On The 80th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Fourth International-In Honor Of The “Old Man”- On The Anniversary Of The Death Of Leon Trotsky-Eighty Years Ago By Pierre Frank

In Honor Of The “Old Man”- On The  Anniversary Of The Death Of Leon Trotsky-Eighty Years Ago By Pierre Frank

Click on the headline to link to a review of the early life of Leon Trotsky in his political memoir, My Life.

Markin comment:

Every year at this time we honor the memory of the great Russian revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, a man who not only was able theoretically to articulate the arc of the Russian Revolution of 1917 (the theory of permanent revolution) but personally led the defend of that revolution against world imperialism and its internal Russian White Guard agents. Oh yes, and also wrote a million pro-communist articles, did a little turn at literary criticism, acted in various Soviet official capacities, led the Communist International, led the opposition first in Russia and then internationally to the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution, and created a new revolutionary international (the Fourth International) to rally the demoralized international working class movement in the face of Hitlerite reaction. To speak nothing of hunting, fishing, raising rabbits, collecting cactii and chasing Frida Kahlo around Mexico (oops, on that last one). In short, as I have characterized him before, the closest that this sorry old world has come to producing a complete communist man within the borders of bourgeois society (except that last thing, that skirt-chasing thing, although maybe not). All honor to his memory. Forward to new Octobers!

Usually on this anniversary I place a selection of Trotsky’s writings on various subjects in this space. This year, having found a site that has material related to his family life, the effect of his murder on that family, and other more personal details of his life I am placing that material here in his honor. The forward to new Octobers still goes, though.
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Markin comment:

Of course the writer of the memorial, Pierre Frank, did no small amount throughout his political career as a "leading" member of the post-Trotsky, post-World War II, confused, sometimes massively confused, international leadership to bring down the Fourth International. At least one that Trotsky might have recognized as his own.
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Pierre Frank
Eighty Years Ago

Published: Fourth International, Autumn 1959

Next November 7th will complete eighty years since Leon Trotsky was born. By his theoretical contribution and his militant life, he takes his place in the class of the most eminent proletarian revolutionaries, that of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg. But if these others are accepted as such in the workers' movement (which does not mean that their teachings are not trodden underfoot), the place of Trotsky, even at the present beginnings of "destalinization," has not yet been recognized. True, the crudest Stalinist lies are no longer repeated, for they would no longer find any listeners; but a number of lies and false ideas continue to drag on, including among those who think that they have been delivered from Stalinism. How many try to get out of it by saying: The struggle between Trotsky and Stalin is ancient history, outlived, a personal rivalry about more or less abstract theories, and Trotskyism -- apart from a few faithful followers -- no longer exists. This was not at all the opinion of Stalin who, after claiming that Trotskyism was dead, went on setting up -- in vain -- the most monstrous judicial machinations to kill it. Nor is it the opinion of Stalin's present successors, either. If they have not rehabilitated Trotsky and the Left Opposition, it is because they realize that it is not outlived ancient history, but one of the burning problems of the present day.

The figure and the teachings of Trotsky will inevitably find the place they deserve in the course of the anti-bureaucratic movement of the masses, and not in the bureaucracy's measures of self-defense to protect its political power and privileges.

Among some who perhaps do not lack sympathy but do lack a sense of history, what contributes to their failure to appreciate Leon Trotsky is the contrast between the last part of his life (from 1928 on) and his period of glory and power in the first years of the Russian Revolution. Max Eastman wrote in a recent article that Trotsky was a man of indecision who did not know how to fight against Stalin -- all this based on a "psychoanalysis" for the American petty bourgeois. Without expressing themselves so stupidly, there are not lacking people who think that if after all Trotsky was defeated by Stalin, it was because he pierced himself with his own sword at a given moment by his vision of the glorious period of the Russian Revolution, without understanding the new situation that was then opening up. It is, however, easy to verify the fact that it was Trotsky who really understood the new situation, whereas Stalin did not have the faintest idea of where he would be led by the struggle he started after Lenin's death. Power not only contributes to corrupt those who wield it; it also sets them on a pedestal which deforms their real stature. If someone like Trotsky lost the power, that must be his fault, and he was not so great a man as all that -- such is the reasoning of petty-bourgeois thinkers. We are convinced that the future will say that the whole greatness of Trotsky was shown most clearly in that last and so dramatic period of his existence -- such a period as none of the other great revolutionaries had to go through. Marx and Engels at the end of their days saw the workers' movement accept the doctrines that they -- for a long time almost alone -- had developed and advocated. Rosa was assassinated in a revolutionary period. Lenin died respected, just It the turning in the Russian Revolution, before he could join battle against the rising bureaucracy. It was to Trotsky, who, together with Lenin, had had the glory of leading the proletariat to power, that it fell to carry on that struggle. In it, the state that emerged from the first victorious proletarian revolution became the instrument of a narrow-minded and reactionary social layer of the new society, who systematically resorted to methods of violence within the workers' movement against the revolutionaries, cite a degree that even the reformists had not reached. In the Soviet Union alone, the number of members of the Bolshevik Party liquidated by Stalin -- according to the statement of Khrushchev at the session of the Central Committee in which he defeated Malenkov, Molotov, and Kaganovich -- reached 1,600,000. This figure alone indicates what was then the power of the bureaucratic reaction. Its hatred was aimed with its full force against Trotsky.

Trotsky's third exile never had an equal not so much because of the agents of Stalin who never ceased to exist around Trotsky and Leon Sedov; but this exile was in practice doubled by a cloistering imposed by various capitalist governments and by the interventions of the Soviet government. True, Trotsky could leave his home, engage in physical exercise (walking, fishing, hunting, etc), but it was in fact forbidden to him to take a direct part himself in the workers' movement. It is necessary to recall the rage poured out by the Soviet press when it was learned that Trotsky had left Istanbul to give a lecture in Copenhagen. The lion had escaped from his cage; few interventions were necessary to make the Social-Democratic Danish government understand what attitude it must take. Trotsky, a man of the masses to the highest degree, a militant the essential part of whose life had been passed in workers' organizations, in fact during this last exile found himself in a sort of prison with invisible bars, for he could communicate with the world and especially with the workers' movement only through visitors under the more or less discreet control of the police of the country he was in.

What is more, he had no exchange of thoughts, no relations, with the workers' leaders of his generation: the Social-Democracy and Stalinism had divided up between them the old leaders of the workers' movement. The more recent strata -- those of the First World War and its postwar period -- provided the elements for the bureaucratic apparatuses. Those who gathered around him were quite young militants, without a past, without training. It is easy to understand that this great difference in age and experience added to his isolation from the big labor formations kept up by apparatuses.

On the occasion of the publication this year of his Diary for the years 1934-35, some persons have discovered a "human" side to Trotsky. That is because they never knew how to read Trotsky. It is not at all hard to see in all his works how much he understands -- because he shares -- the feelings of the masses risen up against all oppression. And with him, as with Marxism's other great ones, these feelings take on all the more force in that they find their source in the understanding of causes and in the conviction that mankind now possesses the means to put an end to those inhuman conditions in which the great majority of them live. Nobody was more sorely tried than he and Natalia by the most hideous manifestations of Stalinism; those who were at their side saw how they suffered each time that their children were struck down by Stalinism. But they also saw the firmness with which they faced it, and how Trotsky in his grief redoubled his strength to carry on the struggle to which he had devoted his existence.

It is not simple to summarize Trotsky's theoretical contribution to Marxism, so considerable is it.

Above all, there is the theory of the permanent revolution, formulated when he was 26, in connection with Czarist Russia, but which, because of the trend taken by the world revolution from the U S S R toward the East, in colonial and semi-colonial countries -- contains its strategic basis for nearly two thirds of humanity in our times. While the Stalinist conceptions about "socialism in a single country" and "revolution by stages" have been swept away by such gigantic facts as the Chinese Revolution, the theory of the permanent revolution is still officially ignored by some, reviled by others, who remain in tow to native bourgeoisies without strength and without future.

The fundamental strategy for the struggle for power in the advanced capitalist countries (united front and transitional programme) had been formulated by the Communist International at its IIIrd and IVth Congresses, in fact by Lenin and Trotsky. It was defended and systematically elaborated by Trotsky against Stalinist revisions (sometimes sectarian, sometimes opportunist, conceptions of the united front -- renunciation of the struggle for power and a transitional programme, and a policy of alliances with wings of the bourgeoisie, such as the Popular Front etc). Trotsky further proceeded to study in a practically exhaustive way declining capitalism's forms of defense (fascism, Bonapartism).

The creation of a first workers' state in an economically backward country and its isolation in the world raised the most complex problems on every plane. The victory of the bureaucracy and its absolute power under the tyrannical leadership of Stalin helped to aggravate all these problems. It is to Trotsky that we are indebted for the greatest clarity about these questions. On the problems of industrialization, planning, the proportions of the various branches of the economy, relations with the peasantry, relations of economic questions with soviet democracy, on political problems in the workers' state (separation of state and party, plurality of parties, etc), on cultural problems, on all problems posed today with a force rendered doubly explosive, both because of the level attained by the Soviet Union and because of the Stalinist methods of repressing independent initiative in any field whatever -- on all these problems Trotsky provided the correct method of approach, and often indeed solutions that are still valid today. That the bureaucracy, forced to take action along lines indicated by him so many years ago, should continue to manifest hostility toward Trotsky, without however resorting to the worst calumnies of the Stalin era, is easy to understand: at the basis of all Trotsky's answers there is to be found as the essential element the intervention of the masses by the reestablishment of soviet democracy.

