Probing the essence of

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Against Revolution Wohlforth and Ada Ltd., 31, Dartmouth It is significant that the publication of this volume should coincide with a sharp new turn in the relationship between Stalinism and imperialism in the African continent and with a further lurch towards Stalinist class collaboration in Europe.

Both the essays contained in 'Communists' Against Revolution start, as did Trotsky, from the necessity to analyse Stalinism as a counter-revolutionary international system operating on a world scale, and shot through with all'the contradictions of the degenerated Soviet state.

In Europe the movement of the mass Communist Parties towards "Eurocommunism" is part and parcel of their move into Popular Front formations with bourgeois parties in which they now play a key role in defusing and containing the militancy of the working class.

Smokescreen

in _ Spain, veteran Stalinist and arch Eurocommunist Santiago Carrillo combines 'left' talk of rehabilitating' Spanish centrist leaders murdered by the Stalinists in the 1930s and of Trotsky's role in the Russian Revolution as well as criticism of the repression of dissidents in Eastern Europe, with the practical act of signing the wage-cutting Moncloa Pact with the Francoist regime and abandoning even the pretence of Leninism.

In every instance the "Eurocommunists" use a smokescreen of left talk and apparently open attitude to discussion with 'Trotskyists' of the USFI to help cover the most reactionary collaboration with their own crisis-ridden bourgeoisie.

Eurocommunism is not a new phenomenon, but a latter-day version of the Popular Front betrayals of the 1930s in which, under Stalin's orders, Communist Parties used the left' pretext of the 'anti-fascist' struggle to form counterrevolutionary political blocs and alliances with "progressive sections of the bourgeoisie".

Drawn closer But whereas in the 1930s such class collaboration took place as part of the Kremlin strategy to head off concludes '-Two Essays m Westoby, p Park Hill, Lon This two-part review of 'Con revolutionary struggles' and stabilise a 'peaceful coexistence' between Stalinism and imperialism in Europe, in the 1970s the bureaucratic leaders of the mass CPs of Western Europe are being drawn ever closer to direct collaboration with their own' bourgeoisie, irrespective of the wishes of Moscow.

Unease

To a certain extent, the Kremlin bureaucrats can remain content that these parties are so tenaciously carrying out their struggle to prevent any revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.

Certainly that was the exclusive task allotted by Brezhnev to the pro-Moscow Portuguese CP during the struggles of 1974-6.

But at the same time there must be unease in the Kremlin at the extent to which these CPs in their urge to collaborate fully with their 'own' bourgeoisie have publicly committed themselves to side with imperialism in the event of a confrontation with the Soviet Union.

The present move towards a revival of Cold War propaganda by the imperialists will further reveal the extent to which this separation has developed.

But, as ever, rejecting any idea of defending the USSR through the revolutionary mobilisation of the working class internationally, and unable to find a way around the entrenched Stalinist parties of France, Spain and Italy, the Stalinists have attempted to compensate for this loss of influence on the European CPs by securing strategic bridgeheads in Africa.

Alliances Again bureaucratic-military rather than revolutionary means have been adopted, and the Stalinists have sought out alliances with bourgeois nationalist leaders in areas where imperialist rule had virtually collapsed (Angola, Mozambique) and with the reac tionary military dictatorship in Ethiopia, sooner than champion proletarian and anti-imperialist struggles in Africa.

Elsewhere Stalinism's left' face in Africa is shown in such a way as to avoid offending the imperialists, and to hold back or head off revolutionary struggles for national liberation, as in the case of the Zimbabwean two-part review of on Post-war Stalinism, iblished last Thursday by on NW5 1HR, price £1.75 amunists by Tim Folrose plus 20p Patriotic Front.

Any analysis of these changes on a country-bycountry or event-by event basis must be futile and disorientating for revolutionaries.

Stalinism in the post-war system is and acts as a world system of bureaucratic counter-revolution which seeks in its own way to defend both its privileges and power, based as they are on nationalised property relations and its "peaceful coexistence" with imperialism.

The political, military and economic processes through which the policy of 'defensive expansion' brought capitalist property relations to be overturned under Stalinist leadership in the East European buffer states and in North Korea, North Vietnam and China are the main subject matter of Tim Wolforth's Theory of Structural Assimilation.

He shows that these overturns took place only as part of an overall strategy of peaceful coexistence with imperialism which involved Stalinist complicity in upholding-even restoringcapitalism in the remainder of Europe and Asia.

And Wohlforth explains that because these overturns were neither fully planned process varied enormously within the buffer countries themselves and, in the case of Austria and Finland was actually reversed despite the control exercised after the war by the Red Army.

But his account is not without its weaknesses and its errors, which must be understood if the approach of his Theory is to be applied with any success to an analysis of events today.

Take for instance the question of Cuba.

The decision of the Kremlin bureaucrats to use Cuban troops as their chosen intervention force in Africa highlights the way in which the Castro leadership has been absorbed into the Stalinist system in the period following the 1959 revolution by petty bourgeois forces.

