Wrp on the Road Back to Pabloism

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Liberation of Da Nang, March 1975.' The liberation of Vietnam and the other nations of Indothina is the greatest blow truck at imperialism since the Chinese revolution. Like the bberation of China from the Kuomintang, the rout of Thieu in South Vietnam was led and organised by Stalinists. But Stalinism in Vietnam, which finally carried to a successful conclusion the military strug gle against imperialism, was at the same time responsible for some of the worst defeats and I betrayals of the Vietnamese revolution.

This political contradiction reflects the fundamental threat which imperialism levels at the gains and rights of working people of the entire world, no matter what attempts the Stalinist, reformist and centrist parties may make to find a basis for equilibrium.

But because we indicated the Stalinist political character of Ho Chi Minh and of the Vietnamese cadership - and drew out the political implications of their policies in the 1945 revolution, when they murdered the Vietnamese Trotskysts and allowed French troops to to Vietnam - the Workers Socialist League has been stridently mified in the pages of Workers paper the revisionist Workets Revolutionary Party.

This takes the form of a series of four long articles by Stephen Johns: ‹Stalinism and the Liberat on of Vietnam', in Workers Press (August 5th-8th) of which the last instalment is an attack on our article 'Vietnamese Trotskyists', in Socialist Press of June 12th.

PURPOSE

The central purpose of Johns iraudulent excursion into history is to deny that the Vietnamese leadership is Stalinist. His formal logic (backed by the marching orders of the WRP leadership) forbids him to recognise either this fact or the contradiction it crystallises.

As he nuts it (several times) a revolutionary leadership?" This logic' leads Johns not only to distort the history of the Stalinist leadership in Vietnam, but to falsify wholesale the struggle of the Vietnamese Trotskyists.

Apparently without being aware of it (though other leaders of the WRP, such as National Secretary Gerry Healy, certainly are Johns also raises one of the most fundamental political and theoretical questions in the post-war history of the international Trotskyist movement: what is the significance of the fact that Stalinism has overthrown capitalist property relations and established deformed workers states in many countries, including China and eastern Europe?

1953 SPLIT The basic split in the Fourth International, in 1951-3, took place when a faction led by Michel Pablo capitulated politically to Stalin, 'logically' and empirically concluding from these events that Stalinism was capable of an overall revolutionary rote. In the 1953 split some of the present leaders of the WRP fought organisationally against Pablo's liquidation of the Trotskyist cadres into Stalinism, but never took up the struggle to found a political reply to it.

In the recent degeneration of the WRP leadership the wheel begins to come full circle, and they set their journalists to apologetics for Stalinist politics, dragging the record of the Vietnamese Trotskyist movement in the mud. For similar reasons they falsify their own role in the 1953 split First we take up some of the main falsifications in Johns' articles.

On his own admission he knows next to nothing of the real record of Vietnamese Trotskyism, in 1945 or before. How come? Because, as he disarmingly explains, the 'internationalism' of the WRP stops north of Dover:

"There is no thorough investigation in English into the role of the Trotskyist movement in Vietnam, still less a Marxist analysis. It appears that no Vietnamese Trotskyist has ever written an account ary power in Saigon in AugustSeptember 1945, the struggle of the Trotskyists to prevent the Stalinists allowing French troops to reoccupy, and their murder at the hands of the Vietminh]. Most of the available material is in French, and an investigation of this would be required before any definitive view could be reached"

There could be no clearer statement of the cynicism and national arrogance with which Johns. wields his pen. If only these foreigners would learn to speak English! Then perhaps the WRP would condescend to read about the policies they fought for - and he has the impudence to accuse us of being petit-bourgeois English patriots!

In any case, Johns is wholly wrong. There is a full account of 'the Saigon events' in the official journal of the Fourth International, by a surviving comrade of the International Communist League who played a leading part in them. (See Some stages in the revolution in the South of Vietnam in Quatrieme Internationale 1947).

