Hate Trotskyism, Hate the Spartacists

-a bulletin series of opponent material

NUMBER 1 Workers Power and the Irish Workers Group Table of contents

Introductory note 3

Material by the Irish Workers Group

Sectarianism and Stalinophilia: The Politics of the Spartaclsts IWG pamphlet (February 1990) 4

The Spartacists: A Poisoned Well IWG pamphlet (1 October 1990) 22

Material by the Spartacist League

Tony Cliff's stepchildren Workers Power: the baggage of State Capitalism Workers Hammer no 100 (September 1988) 32

Soft-core capitalist restorationists Workers Power: right turn on East Germany Workers Hammer no 113 (March/AprU 1990) 34

The Butchenko affair: .anti-SoYietism comes home to roost Workers Power caught with Russian fascists, Thatcher's scabs Workers Hammer no 116 (September 1990) 38

The Workers Power school of "re-elaboration" Turning on the Butchenko spit Workers Hammer no 117 (October 1990) 41 Introductory note

This bulletin, published by the Spartacist LeaguejBrit­ proposals and, following an aborted debate in 1982 which ain and the Dublin Spartacist Youth Group, reprints two they scuttled by insisting on their proprietary "rights" to lengthy polemics against our organisation by the Irish exclude an SL literature table, they went on to harden a Workers Group (IWG), affiliates of the British Workers position of excluding SL supporters from aU of their Power group and its League for a Revolutionary Com­ "public" meetings. In the meantime they sought to carve munist International. In Britain, Workers Power and the out a niche as the most "left-wing" supporters of any and Spartacist League are frequently considered to be the every "mass movement", aU the while remaining carefully leading contenders for the organisation which stands for within the bounds of what is politically acceptable to the authentic Trotskyism. The material contained in this Sta1inophobic Labourite milieu which they inhabited. collection should enable the reader to arrive at a satisfac­ Their refusal to swim against the stream on any account tory answer to this question. led them to support such movements, like Polish Solidar­ This is the first "Hate Trotskyism, Hate the Spar­ no~c, that were counterrevolutionary even in WP's terms. tacists" bulletin to be published by the SLjB and the It is notable that while Workers PowerfIWG have for DSYG. It continues the tradition begun by our comrades years maintained a posture of dismis.o;.ive silence towards in the Spartacist League/US of reproducing hostile our polemics, within the space of eight months they have, polemics against our tendency. under the name of the IWG, produced some 28 pages Since 1975, five of these bulletins have been published attacking our politics. The timing of this considerable by the SL/US: no 1 reprinted a bulletin on the SL by the literary output coincides with the sharp right turn that Internationalist Tendency, a current of the early 1970s Workers PowerfIWG undertook when confronted by the coming out of the American Socialist Workers Party events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. With the which stood somewhat to the left of Ernest Mandel's collapse of the Stalinist bureaucratic castes posing point United Secretariat before decomposing; no 2 reproduced blank the alternatives of capitalist restoration or prole­ a leftist-sounding critique of the SL by a couple of then­ tarian political revolution, the centrists of Workers Power recent ex-members in the process of embracing social could no longer walk on two stilts over the Russian democracy; no 3 contained ex-Workers League leader question. WP's rightward motion came to a head on their Tim Wohlforth's 1973 pamphlet "What is Spartacist?" home terrain with the "Butchenko affair". Our articles on written in the service of Gerry Healy; no 4 made available this, "Workers Power caught with Russian fascists, the farst issue of the Bolshevik Tendency's pUblication Thatcher's scabs" and "Turning on the Butchenko spit", 1917 featuring their article on "The Robertson School of are reprinted in this pamphlet. We have also reprinted a Party Building", and no 5 contained a series of polemics short article from Worlcm Hammer outlining Workers against the SL by the BT-a collection of embittered ex­ Power's political origins (''Workers Power: the baggage of members of ours whose motives in their relentless and State Capitalism") as well as a polemical response on hostile pursuit of the organisation which they quit are East Germany (,'Workers Power: right tum on East Ger­ obscure to say the least. many"). This bulletin begins with an IWG pamphlet entitled Much of the IWG polemics against us has an hysterical "Sectarianism and Sta1inophilia: The Politics of the and frenzied quality and a lot of what they say is simply Spartacists" which was published in February of this year. lies made out of whole cloth. Yet for anyone who wants It is followed by another IWG pamphlet published this to know what our real positions are, for example on the October called "The Spartacists: A Poisoned Well". As question of our opposition to racist immigration policies the introduction to the most recent SL/US "Hate Trot­ or the fagbt against national oppression, we uniquely make skyism" bulletin noted: "we aim to select for attention not available back issues of Worlcen Hammer and indexed the threadbare reformists but rather the more adeptly bound volumes of the SL/US newspaper Worlcm Van­ slithering centrists." guard and Sportocist, our international theoretical and Beginning in the late 1970s, shortly after Workers documentary journal. Our reproductions of the IWG's Power's emergence as an organisation and at a time when material are taken straight from the originals; respon­ by their own admission they had no clear position on the sibility for aU typographical, spelling and punctuation Russian question, we proposed to Workers Power on a errors lies with them. number of occasions public debates with the aim of political clarification. Workers Power rejected these - 16 November 1990

3 Sectarianism and Stalinophilia: The Politics of the Spartacists

["international Spartacist tendency" / "International Communist League"]

CONTENTS page 2 Introduction

The Spartacists and Political Revolution in Eastern Europe page 3 The Bitter Fruits of the Spartacists' Bloc with General Jaruzelski page 4 Berlin 199O-Spartacists Make Peace with Stalinism Once Again

Adapted from "'The Death Agony of the Fourth International and the Tasks of Trotskyists today" page 7 The Origins of the Spartacists. page 9 The Method of the Spartacists-Sectarians to the Core

page 12 The Chauvinism of the Spartacists Paraded in the USA

Abridged from "The Degenerated Revolution. Origins and Nature of the Stalinist States" page 13 The Nature of Stalinism page 14 The Spartacist School of Stalinophilia

page 17 Spartacists oppose workers solidarity against the Beijing Butchers.

£1 students 30p

Published Feb. 1990 by the Irish Workers Gro Irish section of the League for a Revolutionary Communist International

4 INTRODUCTION

is what programme, strategy and tactics are they "IRISH WORKERS GROUP CALLS ON POPE TO EXPEL CHINESE AMBASSADOR" winning these people to? What, beneath the demagogy, are the actual politics of the Spartacists Such was the lying headline of a whole page of when faced with movements of political revolution abuse directed against the Irish Workers Group and against Stalinism in which large the mass of the League for a Revolutionary Communist workers have yet to be won to a consciously socialist International in the paper of the British Spartacist programme. League in November 1989. It is but their most recent "offensive" against the IWG and the LRCI. It Their past record, especially on Poland and illustrates the method by which the Spartacists Afghanistan, guarantees that the Spartacists will deliberately hope to "destroy" all other groups ultimately not take the side of working class revolutionary struggle against Stalinism. claiming to be Trotskyist. Time and again, honest polemic and debate is substituted by smear, Rescuing the Wlfalsified tradition amalgam and deceit. ofRevoiutionary Communism Their method. however, is but an expression of The roots and history of this characteristic of the their politics. For the twenty-five years of the Spartacists were summarised in 1982 by the IWG "international Spartacist tendency" is littered with and Workers Power (Britain) in The Degenerated notorious examples of sectarianism, pro-Stalinism, Revolution-The Origin and Nature of the Stalinist chauvinism and crass bureaucratic methods, all in States. Currently out of print, we present excerpts the name of Trotskyism. The "iSt" is by no means from the book in this pamphlet in relation to the unique in this respect. It is but a dwarf among the Stalinophilia of the Spartacists. other degenerated fragments arising from the breakup of the Trotskyist international-each with But before that, we examine the Spartacists in the its own record of adaptation to national pressures, to context of the degeneration of the fragments of Stalinism or to Social democracy etc. Trotskyism internationally. This is adapted from our book The Death Agony of the Fourth The Spartacists claim that they, as against all International and the Tasks of Trotskyists Today others, are the living continuity of Trotskyism, that (1983) in which we characterised, in 1982, each of the this continuity was maintained on the national degenerate fragments of Trotskyism, including the terrain of the United States and that they are its "international Spartacist tendency". inheritors. In many respects, indeed, their political outlook is defined by USA national-centredness, not That book, by Workers Power and the IWG, was least their contemptuous metropolitan chauvinism a major step in establishing the case for a new towards some oppressed peoples. Trotskyist programme and a new international, in the recognition that no existing "Trotskyist" More important in analysing the S'partacists' organisation had in fact maintained and re-applied brand of politics is to recognize just what they are the Trotsky's programme to the post-war world. living continuity ot1 At heart, their politics is a variant of the adaptation to Stalinism which was The Spartacists jibe at the LRCI for daring to re­ central in the breakup of the Trotskyist elaborate the revolutionary communist programme revolutionary tradition into centrist fragments for the new world period ("Is Trotsky's 1938 pushed and pulled by non-revolutionary forces. The programme not good enough for you?"). Without Spartacists are a living continuity of that centrist facing this task, however, an international tradition. revolutionary tendency can only lead militiants into a cul-de-sac, or worse, into outright treachery to East Gennany: Spartacists Tail the Stalinists the proletariat, whether in Berlin, Warsaw, It is particularly relevant at the moment to Palestine, South Mrica or Chicago. understand the Spartacists from this aspect. The In January of this year the LRCI published The events in Eastern Europe have created new Trotskyist Manifesto. a New Transitional openings for centrists and revolutionaries to Programme for World Socialist Revolution. It is the intervene. While all of the international fruit of 15 years of struggle to overcome centrism tendencies, including the LRCI, struggle to win and to lay the basis for the new revolutionary activists to our programmes in these countries and communist international. It is rooted in the most in the USSR etc., the Spartacists have thorough theoretical work within the Leninist demagogically portrayed themselves as leading Trotskyist tradition. It was hammered out in masses of workers on a revolutionary road in the struggle, in debate and in deepening co-operation German Democratic Republic where they aim to run among groups breaking with the different centrist a few candidates in the forthcoming elections. In fragments of Trotskyism in Austria, Bolivia, fact they have openly espoused peaceful relations Britain, France, Germany, Ireland, Peru and. It is with the Stalinists! a manual or action, therefore, for a truly Whatever the claims they make in their own international tendency which emerged and defined press, whatever the actual numbers they may recruit itself from the start a~ainst all forms of national­ from among those fleeing the sinking ship of the centredness. Read it! Discuss with usl Join us! ruling Stalinist party (SED), the decisive question 5 The Spartacists and Political Revolution in 1989190

Poland, The 18th Brumaire of General Jaruzelski, we argued in 1982, as throughout the period before the Bitter Fruits of the Spartacists' Bloc Jaruzelski coup, that the Solidarnosc leadership was dominated by a tendency to compromise the With General Jaru.zelski workers' opposition to Stalinism, to confine their struggles to piecemeal reforms in Poland; and Trotsky recognised the legitimacy of a strictly secondly by a tendency to outright capitalist delimited united front with the Stalinist Bureucracy restoration. They thus parleyed with the Stalinists against military attack by imperialism. But every and the Church, and held back and sought to day extra that they remained in power undermined demobilise the workers. The Stalinists showed their the post-capitalist basis of society in the degenerated gratitude with a bloody coup and a declaration of workers' state:- war against the Polish workers. Should the 'faction of Butenko' prove to be in alliance with Hitler, then the 'faction of Reiss' Far from planning a reactionary military coup would defend the USSR from military as alleged by Jaruzelski and parrotted by the intervention. inside the country as well as on the Spartacists. Walesa deliberately refused to rally world arena. Any other course would be a mass working class action against J aruzelski's betrayal. Although it is thus impermissible to suppression of Solidarnosc. deny in advance the possibility, in strictly As against the Stalinist dictatorship, we gave defined instances, of a 'united front' with the unconditional support to the mobilisations of the Thermidorian bureaucracy, each day added to workers for their demands for better conditions and its domination helps rot the foundations of the wages, union rights, etc. and we argued, as against socialist elements of economy and increases the the Solidarnosc leadership. for the development of chances for capitalist restoration" (Trotsky, this living movement of struggle into the outright Transitional Programme). political revolution against the regime. The period of political revolutionary struggle The task of revolutionary communists was to which opened in Poland in 1980 saw the Spartacists stand with the Polish workers in their mass quickly form a strategic bloc with the 'thermidorian struggles against economic austerity and for bureaucracy',· the Stalinists. Taking sides with democratic rights against Polish Stalinism, and to Jaruzelski's brutal offensive against the workers' fight to develop those struggles to the revolutionary movement, the Spartacists claimed to be defending destruction of the Stalinist bureaucracy and its the post-capitalist property system in Poland repressive apparatus; fighting at all points to win against imperialist reaction. Eight years later it is the workers to place the planned economy under the plain for all to see that their preferred allies, control of their own workers' councils and Jaruzelski and the Stalinist bureaucracy, have militias-as the only sure basis to defend the post­ preferred to co-operate in the government-led drive capitalist property forms, and the only basis for re­ to hand over Poland to private capitalism lock, stock opening the road to international socialism. and barrel. In the very nature of Stalinism, the last thing Jaruzelski &: Co. were prepared to do was to The Spartacists, by contrast, in terror of rally a mass independent workers' movement from contamination by cross-kissing Catholic workers below to resist capitalist restoration! rushed headlong into the embrace of the Polish Stalinist dictatorship. Not only have they the blood All the mass movements which have arisen in of the anti-Stalinist proletariat on their hands but 1989-90 against Stalinist rule, from China to events have now demonstrated that siding with Romania, have been politically confused, Jaruzelski did nothing to defend post-capitalist suspicious of slogans for socialist alternatives, and property in Poland or to win workers to a Trotskyist subject to leaderships with programmes alien to the alternative. historic interests of the working class-and understandably so, given the oppression, inequality Instead of the Solidarnosc leadership being and misery they had suffered for generations at the driven into crisis by developing the mass hands of regimes claiming to be socialist, claiming movement against Stalinism, the renewed to offer them the benefits of "planned economy". repression of the masses and the wheeling and dealing of the Stalinists with Walesa and the Those movements thus had no clear objective imperialists, resulted in huge political gains for beyond the destruction of the Stalinist dictatorship. precisely the most pro-capitalist elements· in The fact that social counter-revolutionaries were Solidarnosc, and the most dramatic drive involved did not absolve revolutionaries from imaginable to restore capitalism. supporting and participating in mass action by workers to completely oust the Stalinist rulers and As we argued in Class Struggle in October '89 break up their military and bureaucratic apparatus (Whither Poland?) the Solidarnosc which stood in of political rule. the 1989 elections was a self-selected clique from among committees of Catholic intellectuals, priests This was especially the case with the mass and the new growing capitalist class. Walesa & Co. Solidarnosc movement in Poland. In our Theses on had resolutely obstructed any attempt to call a

8 congress of the Solidarnosc "union". Its and Walesa to escape from the class pressure of the membership had been slashed to a fifth of its 1981 workers. level. At all times the IWG and our international The role of Walesa's leadership and the tendency have proudly stood for a consistently repression of the mass of workers-against which Trotskyist programme and strategy and for the he had refused to mobilize direct workers' action­ tactics which alone could have related it to the actual had enabled him to separate himself from any living reality of the Polish political revolutionary pressure of the mass of workers and thus to upheaval. It is nothing but a smear and a lie for the constitute a consciously bourgeois government. So Spartacists, as they do repeatedly, to accuse us of much for the Spartacists' support for Jaruzelski's political capitulation to Walesa and even to the coup to supposedly defend the Polish workers' state ultra-right KPN in Poland. It is not our programme from reactionary capitalist restorationists! Far comrades, but your common strategy with from opening up conditions "for the crystallisation Stalinism which, by crushing the mobilisation of of a Leninist Trotskyist party" (Workers Vanguard the Polish workers, opened the door to a pro­ 295), it created the conditions for both the Stalinists capitalist government in Poland.