We are leaving aside very many manifestations of Trotsky's thought in the most varied fields, in which most often he no more than sketched out the way of treating them, but which will unquestionably constitute for future Marxists -- as is the case for very many passages in the work of Marx -- a guide for tackling new problems.


There is in Trotsky's work one point on which many an admirer of today is skeptical: that is his creation of the Fourth International and his conviction that it was, as early as before the Second World War, indispensable for ensuring the future of revolutionary Marxism and of the workers' movement. We shall not take up this whole question again here, where the militants of the Fourth International have so often had occasion to deal with it. We wish only to insist on the continuity of the international and internationalist activity of Trotsky. He had been one of the representatives of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party to the Second International, and had seen its weaknesses; he had been at the foundation of the Third International, had there, together with Lenin, played the leading role, and had tried to make' it into a genuine international leadership of the revolutionary workers' movement; and had seen that one of the essential factors in its disintegration had consisted of abandoning an internationalist conception in favor of "socialism in a single country." To that it must be added that Trotsky had taken not at all lightly the error he had committed, compared to Lenin, on the question of the party. It was necessary to keep revolutionary Marxist principles intact, including that of the party -- and, after 1914, there could be no question of anything except an international party. It is there that is to be found the explanation of the immense efforts expended by Trotsky in his last years on the turbulent problems of an organization so numerically weak as the Fourth International, efforts which remain incomprehensible to those who do not understand that in so doing Trotsky was showing that he had adopted the Leninist conception of the party. On this question too, we are sure that the future will show that Trotsky was right. No one can yet foresee the forms of organization by which we shall pass from today's Fourth International of cadres to tomorrow's Fourth International of mass parties, but for us there is no doubt that the mass revolutionary Marxist movement of tomorrow will connect up with the Third International of the time of Lenin and Trotsky through the Fourth International founded in 1938 under Trotsky's leadership.


The error that Trotsky most often committed in more than one circumstance was to be ahead, and even very much ahead, of events. In that also, it may be said in passing, Trotsky found himself in the company of Marx and Engels. Although the brakes of reformism and the Soviet bureaucracy continue to have a strong effect on the mass movement throughout the world, they have lost much of their power. There is very little left of the Stalin cult five years after his death. And so we can, on this eightieth anniversary of Trotsky's birth, affirm with the greatest confidence that on his ninetieth anniversary his memory and his work will be honored by the great masses of the entire world.

On The 50th Anniversary Of Tet-From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- Clarification On The Question Of Laos As A Workers State (And An Article On Thailand)

Workers Vanguard No. 977
1 April 2011
On Laos

(Letters)

24 January

The latest issue of Workers Vanguard (No. 972) reprints an article [“Thailand: For a Workers and Peasants Government!”] from Australasian Spartacist (No. 211) that inexplicably characterizes Laos as a “deformed workers state”. It is my understanding that Laos, like Cambodia, never became a deformed workers state due to its extreme economic backwardness, almost nonexistent proletariat, devastation under US imperialist bombing, and anti-working class Stalinist leadership.

Joel

27 January

To the editors,

I think you owe the readers an explanation why you never before (to my knowledge) considered Laos a workers state.

H.F.

28 January

I read a WV article last nite on the situation in Thailand. In the article, it states that there is some sort of deformed workers state in Laos. I have never read anything about this in the past, including in the WV, which I have been reading closely for decades. Could the WV elaborate on this, as I think that readers would be interested in learning about this. By the way, the article was very good.

N.B.

WV replies:

After internal discussion, a recent gathering of the International Communist League codified that Laos is, and has been since the victory of the Indochinese Revolution, a bureaucratically deformed workers state. The Pathet Lao guerrilla insurgents gained state power in Laos several weeks after the 30 April 1975 seizure of Saigon, capital of South Vietnam, by the forces of the Democratic Republic of (North) Vietnam and the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front. The liberation of Saigon marked the victory of the Vietnamese Revolution against U.S. imperialism and its South Vietnamese puppet regime.

After the Pathet Lao took power, the Spartacus Youth League, then the youth organization of the Spartacist League/U.S., wrote: “With its predominantly feudal and even pre-feudal tribal relations of production, a Laotian state established by the Stalinists would tend to lean on and take on the social character of the neighboring more advanced Vietnamese and Chinese deformed workers states” (Young Spartacus No. 33, June 1975). In power, the Laotian Stalinists went on to establish a regime based on proletarian property forms, in conjunction with Vietnam. We explained two years later in “Cambodia: Peasant Stalinism Run Amok” (WV No. 180, 4 November 1977) that what happened in Laos was akin to Soviet Central Asia and Mongolia in the decade following the October Revolution, where peasant and nomadic societies were absorbed into the Russian economy. However, in subsequent years we failed to codify this understanding.

Laos is based on a collectivized economy but ruled by a nationalist bureaucratic caste under the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party. While in recent years the Stalinist regime has enacted a series of “market reforms” following the examples of China and Vietnam, the class character of the state remains the same.

Trotskyists unconditionally militarily defend such workers states—which also include China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba—against imperialism and internal counterrevolution. We also fight for proletarian political revolutions to oust the parasitic, nationalist Stalinist bureaucracies, whose program of “socialism in one country” undermines the defense of the workers states and means conciliating the imperialist powers that are intent on their destruction. In the case of Laos, which has only a tiny proletariat, this perspective is integrally tied to the fight for political revolution in Vietnam as well as China. In all cases, development toward socialism is dependent on proletarian revolution in the imperialist centers, such as Japan and the U.S.

Under Pol Pot’s Stalinist Khmer Rouge, Cambodia fared differently than Laos. As the U.S. imperialists were being routed in Vietnam, Pol Pot, at the head of a peasant army, seized control of neighboring Cambodia, which had also suffered years of U.S. carpet bombing and destruction. We initially characterized Cambodia as a deformed workers state while noting that “the contradictory character of Stalinism was nowhere more graphically revealed than in the actions of the victorious Cambodian peasant army marching into Phnom Penh not to liberate the poor and working people but rather to brutally impose an immediate and total depopulation of the city” (WV No. 72, 4 July 1975).

Indeed, Pol Pot’s murderous horror brought Cambodia to the brink of extinction, razing the cities, destroying the tiny proletariat and forcing virtually the entire population into barely disguised labor camps at the most primitive subsistence level. As we later wrote: “Pol Pot’s Cambodia was never a workers state, even deformed…. The ideology of Pol Pot & Co. was the antithesis of the program of communists for whom industrialization and technological progress lay the material basis for the free and full development of human potential in a socialist society of plenty for all” (WV No. 692, 5 June 1998).

In the winter of 1978-79, Vietnam, seeking to end Khmer Rouge border attacks, invaded Cambodia, liberating the Cambodian people from the death grip of Pol Pot’s forces. Washington, in its vindictive drive to punish Vietnam for the defeat of U.S. imperialism in Indochina, seized on this invasion to side with the Khmer Rouge. For more than 10 years, Vietnamese troops defended the People’s Republic of Kampuchea against the CIA’s murderous Cambodian allies. However, in 1989 Soviet leader Gorbachev, in his treacherous and futile drive to appease imperialism, joined the imperialists in pressuring his Vietnamese ally to cut a deal with the Khmer Rouge. In September 1989, the last detachment of Vietnamese troops left Cambodia, opening the way for the return of the imperialists and the king. Cambodia is a bourgeois state under a constitutional monarchy.
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Workers Vanguard No. 972
21 January 2010

Down With Bloody Repression of “Red Shirts,” Minorities!

Thailand: For a Workers and Peasants Government!

Abolish the Monarchy!

The following article is reprinted from Australasian Spartacist No. 211 (Summer 2010/11), newspaper of the Spartacist League of Australia, section of the International Communist League.

On 9 January, up to 40,000 demonstrators led by the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD—more popularly known as the Red Shirts) rallied in Thailand’s capital, Bangkok, to commemorate supporters killed in the bloody crackdown on anti-government protests in mid-May. For weeks during April-May, tens of thousands had rallied behind the UDD, supporters of exiled former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, in protests demanding new elections. Drawing in masses of urban and rural poor, demonstrators sustained repeated attacks by state forces against their occupation centred on Ratchaprasong intersection in the commercial heart of the capital. Then on 19 May, under the orders of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, the Thai military mobilised armoured vehicles and thousands of troops to brutally disperse the protest. Ninety-one people were killed and up to 1,900 injured in the bloody repression against the weeks-long demonstration. The slingshots, bamboo spears, Molotov cocktails and other more conventional weapons of the demonstrators were no match for the tanks and live ammunition of the Thai army, which, along with the police, has a long history of murderous suppression of worker and student protests, separatist and leftist insurgencies.

Following the crackdown, a pall of terror fell over Thailand. Hundreds of Red Shirt protesters were rounded up and imprisoned, many detained under an Emergency Decree imposed in early April. The government froze bank accounts of suspected Red Shirt supporters, raided and closed down radio stations and blocked over 100,000 websites. Twenty-five people, including the exiled Thaksin and other leaders were charged with terrorism-related offences that can carry the death penalty.