There is also a book published by the International in 1948 -jointly written by a Vietnamese and a French comrade - describing more widely the problems of the Vietnamese revolution: National movements and class struggle in Vietnam by Anh Van and Jacqueline Rose. Mr to of in ree regret -SCANDAL It is a scandal that the WRP - largest section of the so-called "International Committee' - writes about a struggle which they say is the most important since the October revolution, and in which the Trotskyist cadres played a central part, without bothering to read these accounts. Ignorance, of course, does not inhibit Johns from condemning the Vietnamese Trotskyists for taking "far too superficial a view" of the peasants and for "an abstract and sectarian approach" to the national question.

The Saigon events' of AugustSeptember 1945 were revolutionary developments, and they moved rapidly. The critical time for the south of Vietnam (Cochinchina)

was the entry of British, then rrench, troops in the first half. of September to gain a hold in and around Saigon. These troops were welcomed by Tran Van Glau, the Stalinist head of the 'Committee of the South' which claimed government power in the vacuum after the Japanese surrender in August.

ARRESTED

The cadres of the International Communist League were arrested by Giau on or just after September 12th precisely for issuing an appeal which denounced "the treasonable policy of the Stalinist government, and its capitulation before the English of the general staff of the The ICL's words were only too true. By September 23rd enough French and British forces were concentrated in Saigon to launch a coup against the Vietminh, and drive them out of the city. From then on there was war throughout the south Vietnamese countryside but the imperialists held Saigon, and French troops began to retake the Mekong delta area and drive Trichine fastninht thia of their own policy.

Johns' articles, however, slide over these critical days giving virtually no dates (the purpose of the chronology in Socialist Press of June 12th was to make them clear). His aim is to confuse the situation in September 1945 with that in March 1946, when Ho Chi Minh was forced by massive French forces in the south and the north to sign an 'independence' agreement.

Johns then justifies this retreat on grounds of the "objective circumstances the Vietminh and the ICP (Indochina Communist Party) found themselves in in 1945-6" In effect, Johns chooses to recognise the revolution by its backside, and then employs this as 'explanation' for the defeat.

Exactly the same opportunism is at work in Johns' slanders on the Vietnamese Trotskyists in 1945. He attacks them on the basis of extracts from Trotsky's short comments on their policies - in 1930! Using these, Johns charges them with: "a failure to grasp • the peasant question, an underestimation of the progressive role of nationalism, and the dangers of sectarianisas towards both the working class and the peasantry"

He says - falsely - that they were opposed to "peasant soviets - which were in fact embryo liberated areas" and that their policies ("completely idealist" according to Johns) "accounted in part for their inability to withstand the liquidation of their movement"!

Nothing could be further from the truth. The Trotskyists crystallised the tasks of the hour and the temper of masses of Vietnamese in August revolution. They put right to the fore demands both for the redistribution of the land, and for the arming of workers and peasants to defend national independence. In the huge Saigon demonstration of August 21st thousands took up their slogans. They still got mass support in the demonstrations of August 25th and September 2nd, when the Stalinists had tightened their grip on the governmental apparatus.

COMMITTEES

In the countryside peasant committees were dealing with the parasites of French rule wholesale:

in Saigon-Cholon the Trotskyists led aumerous local 'Peoples Committees' . A 'Provisional Central Committee', uniting about a hundred such committees, was set up after the August 21st demonstration ard, on August 26th, issued a pro.

gramme for the revolutionary defence of national independence, for uniting peasants and workers via the Peoples Committees in towns and countryside, and for the struggle for:a national assembly of Peoples Committees. The Provisional Central Committee held delegate meetings daily, centring on the fight for armed defence of independence. On September 4th delegates from the workers' districts of Banco and PhuNhuan brought forward proposals to take over French-owned factories and produce war materials. It was also demanded that the Bank of Indochina be taken over and fortified as a centre of defence.

On September 6th the Stalinist press and radio launched a concerted and vitriolic witchhunt against the Trotskyists - on the same day that the British mission demanded the disarming of Vietnamese. On the raids and arrests of Trotskyist cadres.

