4. New echoes of Pablo

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main physical weapon of imperialism, was shown to be unable to destroy the resistance of the working masses of Indochina.

This-as we have seen in Africa, Latin America and elsewhere since then-has led to a sharp setback to the political power of imperialism and in particular its giant, the USA.

This, combined with the prolonged crisis of the world capitalist economy, is opening up new opportunitles for revolutionary advances towards socialism.

Decades of struggle

Many decades of struggle took place in Indochina between the exploited masses and French, Japanese, British and American imperialism in their turn.

Since the 1930s . the leadership of the masses in Indochina has in large part, though, not exclusively, been in the hands of Stalinist parties.

This leadership has not been uncontested. At certain times sections of the nationalist petty bourgeoisie and the Buddhist religious leadership have played a role at the head of mass organisations.

And at certain crucial moments in the 1930s and the 1940s groups of revolutionary socialists, fighting Stalinism as part of the Left Opposition and then of the Fourth International founded by Leon Trotsky, struggled to expose and end the counter-revolutionary role of the Stalinist leaders in Indochina and of the more powerful bureaucracy in Moscow on whom they depended.

Held in check

The Indochinese Stalinists, however, succeeded in maintaining their own leadership through a combination of manoeuvre and at times naked oppressive force.

Independent movements of the masses have been held in check. The small group of Trotskyists was murdered by the Stalinist-led Vietminh at the end of World War Two after struggling to prevent the reoccupation of Saigon by the French imperialists. * The Vietnamese Trotskyists who perished in the fight to build an independent proletarian movement in Vietnam displayed such persistence and courage because they had understood what the Stalinist Chinese tanks in Vietnam leadership represented relation to the struggle the masses in Vietnam.

They had understood, Trotsky's words:

"The workers' line of march at all times cut a certain angle to the line of the leadership. And at the most critical moments this angle became 180 degrees."

Despite these cruel blows inflicted against revolutionary socialists by the Stalinist leaders imperialism in Vietnam has suffered a defeat. Capitalist property has been overthrown.

In the struggles which led up to these events, millions of Indochinese workers and peasants were mobilised against imperialism.

Prestige

And the leadership of the mass movement remained in the hands of the old Stalinist leadership which. despite the blood on its hands, emerged from the struggle with much international prestige.

There is a form of "logic" which has since the 1940s been an endemic infection in the ranks of those who have claimed to be Trotskyist.

This "logic" concludes that because Stalinists end up at the head of a victorious struggle against imperialism, then the Stalinists play a revolutionary role even though this may involve their "going further than they intended under the pressure of the masses."

Such has been the interpretation by some leaders in the Trotskyist movement of the role of Tito, Mao, (in a rather different way) Castro and most recently Ho Chi Minh and the leadership of the Vietnamese CP.** That position is one the basic manifestations Pabloism in the ranks Trotskyists.

So it was that in 1975 many sections of the leadership of the USFI, especially those associated with the former International

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ticle by HENRY PHILLIPS about retical crisis within the United th International arising out of the eformed workers states in South lows how the American SWP have ese CP leadership and searched for Ists support their capitulation.

It can be assumed that repressive measures are and will be used against anyone attempting to mobilise the masses independently of the When the Vietnamese army moved south in 1975 independent workers' committees in factories and neighbourhoods were forcibly disbanded and the Northern bureaucratic forms of rule extended to the whole of Vietnam.

The Vietnamese leadership has killed revolutionaries before. We should not expect it to hesitate before doing so again.

In short, no forms of independent workers demopracy are permitted in Cover up ¡ It is every day more evident that the SWP's picture of the "boat people" as "expropriated merchants, traders and the like who left Vietnam roluntarily after losing their property and privileges" ICP, June 4 1979, p.553) s now no more than a over-up for a policy of ystematic racialist terror gainst the Chinese racial ninority. (It is worth noting that he SWP's minority resoluion goes out of its way to ondemn Moscow's anti-Chinese racism-ICP, June 4 • No gulags : Despite all this, the SWP ays that the Vietnamese egime is not very represive. There are no gulags.

... those people being eld in "re-education amps." the SWP resolution ssures us, "are mostly the fficials and army officers I the old regime, many of rem guilty of war crimes. hey have not been treated : the horrendous manner ley once treated the liberain fighters who fell into eir hands." (ICP, June 4 179).

bloism" in Socialist Press, tober 15 1975.

