Nonetheless, in this instance, too, if the special measures taken in a situation of civil war - E.M.] are extended until they become an enduring pattern, they in themselves carry the danger of getting out of hand and of the workers' bureaucracy gaining a political monopoly that would be one of the sources of its degeneration. they require, of Leon
It Luxembourg predicted in an impresSive way as early as 1918 the danger of a worsening bureaucratisation consequent on the ending of political pluralism: working become more Without general without public Political life bethe working is convened to assemblies from to time to applaud the speeches and original German Zur Russischen Revolution, Gesammelte Schriften, emphasis). mistaken in not taking democratic rights due to the civil war conditions. She was clearly and 18
She was that the pluralism sions the whole society.
ness question:
which
Will the comrades thusiasm for the adopt the toward them that the
Cubans?'
(The
International, irth p 44).
iculty in replying of in the course participating in workers' inst the upporting it, we ban.
of
Our this democra clearly cy prin ciple, in intary co mmon sense.
But if, after the end of the civi!
orkers' dation of the ban targets opposition inst the dictatorot the proletariat, which are banned
Lorimer's elegant formulation - 'they oppose the government in one way because proposposition, then sure as workaragua. ect for merits But it riticism, aviction seventy tionary than internawould les that kwards exemattitude nen, at the time of the struggle against the Anibal Escalante micro-fraction, Fidel Castro proclaimed that the tion must be a school of unfettered thought, we enthusiastically applauded this correct principled position, promulgated for the first time by a recog nized leader of a workers' state. But when they began in practice, above all under the pressure from the Soviet bureaucracy, to severely limit the public theoretical and political debates, when the books of Trotsky, Rosa Luxembourg, the main Bolshevik leaders, contemporary socialist and Marxist theoreticians who are considered 'non-conformist' in Moscow's and Chinese leaders, began to disappear from the public bookshops in Cuba, we said this was a regression and not progress. This retrograde step damages the interests of the Cuban and international revolution. Do the Australian SWP leaders have a different opinion? Do they think it is so good, maybe a step forward, that their own writings are no longer freely sold in Cuba?
Without freedom of thought, discussion and controntation different opinions, it is much more difficult to work out the correct way forward on any sort of political or theoretical problem. This is not just the verdict of history. It was also Marx and Engels' starting point. Engels wrote to Bebel: "The party needs socialist science and the latter can only develop in liberty'. This declaration found a delayed and melancholy the USSR. The father-figure of Soviet nuclear physics, the great
In August 1936, we know of no social democrat or libertarian who recom struggle to the finish against the proletariat, publish their newspapers in Madrid or International Viewpoint 24 February 1986
scientist Kapitsa, stated in 1967: 'Our youth no longer know how to discuss; it must relearn this art from its grandparents who made the October revolution? Yes indeed. 'Campism' and the present world situation
La growing scepticism of the working class and in practice discounting revolutionary perspectives in the imperialist countries and the bureaucratised workers' states, at least in the foreseeable future, the Australian SWP leadership is led to look for substitutes for the more than 65 per cent of the world proletariat who thus disappear in practice as the subject of the unfolding world revolution. This substitute is the 'socialist camp', all the 'socialist states' as the
Thus the resolution adopted by the 1984 SWP congress uses the formulation 'three sectors of the world revolution', but to the conflict between proletariat and the bourgeoisie on the one hand and that the oppressed nations and imperialism on the other, the resolution adds 'the struggle between the Socialist States and imperialism' (The Struggle for Socialism in the Imperialist Epoch, p 15). Support is found for this formulation in the quotation from Lenin dating from 1920 that we have already mentioned above they forget a small detail: the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet state since then. Ramming home the same vision of the role of the workers' states liberation struggles 'to establish links with the socialist states'. (p 16)
Once again a slight detail is overlooked. If the Soviet bureaucracy demands as the price of these 'links' political capitulation, alignment on the diplomatie needs and economic requirements of the Kremlin, destruction of the political independence of these 'movements' and their leaders, those that consider themselves communist, or indeed eliminating masses, should concessions be made in these links? Were Tito and the Yugoslav CP wrong not to follow Stalin's diktats? Were Mao and the Chinese CP to refuse to follow similar diktats from Khruschev and Brezhnev? 'maintain' "links' at any price? Would not the Czech CP have had to have
International Viewpoint 24 February 1986 done the same thing in 1968?
Jenness, to the Australian SWP in Interconti-
Press, unfortunately suit by attributing to the whole of supposedly following opinion, expressed just after the Cuban revolution, that is, at the 1963 Reunification
Congress.
The gains of the Cuban workers and peasants are alleged to have helped the
Fourth International to understand
"The decisive weight in world politics of the workers' conquest the Cuban revolution would not have been able to survive. This has richly reconfirmed the historic view of
International progressive character of the workers' in the Soviet Union, and China is a far more weighty factor for the world revolution than the obstacles represented by bureaucracies.'
(Intercontinental
September 23, 1985, p 561).
No such position can be found in any document from the Reunification Congress, in any document from a previous or later congress of the
Fourth International or in any United
States SWP official political document in the period of the 1960s and 1970s.
In fact the exact opposite opinion is
We considered at the time, and we continue to think so today, that the counter-revolutionary role of the
Soviet bureaucracy weighs more heavily on world history than positive effects
(undeniable, as we have always accepted) of the survival of the workers' state. It is difficult to challenge this judgement in the light of an overall view of what has happened in the last sixty years.
Stalinist bureaucracy, responsibility for such catastrophes as the following:
the defeat of the 1927 Chinese
Hitler's coming to power in the defeat of the 1936-37
Spanish revolution;
the blocking of the revolutionary upsurge in France;
the historic possibility of setting up a mass labour
United States in the outbreak of the World the heavy defeats of the Red the restoring of the capitalist economy in France
Italy in 1945-48;
the defeat of the Greek revoluthe stabilisation of the regime of the bourgeois Congress party in India;
the absence of a credible socialist perspective for the United States masses;
the bloody defeat of the Indonesian and Chilean revolutions;
the failure of the May 1968 French general strike;
the failure of the 1974-75 Portuguese revolution;
not to mention their responsibility for crushing proletarian mass movements in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland.
Can this negative balance sheet be counterbalanced by the protection accorded to the Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions?
Does it have to be repeated once again that all victories of popular revolutions since the Second World War have been possible because the leaderships of these revolutions -whether originating or not from the Stalinist current - decided to cut loose from the instructions, orders and especially the strategies emanating from Moscow. The July 26 movement was only able to take power because it followed a line diametrically opposed to that of the Cuban PSP. The Kremlin - through the intermediary of the Cuban PSP -wanted to prevent this seizure of
Even in Cuba Stalinism's power. counter-revolutionary influence did for a long time outstrip the positive effects of the existence of the Soviet state on the world arena.
We continue to share the opinion formulated by Trotsky on this balancesheet at the beginning of the Second World War:
'In order to gain the possibility of occupying Poland through a military alliance with Hitler, the Kremlin for a long time deceived and continues to deceive the masses in the USSR and in the whole world, and has thereby brought about the complete disorganisation of the ranks of its own Communist International. The primary political criterion for us is not the transformation of property relations in this or another area, however important these may be in themselves, but rather the change in the consciousness and organisation of the world proletariat, the raising their capacity for defending former conquests and accomplishing new ones. From this one, and the only decisive standpoint, the politics of Moscow, taken as a whole, completely retains its reactionary character and remains the chief obstacle on the road to the world revolution.' (In Defence of Marxism, p 19, Pathfinder edition.)
The 'campist' approach to the world situation, which minimises the counter-revolutionary role of the
19