How revolutionary is the Salvadorean Communist Party?

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THE Salvadoran Communist Party has a record as long and squalid as any Moscow-line CP. For fifty years it has rejected the fight for working class leadership of the fight against the dictatorship, and instead doggedly pursued a search for political alliances with sections of the capitalist class.

its central conception has been of two distinct 'stages' in the revolution, the 'first' of which is the establishment of a 'democratic bourgeois state. This concept, at best utopian, has led the CP into outright reactionary policies.

For eleven years from 1969 it followed a cravenly electoralist trategy In allance with section f Christian Democracy and th social democratic MNR.

As late as May 1979 the Salvadoran CP insisted that:

"The bourgeois democratic path to solving the political crisis has today to be an inseparable part of substantial socio-economic reforms...

Five months later the same CP leadership ignored even bourgeois democracy and took five cabinet posts in the October 1979 junta — with catastrophic results for its own credibility as a party.

Government troops stepped up their murder of workers and peasants. Angry strikers kidnapped CP ministers and held them hostage.

By January, 1980, in total disarray, the CP left the government and looked for an alternative means of lining up with 'progressive' sections of the bourgeoisie.

They joined the 'left' alliance, the CRM, whose ill-conceived programme they hailed as an 'unstoppable advance of Popular Unity' • and then joined the cross-class front, the FDR.

CP General Secretary Shafig Jorge Handal took a seat or the centralised guerrilla command, the DRU - indicating a miraculous about-face by sections of the left, which had consistently and correctly denounced the CP's politics as 'rightist' These facts are no secret:

LABOUR Movement Campaign for Palestine' - first national conference postponed because of election from May 21 to June 26.

Also, on June 18-19, a weekend school with speak ers including Avishai Erlich, Moshe Machover, Nira Yuval Davis, Uri Davis.

Contact: LMCP c/o 28 Carlton Mansions, Holmleigh Road, London N16. they are well documented, ans in the forefront of the conscious ness of militants at the time.

Yet now they are beins deliberately concealed not only by the legitimately shame faced leadership of the Salvadol Communnist Party; not only by their new-found allies of the left and the reformist bourgeois leaders in the FDR; but also by the one-time Trotskyists of the American Socialist Workers Party, who have now openly disavowed Trotskyism and look to Stalinist leaderships in Cuba and El Salvador and the petty bourgeois nationalist leaders of Nicaragua and Grenada as the basis of a new revolutionary To paint up the 'revolutionary' credentials of the Salvador CP is no easy task.

It demands on the one hand suppressing references to the CP's recent involvement in the October 1979 junta. The SWP is more than prepared to do that. A recent issue of its paper, The Militant (May 6) contains a potted history of the Salvadoran left which deliberately avoids any reference to the CP's involvement in the junta.

On the other hand, the task of building up 'revolutionary' credentials for the CP demands that its current brand of pupulist rhetoric be accepted as good coin and retailed by the SWP.

This was done by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes last December in a keynote speech to the SWP's youth organisation the YSA.

He singled out for special praise an article by Le survuuur substacles to a peacel Shafiq Jorge Handal which was produced in 1981 (and reprinted nearly a year later in Intercontinental Press, which supports the SWP's line).

In the article, Handal -General Secretary since 1973 - shows clearly that the CP leadership is predominantly affected by its fears of losing credibility and influence in the face of the emergent groupings to its left.

Hoping at all costs to regain lost support, Handal recognises the need to throw overboard some long discredited policies - most obviously the unworkable strategy of electoralism and the 'peaceful road to socialism' In the wake of the 1973 Chilean catastrophe (which was brought about by the class collaborationist policies of the Socialist and Communist parties) and in an objective situation in El Salvador where none of the trappings of bourgeois democracy have ever carried much conviction, it is not hard for even a Stalinist to take his distance from the notion of a 'peaceful road' to Handal duly does so, declaring - albeit 50 years too late -that:

"The idea of a peaceful road to revolution in Latin America is, in my opinion, tied to reformism.

He goes even further, and -in contrast to the CP's actual strategy of seeking to purge only particular fascists from the government and • carrying through a programme of reforms - Handal actually talks about:

'dismantling the state machinery of the capitalists and their imperialist masters, to erect a new State and a new Power'.

But though Handal talks (in strange terms) about Chile he makes no explicit criticism of the 'Popular Unity' strategy of the socialist and communist parties. Either he has learned nothing of substance, or his unbroken loyalty to the Kremlin forbids him to draw out any useful lessons.

Nor does he draw an honest balance sheet of the CP's past record, even though his speech poses as a form of self-criticism. road...

He defends the party's eleven year electoral block with the bourgeoisie, which he claims 'was a huge political contribution to the struggle toward the revolutionary movement'.

