Reply to angry Castroite
Socialist Organiser1983 1983-06-23Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 10 →
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Lift anonymous, but apparently 'wery Angry Reader' who wrote last week in defence of the Salvadorean Communist Party and the L'S Socialist Workers' Party offered up some strange and evasive arguments against my article in Socialist Organiser no.133.
The whole letter is couched in ierms of opposing 'camps' imperialism' on the one side and revolution' on the other - which denies any independent perspective for the working class.
From this blinkered starting point, any criticism of the leadership of the 'revolutionary' camp is seen not as a means of educating the workers' movement, but as a blow against the 'révolution' Equally, the 'Angry Reader' feels able to justify deliberate falsifications which conceal the reactionary nature of the Salvador CP leadership, as a way of defending the revolution' Hence we find, behind the bluster, our 'Angry Reader' makes no attempt to deny that the American SWP deliberately omitted references to the Salvador CP's brief and inglorious period in what s/he admits was "the pro- imperialist regime from October 1979 to January 1980", , in a potted history of the Salvadorean left.
"Angry Reader' takes up the same theme - of lending a revolutionary' aura to Stalinist leaderships - when s/he argues that the Cuban leadership is a revolutionary force distinct from Moscow. Proof is of course thin on the ground - and we are offered examples from Bolivia in the late 1960s, and the Vietnam war.
Our reader is apparently not so 'Angry' about Castro's military support for Ethiopia's barbarous dictatorship in its bid to crush the Eritrean people, or his support for the repression of the Polish working class.
These are Stalinist positions. The Castroite leadership, which rose to power independently of the Stalinists, was protected and given vital aid by the Kremlin, and assimilated politically in the late 1960s, when Castro supported the crackdown in Czechoslovakia. Cuba today is sponsored to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year by an approving Moscow bureaucracy. It maintains cordial relations with the government of the most powertul bourgeoisie in the area - i.e. Mexico.
Certainly some differences of interest exist with Moscow. Castro's strategy for Central America is for stability through the establishment of 'democratic' cross-class regimes: He has repeatedly urged negotiations to achieve this.
Where negotiations fail, and mass struggles are underway - as in Nicaragua - the Cuban leadership is not opposed to revolutionary means to secure 'democratic' forms of government. This is not so strange. In El Salvador even former bourgeois politicians from the 1979 junta have joined the revolutionary armed struggle. but they seek through revolutionary means to secure a reform of the bourgeois state on democratic lines, not a socialist revolution.
The Salvador CP seeks just the same. One reason it switched from participation in a repressive junta to participating in the fight against the regime is that the guerilla forces adopted a weak prosearch for an alliance with the so-called 'progressive sourgeoisie'.
The reason the CP is now floating ideas about the unification of "parts of all the revolutionary organisations of the left" into a single party under "iron discipline" is to crack the whip and rein in the more revolutionary elements who may become impatient at the restricted demands of the leadership of the FMLN/FDR.
The reason the American SWP and our 'Angry Reader' welcome such proposals is because they have capitulated politically to Stalinists positions, and turned their backs on the bitter lessons learned by the Trotskyist movement.
Socialist Organiser should continue to focus as consistently as it has done on the developing struggle and the need for maximum solidarity with those in the front line: but we must not retreat from pointing out the political dangers that face the heroic fighters of the FMLN, and pointing to the Trotskyist politics which provide the only coherent alternative.
HARRY SLOAN oopa Send letters to Socialist Organiser 28 Middle Lane, London N8. No longer than 400 words, please: longer letters are liable to be cut.