August 18th, 2018

Zimbabwe

The policy of “Real Democracy” in Southern Africa

ISO, like the trade union bureaucracy of ZCTU,
submitted the working class to one of its executioners:

They called to vote for MDC and legitimized the electoral fraud 
and the dictatorial regime of Zimbabwe

ISO in its post-election result balancesheet (published on 08/05) only deepens the evidence, shamelessly, of its open support to capitalists of Zimbabwe (starting with the imperialist pirates who are the most important fraction in every semicolonial country), by supporting the bourgeoisie of MDC and kneeling before the infamous regime of the military dictatorship and ZANU PF, legitimized and sustained by MDC supporting the electoral fraud with the full collaboration of these wrongly called “socialists”.

ISO wanted to show this policy of submission of the roletariat to the bourgeoisie as an alleged struggle for “democracy”. This was a complete deception, since MDC said that it had enough strength to “make the country ungovernable”, i.e. to overthrow the military dictatorship. On the contrary, what MDC did, supported by ISO, was making the country “governable” again for the military dictatorship and ZANU PF, which were beginning to be cornered by enormous mass battles in the last couple of months; struggles that trade union leaders left isolated. This shows that calling to vote for the “democratic” MDC, a direct agent of imperialism, for the sake of “fighting for democracy” was nothing but a detour so that, through the electoral trap, the military dictatorship and ZANU PF return to legitimize and save the pro-imperialist regime of Zimbabwe. This is what happens when those who call themselves “socialists” call to vote for bourgeois parties like the MDC.

By supporting MDC, -a party agent of imperialism, IMF, the transnationals that plunder Zimbabwe and supporter of the military dictatorship- ISO broke with the most elementary class principles, and also with revolutionary Marxism, with which this current had broken many years ago. The policy of supporting the “democratic” bourgeoisie to fight for “democracy” is the same stale and false Stalinist theory of “two-stage revolution”, which forced the proletariat to stop fighting for its own interests and to submit to the bourgeoisie to, in this case, in a first stage achieve the full functioning of bourgeois democracy, and once this goal has been achieved, to begin, in a second stage, the struggle for socialism. This is how Stalinism prevented the working class in a thousand and one battles from achieving victory through the revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of bourgeois governments and regimes.
The working class of Zimbabwe has already achieved democratic conquests with its mobilization and struggle, and not by the divine grace of any party that, like MDC, boasted that it did not boycott the elections because it meant boycotting itself, since, they affirmed, “our triumph is secured”. ISO proved to be the “socialists” of the Queen of England, which covered up MDC, the party of British Petroleum and Anglo-American to cheat and deceive the people.

The revolutionary socialists, the Trotskyists, intransigent enemies of capital and their representatives, fight under revolutionary banners. Fighting for them, we know that here or there we can wrest certain conquests from capitalists. They are not willing to yield even the slightest demand unless they see they can lose everything.
Therefore, we affirm, as Trotsky did in the lessons of the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s: “Always and everywhere, where the revolutionary workers are not strong enough to end the bourgeois regime, they have to defend even bourgeois democracy itself, against fascism, but, above all, they have to defend their own positions within bourgeois democracy.
However, the workers do not defend bourgeois democracy with the methods of bourgeois democracy (popular front, electoral blocks, government coalitions, etc.), but with their own methods: that is, with the methods of the revolutionary class struggle.” (“Against the defeatism in Spain “, September 14, 1937 - Leon Trotsky).

From England, British SWP, ISO’s mother party, gave the order to support MDC, the party of the transnationals and bankers of London. They work with the Labour Party of the Queen of England in a common front. The same Labour Party, for decades, ruled England defending the interests of imperialism in all its colonies. Same old story... the order came from London.

There is no justification -or there cannot be- for calling workers to vote for their executioners. What happened here then? The workers of Zimbabwe must know the truth: what prompted ISO to promote this policy are the interests of a social-chauvinist current like Bristish SWP. The order from London was to support MDC, a bourgeois party which defends the profits of England in Southern Africa. And the reason for this is because politics and the world economy today are marked by a fierce trade war, and each imperialist power -England in this case- moves its agents according to its needs, as we have just seen in Zimbabwe.

