Book Reviews

[p049] ' BOOK REVIEWS From a background of peasants and artisans not long released from serf- dom, the future Stalin completed his formal education in a seminary for orthodox priests before becoming a devoted revolutionary. No doubt the seminary gave Stalin his liturgical style; otherwise he preferred action to literature. What he wrote was usually required for a specific pur- pose. While in deportation he wrote little and there were other periods of his life when he neither wrote nor spoke in public for weeks or months on end although the supreme ruler of a vast country. Returning from exile after the February revolution Stalin found himself one of the editors of Pravda, the central Bolshevik newspaper, and thus for determining its line to- wards the Provisional Government. As is once again admitted in Soviet historical writing, Stalin was respon- sible for Pravda’s conditional sup- port of the Provisional Government and for cutting, or not inserting, Lenin’s articles which advocated absolutely no support for the new regime. Stalin did, however, rally to Lenin, only to take up an ambiguous posi- tion once again on the eve of October. These political mistakes of Stalin were, of course, shared by other Bolsheviks and were part of a drift of the party leadership only arrested and reversed by the firm- ness of Lenin. The point in insist- ing upon them is to refute the legend of Stalin’s role in 1917 which was put forward in the struggle against the Left Opposition in the 1920s and was then regarded as historical truth. What was important, biographi- cally speaking, was Stalin’s position in the party apparatus: an organiser who listened and talked little, who made sure that meetings were held and conferences arranged, who found the men who filled the jobs which had to be done. The rise of Stalin was associated, in the first place, with the growing role of the party apparatus in the early years of the Revolution. His political standpoint is assessed by Marie as maintenance of the Soviet state and readiness to sacrifice the cause of international socialism to it. At the end of the civil war the economy was in ruins, famine stalked the land while the revolution had not been carried into Central and Western Europe. Hence the en- hanced role of the party and state apparatus, the emphasis on discipline which found expression in the pro- hibition of factions at the Tenth Party Congress, the need for a breathing space which took the form of the New Economic Policy. As an efficient organiser who carefully kept free of factional commitments and to whom no one attributed the desire to become the master of the Party. Stalin was nominated its General Secretary. It was from this mainly technical post that Stalin built up a cadre personally loyal to himself consist- ing largely of younger Bolsheviks who had joined the party since 1917. Stalin’s handling of the nationalities question roused Lenin, by this time a sick man, to vigorous opposition and this, together with his rudeness to Krupskaya, earned him the famous reference in Lenin’s Testa- 107

[p050] ment—for so long denounced by the Stalinists as a forgery. . Meanwhile, with the death of Lenin, Stalin strove to create the legend of the faithful disciple. In doing so he distorted and reformed Lenin’s thoughts and added some- thing of his own, the theory of ‘socalism in one country’, With this theory Stalin launched into struggle with those who remained faithful to the Bolshevik tradition of interna- tionalism and defeated them. ‘Stalin triumphed’, writes Marie, “because he incarnated a privileged caste which emerged with the reflux of the revolutionary wave.’ The isola- tion and backwardness of Russia operated in the same direction. Stalin added to the body of his supporters many who had fought against the re- volution, allied himself first with one group in the party then. another. Stalin’s strength undoubtedly de- rived from his handling of the apparatus of the party, an apparatus which he built up and shaped to his needs. He used this apparatus to attract and reward supporters, no matter from whence they came, and to discredit and chastise his oppo- nents. In his hands, the Bolshevik Party, which had carried through the first successful working class ‘revo- lution, was itself destroyed - and turned into an organ of power for the privileged caste which Stalin personified. What happened in the twenties, therefore, was not the outcome of Bolshevism but the result of its de- struction. Was this destruction, and the triumph of Stalin inevitable? This is the conclusion which emerges from Deutscher’s much lengthier and more detailed biography. Marie does not explicitly reject this determin- ism, although a reader of his book will not, as with Deutscher, come away with the feeling that history was like that and could not have been otherwise. The intensity of the opposition which his policy ‘and methods generated drove Stalin to use the power at his command more brutally and vengefully. The upheavals in a country in which, amid great hard- ships, a modern industry was being created and the sloth of ages over- come, provided the background, and for the apologists the explanation, 108 for the veritable terror unleashed in the 1930s. Stalin’s violent turn to- wards industrialization convinced even many of the Opposition that