Trotsky's fight for internationalism against Stalin

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of it. Its manitestos called for general strikes and hinted at armed struggle. It wasn't economist, and was clearly worker and small town based-in contrast to the RSF, which was student and Prague based.

But Lenin developed his conception of the vanguard party precisely in illegal repressive conditions.

Many of the seeds of Stalinism are in Leninism. A good party is necessary, but it must never be a party which attempts to monopolise power. There is a natural distaste among the population for 'parties'-after the experience of the Stalinist parties. Also the development of political analysis and of programme does go on without the party.

Is there any connection between the Charter 77 movement and the more specifically working class developments in, for example, Poland and Romania, with the food price riots and the miners' strikes?

There is no direct connec tion. The sitution varies. Since 1968 the USSR has tried to buy off the Czech population. It has poured in enormous amounts of money.

Romania has always been more dependent economically, and consequently poorer, as has Our working class is frustrated politically. Until recent price increases it was more or less satisfied economically despite the low productivity from absenteeism.

The separation between intellectuals and workers is much greater in other countries.

No support • In' the strikes in Poland which toppled Gomulka the workers got no support from the students-who claimed they had no support from workers in 1968. Since 1976 they have started to get together.

It was achieved in Hungary in 1956. That is why the invasion was so rapid.

A cosy little dissident group is no threat. But once it becomes a mass movement on a common programme . . . over 50% of the signatories of Charter 77 are workers.

Why has the wave of human rights campaigns erupted in the 1970s?

Humanism is the Czech tradition. There is a logical development. We passed from feudalism to socialism in less than one century experiencing fascism and progressive social democracy on the way.

We understand socialism as the liberation of human and individual potential.

The bourgeois class was eliminated. But Stalinism has produced a new potential class.

The main priority is the fundamental extension of democracy. And we are at a historic juncture where it begins to be possible in our country.

It might even be possible without great social change. The parasițic group is very small, without a firm social base, and without a great hold on the individual. Though the military weight of the USSR might necessitate great violence. PHOTOS: Plastie People's Defence Fund By saying "without great social change', do you mean a more humanised, democratic. version of the present social structures or a fundamental change-socialism based on soviet rule?

A fundamental change in social structure will have to be made. I see it in terms of a horizontal democracy of producers; a vast extension of self-management in the economic system. The conditions for it are there-that is why the repression is so great. What about the Helsinki monitoring groups in the USSR?

We saw Helsinki as a second Yalta. Others saw it as a great hope.

What about theoreticians such as Bahro, Havermann?

I don't regard them as revolutionaries, though | respect them.

Bahro still belongs to the older generation of bureaucrats, although he has freed himself amazingly, and without turning to social democracy, as others have.

You are a co-founder of Labour Focus on Eastern Europe. How do you view that?

It took us many years to persuade the British left that Eastern European developments were fundamental because of the need to avoid the same mistakes here. The USSR would rush in if there was a revolution in the West. They are an utteriy counter-revolutionary force today.

But why do we understand more from talking with you than from reading Labour Focus?

We wanted to avoid sectarian infighting and thought the important thing was to provide hard information and to avoid the political conflicts over state capitalism, degenerated workers' states, glorious communism, etc.

The magazine's intention is to inform; you can analyse.

I want people to develop their analysis of Eastern Europe and develop solidarity work.

We have also initated the Eastern Europe Solidarity Campaign which is aimed at the Unions, Labour Party, etc. But why do you not use the journal to fight Stalinism here? The emphasis on 'left' Labour and Communist Party sponsors consolidates the illusion that Eurocommunists are antiI personally do not share the illusions which some people have about Eurocommunism. l haven't seen many proofs that it is anything but an updated version of Stalinism, adapted to new conditions.

However, some people feel that Eurocommunism deserves respect at least for its awareness of East European dissent. Here ! give only my personal opinions and cannot answer for the whole editorial collective and board of the Focus.

But if you have any criticism or suggestions, please get yourselves involved.

Write in, organise support campaigns of your own, affiliate to the East European Solidarity Campaign-do what you think is the best.

The basic work in this volume is Trotsky's criticism of the Draft Programme submitted to the Sixth Comintern Congress in 1928. It is vital reading for all who seriously wish to understand the struggle of the Left Opposition against the rise of The Criticism itself has its own history. Stalinist suppression of discussion made its presentation to the Congress impossible-Trotsky was exiled in Alma Ata.

But by some quirk of fate the Criticism found its way into the hands of an underemployed functionary who knew no better than to translate it. A result of this administrative slip-up was that American delegate, James P. Cannon came upon a copy, was 'converted' and on returning home took up the struggle for the Left Opposition in the US Burning questions Even today the polemical power of the Criticism is striking. Though Trotsky sets out to defend the political line of the first four Comintern Congresses he does so through the application of this line to the burning questions of the period-particularly the Stalinist 'theory' of socialism in one country, the bureaucratisation of the Comintern and the problems posed by the Chinese revolution of 1925-27.

The product is not merely a reaffirmation but an important development of the theoretical arsenal of Marxism.