EASr BERLIN 1990 The Spartacists Make Their Peace with Stalinism Once Again

And did the Spartacist speakers at the rally warn From the outbreak of the political-revolutionary against the strengthening of the security apparatus? crisis in the GDR we find the Spartacists proclaiming-For political reuolution in East Did they argue there or in any of their literature that the workers must organise to ouerthrow and Germany! and Workers Souiets must rule in all completely break up the armed Stalinist apparatus Germany! We look in vain, however, to find any which prevents the workers from exercising actual spelling out of these slogans, in terms of reuolutionary tasks, for the working class of political power? No! The Stasi are criticised, rather, Berlin/GDR where the Spartacists are as a parasitic economic burden on society, concentrating their work internationally. However outweighing the "minor privileges" of the bureaucracy!! Those who raided the Stasi are many hundred thousand leaflets they may merely tools of the extreme right! dispense, however many votes their token That same day the fascist Republikaner party, candidates may get in the elections, the decisive meeting near Munich, declared itself the question is what are they actually arguing to the spearhead of "reunification now" while militants of the class. uituperating against Communists, Jewish Eager to proclaim themselves around the leaders and foreign workers. world-deceitfully-as the representatives of The next day, a mob inuaded the headquarters of Trotskyism in the GDR, their press reprints copious the former State Security (Stasi) in East Berlin. leaflets, speeches and statements reflecting their The right wing is seeking to exploit widespread activity in Berlin. Much of it has centred on an hatred of the Stasi, whose brutal methods MEast Berlin Protest Against Fascist Desecration of escalated in the last years of HOllecker's rule. Soviet War Memorial" at which, they assert, Thi.<; extended to the factories, where there were "250,000 Say: No Nazis in East Germany". many who drew a second pay-check euery month The Spartacists claim credit for the for spying 011 their fellow workers. The demonstration by over 200,000 workers in Berlin. gouernment reported to the Round Table meeting The cold print of Workers Vanguard reports, with opposition parties on January 15th that the rather, that they first wrote to the Soviet military Stasi had employed 85,000 people and more than commander in Germany expressing shock on 100,000 collaborators. and consumed 3.6 billion behalf of "broad layers of the populace" at the marks, 1.5 percent of the entire state budget. The defacing of a Soviet war memorial by fascists. They dead weight of the secret police needed to defend issued a call for a demonstration at the monument bureaucratic rule is a far greater burden on the and "brought this call directly to the SED economy than the comparatiuely minor leadership"-the party of the ruling Stalinist priuileges enjoyed by the upper layer of bureaucracy. The SED did indeed call such a bureaucrats. (WV 494. p.5) demonstration, having it announced on radio. As These "minor" privilegesof the bureaucracy are the Spartacists admit sufficiently valuable to be the material basis for "Of course the SED gouernment of the DDR has maintaining the counter-revolutionary rule of this used the neo-Nazi menace as an argument for huge social caste, undermining the whole post­ reorganizing and strengthening the state capitalist system. oppressing the working class and security apparatus" blocking the road to socialism in Germany and Indeed! This throws considerable light on the internationally! The significance of the Stasi is not Stalinists' enthusiasm to rally such a large crowd. how much they cost but that they protect the bureaucracy and must be completely smashed! The 7 Spartacists claim that the SED's monopoly of power capitalism as the only guarantee against the has been broken. The truth is that the state power of resurgence of pro-imperialist bourgeoisies within the ruling counter-revolutionary bureaucracy his zone! What the Spartacists are now preaching to remains intact! the Stalinists of the East German SED is an In all of their reports of speeches, statements and unmitigated Stalinist interpretation of the role of the leaflets, the political revolution never amounts to Kremlin in Germany in 1945-50! anything more than a perspective of reform. The Indeed, even the present wave of mass protest need for workers' councils is presented not as a against Stalinist rule in the GDR, we are told is due weapon of revolutionary struggle against the to the benevolence of the Kremlin. The Spartacist apparatus but one-sidedly as a form of economic speaker at the war memorial rally is reported by control and as future organs of workers' democratic WV as follows- rule. A Spartakist-Gruppen address to their own "Comrades, as you know. the SED's monopoly of public meeting makes this abundantly c1ear- power has been broken. The masses are free to Decision-making must rest with those who speak their minds. Learn to listen to them. It is produce value. only through the benevolent pressure of the Soviet That is why we say: Organize. create for Army that thi., has been made po.,sible" (Special yourselves organs of political power. Nothing Supplement, p.8) other than this lies behind our slogan for workers The truth is rather that Gorbachev had decided and .~oldiers councils to power. A first key task of that the post-capitalist system in Germany could be these councils is the demand to open the books. sacrificed to imperialism in the interests of detente. That means that the present economic situation It was for this reactionary strategy, and not out of of the enterprises must be revealed to the working benevolence, that Gorbachev, with his armed forces people. Put an end to the secret negotiations in the GDR, was able to threaten Honecker and behind the backs of the workers. Read our "Open prevent him gunning down the mass letter" and you will think of other questions ... demonstrations of the workers in November 1989! ... the course of the present government is dangerous and undermines the foundations of The powerful bourgeoi~ ·.vorkers party in the the workers' state. (WV 494 p.8) other Germany (SPD) is rapidly becoming a major force in the East in the approaching elections. The No hint here that the present government is that Spartacists make no secret of their clear preference of a counter-revolutionary caste maintaining a for the Stalinist SED over the SPD/SDP. Their mass dictatorship by armed force against the working leaflet for the war memorial demo argued- class! The programme of political revolution of Resurgent fascism is still an extremist fringe Trotsky is thus fudged into a reform programme phenomenon. It would again threaten all while the emphasis of propaganda, like that of the mankind as soon as the first crises in a SED itself, appeals to the German tradition of the reunified GrOl~deutschland appear. Today, revolutionaries Luxemburg and Liebknecht. however, the SPD I SDP is the chief instrument to Repeatedly we find references to the Stalinist bring about such a Greater Germany. Throttling system as "a bus i v e" rather than coun ter­ the hydra-headed fascist monster now is to blunt revolutionary or in any way fundamentally this Social Democratic penetration. (WV special opposed to the interests of the working class. Indeed, supplement) the Stalinist bureaucratic overthrow of capitalism The same supplement claims- in East Germany is presented as a wholly And at the DDR's Round Table conference the progressive act - East German SDP demanded the SED disavow "Despite Stalinist dogma and despite Stalin's the TLD I sa [Spartacist/ call which termed the beheading of the Red Army, the Soviet working social democrats "the Trojan horse of counter­ people smashed Hitlerite fascism. It was they, revolution ". comrades, who "exported" the revolution to the For Trotskyists, however, there can be no Elbe-on the bayonets of the Red Army, founded preference between Stalinism and Social by Leon Trotsky." (Reply to Neues Deutschland Democracy. Both are counter-revolutionary parties 12 Stalinists, inWV, Special Supplement, Jan and programmes in the working class. 1990) It was not proletarian revolution by Stalinist Spartacists Declare Peace With Stalinism bureaucracy and the crushing of the workers which Nothing could more clearly express the was exported on Stalinists bayonets! By the early treachery of the Spartacists to the Trotskyist 1930s, the Soviet Armed Forces had long ceased to be programme of political revolution than their in any sense the Red Army Trotsky created! Its crawling letter "to Commander of Soviet Forces in mission in Germany in 1945, after the smashing of Germany". Here we see them publicly disown the the Nazis, was a thoroughly counter-revolutionary need for revolutionary violence against the one. Stalin's global strategy was one of reactionary Stalinist bureaucracy- detente with imperialism. He enthusiastically co­ "We warn that those who call for violence are operated in putting down workers' revolution doing the work of the imperialists. who at all everywhere. He handed back Finland and Austria cost.'l want to undermine the peaceful to imperialism while keeping capitalism intact in development of the political revolution unfolding the countries of Eastern Europe. When he could not in the DDR." (Letter to Cvmmander of Soviet get imperialist co-operation in neutralising this Forces in Germany, Workers' Vanguard. 26 Jan buffer zone he moved to fully crush all independent 1990. p.i) organisations of the workers and expropriated 8 THE IWGILRCI DEFENDS THE TROTSKYIST Trotsky on Defending the USSR PROGRAMME OF POLITICAL REVOLUTION! To conclude on the Spartacists' subordination of the political revolution to the Stalinist "defence" of the workers' states, we quote Trotsky's letter to Max The propaganda of the LRCI in the GDR stands in Shactman. clear revolutionary contrast to the crystallised "You seem to (orget the so-called "thesis 'on confusion and centrist fudge of the Spartacists' Clemenceau" which signified that in the brand of "Trotskyism". A leaflet distributed on a interests of the genuine defence of the USSR the Berlin demonstration against capitalist restoration proletarian vanguard can be obliged to is reprinted in Class Struggle (Feb. 1990). It eliminate the Stalin government and replace it contains the following unambiguous statement- with its own. This was proclaimed in 1927. Five years later we explained to the workers that this Smash the Stalinist Dictatorship change of government can be effectuated only by political revolution. Thus we separated The old gang have been forced out of office but fundamentally our defence of the USSR as a much of their machine is still there. The power 0 workerll' date from the bureaucracy's defence of working class mobilisation has demobilised the the USSR. ... Stasi. Good! But the working class has not yet At the end of your speech you quote Trotsky's imposed its own law and its own order on society_ formula concerning the necessity of When capitalists and Stalinists both talk of the subordinating the defence of the nationalised need for "stability" they mean preserving and re­ property in the USSR to the interests of the world grouping the forces of repression that they both revolution and you continue: "' ... the term implies hope to use in the future against the working either that there is a conflict between the two or the class. possibility of such a conflict". ... Consistent revolutionaries will never forget that Tacitly you infer that the Kremlin'lI (not our) the state is "essentially special bodies of armed policy of defence can come into conflict with the men" as Engels said and Deng Xiaoping proved interests of the world revolution. Of course! At once again in Tiananmen Square. The every step! In every respect! (Trotsky, In Stalinists' "armed bodies of men" must be Defence of Marxism, p.39-40) completely disbanded and broken up by the workers' organisations. Break down their discipline, for soldiers' committees in all barracks and soldiers' councils in all regiments and divisions, for the election of officers, the ending of privilege and for maximum wages to be based on those of a skilled worker. For a workers' militia of rank and file men and women to defend the factories, the working class organisations and meetings. Hunt down the Stalinist parasites and spies, keep out the capitalist speculators, disband the repressive apparatus, impose working class control 0 production and distribution!"

• The Origins of the Spartacists in the degenerating fragments of Trotsky's Fourth International. Adapted from The Death Agony of the Fourth International and the Tasks of Trotskyists Today. IWGIWorkers Power, 1984

Ten years after the first Congress of Trotsky's crisis of Stalinism. They re-cast Tito's partisan Fourth International, the revolutionary war in retrospect as a "proletarian revoluti(\n" communists who had survived the War were which had supposedly created a relatively healthy, if somewhat deformed, workers' state. Tito's isolated and defeated. The Transitional Programme of 1938 had contained a perspective of parasitic bureaucracy was no longer counter­ revolutionary upheavals, mortal crisis for the revolutionary but Leninist! The implications were Stalinist bureaucracy and for capitalist economy far-reaching and permeated the whole politics of the alike. Events took a very different course. FI. The error in those perspectives was of a ki.nd This position was formally ratified by the FI faced previously by Marx, Engels and Lenin, an and all its major sections and leading figures at the 1951 Third World Congress. There was no error which telescoped the timetable for the revolutionary opposition to Pablo's position that-­ exhaustion of capitalism, but one inseparable also from a necessary revolutionary optimism. A In Yugoslavia, the first country where the similar error of perspective was addressed in 1921 proletariat took power since the degeneration of by Trotsky in the Communist Intemational- the USSR. Stalinism no longer exists today as an When we spoke of the revolution resulting from effective factor in the workers' movement ... the world war, it meant that we were and are This fundamentally negated Trotsky's striving to utilise the consequences of the world understanding of Stalinism-that it is a counter­ war in order to speed the revolution in every way revolutionary force; that under all conditions the possible. Stalinists will obstruct the working class from Trotsky devoted a major part of his energies in taking political power directly into its own hands the 1930s to re-elaborating the communist for its own class interests. Trotsky's analysis of programme to address the changed world reality. Stalinism, as contradictory but overall counter­ Had he lived till 1948 he would have undertaken that revolutionary even when it breaks up along task anew. But the isolated and defeated leaders of national social-patriotic lines, was junked. the Fourth international could not face the fact that The subsequent political degeneration of the FI, they were passing from an aborted revolutionary growing opportunism towards reformism, period (1944/45), to a counter-revolutionary period nationalism etc. led to a split in 1953 into the led by "democratic" imperialism. They sought to International Secretariat and the International justify still the "orthodox" perspectives of the 1938 Committee. Neither section embodied a programme. Unable to apply the programme in a revolutionary opposition to the political scientific way on this basis to the new events, the degeneration. leadership of Pablo and Mandel began to transform The US section, the Socialist Worker' Party Trotsky's tactics, stratgey and programme in a (SWP), despite later attacking "Pabloism", piecemeal and empirical fashion-while nevertheless accepted all of the tenets of Pablo's proclaiming fidelity to the document of 1938! Blind positions. The SWP turned against him only as a optimism, dogmatism and adaptation to non- result of his "interference" in the United States revolutionary forces increasingly dominated. section itself. The second Congress of the FI in 1948 did not yet In 1951 the Third World Congress of the sanctify these errors in its formal resolutions. But International explicitly adopted wrong positions on as its world view became increasingly at variance Stalinism, on Yugoslavia, and in its general with reality, the orthodoxy of the FI became more perspectives of an impending global "civil war". fragile. All that was needed to destroy the trappings This marked a complete programmatic collapse of of fidelity to Trotsky's method was a sharp twist in the Fourth International as a revolutionary world even ts. leadership. That no section voted against the That twist in events came almost immediately. Yugoslav resolution, the cornerstone of all the In the summer of 1948 the Tito-Stalin split was made errors, is a faet of enormous significance. The FI as public. The Yugoslav Communist Party (YCP) was a whule had collapsed into centrism -adaptation to outcast by Stalin, denounced variously as non-proletarian-revolutionary forces. From this "Trotskyist" or "Fascist". Tragically the FI saw point on, the task facing Trotskyists was to create a these events as a new confirmation of their former Leninist-Trotskyist international on the basis of a perspectives. They saw Yu~oslayia as the predicted re-elaborated pro~ramme of revolutionary 10 communism. Manoeuvres to replace the leadership Spartacist grouping saw itself initially as the were entirely insufficient. The programmatic basis defender of IC orthodoxy inside the American SWP. had to be changed. It was not done then nor The group centred on a number of youth around attempted by any international tendency during 40 Tim Wohlforth (later to abandon them) and James subsequent years of fragments and splinters. Robertson. While it recoiled in horror from the Disorientation after the war had led to a SWP's liquidationist positions on Cuba, it could not programmatic collapse of the Fourth International. provide a coherent scientific alternative After the Third (Communist International) had explanation of the Cuban events. Robertson and the collapsed programmatically the International Left Spartacists insisted, in an idealist fashion, that the Opposition continued fighting to reform it because it Cuban workers' state had been ushered in by a contained within it a mass movement. After the FI's "petit-bourgeois government" (the Castroites) who, programmatic collapse, and the failure of an from 1959-60 presided over a state whose class Opposition to materialise, the FI was left without a character was indeterminate. Such a standpoint in programme and had never contained a mass Cuba would have left Trotskyists without an n vanguard within it. The FI, unlike the Communist operative programme for soviets and a workers' " International, was its programme in an essential militia to contest the rule of the Castroites and of ,, sense. That is why we say that after 1951, whatever capitalism in this period. s the tactics that may have been employed to win over The Spartacist grouping itself was soon to split, '- sections of the disintegrating international, under attack from the SWP leadership. Robertson e authentic Trotskyists had to elaborate a new e decided to characterise the SWP as no longer programme and build the international anew. revolutionary but centrist, resulting in a rupture The principal tendencies that emerged from the internally. Internationally, this led to a break with I 1953 split failed either then or subsequently to raise Gerry Healy's British section of the International e themselves out of centrism. Neither the Committee. Healy had been using the Spartacists as :> International Committee nor the International a means of pressurising the American SWP Secretariat, nor any of the tendencies claiming leadership from going over to the rival e continuity with them, have proved capable of "International Secretariat" of Ernest Mandel. f regenerating a democratic-centralist international Robertson was correct to identify the SWP's t based upon a transitional programme re-elaborated politics as centrist, though they were over ten years to encompass the new circumstances and tasks of late in their dating of this political degeneration to the period since 1944. 1958. The SWP's position on Cuba was entirely of a Certain groupings today claim that the piece with the capitulation to Tito of 1948! International Committee "tradition" represents the However formally correct their position on the revolutionary continuity of Trotskyism. This so­ SWP, Robertson's group was wrong in its position called "IC tradition", however, is a myth. MThe f on the "International Committee". Becoming the Death Agony of the Fourth International" gives a Spartacist League in 1964, Robertson saw their place detailed account of its record. as being within the "orthodox" and increasingly Among the groups defending the "IC tradition" sectarian IC, dominated by Gerry Healy's Socialist is the Spartacist League whose "international Labour League in Britain (to become the WRP in Spartacist tendency" in 1989 restyled itself the 1973). Thus it failed to develop, not only on Cuba, but "International Communist League". How did the also on the question of the IC itself, a rounded Spartacist League emerge within the International programmatic alternative to the the degenerate Committee current? fragments of Trotskyism. From American SWP to Robertson's Its call for the "rebirth" of the Fourth Spartacists International" was founded upon acceptance of the political method of Gerry Healy's organisation in In 1963 the question of the Cuban revolution cau:;ed a Britain and Pierre Lambert's in France as good major realignment among IS and IC groups. The coin. The Spartacists were not uncritical of these Socialist Workers Party in the US crossed over organisations but their criticisms were premised on from the IC to the IS current. They shared with the IS the belief that as sections of the IC they were the liquidationist view that Cuba was a relatively qualitatively superior to the International healthy workers' state, that Castro & Co. were really Secretariat tradition. Thus Robertson told the IC unconscious Trotskyists etc. The major conference in April 1966: organisations in the "IC tradition"-under Gerry We are present at this conferellce on the basis of Healy in Britain and Pierre Lambert in France­ our fundamelltal agreement with the had no alternative method of analysis. Rather than International Resolution of the IC; moreover, the accept the conclusions of the International report of Comrade Slaughter was (or us solidly Secretariat bloc (the United Secretariat of the FI, commullist, unified throughout by revolutionary USFI ever since), they simply denied that determination. (Marxist Bulletin 9, p.5) capitalism had been abolished in Cuba! This sycophancy to Gerry Healy's chief After 1963 the major fragments underwent intellectual hack availed them little. The repeated splintering. One of the earliest splinters conference ended with Gerry Healy expelling the from the "International Committee" was the Spnrtacist League from the IC, in essence because of Spartacists. Originating in the SWP(USA) as the the polite criticisms of the IC raised by Robertson. Revolutionary Tendency (RT) in 1961, the The failure to go beyond a negative response to the "Pabloism" of the International/United 11 Secretariat on Cuba, and their loyalty to the bad method, marked henceforth by a rabid and International Committee, prevented the Spartacists increasingly right-wing sectarianism. from developing towards revolutionary communism. Their errors became codified into a

The Method of the Spartacists --Sectarians to the Core

The Spartacist conception of a "fighting propaganda Spartacists' notion of a fighting propaganda group group" is passive and propagandist in nature and is a thoroughly abstentionist one. The fighting is therefore sectarian. Their method is succinctly only with left groups, not with the class enemy and expressed: its agents in the mass organisations of the working We recognise that a currently embryonic party class, and the propaganda does not concretely relate organisation must necessarily constitute itself to the key struggles of the proletariat. in the form of a 'fighting propaganda group' in The "fighting propaganda group" is not, for the order by destroying ostensibly revolutionary Spartacists, a vehicle for progammatic re­ organisations, [i.e. rival Trotskyist groups J to elaboration (they do not count this among their initiate and / or drive forward a regroupment tasks), a vehicle for carrying focussed propaganda process in order thereby to build up one's own into the working class (they de-prioritise such organisation. propaganda) or a painful but necessary step which Combined with its demolition-squad approach to communists strive to outgrow (they revel in rival tendencies is a chronically minimal remaining a propaganda group). The Spartacist involvement in the class struggle or the conception of a fighting propaganda group is not organisations of the labour movement. The fig-leaf ours. Ours is rooted in the methods of Lenin and of a little "exemplary" work is maintained but even Trotsky. Their conception is alien to the communist here it is stressed that this is not real leadership of tradition. real struggles: The content of the Spartacists' propaganda is In doing so the character of this work must frequently abuse. Where they do have distinct always be regarded as exemplary, rejecting out positions the Spartacists show a complete lack of of hand any voluntaristic notion of intervening understanding of the basic tenets of the Marxist as a propaganda group into all the daily programme. struggles of the working class inasmuch as this The Spartacists have developed scandalously would lead to dissipating one'.'! own forces and to right-wing positions on the national question in liquidating the programme. (Quoted in J.Lister, backward countries. They reject Lenin's' theory of Spartacist Truth Kit, 1982,p.12) imperialism (tactily) and its understanding of There are two distortions of the concept of a oppressed and oppressor nations. In its place they "fighting propaganda group" here. First, the have put concepts such as states consisting of fighting propaganda group is portrayed as a stage "interpenetrated peoples". The national rights of all during which the main task is to "destroy" other "interpenetrated peoples" weigh equally for the groups. Note the choice of words. The Spartacists Spartacists. seek not to win leftward moving centrist groups to communism, but to destroy them as obstacles. This Northern Ireland perspective leads characteristically to politically Thus m Northern Ireland the Protestant disloyal manoeuvres and provocations. In place of community are "interpenetrated with the political debate, political combat and the destruction Catholics". Their "national" rights have to be of opponents' political arguments, Spartacist groups carefully protected as a priority equal with fighting have engaged in a vicious circle of disruptions, imperialist oppression! This position ignores the physical confrontations, occupations of meeting fact that one section of these "interpenetrated rooms and pickets of other tendencies' events. The peoples"-the Catholics-have been imprisoned in a international Spartacist tendency consequently pro-imperialist, artificially imposed statelet. They developed from a sect into a cult. are subjected to pro-imperialist rule with the Integrally linked to this mission to "destroy" all complicity ofthe other people-the Protestants. other tendencies is their adamant refusal to get The national rights of the whole of the Irish involved in what they consider to be "minor" people have been subverted by the creation of the struggles of the working class. Their tasks are Northern statelet. Those fighting to smash that conceived of in rigid stages; first destroy the left state-the Republicans--