there was no alternative but to rally to his side. The enforced collecti- vization, carried through at immense human cost, saddled Soviet agricul- ture with a legacy which it has still not thrown off. There is, then, a legend that Stalin’s way alone could have carried through the transformation of Russian economy; that while the . terror may have ended by getting out of control only the heavy hand could have driven the peasant into the factory and realized the increases in production of the five-year plans. Again, while Marie does not deal with this specifically, it seems to fol- low from his treatment that such a legend is false. One would have liked to have seen, however, per- haps less repetition of old points made against Stalin (sometimes de- pendent on the evidence of wit- nesses such as Krivitsky, Barmine or Djilas which can hardly be checked from other sources) and more atten- tion given to refuting the still per- vasive apologetics for Stalin which are present in some circles. In fact it can be shown that the Stalinist bureaucracy, far from be- ing necessary to carry through the industrialization of Russia, acted as a drag on the productive forces, pre- judiced the security of the country by its foreign policy and weakened it militarily. The costs of ‘social- ism in one country’, besides includ- ing the betrayal of the world working class, were extremely heavy for Russia. Stalin’s heirs today have still not been able to throw off the weight of this history. What, after all, is their shamefaced repudiation of Stalin based upon? Chiefly upon the period, from the assassination of Kirov (now assumed to have been engineered by Stalin himself), in which Stalin made himself master of the bureaucracy by an arbitrary reign of terror. As Marie puts it, ‘From the assassination of Kirov, the incarnation escaped from the control of its creators and the threatened bureaucrats sang his glory because they could not do anything else and because his policy was theirs, al- though carried out without them and no. dictator liquidated loyal communists. often against them’. By this time, indeed, the last vestiges of Bolshevism were stamped out. Its most notable representa- tives perished in the purges or were sent to the camps. Symbolically the Society of Old Bolsheviks was dis- solved—it spent too much time re- ferring to deportations under the Tsar. Even while the purges reached their height the Stalin Constitution, with its formal concessions to liberal democracy, was proclaimed. The Third International, now a docile instrument of Stalin, adopted the policy of coalitions with bour- geois parties known as the Popular Front. The turn to the Popular Front followed a series of defeats for the working class of which the coming to power of Hitler was the most catastrophic. The responsibility of Stalin for these defeats was heavy; in a political biography more atten- tion should be given to them. More could be said about the connection - between the policy of ‘socialism in one country’ and the counter-revolu- tionary role which the bureaucracy played. But at what stage did Stalin contribute to the defeats of the communists of other countries by mistaken policies and when by a cynical desire to preserve his rule in Russia at all costs? The bio- grapher has to avoid thinking of Stalin in the 1920s in the light of his later crimes and betrayals. With the purges and trials of the 1930s the pathological traits in Stalin’s character appeared more markedly, but in the manner rather than in the purpose of his policies. Essentially these years saw the final destruction of Bolshevism and the stamping out of all opposition and criticism. Among his victims were many foreign communists who had taken refuge in the Soviet Union in- cluding at least twenty-three mem- bers of the Communist International; so Many As Trotsky had warned before Hitler took power, a victory for German Nazism would inevitably mean an attack upon the Soviet Union, Stalin, having contributed by the policies he imposed upon the German communists to this victory, refused to face up to this. For a FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, NOVEMBER, 1967

[p051] number of years he sought allies among the bourgeois governments, seeking, as Marie says, ‘to alle- viate by diplomatic manoeuvres the consequences of his internal policy and of the policy of the Popular Front in Spain and France’. Then came the advances to Germany— with whom the line had always been kept open—and the non-aggression pact of August 1939. By its nature the understanding between Hitler and Stalin could only be short-lived, but it was accompanied by state- ments and gestures which testified yet again to Stalin’s contempt for the international communist move- ment now completely under his control. When the war came inadequate preparations had been made. Stalin himself seems to have lapsed, in the early weeks, into panic and des- pair, though in the nature of things little can be known definitely about this phase. However, the resistance of the Red Army and Soviet workers and peasants to the invader re- awoke his powers of leadership. Perhaps memories of the battles of the civil war stirred again. If they did they acted in a peculiar way. Stalin’s whole emphasis in the con- duct of the war was upon its patriotic and national character and to