Perhaps the most important question posed by Trotsky is the nature of an international revolutionary programme. At the very beginning of the Criticism Trotsky points out:

... not a single communist party can establish its programme by proceeding solely or mainly from conditions and tendencies of developments in its own country. .. On August 4 1914, the death knell sounded for national programmes for all time ... An international programme is in no case the sum total of national programmes or an amalgam of features.

'The international programme must proceed directly from an analysis of the conditions and tendencies of world economy and of the world political system taken as a whole in all its connections and contradictions, that is, with the mutually antagonistic interde. pendence of its separate parts ... the national orientation of the proletariat must and can flow only from a world orien. tation and not vice versa."

It is this conception which provides the basis for an offensive against the Stalinists' subordination of the Comintern's role to the needs of the parasitic bureaucracy of the USSR. It is through his understanding of the nature of world economy and the political relationship of forces produced by imperialism that Trotsky is able to expose the reactionary implications of 'socialism in one country' for the future of the workers' movement.

Trotsky was not content with repeating scholastic abstractions-'imperialism' 'socialism' , etc. (something which came easily to Bukharin, the Draft Programme's author).

Rather he sought to invest in these terms a specific content that flowed from the actual stage of development. In particular he focuses upon the rise of US imperialism in the 1920s and the inter-imperialist antagonisms that flowed from it.

Continuous battle

Throughout the Criticism there is a continual battle to expose the political method of the Stalinist bureaucracy which relied entirely upon empty schemas and the pigeon holing of reality in place of the Marxist method of studying living processes in all their many-sided forms.

• But more than this, Trotsky was able to explain the outlook of the Stalinists as a reflection of the social position of the privileged stratum opposed to and increasingly remote from the proletariat growing up in the Soviet Union.

While the Stalinists branded functionaries who were only yesterday heroes as scapegoats PA..

Lenin •ENE for their betrayals, only the Left Opposition was capable of explaining the material roots of the criminal errors of its political opponents.

In particular, appended to the Criticism in some editions of The Third International After Lenin, it is well worth reading the article Who is heading the Comintern Today? in which Trotsky demonstrates, through examining the political history of the leading functionariesmany being ex-Mensheviks or much worse-the transformation taking place among the top personnel of Soviet society.

To the 'theory' of socialism in one country Trotsky counterposes the basic elements of his theory of permanent revolution which, originally based upon an analysis of Russian conditions, he greatly enriched in light of the experience of China 192527.

The Criticism contains the first thorough balance sheet on the Stalinists' policy: of liquidation into the bourgeois nationalist Kuomintang. Though events in the highly complex turmoii of the Chinese revolution may have appeared remote even to revolutionary workers in the West at the time the betrayal perpetrated by Stalinism was of an historic nature.

Merciless criticism

The Menshevik notion of 'democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry', the idea of the Kuomintang as a 'two class party' and the notion of forming a 'Peasants' International' are all subjected to merciless criticism, as is every kind of reliance on the good intentions of other classes outside the proletariat in a revolution.

The question is particularly pertinent today since all the basic revisions of the Stalinists have, in one form or another, been repeated in recent years in Latin America and elsewhere, including by forces which pose as 'Trotskyist', in unprincipled alliances with petty bourgeois nationalist and populist forces.

In the Criticism can still be found the principled guidelines that should guide the relation of the proletariat to the national bourgeoisie in the work of preparing revolution in the backward countries. Trotsky quotes Lenin:

«The workers must open the eyes of the people to the fraud of the bourgeois politicians, Pathfinder Press.

Trotsky teach them not to place trust in promises and to rely on their own forces, on their own organisation, on their own unity and on their own weapons alone."

Against Stalin's slavish flattery of Chiang Kai-shek, and the radical pretentions of the latter, Trotsky patiently explained the need for the utmost clarity on the motives of the 'national', 'anti-imperialist' bourgeoisie.

"It will make you any promises you want! It will even send its delegates to Moscow ... it will promise anything that will give it the opportunity (with our assistance) to dupe the workers and peasants."

Paid in blood

This in no sense meant that Trotsky and the BolshevikLeninists were always against every specific practical agreement that could be made, taking advantage of the contradictions which beset bourgeois nationalist forces:

•For example such cases as involve agreements with the student youth of the Kuomintang for the organisation of an anti-imperialist demonstration, or of obtaining the assistance from the Chinese merchants for strikers in a foreign concession The sole condition consists in not allowing either the organisations or the banners to become mixed directly or indirectly for a single day or a single hour."

The Chinese Communists had paid in blood for the policies of Stalinism-yet Trotsky was unable to stem the rising tide of Stalinism within the Comintern. Given the isolation of the Russian Revolution (as the years went by increasingly reinforced by Stalinism's own betrayal of the international revolution) the bureaucracy represented a powerful social and political agency of reaction.

In turn the workers of Germany, Spain and elsewhere would pay the gory price for the degeneration of the revolutionary instrument created by Lenin and Trotsky.

Trotsky's Criticism and the Third International After Lenin represents the high point of Marxist resistance to this process within the Communist Parties themselves. It is of invaluable assistance to those who seek to build a genuinely revolutionary International today.

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