The mammoth Leonid Breznnev Show

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pieces. Workers on The Times Denign smit, Wreter " ut cro fight to hold the line against intricate working models of direct inputting, while the fuily automated petro-chemical management at the Mirror, production, cross sections of introduces the technology nuclear fast reactors, bottled without insisting on direct in- plums, colour television sets or putting, biding its time until its medical equipment.

In this era even a policy of was bedecked with copies of transitional demand. It is the On the Draft Constitution starting point of many workers' (Fundamental Law) of the fights yet it cannot be achieved Union of Soviet Socialist under capitalist competition. Republics and the Results of the A policy of work sharing on Nationwide Discussions on the loss of pay, and that a shorter profusion of pamphlets bringing fought for. greetings from Leonid Brezhnev.

Jackson monopoly on supplying private exchange systems.

In 1976 Labour minister Eric Varley, sat on a committee of bankers and manufactuers which recommended the breaking of this nationalised monopoly.

The Labour Government, at the same time as launching through the NEB its own capitalist chip industry, provided such cushions for private industry that GECFairchild managed to build a microelectronic factory in Cheshire entirely on grants, They paid only for the land!

No change takes place in a vaccuum. The manufacturers seek to drive each other out of business. Buyers of the equip-i ment hope to gain an advantage over their competitors. They are driven on by the forces of their class.

Unplanned resistance In the same way the working class is driven to resist. This resistance comes, not in a planned way, not seeing the whole picture, but in bits and next attack on jobs.

defence of all jobs is full pay where workers demand Draft. that all jobs are kept without week is worked can and must be But it is incompatible with the owners' drive to cut labour costs.

Workers who mobilise in support of these demands can be won to an understanding that talk of "using technology to improve workers' lives" is utopian waffle under capitalism.

•Workers must demand that the full plans and accounts of the company-who always disguise their job cutting plansare thrown open to committees challenge the concept of business • confidentiality and business secrets.

Any challenge to job cutting must widen workers' horizons to an international scale. The problem is not 'Japanese and American competition' but the competition between all capitalists and the exploitation of all workers.

Micro-electronics above all other industries crosses national frontiers seeking the most highly exploited sections of workers.

Workers caught in this crushing vice must see that squeezing one end of it is the leadership of the unions. A fight for jobs requires the breaking of this leadership's stranglehold.

Only a planned socialist economy on an international scale can hope to use technology to improve the lot oT ine masses.

That is why the building of a revolutionary party capable of combatting the betrayals of the TUC and the Labour Party and leading to the overthrow of capitalism is the number one question for the working class.

There can be no middle ground between the employers and the revolutionary needs of the workers.

That is why the TUC have cast their lot in with the employers There were queues at Earls Court last week to see the uniquely preserved iceage baby hairy mammoth on display at the USSR National Exhibition.

But the organisers had omitted to put on show two less ancient hairy relics of the past that have far more relevance to the reality of today's Soviet Union.

One, of course, was the late Joseph Stalin, whose name (and that of his successor Nikita Kruschev) was tactfully missing from the proceedings, though he would have been well pleased with the method of approach.

Sycophantic

And the other was Leonid Brezhnev, whose personal absence from one of the glass cases was compensated for by a veritable barrage of embarrasingly sycophantic references to him in almost every conceivable leaflet, brochure and sound commentary.

. Indeed despite the splendour of some of the exhibits, the Exhibition could best be entitled The Leonid Brezhnev Show.

Nothing escaped his shifty, averted stare and attempted hanian emilo hothar it ho the L.I. Brezhnev's racy best-seller Lada cars, moon modules and space exhibits ali boasted a Gagarin Brezhnev was also conveniently shaking hands with Russian space pioneer Yuri Gagarin, whose historic flight in 1961, took place of course in the era of Kruschev.

But in case anyone should ask about this, a lavishly illustrated short Life of Leonid Brezhnev explains how, as Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, it was none other than the ubiquitous Leonid Brezhnev who was actually responsible for the space But it was not all light reading. For those who found Brezhnev's The Great October Revolution and Mankind's Progress a little flippant for their taste, the Zenith camera equipment stall offered a free 200-page book, Marxist Dialectics Today, in which straight-faced Stalinist theoreticians reel out sentences like:

"An impetus to the Er. gence of neoconceptualistic and neonominalistic conceptions in mathematics and logic must have been given by the discovery of antinomies in Kantor's theory of sets. ..

