A response to the SWP leadership: Is there a capitalist remedy for underdevelopment?

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A central element of the Socialist Workers Party's (SWP) rejection of its revolutionary heritage is its discarding of Leon Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution.

This theory, first devised for Russia in 1905, holds that in the underdeveloped countries of the 20th century, the bourgeois-democratic tasks-national liberation, land reform, political democracy, etc.—can be fully won only through the course of an anticapitalist revolution that establishes a dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasantry.

Trotsky further held that such a revolution would not be secure, much less realize its full social potential, unless it was aided by successful socialist revolutions in the advanced capitalist countries. In fact, the Trotskyist movement analyzed the bureaucratization of the Soviet Union as the result—in the last analysis-of the failure of the post-World War I proletarian revolutions in Western Europe.

Beginning in 1982, the leadership of the SWP substituted for this concept Lenin's pre-1917 theory of the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry," ostensibly to compensate for Trotsky's alleged "underestimation" of the revolutionary potential of the peasantry. In SWP parlance, a "workers' and farmers' government" was the concretization of the "democratic dictatorship" in our epoch.

Despite the terminological dispute between "proletarian dictatorship" and "democratic dictatorship," a workers' and farmers' government was, in the SWP's lexicon, an explicitly anticapitalist formation. Thus the SWP retained a tenuous link to its revolutionary-Marxist past.

But that link began to be severed this summer.

A prolonged antifeudal stage?

In August 1983, a military coup in the extremely backward West African country of Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta) brought to power a group of radical anti-imperialist military officers.

The new government began mobilizing the populace of this impoverished land against imperialism. It began a land reform.

Shortly thereafter, glowing articles appeared in the SWP press.

In the discussion period leading up to the August 1985 SWP convention, a party member proposed that Burkina Faso be labeled a workers' and farmers' government. SWP leaders Doug Jenness and Steve Clark disagreed, saying that while the measures taken by the Burkinabe government were progressive, they were not anticapitalist.

If the sole issue was merely the label to be placed on the government of Burkina Faso, there would be no reason for concern. Jenness and Clark, however, used the debate to rationalize the government's procapitalist policies and to draw sweeping SOCIALIST ACTION conclusions bearing on revolutionary strategy for large portions of the globe. In their response they stated:

"An anticapitalist revolution is not on the agenda in a number of countries in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. This is because of the low level of capitalist development in these countries, the small size and weight of the working class, and the predominance of precapitalist and prefeudal social relations in the countryside. " [Discussion Bulletin, v. 40, p. 11, emphasis in original.

Such ints € 220 Soldiers in Gorom-Gorom, Burkina Faso Indeed, the Mensheviks used them to prove that the socialist revolution in Russia was impossible. Their view was that a capitalist stage was necessary in Russia in order to develop a working class sufficient for an anticapitalist revolution.

Lenin's 1917 April Theses were a polemic against similar arguments within his own party which were raised to justify not aiming for the seizure of power.

In our era, the Stalinized Communist parties used the same reasoning to support the "progressive bourgeoisie" in their own countries against imperialism and precapitalist survivals.

A similar logic was utilized by the petty-bourgeois military officers in Mali and Egypt, who established "statecapitalist" regimes. Middle-class politicians like Sekou Toure in Guinea and Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana used the same arguments to theorize how their "anti-imperialist" revolutions were neither capitalist nor socialist.

Although some temporary gains were won by the exploited of these countries, in all cases these nations remained entrapped within capitalist bounds and thus in the web of imperialism.

At the beginning of the century, imperialism united the world under its domination. This is signified by the fact that the economies of all the semi-colonial and underdeveloped capitalist states remain at the whim of the world market.

This is especially true for the most underdeveloped countries countries whose economies depend on the export earnings of two or three agricultural or mineral products subject to volatile price fluctuations determined in New York, Paris, London, or Tokyo.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, imperialism created a comprador bourgeoisie based on the indigenous middle-class (traders) and allied to precapitalist ruling strata. Imperialism, acting through its comprador agents, began destroySocialist Action/Gas Grecor ing the native communal economy in order to convert more and more acreage for the production of cash crops destined for the world market.