[n spring of 1977 a far-left group in New York, the and who publicly refers to the Albanian peasants Seague for a Revolutionary Party (LRP) published a as "goatfuckers"? Who complains of the poor 'eport in Socialist Voice of a public address by showing made by an SL candidate to student office Tames Robertson, founder and leader of the even though "we ran a very pretty girl"? Who 5partacists, and condemned it for its vulgar claims to be a champion of the exploited and :hauvinism as a stain on the name of Trotskyism. oppressed and yet characterizes the gastarbeiters rhe Spartacist League responded to the LRP on Sep. ("guest workers") from southern Europe as l6 in Workers Vanguard with the contemptuous incapable of anything except "screaming for the laiting- popular front"? Who claims that Jewish If you believe what you read about the Spartacist merchants in the black ghettos charge higher .eague in Socialist Voice, you')) love the Protocols prices because they are "being ripped off by all the " the Elders of Zion". (This refers to an ultra­ black kids"? '~nd what can one say of the SL eactionary anti-semitic tract produced by the membership who did not sit through this shameless performance in embarrassed silence, ~zarist secret police.) but who roared their approval at 'every turn, Subsequently, however, the truth of the LRP's cheering Robertson on to the next indecency, to the harges against Robertson emerged when a taped next slap at the oppressed. (p.3J". .. ersion of his speech was published in a Communist "But nowhere-not even in the lengthy statements ~adre pamphlet. They defended the LRP despite the of WV defending such pro-imperialist politics adically different positions each group adopt {reference is to Lebanon and Irelandl-has the owards the Spartacists on their attitudes to the basic political premise of the SL attitude to the :talinist states. What the LRP charged in their national question been so exposed as in aper was fully confirmed as to facts in "What the Robertson's unguarded remarks of January 29, partacist League Really Stands For", (Communist 1977. [[ere displayed for ail to see is the SL's :adre, NY, 1978) national chauvinism, its glorification of the The speech by Robertson was outrageous in its superior culture of the imperialist (and especially rrogant metropolitan derision towards the peoples English-speaking) nations and pro-imperialist nd workers of a whole series of countries and settlers (such as the Israelis and Boers), its petty lwards blacks in the US. The Irish Workers Group academic sectarian horror before the untutored oes not share the politics of either the LRP or violence and rage of the oppressed" (p.9) ommunist Cadre, but their publication of The refusal of the Spartacists, in the face of obertson's speech was a principled action of testimony and protest from many quarters, to make !rvice to all who oppose national chauvinism any semblance of apology is even more instructive lssing itself ofT as Trotskyism. Any reader of the than the fact that their founder and leader could leech must agree with Communist Cadre's have made such a speech. But the roars of approval !scription of it as an- from the mainly Spartacist audience testify to one ·unrelieved and uninterrupted .'1tring of other aspect of this tendency's internal life. It is the =omments that can only be described as national life of a cult, and not the democratic centralism of a =hauvinist and sexist in the extreme. What can Leninist Trotskyist organisation. me say of a man who claims to be a revolutionary

HE FOLLOWING QUOTATION from Robertson's where their dictators wiped them out. So, I don't leech reveals an opportunist US-centred view of suppose that's an issue that's going to grab an rotskyism which is fundamentally false. As the American audience very much. But in fact, in a eath Agony of the Fourth International critical way, because of the protection of a very lmonstrates, the US section fully shares powerful, imperialistically-based bourgeois sponsibility for the political degeneration of the FI democracy, in the last thirty years we have had the ,tween 1948 and 1953, which left the FI dead (or privilege, if we Ilse it well-and otherwise we have volut ion, a role which the US Trotskyists it not at all-of the Cl.l1l.x. CDrltil1110ltS revolutionary reshadowed by their own adaptation to US Marxist experience on the (ace of the planet! " Iperialism during the war. [Dismissing the 'otskyists in China, Poland, USSR, France, From the transcript of speech by Robertson to his 'itain etc. in the '30s and '40s, Robertson goes on to Spartacist League- , . y:l "We have had our comrades checking, and It IS Inly in the United States, however bad the not vet assured. but we believe that Marx referred perience was in the thirties here. was there a to the Albanians as "goat-fuckers". Is that True? ntinuous Leninist-Trotskyist tradition embodied I LOUD LA UGH TER I. But then he was prO/Ie to be organization and a cadre. And, however ethnically pejorative of races. [LA UG I!T ER itically we take a look at the history of the RISES. 1And it must be pointed out that, to thIS day, nerican section, its's the only one that received and under the conditions of the fourth fiv~ year / the blows. had to make all the political plan. the productiolO( goats is still the prinCIpal... ~ponses, had to deal with all the questions {HERE ROBERTSON IS CUT SHORT BY "oughout the whole period. ilnd we're Iwt even LAUGHING, WHISTLING .. \ND APPLAUDING eaking of the comrades in Germany and Italy SLas/ . ..

15 The Nature of Stalinism The Spartacist School of Stalinophilia [From The D.~~enerated Revolution, Origins and Nature of the Stalinist States workers Power/IWG 1982. pages 89-90 and 98-100.1 conception of Stalinism as predominantly countE Stalinism's 'Dual' Nature revolutionary but with contradicto [Following on (rom an account of the revision made characteristics. We recognise this contradiction in its programme by the Fourth Internationai an intensely dialectical one; that is, that Stalinis which re-classified Yugoslav Stalinism as is capable of achieving (in exception. progressive in 1951./ circumstances) results which taken in isolation a: progressive (the liquidation of capitalism). BI This revision entailed redefining Stalinism as having a "dual nature". The bureaucratic social Stalinism achieves these results for a counte revolutions in the (E. European I Buffer Zone were revolutionary strategy. We recognise that H seen as examples of the counter-revolutionary role "progressive part" is permeated and dominated ~ of Stalinism. The progressive side of Stalinism is the counter-revolutionary whole. By dissovlvin regarded as being the ability of some of the CPs, this dialectical understanding of Stalinism into acting under the pressure of the masses, to break pair of formally opposed and separable elements - with the Kremlin and project a "revolutionary progressive and reactionary-the FI after 195 orientation". This was what the FI claimed had opened the way to a liquidation of the revolutionar happened in Yugoslavia and later in China. It fell programme in favour of an orientation whic to Germain [Man den, now obediently following sought to pressure the national Communist Partie Pablo's line, to give this revision theoretical into taking the progressive path-through "dee: expression in his "ren Theses" on Stalinism: entryism". "The contradictory nature of the SO'viet Finally the FI's revisionism on the question 0 bureaucracy is only partially reflected in the Stalinism cannot be fully understood withou Stalinist parties. The dual nature of these parties reference to the positions taken on the FI's othe: is of a different social origin; it does not flow major concern of the period-the continuin~ from the special role of a parasitic bureaucracy instability of imperialism. Up to 1948 thi! in a workers' state but from the dual function of instability was understood in terms of chroni( these parties, which are working class because of economic stagnation. After 1948 this instabilit) their ma:;s base in their own country as well as came to be expressed, according to the FI, more and international instruments of the Soviet more in terms of preparations for a Third World bureaucracy. (Towards a Hi!ftory of the Fourth War against the USSR and Eastern Europe. Intemational. NY, 1974, part 4, vol.1, p.17) The errors on Stalinism and Eastern Europe and It was only being instruments of the Kremlin on the prospects for imperialism came together in that defined them as Stalinist. Having a mass base the 1951 Congress resolutions on "Orientation and could supposedly, under certain conditions, serve to Perspectives". These argued that a new world war negate this Stalinism. Thus: was imminent, that the balance of forces was The Yugoslav and Chinese examples have weighed against imperialism in favour of the demonstrated that, placed in certain exceptional workers' states, and that the newly discovered condition.If, entire Communist parties can potentially progressive character of Stalinism modify their political line and lead the struggle everywhere would mean that the new war would of the masses up to the conquest of power, while take the form of an international civil war. The end passing beyond the objectives of the Kremlin. result would be a series of revolutions at least as Under such conditions these parties cease being healthy and progressive as the Yugoslav one. Stalinist parties in the classical sense of the word. (ibid p.8) Vern-Ryan Tendem'Y.. Foreshadows Spartacists That is, they became centrist parties capable of An opposition that purported to defend being made to carry out the revolutionary Trotskyism against Pablo's revisionism on the programme. question was the Vern/Ryan tendency inside the We reject the view that Stalinist parties are SWP(US) 1950-53. This tendency argued that the FI defined as such exclusively by virture of their had been wrong to delay for so long in relationship to the Kremlin. This forms only one characterising Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia important constituent part of a Stalinist Party's included. as workers' states. They argued that the programme and overall nature. Further we reject only decisive criterion for the characterisation of the notion that Stalinism has a dual nature and that the class nature of a state was which class's it can be pushed in a revolutionary direction without representatives. controlled the repressive apparatus first breaking up and being replaced by a of the state machine. Thus in Eastern Europe the revolutionary party. entry of the Red Army (the repressive apparatus of a workers' state) marked the establishment of Against this notion of Stalinism as possessing workers' states-i.e. as early as 1944-45. They both a pro~essive and counter-revolutionary side, reasoned that-"IIere in this superstructure of each weighing equally in the scales and separated society, is where the revolution of our time takes in time and space. we assert the Trotskyist place" (Documents IIi the Vern-Ryan Tendency, 16 Communard Publishers, p.13). Slalinism is rooled in the working class-therefore, supposedly, the • • • • • • Stalinists in power always equal a distorted form of The Spartacist School of Stalinopbilia workers' power. Supposedly, too, Stalinism could The Cuban Revolution created a new basis for not possibly rest on capitalist property relations, or agreement between the two principal camps of world prop up a capitalist state, even for a limited period, 'Trotskyism'. It enabled Joseph Hansen and the because it itself rests on the post-capitalist property SWP(US) and Ernest Mandel and the International relations. Secretariat to reunite around similar positions on These undialectical positions of the Vern/Ryan Cuba, that stemmed from their shared erroneous tendency which failed to recognise the contradictory assessment of the Yugoslav revolution in the late nature of Stalinism, foreshadowed many of the 1940s and early 1950s. The SWP's positions on Cuba errors of the international Spartacist tendency (iSt) did not, however, go unchallenged within that on the Russian question. Their position can be organisation. defined as Stalinophile. During the latter half of 1960 a minority It rests in the first place on an incorrect analogy tendency within the SWP(US) led by Mage, with the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Because the Wohlforth and Robertson, developed an alternative Bolsheviks in state power presided over private position to the SWP majority on the Cuban property in whole sections of t.he economy the revolution. This led, in 1961, to the formation of the Vern/Ryan tendency disregarded economic Revolutionary Tendency (RT), later to become the criteria altogether. They equated a healthy international Spartacist tendency (iSt-sic),. revolution, in which the capitalist state was Wohlforth was quickly to abandon the positions he decisively smashed by the direct action of the helped to develop within the opposition and, in masses led by a revolutionary party and a new type alliance with Healy, was to side with the SWP of state established (1917), with the Stalinist led majority in the bureaucratic expulsion of the RT. bureaucratic overturns of capitalism and the The initial positions were further developed establishment of degenerate workers' states (1944). within the iSt and have by implication rather than The same criterion was applied to two distinct through theoretical elaboration, been extended to historical phenomena. This was done because the cover Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia, China etc. Vern/Ryan tendency regarded the counter­ (Indeed it is astonishing that over twenty years later revolutionary bureaucracy as only quantitatively barely a few lines have been written by the iSt on the different from the early Bolshevik state Eastern European overturns). Motivated initially functionaries. by a desire to avoid the chronic opportunism and They define the bureaucracy solely as part of the Iiquidationism of the Hansen majority, the RT/iSt working class, ignoring their nature as a distinct proceeded to make a series of major revisions of the and ruling caste within Soviet society, based on the Marxist theory of the state, which in their working class. They deny the predominantly implications for the Marxist programme are no less counter-revolutionary nature of the bureaucracy. erroneous and dangerous than those made by either They deny· the reality of Stalinism in Eastern Hansen or Wohlforth. Europe after the war. They ignore the reality that The core of the iSt's error lies in the Stalinism did defend capitalist property relations characteristion of the nature of the state that existed for a period and that it did hand back countries it in Cuba between January 1959 and late 1960. For controlled, like Finland and Austria to the them the government which controlled cuba was "an imperialists rather than abolish capitalism in inherently transitory and fundamentally unstable them. This tendency's one-sided analysis of phenOmellOf1~ petty bourgeois government which Stalinism grants to the Soviet bureaucracy a was not committed to the defense of either bourgeois revolutionary dynamic it does not possess. private property or to the collectivist property forms The criterion for establishing whether a of proletarian class rule" (WV 102). The degenerate workers' state exists is not, in the first government came to power in a situation where -a place dependent upon whether the Stalinists have capitali.'It state namely armed bodies of men secured political power. As we have shown dedicated to defendi1lg a particular property form, [preceding chapters of the bookl, this is a did IIOt exi.'It in the Marxist sense". (ibid) The precondition for the creation of a degenerate armed force on which this state rested was led by workers' state. But it does not follow that fulfillment commanders who had their "previous direct of this condition will inevitably lead to the connections with oppo.'Iitiollal liberal elements establishment of planned property relations. This brokert and had become episodically autOf1omous fact was proved beyond doubt by Austria, Finland from their class ... the Cuban bourgeoisie" (Cuba and Vietnam (in 1945). and Marxist Theory, SL pamphlet). In the period 1948 to 1953 there was no Thus despite the attempts to distance themselves revolutionary opposition to Pablo's revisionist from the original Mage/Wohlforth position of a positions on Stalinism.-The FI split into the the "transitional state" with no defined class International Committee (IC) and the International character-a position defined as "indefensible" in Secretariat (IS). The American SWP, the British Cuba and Marxist Theory, this is nevertheless the Healy group and the French PCl, all of which joined characterisation the iSt itself used. Cuba af1d the IC, repeatedly expressed their support for the Frs Marxist Theory declares: "at Ito point was there a positions, up to and including the 1951 Congress classless 'transit icmal' state in Cuba ", there was "a documents on Yugoslavia. petit ·bourgeois government-llot a class neutral one". The use of the term "petit-bourgeois 17 government" does not get round this problem. Does The basis on which Cuba is characterised as a this mean we have a petit-bourgeois state, based on a "deformed workers' state" by the iSt is also wrong: petit-bourgeois mode of production? The iSt recoils "Cuba became a deformed workers' state with the from this further revision of Marxism by pervasive nationalisations in the Summer and Fall remaining silent on this interesting new state of 1960". The equation put forward here: form. Instead it prefers to define this state "Nationalisations=deformed workers' state" is negatively, as one which nei.ther defends bourgeois completely false. The monopoly of foreign trade, private property nor proletanan property forms. and most vitally the introduction of planning on the Either this is a "class neutral" state, or the iSt is basis of the suppression of the law of value, as well trying to breed a unicorn. Such a position directly as nationalisations, are the features which, taken overthrows the Marxist analysis of the state as together, define an economy as post-capitalist. elaborated from the Communist Manifesto Further, this position implies that a "petit­ onwards, that the state is a machine for bourgeois government" can overturn capitalism maintaining the rule of one class over others. It is and construct a "deformed" workers" state merely an organ of class rule which defends, even in its through massive nationalisations. On this basis, no bonapartist form, one set of property forms. A state real distinction can be made between Cuba and which defends neither capitalist nor proletarian other "petit-bourgeois governments" which have property forms is therefore a classless state, a state followed a similar course, such as Algeria, Egypt, which is no longer an organ of class rule, and a Burma, etc. -except on the basis of the percentage of contradiction of the Marxist theory of the state! the economy nationalised. Were all of these Note further how the iSt defines the state as capitalist states "deformed workers' states in the "armed bodies of men dedicated to defending a process of formation?" By answering "No", the particular property form" [our emphasis]. This is an Spartacists are forced to contradict their own idealist notion of the relationship between property methodology. relations and the state machine. We judge the class The Spartacists also do not recognise in any nature of a state by its actions, not by the form the essential role played by Stalinism in the "dedication" of the individuals who make up its Cuban Revolution. They do not recognise the proto­ apparatus. This revision is essential for the iSt in Stalinist wing ofthe pre-1959 J26M. They do not giving a theoretical gloss to their notion of a "petit­ recognise the alliance of Castro with the Cuban bourgeois government", in which the property Stalinists from November 1959. They do not relations the state chooses to defend at any given recognise Castro's reliance on the bureaucratic time depends upon indecision in the minds of those apparatus of the PSP (the Cuban Stalinists> and the in political power. essential assimilation of Castroism to Stalinism, This fundamentally false analysis has been complete by the onset of planning in 1962, during the extended to Nicaragua, where we are expected to period of the bureaucratic workers' government. believe that [in 1982J a government that has been in Nor do they recognise that such a process would have existence since the summer of 1979, presiding over been impossible without the economic and military an economy overwhelmingly in the hands of support of the Kremlin. Consequently they assign to private capital, does not defend capitalism. It is, the petit-bourgeoisie the ability to form a "deformed" rather, not yet decisively "committed" to either workers' state-a revision of Marxism with regard capitalism or to proletarian property forms! to the fundamental characteristics of this class. Such an analysis of the Cuban events is unable The Spartal.-ist;s Capitulate to Stalinism to explain the class character of the popular front which came to power [under Castrol in January 1959, The fragmentary references of the iSt to the which the iSt assures us was not capitalist. It formation of "deformed" workers' states in Eastern ignores the pro-capitalist, bourgeois movement of Europe imply the existence of similar periods of the [Castroite] July 26th Movement (J26M). When "classless states" or "workers states in the process of this aspect was dominant (i.e. during the popular formation". From the entry of the Red Army, the front) the J26M crushed all attempts by the workers class nature of the state is indeterminate. They only and peasants to go beyond the bourgeois limits set by flaw which the iSt sees in the Vern-Ryan tendency's the Castro leadership. Further, this analysis sows equation of entry of Red Army with formation of illusions in the petit-bourgeois leadership of the "deformed workers' state" is that in some cases the Rebel Army, declaring them to be somehow Soviet forces withdraw-e.g. in Austria, leaving committed to no class interests, implying that the behind a capitalist state. But the preferred term Army was somehow "neutral" between workers and "workers' state in the process of formation" is a peasants on the one hand and the capitalists and designation of no use. It can only be used after the landowners on the other. It therefore cannot explain event, as a description. This is a position which, as the struggle-in the form of dual power which in Cuba. will not define the class character of the existed between the bourgeoisie plus its supporters in state, its government, or what property forms its the army on the one side and the petit-bourgeois army defends at each stage, and thus fails to provide leadership on the other side around Castro any coherent revolutionary programme during the representing, in however distorted a form, the period of dual power, or the period of an anti­ demands and pressure of the aroused workers and capitalist bureaucratic workers' government. peasant masses. The programmatic conclusions of Not only a revisionist position on the state such analysis are necessarily uague. Because the emerges from this analysis. In echoing the Spartacists could not perceive the dual power situation, they had no programme for resolving it. positions of the Vern-Ryan tendency, the iSt have made :1 fundamental revision of the Trotskyist 18 understanding of Stalinism. For the iSt, Stalinism October revolution. They "Hail the Red [sicl Army" has a "dual character" it has a "bad", counter­ as agent of this process. That is, behind the radical revolutionary side, and a "good", progressive one. verbiage, they call for, as part of their own Its bad side involves it in crushing workers' programme, the establishment of a degenerate democracy, expropriating the proletariat from workers' state. This is not a tactical united front. it political power; its good side is that it can overturn is an abandonment of an independent programme. capitalism, and the two weigh equally in the This reliance on the Soviet bureaucrats as second balance. best given the weakness of the Afghan working class, leads inexorably to a strategic bloc with Mghanistan and Poland Stalinism. This position is evidenced in the increasingly On the events in Poland 1980-1981, the iSt have Stalinophile programme of the iSt. particularly with gone from simple hostility to the Polish workers' regard to Afghanistan and Poland. In these movement right up to a bloc with the Stalinists to countries, the "dual" character of Stalinism is help crush that movement. They started their reflected in the supposed ability of the Stalinists to analysis of Poland not from the revolutionary act as "liberators in a sociaL as well as nationaL possibilities that existed, but from a supposed threat sense" in particuar countries. and in its inability to posed by the Polish workers' action to the property carry through the proletarian revolution on a world relations in Poland and the USSR. Their excuse for scale (Whose PoLand?, in Spartacist Britain no.32). this stance was their exaggerated view of the Both Mandel (in his "Ten Theses", 1951) and the immediacy of the Catholic church's restorationist Vern-Ryan Tendency (in their description of intentions. Stalinism as centrist) articulated a similar After trying to square the circle-giving limited position. This position is absolutely false. It has support to the misled Polish workers, and opposing a nothing in common with genuine Trotskyism. Russian invasion (by "hissing at tanks" as Workers Vanguard advised), by late 1981 the iSt Stalinism does not have two competing aspects, gave up and decided that Solidarnosc was counter­ one of which at anyone time predominates over revolutionary to the core, and should be crushed, by another. Rather, it has a contradictory character Kremlin tanks if necessary: because its privileged caste existence in the USSR is "Solidarity's counter-revolutioal1ry course must based on the post-capitalist property forms be stopped! If the Kremlin Stalinists, in their established by the October Revolution. To defend necessarily brutal, stupid way, illtervene these property forms, the very basis of this caste's militarily to stop it, we will support this. And we existence, the Stalinist bureaucracy is sometimes take responsibility in advance (or this; whatever forced to carry through measures which, if taken in the idiocies and atrocities they will commit, we do isolation from the way they are carried out and the not flillch from defending the crushing of effects they have on the international class struggle, Solidarity's counter· revoLution. (Spartacist would be considered progressive. But these Brita ill. no.32) measures are never carried through in isolation, When the Jaruzelski variant on their advice was they are always carried through in a counter­ launched on December 13th 1981, when Polish tanks revolutionary manner, and always involve the moved to crush the 10 million strong movement of political expropriation of the working class in the Polish workers, the Spartacists were quick to ofTer country concerned. Thus for us, the Stalinist their support. They warned the Polish workers bureaucracies have a contradictory character but against any resistance, and cynically described the form a predominantly counter-revolutionary crackdown as a "cold shower" for the Polish whole. We do not grant to this caste the potential for proletariat. Upset by over a year of class struggle, fulfilling the mission of the proLetariat-genuine these miserable pedants, who can only imagine proletarian revolutions are the pre-requisite for winning the working class to their cruel caricature building world socialism. of Trotskyism in the sterile atmosphere of the The retreat from the revolutionary programme propagandists' schoolroom (separate from the actual which the Spartacist position involves can be struggles of workers), called for a return to Gierek's accurately gauged from the answers that they have 1970 style of government: "If the present crackdown offered to the Afghan and Polish masses. restures something like the tenuous social In Afghanistan the iSt reject the perspective of equilibrium which existed in Poland before the Permanent Revolution for that country, because of Gdansk strikes last August, a tacit understanding its backwardness. They make a false analogy that if the people left the government alone, the between the healthy Soviet workers' state of the early government wouLd leave the peopLe alulle­ 1920s that assimilated certain backward Asian conditions will be opened again for the countries, and the counter-revolutionary crystallisation of a Leninist· Trotskyist party" international designs of the bonapartist clique in (Power Bid Spiked. in Workers Vanguard No. 295). the Kremlin. Events in Afghanistan are viewed not The iSt have blood on their hands. The "good" from the standpoint of international class stru~gle side of Stalinism's "dual nature", the side that the (which would link the- struggle of progressive iSt call on revolutionnries to support, has become its Afghans with that of their fellow Afghan workers willingness and ability to crush the independent resident in Iran. Pakistan etc. as part of a struggle activity of the working class. Programmatic for a Socialist Federation of South-West Asia), but confusion on Cuba in 1960 has become froln the abstract standpoint of 'backwardness' metamorohosed into Stalinoohile claritv in 1982. • versus 'progress' "nuw led by Russian tanks" (Spartacist. Winter 1979180). The Spartacists call on the Bureaucracy to flxtend the social quins or the 19 SPARTACISTS OPPOSE WORKERS' SOLIDARITY AGAINST THE BEIJING BUfCHERS

