SOUTHALL: huge fines

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Defend abortion rights! Fight the emble at Speakers Corner at 11.30 :

begins at 12.30 p.m. to Trafalgar S Harland and Woolf shipyard 342 defendants are being processed through sequence of political trials in Southall following the events of April 23 this year.

On that day, 5,000 police defended and assisted 58 fascists in staging a deliberately provocative meeting central Southall.

Not content with this, they also turned Southall into a police state and went on a vicious rampage against Southall's protesting communCorrie Bill!

• Demonstration called by the Sunday 28 October for a Rally ity.

Blair Peach was murdered by the notorious Special Patrol Group and hundreds injured, many seriously.

One 19 year old boy had to have his testicles removed, such were the injuries inflicted, while two others were hospitalised on the critical list.

Many of the 710 people arrested that night were held at Beaconsfield Police Station until the early hours and left to walk back.

of the 342 actually TUC charged have so far been referred to Barnet Magistrates Court (well known for the stiff sentences passed on those arrested at Grunwick picket lines and Notting Hill Carnival).

There has been a conviction rate of 89% of these cases heard so far: 21 people have been fined to a total of £2,500.

• Jail terms The highest single fine was one of £525 and two convicted youths have been sent to prison.

Many of those appearing in September face more than one charge of à serious nature, i.e. grievous bodily harm and possession of an offensive weapon.

Two of those convicted have served a part of their sentences but are on bail pending appeals against conviction.

They are being harassed by being forced to report to Southall Police Station every midday.

The Southall Defence Committee has called for a mass picket of Barnet Magistrates Court at 9.30 am on September 10.

The London labour movement must oppose these political trials by turning out in force on this occasion with their banners.

Also a public meeting will held at the AUEW Hall, 1 Wo lands Road, Southall fr om 11 am to 4 pm.

A registered-disabled man from Southall was murdered by local police just five weeks ago.

Arrested at 10.30pm on July 13, Swaran Singh Grewal was found to be dead by 1.30 that night. . Both his wife and family doctor were denied the right to see his body for 9 days after his death, after which the doctor found "definite signs of assault" although the police claimed he had choked on his own vomit.

This police murder follows those of Liddle Towers in Newcastle and more recently Jimmy Kelly in Liverpool, and Blair Peach in Southall. It must not go unchallenged.

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Pagé 5 SOCIALIST PRESS, Wednesday 22 August 1979 This is the third of a series of articles by about the major political and theoretical promoted by the recent wars in S.E. Asia.

In this article the contradictions of the Party's analysis of Kampuchea are analysed. even by a healthy workers • Rouge Ukraine PENH Setting the pace in opportunist diplómacy, Vietnamese Stalinist leaders were feted by Thai In arguing that the process after the defeat of imperialism in Kampuchea led to the establishment of a new form of capitalist state, the American Socialist Workers Party falls into numerous contradictions. % In some cases its "theoreticians" show some awareness of this by falsifying the evidence with which they support their case.

In this week's article we will look at these inconsistencies and falsifications as well as Ernest Mandel's critique of them.

But we will then go on to what is much more important-the theoretical positions which lie behind the inconsistencies and falsifications.

In these the SWP fails; in our view, to make any qualitative distinction between the creation of healthy and deformed workers states.

Apologist

And in failing to do this it acts as an apologist for the Stalinist bureaucracy.

As we shall explain, its position that the Kampuchean Stalinist bureaucracy is a part of imperialism is a vital part of a wholesale theoretical SWP revision of Trotskyism which effectively denies the counter-revolutionary nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy in general.

The SWP define Kampuchea under Pol Pot as a capitalist state.

Before looking at the arguments they use to support this we must reject one subsidiary argument: that if the Pol Pot regime in Kampuchea had been a capitalist regime this would have given any justification to the Vietnamese invasion.

In producing this argument the SWP abandons all consideration of the question of national self-determination.

Though revolutionaries have correctly established the principle that the working class must defend even deformed or degenerated workers states against imperialism, they have never manhatine abral, that tha revoution should revoluon spread to capitalist states by external armed invasionstate, let. alone by the actions of • a parasitic bureaucracy.

When Stalin invaded bourgeois Poland arguing that he was going to unify Polish-ruled Ukraine with Soviet Ukraine, Trotsky denounced this.

Trotsky declared that if the invasion achieved its objective the Ukrainian people would ind itseli "unified" not in national freedom but under bureaucratic slavery.

What was involved, he argued, was not the emancipation of an oppressed people but the extension of the rule of bureaucratic oppression and parasitism.

The SWP's support of the invasion of Kampuchea is, of course, inseparable from its view that Pol Pot was acting in alliance with Peking as a tool of imperialism.

