workers vanguard no 691 - 22 may 1998

7/29/2019 Workers Vanguard No 691 - 22 May 1998

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WfJlIKEli1 ""''''111) oeNo. 691 . . . , . X ~ 22 May 1998Indonesia:

For Workers Revolution!

AFP photosProtest by University of Indonesia students against dictator Suharto. Anger over police/military terror, IMF austerity triggered plebeianupheaval against U.S.-backed dictatorship.MAY 19-After more than three decades of tyrannical military dictatorship,ushered in by the slaughter of a half million workers, peasants, Communists andethnic Chinese in 1965-66, the reign ofIndonesian strongman Suharto appears tobe coming to an end. Months of skyrocketing inflation and unemployment resulting from the economic crisis rackingSoutheast Asia have led to growing turmoil throughout the country. The angerexploded in the past two weeks, when thegovernment imposed draconian cUts insubsidies for fuel and other necessitiesjacking up prices by as much as 70 percent-as part of the austerity measures

Down. With'" thecGenerals!Down With A n t i - C h i n e ~ ~ : P o g , o m s ! Independenc'e .for . E a s ~ , . Iimo,r!

dictated by the International MonetaryFund (IMF).When troops shot dead six studentprotesters from Jakarta's elite TrisaktiUniversity last Tuesday, this provoked ap1ebeian upheaval which left hundredsdead and wide swathes of the capital in

smoldering ruins. Fearing for their safety,the IMF vultures and imperialist bankerswho have sucked the lifeblood out ofIndonesia's toilers temporarily withdrewtheir personnel from the capital. The desperately poor slum masses particularlytargeted the mansions and businesses of

the president, his family and cronies. Butthe looting of stores and shopping mallsalso spilled over into murderous attacksagainst Chinese merchants and homes.There are clear indications that thesepogromist assaults were encouraged bythe regime itself, which has time andagain channeled popular outrage intoanti-Chinese racism.Suharto, returning from a conferencein Egypt, revoked some of the cuts whileflooding the streets of Jakarta with thousands of troops. As the dictator temporizes, calls for his resignation multiply . From the slums of Jakarta to thecontinued on page 6

Death Squad Massacres in ColombiaThe murder of some two dozen peasants in the Colombian village of Puerto

Alvira on May 4 cast a stark light on theescalating war of terror being waged byU.S.-backed military forces in thatSouth American country. Many of thosekilled, who included children only fiveyears old, were doused with gasolineand set ablaze. This was the third massacre perpetrated by death squads inpeasant villages in less than two weeks.21

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And on May 8, even as Colombian president Ernesto Samper was hypocritically condemning "paramilitary. violence," his own troops gunned do\yn atleast 25 members of the RevolutionaryArmed Forces of Colombia (FARC) inthe vicinity of Puerto Alvira. Dozens ofpeasants were also killed by deathsquads in the same area last July.U.S. imperialism stands directly behind this grisly, and growing, slaughterof peasants and leftist guerrillas inColombia. The country is crawling withPentagon "advisers," CIA operatives,Green Berets and other "counterinsur-- gency" units, as well as U.S.-suppliedhelicopter gunships. In late March, onlycontinued on page 2 Some two dozen peasants in Puerto Alvlra were slaughtered by Colom-bian death squad, May 4.


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ColombiaMassacres...(continued from page 1)weeks before the most recent massacres,the Clinton administration called for asharp increase in military aid to Colombia, supposedly aimed at eliminating theColombian cocaine and heroin trade. Aswe wrote last year: "The 'drug war' hasbecome Yankee imperialism's latest figleaf for beefing up the forces of repression agaiRst peasant and working-classunrest itiLatin America, while at home ithas meant an escalation of racist policeterror in the ghettos and barrios" (WV No.664, 21 March 1997).

gaining strength and with imperialist oilinterests in the country increasinglythreatened, the U.S. has been funnelingever more arms and "advisers" to theColombian regime. Clinton's latest aidrequest came just days after the FARCinflicted the worst defeat on the Colombian army and its U.S. advisers indecades, as the leftist guerrillas killed upto 80 soldiers of an elite, Pentagontrained counterinsurgency unit during a

Colombia offers prime evidence of thereal purpose behind Washington's global"war on drugs." Only a year ago, Clintonwa,s denouncing Samper for being "softon drug traffickers." But with the FARCand another leftist guerrilla organization,the National Liberation Army (ELN),

TROTSKY

Indonesia andPermanent Revolution

As mass protests sweep Indonesia, theimperialist powers are angling to replacethe discredited Suharto dictatorship with amore reliable capitalist regime. Any such"solution" promises only to continue the impoverishment and repression of the workerand peasant masses, oppression of womenand subjugation of national and ethnicminorities. What is needed is a Leninist vanguard party to lead the vibrant, young prole LENINtariat, standing at the head of all the oppressed, in socialist revolution against theimperialist-backed bourgeoisie. This is the road ofpermanent revolution elaborated byBolshevik leader Leon Trotsky in drawing the lessons of the victorious October Revolution of 1917 and the defeated 1925-27 Chinese Revolution.

Not a single one of the tasks of the "bourgeois" revolution can be solved in thesebackward countries under the leadership of the "national" bourgeoisie, because the latter emerges at once with foreign support as a class alien or hostile to the people. Everystage in its development binds it only the more closely to the foreign finance capital ofwhich it is essentially the agency. The petty bourgeoisie of the colonies, that of handicrafts and trade, is the first to fall victim in the unequal struggle with foreign capital,declining into economic insignificance, becoming declassed and pauperized. It cannoteven conceive of playing an independent political role. The peasantry, the largestnumerically and the most atomized, backward, and oppressed class, is capable of localuprisings and partisan warfare, but requires the leadership of a more advanced and centralized class in order for this struggle to be elevated to an all-national level. The task ofsuch leadership falls in the nature of things upon the colonial proletariat, which, fromits very first steps, stands opposed not only to the foreign but also to its own nationalbourgeoisie .. ..The above developed views regarding the special character of the "bourgeois" revolutions in historically belated countries are by no means the product of theoreticalanalysis alone. Before the second Chinese revolution (1925-27) they had already beensubmitted to a grandiose historical test. The experience of the three Russian revolutions (1905, February and October 1917) bears no less significance for the twentiethcentury than the French revolution bore for the nineteenth ....The regime of the proletarian dictatorship, by its very nature, however, could notlimit itself to the framework of bourgeois property. The rule of the proletariat automatically placed on the agenda the s()cialist revolution, which in this case was not separatedfrom the democratic revolution b{any historical period, but was uninterruptedly connected with it, or, to put it more accurately, was an organic outgrowth of it. At whattempo the socialist transformation of society would occur and what limits it wouldattain in the nearest future would depend not only upon internal but upon external conditions as well. The Russian revolution was only a link in the international revolution.Such was, in broad outline, the essence of the conception of the permanent (uninterrupted) revolution. It was precisely this conception that guaranteed the victory of theproletariat in October.

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-Leon Trotsky, "Revolution and War in China" (January 1938)

! ~ ! ! l ! ~ . ' ! ! y o ! ~ ! ~ ! ! . ~ ! ! l ! . . EDITOR: Len MeyersEDITOR, YOUNG SPARTACUS PAGES: Jacob ZornPRODUCTION MANAGER: Susan FullerCIRCULATION MANAGER: Jane PattersonEDITORIAL BOARD: Ray Bishop (managing editor), Bruce Andre, Helene Brosius, George Foster,Liz Gordon, Frank Hunter, Jane Kerrigan, James Robertson, Joseph Seymour, Alison SpencerThe Spartacist League is the U.S. Section of the International Communist League (FourthInternationalist).Workers Vanguard (ISSN 0276-0746) published biweekly, except Skipping three alternate issues in June. July andAugust (beginning with omitting the second issue in June) and with a 3-week interval in December, by the SpartacistPublishing Co., 299 Broadway, Suite 318, New York. NY 10007. Telephone: (212) 732-7862 (Editorial), (212) 732-7861(Business). Address all correspondence to: Box 1377, GPO, New York. NY 10116. E-mail address:vanguard@t iac.nel.Domestic subscriptions: $10.00/22 issues. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY. POSTMASTER: Send addresschanges to Workers Vanguard. Box 1377, GPO. New York, NY 10116.Opinions expressed in signed articles or letters do not necessarily express the editorial viewpoint.The closing date for news in this issue is May 19.No. 691 22 May 1998

Clinton drug czarMcCaffrey visitsBogota as U.S.pours in "advisers"and helicoptergunships.24-hour battle in the southern provinceof Caqueta.The FARC and ELN now control asmuch as half of the countryside. A recentU.S. News and World Report (May 11)headlined its article, "Is Colombia Lostto Rebels?" Republican CongressmanBenjamin Gilman rails about the spectreof a "narco-state" and Clinton drug czarGeneral Barry McCaffrey denounces theFARC and ELN as "narco-guerrillas."In fact, the U.S.-backed military anddeath squads are linchpins in the Colombian drug trade. The head of the anticommunist paramilitary alliance that perpetrated the Puerto Al vira massacre andmany others, the "United Self-DefenseUnits of Colombia," is himself a leadingmember of the country's new landowning "narco-bourgeoisie." These deathsquads murdered over 3,300 peasants inthe first nine months of 1997 alone,while more than a million have beendriven from their homes.Meanwhile, trade unionists and leftistmilitants are increasingly targeted bygovernment repression and right-wingterror. On April 21, public sector unionsheld a nationwide 24-hour strike to protestthe assassination of Eduardo Umana, arespected human rights lawyer killed fordefending jailed leaders of the USO oilworkers union. Less than three weekslater, two oil workers were murderedand a USO leader narrowly escapedassassination, provoking a protest strikeby 7,000 USO members against the staterun Ecopetrol company. Colombia's capitalist rulers have been selling off thecountry's oil wealth to "multinational"giants like British Petroleum and Occidental Petroleum, themselves reported tobe key backers of the r i g h t ~ w i n g paramil-itary butchers. .

