El Salvador protests

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Church.

The January actions are aimed at pressing Congress to cut off all aid to El Salvador. At the same time, they are seen as preparation for more ambitious regional demonstrations on March 24, the 10th anniversary of the assassination of Salvadoran Archbishop OsJANUARY 1990 U.S. WAR IN LVADOR DISPEN Joseph Ryan/Socialist Action car Romero.

A disturbing aspect of the call for the national spring actions, however, is the initial inclusion of a demand for a "political settlement" of the war in El Salvador. Inasmuch as the demonstrations are aimed at influencing U.S. policy, the implication of United States has the right, by force of arms, to determine the future of another nation. Such a demand carries with it the notion that the right of nations to self-determination is a negotiable item.

Of course, imperialist policy-makers predicate their continued intervention in the affairs of other nations on the indefensible notion that U.S. power gives it the right to decide any nation's future, the recent invasion of Panama being the most recent example.

For most of the past decade the mass demonstrations which have been called to protest U.S. policy in Central America have been largely based on the simple and clear call for an end to U.S. intervention.

This demand has served the movement well, allowing it to win the broadest possible support without having to commit any component to a particular negotiating stance. At the same time, the non-intervention demand defended the right of people who are victims of U.S. aggression to decide their fate for themselves, thus respecting the right to self-determination for all nations.

Hopefully, the March 24 organizers will see the greater utility and principled character of the demand: No U.S. Intervention in Central America! U.S. Out now!

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'Why I joined Socialist Action' (Introductory note: Barry Sheppard, a former leader of the Socialist Workers Party, recently applied for membership in Socialist Action. At a meeting of the Political Committee of Socialist Action on Dec. 6, 1989, Sheppard was taken into membership in Socialist Action. The following is a letter in which he describes the reasons for his joining.)

My joining Socialist Action is the result of a process of political convergence between myself and SA. There are four broad areas of political agreement that have led me to the conclusion that Socialist Action is the nucleus of the revolutionary party that must be built in this country.

1. The past decade has been characterized by a deepening of the capitalist offensive against the working people, including in the United States and the other imperialist countries. With notable exceptions—-such as the British miners' strike, and the fights of the meatpackers, paper workers, Pittston miners, airline workers and others in the United States-by and large there has been a retreat of the workers before this offensive. The workers have yet to organize the kind of fightback that could begin to win.

This situation is the payoff for the decade of entrenchment of class collaborationism by the union bureaucracy in the period following the labor upsurge of the 1930s. The resulting disorientation of the workers has yet to be overcome, contrary to what we hoped and expected at the beginning of the 1980s. The political radicalization of the working class in the United States is still ahead of us.

In this situation, it is wrong to say that the unions are at "center stage" of U.S. politics, as the SWP has insisted for 10 years. This distorts reality and sets a disorienting framework for setting political tasks and goals both in the unions and in struggles that are being organized largely outside them. To so stubbornly hold onto this shibboleth is itself an indication of serious problems in the SWP.

Capitalism on a world scale is approaching a major crisis. The mounting unpayable debt of the oppressed nations to the imperialist banks is one sign. Another is the savings and loan crisis. The 1987 stock market crash and shakiness in the world financial system point to this coming catastrophe.

The Socialist Workers Party at its 1988 convention adopted an analysis of this crisis, the general line of which Socialist Action and I agree with. However, as this crisis approaches and begins to happen, we cannot predict how quickly the political radicalization of the working class will develop in response.

Eastern Europe 2. The great upsurge of the masses in Eastern Europe, and to a lesser extent so far in the USSR itself, against bureaucratic rule centers around demands for democratic rights and an end to the social inequality promoted by the petty bourgeois bureaucratic castes that sit on top of the workers' states like hideous parasites, sapping their strength, sabotaging the economic plan, and preventing development toward socialism.

