Convention No Answer

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of revolutionary parties on the The Editorial Board wants tv encourage readers' letters on programme of the Fourth Inter- any subject. Send them to: 31, Dartmouth Park Hill, NWS 1H?

The results of the election held on May Day for the Northern Ireland 'Convention' herald yet another set-back for the British ruling class in their increasingly desperate efforts to set up a stable method of rule in their six county statelet.

The purpose of the Convention Catholic communities of Northern Ireland. However, since the great• majority of the seats have been won by the most bitter opponents of any such arrangement, the Convention will inevitably be stillborn.

In the long run, however, there is probably greater significance in the eclipse of the more moderate parties of the Protestant middle class. The Faulknerite Unionists, who were thoughtfully provided with a system of Proportional Representation which would reflect as much as possible of their diminishing strength, nevertheless could only muster five seats in the new assembly as against over 50 from the various factions of extreme right wing loyalists.

Behind the inability of the British ruling class to discover a political solution lies a rapid undermining of the economic position of their clients in the Northern Ireland bourgeoisie. They are no longer able to provide those crumbs of privilege to the Protestant working class that establihsed the basis of their position in the past. The traditional populist alliance between the Protestant workers and their employers, held together by the cement of reactionary Orange ideology, has begun to break up.

The roots of these developments lie in the deepening crisis of a British capitalism facing problems of its own far too acute to allow it to continue to provide the protected markets and large subsidies which kept the old statelet in existence. This will inevitably reflect itself in an onslaught on the jobs and conditions of Irish workers both Protestant and Catholic.

One example of this is provided in the recent proposals for the nationalisation of shipbuilding. Thi industry has been the largest employer of labour in the area, and offered some of the best pay and conditions for Protestant workers. However, the nationalisation of the industry under a reformist government will lead inevitably to tha enmo sit hanks in inhe and uit sallt cul vacks 1 jous auu conditions as are being threatened in the steel industry in Britain. What price then the special privileges of the Protestant workers?

In themselves, these problems will not cause the Protestant workers to turn away from their loyalist mis-leaders. They will have to see another road.

The Protestant workers can hardly be blamed for not wanting to lave anytilllig lo uo with we hara anithimn ta da srith tha bourgeois 'Free State' of the South. The immediate problems facing workers there, with rocketing unemployment and restricted welfare benefits, are at least as great Yet there can be no lasting solution to any of these problems without the re-unification of Ireland under the leadership of the working class and small farmers.

This situation has been allowed to develop by a republican movement which has only seen matters in terms of the national question, and a working class movement that attempted to ignore the național question altogether. None of the differend wings of the republican movement are capable of posing the class solutions to the national oppression of the Irish people. For the reformist leaders of the working class on both sides of the border, political strength. it has been simply a matter of finding new ways of entering into alliance with the employers and would like more information about tie their 'sharing power' with the WORKERS SOCIALIST LEAGUE Protestant bourgeoisie. This kind of power sharing is already being OMPLETE THIS FORM AND SEND TO: carried dout by the Irish Labour Party in the South in their 1, Dartmouth Parl: Hill, London NW5 1HR coalition with the reactionary Fianna Gael ministers. Such class Name. collaboration can offer no solution Address to workers.

WITHDRAW TROOPS SOCIALIST PRESS Issues... ..93p tions of workers and small farmers in Ireland must be sought through Issues. £1.86 the building of a revolutionary leadership based on mobilisation on Issues. £3.72 a class basis. The defeat of imperialism and of national capitalism cannot be separated especially in COMPLETE THIS FORM AND SEND TO: Ireland, where history has taught 31, Dartmouth Park Hill, London NW5 1HR many bitter lessons to those who have attempted to do so.

Here in Britain the vital task remains a struggle against the mur- would like.. issues, I enclosef ..subscription der squads of the British army.

We must fight uncompromisingły Name... in the working class movement for the immediate and unconditiona Address withdrawal of the British troops and the self-determination of the Irish people. This campaign must be linked with a struggle against LETTERS the reformist leadership of the working class and for the building national.