A FA VOURITE TERM of abuse in the Spartacist lexicon is to refer to the "crazed" positions of their rivals. The IWG leaflet in no way implied an alliance Rarely has the word been so apt to describe the with the bourgeOisie agail1st a workers' state. The polemic of a centrist group than the crazed language of whole line of the leatlet is against the hypocrisy of the Spartacists' Workers Hammer when it headlined imperialist "concern" about the Peking massacre. The page 5 of its November 1989 issue:-"Irish Workers whole line is for independent working class action in Group calls on Pope to expel Chinese Ambassador". solidarity with the workers and students of China. The rant which followed is a chemically, if not The slogan for action against Peking's diplomats, was comically, pure example of misrepresentation, one of 10 action-slogans which we put forward. All distortion and amalgam ending up with an outrageous were posed as tasks for an independent workers' lie for its headline! campaign. The relevant passage in the British Spartacists' The demand is posed in these terms-"force the "polemic" in November reads- Irish state to expel the Chillese ambassador On 6 June, the Irish Workers Group ... issued a immediately". Note that the Irish state would have grotesque statement headed: "Solidarity against to have been forced to take such action. There was no the Beijing butchers! Expel the Chinese question of adapting to bourgeois pressure for action ambassador now!" This is a de facto call for against China, for there was none! Our leaflet rupturing diplomatic relations, a measure generally stated:"We do not for a single moment make any undertaken on the eve of war. This revolting common cause with the hypocritical outrage of the appeal to the clerical-bourgeois Irish state-with White House, Thatcher and their clients througout its constitutional allegiance to the pope-to isolate the capitalist world, including Dtiil Eireann who the Chinese deformed workers' state is nothing but boast the superiority of their 'democracy'" etc. At the a social chauvinist pledge of alliance with the time of the Beijing massacre, the express interest of bourgeoisie against a workers' state. capitalist and imperialist states was to maintain the The call by the IWG for the the expulsion of the new economic relationship with the Chinese Chinese Ambassador was politically wrong-a bureaucracy. This clearly dominated over any mistake on the part of the IWG which was not pretended concern for the Chinese masses. repeated after the day of distribution of the leaflet in There was not the slightest possibility that such question at a demonstration at Dublin's Chinese action would be taken by the Irish bourgeoisie. Our embassy. In fact the mistake was openly admitted face wrong demand did not, therefore undermine our call for to face to a leader of 'the British Spartacists at a independent workers' action in solidarity with the meeting in Dublin before they wrote their diatribe! Beijing masses mobilising against Stalinism. Any reading of the IWG leaflet in question leaves no doubt whatever about the IWG's complete commitment It is the latter that the Spartacists really object to working class independence in the solidarity to. Oblivious to the fact that imperialism was not struggle. Anyone with the slightest acquaintance with attacking China, either militarily or economically, the IWG's politics over 15 years will also know that they condemn our call for workers' sanctions against we maintain an implacable class hostility to the Irish the Chinese bureaucracy as "nothillg more than bourgeoisie and its clerical allies! backhanded support for imperialist economic blackmail, undermining the collectivist flundations of It would be wrong to join with the bourgeoisie in any the Chinese deformed workers state and punishing the attack on the diplomatic apparatus of the Stalinists. Chinese workers 10 boot". That does not mean for a moment that it would be wrong for the working class to independently act, as a The Spartacists also reject the use of workers' class, in solidarity with Chinese workers, against sanctions against the Apartheid state in periods of either the diplomatic or economic interests of the mass mobilisation in 5.Africa! That, too, would only Stalinists when they are murdering workers in "punish" the workers economically! So do many struggle. This is where we differ radically with the strikes undertaken bv workers themselves! The South Spartacist fellow-travellers of Jaruzelski and Deng African workers and,' we are confident. the vanguard of Xiao Ping. the Chinese workers, appreciate the necessity for the active international solidarity of workers' embargoes They opposed all direct action by workers to put on trade with their oppressors; especially when they pressure on the Beijing butchers.-a description of the themselves are sacrificing 'their lives in the offensive Stalinists which obviously pains Workers Hammer as against these oppressors. 'grotesque'. By contrast, we fully support the action of Australian dockers in besieging the Chinese embassy Once more the defence of the workers' state. for the and in blockading trade with China during the brutal 5partacists, becomes nothing more than the defence of martial law. the Stalinist bureaucracy. The independent mobilisation of the proletariat worldwide in solidarity with the anti-Stalinist uprising in Beijing 20 takes second place to defending the immediate eccnomic interests of the Bureaucracy! The Spartacists' hysteria in defence of the diplomatic apparatus of Stalinism, even when it is not under attack from imperialism, when it is used to lie about the massacre in Beijing, ties in with their diplomatic advocacy on behalf of the Cambodian bureaucracy of Heng Samrin for whom they demanded a seat in the imperialist Thieves' Kitchen of the United Nations! (Trotsky explicitly rejected any such involvement by a workers' state.) The Chinese Ambassador and .•• the Pope? As for the role of the Pope in the whole question, it is conjured up simply as a form of abuse against the IWG. To dress up their fantasy of an IWG bloc with the Irish bourgeoisie, they invented for the Irish stale a "constitutional allegiance to the Pope" which in fact has never existed. The amalgam of the IWG, Haughey and the Pope against the Chinese ambassador is a deliberate lie and smear in every respect. The crazed tone of their absurd headline reflects their metropolitan phobia towards religion and nationalism in the backward countries-a phobia which, as we have seen, repeatedly topples over into pro­ imperialist chauvinism.

Mimicking the Spartacists7 It is appropriate to here to nail another lie in the same diatribe in Workers Hammer. Their first sentence reads- Some months ago; mimicking our founding of the International Communist League, Workers Power and its confederates set up the League for a Revolutionary Communist International (LRCJ) to address the "crisis of Stalinism". In fact the LRCI founding conference had been scheduled for nearly two years preceding the announcement of the Spartacists' change of name. That period had been one of intense preparation of the Trotskyist Manifes.to as the basis for our new League. Our change from Movement to League marked a major transformation from a co-operating series of groups from different countries and traditions into a united democratic-centralist and genuinely international organisation. A change of name was entirely justified to mark this qualitative leap. The Spartacists' change of name, by contrast, had no political rhyme or reason. In the middle of the international Trotskyist gathering of the Lu t te Ouvriere Fete in Paris the banner with the old name was hauled down and the new one hauled up. In none of the many leaflets they gave out was there any political explanation offered to the many activists from around the world! There appears to be no reason other than the impatience of the Spartacists at marking the passage of 25 years since their American founders set out to "destroy" all rival organisations claiming to be revolutianilry. The only "destruction" in which they are likely to succeed is their own political collapse as their craven alliance with Stalinism comes more and more into conflict with the revolutionary struggle of the working class against the Bureaucracy!

21 The Spartacists: A Poisoned Well

A reply to slanders by the "International Communist League" formerly "international Spartacist tendency" /

CONTENTS

Introduction- Polemic Versus Siallder page 2 The IWG and the Abortion Information Campaign Spartacist abstractions on womw's liberation callcealed by campaign of misrepresenting IWG. page 3 An Unprincipled Method How the Spartacists combat rival groups. page 4 How Spartacists excluded themselves from debate. page 5 "Caught with Russian Fascists, Thatcher's Scabs" As events in the East negate all their predictions and expose their own Stafinophifia, the Spartacists step up their attack on the one tendency which really represents a healthy Trotskyist alternative. Twisting all the fads into a criminal lie, they smear our pri/lcipled solidarity with the /lew workers' movements in the USSR as callusioll with fascism! page 7 LRCI Reply to Critics 011 the smear campaigll over the Brtitish visit of Butchenko, international delegate of the Siberian Kuzbass workers.

Published by the Irish Workers Group Irish section of the League for a Revolutionary Communist International 1 Oct 1990.

40p

22 INTRODUCTION

IN FEBRUARY 1990 the Irish Workers Group com:erneu 10 will political activists to tncH published a pamphlet on the 'Spartacists' , a far-left programmes. The revolutionary tradition of Lenin and political group spuriously claiming to be the living Trol"ky-in which both (WG and the Spartacists claim continuation of Lenini-sm,- Trotskyism and 10 stand-has a special commitment. however. to internationalism. Our pamphlet showed how they are, politicallwllesty in all such polemical and ideological rather, a U.S.-centred sect whose politics embody conflicl<;. profound adaptations to Stalinism. of a kind totally Trotsky's struggle against Stalinism was alien to Trotsky-an exaggerated version of the very quiiltessentially a struggle against a monstrous lie­ political errors which destroyed Trotsky's world party machine of unparalleled proportions. The Kremlin within ten years of his assassination by Stalin in 1940. cloaked in 'socialist' rhetoric the policies of a brutal (The Politics of the Spartacists, IWG, Dublin, Feb. bureaucracy which crushed all workers' democracy ill 1990.) the USSR and sold out workers' revolution in China, Gennany. France. Spain in the '20s and '30s. That pamphlet was occasioned by attacks on the Irish Workers Group in the paper of the declining Trotskyism fundamentally rejects methods of Spartacist League in Britain who were targeting Trinity political argument which rely on slander, amalgam of College Dublin for recruits in 1989-90. This latest half truths. imputing guilt by association to rivals etc. pamphlet is unfortunately necessary in response to There is no room for such methods in polemic. renewed attacks. however sharp it may be. To tolerate such methods is Internationally, among all the currents which claim to court disaster. for sadly, groups which use such their origins in Trotsky's struggle against Stalinism, methods can sllcceed in destroying healthy attempts to recreate a genuine revolutionary communist movement. the Spartacists are a by-word for the most deliberate use of lies and smears against rivals. In Ireland, where This brief pamphlet focuses on two major issues they are not known, it is unfortunately necessary, which reveal this difference in method. The first arose therefore, to reply to their recent slanders in some from the student-led struggle for the right to abortion detail. Hence this pamphlet. infonnation last year. The second concerns the most momentous political events since I945-the collapse of Polemic versus Slunder the "communist" world and the question of how The 150 years of socialist struggle since the socialists in the west should relate to the new industrial revolution has always been marked by movements of opposition to Stalinism in the Eastern intense debate and polemic among rival currents Bloc countries.

The IWG and the Abortion Information Campaign

The record of the Spartacists in TeD

THE SPARTACIST LEAGUPJBritain anived in TCD on which only a tiny minority were yet prepared to light. . last autumn in the midst of a struggle, led by TCD Students Union and the USI, to defend women's right In that struggle, as the IWG has always openly to infonnation on abortion. They involved themselves argued since its foundation, we fight for free abortion in the issue with the overriding aim of attacking the on demand as the only adequate solution. Short of an Irish Workers Group. They began a year-long actual struggle for this goal we continue to argue in our campaign-internationally!-of smearing IWG with a propaganda why this demand must be taken up by blatant lie about our position on the abortion issue. workers, women, socialists and democrats as the only IWG addressed student meetings and guarantee of women's control of their own lives. demonstrations, and trade union meetings, arguing for What was the position of the Spartacists? Their an action programme for a united front of workers and organiser in TCD. opposed our attempt to have students in a fighting campaign to will the right to socialists take up the light for such a united front. TIley abortion infonnation. But, we argued, such a campaign even opposed our attempt to have the TCD Socialist would go nowhere unless it openly challenged the state Society issue a leallet caUing for a vote in defence of with political demands. We argued that it was vital to abortion infonnation in the TCD referendum-a leaflet take up immediately the fight not only to defy the law. which outlined how the struggle should be developed not only to defend those victimised for doing so, but to now for decrirninalisation, with the perspective of force the state to repeal the 1861 Act and the 8th going on to fight lor ah0l1ion on demand. Constitutional Amendment which crimina lise abortion They coullterposed a leaflet of their own which information and abortion itself. Based on our argued flO tactics for the actual ~truggle. but arguing involvement with this issue since 1975 we raised these that the fight should he for nothing short of abortion on as slogans which we believed could unite Ihe disparate demand. lis only concrete advice was 'vote yes' in the activists and groups in developing the ex.isting action refercmluJI1 anu build the 'revolutionary party'. It campaign action now and which could open up the concluded with the incredible aI:..;tractioll-"women's road of struggle for positive abortion rights. an issue liheration through socialist revolution". 23 Implicit in their arguments is the cop-out position tactics which would build a bridge from the immediate issue to the fight for the full programme. that in Ireland abortion rights could never be won this side of the secialist revolution, so why bother The sectarian Spartacists fear to 'contaminate' proposing tactics for the existing campaigns which are themselves by getting involved with the actual only scratching the surface? When challenged to struggles of workers, women and students with a participate in addressing student classes in the tactical method whiCh seeks to raise these partial referendum campaign, this 'revolutionary' Spartacist beginnings to the level of the revolutionary did indeed cop out! programme. The Spartacists' British paper, stated more fonnally It was a deliberate lie for the Spartacists, therefore, their seetarian and ultra-left position-"None of these to claim that the IWG did not raise the right to free groups [IWG or SWMI raised the right to free abortion abortion on demand. SpartacisLS around the world were on demand. This should be the minimal starting point given the instruction to harangue members of the for revolutionaries!" TIle real existing struggle wasn't IWG's international group, the LRCI, with the advanced enough to be treated as a starting point for accusation that "your Irish comrades refused to call/or these revolutionaries to intervene in and fight for tactics abortion on de/nand" . that could develop it! And not for the first time. When we followed a Our Record similar method in the 1983 Constitutional Amendment campaign on abortion in Ireland, the Spartacists made IWG's October issue of Class Struggle carried a the same charge against us in their British paper-of short agitational article arguing how the immediate dropping our programme for abortion on demand! At struggle could aetually be developed to smash the legal the international far-left gathering in Paris in 1984 their obstacles to abortion infonnation. IWG held a public Australian members were primed to harangue us with meeting at which we argued our full position in depth the same lie. Comically grasping at straw, they even and how we Ii nked the present struggle to the claimed that James Connolly had supported the right to perspective of opening up a fight for abortion on abortion 80 years ago! Sadly, Connolly could not even demand. bring himself to defend the right to divorce. Our November paper carried a more in-depth page In May 1990, at the same venue, the leading on the issue in which we explained why free abortion French Spartacist present intervened in an IWG public on demand was necessary to guarantee women's meeting-launching our new book on James control of their own lives-the kind of political Connolly-to make the highly relevant point that... argument we have been making consistently since the "you refused to call for abortion on demand in 1970s when Magill magazine listed the IWG as the Ireland'! only group in Ireland which openly campaigned for abortion on demand. That record was maintained when Why, one might ask, should the Spartacists go to four of the main Irish left groups united in 1978 in the such lengths to attack the groups of the LRCI (Workers Socialist Labour Party, and all of them shied off the power in Britain, 'the Irish Workers Group etc.)? No issue of abortion, with the exception of the IWG. We such energy was directed against the larger, more alone struggled to get the issue to the SLP conference influential Socialist Workers Movement in Ireland, or and eventually we won a two-thirds majority of the 150 the Labour Party. The reason is that for over a decade delegates to adopt a programme for abortion on the British Spartacists have seen the Workers Power demand. In fact, the IWG has constantly been attacked group and its IWG co-thinkers as the most dangerous on the Irish left for trying to link immediate issues to a challengers to their claim to be the Bolsheviks and perspective of fighting for abortion on demand and the Trotskyists of our time. Consequently, they targeted full needs of women. Workers Power in Britain in the early 1980s with the aim of destroying this healthy revolutionary tendency But then, as now, we always rejected the ultra-Iert because our political method contrasted so powerfully idea that the existing campaigns of disparate forces with the sectarianism, pro-Stalinism and ultra-left could be magically turned into a fight for this full abstractions of the Spartacists. programme by an ultimatum. We always argued for

An Unprincipled Method /low the Spartacists combat rival groups.