In doing this, imperialism commited the African masses to famine, misery, and underdevelopment while creating a mining and agricultural working class.

Revolutions must attack capitalism Under these circumstances, in the attempted to develop the productive forces of their societies using the vehicle of "state capitalism. " Often this was done under the guise of "African socialism. " Thus the state became the main vehicle for the attempted capitalist development of the countrythrough state ownership of industry and the financial system.

But such attempts-in Mali, Guinea, Egypt, and now in Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, and Benin— were based on a demobilized and repressed working class. The economies, moreover, remained fundamentally subject to the law of value rather than the logic of the plan.

In this manner, the state sector became the breeding ground for new capitalist layers arising out of the military and state bureaucracy. In Egypt nationalized enterprises has been transferred to this new bourgeoisie. This is the price of an anti-imperialist revolution that is not also anticapitalist.

"Bolshevik" orthodoxy

SWP leaders Jenness and Clark try to avoid these conclusions by insisting that even in countries like Burkina Faso, "the alliance of exploited producers-the peasants, other rural toilers, and urban workers" would be the heart of the "antifeudal" revolution'.

They compare Burkina Faso to the Russia of the early 20th century, wherein Lenin raised the "democratic dictatorship" slogan as the "class content of a victorious revolution. "

"Moreover," they continue, "the 'victorious revolution' referred to by Lenin was not the anticapitalist revolution in Russia, but the democratic revolution against tsarism and landlordism, and for a democratic republic, a radical agrarian reform, and labor rights" (p. 12, emphasis in original).

Jenness and Clark scholastically reason that while social progress can come only if led by an alliance of the toilers, the aim of that alliance (and of the "popular revolutionary dictatorship" it brings to power) isn't necessarily anticapitalist. Thus a "workers' and farmers' government," by definition anticapitalist, is only one variety of "popular revolutionary dictatorships.

The reference to Lenin's thinking before 1917 is, of course, true. However, our born-again Leninists forget that when Lenin was advocating the democratic dictatorship, he accepted the political and economic consequences of the slogan:

"The whole content of the revolutionary mass struggle at the present stage is whether Russia is to be a Junker-bourgeois state (as Stolypin and the Cadets desire), or a peasant-bourgeois state (as the peasants and workers desire).

"One cannot take part in such a revolution without supporting one section of the bourgeoisie, one type of bourgeois evolution against the other. Owing to objective economic choices, there is not and cannot be any other 'choice' for us in this revolution than between a bourgeois-centralized republic of peasantfarmers and a bourgeois-centralized monarchy of Junker-landlords... I"The Agrarian Programme of Social Democracy," Collected Works, v.

13, p. 217, emphasis added].

Lenin reached this conclusion under the influence of George Plekhanov, a Menshevik and the father of Russian Marxism. Applying a mechanical materialist approach to social development, Plekhanov believed that the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution had to be completed and capitalism developed, before socialism and an anticapitalist revolution could be put on the agenda.

The lesson of 191 It was only in 1917 that the chaos caused by World War I convinced Lenin that only socialist solutions could solve Russia's bourgeois-democratic problems. Thus in 1921 he concluded:

"We said-and proved it by deeds-that bourgeois-democratic reforms are a by-product of the socialist revolution....The first develops into the second.

The second, in passing, solves the problems of the first. Struggle, and struggle alone, decides how far the second succeeds in (continued on page 9)

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(continued from page outgrowing the first" ["Fourth Anniversary of the October Revolution," Collected Works, v. 33, p.

54, emphasis added).

The Communist International drew similar conclusions for the underdeveloped countries in general. At the 1920 Congress of the Peoples of the East, Gregory Zinoviev, chairman of the Comintern, stated:

"For a long time the view existed that, first of all, each country must pass through the capitalist stage, creating big factories and large-scale factory owners... and only then could there be any question of socialism. We now think that this is not sO.

"From the moment that even just one country has broken away from the chain of capitalism, as Russia has done, from the moment that the workers have put the question of the proletarian revolution on the agenda, from that moment we can say that in China, India, Turkey, and Armenia it is possible and necessary to begin fighting directly for a Soviet system"

[Baku: Congress of the Peoples of the East, p. 31].

