Socialist Challenge Raises an Unanswered

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QUES Anti-imperialism versus imperialism, or labour against capital? Is working class opposition to regimes like Iran — or even Cuba — a sectarian diversion, or necessary for socialists? Harry Sloan reviews a debate. Castro with Ethiopian president Mengistu: another anti-imperialist? Nicaragua's Ortega, Grenada's Bishop, Cuba's Castro AFTER rumbling along uneventfully since July, a series of articles in Socialist Challenge by John. Ross has begun to reveal their true purpose - the pursuit of an unspoken debate now under way in the British International Marxist Group and its international umbrella grouping the 'United' Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI).

The article in the current Socialist Challenge is on Iran; but the question at issue is one of more general significance. How do the comrades of the IMG/USFI view the world struggle for socialism? Do they see it as a global contest primarily betwèen 'anti-imperialist' and imperialist regimes? Or do they analyse it - as we do - to be a class struggle in every country, for which the working class requires a revolutionary Marxist leadership?

Camps.

The view that the issue is one between the friends and enemies of imperialism is most expressly argued by the leaders and supporters of the American Socialist Workers Party (which is prevented by US legislation from formal affiliațion to the USFI).

For the SWP, the world is divided into two "classcamps and problems of political anaiysis are reduced to the crude rule-of-thumb that "any enemy of Reagan is our ally"

For the most crass statement of this view, we need only look to the SWP's recent explaration of its position on Iran:

"It is true that ine Iranian government is a capitalist government. It is true that it carries out repression against the workers and oppressed nationalities, against left wing groups, and others. But if the Khomeini government had crushed the mass movement in Iran, if repression really were worse today than under the Shah, US imperialism would be supporting the Iranian government instead of trying to overthrow it."

(SWP weekly The Militant, Aug 6, 1982)

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More recently The Militant has carried a wholepage, uncritical interview with Khomeini's UN ambassador and reemphasised its support for Iran in its attempts to invade lraq.

Ross on the other hand puts forward a very different view. He stresses not the "anti-imperialist" but the capitalist character of the Khomeini regime. He expands on Khomeini's actual record of repression against the working class and minorities: and he argues that. "the strategic way forward for the working class in Iran. including in the fight against imperialism, lies not ir siliar a with the Khamet-TAMInET 91111/7EM guma but in their overRemains iu be sen ; - which Ross will extend this broadly correct polemic against the SWP view (which he does not openly mention) to the other areas of world politics where it is plainly relevant.

Because it is the SWP view which at present is gaining ground within the IMG, and which colours the poutical analysis put forward by the other pages of Socialist Challenge.

Significantly Ross's series of articles began publication shortly after a classic example of this world view caused a stir. A whole-page article by leading SWP writer Mary-Alice Waters was reported in Socialist Challenge.

Written in Havana it gave uncritical and enthusiastic support to the speech at the Non-Aligned States conterence by Neanor Costa ON Mendez - Foreign Minister of the Argentine dictatorship.

Socialist Organiser in July pointed out that this gave credence to the fraudulent basis on which the Non-Aligned Movement itself operates. We.: showed the particularly cynical nature of Costa Mendez' "anti-imperialist" speech, and warned that:

"In giving quite spurious "anti-imperialist' credentials to the junta, such a position can only politically disarm the Argentine workers whose prime task remains now, as before, to organise their own power for the overtlrow of the military regime and establishment of a workers' government."

(SO no. 91, July 1)

The correspondence columns of Socialist Challenge showed that number of IMG members and supporters shared our criticism..

And there have been other indications in Socialist Challenge that criticism of SWP political positions is increasingly vocal within the IMG.

The cornerstone of the SWP's positions on Iran and the Non-Aligned Movement is the political adaptation of the SWP leadership to the werld view put forward by Fidel Castro's Stalinist bureaucracy in Cuba.

In the early 1960s, bedazzled by the living events of the Cuban Revolution, the SWP extolled Castro and advocated the "Cuban Way" to socialist revolution in the colonial and semi-colonial countries.

Together with the leadership of the European International Secretariat, they advocated that Marxists should join the proliferation of petty bourgeois guerrillaist groupings in Latin America and Fidelista currents elsewhere.

The SWP and its co-thinkers began to pull back from and criticise this political line in the late 1960s. But the European leadership headed by Ernest Mandel remained committed to its orientation at first towards guerrillaist groupings and then to ultralett and centrist " vanguard" forces. These differences led by 1974-76 to enormous tensions within the USFI, particularly over the Portuguese revolution.

Eventually in 1977 the Mandelites put forward a "self-criticism' and withdrew from their guerrillaist line.

But the next period saw the SWP revive pro-Castro positions more craven and exaggerated than at anytime since the heyday of the Cuban revolution - under conditions where Castro's leadership in government over some 15 years had plainly • consolidated hardener hureaucratic JALUVIINU alliance with the Stalinist chiefs in the Kremlin, and developed its own reactionary diplomatic deals and relationships in this context.

This political adaptation by the SWP developed to even more grotesque levels in the aftermath of the Nicaraguan revolution.

The SWP (which had previously stood aloof from the Sandinista leadership in Nicaragua) opportunistically switched completely, to hail the coalition government -complete with its component of bankers - as a 'workers' and farmers' government' SWP leaders declared themselves opposed to the building of an independent Marxist party, looking instead exclusively to the Sandinistas to carry through the socialist revolution. And they supported the Sandinistas in expelling from Nicaragua members of the 'Simon Bolivar Brigade' dispatched by the USFI Argentinian section, the PST.

•Similar enthusiastic support for a workers' and farmers' • government' has been extended by the SWP to the New Jewel Movement in Grenada. In both cases the key to SWP 'analysis' is the close diplomatic, economic and military alliances between these petty bourgeois nationalist regimes and the Cuban government.

Mexico

And it is uncritical support. The SWP for wistance failed to point out that the Sandinistas lent their backing to the main party of the Mexican ruling class, the PRI, in the recent Mexican elections, in exchange for the diplomatic support given by PRI leader Lopez Portillo to Nicaragua. -If 'hate Reagan, love his enemies' produces some strange bedfellows for the 'Trotskyist' SWP, 'love Cuba, love Fidel's friends' is no better as à guide to revolutionary action.

Under its influence the SWP has revised its previously critical stance towards the Vietnamese Stalinist regime, producing eulogistic articles in 'The Militant on its supposedly revolutionary' achievements since the defeat of US imperialism in 1975, and making no call for the revolutionary politic. al overthrow of the Hanoi leadership which murdered the Vietnamese Trotskyists in 1945. In exchange the Vietnamese ambassadors to the UN have graced the pages of The Militant with interviews setting out their politics - without a hint of criticism or question from the editors.

Eritrean

SWP political approva has been extended. to the blood-stained Mengisti regime in Ethiopia which with Cuban military backing - is fighting to crush the struggle of the Eritrear

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Socialist Organiser no.105