Defend right to struggle!

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legal Lovalist prevent the establishment of a fighting-under various generally a time when the continued do We перт The Socialist Press article 'made clear that we have profound disagreements with the tactics political programme of the republicansbut categorically defend their "right to fight, arms in hand, to drive the foreign army of British imperialism out of their country."

• We do not in any way equate the often misguided and counter-productive armed actions of the nationalist fighters with the activities of the legal and semi-legal Loyalist paramilitary groups who seek to defend imperialist rule.

We have no intention of painting Irish or any other nationalism "red"-but neither do we intend to join those "socialists" who wish to paint it Our article could in no way be construed as supporting a nine-county Ulster: rather it looked at the political manoeuvres by Loyalists, imperialists and nationalists which helped prevent the establishment 32-county Irish republic.

Of course much more could have been said of the class character of the republican leadership and the detail of the political developments leading up to partition: the article in SP225 did not set itself that task. Our reader supplies some useful information on these questions.

But he does not provide any basis to question the fact that the Irish people have been fighting-under various generally treacherous, leaderships for several centuries against British imperialism.

Domination

The fact that Marx at one point saw the revolutionary movement of the British working class as one possible means of lifting the oppression of the Irish people unfortunately offers us no guidance today-at a time when the continued domination of pro-imperialist bureaucrats over the British labour movement is perhaps the principal obstacle to the construction of a mass 'troops out' current.

While we struggle to continue Marx's "critical method", it would be wrong for us simply to embrace the conclusions he himself discarded more than a century ago.

John Lister Marx

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The slogan "N • Return to the '30s" ha S gained general, popular currency throughout the movement in the past few years. • It came as an immediate response to the break up of the post-war "boom'-those years when the illusion of a steady expansion of capitalism, full employment and rising living standards seemed to some to throw into question the Marxist analysis of capitalism as a bank• rupt, crisis-ridden system.

Now, with the unquestioned re-emergence of this underlying tendency to crisis and the rapid development of conditions of world-wide slump, it is natural for the labour movement to look back to the crisis which wracked pre-war capitalism.

Profitability As unemployment rises, factories, shipyards, mills •and mines close, and the capitalist class moves again to bolster profitability by driving up exploitation in order to attempt to make the working class pay for the crisis of their anarchic capitalist system, so the trade VIJUIN VI MAILAVALAU union and Labour leaders troop out, one by one, to lament the horrors of the 'great depression'.

Even the right wing Labourites can sing this song. So, at Blackpool. Jim Callaghan [who had launched the attack on jobs, wages and services| duly rose, straight faced, to announce in his sternest voice, •This, movement will not tolerate a return to the conditions of the 1930s."

But what these labour movement wiseacres consistently fail to point out-and indeed cannot point out-is that what still has to be abandoned, let alone not returned to, is the politics of the 1930s!

It was precisely the politics of the then trade union and Labour leaders which led to the defeat of the General Strike.

These same politics led to the retreat before . the employers' offensive in the reactionary Monde-Turner talks of 1927.

(left) Bukharin, The same politics led to the splitting of the Labour Party in 1931 when MacDonald put defence of capitalism before the interests of the working class.

And it was these retreats and betrayals that paved the way for the defeats and misery of the 1930s and the Second World HASN IT WLAN War.

How could the present reformist leaders be expected to resolve this political problem when the root of the problem is to build a leadership to combat their political ideas?

Their politics of seeking gradual. reforms within the system refuse to recognise the need to begin at all times from the independent economic and political interests of the working class.

They seek through electoralism and other diversions to avoid mobilising workers to challenge for state power.

• . BORN Such leaders must always find themselves lining up with the ruling bourgeois class against the working class.

In practice the politics of reformism, then and now, are the politics of defeat, flow from and draw their parasitic strength from those defeats.

Socialist Press has, on many occasions, drawn on the lessons from this period for workers in terms of the counter-revolutionary, anti-working class role of reformism.

But equally important to an understanding of this period are the lessons to be learned about the degeneration of the Third [Communist] International under Joseph Stalin and the counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism in the crisis of the 1930s.

This is of particular importance because the 'Comintern? resting on the credentials earned by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution, still presented itself in the 1930s as a revolutionary alternative to reformist social democracy.

But under Stalin's leadership It had become, in reality, a major factor in the preparation of the defeats suffered by the working class on a world-wide scale from the mid-1970s onwards.

"theory' In Germany, in Spain and throughout Europe the working class was to pay bitterly for the counter-revolutionary policies of Stalinism.

It is, therefore, to the nature of the betrayals carried out by the Comintern' that this article will address itself.

The Comintern under Stalin began not from the actual development and requirement of the class struggle on an international scale.

Nor did it start from the struggle to break the isolation of the Soviet Union through the extension of the revolution to advanced capitalist countries.

Rather it began its analysis from Stalin's conception of building "Socialism in one Country"

This nationalist "theory' which is central to Stalinism, was first introduced in 1924. It became official Soviet policy in 1926 as Stalin began his drive to remove oppositionists from the Soviet Communist Party.

Trotsky, the leader of the Left Opposition, was constantly point to the close inter-relation : which existed between • Stalin's internal requirements and policies in Russia and those carried. out by the International.