The ISO and how to “justify” the unjustifiable, to deepen the submission of the combative vanguard to the “democratic” bourgeoisie that legitimizes the dictatorship of the military and ZANU PF

ISO not only called to vote for MDC, that is to say for the bourgeoisie, but on its post-electoral balancesheet ensures that the elections have been beneficial for the exploited and that they have been a problem for the bourgeois regime. Saying this after the elections, with workers bleeding in the streets of Harare, is of an unbounded cynicism. ZANU PF remains in power. The military dictatorship has its power untouched. Meanwhile, MDC conquered parliamentarians to support, from the parliament, the government. ISO can no longer deceive anyone, not even its own members, who cannot defend the indefensible, as it is to subject the working class to its executioner, the bourgeoisie.

ISO, in its electoral balance, then says: “we promote the participation of the capitalist opposition led by Chamisa and MDC. We support MDC marches for free and fair elections and we call for a vote against Edgar Mnangagwa and Zanu PF and a tactical, critical but unconditional vote for Chamisa, “since” Mnangagwa-Chiwenga represented a deadly killing machine, proven in time, from the military junta that would lead to a ruthless neoliberal dictatorship.”
Some lines below it states what the reader should observe carefully. Without blushing, ISO states: “The MDC, on the other hand, was ideologically the same (as the ZANU PF NdeR), it also supports a great neoliberal offensive against the workers, the peasants and the poor. But a state of MDC would be weaker.”
That is to say that according to the ISO “MDC supports a great neoliberal offensive” and affirms that “it would be weaker!”. But if MDC wins the elections it would be a million times stronger to implement the “neoliberal offensive”, and its aim is not disarming the murderous officer caste of the military dictatorship.
We are before a great lie, that is, a true fallacy: there is no country in the world -and mainly in the colonies and semi-colonies- where neoliberal offensives of the IMF (which has lent U$ 9 billion from the nation) are made peacefully. And if the MDC had won, it would have done just what ZANU PF does today: killing the people with the army. Enough with showing the executioners of the people as allies!
The Socialists of the Queen of England cannot hide that they have a spurious and dirty agreement, ordered from London, with the bourgeois gang of MDC, agent of English imperialism.

But here the absurdities do not end to justify the unjustifiable. In other paragraphs, ISO leaders state that “an MDC government would also be the most effective way to expose the anti-worker, anti-peasant and anti-poor character of MDC and to end the false illusions that workers and young people have in that capitalist party.” They lie. ISO was the one who created illusions among workers calling to vote to MDC even knowing its “character”. In addition, the workers did not need to make an experience with the executioner MDC to learn about their reactionary role, since they suffered it when this party governed with Mugabe and ZANU PF in 2008. In the history of the class struggle, we have heard everything, but something as sinister as what ISO affirms here is very difficult to find! It would be like telling a person that “to know how to torture a torturer you should let somebody torture you”. Only people who broke with socialism and moved to the bourgeoisie field are able to lead the working class to support one or the other of their executioners, knowing that both with MDC or ZANU PF, people would bleed, suffer hunger, misery, death and looting. ISO should stop calling itself a socialist!

Out of the hands of ISO and its falsifications from Lenin and Marxism

In an attempt to counteract the unmasking that we Trotskyists have been doing against the hardworking workers vanguard about the nefarious and treacherous policy of this current led the SWP from England, ISO defending its policy of support for the “democratic” bourgeoisie, pretends to call us “Ultra leftists”, who fight for the political independence of the workers and for the regroupment of the forces of the exploited to organize the boycott with the revolutionary general strike to the electoral trap and the regime of the dictatorship, ZANU PF and MDC. As we can see, even the bourgeoisie recognizes that there were enough conditions for a boycott of these fraudulent elections. The leadership of ZCTU had it within reach and could impose it in the only possible way, with the general strike and the methods of struggle of the working class.

