Butcher Mason in anti- Tory outburst

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Callaghan From his closely guarded, floodlit, bulletproof hideaway Labour's former chief Torture Minister Roy Mason sent a rare message last week.

A note to a massive 2,500strong anti-cuts rally in Sheffield appeared to adopt a militant anti-Tory stance.

He warned the Thatcher government that they were "throwing down the gauntlet" and that if they were not care. ful the Labour and trade union movement "would have to resist"

Empty wrath

And he threatened a "united effort" by unions, MPs and councillors. But perhaps workers should be more worried at this prospect than should Thatcher. such empty wrath from the biro of the architect of the barbarities of Long Kesh and the torture of Castlereagh.

The message itself made this clear. The Tories, Mason complained, are prepared to stand "idly by" while workers this winter fight for wage increases to match inflation.

"This is a complete negation and abandonment of government", he moaned.

Beware

So that is it! Mason wants mass protests by trade unionists and Labour activits against Tory policies and in favour of ... WAGE CONTROLS!

Workers in Sheffield and elsewhere should beware. Hyenas like Mason never change their spots-and the Callaghan gang can never lead the fight against the Tories.

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The USFI documents show that no lessons have been learned from these struggles PETDFI It is not simply the series of awkward silences, evasions and omissions from the USFi's documents that mark them out as inadequate to offer a lead to the working class on a national or international level.

The documents also contain wrong positions-which yet again arise from the ramshackle theoretical and diplomatic basis on • which the USFI is constructed.

There are a number of points that could be stressed-but this article will take up only a few of the more glaring examples, since others are generally either of a similar type or on clearly related issues.

Learned The World Document puts forward a section on Political Revolution which shows that the USFI has either learned nothing from the Hungarian events of 1956, or is simply congenitally incapable of putting forward a 'clear programme as the basis for practical action.

A study of the following passage reveals that the progress of the argument is upside down:

"The programme of the political revolution has thus been hammered out in living struggles. The main points include the elimination of the organs of mass repression, the conquest of political freedom for the toiling masses, the establishment of. independence for the trade unions and of genuine proletarian democracy with its real control by the workers; diversity of parties or factions, abolition of the censorship, and assurance of the right to real ideological opposition in all spheres of social life.

"TO CONSOLIDATE THESE GAINS requires the exercise of workers' power through freely elected councils of the masses, the establishment of workers power and workers' management, (... etc.).

"As part of an internationalist foreign policy, the army will be democratised and placed at the disposal of the international proletariat as it was when it was built under Trotsky." (emphasis added).

What this passage in the USFI's document cannot answer is how all these sweeping changes are to be brought about, if they are only going to be consolidated by the building of workers councils, and topped off by the democratisation of the army.

The question arises: is the bureaucracy to be removed from above or from below?

Mobilising forces

If from below, then the first primary question before sketching out a schema for the elaborațe transformation of the state machinery, is to address the task of mobilising the forces for building factory committees workers councils, and other independent class bodies as the essential organs capable of challenging the state power held by the bureaucracy and advancing the independent strength of the proletariat in the deformed the proletariat workers' states.

This is the unmistakeable lesson of the workers councils in Hungary.

Mass organisations

And the only way in which the proletariat, arms in hand, can hope to topple the conservative parasitic caste that at present controls the functioning of the workers states, is if the same struggle for independent mass organisations is also advanced into the ranks of the Red Army, and the fight taken up for the construction of committees of rank and file Red Army men independent of the officers.

Far from being the final seal that consolidates a victory won by other means, such committees and councils offer the only road to political revolution.

It is aiso conspicuous that the section on Political Revolution is stated to apply only to 'the USSR, E. Europe and In this context we should recall that no USFI statement called-in even the most general terms-for the construction of workers and peasants councils in South Vietnam at the point where the imperialist puppet forces crumbled in mid 1975.

There still is no real conception inside the USFI leadership -despite the continued existence of USFI sections in Eastern Europe and the individual courage of those militantsof how central the struggle for working class independence from the Stalinist bureaucracy is to the method of the Transitional Programme.

But this confusion is compounded by the producțion of the document on Socialist Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

This amounts to a wordy, evasive but wholesale adaptation to the various Eurocommunist currents that seek to transform the Soviet Union into a bourgeois democracy, and which have publicly thrown overboard even the pretence of fighting for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The most obvious question to raise is why on earth such a document should be written by Trotskyists.

It seeks to lay down in the most abstract possible terms, formulae and norms for a hypothetical future workers' state: but at the same time it ignores the obvious theoretical starting point for any such analysis-the Transitional Programme itself, ana the actual experience of workers in the Soviet Union and the subsequent deformed workers states.

Free vote

Trotsky makes it clear in calling-remember in 1938-for the democratisation of the Soviets, that:

'In the Soviets there is room only for representatives of the workers, rank and file collective farmers, peasants and Red Army men.

"Democratisation of the Soviets is impossible without legalisation of Soviet parties.

The workers and peasants themselves, by their own free vote, Part Five will indicate what parties they recognise as Soviet parties."

This class criteria-placing the decision in the hands of the independent organs of the toiling masses-is not good enough for the USFI leadership.

They wish to accommodate to the Eurocommunists, by watering down the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, to the extent of specifying the legalisation of bourgeois parties, and elaborating in the most idealistic fashion, what they consider would be necessary to provide workers with democratic rights in excess of those available under bourgeois democracy.