Explored

But this points the finger clearly at the major weakness of Wohlforth's Theory: it does not come to grips with the Cuban revolution, which was in the first instance the reason why the essay was begun!

Wohlforth actually declared in his introduction that:

"It is now far easier to see than it was in 1961 that the limits of the expansion of Stalinism were essentially reached with the victory of the Chinese Revolution, onolith is now visibly cracked that this expansion was essentially defensive in nature, not going beyond buffer areas on the USSR's Eastern and Western frontiers...

In Adam Westoby's critical commentary On Wohlforth's Theory of Structural Assimilation, this error and its background are examined and the events of the Cuban Revolution are explored in the context of the strategic requirements of the Stalinist bureaucracy in its defensive moves against the superior weaponry developed by US imperialism.

"During 1962 Kruschev sought, in the most direct way possible, to use Cuba as a military point of pressure _like the buffer zone"for defence and deterrence against the main imperialist States: the most obvious difference [with Eastern Europe]-important, but not absolutely so-is that Cuba is not adjacent to the Soviet Union". (p.134).

Tracing the growth of economic, political and military dependence of the petty bourgeois Castroite leadership on the Kremlin, whose military power shielded the Castroites from a Santo Domingo-style US invasion, and whose economic aid sustained Castro in the face of a US economic blockade, Westoby shows that:

"Taken as a whole the Cuban revolution confirms, precisely in its 'exceptional' features, the general thesis of 'structural assimilation'". (ibid).

Another problem with Wohlforth's essay was highlighted last week when at the same time as Castro proclaimed that Cuba had plaved no role in assisting Katangan rebels in their recent invasion of Zaire, another Stalinist bureaucracy -the Peking regimewas actually proving its support for Mobutu's imperialist puppet regime.

Sharpened

The splits in world Stalinism brought about by the logic of 'socialism in one country' have sharpened even since Westoby's commentary was completed in late. 19.76.

Westoby investigates the reasons why Wolforth in 1964 underestimated the "real, if limited, political independence of both the Chinese and Yugoslav CPs" -and stresses the fact that each bureaucracy though originally dependent upon the Kremlin, tends to develop its own national roots:

each national bureaucracy which, in its own right, takes or begins to take state power does so not as part of the international revolutionary movement of the working class, but in the attempt to secure, protect and extend its own national interests" . (p.140).

Contradictions

It is particularly along this line of enquiry-the contradictions and splits emerging within world Stalinism today-that further work needs urgently to. be undertaken by Trotskyists in order accurately to assess the changes that are taking place and producing apparent inconsiștencies in the actions of various wings of the bureaucracy.

Westoby's essay shows which important aspects of Wohlforth's Theory stand in need of correction, extension and amplification in the light of more recent events and an objective analysis of the International Committee with which Wohlforth was then politically aligned.

Mandel-shot to ribbons But it also draws out the inner strengths of the Theory, which provides us with a key to understanding the complex process• of development of post-war And in doing so Westoby demonstrates clearly why this 1964 essay, which contains sufficient to shoot to ribbons the impressionist schemas of the USFI and the wooden and self-contradictory "orthodoxy" of the Healyite International Committee, has been suppressed by both sides for 14 years.

In publishing these two essays and fighting to stimulate the widest discussion on . the problems they analyse and illuminate, the Workers Socialist League is continuing to pursue its stated aim of fighting. for an objective assessment of the historical problems and the present disorientation of the international tendencies calling themselves "Trotskyist' , and for a serious turn to resolving the theoretical and practical problems that have for 30 years dogged the Fourth International.

Now Trotskyists can freely obtain the text suppressed by Trotskyist' leaders for 14 years, and hopefully decide to join with us in undertaking the overdue task of developing a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of post-war

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Scene from Harlan County USA, miners go to work by conveyor belt The 13 month strike of coal miners at the Brookside pit in Harlan County, Kentucky, Juring 1973 and 1974 was marked by a series of phenomena which will be familiar to anyone who has participated in any similar battle.

First there was the memory of battles fought and won by the generations that had gone before.

Harlan County was the scene of many violent confrontations and at least five deaths during the 1930s, and some of these are recor ded in films and still photographs.

Then there is the sense of deteriorating conditions and accumulated grievance which, as always in mining, was particularly harsh and violent.

Determination

There are the disasters and deaths, and in the end the realisation that matters can only improve by the recognition of a union that had won better conditions on a national level than prevailed at Brookside.

As the Harlan County strike developed, and the employers grew more intractible, the workers shared the same determination that they always will when faced conscious disciplined force in such a struggle not simply raising the questions of leadership but also seeking to answer them, is something that the film cannot show, and of which. we assume Ms Kopple does not even dream.

The polities of class betrayal is nowhere mentioned except as corruption, or wickedness., 'left' President Arnold Miller The polities of the alternative, with dedicated disci. plined understanding of the rhythm of the class struggle, and a determination to raise that struggle to a political level in conflict with workers" illusions, nowhere to be seen.

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nor executed by revolution- ary means, the pace of the