RCIT and the COVID Pandemic
RCITs supra class Anti-Lockdown Campaign for a Red-Brown COVID alliance alongside Trump, Putin and Barnes: denialism and obscurantism in the epoch of wars, revolutions and counter-revolution.
Our answer to the RCIT slander is the infections and freakout at the White House. What actual Marxists call for the workers to defy medical science? The RCIT engages in comparative lethality! They compare this pandemic to an ordinary flu! This will cause deaths of their own members who don’t read their fine print in favor of social distancing! Or who violate social distancing during street demonstrations while there is neither mass vaccination nor any sign the pandemic has run its course. Our call for workers’ control of the medical industry and services is a transitional demand within a system of transitional demands, a program for the proletarian conquest of power. Bravado does not substitute for class struggle. That is as politely as we can put it.
The RCIT howls about “social-bonapartism” in a new period, a period of worldwide counterrevolutionary offensive. For the working class, Capital is permanently on the counterrevolutionary offensive. That is our understanding of the epoch of wars and revolutions. We offer a transitional program and recommend reading Trotsky’s 1938 program during the stay-home period, asking workers to discover the unity of the Marxist method. We see the RCIT selling a book and arguing their relevance by stumbling into an alliance with Amon Bundy and fascists! The only ‘popular masses’ fighting for an early end to the lockdown are Koch brothers shills and plants waving confederate and nazi flags alongside obscurantist anti-vaxinators. We see analogous rightist lashups in Brazil, the U.K. and Russia too.
The historic program of the working class poses the question of which class must control production and rule society; this question is an entry point to the entire transitional program leading from the most basic issue of who should control the PPE resources of the hospital to how the economy needs planning to ensure that what is needed is where it’s needed when it’s needed. The fight for the planned economy, social ownership and workers’ control leads through self organization of the working class to an armed self defence militia right up to the workers government. This is where the RCIT falls off. They are always looking for a halfway house. In Egypt, Thailand and Brazil they abandon the Permanent Revolution and tell us that genuine bourgeois democracy existed in semi-colonies without the defeat of imperialism. .
As Marxists, the International Leninist-Trotskyist Tendency (ILTT) supports a scientific approach; part of such an approach during a pandemic of a dangerous and highly contagious virus means that physical distancing and isolation are required in order to stay alive, to “flatten the curve” and not overburden the medical system. We are watching new “spikes” where the capitalist state sends unprotected, and untested workers back to work, and this lets the virus spread rampant throughout the Black and Brown working class communities, who are already 60% of the fatalities..
It is possible to oppose Bonapartist measures by the capitalist state, while at the same time recognizing that a rational, scientific approach against a pandemic is needed. The workers themselves are better unconscious Marxists than the RCIT Mensheviks. They can see the difference between the need for isolation from the virus, and the need to fight for workers’ control of their social conditions as survivable. We see them wearing their masks, and even keeping a physical distance. Our program is a guide to fight their way out of the lockdown as a death trap all the way to the socialist revolution!
We don’t conflate social distancing and isolation with a retreat from struggle and neither do the U.S. front line workers whose 200+ strike actions and protests for safe working conditions have maintained social distancing, including heroic frontline medical workers standing down the wing-nut anti-vaxxer and quasi-Hitlerite MAGA rightist protesters, whose disregard for science spreads the pandemic. In Michigan, the rightist show of armed force caused the state government to quit meeting! As little as we love bourgeois parliaments, we love this development even less. The RCIT position looks suspiciously like support for their ACTIONS, a nuanced distinction at best.
Our program advances Labor, Black and Brown self-defense guards to defend all our strikes, to defend workers’ right to assembly, the right to access to all necessities of life, health and safe working conditions. We demand open the storehouses and factories to workers representatives! For workers control of distribution of necessities of life! Today the lockdown is enforced by the capitalist ruling class and its state apparatus. For the working class to survive we need workers’ control of production and distribution, which can only be enforced by an armed and mobilized working class.
