xists in the Party. the relevance of the demands made We should instead be making clear patronising and racist as those in the
mand made; in its way uncritically support every single dener of some on the Labour left, who from Black organisations in the manWe should not "tail-end" demands
youth organisations. has a high involvement from sectarian anti-fascist movements such genuine noncommunities and the labour moveincrease the links beween the Black It is now, therefore, that we should
"racist card". Right are increasingly playing the
Othe election approaches, the Tories to divide the workforce. As there will be increasing attempts by with Black people bearing the brunt, economic crisis worsens, abstract would be rejected out of raise demands that if raised in the militias. It gives us the context to
Friendly bobbies give black ratepayers
Socialist Viewpoint No. 16 April 1987 p20
squads and eventually raise demands of community defence provides the opportunity for us to table to the commuity, but because it of the British state genuinely accoun make an ever-more-militarised wing are key, not because it is possible to demands for police accountability shown over the issue of policing. The
movement have tivists in the Black community and the The inseparable links between acmembers such as Mohammed Idrish labour movement in the cases of its and has brought the issue into the port for anti-deportation campaigns that has been most vocal in its sup strongest Black caucus of all unions cidence that it is NALGO, with the
Tin the unions, it can be In terms of black self-organisation Party in a far stronger way than it used the Left to challenge racism in the fact is that Black Sections have forc-
Afar outweighs what divides us. in the Labour Party. building a principled Left
healthy way But these debates can be had in a the racism of other school nature of the education system, or in-
education system, to challenge the order" polícies in practice. a taste of Neil Kinnock's "law and
some Black school students, would do improve the qualifications gained by which whilst they would undoubtedly as the advocacy of Black-only schools we as Marxists would oppose - such sions adopted by Black Sections that There are of course policy deciup and force the Party into anti-racist already there the confidene to stand new Black activists into the Party and Sections have succeeded in bringing The fact remains that the Black ing to discipline people like Ashton. there is no sign of Neil Kinnock seek-
This is an absolute disgrace — London because they were racist. black bin liners had been banned in Russell Profitt on TV, claiming that press. Joe Ashton recently attacked parotting the racist lies of the Tory The fact is that Labour MPs are still
munity in Parliament is clear. organised lobby for the Black comof Black Sections? The need for an tion would be passed by a conference find it surprising that such a resolumen in the Shadow Cabinet
Parliament - but why would form a caucus of Black MPs in ned Labour's leaders by stating they Their recent Conference has stun-
education and police oppression. up issues in society as a whole such as people in South Africa, and to take out to support the struggles of Black the bureaucracy, and have turned Parliamentary seats and positions in those critics who claimed they were have defied
should learn them very quickly. by now, we government Labour and housing allocation under the last discrimination in employment trols, lessons of the racist immigration conIf we haven't learnt the for them. Labour government to do something being told to keep quiet and wait for a Black people in the Party are again
Tin the other direction. tions in 1986 in fact point if anything the London Boroughs and ILEA elecStudies of by-election in Hackney. seemingly based on a single council people lose votes"; the latest outcries proved line of claiming that "Black returning to the racist and in fact unHead Office is increasingly one of tions in the Party. The message from Party leadership on the Black Secthe renewed attacks by the Labour It is in this light that we have seen
Ting forces.
the oppressed will overthrow the rul-
ly through such self-organisation that
movement in the last century. It is on-
ing class that produced the labour
and the self-organisation of the work-
organisation of Black people today
self- the between parallels
ported by people who fail to see the
and sup rather than encouraged
example), they have been "tolerated"
(the Indian Workers' Association, for
in the labour movement for decades
The Gorbachev
WHAT's going on in the Soviet Union is big news. Every week the mass media offer us new revelations and new "radical reforms" in the Soviet Union.
As in every political crisis in the so-called "socialist countries", bourgeoisie can't make up its mind between two basic responses. Liberal elements crow over the "failure of socialism" and insist that the reforms in the USSR show that the Gorbachev leadership have become again" capitalists. For the right wing the reforms are cosmetic and basic evil nature of the USSR is unchanged
It is important for the working class movement to understand what is going on in the USSR. In the first place the reforms will have important repercussions and will find reflection in other deformed workers states. The reforms of the Chinese bureaucracy were briefly discussed in our last issue. Similar "liberal" reforms under Gomulka in Poland were the prelude to the rise Solidarnosc. Husak Czechoslovakia has recently made a speech along similar lines to Gorbachev, involving himself in a policy U-turn.
