Communist Workers Group (CWG-USA)

Differences with HWRS inside/outside faction on using critical support tactic

HOW THE HWRS INSIDE/OUTSIDE FACTION LOSES ITS WAY

The inside/outside faction of HWRS fumbles all over itself in its statement against applying the tactic of critical support (CS) to SYRIZA in the election of June 17, 2012.

1)    They claim the EC abandoned the position taken by HWRS on CS toward entrenched and proven Social Democracies (SD).  We Respond: key difference is that the RTT statement pointed to the transformation of the Blairite New Labor Party and the resolution of the contradiction of the bourgeois-workers parties in favor of the bourgeoisie, despite still being connected organically to the working class through control of the Trade Union Congress (TUC).  The workers hold no illusions SD will deliver socialism, rather they are seen as only providing a lesser evil, to impose the will of the capitalist class.   So the traditional SD’s, unless they are transformed under the weight of the class struggle back into workers parties, no longer provide the class basis for application of the CS tactic.

2)    They then review the reformist positions of the SYRIZA and point to them as argument not to apply the CS tactic. (Response: in section below on Lenin’s position on the 1920 USA election.)

3)    They place CS/the “united front from below” in a the limited historical context of its origin only, i.e., guiding the working class vanguard not to utilize it unless those conditions as were seen in the 20’s and 30’s are repeated, while ignoring applications even from the period of origin of the tactic not fitting their viewpoint (addressed below.)

4)    They claim the CS tactic is only correctly used when the target party has deep roots in the factories and workplaces, implying an entrenched party leadership upon which to make demands in order to expose them by calling on them to lead the class struggle itself and in turn showing their incapacity to.  This is a false construct–the SYRIZA is evolving and gathers to it a plurality with a large base in the working class, as the PASOK Rank and File abandon ship and look for a new home in SYRIZA.   Some of the old PASOK leadership, ever the opportunists, are quick to follow.  With the ranks and layers of the old leadership the unions can’t be so far behind them.  The same tactic can be used to drive a wedge between the base and the reformist leadership.

5)    They claim SYRIZA is just an electoral bloc, not a party, (despite its recent registration as a party,) in order to somehow conflate the EC statement with the Workers’ Power method of giving their small propaganda group’s electoral support to reformist parties, and calling that a united front.  We are admonished that when a real Leninist united front exists it is an action front not an electoral bloc.   We respond: CS is the a tactical form the UF takes in the elections.   The method counterpoises the necessary independent working class united front action to what can be expected from the electoral limitations of bourgeois parliamentary, as were outlined in the EC’s Revolutionary Worker article.)

6)    They claim that without real forces in Greece and “under these concrete conditions…,  “…electoral support is at best abstract and smells of opportunism.”  We respond to this sectarian attitude, which itself negates any statement from afar: the call for the indefinite general strike, the militia’s, the councils, … let alone making a statement on MENA–why warn the Arab workers if there is no one to deliver the message?   Our entire party work becomes, for our sectarian abstentionists, abstract and opportunist.   Better not to say anything that would make it concrete–in the view of the muddle-headed deserters from the best traditions of our tendency.

SURPRISE! CRITICAL SUPPORT IS AIMED AT WINNING THE WORKERS FROM  PARTIES WITH REFORMISTS PROGRAMS

After presenting the understanding that CS is a method for the communist workers to get close to and challenge the illusions of SD workers who hope for socialism, the alternate statement goes to great lengths to show how SYRIZA’s leadership is capitulating on even the most banal of the organizations programmatic positions, and that they indeed have a reformists program.

But we have been saying all along they are “modeling for the role.”  They are on a trajectory to become the replacement SD after the decline of PASOK, but they are not there yet.

SYRIZA is not a SD party of the proven traitorous type even if its program is co-located.  They are not responsible for the crimes of the bourgeois state.  They have never been in power.  With thirteen sizable organizations in this party it must contain considerable tension and these tensions can only increase in the approach to the election and will continue to increase thereafter.  Furthermore the party will immediately be beset with the problems of Greece’s’ international relations, not least of which will be its relations with the revolutions in MENA.  And finally SYRIZA is not a SD party as it has not voted for war credits for two world wars, or sided with the imperialists in the Greek civil war.  It is a classical (Kautskyian amalgam) centrist workers party of unfinished evolution containing reformists. The leadership of the largest single group, Synapismos is reformist, but exists in internal tension with left reformist Allendeists.  Synapismos exists in tension within SYRIZA in its relations with various Maoists, Eco-Communists and self-styled Trotskyist groups.  We say it is centrist principally because its program foresees a peaceful road to socialism.

