenient and grotesque opportunist appetites. For example, in 1979 their international tendency extolled the murder of 21 Iraqi CPers by Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist regime as a blow against “counterrevolutionary Stalinism.” Heralding the murder of Communist worker-militants paid big dividends for the Healyites, who raked in millions in pounds sterling for their services on behalf of various oil-rich Middle Easter dictators.

Consummate hatred for the Soviet Union has been one political constant in Healy/North's “ICFI." They supported every imperialist-inspired “movement” that aimed at destroying the remaining gains of the 1917 October Revolution, from Khomeini's viciously anti-communist “Islamic Revolution” to the barbarous CIA-backed mujahedin in Afghanistan, to Lech Walesa's company “union” Solidarnosc in Poland. But after the destruction of the Soviet degenerated workers state through capitalist counterrevolution, the “ICFI” refused to call for the military defense of Chechnya and the defeat of the Russian army in that neocolonial war. Thus, for the first time in their history, the Northites came out for the Russian army – now that it is the army of capitalist Russia!

Afghanistan, Poland, Chechnya

Northites: Counterfeit Trotskyists

As Trotskyists, the International Communist League stood for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution, while fighting for proletarian political revolution to oust the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy that undermined the October Revolution. The erosion of the revolutionary internationalist consciousness of the Soviet proletariat, as a result of decades of Stalinist misrule, ultimately led to the collapse of the USSR and the consolidation of new capitalist states in the area. This was a historic defeat for the proletariat, ushering in catastrophic declines in the living standards of the peoples of the former Soviet bloc, while freeing up the imperialists to unleash renewed attacks on the working masses in the West and the already savagely oppressed peoples of the semi-colonial world.

With the restoration of capitalism, the tasks for Marxists changed: we do not defend the Russian state, which is a capitalist state with resurgent imperialist ambitions. We fight for socialist revolutions throughout the lands of the former Soviet Union. As we have noted, aggressive nationalism was both the driving force for capitalist restoration in East Europe and the Soviet Union, and a product of the counterrevolutionary drive. From Milosevic's Serbia to Tudjman's Croatia and Yeltsin's Russia, nationalist demagogy is being used to turn working-class anger over economic immiseration against neighboring peoples and minority communities.

The decomposition of the USSR resulted in bloody nationalist conflicts in every republic of the former Soviet Union, with nationalist wars in the Caucasus and a sharp increase in Great Russian chauvinism. As we noted in our article, “Why Marxists Do Not Raise the Call 'Restore the Soviet Union'”:

“Today bourgeois Russia aspires to the role of a regional imperialist power. Its bloody handiwork is evident enough in the brutal colonial-style war against the Chechen people.... To talk of `restoring the USSR' is a nationalist trap. What is necessary is to sweep away the new bourgeois states and replace them with the rule of workers soviets. We know of no other road to this goal but the one pursued by Lenin and the Bolsheviks – a thoroughgoing struggle against all manifestations of nationalism and chauvinism as part of patient but persistent propaganda aimed at winning the proletariat to the program of international socialist revolution.”

In an article by V. Volkov in Rabochii-Internatsionalist (May 1996), the Russian supporters of the so-called "International Committee for the Fourth International” (ICFI) attack us because of our opposition to the slogan of restoring the Soviet Union. The ICFI is a gang of political charlatans who falsely claim the mantle of Trotskyism. Led with an iron hand by Gerry Healy in Britain until it spectacularly imploded in 1985, producing a number of rump organizations, the “ICFI” is currently headed by one David North of the U.S. Workers League.

In his article, Volkov protests our call for the military defense of Chechnya in the war, asserting that this is “anti-communist” and “liberal” The ICFI's refusal to call for the defense of the Chechens in this brutal colonial-style war, and their opposition to the right of Chechen independence, is unvarnished Great Russian chauvinism. The Northites prove our point, that those who today loudly proclaim themselves for the “Soviet Union” are nothing more than Russian nationalists. Their whole history shows them to have been enemies of the defense of the Soviet Union; now, for the first time in their history, they have come out for the Russian army – now that it is the army of a capitalist Russia!

Thus the call to “restore the Soviet Union” in the mouths of the Russian Northites is simultaneously a self-solacing “left”-sounding slogan and a cover for naked chauvinism in a capitalist state. In the wake of the October Revolution's final undoing, which we fought to the best of our ability, we now raise the call for new October Revolutions that go all the way to the destruction of imperialism on a world scale. This was the Bolsheviks' program and it is ours still.

Volkov writes at length, purporting to show “the pro-Stalinist character of the Spartacist tendency” through such examples as our positions on Afghanistan and Polish Solidarnosc. In reality what Volkov, North & Co. have against us is that we are Trotskyists. In his 1933 article, “The Class Nature of the Soviet State,” Trotsky warned of the “tragic possibility” that the Soviet workers state “will fall under the joint blows of its internal and external enemies”:

“But in the event of this worst possible variant, a tremendous significance for the subsequent course of the revolutionary struggle will be borne by the question: where are those guilty for the catastrophe? Not the slightest taint of guilt must fall upon the revolutionary internationalists. In the hour of the mortal danger, they must remain on the last barricade.”

In contradistinction, the ICFI under North and his predecessor Gerry Healy supported every counterrevolutionary movement internal to and on the borders of the Soviet Union. Thus they supported Khomeini's Islamic fundamentalists in Iran; the CIA-backed mujahedin in Afghanistan; the Pilsudskiite Polish nationalists of Solidarnosc; and bourgeois-nationalist movements, encouraged by the imperialists, within the USSR. They enthused over all manner of pro-imperialist Soviet “dissidents," publishing for example a glowing obituary for Andrei Sakharov. Sakharov was the quintessential pro-capitalist “dissident," winning kudos from the imperialists (and eventually the Nobel "Peace” Prize) for his advocacy of unilateral disarmament of the USSR, while of course opposing disarmament for the bloody-handed U.S. imperialists.