Trump is pushing to re-open the U.S. economy and most of the state governors are falling in line, and in many of those “anti-lockdown” Red states’ statistics show an increase in the spread and deaths just two weeks into the re-opening. The one draconian measure Trump did take was to use the Defense Production Act, a Korean wartime measure that the ILTT opposes, to keep the meatpacking plants open, consigning workers to illness and death in working conditions where COVID is running rampant. Workers in the effected states cannot refuse; to do so costs them their unemployment compensation. The net vector and specific May Day call of the RCIT is likewise a push to re-open, putting you in a bloc with Trump and the Barnesite SWP! It is armed, fascist and white supremacist mobs who are mobilizing at the state capitals in the United States pushing to re-open the economy in the interests of Capital and the ruined petty-bourgeois small businesses.
The method of the Trump administration is to let the pandemic run its course. If workers and the elderly die, so be it. The elderly are a “surplus population” as far as Capital is concerned, while with unemployment at Great Depression levels, the huge reserve army of labor can replace those workers lost. Our position is to back workers who refuse to work without full PPE protection with a call for a general strike of “essential” workers uniting all workers in the struggle against the Bonapartist drive to neutralise the proletariat! It is already clear that Capital will be slashing wages in the coming period– they are already at it– and we are sounding the alarm now.
AND WE DON’T SEEK POLITICAL COMBINATIONS OVER THE WORKERS’ HEADS!
Here is the critique of the RCIT adaptation to the FIT in Argentina. From our article found here
“For example, the Internationalist Leninist-Trotskyist Fraction (FLTI) for all its boisterous language of class war always fails to pose the question of power except rhetorically. It’s program never exceeds that of syndicalism or some half-way house like national workers’ assemblies. The Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT), equally demonstrative in leading the revolutionary communist vanguard to the insurrection, invariably sells its literature in the shadow of the popular front; most recently in an open letter to the Workers Left Front (FIT) of Argentina, a bloc of fake Trotskyists acting as the left wing of the bourgeoisie in parliament (Congress). For Leninist Trotskyists, Menshevik/Pabloite groups such as these fail to pass the test of raising Trotsky’s ‘crowning’ demand that sums up the transitional program – The Workers’ Government.”
RCIT says:
“In the above mentioned statement on the COVID-19 crisis the CWG/ILTT raises various criticisms against the RCIT. Some of them are … “original”. For example they attack us for publishing an “Open Letter to the FIT-U” in late March which included the proposal for an international virtual conference on the current COVID-19 crisis. [6] FIT-U is an alliance of several Trotskyist organizations in Argentina which have gained some deputies in national resp. regional parliaments.
The CWG/ILTT denounces us for approaching this alliance because it is supposedly “acting as the left wing of the bourgeoisie in parliament”. While we also have our criticism of the political orientation of the organizations involved in the FIT-U, it is simply hilarious to call them “the left wing of the bourgeoisie”. [7] This is an ultra-left caricature of ultra-leftism, an expression of political delirium in a parallel universe which does not serve anyone, and much less the reputation of the CWG/ILTT comrades!”
We are not critiquing the RCIT for sending a letter….send all the letters you like; the difference is you identify fake Trotskyists who abandon the transitional method and play to parliamentarism and electoralism as “Trotskyists”. We denounce their opportunist wrangling to get a hearing among the tens of thousands of fake Trotskyist Morenoites and Altamira followers. The point is not even the qualifier “fake, ” it is in their letter to the FIT where they abandon the Transitional method that carries the program through to the Workers Government.
So we learn that the RCIT DOES again (!) describe the FIT as Trotskyist. An electoralist bloc! In Argentina, no less, where veterans of the Cordobazo are still alive. The RCIT raves on about our supposed cavalier attitude toward bourgeois-democratic rights…. (“It” is us in what follows.)
“However, it never managed to overcome a sterile, undialectical method which repeatedly led them into a combination of ultra-leftist and arch-opportunist debacles. Examples for these, among others, are their failure to defend bourgeois democracy against reactionary coup d’états (e.g. Egypt 2013, Thailand 2014, Brazil 2016) or their social-imperialist support for immigration control in rich countries (e.g. U.S., New Zealand).”