STALINIST FEARS

The Stalinists were equally fearful of the Trotskyists' agitation on the land question. Un August 27th Stalinist 'Interior Commissar' Nguyen-Van-Tuo declared: "All those who have instigated the lessly punished"

He added: "We have not yet made the Communist revolution which will solve the agrarian problem. This government is only a democratic government. That is why such a task does not devolve on it. Our government, I repeat, is a bourgeois democratic government, ezen though the Communists are now in power"

So Stephen Johns' accusations of 'neglecting' national independence and the peasants should therefore be wholly directed at the Stalinists, not the Trotskyists. So powerful was the (largely spontaneous) peasant movement in the countryside - to which the Trotskyists' policies gave political voice -that it took months of bloody warfare and torture by French troops after September to put it down.

Thus did imperialism (allowed in the door by Stalinism) 'attend' to the solution of "the agrarian well understood, the laws of the permanent revolution apply as strongly in defeat as in victory.

• DISHONEST But Johns' dishonesty on the Vietnamese Trotskyists goes much deeper. The sole basis for his criticism of their policies in 1945 is a letter written by Trotsky in September 1930 (Johns quotes some passages from it, but conveniently 'omits' its date). The letter was addressed to a group of young Vietnamese communists in France, supporters of the International Left Opposition.

They included Ta Thu Thau, one of those killed in 1945. They Ho Chi Minh - WRP conceals his murder of Trotskyists.

were shortly to leave France (expelled by the government for agitation in support of Vietnamese independence!) for Vietnam, where they helped found the Trotskyist movement and fought for the positions of the Left Opposition the Italinint landorchin nf

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Revolutionary militants freed from Poulo Condor prison island.

capture palace headquarters of the Thieu puppet regime. the Communist Party there (founded in February 1930). In 1931-2 they adopted revised positions which accepted many of Trotsky's criticisms, and they built a considerable movement during the 1930's.

The character of Trotsky's letter is clearly shown in the source from which Johns quotes it (International Socialist Review, September 1973).

That Johns, who has never led anything but a mendacious pen across a piece of paper, should read the Vietnamese Trotskyists a lecture on the problems of revolutionary leadership in Vietnam in 1945, going by weaknesses of some marts of their positions as new recruits in Paris in 1930, is grotesque. He simple writes off a decade and a half of revolutionary struggle.

Johns also uses Vietnam as the platform for some fraudulent bragadaccio on the WRP and the role of "the Party" - by associating the WRP with the Vietnamese Stalinist leadership! According to him the WSL's criticism of the role of the Stalinist leadership flow from a wish to "attack the whole conception of revolutionary leadership"; specifically, our "method is hatred of the British revolutionary leadership - the WRP"

Attacking us for separating the peasant resistance movement and the militaty struggle from the political leadership provided by ""the Party" • Johns delivers a sermon on the need to have a party above all - the Stalinist Party in Vietnam, and the WRP in Britain. Of the struggle in Vietnam he writes that the party has provided "always the leaders, organisers and tacticians of the struggle to liberate the south. The leadership did not reside in any one town or city, but in the Party - without the Party the victory in Vietnam could not have occurred"

DISSOLVED

How, then does Johns explain this - that on November 11th, 1945, as French troops drove deeper and deeper into Cochinchina, Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi dissolved the Indochina Communist Party! (In 1943 Stalin had dissolved the Comintern as a peace-offering to US imperialism). The communique stated: "In order to destroy all misunderstandings, domestic and foreign, which can hinder the liberation of our country, the Central Executive Committee of the ICP in meeting assembled on November 11th 1945, has decided to formally dissolve the ICP.

Those followers of Communism desirous of continuing their theoretical studies will affiliate with the Indochina Association for Marxist Studies"

From then until the party was reestablished in 1951 the Stalinists organised through the Vietminh. In July 1946 they sponsored the formation of a social democratic party in the north. Part of its programme stressed "Reliance on parliamentary means, peaceful org anisational methods, and propaglanda" • These events are clearly indicated in one of Johns' sources. ¡Needless to say respect for "the *Partv" prevents him from being so indelicate as to mention them.

