How Kampuchea be a deformed workers

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if a series of articles by HENRY lajor political and theoretical crisis in the recent wars in South East Asia.

This is the second PHILLIPS about the the USFI promoted b The tendency of both parties in the present USFI dispute over IndoChina to minimise the difference between healthy and a deformed workers state is closely related to two important questions for Marxists.

First, is whether the social overturns that have taken place since the Second World War can be explained individually in relation only to events in the country where they took place or do they (as we would argue but as again both sides in the USFI seem to deny) requires to be explained in relation to the overall international line up of forces between imperialism and Stalinism?

Stalinist role

Second, what is the role of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the formation of deformed workers state? The SWP, in minimising the difference between the formation of a healthy and a deformed workers state (and thus minimising the counter-revolutionary role of the Stalinist bureaucracy) argue that mass mobilisations have always been crucial in the process of social overturn. And in order to do so they are obliged to stoop to crude historical falsification.

Mandel, as we shall see, has little problem in demolishing the falsifications of the SWP on this point. Yet Mandel and the USFI majority also emerge from the present discussion with a' position on the Stalinist bureaucracy which in its essentials is little different Irom • that of the swi.

Progressive

We intend to show how both sides express a position which grants to the bureaucracy a conditionally proghistorical role, position which sees the bureaucracy primarily as a force which advances the forces of production and the struggle for socialism rather than holding them back. Such a position underplays . or is necessarily ambiguous about the need for political revolution and the construction of independent revolutionary Trotskyist parties in the degenerated and deformed workers states.

In addition, both Mandel and the SWP argue a similar line on the outbreak of inter-bureaucratic wars in the recent period-that they do not seriously endanger socialised forms of property already established.

The sharp differences, which are producing a new political crisis in the USFI, are of great importance.

In this article occurred in K: imperialism fro:

But beneath them in our opinion lies a basic underlying theoretical similarity, which leads in both cases to a position of adaptation to the counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy. In other words, the present discussion in the USFI is showing just how deeply rooted • are. its Pabloite politics, and just how far the USFI has strayed from the method of Leon Trotsky.

The purpose. of these articles is to develop the points we have sketched above through a detailed examination of the polemic now raging inside the USFI and to open the discussion of theoretical and political alternatives which can advance the fight to reconstruct the Fourth International. the process of impuchea after n South East As social transformation whic transfo the withdrawal of America thdraw: a is described icribed.

leaders in 1954 and subsequently.

And 1954 was only the beginning of a long series of further betrayals from the same sources.

In the early 1960s the Peking Stalinists formed a long-lasting friendship with the anti-Communist Sihanouk.

Both Peking and Hanoi were opposed to the KCP's launching of rural war against the repressive Sihanouk regime.

Later, in 1970, Moscow was one of the first governtorship of Lon Nol.

The KCP, however, especially after the massive American invasion of Kampuchea which started in May 1970, began to defend itself by building up a large peasant base and establishing control over sizeable 'liberated areas' in the countryside.

Risings

In 1972 attempted risings by the working masses in the cities of Kampuchea were put down by Lon Nol and the imperialists.

Then in 1973 came the Paris agreements in which a shameful political compromise was mapped out between the Vietnamese Stalinists and the imperialists who were by now desperate to find a way of withdrawing the troops in the face of military defeat and growing domestic political opposition.

The Paris accords looked to the formation of a coalition government in Vietnam known as the National Reconciliation and Concord Council which would be composed of the South Vietnamese puppet government, the Provisional Revolutionary Government and some bourgeois "third

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HE LET CAN A VET-MAI

ments to recognise the new, even more repressive, dicta-