Workers Vanguard No. 1017 |
8 February 2013
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Honor Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht!
German Trotskyists Say: No to Stalinophobic Bloc at “3 L’s”
Demo!
Thousands march to the Memorial to the Socialists in eastern Berlin
every January to honor Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, founders of the
Communist Party of Germany (KPD). The two great revolutionists were assassinated
in 1919 by Freikorps officers at the behest of the German Social Democratic
Party (SPD) government of Friedrich Ebert, Philipp Scheidemann and Gustav Noske
amid the suppression of the Spartakist uprising. After the death of Bolshevik
leader V.I. Lenin in January 1924, this annual demonstration commemorated the
“Three L’s.” Now organized by the Communist Platform of the Left Party along
with the former West German Stalinists, it survives the 1990 capitalist
counterrevolution in East Germany (DDR) to the consternation of the German
ruling class and anti-communists everywhere.
Each year our comrades of the Spartakist Workers Party of Germany
(SpAD) organize a contingent in the demo honoring Lenin, Luxemburg and
Liebknecht. Reprinted below is an excerpt from a supplement to the SpAD’s
newspaper Spartakist that was distributed at this year’s 10,000-strong
march. It is a reply in the negative to an Open Letter by the Revolutionary
Internationalist Organization (RIO) calling on the SpAD, as well as a coterie of
pseudo-Trotskyist organizations, to build a joint contingent in the “Three L’s”
demonstration. RIO is a split from the German Workers Power youth group
Revolution and is now affiliated with the Argentine-based Trotskyist
Faction-Fourth International (FT-CI), peddlers of nationalist “anti-imperialist
united-front” politics.
RIO sought to build its bloc after elements of youth organizations
connected to the SPD and the Left Party called for an alternative “Rosa &
Karl” demonstration in the former West Berlin. The organizers of that event,
which drew about 500 people, didn’t want to be associated with flags of the DDR
and Soviet Union, portraits of Stalin, Mao and Lenin or symbols of the Kurdish
and Palestinian national liberation movements.
Its instigators were the deceptively named “Anti-Germans”:
pro-Zionist, pro-imperialist provocateurs who purvey the Big Lie of “collective
guilt.” This convenient alibi for the German bourgeoisie that brought the Nazis
to power maintains that all Germans, including workers, are responsible for the
Holocaust and other Nazi crimes. “Anti-German” thugs have repeatedly physically
attacked leftist meetings and individuals defending the rights of the
Palestinians. They are virulently hostile to the workers movement and out to
destroy it.
Significantly, the call for the “Rosa & Karl” demonstration did
meet opposition within the social-democratic youth organizations. Several groups
defied the decision of their leaderships and instead took part in the “Three
L’s” demonstration. None of the recipients of the open letter opted to bloc with
RIO. But marching behind them was a disparate collection of social democrats and
organizations with Trotskyist pretensions, including the Workers Power group
from which RIO split. Also in tow were some Pabloites intent on building yet
another lash-up modeled on the French New Anti-Capitalist Party, who tailed
after the anti-communist campaign of the “Anti-Germans” by carrying the banner
“Neither Stalin nor Noske.”
The SpAD supplement included the January 1990 call by the
Trotskyist League of Germany (TLD) and the Spartakist Groups for the “Three L’s”
demonstration in the DDR (reprinted in WV No. 994, 20 January 2012). The
TLD and the Spartakist Groups fused soon thereafter to form the SpAD. The 1990
call vehemently condemned the SPD as the Trojan horse of counterrevolution. The
SPD used its traditional influence in the working class to push capitalist
reunification of East and West Germany. For their part, the Stalinist
predecessors of today’s Left Party, who retained great influence among workers
of the DDR, fostered illusions in the SPD and sought them out as partners,
betraying widespread sentiment among the working class to struggle for a real
socialist society. The International Communist League fought tooth and nail
against capitalist Anschluss and for revolutionary
reunification—proletarian political revolution in the East and workers
revolution in the West.