In the ironic sense - that the CP's electoralist line alienated many militants from the CP and helped line them up with more radical organisations to its left, this may be true - but not in the way Handal intends!

He now claims that the CP's electoral interventions:

'freed [the masses) of illusions about the electoral 'path', so that they understood that there was no other road ... than the defeat of the dictatorship ... by means of violent revolution.' Yet in October 1979 the Communist Party sent ministers into a junta which was designed precisely to crush revolutionary struggles! Handal, significantly avoids any reference to this. He claims, on the contrary, that the CP decided as early as 1977 to redirect the party towards armed struggle, though they 'delayed two years in doing so' What happened in those tw ears?. The armed struggle waged by forces to the left of the CP grew substantially in scope. The Stalinist leadership, still coyly flirting with the bourgeoisie, was getting left behind.

Handal certainly hits the right note when he points out that It is curiously symptomatic that the Communist parties have shown in the last decades a great capacity to reach understandings with our neighbours to the right, while, in contrast, we have not been able in the majority of cases to establish relations and stable progressive alliances with our neighbours on the left.' In case any of his members should fear that he is abandoning the well-worn line of the Popular front, with 'democratic' bosses, Handal hastens to reassure them:

"There is nothing disrespectful or scornful in the denomination 'neighbours on the right'; it is only a way of expressing these ideas. The Salvadoran communists swell with pride, I! honoured by the friendship of a large number of these allies, who are firm and consistent:

fighters for the democratic ideals of independence and social progress.' Handal goes on to offer explanations of the rise of revolutionary organisations to the left of the CP, blaming previous 'reformist' errors by the CP, and the emergence of a new proletariat, the radicalisation of the agricultural proletariat, and the enormous 'marginal urban society' thrown up by economic development.

In Latin America, leftist organisations based on these strata, Handal admits ... appear even where there are developed communist bernie and reppe even effer down and even physically annihilated; they are not, then, special expressions of the infancy of the workers' movement and communist parties, made obsolete by the further development of these structures, but rather these organisations are repeatedly appearing with greater frequency than the respective communist parties [!]. The communist parties in the majority of our countriés are small and have little influence, in spite of the fact that their mean age is about half a century?

There is no point in CP members believing that they can defeat those left wing rivals by ideological and political struggle insists Handal. 'That schema has failed in Latin America.

Indeed in Cuba, Nicaragua and Grenada it has been non-Stalinist radical forces that have led struggles that inflicted setbacks on imperialism (though of course the Cuban leadership has since been assimilated fully into the Stalinist apparatus).

From these points arises an almost inevitable conclusion: if you can't beat them, join them - and crush the life out of them. And so it is no surprise that Handal winds up arguing that it is the CP who *first raised and systematically defended the banner of the unity of the left.

The basis on which the CP seeks unity with the left however is the same as that on which it sought unity with the bourgeoisie: a popular frontist programme of building a 'broad alliance' to achieve - now by avowedly armed struggle methods - the reformist bourgeois • govemment . which a decade of electoralism failed so abysmally to secure.

So long as this is guaranteed, Handal can offer a few apparently magnanimous gestures, such as the possibility - sooner or later - of the formation of a single revolutionary leadership and even the integration of parts [!] of all the revolutionary organisations into a single Marxist-Leninist Party' But before the American SWP and its co-thinkers rush to sign on the dotted line for membership of this party, they should note that on this question, too, Handal remains an unregenerate Stalinist. With not so much as a whisper of inner-party democracy, he insists that one fundamental aspect of a 'Marxist Leninist' party must be 'an iron discipline ... impressed upon and maintained in the ranks.' Neither Handal, nor the party he represents, have moved in real terms to the left: but they have been forced to adapt politically to a new objective situation of intensified class struggle; in which the old CP line brought the danger of total isolation and permanent irrelevance.

Those like the SWP who promote such populist versions of Stalinism as some kind of progressive, internationalist leadership for the workers' movement are actively betraying the programme and principles of Trotskyism and - insofar as any workers heed their advice -cruelly misleading and confusing the working class.

The only way forward for the Salvadorean working class is through the construction of a proletarian revolutionary party that will resist pressures towards class collaboration and defend the political independence of the working class even while engaging in joint military and industrial action with reformist and Stalinist forces.

Published by Socialist Forum for Southern Africa Solidarity.

