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	Australasian Spartacist No. 221	Spring 2013

"Trotskyist" Platform: Waterboys for Stalinist Bureaucrats

Defend China, North Korea Against Capitalist Counterrevolution!

Ever since capitalism was overthrown in North Korea and China, the imperialist powers have striven, by one means or another, to take back these countries for capitalist exploitation. During the Korean War (1950-53), U.S.-led imperialist forces, including from Australia, slaughtered three and a half million Koreans in a failed attempt to “roll back Communism.” Today, the U.S. imperialists, backed by their Australian junior partners, are escalating a military build-up that is widely recognised as aimed at China. Furthering this purpose, a 2011 agreement between Canberra and Washington expanded U.S. access to air and naval bases in the Northern Territory, with 2,500 U.S. Marines to be based in Darwin by 2016-17. In August, almost 30,000 U.S. and Australian military personnel carried out exercises off northern Australia.

After North Korea’s successful third nuclear test early this year, alongside implementing a harsh round of new economic UN sanctions against that country, the U.S. imperialists predictably responded with sabre rattling as well as overt military provocations. This included joint exercises involving thousands of U.S. and South Korean troops. For 60 years, since the Korean War ended, the U.S. has maintained a massive military presence in South Korea, a dagger pointed at both the Chinese and North Korean workers states and at the South Korean working class fighting against brutal exploitation and oppression.

It is in the direct interests of the international proletariat to stand for the unconditional military defence of China, North Korea and the other bureaucratically deformed workers states of Vietnam, Laos and Cuba against imperialist attack and internal capitalist counterrevolution. This includes supporting North Korea’s and China’s development and testing of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems as a deterrent against the threat of annihilation by the nuclear-armed imperialists in Washington, backed by their lackeys in Canberra. At the same time, we Marxists fight for proletarian political revolution to oust the ruling nationalist Stalinist regimes whose bureaucratic mismanagement of the economy, brutal suppression of workers democracy and opposition to international socialist revolution undermines the gains of these revolutions.

We stand for the revolutionary reunification of the Korean peninsula through proletarian political revolution in the North and socialist revolution in the South. As we wrote in “Chinese Stalinists: Running Dogs for Imperialist Drive Against North Korea” (ASp No. 220, Winter 2013),

“This is part of the International Communist League’s perspective for a socialist Asia, which requires as well a political revolution to sweep away the Chinese Stalinist regime and, crucially, the proletarian overthrow of Japanese imperialism and the jackal Australian imperialists. The ICL is dedicated to forging Leninist-Trotskyist parties to lead such struggles around the world.”

Kim Jong Un’s Fellow Travellers

In contrast to our Trotskyist tendency and its program, most of what passes for the left in this country are hostile to China and North Korea, either declaring that these states are now capitalist or, in the case of the Cliffites of Socialist Alternative and Solidarity, denying that social revolutions ever took place. Their hostility leads them to make common cause with all manner of reactionaries from the Dalai Lama to Falun Gong. However, one group that does posture as a staunch defender of these countries is the misnamed Trotskyist Platform (TP). Given that defence of the workers states is a vital question for the international proletariat, it’s necessary to warn against these charlatans.

Despite the name, Trotskyist Platform have nothing to do with Trotskyism. Led by P. Balasubramaniam, who quit our organisation in 2005 in a headlong flight from genuine Trotskyism (see “‘Trotskyist Platform’: Opportunism in Action” ASp No. 192, Spring 2005), this motley band are defined by the search for agencies other than the proletariat and vehicles other than a Leninist party to lead a struggle against capitalism. This is illustrated by TP’s pandering to various reformist left groups, trade-union bureaucrats and others who serve as obstacles to achieving proletarian class consciousness, and by their penchant for fake “united-front” rallies that are really non-aggression pacts with whoever may be their current bloc partners. It is also exemplified by TP’s prostration before the class-collaborationist Stalinist bureaucracies in China and North Korea.

As part of a lash-up grandiosely named the “Oceania-DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] Solidarity Committee,” TP organised a 22 June “action” in the western Sydney suburb of Auburn that demanded: “Stop Imperialist Provocations Against Socialistic North Korea!” and called for “Working Class People—we must protect our gains: Defend Our Trade Unions and Defend Our Workers State in North Korea!” This militant-sounding bluster served a thoroughly reformist program, with the committee’s rally propaganda criticising neither the pro-capitalist Laborite trade-union misleaders in Australia nor the Stalinist bureaucratic misrulers of North Korea. It didn’t even pose the need for socialist revolution against Australian capitalism—the class enemy of both the unions at home and deformed workers states abroad.

