Cp Revolutionary Line Extinguished

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treated in tedious detail to the proceedings of 'fraternal' party congresses....silence!

Pravda only reported Marchais' speech a day late, and when it did so it used a paraphrase version which fudged the relevant passage into unrecognisable blandness. Only the Polish party paper, Trybuna Ludu ventured a sideways comment to the effect that 'while searching out a road that corresponds to French conditions, the French communists propose to take account of fundamental and universal experiences in the building of socialism' And from other Eastern European party chiefs came comments which were strong implicit criticisms of the French leadership. On the same day as Marchais speech Neues Deutschland, the East German party paper, carried an editorial on Marx's use of the letariat', commenting that its dem- notion 'dictatorship of the proocratic character must be underlined, 'since it is one of the favourite gambits of bourgeois argument to oppose democracy to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

And simultaneously the Rumanian Party leader Ceasescu was giving a public speech using the same quotation from Marx and attacking those who espoused a 'socalled pure democracy.

DISMAY

Why has Marchais' move caused such dismay in the party and state apparatuses of Eastern Europe? The explanation is that the same cause may produce, in different situation opposite effects.

The Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy has never held to any principle of struggle for proletarian power. They sacrificed the Spanish workers the colonial liberation struggles brought the collapse of fascism in April 1974, the opening of revolutionary struggles between the basic classes in Portugal itself, and the end of its entire colonial empire.

But imperialism will never yield its place "peacefully' • Whatever "liberal' formulae may from time to time be voiced in Lisbon or Washington. The Portuguese AFM government schemed up till the last moment before Angolan 'independence' to cripple the MPLA, • and refused them recognition of any form.

The field was thus left open for the US to step in. The fact that Washington's puppets have been routed in months rather than decades, results directly from the provision of military aid to the MPLA by the Soviet Union and Cuba.

It shows, in the clearest possible way, that the years of bloody war that the peoples of Indochina had to pass through before they were able to free their countries from imperialism are the responsibility of the Stalinists in Moscow and Peking, who could easily have provided them with military and sutficient for victory, but instead applied continual pressure for a 'settlement'.

The fact that military aid has gone to Angola demonstrates not that Moscow has abandoned its overall strategy of compromise with imperialism, but that the Stalinist chiefs are caught up in a permanent combined revolutionary process which they are far from being able to control. And with the multitude of political and commercial interests reaching out to stake claims in Angola, they are unwilling to risk Angola becoming another Vietnam - a long-running war continually undermining their attempts at compromise on a world scale.

Certainly, Moscow is intent on finding agreement with Washington that Angola is an 'exception' , and that once this dispute is resolved Who romanted once n 1936-39, to the requirements 01 popular front agreements with "progressive' capitalist politicians. This they cemented with the notorious Hitler-Stalin pact. After the war they held back the mass, Stalinist-led resistance movements in France, Italy and Greece from a bid for power, and returned these states to imperialism.

In dropping the demand for class power as a sop to bourgeois opinion and the "national interest', Marchais only recognises explicitly decades of Stalinist treachery. But,_ unlike Marcha: Europe and the Soviet the apparatchiks of eastern bureaucracy have to deal directly with the political revolution against their autocratic rule - already expressed in the workers' uprisings in Berlin in 1953, in Poland and Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and in Poland again in 1970.

For them the "dictatorship of the proletariat' is the political camouflage for their own usurpation of political power, their own bureaucratic dictatorship over the proletariat. It is in the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat that they intend to use tanks and machine guns against the workers of Eastern • Europe in the future, with, they hope, indignant noises but careful 'non-interference' on the part of other states.

Thus the Marxist principle of opposites reveals itself blatant class-collaboration in Paris, and in Moscow as an embarrassed and constipated silence. Class-collaboration in both cases, but seen from Paris on a national stage and from Moscow on an international one.

Yet even the fact that the Soviet bureaucracy is able, through its control of the press, to concea Marchais' speech from their own working class expresses - in a degenerate and reactionary form -for years been bled white by Portuguese imperialism, to which American and Brazilian capitalist interests have more recently added themselves.

The huge resources of oil and minerals were exploited, while the vast majority of people remained poverty-stricken, oppressed, illiterate, eking out a living - the same conditions that have already driven millions in the colonial countries to revolt against imperialism. This is why the military victories of the MPLA (falsely described as 'communist by capitalist politicians) is only the beginning of the revolutionary struggle in southern Africa.

The wealth of Angola can only be harnessed to the needs of its people (and turned to the support of other African liberation struggles) by nationalisation and an overall economic plan to repair the damage of war and satisfy the elementary needs of the people.

But the MPLA has no such policy, and has already said it will not move against the huge Americanowned Gulf oil sources in Cabinda.

The imperialists, for their part, look to continuing the exploitation of Angola under different political conditions.

This is why Laire President Mobutu - who has provided a base for US-backed and mercenary operations across the border - last week reshuffled his cabinet, sacked his foreign affairs minister and moved towards acceptance of the MPLA's offer to 'normalise' relations.

The struggle in Angola confirms, above all, the Marxist perspective of the permanent, combined nature of the world revolution.

The lessons and resources it offers now threaten the racist dictatorship in South Africa, and its rule over the huge territory of South West Africa, the Smith regime in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and Mobutu in Zaire. the fact that their own rule rests on the social gains of the October revolution, in which the dictatorship of the proletariat was established for the first time in history.

And the turn by the French Party has a more than symptomatic importance. As the second largest Communist Party in Western Europe, with a membership of half a million, and more than eighty thousand recruits in the last year, it has now moved towards forming an 'axis' with the right-wing courses of the Italian and Spanish Communist Parties.

COMPROMISE

Needless to say they are not united by any positive principles, but by a common concern to be given a free hand to compromise with their own' capitalist class. But this in itself tends to destroy the Moscow Stalinists' attempts to negotiate with imperialism - over Portugal, Spain and the rest of Europe - from a basis of loyal unanimity on the part of the European Communist Parties.

Spanish CP chief Santiago Carillo has already declared that 'internationalism' is historically outdated. For the French CP Marchais echoed him, saying that the international Communist Also echoing in the CP Congress was the case of Leonid Plioutch, the socialist mathematician incarcerated for years in Soviet 'psychiatric' hospitals - run by the KGB. Plioutch was freed and expelled to France early in January after a campaign, centred in the French Labour movement, which formaily forced Marchais and the CP leadership to request his release.

At a press conference on the eve of the CP Congress Plioutch - who is still recovering from the drugs forcibly administered to him at the Dnipropetrovsk hospital - repeated that he was a communist. He supported the Dubcek 'reform' movement of Czechoslovakia in 1968, stressing that:

The spirit of Dubcek is totally unacceptable to the Soviet bureaucracy. They do not wish to lose the benefits and privileges which they hold. But it seems to me that for the population of the USSR it is the only possible and acceptable way to escape trom the political, social and spiritual impasse they find themselves in!

The CP leadership conveniently 'lost' a letter from Plioutch, appea ing to them to defend other political prisoners in the USSR. And Marchais' report evaded the issue, referring in general and apologetic terms to repressive measures' But such comments in no way indicate that the French Stalinists are moving to detend communist oppositionists in the workers states, only that they respond more and more to the pressures of bourgeois 'public opinion'.