This "fact" is one of their arguments that Kampuchea was a capitalist, and not a bureaucratically deformed workers' state.

On this point the SWP is,; to put it generously, loose in its use of evidence. bourgeois puppet regime in 1978.

The SWP never makes clear, for example, that the attempt by Pol Pot to develop friendly relations with imperialist forces was not a permanent feature of his policy.

Rather it was the result of a sudden turn in 1978, when leng Sary, the Kampuchean Foreign Minister, toured the countries of the regional pro-imperialist alliance, ASEAN, seeking alliances.

Diplomacy

This exercise in opportunist diplomacy was in fact a mirror image of almost identical moves by the Vietnamese Stalinists, While it is true that the tension on Kampuchea's border with Vietnam intensified after this point, it had been an ongoing problem Pol Pot for two years prior to this.

And as we showed in the previous article, the hostility between the Vietnamese and Kampuchean bureaucracies had very deep and | material historical roots.

It can in no way be exclusively. or even primarily laid at the door of the Kampucheans.

The date of the conflict, theretore, does not support the SWP's opinion that Vietnam, by invading Kampuchea, was simply defending itself against an imperialist-backed attack.

Nor does the attempt by the Pol Pot bureaucracy to find pro-imperialist allies go any way to defining the Kampuchean state as capitalist.

If that argument were valid, then all the degenerated and deformed workers states would be capitalistincluding the USSR and For at more or less the same time that the Kampuchean Foreign Minister made a tour of the ASEAN states, seeking friends, so did the Foreign Minister of But the SWP's final "proof" of Kampuchea's supposed collaboration with . the imperialists concerns the role of China.

World analysis

The SWP: presents an utterly false and misleading world analysis that portrays the basic political alignments today as being between imperialism and its allies-including China-on the one side, and the revolutions of Vietnam, Cuba and their backers on the other..

• This is a superficial and dangerous conception which we will go on to analyse critically in a later article.

Meanwhile we must turn to the other set of arguments by which the SWP seeks to prove that Kampuchea under Pol Pot was a capitalist state-the arguments relating to Pol Pot's internal policies.

The recent articles by four leading SWP members Clark, Feldman, Horowitz and Waters (to be referred to as CFHW), is the most complete and developed statement on the subject so far.

Reply to Mandel

For this reason we will develop the criticisms of the SWP leaders' position largely on the basis of this article.* The article itself is a reply to Ernest Mandel's critique of the same SWP writers.

Coming to the end of a summary of the nefarious policies produced by the Pol Pot regime, Mandel had concluded:

"It is one thing to say that an inhuman despot used barbaric methods Which we, of course, condemn fully and without reservation, and which are unable to further the building of a classless socialist society-in order to suppress private property. It is something else again to present this despot as a "counterrevolutionary capitalist." (ICP, April 9 1979, p.336)

We agree with Mandel's point here! He is pointing to the fact that the class nature of a regime or state *Steve Clark, Fred Feldman, Gus Horowitz, Mary-Alice Waters, 'War and Revolution in Indochina-What Policy for Revolutionists?' Intercontinental Press/Inprecor, July 16 1979.

ENRY HILLIPS

Isis in e USFI, cannot be decided, as the SWP leaders are in effect partly doing, by moralistic references to the methods which its rulers use.

The point, however, is not only one of the implicit moralising of the SWP leaders' arguments. Mandel is able correctly to draw attention to the fact that the policies pursued by the Pol Pot regime are obstacles to the pursuit of a socialist society.

But he fails to draw out the argument sufficiently.

The point is that in Kampuchea, in an extreme way, the Stalinist bureaucracy pursued policies against the masses which held back the socialist revolution in the very açt of overturning property relations.

Hold back

In doing so they were behaving in accordance with all Stalinist bureaucracies, which pursue policies which politically hold back both within their own countries and . on a world scale the socialist revolution.

In other words the Stalinist bureáucracy is a reactionary force-but one which feeds parasitically on new, non-capitalist, property forms. • Let us see how CFHW react to this. Referring to Mandel's summary of Pol Pot's policies they say:

"Contrary to Comrade Mandel none of these policies are the tasks of the proletarian revolution ... It is not a revolutionary policy to "physically eliminate" participants in the bourgeois state apparatus... It is not a step towards a workers state to eliminate "the lower middle classes • Wholesale slaughter has never accompanied a socialist revolution-not even when the revolution was dominated by Stalinist parties ... it is not a task of the proletarian revolution to force peasants... into whai Comrade Mandel delicately Thailand Refugee camps Aranyaprathet Battambang PHNO Gülf of Siam

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$ 'STATE leadership, (namely the ism. calls collective ing"

It is certainly not a'task of the socialist revolution to suppress "all forms of trade and money"

The socialist revolution does not aim to suppress all private property... Nor is it a revolutionary act to disperse the urban population and forcibly separate families...