In the second place what happens in the USSR has important political implications for socialists capitalist countries. The Revolution of 1917 was a beacon and an inspiration to the socialist movement. The tyranny perverted international munist movement and provided the basis for endless bourgeois slander against socialists. Do the Gorbachev reforms open the way for regeneration in the USSR? If this was a real possibility, the world-wide legacy of Stalinism might be rapidly overcome. But there are possibilities. The reforms may be really cosmetic and insignificant; or they may, like similar moves towards marketisation, e.g. in Yogoslavia, be the prelude to a crísis bureacratic regime.
It is obvious that the political reforms are extremely limited. extension of elections, and permission to have several candidates in certain elections is important; but organising around political platforms remains hibited. The censorship remains in force; many political prisoners
Reforms By SUE OWEN hospitals. the calls when (alasnost") is not to unleash "born "criticism" the interested in is not criticism of its own policy, but criticism of the past, of its bureacratic rivals, the Brezhnevites. exactly criticism has a definite slant. Selec- tive quotations from Lenin's Testa- ment are published; a rehabilitation of Bukharin, leader of the Right Op- position, is rumoured to be in the tion of the leaders of the Revolution of in Oppositionists. economic reforms that are proposed against the resistance of vested in- terests entrenched in sections of the bureaucracy. the 1n Russian Stalin both socialist other of the The alternative pro- re- Socialist Viewpoint No. 16 April 1987 p21
bachev main in the camps and psychiatric
Gorbachev's "radical speech" to the Central Committee in January went out of the way to praise the work of the KGB. In this context, it is obvious that what Gorbachev means
Ffor openness the creative potential of the masses. The
Othe Soviet leadership is 23). be
Even when it comes to the criticism the of the Stalin period, the "reformers'" pipeline, but no general rehabilitamurdered by Stalin, or in particular
It is fairly clear that "democratisation" is a lever to force through the
saying
The key to understanding the Gor-
reforms, then, is their economic content. Is this in the interests of the working class or not? The speeches are full of fulsome references to workers' participation. But it is not participation in effective decision making which is proposed. Rather workers are being asked to participate (as participation schemes in the capitalist countries) in "giving a collective guarantee of productive discipline" (Pravda, Feb. 25, cited in International Viewpoint, Feb
The "workers" councils that are to
set up will "bring together representatives of the administration,
Party organisations, the unions and the Komsomol (CP youth) as well as team councils etc... * (Nouvelle Revue Internationale, Oct. "86, cited in IV, Feb 23). In other words, the "workers councils" are aimed at representatives of the buraucratic organisations, not of the rank and file. Strikes remain illegal.
The main burden of the Soviet leadership's proposals is to give more power to the factory managers, and the question is openly being raised of firing surplus workers. An article by Tatiana Zaslavskaya in September in Kommunist reports plant managers as
that where there was more
autonomy for an enterprise, it would
be both necessary and possible to
reduce the numbers of workers. So the direction of the reforms is to pro-
mote speed-up and unemployment.
At the same time the reformers are launching an attack on "irrational" subsidies, low rents and low food
prices. The "attack on the black
market" involves a small element of
criminal prosecutions and a large
element of extending the legal
market in food and services. This leads to a sharp rise in prices and deepening social inequality. This is why one of the first demands of the
Gdansk strikes in Poland was food rationing.
In social policy the orientation of tamily. Bureaucrats talk of "d and reformers is to women from harmful work Physically 1 from "men's" jobs (IV, March 23, p9). An article on homosexuality in the Moscow Komosol paper blames insufficent differentiation of male and female roles "disease of homosexuality":
"The overwhleming dominance of women teachers in our schools contributes to the growing equalisation of sex Who, according to teacher is the best boy in class? quiet, obedient one. And the best girl? One who is energetic and active. And we can count the male or purely female professions on the fingers of one hand. The common goals and targets that we put in front of our children lead in their minds to a sexually neutral self-evaluation." (Guardian, March 25, front page)
Thus homosexuality is used as a bugbear to reinforce the oppression of women.