The RCIT also goes after centrists and reformists such as the L5I for their workers control demand:
“We think that such a slogan is a poor attempt to cover-up a de facto support for the state bonapartist lockdown policy. The whole idea of “workers control” is to challenge the power of the capitalists over the means of production as a first step to expropriate them and to ultimately transfer them in a planned economy.”
The stark reality is that in the U.S. meatpacking plants (and industries such as transit), “workers control” is the only means workers have of defending their health and safety against the pandemic. They need to organize and seize the plants and workplaces through strike actions and enforce appropriate PPE, health and safety measures, shutting down non-essential work, while guaranteeing full pay and benefits for furloughed workers. And yes, even (horror of horrors!!!), enforcing social distancing in the workplaces through democratic workers committees. It is a tragedy that the healthcare workers, denied appropriate PPE and dying in disproportionate numbers, didn’t exercise a bit more workers control through strike actions.
The RCIT, while buying into the unscientific COVID conspiracy crap by citing unsubstantiated death rate studies, themselves call for quarantines (i.e. lockdowns imposed by the bourgeois state) and “massive expansion of the public health service under workers and popular control”.
“Naturally, we never denied the existence of this pandemic. But an increasing number of studies demonstrate that it is much less deadly than the ruling classes and their media claim in order to justify the creation of a chauvinist state bonapartist machinery with an rapidly expanding police and surveillance state and the massive limitation of democratic rights. While the lethality rate of Influenza is about 0.1%, various studies indicate that the lethality rate of the Corona Virus is between 0.2-0.6%.
In short, this is a serious pandemic which must be combated with a program of wide-ranging mass free testing, quarantine of those infected and a massive expansion of the public health service under workers and popular control. It can not and must not be combated with bourgeois state repression and atomization of the popular masses (“stay at home”, “social distancing”, etc.). It can not and must not serve under any circumstances as justification for the creation of authoritarian regimes and the destruction of democratic rights!”
For the RCIT, the pandemic is not bad enough to justify staying at home, therefore the lockdown by the bosses must have some other reason – a conspiracy to isolate and destroy workers. They can easily test this by looking at the case of China where the lockdown was imposed as a public health measure and succeeded in halting the virus spread. Workers in the main recognised that the lockdown worked, while some protested the draconian methods, mistakes and shortfalls in provisions for public health which made the lockdown necessary. Of course, as we say in our article, a Transitional Program is needed for China to take public health out of the hands of the CCP and put it under workers control in the struggle for a Workers’ Government.
For the RCIT instead of a Transitional Program that addresses this situation which exists in reality, they write letters to the actual social Bonapart popular frontists for a world popular front. For the RCIT, the class content of isolation against just another flu cannot be contested by workers action, workers control, etc., as immediate demands that build workers power. Do they not approve of food riots, of seizing PPE, supporting the strikes, fighting the armed fascist thugs for Trump’s “re-opening” etc etc? That is, workers taking control of their self-isolation as a class struggle method to overcome social isolation and build international solidarity for socialist revolution!
Delirium? Really? Your problem is with Trotsky!
You sneer at our view of the life of society after a historic defeat of the proletariat. Trotsky hypothesized how that would be configured and we’ll quote what he wrote below. We rephrased his view without alteration apart from length. But your sneering at us just shows that you, like the Schachtmanites of 1939, do not believe in the power of the proletariat to defend civilization. Workers are defending civilization right now, and better than you know; they are better Marxists than you!! In Latin America, Asia and Southern Africa they wear masks, observe physical spacing and still fight the state.
You want life to return to the pre-existing normal, where the triple crisis did not yet exist, just as the right does as its officeholders lift social restrictions, opening all sorts of venues for the virus to spread. Your position is not fundamentally different from those who call the pandemic a hoax, even as you grant that it exists. You retail FALSE numbers for the lethality rate at a time when neither the present nor the ultimate number of the infected is known and the fatality statistics are openly challenged by Epidemiology as incomplete! You reject social distancing too, even though it takes little imagination to envision rings of socially-distanced picket lines, ‘6 foot interval’ marches and sit down strikes. With fatal, ignorant politics you will lead whoever you lead to the doorstep of barbarism. They are the politics of anti-science backwardness.