Available (at 90p plus 20p post) c/ó'SO, 28 Middle Lane, London N8. 90p Bob Fine

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He edited and sold in Poland the information bulletin "The Hornet" in which he called into question the basis of the institutions of the People's Republic of Poland, and in particular, its military alliances, and insulted and ridiculed the leading organs of the People's Republic of Poland; he worked to bring into existence a party of a Trotskyist type: in public declarations he called for action against the united alliance of Poland with the Soviet Union, and in particular for the withdrawal of the Soviet forces stationed in Poland; he insulted the PUWP and the leading organs -Internatic Edmund Baluka, a leader of the Szczecin shipyard workers' struggle in 1970-71, a member of Solidarnosc and a founder of the Polish Socialist Labour Party, is now on trial in Bydgoszcz. These are excerpts from his defence speech, reprinted from the bulletin 'Free Trade Unions' (20p. plus postage from 114 John Scurr House, Branch Road, London E14). "1 deny that I am guilty of crimes against the People's Republic of Poland. I am a socialist and I have never nor would in the future engage in any activity which sought to destroy socialism, either in Poland or any other country. There never has been nor will there be in my programme of political action proposals for the use of violence to overthrow socialist systems.

My aim is to destroy the bureaucracy in the state apparatus which in my opinion is antiA leader of the KPN (Confederation for an Independent Poland), Szeremientiew, said during his trial "The mechanism which exists in our country is a mechanism which dates from another epoch and in order to get rid of it blood must be shed."

Personally I see this mechanism referred to by the KPN leader as being based on Stalinism. It has already been covered with the blood of the workers of Poznan in 1956, of the Baltic ports in Edmund Baluka The charges against Baluka: of the state.

view is very different.

I see those events as the concan flow again, rests with those holding state power and not the brought out into the streets and the state of war was declared, we were faced with the following fundamental question: how can a socialist government, a socialist society carry on a dialogue using such methods!

In my opinion, it is not possible to consider the reform of the greater part of the state apparatis. Indeed, it is the basis of the bureaucratic system.

That is why the imposition of the state of war on the 13th December was certainly not just directed against the so-called "extremists" - since to get rid of small groups would not have required such radical measures.

The state of war was imposed to repress the entire Polish people who were trying to alter the way in which power was used.

The Polish Socialist Party of Labour (PSPL) is fighting so that the idea of socialism regains its credibility and its respect. This remains a very difficult fight because of what Stalinism has done in the USSR and what has been done by the Polish United Workers Party and similar parties in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Roumania, East Germany and Bulgaria.

The programmatic basis of the PSPL is the struggle for political pluralism and for the plurality of parties. Clearly the PSPL has its place within the opposition movement. though this is not to minimise the fact that it has its own role to play and its own objectives.

In an open letter in 1965, representatives from factories and workplaces. This would mean a system of workers' councils and of workers' delegates in a central council. Through this system of councils the working class could formulate a • national economic plan, relating to the setting of production targets as well as the allocation and use of products."

This corresponds to the programme of the PSPL and it is my own opinion as well.

The changes necessary cannot be accomplished by a single man or even by a single party, whatever its strength. This task can only be accomplished by the Polish people themselves since it is vital for their interests.

Socialism does not come about through issuing decrees, nor can it be imposed by decrees or violent means. Socialism is the expression of the interests and the will of working people."

"Sinn Fein of Ireland demands that you immediately grant political prisoner status to Edmund Baluka on hunger strike in prison in Szczecin. Baluka, during his visits to Ireland, supported the hunger strikers in the hi-blocks, ten of whom died at the hands of the British government. We do not want to see such a tragedy occuring in Poland and we believe that a total amnesty for all those detained, whether sentenced or awaiting trial as a result of martial law, can only help to advance the • cause of democratic socialism."

flop DESPITE brutal repression REainst Solidarnosc, Jaruzeis* new state-sponsored mices are still being effectivel! borcotted by Polish workers.

A report in the latest Toice af Solidarnosc' bulletin gives figures for membership of the ner organisations in the Gdansk region. It lists workplaces with e total labour force of 71.480 -and shows that the highest por sible estimate for the state unions' membership is 4,500. This must indicate that they have re cruited practically DO-ODe beyond careerists, foremen. Roc managers.

Typical In several workplaces - including large ones like the 2500 worker Unimor electronic works - no new 'union' has been essablished at all. Elsewhere sypical figures are between 88 and 450 at the Lenin shipyard (14,500 workers), about 320 the Paris Commune shipyard (10,000 workers), and 12 Gdansk Polytechnic 13.700 workers).

This report should give additional weight to the call for tbe British labour movement to break links with all the state 'unions' in the USSR and Eastern Europe, and instead to give support to Solidarnose and to those groups in other countries trying to create independent trade unions.

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Harry Sloan reviews the 'left turn' of the Salvador CP

AQUESTION OF SOLIDARHY Indepęndent traderUnlons .indowihulri

Polish socialist denounces Stalinism from the dock