Following are excerpts from Workers World Party Chairperson Sam Marcy's talk at a special conference on the theme of "In Defense of Socialism" held in New York City Sept. 28.
We called this conference because of an emergency in the world situation.
The world situation is obscured and falsified by the capitalist press, even more than in the past. If it were only a question of exposing them in a literary way, there wouldn't be such a great hurry. That's fine for an organization that analyzes and observes events only.
But we are the political party of the emerging revolutionary working class organization. We are not just observers and analysts. We are not just an organization that attempts to educate ourselves, period. We are a participant in the struggle.
We're not sitting on some high mountain watching which way the struggle goes. In this world struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed, where reaction is now aided by the forces of counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, we have to be more than ever a partisan in the struggle, on the revolutionary side of the class barricades. We have to utilize everything possible, from literature to sticks and stones, to beat back the bourgeoisie.
Struggle in Tadzhikistan
Millions of workers here are for the first time hearing about a country called Tadzhikistan, one of the 15 republics in the Soviet Union. They will find that (to our great surprise and happiness) in Tadzhikistan the reactionary rule of the imperialist bourgeois stooges has been overthrown and they have reinstalled their old government.
This is a very, very important event. But the ink is hardly dry and the capitalist press is already writing about how this government will be overthrown, how masses are gathered in the streets.
Let us get a few facts straight. It's not such a small country. It's rather big geographically. And it has five to six million people. That's larger than about 20 or 30 countries in the United Nations. It is, according to the Constitution of the USSR, a free republic with equal rights with all other republics.
Gorbachev and Yeltsin, you just said the other day that all the republics are equal. You just signed a treaty to give the republics more rights, so there wouldn't be any interference from the central government. Aren't these your own words?
You and your collaborators will grant equal rights to all republics and defend them against incursions from others--that's what you dished up just two weeks ago, although it's been in the constitution for many, many years.
In Tadzhikistan they elected a parliament said by all to be representative of the people. We're not even going into the question of whether it was bourgeois parliament in composition or whether it was worker and peasant. But it was a representative parliamentary institution.
And what happened to that republic? You Yeltsins, Gorbachevs and Yakovlevs, you managed to create a reign of terror so that the parliament got shook up temporarily, the president turned tail and became your tool. The parliament seemed docile and obedient to what looked like an overpowering, omnipotent grouping, newly established in the USSR.
Well, they thought for a while. They saw that Yeltsin and Gorbachev were not so strong. Those in the parliament could get together again and say, "We're not going to be bulldozed by the forces of political reaction and capitalist reform. We are going to reconstitute ourselves and put back the president we elected. We are going back to what we were before you panicked the whole population, tried to subdue them, disorient the, create confusion and an ideological and political terror."
Lenin statues put back
So what happened? They go together, they got their parliament back again, and they reestablished working class law and order. They put back the statues of Lenin.
That's strong symbolism. All those who are only too happy to see the symbols of revolutionary Marxism brought down now see some are being restored. Only the czarist riffraff could confuse Lenin with any type of unjustified terror. He's the symbol of the revolution, and restoring that symbol speaks volumes. Not all the bourgeois professors on the face of the earth can obscure that singularly significant fact of the parliament restoring the symbol of world socialist revolution.
We ask these "democrats," the exponents of imperialist democracy and their stooges in the Kremlin, are you going to allow this parliament to stay in power? Are you going to allow them to be equal, like you said, without interference from the center?
You're the ones who talk about how the center only orders and commands, that you want to abolish all that and give the republics freedom. Well okay. Here is this one republic which has gotten real freedom. Are you going to let it alone? That's the question. Or are you going to organize counterrevolutionary mobs?
Are you going to get together the so-called gilded youth, like during the French Revolution, the counterrevolutionaries, bring them from Moscow by plane and by train? Are you going to get your friends and collaborators in Pakistan or even Saudi Arabia?
Are you going to say that this is really a religious war between the Muslims and a secular power? In that whole country, everyone has been Muslims for centuries. What kind of nonsense are you raising, saying that outside of parliament there are Muslims and inside there are not?
This struggle raises a very important question, because if one republic can restore its sovereignty, then all the other republics can do so. And we look forward to that prospect!
We look toward the regeneration of the Soviet Union, not to the downfall of communism, which is a lie. It's only a phase in the class struggle. It took one small republic to remind us how fraudulent are the capitalist doomsayers who have written off the whole epoch of socialist revolutions, who say that the free enterprise system is on the rise.
The U.S. has authority over the grouping in power in the Soviet Union today. Are they going to try to snuff out the rebellion in Tadzhikistan and say this is the end of the revolutionary struggle?
Tadzhikistan is only one event that requires our closest scrutiny and support. The issue here is not our ideological solidarity with them on all fundamental issues. The issue is whether the Gorbachev-Yeltsin camarilla that is now in authority will allow it to exist without using unconstitutional means, mob violence of a fascist type to overthrow it.