A November 1996 Human RightsWatch report-"Colombia's Killer Networks: The Military-Paramilitary Partnership and the United States"-makes itclear that the surge in death-squad terroris directly linked to a recent CIA andDefense Department program to createclandestine "intelligence networks" inColombia. Over the past decade, Washington has poured a staggering $500 million-half of all U.S. military aid to LatinAmerica-into Colombia, much of itgoing to supply the army units most notorious for perpetrating massacres. Morethan 9,000 Colombian officers, includingarmed forces chief Gen. Manuel JoseBonett, got their training in torture and"neutralization" of leftists at the "Schoolof the Americas" (more accurately knownas the "School of the Assassins") nowlocated at Fort Benning, Georgia.

U.S. imperialism's keen interest inColombia also derives from that country's strategic location just south of Panama and the Canal Zone. The U.S.slaughtered thousands in its 1989 invasion, supposedly to arrest Panamanianstrongman and former CIA "asset" Manuel Noriega for running drugs. Panama'srole in the drug trade has only increasedsince then. Meanwhile, the country isbeing used as a staging area for the U.S.backed war against the Colombian insurgents. Washington has been scheming forways to get around the 1977 Panama

Richard EmblinCanal Treaty, which stipulated the returnof all U.S. military facilities there toPanamanian control by the year 2000.Although the U.S. Southern Commandwas transferred to Miami last year, Clinton announced the creation of a vast,new "drug war" command center in Panama, to be manned by as many as 3,000U.S. troops.As many as 30,000 people have beenkilled in Colombia since the mid-1980s.Yet the armed struggle of the peasantbased leftist insurgents is aimed simplyat pressuring the country's capitalistrulers into a "power-sharing" agreementbased on negotiating a settlement overquestions such as land reform, the selloff of state-owned enterprises and "independence" from U.S. imperialism. Asthe U.S.-brokered "peace" in El Salvador makes clear, such an agreement onlypromises further immiseration and repression for the worker and peasantmasses. The fight for national and socialemancipation requires an internationalistproletarian vanguard party built in political struggle against all variants of pettybourgeois nationalism and peasant guerrillaism. As we wrote in "U.S. 'Drug War'Means Imperialist Terror" (WV No. 664,21 March 1997):"What is needed above all is the forgingof revolutionary workers parties armedwith the Trotskyist perspective of permanent revolution: to break the chainsof imperialist domination, the proletariat-standing at the head of the peasantry and all the oppressed-must seizestate power from the weak and venallocal bourgeoisies and seek to extendsocialist revolution to the U.S. imperialistheartland."As Marxist internationalists, the Spartacist League seeks to bring down U.S.imperialism from within through proletarian revolution against the rapaciousAmerican bourgeoisie. A revolutionaryleadership of the workers movementwould mobilize the multiracial proletariat to oppose cop terror in the ghettosand barrios carried out under the guise ofthe racist "war on drugs"-calling fordecriminalization of drugs-and to combat anti-immigrant racism. We demand:Full citizenship rights for all immigrants!Against the chauvinist, pro-imperialistAFL-CIO tops,. we fight for international workers solidarity and for commonclass struggle by workers throughout theAmericas. The millions of Mexican, Central and South American workers in theU.S. can serve as a living bridge betweenthe struggles of the Latin American proletariat against the depredations of WallStreet and the International MonetaryFund and the fight for socialist revolutionhere. Down with death squad terror! U.S.hands of f Colombia!.

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Down With Anti-Immigrant Chauvinism! tal groups would have much in common with right-wing Republican PatrickBuchanan" (Socialist Worker, 27 March).But the enviromhentalists' class hostility to the proletariat is nothing new.The turn-of-the-century conservationistmovement expressed the interests of influential elements of the native whiteAmerican bourgeoisie and upper pettybourgeoisie, who wanted to preserve thecountry's diminishing wilderness areasfor their own enjoyment. "Love ofnature" became an important componentof American bourgeois-nationalist andnativist ideology.

Sierra Club Eco-RacismFor several years, California has beenon the leading edge of the wave of antiimmigration racism in the U.S. The passage of the state's anti-immigrant Prop.187 four years ago helped spur passage

of the immigration "reform" bill-withthe backing of both the Democraticand Republican parties of capital-whichwas signed into law by Clinton in 1996.More recently, the California-based Sierra Club, one of the country's oldest,largest (and most bourgeois) environmentalist organizations, became embroiled ina highly publicized dispute over an explicitly anti-immigrant proposal. While thisracist measure was ultimately rejectedlast month, it demonstrated the deeplyreactionary u n d ~ r p i n n i n g s of the "environmentalist" movement.Sierra Club members were faced withtwo proposals on immigration and population control. The openly racist "Alternative A" called for an "end to U.S.population growth" including "throughreduction in net immigration." "Alternative B" called for limiting global,population growth without taking a formalposition on U.S. immigration policy, reasserting a position which the Sierra Clubfirst adopted in 1996.Nevertheless, Alternative B bought into the racist anti-immigrant frenzy bycalling to slow down immigration "byencouraging sustain ability, economic security, health and nutrition, human rightsand environmentally responsible consumption" in underdeveloped countries.In other words, Third World peoplesshould stay at home to suffer the untrammeled exploitation, poverty and oppression meted out by the imperialist rulers ofthis world. In its opposition to AlternativeA, the New York Sierra Club whined thatimmigrants only "indirectly" hurt theenvironment as the "result of their participation in the American economy" (CitySierran, Spring 1998).One way or another, all environmen-

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talists embrace the false premise first putforward by Thomas Malthus in his 1798tract, An Essay on the Principle of Popu-lation, that there are too many peopleon the planet and not enough resources.Unlike "right to life" bigots and otherreligious reactionaries, Marxists do notpromote unlimited population growth;we recognize that the resources of thisplanet are not infinite. But our fight isfor socialist revolution internationally toexpropriate the capitalist exploiters andto introduce a planned economy to vastlyexpand productive capacity. Only in thisway can the needs of the world's massesbegin to be met on the road to building

with jobs and housing. With the notableexception of the few primitivists, whofirmly advocate closing America's borders, few have faced this contradiction."-Green Delusions: An Environ-mentalist Critique of RadicalEnvironmentalism (1992)With the capitalist rulers' anti-immigrantdrive in full steam, that "contradiction"almost split the country's most venerable environmentalist organization downthe middle.Radical youth drawn to environmentalism are no doubt horrified that the"green" movement can encompass openracists. But there is a solid logic to sucheco-racism. Epvironmentalists view tech-

Prior to the 1960s, almost all significant conservationist and environmentalistlegislation had been enacted early in thecentury under the administration ofTheodore Roosevelt, the most bellicose of U.S.imperialist rulers, who also pressuredJapan into prohibiting further emigrationto the U.S. The present-day Americanenvironmentalist movement was formedin the 1970s by an organic fusion, so to

WV Photo Gropp/SipaMarxists seek to mobilize proletariat in defense of immigrant rights against racist INS round-ups and deportations.a classless communist society of abundance, where the organization of production and environmental and populationissues can be addressed in a rational way.And in the U.S. as well as internationally, defense of the rights of immigrantsand all the oppressed is key to mobilizing the proletariat in revolutionary struggle against the capitalist exploiters. Fullcitizenship rights for all immigrants!When the votes were finally tallied inlate April, 60 percent of the Sierra Clubchose the liberal bourgeois hypocrisy ofAlternative B over in-your-face racism.The environmentalist luminaries backingAlternative A included Paul Watson, cofounder of Greenpeace, and former U.S.Senator Gaylord Nelson, initiator ofEarth Day. Joining them was Prop. 187co-author Barbara Coe and the racist"Federation for American ImmigrationReform" (FAIR), which promotes theorganization of anti-immigrant "citizen 'smilitias" at the Mexican border. Also onboard was one Garrett Hardin, an advocate of "eugenics"-the pseudo-scienceof selective human breeding which waspushed by Hitler's Nazis-who recentlydeclaimed, "It would be better to encourage the breeding of more intelligentpeople rather than the less intelligent"(quoted in Slingshot, Spring 1998).The association of such virulent racistswith the environmentalist cause had theliberals of the Nation (I8 May) complaining that "it looked as though the Si((rraClub was in danger of being hijacked."But the immigrant-bashing outburst in theSierra Club was not the result of someplot by "outsiders." As one Alternative Asupporter pointed out, already in 1988 theSierra Club advocated immigration limitsin order to achieve "population stabilization" in the U.S. Several years ago, liberal environmentalist Martin W. Lewispointed out:"As would-be progressives, eco-radicalscan hardly call for migration restrictionswithout appearing racist, yet as naturelovers they abhor the kind of development necessary to provide newcomers