We stand with the masses of Eastern Europe, the USSR, and China in their struggle to overthrow the bureaucratic misrule of the Stalinists. The toilers, by winning democratic rights, are freeing themselves of the bonds that have prevented them from stepping onto the political arena in their own name. This is a necessary step for the working people to reconquer full social consciousness after so many years of Stalinist inculcation of such bourgeois ideas as national chauvinism, anti-Semitism, the extolling of capitalist methods, and the rejection of proletarian internationalism— all in the name of Marxism.

In Eastern Europe, the Stalinists, with the help of middle-class "opportunists," are seeking to contain the mass upsurge by adopting reforms that go in the direction of bourgeois parliamentarism. These reforms give the appearance of democracy, but just as in the capitalist West, the toilers are reduced to passive onlookers who get to vote every once in a while for candidates they really have no voice in selecting. What is needed are real forms of proletarian democracy such as the soviets in the early years of the Russian Revolution, through which the workers can fight to cleanse the deformed workers' state of the bureaucracy and once again move toward socialism.

Another danger has reared its head. Trying to preserve their parasitic rule and positions of privilege, representatives of the discredited bureaucracy are openly calling for even more use of "capitalist methods" and "market mechanisms" that are aimed against the interests of the toilers. They are being aided by elements among the middle class "dissidents," who call for the restoration of capitalism itself. This has gone furthest in Poland and Hungary.

These moves in the direction of capitalism will be resisted by the workers and peasants because implementing these proposals will hurt them. The fight of the Soviet miners is a case in point. With newly won democratic rights, the struggle of the toilers will take on much larger dimensions.

It is only the toiling people as a whole, led by the workers, that will resist moves toward capitalist restoration. No confidence should be placed in the bureaucracy to do this although as the struggle deepens, sections of the bureaucracy closest to the workers can break and go over to their side.

The capitalist-minded bureaucrats aren't content to skim the cream of social production for themselves. They year for the greater creature comforts they see their counterparts in the West enjoying. Some dream of becoming capitalists themselves, and some are already on the way to doing so.

The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution, the founding document of the Socialist Workers Party and of the Fourth International, drafted by Leon Trotsky, hit the nail on the head when it explained in relation to the Soviet Union in 1938:

"The political prognosis has an alternative character: either the bureaucracy, becoming evermore the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers' state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back into capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism."

The successful outcome of this confrontation from the point of view of the workers is dependent upon the construction of a revolutionary Marxist party. The evolution of Solidarity in Poland is a clear example that simply the organization of the working people into independent trade unions to fight for their rights, however necessary, is insufficient.

Middle-class intellectuals, speaking in the name of Solidarity while stifling the voice of the workers, have now joined forces with the Stalinists in an anti-working-class government that proclaims its intention to restore capitalism.

To counter the decades of Stalinism masquerading as Marxism, a party is needed that can explain what true scientific socialism is, and why it is needed by the workers to win their struggle against the bureaucracy and world capitalism, including against attempts to overthrow such things as nationalized property in the means of production, economic planning, full employment, socialized medicine, etc.

The fight of the workers in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China is linked to and in the last analysis depends upon the worldwide struggle of toilers everywhere to free themselves from imperialist oppression and capitalist exploitation, and to open the road to world socialism. It is through building a new communist party that the workers can make these links in consciousness and in fighting unity.

It is in this context that the position of revolutionary Cuba is so important. Cuba has charted a course directly against that of the bureaucracy in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and China. "Cuba will never adopt capitalist methods" has become the watchword on the revolutionary island. A struggle has been launched against bureaucratic privilege and mismanagement, through attempting to bring the masses themselves into the process of making decisions concerning their needs, and giving them the wherewithal to carry them out.

Through this "rectification" campaign, for example, hundreds of new day-care centers have been built by the workers themselves, using their own volunteer labor and state-supplied material. To defend the revolution, a vast new militia encompassing millions has been formed. The leadership point to such activity to show why the masses themselves must take part in all aspects of economic and public life if socialism is to be built.

