The "victory to Argentina" argument
This is how the "victory to Argentina" section of the WSL argued their case, in their major initial statement (WSL Internal Bulletin 7, June 1982).
"The class camp into which Argentina fits in a war against imperialism cannot change... We have to determine our position according to the basic class camps...
The course of action followed by the proletariat in one country should be subordinated to international considerations. Difficult or not, we have to base our position on an assessment of the international meaning of the conflict. Whatever the implications of that for the Argentinian or British proletariat, we have to base our position on the implications for the international struggle against imperialism first.
This means that even if a successful defence against Thatcher did strengthen Galtieri, we would still have to call on the Argentinian workers to undertake that defence. In the event, however, we believe that a successful defence against imperialism (or victory for Galtieri, as the majority would put it) need in no way necessarily strengthen Galtieri. On the contrary [it] would open up new opportunities...
The international balance of forces... It is the balance of forces which gives the struggle its real importance. It is against the balance of forces that we must measure it - not according to our own scale of idealist morality...
The majority comrades in effect call for an immediate general strike and a revolution... Behind their ultimatism is a deep pessimism about the capacity to respond to any progressive leadershp of the Argentinian workers. We do not call for an immediate revolution. But where the majority can see only problems, weaknesses and backwardness, we see contradictins, the real progressive element of mass mobilised spontaneous anti-imperialist sentiments".
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The Part Must Be Subordinate to the Whole
"The course of action followed by the proletariat in one country should be subordinated to international considerations. Difficult or not, we have to base our position on an assessment of the international meaning of the conflict. Whatever the implications of that for the Argentinian or British proletariat, we have to base our position on the implications for the international struggle against imperialism first."
Actually, I beleive this argument in itself is correct. It follws the position adopted by Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. Of course in the class struggle the part has to be subordinated to the whole, we do not place sectional struggles above class struggles for instance. Failing to demand the withdrawal of imperialist troops from Iraq on the opportunist basis that they might provide a breathing space for Iraqi workers - as pigs might one day fly - cannot be a justification for that position, especially when it comes at the expense of placing Iranian workers, and other workers in the region in danger, as a result of the strategic bridgehead those imperialist forces have created.
Lenin spelled it out, precisely in relation to the issue of self-determination.
"Consequently, instead of rejecting any examples of Marx’s tactics—this would mean professing Marxism while abandoning it in practice—we must analyse them concretely and draw invaluable lessons for the future. The several demands of democracy, including self-determination, are not an absolute, but only a small part of the general-democratic (now: general-socialist) world movement. In individual concrete casts, the part may contradict the whole; if so, it must be rejected."
Lenin: "The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up."
The Thornettites were not wrong on that score. They were wrong on many more, and in concluding that a victory for Galtieri was a victory for the working class against imperialism. Galtieri was not in the class Camp of the workers, for that Argentina would have to have been a workers state. It clearly wasn't. Had it been, had the Falklands been an imperialist base that could threaten that workers state the argument would have been different. In those conditions as Lenin argued it might have been necessary for the workers state to override the bouregois democratic right of self-determination for its own defence, and socialists would have had to defend its right to do so.
"If the concrete situation which confronted Marx when tsarism dominated international politics were to repeat itself, for instance, in the form of a few nations starting a socialist revolution (as a bourgeois-democratic revolution was started in Europe in 1848), and other nations serving as the chief bulwarks of bourgeois reaction—then me too would have to be in favour of a revolutionary war against the latter, in favour of “crushing” them, in favour of destroying all their outposts, no matter what small-nation movements arose in them."
(ibid)
As the Bolsheviks did with Ukraine in 1918-9.
But Argentina was not a workers state. The argument did not apply.
Arthur Bough
Arthur Bough