When the hour of decision came, in August 1991, an ICFI statement “welcome[d] the humiliating collapse of the August 19 Stalinist putsch in Moscow.” This was also welcomed by every imperialist power in the world! Yeltsin's countercoup marked the ascendancy of counter-revolutionary forces in the Soviet Union itself, which led ultimately to the consolidation of a Russian capitalist state.

For our part, in August 1991 the ICL - while giving no support to the pro-perestroika coup plotters – called for a workers mobilization to sweep away Yeltsin's counterrevolutionary barricades. We raised the call for the formation of independent workers committees to take over the plants, as the basis for soviets drawing in collective farmers, oppressed minorities, working women, Red Army soldiers and officers, pensioners, etc. We called for workers militias to defend workers, Communist Party members, Jews and other minorities against Yeltsinite reactionaries and racist pogromists. And we wrote:

“The alternatives posed before the Soviet bureaucratically deformed workers state have always been: counterrevolution or Trotskyism. Today Stalinism is dead. The key to frustrating the bloody plans of Bush, Yeltsin and their counterrevolutionary cohorts is the early forging of a Trotskyist nucleus in the Soviet Union, representing those elements in the workers movement, the army and throughout society who would fight for the program of October.”
-“Soviet Workers: Defeat Yeltsin-Bush Counterrevolution!” Workers Vanguard No. 533, 30 August 1991

While the Soviet Union existed, we recognized the right of self-determination for the constituent nations of the USSR, as long as this was not a cover for capitalist restoration. As Trotsky explained, the right of self-determination is a general democratic right, subordinate to class considerations:

“We do not only recognize, but we also give full support to the principle of self-determination, wherever it is directed against feudal, capitalist and imperialist states. But wherever the fiction of self-determination, in the hands of the bourgeoisie, becomes a weapon directed against the proletarian revolution, we have no occasion to treat this fiction differently from the other 'principles' of democracy perverted by capitalism.”
- Social Democracy and the Wars of Intervention in Russia, 1918-1921 (1922)

Today, when the Soviet Union is no more, the Northites are a mouthpiece for Russian chauvinism and defend the territorial integrity of the Russian capitalist state. But earlier the Northites had no problem in supporting all manner of fascist-infested nationalist movements, which the imperialists sponsored as a means of tearing apart the Soviet Union. An example was the Sajudis – a Lithuanian secessionist movement shot through with outright fascists – which had its own program of "ethnic cleansing” for the non-Lithuanian component of the population. In 1990, North's Workers League denounced U.S. president Bush for not imposing imperialist sanctions against the Soviet workers state on behalf of Lithuanian “independence,” i.e., capitalist restoration. At the same time the ICFI demanded “immediate pullout of all Soviet troops from the Baltics, Moldova and other republics where Moscow's Stalinists are trying to strangle the democratic hopes of the oppressed nationalities. The working class must unconditionally defend the right of these peoples for self-determination including national independence from the USSR” (Russian language Bulletin of FI, February 1995).

Afghanistan: How the Northites Backed the CIA

When all the imperialists raised a hue and cry about “poor little Afghanistan,” the ICFI chimed in, calling the actions of the Soviet Army “a brutal campaign of military and police repression against a semi-colonial people” whose “national rights were being criminally violated” and stated that “the movement of the Red Army into Afghanistan” was “aimed at sealing off the radical impulse of the [Khomeini-led] Iranian Revolution" (Bulletin, 8 July 1986).

Unlike the Northites, who gloried in supporting the counterrevolutionary, CIA-backed Islamic mujahedin, we in the ICL said, “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan! Extend Social Gains of October to Afghan Peoples!" We noted that Afghanistan was not a nation but a preindustrial society of different peoples and tribes with little or no indigenous proletariat. Although the Brezhnev bureaucracy certainly did not intervene from the perspective of proletarian internationalism, we pointed out that a prolonged Soviet military occupation would likely mean the integration of Afghanistan with the economy of the USSR, thereby posing social liberation of a society saturated with medieval backwardness.

The Soviet Army intervened in a civil war between the left-nationalist government of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) and Islamic reactionaries. This was the first and only time in modern history that a civil war was ignited centrally by the issue of women's rights. After coming to power in an April 1978 coup, pro-Moscow intellectuals and army officers in the PDPA sought to implement some minimal reforms to bring the country closer to the 20th century: land distribution, freeing women from the burka (the head-to-toe veil), reducing the bride price to a nominal sum and providing education for girls. However, such basic democratic reforms can be explosive in a cruelly backward country like Afghanistan, not least because women's subordination in the family meant that they were considered the “bearers” of the “national culture” to the next generation. Afghan landlords, tribal chiefs and mullahs launched a ferocious jihad (holy war), burning down schools and flaying teachers for the “crime” of teaching girls to read.

The conservative Brezhnev leadership didn't send 100,000 Soviet troops to Afghanistan to make a social revolution. But independently of the motives of the Soviet bureaucracy, the intervention of the Red Army in this civil war on the side of social progress strengthened the position of women, providing the possibility for young Afghanis to learn to read and write, and opened the road to progress through social assimilation by the Soviet Union.

But Islamic reaction, the woman question, and defense of the Soviet Union from imperialism are precisely what the Northites do not mention, in order to portray the Soviet intervention as one continuous brutality. It is no accident that they never say a word about the $2 billion invested by the CIA in the arming of the mujahedin, since for years their goals and the goals of the CIA-backed fundamentalist cutthroats coincided. In 1980, their German newspaper, Neue Arbeiterpresse, headlined: “Pull Soviet Troops Out of Afghanistan! Defend the Iranian Revolution!”