Lastly - how does Johns assess politically the results of the Stalinists murdering the Trotskyist leadership in Saigon? He calls it a "dastardly" act and "an outright counter-revolutionary blow" . But why was it counter-revolutionary? Recance "it denrived the masses of the possibility of an understanding of international Stalinism and therefore disarmed them in the face of the parasitic and counterrevolutionary Moscow bureaucracy"

This is the quintessence of the WRP's abandonment of Trotskyism. Revolution and counterrevolution themselves are contemplated in wholly idealistic terms. Johns - eager at every point to exonerate Vietnamese Stalinism Irom material responsibility for the defeat of the revolution - just April 30th, 1975; liberation turns his back on the real situation in Saigon and the south.

The Vietnamese were disarmed, not "in the face of the Moscow bureaucracy", , but by the Stalinists in Saigon in face of two imperialist armies who were already landing. The murder of the Trotskyists des troyed the political spearhead of the struggle for workers and peasants power, and for revolutionary defence of independence. With their liquidation, the road was open to ments forced lime the agree1946.

But Johns lifts the whole question to some ideal fairy-land outside the borders of Vietnam. All the Saigon Stalinists were guilty of, in his eyes, was "depriving the masses of the possibility of an understanding" of "international Stalinism' and the Moscow bureauстаск' . Ah! Now we understand the role of 'theory' in the gospel of the WRP. If only counterrevolutionary retreats could be carried out with a proper 'understanding' of the role of Stalinism - elsewhere! - Mr Johns and the 'theoreticians' of the WRP would withdraw their lingering objections. It is not difficult to imagine what Ta Thu Thau and his comrades would have said of Johns' offer to correct their 'grave weaknesses' As we have shown in the specific case of the 1945 revolution in Vietriam, Johns' articles are written in a spirit of dishonest factionalism. But, underlying this, what is clear is his total inability to see the post-war development of Stalinism in an all-șided and dialectical way.

With straitjacketted formal logic, Johns reasons that since the Vietnamese leadership finally suceeeded in defeating imperialism and taking power .. therefore they cannot be Stalinist. (On the contrary, Johns credits them with "a consistent revolutionary line" sinee 1941: within this, every compromise and defeat is evasively put down to 'Stalinist training' or the external pressure of Moscow.

Yet the Chinese Communist Party, too, led a revolutionary struggle to victory - but Workers Press (with occasional vacillations) quite clearly characterises them as Stalinist and has, for example, commented' on their thoroughly reactionary foreign policy.

Johns' approach is a classic case of the impressionism, the worship of the accomplished fact, which Trotsky so often had occasion to denounce in certain 'theoreticians' around the Fourth International. Unable to maintain and develop a consitent world-view, Jonns nups 1-11 - Taken lamen from one inconsistent assertion to next.

He goes on to defend the claim that NLF declarations on independence and revolutionary movements in other countries are 'revolutionary internationalism', , cynically glossing over - for example - the support Hanoi has given (in accomodation to Soviet foreign policy) for Ghandi's emergency measures in India, under which thousands of left-wingers are being imprisoned, gagged and persecuted.

Stalinism cannot be understood and fought against piecemeal. It is a world political formation, resting on the world antagonism between imperialism and the revolutionary aspirations of a rotten social order. and is itself contradictory to the core.

It is based on the see bari property lishmen: di diacred soccers. ==: on the other on the national limitation and division of those gains, and their subordination to the interests of narrow bureaucratic castes. It attempts to regulate its relations with imperialism on a world scale within this it is no more impossible that Stalinist leaderships should be driven to fight and win struggle for state power than it is that social democratic leaders should -even in conditions of the sharpest crisis - lead real struggles in defence of the working class.

But what Johns does is to divide up world Stalinism, looking for segments within that have 'empirically' broken with 'real' Stalinism, so that he can confer revolutionary credentials on them and even use them as a model for the WRP's conception of a revolutionary party.