The Spartacists, internationally, have committed abusive articles in their paper and turned into a slogan themselves to a sectarian policy to explicitly destroy all with which to harangue members of the rival group wherever they may be encountered across the globe! rival groups claiming to stand for t~e revolutionary communism of TroLSky. (See the historical background The method also involves disrupting public meetings of in the IWG pamphlet on the Spartacists, Dublin, Feb. a targeted group-sometimes by a deliberate 1990). This involves combining propaganda for their provocation, more often by abusive allegations totally own abstract programme with campaigns of smearing unrelated to the subject of the meeting but calculated to rival groups with gross distortions of the truth and destroy any atmosphere of honest debate. The first downright lies. meeting they attended in TeD last year was given by the SWM on Eastern Europe. The Spartacists' Typically, a well-calculated smear, however contribution was to abuse the SWM because, allegedly, localised or limited in content, is promoted with long 24 five years before. individuals in their fraternal struggles of workers. students. al1l1-impcnaiisls. allU III organisation in Britain had crossed a picket line! that context to conduct honest debate and polemIC. Such a l1]ethod ultimately leads to the use of however sharp. against other groups offering rival physical force to intimidate rivals. There is a world of programmes. This. we believe. is the only way to test difference between setting out to destroy rival groups out in practice the rival claims. and aiming to defeat them politically in honest polemic It is th,e only way, we believe. that can ultimately which focuses on the actual political differences and bring together the best political activists to create the not on lying caricatures. nucleus of the kind of pany that is needed in'the fight for socialism. It is a process which must lead to Our Method political defeat and eventual marginalisation of groups The IWG and our international organisation (LRCI) whose politics fail to connect the goal of socialism to has nothing in common with the methods or outlook of the living struggles of the oppressed and exploited for the Spartacists. We emphasise at all times the open their social emancipation. fight for a revolutionary action programme, through active involvment by our members in the living

How the Spartacists Excluded Themselves From LRCI Meetings in Britain

The decision by the Spanacists ten years ago to target German reunification--thistook place in TCD in April Workers Power (and the IWG) for 'destruction' was 1990. And our comrades in Berlin undenook a similar renewed, in desperation, in the past two years. Not debate with them. In every detail, therefore. the method only did they completely fail in this sectarian project of the LRCI groups has been open, honest and over 10 years, but Workers Power grew in numbers principled. and in the strength of its politics and its international But what were the circumstances of the Spanacist relations while the Spartacists in Britain declined provocation? Workers Power held a meeting on Nov. sharply. Their 'offensive' did, however, backfire in 13th 1982 in Binningham to launch the book The one important incident which was the subject of Degenerated Revolution--Origins and Nature of the renewed black propaganda against us last year in their Stalinist States. The Spanacists accepted an invitation attempts to recruit in Dublin. to have a speaker in the session on Cuba. They were In brief, they claim that they have been unfairly assured their members could also speak from the floor excluded from public meetings in Britain by Workers in all other sessions. They raised no objections to any Power.The British Spanacist paper fumed over this of the proposed arrangements. They asked to be question in December 1989 because they were refused allowed set up a bookstall in the meeting. They were entry to a major open meeting in London-the told that as it was not a jointly organised meeting the Permanent Revolution Weekend-at which several only bookstall inside would be that of the organisers, other groups debated under the auspices of Workers Workers Power, but they would be free to sell their Power. Spartacists claim that our action gives the lie to material out of hand even inside the meeting-a right the claim of the LRCI groups to stand for open that is often denied by organisers of open public democratic debate among all groups claiming to be meetings. Trotskyist Ag~in, what are the facts? On the day of the meeting an organised group of The Spartacists in Britain, in 1982, deliberately set them marched into the hall and set up a bookstall and out to disrupt a Workers Power public meeting to then surrounded it with a defence guard. refusing all which they had been invited. As a result they were told requests to remove it. The meeting was suspended that they would henceforth be banned from all public while the Spartacists were given an ultimatum to leave meetings of Workers Power, until such time as they or the (civilian) caretaker would be called to order them apologised for their disruptive action. They refused. off the premises. They finally acceded to the caretaker's request but then set up a picket line outside For 8 years the Spartacists refused to apologise and the hall with prepared placards! Throughout the day continued to be excluded. In November 1989 Workers they maintained that Workers Power had called the Power went so far as to tell them that they could attend police to get rid of them! This was even put on some of the Permanent Revolution meetings if they would give the placards. They produced a leaflet and organised a a fonnal undertaking to respect the rulings of the chair meeting in a pub room nearby which they had booked at the meetings. They refused because they believed in advance. this would be an admission of their guilt in the 1982 provocation! Instead they stood oulc;ide this meeting in A member of the Spanadsts at the time confirmed London (on the crisis of Stalinism) and harangued later to Workers Power the evident fact that the entire Workers Power members-"your Irish comrades operation had been pre-planned and that even their refused to call for abortion on demand" ! international headquaners in the US was angry that they had been caught out in a failed prowocation against Subsequent to imposing this ban, Workers Power Workers Power. For them there could be no question became a member of the international LRCI. The of admitting a mistake or apologising. It revealed that conditions for lifting the ban in Britain were never met the Spartacists are, on occasion, prepared to breach and in the other countries no cause was given to the workers' democracy and physically disrupt other LRCI sections to impose a similar ban. Thus, for groups' meetings for their own tactical purposes. That example, the IWG invited the Spanacists to debate is a serious offence by the standards of Trotskyism. 25 They were prepared to systematically lie to defend their reasons and will stand until they give an undertaking to actions-daiming that the police of the bourgeois state abide, at Workers Power meetings, by the discipline of had been called in. The Spartacists to this day maintain the organisers. the lie. The dtcision to ban them was taken for these

"Caught With Russian Fascists, Thatcher's Scabs"!

The latest slander orchestrated against the LRCl by the To be sure, the leaders of Solidamosc were either SpartacislS is rooted in major differences over the pro-capitalist or all too ready to compromise with the collapse of the so-called "communist" countries and the Stalinists and hold back the workers from nature of the workers' political revolution which is overthrowing their oppressors. To be sure, the mass of necessary in those states. Their smear headline reads--­ Polish workers had real illusions in western "The Butchenko Affair: Anti-Sovietism Comes Home 'democracy'. After forty years denied any political to Roost. Workers Power Caught with Russian freedom, with no party of their own, only the Fascists, Thatcher's Scabs". Before listing the facts experience of concrete struggle could possibly teach which they have set out to falsify, it is useful to look at workers that parliaments and the free market were no the political issues which the Spartacists are running solution to their problems, that they needed to fight for from under cover of such poisonous slanders which a political revolution to bring the planned economy cover page after page of their papers. under the democratic rule of workers' councils as the The IWG pamphlet The Politics of the SpartaciSlS only way forward-to genuine socialism. showed how they have distinguished themselves for 25 But because the Polish workers had not yet arrived years internationally by a profound adaptation to the at this Trotskyist understanding of their tasks, because Stalinist bureaucracy which rules in all of the post­ they tolerated leaders who were openly pro-capitalist, capitalist countries-USSR, China, E.Europe, their mass organisation had to be suppressed, Vietnam, Laos, Kampuchea, N.Korea, and Cuba. according to the Spartacists-

Progressive Stalinism'! for. al the hcar1 of their theory. they believe Stalinism has a 'dual nature'. i.e. two natures at different times. As explained in our earlier pamphlet. the Spartacists somelimes progressive and sometimes reactionary. rationalise their slavish cheer-leading of the Stalinists in either of which can dominate in different Poland, Afghanistan etc. by claiming that in these cases cirCUlTlstallces--as adjudicated by the Spartacists! They Stalinism was putting forward its progressive side. try to jusli fy this idealistliclion by a willful misreading 26 of a line in Trotsky's writings where he speaks or tlle dual jUnction of SLalin- ''TIle function ... of Stalin has The New Workers' J\lovements a d.ual character" (Workers Hammer. July 1990. p.3). Only the living self-organised struggle of the mass This does not say that Stalinism has a dual nature. The of workers for their concrete needs can ever open up theoretical issue at stake here has profound political the road for socialist revolution. even if the workers consequences. begin that journey with lhe most pathetic illusions in Every social force has dual. even multiple. western 'democracy' and the 'market' The whole of functions. The trade union bureaucracy. the Labour Marxism hinges on this principle. But not for the Party, etc. based on workers' organisations but Spanacists. pur,suing a p'r~-capita~ist programme and defending The method of Trotsky. Lenin. Engels and Marx theu own pnvdeges. dIsplay dual functions. They are was always to unite in action with the mass movements repeatedly compelled to partially defend working class of workers wherever they actually struggled for a interests while they remain. overall. wedded to the progressive demand. even though their outlook was preservation of capitalism. The overall nature of such still clouded with false and even poisonous illusions. forces is to oppose working class revolution at This united front was the only basis on which the whatever cost. They are, overall, counter­ revolutionaries could have any means of persuading revolutionary. Limited actions of a progressive thee ,",,:orkers and winning them to take up the character, which they may be forced to carry out. are revolutionary programme. step by step. and destroying always subordinated to their overall reactionary their illusions tllrough actual experience. strategy-

27 struggle against capitalism, to debate with them, to challenge their illusions. Not to atjempt such solidarity work is ultra-left sectarianism -or collusion with Stalinism- and actually surrenders the new movements to the pro­ A REPLY TO CRITICS: market propaganda of international agencies which are TilE BUTCHENKO AFFAIR busy trying to buy over their new organisations. IN lUL Y AND August any reader of the "Trotskyist" "Caught With Russian Fascists"! press who was not familiar with the stock in trade of The LRCI's solidarity work on this front revealed half truths and downright lies which passes for polemic just how real is this danger to the new workers' amongst the sectarians and centrists might have come movements. A representative of Soviet workers-Yuri to the conclusion that Workers Power, British section Butchenko-whom we brought to meet workers and of the LRCI, had undergone its 4 August 1914. socialists in Britain in June 1990, succumbed after 10 Workers Press, British section of the newly formed days to the bribes of right-wing agencies into "Workers Intemational", led the pack with an expos~ supporting the seab 'Union of Democratic Miners' in a by Simon Pirani revealing how leading members of slander campaign against Arthur Scargill and the Workers Power and Socialist OrganiserE met "behind National Union of Miners. He was disowned closed doors" with one George Miller to organise a absolutely by Workers Power which was to the fore in tour of Britain by a Soviet trade unionist Yuri the struggle to defend Scargill. The incident exposed Butchenko, a representative of the Kuzbass Workers' how real is the danger to the new movements from Union. Miller is a member and British representative of ,powerful capitalists such as Robert Maxwell (who the extreme right wing National Workers' Union leads the attack on Scargill) and imperialist-financed (NTS) which has been active in the USSR since the agencies such as the Russian NTS (National Workers 1930s. This "news" was eagerly seized upon by the Union). Leninist a tiny left Stalinist sect in Britain, which At all times in the Butchenko events the actions of rehashed the same story in good gutter press fashion. the LRCI and Workers Power were open and However, lacking either nerve or imagination, or both, principled. Before and during the whole affair our they added nothing to the slanders of the Workers organisations remained actively 10 the fore as defenders Press. of Scargill against the UDM. The Spartacists, whose Not to be outdone, although a litLle slow off the paper had attached little importance to the defence of mark, the slavishly pro-Stalinist Spartacist League (US Scargill beforehand, now suddenly sought to smear section and font of all wisdom for the International Workers Power with the lie that they collaborated in the Communist League) weighed in with new revelations witch-hunt of Scargill. in August. In July and August, Spartacist papers Workers Under the shock-horror headline, "Workers Power Hammer in Britain and Workers Vanguard in the US caught with Russian fascists" intrepid Workers dedicated whole two-page features to the smear that Vanguard reporters revealed the abyss into which the Workers Power had been caught out "lending their comrades of our British section had fallen. "Workers services to a sordid cabal of the UDM (a scab miners' Power", it declared. had been caught out "lending their organisation in Britain), NTS and other similar forces services to a sordid cabal of the UDM (a scab miners' aimed at breaking the NUM and its president Arthur organisation in Blitain), NTS and other sinister forces ScargiU." aimed at breaking the NUM and its President Arthur The LRCI has replied in detail to the allegations of Scargill". Workers Power, the article continued, was these and other sectarians who have tried to smear us now trying to "squirm out of its responsibility for with criminal allegations about the Butchenko events. selling up Arthur Scargill"! That statement is included here. The reader is invited to To top it all off, that lively tabloid International seriously compare the record, method and arguments Worker. paper of the British International Communist of the IWG, Workers Power and the LRCI with the Party, added Workers Power to the growing list of poisoned well of the Spartacists, exemplified in their CIA agents whose main objective is to disrupt the so-cal1ed 'truth kit' devoted to slandering the LRCI and building of the ICFlled by David North. Workers Power. To the reader prepared to seriously compare the respective positions of the two groups this To be accused of such crimes by fragments of 'kit' (sic) is revealed as nothing more than a ragbag or Ilealy"s IntcllIational Committee, given their record of gutter-press srticles caricaturing the LRCI and paid service ('or assorted hloody Bonapartist regimes in testifying only the obsessional sectarian bile of its the Middlc East, or by groups that hailed laruzelski's authors. crushing of the Polish workers, hardly carries much weight. But unanswered slanders can stick in the It is the only response these infantile Icrtists, badly minds or those who do not know the rotten records of caught out by the events in Eastern Europe, can make these organisations. Readers will have to forgive us for to the one political tendency which has fought for a going into entomological detail with regard to the genuinely Trotskyist programme of political revolution. events surrounding Butchenko's visit, but our centrist In that fight the LRCI puts the working class at the delraclors make such an explanation necessary. centre of its perspectives and refuses to entrust the future of the proletarian revolution to the blood-stained What farts underlie this phantasmagoria of Brezhnevs and laruzelskis of this world. bizarre slanders? Workers Power participated with Socialist (JrRCllli.l'er in a united frolll "Campaign for Solidarity 28 with Workers in the Eastern Bloc" (CSWE£3). Among formation of. il~dependent workers' organisations in the a number of representatives from SOl:ialist and K.uzbass ITIlnll1g and industrial region in central w~rk~rs' organi~ations which this campaign broughtlO Slbcna. Bntam was ¥un Butchenko. During his visit to Britain . Butl:henko's magazine canied no articles of a right Butchenko broke from CSWEB, threw in his lot with Wing charal:te~-no material from the NTS let alone the UDM scabs and joined in the auacks on Arthur lrom the faSCIst Pamyal. Butchenko himself, and Scargillieader of the NUM. tru~tworthy contacts who had known lTim for a long . Oearly this was a major set-back for CSWEB, and penod, never i?entified him as a member of the NTS. Indeed for the whole attempt to build links between the We had no eVIdence then nor have we received any militant left wing of the British labour movement and Stnl:C, that he was a member of the NTS. On the the ~ew~y formed S~viet independent workers' contrary, we received reports that he had expressed his o~g~sauons. It was a VICtory of the forces of the right opposition to the NTS in conferenl:es etc. within the labour movement and its millionaire backers ~f l:ourse we knew Butchenko, like nearly all like Robert Maxweell, for the UDM yellow unions and RUSSIan work:rs, was no defender of the planned for the forces of the state. We have no reason to economy which he saw as inseparable from conceal this be~ause throughout the whole period we burc'.lUcratic di.ctators~ip. He was in favour of "market" were engaged m a struggle with these forces, not in rclallons but, IIlwnslstently, not of the privatising or any form of collaboration. h~ndi~g over of industry to capitalists. He expressed The origins of our contact with vIews m fav?ur of wor~ers.o~ing and managing their Butchenko own enterpnses. That IS~ hIS vIews were typical of the danger~usly ~onfused pro.-western ideology which Through the LRCI's work we had obtained a number predommates 111 the new UnIons. of ~onta~ts among the developing independent miners' . As an individual we would certainly not have untons m VO.rkuta .and the K~zbass. We knew very WIshed to commend his views to British workers nor well that the nght wmg trade uruon leaderships, like the arranged a tour for him alone. But he was the AFL-CIO. Force Ouvriere in France and the EETPU in international representative of the Kuzbass Workers' Brita~n. back~d by their governments, were actively U~ion,. a mass organisation including the new miners' wo':".mg to WI~ ~ese n~w ~?ions over to right wing umon 111 the coalfields of that region. He was present ~slttons. In. Bntaln the left. trade unions were doing and helped organise the first congress of the new ltttl~ ?r no~mg to ~ombat thiS. largely because of their Confederation of Labour. What Workers Power, and tradltlonalltnks with. and sympathy for, the Stalinist later CSWEB, set out to organise was a tour of Britain st~o~e "trade unions" . .This was especially true of the by a delegation of workers' representatives from the Bn~lsh NUM led by Arthur ScargiII, the members of which were perhaps in the best position to influence new unions. these developing unions and prevent them coming Butl:henku offered to organise this and to come under the sway of right wing free marketeers. with them. He did not ask for, nor did he receive, any money from Workers Power or CSWEB for this. Rathe.r than sit ~ack in smug passivity like the Butchenko always claimed that the Kuzbass Workers sectanans. we deCided to take up this struggle, despite Union would pay for the tickets to London but would our small forces. and organise visits from these thcn wish to raise money for the expenses of the tour organisations to rank and file workers in Britain. Our and for the unions. We know Butchenko's air ticket aim was to influence. argue with and inform these was purchased in Moscow in rubles. he always delegations as to the nature of the right wing in the maintained to us that it was paid for by the Kuzbass trade unions and the implications of the market Wo~k~~' Union. Thus it is absolutely false to say that economy for workers' lives in the west. We also we Imtlated or arranged the tour with anybody other sought to win practical assistance from class conscious than Butchenko himself. If Butchenko's ticket was workers in the west for building the new labour paid for by the NTS we did not know of it nor do we movement in the workers' states. We do not believe have any evidenl:e that this was the case. Do the that a precondition for undertaking these links must be slanderers? If so we should be glad to have it. that the Soviet workers' organisations pledge themselves in advance to the defence of the planned Enter Miller Stage Right eco~?my in the USSR. If they already had those poslttons there would be no need for pursuing this How then did the figure of George Miller, editor of the work of argument and education. periodical Svviet Lahour Review. and as it transpired. Britis~ representative of the NTS, enter the picture? In the autumn of 1989 representatives of Workers Certalllly not, as the slanderers claim, as the co­ Power met ¥uri Butchenko in the Soviet Union. In the organiser of the tour. early 1980s Butchenko had been a student dissident in Len.ingra~, w~e~e h~ had helped organise a protest Shortly before the !irst CSWEB conference on 26th agamst dlscnmmatlOn and persecution of Jewish January Butchenko and a number of Soviet trade students in the university. He had been arrested for unionists sent a fax welcoming the offer to host a visit communicating information about this protest to the by. a delegation of workers. Through sources in the western media via the US consulate and sentenced to unIOn movement in Moscow, quite possiblX from the eight years in labour camps. NTS,.they had acquired Miller's fax number in London and scnt their fax asking for it to be forwarded After his release. Butchenko worked as l:hemil:al to CSWEB. A phone l:all from Miller about this fax worker in his home region, and there, with the arrival resulted in the !irst contal:t with CSWEB, to hand over of glasno.st, he beca~e the editor of a magazine the fax. At this point nobody in Workers Power had Kuzbasskle Vedemostl (Kuzbass chronide). This was any knowledge of who or what Miller was. No an eclectic journal which supported and promoted the 29 agreement, co-operation, or united front was struck at this "meeting" which did not take place "behind closed Spartacist Lies doors" but at London's School of East European and But what about Workers Vanguard's "revelations"? A Slavonic Studies where it appears that Miller is brief reply to just some of them will confirm what most researching for a doctorate. of the left already knows about the editorial "standards" Workers Power and CSWEB did, however, initiate of this paper, renowned for its lies, half truths and enquiries as to Miller's political character. All we scandalous amalgams. discovered was that he had links to the right wing in Workers Vanguard says we provided Butchenko the unions, that he as a "shady character", and that his with a carte d' entree into the labour movement magazine was very well informed. He himself claimed "knowing full well that he was at the very least first to be a Liberal and former anarchist. No intimately connected with the fascist NTS, through its connection to the NTS emerged. British rcpresentative George Miller". This is a bare­ The next contact with Miller, again undertaken by faced lie. As stated above, we confirmed from several him and unconnected to the proposed tour with independent sources in the USSR that Butchenko was Butchenko, was when he phoned Workers Power to not a member of the NTS. If Workers Vanguard has say that he had staying with him one Yakovlev, a evidence that hc was in fact "intimatcly connected" Vorkuta deputy to the Supreme Soviet and before the tour, let them produce it. representative of the Workers' Committee of this All that Workers Vallguard bases this assertion on region. He inquired if we wished to meet him. We said is the fact that it was Miller's invitation that got yes. Butchenko the visa to Britain. But is this fact damning Yakovlev, we discovered on meeting him with as Workers Vanguard claims? Not at all. Perhaps Miller, had been invited to Britain by Labour MP Terry ordinary readers are unaware of the complex Fields and the Militant, but had broken from them bureaucratic procedure that the Stalinist USSR and because they were "too left wing". Yakovlev racist Britain dcvise to block and delay visits between proclaimed himself a "social democrat". Shortly after the two countrics. this meeting, which was solely to gather information, A Soviet citizen requires an exit visa from the we discovered from Militant's denunciation of Miller USSR issued by OVIR (the bureau for foreign travel). and Yakovlev that Miller was a representative of the To gct this visa the applicant must have an invitation NTS. Having found out as much as we could from from an individual in the country concerned in both Searchlight (a British anti-fascist journal) etc., about their languagc and in Russian. Once having obtained a Miller, we confronted Miller and Yakovlev with this. Russian exit visa he/she must obtain a British entry Miller confessed that he was a member of the NTS visa. To get this, again, a British citizcn must invite, but denied that the NTS was a fascist organisation. We and guarantee the maintenance of, the visitor. Since made absolutely clear to him neither Workers Power CSWEB was planning thc tour for Autumn 1990 it set nor CSWEB would have anything to do with the NTS about seeking invitations from left Labour MPs, in Britain or with Soviet NTS members. Far from any academics etc., not/rom Miller. collaboration or agreement being arranged wc madc Before this process was complete we received a clear the exact opposite. messagc from Butchenko saying he and three to four Thus the WRP's accusation that Workcrs Power other Soviet tradc union representatives were coming to and Socialist Organiser representatives met with thc Britain in May/June and requesting CSWEB to NTS to "organise a tour of Britain by a Sovict trade organise a tour. The tickets would be paid for by the unionist" is an outright lie. Its purpose was the cxact Russian unions. Later enquiries as to how they were opposite, to make clear we would not. Pirani ends his getting visas revealed that fonnal invitations of the type article by declaring "There are times and placcs whcn mentioned above had been received from Miller and/or against the imperialist and Stalinist enemy, all sorts of Terry Piclds MP. We kncw from Sovict sources that expedient alliances are possible-but not this one". Tcrry Pields had issucd many invitations to Soviet trade unionists on his visit to the USSR. Although As we have just made clear, wc made no allianccs Miller's involvement was worrying we fclt it was no with the NTS. But exactly what kind of "cxpcdicnt reason to refuse to organisc the tour since there was no alliances" is Pirani rcferring to? He is prcsumably evidencc of any political link between Butchenko, referring to the fact that for years and years Pirani, Miller and the NTS. Slaughter, Pilling et al sat and agreed with Healy's "expedient alliance" with Gadaffi and other bourgeois But it was Miller's invitation which worked with leaders in the Middle East. An "alliance" which brought the British Embassy, no doubt because of Miller's in millions of pounds to the WRP for 'services conncctions and the fact that he is a known anti­ rendered'. Although the WRP has apparentl y comlllunist. Originally four mincrs were coming, but renounced these methods, individuals like Pirani who bccausc of thc imminence of a national miners' strike were up to their ears in all this should be a little wary of only BUlchcnko camc. donning the mantle of accuser. At this point we should make something clear. About thc only thing that is true in the Workers Vanguard article is that Workers Power made a mistake in its August article. Workers Power's 11 July slalclllcllt llIadc c1car thcy learnt by phonc from Moscow lhat it was Miller's invitation that had secured Butchenko's visa. In an articlc in the August issue of Workcrs Power the author said this only became appan:~nt whcn Butchenko arrived in Britain. 30 show themselves as the best IOOl-soidiers for the We await wilh little interest the use to which this Stalinist bureaucracy in its "hour of need". Thus thev error will be put in a future Workers Vanguard expose fulminate against us for daring to point out lhat the of our sinist~r plot. Scargil! leadership of the NUM played onto the hands In fact it was quite simply a mistake. The author of of the right wing by their slavish commitment to the the August article believed wrongly lhat Miller's slalc-run Stalinist dam mated unions. They froOl at Ole invitation had been discovered after Butchenko arrived. mouth because we dare to compare. these state-run In fact it was discovered in a telephone call shortly miners' unions, with their rotten history of strike before his departure when he asked us to notify Miller breaking on behalf of the bureaucracy, wiOl Ole scab of his arrival\ This we refused to do. We met UDM in Britain. Butchenko at the airport. CSWEB organised his tour 111e Spartacisls know which side they are on. They without the slightest link with Miller. are wcll on their way to writing off Ole independent Workers Vanguard repeale; the accusation that when workers' movement in the Soviet Union as counter­ Butchenko arrived we had a "cozy" relationship with revolutionary just as Oley wrote off Ole multi-millioned Miller. This accusation is completely untrue. The Solidarity workers' movement in 1981, and finally evidence? We initiated no contact with Miller. "took responsibility" for the bloody crushing of Ole Butchenko did. Only when Butchenko announced that movement in 1981. he had contacted and was meeting Miller did we send There is lillie chance that these brave someone along who could understand Russian to find revolutionaries, secure in their New York offices, will out what they were arranging. make any concrete allcmpt to fight the influence of the In fact all that Butchenko and Miller decided at this right wing in the Soviet working class, and even less meeting was that Butchenko would visit the TUC that they will try to convince the rank and file Olat Olere International department. Workers Vanguard seems to is a revolutionary alternative to Stalinism. regard it as a crime that we did not denounce or 111e ;'defencism" of these characters boiled down to obstruct this visit. Now whilst the International derence·of the Stasi against the outrage of the workers; Department of the TUC doubtless performs services thei r ~trategy for building a "Trotskyist" party is for Whitehall and even MI6 it is not simply a nest of nothing but hobnobbing with SED bureaucrats, gracing spies as the Spartacists would have us believe. Indeed, their platfonns with uncritical speeches and sending we can have little reason to doubt that ordinary union ludicrous and unread pleading telegrams to assorted head offices perform similar functions. Does that mean Stalinist functionaries. Soviet generals etc. we prevent workers from contacting their own union bureaucracy and making demands of it'! This revolting debasement of revolutionary politics For these infantile leftists, however, "they might as is a product of the terrible degeneration of well have gone directly to the Foreign Office or for Olat "Trotskyism" after its post-war crisis and breakdown matter the US Embassy in in Grosvenor Square". Isn't in the years 1948-51. Despite the ICL's claim to be it about time that the ICL seriously thought about "anti-Pabloites" Oleir total surrender to Stalinism goes giving James Robertson a basic Marxist educational on far beyond that of 'Michel Pablo in the late 1940s and the difference between a trade union and organs of the early 1950s. The difference is that Pablo was the bourgeois state? But perhaps they could find no one in secretary of Ole as yet unbroken and unbowed Fourth their ranks able to give it. International. His capitulation to the triumphant Stalinist bureaucracy was a tragedy. The ICL's self­ As if their farrago of lies and half truths was not abasement before Stalinism on its deathbed is still a enough, Workers Vanguard has to add Workers crime, but it is also a vulgar farce. Power's role in "setting up" Arthur Scargill! Now this is very curious. One of the first papers on the left to take up the defence of Arthur Scargill against the witch­ hunt was Workers Power, starting with an editorial in its April issue. Meanwhile Workers Hammer, the British ICL's paper, and likewise Workers Vallguard. remained strangely silent on the issue. Both these FOR INfORMATION ABOUT THE august journals suddenly discovered the issue in League for a Revolutionary August when it was to be used as a weapon against the LRCI!· C 011l11l11llist International And what is the evidence that we set up Scargill'! Contact the Irish Workers Group Workers Power and CSWEB were involved in organising a tour for Yuri Butchenko. Butchenko. by writing to: unbeknown to us, went with Miller to see the UDM who are key players in the witch-hunt against Scargill J .Larkin, 12 Langrishe Place, Dublin 1 and the attempt to drive him from office. Workers or:Workers Power, BCM 7750", Power and CSWEB broke all links with Butchenko over this. Ergo Workers Power is responsible for London WeI 3XX setting up Arthur Seargill! This is the most ridiculous transparent amalgam yet seen from the Workers Vanguard editorial office. Gerry Healy-or Stalin!­ could not have done belter. At the root of this pathelic slander is the desire of Robertson and this increasingly Stalinophile sect to