The reply of the SpAD to RIO was snapped up by demonstrators. A
youth from Dresden with a Stalinist background was surprised to learn that
Trotskyists defended the Soviet Union and still defend China and the other
bureaucratically deformed workers states. Others were happy that the SpAD had
denounced “Anti-German” maneuvers to wreck the “Three L’s” demonstration. The
SpAD explained that Trotskyism is not a left version of anti-revolutionary
social democracy but represents the revolutionary continuity of Lenin and the
Bolsheviks.
* * *
To the Revolutionary Internationalist Organization:
We received your invitation to join a “commemoration contingent”
for the Bolshevik-Leninists [the Trotskyist Left Opposition in the Soviet
Union]. We will not participate in your contingent. The call by
social-democratic youth organizations for the “Rosa & Karl” demo, which is
heavily influenced by the “Anti-Germans,” is an anti-communist provocation
poorly disguised as anti-Stalinism. Your call also capitulates to
social-democratic anti-communism. The SpAD and Spartakist Youth will take part
in the “Three L’s” demo with our own contingent, under our banner “For the
Reforging of the Fourth International!”
As revolutionary Trotskyists, we don’t agree with the positions
expressed in your Open Letter and various articles. You say not one word about
the more-than-dubious character of this “Rosa & Karl” demo, which clearly
reflects the politics of the “Anti-Germans,” who have implanted themselves in
the social-democratic youth organizations. Already at the “Three L’s” demo in
January 2012, a small group of “Anti-Germans” staged a provocation with their
banner “No, No—That’s Not Communism!” that was aimed at the contingents of
Turkish/Kurdish leftists. Later, they posted photos of these leftists on the
Internet, clearly playing into the hands of the repressive state apparatus. It
is no accident that the “Rosa & Karl” bloc has made the slogan on this
banner their main rallying cry, and the Berlin Jusos [SPD youth group] refer
positively to this “action.”
The pro-Zionist and pro-imperialist “Anti-Germans” are racists who
hate Muslims. They are inspired by the state’s reactionary “war on terror” and
have distinguished themselves with past provocations in which they beat up
leftists and liberals. They are tolerated by the reformist leaderships of the
SPD and Left Party and used as a battering ram against the left. The
“Anti-Germans” applaud the imperialists’ work: they enthuse over the imperialist
occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, are in the front line of the warmongering
against Iran, etc. These cheerleaders for George W. Bush, the butcher of the
Balkans [German chancellor Gerhard] Schröder (SPD) and Benjamin Netanyahu’s
Zionist state of Israel have no place in the workers movement and on the
left.
You concur with the “Anti-German” censorship efforts when you
comment in your 17 December Indymedia article “Social Democratic LL Demo”
[referring to the traditional march] that pictures of Stalin and Mao at the demo
are “against the wishes of the organizers.” By contrast, our solidarity is with
the Turkish/Kurdish workers and leftists, who are persecuted by the bourgeois
state here and in Turkey. Unlike the “Anti-Germans,” they are a crucial part of
the workers movement in this country and often stand in a more militant
tradition of class struggle, which is another reason that the “Anti-Germans”
target them. We Spartakists oppose censorship in the workers movement! We argue
against the reformist Stalinist politics of Turkish and other organizations—such
as the notion of building “socialism in one country” and the treacherous
popular-front policy. It is through sharp programmatic debate that
revolutionary Trotskyism can win out in political struggle.
We also reject your characterization of the Bolshevik-Leninists as
a “revolutionary current” “that opposed capitalism and Stalinism, and hence was
persecuted by capitalist and Stalinist regimes.” By disappearing Trotsky’s
programmatic demand for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union,
which in spite of its bureaucratic degeneration under Stalin remained a workers
state, you implicitly equate the bureaucratically degenerated Soviet workers
state—as well as the deformed workers states—with capitalism, spreading
reformist confusion. In the “Social Democratic LL Demo” article, you equate
capitalist regimes with workers states when writing:
“Their reason for the parallel event with the name ‘Rosa and Karl’
is that the pictures of Stalin and Mao, which are shown every year at the LL
demo...supposedly stand ‘for the failure of state socialist projects in the last
century.’ What this totally ignores is that the political balance of the Social
Democracy in the last century was no less problematic.”