nology and "overconsumption," not thecapitalist system of exploitation and poverty, as the problem. If increased industrial production can only ruin the planetand there isn't enough to go around, thenit's necessarily a question of decidingwho loses out.Many anarcho-greens who protest thatcapitalism, not over-popUlation, is "killing the planet" end up extolling the ecological virtues of poverty. A Bay Areaanarchist newsletter posits that the environmental "impact of an immigrant family, for example, living in a one-bedroomapartment and using mass transit pales incomparison to that of a wealthy familyliving in a single family home with twocars" (Slingshot, Spring 1998). This "lessis better" mantra could not possibly findresonance among the oppressed neocolonial masses whose exploitation by the domestic capitalist rulers and the imperialists means miserable poverty and squalor.Indeed, "self-restraint" is the programcynically preached by the InternationalMonetary Fund and the World Bank asthey impose starvation austerity on workers and peasants in Indonesia, SouthKorea and elsewhere in the Third WofJd.The environmentalists' reactionary message of less consumption for the impoverished Third World masses is combinedwith petty-bourgeois hostility for theworking class in the advanced countries.This is seen not only in their disdain forthe fight against the brutal conditions ofcapitalist exploitation, such as job speedupand other attacks impairing the health andvery lives of workers, but in incidentssuch as tree "spiking" in the 1980s, whereto save some trees from logging companies environmentalist "radicals" directlythreatened workers in the lumber industry with serious injury or death.Even so, the reformists of the International Socialist Organization (ISO)expressed astonishment that the august Sierra Club would consider anopenly racist anti-immigrant policy: "Youwouldn't think that leading environmen-

speak, between the old bourgeois conservationists represented by the Sierra Cluband certain currents of New Left pettybourgeois radicalism.Marxism is fundamentally counterposed to the bourgeois ideology of theenvironmentalists, who care more abouttrees than humans. It is the capitalistprofit system and the bourgeois nationstate which are the real barriers to therational development of the world's productive forces. The capitalists' insatiabledrive to increase profit margins has certainly created massive problems of pollution and destruction of the environment.But a much greater and immediate threatto mankind is the intensification of rivalries among the imperialist powers, whichearlier this century led to two devastatingworld wars and now threatens the ultimate destruction of humanity through athird, nuclear interimperialist war.

It will take proletarian revolution internationally, leading to a vast increase inenergy and technology, to secure for theThird World masses the basic things thatmost working people in industrializedcountries take for granted: electricity, literacy, clean water. A socialist plannedeconomy would invest massively in research and development to produce themost labor-saving and energy-efficienttechnology. Only economic planning onan international scale, with massive transfers of technology to the backward countries, can provide the bridge to narrowingand eventually overcoming the vast gulf instandards of living separating the peoplesof Africa, Latin America and much ofAsia from the imperialist centers of theU.S., West Europe and Japan.The Spartacus Youth Clubs look torecruit revolutionary-minded youth whohl;tte the bigotry and exploitation of capitalism. What's needed is a Marxist understanding of class society, and with that thecommitment to building a Leninist partyto fight for proletarian revolution and acommunist future which will put an endto degradation, racism and poverty

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"Death 01 Communism" CentristsThe following is reprinted from Workers Hammer No. 161 (March-April 1998),newspaper of the Spartacist League!Britain,W O R K E R S I l A M M E R ~

Following the December 1979 RedArmy intervention in Afghanistan, theimperialists fired the opening shots oftheir Cold War II drive to destroy theSoviet Union. Marching in lockstep behind the anti-Soviet war drive, most leftgroups accelerated their headlong rush tothe right. In contrast, the Workers Power(WP) organisation used the occasion toannounce its repudiation of the antiSoviet "third camp" position inheritedfrom Tony Cliff's organisation, fromwhich WP had split five years earlier.Rejccting Cliff's ignorant "thcory"derived frolJl buying into the "democratic" credentials of British imperialism- tha t thc Soviet Union was "totalitarian"and "state capitalist," WP declared that ithad come over to Trotsky's understandingthat the Soviet Union under Stalinismwas a dcgeneratcd workers state.Yet, in practice, WP never drew theprogrammatic conclusions of Trotsky'sanalysis: unconditional military defenceof the Sovict Union and the other deformed workers states against imperialistattack and internal counterrevolution. WPjoined the imperialists and their Labourlieutenants in opposing the Soviet military intervention against CIA-backedIslamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan,while claiming it would be "tacticallywrong ... to demand the immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops" (Workers Power,February 1980). And when Polish Solidarnosc made its power bid in late 1981,WP acknowlcdged that it was an openlycounterrevolutionary movement backedby the Pope, the CIA and Western bankers, but supported it anyway.The 1982 WP pamphlet, The Degenerated Revolution, codifying their line"change," is a chemically pure expressionof Trotsky's description of centrism as"crystallised confusion." Thus, while recognising that capitalism had been overthrown in the Eastern European countriesunder the post-World War II Sovietoccupation, Workers Power called these"counterrevolutionary social overturns."As the winds of Cold War II blew Increasingly hot, WP moved farther to the right.In 1990, Workers Power called on antiCommunist Tory prime minister MargaretThatchcr to give arms to the fascistinfested Lithuanian Sajudis. The sameyear, it played an active part in pushingthe anti-Communist witchhunt, orchestrated by the MI5 secret police, againstNational Union of Mineworkers head

Arthur Scargill, who was hated by theBritish bourgeoisie not only for leading the heroic 1984-85 miners strike butfor denouncing the anti-Soviet war driveand rightly calling Solidarnosc "antisocialist" (see "Workers Power Caughtwith Russian Fascists, Thatcher's Scabs,"WHNo. 116, September 1990). In August1991, WP supporters literally stood onthe barricades of counterrevolution inMoscow alongside Yeltsin's imperialistbacked forces.Having joined Yeltsin in dancing onthe grave of the great 1917 October Revolution, Workers Power and its international, the League for a Revolutionary

of counterrevolution which did indeedsmash the Soviet degenerated workersstate and the bureaucratically deformedworkers states of Eastern Europe. Butmore than that it reflects how deeplyWorkers Power drinks from the "deathof communism" well of the imperialistbourgeoisie.Burying the Legacy of theRussian Revolution

The "Russian question" has been thedefining political question of the 20thcentury and the touchstone for revolutionaries. We Trotskyists stood at ourposts and fought to preserve and extend

tence. Thus a leading supporter of theUSec in Italy asked: "Does it still makesense for militants, history apart, to bowdown before the writings of the Russianrevolutionary? .. I don't believe that onecan think of a socialist project for the21st century that starts from the paradigms of Leninism and Trotskyism."The LRCl's new "theory" is correspondingly the codification of their repudiation of the fight for proletarian revolution. They stridently call to "smash theStalinist state" while on the home frontoperating as the most cringing, servileapologists for the maintenance of capitalist rule in its social-democratic face. In"'

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leftist youth, who are bombarded withbourgeois ideology that "socialism isimpossible" and "communism is dead."-The International Communist Leaguefights to complete the task begun byLenin and Trotsky's Bolshevik Partywhen they led the working class to victory in Russia in 1917-to pursue theclass struggle to a victorious conclusion,with state power embodied in workerscouncils around the world. In a periodconditioned by such colossal defeats forthe international proletariat as capitalistcounterrevolution in the homeland of theOctober Reyolution, the. disproportionbetween our purpose and the currentpolitical consciousness of the workingclass, youth and the left internationally isgreat. ,Unlike those self-proclaimed leftists who disparage Leninism and the lessons of the Russian Revolution, we holdon to the dearly bought lessons of thepast as part of our fight to be the revolutionary leadership that can rearm the proletariat with the consciousness of its historic interest in the struggle for newOctober Revolutions.For the first and only time in humanhistory, the Russian Revolution took theMarxist programme of proletarian revolution out of the realm of theory andgave it living reality, creating a societywhere the proletariat ruled through itsown class dictatorship. The BolshevikRevolution wasa beacon to the workersof the world. The Bolsheviks understoodthat socialist revolution in the imperialistcountries was essential to the survival ofthe proletarian dictatorship in Russia,and saw the Russian Revolution as theopening shot in the overthrow of capitalism internationally, expecting it to bequickly followed by workers revolutionselsewhere.The defeat particularly of a revolutionin Germany in 1918-19 and imperialisthostility to the fledgling Soviet republic,which was invaded by 14 capitalistarmies, led to prolonged isolation of theworkers state in a very backward country. Writing in 1921, Lenin noted: "Theworkers' state is an abstraction. In realitywe have a workers' state with the following peculiar features, (1) it is the peasants and not the workers who predominate in the population and (2) it is aworkers' state with bureaucratic deformations" (cited in Trotsky, "From aScratch-To the Danger of Gangrene,"1940). In 1922, Lenin urged Trotsky totake up the fight against the increasingbureaucratisation of the Bolshevik Party.Particularly following the failure of asecond revolutionary opportunity in Germany in October 1923 and the consequent demoralisation of the Soviet proletariat, quantity turned into quality, asthe bureaucratic layer headed by Stalin usurped power from the proletariatthrough a political counterrevolution.In his retrospective analysis of the'triumph of the Stalinist bureaucracy overthe Trotskyist Left Opposition, Trotskywrote:"Socially the proletariat is more homo-geneous than the bourgeoisie, but it con-tains within itself an entire series ofstrata that become manifest with excep-tional clarity following the conquest ofpower, during the period when thebureaucracy and a workers' aristocracyconnected with it begin to take form. Thesmashing of the Left Opposition impliedin the most direct and immediate sensethe transfer of power from the handsof the revolutionary vanguard into thehands of the more conservative elementsamong the bureaucracy and the uppercrust of the workiQg class. The yearI924-that was the beginning of the