Defining the politics of the event, the rally opened with one of TP’s co-endorsers, the MC, calling for the “peaceful reunification” of the Korean peninsula while another circulated a resolution promoting the “establishment of a unified Korea” as “an urgent task of the times for world peace.” None of the other speakers, including from Trotskyist Platform, challenged these utterly nationalist, peace-mongering calls or voted against the resolution. The call for “peaceful reunification” with the South has long been promoted by the North Korean Stalinists and is a recipe for reunification on a capitalist basis through the annexation of the North by the chaebols, the giant conglomerates that dominate South Korean capitalism. It is a betrayal not only of the North Korean workers state but also of the historically militant and combative South Korean proletariat. It is also counterposed to mobilising workers internationally against the imperialist rulers, who seek to restore capitalist exploitation in the workers states.

A recent gushing account of a trip to North Korea by one unnamed TPer concludes by lauding the June demo as an “important step forward” in building a “united front movement” in solidarity with the DPRK (www.trotskyistplatform.com, 20 October). In fact, by promoting the Stalinists’ futile quest for “peaceful co-existence” with imperialism, TP and the other cheerleaders of the Pyongyang regime ensured that this demo served to undermine defence of the workers state.

The lengthy TP travelogue offers the odd, vaguely Trotskyist-sounding criticisms—North Korea “was somewhat deformed” by a “bureaucratic layer” and lacks “genuine workers democracy” which is necessary to “drastically curb” bureaucratic privileges. However these are only meant to dupe the unwary. Politely advising the Pyongyang bureaucracy on the benefits of “open political debate” as opposed to political suppression, what the TP writer does not say, i.e., what TP reject, is the vital necessity to forge a Leninist-Trotskyist internationalist party that can lead the North Korean masses in the struggle for proletarian political revolution. Instead, looking for a “progressive” wing of the bureaucracy, and brandishing the threat of capitalist counterrevolution, TP in fact back the North Korean regime’s bureaucratic rule:

“Even though pro-capitalist tendencies are by definition excluded in a workers democracy, there is nevertheless a danger that counterrevolutionary forces could exploit the greater openness to push their agenda or that inevitable differences of opinion within the pro-socialist camp could lead to dangerous disunity” (bold in original).

Given such support, it’s hardly surprising that TP lider maximo Balasubramaniam resorts to censoring revolutionary opponents in true Stalinist fashion. At a February 2011 TP-led North Korea demonstration, he turned off the sound system rather than let a Spartacist League supporter speak, ranting about his rally being “hijacked” by people who weren’t really in “solidarity with North Korea.” Determined that people should hear the Trotskyist program, our comrade began to speak anyway, outlining our unconditional military defence of North Korea. However the call for proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist misrulers was too much for an enraged Balasubramaniam, who switched on the PA again and began screaming chants to drown her out.

In a 2009 article, “Celebrate the 60th Anniversary of China’s Anti-Capitalist Revolution,” TP “explained” that a bureaucratic degeneration of the isolated Soviet Union occurred “about seven years” after the 1917 Revolution. TP consciously buried the political counterrevolution led by J.V. Stalin in 1923-24 that brought a conservative, nationally narrow bureaucratic caste to power, consolidating its brutal, anti-revolutionary regime over more than a decade. Not least, this was through strangling the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky. TP merely commented, in parenthesis, that from its degeneration until its collapse in 1991-92, the “administration” of the Soviet workers state “was no longer based on workers democracy.”

Likewise, covering for the Mao-led Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which turned its back on the urban working class after the defeat of the 1925-27 revolutionary uprisings, TP asserted that the “poor farmers,” (i.e., the peasantry) were “the key revolutionary class” in China. For TP, the Chinese workers state was “unfortunately” deformed from inception because “CPC cadres were required to smother centrifugal tendencies that would otherwise have torn the unity of the tenant farmers apart.” This apologia for Maoism spits on the heroic struggle of the Chinese Trotskyists to build a Leninist vanguard party to lead the proletariat, at the head of the peasant and oppressed masses, in an internationalist revolutionary struggle to bring down the imperialist world order, the only road to socialism (see “The Origins of Chinese Trotskyism,” Spartacist No. 53, Summer 1997).

Capturing TP’s fawning conciliation of the Stalinist bureaucracies, a TP reporter in 2008 enthused over the flag of the People’s Republic of China, declaring that “The combination of [four] yellow stars on a red background is meant to be similar to the famous yellow hammer and sickle on a red background that was the Soviet Union’s flag” (“From The Bright Depths of The Sea of Red,” Trotskyist Platform, Sep-Oct 2008). Actually, the four yellow stars symbolise the Stalinist/Maoist class-collaborationist bloc of four classes. This has nothing to do with Marxism or communism, and everything to do with the politics of TP.

For Proletarian Internationalism!

The social overturns in North Korea and China in the wake of the Second World War were a great victory for the working people of the world, establishing the collectivised property forms of proletarian rule that are essential to building an egalitarian society. However, in the absence of the working class contending for power under the leadership of a Trotskyist party, the insurgent masses were led by peasant-based guerrilla forces under a petit-bourgeois leadership which could lead to nothing more than anti-working-class bureaucratic regimes modelled on the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union.

