Soviet bureaucracy, disarms the Australian SWP leadership - and all those who adopt a similar analysis - when faced with the ups and downs of the international class struggle. A useful illustration of this is provided by the post-1979 imperialist counter-offensive and especially the development of the revolution and counterrevolution in Central America.
After the defeat it suffered in Vietnam in 1975, American imperialism was temporarily paralysed as a result of domestic political factors (the famous 'Vietnam syndrome') but in no way by military, financial or economic weakness. During this period anti-imperialist mass movements like those of Iran, socialist revolutions like those in and Grenada and the Kremlin's military-bureaucratic operations like the invasion of Afghanistan - more or less independently of each other able to make gains without a serious reaction from Washington.
But as a result of these defeats the American imperialist bourgeoisie tightened its ranks. It overcame the again a dynamic, organised ideological Cambodia and Afghanistan and the political counter-revolution in Poland were a great boost to this campaign. It launched an intense rearmament drive aiming to oppose by force, as before 1975, any new advance of the revolution in the world. But there is no question of its launching a military attack against the USSR. the most it is a case of stepping up the pressure on the Soviet bureaucracy.
idealised "campist view the world on the other hand predicted confrontation' America, between, on the one hand, the 'socialist camp' as a whole and, on the other, American imperialism supporting the central American bourgeoisies and the contras in Nicaragua.
This global confrontation did not not happen. Grenadan revolution has been crushed intervention, facilitated by the Stalinist crimes of the Coard faction. The stepped-up imperialist military interagainst the Salvadoran and Guatemalan revolutions is producing a growing isolation of these revolutions and no perspective of a rapid victory in these countries, although no counter-revolutionary stabilisation is in sight. The Nicaraguan workers' state is in turn defensive, encircled and very much
It is fighting for survival against the Central American counterrevolution as a whole - an enemy armed, financed and more and more directly militarily aided by ton. Enormous combined economic, 20 military and political pressure is being against Cuba to revolution in Central America.
True, the Soviet bureaucracy continues to subsidise and arm the Cuban state. It also arms - to a more limited degree - the Nicaraguan workers' state. We obviously approve of this aid. But this aid stays within very strict bounds. It is limited by the bureaucracy's approach: to contribute the survival of these states without compromising its basic strategy of peaceful coexistence with imperialism. The objective is a new global agree-
Washington. The revolunegotiations for this agree-
This does not imply any criticism of the prudent attitude of the Fidel. ista and Sandinista comrades who are literally fighting for the survival of their states in increasingly difficult
This only confirms that the world-wide struggle against imperialism cannot be victorious on fronts open at this time, which too narrow. we need to have a realistic judgement real role of the which never for one moment - along with its allies from the other 'socialist
-"third sector of the world revolution'. The balance sheet of Stalinism and the historical justification for the Fourth International logic of their increasingly 'campist' positions drags the Australian SWP leaders towards an overall revision of the past counterrevolutionary role of Stalinism. In deny having still publish denunciations of the Moscow trials. They still em-
'reformist' role
Stalinist (and post-Stalinist) mass CPs in the imperialist countries. But this revision is already sharply expres the SWP's secretary, Percy. Speaking at the August 16-18 National Committee, Percy stated the following: (15)
*I think it was wrong to form the Fourth International in the first place, although we're not voting on that. In the end the organisational form cut off Trotsky and the Trotskyists from any other possibility of development of the Communist movement. And some parties, as we know now, for instance the Vietnamese Communist Party, did develop in a revolutionary made revolutions ... If we hadn't had these blinkers about Stalinism, that massive struggle (which the Fourth International did a great deal been enough to make us understand go through that unless there's something good about it.' (Direct Action, August 28, 1985).
hardly believe So, because the Vietnamese CP carried out a revolution, which about it (something which we not only never denied but recognised more than ten years ago when Percy political allies still had an approach to this CP attitude to all the other CPs which, for 95 per cent of them, have not only not made a revolution but have on most occasions contributed actively, if not decisively, to being a revolution tive countries. Sixty years' history of international communist movesixty years of gigantic class struggles, are thus rubbed out with a stroke and reduced to the single case of Vietnam.
This crude reasoning furthermore confirms the sectarian subjectivism of Percy/Lorimer. Why make an exception for the Vietnamese CP? Did not the Yugoslav and Chinese CPs lead revolutions? able to overthrow capitalism in their without there 'something good' about these Dou-Siou, founder and general secretary of the Chinese CP; Maring/ Sneevliet, founder of the Indonesian CP; Pouliopoulos, general secretary of the Greek CP; Van Overstraten, founder and secretary of the Belgian CP; James P. Cannon, member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International for the United States; three out of six members of the of the Italian CP
Comintern out of sectarian blindness, or because they were "blinkered' about
15. Lorimer himself kicked off this process when he stated in his report:
'Moreover, because the Fourth International majority has a false conception of the framework of the world revolutionary process. because they fail to see that the anti-bureaucratic struggle is secondto the overall struggle against world imperialism, their particular view they mare the of "Stalinism' a question of shibboleth a point of honour to distinguish themselves from the mass revolutionary movement that does not exist, a justification for their separate existence from that movement.
16. See in particular their comments on the Paris Accords, which presented the latter as practically a capitulation of the
Vietnamese CP. whereas we had seen them correctly as the precursor of a rapid victory of the revolution. International Viewpoint 24 February 1986