This United Front of workers, in action, is the opposite of the Popular Front strategy adopted by the Stalinists, and to which the petty-bourgeois “Left” has accommodated, and embraced. The tactics of the revolutionaries, inside any country going through such a revolution, depends on the conditions. For example, in Vietnam, the revolutionary forces, much as with those in China, in 1927, found themselves under murderous attack from the nationalists, making any practical alliance difficult. The revolutionaries can raise the need for such an alliance, propagandistically, so as to expose the nationalists, and build their own forces, but that is all. The same was true of Trotsky's approach to defence of the USSR, and his proposals for how the revolutionaries should proceed in proposing an alliance with the Stalinists. Similar situations existed in Algeria, and more recently in Iraq and so on.
But, as The Theses On The National and Colonial Questions set out, for communists, globally, outside the given country, the question is, itself, different. Not only do communists only provide support for the revolutionary forces, but, in the absence of such forces, they do not support the actual bourgeois-democratic movement at all, precisely, because our goal is socialist revolution, via permanent revolution, not bourgeois revolution. As Lenin points out, the fact that we recognise the right to national self-determination, in the abstract, does not at all commit us to supporting any actual concrete struggle for it, by any given movement, where that conflicts with our international socialist objectives.
“From these fundamental premises it follows that the Communist International’s entire policy on the national and the colonial questions should rest primarily on a closer union of the proletarians and the working masses of all nations and countries for a joint revolutionary struggle to overthrow the landowners and the bourgeoisie. This union alone will guarantee victory over capitalism, without which the abolition of national oppression and inequality is impossible...
… It is also necessary, first, constantly to explain that only the Soviet system is capable of ensuring genuine equality of-nations, by uniting first the proletarians and then the whole mass of the working population in the struggle against the bourgeoisie...
… Without the latter condition, which is particularly important, the struggle against the oppression of dependent nations and colonies, as well as recognition of their right to secede, are but a false signboard, as is evidenced by the parties of the Second International. ..
the need for a determined struggle against attempts to give a communist colouring to bourgeois-democratic liberation trends in the backward countries; the Communist International should support bourgeois-democratic national movements in colonial and backward countries only on condition that, in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties, which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e., those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations.”
No comments:
Post a Comment