Strange bedfellows defend Vietnamese

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Khmer Rouge troops welcomed as liberators in Phnom Penh after defeat of Lon Nol puppet regime In 1963, the American which is barred by reactionary US legislation from international affiliations) broke from its support for the International Committee and joined hands with the Pabloites of the International Secretariat, which then formed the United' Secretariat of the -Fourth The USFI recognised the social transformations which had taken place in Cuba, and deduced artificially from this empirical evidence that Cuba had become an undeformed workers state under the 'unconscious Trotskyist' leadership ot Fidel Castro.

Against this crude piece of formal logic; the International Committee, now headed by the British Socialist Labour League, forerunner of the WRP, argued in equally formal fashion that since Castro had clearly not led proletarian socialist revolution, then Cuba could not be any kind of workers state at all.

Abstract While Gerry Healy and the WRP leadership continue to defend this abstract position, the USFI has. extended and deepened its own real political accommodation with the Stalinised leadership of the Cuban bureaucracy.

In this field, they raise hymns of praise of the supposed "revolutionary internationalism' of the Havana Stalinists, as shówn by their policies in Africa where the Cuban troops have massacred and politically destroyed the proletariat in Angola-where they are even now collaborating with the Ethiopian Derg's offensive against the Eritrean revolution.

But the rigid armour of "orthodoxy" did not prevent the IC from succumbing to the very same pressures which brought Pablo to abandon the struggle of the Trotskyist movement for. independent revolutionary parties to fight Still under the leadership of Healy, the WRP began, particularly from 1975, a systematic adáptation towards 'left' bourgeois nationalism in the Middie East-the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Gaddafi's military dictatorship in Libya and the Ba'athist regime in Iraq.

That adaptation has now extended even to the populist religious fanaticism of the Ayatoilah Khomeini.

Communists

Two Essays on Post-mar staltrian But from 1975 onwards the WRP leadership adapted politically to the Stalinist leadership of the NLF in Vietnam. Vietnam became Healy's 'Cuba' The degenerating WRP has retrospectively attempted to conceal or whitewash the crimes of Vietnamese Stalinism during the long wars against imperialism.

The Healy leadership has projected an image of the Vietnamese. bureaucracy as a progressive, even revolutionary force-certainly not an agent of Stalinist counter-revolution.

Moving in an ever-widening turn away from the central fight to build Trotskyist parties and a Trotskyist International with the method of the Transitional Programme, the IC can now-as we saw last week-be seen alongside such veteran Pabloites as Tariq Ali. in defence of the Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea: even equated with the decision of the revolutionary Bolshevik leadership of the Soviet republic to send the Red Army into Georgia in 1921.

Clearly Pol Pot's regime was a thorn in the side of the ruling Vietnamese Stalinists. But the IC made no attempt to explain how the deformed workers' state of Kampuchea genuinely threatened the gains of the Vietnamese revolution.

Unanswered

That difficult question was left unanswered by almost all the self-styled Trotskyists who defended the Hanoi Stalinists.

But the Socialist Workers Party of the USA did not hesitate in providing a comprehensive solution. They simply cut the Gordian knot.

A lengthy article in the Militant of February 23 (reprinted in the Intercontinental Press of February 26) argued that Kampuchea was not, and never had been a workers state in any shape or form!

The starting point for the SWP's argument is not a class analysis, but the surface appearance of the vicious, and totally indefensible repression organised by Pol Pot's Stalinist regime to maintain its own political power.

It was this, as Tariq Ali declared in Socialist Challenge which made the Kampuchean state a blot on the international workers' movement'-and questioned its: character as a deformed workers' state.

But in every state from Cuba to North Korea where its dictatorship has been imposed, the Stalinist bureaucracy exists on the basis of total repression of all forms of independent working class movement-as just such a 'blot' Artificial Trotskyists do not create any artificial differences in quality between rival factions within the bureaucracy though the Pol Pot regime clearly used repression to a very high degree.

In whatever guise it presents its counter-revolutionary features-whether "liberal" or openly reactionary-Stalinism must be defeated and overthrown by political revolution.

But this is not the onty way in which the SWP falsely distinguishes the workers' state of Kampuchea from other deformed workers' states.

Militant makes no attempt to deny the massive economic and social transformations which were effected in Kampuchea after the Khmer Rouge was victorious in the war against imperialism and its local allies.

But it attempts to portray them as false coin:

"The nationalisations in Kampuchea came about not through mobilisations of the working class-even limited and controlled ones-but following the Khmer Rouge's crushing of the urban workers.

From above That is to say, they followed the pattern established decades before in eastern Europe and China when the first deformed workers states were created ang nationalisations were carried through from above after the had ilised.

The SWP has to mangle the history of this earlier process to fit its distorted argument, but a Trotskyist analysis of these developments is to be found in the book Communists Against Revolution, published last year by the WSL.

Having turned their backs on the real means of understanding the events in Kampuchea, SWP "theorists' Fred Feldman and Steve Clark prolong their rigmarole to give a new 'analysis' of the Pol Pot regime.

State capitalist

Stripped of its pretensions, this stands out in all its naked ugliness as a crude version of the Castro IN PARKER state capitalist theory.

Feldman and Clark d produce one single shr serious convincing evider support their case.

Irrelevant

The whole argument is based on the supposedly vital, but actually irrelevant fact that the 'nationalisations in Kampuchea came about not through mobilisations of the working class' But Militant cannot show any way in which these massive nationalisations lunlike those cited in Egypt, Burma, Mozambique and Angola) were of any benefit to imperialism internationally, or to any remaining bourgeois elements within Kampuchea.

Indeed try as they undoubtedly have done to' find it, they have been unable to point to any bourgeois elements at all.

Feldman and. _ Clark also fail to point out that the economy of Kampuchea for all its chronic backwardness—a legacy of imperialist oppression-was no more subordinate to imperialism than that of many other bureaucratised workers" states.

They forget to mention that the major economic policies of the Pol Pot regime nearly allhave parallel (if less extreme) predecessors in these other bureaucratised workers' states.

And the one policy that does not have a parallel-the abolition of money-was scarcely conducive to capitalist accumúlation.

Privileges

The only refuge left to the SWP is to point to the obvious privileges of the Pol Pot bureaucracy, and then assert that its 'central goal' was:

"minimising consumption, while maximising the exploitation of the work force-thus maximising the accumulation of wealth in their own hands."

Which section of the Stalinist bureaucracy in Eastern Europe or even the Soviet Union does not fit this description?

At the very best, this case is not proven.

Confronted with the complex developments of political reality, the SWP turned once again to the method of analysis adopted 30 years ago by Michel Pablo.

But faced with a contradictory, situation that could only be understood through a dialectical materialist analysis, something had to give.

The SWP preferred to deny that Kampuchea had ever been a workers' state rather than admit the bankruptcy of its own political theory.

Tables turned

Thus the last five years' events in South East Asia have turned the tables on the SWP and the IC.

Where the IC to this day brands Cuba as 'capitalist, it swung in Vietnam to uncritical defence of the Hanoi Stalinist regime.

And where the SWP readily accepted Cuba as an undeformed workers' state, it now seeks to preserve its positions on Stalinism by denying • Kampuchea is a workers' state.

Such are the swings and roundabouts "of impressionist analysis.

Concluded next week