Dear Comrades of the ISO-Z,
Revolutionary greetings and best wishes from the Liaison Committee to the comrades for the success of this Special Congress to reconstitute the ISO-Z on a democratic centralist basis and open the road to the formation of a revolutionary organization in Zimbabwe.
We have learned that the faction of the ISO-Z calling itself the IRL has expelled your leaders in a highhanded bureaucratic fashion. Why does this not surprise us? Both the HWRS and CWG went through a similar experience, in which our differences with the FLTI over China produced a stream of accusations that we were Stalinists and Obamaphiles, which precipitated a cynical split. The Liaison Committee of the HWRS and CWG is the result of that split.
We are in good company fighting alongside you, comrades, betrayed by the African Secretariat of the FLTI led by Shaheed Mahomed who organized a secret faction of the ISO-Z to fuse with the FLTI and adopt a new position on China without the discussion and vote of a congress of the membership.
We are confident that revolutionary fighters in the ISO-Z will reject this double treachery, restore democratic centralism and continue the fight that began with the split in the ISO-Z over the question of the popular front in Zimbabwe.
In that struggle the tendency of the ISO-Z to which you belong took a giant step to break with the bureaucratic centralist federation of the IST and its traditions. However, that break was barely underway and a provisional balance sheet written when the FLTI staged its bureaucratic maneuver to go beyond an relationship of “engagement” to a full scale fusion around the program of the FLTI.
In our view, to jump out of the fry-pan into the fire is no way to reconstitute a revolutionary tendency in Zimbawe. We strongly support the purpose of this Special Congress which we understand is to revoke that undemocratic fusion and hold the secret faction responsible for it accountable. Once that decision is revoked, and once the question of China is once more opened up for proper debate and voting, and workers’ democracy prevails, the ISO-Z will have reached the next point in its reconstitution from a section of the IST to a truly revolutionary tendency.
The Liaison Committee supports the objectives of this Special Congress despite our different traditions because we know that we have much more in common than that which presently separates us. We believe than the road to revolutionary regroupment is via hard debates that go hand in hand with common actions. So let us list our common agreements first.
We are for a revolutionary socialist international party that can lead the working class to the victorious socialist revolution. Leninist democratic centralism is the organizing principle of the revolutionary party which advances the program by uniting theory and practice in the class struggle.
In the epoch of imperialism, capitalism is rotten ripe, and capitalist crises such as the one we are living through open the possibility of revolution and counter-revolution. The crisis is expressed in the form of inter-imperialist rivalry, in which the ruling classes attempt to make the weaker imperialists, the semi-colonies, and the colonies pay for the crisis, driving the world towards many local, regional and wider wars, which in the end means the hundreds of thousands of workers and poor peasants in and out of work pay with their lives.
In the imperialist countries, revolution means the overthrow of the ruling class by mobilizing the working class – through strike action, occupations, formation of workers’ councils and militia, and the general strike – to take power, overthrow the state, and impose the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In the semi-colonies like Africa, and specifically South Africa and Zimbabwe, the class struggle is expressed first as the national struggle against imperialism. Thus the working class joins forces with poor farmers to lead this struggle. You have already repudiated the IST blocking with the bourgeoisie in the national struggle. You recognize with us that the national question can only be resolved by a socialist revolution that not only breaks all ties with imperialist powers including China, but necessarily removes the national bourgeoisie who are in the last analysis the class allies of the imperialists.
In this struggle we are shoulder to shoulder with you, as the HWRS is located in the heart of the US imperialist beast, and the CWG is located in the advanced semi-colony of NZ, subordinated to the US, UK and Australia, and now in the last 10 years the emerging Chinese imperialism.
Insofar as we are advancing a program for the defeat of imperialism in its heartlands, and of the semi-colonial bourgeoisies, our program is your program. We therefore pledge our support for the reconstituted ISO-Z in the struggles you are facing in Zimbabwe and Southern Africa. In particular, since your break with the policy of the popular front of the old ISO-Z, we support your struggle to break the workers from the trap of participating in the ZANU-MDC regime and the SA-ANC popular fronts, and their projects of tying the hands of the workers so that they can be smashed by state repression.
