December 2017

DSA, ISO, Left Voice...

On North Korea: “Socialists”
Who Capitulate to Imperialism

U.S. imperialism’s threats of annihilation against North Korea pose a fundamental test for the left. What is the response of ostensible socialists when the most powerful ruling class in the world menaces to rain “fire and fury” on a nation where it already killed 3 million people, in the Korean War of 1950-53? When the only country that has ever used atomic weapons in war threatens, as Donald Trump did in his speech to the United Nations this past September, to “totally destroy North Korea” with its population of 25 million?

As revolutionary Marxists intransigently opposed to both wings of imperialism’s capitalist War Party, we have stressed that Trump is building on the threats and provocations of his Democratic and Republican predecessors. Four decades after Democrat Harry Truman’s genocidal war against Korea, Colin Powell – the Republican war criminal who led the U.S. into the Iraq War with Big Lies about “weapons of mass destruction” – said the U.S. could turn North Korea into a “charcoal briquette.” A year before Trump’s U.N. speech, then-president Barack Obama said the U.S. “could, obviously, destroy North Korea with our arsenals.” Now the U.N.’s December 22 resolution to further isolate and strangle the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea raises the stakes even further.

The Internationalist Group has taken a clear and unambiguous stand, defending the DPRK, a bureaucratically deformed workers state, against U.S. imperialism, and stating:

“Against these warmongers, it is the duty of all class-conscious workers and opponents of imperialism to stand with North Korea and its right to nuclear, or any other kind of weapons to defend itself against the imperialist behemoth.…
“As the bipartisan War Party builds up for a showdown and possible first-strike attack in Korea, internationalist workers and opponents of imperialist war must stand ready to take to the streets to oppose the plans of U.S. imperialism and defend North Korea (and China, the U.S.’ main target). That starts by shooting down the dangerous Big Lies that are coming from the White House and every quarter of capitalist media.”

–”Lies, Dumb Lies and Imperialist Whoppers,” The Internationalist No. 49, September-October 2017

Internationalist Clubs at City University of New York held speak-out at Hunter College against imperialist war, April 21, in response to U.S. bombing of Syria and Trump announcement of war fleet heading to Korea. Internationalists say: defend Syria, North Korea and China against U.S. imperialist attack and war threats. (Internationalist photo)

Genocidal racist wars against Asian peoples have been central to U.S. imperialism since the “pacification” of the Philippines after the U.S. seized it (together with Puerto Rico, Guam and, de facto, Cuba) from Spain in 1898. This set a pattern the imperialists followed in the Korean and Vietnam wars, and against semi-colonial countries from Central America to Iraq. The struggle to defeat the imperialist aggression of one’s “own” capitalist ruling class should be fundamental to any genuine leftist, all the more so within the U.S. itself. Yet most of the U.S. “left” has echoed liberal apologists for U.S. imperialism and their line that what’s going on between the U.S. and North Korea boils down to a face-off between two “unhinged despots.” With most of the left cozying up to Democrat-led “resistance,” among the only protests against the imperialist war threats have been speak-outs organized by the CUNY Internationalists, and a demonstration in August where we joined Korean peace activists, as well as supporters of the Workers World Party (WWP), outside the U.N.

For Trotskyists, defense of the DPRK against U.S. war threats is not only a question of basic anti-imperialist struggle but an expression of “the Russian question” – that is, of revolutionary policy towards those parts of the world that the imperialists have sought to reconquer all the way back to the onslaught against Soviet Russia they launched after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. When years of war, scarcity and capitalist encirclement of the workers state gave rise to the conservative nationalist bureaucracy that usurped political power under Stalin in 1923-24, Leon Trotsky’s Left Opposition – predecessor of the Fourth International he founded in 1938 – insisted on the need to continue to defend the USSR against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution.

The centrality of this position was shown in the all-out political struggle waged by Trotsky in 1939-40 – summed up in his book In Defense of Marxism – against the “petty-bourgeois opposition” led by Max Shachtman, which renounced defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state and proclaimed a mythical “Third Camp” hovering between the workers state and its imperialist enemies. Unlike the present-day WWP – which to its credit at least takes a stand defending North Korea against imperialism – Trotsky emphasized that military defense did not equal political support to the Stalinist regime. To the contrary, he emphasized the need for a proletarian political revolution to reestablish the proletarian democracy of workers soviets and extend revolution internationally.