A socialist • revolution means establishing institutions which open the door to human progress and social advance-that is a better life for the masses of working people ... The policies of the Pol Pot regime, on the contrary, constituted a brutal economic, social and political retrogression for the Kampuchean workers and peasants."

(ICP, July 16 1979, pp. 716-7, emphasis in original).

To all these arguments must be added CFHW's other principal argument as to why Kampuchea was not a workers' state-that:

"No workers state has thus far been established or consolidated without the accompaniment of these tasks through the active involvement of the toiling masses."

(ICP, July 16, Or, as Feldman and Clark put it in a previous article:

«The nationalisation of property is not by itself sufficient to establish a workers state. The intervention of the workers-the only force in modern society capable of establishing and maintaining a progressive economic structure —is needed" (ICP, February 26 1979, This collection of arguments from CFHW is so extremely and evidently inconsistent that it is hard to escape from the conclusion that the whole of their position on Indochina and the workers' states is put forward in. a spirit of cynicism.

But it is still necessary to demolish the errors of the argument step by step.

First of all, its historical Laos • Stung Treng 'sat ompong Cham обл. 4.1 miles 100 inconsistencies. These basically concern two points. _ Firstly, there are plenty of historical examples of regimes which CFHW appear to recognise as Stalinist bureaucratic regimes in power in deformed or degenerated workers states that have pursued policies which clearly parallel those of Pol Pot; and second there are plenty of examples of the formation of what CFHW accept as workers' states without the "intervention of the workers" in mass mobilisations.

Mande, argues correctly in relation to Pol Pot's policies of rural collectivisation:

"The obvious parallel which comes to mind is the severity, scope and extreme terrorism of Stalin's forced collectivisation in the Soviet Union... (ICP, April 9 1979, Soviet Union He might have added many other instances of Stalin's policies of terror against the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union-which the SWP still defines as a degenerated workers' state.

Certainly there were parallels in periods of Chinese history since the revolution of 1949 of similar policies. being pursued.

For example when the Peoples Communes were suddenly established in 1958-39, tne Chinese bureaucracy, like Pol Pot, went so far as to suppress for a time all private agricultural production, and introduced compulsory communal dining halls.

Yet the SWP still accept that China is a deformed workers' state-though they now curiously bracket it with imperialism in their Stalin world line-up of forces.

There is also a parallel for the mass slaughter carried out by the Pol Pot bureaucracy not only in Albania which on the basis of all CFHW's criteria would also presumably have to qualify as a reactionary capitalist state.

More worrying the to sensibilities of the SWP leaders would be the parallels which undoubtedly exist between Pol Pot's policies and some of the economic policies pursued by the government of Fidel Castro (which the SWP regards as a revolutiunary and not a bureaucratic As a result of the economic policies of the Cuban government in the 1960s Cuba, too, came very close to the abolition of money in the economy and the distribution of goods by administrative fiat (certainly it was not by rational economic planning).

Such close parallels between Pol Pot's policies and those of capitalist states would be hard to find. But examples of parallels with the policies of Pol Pot from other deformed workers states could be multiplied almost without limit.

And that, for us, is no surprise. Because we are dealing with qualitative related social and historical phenomena: whether these be the initial bureaucratic, Stalinist degeneration that followed the one socialist revolution which took place under a truly revolutionary USSR), or the subsequent processes of abolition of Deng Xiao-Ping capitalist property forms in a deformed way under the leadership of a parasitic, counter-revolutionary Stalinist caste, under the military protection of. the existing Soviet state.

Of course, Kampuchealike all the other examples of this phenomenon-had its distinctive peculiarities.

Those, however, as we outlined in the previous article, can be explained in relation to the motive of Kampuchea's extreme econeomic backwardness combined with the destruction of the war and with the history of (legitimate) suspicion and hostility between the Pol Pot leadership and the other Stalinist bureaucracies.

CFHW's final, and to them apparently most decisive, argument as to why Kampuchea was not a workers' state is that there was no workers' mobilisation to achieve the expropriation of the bourgeoisie in Kampuchea, whereas in all other workers' states the social overturns were carried out under conditions of mass mobilisation.

It is hard to understand how CFHW expect to get away with such obvious historical invention.