To try to escape from the trap they imposed on the masses along with MDC and ZCTU bureaucracy, ISO quotes Lenin’s work: “Ultra Leftism, the Communist Childhood Illness”, falsifying it and taking away all its revolutionary content. Zimbabwean workers should know that the discussion that Lenin made in this work was against those who refused to allow the revolutionary party to use the electoral and parliamentary tribune (a question denied in Zimbabwe where the working class is banned without being able to participate with their own organizations), to promote the revolutionary mobilization of the great masses against the bourgeois order. Lenin -against what ISO wants to invent- would have never thought for a second call to support a bourgeois party like the Russian Kadet Party of those times; as today ISO does calling to vote for the bourgeois of MDC.
Could ISO leadership tell when, whether in the Duma of the Tsar or in the soviets of ‘17, the Bolsheviks called to vote for the Kadet Party? If there is anything that distinguishes Bolshevism, it was its intransigent struggle to separate the working class from the Kadet Party, that is, the liberal bourgeois gang associated with the Tsar. Not to mention the fight to expel the Kadet Party from the provisional government in the February and October 1917 revolution, while the Mensheviks -that is, the social-imperialists- supported it to govern, just like ISO today. What was the excuse of these traitors? The same one as the ISO: march with the Kadet Party to “conquer democracy”... when the masses had already conquered it in the streets and in the struggle, setting up the Soviets.

The same thing happened in 1905, a year of revolutionary struggle of the working class against Tsarism. Then, the Bolsheviks, who many times called to participate in Tsar’s Duma to fight to separate workers from bourgeois influence of the Kadet Party (MDC), called for the boycott of the elections. The crisis of tsarism was already open. The Tsar was trying to get legitimized with parliamentary elections. The Kadet Party participated. Workers boiled with hatred against Tsarism. This is what Lenin affirmed on the elections to the Duma in full revolutionary boom: “The revolutionary social democracy of Russia understood very well the true character of this concession, of this gift of a phantom Constitution made in August of 1905. Therefore it immediately launched the slogans of Down with the Advisory Duma! Boycott to the Duma! Down with the tsarist government! Let’s keep the revolutionary struggle to overthrow the government! It is not the Tsar, but a revolutionary provisional government who must call the first genuinely popular representative institution of Russia!” (“Report on the Revolution of 1905“, January 22, 1917 - Lenin).
Precisely this is the policy that refused to support ISO of Zimbabwe and the one that we, the Trotskyists of WIL, drive: boycott the elections, where the Kadet Party (MDC) tries to legitimize the Tsar (military dictatorship), at a time when the working class tends to generalize a masses uprising to overthrow it.
In order to be clear, this happens in Zimbabwe, where the dictatorship moves the elections for fear that the masses will sweep it away with their combats and the general strike. To do this, it calls MDC, ZCTU bureaucracy and ISO to endorse this attempt to divert the revolutionary mass struggle to a real trap.

We will continue to unmask ISO so that there is not a single worker deceived by this current sustaining the bourgeoisie, enemy of Marxism and proletarian revolution.
In other paragraphs of its electoral balancesheet, and after the military junta came out to defend the fraud with the army by shooting 6 exploited, this current says: “But the brutal murders have also exposed the board. It is a naked killing machine. Any illusion that they are friends with the people after November coup has disappeared. Young people, workers, vendors and even the middle classes are full of anger. It’s like after the Bloody Sunday massacres in Russia in 1905, where the Tsar’s forces killed 2,000 demonstrators. The former priest Gapon –supporter of the Tsar- then exclaimed: “Russia does not have a Czar but a dictator”. The Russian Revolution of 1905 began.”
First, workers have been full of anger for a long time, as it was proven by the hard struggles of different sectors of the working class, students and poor people. This anger, which in its interior carried the flame of the revolutionary struggle, as we saw, was intended to be shut down by ISO when it called to vote for MDC, at the time that the conditions were right to, around the fight against the electoral trap, centralize the dispersed combats and put an end to the dictatorship of the army with the methods of struggle of the proletariat, which was the only way to conquer democratic liberties for the exploited.
But the analogy posed by ISO leadership with the experience of 1905 is typical of a charlatan who does not even know how to lie seriously. The 1905 uprising of the workers of St. Petersburg, led by priest Gapon, by the character of their struggle, by the class that carried it forward (the working class) and by the objective it had (to conquer the bread) was the first step of the beginning of a socialist revolution, which led the masses to set up the soviets, that is, a commune-type organism. Very quickly the demagoguery of priest Gapon, who requested bread to “father Tsar”, was left behind. The priests, crucifixes were left behind, and a great revolution of workers and soldiers began.
Just when this process opens, the Bolsheviks propose a boycott of the Duma elections. The boycott was a slogan that made it easier for the masses to fight for the overthrow of the Tsar.
ISO did the opposite in Zimbabwe. It did not help the masses or break with the Kadet Party or with priest Gapon, but subjected them to these to support the Tsar. The truth is that the “enlightened” socialist teachers of such a low level already seem despotic repeating vulgarities of the history of Marxism. Nor do they know the historical events as they developed. The intelligence of the advanced workers of Zimbabwe, let alone the socialist rank and file members of ISO, cannot be offended in this way.