While we strike together on these united fronts to make imperialism and their local lackeys pay for their own crisis, at the same time we propose that we enter into vigorous debates around our differences. That is while we strike together we march separately to raise our full program and attempt to resolve our programmatic differences.
We will state the most important differences briefly here since this is not a formal discussion document but a statement of our revolutionary solidarity at the time of your Special Congress.
Essentially, our differences arise out of the different methods of Trotsky and Tony Cliff and divisions in the imperialist working class. In our view Cliff revised Trotsky’s position on the Degenerated Workers States to arrive at a particular conception of state capitalism that was congenial to the labor aristocracies in the imperialist countries. Thus for Cliff, the Soviet Union after 1929 was no longer a DWS, and thus the events of 1989-1992, when the Soviet Union, Eastern European states and China underwent a return to the market, were not counter-revolutionary.
The Cliffite SWP rejoiced at the victory of Yeltsin, which resulted in a brutal sell-off of social property accompanying a vicious churning of capital accumulation, leading to destitution of the workers, unemployment (unknown for 70 years), loss of health care, dismantling of social services, and ultimately population decline. For us, the defeat of the DWSs was a historic defeat for the world working class; for the Cliffites it was merely a regime change, opening the East to a more democratic form of capitalism in which the fight for the socialist revolution would be easier.
This difference clearly impacts on all aspects of our program. The road to the popular front taken by “new class theorists” from Shachtman to Cliff can be traced through the rejection of defense of the DWS. The history of programmatic differences between Trotskyism and “new class theorists” like Cliff has had our separate tendencies on opposite sides of the class line on more than one occasion. Thus, while we opposed NATO bombing Serbia, the Cliffites stood by.
Your rebirth as a tendency came about at the tail end of the consequence of Ciffite revisionism. They (SWP-UK) were taking the vanguard of the Zimbabwe working class into the same swamp of popular front politics that has defeated the workers’ revolutions over and again. Your escape from the Popular Front is testament to the rise of proletarian consciousness and inherent fight for the dialectical method of the Transitional Program in Zimbabwe! If you follow the trajectory of the “new class” theorists, you find a capitulation to the national chauvinism and social pacifism of the labor aristocracy and petty bourgeois, crawling at the feet of their own imperialist ruling classes, ultimately putting these revisionists (be they Shachtmanites in the US or Cliffites in the UK) in the camp of imperialism and betraying workers both by abandonment of internationalist duty and by mis-leadership as in their relations with the ISO-Z!
Most important for us, is in our difference over China. We can agree that China is imperialist and hold a correct common position of defeat in a war with other imperialists or in wars with semi-colonies. But we arrive at it from different methods. The ITC position is that China was never a DWS, but developed a state capitalist economy that is today expanding globally. It is easy to attach the label imperialist to the number two global capitalist economy. Yet, we, coming from the Trotskyist tradition, do not think that a state capitalist semi-colony could escape from semi-colonial domination to become an imperialist power. For us, the only explanation for this transition is the massive development of the forces of production in a DWS that remained out of the control of the existing imperialist powers and their global divisions of labor and which, upon the restoration of capitalism, could be harnessed to develop into a new imperialist power.
This difference in method is crucial, in the event that those still existing DWSs such as the DPRK and Cuba, while on the way to capitalist restoration, are not fully restored and in our view must be defended unconditionally from imperialism. This question is one of immediate importance because the growing rivalry between the US and China which is manifest all over the world may break out into local or regional wars over the DPRK or Cuba and its allies in Latin America.
Therefore, comrades, we propose that these and other questions that this Special Congress may decide become agenda items to be agreed between us to guide our discussion in the period immediately following the Congress. While we pledge our international solidarity in these tasks, we will have to work toward a greater level of programmatic agreement before we can enter formal fraternal relations, such as your joining with us in the Liaison Committee and working together for a new revolutionary International.
Forward to the new reconstituted ISO-Z!