pre- vent it becoming a revolutionary war. This found expression in many ways: in the appeals to Russian nationalism and the Churches, in the evocation of Tsarist heroes and in the policies adopted towards the resistance movements in Europe. What role Stalin played in the military operations is again difficult to say with certainty. Belittled by Khrushchev, who displayed him planning battles on a globe, and now generally criticized for his role in July 1941, some war memoirs still depict him in a favourable light. Concentrating so much power in his hands, as well as having at his dis- posal much detailed information not available to his generals, he was obviously indispensable for the con- duct of the war. Was his role, as Marie says, ‘very negative’? Assum- ing the rule of the bureaucracy they could not do without him in fighting a national patriotic war. If they attribute errors to him now which proved costly in lives they only do EDITORIAL so to diminish their own responsi- bility. Stalin’s indispensability to the bureaucracy was shown still more clearly in his relations with Churchill and Roosevelt and in the imposition of a policy of national union on the Communist Parties. Above all there was to be no revolutionary after- math to the war if Stalin could avoid it. The Communist Interna- tional was dissolved in 1943. The following year the carve up of Europe was decided with Churchill which amongst other enormities left the Greek resistance to be dealt with by the British forces. The division of the world into spheres of influence became the basis of the policy towards the capitalist powers of Stalin as the representative of the bureaucracy: this remains its policy at the present time. Such a policy, by its whole nature and aim, was not a fulfilment of Lenin’s internationalism but its antithesis. It corresponded exactly to the needs of the bureaucracy which yearned for the peaceful consolidation of its rule without adventures and without revolutions abroad. The final years of Stalin’s life, even more than the rest, and despite the ‘revelations’ of Khrushchev, re- main shrouded in mystery. He appeared little in public, he spoke rarely and wrote little. This was a time of great social tensions, acer- bated still more by the falling apart of the Grand Alliance and the open- ing of the Cold War. In this period of hardship and penury, of police terror and the stamping out of all dissident voices the Stalin cult flourished as never before. The bureaucracy, in its turn, was obliged to put up with the caprices of the old dictator even when he struck arbitrarily in their own ranks. With Stalin controlling the machinery of the party and the state, having power of life and death over themselves, the bureaucracy was obliged to appear as the most strident devotees of his cult. But in doing so they built up within themselves a tre- mendous resentment, a bitter hatred for the man whose boots they licked and whose dirty work they had to perform. Meanwhile the arm of Stalin ex- tended into the ‘peoples democracies’ with a series of frame-up trials staged against leaders feared capable of following Tito’s path of inde- pendence. Few communists questioned these trials or the stream of abuse poured out on Tito. Was not Stalin the great and infallible guide, the genial leader of all humanity? On his seventieth birth- day an immense and unparallelled volume of adulation was showered on Stalin throughout the world com- munist movement. It is almost un- believable that the subject of so many learned articles (‘Stalin as an Economist’, ‘Stalin and Science’, ‘Stalin and Culture’, etc.) is now, in the same press, or by the same writers, scarcely mentioned even in passing. For the bureaucracy and its apologists today Stalin has not passed into history, he has passed out of it. His monuments have been torn down and his body removed from the place it was laid beside Lenin’s. History is re-written. so that he does not appear in episodes in which he played a leading part. Publication of his Collected Works stopped and quotations from them no longer appear in works on every subject from surgery to semantics. In this way the Soviet bureaucracy shamefacedly tries to conceal its own origin and record. Clearly it is not a tenable position. If the older generations want to forget, the new generations will demand imperatively to know. The question of Stalin thus re- mains posed. It cannot be resolved, as the Communist Parties try to do, by simply erasing him from history. Nor is the Chinese way, which stops the clock in 1953, any more successful. Stalin set his stamp on a whole era in the history of the working class movement, an era which is not yet at an end. The resolution of the crisis of leader- ship means, amongst other things, settling accounts with Stalinism. This new biography by Jean-Jacques Marie, readable and informative as it is, can, despite its inadequacies on some points, make a contribution to this task. As an introduction to the large and often heavy literature - of the subject, or as a refresher course for the initiated, it is a very useful volume. 109