Romanian miners
But let us go to another very current event which gives us heart and which the previous speakers went over--the miners' strike in Romania. That is a reversal of the capitalist reforms, a singular event that shows there are forces moving to overturn what was imposed on the Romanian people.
As soon as the Gorbachev regime got together with its imperialist allies, one of the first victims was the Romanian regime. How terribly it has vilified, how little true information has come out. Let us ask ourselves the question, what started off the counterrevolution in Romania? It did not start as a mass movement.
What happened was a bloody coup d'etat carried out by the military, which overthrew the duly elected leaders of the party and the government.
It was a conspiracy between Gorbachev and the imperialists to overturn the government by force and violence, and execute the leadership. They started a reign of terror and an ideological and political campaign that confused the masses.
When the coup d'etat took place, the U.S., its Western supporters and its friends in the USSR saw that they could not get a full cabinet of the bourgeoisie to take over. They couldn't get enough from the old counterrevolutionary elements in Romania to take the helm of government. They couldn't even hold all the old generals in line to support a thoroughgoing counterrevolutionary government.
Council of National Salvation
They decided they'd have a Council of National Salvation, get those Communist leaders who were scared to death and who quickly capitulated. All throughout Eastern Europe, hundreds of thousands of Communist officials have panicked and surrendered what they presumably stood for.
But that was not enough for the imperialists. They wanted a complete overturn. They couldn't get it because they are nowhere near having a majority of the people. They had to turn to Communist renegades to participate in a government that they knew in advance would be a servant of the imperialists.
You know, over the years we agreed with hardly any of the strategic approaches of the Romanian leadership on international questions. We didn't agree with their ideology, their tactics or their course of conduct, which we've always doubted and criticized as leading in the direction of the bourgeoisie. But it was a shocking thing to see the execution of the authentic leadership of the Romanian government.
It was a situation where the class enemy takes the initiative and by the use of terror finds that the party is unprepared, is disarmed, not so much militarily as politically.
This lesson about Romania applies to all of Eastern Europe. the imperialist bourgeoisie and its stooges can't run the governments without former Communists and without the support of workers who still believe in socialism and communism.
For more than a year and a half now, the Romanian bourgeois elements, their supporters in the USSR and the imperialist governments have attempted to hurriedly introduce the capitalist system, not in slow stages over many years, but all at once.
By hurrying it, they have brought the country down to a starvation level. What else could bring out thousands of miners twice in a row? What could do that except economic catastrophe?
The imperialist bourgeoisie have installed a group of stooges who cannot stand on their own feet and are begging old-line Communist officials to come in and help them. They should not do it. They should not help them in any way.
Any former Communist in the government of National Salvation should resign, get out of it. It is a trap. It is a phony setup by the imperialists. The miners have shown this. And for the first time the city of Bucharest, which seemed to be the scene of counterrevolution, joined the miners. The capital and the provinces seem to be together on this.
The economic crisis has brought it out sooner than we expected. The workers are aware that this government is no good for them. As you see, the miners and the other workers forced them to resign. And that is a sign of acute political crisis, of a prerevolutionary crisis.
Is there a leadership capable of dealing with the situation? A lot of leaders know that this capitalist government cannot run the country. It can't stabilize the economic situation. But are there enough working class forces who understand the situation and who are courageous enough to say that we'll take a chance and run it ourselves?
There isn't as yet a revolutionary leadership that can disengage itself from the counterrevolution and form an alliance with those political elements of the Communist Party who are not besmirched by having taken office, who have not been waving the counterrevolutionary flag of the old Iron Guard, monarchist regime.
There are many communist intellectuals in Romania. They have written a lot. Intellectuals in a revolution are necessary, as Mao Zedong once explained. You can't have a revolution without them.
But what are the intellectuals doing there now? They're sitting on the fence. They have seen the workers' rebellion, they have seen that the fascist element is small, that the army is in reality divided if not neutral, and the police are scared. But are they bold enough to say to the Salvation Government, "Now you get the hell out of the offices before we drag you out," and set up a working class regime? That's what's needed.
The intellectuals are the first ones to look abroad. They're the first to see what's doing on the international arena. They're looking westward, and also east to Moscow.
They're scared to take power because they overrate the imperialist bourgeoisie. They overrate their finances. It was intellectuals who thought the capitalist market would bring relief to the country. It was they who read capitalist literature, they who knew the foreign languages best.
Now their historic opportunity has come. The workers have shown they're not backward, they're moving forward, they've come as close to taking power as they can. But they haven't got the implements of statecraft, they haven't got the education necessary for administering a workers' state. Now is the time for the revolutionary elements in the intellectual petty bourgeoisie to step in.