Opportunist

In 1925-28, for instance, there was a marked rightward turn by the Comintern. It directed the Communist Party in Britain towards an opportunist relationship with Labour and TUC bureaucrats in the Anglo-Russian Committee.

And in China the Communist Party was subordinated to the bourgeois nationalist Kuo Min Tang of Chiang Kai Shek.

In each case the results were disastrous-the effective muzzling of the British CP in the TUC sell-out of the 1926 General Strike, and a wholesale slaughter of Chinese Communists by Chiang in 1926-7.

The whole turn towards opportunist deals was simply an extension of Stalin's domestic policy. Within the Soviet Union he and the new Kremlin bureaucracy had sought to develop an alliance with the rich peasantry (Kulaks) and other conservative forces.

But in 1928 the Kulaks threatened to withhold food supplies and even began to challenge the nationalised economy within the USSR, Stalin was forced into panic measures-brutal forced collectivisation of Kulak land imposed at gunpoint under the slogan "liquidate the Kulaks as a class."

All of a sudden, five-year plans for the crash development of industry were drawn up. This lurch in domestic policy also found its reflection in the international orientation of the CPSU and the Comintern-the ultra-leftist policy of "Third Period" Stalinism.

According to Stalin's new 'theory' post war capitalism had passed through three periods.

The first period had been one of capitalist crisis and revolutionary upsurge, 19171924.

The second period had been one of capitalist stability (19251928): but this had now been succeeded by the "third period" -the period of crises and imminent proletarian revolution.

"Twin' of fascism

As an element of this assessment of the world situation, moreover, the social democrats, who had been uncritically wooed in the period from 192527 were suddenly written out of the workers movement entirely and cast in the role of a twin' to fascism.

Thus, Robin Palme-Dutt, the British CP theoretician could announce:

€23.50 per week (minus travel), no canteen facilities, fines for "misbehaviour' and a wage increase frozen by the government.

These are just some of the "perks' of the so-called 'Youth Opportunities Programmes (YOPS), organised and escalated by this government to cut down unemployment figures.

Aven thie armiment whichered by some unions, is sour. The real reason for the scheme and its escalation is the exploitation of working class youth on the dole, in a situation deliberately created by the Tories-600,000 youth unemployed.

The roots of the YOPs scheme doesn't stop there, though. You may well say, looking at these and many more conditions, that what they need is a union.

Well, let's look back to 1979. The TUC (yes! the TUC!) produced a pamphlet entitled Could you become a steward for the young?' Did this mean that they wanted stewards to go and TELLLULA organise youth against this exploitation?

No, what the TUC were actually doing was asking existing trade union members to supervise the running of the slave labour YOPS factories and schemes.

The TUC still claims to have some say in these schemes, ahe it claims to be against programme being used by unscrupulous sponsors."

Well if the TUC opened its eyes they would find lots of these 'unscrupulous sponsors', not unlike the one in Leicester who fines workers £2-£20 for "This is the lesson of the episode of 'Social Democracy' (correctly, Social Imperialism, and later Social Fascism) in working class. history, an episode which is beginning to draw to its close, as the workers increasingly awaken from reformist illusions, through the experience of fascism."

As Trotsky pointed out continuously at this time, the whole of Stalin's analysis was based on • a completely erroneous understanding of the movement of the class struggle.

As early as 1930 Trotsky was to write in "The Turn of the Communist International and Germany":

«The ninth plenum of the ECCI, the Sixth Congress and particularly the tenth plénum, adopted a course towards an abrupt and direct revolutionary rise (the third period) which was absolutely excluded at the time by the objective situation existing after the great defeats in Britain and China, the weakening of the Communist Parties throughout the world, and particularly under the commercial and industrial boom, which embraced a series of the most important capitalist countries. The tactical turn in the Communist International begun in February 1928 was therefore directly contrary to the actual turn of the historic road."

This of course was because the bureaucracy still attempting to consolidate its political control over the world's first workers' state was itself acting from a standpoint directly contrary to the interests of the Soviet and international working class.

Next week's article will examine how this rendered the Stalinists incapable of offering a lead to the German proletariat in the face of the fascist menace. 'offences' such as looking at supervisors' , or wanton destruction of machinery'.

In the last 1½ years he has cut down his wages bill by more than three-quarters. The problem for the TUC is that the workers (as usual) are way ahead of them.

In Leicester they have organised into the TGWU against the lousy pay and conditions.

In Knowsley they have organised into the local GMWU and are holding a one-day protest strike with wide labour movement support.

The time has come to realise that the YOPS schemes are nothing more than the superexploitation of working class youth.

All of the YOPs schemes have to be unionised and given a lead in fighting the government. It is essential that these isolated sections of workers are brought into the fight to bring down the Tory government.

The unions must fight for and organise:

*Immediate wage increase on all YOPs schemes backdated to November 1980. Protected by a sliding scale of wages in line with prices and inflation.

*An immediate independent trade union enquiry into the dealings of YOPs and a review of wages and conditions.

*That a programme of useful public works such as housing, council work, etc, be initiated, under workers control, and the unemployed employed on them at full union rates.

*That the TUC gives a lead in the immediate defeat of this Tory government, through general strike action.

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Wednesday First Ann histo the f