**See T. Wohlforth and Westoby, Communists ainst Revolution, Folrose ooks, 1977, and the WSL's ›cuments "The Poisoned ell" and "Fourth Interitional-Problems and isks"

In other words, the SWP is calling on revolutionaries not to criticise this "counter-revolutionary, Stalinist bureaucracy"

because it is not really very repressive.

Where, we ask them, would any Trotskyists in Vietnam be today? Beyond question in the "re-education camps" as they were under Stalin.

Reminiscent

But, as far as we know, the Vietnamese bureaucracy long physically destroyed all the Trotskyists in Vietnam. ' The SWP say that to criticise the repressive policies of the Vietnamese state (except in a purely formal way) is to join the campaign of imperialism-an argument which is reminiscent of those who defended Stalin in the 1930s.

Alongside this whitewash of the repressive nature of the Vietnamese regime (and of course, that of its new puppet FUNSK government in Kampuchea) goes a glorification of the achievements of the bureaucracy.

"Advances"

Thus, according to CFHW, Vietnam under the leadership of the VCP has undergone "social and political advances" in which the Kampuchean masses under the puppet government of the FUNSK now participate. (See ICP, June 16.1979, p.702 and elsewhere).

In arguing that Kampuchea did not become a workers' state in the period after 1975, and implicitly that Vietnam did, CFHW say that:

"A socialist revolution means establishing institutions that open the door to human progress and advance -that is, a better life for the masses of working people." (ICP, July 16 1979, p.717).

They repeatedly insist, without citing a single source, on the material benefits obtained by Vietnamese and Kampuchean masses and on the fact that the Kampuchean masses welcomed the Vietnamese invasion.

It should be noted that this argument is implicitly applied to other Stalinist bureaucracies, notably of Chinese troops the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

So Stalin's collectivisation of agriculture or industrialisation programme have become, for CFHW, proof that the USSR, despite Stalin, remained a workers' state because the needs of the masses were partially met and rapid industrialisation took place.

This is totally at odds with the method used brilliantly by Trotsky in The Revolution Betraved where distinguished between the material achievements made possible -and proved by what did take place-and the obstacles placed in the way of all these material achievements by the policies of the Worsened The policies of the bureaucracy did not improve the condition of the masses, they worsened them.

Trotsky, contrary to CrHW, argued that Russian industrialisation in the 1930s was SO great not because of the bureaucracy but in spite of the bureaucracy.

Under a revolutionary leadership the Soviet masses (and now the Vietnamese and Kampuchean masses) could have achieved much more-and, of course, socially and politically as well as economically.

The Stalinist bureaucracy in Vietnam, as everywhere else that it rules, does not unlock the creative powers of the masses; it im prisons and destroys them.

The SWP, however, in the present dispute failed altogether to involve this all-important distinction between the counterrevolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy and the potentially or actually revolutionary oppressed working masses.

So CFHW talk of the «Vietnamese revolution" and the Vietnamese bureaucracy in a way which is almost interchangeable.

They say they favour "decisive Vietnamese action to defeat Pol Pot and his counter-revolutionary gang"

but they do not distinguish between action by the bureaucracy and action by the masses. (ICP, July 16 1979; p. 707, our emphasis).

They say that "from the beginning, the Pol Pot regime took an extremely hostile stance toward the Vietnamese revolution" (ICP, July 16 979, p. 702, our emphasis).

But they do not say that there was every reason for the Kampuchean masses and the KCP to be hostile to the Vietnamese Stalinist leaders because of their betrayal of the interests of the Kampuchean revolution (see article 2. in this series, Socialist Press, August 15, 1979).

The cumulative effect of the SWP's positions on the relation between masses and bureaucracy is that either the bureaucracy in a limited way pursues the same interests as the masses, or, if it does not, this is of little significance because the bureaucracy has no power to divert the revolutionary movement of the masses.

Underlying these points is an erroneous view of what is permanent revolution.

Trotsky's strategy of permanent revolution was developed in the course of the revolutionary struggle in Russia.

Retrogressive

Based on the retrogressive stage which capitalism and imperialism had reached on a world scale, it is a strategy which stresses the need to fight for all revolutionary developments to be given a proletarian, socialist and internationalist content.

The historic tasks of the bourgeois revolution can be achieved in the age of the death agony of capitalism only by the international proletarian revolution and planned socialist economy.