The opportunity is there. Are they going to let it slip by? The situation is clearly one that is pregnant with a revolutionary seizure of power. But those internationalist minded in the bourgeois, pro-imperialist sense are scared of outside intervention.
If we want to understand the miners' strike and what is happening there we must understand the relationship of classes, the working class on the one hand, the petty bourgeoisie in the middle, and then the fascist, bourgeois elements, who are a narrow grouping.
History of Romanian CP
Now, a few facts about the Romanian leadership, the old communists. Romania always had a very strong and very devoted communist movement, but it was small. On the other hand, there was always a very strong right-wing, monarchist leadership of the bourgeoisie. The monarchy itself was collapsing and needed extra- military forces to suppress the revolution.
The principal communist leaders spent almost all their lives in jail. Their first National Committee meeting was held in jail. The Iron Guard, the pro-fascist element similar to the Nazis, organized a raid on the prison and shot down many communist political prisoners. That gives you an idea who the Iron Guard is and how communists were treated under the old regime. That's the old Romanian democracy that the U.S. supported and is still for today.
They're the ones who can organize a military coup and shoot down the authentic leaders in a counterrevolutionary coup d'etat.
But the bourgeoisie can't rely on these fascist elements to run the government. Their very faces remind the older generation of the pre-war fascist terror against workers and peasants.
The group of miners who came into the heart of Bucharest with sticks, without guns, didn't just have a grievance over their pay. It wasn't just to solve an economic problem.
Their struggle takes on the political character of overturning the bourgeois regime. If that is done, the struggle for Eastern Europe starts all over again, between imperialism on the one hand this time the socialist revolutionaries, the workers themselves, on the other. And it will be heard in the Soviet Union.
Our purpose is to show the possibility of regeneration, that all is not lost, that the struggle is beginning. In all Eastern Europe the capitalist reforms are disillusioning the masses but the leadership, such as it was, has been inadequate even to return the situation to what it was before the collapse.
Rebellion in Zaire
It would be utterly impossible to have called this conference to discuss the most current events without taking into account an event on the African continent which could have global significance. There's Tadzhikistan, there's Romania, and now comes a much clearer, much more understandable example of resurgence, of rebirth--the struggle in Zaire.
The Mobutu regime is the last holdover from the original Tshombe- Kasavubu-Mobutu grouping, stooges of the Belgian-French-U.S. imperialist bourgeoisie that crushed the revolutionary struggle of Lumumba. It seems like many, many years ago, but the struggle is new and young, as young as Lumumba himself and the delegation that came with him to the UN and wasn't allowed to land over here. Now, how do you like that for democracy!
In the last day or two we've seen an anti-imperialist type of insurrection, not ideologically but in fact. We've seen a rebellion of the military rank and file that from the point of view of narrow economic interest would be taken as just a struggle in the military over not being paid. The army is supposed to brutally suppress the masses. Paying the army is usually the first thing a puppet government would do.
Zaire has the richest sort of natural resources, particularly valuable for the new industrialization in the world. The imperialists keep tight control over a small clique of compradore bourgeois elements that rule as a result of having the military on their side and having the imperialist monopolies run the roost as though it were nothing more than a plantation.
The Belgian government had been one of the most ruthless in the suppression of the Congolese people. They practiced virtual extermination up to the early 20th century, no less than what the conquistadors did in Peru. They reduced the country to semi- slavery, and yet Belgium is one of the most culturally advanced capitalist countries in the world. Their advancement is due to the sweat and blood of the Congolese people.
When the revolutionary struggle started in 1960, it seemed like a new dawn was coming for all of Africa. The new young leadership of Lumumba answered the demands of the people to free themselves from imperialist slavery. But Lumumba was cut down by imperialist intrigue. Eventually their stooges Tshombe and Kasavubu were discredited. And Mobutu was put in as the successor to the Tshombe-Kasavubu regime.
Why regime lasted so long
Why has the Mobutu regime lasted so many years in the face of such horrible imposition of imperialist slavery? Why has there been no general uprising of the type we have seen elsewhere in Asia and Latin America, or in Angola and Mozambique?
In Angola, there was the Portuguese dictatorship of Salazar. It's true it was helped to some extent by the U.S., but the Portuguese Revolution made it easier for Angola and Mozambique to free themselves. The imperialist bourgeoisie was narrowly concerned and could afford, from their viewpoint, a semi-independent government in the former colonies of Portugal. They hoped, as later events showed, to return them to imperialist domination.
But with Zaire it's different. There isn't just one imperialist state that's interested in Zaire. It's not only France, not only Belgium, it's not even only the United States. It's all the imperialist powers of Europe and the U.S. That's how strategic that country is from the point of view of the struggle for profits. And it is a significant reason for the delay in revolutionary organization or the emergence of a leadership to challenge the colonialist, imperialist power.
However, it has finally come to the point where Mobutu will be overthrown along with his supporters.