Cuba has yet to institutionalize forms of proletarian democracy at the level of the central power of the state. Information is restricted. The workers do not have the facts of world politics they need to make decisions on the big questions internationally. Overcoming these deficiencies would help the revolution to build upon the steps forward that have already been made to further the mobilization of Cuban workers and peasants in the struggle for socialism. Maximum mobilization and consciousness is needed to counter imperialist threats and the real danger of economic isolation as a result of a Gorbachev-Bush deal at the expense of the working people of the world.

Nicaraguan Revolution Revolution 1979 dictatorship of the U.S.-installed and backed Somoza dynasty and opened the door to the possibility that a second country in the Americas would follow the road of the Cuban Revolution. The revolutionaries of the FSLN showed they had the capacity to mobilize the toilers in insurrection against the hated tyrant, and afterwards to mobilize them in the beginnings of agrarian reform, unionization of the workers, a mass literary and vaccination campaign, and in other ways.

For the first time, Nicaragua stood independent of the American Empire. That empire set about to destroy the revolution, and inflicted seven years of war and 50,000 deaths on the tiny nation. During the war, steps were taken by the FSLN to deepen the agrarian reform, and to correct bad errors the new government had taken toward the indigenous Indians and Black people in the Atlantic coast region.

The FSLN showed it had the capacity to move against capitalist property rights in defense of the toilers. But when the toilers demanded to go beyond support to a "mixed"that is, capitalist—economy, and to embark upon the Cuban road of a thorough agrarian reform, control exercised over the work places by armed workers, and, at the appropriate time, the expropriation of the capitalist class and establishment of a workers' state, the leadership did not respond.

It is increasingly unlikely that the FLN leadership will take the Cuban road, as they have deliberately set about demobilizing the workers and peasants in an effort to come to an agreement with the capitalist class. This course puts previous democratic and anti-imperialist gains in jeopardy, as the capitalists and their imperialist backers demand more and more.

It would take the mobilization of the toilers in their own interests, which are counterposed to those of the capitalists, leading up to the expropriation of the capitalist class, not only to advance towards socialism, but also to consolidate and deepen those gains already won. The opposite perspective threatens to unravel the revolution.

4. In the past decade, the Socialist Workers Party has begun to use organizational reprisals to deal with political differences. This was true when the party majority cancelled the constitutionally required convention in 1983, and then expelled the minority. Banning those expelled from SWP bookstores and public events was another example. In a series of incidents since, including my own case, organizational measures have been used to smear or expel those with differing views. In the whole decade of the 1980s, only two full political resolutions were considered by conventions of the SWP-in 1981 and 1985.

Socialist Action rejects such methods. Socialist Action adheres to democratic centralism, and affirms the necessity of constructing a Leninist vanguard party in the United States in keeping with its conviction that a socialist revolution is necessary and will be posed as the crisis of world capitalism deepens. Socialist Action has adopted as its own the 1965 resolution of the Socialist Workers Party on party organization, with which I am in complete agreement.

These four areas of agreement make my joining Socialist Action necessary and appropriate. To be sure, differences remain. These concern the theory of permanent revolution, aspects of the nature of the South African revolution, and aspects of the Cuban Revolution. Given the comradely and democratic atmosphere in Socialist Action, I am confident that these will be worked out through discussion.

Finally, there is one more area of agreement, and that is that despite the damage done to it by its current leadership, the Socialist Workers Party remains an organization of revolutionary socialists. Objectively there should be a fusior between Socialist Action and the SWP. Appropriate guarantees must first be agreed upon by our two organizations that the democratic rights historically accorded minorities in the SWP up to the time of the expulsion of the comrades who formed Socialist Action will be respected in the fused organization. These rights are codified in the 1965 Organizational Resolution and SWP constitution, nominally in effect toppled the hated to this day.

SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 1990 15

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'Socialist Action adheres to democratic centralism, and affirms the necessity of constructing a Leninist vanguard party in the United States in keeping with its conviction that a socialist revolution is recessary and will be posed as the crisis of world capitalism deepens.