Even Mandel has no difficulty whatever of disposing of this argument:

in order to have a workers' state one needs to have the bourgeoisie expropriated by the workers, how can one then have a workers' state in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and North Korea where, by no stretch of the imagination, could these expropriations be interpreted as having been carried out by the workers themselves (a few street demonstrations by rigidly: controlled workers in support of these expropriations are obviously something less than expropriations by the workers)?" (ICP, April 9 1979, p.339, emphasis in original).

Mandel rightly goes on to argue against the SWP that:

"A case could be stated in favour of the thesis that 1917 in Russia. in Kampuchea there were actually more mass mobilisations against the capitalists and landlords than in change. most of the East European countries.

(ibid, pp.39-40).

Mandel's demolition of the internal inconsistencies and falsifications of the SWP argument is generally speaking successful.

they intended.

Less specific

This is confirmed by the fact that the only arguments that the latest article from CFHW can put up against Mandel consist of an even less specific and concrete version of what they said before and the even more explicit statement of the theoretical and political positions which lie behind their historical frauds.

The weakness and limitation of Mandel's argument, however, is that he is not able to uncover these positions and reveal the way in which the SWP's historical positions are intimately tied up with their attributing in effect a progressive, historical role to the Vietnamese Stalmist bureaucracy.

That, of course, is because | Mandel, well aware of the gigantic theoretical Pandora's box which the new USFI dispute has opened, continues to argue on the basis of appealing to the SWP leaders to reexamine their positions and see the way in which sections of the USFI have held in common since 1963 or even before.

In a later article in this series we shall expose how the inadequacies of Mandel's theoretical resistance to the SWP's new line results from the inadequacy of these *common positions' Cynical But the key point to make now in rejecting CFHW's absurd denial of the parallels between Kampuchea and other deformed workers states is not the cynical disregard for his- socialism. torical truth which they display but the more important theoretical and political position which lies behind these examples of historical fraud.

That position involves the rejection of the idea that there is a fundamental, qualitative difference between the establishment of a healthy workers state and the establishment of a bureaucratically deformed workers state.

For the SWP the foundation of the deformed workers states is qualitativethe Bolsheviks. ly the same kind of process as the tormation of the healthy workers state 1n It is always in their view the . masses who are the active. determinant of It would of course be "better" if they ala not have a bureaucratic leadership. But essentially in the SWP's view, capitalist property is expropriated because bureaucratic leaderships are pushed to go further than Even though the SWP continues formally to argue that the bureaucratic leaders must be overthrown, they believe that the actions of these leaders nonetheless can (as in the case of the Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea) be progressive:

'Regardless Hanoi's revolutionary-did its action intentions-which were not Kampuchea lead to strengthening the workers' stale in Vietnam; Did it pave the way for advances of the workers and peasants in Kampuchea and elsewhere in Southeast Asia?

Our answer. is yes." (ICP, July 16 1979, p.710)

The same conclusion emerges from the negative arguments as to why Kampuchea was not a workers' state. We are told by CFHW that because of the reactionary policies of Pol Pot, Kampuchea did not conform to "the tasks of the proletarian revolution" (see above). The only possible implication to draw is that in other cases, where workers' states were formed, the policies of the bureaucratic leaderships did conform to the tasks of the proletarian revolution!

For CFHW, all workers?

however they originated, lie along a continuous spectrum from healthy to very deformed. Bureaucratic deformation is a question simply of quantity.

All workers' states are in their view formed only by the mobilisation ot the masses, even if sometimes the bureaucracy stands as a partial obstacle to this.

For CFHW, all workers' states, however they are formed, represent an unambiguous step forward for the working class on the road to workers station however Sider. howeve bureaucratically deformed. advances the material conditions and political possibilities open to the masses.

For CFHW therefore, ultimately, the Stalinist bureaucracy must either not be an obstacle on the road actually open the door to it! to socialist society or "Stages"

What CFHW point first the Stalinist bureaucracy leads the struggle against imperialism and then opens the way for the proletariat to complete the tasks of the proletarian This is a position which is reverse of that struggled for by Trotsky and the founders of the Fourth International as the continuation of the revolutionary socialist tradition of It is a position which, by denying the counterrevolutionary role of the bureaucracy, calls into ques tion the very need for revolutionary Trotskyist parties and a revolutionary It is a new version, but in our opinion even more explicit than ever, of the Pabloite poison which has infected the forces. which often and so long claim adherence to TrotskyContinued next week

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SOCIALISȚ PRESS, Wednesday 22 August 1979 By Peter McIni

----- pull-quotes -----

New victim

orCA Trat Khmer Pu 'stronghold

MRADIAi IMBODIA

Stalin's Russia but, for instance, in Enver Hoxha's

they now violate positions which, he claims, all

towards is a new "stages" theory of revolution-where