Soviet T hermidor."- 'The Workers' State, Thermidorand Bonapartism" (1935)In 1924, the Stalinists repudiated theinternationalist programme of Lenin'sBolsheviks and adopted the nationalistdogma of "socialism in one country,"which Workers Power barely mentions.Instead, echoing the position of TonyCliff, it claims that the qualitative degeneration of the Russian Revolutionoccurred in 1927. Like Cliff, WorkersPower declares that this signalled the restoration of a capitalist state in the SovietUnion. WP disingenuously asks why "did

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Indonesia...(continued from page J)White House and Wall Street, everyoneknows that the dictator's days are numbered. The question is: what will replacehim?The imperialists are scrambling for adeal in which the military butchers agreeto back some less discredited bourgeoispolitical figures, either from Suharto'scurrent entourage or the tame "opposition." This is the sentiment as well ofwide sectors of the Indonesian bourgeoisie fed up with the way the notoriouslycorrupt Suharto clan has run the countryinto the ground. And among the protesters, particularly the students, illusions ina "democratic" wing of the military andcivilian political establishment are rife.Notably, armed forces chief Wirantoappeared at the funeral for the murderedstudents in Jakarta to express his apology, while his troops ostentatiously mingled with student protesters in the daysafter the massacre. But with the armythreatening to prevent a mass studentprotest tomorrow, commemorating thestruggle against Dutch colonialism, thewaning days of the Suharto regime couldyet see a massive bloodbath. And a leading spokesman for the ruling Golkarparty talks of plans to replace Suhartowith an "emergency committee" basedon "built-in martial law"-a dire threatin the context of this blood-drenched dictatorship-particularly to crack down on"looters," i.e., the workers and urbanpoor. We warn: A "reformed" Indonesiancapitalist regime will be just as repressiveand bloody as its predecessor and just asdetermined to force the country's toilingmasses to pay for the capitalist crisis.The massive influx of imperialistinvestment in the last few decades hasfostered the growth of a combative youngproletariat, which has repeatedly engagedin strikes in recent years. Workers joinedstudent protests in the North Sumatrancity of Medan, and elsewhere publictransport came to a halt as drivers went onstrike. For now, however, the proletariatas a class has not entered the arena' ofstruggle against the Suharto regime. It isurgently necessary for the working classto emerge as an independent revolutionaryfactor. This requires the forging of aninternationalist vanguard party committed to leading the proletariat to the seizureof state power. Down with Suharto!Down with t he generals! For workers rev-olution in Indonesia!The proletariat must take its place atthe head of the unemployed poor, therural masses, women, the hundreds ofbrutally subjugated ethnic and nationalminorities in a struggle for socialist revolution against all wings of the capitalistclass. This is the only way to satisfy theaspirations of the masses and break thestranglehold of imperialist exploitationand domination. Indonesia is a classicexample of combined and uneven development, where modem capitali st industrycoexists with deep backwardness. Drawing on the experience of the RussianAP

6

October Revolution of 1917, Bolshevikleader Leon Trotsky explained in ThePermanent Revolution (1930):"With regard to countries with a belatedbourgeois development, especially thecolonial and semi-colonial countries,the theory of the permanent revolutionsignifies that the complete and genuinesolution of their tasks of achievingdemocracy and national emancipation isconceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of thesubjugated nation, above all its peasantmasses."Proletarian revolution in the Indonesian archipelago would resonate throughout Southeast and East Asia, where hun

dreds of millions of working people arebeing crushed under the weight of brutalexploitation and IMF-imposed austerity.It would also be an enormous impetus toproletarian political revolution in China,where the nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy is driving headlong toward capitalist counterrevolution. The fight for asocialist Asia-for workers revolutionsthroughout the region, especially in imperialist centers like Japan and Australiais a life-and-death question for proletarianmilitants in Indonesia. The U.S. and theother imperialist powers-which havearmed Suharto to the hilt-would immediately seek to use their financial and military might to stamp out any challengeto capitalist class rule. The SpartacistLeaguelU.S., section of the InternationalCommunist League, fights to mobilizethe multiracial proletariat in struggleagainst the rapacious American bourgeoisie. IMF, CIA, U.S. imperialism: Keepyour bloody hands of f Indonesia!

Rioting last week left Chinese neighborhood in Jakarta in flames. Indonesianproletariat must combat anti-Chinese terror.

Washington Promotes"Democratic" Military ButchersAs the turmoil in Jakarta mounted,Clinton called for "political reform" andurged Suharto to "open a dialogue withall elements of the society," while organizing a high-level American military delegation to meet with their Indonesiancounterparts, and conspicuously not withthe current president. "It is important tomaintain military-to-military contacts,"

explained U.S. admiral Prueher, commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Command. "Indonesia is important to theUnited States, and it is in our interestthat Indonesia gets through this."From its brain rusting of the 1965 antiCommunist bloodbath, when the CIAprovided hit lists to Suharto's butchers, tothe arming and training of the dreadedKopassus Red Berets notorious for thetorture and killing of suspected politicalopponents, the U.S. has been a chiefbacker of the military regime (see "U.S.Trains Indonesian Death Squads," WVNo. 688, 10 April). Today, the imperialistsare intent on cohering a more stable andreliable regil!le capable of implementingthe IMF's dictates and protecting thesuperprofits Nike and other corporationsreap from the exploitation of staivationwage Indonesian labor. Washington isalso concerned with defending control ofthe strategic Malacca Strait separatingSumatra from the Malaysian peninsula,the quickest sea route between the Pacificand the oil-rich Persian Gulf.

. A measure of the level of imperialistapprehension over the spectre of "anarchy" in Indonesia was the fact that theU.S. mooted direct military intervention,declaring its readiness to send a flotillaof Navy ships, military helicopters andmore than 10,000 troops to "evacuateU.S. citizens." Today's Sydney MorningHerald reports that a "team of militaryadvisers" has been despatched to Jakartaand that "key sections of the AustralianDefence Force have been placed on highlevels of readiness, with naval helicopters being sent to Indonesia and RAAF[air force] crews put on rotation." AndJapan, which is remembered for its brutaloccupation when it briefly displaced theviciously racist Dutch colonialist regimeduring World War II, is organizing a military airlift of Japanese civilians. Thiswould be the first time in postwar historythat Japanese "self-defense" forces areunilaterally deployed abroad.

However, the imperialist powers' principal aim is to broker a political "solution" to the burgeoning Indonesian crisis.In an editorial headlined "Sunset for President Suharto," the New York Times (15May) called for "a new government madeup of trusted leaders" and held up theexample of South Korea's Kim Dae Jung,who "persuaded citizens to accept measures that his predecessors could not."Kim, who was elected president last yearlargely on the basis of his record as anopponent of the former military rulers,was cultivated for decades by the CIA.Now he is administering the police-stateregime and enforcing mass layoffs andIMF austerity. The imperialists' talk ofdemocracy in Indonesia is nothing but afig leaf for maintaining the brutal systemof exploitation enforced through viciousmilitary repression, buttressed as alwaysby the U.S. and its British and Australianallies.A class-struggle labor leadershipwould organize trade-union boycotts ofarms shipments to the blood-drenchedIndonesian military. Australian maritimeworkers have a history of such solidarityactions, from bans on Dutch shippingduring the struggle for Indonesian inde-

Independent

1986 "people power" fraud in Philippines steered opposition tohated Marcos dictatorship into support for CIA lackey CoryAquino, whose regime enforced police-state terror against impoverished working masses.

pendence in the 1940s to a 1996 boycottdemanding the release of imprisonedIndonesian workers leaders. Genuineinternationalist solidarity with the Indonesian working masses requires a political struggle against the union misleaderswho embrace the aims of their imperialistmasters. The British Labour governmenthas sent over 50 arms shipments to Suharto in the past year, while the Australian Labor Party recently voted against aSenate motion calling for the release ofleftists in Suharto's dungeons.And while the pro-capitalist AmericanAFL-CIO labor bureaucracy bleats about"multinational" low-wage sweatshops inIndonesia and occasionally mouths "concern" for imprisoned trade unioniststhere, this is only in order to push protectionist chauvinism and to further thebroader interests of American imperialism. What is needed is a fight to breakworkers and minorities from the capitalistDemocratic Party of racism and war andthe forging of a revolutionary workersparty. Imperialist hands of f Indonesia!"People Power" Fraud