It is difficult for a leadership to grow up under these conditions. Revolutionary leaders in Zaire have to think twice before they undertake an insurrection.
And also I should say this. The socialist countries have made it their business for some years now not to provoke the Mobutu regime. They have not informed the people in the Soviet Union, China and elsewhere in the way required in the struggle against imperialism, even if that is only of a propagandist character.
So the struggle in Zaire has been isolated, but the revolutionary momentum will break through this isolation, get rid of the puppet government and create a truly independent anti-imperialist state. Long live revolutionary Zaire!
Defense of Cuba
The anti-imperialist struggle that we carry on in the United States is so important. We must give every ounce of energy to be part and parcel of the anti-imperialist and proletarian class struggle throughout the world. We cannot have a truly socialist organization unless it is thoroughly anti-imperialist, unless it has an internationalist perspective, unless it sees itself as part and parcel of the same class, bound together by the same common oppression.
It's more difficult than years ago. Today the United Nations is more thoroughly controlled by the imperialist powers than ever.
But the main difficulty is the collapse of the USSR as a workers' state. While much remains that is enormous from the point of view of the revolutionary struggle, from the point of view of its ability to recuperate, it is nevertheless an obstacle at the present time. This has shown itself in an area of the deepest concern to us, the case of Cuba.
We can't call our party together and confine ourselves to just one aspect of the revolutionary class struggle. Imperialism is a world system and it oppresses the overwhelming majority of the human race.
Our problem is always can we carry on a domestic struggle, be with the workers on a daily basis, fight against national oppression in this country first and foremost--can we do this yet give most prominence to the type of struggle which will ultimately decide the fate and destiny of the movement here for years and years to come?
What am I talking about? I'm referring to the danger that is facing Cuba. What is the U.S. preparing? What is it in effect doing at this very moment?
No less than the former president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, and the son of President George Bush have gotten together with others and formed a corporation to sell bonds. It expects resources of $15 billion or more. And what is its objective? To put on the market some new invention? To advance medical research, astronomy or biotechnology? What is so important that it must have the name of an ex-president and by extension the name of a president?
It's a corporation to sell off everything of value in Cuba. How could such a dastardly, impudent, criminal act be countenanced against a sovereign nation that has existed independently for over 30 years.
They even had the gall to publicize it on Radio Marti, the voice of the Pentagon and the billionaires, in order to frighten and intimidate the Cuban people, to tell them that all they have built up in 30 years of life and struggle is already being sold off. Projects that are the pride of the Cuban people, advances in science and in particular medicine, agricultural projects, everything. Saying to them, it doesn't belong to the Cuban government anymore, it belongs to the investors, to those who are buying bonds now and are getting ready to come in to Cuba as soon as the U.S. invades.
That is their prospect. Now, to underline that this is their aim, and to make sure that this message is meant for real, President George Bush went out of his way in his speech to the UN to insolently vilify the Premier of Cuba, the great revolutionary hero, calling him "a little dictator whose time has come."
He wasn't referring to Mobutu in Zaire. He was referring to Fidel Castro, the most heroic figure in Cuban history, if not in all Latin America. It's preparation for an invasion, either through an attempt at some sort of coup if they can possibly engineer it, which we strongly doubt, or through infiltration, through the continuation of sabotage by the embargo, or through other means available to a military colossus only 90 miles away.
We have to take this very, very seriously. It can happen and it will put our movement to the test and put the party to the test. That's one of the reasons we called this conference hastily, because of the threatening situation. You know, you can say we will fight in El Salvador, we'll fight for the independence of Puerto Rico, we'll fight for freedom from the tutelage of the U.S. in Guatemala. But if Cuba goes down, it will set us back all the way.
The bourgeoisie is trying to get us to accept the fact, to ideologically condition us so as to create a passive attitude in the movement and in the people. They want the movement to think that Cuba has already been taken over by the U.S. and the only thing that remains is how to parcel out the property of the Cuban people. They're attempting to create a psychological atmosphere that the act is already done and only a few ceremonial things remain. We have to fight this attitude.
It was a treacherous act when the new military camarilla in the Soviet Union told the imperialist bourgeoisie that from here on it is stopping all support of Cuba and that moreover it is withdrawing a military detachment there.
This was the most devastating and ignominious act because first of all it was supposed to be a secret thing. Defending Cuba was one of the rare progressive and revolutionary things done during the Krushchev period. When the agreement was made in 1962 to remove the missiles, the USSR did leave a military detachment there, which is like putting up a signpost that the Soviet Union is with Cuba, notwithstanding the fact that the missiles have been removed. To acknowledge it so brazenly and say they will remove it is an invitation to U.S. imperialism to invade. It's why Bush can talk so pejoratively about Fidel Castro.
It is this eventuality that occasions us to give our greatest attention to the defense of Cuba. We must not let an invasion happen.