[Dave Whitfield reviews 'An Eye to India' published…]

Scan page 8

Dave Whitfield reviews 'An Eye to India' published by Penguin, price £1.50 The State of Emer- below the 'subsistence level'. gency declared by Prime Such figures almost defy Minister Indira Gandhi in comprehension.

They regularly invite the June 1975 was imposed response of religious defeatwith its full force for ism, in various forms: the twenty months. long and terrible history of India itself testifies all too During that period the well that the narcotics of Indian people suffered a piety and mysticism can only degree of oppression that deaden such pain, not remove rivalled the worst excesses of its source.

British colonial rule. The Emergency highYet the Emergency was lighted every aspect of the not as liberals claimed a break problems of India: economic from the 'democratic' tradi- crisis, political crisis, social tions of India since 1947, but crisis of every form. merely another, intensitled expression of the prolonged "Crisis crisis of Indian society.

The proportions of that In particular, developcrisis are on a colossal scale: ments during Gandhi's dicta600 million live in a land torship brought sharply into which could be self-sufficient focus the crisis of leadership in food, but where 300 in the working class. million people "survive' on or The central economic problem lies in the contradictions at work in the relation of India's under-developed economy to world imperialism.

As Selbourne makes clear:

'One section of the ruling classes must resist the agrarian revolution which is needed by another for the development of capitalism;.. The other seeks to build, and partially succeeds in building an indigenous capitalism, while itself held in near thraidom (circumscribed by shortages of resources, insufficient investment and its inherited position within the international division of labour). to the world economy, with its disorderly succession of slumps and recoveries, inflation and recession, and its control of both capital and market' Beset by these crushing problems, the Indian economy was then assaulted by the current inte rational crisis of capitalist profitability.

The effect was to produce closures, idle prices spiralling upward at an increasing distance from wages.

The poor peasants became more indebted; the landless labourers continued to starve or were driven into bonded And over all this presided the Congress Party, ruling India for the thirty years from independence. Here the landlords and industrialists were forced together in an uneasy alliance against the workers and peasants.

This bourgeois party gained mass support from its constant barrage of populist rhetoric: endless proclamations of faith not just in democracy, but in socialism for India.

Apparatus

Selbourne firmly places the origins of the dictatorship in the previous history of Congress rule, when the same methods had been employed but on a smaller scale.

He then moves on to show how the Emergency legislation was implemented.

Selbourne documents thoroughly the whole apparatus of repression: strict censorship; forced sterilisation, mass demolition of poor housing, round ups of beggars, torture, detention without trial and all the provisions of the 1971 Maintainance of Internal Security Act.

Behind all this was clearty the objective of Gandhi's ruling faction in Congress Party, to establish a corporate state.

In this bid to preserve India for capitalist exploitation, a frontal attack on workers and peasants took pnonty.

Wages were slashed and strikes banned. The independent trade unions were restricted and outlawed according to the Indian Express 'The workers and the trade unions which aspire to accreditation with the govern. ment are required to accept new and special obligations.

"They are called upon to abjure strikes and agitational methods, to strive for higher production and productivity, and to subordinate their immediate sectional interest for the sake of long range gains for the national economy.' (p.181)

These conditions were acceptable to Congress Party's own stooge unionand to that of the pro-MosCOW • Communist Party of India. Indeed almost any condition was acceptable to these Stalinists, as one of these leaders explained:

"Achutha Menon told me clearly, and then retracted his opinion when I wrote it down in my notebook, (that *there are no significant ideological differences between the CPI and the Congress' DEM investment: low wages, an extremely high rate of exploitation-and every concession from the government. ("Wild conjectures are circulating about nationalisation. we have no such plans", said the Prime Minister. "Our purpose is to increase prodúction." (p.236))

Dominant Multinational corporations grew even more dominant over the economy, controlling 30% of the private corporate sector.

The increase in economic exploitation developed together with the destruction of democratic rights and the whole battery of emergency measures. They existed in a complex inter-relationship that cannot be simply torn apart in analysis.

Complex picture

Selbourne's method of overcoming this problem is essentially to bring together five ways of seeing India: the writer's own observation of specific scenes; statistics of the condition of India; socioeconomic analysis of those statistics; commentary from India of different classes; and a special category, the propaganda of the dictatorship.