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Peaceful Co-existerice in practice: Stalin and Churchill meet in 1945 On May Day 1975, while millions of workers and peasants internationally celebrated the outstanding victory of the Vietnamese liberation forces who after more than 30 years have finally defeated imperialism and expelled the last remnants of US domination, the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Kremlin was subdued.

On the huge May Day procession through Moscow only four banners hailed this great blow at imperialism This is an indication of the extent to which the Stalinists have abandoned even a formal pretence of working class internationalism.

It is not the first time this has happened. Both the Yugoslavian and the Chinese revolutions took place not just against the wishes of the Kremlin bureaucrats, but in spite of their every maneouvre to prop up the crumbling bourgeois regimes and extend them recognition.

HOSTILITY

This hostility to international revolutionary developments is fundamental to the political orientation of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Kremlin, and likewise to the Maoists in Peking, who glorify the name of Stalin and his hostility to Trotskyism. To understand it we have to look back to the years following the Russian Revolution of 1917.

That revolution was brought about under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party headed by Lenin and Trotsky. The decisive point in the development of that Party had been Lenin's split at the beginning of the First World War with the social-democrats of the Second International, as a result of the support given by the partners of that International to their "own" ruling class in the war.

In other words Lenin finally split from social democracy on the question of internationalism, and it was only from this standpoint that the revolutionary slogans of the October Revolution - Bread, Peace, and Land - could be advanced against the capitalist Provisional Government to turn the imperialist war into a civil war and social PRIORITY Lenin's priority following the revolution was the establishment of a new international, a Communist international party of world revolution. This was constituted in 1919. In its call for the Third International was the following passage:

"The International, which subordinates so-called national interests to the interests of the international world revolution, will embody the mutual aid of the proletariat of different countries, for without economic and other mutual aid the proletariat will not be in a position to organise the new society. "[emph added] [March 4th 1919 Platform of the Communist International] This basic principle of internationalism was reinforced by Lenin in July 1920:

"Proletarian Internationalism... ...demands 1. Subordination of the interests of the proletarian struggle in one country to the interests of the struggle on a world scale; 2. That the nation which achieves victory over the bourgeoisie shall display the capacity and readiness to make the greatest national sacrifices in order to overthrow international capitalism". (Theses on the National and Colonial Question: emphasis added] Yet by 1924 singular material conditions and contradictions within the Soviet Union, combined with the blow suffered to the Communist Party's leadership following the sèvere illness and death of Lenin, and in conjunction with the death of many of the best cadres of Bolsheviks who died in the war defending : the Revolution against capitalist intervention, had opened the door (despite the political struggle carried out by Trotsky and a group of supporters) to the establishment in leading political and administrative positions of a bureaucratic stratum hostile to the international revolution.

LEADER

Their political spokesman and leader was Stalin. Their base of support in Soviet society was the more theoretically backward layers of the old Bolsheviks, together (most decisively) with the new forces that had wormed their way into the Communist Party since the Revolution in search of 'safe' positions of power and prestige. Many of them, as Trotsky repeatedly shows in his writings, had opposed the Revolution itself - even fought against the Bolsheviks - but with the Party apparatus firmly under the direction of Stalin as General Secretary, ways were found of admitting them and places of influence secured for them. This escalated following the death of Lenin with the opening of the gates of the party to all comers, in order to isolate and swamp the experienced cadres:

"Workers, clerks, petty officials, flocked through in crowds. I'he political aim of this manoeuvre was to dissolve the revolutionary vanguard in raw human material, without experience, without independence, and yet with the old habit of submitting to the authorities. The scheme was successful. By freeing the bureaucracy from the control of the proletarian vanguard the "Leninist levy"

dealt a death blow to the party of Lenin"

(Revolution Betrayed pp 97-981 Alongside this influx of careerist was an increasing tendency of the bureaucracy to pander to the mass ranks of the peasantry in Russia, at the expense of the necessary planned expansion of the underdeveloped industry in the towns. Thrust forward as the political expression within the workers movement of all these reactionary forces the bureaucracy began to voice their prejudices - fear of large enterprises and planning, chauvinism and national prejudice, underestimation of the strength of the working class, and a corresponding drive to seek artangements and accomodation with the capitalist class internationally.

