USFI 'critics' give credentials to Vie

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Celebrating the liberation of Saigon from US imperialism The new version of Pabloism which the American SWP is putting forward in the USFI's important internal. polemic on the South East Asia wars shows up in three ways.

• First in its negative arguments (discussed in our two previous articles) as to why Kampuchea under Pol Pot was not a workers' state.

Second, in its positive arguments discussed in this article, about why Vietnam was a workers" state and why its invasion of Kampuchea was a progressive step.

Third, even more explicitly, it is shown up by the SWP leaders' arguments about the causes and consequences of wars between workers' states.

Together with the weaknesses of the counter-position of Ernest Mandel and the USFI majority, we will take these up in the next article.

VIETNAM AND THE USFI The defeat of the imperialists in Indochina in 1975 was a major step forward for the working class and other oppressed and exploited clases throughout the world.

The vast US army, the Dc of of of a position which gave (qualified) revolutionary credentials to the Vietnamese Communist Party.

This was underlined by their refusal to characterise it as counter-revolutionary and Stalinist or to call for political revolution.

In the latest dispute in the USFI, the SWP leaders (who have referred to the VCP as Stalinist and called for political revolution in Vietnam) note with justified (but in their case hypocritical) surprise that in his article on the dispute, (ICP, April 9 1979 p.348) Ernest Mandel had for the first time to their knowledge appeared to refer to the Vietnamese leadershp as representing "hardened and institutionalised" bureaucratic rule which "can only be removed by a political revolution." (See ICP, July We certainly agree that not to label the Vietnamese leadership as Stalinist and counter-revolutionary: not to call for the formation of a Trotskyist party and for political revolution in Vietname is an adaptation to Adaptation But the SWP is now showing more clearly than ever how the prescription of faultless, formal "orthodox" positions on these questions can also amount to an equally profound and dangerous adaptation to the counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy.

But the SWP's minority resolution and the latest article by Clark, Feldman, Horowitz and Waters (CFHW), are among the grossest examples to have emerged from "Trotskyists" of such an adaptation.

Called into question

The positions put in the SWP resolution and in the articles are of course the same. All four authors of the article (CFHW) are among the leaders of the SWP.

Their positions call into question the meaning which the SWP is giving to the words it uses.

What kind of a "counterrevolutionary Stalinist" caste is it which takes measures to defend the workers state which "encourage the workers and peasants of Vietnam and elsewhere in the region, and can facilitate class mobilisations that will take the social revolution further than the Stalinist misleaders intend."? (ICP, June 4 1979 What kind of political revolution will it need to dislodge a bureaucracy which has made concessions to popular pressure and at decisive points has This is the fourth a the political and the Secretariat of the Fou recent wars between East Asia. This article adapted to the Vietnan 'progressive' qualities td mobilised key sections of the Vietnamese people to drive through anti-capitalist measures." (CFHW, ICP July 16 1979, p.704).

Do CFHW envisage building a Trotskyist party independently in the mass movement, or could their "Trotskyist party" not result from the reform of such a responsive Stalinist Shamefully silent Mandel and the USFI majority resolution (ICP, June 4 1979) is shamefully silent on all these points.

It in effect maintains the positions of the former IMT's resolution on Indochina for the USFI World Congress (withdrawn when the factions wre dissolved in 1977)-that the VCP was centrist and had followed a largely revolutionary course.

But, despite its characterisation of the VCP as Swunt minuto resolution and the articles by its leaders are profoundly adaptationist.

In part this shows up as the counterpart to their treatment of Kampuchea (discussed in the two previous Socialist Press articles) where an attempt scientifically to characterise the nature of the state and the leadership in Kampuchea is substituted by moralising on the deeds of the Pol Pot leadership.

The true colours of the Vietnamese leadership, however, are whitewashed over.

Denied It does appear that the prestige of the North Vietnamese leadership has in recent years allowed them, as in Cuba, to keep their bureaucratic power without the extremes of police-state repression employed in some Stalinist states.

Nonetheless all forms of workers' • democracy are systematically denied.

*See "Some stages in the revolution in the South of Vietnam", Quatrieme Internationale, 1947: Anh Van and Jaqueline Rousse., National Movements and Class Struggle in Vietnam (in French); and "Vietnam: WRP on the road back to