These are all set against each other in an elaborate pattern to give a complex picture of emergency India.

Selbourne argues that only such a 'combination of marrantual and ratinnal IrrassModern equipment in Indian steelworks Certainly the result is far more than a sterile collection of incongruous impressions and opinions.

The book is sub-titled The Unmasking of a Tyranny, and its juxtaposition of the cant, bland optimism or grotesque lies of government "information' with the detailed reality they distort, generates a power which-at one level-annihilates the dictatorship's pretensions to 'democracy' and 'socialism'.

But that level is criticism, and as Marx observed long ago, 'Not criticism, but revolution is the driving force of 382342 An Eye to India does not engage its analysis of emergency India with the continuing struggles of the Indian workers and peasants, to produce a programme of action that can develop those struggles to a revolutionary level.

Crucially, Selbourne seems not to see the central importance of building a revolutionary leadership through the fight for that programme -a leadership which can stand as a genuine socialist alternative to those forces which have betrayed the Indian masses in the past, and left them prey to the rightwing Janata coalition that succeeded Gandhi in office.

But the book remains a mine of valuable material-or rather, it provides a supply of material, already extracted but only partly processed.

Scan page 9

POINTER Red my men-did they give up the gains of October without a fight.

Lenin in Red Square in 1918-the SWP theory suggests that the Öctober Revolution was As the Socialist Workers Party's Rank and File conference assembles at the weekend few of the delegates will the International Socialists in the first place-the question of what sort of state is the Soviet Union.

Why on earth should any militant want to defend the Soviet Union? What is left, in that country where Trotskyists were hounded and killed, to defend?

When a Stalinist bureaucracy rules through a police state, when politics has been reduced to the fawning of the party workers sycophants, when democracy has become a cruel joke, is it not time to say There is nothing left of the revolution"?

This is the logic of the SWP's position.

Such questions come naturally. The answers do not.

Incredulous They require an approach which goes beyond gut reaction, "common sense" and other substitutes for Marxist analysis.

Many members of the SWP are incredulous that their organisation should be attacked because it assesses the Soviet Union as "state capitalist". They shake their heads at the thought that the issue is considered of more than academic interest.

Indeed it would be difficult for rank and file SWP members to think otherwise. The state capitalist position is more often stated than argued, and is given a secondary importance to the membership.

Yet the question is not secondary, nor is it academic. It is the issue on which Tony Cliff and his supporters were expelled from the Fourth International in 1951.

Both 'capitalist' Cliff argued in 1951 that since the Soviet Union and China were both "capitalist" states there was nothing to choose between them and US imperialism.

Drawing the conclusion from this, he and his followers refused to support the Stalinist-backed Korean liberation forces against world imperialism when war broke out.

"We can give no support either camp" they declared in Socialist Review.

Meanwhile Trotskyists internationally were braving a huge jingoistic and Cold War witch-hunt in order to oppose the imperialist intervention and support the Korean and Chinese forcés.

But in the late 1960s, with the witch-hunt largely abated and opportunist pickings to be made from student hostility to the Vietnam war. the "International Socialists" switched position-to : give apologetic support to the Vietnamese NLF.

Unconditional defence of the Soviet Union against imperialism remains a touchstone of a correct attitude to international work.

Relations between the Soviet Union and the West are determined-despite the best efforts of the Stalinistsby the fact that the Soviet Union is not capitalist in any sense at all.

Workers' state

The Workers Socialist League holds that the Soviet Drivents workers, sortert, • state-a state where political revolution is a necessity and the building of a Trotskyist party an urgent task.

But it remains nevertheless a state where the property relations overthrown and the old capitalist state machine destroyed in 1917 have never been restored.

Despite Stalin, despite his successors, it remains at its base a workers' state.

This is not a novel position. It was held by Trotsky, who had more reason than anyone to hate the Stalinist bureaucracy, until these same forces murdered him in 1940.

After his exile Trotsky's major task was to assess the role of Stalinism as the greatest counter-revolutionary force in the international workers' movement.

