'United' Secretarial divided over Indochina wars

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Trotskyism three countries of Indochina confirms the SWP's boast of will advance liberation struggles "having something different to The Marxist as one states"; ary Cor goes fur "the invasion The Militant has something different to say about what's happening in IndoWith this modest claim, the US Socialist Workers: Party grotesquely understates its remarkable position on the wars in south-east Asia.

An analysis does not become 'true' simply by differing from the assessment produced by the bourgeois media. That is an entirely secondary question.

A Marxist analysis of any political development is rooted in a scientific understanding of the dynamics of world history and the class struggle.

But the SWP's lengthy arguments on the recent conflicts between Kampuchea, Vietnam, and China are not grounded in this method.

The "theoreticians" of the SWP cavort before their audience like a band of trapeze artists.

They seem constantly on the verge of falling to the ground with a sickening thud. But in swinging from one dizzy perch of idealism to the next they clutch desperately at a bar of orthodoxy that prolongs their antics and contortions.

It's magnificent, but it's Marxism.

State capitalist

The Pabloite leaders of the SWP who claim that Cuba, under the bureaucratic dictatorship of Fidel Castro, is a 'revolutionary' workers state, tell us that Kampuchea, under the bureaucratic dictatorship of Pol Pot, became a state-capitalist regime, a hybrid of dubious origin.

The merit of this quaint position, based, in essence, on a combination of petty bourgeois moral revulsion at the atrocities carried out by the Kampuchean Stalinists, is that it enables the SWP leaders to dodge the thorny problem of analysing a war between deformed workers' states.

But if the SWP has "something different to say". • then the same is true of all the various sections of the so-called 'United' Secretariat of the Fourth International.

Each one different According to extracts from their press published in Intercontinental Press/Inprecor (Feb. ruary 12) every one of them has something different to say-each presenting completely different anaiysis of this major war!

Thus Britain's Taria Ali writes in Socialist Challenge:

"While the Vietnamese were dearty involved in removing the (Pol Pot) regime, there is no doubt that the Cambodiar Unitad Front for National Salva tian does have locel support.."

But his Swedish com ades meren't so sure:

What is not coar is whether the new ragime has broad sup. port.

Fi shether or not Wages itor yes.

505 = 85: =7=00 a German imtera:ora Group describes the war between "non-capitalist the Spanish Revolutionnmunist League (LCR) ther and talks of: first time since the of Czechoslovakia in 1968 that two workers' states have confronted each other militarily in a war of occupa. tion."

comparison, the LCR goes on to defend the invasion!

Workers Party is far more guarded, however, and talks of Kampuchea as "a country where capitalism was being swept away ...

be found in the Japanese section, however, which enthusiastically hails the invasion and the establishment by Hanoi of a puppet regime in Kampuchea as "a new advance of the Indochinese Revolution"

ably its illusions in the supposedly "progressive" character of the Hanoi Stalinist regime, the Revolutionary Communist League claims that:

nal [I] unified force in the Pol Pot in East Asia'!

The RCL suggests that this "unified force" (of Stalinists) should now:

Strangely, in view of this "jointly grapple with the challenge of setting up a Socialist Federation of • The Mexican Revolutionary Indochina, which includes the perspective of winning a revolutionary victory in Thailand."

A score sheet of the various USFI sections and sympathisers quoted in Intercontinental Press No scruples whatever are to shows the following: open supporters of the invasion-Japanese, British, Danish, Spanish, and Mexican sections; those conversely calling for Vietnamese troops out of Kampuchea -German, Belgian, (implicitly)

Australian, Swiss and French Demonstrating unmistake- sections; while those taking a "'neutral" non-committal position included Sweden and Austria.

None agree "the emergence of a fraterThis sorry line-up certainly ugees in Thailand say'"

Indeed none of the USFI groupings argue the same fine as the SWP.

The confusion and disarray of Pabloite forces is once again shown to be at its greatest when major events actually demand a prompt response and a clear analysis of Stalinism.

For the SWP, however, the analysis of Kampuchea as a state capitalist , regime has distinct advantages.

It enables them, as is the habit of Pabloites, to "take sides"-unambiguously backing the Vietnamese Stalinists without dropping the veneer of "orthodox Trotskyist" criticism of the Hanoi regime.