This is precisely the way in which Michel Pablo justified. his capitulation to Stalinism in the period before the 1952-3 split in the Fourth International - at that time the liquidationist tendency concentrated on the 'revolutionary' role of the Yugoslav Communist Party leadership after Tito's break with Stalin in 1953. In two quite definite respects Johns returns to tread in Pablo's steps.

In the first place he defends the retreats of the Vietnamese Stalinists from armed conflict with French imperialism in 1945-46, on the grounds that the military relatiamshin of franna mithin ther ansntar was "unfavourable" to them and that the city populations in Saigon and Hue were not controlled by CP (in fact, their mass demonstrations were in many respects to the left of the CP). Thus, whatever he may protest, Johns places himself and the WRP leadership politically with the Stalinists and against the Trotskyists.

And he judges the 'balance of forces' on the situation within vietnam alone - ine ony inter- dha i am do an national factors he places in the balance are those hostile to the Vietnamese revolution; imperialism and Moscow Stalinism. He does not mention the support of the international working class, the fact that British troops sent into Vietnam were profoundly bitter at being forced to fight a war they regarded as none of their business, or the fact that even the bourgeois Indian nationalist leader Nehru was forced to protest against the invasion of the south.

Little wonder, then, that Johns, compartmentalising the world revolution in typically Stalinist fashion to suit his theori, cordadas is: it would hate bese presar 2i abortise E RE Vie:

:3:25 Pzi: = **=SJ5:=E is dotto "The Vietnamese revolutionary war is however a living example of the correctness of Marxism as dereloped by Lenin and Trotsky. In particular it represents a vivid illu stration of the permanent Johns grants that the 'links' of the Vietnamese leaders with Stalin ism "led to many grave weaknesses at crucial junctures", but:

"in breaking empirically from the dictates of Stalinist peaceful coexistence the Vietnamese leadership were able to carry through the revolution"

Johns then looks forward to the and the theoretical gains of Trotsky's struggle against Stalinism and the building of the Fourth Thus speak Johns and the WRP. And here is fablo, wrting on the Chinese revolution in 1953 (in the document where he lays out his plans for liquidation into the stalinist organisations):

"Despite empirical waverings and errors, anyone who seriously takes part in the revolution is obliged to more-or-less come over to this program and these ideas [of Trotskyism]. The development of the colonial revolution and the victory in China in particular is a masterful demonstration of the Trotskyist revolutionary Marxist theory of the Permanent Revot ution. Thus the Chinese CP has found itself and is now obliged to bend its policy in practice in a manner which approximates the fundamental positions of Trotskyism"

OPPOSED

The present leadership of WRP correctly opposed Pablo (after having supported his bureaucratic expulsions of those who disagreed with him) in 1052 Rut they never fought on the basis of a political opposition to him. Now, disoriented by the world-wide offensive of the working class, they jump, as did Pablo, from impression to impression.

Eager to climb on the bandwagon of the enormous and correct enthusiasm which the Vietnamese revolution has aroused, they drag its real history in the mud.

In the view of the WSL the study of the revolution in Vietnam and of the struggle of opposed social forces which the polis; ce the leadership reflected, s i cas 5 = 050=0: 10 2:00 22=x7

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A long interview last June between Arthur Scargill, the militant Yorkshire miners' leader and the periodical New Left Review has recently been serialised in the Observer. This is no doubt to show the middle class readership of that newspaper what dangerous "extremists" exist in the rasks of the Trade Union movement.

Scargill begins by recounting his early history as a young miltant in the NUM fighting for the right even to attend branch meetings against the entrenched power of the right wing leadership.

