Defend Czech dissidents - and Lenins tight for

Scan page 8

implicated in the first post-invasion trial with the opposition, when a group of Prague students were jailed for their cooperation with the Polish student In 1977 he was stripped of Czech citizenship. This edited interview coincides with the 11th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and also the current show trial against ten members of Charter 77 and of VONS (Committee to Defend Unjustly Persecuted Persons). They are charged with subversion and threatened with three to ten years in prision.

Hartel identifies the growing opposition to the Husak regime and its defence of democratic rights. He specifically dissociates the movement from the imperialist' human rights' campaign led by Carter.

It is clear from this interview that Charter 77 rejects the Leninist party, relying instead on a broad anti bureaucratic movement which does not have a perspective of of political revolution to overthrow the Trotskyists would struggle to forge a party capable of overthrowing that bureaucracy and replacing it with Soviets and genuine organs of workers control.

Socialist Press will at later date publish extended critique of Charter and VONS.

Above and below: Prague on the first anniversary of the invasion underground.

Stalinist leadership.

Why have the authorities staged the trials just now?

You see the fundamental reason is that they are being forced onto the defensive by Charter 7 tset a constantly radicalises which continues to grow despite the growing terrorism used against its members.

The Minister of the Interior himself admits that if their documents were allowed to be published they would get the support of millions, overnight.

All on trial are VONS members, and VONS has done what no dissident groups have previously done. It was established last year and it defends and takes up the cases of ordinary, unknown people who are charged for small actspinning up a pay slip, painting a slogan, etc.

an Now, VONS, by giving sup. port to ordinary people, and depending on their support in return, is robbing the regime of its main weapon-intimidation of the defenceless.

In what sense has Charter 77 "radicalised' itself, and why does doesn't it differentiate itself from Carter's anti-communist 'Human Rights' campaign?

It is to be fully expected from any establishment at any time that it will twist and attempt to utilise to its own ends any moral demands of an epoch. This is equally true of today's Carter as of today's Brezhnev.

Charter 77 has nothing whatsoever to do with Carter 77, and their simultaneous appearance on the world stage is pure historic coincidence, testifying merely to the increasing awareness about the struggle against oppression world wide.

It chose its name merely to emphasise its coincidence with the International Year of Political Prisoners.

Charter 77 did not start on January 1 1977 when it was delivered to the Czech government. It has grown organically out of internal conditions in Czechoslovakia out of the past one and a half decades.

Since then, Charter 77 is radicalising itself in a social rather than in a narrow leftist sense.

It has been inspired by the radical young working class movement of the Plastic People and company, and it continues now to treat in a systematic manner the problems of every major social and occupation group (workers, women, children, writers, musicians, etc.).

In other words, it has broken the tradition of almost ten years of elitist dissident personalities, whose main concern was always primarily with the problems of their own narrow social groupthe tradition which still to a large extent continues within the Soviet dissident movement.

The proof of this social radicalisation I see in the fact that, unlike in the past, Charter 77 is actively supported by many thousands, and passively by millions.

Out of the thousand public signatures alone, over 50% of the signatories are ordinary workers. This was never the case with any dissident manifesto before Charter 77.

The campaign always sounds reformist, trying to make the police less 'arbitrary' and more 'just', concentrating on proceedings in the courtroom, taking up individual cases...

There is nothing reformist about taking up individual cases. On the contrary, it is precisely the concern about the individual and ordinary worker, that is the very opposite of reformism.

There was a strong Communist reformist current before and after 1968. After the occupation, this Dubcekite reformism, which in many ways is the predecessor of Eurocommunism was and continues to be very active in the opposition.

It was always in a very strong position because, consisting, largely of ex-bureaucrats themselves, it continued to have the advantage over the other more radical oppositional currents.

Furthermore, they have a certain undeclared protection from the heaviest prosecution and imprisonment, which was as a matter of course meted out to the radicals and ordinary citizens.

The alternatives which this reformist current put forward were: never fundamentally different from Dubcekism itself; they were merely its updated versions.

While practically everyone, within the narrow dissident movement, including Trotsky.

ists, was in a way mesmerised by this current, the masses of ordinary working class men and women were fed up to their teeth with reformist Dubcekism almost as much as they are fed up with collaborationist Husakism.

Collaboration

They will never forget that while they defended Dubcek en masse, the moment of truth, the Dubcek leadership turned to collaboration with the Kremlin bureaucracy rather than to the mass movement opposing This helped them to realise more than anything else that the interests of the reformist leadership and the interests of the working masses can coincide very rarely, it ever. Charter 77 is the first movement which does not treat reformists with the . reverance they do not deserve, and which gives preference to treating problems of wide sectors of population to the problems of the elite only.

Legality, while it might look reformist to you, is in fact the Charter 77's strongest weapon.

The regime flouts its own constitution and laws. so flagrantly, that to draw popular attention to it and to work out alternatives amounts to humble but nevertheless revolutionary activity.

PHOTOS:

Also, the movement breaks out of its reformist boundaries by breaking out of its national boundaries. Everyone, now, realises that an isolated revolution, only in Czechoslovakia itself will have no chance for success. That is why contacts to other East European countries are intensifying.

well as the work between various currents of Charter 77 itself, is carried out in the spirit of cooperation rather than rivalry.

Therefore, our struggle takes the form of a movement, with diverse currents, rather than the form of a party.

So you are saying that the vanguard party approach does not apply under Stalinism? Are you saying it's not necessary or not possible?

It's not possible. The party type of organisation gets smashed from the beginning. Uhl, a Trotskyist, did that. He formed the Revolutionary Socialist Party in 1969.

The programme and manifestos were some of the most developed positions we have seen. But it was infiltrated from the beginning. It was the first time the charge of 'subversion' was used.

There was also the Workers Councils Party, formed in 1974. Since 1975 we've heard nothing

Scan page 9

In our continuing series on the major writings of Leon Trotsky to commemorate the centenary of his birth, Mark South looks at his polemical work directed at the Sixth Comintern • Congress published under the title The Third International After Lenin. Available in paperback from

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

Co-operation Furthermore this work, as