SETBACKS

They used their positions within the party increasingly to stifle all political opposition. Defeats and setbacks to the working class internationally served only to strengthen the hold of the bureaucracy:

«The international situation was pushing with mighty forces in the same direction. The Soviet bureaucracy became more self-confident, the heavier the blows dealt to the world working class. Between these two facts there was not only a chronological but a causal connection, and one which worked in two directions: The leaders of the bureaucracy promoted the proletariat's defeats; the defeats promoted the rise of the bureaucracy. [Reyolution Betrayea pyul Thus it was that in 1924 (only two years before the British General Strike and the great struggles in China of 1926-7) that Stalin, beginning to assess that capitalism had "stabilised" , started to speak openly not of internationalism but the national construction of "socialism in one country":

"But the overthrow of the power of the bourgeoisie and the establishment of the power of the proletariat in one country does not mean that the complete victory of socialism has been assured. After consolidating its • T ro power and leading the peasantry in its wake the proletariat of the victorious country must build a socialist society."

[Stalin Works, Volume 6, p 110] Then the internationalist priorities of Lenin's conception were thrown aside. Alongside this revisionism, the Stalinists began to develop the linked theory of "peaceful coéxistence" between socialism and imperialism on a world scale - which then opened the way to diplomatic deals and co-operation with imperialist governments as the bureaucrat: ic method of supposedly "defendLenin- Internationalism a priority ing" the gains of the revolution.

These deals, and with them links and unprincipled blocs with counter-revolutionary working class tendencies came more and more to predominate in the minds of the bureaucrats over the international requirements of the working class.

They started instead from the requirements of their own, priveleged stratum "mediating" between the nationalised property relations of the Soviet Union and the international" forces of imperialism. They used the apparatus of Lenin's Communist International to assist them in their bargaining and to transmit their own counter-revolutionary theories into the world workers' movement. Their preoccupation turned from Lenin's willingness to sacrifice national interests for the international revolution towards first abandoning, and then in Germany in 1933 through criminal ultra-left sectarian policies betraying the international revolution in the interests of their own national bureaucratic caste.

NEW PARTY It was from this betrayal, in 1933 that Trotsky took the decision that no longer could he just continue as he had done to attack and expose Stalinism from the standpoint of a faction of the Third International, but that the International was dead for the purposes of revolution, and that it was necessary to prepare for a new, Fourth, International to continue the fight for Marxist internationalism.

Since 1933 however Stalinism has maintained its reactionary nationalist positions, using the influence and prestige it has usurped from the successful Revolution of 1917 in order to mislead and betray some of the most militant and determined struggles of workers, in the interests of "peaceful coexistence" • This statement from the Programme of the CPSU, (1961)

is typical:

"Soviet experience has shown that socialism and peace are inseparable [emphasis in origi nal] ... The Soviet state, which champions peace and implements the Leninist principle [!] of peaceful coexistence of states with different barrier to imperialism," mighty This is comparatively recent and shows that the fundamental nature of Stalinism has remained unchanged, regardless of the death of Stalin i as an individual.

Stalinism is the political outlook of a particular social grouping -the degenerated, bureaucratic leadership of a workers' state - and not at all the whim or peculiarity of any one man.

A common thread thus links the betrayals of Germany 1933 with that of Spain in 1931-1938; with the signing in 1939 of the Stalin-Hitler ('peaceful coexistence') Pact; with the full-scale support given to the so-called "anti-fascist" bourgeois governments in the war against Germany (following Hitler's attempted invasion of Russia in 1941); with the cynical division of the world into "spheres of influence" in the Teheran Yalta and Potsdam Three Power conferences between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill; with the collaboration of Communist Parties in bourgeois coalitions in post-war Europe preserving capitalism from revolutionary working class struggles; with the ruthless crushing of the Greek revolution by imperialist troops while Russia stood back silently;

with the hostility of the Kremlin to Yugoslav and Chinese revolutions; and, to bring us up to date.

with the counter revolutionary policies of the French Communist Party which preserved de Gaulle and French capitalism in May-June 1968, and the reactionary "parliamentary road" pursued by the Chilean Stalinists which gave all the necessary cover to Allende and assisted in physically disarming the working class, while the fascists and the generals prepared to impose crushing dictatorship. That common thread is the out and out counter-revolutionary policies of Stalinism internationally, which stands in dread of revolution, and every one of these betrayals has been opposed by the Trotskyist movement, and alternative revc lutionary policies fought for.