The alternate statement then explains how no support for SYRIZA is possible among other reasons because they call for “tax the rich” alongside other reformists demands.  Does the inside outside faction forget that’s what reformists do?!  That is how they foster illusions, and that is why the CS tactic was developed!  In order to create a wedge between the objective conditions which are driving the workers to search for their proletarian program on the one side, and the pious and deadly embrace of all manner of social democrats, Stalinists, syndicalists, anarchists on the other, whose only solutions are to tinker with the mechanisms of Greek integration into imperialism and contain the consciousness of the proletariat within the parameters of capitalist and bourgeois- democratic perpetuity.

LENIN MUST NEED A LESSON FROM THE INSIDE/OUT FACTION

Theirs is not the method Lenin applied to the US Socialist Party in 1920 when Debs was in prison and got just under a million votes (6% of the electorate.)  Cannon reports, in discussion with Trotsky and Dobbs, that Lenin had written to the newly founded  American CP telling them to vote for Debs.  Compare the program of the Socialist Party USA 1920 to the reformism of SYRIZA.

From the Socialist Party electoral program 1920

Section 5:  Fiscal

1)    All war debs and other debts of the Federal Government should immediately be paid in full, the fund for such payment to be raised by means of a progressive property tax, whose burden should fall upon the rich and particularly upon great fortunes made during the war.

2)    A standing progressive income tax and a graduated inheritance tax should be levied to provide for all needs of the government including the cost of its increasing social and industrial functions.

3)    The unearned increment of land should be taxed all land held out of use should be taxed at full realty value.

Section 3: Political

6) The President and the Vice-President of the United States should be elected by direct popular election and be subject to recall.  All members of the Cabinet should be elected by Congress and be responsible at all time to the vote thereof.

Further along in the program: “The Socialist Party seeks to attain its end by orderly and constitutional methods, so long as the ballot box, the right of representation and civil liberties are maintained.  Violence is not the weapon of the Socialist Party but of the short-sighted representatives of the ruling class.”

The statement of the inside/outside faction correctly condemns SYRIZA for not calling for armed workers militias to defeat the fascists.  Yet on the heels of the great General Strike in Seattle in 1919, where workers faced down the machine guns of the “citizens alliance,” in a period of unending and uncounted brutal lynchings and murderous attacks on the black communities, when immigrant anarchists, communists and socialists were being rounded up and deported by the tens of thousands and the SP is not calling for worker’s militia or armed defense of the black and immigrant communities but instead promoted the Kautskyian road to power, 50% plus one and we win! Lenin  never the less still called upon the CP to vote for the SP.

“…in 1939, the CP struck an “anti-imperialist” posture and began to issue propaganda against the New Deal. This political turn allowed an appeal to Stalinist workers. Here is how Trotsky proposed that the SWP intervene:

“What I propose is a manifesto to the Stalinist workers, to say that for five years you were for Roosevelt, then you changed. This turn is in the right direction. Will you develop and continue this policy or not? Will you let the leaders change it or not? Will you continue and develop it or not? If you are firm we will support you. In this manifesto we can say that if you fix a sharp program for your candidate, then we will vote for him.”

The CPUSA was not a mass party in 1939, although it was several orders of magnitude larger than the SWP and claimed 100,000 members.”

The inside/outside faction’s statement mechanically sets rigid conditions for applying the tactic of CS.  For them these conditions continue to get more prohibitive the smaller the Bolshevik current.  Consider Trotsky’s earlier push to support Browder and the CP in the mid 1930s.  Cannon talks like DW.  He does not want to appear to the Rooseveltian workers to be supporting the CP.  Trotsky has got his number! Trotsky talks elsewhere about how difficult it is to get comrades who have broken from the 2nd and 3rd Internationals to use the CS tactic and explain themselves to workers.  He says of the SWP you haven’t even published a leaflet because you know the workers will ask, “who you will vote for.”

Trotsky would also have ignored the alternate statement’s admonition that this tactic is only for groups with mass bases in the class.  In the ‘30s in Europe when the Left Opposition (LO) was almost non-existent he advised entryism (the French turn)!  How do our latter day sectarian abstentionists explain this?  The LO was tiny and the mass 2nd and 3rd International parties were open traitors.  Ask, why then Trotsky’s advice to vote for the counter-revolutionary British LP in 1938?  Trotsky answers, that as the revolutionary party get smaller in relation to the mass traitor parties, we have to be more daring.  We are few but we have a big wedge.  Join them!  Send the youth in.  These are all different conditions for CS which proves that they are United Fronts for a specific purpose; to put demands on the bureaucrats and politicians to expose them by raising revolutionary demands.  How easy it is for Trotsky to think in terms of tactics without raising his voice and calling people names, whereas Cannon, and DW are worried that others will think tactics are strategies.  And of course Trotsky was right. When the war came Cannon, sold out to the labor aristocracy, capitulated and became a US chauvinist.

