Comrades, I do not wish to criticize the main content of Comrade David Masondo's speech. In general, in terms of South African problems, the speech was fine -- though others might find fault here and there.
What however was wrong and dangerous in his speech was the attitude towards the Soviet Union which was simplistic, divisive and quite simply, Trotskyist in content. Firstly, the Soviet Union did not 'collapse'. There was counter-revolution: let us not use the language of the enemy. The source of the counter-revolution was indeed the bureaucratic strata which Comrade Masondo refers to, led by the social-traitor Gorbachev and the alcoholic Yeltsin. However, the USSR was a socialist state to the end, and its citizens together with those of the rest of Eastern Europe are discovering that whatever the errors of the communists, life is not so great under capitalism, and recent opinion polls throughout eastern Europe are revealing that most of the people there believe that they were better off before the counter-revolution. (See a number of articles in the 21stcenturysocialism.com website.) Comrade Stalin, in his reply to the Congress debate in 1937, had this to say: "In the mythology of the ancient Greeks there is the celebrated hero Antaeus who, so the legend goes, was the son of Poseidon, god of the seas, and Gaea, goddess of the earth. Antaeus was particularly attached to his mother who gave birth to him, suckled him and reared him. There was not a hero whom this Antaeus did not vanquish. He was regarded as an invincible hero, Wherein lay his strength? It lay in the fact that every time he was hard pressed in the fight against his adversary he touched the earth, his mother, who gave birth to him and suckled him, and that gave him new strength. "But he had a vulnerable spot - the danger of being detached from the earth in some way or other. His enemies took this into account and watched for it. "One day an enemy appeared who took advantage of this vulnerable spot and vanquished Antaeus. This was Hercules. How did Hercules vanquish Antaeus? He lifted him off the ground, kept him suspended, prevented him from touching the ground and throttled him. "I think that the Bolsheviks remind us of the hero of Greek mythology, Antaeus. They, like Antaeus, are strong because they maintain connection with their mother, the masses who gave birth to them, suckled them and reared them. And as long as they maintain connection with their mother, with the people, they have every chance of remaining invincible." At that time, almost the whole Soviet people was involved and supported reconstruction of the Soviet economy along socialist lines. It was Trotsky who declared the impossibility of building socialism in one country -- despite the fact that revolution in the rest of Europe following the First Wold War had failed. Yes, Comrade Trotsky played a major organizational role in the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks and in the formation of the Red Army and its Civil War victory. Trotsky, however was not really a Bolshevik. Following the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903, in which the party split into a Bolshevik faction led by Lenin and a Menshevik faction led by Martov, Trotsky took an intermediate position which leaned towards the Mensheviks. He only joined the Bolsheviks in June 1917, a few months before the October Revolution. Stalin., on the other hand, not only became a Bolshevik from the beginning, but never went into exile, leaving the country only for conferences, and becoming one of the most -- if not the most -- important Bolshevik organizers inside the Russian Empire. A further word about Trotskyists. When talking about Comrade Trotsky himself, we have to recognize that despite his faults, he was a revolutionary who played an important part in the Russian Revolution, mainly between 1917 and 1923. Trotskyists, on the other are hand are people purporting to follow Trotsky, who spend a lot of time criticizing genuine revolutionaries and revolutionary movements whilst bickering amongst themselves. Their '4th International' became an instant failure, dividing into multiple fragments. Wherever, they obtain a foothold, they breed division and failure. As people in South Africa have experienced, the period of revolutionary ferment and uprising is far easier to deal with than the building of the economy -- despite the physical danger during the revolution. Building the economy is a difficult and complex task. However, in the USSR , in an country ravaged by the First World War, the Civil War and the Wars of Intervention, a period from 1914-1922; under Comrade Stalin's leadership, the Soviet people were able to build the basics of a socialist economy without any outside assistance. It was an economy which by the Battle of Kursk in 1943, the biggest tank battle in history, the Soviets were able to build bigger and better tanks than Germany, the industrially most advanced country in Europe, using their own iron ore smelted by their own coal