When Trotsky finally in 1928 codified Permanent Revolution in a book of that name it was as counterblast to the strategy of "revolution by stages"

and socialism in one country which were the "theoretical" bases offered by Stalin as a cover for his policy of betrayal and class compromise.

In the hands of the USFI leaders, however, permanent revolution has lost its content as a central theoretical strategic weapon in the conscious building of the revolutionary party.

It has become a description of a process whose participants are unconscious actors.

This tendency has been visible since 1963 in the USFI's analysis of Cuba where Castro, the "unconscious Trotskyist" , is said not to have followed a strategy of permanent revolution but to have followed the logic of permanent revolution.

More distant But the origins of the error are more distant as is shown by CFHW's approving quotation of an excerpt from . the Fourth International's International Executive Committee resolution on China in May 1952:

"The establishment of the People's Republic of China is only the beginning of a process of permanent revolution which is unfolding before our eyes." (Quoted in ICP, with this emphasis, July 16 1979, So permanent revolution is here seen not as a strategy to be consciously implanted by a revolutionary party in the struggle to build an authentic workers state but as a process which unfolds and leads to the establishment of a deformed workers state.

And if the political situation in Indochina has evolved according to the process of permanent revolution, what need iS there of a revolutionary Trotskyist party, the political embodiment of the strategy of permanent revolution?

CFHW's answer is implicit in their analysis and stands in sharp contradiction to the SWP's formal commitment to the building of independent Trotskyist parties in Indochina.

A further way in which CFHW give revolutionary credentials to the Vietnamese Stalinist bureaucracy is by concealing its relationship with the Soviet bureaucracy in Moscow.

Vietnamese gun position It is true, of course, that in particular during the war, the Vietnamese leaders maintained relative neutrality between Moscow and Peking and received material aid from both, though predominantly from the USSR But this relative independence was not that of an independent non-Stalinist leadership but of a national Stalinist bureaucracy which at that time was in a strong position to support its own interests through taking its distance froni the two main Stalinist bureaucracies.

Even this limited and bureaucratic independence rapidly evaporated after the end of the war in 1975 as the Hanoi leadership moved more and more into the orbit with Moscow.

The material dependence of Hanoi on Moscow and their complete political involvement are now obvious, as they are also in the case of Havana.

But CFHW choose to ignore this and write about Vietnam (as the SWP writes about Cuba) as if it was completely independent of the USSR.

Ironically, the SWP in its present dispute with the majority of the USFI leadership makes much of the fact that the Chinese invasion of Vietnam took place a short time after Deng Xiao-ping's visit to Washington.

This, they say, proves that Washington approved the invasion. While their argument is a bit crude, they have a point against the USFI majority's virtual ignoring of this aspect of the crisis.

A few days before Vietnam's invasion of Kampuchea, however, the Vietnamese Premier Phan Van Dong went to Moscow-an event which CFHW and the SWP choose to ignore!

It is not, of course, the visit, but every aspect of the relationship between Vietnam and the USSR which shows plainly that the Vietnamese occupation of Kampuchea was carried out in full collaboration with Moscow and can only be understood as part of the international policy of the Stalinist bureaucracy of the Soviet Union.

This fact (like Cuban policy in Ethiopia and Angola) presents a difficulty for the SWP since they remain adamant that the Moscow bureaucracy remains counter-revolutionary in everything that it does.

Contradiction

How can events like the Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea, or Cuba's military and political support of the Ethiopian military dictatorship be revolutionary in contentwhich the SWP says they are -and yet at the same time be an aspect of an international. policy run from Moscow-which the SWP says is counter-revolutionary to the core?

It is a contradiction which the SWP deals with by a silence which amounts to a complete refusal to see the Stalinist bureaucracy as an international force.

In fact, in the SWP's view, as we will show in the next article, at an international level the whole of the Stalinist bureaucracy dissolves in the struggle between imperialism and the oppressed masses.

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Charter 77 defendants (from left to right) Dana Nemcova. Vaclav Benda Tiri Dieusthior and Tawmile Daline took trer "uur seruu, vue bituslier, ana Jarmua bellko va, Jiri Nemek, Vaclav Havel.

Ivan Hartel was a Prague student leader in the sixties and a member of the Prague student parliament in 1968. He was a founder member of Labour Focus on Eastern Europe and an initiator of the Eastern Europe A founder of the Plastic People's Defence Fund, he is also a member of the Charter 77 Defence Committee.

He left. Czechoslovakia in 1969 after being Solidarity Campaign.

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