[Airs with captured Soviet tank But what is…]

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Airs with captured Soviet tank But what is new, and what forces itself even upon the blinkered empiricists of the USFI, is the fact that this policy now runs to the lengths of lactuatly assisting genocide in And Castro has also paraded for all the world to see as Brezhnev's puppet in the "non-aligned" Havana conference.

This has thrown Cuba's "revolutionary" credentials into question among the politicaily conscious workers and the petty bourgeois radical circles that form the actual base of most USFI sections.

While the description of Castro as a "revolutionary" could perhaps have béen on the basis of superficial impressions adopted in the 1960s, it can only be defended in the 1970s on the basis of denying the most obvious of empirical evidence!

Thus the issue that 'united' the USFI in 1963 has now emerged as one of a whole series of bones of contention and sources of conflict in the late 1970s.

Of course the USFI could argue that it need not take a clear position on Vietnam, Angola and Cuba because it has no sections there (and no intention of building them in Vietnam or Cuba!).

But that argument could hardly be put. forward on Argentina, where Moreno's PST is one of those USFI groups claimed as the largest Trotskyist party in the world.

The practical experiencesbe they positive or negative-of that party in the struggles to prevent and then to resist STILL AVAILABLE The Poisoned Well SL Discussion Docume ilable, price 30p inclur postage from WSL, 31 Dartmouth Park Hill, London NW5 1HR South African troops patrolling Videla's military coup and vicious dictatorship must surely bea key starting point for analysing and developing the struggles of sections throughout Latin America.

Its mistakes must be analysed in order to prevent similar mistakes recurring: • its strengths should be drawn out to reinforce the work of much weaker sections elsewhere on the continent.

What else is an International for?

ment or their Latin America Document for any such analysis.

The actual experience of the "biggest Trotskyist party in the world"-or certainly in Latin America-is apparently of little interest beside the vague and abstract formulations spun out by the new majority leadership of the USFI.

A recognition that the PST is the lynch-pin in the main USFI opposition tendency is clearly a major factor in this omission: the leadership are plainly incapable of an objective assessment of its political experience.

They realise that if they endorse the PST's record, this might strengthen the opposition, but if they attack it they might direct a whole polemic towards examining the practical work of other USFI sections, who support the majority.

But this blindness to practical experience is not restricted to the majority leadership: the Bolshevik Tendency's own declaration makes no attempt whatever to assess its own practical work and struggles in Latin Americafocussing almost exclusively on the issues of Portugal and Angola in the challenge to the majority leadership, and drawing no comparisons or contrasts with its own actions!

This shows as clearly as anything the preoccupation of the USFI sections with internationalism as an abstraction and ideas rather than practice. on the border with Angola The USri majority, of course, cannot claim that it has no direct interest in Spain, where it claims that the LCR numbers : several thousand members.

And of course in Spain the scale of mass mobilisation, particularly in the aftermath of Franco's death, has at times reached considerable proportions.

How are Marxists to assess the cautious, complex process through which the outward trappings of the old fascist apparatus have been dismantled and an increasingly fragile cosmetic face of bourgeois democracy erected by Franco's heirs in Spain?

Why is Spain seen as a 'model' by a string of Latin American and other dictatorships seeking to head off working class resistance?

In particular what does the communist" CP tell us about the developing position of Stalinism in Spain, and throughout Europe?

Are we to detect a chink of "progressive" light in Eurocommunism or understand it as a more brazen expression of the determination of the Stalinist leaders to embrace the politics of the Popular Front?

How are Trotskyists to fight this treachery?

Well, we in the Workers Socialist League, from Britain, have tried to assess this-and devoted a lot of space to the issue in Socialist Press.

We regard these political questions as of paramount importance, partly for understanding Stalinism in Britain, but more importantly for assessing its role and the fight against it on an international scale.

Practical record

The USFI does not seem so concerned, however. Nor are its leaders at all anxious to draw on the experience of another supposed "biggest Trotskyist party in the world"-the LCR in Spain.

The LCR's practical record of chronic electoral opportunism, its liquidationist "unity" campaigns towards centrist and even Maoist currents, its adaptations on the question of the self-determination struggles of the Basque peopie, its failure to expose the full extent of the fraud of Suarez' cosmetic democratisation of the state-(where the LCR has called simply for the purging of fascists from the police and the army)-and its adaptation to the Spanish Stalinists make the USF! reluctant to examine • the LCR's record too closely.