Do we really need to remind you that the SPD leadership around
Ebert/Scheidemann/Noske gave the order to assassinate Liebknecht and Luxemburg?
They knew exactly what they were doing. As Noske said, “Someone has to be the
bloodhound.” The politics of the SPD leadership were not simply “problematic”
but were a key element in heading off revolution in 1918-19 and again in 1923 in
the service of the bourgeoisie [see “A Trotskyist Critique of Germany 1923 and
the Comintern,” Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 56, Spring
2001]. Social Democratic politics bear a central responsibility for the fact
that German imperialism was able to resurrect itself, almost entirely
annihilating the Jews of Europe and helping drown the world in blood for a
second time in the interimperialist Second World War.
Your reformist appetites bring you to a point where you can’t even
distinguish between the class character of capitalist rule under a
social-democratic government and that of the Soviet degenerated workers state.
So what defines your “commemoration contingent?” We think it is its closeness to
anti-communist Social Democracy, which ever since the October Revolution has
hated the Soviet Union more than its own bloody bourgeoisie. You sell the
form of your contingent as a united front, with freedom of
propaganda and criticism. But the content of your “commemoration
contingent” is totally counterposed to the purpose of the united front, which is
to unite the working class in action against the class enemy: class against
class. You bow to the anti-communism of Noske’s successors and cannot discern
where the fundamental class line is. You have this in common with the other
pseudo-Trotskyist organizations that you invited to join your “commemoration
contingent.”
When the question was one of proletarian political revolution or
capitalist counterrevolution, all these organizations chose the side of
counterrevolution—starting with the rise of Solidarność in Poland, followed by
the DDR in 1989-90 and the Soviet Union in 1991-92. Thus, in the winter of 1990
the SAV [Socialist Alternative, part of Peter Taaffe’s Committee for a Workers’
International] in the DDR demanded, “SPD, go on the offensive” and in 1991 the
international of the GAM/Workers Power, your former mother organization, was
literally on Yeltsin’s barricades with the counterrevolutionary rabble. The
dubious BSA (today PSG [Party for Social Equality]) could be found in the front
lines of the anti-Stasi witchhunters alongside the SPD and the petty-bourgeois
Citizens’ Movement, which fused with the Greens. The deeply divided “United
Secretariat,” whose members at the time were in the VSP, liquidated into the
United Left, which for its part joined a short-lived electoral alliance with the
pastors of the SDP (SPD offshoot in the DDR) and, later, a section of the
[Christian Democrat] CDU. Only the SpAD and our comrades of the International
Communist League fought to defend the Soviet Union and the deformed workers
states against the counterrevolutionary machinations of Solidarność, the SPD in
the DDR and Yeltsin, and to sweep away the Stalinist bureaucracy through a
proletarian political revolution.
Our tradition is that of the then-revolutionary Trotskyist
Socialist Workers Party in the U.S., which sent the following telegram to Stalin
in 1941, shortly after the attack on the Soviet Union by fascist Germany:
“Trotskyists all over the world, now as always, are solidly for
the defense of the Soviet Union. In this hour of grave danger to the
achievements of the October revolution, we demand that you release all
Trotskyist and other pro-Soviet political prisoners who are now in jails and in
concentration camps, to enable them to take their proper place in the front
ranks of the defenders of the Soviet Union.”
Likewise, today we Trotskyists of the ICL stand for the military
defense of the remaining deformed workers states—Cuba, China, Vietnam, North
Korea and Laos, and for proletarian political revolution to bring down the
Stalinist bureaucracies, which endanger the defense of these countries with
their pursuit of “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism.
In the DDR, the SPD was the Trojan horse of capitalist
counterrevolution. It is necessary to break politically with social-democratic
reformism, whether it take the form of the SPD or of the Left Party. The
pseudo-Trotskyists, including your organization, are a political obstacle to
this aim. Reforge the Fourth International!