Much of the Soviet and Western “left” compared the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan with the American imperialists' slaughter in Vietnam - a shameful position later echoed by Gorbachev. During the Vietnam War some two million Vietnamese were killed, while Saigon was transformed into a giant bordello. The Soviet military presence in Afghanistan was manifestly different, as aspects of Soviet society began to be reproduced, attracting youth looking for a future and the deeply oppressed women.

Our fight for Red Army victory was counterposed to the halfhearted policies of the Soviet bureaucracy. We fought for a proletarian political revolution in the USSR, pointing out that the Kremlin gang was perfectly capable of selling out the Afghan peoples in order to placate the imperialists. Instead of fighting the war to a victorious finish, Brezhnev sought to stabilize the situation in Afghanistan, while at the same time offering concessions to sections of the fundamentalists. Land reform was sharply curtailed, as the government declared a “general amnesty” under which feudal landlords who had defected to Pakistan would be given back their property if they returned, while many categories of landowners were now exempted entirely from the reform. Meanwhile, compulsory education for girls was revoked.

All wings of the Kremlin bureaucracy ultimately agreed to abandon Soviet intervention into Afghanistan. So-called "hardliners” like Yegor Ligachev were crucial in delivering to Gorbachev the necessary support in carrying out the decision to withdraw the troops. None of the Stalin-loving “patriots” (such as Nina Andreyeva and Viktor Anpilov) ever tried to mobilize against withdrawal. Thus all wings of Stalinism were complicit in this outright capitulation to imperialism which emboldened the imperialists, guaranteed a bloody revenge against modernizing nationalists and women in Afghanistan, and brought capitalist counterrevolution much closer to the Soviet Union.

While impudently accusing us of supporting the politics of the Stalinist bureaucracy, the ICFI's Volkov literally repeats the arguments that the defeatist Gorbachev bureaucracy used to justify withdrawal and demobilize and dismiss pro-socialist and would-be internationalist sentiments among Soviet workers and soldiers. Thus Volkov claims:

“The redirection of an enormous quantity of resources was undermining the planned economy. The Afghan proletariat, extremely small in number, was either ignored or suppressed. The position of the USSR in the world had weakened and world imperialism gained invaluable advantages using the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan to escalate the 'Cold War'.”

This is a mixture of factual nonsense, pro-imperialist cant and outright anti-internationalism. The Afghan proletariat could not be an independent factor: in fact there were more mullahs in Afghanistan (more than 250,000 of them) than there were industrial workers, and only two factories in the entire country! At the time the USSR intervened, more than 90 percent of the population of Afghanistan was illiterate; life expectancy was only 40.

The assertion that the Soviets were responsible for escalating the Cold War because of their intervention in Afghanistan is simply a rendition of the line spouted by Ronald Reagan. As far as the imperialists are concerned, the whole world belongs to them to plunder however they see fit, and nobody better get in the way... or else. Gorbachev in effect endorsed this line to justify abandoning Afghan leftists and women to their fate.

Many Soviet soldiers serving in Afghanistan rightly believed they were doing their internationalist duty. The claim that the money would have been “better spent at home,” which the Gorbachevites argued, was not only anti- internationalist but racist as well, deliberately appealing to sentiments like “why should our boys die in Afghanistan for those blacks?” It is no accident that today as well, the Northites scandalously maintain silence about racism directed against people from the Caucasus.

In Afghanistan, soldiers from Soviet Central Asia were particularly aware that they were fighting against the same kind of benighted social relations that had held their own grandmothers in virtual bondage prior to the victory of the Bolsheviks. A New York Times reporter traveling through Soviet Central Asia in 1980 found absolutely no sympathy for the Afghan “rebels” and broad support for the Soviet Army's intervention. An irrigation engineer in Khiva, near Dushanbe, showed the reporter where the town's slave market had been located before the Soviet authorities deposed the last Khan of Khiva. He added, “The Afghans are our neighbors. Where there is poverty and backwardness it is our duty to help” (New York Times, 11 April 1980).

More generally, the position expressed here by Volkov is an apology for the nationalism of the Stalinist bureaucracy, which viewed “export of revolution” as the original Trotskyist heresy. The conservative bureaucracy's suicidal “theory” of “socialism in one country” was based on the illusory search for peaceful coexistence with capitalist regimes abroad. To be sure, the Bolsheviks did not believe the victory of world socialism would come mainly through military triumph by the Red Army. But they did not reject revolutionary war as an instrument of social liberation. Perhaps the most important example came in the summer of 1920 with the Red Army's counteroffensive in Poland. In a speech at the Ninth Party Conference, Lenin forcefully defended the Polish campaign against conservative critics of this attempt to extend the revolution militarily, pointing out that on the other side of Poland lay Germany, whose powerful proletariat was the key to the European revolution: “Rote Fahne [German Communist Party daily] and others could not accept the idea that we should help with our own hands to sovietise Poland. These people regard themselves as Communists, but some of them are still nationalists and pacifists.” (“Political Report of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party to the Ninth Conference of the RCP(B),” printed in In Defence of the Russian Revolution [1995]).

The revolutionary imperative to extend the revolution -- taken for granted by the Bolsheviks until this program was overthrown by Stalin -- flows straight from Marx's elementary observations that capitalism had become a world system, hence it had to be destroyed on a world scale. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels pointed out that the international development of the productive forces made possible by world revolution

“is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and destitution, the struggle for necessities, and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced.... Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples `all at once' and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and world intercourse bound up with communism.”

In the 1920s, the Red Army's smashing of the reactionary Basmachi in Central Asia propelled the Soviet Central Asian republics on a course of intensive economic growth, significantly raising living standards while achieving an impressive success in the liberation of women. A similar process occurred in Mongolia, a terribly backward country similar to Afghanistan, with little in the way of an indigenous proletariat (and therefore no material basis for proletarian revolution). A Soviet republic was established there in 1921-22 largely through the intervention of the Red Army, leading to the founding of the first city in Mongolia, Ulan Bator (Red Dawn).