Cavorting

Far from struggling on a Trotskyist platform against the Stalinists' counter-revolutionary strategy, the USFI's Spanish section has been cavorting shamelessly with Carrillo's Eurocommunist CP-sending messages of greeting to the Barceiona Eurocommunist rally; swapping delegations at party congresses; exchanging space in their party press; engaging in football matches; and generally carrying on as if there is some common ground for "discussion" and "debate" between counterrevolutionary Stalinism and the Trotskyist movement.

The World Document and the European Document. both therefore studiously refrain from any serious analysis of political developments in Spain.

And of course they avoid any examination of the practice of the LCR in the mass struggle.

And on Eurocommunism, the "orthodox" statements about the integration of the CPs into the machinery of the bourgeois state are counter-weighted by the confusing declaration that Eurocommunism reflects the pressure of:

"broad sections of the workers' movement in Western Europe'' who have 'become more acutely sensitive to questions of democracy"

Three pages on European Stalinism and a half page on 'work directed at the SPs and CPs' all manage to avoid any reference to the practical work carried out in this field by Soweto events of 1976-events that showed the massive threat to the apartheid capitalist state posed by the black proletariat in this industrialised African country.

Yet the USFI World Document dismisses the whole affair in a sentence:

"The unfolding struggles in industrialised South Africawhere an indigenous white bourgeoisie and its racist state are pitted against a powerful black working class and its allies-will be especially important for the course of the African revolution as a whole."

Behind this truism there lies another uncomfortably stark reality: whereas the Mandelites' "Self Criticism" and the USFI's document on Latin America explicitly revoke the USFI's disastrous 1969 guerrillaist perspective for that continent they have made no moves whatever to rescind the parallel 1969 policy for South Africa which states that:

"the South African revolucan b..." can base itself on a mass of tion... lis the only one which workers and peasants who have been proletarianised and largely detribalised in the crucible of capitalist exploitation and apartheid oppression. The historic role of all the armed struggles now in progress in the African continent, which are siowly moving southward, is to prepare, facilitate and spur the outbreak of the South African revolution, beginning with guerrilla warfare." lour emphasis).

The Soweto events demonstrated the power and scope of the mass working ciass movement.

Refutation

The subsequent forcing of concessions from the apartheid capitalist state in the Crossroads settlement also stands as a complete refutation of the USFI's guerrillaist strategy.

Both mass movements are clear statements of the necessity for revolutionaries to fight for a programme of transitional and democratic demands to mobilise the black proletariat and create conditions for the masses to take up arms in the overthrow of capitalist-apartheid rule.

The USFI draws no such conclusion: it scandalously draws no political conclusion at all from the Soweto events, and thus clings willy nilly to a fundamentally wrongheaded policy that effectively lines it up with the anti-working class strategy peddled by the Stalinists of the ANC. main cities.

Turkey-wracked by insoluble economic crisis, worsened by each lurch in the worldwide crisis-has witnessed the emergence of the biggest organised fascist movement in the world. • Yet it also has a powerful and militant trade union movement, which has been restrained continuously by Stalinist and reformist leaders who are in a Popular Frontist political bloc with Ecevit and the RPP Their respect for this bourgeois leader whom they term a "social democrat" , and their fear of the mass mobilisation of the working class has meant they have opposed establishing a working class united front to mount the necessary workers' defence against fascist attacks.

Political crisis

Yet these attacks daily claim the lives of dozens of workers, and have included the murder of leading members of the Turkish The country is now in the grip of a political crisis as Ecevit's ministers and MPs desert him and the fascists wage a united struggle with the extreme right wing to discredit him through scandals, prior to defeating him in Parliament:

The danger of a military-fascist coup is crystal clear and has been for over a year now. The hallmarks of a 1930s-style Popular Front betrayal by the reformist and Stalinist leaders in tailing behind Ecevit are plain for Trotskyists to see-and have been for many months.

Yet the sole reference to Turkey occurs in the USFI's European Perspectives document-where the leadership inform us that its trade union movement has grown!

There is no analysis whatever of its political crisis.

But there is also a good reason for this omission: the USFI's Turkish supporters have repeatedly declared themselves in favour of supporting Ecevit's RPP government!

While in the last elections our supporters campaigned for a break by the unions and workers parties from the RPP and the fight for a workers' and peasants' government, the USFI group was in favour of a vote to Ecevit!

From that standpoint no programme, no analysis can be argued-other than hoping Ecevit clings to office.

The USFI have good reason to be silent on Turkey-but that silence too masks their real political position. For that we need to know their practice in the country concerned.

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But you will search in vain through the USFI's World Docu-

reactionary Popular Frontist role played by Spain's "Euro-