Soviets The fact that the organs of workers power-workers councils or Soviets-that emerge as the basis of the revolutionary seizure of power, and within which conscious revolutionaries will. be only one tendency among many-will offer to workers the opportunity to participate for the first time in their lives in the determining of political policy and the shaping of the future, is set aside as inadequate.

The USFI wants television, radio time, phone-in time on computers, and a whole series of rights to give full vent to the most avid petty bourgeois appetite for individual expression.

As a result the concept of Dictatorship of the Proletariat is robbed of any real class content.

Though a few careful disclaimers are thrown in here and there, the document as a whole makes it clear that this is seen as a "Dictatorship" that really represses nobody, suppresses nobody, and makes itself felt chiefly by its absence from view.

It bears no relationship at all to the only actual example of the dictatorship of the proletariat-in the Soviet Union.

The USFI's schema is not only a million miles away from the reality of the Russian Revol ution; it is also a strong echo o' the kind of idealist current: vigorously attacked by Trotsky in The Class Nature of the Soviet State:

"To these gentlemen thi dictatorship of the proletariat i simply an imponderabli concept, an ideal norm not ti be realized upon our sinfu planet. Small wonder that 'theo reticians' of this stripe, insofa as they do not denounçe altoge ther the very word dictatorship strive to smear over the irrecon cilable contradiction betwee the latter and bourgeois deme cracy.

"Extremely characteristir from the laboratory and not th political point of view, is th Parisian sect of 'Communis democrats' (Souvarine and Co. The very name already implie a break with Marxism. In th critique of the Gotha pri gramme, Marx rejected th name social democracy in vie' of the fact that it places th revolutionary socialist strugg under the formal control democracy.

"It is quite obvious thi there is no difference in pril ciple between "communi democrats' and 'socialist dem crats, social democrats that i There is no hard and fast pari

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But the bankruptcy of their national Majority Tendency, rivals is in our view no argu- clinging on to the ultra-leftist dissolution of factions and the seen in the statements produced ment for recognising in the and guerrillaist schemas of the formation of a now, "united" by a new, 'Leninist Trotskyist USFI the exclusive continuity USFI's European Secretariat. leadership prior to the Xith Tendency' which has also emer Congress. ged, with forces in a number of The United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI) is undoubtedly the largest and most widely known of the currents that have emerged from the postwar crisis of the Trotskyist movement.

With thousands of members and sections or sympathising sections in dozens of countries, it is viewed by many militants "the" Trotskyist Fourth International.

The • Workers Socialist League does not share this view. We see the USFI as a movement that has departed on numerous key questions from the positions and method put forward in the Transitional Programme on which the Fourth International was founded in 1938.

We know, of course, that the two other main groupings that lay claim to the title of "Fourth Intornational" are both now substantially smaller than the USFI.

Both of them-the Healyite ''International Committee" (run by the British WRP) and the "Organising Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International" (run by the French OCI) -certainly told political positions as bad or far worse than the USFI on many questions and are themselves • (like the USFI) wracked by internal crisis.

Disorientation

of the Trotskyist movement, whose post-war period has been characterised by profound political disorientation and a continuing series of incomplete and opportunist splits and fusions.

The forthcoming Xith World Congress of the USFI is however an important event. It offers Marxists the opportunity of assessing in more detail the stage of development of the political crisis which has characterised the USFI's existence since its formation in 1963.

At its Tenth World Congress in 1974 the main factions were the Leninist Trotskyist Faction, politically supporting the formally "orthodox", • opportunist positions of the US Socialist Workers Party, and the InterBut the untenable positions. taken by both the LTF and the IMT during the Portuguese vents of 1974-6 and the Angolan war led to a sharp realignment of forces which now shapes the coming XIth World The bulk of the USFI's Latin American sections and sympathising sections broke with the line of the SWP and the LTF and, led by Nahuel Moreno's Argentinian PST, formed the Bolshevik Tendency'.

The growing challenge from these forces, combined with the complete collapse in the credibility of the iMT's guerrillaist perspectives of 1969 and 1974, pressured both the European and SWP leaders into a hasty It was this new majority leadership that drafted the five main documents tabled for the Congress. But their manifest failure to reconcile past political disagreements is demonstrated by the pattern of conspicuous diplomatic omissions and evasions in the documents.

The Bolshevik Tendancy has in the meantime declared itself a Faction dedicated to the removal of what it calls. a "Castroist current" and an "unprincipled bloc" at the head of the USFI and the restoration of "orthodox" Trotskyism.

Correct errors

A much lesser threat is errors" of the existing USFI The article below, part five of a series examining the position of the USFI in the run-up to its XIth Congress, is a critique of the five main texts presented to the Congress by the new majority leadership.

These deal with:

*The World Political Situation.

*European Perspectives.

*Perspectives for Latin America.

*The fight against women's oppression.

#'Socialist Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat Concluded Readers who doubt our assessment are advised themselves to explore the document and wade through the leighteen pages of platitudes, abstractions and cop outs that are the USFI's substitute for a clear line of march for the European proletariat.

However it would be wrong to conclude an examination of the XI World Congress documents without looking briefly at the USFI's line on the struggle against women's oppression, because their refusal to draw a class line on this struggle echoes

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says: OFFICIAL

OFFICIAL sections, pledged to "corract the