He then talks at length about his role in the miners' strikes of 1972 and 1974 which brought down the Tory, government. He gives a vivid picture of the battle of Saltley coke depot in Birmingham where a mass picket of miners finally closed the depot after battle with the police and how the working class movement of the entire midlands rallied to the support of the miners. Speaking of the development of the "flying picket tactic, in which he played a leading role himself, Scargill says:

"The picketting had been launched in all the areas but mobile pickets directed on targets outside the pits had been sent mainly from Yorkshire. You see we took the view we were in a class war. We were not playing cricket on the village green like they did in 1926 We were out to defeat Heath and Heath's policies because we were fighting a government. Anyone who thinks otherwise was living in cloud cuckoo land. We had to declare war on them and the only way was to attack the vulnerable points. They were the points of energy, the power stations, the coke depots, the points of supply."

Scargill was quite aware moreover that the miners strike, having brought down the Tory government had to be continued under Labour until the claim was met, and that the working class must come into conflict with the Labour government.

"Yes, what we should really do is go harder into the attack because a Labour government should never ever find itself in a position of conflict with the trade unions in this way. And if it does then it has nothing in common with socialism and it has nothing in common with working class principles . • • They (the Labour leaders) are now deliberately operaPORTUGAL (cont'd from p 3)

with an inability to distinguish between the class forces at work in the revolutionary situation that confronts it. They have support among sections of the Armed Forces Movement and in practice work closely with the Stalinists, whose counter-revolutionary politics they appear incapable of confronting.

The first thing that strikes the visitor to the offices of the PRP in Lisbon _is that their book-stall contains no works of serious Marxist theory, though there is plenty about colonial warfare such as Che Guevara and Amicar Cabral.

On being asked about this, they assure you that they have no need of the theories of such outdated writers as Lenin and Trotsky. The result of this now is clear in their practice. The vacuous phrases of the left COPCON document and the 25th August accord are normally attributed to them, rand one can see the disastrous results of their disdain for questions of ting measures that are deliberately designed to solve the capitalist crisis at the expense of the working class.. The ruling class have created these problems... and if they're not prepared to pay then we take over as we should do anyway all the means of production, distribution and exchange."

Fighting talk! How then from such a 'clear perspective' does Scargill get to the position he adopted for example at the last Miners Conference of effectively capitulating on the question of the defence of miners living standards by his retreat on the £100 claim? To understand this is to understand the forces that drive towards betrayal in all the 'left talkers' in the unions and the Labour Party, however militant they are, and the vital need for the construction of an alternative leadership.

Trotsky wrote in the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International in 1938:

"Classical Social Democracy . .. divided its programme into two parts independent of each other: the minimum programme which limited itself to reforms within the framework of bourgeois society and the maximum programme which promised substitution of socialism for capitalism in the indefinite future Between the minimum and the maximum programme no bridge existed. And indeed Social Democracy has no need of such a bridge since the word 'socialism' is used only for holiday speechifying."

And this is exactly what 'ultimately unites Scargill and the lefts' with the right wing. On the one hand Scargill speaks of the necessity to take over "all the means of production, distribution and exchange" and on the other hand the need to "go harder into the attack" on the struggle over wages. HOW are the two questions to be linked?

For Scargill the answer to this question is absurdly simple:

"But struggles convince the workers of the need for real control over society. Saltley and the miners struggles of '72 and '74 did more to convince the miners in the coalfields of the need to take into social control all the means of producing wealth and not just nationalisation than anything else Iknow."

Struggle alone without clear political leadership convinces no-one of anything. Was it the struggle at Saltley that convinced Scargill of the "necessity" to capitulate to the £6 wage limit by abandoning the £100 a week demand?

result they are precluded from any serious contact with rank and file members of the SP and are driven increasingly into the arms of the Stalinists. In their blind romanticism they claim that in their alliances with the CP it is they and not the CP who are in charge.

"LEFT STALINIST"

For example, we were assured that although it was true that Vasco Goncalves is a Stalinist, he is a very 'left' Stalinist! Even more alarming are the constant references to "Comrade Otelo' (de Carvalho), and the assurances that 'he has never betrayed the revolution' given to us at a time when he was actively preparing a coup in association with right-wing chief of staff Fabiao.