As revolutionary Marxists, the International Communist League defends the Red Shirt protesters against ongoing bloody state repression while at the same time standing in political opposition to this bourgeois-populist movement, which is defined by its support to, and from, Thaksin, a billionaire telecommunications mogul. Its aims and politics are counterposed to the interests of the workers and rural toilers who have rallied behind it. It is necessary to build a Leninist-Trotskyist party to mobilise the proletariat, standing at the head of all the downtrodden and oppressed, against all wings of the Thai bourgeoisie in the struggle to overthrow the exploitative capitalist system through socialist revolution.

Thaksin, who was ousted from government in a military coup in 2006, was the first Thai bourgeois political leader whose wealth and base of support lay outside the Bangkok elite. Describing themselves as phrai (serf), and sneeringly referred to as “savages” and “buffalos” by sections of the elite, many Red Shirt supporters are disenfranchised peasants from Thailand’s poverty-stricken north and northeast. Thaksin garnered his broad support among the urban and rural poor following the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which hit Thailand particularly hard. The crash saw real wages plummet by up to 40 percent and over two million workers lose their jobs in just a few months. Many were forced back to rural villages or into sweatshops and informal or casual work to survive. Before the year ended, the prime minister resigned in the face of the continuing economic turmoil and burgeoning street protests by workers, peasants and the middle classes. The following year Thaksin founded his Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thais) party. It put forward a nationalist, populist program that promised to ameliorate conditions for the masses, particularly in the rural areas. Elected prime minister in 2001, Thaksin delivered on many of his reform pledges, including a debt moratorium for peasants and a heavily subsidised universal healthcare system.

For Thaksin, these reforms served to co-opt and contain plebeian discontent within the framework of capitalism, ensuring the necessary social and economic stability to attract imperialist investment back to Thailand, and with it a smooth flow of profits for himself and his cronies. Corruption, nepotism and authoritarianism prospered while Thaksin was in power. A former police officer, he undermined the power of the entrenched bureaucracy by centralising management of government affairs in his own hands and that of his Thai Rak Thai party. He exercised tight control over the media and embarked on sweeping anti-union privatisations as well as repressive domestic campaigns especially targeting ethnic minorities. These measures were designed to suppress any restiveness among the population while mobilising the majority behind greater Thai nationalism.

Following Thaksin’s re-election in a second landslide victory in 2005, bourgeois opposition elements coalesced around the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD). This included support from Abhisit’s Democrat Party, sections of the military and bureaucracy, businessmen and others who felt threatened by Thaksin’s government including some public sector trade-union leaders. Known as the Yellow Shirts (the colour associated with the king), PAD seized on a tax scandal involving Thaksin in early 2006 to escalate protests against his regime. In September, while out of the country, Thaksin was deposed in a military coup—the eighteenth in the 60-plus year reign of King Bhumibol.

With the banning of Thai Rak Thai, its leaders regrouped as the People’s Power Party (PPP) and managed to form a coalition government after junta-approved elections in late 2007. The PAD Yellow Shirts launched a new round of protests, storming Government House [the prime minister’s office] and blockading two international airports, while security forces largely refrained from intervening. Clashes occurred with Red Shirts who had mobilised on the streets. In a December 2008 judicial coup, the Thai Constitutional Court dissolved the PPP, leading to the installation of Abhisit as prime minister. Branding the Red Shirt opposition “communists” and “destroyers of Thailand,” the government of the Oxford-educated Abhisit has ruled with an iron fist ever since. Abhisit immediately slashed Thaksin’s healthcare scheme by 23 percent and bolstered his regime with a paramilitary band of armed thugs, known as the Blue Shirts, who serve to intimidate government opponents.

Without giving any political support to Thaksin, it was necessary for the proletariat to oppose the 2006 military coup—which threatened the ability of the working class to organise in its own interests and struck a blow at all the oppressed—and to defend the reforms gained under Thaksin. Concretely this would have meant militarily siding with Thaksin and his supporters against the coup, and with the masses on the streets, while fighting for the proletariat to emerge under its own banner.

Thaksin Shinawatra: Blood-Drenched Bourgeois Nationalist

Bourgeois nationalists such as Thaksin are committed to defence of the capitalist order, which necessarily means enforcing the exploitation of the masses and the plunder of resources to enhance the power and the profits of the bourgeoisie and their imperialist masters. As prime minister, Thaksin launched two savage domestic campaigns. His “war on drugs” resulted in some 3,000 extrajudicial killings by the police and military. Many were also slaughtered in his bloody campaign against the Malay Muslim minority in the southernmost provinces of Pattani, Yala, Narathiwat and parts of Songkhla, which he kept under martial law. The ferocity of the repression is captured by the events in Tak Bai on 25 October 2004. After firing on a demonstration in the town, killing at least seven people and wounding many more, Thai security forces then rounded up over 1,300 Muslims. With their hands bound behind their backs, the detainees were stacked on top of one another like cordwood in the back of trucks and driven to a military detention camp six hours away. By the end of the journey up to 85 prisoners had died of beatings, suffocation and kidney damage. Thaksin Shinawatra responded to this slaughter by praising the “good work” of the security forces.

While Thailand was never colonised by the imperialist powers, its borders nevertheless reflect the struggles between British and French colonialism in Southeast Asia. Thailand, or Siam as it was formerly known, emerged as an independent state in the late 19th century mainly as a buffer between French and British imperialism. The 1909 Anglo-Siamese Treaty handed several Malay states to the British while allowing Siam to retain the four states that it still holds today. The Malay state of Patani, which had been largely self-governing while paying tribute to Buddhist Siam, was forcibly incorporated into the state of Siam in the early 20th century. Once under Thai suzerainty the Malay Muslims suffered national and religious oppression and violent clashes occurred. In the period following the Second World War thousands migrated to the newly formed Federation of Malaya.

For decades Malay Muslims remaining in Southern Thailand have waged a sporadic insurgency against the Thai military and police. Making up about four percent of Thailand’s population, but comprising the overwhelming majority in the four southern provinces, the Malay Muslims are largely denied education in their native tongue (Yawi, a Malay dialect), and suffer religious oppression at the hands of the state and Buddhist elite. The Thai working class must defend the Muslim minority against state repression without giving one iota of political support to the Islamists. Fighting for full democratic and national rights, it must demand that the Thai military and security forces get out of the southern provinces.

Revolutionaries would seek to unite all nationalities behind the proletarian fight to overthrow the Thai capitalist rulers. This requires a sharp struggle against the monarchy, which acts as both symbol and purveyor of Thai nationalism. While the arch-monarchist PAD Yellow Shirts seek to paint Thaksin as eroding the authority of the king, Thaksin of course well understands the monarchy’s historical role and has no intention of undermining this important institution for capitalist class rule. The bourgeoisie has spent decades deifying the monarchy as a rallying point for capitalist reaction and national unity, codifying in the Thai constitution that “The King shall be enthroned in a position of revered worship and shall not be violated.”

Despite their best efforts, today the Thai rulers are increasingly fearful the country will fall apart when the aged and ailing King Bhumibol dies, particularly as his successor, the Crown Prince, is widely despised. In order to “protect the monarchy,” the Abhisit government seized on the April-May demonstrations to establish a new “Bureau of Prevention and Eradication of Computer Crime.” Two hundred people, including Giles Ji Ungpakorn, a leader of the Thai leftist group Turn Left/Workers Democracy which is linked to the Cliffite British Socialist Workers Party, have been blacklisted from posting to the Internet. In February 2009, Ungpakorn left Thailand to avoid facing a charge of lèse majesté over criticisms of the monarchy expressed in his book on the 2006 anti-Thaksin coup, A Coup for the Rich. The draconian lèse majesté law is defined by Article 112 of the Thai criminal code, which states that defamatory, insulting or threatening comments about the king, queen and regent are punishable by three to fifteen years in prison. Down with the blacklists! Drop the charges against Ungpakorn! Down with the lèse majesté law! Abolish the monarchy!

Opposition to the monarchy is intertwined with the struggle against religion, which deeply oppresses women and minorities. The overwhelming hold of Buddhism has a strong conservatising effect on the masses. Men are expected to join the monkhood for a period in order to “purify” their minds and become morally upright family leaders. For the rural poor, getting their sons into the monastery can be a means to ensure access to food, shelter and education. Barred from the monkhood, women are treated by the Buddhist elite as potentially greedy temptresses whose attractiveness is seen as a potential source of anarchy.

While women now represent close to 50 percent of the labour force they are locked into the informal economy, heavily exploited as home-workers, or toil long hours in low-paying factory jobs with virtually no rights. In the 1993 fire at the Kader toy factory just outside Bangkok, most of the 188 people killed were women workers, trapped because exits were locked as an “anti-theft measure.” Domestic violence against women is also rife. Thai women face sharp restrictions on abortion, which serves to keep them chained to the patriarchal family. In the poverty-stricken north and northeast rural areas many women have no choice but to join the thriving sex industry where unsafe practices abound and HIV can be a death sentence. We fight for the separation of religion and state, for full legal equality for women and for free abortion on demand as part of the struggle for free quality healthcare for all. Thai women workers will be in the forefront of the revolutionary struggle to shatter the stifling control of monarchy and religion as part of the struggle to overthrow the exploitative capitalist system as a whole, the only road to the liberation of women.

The Thai proletariat needs a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party to bring to the working class the understanding of its historic role as the leader of the dispossessed masses and gravedigger of the system of capitalist exploitation. Such a party must fight as a tribune of the people, combating all forms of discrimination and raising the banner of internationalist working-class struggle.