IGNORE THE EXPECTATIONS OF THE MASSES AT YOUR OWN PERIL

The inside outside faction ignores the consequences of Tsipras backing away from the SYRIZA program.  “Thus,” we are told, “SYRIZA’s leader calls for only a limited nationalization of certain Greek banks, while at the same time calling for their recapitalization by the imperialists:…”  Indeed we said in the RW article that SYRIZA would tilt to the right.  But if we look at their program we see the expectations that the masses were putting on SYRIZA to challenge big capital, and must consider the opening of this chasm is exactly where we want to place our wedge.

The Greek workers are looking at this program:

Section 4.  Productive social and environmental reconstruction:  “Nationalization/socialization of banks, and their integration into a public banking system under social and workers’ control, in order to serve developmental purposes. The scandalous recapitalization of the banks must stop immediately.”

The abandonment of  the program by Tsipras must be throwing the rank and file into a furor!  Fertile ground for the subjective factor, the vanguard workers, to make a qualitative leap in consciousness.  When they see Tsipras turn into the opposite of their program that dialectic exposes the Kautskyian fallacy and the “teachable moment” appears.  This CS tactic puts the revolutionary forces smack in the middle of this moment.

Not unlike the US SP, which Lenin supported in 1920, the SYRIZA has a reformist tax program, some of which is very threatening to capital.  This is attracting a large percentage of the workers abandoning Social Democracy who still have illusions in the parliamentary “democracy” Section # 3 of their program which includes:

• Reorganization and consolidation of tax collection mechanisms.
• Taxation of fortunes over 1-million euros and large-scale revenues.
• Gradual increase, up to 45%, of the tax on the distributed profits of corporations (SA).
• Taxation of financial transactions.
• Special taxation on consumption of luxury goods.
• Removal of tax exemptions for ship owners and the Greek Orthodox Church.
• Lifting of confidentiality for banking and merchant transactions, and pursuit of those who evade taxes and social insurance contributions.
• Banning of transactions carried out through offshore companies.
• Pursuit of new financial resources through efficient absorption of European funds, through claims on the payment of German World War II reparations and occupation loan, and finally via steep reductions in military expenses.

But what really attract the workers with illusions in reformism to this party is their first point:

1. Creation of a shield to protect society against the crisis:

• Not a single citizen without a guaranteed minimum income or unemployment benefit, medical care, social protection, housing, and access to all services of public utilities.
• Protection of and relief measures for indebted households.
• Price controls and price reductions, VAT reduction, and abolition of VAT on basic-need goods.

The inside outside faction gives the impression that the militants of SYRIZA have no appetite for the class struggle and that they are solely an electoral bloc.  But it appears in fact that they whet their eye teeth on the youth rebellion in 2008.  Many of whose participants were impressed with SYRIZA’s stand expressed in their poster  “NOT A SINGLE STEP BACKWARDS.” The contradiction between the rightward tack of Tsipras and the program and militancy of the workers and youth who built SYRIZA can only be exploded by walking with the workers through their experience.  As PASOK and the New Democracy have no choice but to chase their left-moving constituency in order to salvage a few seats in parliament, it is no surprise they intersect programmatically with the rightward drift of Tsipras the candidate.

Consider The SWP’s (UK) report The youth rebellion of 2008

“The next high point in Greece’s struggle was the youth revolt of December 2008 after a 15-year-old student was killed by two police officers in Athens.

“SYRIZA was the only force in parliament that supported the youth revolt. With Athens burning every night from rioting and police stations besieged by angry youth, the left was under enormous pressure to “denounce the violence” and support a “return to stability”. The Communist Party (KKE) backed off and attacked the rebellious youth as “black-hooded provocateurs.” SYRIZA withstood that pressure — its message to young people was not to go back, but to keep demonstrating.

“According to many commentators, SYRIZA paid a price for its support of the youth among the broader population — SYRIZA’s strong position in the polls began to decline. Even some leading members of SYN concluded that the coalition had gone too far in supporting the protests. But for DEA, December 2008 is one of the moments when we were proudest of SYRIZA.”

A role in the street militancy appears confirmed in this report by Paul Mason from the BBC 6/14/12 :

“Some of its (SYRIZA’s) star names – television demands parties have star names – are people I’ve seen with smeared faces trying to link arms and impose discipline in the middle of riots on Syntagma square last summer – ie, frankly, to dissuade their followers from joining in the rock throwing, but to face down the riot police.”

