Globalisation
The Marxist University declares war on chauvinism!
The Marxist University is going international. For the second time the Institute of Marxist Studies has invited Marxists from abroad to give a course. This time, we are very honoured to have José Maria Sison, founding president of the Communist Party of the Philippines and a frequent contributor to the International Communist Seminar, and Ella Rule, General Secretary of the Society for Friendship with Korea of Britain, who has just published with Harpal Brar an important new book, Imperialism in the Middle East. They will jointly lecture on the Marxist vision of War and Peace. We interviewed José Maria Sison.
Maria McGavigan
25-06-2002
>...In your course you are going to take into account Socialist and
Green Party points of view, as well as those of various Trotskyite
groups. Usually you are pretty hostile to them. Why do you think it is
important to study what they have to say?
JMS: It is important to study what the social democratic and green parties and Trotskyite groups say because we need to understand how the imperialists or the big bourgeoisie use political formations that spout certain petty bourgeois ideas in order to mislead the proletariat and people and block the advance of the revolutionary party of the proletariat. Our understanding will enable us to fight more effectively for the revolutionary cause against the imperialists, all reaction and the petty bourgeois anticommunists. The social democrats or classical revisionists have traditionally cloaked their petty bourgeois liberalism with Marxist phraseology in order to push reformism, social chauvinism, social imperialism and social pacifism. Nowadays, after subverting the working class movement for a long time, they use neoliberal language unabashedly. The greens have taken the petty bourgeois stance of being above classes and have appropriated environmentalism as the all- encompassing issue to divert attention from the class struggle of the proletariat.
In collaboration with social democrats in ruling coalitions in Europe, they have actively supported imperialist wars launched by the U.S. and have enabled Germany to partipate in wars of aggression. The Trotskyites misrepresent their petty bourgeois notions of ultraleftism, ultrademocracy and anti-Stalinism as proletarian. In a sense, they are anarchists pretending to be Marxists. They have a predilection for ultra-Left positions which are so utterly futile that these are in the direction of defeatism. In the name of world revolution, Trotsky was against socialism in one country and against the worker- peasant alliance. He was neither for peace nor war at a time that the point was to make the Brest Litovsk peace treaty1 in order to gain respite for the Soviet revolution. In the name of the Left Opposition, he was against the transition policies of Lenin and Stalin. Trotsky and the Trotskyites tried all they could to undermine the Soviet Union's position and preparations against the fascist war of aggression, which finally broke out in 1941...
So there! Michael Pugliese