The Fight for Permanent Revolution

Thailand is a classic example of combined and uneven development, where modern capitalist industry coexists with deep backwardness. The workings of international capitalism since World War II have transformed Thailand from a predominantly agricultural country to an industrial one with manufacturing such as vehicle assembly, electronics and food processing. In particular, industrial growth came on the back of the massive shift of production to Thailand by Japanese corporations first in the 1980s and then again under Thaksin following 2001. These developments have created a modern industrial proletariat with immense potential social power. This was demonstrated in 2004 when over 200,000 workers rallied on the streets of Bangkok, thwarting Thaksin’s attempted anti-union privatisation of the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand.

The recent mass plebeian Red Shirt protests reflect the deep inequalities of Thai society. Millions of Thai workers eke out an existence often at below subsistence wage levels, with Burmese, Laotian and Cambodian unskilled and semi-skilled migrant workers having the worst conditions and pay. The sizable and deeply exploited internal migratory labour force, consisting largely of peasants seeking to escape impoverishment on the land, are a living link between urban workers and the countryside where over a third of Thailand’s labour force continues to toil in back-breaking labour-intensive agriculture.

While the oppressed Thai masses chafe under repressive capitalist rule, various fake-left and petty-bourgeois nationalist groups internationally have avidly promoted the bourgeois Red Shirts whose demands are limited to the dissolution of parliament and new bourgeois elections. The maximum demand of a 14 April 2010 statement by the reformist United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USec) was for solidarity with the “fight for social justice and democracy of the ‘Red Shirts’” (International Viewpoint online). A 10 April joint statement by various outfits in Asia, including the Socialist Party of Malaysia, Partido Lakas ng Masa of the Philippines, Turn Left Thailand and the Australian Socialist Alliance (to name a few), declares that the crisis in Thailand “only can be resolved through genuine democracy and people’s power.”

In his “Red Siam Manifesto” (2009), Ungpakorn explicitly promotes similar illusions, fatuously declaring:

“The red, white and blue Thai flag, copied from the West in order to indoctrinate us to be loyal to ‘Nation, Religion and King’, the same slogan which was recently last used by the PAD protesters who blocked the airports. Yet during the French revolution, the red white and blue meant, ‘Liberty Equality and Fraternity’. This is the slogan we must use to free Thailand from the ‘New Order’ which the PAD and the army have installed.”

Military rule and repression is the norm and necessary means by which the small bourgeois class in neocolonial countries, as agents of imperialist domination, keep the democratic and social aspirations of the masses in check. In stark contrast to Ungpakorn’s faith in bourgeois democracy, history has shown that in backward countries like Thailand, where economic and social development has been stunted by the global domination of the imperialist powers, basic democratic rights can only be achieved when the proletariat takes power through workers revolution and begins to carry out the tasks of socialist construction. As Leon Trotsky, co-leader of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution with V.I. Lenin, outlined in his “Basic Postulates” in The Permanent Revolution (1930):

“The dictatorship of the proletariat which has risen to power as the leader of the democratic revolution is inevitably and very quickly confronted with tasks, the fulfilment of which is bound up with deep inroads into the rights of bourgeois property. The democratic revolution grows over directly into the socialist revolution and thereby becomes a permanent revolution.”

In further developing this point Trotsky stressed that the conquest of power did not complete the socialist revolution but only opened it by changing the direction of social development. Such social development can only be consolidated through the international extension of the revolution, particularly to the advanced imperialist centres. Defence of those subjugated by imperialists around the globe demands the pursuit of class struggle in the imperialist centres pointing toward a proletarian struggle for power.

Our model is the October 1917 Revolution in Russia. Indeed it was the program of permanent revolution first developed by Trotsky for the Russian Revolution that points the way to national and social liberation in countries like Thailand. The October Revolution proved in life that only the proletariat, led by a revolutionary internationalist vanguard party like Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks and winning the support of the peasant and urban plebeian masses, can liberate societies in countries of belated capitalist development. In the imperialist epoch of decaying capitalism that began more than a century ago, all wings of the bourgeoisie in such countries are too dependent on their multiple ties to the imperialists, too fearful of independent working-class action to play any progressive role. They are incapable of solving bourgeois-democratic tasks, such as agrarian revolution and national independence, associated with the European revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries.

The revolutionary internationalist perspective of permanent revolution is counterposed to Ungpakorn’s bourgeois- democratic musings and grovelling reliance on the capitalist state. In his article “Class Struggle between the Coloured T-Shirts in Thailand” (Journal of Asia Pacific Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2009), Ungpakorn argues, “We need to cut down the military’s influence in society, reform the judiciary and the police and to expand freedom and democracy from the grass-roots movement.” In contrast, Lenin explained that the capitalist state cannot be reformed or pressured to serve the interests of the working class and oppressed. Consisting at its core of armed bodies of men—the police, military and their auxiliaries—this state exists to defend the private property and rule of the bourgeoisie. There can be no overcoming the desperate plight of the working class and oppressed rural masses without overthrowing the capitalist social order and smashing its state, thus laying the basis, through a series of proletarian revolutions internationally, for a classless society of material abundance in which all forms of exploitation and oppression have been eliminated.

The proletariat is the only social force that can successfully lead such a struggle. It has vast potential power due to its central role in production—where its collective labour in industry is exploited by the bourgeoisie for profit. The peasants are incapable of cohering an independent social policy. They are part of a heterogeneous intermediate layer, the petty bourgeoisie. Their immediate felt interests are for the defence or acquisition of land. There are only two decisive classes in capitalist society: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In countries like Thailand, the working class must win the support of the masses of poor and/or landless peasants, including through demands to expropriate the large landlords and for land to the tiller. A workers and peasants government in Thailand would give full, equal rights to women, immigrants and all oppressed minorities. It would seize the vast holdings of the imperialists and all the blood-sucking domestic capitalists, including Thaksin and Abhisit, and lay the basis for a centrally planned economy under workers rule.

Socialist revolution in Thailand would reverberate throughout the region and beyond. In the bureaucratically deformed workers states of Laos, Vietnam and China, the spark of proletarian internationalism could inspire workers political revolutions against the nationalist Stalinist misrulers, whose futile pursuit of “peaceful coexistence” with world imperialism undermines defence of these workers states. The road to the emancipation of Thai workers, and with them the peasantry and oppressed minorities, lies in the fight for a socialist federation of Southeast Asia, linked to the struggle for proletarian revolution in the imperialist heartlands. An insurgent Thai proletariat would find no shortage of allies in the imperialist centres such as Australia, Japan and the U.S. where today the various capitalist rulers seek to make working people pay for the deepening slump of the world economic crisis.

Down With U.S./Australian Imperialism!

Following World War II and with the advent of Cold War I, which particularly targeted the Soviet degenerated workers state, the U.S. built up the Thai military as a bastion for counterrevolutionary terror within Southeast Asia. The anti-communism of the U.S. and Thai leaders reinforced each other in the face of peasant guerrilla insurgencies throughout the region including social revolutions in North Korea and China. With the defeat of the French colonial power in Indochina in 1954, and following the slaughter of some three million Koreans during the Korean War, the U.S. increasingly used Thailand as a military base and launching pad for imperialist aggression against the revolutionary struggles of the workers and peasants in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. About three quarters of the bomb tonnage dropped on North Vietnam and Laos in 1965-68 alone was flown out of Eastern Thailand. By 1969, there were more than 45,000 U.S. troops stationed there. Thai troops fought in Laos and some 11,000 fought in South Vietnam as lackeys of the U.S.

The bloody Thai military was also mobilised against the guerrilla forces of the People’s Liberation Army of Thailand (PLAT), the military wing of the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT). Founded in 1942, the CPT had increasingly adopted a nationalist, peasant-based guerrilla strategy, not least under the impact of the 1949 Chinese Revolution, shifting its cadre from the cities, where they had some influence in the unions, to the countryside. This anti-Marxist strategy rejects the proletarian struggle for power. Ultimately the CPT/PLAT would fall victim not simply to military repression but also to its own class-collaborationist Stalinist-Maoist politics, compounded by the treachery of the ruling Stalinist bureaucracies in Vietnam and China. Committed to the anti-Marxist dogma of building “socialism in one country” and seeking peaceful coexistence with imperialism, the Vietnamese and Chinese Stalinists were not interested in fighting for the overthrow of the Thai ruling class.

Thus, following the 1975 victory of the Vietnamese Revolution and the destruction of capitalist class rule in South Vietnam, the Hanoi bureaucracy pledged not to interfere in the “internal affairs” of Thailand. For its part, the Beijing Stalinist regime, having already cemented its treacherous anti-Soviet alliance with U.S. imperialism, had assured the Thai military by late 1974 that “China had stopped supporting insurgents in Thailand” (“Thai Coup Follows Savage Slaughter of Students,” Young Spartacus No. 48, November 1976). By the end of the 1970s, the CPT/PLAT, isolated from the proletariat and kept isolated by Stalinist treachery abroad, had begun to collapse, surrendering its arms in 1982-83. Its remnants were arrested when they tried to hold a congress in 1987. The “people’s war,” as the CPT called it, was over, as was the CPT.

