[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >>My comments about Tariq's Entryism when he was in an explicitly Trotskyist phase, are relevant in this manner: He eschews any but the apparently easiest cosying up to the most shameless forces. Again: It was this shameless opportunism, that assisted [I do of course realise there were other objective forces moving to this end - One can hardly blame the little old Tariqian-IMG for all that followed alone!] the forces of Thatcher, & then Blair.
An older generation of activists more overtly influenced by (and un-ashamed to say so) of Lenin had a word for this type of behaviour: "opportunism". You will call all this un-adulterated 'Stalinism.'<<
---
I can't agree with this. Whatever the faults of the kind of British Trotskyism that Tariq Ali was involved with, reformism/opportunism was not included. This was basically an ultraleft current that despised the Labor Party. In fact, many of the leaders of the IMG had made a conscious decision to break with the entryism of the Militant tendency led by Ted Grant and Alan Woods. Of course, when Tariq and the rest of the NLR posse discovered that revolution was not on the agenda, they moved on with their lives.
With respect to Stalinism, it is a fact that the ABB phenomenon is in that tradition. Multiclass alliances, especially on the electoral front, were alien to the communist movement. Marx, Engels, Lenin et al never supported bourgeois candidates. The whole purpose of the Critique of the Gotha Programme was to challenge a "socialist" current in Germany that illusions in the "progressive" Kaiser. What they never understood is that all the social legislation--including the first social security laws in Europe--was designed to bind the workers to the bosses in anticipation of Germany's imperial expansionist drive.
Social democracy, of course, was always involved with multiclass alliances. That was one of the reasons that Lenin broke with the Second International. The spectacle of socialist parliamentarians voting for war credits in 1914 convinced him that a new movement was necessary.
Until the mid 1930s, the Stalinist dominated Comintern also eschewed multiclass alliances. It was only after the "3rd period" disaster that it reversed course, but the reversal bent the stick too far in the other direction. You ended up with Popular Fronts everywhere, whose logic is identical to what you read in the CPUSA newspaper and the Nation Magazine. In the first instance, you are getting Stalinism without Stalin. In the second, you are getting social democracy without the institutional base of the trade unions. In either case, it has nothing to do with what Karl Marx stood for.
"... Even where there is no prospect of achieving their election the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention. They must not be led astray by the empty phrases of the democrats, who will maintain that the workers' candidates will split the democratic party and offer the forces of reaction the chance of victory. All such talk means, in the final analysis, that the proletariat is to be swindled. The progress which the proletarian party will make by operating independently in this way is infinitely more important than the disadvantages resulting from the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body."
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Address Of The Central Authority To The (Communist) League, March 1850 Collected Works, Vol. 10, p. 284
-- Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