When anti-capitalist revolutions established deformed workers states on the pattern of the USSR after WWII, the Trotskyist movement militarily defended them against the onslaught of imperialism. This reached a bloody height in the Korean War. When Soviet-armed Chinese and North Korean troops threw back the U.S. imperialists south of the 38th Parallel, the imperialists’ social-democratic sidekicks denounced this as “Soviet imperialism.” The U.S. war against Korea was “a struggle to preserve civilization,” proclaimed Norman Thomas, head of the Socialist Party – cited (accurately) as a forerunner of their organization by today’s Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

Joining the anti-Soviet crusade was Shachtman, whose “Third Camp” anti-Sovietism led him to work with Thomas directly in the Korean War, writing propaganda leaflets that the imperialists quite literally dropped on the Koreans. Soon, the Shachtmanites (including future DSA founder Michael Harrington) became central leaders of Thomas’s “State Department Socialist” Party.¹” In Britain, the “Third Camp” grouping led by Tony Cliff broke with the Fourth International, coming out against the defense of North Korea, China and the USSR. While echoing the Shachtmanites’ motto “Neither Washington nor Moscow,” Cliff gave it his own spin by calling the USSR “state capitalist” (whereas Shachtman thought “bureaucratic collectivism” sounded a bit less implausible for purposes of “theoretical” cover).

Rocketed to liberal/”progressive” media fame with its embrace of the Bernie Sanders campaign and rapid growth since Trump’s election, today’s DSA tries to give its social-democratic politics a more youthful look. So where does it stand on Korea? Unsurprisingly, its organizers sneer at the very idea of defending the DPRK against imperialism. Its hero Sanders praised Trump as “doing the right thing” over Korea back in April, but the DSA knows that fear and loathing of the bully in the White House have helped put the wind in its sails – so it outsources the dirty work.

If you look for articles on Korea on the DSA website, what you find is an article titled “Should Limiting North Korea’s Nuclear Ambitions Be the Responsibility of the U.S. Government?” (29 November). The problem with “threatening North Korea with destruction,” states author Laurence Wittner of the State University of New York at Albany, is that “it has been remarkably unproductive.” From “the standpoint of heading off nuclear weapons advances by the North Korean regime, [the] belligerent approach by the U.S. government has shown no signs of success.” Instead, the United Nations should take charge of the “dispute.” After all, the U.N. “is already involved in efforts to limit North Korea’s nuclear weapons program,” it has “condemned” the DPRK “on numerous occasions,” and “imposed stiff economic sanctions.” The article sermonizes that “the strengthening of international law and law enforcement” is what “the nations of the world” wanted when they established the U.N. in 1945. Like hell it was! In reality, the U.N. was the vehicle that the U.S. used as sponsor for its bloody Korean War five years later.

Staking out a niche a bit to the left of the DSA has required a balancing act for the Cliffite International Socialist Organization. Lauding the Sanders campaign for putting “Socialism In the Air,” they judged it imprudent to openly endorse him unless he presented a “third-party alternative.” Waxing jubilant over the DSA’s growth, the ISO urges it to be more “independent.” On North Korea, it channels Cliff, calling the brittle Stalinist caste headed by Kim Jong Un the “ruling class” of a “state capitalist” society which has “ramped up the situation by greatly increasing the frequency of its missile tests and making clear progress in its pursuit of a viable nuclear option” (“Trump’s game of chicken with North Korea,”Socialist Worke r, 19 December).

To be sure, Socialist Worker details the U.S. nuclear threat and notes that for the DPRK leader, nuclear arms development is not “crazy” or irrational, but a matter of survival. Yet it claims that since “the costs would be unacceptable to both sides,” a war on the Korean peninsula is “unthinkable.” Tell it to the millions around the world who think each day might be the one Trump pushes the nuclear button! While observing that a key part of U.S. strategy is “targeting China,” it calls for the nuclear disarmament of China (as well as the U.S. and Russia) – which would mean China’s conquest by the U.S. imperialists. Needless to say, it does not call to defend North Korea against the imperialists.