Internationalism abandoned

The main error in the Jenness-Clark schema is that they see underdeveloped countries like Burkina Faso in isolation. Of course when looked at alone, socialism is not on the agenda in Burkina Faso-nor for that matter in Grenada, Laos, and even Nicaragua.

In answer to this objection, the Comintern in 1922 pointed out:

"The workers in the East have to ally with the proletariat of the advanced countries, not only in the interests of their common struggle against imperialism, but because only the victorious proletariat of the advanced countries Market in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso will give them disinterested aid in the development of their productive forces.

"Alliance with the proletariat in the West will pave the way to an international federation of soviet republics. For backward peoples the soviet system represents the smoothest form of transition from primitive conditions of existence to the higher Communist society" ["Theses on the Eastern Question", in Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International, pp. 413-414, emphasis added].

Or as Lenin bluntly put it:

"All the national liberation movements in the colonies and among the oppressed nationalities...are learning from bitter experience that their only salvation lies in the soviet system's victory over world imperialism"

["Preliminary Draft Theses on the Sain Collected Colonial National and the Colonial 31, p. 146, emphasis added].

What the discussion reveals Jenness' and Clark's resurrection of a stagist conception of revolution is not merely an error of formal logic. Rather, it reflects a profound pessimism in the revolutionary potential of the workers of the advanced countries.

"For if these workers cannot come to the aid of a Burkina Faso or similar countries, then the exploited and oppressed of these lands have no choice but to rely on their own efforts.

And if, according to the new logic of the SWP leaders, a socialist revolution is excluded, then only capitalism can create the conditions for the development of the productive forces of society, including the development of an industrial proletariat.

But, as the history of the 20th century has clearly demonstrated, a break with underdevelopment is impossible within the framework of capitalism.

The logic of the new positions adopted by the SWP leads almost inevitably toward an exclusive perspective of strategic alliances with sectors of the "progressive" native capitalist class-the necessary allies during the first "democratic" stage of the revolution.

But such a strategy only delivers the revolution to a wing of the class enemy and ultimately paves the way for the defeat of the revolutionary movement.

So the next logical step in the SWP's tortuous course away from revolutionary Marxism will be political support for such "revolutionary popular dictatorships" as the Dergue's Ethiopia and Qaddafi's Libya' A far more serious mistake, however, has been set into motion by the SWP's new line. It is a historic law that such views cannot be reserved for only the more backward countries like Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, or Libya. Once embarked on a line which justifies class collaboration in these countries, the inevitable tendency is to generalize the need for such multiclass alliances in the more advanced countries of the world.

Bourgeois nationalism in Africa The discussion also reveals an adaptation to the bourgeois-nationalist framework of "real politik." Jenness and Clark note that one of the uncompleted bourgeois tasks in the underdeveloped and tribally divided Sub-Saharan Africa is the forging of a "nation" (p. 12).

But one of the central political problems of the continent is that national boundaries were artificially erected by the colonial powers to better serve their interests of exploitation. And the native ruling elites that inherited these borders jealously defend them precisely because they carve out distinct spheres of influence which allow them to enrich their own coffers.

The slogan of a united, socialist federation of African states is therefore of Burkina Faso's Rawlings primary importance if the workers and peasants of the continent are to put poverty and famine behind them.

The need for an international outlook is underscored by the experience of the revolutionary-nationalist regimes that took power in the former Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique.

In these countries, the leading party called itself "Marxist-Leninist" and won power through armed struggle. But after national independence was won, both states failed to mobilize the "Social liberation is Impossible within the limits of one nation."

workers and peasants to fight for their own interests and refused to touch imperialist concerns that were the major source of foreign exchange. Finally, the new regimes continued to recognize the narrow national framework imposed on them by imperialism.

This framework led Angola and Mozambique to sign accords in 1984 with South Africa prohibiting the use of their national territory by the Southwest African People's Organization (SWAPO) and the African National Congress (ANC) as sanctuaries for operations into Namibia and Azania respectively. Thus these "revolutionary anti-imperialist" fighters ultimately capitulated to their self-avowed main enemy.