Imperialist spokesmen have beenchurning out endless streams of propaganda glorifying the "people power"movement which led to the installation ofCorazon ("Cory") Aquino in the Philippines in 1986. The New York Times (15May) reports that "many Indonesianshave become fascinated by the experienceof the Philippines a decade ago in whichmass demonstrations of 'people power'stopped the tanks of former PresidentFerdinand E. Marcos and persuaded soldiers to disobey his orders to shoot."In fact, the "people power" mobilizations on the streets, heavily backed by thepowerful Catholic hierarchy, were used asa vehicle for the U.S.-orchestrated removal of Marcos and the installation of amore credible and reliable government.Aquino's "people power" sham only succeeded because two top military leaders,Defense Minister Juan Ponce Emile andArmy Chief of Staff Fidel Ramos, swungto her support under direct prodding fromWashington. The result was to consolidate the imperialists' control of their semicolonial client state.To carry off this charade, Washingtonhad in Aquino a ready candidate withimpeccable anti-Communist credentialsand proven allegiance to the dictates ofWashington. Aquino was a mem ber of thelanded aristocracy, owner of one of thecountry's largest estates. Her husbandBenigno, who was assassina ted in Manilain 1983, had long been groomed by theCIA as a potential replacement for theincreasingly despised Marcos regime. Agraduate of the CIA school in Quantico,Virginia, Benigno Aquino began his political career by participating in the suppression of the Communist-led Huk rebellionin'the late 1940s and early '50s. He wenton to serve as CIA "control" for a 1958c1al}destine operation in North Sulawesiin Indonesia which was part of an illfated attempt to provoke secessionistrevolts against the Communist-supported,left-nationalist Sukarno regime.The Filipino masses are-no less exploited and oppressed today than they

WORKERS VANGUARD


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were under Marcos. The military butchers who served Marcos remain in place.The urban and rural masses are amongthe most impcverished in all of SoutheastAsia. The myriad national and religiousminorities, particularly in predominantlyIslamic Mindanao, continue to sufferunder the boot of police-state terror. Wewarned in 1986 that the replacement ofthe corrupt, brutal Marcos dictatorshipwith Aquino's "clean team" would mean"the substitution of one set of Americanlackeys for another. Marxists say: bewareof coups 'Made in U.S.A.'" (WVNo. 398,28 February)986).

Whatever deal the imperialists andtheir Indonesian bourgeois lackeys cobble together will solve nothing, even inthe short term. Whoever replaces Suhartowill still have to push through the starvation policies demanded by the worldbankers against an increasingly restiveproletariat. And after decades of backingSuharto's iron dictatorship, Washingtonhas no Indonesian equivalent of KimDae Jung waiting in the wings. Currentvice-president Habibie, a fanatically antiChinese racist with ties to German imperialism, is very much a creature of hispatron Suharto. "Moderate" generals likeWiranto are up to their necks in the bloodof countless victims, from the slaughterof ' 65 to the ongoing torture and murderof leftists and worker militants to therepeated massacres of East Timoreseindependence fighters. "Opposition" politicians like Megawati Sukarnoputridaughter of nationalist leader Sukarno,who was Suharto's predecessor-andMuslim leader Amien Rais have served asprops for the military dictatorship.Class Collaboration:Road to Bloody DefeatNonetheless, popular illusions in suchfigures pose an obstacle to the mobilization of the Indonesian proletariat. Thereis a syphilitic chain linking those whoclaim to speak for the proletarian and plebeian masses with the bourgeois "opposition" of Megawati and Rais, who in turnlook to a wing of the military. Thusthe left-nationalist People's DemocraticParty explicitly calls for an alliance withMegawati and the Islamic PPP. The role of"moderate" Islamic leaders is typified byRais-head of the 28 million-strongMuhammadiyah, the second-largest Muslim organization in the country-whoappeals to the army to "protect the interests of the nation," hailing it as "the backbone of the community" (Jakarta Post,18 April).It is natural that these bourgeois politicians would look to the military butchersto "protect the interests of the nation."But those who promote such a perspective among the workers and urban poorare leading them to repeat the bloodydefeat of 1965-66. Suharto came topower through an anti-Communist massacre carried out by ti1e military andreactionary Islamic gangs, with the directinvolvement of the American CIA and itsAustralian jackals. The terror whichbegan in October 1965 crushed the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), whichwith three million members and 14 million supporters in trade-union, peasant,women's and youth organizations wasthe largest in the capitalist world.This horrendous bloodbath was anobject lesson in the deadly danger ofclass collaboration. Basing itself on theMenshevik/Stalinist schema of "twostage" revolution-which amounts to mobilizing the workers to bring the bourgeois nationalists to power in the first"stage" and ends in the massacre of workers and Communists-the PKI opposedthe fight for proletarian revolution. PKIchairman D. N. Aidit proclaimed: "Longlive Sukarno! Long live the PKI!" Withthe full backing of its Stalinist mentorsin Moscow and especially Beijing, thePKI preached "national unity" with thebourgeois-nationalist rulers, the Islamicestablishment and the military officers.The PKI gained a number of cabinet postsin Sukarno's government, embracing hisstrategy of "Nasakom"-an alliance ofbourgeois nationalists, Islamic groupsand "Communists." This nationalist pop-22 MAY 1998

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ular front chained the proletariat to itsclass enemy.The PKI repeatedly banned strikes,suppressed peasant protests and preachedconfidence in Sukarno and his generals.Pledging to enforce "co-operation between the people and the Armed Forces,in particular the Police Force," the PKIhelped strengthen the very apparatus ofrepression which would slaughter its followers. Following a counterrevolutionarycoup in October 1965 led by Suharto, thegenerals struck out against the party,while Sukarno turned a blind eye to themassacre of his former allies. The PKI,and the proletarian and peasant masseswho looked to it, remained paralyzed inthe face of the terror. We wrote at thetime: "The working people of Indonesiaare now paying with their blood forthe betrayal by the leadership of the3,000,000-member, pro-Chinese Communist Party of Indonesia" (Spartacist[English edition] No.5, NovemberDecember 1965).In the aftermath, those leftists and liberal intellectuals who had escaped theslaughter found themselves locked awayin Sunarto's dungeons for decades.Twenty-five years later, PKI leaders werestill being executed. Untold thousandsof ethnic Chinese were also slaughteredin 1965-66. Following the massacre,Suharto closed down Chinese-languageschools and newspapers and even bannedChinese writing-. Ethnic Chinese are virtually banned from the political system,civil service and academia. At the sametime, the fabulously wealthy Suharto clanhas deeply entwined its interests with atiny Chinese elite who control some 70-80 percent of the country"s economy. Thishas served to make all ethnic Chinese, apredominantly Christian minority composing less than 5 percent of the population in the largest Islamic country in theworld, convenient scapegoats for theabject poverty of the Indonesian masses.Yet throughout Southeast Asia, ethnicChinese form an important part of theproletariat and have historically playedleading roles in workers' struggles.In February, Suharto got Islamic religious leaders to declare a "holy war" on"speculators," touching off renewed antiChinese attacks. In March, British !TNtelevision news reported that a pogromon the island of Lombok was organizedby security forces. And the London Sunday Times (17 May) indicates that thesame Kostrad military unit which iswidely believed to have been behind themurder of the Trisakti University students also encouraged last week's rampage against Chinese homes and shopsin Jakarta. Kostrad is commanded bySuharto's son-in-law, Lieutenant Gene'ralprabowo, an Islamic fanatic who formerly headed the notorious Kopassus.Shortly before that pogrom, Prabowo

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ominously suggested that it was time forIndonesians to "take back control of theirown economy." These incidents underline the need for Indonesian workers tochampion the defense of the persecutedChinese minority as part of the fightagainst their blood-drenched capitalistrulers.Indonesia andPermanent Revolution

Bourgeois press reports have noted thatthe student protesters are supported by awide array of forces, including some whothemselves participated in the 1965-66anti-Communist slaughter. The image ofhaughty IMF director Michel Camdessusstanding over Suharto as the Indonesianstrongman signed the world bankers'humiliating agreement served as a focusfor "national unity." But underneath theshared outrage against Suharto and theimperialist bloodsuckers lie sharply counterposed class interests. Significant sections of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie despise the regime for its corruptnepotism: the Suharto family is reputed tohave amassed a fortune ranging upwardsof $30 billion, one-seventh of the entirenational economy. For the proletariat andurban and rural poor, the question is oneof simple economic survival.Unemployment has skyrocketed inthe past year, leaving more than eight million jobless. Estimates indicate that byyear's end nearly half of the workforce of90 million will be making too little tomeet their minimum daily needs. Onemechanic in Jakarta described the latestupheaval as the result of "the big gapbetween the rich and the poor," adding:"We need to change the way the countryis run." And an article in the New YorkTimes (18 May) noted that in the slums ofthe capital, unemployed "idle young mensound less interested in political warfarethan in class warfare." But the looting ofshops amounts only to a primitive appropriation of some articles of consumption,when what is needed is the expropriationof the means of production.In order that any of the deeply feltneeds of the masses can be met, the proletariat must seize power from the_ national bourgeoisie, expropriating its.holdings and those of the imperialists.Indonesia won formal independence under Sukarno's nationalists in 1949, aftercenturies under the boot of Dutch colonial rule. Under Dutch colonialism, therewas scarcely anything resembling a modern proletariat. In the years immediatelyafter World War I, Communist leadersTan Malaka and Henricus Sneevliet pursued a futile strategy based on politicalblocs with and accommodation to "revolutionary nationalists." They carried outan entry into the bourgeois-nationalist(and anti-Chinese) Sarekat Islam andeven defended pan-Islamism as corre-