The RCIT accuse the ILTT of capitulation to Stalinism, and the “COVID Counter-Revolution”:
“Consequently, following the lead of Stalinism and semi-Stalinism, the CWG/ILTT sympathises with the “Chinese” draconic response to the pandemic: “The China model of combatting [sic!] the pandemic did not impose unusually draconian controls over workers compared to the ones that bourgeois democratic regimes have themselves used under war-time ‘blitz’ conditions. (…) It was the failure to impose the China solution when there was plenty of advance warning of a pandemic that left China’s imperialist rivals resorting to panicked, confused and draconian blanket curfews, economic shutdowns, and punitive lockdowns of the working people. This was the result of the chaos of the market, not a capitalist conspiracy….
Then the RCIT goes on to say…,
“In short, we see how close, in fact, how inseparable, ultra-left sectarianism is wedded to opportunism! In the current crisis, when the international working class experiences the worst attack on democratic rights in many countries since 1945, we see such ultra-leftists proudly stating that they “do not reject lockdowns on principle”, in other words, that they join the reformist caravan of social-bonapartist cheerleaders!”
Truly the ILTT does not oppose lockdown on principle: what we do oppose is the desperate and transparently political public health decisions being made by the capitalist Ruling Class.
The RCIT continues:
“And what are the programmatic consequences of such ideas? If a “new bureaucratic class” based on “Bonapartist dictatorship” can develop the productive forces better than capitalism, one would have to support such forces and work towards their victory over capitalism. The CWG/ILTT comrades might not consciously have already drawn such conclusions but there is an inevitable logic in their position which will push them in such direction. In any case, such theoretical nonsense already serves as a cover for the CWG/ILTT’s social-bonapartist support for the lockdown policy.”
We don’t know where you got the idea that a barbaric regime would develop the productive forces, or that we believe it would, or that it’s the inevitable logic of what we do stand on. Just the opposite! Our position derives directly from Trotsky’s “The USSR and War” (1939):
“If, however, it is conceded that the present war will provoke not revolution but a decline of the proletariat, then there remains another alternative: the further decay of monopoly capitalism, its further fusion with the state and the replacement of democracy wherever it still remained by a totalitarian regime. The inability of the proletariat to take into its hands the leadership of society could actually lead under these conditions to the growth of a new exploiting class from the Bonapartist fascist bureaucracy. This would be, according to all indications, a regime of decline, signalizing the eclipse of civilization.
…if the world proletariat should actually prove incapable of fulfilling the mission placed upon it by the course of development, nothing else would remain except openly to recognize that the socialist program based on the internal contradictions of capitalist society, ended as a Utopia. It is self-evident that a new “minimum” program would be required for the defense of the interests of the slaves of the totalitarian bureaucratic society.
But are there such incontrovertible or even impressive objective data as would compel us today to renounce the prospect of the socialist revolution? That is the whole question.”
The crises of capitalism, the compound of economic crisis, rising Bonapartism and fascism, climate catastrophe, pandemics and inter-imperialist world war danger…these are catastrophes that “threaten the whole culture of mankind” that will usher in a world of barbarism unless the proletariat rises to our historical tasks.
Below are links to some of our polemics with the RCIT:
EGYPT DEBATE: RCIT Statement on the “Coup” and the tactics of the Revolutionary Constituent Assembly
EGYPT Debate: LCC responds to RCIT
Thailand: Defeat the Coup d’etat Polemic and Program a response to the RCIT
Forward to Permanent Revolution in Thailand! An open letter to all members and supporters of the RCIT
CWG-A/NZ: Worker or Capitalist control of borders? Reply to RCIT
LCC vs. RCIT on Immigration
http://www.cwgusa.org/?page_id=1876
Historical Differences with the RCIT (Aug 2012)