A relative newcomer to the field is Left Voice, an amorphous group which is part of the international media “network” of the “Fracción Trotskista” (see box). At the time of publication, the Left Voice website has four articles that address the North Korea question. While criticizing the U.S. government and cogitating about which regime is worse, Left Voice pointedly does not take a stand for the elementary duty, most especially of leftists in the U.S. itself, to defend North Korea and its right to nuclear weapons, against U.S. imperialism. This is only logical for the FT, a tendency that got its start capitulating to “democratic” counterrevolution in the Soviet bloc and the capitalist reunification of Germany.

Its main article, “The U.S. and North Korea: A War of Nerves, For Now” (Left Voice, 7 September), might as well have been channeling vintage Shachtman on the so-called “Third Camp.” While much of it runs strikingly parallel to the ISO’s coverage, the Left Voice piece is if anything even further to the right. Like the ISO, it downplays the imperialist threat, stating, “The U.S. and its allies want to avoid a military conflict that would have huge costs....” Rather than a deformed workers state, the article calls the DPRK a “detestable dictatorial regime.” It says it’s “an exercise in intellectual laziness” to label Kim “crazy,” but hastens to add that “[t]his does not justify Kim Jong Un’s actions.” Again in classic Third Camp style, it states that the DPRK’s “newest missile launch signals a clear escalation of the threat of violent military confrontation.” It ends: “The U.S. and North Korea are now toeing the line with a war that it seems that no one really wants.” In light of Trump’s escalating threats, this bizarre statement amounts to propagating willful blindness in the face of the deadly threat posed by U.S. imperialism.

Two weeks later, Left Voice ran a long piece analyzing Trump’s speech to the U.N. (“Trump’s America First Imperialism,” 21 September). Observing that the U.S. president’s “strongest words were reserved for North Korea, with whom tensions have been escalating over the past months,” it continues: “while Kim Jong-Un has threatened the U.S. territory of Guam, tested a hydrogen bomb and sent two missiles flying over the territory of U.S. ally Japan, Trump for his part has promised to bring ‘fire and fury’ n North Korea – a threat that thus far has not materialized.” Trump “stunned onlookers with his threat not just against the North Korean dictator, but against all the North Korean people,” the article says. For now, it’s “primarily a war of words” and “it seems that neither side wants an open war for now.” Yet in light of the history of U.S. aggression, it avers: “Trump’s rhetoric should be taken seriously.” So what does that mean concretely? Upholding North Korea’s right to defend itself? Not a word on that.

In his speech to the U.N., as Trump wound up to his chilling threat to “totally destroy North Korea,” near the top of his bill of particulars was this: “We were all witness to the regime’s deadly abuse when an innocent American college student, Otto Warmbier, was returned to America only to die a few days later.” So it was particularly striking to see the Left Voice (23 June) article titled “Death of Otto Warmbier – That Could Have Been Me!” Based (like a previous piece from 2015) on a tourist trip that Fracción Trotskista spokesman Wladek Flakin made to North Korea, this ostentatiously echoes the imperialist war propaganda against the DPRK. Sure, Flakin tries to cover himself by claiming that on his visit he “opposed imperialism far more than Pyongyang’s weak Stalinist regime,” and averring that one “shouldn’t forget that Trump commands the world’s second largest arsenal,” nor that the U.S. actually used atomic bombs in 1945. But, he says, “we worry about the DPRK developing ever more sophisticated nuclear weapons.” On the contrary, Trotskyists defend North Korea’s right to develop a nuclear deterrent against the deadly imperialist threat.

Over North Korea, the anti-Trotskyist “Fraction” links arms with the latter-day Cliffites of the ISO and the left-over Shachtmanites of the DSA. And as Shachtman’s trajectory shows, the mythical “Third Camp” is just a stepping stone to outright support for imperialism. Genuine Trotskyists base their politics on classes not “camps.” Thus a quarter century ago, we fought for defense of the Soviet Union and the East European deformed workers states, whereas these assorted social democrats all sided with the imperialist-led counterrevolution in the name of (supposedly classless but actually bourgeois) “democracy.” What’s happening over North Korea today is a replay.■