And from the Northites (WSWS.org) we read:

“Giota and her partner are first year students at the university in pharmaceuticals. She is a member of the New Left Current, which is a faction of the pseudo-left Antarsya coalition (Anti-Capitalist Left Cooperation for the Overthrow).  Asked what she thinks about SYRIZA, she said, “I don’t think there is a solution inside the European Union so that’s why I don’t support Tsipras, because he says there is.”  “I think there has to be a solution that comes from the streets, from the universities and from the people themselves.”

Asked why SYRIZA has increased its support, Giota said, “I think it is because of the disillusionment in politics over the last years.  People have seen there is no change with PASOK [the social democratic party] and the ND [New Democracy, the Conservative Party].  “I don’t think there is a deep left consciousness in people voting SYRIZA. They just see it as a hope. SYRIZA, just in words, puts forward a certain radical outlook so people voted for it.”

Again from Paul Mason of the BBC who asked young farmers in Anavra at a tavern, “… about politics and they come out with the normal complaints as well:

“The politicians are corrupt,” says 30-year-old Stathis Mithroleos. “We’re the generation that should be peaking now. I have two children and I am worried about them. If I knew things would be like this I would not have got married.”

Then something happens that is not normal. In the baking heat, and amid the beer fumes, one by one they tell me who they’ll vote for: “Syriza, Syriza, Syriza, Syriza…”

Do they realise Syriza is a Marxist party and that its leader, Alexis Tsipras, has no experience of government?

“People are desperate that something can change. Tsipras is new. Let’s see what he’s going to offer,” says 22-year-old Iannis Tsantouris.

Apostolos Mithroleos, aged 25, says: “Of course we’re worried that Syriza will take us out of the euro. We don’t want to vote for them but we have to because we’ve seen no good from the others in all these years.”

Farmers, petty bourgeois liberals, social democratic workers are putting hope in the SYRIZA even while PASOK’s professional leaders abandon ship and look for a new home in the party’s upper echelon in the grand conspiracy to contain the masses.  Our task is not to prophesize from our armchairs about the hopelessness of the situation because of the lack of the revolutionary party but to find a way to the workers still searching for a road out of the crisis, and to explain to them the limits of social democracy, of bourgeois democracy, of the impending clash with the fascists and the need to build their own revolutionary workers party and international, action committees, workers councils and armed detachments/self-defense guards.  But they won’t hear us if we call for a boycott of the elections or have only the panacea of the indefinite general strike (which we have been calling for in the abstract for two years) to offer.   Workers’ history tells us a thousand times over the workers will try the easiest next step before getting discouraged and making a jump in consciousness and action past the limitations they confront.  While the illusions in the elections outweigh the workers’ drive for the formation of workers councils we will not find the workers at the councils, no matter how loudly we proclaim their necessity!  The emergence of popular assemblies are encouraging pre-soviet formations, however they are not based in the workplaces but only in the communities.  To explain the need for and role of the action committees, workers councils and workers militia to the very workers whose hope for a peaceful/legal path beyond the capitalist crisis keeps them in the clutches of reformism, the revolutionary must go to the workers and where the workers are going is to the polls.  That is why Lenin sent the CPUSA to support Debs.  Why Trotsky sent the French Section (SFIO) into the French Socialist Party, and why he struggled hard to get the infinitesimal SWP to use the tactic of CS on the CPUSA!   This tactic is not limited by size, implantation in the class or how rotten the traitor’s at the top of social democracy or Stalinism are.

Context matters!  We (in the 90’s discussion on CS and the Labor Party) were talking about the workers attitude toward the British LP during the rise of New Labor and the Blairite right turn,  as it charted new ground in the betrayal of the working class internationally and at home.

This entire discussion in 1991 assumed that the WP was doing a perpetual intervention/entry into the British LP.  We are not calling for entry into SYRIZA.  From this side of the ocean we can’t know enough about the dynamics of SYRIZA to formulate an entry tactic or a compelling logic for doing so.  Nowhere in the RW article did we mention entryism in SYRIZA.  We did not contemplate that for an instant.

The sectarian abstentionists focus on the critical support tactic in the RW article and ignore the overall content to a fault.  In that short article the workers are warned of the danger of the electoral road, the treacherous path the reformist leaders would take, the need for the revolutionary party, the necessity of the action committees, workers councils, soldiers unions and workers/soldiers militias.  We explained some aspects of the transitional program, called for the abolition of the debt.  We explained how the fascists will be employed by the bosses and the necessity to smash fascism in the egg!   One does not come away from reading that article thinking SYRIZA or its current leadership can deliver anything but defeat.  The entire thrust is to advance the class struggle.  There is no opportunism there.  Of course for those who never get off the couch and refuse to bury themselves neck deep in the struggles of the class, they will never have to explain anything to the workers, hence their sectarian admonition that without boots on the ground we should have nothing to say!