The collapse of the CPT is a powerful indictment of the nationalist, class-collaborationist Stalinist-Maoist doctrine on which it had always been based and which is hostile to a revolutionary proletarian and internationalist perspective. Following a military coup in late 1947, the CPT called for “a ‘truly democratic’ coalition government of the Communist Party and other democratic, patriotic, and peace-loving political forces,” to be achieved through a common struggle under a “United Front of the Thai nation...consisting of ‘the oppressed classes of workers, peasants, soldiers, students and merchants, including all democracy-oriented organizations, associations and political parties, as well as minorities and patriots’” (Kasian Tejapira, Commodifying Marxism, 2001). Seeking to ally with a mythical progressive wing of the Thai bourgeoisie, such calls push the false dogma of “two-stage revolution”—first “democracy” and later, socialism.

This schema was first peddled by the Mensheviks (the pro-capitalist wing of the Russian social democracy who opposed the 1917 Russian Revolution) and later by the Stalinist betrayers and all stripes of petty-bourgeois nationalists. A class-collaborationist trap for the proletariat, it has always meant tying the masses to the capitalist class enemy and has repeatedly resulted in the massacre of the communists and their supporters. This was exemplified in Indonesia, 1965-66.

In one of the most savage massacres in modern history, over a million Indonesian Communists, workers, peasants and ethnic Chinese were slaughtered. This bloodbath, a holy war against Communism, was the work of an alliance between the Indonesian army and Islamic fanatics directly aided by the American CIA and its Australian counterpart, ASIS. A catastrophe for the Indonesian working class, it was a direct product of the support by the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) to the capitalist government of then-president Sukarno. The pro-Beijing leadership of the PKI—the largest Communist party in the capitalist world—preached “joint unity” with the “progressive” Sukarno and his Indonesian Nationalist Party to form a “united national front, including the national bourgeoisie” to carry out “not socialist but democratic reforms.” Politically disarmed by this program of “two-stage revolution,” the proletariat was unable to defend itself when the Indonesian generals, led by Suharto and backed by imperialism, struck to behead the PKI (see “Lessons of Indonesia 1965,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 55, Autumn 1999).

The key lesson of Indonesia 1965 is that the proletariat and the bourgeoisie have no common interests. For a proletarian party to proceed otherwise is a betrayal. Against suicidal reliance on the imperialist-dependent bourgeoisie of countries like Indonesia and Thailand, the ICL uniquely stands on Trotsky’s program of permanent revolution. As for the class-collaborationist opponents of revolutionary Marxism such as Socialist Alliance in Australia, the USec and Giles Ji Ungpakorn, they reject this program and are thus obstacles to the liberation of the oppressed masses of neocolonial countries from Thailand to Indonesia, the Philippines and beyond.

Today, the U.S., with the aid of its Australian junior imperialist partner, continues to back the blood-drenched Thai generals. The U.S. has used the Utapao air base as one of its global “anti-terror” interrogation centres. Supporting Australia’s economic interests in Thailand, its eighth-largest trading partner, the Australian government has maintained formal ties with the Royal Thai police since 2003. Alongside enforcing exploitation in Thailand and the region, imperialist cooperation with the Thai military is part of a broader strategy to foment capitalist counterrevolution in the Chinese bureaucratically deformed workers state and a return to the untrammelled imperialist exploitation that existed prior to the 1949 Revolution. This they hope to achieve through a combination of economic penetration and military pressure.

Following the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92, U.S. imperialism and its allies have increased pressure against the remaining deformed workers states. In particular, they have been surrounding China with military bases from South Korea to Central Asia. The growing U.S./Australian imperialist military presence in the region is also a profound threat to the North Korean, Laotian and Vietnamese deformed workers states where millions lost their lives in heroic struggles against imperialist terror. U.S./Australian troops/cops get out of Southeast Asia! We stand for the unconditional military defence of the Chinese, North Korean, Vietnamese, Laotian and Cuban bureaucratically deformed workers states against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution and fight for proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist misleaders whose bureaucratic mismanagement and appeasement of imperialism paves the way for capitalist restoration.

Genuine communists, intransigent in their struggle for the political independence of the proletariat from all wings of the capitalist class, seek to unite workers everywhere around their historic class interests in sweeping away this system of imperialist war, exploitation and repression. The Thai proletariat and their class brothers and sisters throughout the region must look to the example of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution if they are to throw off the oppression and poverty enforced by the capitalist rulers and their imperialist patrons. Foremost is the need to build internationalist revolutionary workers parties committed to the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution. The International Communist League fights to build such Leninist-Trotskyist parties to lead the struggles for new October Revolutions from Australia to Indonesia and Thailand, to Japan and the U.S.

From The "Socialist Alternative (CWI) Press"- "The Permanent Revolution today"

From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future

Markin comment on this series:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*******
18 February 2010
Theory

We publish below a new introduction by Peter Taaffe to Leon Trotsky’s ‘Permanent Revolution’, which the comrades of Socialist Movement Pakistan (CWI) are to translate into Urdu and publish.

The Permanent Revolution today
Introduction to new Urdu edition of ‘Permanent Revolution’ by Leon Trotsky

Peter Taaffe
What relevance does Trotsky’s Theory of the Permanent Revolution have to the problems of the workers’ cause or the peasants’ (small farmers) movement today? After all, it was formulated more than 100 years ago during the first Russian revolution of 1905-07. The same kind of question could be posed – and it is – regarding the ideas of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. But no matter how ‘old’ is an idea – a method of analysis upon which mass action is based – if it more accurately describes the situation today than ‘new’ theories, it retains all its relevance in the modern era. This is particularly the case for the masses in the neo-colonial world – and especially today in the vital country of Pakistan with more than 200 million inhabitants – confronted as they are with all the terrible problems flowing from the incomplete capitalist-democratic revolution.

A similar situation as exists in Pakistan today confronted Russia also in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Russia had not completed the capitalist-democratic revolution: thoroughgoing land reform, purging of the countryside of feudal and semi-feudal remnants, unification of the country, the solution of the national question, and freedom from the domination of foreign imperialism. At the same time there was no democracy – the right to vote for a democratic parliament, a free press, trade union rights, etc. This system was crowned by the brutal, autocratic, age-old tsarist state. How to solve the capitalist-democratic revolution? This was the question of questions posed before the young Russian workers’ movement. The different theories exploring this issue were tested out in practice in the three Russian revolutions of 1905-1907, the February revolution of 1917 and the October 1917 revolution itself. The latter, for the first time in history, brought the working class to power and it remains to this day the most important single event in human history.

The bourgeois revolution
Both Lenin and Trotsky differed fundamentally from the Mensheviks (the original minority in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party) who believed the task of the working class in economically undeveloped countries such as Russia at that stage was to tail-end, give ‘critical support’, to the liberal capitalists in completing ‘their’ revolution. This was because they considered the liberal capitalists to be the main agents of the capitalist-democratic revolution. However, the belated development as a class of the capitalists – already revealed in 1848 by the German capitalists, who did not press through the German revolution at that stage – meant that they were incapable of completing this historic task.

Firstly, the capitalists invested in land and the landlords invested in industry and both were united, particularly in the modern era, to bank capital. Therefore any thoroughgoing bourgeois-democratic revolution would come up against the opposition not just of the landlords but also the capitalists themselves and their political representatives, the liberal capitalist parties. Above all, they were afraid that the masses, the main agency of change in all revolutions, including capitalist ones, inevitably pressed forward with their own demands, thereby challenging the position of the capitalists themselves. Even in the bourgeois French revolution of the eighteenth century, the plebeian sans-culottes (literally ‘without trousers’) were the main agency in clearing French society of all feudal rubbish. But they then went on to demand in 1793-94 measures in their own interests such as ‘maximum wages’ and ‘direct democracy’ which the newly empowered representatives of the bourgeoisie correctly understood as a threat. The sans-culottes were suppressed, first of all by the Directory and then by Bonaparte himself.

A similar, although even more pronounced, fear of the rising bourgeoisie in Germany occurred in the 1848 revolution. Then, the fear of the masses trumped the desire of the bourgeois to establish their own untrammelled political rule. Hence the compromise of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties with feudalism and its representative, the monarchy. In the case of Germany, it took the intervention of Bismarck, basing himself on the Junkers – the former representatives of landlord-feudal reaction – to carry through belatedly the capitalist-democratic revolution ‘from above’ in the late nineteenth century. Even then, it was not fully completed and only the 1918 working-class revolution in passing following the First World War completed this process.

Lenin’s idea of the ‘Democratic Dictatorship’
Therefore, Lenin and Trotsky opposed the Menshevik idea that the liberal capitalists could carry though their own revolution in Russia. The capitalists had come onto the scene too late and were afraid of the masses. Arising from this, Lenin formulated his idea of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’. ‘Dictatorship’ for Lenin – as with Marx – meant the rule of a definite class. ‘Dictatorship of the working class’ meant the democratic rule of the working masses and not military rule or bonapartist ‘dictatorship’ over the masses, as opponents of Marxism argue. Because Stalinism – a one-party dictatorship of a bureaucratic elite resting on a planned economy – blighted the understanding of the masses, Marxism today does not use the term ‘dictatorship’. The phrase ‘workers’ democracy’ explains better Marx and Lenin’s idea today. Lenin’s idea was, in effect, a proposed democratic alliance of the working class and the peasantry as the main forces in a mass movement to complete the capitalist-democratic revolution. Trotsky agreed with Lenin that these were the only forces that could complete the process.