If the situation facing the working class were not so serious such .confusion would simply be laughable. The PRP was recently delivered a large consignment of arms from some of its friends in the Armed Forces Movement, and though these may well be needed -4- it in The subsequent campaign Yorkshire and other areas against the £6 wage limit were crippled before they began by Scargill's retreat.

Scargill capitulated of course not because he is a cynic or any such personal motives but because he could see no political alternative. Such claims as the one before the last NUM conference are in themselves inadequate to defend the living conditions of miners. As Scargill admits: "Even if you get a wage increase the problem will be there tomorrow."

Unable to see any concrete alternative to wage militancy and faced with a rate of inflation of 25% a year while the entire right wing in the unions and the Labour Party together with the capitalists campaign at high pitch for the view that one man's wage increase is another man's job' then of course Scargill out of "tactical considerations' backs down on the claim itself.

His capitulation is aided by his attitude to the Labour party. Though starting from a position that workers should go "harder into the attack" on a Labour government, Scargill ends up in effect supporting the government. Scargill fails to understand that a Labour government is not just another Scargill and Stalinist McGahey -com government like the Tories. Whereas the Tory Party is a capitalist party, the Labour Party, like the unions was created to defend the working class.

When its leadership turns now to implement capitalist policies and viciously attack working class people this raises the most fundamental political questions in the working class movement. Namely the necessity for the construction of an alternative political leadership in the working class based on the defence of the independent class interests of the proletariat, and capable of leading a struggle for a socialist planned economy which is the only solution to the present crisis.

Scargill agrees that Wilson has to go but when asked what is his alternative he replies:

"I would like to see a broad alliance of the whole Left inside the party. I want to see the bans and prescriptions lifted so that the whole of the Left could participate.

But having said that I'm a realist.

You're not going to get that overnight. So in the meantime we have to see how we can get the ary lead will be attracted to their militancy and their romanticism.

Without a serious effort to understand the forces currently pitted against them, and to win over the workers who currently follow the CP or SP, the PRP is clearly in no position to lead such workers to the socialist revolution.

Of course the basic questions can only be explained by the Trotskyist movement. It is impossible in the space of this article to go into the policies of all those claiming this mantle in Portugal. The movement is very new, only being established about 1968, and there are at least four organisations, reflecting the well-known international divisions.

The two smallest groups in Portugal are supporters of the international tendencies associated with Lambert's 'Committee for the Construction of the Fourth International. ,. and Healy's 'International Committee. Lambert's followers, as elsewhere, seem content to burrow into the inmost recesses of tha annial damartary. from SOCIAL IST PRES best for workers out of the situation as it is."

This is the essence of the reformist separation of the maximum programme of socialism - always put off till tomorrow because no-one can see what on earth can be done about it today - from the minimum programme of reforms which we try to get 'out of the situation as it is' 'Workers' practical struggles are limited in this way within the confines of reformism and trade union consciousness. But when reforms are no longer possible, and nothing can be got from the "situation as it is', Scargill cannot see how a political alternative can be fought for in the working class movement. For this enable workers to see beyond both Wilson and Benn and the 'lefts' and drive these people out. Therefore despite all the rhetoric about democratising the Labour Party Scargill ends up making the best of "It may be with all his weaknesses a bad job. the Left has got to consider whether or not Benn has got to be supported. Nobody's got more criticisms of Benn than I have ... But at least he would be an improvement on the present leadership.

That the position of the 'Lefts' brings them in practice into unity with the right wing is shown graphically by the speech at the Labour Party Conference by ex-left Michael abined to drop the f100 demand.

Foot who denounced any attempt to criticise the £6 wage freeze as "a recipe for its [the Labour government's] destruction. On this basis the left was completely immobilised. At the same time Benn calls for support of the Labour government as 'the only alternative' and votes for Wilson's policies one day, only to mouth abstractly about "socialism' the next.

Scargill ultimately can see, like all the other 'lefts', no alternative to supporting this Labour government which is determined to maintain capitalism, and therefore must intensify its attacks on the working class.