31 ~ -reprinted from Workers Hammer ______mDflKE~SI£mM~ll~ . no 100 (September 1988) Tony Cliff's stepchildren Workers Power: the baggage of State Capitalism

David North's The Heritage We 1980 and the Soviet intervention in Defend is the subject of a critical Afghanistan that WP renounced review by Trotskyist International Cliff's "third camp" ("Neither Wash­ (Sum mer 1988), new journal of the ington nor Moscow") line, adopting a centrist current led by the Workers formally Trotskyist position that the Power group, the Movement for a Soviet Union was a degenerated wor­ Revolutionary Communist Internat­ kers state. ional (MRCI). In a nutshell, the re­ In typically centrist fashion, how­ view is devoted to again vindicating ever, Workers Power recoiled from WP's "plague on both your houses" drawing the hard revolutionary con­ line on the 1953 split by the Inter­ clusions. In the abstract, WP called national Committee, then led by the for defence of the Soviet Union; in American Trotskyist SWP of James the concrete, they had "no hesitation P Cannon, from the Pabloist liquida­ in condemning the Soviet invasion of tionism which destroyed the Fourth Afghanistan" (Workers Power, Febru­ International. Yet, throughout five ary 1980). But with mealy-mouthed densely packed pages, the review gutlessness, they deemed it "tacti­ never takes note of North's ludicrous cally ~rong" to openly join the im­ misattribution to Trotsky of Hansen's perialist outcry for Soviet withdraw­ formulation that "Stalinism is coun­ al until "the forces exist in Afghan­ terrevolutionary through and through". istan which can mobilise the masses On the contrary, it takes the logic for the major democratic and social­ of this stupidly one-sided formula­ ist goals, and hold the pro-imperial­ tion to absurdity, asserting that ist forces at bay". NOW, with a blood­ "Castro and co, like Mao and Tito bath looming, an April 1988 MRCI before them, carri"ed out a counter­ resolution continues to "condemn the revolutionary overthrow of capital­ invasion as counterrevolutionary", ism". Ditto for the bureaucratically while simultaneously denouncing the imposed social revolutions in Soviet­ Soviet withdrawal! Not one of the occupied East Europe following World some two dozen slogans at the end War II. In brief, according to Workers of the resolution raises defence of Power, every overthrow of capitalism the Soviet Union. since the Russian Revolution has • Workers Power's line on Afghan­ been "counterrevolutionary". What istan is a quintessential example of could a counterrevolutionary over­ the "crystallized confusion" that Tro­ turn of capitalism mean - except, tsky cited as a prime characteristic perhaps, a return to feudalism? The of centrism. In the eight years since closest thing to this in recent times it repudiated its state capitalist was the "Islamic revolution" in Iran. position, WP has continued to try to But there WP backed the mullah-led keep one foot in each camp. In its "mass movement" unconditionally, "Twenty two theses in defence of just as they supported Polish Solidar­ Trotskyism" (May 1987), the MRCI nosc' full-blown attempt at counter­ asserts: revolution despite admitting the Sol­ "We reject Stalinophobia - a differ­ idarnosc leadership was committed ential hostility to Stalinism over to the restoration of capitalism. social democracy or other alien Workers Power carries the politi­ class influences. This, with its em­ cal baggage of its origins in a 1975 phasis on a monolithic nature for split from Tony Cliff's International Stalinism ('counterrevolutionary Socialists (now the Socialist Workers through and through'), has led to Party). It was not until February softness and accommodation to

32 social-democratic reformism .... " kyist movement in the face of the But in practice, on every contempo­ post-WW II Stalinist overturns of cap­ rary issue, Workers Power ends up italism in East Europe, Workers Po­ refusing to defend the deformed/de­ wer contemptuously dismisses the generated workers states. And else­ Trotskyists who fought the liquida­ where WP asserts: "Essential to tionism of Michel Pablo, albeit be­ Pablo's position was a revision of the latedly, partially and primarily on Trotskyist understanding of Stalin­ their own national terrain, and who ism, i.e. that it is invariably a coun­ reconstituted themselves as the IC. ter-revolutionary force" (The Death Cannon just isn't up to snuff for Wor­ Agony of the Fourth International, kers Power, because it took him a 1983). few years to catch on. But he led a This is hardly an original thesis. fight to preserve Trotskyism against Workers Power's Cliffite godparents those who sought to destroy it. Wor­ like to claim occasionally (when kers Power takes no side in this strug­ overt anti-Sovietism is not in vogue) gle for revolutionary continuity, and that they originated in a fight against they can hardly claim Cliff as the "the shamelessly opportunist support continuity of Trotskyism. for Tito's Yugoslavia by the rest of To believe WP/MRCI, from the the Trotskyist movement" (Interna­ Fl's "collapse" until WP emerged full­ tional Socialism no 76, March 1975). blown on the scene like Athena from The Cliff group fought against Trots­ the head of Zeus, there existed no kyism, not Pabloism, arguing as early real Trotskyists on this planet. It re­ as 1948 that the Soviet Union and the quires a big dose of hubris for a deformed workers states were "state group to anoint itself the first Trots­ capitalist". They got themselves ex­ kyists since Trotsky. We can only lay pelled from the Fourth International claim to continuing, as best we can, in 1950 for publicly repudiating the the struggle passed on to us by Fl's defence of the North Korean de­ Cannon, and to him by Trotsky. We formed workers state against US im­ can, however, boast that we make perialism. And it is precisely in the available 25 years of our written period 1948-51 that WP locates the material in bound volumes for criti­ definitive "collapse" into centrism cal examination by the working-class of the Fl. public. Workers Power, like all cen­ Seizing upon the disorientation trists, is loath to deal honestly with that gripped the entire world Trots- its own heritage._ International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)

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33 ~~ .....E'D~ ... ~ -reprintedfrom ~'~l'~LA· .' Workers Hammer __JfiD~'RS--::;_:....:.:..:.:.;:..______no 113 (March/April 1990) Soft-core capitalist restorationists Workers Power: right turn on East Germany

Last November in the midst of the political revolution refused to allow King Michael back into the country.) which had shattered the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy Now, in East Germany, Workers Power embraces the in the DDR, Workers Power portrayed the disintegrat­ "counterrevolutionary" Stalinists of the PDS who have ing remnants of the Stalinist bureaucracy as a force c0- identified themselves, in more than name, as an effectively equal with imperialism. "Down with Stalinist and im­ social democratic component of the forces for capitalist perialist plans to restore capitalism!" declared a resolu­ restoration. In its role as the "opposition" in the "parlia­ tion "On the political revolution in East Germany" by ment" of the Volkskammer, the PDS is an animal which Workers Power's League for a Revolutionary Communist the Little England Labour Party leftists of Workers Power International (LRCI). Six months later, following the 18 can really understand. March elections which were swept by the parties of cap­ italist counterrevolution, Workers Power is demanding The chickens come home to roost that the Stalinist leftovers of the PDS (the renamed SED), who capitulated down the line to the imperialist In 1980, at the time of the imperialist uproar over the stampede for capitalist reunification, hold the line against Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, Workers Power capitalist restoration! How can one explain the above publicly announced that it had completely broken from its contradiction? origins in Tony Cliff's Socialist Workers Party and In the April issue of its press, Workers Power writes: declared that it had adopted a Trotskyist understanding of "We must demand that the SPD and PDS have no truck the Soviet Union as a bureaucratically degenerated with any Alliance-led government. They must be forced to workers state. Although claiming to have rejected Cliffs use their votes in parliament to block any change in the state capitalist position, Workers Power never broke from constitution which aids this restoration and any other mea­ the methodology of Third Camp anti-Sovietism, ie, one sures directed against the workers. They must table pro­ which views the Stalinist bureaucracy as a purely counter­ working class legislation in the current parliament and dare revolutionary force. the Alliance to oppose it in front of the workers who voted for them." While nominally claiming a position of Soviet defen­ sism around Afghanistan, in the concrete Workers Power This is more than Workers Power's usual parliamen­ condemned the Soviet intervention against imperialist­ tary cretinism. The SPD was the Trojan horse for capital­ backed feudal reaction as "counterrevolutionary". (They ist counterrevolution in the DDR. They lost out to Kohl's also denounced the Soviet withdrawal as "counterrevolu­ COU precisely because many figured: why vote for the tionary".) In 1981 they "critically" championed Soli dar­ social democratic lackeys when you can have the banker no~c even while admitting that Solidarno~c in power with the money in his pocket. The SPO has already would mean capitalist restoration. Now that the Soli­ thrown its lot in as a partner in Kohl's "grand coalition" darno~c-led government in Poland is implementing its Alliance government. As for the POS, on 5 April its programme for capitalist restoration Workers Power delegates to the Volkskammer raised their hands for the pathetically opines: "Poland: No Return to Capitalism"! unanimous vote to delete the preamble to the constitution But, the chickens really came home to roost when which called East Germany "a socialistic state of workers Workers Power was confronted by the rapidly unfolding and farmers". events in the OOR. Before the elections Workers Power howled for blood, Here was the perfect refutation of the Third Camp calling to "hunt down the Stalinist parasites and spies". view of the Stalinist bureaucracy as a monolithic new The evident model that Workers Power had in mind was ruling class, and the perfect confirmation of Trotsky'S the mass revolt that toppled the family Stalinist dictator­ understanding of the bureaucracy as a brittle and contra­ ship of Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania. These Stalino­ dictory caste-which is simultaneously dependent on the phobic centrists were really stimulated by the sight of existence of the collectivised property forms of the Stalinist blood flowing in the streets of Romania. Enthus­ workers state while acting as a transmission mechanism ing over "a real, armed and bloody revolution", Workers for the pressures of hostile world imperialism in under­ Power glorified the revolt against Ceausescu as a great mining the workers states. In the face of mass protest workers revolution, even comparing it to the Bolshevik against its rule, and increasingly under the pressure of Revolution of 1917! (What emerged from this glorious West German imperialist revanchism, the bureaucracy revolution was a government which abuses Hungarians completely disintegrated. The choices were starkly posed: and is anti-Semitic but Workers Power can take heart-it either a Germany of workers councils to replace the