The limits of "campism"

This debacle was also aided by the acceptance by the ruling MPLA in Angola and FRELIMO in Mozambique of the "campist" view of the world promoted by the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union. In this view, two global class camps face each other: imperialism, on the one side, and anti-imperialism, led by the USSR, on the other. The USSR was seen as a staunch champion of the semicolonial and "non-aligned" world.

But the privileged bureaucracy of the deformed Soviet workers' state had a higher interest-the preservation of its own caste interests. Thus "detente" with the West and "stability" throughout the world were justified under the anti-Marxist pretense of building "socialism in one (their own) country."

It is no more realistic to build socialism in the Soviet Union alone than it is in Cuba, Vietnam, or China-or in all the less developed countries put together.

The Soviet Union, too, can catch up with and surpass capitalism only with the help of socialist revolution in the advanced capitalist countries. "Socialism in one country" is the rationalization for collaborating with world capitalism, not struggling for its overthrow everywhere.

Thus, the Soviet bureaucracy had no desire to disturb the status quo by SOCIALIST AC President Thomas Sankara (right) with Ghana's leader Jerry encouraging revolution in Africa, a prospect which necessarily challenged the artificial division of the continent.

So the effect on Angola and Mozambique, which accepted this framework, was to deepen their isolation. And now, dissatisfied by the results, Mozambique has begun to turn to the Western imperialist powers, sending its ambassador to Washington, submitting to the dictates of the International Monetary Fund, and seeking U.S. capital investment.

The path to social liberation is an arduous one which cannot, in our epoch, be resolved within the framework of the national state. Today, the African revolutions stand on the threshhold of a monumental event which could help answer the dilemma faced by Angola, Mozambique, Burkina Faso, and a whole host of African countries-the overthrow of the settler-colonial Republic of South Africa by the workers and peasants of that most developed country in Africa.

In the face of that prospect, the antiLeninist outlook projected by the SWP leadership must be decisively rejected.

The SWP must return to the principle inscribed in the statutes of the Communist International: "The emancipation of the workers is not a local, nor a national, but an international question" ["Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos," p. 124, emphasis in original.] 1—Jenness' and Clark's application of the term "feudal" or "prefeudal" to describe the rural society in the underdeveloped countries is a revealing adaptation to Stalinist theory. The Stalinists reduced the complex social development of humankind to a rigid schema, in which barbarism was succeeded by slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and socialism in that order. They could thereby "scientifically" justify their support to the national bourgeoisie in its fight against "feudal" holdovers.

But Marx recognized that much of the world had never experienced a feudal stage, and Lenin recognized that in many cases capitalism (in its imperialist stage) had been forced on the backward countries. Indeed, it was precisely the rise of imperialism which foreclosed capitalism as an avenue for independently developing the productive forces of the semicolonial world.

2-In the debate leading up to the 1981 SWP convention, Steve Clark posed as a defender of permanent revolution. In the SWP's internal discussion bulletin Clark stated categorically that the party was not abandoning permanent revolution.

But the week after the convention, at a meeting of the National Committee, the SWP leadership unveiled its anti-Trotskyist "Leninism. " And in his three-part class series at the August 1985 SWP convention, Clark admitted that the SWP leaders had begun to change their minds about permanent revolution as early as 1979. In fact, Clark's recent class series represented a thorough and definitive break by the SWP leadership with Trotsky's theory, one of the fundamental bedrocks of revolutionary Marxism in our epoch. In the footsteps of Joseph Stalin, Clark falsely accused Trotsky of "underestimating the peasantry. " Trotsky's insistence on the need to expropriate bourgeois property, Clark stated, has been at the root of the "constant leftist deformations of permanent revolution. " 3-Significantly, Steve Clark's August 1985 lectures on the defects of the theory of permanent revolution also parroted Plekhanov's insistence that the democratic revolution had to be completed before the socialist revolution could begin.

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"SWP's stagist view is not merely an error of formal logic."

post-World War Il period of "decoloni- zation," a number of African states