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sponding "to the national liberationstruggle." In The Permanent Revolution,Trotsky wrote:"Under the conditions of the imperialistepoch the national democratic revolutioncan be carried through to a victoriousend only when the social and politicalrelationships of the country are maturefor putting the proletariat in power as theleader of the masses of the people. Andif this is not yet the case? Then the struggle for national liberation will produceonly very partial results, results directedentirely against the working masses."A backward colonial or semi-colonialcountry, the proletariat of which is insufficiently prepared to unite the peasantryand take power, is thereby incapable ofbringing the democratic revolution to itsconclusion."Today, Indonesia remains a neocolonyof imperialism-a source of cheap natural resources and low-wage labor-seething with unresolved national and socialcontradictions. But what has changed isthe emergence of a young proletariatwhich has indicated its potential power ina series of strikes beginning in the early1990s, many of them in the JakartaBogor-Tangerang-Bekasih industrial beltof central Java. This is the social forcewhich can sweep away the military dictatorship and put an end to the brutaloppression of women and the subjugationof national and religious minorities.There is no democratic wing of the bourgeoisie, and there can be no genuinedemocracy under capitalism in backward,dependent countries saddled by imperialist exploitation and grinding poverty. Theproletariat must be made conscious of itshistoric role as the leader of the dispossessed masses and the gravedigger of thissystem of capitalist exploitation. It is thetask of a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguardparty to bring that understanding to theworking class.Amid the deepening economic crisisin Southeast Asia, hundreds of thousandsof immigrant workers have been savagely expelled from one country afteranother. Working-class militants mustoppose all deportations and demand fullcitizenship rights for all immigrants. InIndonesia itself, hundreds of nationaland ethnic minorities suffer under thewhip of the Java-centered bourgeoisie.This is particularly clear in East Timor,which has been the scene of one bloodymilitary massacre after another. Proletarian revolutionaries in Indonesia mustuphold the right of self-determinationfor oppressed nations. Independence forEast Timor! 'Against the schemes of the imperialists, the bourgeois "opposition" and themilitary to impose a new police-stateregime-possibly with a new versionof the hand-picked "parliament"-inSuharto's wake, we oppose the ban onpolitical parties and call for a revolutionary constituent assembly. In rarsing thiscontinued on page 8

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Indonesia...(continued from page 7)slogan for China following the suppression of the 1925-27 Revolution by thebourgeois-nationalist Guomindang (Kuomintang), Trotsky explained how thefight for a constituent assembly must belinked to a perspective for proletarianpower:"The Communist Party can and shouldformulate the slogan of the constituentassembly with full powers, elected byuniversal, equal, direct, and secret suffrage. ln the process of agitation for this

slogan, it will obviously be necessary toexplain to the masses that it is doubtfulif such an assembly will be convened,and even if it were, it would be power,less so long as the material powerremains in the hands of the Kuomintanggenerals."Both under Sukarno and Suharto, thenationalist regime has imposed many ofthe dictates of Islamic law on women:abortion is banned, the woman's role asfamily housekeeper and domestic slaveto her husband is enshrined in law.Suharto sought to achieve social stabilityby reinforcing the hold of conservativeIslamic interests, making religious education compulsory in public schools andgranting increased powers to Islamiccourts. The role of Amien Rais points tothe growth of Islam as a political factor,which can only be a force for reaction,particularly targeting women and religious minorities.At the same time, this deepgoingoppression has impelled the new generation of women workers into the forefrontof the class struggle (see "Women Workers and the Fight for Socialist Revolution:Indonesia Seethes Under IMF Austerity,"WV No. 688, 10 April). The proletariatmust fight for the separation of state andreligion and against theocratic reaction,opposing all discrimination against religious minorities. We call for free abortionon demand and free quality health carefor all as part of the fight for women's liberation through socialist revolution.

As in all underdeveloped countries, theIndonesian bourgeoisie is tied by a thousand strings to the imperialists and incapable of resolving the tasks associatedwith the European bourgeois revolutionsof the 18th and 19th centuries, such aspolitical democracy, agrarian revolutionor national emancipation. In elaboratingthe program of permanent revolution,Trotsky stressed that in the epoch of imperialism these tasks can only be resolvedthrough the proletarian seizure of power.To thwart imperialist intervention andovercome the economic backwardness of"Third World" countries, this must beintegrally linked to a struggle for international socialist revolution, particularly inthe advanced industrial countries.

Mumia .. .( continued from page 12)

Ashley asks, "Why are so many sowilling to donate so much money andenergy to a case they seem to know so little about?" He seeks to portray Jamal'ssupporters as dupes who know little abouthis case, and hopes to drive away futurecontributors to Jamal's defense by depicting his fight for freedom as a. moneymaking operation. The truth is simple.Millions of people around the worldknow Mumia was framed up. They knowthat Mumia had been in the cross hairs ofthe Philly cops and FBI because of hisprominent role in the Black Panther Partyas a teenager, because of his later supportof the MOVE organization, because of hissearing exposure of racist cop brutalityand the American injustice system.KGO-TV's attempt to scare awayMumia's supporters is also not new.After the PDC initiated a 1990 rally inPhiladelphia, F.O.P. chief Richard Costello railed that Jamal's supporters were"misfit terrorists" deserving of an "electric couch." In 1994, National PublicRadio capitulated to F.O.P. pressure and -canceled a planned series of commentaries by Jamal. In 1995, Addison-Wesley8

This perspective was confirmed in boththe positive and the negative in the experience of the Soviet Union. The 1917Bolshevik Revolution transformed backward Russia, a preponderantly peasantsociety and a prison house of oppressedpeoples under the reign of tsarist despotism. But seven decades of Stalinistbetrayal of revolutionary opportunitiesaround the world, perpetrated in the nameof "socialism in one country," finally ledto the undoing of the October Revolution.This ultimate Stalinist betrayal onlyunderscores the need for a revolutionaryinternationalist program for proletarianpower.Viewed narrowly from the Indonesianarchipelago, prospects for consolidatingproletarian rule in the face of imperialisthostility might appear bleak. But particularly given the economic turmoil inthe region, especially in Thailand andMalaysia-which has strong linguisticand cultural links with Indonesiasocialist revolution in Indonesia wouldbe a spark for class struggle throughoutthe Pacific Rim. The ties connecting theproletariat of these countries are embodied in the millions of immigrant workersin the region. South Korea is a tinderbox, with its combative working classchafing under the prospect of millions oflayoffs. And in Japan, the industrialpower house of the region, the proletariat likewise faces mass layoffs as thebourgeoisie seeks to stem a deepeningeconomic slump and financial crisis.The fate of the Indonesian masses isparticularly bound up with events inChina. The Beijing bureaucracy boredirect responsibility for the Maoist PKI'sdisastrous course, a betrayal of socialistrevolution which served only to furtherisolate the Chinese deformed workersstate. Now the Chinese Stalinists arepushing rapidly toward capitalist restoration, provoking a wave of workers' struggles. The fight for proletarian politicalrevolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy and stop capitalist counterrevolution

. was subjected to a campaign of harassment when it published Jamal's Livefrom Death Row. Two years ago,witnessVeronica Jones was even arrested whileshe testified on the stand at the hearingsfor Jamal. More recently, Mumia's son,Jamal Hart, was railroaded to prison for15 years on bogus weapons possessioncharges for speaking out on behalf of hisfather. Meanwhile, state officials haveintercepted and copied privileged legalcommunications and sent them to thegovernor's office.In their efforts to isolate and silenceMumia and obstruct his legal defense,state officials have thrown him into theirsupermax-security, high-tech hellhole atSCI Greene. In March, draconian newregulations curtailing family visits andconfiscating personal possessions provoked a hunger strike by 38 of the 111prisoners on Greene's death row. Someof the new measures were subsequentlyrescinded ("Death Row Hunger StrikeEnds," WV No. 687, 27 March). Jamalwas forced to tum over some 16 boxesof personal materials, including legallegal papers.Last December, SCI Greene counselorRobert DeBord resigned after comingforward with details confirming Jamal'sdescription of this racist prison hell.

SpartacistLeague/Australiacontingent at1997 Melbourneprotest againstSuhartodictatorship.

is at the center of any revolutionary perspective in the region. It is crucial forproletarian militants in Indonesia andelsewhere to call for unconditional military defense of China and the otherdeformed workers states-North Korea,Vietnam and Cuba-against capitalistattack and internal counterrevolution.Forge a Leninist-TrotskyistParty!

