I had an interesting altercation with some rrr-revolutionary “anti-imperialists” Workers’ Power people at a post support group meeting yesterday.

Workers Power has long denounced anyone who belongs to the Labour Party, even when they’ve been involved with struggles against the leadership (e.g. McDonnell campaign) and for the unions to assert their power inside the party. For Workers Power, it appears Labour has long been merely a bourgeois party.

This is in sharp contrast to their attitude towards Chavez’s new party in Venezuela, the PSUV. For years Workers Power like the AWL characterised Chavez as a bourgeois Bonapartist figure intent on castrating the independent workers movement. But now these rrr-revolutionaries advocate that socialists and trade unionists join the PSUV.

Apparently, this is because the class character of the party is not yet determined. This despite the obvious top-down nature of the party, right from the decision to form it, to who occupies its leading positions. No doubt it has many members, including workers. So do many bourgeois parties, but Marxists don’t advocate joining them. What is clear is that Chavez has not and is not in the process of overthrowing capitalism; nor is he building an independent working class party.

The model they say is the Comintern tactic of getting the Chinese Communists to join the nationalist Guomindang. A moment’s reflection on the conditions in China in 1921 and Venezuela today are so different as to make such logic plainly… absurd. And for such a conscientious group of “Trotskyists”, they seem to have forgotten that Trotsky himself did not advocate his Mexican comrades join the ruling party in Mexico in the 1930s, despite the actual role of unions within it.

Workers Power today are the supreme representatives of kitsch-centrism, that when you scratch a sectarian and underneath you find an opportunist.

The discussion ended when a leading WP member said I should attend their school in a few weeks, which is discussing Venezuela. Gladly I’ll debate you, I replied. You can speak from the floor I was told. What about a debate, I said, putting the two sides head to head. Why don’t you debate with the AWL over Venezuela? Off they went with their invitation, all talk.