The expropriation of capital and elimination of the bourgeois state apparatus through military occupation in the western Ukraine and Byelorussia in 1940, and in the East European countries following World War II, are other examples where the Red Army was an instrument of social liberation, although in a bureaucratically deformed way. The Soviet Army, as an instrument of the Soviet bureaucracy, reflected both aspects of the bureaucracy's contradictory nature. The crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the suppression of the “Prague Spring” in Czechoslovakia in 1968 were counterrevolutionary acts of Stalinist repression which we Trotskyists forthrightly opposed. The Afghanistan intervention, though undertaken for defensive geopolitical reasons, opened up the possibility for social liberation and cut against the grain of the Kremlin's “peaceful coexistence.”

Trotsky certainly did not fetishize national borders, and he never placed the “sovereignty” of so-called neutral and buffer countries above the revolutionary obligation to defend the Soviet Union. Indeed, he sharply criticized the Stalinist bureaucracy for fostering the illusion that long-lasting agreements could be negotiated with the imperialists in order to stabilize the world order. Thus in The Revolution Betrayed Trotsky wrote:

“The question of Mongolia is already a question of the strategic positions to be occupied by Japan in a future war against the Soviet Union. The Soviet governmentfound itself this time compelled to announce openly that it would answer the intrusion of Japanese troops into Mongolia with war. Here, however, it is no question of the immediate defense of `our land': Mongolia is an independent state. A passive defense of Soviet boundaries seemed sufficient only when nobody was seriouslythreatening them. The real method of defense of the Soviet Union is to weaken the positions of imperialism, and strengthen the position of the proletariat and the colonial peoples throughout the earth. An unfavorable correlation of forces might compel us to surrender many `inches' of land, as it did at the moment of the Brest-Litovsk peace, the Riga peace, and in the matter of the handing over of the Chinese-Eastern Railroad. At the same time, the struggle for a favorable change in the correlation of world forces puts upon the workers' state acontinual obligation to come to the help of the liberative movements in other countries. But it is just this fundamental task which conflicts absolutely with the conservative policy of the status quo.” [our emphasis]

The betrayal in Afghanistan was a significant milestone in advancing capitalist counterrevolution. The withdrawal of Soviet troops was followed by counter-revolutionary Solidarność taking power in Poland, Gorbachev giving the green light to capitalist reunification of Germany, and Yeltsin's pro-imperialist countercoup in Moscow in August 1991. And in Afghanistan the military defeat of the PDPA government by Islamic fundamentalists has led to the institution of a reign of medieval terror, torture and virtual enslavement of women, and continuing bloody civil war between the ultrareactionary local factions. These are the fruits of the victory of the reactionary forces that the Northites supported.

We sought to fight counterrevolution while there was still time: far better to defeat counterrevolution in Afghanistan than be defeated by it later in the Soviet Union. When Gorbachev pulled the Soviet troops out, we offered to the Afghan government that we would organize an international brigade to fight against the CIA-backed mujahedin. Not least, this would have served to awaken the revolutionary internationalist consciousness of Soviet workers and soldiers in the direction of proletarian political revolution. Several months later, we threw a significant proportion of our international resources into East Germany, fighting for workers and soldiers soviets throughout Germany to smash capitalist reunification, through political revolution in the East and socialist revolution in the West. We called for “A red Germany of workers councils, part of a Socialist United States of Europe.”

Poland: Northites in League with Solidarność

At a time when virtually the entire Western left was proclaiming “Solidarity with Solidarity,” our tendency sought to expose before the world's working class that Lech Walesa & Co. were a counterrevolutionary agency for the CIA and Western bankers, Ronald Reagan, the Pope and clerical nationalists. We supported the Jaruzelski regime's spiking of Solidarność's bid for power in December 1981, while emphasizing that the Stalinist progenitors of Poland's crisis were incapable of politically defeating Solidarność and that what was necessary was to forge a Trotskyist party that could lead a proletarian political revolution to oust the sellout bureaucracy. Volkov quotes as if it were an outrage our forthright statement from that period: “If the Kremlin Stalinists, in their necessarily brutal, stupid way, intervene militarily... we will support this. And we take responsibility in advance for this; whatever the idiocies and atrocities they will commit, we do not flinch from defending the crushing of Solidarity's counter-revolution” (WV No. 289, 25 September 1981). David North et al., in the name of “anti-Stalinism,” lined up with the counterrevolutionary Solidarność cabal and held them up as a model “trade union.”

The purpose of the Northites' embrace of Solidarność had little to do in any case with the Polish workers. Fully in step with other fake leftists at whom the Northites like to sneer as “diseased petty-bourgeois" tendencies, they were joyfully cuddling up to the American AFL-CIO, the German SPD, the British and Australian labor parties, etc. In hailing Solidarność, the social democrats and their “left” tails were simply doing the bidding of their imperialist masters once again, providing a “labor” face for Cold War anti-Sovietism.

According to Volkov, Jaruzelski's coup “expressed the fear of the bureaucracy in the face of spontaneous protest by the working class that could have led to a new political revolution in Poland and the establishment of a genuine workers republic there.” But had Solidarność taken power, it would not have been a political revolution but a social counterrevolution (and when Walesa & Co. did eventually take power as Stalinism was collapsing worldwide, a counterrevolution is exactly what it was). The Northites are cynically distorting the views of Leon Trotsky, who used the term “political revolution” to mean the overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucratic caste by the workers and the establishment of a regime of soviet democracy, based on preserving the dictatorship of the proletariat and the nationalized planned economy. Trotsky, co-leader with Lenin of the October Revolution and organizer of the Red Army, stood unconditionally for the defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state against capitalist counterrevolution.