Over the past decade, a number ofindependent trade unions have emergedout of wor}


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NYC Transit...(continued from page 12)the bosses' state degrade the consciousness of the working class. Every classconscious worker must demand the complete and unconditional independence ofthe labor movement from the capitalistgovernment!An object lesson in the danger ofappealing to the state is provided by thegovernment's sinister intervention intothe International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT). In a vindictive payback forthe modesfvictory won by the Teamstersin last summer's strike against UPS, thefederal courts overturned the results ofthe 1996 union elections and disqualifiedIBT president Ron Carey from runningfor re-election. After being catapultedinto the union presidency in elections runlock, stock and barrel by the feds, Careyhas now himself been bitten by the antiunion class enemy. The ostensible pretext for the courts' latest move, thatCarey and his cronies were engaged incorrupt practices, had nothing to do withthe real reason for the government'sintervention. For decades, DemocraticParty politicians in particular have pursued a vendetta against the Teamstersaimed at curbing the potential power ofthis union to wage class struggle. Thereis nothing more corrupt than tying theunions to the government of the exploiters. Labor must clean its own house!To defeat the growing barrage ofunion-busting attacks requires a leadership committed to a program of classstruggle, not class collaboration. At bottom, there is a fundamental identitybetween all wings of the labor bureaucracy, whether it be "old guard" bureaucrats like Sonny Hall and Willie James ofthe TWU, or "new voice" AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, New Directions andthe pro-Carey Teamsters for a DemocraticUnion, whose calling card is also suingthe unions. All of them subordinate theworkers movement to the capitalist classand its state, while chaining the workingclass politically to the Democratic andRepublican parties of capital. The fight toemancipate labor and all the oppressedcan only go forward in the struggle toforge a multiracial, class-struggle workers party, which acts as a tribune of thepeople, in counterposition to the partnerparties of capital.Mobilize the UnionsAgainst Racist Attacks!

The "workfare" deal negotiated byWillie James in September 1996 camedown hardest on the most vulnerable sections of the TA workforce, particularlywomen and younger black and Hispanicworkers for whom cleaners' positions areoften the avenue to better-paying transitjobs (see "NYC Transit 'Workfare' Deal:Enslaving the Poor, Busting the Unions,"WV No. 652, 27 September 1996).AFSCME District Council 37 chief Stanley Hill was furious over this contractbecause it blew the cover off his ownlongstanding sweetheart deal with Giuliani, through which more than 20,000

Pennanent Revolution n.the "Antl-lmperiallst United fflJltt"orIglnsa' Chinese trotskyism. . . Slt1l'Clei:'u ." .Iorlglnal Documents Published from Soviet ArchivesI Trotsky's Fight Against Stalinist Betrayal01 Bolshevik Revolution

SEE PAGE 38

Revolutionary Regroupment orCentrist Alchemy?SEE p"GE 5t1

O . . . . .A .0 . . . . . 1MUoIOO .... ' O . " ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' - ' ~

No. 53, Summer 1997, $1.50 (56 pages)

formerly unionized municipal jobs werefilled by welfare recipients.The lie pushed by James, Hill & Co.that such slave-labor schemes would notthreaten union jobs has worn increasinglythreadbare as "workfare" expands and thenumber of layoffs climbs. Now Giulianihas announced layoffs of another thousand workers, overwhelmingly black andPuerto Rican, in the city homeless services. This comes on top of last month'sdecision to layoff over 900 AFSCMELocal 420 hospital workers-many atHarlem Hospital, one of the few remaining city hospitals in minority neighborhoods-even as a thousand "workfare"recipients have been forced into suchjobs.But the slashing of unionized jobs andthe attacks on welfare are not si.mply the

During 1966strike, NYCtransit workersvowed to defystrikebreakingcourt injunctions"till hell freezesover."

work of NYC's racist "law and order"Republican mayor. Thousands of cityworkers were laid off by Giuliani's predecessor, black Democrat David Dinkins.And it was Democratic president Clinton,working hand in glove with Congressional Republicans, who consigned millions of babies and mothers, poor peopleand immigrants, to starvation, sickness,homelessness and death with the bipartisan 1996 "welfare reform." The introduction of "workfare" is not simply intendedto further savagely brutalize welfarerecipients, who are disproportionatelyblack, Hispanic and other minorities . Thissinister program is endorsed by widesections of the capitalist class, who seekto use the most impoverished, vulnerable layers of the population as a battering ram against better-paid, unionizedworkers.Any labor leadersbip worthy of thename would seek to lead not only itsown membership against these deadlyattacks but would champion the millionsof unorganized working people andminorities, initiating an aggressive campaign to organize the unorganized anddemanding that "workfare" recipients receive union wages with full union protection and benefits. There needs to be afight for jobs for all and for union controlof hiring and training programs. The

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Centrists...( continued from page 5)

Lenin wrote in The State and Revolu-tion that the state begins to "wither away"from the first day of the proletarian dictatorship. Workers Power points to the 1919Russian Communist Party programme,which looked forward to the earlyreplacement of the standing army by anarmed people. Citing the fact that thesenorms were not realised in the SovietUnion, and that the state machine grew tomonstn?us proportions 'under Stalin, WPconcludes that a capitalist state had reemerged, describing this in languagetaken straight from the anti-Communistide'Ologues for "democratic" imperialism:"Soviet power had been comprehensivelysmashed or 'blown up' and replacedby the absolutist rule of a totalitarian bourgeois bureaucratic-military statemachine, but one which drew the sourceof its power and material privileges fromnationalised property and planned economy" (Trotskyist International, JanuaryJune 1998). Trotsky was scathing in hisresponse to such arguments:"To these gentlemen the dictatorship ofthe proletariat is simply an imponderableconcept, an ideal norm not to be realizedupon our sinful planet. Small wonderthat 'theoreticians' of this stripe, insofar

as they do not denounce altogetherthe very word dictatorship, strive tosmear over the irreconcilable contradiction between the latter and bourgeoisdemocracy."- "The Class Nature of theSoviet State"Trotsky insisted that the growth andconsolidation of the Stalinist bureau

cratic apparatus proved not that a capitalist state had been consolidated, but thatbuilding "socialism 'in a single country"-moreover a backward and isolatedone-was a Stalinist lie. The materialbasis for socialism is the elimination ofscarcity, which requires surpassing thehighest level of development achieved bycapitalist society. For this reason, socialism can only be achieved on an interna-tional basis.

The necessary prerequisite for thestate to "wither away" is the abolition ofclass society, which cannot be achievedin the absence of proletarian revolutionin at least several advanced capitalistcountries. As Trotsky wrote in "Not aWorkers' and Not a Bourgeois State?"(November 1937):"The USSR as a workers' state does notcorrespond to the 'tradit ional' norm. Thisdoes not signify that it is not a workers'state. Neither does this signify that thenorm has been found false. The 'norm'counted upon the complete victory of theinternational proletarian revolution. TheUSSR is only a partial and mutilatedexpression of a backward and isolatedworl):ers' state."At times, WP contends that the Sovietdegenerated workers state was simultaneously the dictatorship of the proletariatand the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie:"The dictatorship of the proletariat hadtaken the paradoxical form of a politicaldictatorship of 'a bourgeois state withoutthe bourgeoisie' over the proletariat." Ituses Trotsky's phrase '''bourgeois' statewithout the bourgeoisie"-deliberatelyomitting the inverted commas Trotskyplaced around "bourgeois"-in his seminal analysis of the degeneration of theRussian Revolution, The Revolution Be-trayed (1936). Trotsky used this expression in the same sense that it was usedby Marx and Lenin-to explain the gen-!Xl

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Leon Trotsky,organizer of RedArmy, rallyingtroops in struggleagainst counterrevolutionaries.

eral necessity under the dictatorship ofthe proletariat to maintain a public forceto regulate distribution while scarcityremains.Trotsky noted that even in an advancedindustrial country like America, a workers state could not immediately providefor everyone's needs: "Insofar as the statewhich assumes the task of socialist transformation is compelled to defend inequali ty-that is, the material privileges of aminority-by methods of compulsion,insofar does it also remain a 'bourgeois'state, even though without a bourgeoisie."WP is forced to acknowledge thatTrotsky's references to "bourgeois normsof distribution" in the Soviet Union didnot mean that he considered the USSR a"bourgeois state." Castigating Trotsky

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Victorious Soviet troops raised red flag over Berlin, 1945. Yevgeni Khaldeifor this, it writes: "The legacy of Trotskyon the issue of the class character of thestate machine in the USSR is at bestambiguous. Nowhere did he clearly pointto the fac! that, conceived in abstractionfrom the property relations defended bythe bureaucracy, this state machine wasbourgeois." Indeed, no Marxist could orwould conceive the class 'nature of thestate independent of the property relations it defends! Only for vulgar pettybourgeois democrats like Workers Poweris the question of property relations anabstraction!In his 1937 polemic against Burnham'sposition thai the Soviet Union was "neither a workers nor a capitalist state,"Trotsky argued that "only the intrusion ofa revolutionary or a counterrevolutionaryforce in property relations can change theclass nature of the state." Trotsky went onto acknowledge that there are temporarycases where the economy and the statestand in contradiction: "In the firstmonths of Soviet rule the proletariatreigned on the basis of a bourgeois economy ... Should abourgeois counterrevolution succeed in the USSR, the new government for a lengthy period would haveto base itself upon the nationalized economy. But what does such a type of temporary conflict between the economy andthe state mean? It means a revolution or acounterrevolution."The victory of Yeltsinite counterrevolution in the USSR led to exactly such asituation. But Workers Power, arguingthat some industry remains I'n the handsof the state, ludicrously characterised theformer Soviet Union as a "moribundworkers state." At bottom, WP's viewof "workers rule" derives from BritishLabourism,which equates "socialism"with nationalisation of the "commandingheights of the economy" under a capital-ist parliamentary democracy.Workers Power vs. Trotsky onthe Soviet Army