In international policy Moscow continues to deepen its orientation of peacetul coexistence. The proposed deal on intermediate nuclear forces, for all the embarrassment it has caused in Washington, amounts in fact to capitulation to US imperialism's de. mand that disarmament and "Star Wars" be separated
The statements of the bureaucracy continue to lend support to the proponents of reform and class collaboration in the capitalist countries, and even to right wing bourgeois forces. Conversations of Western correspondents with foreign policy officials in Moscow suggest that the Kremlin would prefer a Thatcher vietory in the coming general election in this country, as a Labour victory might "destabilise" NATO; and the new initiatives on disarmament offer Reagan his best chance of escaping the Irangate scandal
The reforms of the Soviet leadershp therefore represent a shift not to the left but to the right. Why is this happening? For those who think that the USSR is "state capitalist" there is no problem - of course capitalists attack workers. "State capitalist"
groups like the British SWP simplistically correlate attacks on the workers, East and West, as responses by the ruling bourgeoisies to the international crisis of capitalism. It is true that the Gorbachev reforms are a response to economic crisis.
crisis of the Stalinist system is a different crisis to
"West". production produces sharpened competition and the drive for increased profitability and reduction in unit costs brings continual attacks on
class and unemployment.
But the root cause of the crisis in the "East" is under-production. Far from too many goods being produced to be sold at a profit, too few goods, and goods of too poor a quality, are produced to satisly the needs of society. The anarchy of the market produces crises, waste and unemployment; the anarchy of the plan, as it is run by bureaucrats who are ultimately unaccountable, produces a different sort of waste, and, more commonly, shortages and
The sort of attacks that are now be. demonstrate that Soviet workers have some advantages that we haven't won here: full employment, and subsidies on basic necessities like food and bureaucratic system of "socialism in
Tis ultimately incapable of meeting the basic needs of
- let alone, as Khruschev claimed in the 1960s, overtaking the USA in economic development.
Do the reforms then show that those pro-capitalist politicians theorists are right who claim that the Socialise Viewpoint No. 16 April 1987 p22
market is the only and best way of organising the economy, and that fuller steps towards the restoration of capitalism - or at least a "mixed economy" - is inevitable? Should they lead us to despair of communism? After all, the USSR is only following in the path of Yugoslavia,
The ultimate cause of the economic problems of the USSR is neither the "bankruptcy of socialism" bureaucracy's mismanagement of the backwardness which the revolution inherited from Tsarism, and its isolation amidst the continued domination
Othe imperialist powers. The imperialists retain to a arge extent a monopoly of the most advanced technology, and they have demands the diversion amounts of resources to defence and military production.
Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership, when they led the resolution in October 1917, never imagined that the Russian revolution would be the first step in the short-term development of worid reovlution.
Within this framework, however, the isolated revolution drove them to civil war and intervention, they had to use "war communism" in which the market had no place, production was organised by and peasant food surpluses were seized by force. As the civil war came to an end, it was apparent that these methods were economy and sharp hostility to the Soviet government in the countryside. So the Bolsheviks retreated - and they described it openly as a A GOOD UNION CANNOT PUNCHO WITHOUT FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION! TO TA BUNC
S GET THAT MANS NAME!
retreat - to the "New Economic | and the Policy", a policy in which the market and private industry anything, a greater role than is proposed for them in the Gorbachev reforms or than they play in China today.
But this policy, too, soon ran into problems. Competition between dustrial enterprises produced inefficiency - and unemployment among workers. The market could not produce investment in heavy industry, and lack of heavy industry produced shortages in parts for consumer industry, which created shortages of goods to sell to the countryside, which in turn created difficulties in food supply to the cities. agriculture revived, farm prices fell while industrial prices rose — "scissors" crisis which brought a dangerously sharp division between the working class peasantry. The experiment limited capitalism had produced a capitalist-style crisis in dustrial goods could not be sold or the workers paid.
In this situation the CPSU leaderStil Ayor and Zinoviet Tomsky, Bukharin, the view that the market mechanisms should be allowed to sort the crisis out. But this would, in fact, imply a steady movement towards restoration of capitalism reintegration of the USSR into the world market — as was implied in a proposal made in December 1922, but blocked by Lenin's opposition, to dismantle the state monopoly foreign trade. If this had been done, the USSR would gradually fallen into the position of the neocolonial countries today, with the state-owned national destroyed by imperialist competition.
In addition, the NEP developed led to increasing inequality in society and the development of privileged classes: the kulaks arge tarmers, in the
Obedient bureaucrats applaud Gorbachev's reforms NEPmen, capitalists, in the cities. These classes played, if tended to link up with the develop- ment of a privileged bureaucratic layer in through corruption. familiar through the way in which in- numerous regimes, starting with high "socialist" ideals after decolonisation in Africa and Asia, into corrupt pro-imperialist oligar- chies. There was a steady develop. ment in this 1920s until, in As the and the mass with which in- the full and the of have industries as it or countryside, Socialist Viewpoint No. 16 April 1987 p23
the state and the party These processes are now all too ship, have developed tivisation. make direction through the 1928, the kulaks ПРОТИВ ЗНАКА КА ДЕЛЕ Left Oppositionists in Siberia, 1928
or individual | started to refuse to sell grain, seeking further concessions to private enterprise. At this point Stalin suddenly broke with his rightist cothinkers in the CPSU leadership and launched the frantic drive to industrialisation and forced collectivisation, strictly planned by the bureaucratic dictator-
which shaped the Soviet economy as it has developed to date.