The implicit methodology of Volkov & Co. is that any attempt to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy constitutes a “political revolution.” But Solidarność was very different from the pro-socialist Hungarian workers who rose up against the Stalinist bureaucracy in 1956. And the consciousness of the Polish working masses in 1981 was much different than during earlier periods of working-class protests in 1953, 1956, 1968 and 1970-71, when the influence of capitalist-restorationist tendencies was far weaker. What is decisive here is from what class standpoint the Stalinist bureaucracy is opposed. As we have noted, “whether the collapse of Stalinist rule led to a workers government or to capitalist restoration would be determined by the political consciousness and leadership of the working class, specifically the ability of the workers movement to overcome and combat illusions in parliamentarism and nationalist prejudices” (“On the Collapse of Stalinist Rule in East Europe,” Spartacist No. 45-46, Winter 1990-1991).

Back in 198, North's U.S. Workers League literally gushed over Solidarność, hailing it as “an undaunted, young, vigorous and independent trade union movement” (Bulletin, 15 September 1981). Naturally now that the Polish workers have been through the brutal experience of Walesa's capitalist-restorationist government, it is no longer fashionable for fake leftists to be cheerleaders for Solidarność. To prettify their earlier support to Walesa & Co., Volkov has to pretend that somehow the organization has degenerated. Thus he writes that “it was precisely the violent suppression of Solidarność which drove it to total anticommunist degeneration.”

This is utterly absurd. When Solidarność first emerged in a wave of strikes in August 1980, a revolutionary leadership would have sought to split Solidarność, winning the mass of the workers away from the anti-Soviet and pro-Vatican leadership around Walesa. But by the time of its founding conference, in September 1981, the forces of clerical reaction and capitalist restoration had decisively taken the ascendancy. In sharp contrast to the Hungarian workers councils of 1956, the Solidarność congress resolutions made no mention of socialism. Instead they espoused “self management,” calling for the abolition of centralized economic planning. Solidarność's central political demand was for “free elections” to the Sejm (parliament), thereby rejecting soviet democracy in favor of "democratic” counterrevolution.

Taking its cue from its advisers in the fanatically anti-Communist bureaucracy of the AFL-CIO, the American trade-union federation, Solidarność called for “free trade unions.” While the demand for trade unions independent of bureaucratic control is integral to the Trotskyist program of proletarian political revolution, the slogan of “free trade unions” was long associated with NATO imperialism. For the U.S. Cold Warriors who authored it, it had one meaning: trade unions without communists, i.e., its central thrust was the same as the slogan of “soviets without Bolsheviks” raised by the Kronstadt mutineers of 1921. Were the ICFI more honest, it would denounce Trotsky for the necessary suppression of the counterrevolutionary Kronstadt uprising.

There was nothing “independent” about Solidarność, least of all its financing. Years later, the American bourgeois weekly Time (24 February 1992) said openly what we had exposed years before: “Until Solidarity's legal status was restored in 1989 it flourished underground, supplied, nurtured and advised largely by the network established under the auspices of Reagan and [Pope] John Paul II.... Money for the banned union came from CIA funds, the National Endowment for Democracy, secret accounts in the Vatican and Western trade unions.”

Solidarność leaders hobnobbed with anti-Communist leaders of the American “AFL-CIA” and big-time capitalists. Invited to Solidarność's first conference in 1981 as part of the AFL-CIO delegation was one Irving Brown, identified by ex-CIA official Philip Agee as the “principal CIA agent for control of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.” Brown's notorious career began in the post-World War II years, when he used hundreds of thousands of CIA dollars and the services of gangsters to split and destroy militant Communist-led unions in West Europe. And in October 1981, barely two months before Solidarność's bid for power, Walesa was wined and dined at a hush-hush breakfast (subsequently exposed in Le Canard Enchaine, 16 December 1981) with some 20 top-level American financiers and industrialists who flew in just to meet him at a posh restaurant at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport. As the saying goes, “Tell me who your friends are, and I'll tell you who you are.”

Nor did Solidarność solidarize with the struggles of the workers in the capitalist West. When Ronald Reagan fired 12,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981 – the entire national union membership – practically every trade-union federation in the Western world protested. But not Polish Solidarność! Nor did Walesa & Co. support the British miners when they went on a year-long strike in 1984-85. Not for nothing did we say that Solidarność was the only “trade union” in the world supported by Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and the Vatican!

On the eve of the British coal strike, it was North's own international leaders, in Gerry Healy's Workers Revolutionary Party, who instigated an anti-communist witchhunt against Arthur Scargill, the head of the miners union. Healy's press blasted Scargill for accurately calling Solidarność an “anti-socialist” organization. This was a completely calculated act on the part of the Healyites, timed to be a bombshell, and one which was played for all it was worth by Thatcher, the bourgeois press and the anti-Communist labor bureaucrats in Britain in their campaign to cut off solidarity with the miners. The Healyites were so proud of themselves that they published an entire pamphlet about it.

The British miners strike was a class confrontation which could have toppled the Tory government and posed the question of which class would rule. And it was seen as such by the British state. Subsequently it emerged that the political police (MI5) were up to their necks in a vendetta against Scargill, which sought to starve the miners into submission by seizing their treasury and the funds being raised in solidarity internationally, including from Soviet trade unionists. On a more modest scale, our tendency, working with our defense organization, the Partisan Defense Committee, also raised funds for the British miners, in the face of hostility from the American AFL-CIO tops who considered Scargill a dangerous “red.”

Whitewashing the counterrevolutionary character of Solidarność, Volkov claims that there were “several political tendencies fighting inside ‘Solidarność.' The question of which was going to achieve overwhelming dominance depended entirely on whether the Polish proletariat could break from the influence of Stalinism and liberalism.” But the leaders of Solidarność were not Stalinists or social democrats, or even liberals. They were ardent enthusiasts for Western capitalism and the Roman Catholic church hierarchy. Thus, one of the demands of the Gdansk ship workers who struck in August 1980 was for access to the mass media for the Roman Catholic church. And the church had strong support particularly among the one-third of the population employed in agriculture, most of whom worked on privately owned farms. This represented a substantial spearhead for capitalist counterrevolution.

