Date: Thu, 13 Mar 1997 00:15:29 -0500
Subject: Re: M-G: Albania: No responsibility, no slogans!


Dave wrote:

> The LCMRCI article "Victory to the Albanian Uprising"  is based on
> information coming from inside Albania.  It is true that the LCMRCI
> is not present in Albania.   It is unlikely that any serious revolutionary
> organisation is present in Albania. That cannot  stop revolutionaries
> >from attempting to influence the course of struggle. Did not the Bosheviks
> attempt to influence the course of the German Revolution? Who says
> revolutionaries must not intervene where they are not present?
> If as as result of lack of inside information, the analysis is wrong,
> or the demands are wrong then that needs to be confronted directly and
> urgently corrrected. It seems this  is Vladimir's purpose.

Yes. But above all, my point was that one cannot intervene if one is
not present.  I protested not the attempt to do this, but the absolutely
inadequate, purely formalistic way of such "intervention." Dave's analogy
is misleading.  Russian Bolsheviks *were* present in Germany, if only
because there were German Bolsheviks there.  And this is not the case in Albania.
Can we imagine Lenin in the Kremlin sending correct lines and slogans for Germany
to nowhere and nobody in particular?

> 

> These would be fair criticisms if they were true.  They may be true of
> other left positions.  But the LCMRCI does not state that the uprising is
> "consciously anti-capitalist" in the usual sense of the word. It says
> that: "One of the limitations on the movement is that most of the
> people have great illusions in democracy".  It goes on to advocate
> democratic demands including that of an "all-powerful" or constituent
> "assembly".


> 
> Again, no claim is made that workers councils currently exist or that there is a
> clear proletarian leadership.  The LCMRCI statement  says: "the workers
> and poor created new organs to control the distribution of food and
> basic goods and to defend themselves".  However it goes on to say
> that:  "It is indispensible to maintain, democratise, expand and
> centralise them. So they should be the basis for a new workers
> council regime".
> 
>  What is wrong with this?  Do we not need to say that
> real workers councils should be formed,  or point to the need for a
> a workers government? We know that many Albanians are against the
> existing regime, but not yet anti-capitalist, so  we put forward demands
> to demonstrate that capitalism in Albania cannot coexist with `democracy';
> therefore we also have a duty to point to the clear conclusion that a
> workers government is the only alternative.

Then why do you call it  <<“red” uprising>>? And for which country is
intended this line:

<<Revolutionary communists should demand that the socialist and toilers
organisations break the coalition with the capitalist and pro-imperialist
parties>>?

It's for any country in the world, which is to say--for none. And why don't the LCMRCI
call these organization by their names? Rhetorical question! 


> The LCMRCI is not offering Trotskyist slogans that  are
> irresponsible in  the situation in Albania. They are the demands that a
> revolutionary vanguard in Albania would have to raise to try stop the
> uprising being contained  or disarmed by some deal between Berisha and
> the Socialists, and to increase its chances of becoming a consciously anti-capitalist
> uprising.  The fact that there is no revolutionary vanguard with an active presence
>  in Albania is unfortunate. But the only way this can be rectified is for all
>  serious revolutionaries to debate what is the corrrect programme and to
> collaborate inside and outside Albania to help create a revolutionary
> leadership  and to prevent imperialist interventions.

These slogans are irrelevant, and what could be worse in politics
than being irrelevant! And why is this obsession with slogans and
demands, without anything to back them? <<We know that there is no
revolutionary vanguard in Albania, but anyway let us imagine it existed:
What kind of slogans would be correct in such case, comrades?>>  
No debate in London, no correct programme invented in Wellington can
replace a revolutionary organization in Albania, or somehow "rectify"
the absence of it.  What is needed first and foremost is international
solidarity in providing Albania and similar places with the most
basic things: propagandist literature, equipment and 
channels for communication with the outside world, know-how of political
organization, agitation, leaflet struggle ,etc. What is necessary is to plant
the seedlings of future organizational forests, to connect them internationally,
and let them grow.  And don't even think to create an International by 
debate in London or on the Net.  Like revolutions do not fall from the sky, 
but grow from the grass-roots of class struggle, so do Internationals. 

Vladimir


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