Alongside these bureaucratic professions of Marxist orthodoxy and Communist dedication came a wealth of propaganda designed to establish the 'democratic' credentiais of the Soviet Union in the eyes of bourgeois public opinion.

Seeking acceptance

Booklets entitled What do People Discuss in the USSR?, Church and Religion in the USSR and How the National Question Was Solved in the USSR (sic) reflect the pleading of the Stalinists for political acceptance.

The Exhibition was in fact shot through with the same contradiction that characterises Soviet society and all the deformed workers states of Europe, Asia and Cuba.

It is the progressive, socialised property relations that have made possible the astonishing economic growth and technological advancement of the Soviet Union, its virtual elimination of unemployment and its striking development of medical care and the social services.

But the socialised means of production remain saddled and restricted in their further development by a reactionard socially conservative aTI0 parasitic social caste-the Stalinist bureaucracy.

Inept

It is this bureaucracy that must be blamed for the incessant and inept attempts of the Exhibition to combine the crassest of political propaganda with the promotion of a range of luxury consumer goods. Leonid Brezhnev ? Ubiquitous-Brezhnev from furs, through carpets to video cassette recorders.

Only a Stalinist bureaucracy totally estranged from and hostile to the Soviet working masses could lay an Exhibition on such a scale without giving the visitor the slightest impression of how Russian workers actually live, Leonid WHO ? what they eat, what they wear, or what their working conditions are.

Fashion shows proudly exhibit women in clothes that appear freely filched from Western sources-but which are clearly accessible only to the bureaucracy and to British and No good; it looks like, all the are by Leonid Brezhnev !' other buyers who receive them as exports.

Similarly, with the Lada cars, the luxurious furniture and the other sophisticated consumer goods on display; the visitor is given no idea as to whether the average Russian wage would put all or none of these goods in the reach of the working class-nor any idea of the availability of such goods in the shops frequented by workers.

Privileges

Of course it is the bureaucracy's determination to cling on to its own material privileges and the political power that it has held since the mid 1920s which leads to the enforced political atomisation of the working class in this degenerated workers' state.

All the boasting of 'civil' and political rights centres on individual rights-not on work. ing class organisations.

The bureaucracy fear above all the emergence of a mass movement of the working class similar to that in Hungary in 1956, when workers discovered the power of independent workers councils, cast aside their Stalinist "leaders", executed the hated secret police and attempted to seize political power in their own right.

Even Leonid Brezhnev is forced to bow peremptorily in front of the obvious hostility of the masses to the bureaucracy that emerged in the "discussion" On the draft constitution.

Parasitism

While focussing his main hostility against those workers supposedly guilty of "parasitism, habitual breaches of labour discipline, drunkenness and other anti social phenomena"

Brezhnev admits:

"Some letters report disgraceful instances of abuse by some persons in office of their position, instances of defrauding the state by means of falsifying records and cheating, of bribe taking, of indifference ... instances of persecution for criticism."

Such "disgraceful instances" are of course no surprise in a system where the management of the entire wealth of the Soviet economy is in the hands of a self perpetuating bureaucracy, whose drunkenness and parasitism is seen as an acceptable fact of life.

Brezhnev's "New Constitution", like Stalin's predecessor, rests on perpetuating this political domination through the transformation of the Soviets from their original role as organs of workers' power comprising workplace delegates, into privileged Parliamentarystyle bodies, elected by general suffrage, answerable to noone, and not subject to recall.

It is with some justification, therefore, that booklets by Brezhnev and other hacks compare the "civil rights" of workers in the USSR to those notional "rights" they enjoy in capitalist "democracies"

But of course while in Britain, the USA and other oourgeois states the first task of the working class is to national. ise the private property of the exploiting capitalist class, in the Soviet Union this overthrow has already taken place.

Leonid Brezhnev and his fellow bureaucrats are merely a parasitic growth developed by the Russian workers' state as a result of its initial backwardness, its isolation and the hardships and dislocation it suffered in the 1920s.

In developing an understanding of this parasitic social layer and the political revolution needed to cast it aside once and for all, Russian workers will need to look to the record of struggle of a crucial figure in Russian history who was also notably absent-Leon Trotsky.

show-Stalin

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SOCIALIST PRESS, Wednesdar 5 June 1979 ADUSIR AI Pag On Tuesday 29th May in the Camden General Branch of