Indeed, the “several political tendencies” which Volkov refers to as fighting within Solidarność did not include a single known current which opposed capitalist restoration. "Tendencies” there were: liberal anti-Communists, Catholics, monarchists, fascists, etc. The “left wing” of Solidarność, including Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuron (who later became minister of labor in capitalist Poland), refused to oppose the church. Their newspaper Robotnik enthusiastically greeted the visit of Pope John Paul II to Poland in 1979 (Robotnik, 1 June 1979). Nor were the ranks mostly workers – at the time of Solidarność's bid for power, two-thirds of its members were peasants and priests!

As we noted in our article headlined “Stop Solidarity's Counterrevolution!” (WV No. 289, 25 September 1981):

“What do revolutionaries do when the Marxist program stands counterposed to the overwhelming bulk of the working class, a situation we of course urgently seekto avoid? There can be no doubt. The task of communists must be to defend at all costs the program and gains of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Today Trotskyists find themselves in such a position over Poland, and it is necessary to swim against a powerful current of counterrevolution.”

In this same article we note that “in Poland it is the Stalinists themselves, through decades of capitulation to capitalist forces, who have produced the counterrevolutionary crisis.... The crimes of Stalinism, not least the present counterrevolutionary situation in Poland, mandate proletarian political revolution in the Soviet bloc.” Naturally, Volkov does not quote this!

Nor does he acknowledge that after Jaruzelski's countercoup, we wrote: “As the immediate counterrevolutionary threat passes, these martial law measures must be ended, including release of the Solidarność leaders. A Trotskyist vanguard seeks to defeat them politically, by mobilizing the Polish working class in its true class interests" (“Power Bid Spiked,” WV No. 295, 18 December 1981). In fact, nowhere in his long screed does Volkov ever admit that we have consistently raised the slogan of proletarian political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy in our propaganda directed to the deformed and degenerated workers states. This alone testifies to the total intellectual mendacity of North, Volkov & Co.

Dual Role of the Bureaucracy

Volkov claims that “the main theoretical reason that made the Spartacists the eager defenders of Stalinism was their inability to understand the dual nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR.” What chutzpah from the people who systematically and with loud “theoretical” fanfare falsified Trotsky's views on the bureaucracy while in practice portraying it as a pure and simple “counterrevolutionary” agency working hand in hand with imperialism. Thus in his 1989 tract on Perestroika Versus Socialism, North declares that “the political and economic goals of the bureaucracy in its relations with world imperialism” are “the destruction of the planned economy and the social conquests of the October Revolution” and restoration of capitalism. And, more generally, in his 1988 tome, The Heritage We Defend, he declares that “Trotsky had branded the Stalinist bureaucracy as 'counterrevolutionary through and through'.” This stupidly one-sided formulation was the banner of every latter-day anti-Soviet fake Trotskyist.

Trotsky never said the Stalinist bureaucracy was “counterrevolutionary through and through" In fact this dubious formulation had its origins in the 1953 faction fight in the American Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) against the pro-Stalinist Cochran-Clarke faction. Used in the heat of argument by the majority's Dave Weiss, the formulation was then picked up and defended by Joseph Hansen.

Today Volkov seeks to refurbish the Northites' longtime perversion of Trotsky's analysis of the USSR with a new twist: the claim that they agree that the bureaucracy has a “dual nature.” Their best hope is that the reader will emerge totally confused. So a selection of excellent quotes from Trotsky is followed by the mind-twisting statement that “the progressive function of the bureaucratic caste was always relative, but its counterrevolutionary role was absolute”! Of course, the bureaucracy – the usurpers of political power from the proletariat and the executioners of the Old Bolsheviks – never had any “progressive function.” But so long as it rested on the proletarian property forms, it was constrained to behave in a contradictory fashion with respect to the defense of the degenerated workers state.

When Trotsky referred to the dual role of Stalinism in the USSR, he meant that the bureaucracy was not a ruling class but a brittle caste, resting on the collectivized property forms inherited from the October Revolution, while serving as a transmission belt for the pressures of imperialism. Thus at times the bureaucracy was constrained to defend – in a bureaucratic fashion – the workers state in order to protect its own privileges. Simultaneously, in myriad other ways it was undermining the workers state. In a 1937 article against the future renegade Burnham, Trotsky noted:

“The function of Stalin, like the function of Green [then head of the American trade-union federation, the AFL], has a dual character. Stalin serves the bureaucracy and thus the world bourgeoisie; but he cannot serve the bureaucracy without defending that social foundation which the bureaucracy exploits in its own interests. To that extent does Stalin defend nationalized property from imperialist attacks and from the too impatient and avaricious layers of the bureaucracy itself. However, he carries through the defense with methods that prepare the general destruction of Soviet society. It is exactly because of this that the Stalinist clique must be overthrown. But it is the revolutionary proletariat who must overthrow it. The proletariat cannot subcontract this work to the imperialists. In spite of Stalin, the proletariat defends the USSR from imperialist attacks.”
– “Not a Workers' and Not a Bourgeois State?” (November 1937) [our emphasis]

In situations where the bureaucracy felt compelled to defend the workers state, albeit in a bureaucratic fashion, it was in order for Marxists to enter into a united front “with the Thermidorian section of the bureaucracy against open attack by capitalist counter-revolution” (in the words of the founding program of the Fourth International). This was the situation in Poland in 1981, when Jaruzelski took measures that temporarily suppressed capitalist counterrevolution. But for North, Volkov et al., since in practice the bureaucracy was “counterrevolutionary through and through,” it was permissible, indeed obligatory, to support any force that opposed it, no matter how reactionary. Using this revisionist methodology, the ICFI ended up in bed with the imperialists' favorite “union” in Poland, the CIA-backed mullahs in Afghanistan, and fascist-infested nationalists in the Baltics.