and built to their own designs. The following excerpts from Comrade Masondo's speech: "In the context of scarcity a new stratum took responsibility for directing production from above and redistributing worker-produced surplus. This stratum developed new material interests associated with being part of the state. Consequently, it consciously or unconsciously and increasingly became antagonistic to a decimated working class. The rise and dominance of this stratum was also enabled with the decimation of the party militants who had the memories and political practice of the pre-revolution Bolshevik traditions." and "One lesson we should draw from the USSR is that it is possible for the Party to degenerate into an anti-working class bureaucratic machine." These statements are a slur on the Soviet working-class LEAD BY THE COMMUNIST PARTY which built the Soviet Union, destroyed Hitler, supported the Chinese Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, the Vietnamese Revolution and war its against the United States and financed the national liberation movements in Africa, particularly the ANC. That the party became bureaucratic: yes. That it became divorced from the masses: yes. That it became an anti-working-class machine. NEVER. It was the Soviet Union which trained Comrades Moses Kotane and JB Marks, providing a leadership which was able to change the Communist Party of South Africa, a small sect into the SACP, the vanguard of the proletariat and the spearhead of the national liberation struggle in South Africa. That the bureaucratic elite steadily increased their privileges during the existence of the Soviet Union is true. But they had to overthrow the socialist system in order to obtain the full power that they wanted and to become a capitalist class. The assertion that the Bolshevik Party was only alright before the revolution is a petit-bourgeois lie, it was during and after the revolution that the party truly became the property of the working-clas and not of mainly revolutionary intellectuals. even the excesses which DID take place under Stalin's leadership, were often carried out by members of the working-class made ruthless by the necessities of the struggle. By the way, Comrade Che Guevara was one who mentioned this -- wondering if he, coming from a bourgeois background he might die during the fury of revolution. I believe that if Comrade Lenin had lived, the excesses that occurred under Stalin's leadership would have been less. But remember, even Lenin complained in the early days of the revolution that corrupt people were being imprisoned when they should have been shot. Trotsky, also, was known for his ruthlessness on a number of occasions. As for the 'Old Bolsheviks', recent detailed research is leaning towards a link between foreign, particularly German intelligence, and some of the 'Old Bolsheviks' seem to have had links with foreign, in particular German intelligence. The full truth is submerged by people who have a mission to defend either Stalin or Trotsky. What is true, is that though it is difficult to justify the extent to which the state machinery repressed its enemies, and that sometimes, even mild criticism could make one an enemy -- the majority of the Soviet people enthusiastically supported Stalin and the party, as is attested by numerous people who saw or even participated in socialist construction. Simon Korner, in his recent article about King Edward VIII, "Britain's Nazi King", (21stcenturysocialism.com), has this to say: In Russia, the Moscow trials uncovered plotting among the highest echelons of the ruling Communist Party, a fact verified by Churchill in his diaries, who noted that the then Czech president Benes, “became aware that communications were passing through the Soviet Embassy in Prague between important personages in Russia and the German Government. This was part of the so-called military and Old-Guard-Communist conspiracy to overthrow Stalin and introduce a new regime based on a pro-German policy. President Benes lost no time in communicating all he could find to Stalin. Thereafter there followed the merciless, but perhaps not needless, military and political purge in Soviet Russia, and the series of trials in January 1937… The Russian army was purged of its pro-German elements…” The SACP is beginning to recover the Internationalism and Pan-Africanism it was known for in the past. The hosting of the African Left Network Forum and the 12th International Meeting of Communist and Left Parties is testimony to this. The fact that the YCLSA could not come up with a resolution on AFRICOM, the greatest threat to the African Continent since the end of colonialism, coupled with the disgraceful attack by David Masondo on the Communist Party of the Soviet Union shows that the YCl, though indeed it may understand the internal class struggle, has little understanding of what is meant by Proletarian Internationalism. -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. 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