[predictably unobtainable from the It went the same…]

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predictably unobtainable from the It went the same way as any other outdated pamphlets: all CP offices were circulated and asked to send in all old pamphlets books, because they were "needed for a museum in Russia" . In this way embarassing evidence was destroyed.

One quotation from Pollitt's pamphlet shows why:

"All emigration should be stopped for three years until we are through the crisis. I ask you, does it make sense that we allow 500,000 › our best young people to put their names down lor emigration abroad when at the same time we employ Poles, who ought to back in their own country, and bring to work in Britain displaced persons who ought also to be sent back to their own countries? We want our own workers to have confidence in their own land, to take a pride in building it up"

This example shows that we simply cannot take at face value what the Communist Parties or sections split from the Communist Parties say about themselves today. Nor can we assess simply their policies which are often no more than momentary expedients.

To understand these Stalinist parties and their political role we have to grasp that they are the product of a historical process of development. Differences that emerge today have their roots in the past. ( If we are to understand them scientifically, we must start from real developments - not combing statements by this or that faction for quotes to "prove" our own impressions, or divorcing such statements from the practice of the Stalinists themselves.

Needless to say the Communist Parties have consciously tried to prevent their members doing this. But other left wing tendencies, reacting to impressions, have anconsciouslv fallen into the same position on this as the CPs.

First of all it is essential to establish the roots of Stalinism as a counțer-revolutionary political current in the workers movement.

COMINTERN

The revolutionary overthrow of capitalism in Russia was led on the basis of Lenin's opposition to the treacherous positions taken by leaders of the Second (Social Democratic) International.

These parties (today including the British Labour Party) deciared their position openly at the start of World War I when each party declared in support of their own capitalist class. Thus German, French and British Social Democrats found themselves at war with each other, each claiming that workers in their own countries had some common interest with their "own" capitalist class.

It was parties and groupings that opposed this line, and that were in favour of the defeat of their "own" capitalist class that Lenin and the Bolsheviks brought together in 1919 to form the Third (Communist) International, the 'Comintern' The first four congresses of the Comintern, under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky fought both to break the isolation of the Russian Revolution and to give firm PHOTO: John Sturrock, Report A meeting this June held world revolution and construct revolutionary parties in all countries.

NOT COMPLETED "We are far from having completed even the transitional period from capitalism to socialism. We have never cherished the hope that we could finish it without the aid of the international proletariat. We have never had any illusions on that score.... The final victory of socialism in a single country is of course impossible" • (Lenin, January 1918).

But the revolution did not spread except to Hungary —where it was defeated. This was because no other leadership party comparable to the Bolshevik Party under Lenin had been built.

The clearest example of this leadership crisis was Germany which again and again proved the key to extending the October Chances were missed in 1918 and 1919. But in 1920 and 1921 inexperienced leaders overestimated the situation. The Comintern fought to turn the new Communist Party away from putsches to careful work to break the masses from Social Democracy through the tactics of the United Front.

But no revolution took place in Germany and Russia's isolation continued.

NATIONALISM

This isolation strengthened conservative, nationalist tendencies Russia based on backwardness of the country, the small size of the working class relative to the peasantry, the eyastation wreaked by the civil ar fuelled by imperialism which followed the revolution (described by Trotsky as "surpassing anything seen by history"), and the small size of the Bolshevik Party, which had to stand in the forefront of the civil war and lost many of its best forces, as well as furnishing organisers in both countryside and in the towns.

In these co nditions tendencies to CONMUNETRART