Life Among the Grantists: Some comments about Argentina and CMI

Comment: What follows is a post from May 28, 2005, about the politics of the Grantist Workers International League and its international tendency, then known as CMI. Today, discussion of the activities of the Grantists in Argentina is largely moot, since, as of January, 2006, there was only one remaining Grantist in all of Argentina. But the facts related below retain their relevance, since the Grantist international leadership stillwants to send comrades into pro-capitalist ruling parties like the PJ in Argentina. Grantist, of course, refers to Ted Grant, founder of the tendency and a life-long enthusiast for the British Labour Party, an enthusiasm the Grantists still cultivate.

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The CMI, Grantist, leadership has revealed that the youth of the Argentinian section of our movement are to be sent into the PJ. This was first announced at the 2004 National Congress of the WIL in Providence and then confirmed by Sewell at the recent 2005 WIL National Congress.

So, once again, our comrades will be supporting a bourgeois political party, as in Pakistan and Mexico, with the difference that the PJ is a ruling party, whose politicians are actively enforcing IMF austerity against the workers and the poor of Argentina, so, for CMI comrades it is a question not just of entering a bourgeois party, which would be bad enough, but of giving political support to a bourgeois ruling party. Can anyone imagine Marx, or Lenin, or Trotsky, telling revolutionary youth to adhere to a bourgeois ruling party?

All this is such a mess and so gravely compromises the claim of CMI that its politics represent Marxism. The demand that we raised at the last [2005] WIL National Congress, "Break with the bourgeoisie!" retains its relevance. To agree with the CMI leadership today, one has to ignore the fundamental content of Marxism.