[p052] Philip Snowden by Colin Cross Barrie and Radcliffe, London, 1966 Price 50 shillings THERE is nothing particularly new or exciting in this biography of the politician best known to history as the Chancellor in the first two Labour Governments. Mr Cross found no new papers or documents to throw light on his subject but he has brought together what can be known about the external facts of his life and political career. He is as sparing with his praise as he is with his blame; he underlines some obvious weaknesses, such as Snow- den’s addiction to the _ purest financial orthodoxy, but presumably accepts many of the political assumptions which he made. Snowden’s career extended from the pioneering days of the Inde- pendent Labour Party to the for- mation of the National Government after the crisis of 1931. It summed up the progression of a certain type of reformism which begins with the most pure-blooded declarations of belief in ‘socialism’ and ends up by cutting unemployment pay in the interests of the bankers. In a dif- ferent language and style the labour politicians of today, be they ever so left, follow the same path. Snowden’s background was authentically working class and he achieved and retained wide popular support in the industrial North. His contact with the workers was probably closer than that of most of his successors. He had cam- paigned tirelessly for what he thought to be the cause of ‘social- ism’ when it offered no prospect of a successful career. He joined the ILP a year or so after its foundation and became one of its most prominent figures. His back- ground gave him a feeling for the working class: but he thought always in terms of self-improve- ment and reform, not of struggle. He remained deeply suspicious of trade unionism. It was, on the other hand, typical that he should devote 110 as much campaigning to the cause of temperance as he did to that of the ILP at some stages in his career. The Yorkshire working class, moreover, was moving from liberalism. Throughout his career he retained a deep belief in the economic doctrines of nineteenth century liberalism: free trade, the gold standard and balanced budgets in the Gladstonian tradition. His last notable political act was a broadcast on behalf the Liberal Party the election of 1935. His ‘socialism’ was of the pro- pagandist, quasi-religious variety which was the keynote of the ILP. He excelled at depicting a vision of the new society which was to re- place the ugly reality of life in the drab towns of the industrial North. He brought recruits to the ILP in the same way that Billy Graham brings them to God. One of his most popular pamphlets was entitled ‘The Christ that is to be’. As Cross puts it: At the end of a long, inspiring speech, he would drop his voice and gently urge his listeners to play their part in the great cause. He would call on those who wished to join the party to walk to the front of the hall and sign the membership form. One by one they would come forward while perhaps, the choir and the rest of the audience sang ‘The Red Flag’. The technique became famous throughout the movement as ‘Philip’s come to Jesus’. Branch secretaries, eager for recruits, would appeal to him: ‘Now then, Philip, don’t forget the “Come to Jesus’.”’ On the strength of his propaganda activities Snowden won a national reputation and became one of the leaders of the ILP in its heyday. Yet he was clearly and explicitly a re- formist, a parliamentary socialist. It was natural, therefore, that he should seek public office. In this his fundamental liberalism held him in good stead, for while he bitterly opposed those, like Macdonald, who wanted an alliance with the Liberal Party his parliamentary platform was one which appealed distinctly to advanced liberals. In fact, it was with the help of Liberal votes that he first secured election to Parlia- ment. He consciously sought, too, to make the Labour Party respectable in the eyes of the middle class and strongly opposed the Marxist and syndicalist tendencies in the move- ment. His emphasis was always on gradualism: he seemed sincerely to believe, at least before 1914, that the owners of capitalist industry could be persuaded to surrender their property voluntarily for their own good and that of society. That is really what his socialism amounted to. Of course, there was nothing peculiar about Snowden in this. In many ways he stood on the left of the Labour Party and, as Cross points out, his writings, as well as his speeches, were a formative in- fluence in the shaping of future Labour Party policy. The First World War found him, typically, embarked upon an extensive over- seas speaking tour (with his intoler- able wife, Ethel) on behalf of ... temperance. He did not return to England until February 1915, when he took up an anti-war stand, although, as his biographer points out, he ‘had no apparent hesitation about accepting work within the war- time machinery of government— work indirectly relating to the efficiency of the war effort and of munitions production’. It was in the period from 1915 to 1920 when, responding to the shift in the working class, Snowden moved furthest to the left, in words. He campaigned against the war and conscription in a moderate way and was chairman of the Leeds Conven- tion of June 1917. The Bolshevik revolution forced him to declare himself—against the use of violence by the oppressed and exploited and, later, against the affiliation of the ILP to the Communist International in 1920. His wife visited Russia and returned a confirmed anti-Bolshevik (after attending the Nuremburg rally FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, NOVEMBER, 1967