There is an alternative. It lies in the struggle for a programme which can defend workers against wage cuts and unemployment. It rests on a resolute defence of the political independence of the working class, and a fight for principle.

Such a programme - a sliding scale of wages organised by the unions, work sharing on full pay to defend jobs and nationalisation long intervals and confines itself to general statements about the need for a workers' government and the building of a revolutionary party. To judge from the Workers Press of 20th September, the only policies it considers necessary to put forward at this point in Portugal are the immediate introduction of a Soviet Socialist Republic and the building of a revolutionary party. Such perspective, in line with the British WRP's sectarian demand of "Bring down the Labour Government"

will clearly offer nothing to the Portuguese working class, and it is unlikely that much more can come of a group with such conceptions.

The two different factions of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International have separate organisations operating in Portugal.

The Mandelite majority group, known as the LCI (International Communist League) have shown that they bear all the obvious marks of the Pabloite beast by their signing of the 25th August accord against all the elementary principles of Trotskyism. Whatever efforts are now made hv •Mandel Wednesday 15th October, 1975 under workers management of all bankrupt sectors of the economy, together with a programme of public works to create new employment - because it clashes irreversibly with the measures that the employers have to take in defence of profits, poses the necessity of workers control.

That is of workers committees taking control of the factories and supervising the management to prevent capitalist policies being implemented. This stage itselt would lay the basis for the working class moving ahead to abolish capitalist property relations altogether But Scargill resolutely refuses to give leadership by means of such a strategy and covers his tracks with a morass of confusion on the question of 'workers control' "Now I'm a strange trade union leader ... in that I'm totally opposed to workers control... I believe once you start talking about workers control under capitalism what you are saying is that we establish a system where we open the books and we take charge of 51% of the Board and all this sort of thing. That's not workers power. Workers power is to take into the hands of the working people all the means of producing wealth, distribution, and exchange."

Here is a total confusion between collaboration with management for speed up, and workers seizing control of the plant to prevent the implementation of such policies. The struggle to open the books to elected trade union committees is designed precisely to prove the necessity for nationalisation oI the industry under workers management, and to mobilise the forces necessary to compel such nationalisation.

When reminded by the interviewers that "this slogan of workers control has had a very differeat meaning to the one put forward by those who have been advocating participation schemes • • • When the Bolsheviks called for workers control they meant that the workers should anticipate nationalisation by taking control of their factories and using the resources ... to strengthen the workers struggle" Scargill refuses to be drawn, and again totally fudges the issue:

«Yes well I was talking about the situation today. In Russia during the time of the first world war you had a totally different ball game. ... We could take over all the means of production and distribution and exchange more or less immediately. I believe we can do it".

Go on then Scargill - give the order! Of course there's little chance of that. happening. By refusing to acknowledge the differences between a fully fledged socialist economy and the concrete struggle for workers control now (which is both the only solution to the problems facing the working class and the concrete way of posing the necessity of a socialist planned economy) Scargill can maintain the purity of his socialist rhetoric. But despite the words, he is doing nothing to carry forward the struggle to defend jobs, wages, and the democratic rights of the trade union movement which now necessitates the ending of the capitalist property relations once and for all.

reality of the split the movement in 1953.

The Hansenite minority in Portugal also have a group which acts quite independently, called the PRT (Revolutionary Party of Workers). They seem to have taken up a number of wrong positions in relation to the Armed Forces Movement and other issues, but correctly attacked the 25th August unity accord and tried to intervene in the movement that was built up around it with policies aimed at a break with the bourgeoisie.

PRINCIPLE

For our part we will continue to intervene in the developing situation in Portugal on the basis of the principle of Trotsky's Transitional Programme and aim to bring the problems facing the workers there before the working class «movement internationally.

It is only the basis for a struggle for the re-building of the Fourth International that it will be possible to develop the kind of leadership for which the situation in Portugal now cries out. For this we will have

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peasants to seize landowners' property will be severely and piti-

problem". , and simultaneously re- paperialist rape. As the Trotskyists