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Self-description: This is an organization of mostly former Trotskyists who belong to a back-to-Lenin movement. They have broken with their Trotskyist colleagues on a number of points. These activists are also organizing the so-called "Anti-Imperialist Camp," which is an organization, not a reference to the general masses.
In "On the Break with Trotskyism," their issue Soviet #6 of 2000, we can have no disagreements with: "Our declaration on the failure of Trotskyism to fulfil its historic mission was based on two facts: first, Trotskyist strategy was built on the myth of the decisive rôle of the working class in the West; second, the compulsion to fight Stalinism lead to Stalinophobic decay and to an infection with a terminal dose of counter-revolutionary Social-Democratism."
Voce Operaia, October 1996, their Italian section says: "This is actually a genetic defect that historical trotskysm has been suffering from, a defect that explains why these “trotskysts” have not been able to found in more than 50 years and in any part of the world serious revolutionary parties with mass influence. As long as the “trotskysts” won’t learn this lesson, they will remain outside history, for one can’t enter in history only with brilliant theories, but just with a combative party."
See their "For Jacobin liberation movements against the Western parasite society" which agrees with our third cardinal principle
while pushing for small country nationalism and identity movements in Europe. (It is no longer at:
http://www.leninist-current.revolte.net/cgi-bin/ilc/news/viewnews.cgi?category=all&id=1009396802 )
If there is a problem finding this document, try here
Comments: Although MIM is not thrilled with "back to Leninism," the reasons these activists took up "back to Leninism" are pretty good. They realized that they were treating Stalin with a double standard and therefore dumped both Stalin and Trotsky. They also realized where their reliance on the labor aristocracy was getting the movement.
No doubt the dump-Stalin-and-Trotsky idea will be popular amongst idealists and the politically lazy. Bob Avakian has also said Trotsky and Stalin shared more in common than they disagreed. However, materialists never throw out a mountain of data just because it is difficult to decipher. The 1924 to 1953 period of the U.S.S.R. has a mountain of data for us scientific socialists to chew on. We don't just say "to hell with them both." There must have been a most advanced way to proceed--amongst those leaders who actually existed, not just in Lenin's deceased brain. We can never allow the liquidationist position of "to hell with all the leaders." We must make choices from what actually exists--take sides.
Next these particular back-to-Leninists have to realize that Trotskyism had its chances in the late teens and early 1920s, but after that, Stalin's line actually was more suited to making proletarian revolutions. Stalin's orientation toward the East is more than enough reason to lean toward Stalin and dump the Eurocentric Trotsky. Furthermore, the ILC needs to look at more recent issues such as the rot in the socialist countries that came from within the communist party, where a bourgeoisie with access to the means of production existed.
Its roots were in Hoxhaite revisionism; however, Gorbachev and parties including one in Iran moved away from Stalin and "back to Lenin." That maneuver of the late 1980s and early 1990s well-suited Khruschev-spawn like Gorbachev and the Communist Voice Organization. It was their hope to make the international communist movement forget about the past and unite without one under the banner of "Marxism-Leninism"--a motley collection of Gorbachevites, ex-Trotskyists and ex-Hoxhaites.
A March, 1999 publication rediscovers the Progressive Labor Party line on the Cultural Revolution without naming it such. The same publication correctly condemning post-modernism also supports the nihilism of the Red Guard ultraleftists whose ideology has yet to accomplish anything in the world except to serve as a source of criticism of Marxism similar to post-modernism.
See http://www.flash.net/~comvoice/
Further Info: "MLP Statement," MT6
($6).