However, the weakness of Lenin’s formula was who would be the dominant force in such an alliance: the working class or the peasantry? Trotsky pointed out that history attests to the fact that the peasantry had never played an independent role. Scattered in the countryside with scarce access to the culture of the towns – with their literature, theatres, large collected populations – the peasants were always destined to seek for a leader in the urban areas. They could support the bourgeois, which would mean ultimately the betrayal of their own interests. This flowed from the foregoing fact that the capitalists could not complete thoroughgoing land reform benefiting the mass of the peasants. Or they could find a leader in the working class.

Lenin, in effect, left open which class would dominate in the alliance between the working class and the peasantry. His formula was an ‘algebraic formula’ and he left history to give it a concrete form. Trotsky went further than Lenin in his famous ‘Theory of the Permanent Revolution’. It was Karl Marx himself who first spoke about the ‘permanent’ character of the revolution drawing lessons from the 1848 revolutions. He wrote in 1850: “It is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions.” But Trotsky went further and concluded that once having drawn the mass of the peasantry behind its banner and taken power, the working class would be compelled to go over to the socialist tasks, both on a national and an international scale.

This brilliantly anticipated the October 1917 revolution. The working class took power in Petrograd, the seat of the revolutionary upheavals of the time, and Moscow. They then made an appeal to the rural masses, initiated ‘land to the tillers’, which won over the peasantry. But the dispossessed landlords joined hands with the capitalists, both the ‘liberal’ and reactionary wings, in an attempt to try to snuff out the Russian revolution. The peasantry through the travails of the three-year civil war rallied behind the workers and their party, the Bolsheviks, because they came to understand in action that they were the only ones who would give them the land. Even the intervention of 21 imperialist armies, which reduced the revolution at one stage to the old province of Muscovy, around Petrograd and Moscow, could not stop the revolution triumphing.

Another feature of the theory is the idea of ‘combined and uneven development’, particularly as applied to underdeveloped countries even today. Russia itself prior to 1917 illustrated this phenomenon very clearly. It combined extreme backwardness in relations on the land – feudal, semi-feudal, etc – with the latest word in technique in industry, achieved largely through massive imperialist intervention by French and British capital. The consequences in Russia were the development of a young and dynamic working class organised in big factories alongside archaic economic and cultural forms. A similar development has taken place in other countries in the neo-colonial world since.

Attacks on the theory of permanent revolution
Therefore, the permanent revolution has been borne out, not just in the theory formulated over 100 years ago, but also in the triumphant action itself of the Russian revolution. But this has not prevented continued attacks both on the author of this idea and the idea itself. The bureaucracy that arose in Russia, following the isolation of the Russian revolution and personified by the figure of Stalin, launched an attack on this theory. In effect, they borrowed the Menshevik idea of ‘stages’. First, so this theory argues, must come the capitalist stage, followed some time in the future by the ‘socialist’ stage. In the first stage, the workers’ parties are compelled to give ‘critical support’ to the capitalist parties, particularly the liberals, up to and including support for and even participation in bourgeois liberal governments. This idea, when put into practice by Stalinist parties, without exception has led to unmitigated disasters, particularly in the neo-colonial world.

The Chinese revolution of 1925-27 had a greater possibility of victory under the banner of the working class and the young Chinese Communist Party than in Russia itself less than 10 years earlier. A working class super-exploited, kept at the level of pack animals, rose in one of the most magnificent movements in history, created a mass Communist Party and drew behind it the majority of the peasants in a war against landlordism and capitalism. Even though the masses had barely-formed trade unions, they also attempted to create soviets, workers and peasants’ councils, as the organ of the revolution in a movement which sought to emulate the Russian revolution. Unfortunately, the rising Stalinist bureaucracy in Russia itself determined that the rhythm of the Chinese revolution could continue only under the Menshevik baton, this time wielded by Stalin himself. The consequence of this led to support for the ‘radical’ Kuo Min-Tang of Chiang Kai-shek, including recognising it as a sympathising section of the Communist International. This ended in disaster. The revolution was drowned in blood and on its bones rose the monstrous dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek.

This, by the way, gave a vision of what would have happened in Russia if the Mensheviks’ ideas had been followed in the revolution. It would have led, as in other situations, to an aborted revolution. General Kornilov, who was defeated in September 1917 (or a similar military figure) would have imposed a bloody dictatorship on the bones of the Russian revolution itself. This was prevented by the intervention of the Bolshevik party led by Lenin and Trotsky and their ideas. The disasters in the neo-colonial world, of Indonesia, of the setbacks in Vietnam following the Second World War and many others resulted from the Menshevik policy of ‘stages’ in the revolution, implemented by the Stalinists, in place of Trotsky’s clear ideas which were shared by Lenin in October 1917.

Yet despite this, there are some ‘Marxists’, who professed adherence in the past to the ideas of Trotsky, who now attack his theory of the permanent revolution. Others even support the idea of the ‘permanent revolution’ but in practice put forward a Menshevik position, supporting workers’ organisations participating in coalition governments with capitalist parties. In the first category of those who reject Trotsky are the two wings – which are separate organisations – of the now-disbanded Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) in Australia. They have gone to great lengths to attack Trotsky’s idea of the permanent revolution. In the process of attacking our pamphlet written in the 1970s, one of their leaders, Doug Lorimer, counterposed Lenin’s ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’ to Trotsky’s idea of the permanent revolution. To achieve this admittedly difficult task, he engaged in a policy of deception, consistent misquotation, half quotations of Trotsky’s ideas and innuendo which sought to counterpose to Trotsky Lenin’s ‘more correct’ idea of the ‘democratic dictatorship’.

He was not at all original in his endeavours as Karl Radek, once a leading member of the ‘Trotskyist’ Russian Left Opposition, after he capitulated and made his peace with Stalin, had also earlier attacked the theory of the permanent revolution. In answering him, Trotsky pointed out the Radek “did not pick up a single new argument against the theory of the permanent revolution”. He was, said Trotsky, an “epigone” (a slavish unthinking adherent) of the Stalinists. Lorimer acted in the same way. Speaking about the 1905 Russian revolution, Lorimer argued: “Lenin argued that the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution by an alliance of the workers and peasants, led by the Marxist party, would then enable the working class, in alliance with the poor, semi-proletarian majority of the peasantry, to pass uninterruptedly to the socialist revolution.”

But Lenin only occasionally mentioned about moving “uninterruptedly” towards the socialist revolution when he adhered to his “democratic dictatorship” idea. This idea of “uninterrupted” or “permanent” revolution had first been put forward by Trotsky in the book ‘Results and Prospects’. Lenin’s main idea was that the bourgeois-democratic revolution could have led to, could “stimulate” the revolution in western Europe, which would then come to the aid of the workers and peasants in Russia, and only then place ‘socialism’ on the agenda. If Lenin had consistently advanced the idea, as some like Lorimer have suggested, there would have been no fundamental differences between him and Trotsky on the revolution. But clearly Lenin envisaged a period of time, a development of society and the working class between the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” and their coming to power and socialism. There is nothing “uninterrupted” in this.

Role of the peasantry
Another legend perpetuated by the Stalinists and by some like the former DSP is that Trotsky “underestimated the peasantry”, believing that the working class alone could carry through the revolution in Russia. He was therefore against a real alliance of the peasantry with the working class. On the attempts to find a fundamental difference with Lenin, Trotsky wrote: “The devil can quote scripture to his purpose.” He admitted there were “gaps” in his original theory of the permanent revolution, published, it must be understood, in 1906. History, particularly the great experience of the February and October revolutions of 1917, filled in these “gaps” but in no way did they falsify Trotsky’s general idea but rather reinforced and strengthened it.

Look at the honesty with which Trotsky deals with the evolution of his ideas against the shameful misrepresentation of them by Stalin, later by Radek and other latter-day critics. He wrote in answer to Radek: “I do not at all want to say that my conception of the revolution follows, in all my writings, one and the same unswerving line…There are articles [of Trotsky] in which the episodic circumstances and even the episodic polemical exaggerations inevitable in struggle protrude into the foreground in violation of the strategic line. Thus, for example, articles can be found in which I express doubts about the future revolutionary role of the peasantry as a whole… and in connection with this refused to designate, especially during the imperialist war, the future Russian Revolution as ‘national,’ for I felt this designation to be ambiguous.” He goes on: “Let me also remark that Lenin – who never for a moment lost historical sight of the peasant question in all its gigantic historical magnitude and from whom we all learnt this – considered it uncertain even after the February revolution whether we should succeed in tearing the peasantry away from the bourgeois and drawing it after the proletariat.”

Lorimer said much in the past about Trotsky, in his early writings, looking towards an alliance between the working class and the poor peasants rather than the “peasantry as a whole”. Lenin himself sometimes spoke in the manner that Trotsky did of the proletariat linking up with the poorer layers in the villages, etc. But in 1917 the working class in the revolution led the peasantry to complete the bourgeois-democratic revolution but did not stop there. It then passed in an “uninterrupted” fashion to begin the socialist tasks in Russia and to spreads the revolution internationally.

