RE: M-TH: Bolshevism lives
Its interesting how the national question has come up as THE difficult one. Why? Because it's still unsolved, because the bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeoisie have no solutions at all nowadays, and because the oppression and exploitation of weak nations (semi-colonies and to an increasing extent re-colonies, that is colonies again in everything but name) and minorities is getting worse. All this paradoxically enough in a world in which the apartheid regime in South Africa was smashed by a revolutionary war and where the lip-service paid to women and some minorities in laws etc is much greater than ever before. Combined and uneven development. (Read Marx on the Jewish Question for the basic contradictions underlying all this.) Hi Hugh! Could you clarify what you mean by the above. Most of us have read a number of the classics. However the point is how one interprets this stuff with a programmatic and tactical answer. Which I don't think your recent line on Lesotho adequately addresses. And if we are going to have a discussion on South Africa then we should address the whole Southern cone connected to the key position that the South African proletariat will play in all this. Bob The clarification of the general position (recolonization, the increasing contradictions of combined and uneven development, etc) will come in the LIT's world document after our forthcoming congress. Hopefully the relationship between democratic mobilizations on a huge scale (ie in South Africa against the apartheid regime) and socialist revolution (in other words, the Permanent Revolution) will also be made clearer than it has been in the past. As for South Africa, get stuck in! Do you see any relationship at all between the unsolved democratic problems of these countries and the ability of the southern African proletariat to lead the masses there to socialism (ie to expropriate capital and set up workers states)?` The reference to On the Jewish Question is straightforward. Marx deals with the contradictions between the individuals in bourgeois society seen on the one hand as Citizens with all the rights, equality before the law, personal inviolability etc, and on the other as what he calls Bourgeois, in other words actors in the process of capitalist production, where the only thing that matters is a person's relationship to the means of production, either as their owner or as the owner of nothing but an individual body's labour power. On the one hand Equality, civic solidarity, etc, on the other Exploitation and degradation. Marx also deals with this in the transition in Capital from circulation to production (Capital I, Part 2, chapter 6, last three paragraphs). Cheers, Hugh --- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
Re: M-TH: Bolshevism lives
Hugh writes: Hugh's position is a very common one. Wish it was!! [Common enough among Trotskyists. You share it with most of the big groups that came out of the Usec plus the IS and its splinter Workers Power. Have you followed the Australian Green Left stuff on Kosovo?] [...] Dave! At a certain point the relations of production come into conflict with the forces of production, and some of the democratic rights rooted in bourgeois property become contradictory and come into conflict with themselves. Read "The Renegade Kautsky" by Lenin and "Terrorism and Communism" by Trotsky again before dismissing the defence of "basic democracy" like this. Only the greatest respect for the basics will give a revolutionary party and its fighters the respect and support needed to carry a revolution through to completion. Even politically warped forces like the Chinese Red Army, the Yugoslav partisans, and the Cuban and Vietnamese guerrillas won over the masses by the respect they showed for the rights of ordinary workers and poor people -- they were like fish in water. [Yes obviously thats where bourgeois democracy comes from. My point is not that it is invented by only by its recognition, but that it has to be 'recognised' in class terms. We do not fight for the democratic rights of fascists because they aim to smash workers. We do fight for democracy against reaction because it frees our hands to continue the fight etc etc] As the bourgeoisie and more and more of the petty-bourgeoisie desert any kind of democracy, the workers movement has to take up the banner of elementary rights -- but of course it doesn't stop with them. [Yes, but not willy nilly i.e. in the SU in 1991 it was wrong to bloc with Yeltsin on the basis of bourgeois democratic rights against the hardline stalinists on the grounds that they were Stalinist dictators, precisely because such a defence was to reintroduce those same forces and relations which we tried to so hard to reject].] But I think that in the case of Kosovo Hugh and not James is right. The history of Kosovo shows that there is a long-standing national antagonism between Serbs and Albanians which infects the workers and peasants. Most recently this has been exaccerbated by Milosovic under pressure from imperialism, so that several votes and referenda have expressed the wish for ethnic Albanians to secede from Serbia. In that sense the criterion of tactical expediency requires Serbs and workers in oppressor states to defend that right. Dave weakens his position by making it one of tactical expediency. It's one of principle, and much stronger than he imagines. [bourgeois principle yes which is why workers subordinate bourgeois democratic rights to the interests of workers revolution] The question of how this is tactically raised in the middle of an imperialist invasion has been much debated on this list. Hugh and most of the old IS Trotskyists say that Yugoslavia cannot defend itself in Kosovo. That position is putting a major condition on the defence of Yugoslavia. Whether we endorse self-determination for Kosovo or not, this cannot be advanced by the intervention of imperialism. So the Yugoslavian troops are justified in defending Yugoslavia in Kosovo against the KLA as well as NATO. Dave talks of Yugoslavia, but he means Serbia. Not even Montenegro is a really solid prop of the present rump federation any more, even though its population is clearly Serb. [ I use Yugoslavia to mean the FRY as it legally exists, and which sovereignty has been ignored by NATO. NATO will probably try to separate Montenegro from the FRY, again an imperialist intervention in the rump having taken out the prime cuts already.] Since Kosova is a nation of its own, there's no way that separating its fate from that of Serbia harms the revolutionary movement. The same thing goes for East Timor if Indonesia should be attacked. It's obvious that Serbia's policies have been so genocidal that the Kosovar Albanians welcome the NATO jackboot as a liberator. People have to learn from their own mistakes. Lots of workers in Croatia and other parts of the old Yugoslavia thought that dissolution and capitalism would give them the capital and progress they craved. They were credulous and gullible. But they know better now, when their wages buy them milk and bread and little else. [This is the critical question. If imperialism had not intervened in Yugslavia in the mid 80's, and if it had not imposed its will since late 1998 on Kosovo, it would be true to say that the immediate secession of Kosovo has to be supported. However, that is not the reality. Its not obvious at all that Serbia's policies have pushed most people into the arms of NATO. The extremes on both sides have been pushed forward at the expense of the moderates as a result of NATO. First by wrecking the more moderate line and UN settlement agreed by the Serbs; then imposing Rambo yeh! on a new