Seeking to justify its "support" to theBolshevik Revolution on the basis ofpurely democratic considerations, Work-

ers Power makes much of the counterposition between a Red Army based on amilitia system and a standing army. Todo this, it presents tortuous and selfcontradictory accounts of what happenedin the October Revolution. One versionquotes Trotsky: "The October revolutiondissolved the tzar's army wholly andwithout leaving a trace. The Red Armywas built anew from thy first brick" (TheRevolution Betrayed). This is followedby WP's claim that the Bolsheviksmerely reformed the tsarist army:"But almost immediately they wcrethrown into a civil war and the norm wascompromised with the reality as theyinherited it-the Tsar's army, with itsranks and general staff. Trotsky had tomake use of this army. They did subjectit to workers' control-party commissarssupervising generals etc-as the nextbest bet in the circumstances."This is tantamount to denying that thecapitalist state was smashed and replacedby a new state power, the dictatorshipof the proletariat. WP falsely presentsTrotsky, the organiser of the Red Army,as an advocate of a pure militia system.For the same reason the state could not"wither away" overnight, the Soviet republic could not replace the standingarmy by a militia system. In The Revolu-tion Betrayed, Trotsky pointed out thatthe militia (or territorial) system requiresa "high economic basis" which could notbe achieved within the confines of theSoviet Union. He wrote: "Granted thenecessary material conditions, the territorial army would not only not stand secondto the regular army, but far exceed it. TheSoviet Union must pay dear for itsdefense, because it is not sufficiently richfor the cheaper militia system." ButTrotsky never called for the abolition ofthe regular Soviet Army, which wouldhave been tantamount to calling for thedisarming of the degenerated workersstate in the face of the imperialist powers.While in The Degenerated RevolutionWP at least recognised (in words) theneed for a standing army to defend theSoviet workers state from attack, today itargues that "the formulation that thestanding armies of the Stalinist caste

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have a dual character- 'instruments ofbureaucratic tyranny as well as defence'surrenders too much to the Stalinists,above all in the light of events since1989." In short, Workers Power can seeno class difference between the SovietArmy and the armed forces of imperialism. As for events since 1989, it wasWorkers Power who joined the WestGerman imperialists in demanding thewithdrawal of Soviet troops from EastGermany. The withdrawal of these troopsby Gorbachev was an integral part ofthe sellout of the former East Germandeformed workers state.Trotsky ,described the restoration ofthe officer corps and the Cossacks as"one of the clearest expressions ofthe Thermidor." He was scathing in hisdenunCiation of Stalin's disorganisationof the Soviet armed forces and hisbeheading of the military leadership onthe eve of World War II. Nonetheless,writing in "The USSR in War" (1939) atthe time of the Hitler-Stalin pact, Trotskystressed that when Hitler turned hisarmies against the Soviet Union, theobligation of Bolshevik-Leninists wasclear:"Under these conditions, partisans of theFourth International, without changing inany way their attitude toward the Kremlin oligarchy, will advance to the forefront, as the most urgent task of the hour,the military resistance against Hitler. Theworkers will say: 'We cannot cede toHitler the ove'rthrowing of Stalin; that isour own task.' During the military struggle against Hitler, the revolutionaryworkers will strive to enter into the closest possible comradely relations with therank-and-file fighters of the Red Army.While arms in hand they deal blowsto Hitler, the Bolshevik-Leninists willat the same time conduct revolutionarypropaganda against Stalin preparing hisoverthrow at the next and perhaps verynear stage."Trotsky was unambiguous about whichclass should overthrow the bureaucracythe proletariat. As he wrote in "Not aWorkers' and Not a Bourgeois State?":"Stalin serves the bureaucracy and thusthe world bourgeoisie; but he cannotserve the bureaucracy without defendingthat social foundation which the bureaucracy exploits in its own interests ... . However, he carries through this defense withmethods that prepare the general destruction of Soviet society. It is exactlybecause of this that the Stalinist cliquemust be overthrown. But it is the revolutionary proletariat who must overthrow it.The proletariat cannot subcontract thiswork to the imperialists." Subcontractingthis work to the imperialists and othercounterrevolutionary forces is exactlywhat Workers Power did.Workers Power and the Mythof the 'Stalinist State'

WP's description of the overthrow ofcapitalism in Eastern Europe is profoundly revisionist: "After the Seco-ndWorld War the Stalinist bureaucracy,far from smashing the capitalist state,simply took hold of the old apparatusof political domination and, utilisingbureaucratic, military, police measurestransformed/purged its structures.... Inthe first period this state, controlled bythe Stalinists, was used to defend andrebuild capitalism, and then later thesame state machine was used as a leverfor the economic expropriation of thebourgeoisie." As we have noted, the ideathat the bourgeois state can be taken' overand used for the expropriation of thebourgeoisie is utterly reformist.

In the case of post-war Eastern Europe,the Soviet Army-the army of a degenerated workers state-was the decisive military power, the "special bodies of armedmen," which smashed the Nazi warmachine. Faced with imperialist hostilityand the onset of the Cold War-specifically in the form of the West EuropeanMarshall Plan-the Soviet occupationforces expropriated the domestic capitalists and created bureaucratically deformed workers states. Likewise, inYugoslavia, China, Vietnam and Cuba,under exceptional circumstances, pettybourgeois guerrilla forces were able toestablish deformed workers states, qual-22 MAY 1998

itatively the same as the degeneratedSoviet workers state. But in each case thebourgeois state was smashed (see Marx-ist Bulletin No.8, "Cuba and MarxistTheory").WP's use of the term "Stalinist statemachine" is simply an obscurantist version of Tony Cliff's position that the Stalinist bureaucracy was a new ruling class.In contrast, Trotsky understood that thebureaucracy was a deeply contradictorycaste which rested on the proletarianproperty forms while serving as the transmission belt for the pressures of worldimperialism in undermining those gains.Falsifying history to suit its ends,Workers Power says that the Hungarianpolitical revolution of 1956 "showed thatthe ruling Communist Party, the army, thesecret police and the state administration

would act as agents of repression againstany working class attempt to establish itsown control over a state which claimed tobe proletarian." In fact, Hungary 1956showed that the bureaucracy was a brittle,contradictory caste, as the workers' revolt drew in its wake the majority of thearmy ranks and Communist Party cadres.Unlike Polish Solidarnosc in the early1980s, the Hungarian workers explicitlydefended the planned nationalised economy, establishing soviet-type workerscouncils and workers militias in everymajor industrial centre.The Kremlin had to send in two wavesof troops, who had been told that theywere sent in to suppress Anglo-Frenchimperialists or fascists. A first wave ofRussian-speaking units had to be withdrawn after the Hungarian workers fraternised with them, winning many over totheir cause. The essential element thatwas missing was a conscious proletarianvanguard party, which would have counterposed revolutionary internationalismto nationalist prejudices and illusions inthe United Nations fostered by liberalStalinists like Imre Nagy. Only such aparty, based on the programme of unconditional military defence of the gains ofall the degenerated and deformed workers states, could have successfully foughtto win over the ranks of the Soviet Armyin the fight for political revolution inHungary and across Eastern Europe andthe USSR.More than 30 years later, the contradictions inherent in Stalinism wereplayed out in capitalist counterrevolution. Under the pressure of the imperialistworld market, the Stalinist bureaucraciesintroduced "market reforms," laying thebasis for the full-fledged restoration ofcapitalism. Warning of this possibility in1933, Trotsky wrote:

"In the event of this worst possible variant, a tremendous sign ificance for ,thesubsequent course of the revolutionarystruggle will be borne by the question:where are those guilty for the catastrophe? Not the slightest taint of guiltmust fall upon the revolutionary internationalists. In the hour of mortal danger,they must remain on the last barricade."- "The Class Nature of theSoviet State"In sharp contrast to WP and the rest ofthe fake left, in the hour of mortal danger, the ICL fought to the bitter end tod ~ f e a t capitalist counterrevolution in theSoviet Union and Eastern Europe. In

1989-90, we mobilised our forces internationally to provide leadership to theincipient political revolution in the DDRand to stop the juggernaut of counterrevolution, raising the call "For a Red Germany of Workers Councils in a SocialistUnited States of Europe!" In late 1991,our supporters in the Soviet Union distributed tens of thousands of leafletsin Russian declaring: "Soviet Workers:Defeat Yeltsin-Bush Counterrevolution!"Today we fight to win the Chinese proletariat to the urgent perspective of prole-. tarian political revolution to stop thegalloping drive towards capitalist restoration there.The demise of the degenerated anddeformed workers states in the USSRand Eastern Europe is ultimately theresponsibility of the Stalinist bureaucra-

quently repudiated even lip-service toTrotsky'S line on the Russian question,advising Workers Power that it should dolikewise if it was not to follow the roadof the dreaded "Sparts." Some twodecades later, WP has completed thecentrist circle and openly reverted to its"third camp" origins.The utter repudiation by these groupsof Bolshevism, the October Revolutionand the dictatorship of the proletariat is areflection of the-' enormous impact thisworld-historic defeat has had on the consciousness of the proletariat internationally. Within our own party as well, wehave had to wage