Last Years

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WRITINGS (New Park Vol. Two.

Arailable f Dartmanath And it takes the arrogance of a completely ignorant right winger to announce as if a new fact that these countries have four "unresolved problems" - each of which have been extensively dealt with seriously only in the writings of Trotsky and Trotskyists since the mid-1920s.

Trotsky's views on the kind of democracy which would supercede Parliamentary democracy in Britain are also to be found in Where Is Britain Going?:

'And what would there be of evil - we take the liberty to ask -in a Soviet order, applied to British technique, to British industry, to the cultural habits of the British working class? • First, the royal authority would be abrogated ... Secondly the House of Lords would be abolished .: Thirdly the Lenin present Parliament, of whose shiftiness and impotence even the Daily Herald writes almost every day, worldsbe liquidated. The lant parasitism of the landlords would be annihilated for ever. The basic spheres of industry would pass into the hands of the working class, who constitute the overwhelming majority of the people in Britain.

The mighty apparatus of the Liberal and Conservative newspapers and publishing houses could be utilised for the education of the working class ... The workers would select their own representatives not within the framework of those fraudulent electoral regions into which Britain is broken up today, but by workshops and factories.

The Soviets of Workers' Deputies would renew the governmental apparatus from bottom to top. The privileges of birth and wealth would disappear together with a counterfeit democracy based on deposits in banks. A true labour democracy would follow, which would focus the economic with the political administration of the country."

Trotskyists therefore aim not at bureaucratic dictatorship - but at workers' democracy.

And the Labour Party, as the mass party of the working class, is the natural place to argue for such policies.

RIGHT INFILTRATORS Only the extreme right wing will oppose their right to do so -fearful lest principled forces rally to the cause of removing the HealeyCallaghan leadership and taking up the struggle for socialism.

The splitters, the wreckers, the gangs of mansion and country farm infiltrators are on the right wing of the Party not the left. The Labour Party was not built by them or for them. They are a parasitic growth upon it.

it s the who should be drummed out of the movement.

Leon Trotsky WHERE IS BRITAIN GOING? in ON BRITAIN Publications!

Oona MSL. 31 PAUL STEIN reviews "The Communist Movement: from Comintern to Comin PA STEIN reviews 'The Fe lo Claudin. English This is an important book -detailed, frequently accurate, bitter and iconoclastic, uneasily organising revolutionary facts by means of reforist theories.

The author was for nearly twenty years (1947 to Political Bureau of the Spanish Communist Party.

Fernando Claudin was expelled as part of an opposition tendency early in 1965; his opposition to Stalinism began, however, much earlier - with the events of 1956, when Kruschey's 'Secret Speech' and the uprisings against Stalinist rule in Poland and Hungary opened up the most massive divisions with the official movement throughout the world.

Claudin's book is of importance because it deals with some of the main events which give our own period its basic political shape, and because it attempts an all-sided treatment of them.

The first section offthe book centres on Stalin's dissolution of the Communist International (in June 1943) as a 'peace offering' to his allies in the Second World War.

TWISTS AND TURNS

Claudin tries to show how this was the inevitable outcome of the Communist International having been prostituted to the twists and turns of Stalin's foreign policy for years before this.

The second part of his book goes on - in a more narrative form -to Jeal sit the post mar settlement between Stalin and the allied' imperialist powers, the Cold War and the formation of the comuniorm, the break with Tito, and the rictory of the Chinese Revolution, up to the eve of the new situation opened up by the death of Stalin in 1953.

What mars Claudin's book is the tas: standpoint from "hich be 3F725 ibe the Cominters Communist Movement: frol edition, translated by Brian Penguin, 1975, £4.75.

Communist movement he has moved - in certain respects decisively to the right. He therefore attacks not only the Stalinist policies and methods in which he was politically educated, but at the same time Lenin and the leadership of the Comintern in the early yoars after the Bolshevik revolution.

NEW "CLASS"

Although he nowhere spells out how this came about, his book is written on the assumption that Stalin's Soviet Union became totally new social system" controlled by à 'new ruling class" which:

"became the real beneficiary of the means of production, immune to any intervention or control by the mass of the workers, and gradually acquired the subjective characteristies of a dominant class"

(Epilogue, p.599)

But at the same time when (in the first section of the book) be tries to discover the origins of the political crisis which - in his view - led to the dissolutier of the Comintern in 1943, he ste with a Chapter entitled "The Crisis of Theory.

Its main burden is that the perspectives of international revolutionary developments held by Lenin and the other leaders of the Comintern immediately after 1917 were over-schematic, foreseeing more-or-less similar and simultaneous national revolutions in a large number of countries, which the sections of the Comintern would have to lead.