Stalin's policies of forced collec-
adventurist attempts to "Great Leaps Forward" and political totalitarianism on the one hand, and on the other "liberalism" ДА ЗДИСТВЕТ ПРОЛЕТАРИАТА
Stalin which slides towards the restoration of capitalism, have been the two great poles of the policy of Stalinist bureaucracies that have emerged since the 1920s — not only in the USSR, but also in China, the Eastern European satellites, and even Cuba.
In China there have been a series of convulsive turns from one policy to the other, from the "Hundred Flowers" period of the '50s to the "Great Leap Forward" immediately afterwards, and from the "Cultural Revolution" and its aftermath to the present rightist policy.
But there is an alternative, and it was the alternative put toward in the 1920s in the USSR by Trotsky and the Left Opposition. The two poles of the policy of the bureaucracy are two poles within a single conception, the conception of "socialism in one country". The bureaucracy elevates itself above classes, claiming to build socialism in a single country either "at a snail's pace" (the policy of the right) or by leaps and bounds (the policy of the left).
The policy of the Left Opposition, on the other hand, recognised that if was not possible to build socialism in
a single country. What was possible was to maintain the power of the working class in that country as a bastion of the world revolution, and to struggle to carry forward the world revolution, which is, in the end, the only way in which the inherited problems of backwardness and the continuing problems of imperialist pressure will be solved.
Instead of utopian schemes of overnight industrialisation, or the slide of
Cof Opposition fought for the planned development of industry on a more limited scale, and steps towards the encouragement
voluntary collectivisation of agriculture.
The key to both, however, was the political mobilisation of the workers ehind the plan and of the poor peasants behind the struggle against the kulaks. And this demanded a systematic allack on bureaucratism and attempts to solve problems by ad ministrative decree, both in the CPSU and in the state
Moreover, the underlying problem remained in the 1920s, as it remains now, the problem of the world revolution. Within the USSR the class. Socialist Viewpoint No: 16 April 1987 p24
collaborationist policy of the bureaucracy, relying on kulaks and NEPmen at the expense of the working class, produced economic crisis. Internationally, this policy encouraged the Communist Parties in passivity (in Germany) and in relying on blocs with opportunist "left" bureaucrats, such as the TUC "lefts" in the British General strike, and bourgeois nationalists, as in China 1926-7.
These policies led to defeats for the revolutionary mass movement. The policy of "building socialism in a single country" therefore not only produced short-term economic crisis in the USSR, it also perpetuated the isolation of the Russian revolution and the economic pressures on it. Economic policy in a workers' state is inseparable from class politics and from international policy.
It is a profound testimony to the bankruptcy of the Stalinist bureaucracy of the USSR that the policies of the Left Opposition, first put forward in the 1920g, retain all their relevance today. The obstacle to Gorbachev's reforms is the rock on which the Bolshevik Right of Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky foundered in the 1920s. Pursued systematically. their policy would lead to the restoration of capitalism. It thus threatens both the job security of the bureaucracy - and the class interests of the Soviet working class.
The policy of the "Brezhnevites" on the other hand, amounts to no more than clinging to power by force and manoeuvres a policy for paralysis. Only the working class can solve the problems of the USSR. And it can only do so by following the road proposed by the Left Opposition: that is, the road of taking the power into its own hands, planning the economy on the basis of workers' control and workers' democracy, and turning the workers' state into a powerful Instrument for world revolution.
What could have been done by the methods of reform in the 1920s, today requires the methods of political revolution. The bureaucracy and the technocrats have entrenched themseives in the CPSU, the army and the KGB. For more than fifty years they have survived by a combination of repression and manoeuvres.
The Gorbachev reforms will not solve the crisis of the USSR; but they may lift the lid off it, creating, as in Poland, working class resistance which can be the basis of a working class alternative to the regime.
But even such an alternative can be no more than a rebellion, a protest which ends in defeat, unless it finds the way to the politics of the Left Opposition, the politics of the Fourth International, and forcibly overthrows the bureaucracy and takes the power into its own hands.
Syr