The deeply nationalist Chinese and North Korean regimes embraced the anti-Marxist utopian-reactionary dogma of “socialism in one country,” which was adopted by Stalin in 1924. Under this dogma, the Soviet bureaucracy repeatedly betrayed international revolutionary opportunities in a futile attempt to conciliate imperialism. The 1925-27 Chinese Revolution was drowned in blood as a result of Stalin’s Communist International directing the fledgling CCP to liquidate into Chiang Kai-shek’s bourgeois nationalist Guomindang.

The Chinese and North Korean Stalinists have also acted to derail and stymie revolutions abroad in pursuit of peaceful coexistence with imperialism. This includes China’s treacherous anti-Soviet alliance with U.S. imperialism, forged in 1972 at the height of the U.S.-led imperialist bombardment of Vietnam. More recently, Beijing helped draw up the United Nations sanctions that enforce an economic embargo against North Korea. In North Korea, the misrule of the Pyongyang bureaucracy takes on an extreme version of the Stalinist cult of personality and nationalist pipe-dream of economic “self-sufficiency” in half a country. Despite strident rhetoric, it renounces any perspective for the revolutionary overthrow of the South Korean capitalist class.

Some may see a discontinuity between the heroic struggle of the People’s Liberation Army in 1950-53 fighting imperialist forces in Korea and Beijing’s current grovelling to the imperialists over North Korean nuclear weapons. In fact these events illustrate the contradictory nature of the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracies. Deriving their privileges from the collectivised economies at the core of the workers state, these bureaucracies are forced at times to defend these states against capitalist forces. At the same time Stalinist nationalism means that the needs of one’s own country are paramount. This leads to seeking accommodation with world imperialism and selling out revolutions elsewhere.

Domestically, the Chinese and North Korean Stalinists have suppressed the exercise of political power by the proletariat, which is critical to the healthy operation of a collectivised and planned economy as well as to organising for the vital international extension of revolution. Instead, in order to gain the wherewithal for technological and industrial development, the Chinese Stalinists under Deng Xiaoping and his successors have acted as labour contractors for international capital, offering up Chinese workers for exploitation in designated sectors of the economy. For its part, in order to attract capital investment from South Korea and elsewhere, the Pyongyang regime has opened a large free-trade zone. This by no means constitutes the rule of capital. Despite decades of “market reforms” state-owned enterprises in China remain dominant in the strategic industrial sectors and land remains nationalised. However, along with abandoning a strict state monopoly of foreign trade, these measures by the Beijing Stalinists, and by the regimes in the other deformed workers states, encourage imperialist economic penetration and foster internal forces of capitalist restoration. Combined with the internal instability of a society wracked by social protest against the effects of “market reforms” and bureaucratic misrule, they are creating massive social contradictions in China. When they blow, either capitalist counterrevolution or workers political revolution will be posed.

The potential for workers political revolution was shown in the events around Tiananmen Square in 1989. The mass upheaval—which began with student protests against bureaucratic corruption but increasingly drew in workers chafing under the impact of pro-capitalist “market reforms”—heralded the beginning of a proletarian political revolution against the Chinese Stalinist rulers. Workers mobilised and began to hold mass meetings and form assemblies that could have led to the formation of workers councils. For two weeks the Chinese bureaucracy could not implement its own martial law decree. Ultimately the regime was able to mobilise loyal army units which crushed the protesters, overwhelmingly targeting the workers. We called to “Oust the Bureaucrats—For Lenin’s Communism! Workers and Soldiers Soviets Must Rule!” After the massacre, Workers Vanguard, the paper of our U.S. section headlined: “Defend Chinese Workers! Stop the Executions!”

The defence and extension of the revolutionary gains in the bureaucratically deformed workers states requires a workers political revolution to sweep away the bureaucracy. Based on workers and peasants councils, a revolutionary government would seek to maximise economic development, maintaining a monopoly of foreign trade, while championing proletarian revolutions internationally. The establishment of such governments would spark revolutionary upsurges in capitalist South Korea, in imperialist Japan and among the oppressed masses across Asia.

A prerequisite for socialism is the elimination of economic scarcity. Only through the overthrow of capitalist class rule internationally, particularly in the imperialist centres of the U.S., Japan, West Europe and Australia can the material basis be laid to liberate the toiling masses of the world from poverty and oppression. This was the key aim of the 1917 Russian Revolution when workers led by Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party established their own class rule based on workers soviets (councils) and a program of world revolution.

Based on their nationalist outlook of “socialism in one country,” the Stalinist bureaucrats help to perpetuate the capitalist and imperialist system on a global scale. As Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky wrote in the Revolution Betrayed (1936) unless the Stalinist caste is ousted by the proletariat, bureaucratic privilege, political suppression of the working class and appeasement of imperialism threaten the very existence of the workers state. Trotsky’s prognosis was tragically borne out in the former Soviet Union. Those, like TP, who act as apologists for the Stalinist bureaucrats, are in fact an obstacle to the international struggles of the working class. To defeat imperialism and bring the working class to power on a global scale requires first and foremost the forging of Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard parties that champion the fight for international socialist revolution. This is the task to which the SL/ICL is dedicated.