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Soclalist Outlook, PO Box 705, Gorbachev and Political Revolution Glastnost has vindicated the critique of Stalinism by the Trotskyist movement in all but one respect — Trotsky's theory of the Political Revolution. Acording to this, as I understand it, the hurcaucracy, having usurped political power from the working class, would never willingly concede it. Hence the need for a working class revolution from below, in a more or less violent process.
The recent elections in the Soviet Union however now clearly hold out the possibility of a relatively peaceful process of refor Icading to full socialist democracy,
The important points to note here are:
• The elections were sponsored hy a wing of the bureaucracy led by Gorbachev:
® The democratisation process, oven if limited, is irreversible and was initiated from within the bureaucracy itself;
• The process of reform is currently centred around a leading figure in the CPSU - Boris Yeltsin.
All this is a far cry from the scenario of the masses storming the Kremlin and shooting the Stalinists against its walls. (A fate some of them may richly deserve, but that is beside
With Kruschev and now Gorbachev, it is clear that the Soviet bureaucracy is capable of a much greater degree of self-reform and political reform of Soviet society than seemed possible in the 1930s, when Trotsky was formulating the theory of political revolution. At the very least we can now sec that the process of political revolution will be different and more complex than previously envisuged by Trotskyists. It involves, as Tarig Ali says, an element of revolution
I believe this view deserves debate, of the kind Socialist Outlook so well provides. It would be tragic if Trotskyism, having done so much to defend democracy in the working class movement, were to be left in a political backwater because it did not recognise a democratic revolution when it was taking
When history settics a question only sectarian dogmatists cling to obsolete theories, as all good Trotskyists should know, Alan Radford Bristol
ETT ERS Afghanistan There is something of a problems with favouring the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan (SO 13). It is the not insubstantial matter of the consequent slaughter of large sections of the Afghanistan population by the Mujahedin.
Revolutionary socialists formulate strategy not through abstract models of development but day to day reality: the reality of the removal of Soviet Armed Forces is genocidal sanghter and the enforcing of a visciously reactionary fundamentalist regime, Their remaining provides elementary physical
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