Revolutionary Greetings
Signed HWRS/CWG
DEAR COMRADES OF THE LIASON COMMITEE
Firstly we wish to extend our heartfelt gratitude for your support during the most difficult times in the life of ISO-Z and look forward to a revolutionary relationship based on frank discussions and shared experiences. Our special congress resolved to formally engage you to start debate on our differences and in that respect we will ask for educational and political materials to help our members appreciate as best as possible all the different positions in relation to the Chinese question as well as the materialist method. We agreed to commence debate on the issue which will start this weekend in all the branches as well as the leadership. …
We have identified ideological training of the present membership as of primary importance. We also agreed to intervene in the current constitutional reform process alongside the workers and student movements which have called for the boycott of this political parties driven process through exposing the real agenda of the rulers. Also the civil servants are threatening to go on strike and the students plan nationwide protests against the privatisation of education. Social services have now became expensive and the urban poor are seething with anger in a clearest indication of the failure of the bourgeois coalition adminstration.
There is great potential for winning workers and other exploited groups and we must participate in the struggles of the oppressed and expose the capitalist agenda of all the major parties. … We look forward to a comradely relationship that should most importantly enable both of us to deal better with our challenges in an effort to champion the historical struggle of the workers.
Revolutionary regards
National Executive Commitee, ISO-Z
01 September 2010
STATEMENT OF THE SPECIAL CONGRESS OF ISO (ZIMBABWE)
ISO-Z held a special congress on the 29th of August 2010 as a result of calls by members through their branches to deal with the issues affecting the organisation. This statement is therefore a declaration of the resolutions of the congress. The congress considered the following issues and made decisions based on the discussions and evidence provided.
A) Nature of our relationship with the FLTI
The congress noted that comrade Mu. (The National Coordinator) had altered the minutes of the National Members Conference (NMC) held on the 12th of December 2009 to the effect that ISO-Z had agreed to formally be part of the FLTI. What was agreed as shown by the minutes which were confirmed by members was that we should continue to engage with the FLTI among other Socialist formations as we strive to find common ground in the epoch of imperialist decay. This had resulted in a secretive change of name to IRL-FI and an alteration of our political and ideological identity.
The congress then decided to mantain our position in relation with the FLTI and other groups and disassociate ourselves from the IRL which is a reactionary faction bent on thwating the process of our reconstitution as a revolutionary formation, a process we started in 2008. In view of the seriuosness of the matter the congress expelled comrade Mu. from the ISO-Z.
B) The Chinese question
The congress also noted that comrade Mu. had also lied that we had a definitive and representative position on the nature of the present day Chinese society as shown by the report he presented to the congress of the FLTI held in March this year.
The congress mandated all branches to start discussions on the nature of the Chinese society with a view of coming up with a position.
C) Financial issues
The congress also noted that comrade Mu. had gone around saying that comrades T. and Ma. had defrauded FLTI of $250 and that Comrade T. had defrauded Comrade Mo. of WIVL 500 Rands.
It was noted that these allegations were baseless and were meant to discredit senior comrades in view of the political fraud perpetrated by Mu. with the support of the African Secretariat of the FLTI. Further it was noted that indeed it was Mu. who had misappropriated ISO-Z funds and also the solidarity funds from the FLTI including the so- called secret salary when the Organisation has no offices and is struggling to meet its basic needs.
D) Other issues
Mu., it was proved, had abused his position to withhold information from other leaders and had also went around promising comrades that funds for self help projects was about to come from FLTI. He had also personalised all ISO-Z properties and recently had told comrade Man. in the street that Ma. and T. had been expelled from IRL because they were engaged in an unspecified project.
Way forward
The congress reiterated the primacy of the reconstitution process as the basis for building a revolutionary and democratic formation capable of championing the struggles of the workers and other exploited masses.
In order that this process can be implemented effectively the congress declared the National Coordinating Committee (NCC) as constituted at the last NMC be now known as the National Executive Committee (NEC) with comrade T. as Chairperson, comrade Ma. as Secretary and comrade C. as Treasurer. All other members were retained as Committee members.
The congress also resolved to engage the Liason Commitee comprising the HWRS of the USA and CWG of New Zealand in order to share experiences and debate fundamental theoretical and ideological questions.
In the meantime all correspondence should be directed to this address: fortunerera@gmail.com .
Revolutionary Regards.
International Socialist Organisation of Zimbabwe (ISO-Z)
01 September 2010