SUBORDINATION

This conception, which Claudin's view underestimated the resistence of European capitalism and its servants in the social democratic and trade union bureaucracies, opened the door to Stalin's subordination of the Comintern to the interests of Soviet foreign policy. nate the banner of sociatMeredin Hungarian uprising, 1956 clearly what has been established for years - that the 'theory' of 'socialism in one country' had nothing to do with the work of Marx or Lenin, and is a Stalinist invention pure and simple.

Although, therefore, Claudin has a theory of the social degeneration of the Soviet State, this theory informs the body of his book only to a very small extent, and he in fact treats the destruction of the Bolshevik Party and the Comintern as revolutionary organisations in purely political - even 'theoretical' - terms.

Worse, he shows this Stalinist political degeneration, not as the negation of Lenin's Bolshevism, but in some respects as an extension of it.

This is especially to be seen in Chapter 3 ('Monolithicity') where he attacks both democratic centralism as the organisational principle of the Comintern and the famous *21 conditions' in which the Comintern drew a clear line between itself and the old leaders of the Second International parties.

Claudin. desoribes the *21 conditions' as:

"a model of sectarianism and bureaneratic method in the history of the working class movement."

This is an opportunist and facile assessment by Claudin, which ignores the fact that the October Revolution itself was made only on the basis of the most vitriolic opposition to the treachery oi the Second international in the 1914-18 war.

And this assessment accords with Claudin's own class collaboration, today, with the Spanish Social Democratic Party (PSOE), which is busy preparing, hand in glove with the Communist Party leadership, for a new Popular Front in Spain.

Claudin is a living example of the fact that the politics and method of Stalinism can only be fought successfully throne! borough defence Dí Lemmo _ Do these faults, thoset, deprive ment.

And it is within the sta apparatus - and especially in 1 relations with the main imperial powers - that the Soviet burea cracy has gone furthest towar restoring the methods of capita ism.

Therefore Claudin's approach essentially that of looking for tl Taison d'etat' of those who rule ti Soviet Union - combined with wide and sceptical study of ti available materials, cast a good de of light on events.

COVERT CAMPAIGN

This comes out, for exampl when he deals with the bombshe expulsion of Tito's Yugosl Communist. Party from Comintern (June 28th, 1948).

Claudin is able to show not ju how this was the general result the independent role and soci basis of the Yugoslav Communis in the war, but of specific nation pressures from the bureaucraci then developing in the Easte Europe workers' states.

Stalin's covert campaign again Tito within the Yugoslav Party ar state, and then the sudden brea followed by the slandering of Ti as a 'Trotskyist', "fascist' and age of the Western intelhgence servic were all closely connected attempts by other sections of tl Eastern European bureaucracies • loosen their direct political ar economic domination by the Sovi Union.

For instance, in the early part , 1948 the negotiations (under wi since 1944) between Tito al Dimitrov (then leader of t Bulgarian CP) to combine the countries into a Balkan Federatic had reached an advanced stage, a had gained the behind the scen support of Gomulka and the leade ship of the Polish CP.In January 1948 Dimitr publicly spoke of the possibili of a confederation of all t Peoples Democracies, plus Greec He was promptly brought to be by Stalin.

He aimed to create a "buff zone' of states in Eastern Europ each individually tied to ti Stalinist apparatus in the Sovi oration' orchestrated from tl Kremlin.

CIVIL WAR Equally, important, Dimitros proposal (quoted by • Claudin c p. 490) by including Greece struc at the roots of Stalin's post-mi agreement with imperialism.

Greece was to be left i capitalist. Stalin thus refused 1 give any military help at all to t Greek Communists who had bee comparably strong with the Yug slavs during the war and who, : 1948, were still fighting a civil w: in the north against the America: backed government.

Tito's attempts to give some a to the Greeks accelerated the breal Claudin chronicles the politic events accurately and perceptivel: And in general his book is we worth reading *5 politic parative of State in be yes after the wer Europe.

PUNGENT CRITICISM He writes with a correct al pungent scepticism towards tl public motives and statements ‹ Stalinist politicians, This is especi ly so, for example, of the 194 52 purges in Eastern Europe, whe Claudin seems to be trying correct - in retrospect -support for them at the time.

Claudin does not understand ti social, material roots of the burea стасу. Consequently he can treat of its history scientifically.

But he gives an account shich: free of anti-communist pressio and well argued and resee sied o the major phases it ces met The a distie at Panca

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Union, with autarchic econom plans and with any political 'colla