Internationalist Workers' Tendency
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article or section has multiple issues. Please help improve the article or discuss these issues on the talk page.
|
Internationalist Workers' Tendency is a Revolutionary Marxist group formed in 2006.
Contents |
[edit] Origins
Internationalist Workers' Tendency was formed by socialists disgusted by the opportunism of sects who have abandoned the working class as the agent of political and social progress, and have instead substituted bourgeois and nationalist anti-working class forces in their place, embracing alliances with reactionary clerical or nationalist forces, failing to support socialist and secular organisations, women and sexual and ethnic minorities in the poor and developing worlds, and made rapprochment with Stalinists. The group emphasises critical and dialectical thinking, taking account of actual circumstances, instead of recourse to dogma. Internationalist Workers' Tendency members are active in campaigns against fascism, racism/nationalism and antisemitism, and for the rights of asylum seekers and other 'illegals'.
[edit] Organisation
Internationalist Workers' Tendency has sections in Britain, Germany, Finland, Canada, Cambodia and Australia. The executive committee co-ordinates agitprop activities. The Canadian section includes a dissenting Kautskyite platform, whose members are convinced of the redemptive qualities of reformist parliamentary politics. Internationalist Workers' Tendency is an entryist organisation, viz Ted Grant's statement, "outside the workers' movement, there is nothing".
[edit] Politics
[edit] Workers as agents of progress
Internationalist Workers' Tendency is for the self-organisation of workers against the boss class and opposes petit-bourgeois dilettantism in all of its manifestations - 'identity politics', 'third-worldism' etc - with the ultimate end the self-administration of the working class: in other words, democracy not as manifested by the 'freedoms' (for the wealthy) of current bourgeois representative governments, but actual democracy in everyday social relations, which can only be achieved by superseding capitalist relations of production. Internationalist Workers' Tendency opposes all bureaucratic forms of organisation.
[edit] 'Actually Existing' and 'Previously Existing' Socialism
Internationalist Workers' Tendency considers the former Stalinist and post-Stalinist USSR to have been a counter-revolutionary degenerated workers' state, which actively undermined genuine revolutionary currents: murdering or exiling Soviet and international revolutionaries; conspiring against the Spanish Revolution, imprisoning, torturing and murdering thousands of socialists; delivering the Spanish Republic into the hands of Franco and the fascists. The satellite states of the Warsaw Pact were deformed workers' states, while modern 'socialist states' such as Venezuela, Cuba, or Bolivia are bureaucratised workers' states. Although there is a prima facie case for writer Christopher Hitchens' description of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea as a 'thanatocracy' or 'necrocracy'[1], Internationalist Workers' Tendency contends that it and the People's Republic of China are military industrial complexes.
[edit] Nationalism
Internationalist Workers' Tendency is for the self-determination and emancipation of workers not nations. Nationalism deflects the revolutionary consciousness of the workers. When the working class accepts bourgeois ideological abstractions such as the 'right of nations to freedom and independence' and joins the bourgeoisie in fighting for a class state it is acting against its own interests. "On the basis of the general assumptions of historical materialism, the position of socialists with respect to nationality problems depends primarily on the concrete circumstances of each case, which differ significantly among countries, and also change in the course of time in each country"[2].
[edit] Imperialism
Capitalism is the progenitor of imperialism, therefore while capitalism exists it is impossible to 'reform' imperialism out of existence. To overcome imperialism, the relations of production which produce it must be superseded. Furthermore, over-emphasis on anti-imperialism obscures class divisions and leads to cross-class alliances and cretinous support for reactionary and bourgeois elements, as exemplified by the fake left's support for the forces of feudalism and barbarism in Iraq and elsewhere, at the expense of working class, secular, socialist forces. Internationalist Workers' Tendency unreservedly condemns the criminal and sectarian gangs, whom the 'anti-imperialist' fake left have blessed as 'insurgents', whose purpose is to prevent the Iraqi people from building a civil society after 35 years under the Ba'athist jackboot. Internationalist Workers' Tendency rejects the burlesque 'anti-imperialism' which sacrifices workers and workers' representatives in favour of those elements which parrot formalist 'anti-imperialist' slogans but have imperialist or sub-imperialist ambitions of their own, just as it condemns the occupation forces for their harassment of workers and their representatives and organisations.
[edit] Environment
Internationalist Workers' Tendency advocates reduced ownership and use of personal petrol-powered vehicles, and research and implementation of alternative energy sources, while supporting continuing nuclear power generation until alternative energy sources are widely available.