Northites Cover Their Tracks

Having supported every counterrevolutionary force that sought to destroy the Soviet Union, now that it no longer exists the Northites seek to pose as “Soviet patriots.” They take us to task, claiming that “the refusal of the Spartacists to raise the call for the restoration of the Soviet Union is the continuation of their policy of accommodation to Stalinism and to the national bourgeoisie.” The Northites admit that the progressive social foundations of the former Soviet state – based on the overthrow of capitalist class rule by the October Revolution and the construction of a planned, collectivized economy – have been smashed and capitalism restored. So what could the call to “restore the Soviet Union” mean today? It is cynical nonsense mouthed by the degenerate Stalinist remnants – now capitalist politicians who are outright nationalists – who seek to play on nostalgia for the Soviet Union in order to build support for a program of racist, anti-Semitic Great Russian chauvinism. And notwithstanding Volkov's declarations that the ICFI has nothing in common with the Russian nationalism of the Communist Party (KPRF), the facts show otherwise.

As we explained in our article “Why Marxists Do Not Raise the Call `Restore the Soviet Union',

“even after the Stalinist degeneration, the Soviet Union still retained a progressive character based on the collectivized economy established by the October Revolution. This progressive character had nothing whatever to do with its particular national composition. There is nothing inherently progressive about a state incorporating in its boundaries Russians and Uzbeks, Ukrainians and Chechens, etc. It is not for nothing that Lenin termed the tsarist empire a 'prison house of peoples'.”

As is well known, Lenin strongly and clearly advocated the right of national self-determination, i.e., the right to secede and form independent states, for the subject nations of the tsarist empire. This was key in enabling the Bolsheviks to win the support of the non-Russian toilers. And later, after the successful October Revolution and against the opposition of Stalin, Lenin insisted that the right of national self-determination for the constituent soviet republics be written into the founding constitution of the USSR.

With the destruction of the Soviet degenerated workers state, the key task for communists in the former USSR is to work for proletarian socialist revolutions to overthrow the new bourgeois states. Whether future workers states in this region will form a multinational federation and what its configuration would be is a historically open and, at the present time, rather abstract question. What is sharply and directly posed at present is the defense of non-Russian peoples against renascent Russian chauvinist ambitions, including those would-be Russian imperialists who call for “restoring the Soviet Union.”

A central question for would-be Russian communists was the war in Chechnya. While giving no political support to Chechen nationalism, we called for the defeat of the Russian invading and occupying forces and for the right of Chechnya to decide its own fate. This obviously includes the right to establish its own state if the population so desires, as is apparently the case. As for the Stalinist has-beens in the KPRF, they attacked the Yeltsin government from the right, denouncing the withdrawal of Russian troops as a “betrayal.”

No less than for the Stalinists, the ICFI's call for “restoring the Soviet Union” serves as a cover for Russian chauvinism. Thus Volkov cites with approval a resolution by the KRD in Ufa, which says in part:

“Yeltsin's victory brings colonialist oppression to the proletarians of Chechnya and to Russian workers, it brings death in other imperialist military campaigns which will surely come, for example, to the Ukraine or toward the `Indian Ocean.' For Chechen toilers, a victory of Dudayev means neocolonial oppression by Muslim countries, as well as maintaining a semi-fascist regime domestically....

“In imperialist war, communists must not justify or prettify a government or a bourgeoisie of any of the fighting powers because it means supporting the right of one of the fighting blocs (in this case Western or Muslim imperialism) to rob and oppress dependent peoples (including Chechnya). We cannot support 'self-determination' of the Chechen people in the abstract without posing its dependence on the revolutionary proletarian movement in Chechnya and in the other republics of the former USSR.”

This “even-handed” position on the war reflects a chauvinist refusal to distinguish between a regional imperialist power (capitalist Russia) and a subjugated people (the Chechens). To seize on the Muslim leadership of the Chechen people to raise a spectre of Russia being in danger from “Muslim imperialism” simply reflects racist Russian imperialist propaganda. The position of Leninists and Trotskyists in wars between imperialists and colonial peoples is to call for military defeat of the imperialists. Thus in the war between China and Japan in the 1930s, while not giving any political confidence to the anti-communist butcher Chiang Kai-shek, the Trotskyists gave military support to the Chinese against Japanese imperialism. A similar position was taken in military defense of Haile Selassie's Ethiopia in its war against Mussolini's Italian imperialism.

In opposing independence for the Chechens, the Northites are making a political bloc with Yeltsin, Russian fascists like Zhirinovsky and chauvinists of the Zyuganov ilk. This kind of methodology, with the false appeal to “proletarian internationalism” as a smokescreen to avoid taking a side for the military defeat of one's own imperialist bourgeoisie, is typical of the methods of the social-patriotic Second International and alien to Leninism.

It is notable that nowhere in their statement do the Northites make any reference to the whipping up of a racist witchhunt against the Caucasian minority in Russia, fueled by the war in Chechnya. There is no criticism whatsoever of the anti-Semitism, anti-gay and racist bigotry which saturate the Stalinist milieu, nor any mention of the need to mobilize against fascist scum like Pamyat or the other fascist groups that have proliferated in Russia. Indeed, the Northite press in Russia is notorious for failing to address any of the questions of special oppression. In contradistinction, readers of our Russian-language material (see for example Biuleten Spartakovtsev No. 3) are well aware of our insistence that a Leninist party must be a “tribune of the people,” combatting all manifestations of oppression in society.