Marxist strategy: defend democracy with the working class’ revolutionary struggle methods

ISO lies. It was posed as never before in the history of Zimbabwe, by the fearsome workers’ combativeness, the unemployed workers and students, the fight for the boycott of the electoral trap and the beginning of the revolution as a starting point to conquer the minimum democratic demands that the dictatorship has been denying the people for decades. ISO once used Trotskyism to pose as a socialist. But the workers of Zimbabwe need to know that their policy is based on the perverse lessons and pseudo-theories of Stalinism.
For Trotskyism and revolutionary Marxism, the fundamental democratic tasks in semi-colonial or colonial countries are the same resolved by the bourgeois revolutions of 1700 and 1800, that is, agrarian reform and national independence, in this case, breaking with the imperialism. It draws attention when ISO talks about “democracy” that never refers to the structural democratic demands that are set out to be solved in countries subject to imperialism.
As the theory of permanent revolution proposes, these democratic tasks, in the epoch of decay of the capitalist system, that is, in its imperialist phase, can only be solved integrally and effectively by the alliance of workers and poor peasants, who by seizing power and breaking with the bourgeoisie will lead them to victory by combining them inevitably with socialist tasks. The native bourgeoisies have long been more afraid of the mobilized and armed proletariat than of imperialism, of which they are junior partners. That is what the policy of ISO is about, to associate with the junior partners of imperialism in the plundering of oppressed peoples.
But even to fight for bourgeois formal democratic tasks, ISO falsifies Marxism and applies a pro-bourgeois policy of class collaboration. Let’s see how revolutionary Marxism deals with the fight for democratic freedoms when it is necessary to defend them so that the proletariat is in a better position to organize their struggle, or to face the bonapartist or semi-fascist attacks of the bourgeois regimes: “Always and everywhere, where the revolutionary workers are not strong enough to end the bourgeois regime, they have to defend even bourgeois democracy itself, against fascism, but, above all, they have to defend their own positions within bourgeois democracy. However, the workers do not defend bourgeois democracy with the methods of bourgeois democracy (popular front, electoral blocks, government coalitions, etc.), but with their own methods: that is, with the methods of the revolutionary class struggle.” (“Against the defeatism in Spain”, September 14, 1937 - Leon Trotsky).

On the tactic of the boycott and the Marxist strategy of the struggle to make way for the revolution of the exploited masses against capitalists, their government, state and murderous regime

When the ISO attacks internationalist revolutionary socialists for calling to defeat the electoral trap, it does so to defend its servility towards the “democratic” bourgeoisie. Because on elections, there are other possible policies of parliamentary intervention to, according to Lenin, develop the extra-parliamentary mass struggle. ISO did the opposite. It used its electoral intervention to call to support the bourgeoisie, and it was far from using it to prepare and organize the struggles of the working class and as we can see, it submitted it to the bourgeoisie.
But for Marxists there are other alternatives for intervention in electoral processes, when the masses are able to overcome these traps and deceptions, driven by their unseen sufferings and the loss of prestige of the institutions of domination, such as the boycott of the elections.
As we saw, even MDC said that it had conditions to “make the country ungovernable”. Bourgeoisie itself said that there were enough conditions for the boycott of the elections, but as we saw, it was very careful not to do so, because it endangered the domination of imperialism and the entire bourgeoisie and its institutions in Zimbabwe.