34 corrupt, nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy, or capitalist against imperialist attack with the call for the dissolution counterrevolution. of the Warsaw Pact? "Smash Capitalist Counterrevolution" was the headline The bottom line for Workers Power is that reversing of the fIrst issue of Albeitennacht, the newspaper of the the outcome of World War II doesn't matter. By their German section of Workers Power's LRCI. But com­ lights the bureaucratically imposed social revolutions in pelled by the logic that the Stalinist bureaucracy is a Soviet -occupied East Europe following the war were completely counterrevolutionary force, Workers Power "counterrevolutionary". (What could a "counterrevolu­ ended up echoing, albeit from the "left", the imperialist tionary" overthrow of capitalism mean-except maybe a campaign for the annexation of the DDR. Nowhere is this return to feudalism? The closest thing to this in recent clearer than their demand for the withdrawal of the Soviet times was the mullah-led "Islamic Revolution" in Iran Army from the DDR. which Workers Power supported because it was a "mass In an editorial entitled "Germany-no to capitalist movement".) Applied to East Germany this idiotic unity" (Worker.s Power, March 1990) they write: formulation means that the foundation of the DDR "The Warsaw Pact was created in response to the represented the "counterrevolutionary overthrow" of imperialist threat to the Soviet Union and th06e states it Adolf Hitler's fascist state! In the pages of Workers had conquered. Whilst its troops were and are a form of Power's theoretical journal Trotskyist International (no 4, defence of the post-capitalist property relations of th06e Spring 1990) we read that "the division of Germany was states, the only combat they have ever undertaken has a reactionary denial of the right of self-determination". If been the suppression of the insurgent working classes of this is the case then Workers Power should see the 18 the GDR, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. That was the Pact's principal function and we are in favour of its March election results as a victory for the self-determina­ dissolution and the withdrawal of its troops." tion of the German nation! To declare that the only combat undertaken by Soviet The Treptow anti-fascist protest troops has been the suppression of the East European With its view that the Soviet troops in the DDR are proletariat is indicative of a mindset devoid of simple an "occupation army" Workers Power was obviously hard history. What about: 1. the civil war in Russia, 1918-19; 2. pressed to explain that 250,000 citizens of the DDR the war against Pilsudski's Poland, 1920; 3. against Japan rallied at Treptow Park on 3 January to honour the Red in Manchuria, 1937 and 1939; 4. the invasion of Finland, Army and protest the Nazi desecration of a memorial to 1939; 5. the war against Nazi Germany, 1941; 6. the 1979 the Soviet soldiers who fell liberating Europe from intervention in Afghanistan. Hitler's Nazis. Our German comrades initiated a call for Last year, the Soviet Army in Poland, Czechoslovakia, a massive workers united-front action to stop the fascists. Hungary and East Germany was politically neutralised by We brought the call directly to the SED leadership and the Moscow government. With the exception of Romania, urged their participation. So out of touch with the work­ where there are no Soviet troops, there was no bloodshed. ing class and so fearful of them, the SED initially resisted Impelled by his own internal problems, Gorbachev turned our proposal. But as our call was distributed in factories the key and Eastern Europe exploded with political fer­ throughout Berlin, the Stalinists mobilised their forces ment-from all quarters, in every conceivable direction and moved to take over the demonstration. A quarter of from outright capitalist restorationists to anti-bureaucratic a million people came out to protest Nazi provocations Communists. and express their will to defend the DDR against capital­ Gorbachev's present willingness to negotiate the ist restoration. withdrawal of Soviet troops from the DDR is an extreme As our German press ArpreJ«m noted: "For the fIrst example of Stalinist betrayal in the face of imperialist time in the DDR's history, Trotskyists were able to speak, pressure and one which threatens the existence of the and called for a workers united front, workers militias and Soviet Union. But Workers Power stands with him. workers and soldiers councils". Our criticisms of the Withdrawing the Red Army is obviously necessary to the incompetence and economic mismanagement of the SED consolidation of a reunifIed capitalist Germany. Workers party dictatorship and of Gorbachev's market-oriented Power stands reality on its head with the claim that the perestroika economic reforms in the USSR, drew heckling imperialists see the Soviet troops "as a force to prevent from the largely SED crowd. any local opposition to restoration in Eastern Europe Alarmed by the Treptow mobilisation in which they generally" (Worker.s Power, April 1990). correctly saw the forces that could prevail against capital­ The Soviet Army plays a contradictory role, reflectmg istAnschluss, the imperialists and their social-democratic the contradictions inherent in the rule of the Stalinist frontmen geared up their campaign to stampede the DDR bureaucracies. In 1953 Soviet troops were used to crush into reunification. The West German bourgeois press at­ proletarian political revolution in the DDR, yet even tempted to smear the SED as responsible for the fascist Workers Power admits that these troops simultaneously provocations, with headlines like "Fear in the DDR-the were "a form of defence of the post-capitalist property SED's Nazi Trick" and "SED ProfIts from Neo-Fascism". relations". Nonetheless they call for the withdrawal of What was the response of Workers Power? In an 18- these troops which is nothing more than calling for the page pamphlet entitled "Sectarianism and Stalinophilia: creation of a power vacuum which could only be ruled by The Politics of the Spartacist League", its Irish affiliate, the troops of the West German Bundeswehr and NATO the Irish Workers Group, sneered: imperialism. Similarly, if Workers Power believes its own "Eager to proclaim themselves around the world-deceit­ statement that the Warsaw Pact was "created in response fuUy-as the representatives of Trotskyism in the GDR, to the imperialist threat to the Soviet Union" how do they their press reprints copious leaflets, speeches and state­ square their nominal claim to defend the Soviet Union ments reflecting their activity in Berlin. Much of it has

35 centred on an 'East Berlin Protest Against Fascist Dese­ the guys who were insatiable in their calls for the blood­ cration of Soviet War Memorial' at which, they assert, iest "anti-Stalinist" purges. '250,000 Say: No Nazis in East Germany'." Contrary to our "assertions" that this was a massive anti­ Why Workers Power lies fascist mobilisation, the IWG seems to have the same appreciation of the Treptow demonstration as the West To resolve the contradiction between their call to German imperialists ana the social democrats, ie, that it "Smash Capitalist Restoration" and the fact that they was all a gigantic ruse by the disintegrating Stalinists to sided with capitalist counterrevolution at every crucial strengthen their state security apparatus. stage-from demanding the withdrawal of the Red Army, But, in the DDR-where West German Chancellor echoing the social democrats' lies about the Treptow Helmut Kohl used skinheads to guard his own mass demonstration, cheering the attacks of rightist gangs on demonstrations for capitalist counterrevolution-the LRCI Stasi headquarters-Workers Power raves on about Spar­ obviously felt it couldn't get away with echoing the social tacist "Stalinophilia". In the aftermath of the 18 March democrats' lies against the Treptow demonstration. In its elections-in which the Spartakist Arbeiterpartei Deutsch­ "Action Programme for the Workers of East Germany", issued on 13 February, they write: lands was the only party which took a clear and unam­ biguous stand against capitalist reunification-Workers "The desecration of Soviet war memorials and Jewish Power writes: "Posing as 'defenders of the planned graves, and the racist attacks on immigrant workers show the urgent necessity for an anti-fascist united front, a property relations', Spartacist public speakers utterly united front which would include all labour movement ignored the forty years of privilege, theft and counter­ organisations, especially those of the immigrant workers, revolutionary tyranny that Stalinism meant for the work­ and all honest anti-fascists. The anti-Nazi rally at Treptow ers of the GDR" (Workers Power, April 1990). was the first step towards this. But it is only a beginning!" What did "the Spartacists" say? Here's a quote from It was a "ftrst step" that Workers Power refused to touch the "Manifesto and Programme of Struggle", of which with a barge pole! They wanted nothing to do with a hundreds of thousands of copies were distributed during principled and urgent united-front with the SED which the election campaign: was aimed against the stormtroopers for a capitalist "The Spartakist Workers Party of Germany is fighting in Fourth Reich. The SED/PDS completely capitulated in this election campaign against capitalist counterrevolution the face of the imperialist campaign of lies and de­ and for a proletarion political revolution against Stalinism stabilisation following the Treptow demonstration. Now that goes all the way .... that the PDS is operating like a bunch of immiserated "We are the only ones to fight for a planned economy not ruled by the arbitrary dictates of a bureaucracy but on the social democrats in their capacity as the "opposition" in basis of broad deep-going workers democracy. The workers the Volkskammer Workers Power caUs on them to defend must take into their own hands control of the factories the workers of the DDR against capitalist counterrevolu­ and institutions by building soviets [workers councils] in tion! which all currents of the working class are represented .... In its March issue Workers Power notes: "Shortly after Thousands upon thousands in the DDR have stuck to the the SED [Treptow] rally ... the SED government at­ ideals of social justice-workers, collective farmers, sol­ tempted to re-establish the security police (Stasi) but diers, even many in the bureaucracy. These goals were not wrong: it was Stalinism that betrayed your goals and were prevented by mass mobilisations and seizures of the deformed your communist idealsl The doctrine of 'social­ Stasi buildings. For revolutionaries this is the very stuff of ism in one country', that lying invention of Stalin and revolution". Here Workers Power is speaking of a mob Bukharin, was the first great betrayal of the October invasion of Stasi headquarters in Berlin on 16 January. Revolution itself and led to horrible excesses." Among those present was a hard core of fascist skinhead We stressed that these elections were a plebiscite, dis­ types. Prominently displayed was a banner in the form of torted by the imperialist campaign of intimidation, on the a West German flag inscribed with "Germany, One very existence of the DDR. It was a vote for or against Fatherland" and placards reading "SED-PDS, party of imperialist annexation of the DDR. And what did Work­ the Stasi". This is the "stuff" that capitalist counterrevolu­ ers Power's followers in Germany do? They called for tion is made of. But in its mindless enthusing over "anti­ "abstaining on the vote"! Stalinist actions" Workers Power couldn't tell the dif­ The LRCI also tries to identify us with the SED's call ference between revolution and counterrevolution. for a reorganised state security a\,paratus to stop fascism. Now current and former members of the SED /PDS "Why at the Treptow demonstratlon-which we of course and anyone associated with the former Stalinist regime of supported-didn't you centrally agitate against the SED the DDR face the prospect of being purged in anti­ plan for a new Verfassungsschutz [Offtce for the Protec­ Communist witchhunts (as was done in West Germany, tion of the Constitution]?" asks Arbeitemtacht (April initially by American Army Intelligence using former 1990). Only unmitigated Third Campists would say that Gestapo agents and then picked up by the BRD govern­ the most important thing about a rally against fascist ment and the social democrats in the trade unions). terror in the DDR was to ftght against the Stalinist police. Under the watchword of "reds out"-which was the cry What did "the Spartacists" say at the Treptow rally? We of the fascist gangs that infested Kohl's CDU rallies-the quote: "No Verfassun&rschutz in the world has yet been forces of capitalist restoration aim to eliminate anyone able to stop the Brown Plague. What we need is a broad who would defend the workers' interests. In its post­ organisation of the working masses, the masses of the election coverage even Workers Power admits that working people of the whole nation. They must organise "smoothing the path towards capitalism involves purging themselves in soviets, in workers and soldiers councils." the state apparatus of any 'unreliable' elements from its But, how would Arbeitemtacht know? Despite their Stalinist days" (Workers Power, April 1990). Yet WP are proclamations of support they had nothing to do with the

36 Treptow demonstration. In any case, Workers Power perity"? By Workers Power's Third Camp logic, it should doesn't believe its own lies. In Britain, they acknowledged make no difference that the parties of a German Fourth our call for workers militias to defend against fascist Reich are now the government of East Germany. On the terror while sneering that this "certainly sounds revolu­ contrary the workers of the DDR should be celebrating tionary-until we fmd that their main task is to guard the fulfillment of Workers Power's call to "root out and Soviet war graves!" punish every fUthy bureaucrat and secret police agent who Self-evidently there are numerous political differences made life hell for the GDR's workers for forty years". But between us and Workers Power. But in order to bolster now Workers Power teDs the working class of the DDR its own'interpretation of events, Workers Power freely to look to the same "fUthy bureaucrats" in the PDS and resorts to falsehood and slander. Why would anyone want the social democrats' party of capitalist restoration, the to be in an organisation whose leadership knowingly teDs SPD, for salvation. grotesque lies to score points against us-or against The imperialists are salivating over exploiting the anyone else for that matter? The road to the crystallisa­ population of the DDR as a new low-wage ghetto of tion of revolutionary cadres is obstructed by Disneyworld Western capital and semng the DDR as a launching pad versions of events. Yet, for Workers Power, keeping for the imperialist conquest of the Soviet Union. It won't Spartacists out of their "public" meetings in England be easy. Many defensive battles loom ahead. The job of (because we set up a literature table at a public debate revolutionary Marxists is to make common cause with the with their group some years ago!) has been elevated to struggles of the DDR working class to defend itself the same plane as the liquidation of the deformed work­ against imperialist Anschluss and to link these struggles ers states. As JV Stalin knew well, lies are the way of with those of workers in the BRD. This will lay the resolving the contradiction between one's professed groundwork at a juncture for the German workers going programme and what one does in practice. Workers over to the economic and political offensive-for their Power's slander and exclusion is simply the soft-core own sake and for the growth of a larger scale German version of the methods Stalin, backed by force of state revolutionary workers party and to give encouragement power, wielded against his opponents. and implicit guidance to the proletariat further East. Workers Power has sought to carve out a niche for Centrists who only betray when It counts itself as the "left wing" of the spectrum of the Labourite left in Britain, something on the order of the position The fundamental point of departure between us and occupied by the British Independent Labour Party in the Workers Power over the events in East Germany is our 19305. Confronted with having to draw revolutionary con­ understanding of the nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy clusions in the face of imperialist World War II and as a contradictory caste. This view was expressed most increasing political ferment among the working class, the profoundly in Trotsky's 1933 work on ''The Class Nature ILP collapsed. Now in the face of the imperialist drive to of the Soviet State": reverse the verdicts of World War II and destroy the "A real civil war could develop not between the Stalinist social gains of the DDR which were built up from the bureaucracy and the resurgent proletariat but between the rubble of Hitler's Third Reich, the central contradiction proletariat and the active forces of the counterrevolution. of Workers Power's particular brand of centrism com­ In the event of an open clash between the two mass camps, there cannot even be talk of the bureaucracy pletely exploded. They were incapable of trying to strad­ playing an independent role. Its polar flanks would be dle the fence between Trotskyism and the Third Camp. flung to the different sides of the barricade. The fate of Instead, straight down the line, Workers Power performed the subsequent development would be determined, of as the Third Camp running dogs of capitalist counter­ course, by the outcome of the struggle. The victory of the revolution. No amount of lying attacks on the Spartacists revolutionary camp, in any case, is conceivable only under can cover up this treachery although it could be a ticket the leadership of a proletarian party, which would naturally for them replacing Fenner Brockway.• be raised to power by victory over the counterrevolution." The Stalinist bureaucracy in the DDR was not defeated by proletarian political revolution, it simply capitulated before an imperialist onslaught. Theses The very fragility of the bureaucracy's rule imposed on upon it authoritarian and totalitarian qualities. Certainly Ireland there were many elements who carried out crimes against the proletariat. But by no means was this simply an (Spartaclst no 24, organisation of careerists or the privileged. The old SED Autumn 1977) was a mass party with over two million members out of a population of 17 million. In these ranks-including in SOp the army and police apparatus-were many sincere and SUbjective communists. They rightly felt deeply betrayed Order from/make cheques payable to: by· the evidence of lies, corruption and economic mis­ management of the SED leaders. Sj:>artacist Publications With its "Down with Stalinism! Down with Capital­ PO Box 1041 ism!" line Workers Power acted as traitors to the largely London NW5 3EU SED/PDS-oriented working masses in the DDR. If DSYG Stalinism is the co-equal of capitalism, then why not vote PO Box 2944, Dublin 1 for the fool's gold of the promises of D-Mark "pros-

37 rD~- reprinted from A· ~ Workers Hammer ______moma.SIlAB~~ . no 116 (September 1990) The Butchenko affair: anti-Sovietism comes home to roost Workers Power caught with Russian fascists, Thatcher's scabs

The Union of Democratic Miners (UDM) is a scab statements dated 11 July, directed at its various con­ "union" created to destroy the National Union of Mine­ stituencies. None of these have been published in its workers (NUM). The National Toilers Alliance (NTS) is paper, and we can see why. a Russian fascist outfit with links to one or another impe­ Addressing the Kuzbass union, WP called on them to rialist agency going back to Hitler's Nazis in the 19305. "renounce all links with the UDM" while attacking the Workers Power is a self-styled Trotskyist group in Britain. NUM leadership for its ties to the official Soviet unions. What's the connection? Plenty sordid. Workers Power has It even lent credence to the witchhunters' charges by been caught out lending their services to a sordid cabal of appealing to them: "should you wish to pursue the matter the UDM, NTS and other sinister forces aimed at of the money sent by Soviet miners to the NUM during breaking the NUM and its president Arthur Scargill. their strike, to do so exclusively via the NUM itself." Along with Socialist Organiser, its estranged bloc Addressing the British unions, which the Solidarity partners in the Campaign for Solidarity with Workers in Campaign had inveigled into meeting with Butchenko, the Eastern Bloc (CSWEB), Workers Power organised Workers Power had not a hint of criticism of Scargill, the tour in Britain of one Yuri Butchenko, "executive pleading: "Yuri Butchenko has betrayed your solidarity member of the Siberian-based Kuzbass Union of Work­ and goodwill. We apologise unreservedly for being the ers". For "nine very successful days", as WP puts it, these unwitting agency for this person to trade on your inter­ "leftists" provided Butchenko with an entr~ into numer­ nationalism (and ours too)." ous workers movement meetings, knowing full well that WP was confronted with an unforeseen conflict be­ he was at the very least intimately connected with the tween competing opportunist interests-on the one hand fascist NTS, through its British representative George their Stalinophobic appetites, on the other their tailing Miller. after the LabourjTUC left of which Scargill is part. So Then on 5 July, Butchenko appeared at a press conf­ they split from CSWEB following Butchenko's bombshell erence in London alongside UDM honcho Roy Lynk to appearance on behalf of the anti-Scargill rat pack. lend his voice to outlandish claims that Scargill had salted Workers Power condemned a Socialist Organiser/CSWEB away up to £10 million of donations made by Soviet statement for "suggesting that he [Butchenko] is somehow miners to the 1984-85 British miners strike. This was just an unwitting dupe of Lynk and the media" (presumably what union-hating prime minister Thatcher and her WP had cornered the "unwitting dupe" market that lieutenants in the Labour right wing needed: a Russian week). WP loftily declared, "We cannot be party, in any worker, legitimised by speaking before trade-union way, to its decision to excuse Butchenko's treachery." audiences, taking their side against the most militant This canting hypocrisy came after Workers Power itself union in Britain. Butchenko's claims were picked up and had devoted considerable efforts to coddling Butchenko. broadcast far and wide by the bosses' media. Only when he publicly joined the anti-Scargill witchhunt Butchenko's surfacing as one of the key players in the and hit the headlines with his press conference did WP anti-Scargill witchhunt forced Workers Power to issue a decide "a class line has to be drawn between the labour string of denials, non-denials and conflicting disclaimers, movement and Yuri Butchenko." Two weeks earlier, which in sum only confrrmed their criminal complicity in when Butchenko had insisted that CSWEB condone his this affair. WP tried to pass itself off as a pathetically meeting with the UDM and take on the NTS as co­ naive group simply out to make "solidarity" with the organiser of the tour, WP's editorial board issued a lame "independent workers' movement of the USSR and statement (dated 27 June) deploring his decision "to end Eastern Europe" and tragically fmding itself implicated in his commitments to our tour" after CSWEB rejected "the the smear campaign against Scargill. The fact is that these conditions laid down for collaboration by Yuri". Even Stalinophobic, rightward-moving centrists have blatantly then, "Yuri" was invited "to reply to our criticisms in the and directly aided the bourgeoisie, its UDM tool and the next issue of this paper", while Scargill's "allegiance to Labour/TUC right wing in their attempt to crucify the 'official' stooge unions" in the USSR was blamed for Scargill and break the miners union. "opening the door to Lynk" and the scab UDM. Not only does it have trouble keeping its constituencies Confessions of an anti-communist "dupe"? apart, WP can't even keep its "facts" straight. A piece in In an attempt to squirm out of its responsibility for the August issue of Worlcen Power, quaintly titled "Prob­ setting up Scargill, Workers Power issued three separate lems of solidarity", claims that "it was not until But-

