Revolutionary Marxist Group
By Gerry Downing
http://socialistfight.com/2013/10/30/on-the-differences-in-the-revolutionary-marxist-group/
We begin with two long quotes from Trotsky on the trade unions and syndicalism. It seems to us to that this is the central problem of the RMG, manifest in its attitude to the split in the NUM and its political relationship to the opposition current within Cosatu, its attitude to the question of the aristocracy of labour, Imperialism and its failure to see the revolutionary party in the Trotskyist sense as the national section of the world party of socialist revolution. The first quote sets out the central importance of the trade union bureaucracy for the maintenance of capitalism. Of course Trotsky speaks only of Imperialist countries and the colonies. But it is clear that a powerful trade union movement has emerged in many advanced semi-colonies in the last three decades and these have now became heavily bureaucratised and the central prop of the capitalist state representing the interests of global Imperialism. Central to this in South Africa is the alliance of Cosatu, the ANC and SACP, the ‘Tripartite Alliance’. Another example is the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers Party) in Brazil with its CUT labor federation.
Opposed to these are ‘left oppositionist’ federations in both South Africa and Brazil, also bureaucratised and serving as defence of the left flank of the central bureaucracy, often in conflict with them but heavily influenced by centrist groups, some of Trotskyist origins. Their centrism, revolutionary in words in some domestic issues but almost always social-Imperialist in foreign conflicts and wars, serve all the better to defend the capitalist state in conjunction with the trade union bureaucracy ‘from the left’.