Not only it exists the experience of the boycott of elections in tsarist Russia in 1905 by the Bolsheviks, but also an experience of this kind was raised by Trotskyism and the Fourth International at the beginning of the 1930s in republican Spain, when, after the electoral triumph of the republicans in the municipal elections, the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera calls to elections to Cortes (the parliament of the king). Let’s see what the Trotskyists were saying at the time: “The Communists quite evidently made a mistake in not taking the initiative in the boycott. Only the Communists, at the head of the revolutionary workers, could have given the boycott campaign a bold and militant character. The moods for boycott, nevertheless, are evidently very widespread in the opposition parties and are a reflection and a symptom of the profound ferment in the depths of the people. The latest telegrams seem to confirm the fact that the republicans and socialists have come out in favor of the boycott. If the Communists had subjected them to their whip in time, it would have been much more difficult for them to reject the boycott. In the meantime, Berenguer has bound himself and his government up very tightly with the elections of March 1. Had the boycott compelled Berenguer to make some retreat or another, it would have had gigantic consequences in the sense of raising time revolutionary consciousness of the masses, particularly if the leaders of this boycott tactic were the Communists” (“Letters to Nin”, February 5, 1931 - Leon Trotsky).
As we can see, ISO was far from trying to hit the “democrats” and “republicans”, kneeled before them, and subjected the masses to the “Cortes” of the military dictatorship.
The struggle of WIL Trotskyists, not only hit the “democrats”, but also the leadership of ISO and ZCTU, which had to go out to answer us publicly. Regrettably, ISO was far from a revolutionary position, since, if it had had it, we could have hit together ZCTU leadership and open the way together to the general strike and the boycott of the elections.

On this experience, in another letter to Nin, Trotsky says: “The political experience of the Berenguer period shows that the proletarian party must take a firm stand in favor of the boycott of the Admiral’s Cortes (Aznar TN). The socialists, the republicans, run the risk of abandoning the boycott positions that they currently occupy if they are not continuously flogged by the left (...) We should launch the slogan of the active boycott; this would mean that we not only refrain from taking part in the elections, but we also develop an aggressive offensive against the falsely constituent Courts through popular meetings, proclamations, demonstrations, denunciations of the candidates for the elections, etc. I believe that the tactic of active boycott would allow the creation of boycott workers’ committees that could be transformed into workers’ juntas at the opportune moment“ (“Letters to Nin“, February 15, 1931 - Leon Trotsky).

The refraction in Southern Africa of international politics of Syriza, PODEMOS and the New Left

ISO expresses the positions that the New Left raises at the international level led by PODEMOS and Syriza. A New Left that comes to deceive the world’s workers at a time when the old leadership of the exploited, such as the World Social Forum, is plunged into history by killing and massacring the workers, as in Bolivia, Venezuela, and Nicaragua and supporting the genocide in Syria.
As we have already said, the New Left does nothing but raising the policy of Stalinism and its false theory of progressive bourgeois camps versus reactionary bourgeois camps (the «democratic» against the «fascists», the «nationalists» against the «imperialists»), used to subject the working class to the so-called «democratic» bourgeois fraction, which in Africa gave birth to all the current regimes that emerged from the expropriation of the anti-colonial revolutionary struggles of the exploited. Denying in this way the struggle for the political independence of the workers and the task of the proletarian revolution as a measure to reach the minimum demands of the masses.

There are many examples. LIT and its group in Colombia called to vote for Petro: a delivery of the Colombian workers and peasant resistance supported by the businessmen of Antioquia, one of the bourgeois sectors linked to the strongest imperialism in Colombia. Or ISO party in England, British SWP, which calls to support Corbyn of the Labour Party, as its candidate. This party that has already ruled England and administered the business of the British imperialist transnationals, such as the AngloAmerican, which super-exploits, plunders and torments the workers of Southern Africa. Or as FIT does (PO, PTS and IS) in Argentina, where they are responsible for the divertion of the struggles of the working class and the exploited to a policy of pressure on the bourgeois parliament, where the “deputies of left” present bills agreed with bourgeois parties.

Workers and revolutionary students of Zimbabwe and Southern Africa: let’s fight together under the banner of recovering the Fourth International, the world party of the socialist revolution

That is why the WIL internationalist revolutionary socialists (adherents of the FLTI) declare before the masses a merciless political struggle to the New Left that wants to impose the program of Stalinism in support of “progressive bourgeois”, and we call the conscious workers to break with these currents that support bourgeois factions, and to embrace the struggle to recover the Fourth International, the world party of the socialist revolution.
In the proletarian vanguard there are two clear trenches: on one hand the New Left and its Stalinist program of submission to different bourgeois fraction; and on the other hand there is the one of the Trotskyists, revolutionary workers and the militant youth that we fight under the theory-program of the Permanent Revolution of Leon Trotsky, which states: “With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses.”
To move forward in this struggle, we call on the revolutionary workers of Zimbabwe to organize ourselves to win the leadership that our class deserves and needs in order to succeed.
Revolutionary workers of black Africa: let’s start our work!

Julián Juárez, member of
the International Secretariat
of the FLTI