38 chenko arrived in Britain that we were told he had been "arrangements" with until Butchenko got on the airwaves. formally invited here by Miller." But WP's 11 July How did it feel sitting down for a friendly chat with "Statement on Yuri Butchenko and CSWEB" reports that people who "fought alongside the Nazis"? How did Miller it was through a telephone conversation with Butchenko introduce himself to you-with a stiff-arm salute, or did in May, well before his arrival, that "we learnt that Miller a simple handshake do? had been the person to sign the official invitation papers for Butchenko to come." It all reads like one of those "I was a Commie dupe" Tripping over the class line confessions from the McCarthy era, and with about as much sincerity. So how unwitting an agency was Workers Workers Power's fronting for Butchenko and his NTS Power? Butchenko told them enough, as WP makes clear (and UDM) friends recalls the dirty work of Gerry with breathtaking cynicism in the same statement: Healy's WRP as the fingermen for the most right-wing agents of British capitalism within the labour movement. "Only after Butcbenko's arriva1 did be explain to us that he would be meeting Miller. When be did we sent The WRP instigated a vicious witchhunt against Scargill someone along to ensure that Miller did not try to disrupt and the NUM aimed at isolating the militant union on the tbe plans of the tour organised by CSWEB. At that point eve of its bitter yearlong strike. Then also the weapon of Miller expressed no wish to participate in the CSWEB tour choice was anti-Communism-roasting Scargill for his and be and Butcbenko agreed simply that once the tour remark that Polish Solidamo~~ was anti-socialist. The was over tbey would, separately from CSWEB, meet the TUC's international department." WRP, having spent years pimping for Libya's Qaddafl, the Iraqi Ba'athist regime and a host of other oil-rich Middle Cozy enough. The "socialists" of CSWEB would intro­ Eastern despots, knew exactly what it was getting into. duce Butchenko to the British trade-union movement and Workers Power got more than they bargained for or then hand him back over to the NTS and Miller for a know how to handle-a rip-roaring scandal in the British little jaunt to the TUC "international department"~ey left and labour movement. might as well have gone directly to the Foreign Office In its rapid rightward motion, WP is beginning to take (which Butchenko reportedly later did), or for that matter on ever more overtly the political cynicism associated with the US embassy in Grosvenor Square. And what is the NTS? In its letter to the Kuzbass Healy. In explaining their break with Sean Matgamna's union, Workers Power oh-so-delicately desaibes it as "an Socialist Organiser over the Butchenko affair, Workers organisation hostile to the real interests of the labour Power attempts to take the "high ground", criticising the movement". But shortly before that, in a Solidarity SO-inspired CSWEB statement for seeking "solidarity Campaign statement dissociating themselves from two with the emerging labour movements of Eastern Europe other NTS-connected Soviet workers who addressed the -irrespective of their political ideas and affiliations". UDM conference in June, Workers Power wrote rather They even denounce Socialist Organiser for calling on less circumspectly that the NTS "actively collaborated Solidamo~~ to take power in Poland last year, pointing with and fought alongside the Nazis". out bow "Solidarity is committed to a vicious austerity Let us tell you a little more about the NTS. This was package and the introduction of capitalism." the "main group used by MI6 for operations inside the WP's falling-out with Matgamna has not an iota of Soviet Union until the end of the 19605", say Bloch and principle to it. To this day they continue to insist: "Woric­ Fitzgerald in British Intelligence and Covert Action, adding, en Power was correct to try and build the tour, and to try "The NTS actively supported the Nazis before and during to get Butchenko to speak to as many workers as pos­ the 1941 invasion of Russia." John J Stephan in The sible." Indeed, they attack Tony Cliff's Socialist Workers Russian Fascists (1978) notes that of the numerous fascis­ Party (SWP) for pulling out of the organising committee tic "solidarist" organisations which proliferated in coun­ and keeping Butchenko from "being able to meet a wider terrevolutionary Russian tmigrt circles in the interwar number of rank and me miners"-and thus broadcast his years, "the Young Russia movement and the National counterrevolutionary mth among even wider layers of the Toilers' Alliance (Nalsionalno Trudovoi Soyuz-NTS) British workers movement! probably mobilized the widest support." WP's after-the-fact homilies about political principle Stephan explains how "Some solidarists responded ring somewhat hollow given that their chosen bloc favorably to 'radical' Nazis such as Gregor and Otto partners in the Solidarity Campaign, Matgamna and Cliff, Strasser"-the leaders of the SA stormtroops. After are explicitly opposed to defence of the Soviet Union. The Hitler purged the SA leaders in the Night of the Long whole purpose of this "Eastern Bloc" campaign-tbe Knives in 1934, life became somewhat harder for the name itself could have been coined by the CIA-was NTS, which was too Russian chauvinist to suit the Ger­ precisely to compete with the right wing on the terrain of man Nazis. Nonetheless, "individual NTS members anti-Communism. WP says more than it intends when it cooperated with Wehrmacht combat units, Rosenberg's concedes that after arguing "day in, day out" about "the Ostministerium, and Kaminsky's Russian Nazi Party necessity of fighting the restoration of capitalism": ''With during World War II." (The Ostministerium adminis­ Yuri Butchenko we lost those arguments-he was courted tered the starvation and enslavement of Russia.) and won by the right wing who offered him more money, In short, the NTS was a precursor to the contemporary equipment and publicity than we could." So the big-time Russian blackshirts of Pamyat. These are the people anti-Communists could outbid the "left-wingers" in court­ Workers Power was quite happy to meet and work out ing a confirmed supporter of capitalism-what a surprise!

39 The Russian question pOintblank to the pro-capitalist Lithuanian Sajudis movement while conceding it contained "semi-fascist elements". Hell, it's The Butchenko affair is no aberration for Workers crawling with fascists. WP joined Socialist Organiser in Power. As American Trotskyist James P Cannon wrote: a picket of the Soviet consulate in London demanding, ''Who touches the Russian question, touches a revolu­ "Hands Off Baltic States." Worken Power (May 1990) tion." Those who cannot draw the class line in defence of even demanded that the Thatcher government "re­ the most colossal conquest the working class has yet cognises Lithuania and supplies goods requested by achieved, the collectivised economy established through Lithuania without conditions." And 10 and behold, the the 1917 Russian Revolution, will surely not be capable of weekly letter from Denis in Private Eye (8 June) has No rmding a class line in defence of trade unions. The Cliffite 10 considering "scrapping the entire Navy and selling it SWP, which crosses the class line in refusing to defend off to the Lithuanians." the Soviet Union, crossed the class line in scabbing on the And now: the Yuri Butchenko affair. To borrow from miners strike. Workers Power, for its part, found itself in WP's hypocritical attack on Socialist Organiser, this "has bed with Thatcher, Kinnock and the scabs who went on revealed the practical results of their degeneration." to form the UDM in its campaign for a strikebreaking Fifteen years ago, when Matgamna was nominally Soviet­ ''ballot'' at the time. Now the logic of its Stalinophobia defencist and Workers Power not, they entered a short­ has blown up in Workers Power's face. lived fusion with the cynical argument that defence of the Workers Power split from the Cliff outfit in the mid- Soviet Union was "a tenth-rate question" (Matgamna). 1970s. At the time of the Soviet intervention into Afghan­ Formally, the tables have turned, with Workers Power istan, WP took a step to the left, breaking from the now nominally defencist. But WP still retains its deep­ Cliffite line that the Soviet Union is "state capitalist". But going anti-Sovietism and orientation to NATO social it never drew the hard programmatic conclusions. WP democracy. So they end up "unwittingly" getting into bed continued to view the Stalinist bureaucracy as a purely with anti-Communist witchhunters and fascist counter­ counterrevolutionary force. Rejecting the programme of revolutionaries. Only a Third Campist could write, as WP Trotskyism, it set out to "re-elaborate" Trotsky's Tran­ did to the Kuzbass union, that "The UDM, as a bosses' sitional Programme; renouncing the heritage of the organisation, can be compared with your own state run Fourth International, it called for an undefined "Revolu­ stooge unions." How is it, then, that one massively aided tionary Communist International." Above all, Workers the miners strike while the other tried to break it? The Power wanted to have nothing to do with Spartacist Soviet trade-union leaders did a damn sight more to aid "sectarianism". Their bottom line was: if it moves (and the strike than the anti-Communist TUC. it's big enough), tail it-whether it be Khomeini's Iran, Workers Power is not and never was Trotskyist. Polish Solidamo~t or (above all) the Labour Party at Trotskyism means the struggle for defence and extension home. of the gains of the October Revolution of 1917. That's Thus Workers Power dutifully echoed Cold War social why we Spartacists stood with the Red Army in Afghani­ democracy (as well as Reagan and Thatcher) in denoun­ stan when it fought against CIA-financed feudalists. Why cing the Soviet intervention into Afghanistan (only to turn we opposed Solidamo~t from the moment it set out on around and simultaneously denounce the Soviet with­ a course of capitalist restoration in the autumn of 1981. drawal when Gorbachev pulled the troops out). And for And in East Germany, where Workers Power tailed be­ years, Workers Power thought that Solidamo~t was the hind counterrevolutionary Social Democracy, our com­ cat's meow. They had no qualms joining "Solidarity with rades of the Spartakist Workers Party of Germany fought Solidarity" demonstrations alongside fascistic scum like consistently and uniquely against capitalist reunification the Polish KPN, all the while admitting that Solidamo~t' and for a Germany of workers councils through proletar­ programme aimed for the restoration of capitalism. And ian political revolution in the East and socialist revo­ they still call for a return to the "early days" of Soli­ lution in the West. damo~t, the days when it wasn't quite so difficult to sell We have insisted that anti-Sovietism abroad fuels this clerical-nationalist outfit because it was not yet im­ strikebreaking at home. Now Workers Power's repetitive plementing pro-capitalist austerity against the Polish crossing of the class line on the Russian question has workers. played itself out on their home terrain, in a scandal Faced with the collapse of Stalinism in East Europe recalling the Healy-inspired witchhunt of the NUM on the and imperialist cheering over the supposed "death of eve of the miners strike. Even some of the Labourite Communism", these centrists veered sharply to the right, centrists of Workers Power may be shaken by the realis­ giving backhanded support to the capitalist reunification ation that Stalinophobia has led them to front for the of Germany and appealing directly to British imperialism scummiest counterrevolutionary enemies of the workers to back counterrevolution in Lithuania. While claiming to movement. Those who don't want to end up like the cyni­ be against the restoration of capitalism in East Germany, cal zombies left behind after Healy's WRP imploded had Workers Power sided with counterrevolution at every better think hard and long about how their politics got crucial stage-demanding the withdrawal of Soviet troops, them into this disgrace. echoing the Social Democrats' lies that the massive Reprinted from WOtten Vaguanl no 508, Treptow anti-fascist mobi1isation in January was the result 10 August 1990. of a Stalinist trick, cheering the attacks of skinhead gangs on Stasi headquarters as the ''very stuff of revolution". Then Workers Power gave its "unconditional support"

40 ' - reprinted from Workers Hammer -Jfi______D'llKE'RSI£WM~ll~~______no 117 (October 1990) The Workers Power school of 're-elaboration' Turning on the Butchenko spit

Soviet miners' organisations. We are only too happy to correct Yuri Butchenko this simple mistake in our account. A variety of pro-Stalinist organise­ ON U. JULY Wot1cers Power Issued ally arrived In Britain. This was a tlons. such as the Spartacista. have a statement on the Yuri Butchenko mistake. suggested that the discrepancy affair in which we stated that in a It arose whilst attempting to put between our two \'ersions of the telephone caH with Butchenko he together an honest account of the "Invite" means we were involved In Informed us that his official lavite Butchenko affair relying on the .omenefariousplotaimedat_,. papen to this country had been memories of translators and intOI' Ing ArthurScargili and collaborat­ aIgned by George Miller, British mediaries. Ing with imperialism's spy -Cett­ representative of the right wing Consicierabieconfusionsull'Ollncls cies. Having co-.:ted the factual Ruulan orcanisatlon, the NTS. This the bureaucratic fI'OCedwesneeded enor we can only ask our __ _ true. In the August Issue of our to get people from the USSR Into what does this prove? ' _"PIIlpef _ said that we only this country. CSWEB ltMlf had We stand by the political reno... the offlclal Invite came sought to get Labour MPs to Issue for organising and then tenninatInC when Butchenko act... such Invitations to the independent the CSWEB tour..

We reprint (above) Workers Power's statement entitled Thatcher's scabs, Workers Power suffered from a "cred­ "Yuri Butchenko" which appeared in its October issue. It ibility gap" after it denied in its August issue what it had is not possible to reprint here the lengthy and hysterical already confessed in its July statements: namely that it statement on this same question recently issued by knew of the Miller link before Butchenko's tour ever got Workers Power's Irish co-thinkers in the Irish Workers underway. Now, Workers Power has been forced to Group (IWG); stay ~uned. concede this "mistake" which occurred, according to the In the previous issue of Workers Hammer we published statement here reprinted, ''whilst attempting to put to­ an article-which flrst appeared in the newspaper of our gether an honest account of the Butchenko affair relying American comrades, Workers Vanguard-entitled "The on the memories of translators and intermediaries" or Butchenko affair: anti-Sovietism comes home to roost/ according to the IWG's document because the "author of Workers Power caught with Russian fascists, Thatcher's the August article believed wrongly". The latter document scabs" in which we nailed Workers Power for its scand­ makes clear just how ''wrong'' the Workers Power article alous contribution to the witchhunt against NUM leader was. Arthur Scargill. To briefly recapitulate: Workers Power In fact, as early as January, Workers Power knew that had organised a tour of one Yuri Butchenko along with Miller was a contact for Butchenko in Britain. Butchenko Socialist Organiser, its erstwhile partners in the was faxing via Miller's office to CSWEB about the tour. "Campaign for Solidarity with Workers in the Eastern Workers Power was worried enough to "initiate enquiries Bloc" (CSWEB). Butchenko's links in Britain were not as to Miller's political character". "AU we discovered", restricted to the hapless CSWEB and he emerged as a according to the IWG's document, ''was that he had links key player in the anti-Scargill witchhunt with his ap­ to the right wing in the unions, that he [w)as a 'shady pearance at a 5 July press conference with the UDM's character', and that his magazine was very well informed." Roy Lynk, picked up by virtually all the bourgeois media. Later, Miller "confessed that he was a member of the It turned out that Butchenko had been officially invited NTS but denied that the NTS was a fascist organisation". by George Miller, the British representative of the NTS. Thus assured, Workers Power forged ahead with The NTS is a Russian fascist organisation which act­ Butchenko's tour. "Although Miller's involvement was ively supported the Nazis before and during the 1941 worrying we felt it was no reason to refuse to organise the invasion of Russia and which has been used and backed tour since there was no evidence of any political link by Western intelligence. (Workers Power itself ac­ between Butchenko, Miller and the NTS." "No knowledged in July that the NTS "collaborated with and evidence"?-Butchenko was simply faxing messages to fought alongside the Nazis".) Workers Power's own state­ CSWEB via Miller who had signed the official invitation ments hastily issued following Butchenko's press con­ papers and acknowledged he was in the NTS. ference confirmed that they knew about Miller's sponsor­ The IWG writes: "it was Miller's invitation which ship of Butchenko and indeed had met with the NTS rep worked with the British Embassy, no doubt because of where Miller and Butchenko "agreed simply that once the Miller's connections and the fact that he is a known anti­ tour was over they would, separately from CSWEB, meet communist". No doubt! And maybe this had something to the TUC's international department" (Workers Power do with the TUC international department's eagerness to "Statement on Yuri Butchenko and CSWEB", 11 July). meet Butchenko, too. But the question is what worked In addition to being caught with Russian fascists and with Workers Power.

41 Workers Power wants to trivialise the whole affair and ism" took over and Workers Power demanded that the pass itself off as the most pathetically naive group of government of Margaret Thatcher send "goods re­ dupes who ever lived and who make "mistakes" in their quested" "without conditions" to the counterrevolution­ public accounts. But politics are at the bottom of both the ary Sajudis nationalists in Lithuania. Then the conse­ scandal and the subsequent cover up. WP writes: "We do quences of their bloc with the rabidly anti-Soviet Socialist not believe that a precondition for undertaking these links Organiser for "solidarity" work in Eastern Europe blew must be that the Soviet workers' organisations pledge sky high with the Butchenko affair. themselves in advance to the defence of the planned We have documented Workers Power's sharp right economy in the USSR." Which is exactly how they ended . tum in a series of polemics, currently available in our up with scum like Butchenko. ''Workers Power Truth Kit". For its part, Workers Power The ground for Workers Power's blatantly anti-Trot­ has descended to the method of "polemics" used by JV skyist statement of purpose has been well-prepared. Thus, Stalin-who, as the story goes, is the source of the the IWG grotesquely demanded that the Chinese ambas­ statement that paper will take anything that's written on sador be expelled by the Irish bourgeoisie after the it. Workers Power says we are a "pro-Stalinist organisa­ criminal massacre at Tiananmen Square. When Workers tion"-this is a shameless and very cynical lie. But it is Power made its hard right turn over events in East mainly an indication of how accelerated Workers Power's Germany, they tried to resolve the contradiction between departure from any pretence to authentic Trotskyism has their paper call to "Smash Capitalist Restoration" and the become. No amount of lying attacks on the Spartacists fact that they sided with capitalist counterrevolution at and whingeing apologias for their treachery can cover up every crucial stage by raving on about Spartacist "Stalin­ WP's hard drive back into the Third Camp of the running ophilia". Soon thereafter, pure and simple "Third Camp- dogs of capitalist counterrevolution._

Spartacist literature available

(30p for Single issues; £2.00 for all the Issues listed)

• ''The Leninist policy toward immigration/emigration", Spartaclst Britain no 2 (June 1978) • "Hate the Truth, Hate the Spartacist League/New Left Moralists' Big Ue Campaign", Workers Vanguard no 217 (20 October 1978) • "Iran and the left: Why they supported Islamic reaction", Spartacist Britain no 11 (May 1979) • "Workers Power on 'anti-imperialism"', Spartaclst Britain no 28 (December 1980/January 1981) • "Revolutionary, counterrevolutionary, who cares? /Workers Power stUI cheers Solidamosc", Spartaclst Britain no 39 (February 1982) • "Workers Power: Two, three many lines on Cuba/Russian question: Acid test for Trotskyists", Spartaclst Britain no 46 (December 1982/January 1983) • "Workers Power on the miners/Waiting for Murray", Spartaclst Britain no 59 (July 1984) • "Workers Power /Kinnock's poodles in election heat", Workers Hammer no 87 (Apr" 1987) • "Centrists bow to Russia-haters/Workers Power boycotts united-front defence of Tudeh, Iranian left", Workers Hammer no 104 (February 1989) • "For the immediate unconditional withdrawal of British troops!/Northem Ireland: for a proletarian solutionl", Workers Hammer no 109 (September 1989) • "Workers Power on Solidamosc: centrists covering their tracks", Workers Hammer no 110 (October 1989) • "Where LACllurks on China", Workers Hammer no 111 (November/December 1989)

• "WH statement on offensiv~ headline", Workers Hammer no 112 (January/February 1990)

Order from/make cheques payable to: Spartacist Publications, PO Box 1041, London NW5 3EU

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