[Confusion This helped to allow the Stalinists who…]

Scan page 8

Confusion This helped to allow the Stalinists who had originally. been taken completely unawares. by the development of the disaffiliation movement and who condemned the Revolutionary Policy Committee as being infected with Trotskyism, to benefit from the confusion and take over some of the left wing members of the split.

As a number of speakers pointed out, there was nothing inevitable in this decline. The Revolutionary Policy Committee included at least until the summer of 1934 such figures as Matlow and Palsey who were part of the Trotskyist entry into the ILP.

Their ideas remained influential even after they left, as was shown by the predominance of the slogan of workers sanctions at the time of the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935.

Had the Trotskyists been as clear and determined in their intervention as Trotsky himself advocated, then matters could have been i very ditterent.

The second paper, read by Martin Upham, dealt with the by-election in Aylesbury in May 1938 where Reg Groves who had been a member of the recently dissolved Marxist League, stood as the Labour candidate.

Pressure

In this election Groves put forward a clear line against the Stalinist-inspired popular front.

The Peace Alliance', Liberal candidate was supported by a few local Labour people, but most especially by the Communist Party. who viciously attacked Groves and called on the Labour Party to withdraw support from him and support instead the Liberal candidate.

74 Regina Road, London NW4 12 August 1980 Dear Editor, You have repeatedly invited discussion of the WL and TILC's politics.

Brezhnev's war in Afghanistan remains front-page news in the world's press, yet tor months Socialist Press has preserved a guilty sotto voce. The last substantial article, almost a fortnight after the Kabul uprising in February, was demonstrably written by two authors. The first half accurately described the mass uprising and the violence with which it was suppressed, helicopter gunLenin ships strafing unarmed crowds.

The second, shifting from facts_to programme, recalled that Trotskyists defend the Red Army's presence and, from editorial safety, advised Afghans to 'unite' with them.

Your ambiguities are perplexing. You have said, more than once, that the Russians should not have gone in, but now that they are there (and now. they shoula stay. lest others (Afghans, perhaps? fill the vacuum' that would be created by their too precipitate departure.

(Yet you have unaccountably failed to denounce the 'fifth column' which may yet force the rapid redeployment of the Red Army-the workers of Togliattigrad and Poland).

An organisation that prides itself on its Leninist-Trotskyist orthodoxy should have little difficulty in discovering the precedents for a more forthright defence of the Soviet subjugation of Afghanistan.

Has the WSL Executive forgotten: the days of the 'healthy workers' state' in 1920 when Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin jointly attempted to force upon Poland precisely that revolution by foreign bayonets' that Marx condemned half a century before?

Has it overlooked the similar but more successful military annexation of Georgia in 1921?

And, last but not least, why is the WSL so reticent concerning that classic dry run for Afghanistan: Lenin and Trotsky's 'satellitization' of Outer Mongolia?

The Red Army: invaded Mongolia in 1921 and installed a government thickly laced with Soviet 'advisors'. Moscow had to intervene repeatedly • to guarantee the subservience of the tiny Mongolian Party.

Most members of the 1921 cabinet were purged in 1922. At the August 1924 Congress Danzan, head of the Party and Congress chairman, was foolhardy enough to argue for a measure of independence from Moscow. Before the end of the Congress, with full Soviet approval, he had been removed and shot.

So the confusion of WSL members is understandable. They are bufetted on the one hand by the unqualified proStalinist racism of such as the Spartacist tendency and on the other side by their own doubts whether it is possible to carry people closer to socialism by napalming them.

Meantime the WL leadership itself abdicates its theoretical responsibilities, failing to draw out the essential lessons of Lenin's pioneering role as 'proletarian' imperialist.

Trotsky's mature analysis of the USSR was as a 'counterrevolutionary workers' state' But the concepts of dialectical science, you have reminded us, must be ever-mobile to escape extinction.

Forty years on, why no clear statement on the historic gains embodied in the expansion of the 'genocidal workers' state"?

Adam Westoby Robin Blick WE REPLY:

The above letter from Messis Blick and Westoby indicates the sorry degeneration of two intellectuals who in the past have each made valuable theoretical contributions to the Trotskyist analysis of Stalinism.

Westoby walked out of the Workers Socialist League several years ago, not on the basis of the anti-Leninist positions in his letter, but arguing that he could develop Marxist theory as an individual outside of an organised Marxist movement.

Blick-a former leading member of the SLL-was for some time in the mid 1970s associated with the OCRFI "Bulletin" grouping in Britain.

Now both individuals have combined forces in a sudden about-face anti-communist offensive-and have the gall to demand that the WSL-which has consistently defended Trotskyist positions now account for itself!

A full reply taking up the historical questions so flippantly thrown around by Blick and Westoby is beyond our scope here-but will appear as a centre page article in our next issue.