No proof Militant was now able to claim without a shred of proof that the Vietnamese "militarily aided indigenous oppositionists in Kampuchea against a capitalist, counterrevolutionary government that threatened the Vietnamese And, retrospectively, a glowing light was shed on the recent process of: bureaucratically organised expropriation which marked the assimilation. of southern Vietnam into the deformed workers state already existing in the north, while a thick shroud was draped over the nationalisations in Kampuchea:

At each stage, the SWP was guided-subconsciously or cynically-by the factional need to remain true to its past errors.

The historical process in southeast Asia, and its continuity today have been reshaped to conform with the distortions already accepted by the SWP in its 'analysis' of the origins of the deformed workers states in Eastern Europe, Asia andabove all-Cuba.

Lurid scenario

Once the Chinese bureaucracy had entered the centre of the stage with the invasion of Vietnam, then a further line of argument had to strengthened.

The SWP accordingly produced a lurid and unsubtle scenario in which US imperialism featured as the malevolent puppet-master, manipulating all the strings in order-by an undisclosed route-to destroy the gains of the Vietnamese For ail the truth behind this picture, the SWP has carried its denunciation of US foreign policy almost to the pitch of hysterical paranoia.

Beneath their frenetic anti-imperialism, there lies the yawning chasm of the SWP's abysmal failure to understand Stalinism, particularly in its post-war development.

Of course it is only imperialism which stands to gain in the long-run from conflicts between the workers' states.

Contradictions

But that is not to say that every such conflict springs from a plot orchestrated by the Pentagon.

The rivalries between the diferent national sections of the Stainist bureaucracy spring inevitably from the essential contradictory character Stalinism as a force resting on the distorted gains of the THAILAND buodur Gult S:am October Revolution and its later bureaucratic assimilations, while it negotiates for its survival with the forces of imperialism.

It is the objective pressures at work in this situation which have brought, for instance, the Romanian bureaucracy into conflict with its Kremlin sponsors as it struggled to preserve its own parasitic existence in the face of growing working class militancy.

Similar pressures have borne the mass European CPs along the road of Eurocommunism' towards increasingly open collaboration with their 'own' bourgeoisie in hostility to dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union and the deformed workers states.

Unresolved

To present such developments as being in any way progressive' is a complete betrayal of the struggles of Trotskyism against the bureaucratic degeneration and counter revolution within the first workers state.

But the positions held by the USFI on 'Eurocommunism' have their origin in the partial and unresolved conflicts over Stalinism which have marked the post war crisis of the Fourth The positions adopted on the invasions in south-east Asia are also the outcome of the same confusion.

There was no progressive content of the invasion launched by the Vietnamese' bureaucracy. The Hanoi Stalinists were not acting to defend the gains of the Vietnamese revolution against the threat of a restoration of imperialism in Kampuchea. There was no such immediate threat.

On the contrary, the Vietoday Articles include:

*Mandel's dance with Stalinism.

*The US SWP 40 on.

*The Significance of the Transitional Programme.

Available, price 45p Dartmouth P rk Hill, Lo VIETNAM CAMECIMA Scale of namese bureaucracy acted to defend its own control of those gains, by suppressing the troublesome independence of its neighbouring parasitic colleagues.

Above all, the Vietnamese Stalinists moved to pre-empt the dangerous possibility of the Kampuchean workers and peasants rising up against the barbaric repression unleashed by their bureaucratic masters.

Above all Hanoi feared that the Pol Pot regime's vicious methods might produce a revolutionary response which could inspire the workers and peasants of Vietnam to challenge their native Stalinists.

In true counter-revolutionary fashion, the parasites of Hanoi answered this threat with the military might of the Vietnamese army and a group of pliable dissidents from the Kampuchean bureaucracy to usurp the political opposition to Pol Pot.

This action has served to consolidate their political dictatorship within Vietnam.

At the same time, whatever temporary relief it may seem to have brought from the sufferings inflicted by Pol Pot, the invasion placed a new obstacle before the workers and peasants of Kampuchea in their task of political revolution.

For that task a Trotskyist leadership with a clear analysis of the nature and role of post war Stalinism is essential. Such a leadership can only be built in the struggle to reconstruct the Fourth International on the basis of the method and principles of the Transitional Concluded TROTSKYISM DURAA, 00 !4€ InfORI TIÇAI TODAY «E AGUE AORKERS SOCIAL ISY ит, 1479 postage from WSL, 31, 1HR.

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Wednesday 11 1979 April,