He approached the question as a Marxist, seeking the material forces which threw up Stalin, and the social forces which would overthrow Stalinism.

Conservative

But Trotsky specifically rejected the notion that the Stalinist bureaucracy had taken the place of the capitalist class.

He characterised Stalinism as a conservative force arising within the workers" state because of real material difficulties, determined to limit the pursuance of the revolution and settle for 'socialism in one country' But Tony Cliff and • his followers examine, not historical processes, but the outward and visible form of the state.

They do not like what they see. It clearly not socialism. • Therefore they conclude, knowing only two colours, black and white, it must be capitalism-"the opposite of socialism". • And if the private owners are not around then it must be "state capitalism"

They Jo not answer the obvious question. If the Bolsheviks overthrew the property relations in 1917, when were they restored?

Transformation

It is clear enough to the SWP when the overthrow of capitalism took place in the Soviet Union-October 1917.

The mammoth social upheaval and civil strife that brought about this transformation was the first in history to give the wealth to the propertyless class in society-the proletariat.

Yet according to the SWP the working class allowed these gains fo be taken away again with not so much as a whimper or a moan-and certainly no civil war.

The SWP leaders try to skate around this by claiming that the counter-revolution took place over a period of time; certain people with reactionary ideas moved into leading positions:

"This happened not eradually. but by a succession of qualitative " changes by which the mode of operation of the party was brought into line with the demands of the central bureaucracy. Each of these qualitative changes could only be brought about by direct confrontation with those elements in the Party which, for whatever reason, still adhered to the revolutionary tradition.

(Socialist Worker, 5.11.77)

The whole thing is thus presented as nothing more than a battle of ideas. Yet from this vague evasion, we are presented with the conclusion that:

"By 1928 a new class had taken power in Russia. It did not have to engage in direct military conflict with the workers to gain power because direct workers' power had not existed since 1918."

But many nationalisations did not take place until 1918 either! In other words the October Revolution that the SWP claim to "celebrate" is given a total life of between six and twelve months before "state capitalism" began to set in!

Yet the SWP have to ignore economic reality in the Soviet Union i to uphold their views.

The state still owns the means of production, it controls the flow of foreign trade, it controls the reversed inside a year. exchange rate and does not allow market forces to run unchecked.

The bureaucracy that controls this state, does so through control of the working class politically-not through exploitation .of private property relations.

Impressions

A revolution in Britain which toppled the ruling class from power would still have to expropriate the land and the factories and other means of production.

A political revolution in the Soviet Union would find no need to alter the property relations.

The method of the SWP is to pick on external impressions and examine them isolated from the political and social forces which produced them.

And this inability to see through surface appearances is exactly the method that renders the SWP so impotent in fighting the trade union bureaucracy in Britain.

Outraged by the obvious scabbing and sabotage by union officials at Grunwick, at Desoutters, and in the hotel unionisation strikes this year, the SWP have each time seen the answer not in confronting these officials and mobilising workers within the union against them.

Instead they seek to substitute themselves as an organisation for the union. This is the method underlying the SWP's Rank and File Coordinating Committee, which has yet to lead a single serious struggle to victory anywhere in the country.

The fact that trade unions have been politically usurped by the bureaucracy does not mean that workers' immediate task is to build new unions or alternative bodies.

Nor does the fact that political power has been usurped in the Soviet Union mean that workers need once again -to overthrow capitalist property relations.

In both cases the fight is for a conscious Trotskyist political leadership to overthrow the parasitic bureauc racy and establish genuine workers' democracy.

Trotsky spelled out the link between these problems:

"The trade unions of France, Great Britain, United States and other countries support completely the counter revolutionary politica of their bourgeoisie. Thie does not prevent us from labelling them trade unions, from supporting their progressive steps and from defending them against the bourgeoisie. Why is it impossible to employ the same methods with the counter revolutionary workers' state? In the last analysis a workers state is a trade union which has conquered power.

(In Defence of Marxism/ The SWP distinguishes itselt by its wrong policy both on the unions and on the Soviet Union. This is why the issue of 'State Capitalism' is of importance to every SWP member.

----- pull-quotes -----

recession, and inflation: unemployment, machinery;

be giving a thought to the question which created