lutte de classe / class struggle / lucha de clase FRA/ENG/ESP trilingual edition #20

Description

To Our Readers: This review stands on the bases of revolutionary communism, that is, on the bases of Trotskyism. It expresses the analyses and stands of the international tendency which publishes it. This tendency is comprised of the following groups: Lutte Ouvriere (France), Combat Ouvrier (French-speaking West Indies), UATCI (African Union of Internationalist Communist Workers), and The Spark (United States). However, we also want it to become a tool for a real debate between all those who are not satisfied with the existing divisions of the international Trotskyist movement, of the revolutionary communist movement. We realize full well, of course, that the present divisions cover deep, basic divergences - even though it is also the result of the crystallization of specific characteristics which are artificially maintained in order to justify sectarian divisions. We do not at all wish to erase those divergences, quite the contrary, we want to give ourselves the opportunity and the means to discuss them as widely as possible. Our tendency works toward the creation of class parties, of revolutionary communist parties which can ensure that the proletariat will not find itself tagging behind other social forces. To achieve this, we do not think that the revolutionaries' role is to put pressure on apparatuses (whether social-democratic, Stalinist, or nationalist ones) in the hope (a vain one) of seeing them transformed into proletarian revolutionary leaderships. We think that the pressure on these apparatuses must be exerted from the masses, from their aspirations - and especially from the proletariat- in struggle; by addressing the apparatuses in order to put them to the test, but also by directly addressing the masses themselves, and as often as possible, over the heads of the apparatuses. The masses must be offered real choices: revolutionaries cannot be satisfied with being active inside apparatuses while waiting for them to agree with the revolutronanes· proposals before addressing the masses. To believe or to allow others to believe that such a transmutation is possible is to leave the working class without a leadership of its own. More seriously, it means putting it in the wake of non-proletarian leaderships which inevitably, sooner or later, turn against the workers. Neither do we think that revolutionary organizations should enter coalitions or fronts which are but another way _of making the proletariat tag behind antiworker social and political forces. History is full of examples of such fronts which have, each and every time, allowed the poorer people's, in particuliar the proletariat's, energy and combativeness to be channeled and harnessed - to carry out anti-worker objectives. It does not mean that we reject the very idea of alliances, or that we refuse to support the struggles of people who do not struggle on a class-against-class basis, or who would not fight under the leadership of a revolutionary party. When involved in such alliances or giving support, we think that the proletariat is required to maintain its organizational independence whenever possible, and its political independence at all time. Consequently, we consider that in imperialist countries where the weight of reformism - socialdemocratic, Stalinist, or otherwise - is strongly felt, the communist revolutionaries' task is to enter in competition with the apparatuses in order to take the lead of working-class struggles, and not merely to support, even critically, these apparatuses. The working class must realize - and revolutionaries must say this and prove it with facts - that reformist political or union apparatuses will betray the working class at one level or another in the course of the struggle. In backward countries, we fully adhere - programatically as well as concretely- with the idea expressed at the second congress of Lenin and Trotsky's Communist International: that is, revolutionary communism "must support revolutionary movements in the colonies and backward countries only under the condition that elements of the purest communist parties - and communist in fact- are grouped and trained for their specific task, which is to wage the struggle against the democratic and bourgeois movements." While they have not openly given up those principles, many Trotskyist organizations have in fact renounced them by adopting a political line based on the coat-tailing of nationalist-revolutionary organizations. This review intends to go against such abdication. Its contributors nevertheless hope that a wide and fraternal (even though exacting) debate can be established on many subjects, including on this question which is one of the most important for the future of the revolutionary communist current and of the world socialist revolution. #20 November 1988 1. Algeria: Can the revolt become a revolution? 2. Haiti: After September 17 3. New Caledonia: How the French government managed to make the Kanak nationalist leaders ratify the continuation of the colonial status