The Northites try to dress up their chauvinist line on Chechnya by claiming they are “fighting” bourgeois nationalism. Likewise, they have “discovered” that the Tamils in Lanka, the Quebecois in Canada, etc. have no right to independence. (See our article, “David North ‘Abolishes’ the Right to Self-Determination,” WV Nos. 626 and 627, 28 July and 25. August 1995.) There's hardly anything “leftist” about this position. As we noted earlier, Healy/North were shameless enthusiasts for bourgeois nationalists like the Sajudis, or Walesa's Pilsudskiites, when such outfits were being supported by the imperialists as a means to destroy the Soviet Union. But now that the USSR is no more, the imperialist powers are not happy that the spoils they hoped to loot from the victory of capitalist counterrevolution are being drowned in a sea of nationalist-inspired regional conflicts. And the Northites follow suit. It's notable that the American and European governments supported the territorial integrity of Russia and its war against Chechnya. U.S. president Clinton grotesquely drew a parallel between the Russian attempted rape of Chechnya and the struggle against the Southern slavocracy in the American Civil War, claiming that the common principle was “that no state has a right to withdraw from our union.”

It's particularly obscene to hear lectures about the dangers of bourgeois nationalism from this lot. The Northite tendency is not just a bunch of opportunists with bad ideas, but is deeply corrupt. Today fanning fears of “Muslim imperialism” in Chechnya, the Northites for years operated as shameless apologists for a number of Arab nationalist regimes. In 1979, North's Bulletin reprinted articles from Gerry Healy's News Line hailing the execution of 21 Iraqi Communist Party members by Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist government. That same year, celebrating the “Tenth Anniversary of the Libyan Revolution,” the Workers League sent a telegram to Qaddafi praising his “progressive socialist policies.” Operating as press agents for a variety of oil-rich Middle Eastern regimes, the ICFI was rewarded with millions in money from Iraq, Kuwait, Libya and Abu Dhabi, among others. Of course, today the Northites would like to claim that it was all Healy's fault. But none of the leaders of the ICFI objected to the vicious betrayals that were carried out to get the money that came pouring in from Middle Eastern regimes. On the contrary, Healy was deposed by his former lieutenants only after the money was no longer coming in (see “Trotskyism: What It Isn't and What It Is” [“Shto Takoe Trotskizm,” Biuleten Spartakovtsev No. 1, Autumn 1990].

With the Northites, yesterday's orthodoxy is tomorrow's anathema. During the Vietnam War, the Workers League appealed to the viciously anti-Communist AFL-CIO union bureaucracy headed by George Meany to build a “labor party.” The Healyites' platform for such a party made no mention of either the war or the fight against racism, which is key to unlocking proletarian struggle in the U.S. But today the Workers League preaches that the trade unions are totally bourgeois institutions that cannot serve as economic defense organizations for the working class. The only constant here is the refusal to politically fight the sellout bureaucracy within the unions; formerly they prettified the “labor lieutenants of capital,” today they write off the unions, which they equate with the pro-capitalist leadership.

Or take Volkov's assertion that our tendency originated “in the wave of protests against the Vietnam War.” Actually our origins are earlier, in the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) of the American Socialist Workers Party. The leaders of what became the Workers League were also part of the RT until they and Healy decided to conciliate the then-centrist SWP tops by fingering us to the party leadership. One of the central planks of the RT was its criticism of the SWP majority for uncritically enthusing over the Castro regime in Cuba – a fact which it is inconvenient for Volkov to admit since it runs counter to his line that we are pro-Stalinist. Moreover, during the Vietnam War the Healyites oscillated between slavish support to the reformists who sought to keep the antiwar movement chained to the capitalist Democratic Party politicians, on the one hand, and opportunist lunges after assorted Stalinist outfits. Thus, they uncritically hailed Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese Stalinists, who murdered the urban-based Vietnamese Trotskyists; they acted as cheerleaders for Mao's bogus “Cultural Revolution” in China – a power struggle between wings of the Stalinist bureaucracy which was ultimately settled by the army.

The Healy/North operation is sometimes capable of putting some orthodox-sounding stuff on paper, but the reader had better “hold on to his wallet.” To use Lenin's term, these people are “political bandits” – that is, they function as political pirates who will show any flag in order to attack any target. When it has suited its episodic interests, the ICFI has taken subsidies from oil-rich regimes; they have served the queen and the venal right-wing British trade-union bureaucracy by smearing the leader of the miners union as a desperate class battle was looming. And they crawled before any and all forces hostile to the social gains that existed for working people in the collectivized property forms of the former USSR. In their own small way, the Northites facilitated the destruction of the Soviet Union as they made common cause with the imperialist enemies of October, in the name of “anti-Stalinism.” We, the Trotskyists, fought for the only program that would have prevented the catastrophe of counterrevolution: proletarian political revolutions in the deformed and degenerated workers states, and the socialist overthrow of capitalism on a worldwide scale.

The final undoing of the October Revolution has unleashed in its wake intensified capitalist attacks on the working class on every continent, as each imperialist power scrambles to improve its competitive position against its rivals, seeking to turn the screws of exploitation tighter at home while jockeying for the spoils of neocolonial plunder abroad. Defensive struggles, often sharp, have broken out as the toiling masses seek to protect their living standards. But what is required to win such struggles and take the working class over to the offensive to finally put an end to the capitalist imperialist system is an internationalist revolutionary leadership rooted in the working class – a Leninist party which must fight to the finish to defend every past proletarian conquest as part of fighting for new ones. As we wrote in the last issue of Spartacist:

“In the remaining deformed workers states which emerged while the USSR existed, there is still a narrow window of time open for Trotskyist intervention, fighting to defend the remaining gains of the revolutions from China to Cuba through workers political revolution. Trotskyist parties, part of a reforged Fourth International, must be built to lead new October Revolutions to bring the workers to power all over the globe. It is for this aim and purpose that the International Communist League fights.”
-“Trotsky's Fight Against Stalinist Betrayal of Bolshevik Revolution,” Spartacist [English language edition] No. 53, Summer 1997

October 1997