HOLDS BACK

The Stalinists fear revolution because they know that the working class, if it moves into action, can defeat imperialism, the main enemy. But then the nature of the bureaucracy would be exposed. That bureaucracy therefore still holds back the struggle of workers internationally in order to preserve its own base of privilege within the distorted workers' state of the USSR.

Bureaucracy thrives on passivity, backwardness, class collaboration and nationalism. Every one of these is attacked by the mass revolutionary movement of the working class. It is no accident that 1968 brought simultaneously revolutionary struggles in France and the mass movement of the

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"Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, oroanised by the very mechanism of the process of capltalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated." SOCIALIST PRESS, Thursday May 15th, 1975 SM workers demanding democratic rights in Czechoslovakia. There is no doubt that the example of the Vietnamese revolution, while it strengthens every worker and peasant under imperialist rule, will strengthen opposition to the Stalinist bureaucracy also, in the degenerate workers' states.

OVERTHROW

Trotskyists therefore start out not simply from the need to expose and fight the counter revolutionary policies of the Stalinists of the Communist Parties internationally, but also from the need to advance the political revolution of workers in these degenerated workers' states in the overthrow of their bureaucratic leadership.

As Trotsky's Transitional Programme shows this must begir (as shown in Socialist Press on the question of Vietnam after the revolution) with the re-establishment of the organs of workers' power and of workers' parties:

"The bureaucracy replaced the Soviets as class organs with the fiction of universal electoral rights - in the style of Hitler-Goebbels. It is necessary to return to the Soviets not only their free (Marx, Capital Vol 1 time his workforce is paid a wage which is only a part of the value created during their 40 hours of labour in his factory - sufficient only to ensure that the capitalist maintains a labour force. The remainder of the value created (or 'surplus value) forms the basis of the employer's profit. Thus machinery does not make profit for the employer - only workers do.

SPEED-UP

Therefore as labour diminishes as a portion of total capital, increases in its productivity have proportionally less effect in counter acting the falling tendency of the rate of profit. Greater speed up is needed to make any real difference.

In the face of a strong and well organised working class, the capitalist class has, since the end of the last war, been forced to commit itself to a policy of full employment. As rises in productivity have increasingly less effect in maintaining profits a continuous expansion of government spending in the form of loans and subsidies to companies on the verge of bankruptcy has become necessary to prevent slump. Government spending is now 60% of the gross national product, an increasing portion of which comes not from taxes but from credit created out of thin air on the printing presses in the form of paper currency by the state representing no value in terms of real commodities containing labour. This is ised to finance production which from a capitalist point of view is unprofi. table.

However even massive wage increases by themselves are inadequate to defend workers living standards. Healey has announced that if inflation doesn't come down by the autumn - and as we have said, that means through a cut in living standards - then he wil intensify his strategy, begun in the last budget, of "clawing back" wage rises through increases in income tax and VAT. Against these manoeuvres workers must seek to protect their wage increases through taking up the struggle for a sliding scale of wages.

The sliding scale involves an automatic compensation for all increases in the cost of living. What is vital is that it be recognised by workers that only they and not the state can determine the cost of living index for the working class. This necessitates local cost of living committees based on the trade unions and trades councils. Besides monitoring the cost of living such committees would form a basis for beginning a direct struggle against price increases. They would also be a basis for drawing into the fight against inflation whole new layers of the working class. Housewives for example would play a vital part in any such committees.

MIDDLE CLASS Finally, participation in such committees by small shopkeepers would end the sense of powerlessness that this stratum feels against the big monopolies. It would show them that they have everything to gain by following the leadership of the working class, it would destroy the antagonism whict often follows when the lower middle class compare their own weakness in the face of inflation with the

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was to provide the plan for 'power sharing' between the Protestant and