Fantastical schemas have been worked up by the opponents of this theory that the October revolution was not a socialist revolution but represented the victory of the bourgeois-democratic revolution through the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry”. This was separated as the “first stage” (in accordance with the ‘two-stage’ theory) from the socialist revolution which was only carried through in the summer and autumn of 1918. This is a false, mechanistic idea which seeks to artificially separate the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution from socialist tasks. It is completely inaccurate when applied to October 1917. Moreover, it would be absolutely fatal if, as in the past, it was applied to the current situation existing in many of the countries in the neo-colonial world, including Pakistan.

China and Cuba
Some, like the former DSP, even argue that the Chinese and Cuban revolutions are a vindication of the original position of Lenin of the ‘democratic revolution’, of “first the democratic phase and then the socialist”. On the contrary, these revolutions were an affirmation of the correctness of Trotsky’s permanent revolution although in a caricatured form. A social revolution did indeed take place in China and Cuba (see ‘Cuba: Socialism and Democracy’ by Peter Taaffe) but not with the soviets and workers’ democracy of the 1917 Russian revolution. In China, a Maoist/Stalinist one-party regime was established from the outset, albeit with a planned economy. In Cuba, it is true that the revolution saw elements of workers’ control but not the full workers’ democracy of Russia. This limited the attraction of both revolutions – particularly to the working class internationally – which was not the same as the mesmeric effect of the Bolshevik revolution in the ‘Ten Days that Shook the World’.

Some even argue that there can be ‘independent’ peasant parties which can come together in a coalition government with the ‘workers’ parties’ to carry through the bourgeois revolution. Some even drag in isolated quotes from Lenin in which he suggests this: “A provisional revolutionary government is necessary… [The RSDLP] emphatically declares that it is permissible in principle for Social-Democrats to participate in a provisional revolutionary government (during the period of a democratic revolution, the period of struggle for a republic).” [V.I. Lenin, Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, Chapter 2.]

Commenting on this, Trotsky conceded that Lenin did indeed formulate an idea like this. But Trotsky described this as “incredible” and, moreover, contradicting everything that Lenin stood for subsequently, including in the period of the February revolution right up to the October revolution. Lenin in his ‘Letters from Afar” condemned even the slightest ‘critical’ support for the Provisional Government and demanded total class independence, both of the Bolshevik party and the working class. Moreover, the arguments of many such as Radek in his latter-day imitators like the DSP, the very history of Russia, attests to the fact that prior to 1917 there was no stable independent peasant party or parties.

It has been suggested that the Social Revolutionaries fell into this category of independent peasant parties. But all of these organisations claiming to represent the peasantry “as a whole” and existing in relatively stable periods then flew apart, divided along class lines – the upper layers looking towards the bourgeoisie, the lower layers merging and acting with the working class – in periods of social crisis. The Social Revolutionaries in 1917 reflected this. After February 1917 they were a prop of the bourgeois coalition together with the Mensheviks and opposed giving land to the peasants. In action, they were repudiated by the majority of the peasants. The Left Social Revolutionaries who split from the SRs, it is true, shared power for a short period with the Bolsheviks after the October revolution. They occupied a minority position compared to the Bolsheviks, which was not clearly envisaged in Lenin’s original idea of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. Trotsky, from the beginning, in his theory argued that the working class would dominate and lead the peasantry. Subsequently, the Left SRs separated from the government, which itself was a reflection of the growing class conflict at their base amongst the peasantry as well as an indication of their inchoate, middle-class character.

Pakistan and the permanent revolution today
What is the relevance of this to Pakistan and the neo-colonial world today? Firstly, where the mistaken ideas of Menshevism – the two-stage theory of the revolution – have been put into practice, it has resulted in catastrophe for every mass movement fighting for power. Secondly, the bourgeois-democratic revolution remains to be completed in Pakistan. The fact that feudal and semi-feudal relations dominate the countryside and, in a sense, the whole of society is something that is almost taken for granted by the working masses of Pakistan. There is no other country – even in the neo-colonial world – which demonstrates more the intractability, the impossibility, of the bourgeois solving the accumulated problems of their regime. Very few other countries have such a concentration of wealth in the hands of a feudal/semi-feudal ruling class of landlords and capitalists as does Pakistan. Twenty families, as is commonly understood by the mass of the Pakistani population, dominate society. The main political parties, the Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) led by Asif Zardari, the Pakistan Muslim League (PML) of Nawaz Sharif, the army and the state machine, the overwhelming majority of large industrial and commercial combines and companies: all are dominated by this very narrow super-rich ruling class.

However, an additional special feature of feudal and semi-feudal Pakistan is the domination of the army, which has held a controlling hand right from the state’s inception over 60 years ago. It is an extreme example of the corrupt ‘crony capitalism’ which blights the ruling classes in the neo-colonial world and increasingly in the ‘developed’ world too. In 2007, a book demonstrating the colossal private business interests of the Pakistani military, ‘Military Incorporated’, was written by Dr Ayesha Siddiqua. She claimed that this internal military ‘empire’ could be worth as much as £10 billion. Officers run secret industrial conglomerates, manufacturing everything from corn flakes to cement and actually own 12 million acres of public land. The generals have ruled Pakistan directly for more than 30 of the 62 years since independence in 1947. They still control the government, despite the existence of ‘civilian rule’ in the last three years. There has not been one day of ‘peace’ in the country since then, highlighted by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the leader of the PPP, the catastrophe of Swat Valley – hard on the heels of the ‘Talibanisation’ of parts of Pakistan – and now the monstrous ‘suicide bombings’, which plague not just Afghanistan but Pakistan as well, even affecting the urban centres such as Lahore.

There is a false impression – particularly from abroad – that Pakistan, following Afghanistan, is in the unstoppable grip of the right-wing Islamic fundamentalists. Yet, as the Socialist Movement Pakistan (SMP) has pointed out, the fundamentalists have never had mass support up to now. Moreover, the mass, indiscriminate bombing campaign of the Taliban and other murderous terrorists is calculated to alienate the masses even further. At the same time, the indiscriminate counter-terrorism of sections of the Pakistani state and American imperialism armed with its ‘drones’ raining death from the sky can enrage the population and could drive them, at least temporarily, into the arms of the Taliban. However, the Taliban’s murderous rule in Swat, after the Pakistani state had negotiated a truce and withdrawn, was so vicious that the local population rose up against them. They had met with terrible repression from the Taliban. This led to the intervention of the army and a new pacification campaign against the Taliban, which in effect ripped up their previous agreement, signed only a matter of months before. This underlines the highly unstable, catastrophic position that is developing in Pakistan. In fact, so linked together is Afghanistan with Pakistan that they are now referred to as ‘AfPak’ by observers.

One thing is clear; the Pakistani army tops will never tamely adhere to imperialism’s plans in Afghanistan so long as there is no agreement between India and Pakistan, involving the issue of Kashmir. The Pakistani military considers Kashmir as part of its ‘hinterland’, a source of pressure on and a ‘buffer’ against India. Commenting on this, David Gardner wrote in the Financial Times: “Notwithstanding the offensive against the Pakistan Taliban in South Waziristan, the Pakistani military’s mindset has not fundamentally changed. They do not simply regard the jihadis as a greater security threat than India.” He goes on: “The army would need at least three times the troop strength it has deployed to take and hold South Waziristan. This operation looks more like an attempt to punish the Pakistan Taliban for straying off the reservation”! Compelled by its increased effectiveness, the army has recently been forced to go after the Pakistani Taliban, whereas it previously tolerated the Punjabi jihadis, Laskhar-i-Janghvi. Moreover it still supports and uses against India the original Kashmiri-orientated jihadi group, Laskhar-i-Taiba, thought to be behind November 2008’s bloody assault on Mumbai. Again, Gardner states: “The group’s mastermind, Hafiz Saeed, has a revolving door relationship with Pakistani jails.”

Pakistan, in effect, holds down half a million Indian troops in the valley of Kashmir with just a few thousand jihadis. Its support for the Afghan jihadis is based on the same reasoning, as a counter-weight – amongst other things – against India. India, for its part, is suspected of abetting insurgents in Pakistani Baluchistan. A top general commented: “Definitely we want Afghanistan to be the strategic depth of Pakistan.”

The national question in Pakistan
At the same time, the military has not given up hope of stepping in and once more openly seizing the reins of power in Pakistan. To this end, it has conducted a systematic unauthorised campaign of intervention in the political and judicial processes. Moreover, it has brutally repressed and ‘disappeared’ hundreds of its opponents in the rebellious state of Baluchistan. As Khalid Bhatti pointed out on the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) website in November 2009, the uprising in Baluchistan is more serious than that in the tribal areas. Although in the latter the Pakistani state has lost control to the Taliban, there is not a national opposition as such to the Pakistani state. Things stand differently in Baluchistan, which only adhered to the Pakistani ‘federation’ in 1969. As Khalid pointed out: “The majority of the people do not have any positive feelings towards the state. More and more young Baluchi people are taking up the armed struggle. The nationalist insurgency not only continues, but is expanding into more areas of the province.”

There are now numerous Baluchi armed insurgent groups fighting the Pakistani army. Unfortunately, ‘targeted killings’ have also taken place against non-Baluchis with three thousand non-Baluchi people losing their lives with thousands fleeing the province for fear of meeting a similar fate. By one estimate, 50,000 non-Baluchi families have so far emigrated from Baluchistan and thousands more have applied for transfers out of the region. The university remained closed for more than three months, there is growing sentiment for separation from Pakistan, with Baluchi nationalists claiming: “We want an independent Baluchistan as it was before 1948, when it was annexed by Pakistan through military force.” These sentiments are particularly strong amongst youth, with university students in the lead, and, as a symptom of the depth of the movement, with women playing a prominent role.

