Worker Dissidents Need a Trotskyist Leadership

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Tony Richardson reviews 'Workers Against the Gulag", edited and introduced by Viktor Haynes and Olga Semyonova, published by Pluto Press, Haynes' introductions do not mention Stalin or Stalinism price £1.95.

Pluto Press are to be contained in this book.

That said, as with many such books, the political implications of the documents are almost destroyed by the preface by Eric Heffer MP and the introductions.

The documents are mainly from the "Free Trade Union Association of the Soviet Working People"

and are almost all the products of workerswhether as individuals or as groups of signatories.

So they are of the greatest importance in terms of helping us to assess this movement.

Moralist

This where the problem of the Preface comes in.

Heffer argues the question as a moralist, and says that we must protest against the suppression of the FTUA because as "socialists [wel should not be seen to have double standards"

He stresses that we protest about suppression of "human rights'"" in Chile.

Argentina, etc., and that therefore we must protest about Russia.

This is a completely wrong starting point. It puts the deformed workers states on a par with capitalist dictatorships.

This view of course is completely compatible with Pluto Press's mentors-the British Socialist Workers Party, who do view the USSR and the deformed workers states as "state capitalist" regimes.

But this is a concession to the right wing and causes confusion amongst those that want to do something about these workers' struggles in Russia.

Socialist revolution The problem facing the working class of Chile is the necessity for socialist revolution to overthrow capitalism.

The problem facing the working class of Russia is the necessity to overthrow the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy by a "political" revolution in which the basis of nationalised property relations has already been achieved.

Out of Heffer's moralistic approach to rights and his non-historical, non-class position on the USSR come all the problems both of the preface, the introductions and the documents.

Heffer's position is a conscious evasion of his responsibilities. He was able to sit back and watch the Wilson/Callaghan governments attack the working class with only a rare gesture of opposition.

Heffer Now he feels he can clear his conscience by sitting back in his armchair and 'protesting' about Chile, Argentina, and Russia with no intention of acting to resolve the problem.

But the introductions produced by Viktor Haynes demonstrate different political position.

Not one of the introductions mentions Stalin or Stalinism, despite the fact that they appear to go back to the roots of the problem -as tar back as The Second Congress of Trade Unions (1919).

They vaguely refer back to the last independent organisations of workers in the "1920s"

Haynes makes no attempt to understand the degeneration in the Soviet Union.

In fact the whole book fails to refer to any degeneration having taken place.

Similarly the introductions present the solution as lying simply "through the fight for basic political and trade union rights. the fight for a better standard of living". • (p.15).

The documents themselves show the confusion created ariong Russian workers by the forcible suppression not only of Trotskyism but also of people like Solzhenitzyn, followed by the build up of them by the capitalist class, and by all of those that they come into contact with from the West, presenting the question of human rights as a 'moral' issue.

So when we find that many of the documents are addressed to the UN, to US President Carter, to anticommunist US trade union boss George Meany or to the Helsinki Agreement signatories, this error must be understood, blamed on the oppositionists' "friends"

and fought against.

Confused

In reality the only references to Stalin come in a contused attack on the "cult of personality" and in the one mention of an international issue (Czechoslovakia).

The book is divided into five sections, the first of which is The Right to Within this there is a great deal of interesting material with regard to the FTUA.

It began with a worker called, Vladimir Klebanov, who began speaking out against abuses in 1958.

From then on he faced a series ofattempts at dismissal which finally succeeded in 1966. He went through every kind of imprisonment and several confinements in mental institutions.

Waiting Klebanov met together with those who were to form the FTUA in the "waiting room of the Central Committee of the CPSU"

All the others were complainants like him, and, as the book shows, had received similar treatment from the bureaucracy.

What is shown is that although it is alleged that there is no unemployment in Russia and a worker can be prosecuted for being out Stalinist jai of work for more than four months, in reality many of the signatories of the documents have been unemployed for years.

They maintain that they are only the tip of the iceberg, and that there are tens and maybe hundreds of thousands like them.

The FTUA was formed in November 1977, and all its members are unemployed.

They claim to number in the hundreds of members and candidate members.

The various documents in this section show what the so-called 'trade unions' are today in Russia.

The 'elections' are prepared beforehand and after the preparation:

"The workers evidently do not get a look-in. In the end, although workers outnumber staff by ten to one, nearly all those who attend the conference are technical-engineering (top) and political prisoners personnel-that is, those for whom the workers' interests are not important". (p.32).

This system is of course designed to back up bureaucratic privileges.

One of the interesting things about the cases in this section is that many of the workers have been victimised for complaining about corruption.

In the next section on "The Right to Strike", , some of the major struggles of the working class are described.

Particular attention is given to the revolt of workers in 1962 in Novocherkassk in which a mass strike was put down with a massacre.

It is important to note that on the protest demonstration:

"the columns of people fly red flags, a portrait of Lenin, and banners bearing peaceful slogans". (p.76).

One of the documents also shows the mentality of protest that ends up something more like a petition to a Czar rather than to the government of a workers' state.

Activists

The third section on the "Right to Protest" is not particularly strong except to show that one of the writers appeals to "activists of the Communist and Socialist Parties"

The "Right to Emigrate" section is particularly weak except for one statement on the plight of the working class.

"Our intelligentsia may not be allowed freedom of creativity, freedom of thought or speech, but it's far worse for the workersthey don't have the freedom to work, to eat, to rest, to strike or to form their own trade unions". (p.115).

to the Soviet bureaucracy, who seize on the opportunity to argue whether the FTUA is a trade union or not.

The Kremlin bureaucrats argue that the FTUA is not mass based. Their fellow bureaucrats in the British TUC accept this argument.

But this is not the question. What it is necessary to understand is the degeneration under Stalin in the Soviet Union that both took away free trade unions and, more importantly, usurped the power of the working class from within the Soviets.

Suppressed

A bureaucratic dictatorship was installed. All opposition was persecuted.

And it has remained suppressed from the 1930swith the Moscow Trialsright the way through to the present day.

The independent interests of the working class, represented at first in the USSR by the fight of Trotsky • and the Left Opposition, and then by the Fourth International, against the imposition of the Stalin dictatorship find no mention in the book.

Without this background it is impossible to grasp why it is not possible to work openly in the USSR to build a mass trade union.

Just as with the Curresponding Societies before the formation of trade unions in this country, or the Workers Commissions in Spain, clandestine organisation always begins with the sacrifice and struggle of the most resolute few.

The FTUA has only the possibility of being , the embryo of trade unions.

Indeed its members must in reality recognise this, since they have in their constitution that it is a democratic centralist organisation-a form of organisation not possible in a genuine trade union.

In reality the FTUA is a group of people fighting for the right to have trade unions. It is therefore a worker dissident group.

Defensive But this still does not solve the problem for the working class in the Soviet Union.

Trade unions are only defensive organisations. They can only'expose or act against abuses.

What is required in the USSR is a clandestine Trotskyist political organisation that includes in its programme defence of the right of workers to have trade unions for action against bureaucratic excessas, but which goes mu h further.

Such a party would fight for the reconstruction of Soviets on the basis of the political revolution to overthrow the bureaucracy.

These Soviets would then constitute the workers' form of rule.

Such a party, requiring the utmost clarity on the origins and international role of Stalinism in the 62 years since the October Revolution, would have to be part of the reconstructed Fourth International.

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NOUSTRIAL Wed

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thanked for the publica- tion of the documents