The Pakistan regime, however, is prepared to wade through as much blood as is necessary to hold onto this strategically important province. It is important not just for Pakistan but for all the regional powers, with the jockeying for influence by the US, China, Iran and Afghanistan with even the ‘footprint’ of India present in the area. It is important for its rich natural resources of energy, natural gas and minerals, for its fishing and also for the strategic importance of Gawadar, the newly-built port overlooking the Straits of Hormuz, at the entrance to the Persian Gulf and, therefore, a vital stopping-off point for naval vessels in the area. China, in particular, sees this facility as vital for its interests and is the reason why it contributed the lion’s share of the capital and labour to build the port.

Yet Baluchistan is just the most extreme expression of the brewing national discontent in the non-Punjabi provinces which make up the ‘federation’. Even in Sind, resentment at ‘Punjabi domination’ – in effect, the control exercised by the landlord-capitalists of the Punjab, especially in the army – is fuelled by the grinding and growing poverty throughout Sind and Pakistan as a whole. The national question forms a crucial aspect of Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution. Without Lenin’s position on the national question – defended and added to by Trotsky’s analysis of this issue in many countries and many situations – the Russian revolution would have been impossible. That is a thousand times more the case today, especially in the neo-colonial world and particularly given the multinational character of Pakistan.

Yet, unbelievably, the basic demand for the right of self-determination of the oppressed nationalities of Pakistan is, in practice, rejected by the alleged ‘Trotskyists’ in the present crisis-riven ‘Class Struggle’ tendency in Pakistan. Only the SMP has pursued a consistent, principled and sensitive position on this issue. It stands, as Lenin and Trotsky did, for the rights of all oppressed peoples, for equality and against discrimination on racial, ethnic, religious or national lines. This does not mean advocating the right of self-determination, including the right to secede, without taking into account the mood of the masses. It is the right of peoples in the distinct national areas of Pakistan outside of Punjab, and even in Punjab itself, to choose their own path.

The ideal position from the standpoint of the workers’ movement in Pakistan would be a socialist confederation. This would provide full rights of autonomy, allow all legitimate national rights, down to the elimination of the slightest expression of nationalism or national superiority of one ethnic or national group over another. However, if oppressed nationalities wished to separate from even a democratic workers’ state, then the workers’ movement must accept that, as Lenin consistently argued and, in effect, carried out in the case of Finland in 1918. ‘Class Struggle’, led up to now internationally by the Alan Woods group, has consistently opposed such a policy in Pakistan. This has alienated them from some of the best fighters and leaders of the oppressed workers and peasants in the non-Punjabi parts of the country, many of whom have consequently gravitated in the direction of the SMP.

Crisis in the International Marxist Tendency
At the same time, they have a totally false position of sticking to the so-called ‘traditional organisations of the working class’ – without taking into account the concrete circumstances as to whether these organisations still represent the working masses. This policy now lies in ruins as a big split has developed in the Woods ‘International’, the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), on the consequences of this amongst other issues. It has had disastrous consequences for their organisation in Pakistan, as shown by the voluminous documentation detailing the bureaucratic methods of the Woods group, which split from the CWI in 1991.

Very few class-conscious workers now entertain any illusions that the PPP – led by ‘Mr Fifty Per Cent’ Asif Zardari – remotely represents in practice the working masses and the poor farmers of Pakistan. It is flooded out with the influence of the feudals, both in the towns and the rural areas. It is a party which has opposed strikes, called for and tried to organise strike-breaking, of the telecoms workers, for instance. The position of the PPP from what it was under its founder Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a ‘populist’ party capable of responding to the demands of the masses, has long gone. Therefore the same task is posed in Pakistan, as in other countries throughout the world, the development of a new mass party of the Pakistani workers and peasants, which the SMP has consistently argued for. The Woods group – which its leaders boasted was immune from the processes of ‘splits’ that allegedly condemned other organisations to ‘marginal’ influence in the workers’ movement – is seriously divided.

Ironically, it is on the very issues which formed the main ‘political’ reasons for their break from the CWI in 1992. Then it was the alleged existence of a ‘clique’ at the ‘top of the CWI’. This was rejected by 93% of the members of the British organisation and also by a majority of the CWI. Yet this is the same charge, in effect, now levelled against Alan Woods and his circle. There was absolutely no substance in this charge made by Woods and Co in 1992 about the CWI and its internal methods. The proof of this lies in the subsequent development of the national sections of the CWI with independent and thinking leaderships, capable of responding to the concrete circumstances in each country, which collaborates internationally but acts without waiting for ‘instructions’ from an international centre. The CWI operates on the basis of democratic centralism with full rights for all its members and sections with, in fact, a greater emphasis at this stage on the need for discussion and debate rather than the formal aspects of centralism.

The present split in the IMT has been kept under wraps – hidden from some of their members – up to the present time of writing. Yet all the political disputes in the CWI on a number of issues in the 1990s and the ‘noughties’ were public discussions, and documents were made public while the discussion was going on. Current debates are publically aired, for instance, in our journal ‘Socialism Today’ on such issues as China. This is done in order to allow all workers to see and, if needs be, to participate in the discussion of vital issues. Nothing like these democratic discussions takes place in the IMT.

An opposite picture is presented of the IMT, its internal life, its ideas and especially of its leadership in the incredible documents emanating from Pakistan, Spain and others who have fallen out with Woods and his closest circle. The Pakistani ‘dissidents’ around Manzoor Khan – the former PPP MP – paint a tragic picture of where Ted Grant and Alan Woods’s false position on the dogmatic insistence on undeviating work in the PPP and the ex-workers’ parties can lead. Manzoor justifies his opposition – on behalf of the PPP leadership – to strikes in Pakistan by wanting to remain in the PPP “at all costs”. Woods objected to this and promptly expelled Manzoor and his supporters. But a similar approach to that of Manzoor in Pakistan was adopted by Grant and Woods in Britain over our Militant MPs’ stand against the poll tax in 1991-92. We, the leadership and overwhelming majority of Militant (now the Socialist Party), stated that Terry Fields and Dave Nellist (our two MPs) could not pay the poll tax. This was because they and we had successfully urged millions of workers not to pay it and, faced with a similar situation, we declared they should take a similar principled stand. Grant and Woods argued that the MPs should pay as a means of staying inside the Labour Party!

Socialists were ‘dead’ outside of this ‘traditional organisation’, they argued, much as they had miseducated Manzoor and others in ‘Class Struggle’ in continued work in the PPP. We would have been ‘politically dead’ if the MPs and we had followed their advice. The Labour Party has since degenerated like the PPP into a bourgeois formation. Grant and Co were trapped in a false outmoded perception: that all political life of the working class was restricted to the Labour Party; to go outside meant ‘going over a cliff’. What is the result of this? They are insignificant in Britain while the Socialist Party has grown in numbers and influence. The same applies on an international scale with the IMT losing influence in many countries with Woods increasingly reduced to the role of a ‘benevolent advisor’ to Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. They reacted to the opportunist and indefensible actions of Manzoor – which was but the logical conclusion of their own ossified position on the ‘traditional organisations – by expelling him!

There are still sincere Marxists and Trotskyists within its ranks that we hope will cut through the thicket of lies and misrepresentations that have been particularly levelled by Alan Woods and his leading organising group against the CWI, its organisations, its leadership and its policies. A conscientious examination of the ideas of the CWI will, it is hoped, lead the best of these comrades to re-examine their past policies, and those of the CWI’s, and hopefully find a path back to a consistent Trotskyist position.

Socialist Movement Pakistan and the way forward for the masses
Genuine Trotskyism is destined to play a key role in the forthcoming battles of the Pakistani working class. And a vital aspect in the political armoury of the forces that will develop is the ideas and methods of Leon Trotsky, particularly his brilliant anticipation of the character of the revolution in the neo-colonial world, represented by the ideas of the permanent revolution, as outlined in this tremendous book. Despite the terrorism, the nationalism and ethnic divisions, the potential power of the Pakistani working class has also been visible in the number of strikes, mass demonstrations – including those in Baluchistan, of workers of all ethnic backgrounds and all religions – who march together in defence of workers’ organisations and their rights. The future of Pakistan is not in the hands of the mindless right-wing jihadis nor of American imperialism, nor of sectarian groupings but the mighty force of the Pakistani working class organised on socialist lines. The best hope for achieving this is in the ideas and methods of Leon Trotsky married to the contemporary analysis and programme of the Socialist Movement Pakistan.

The capitalist press speculates about another attempt of the military to seize power from the discredited ‘democratic’ politicians. But the alternative of Nawaz Sharif to that of the Zardari-dominated PPP is no real alternative at all. Nor is a coup – perhaps this time led by ‘colonels’ coming from a fundamentalist background – capable of offering a solution to the problems of Pakistan and the region. On the contrary, it conjures up a nightmare scenario of a fundamentalist or fundamentalist-backed regime, armed this time with nuclear weapons. This development, if it was to come about, would in no way represent the people of Pakistan because the fundamentalists have never received more than 10-15% of the vote in elections. Only a democratic and socialist road offers liberation from the nightmare of landlordism and capitalism for the long-suffering Pakistani masses. This book can help lay the basis for the emergence of a force that can lead them in this direction.