[p053] 937 she re orted finding Hitler an whose secret lies ‘in his selfi- W ich began 12 1 ness and sincerity - - J was so ready been foresh dowed in 1924. essed PF sitate imcerity es Snowden's financial policy repre- ane ection oy of ‘Bolshevism Run rd’). sented the last fing of the old ortho- Mad’ and the charge that 4 Labour From. 1920 the prospect of office doxy which had served British caPh sovernment would be 4 threat to aved closer Snowden who ‘had talism S> well before i914. To meet deposits in the Post Office Savings on election the problems created bY the World = Bank Snowden himself did not Economic Depression while clinging = stan FI for re-electi© nm, Made 4 peer d standard an he continued for a time to be 4 f the National Governmen st his seat in the coup ned to Parliament in to free tr 1918 retur Labour Party front 4 balanced budg jn 1930, incl 922 on the ench. In 1924 he became the first et, even i . Y yne budget which showed his free € t) was to play Kins anute. Hars clashed with his most — . realities forced the changes which ; . rade and financial orthodoxy: Tt 8 inking’ of financial policy an the final was the ne 4 Labour Government econome thinking wes then to eR: preak came over protection and which revealed the full extent of the dorse- jeanwhile, having accepted Imperial Preference. contradiction between his ‘full- the conditions imposed by tne There was at least, 2 certain con- blooded socialism’ at 4 the willing- bankers, Snowden became Chancellor sistency ‘ n Snow den’s position. ness to accept the needs of the in the National Government and, DY Having relegated socialism tO some capitalists as paramount in the day- stringent economics and increases in earthly hereaiter he accepted the to-day tasks of raanning the govern: taxation—wildly applauded BY. the practical task of making capitalisr! ment. A full discussion of the 1931 Conservatives ane. Liberals—claime work. Of course the methods which crisis and Snowden’s role in it can- to have. restored international come, Coe employed now appear to be not d her The kind dence the pound sterling. All merely outmoded but Junatic His Ww ' the same ae continue and successors in the Labour Government © eion 0 Ma the differ from Snowden principally in the means which they use to make and the fact that, had helped the aba of policy which 5 for the Labour Party dard an e inevitable pound became m. work d the deva they have ® t coalitions. inevitable. ts capitalis so far, ceptible 12 the trea culture. he general c that agriculture has remained in the grip of a deep crisis of which reports on poth the gene forced collectivization was the be- some of the specialized aspects © Jeave. muc to be desi inni not prevent Soviet and East European agricul- Khrushchev. The quantitative basis ture by 2 number of the leading for some of these studies, depend- erts. It deals principally ing to 4 considerable extent upon V1

[p054] estimates, is therefore subject to wide margins of error. For socialists the experience of agriculture in these countries is of great interest, principally as an ob- ject lesson in how not to deal with the agrarian question in a peasant country. Stalin’s enforced collecti- vization not only physically liqui- dated large sections of the peasantry, but- the antagonism which it generated led to wholesale slaughter of farm animals and a reduction in crop output which was to last for a generation. The bureaucratic methods imposed on the collective farms, while provid- ing, in a crude way, the food and industrial crops needed to carry forward rapid industrialization, at the same time gave rise to acute social conflicts. An uneasy com- promise was arrived at between collective farm labour in which the peasants had little interest and the private plots cultivated on an in- dividual basis. When Khrushchev took over direction of agriculture in 1953, unlike Stalin, ‘he knew what the score was in the countryside’. He thus not. only showed, in a famous report to the Central Committees how serious the agrarian crisis in- herited from Stalin was, but he embarked upon a series of expe- dients intended to bring it under control. The first two chapters are essentially concerned with Khrush- chev’s policies and why they failed. They included the group- ing of the Kholkhoz into larger units, the dissolution of the Machine Tractor Stations, the Vir- gin Lands campaign, the stimulation of the cultivation of maize and other crops and the raising of pro- curement prices and other attempts to win over the peasantry. He stumped the country in an extra- ordinary manner, had himself acclaimed as an agricultural expert and made rash promises, such as that to exceed US per capita con- sumption of meat and milk by the early 1960s. Far from being a brilliant success, Khrushchev’s policies had very patchy results. Production did in-. crease, but not to the extent ex- pected and only at tremendous cost in labour and resources and 112 not without some _— spectacular failures. By 1963, instead of abun- ance, famine stalked the land again and large quantities of grain had to be bought on the world market. Khrushchev was pushed aside and Brezhnev made a report on agriculture which summed up his failure and proposed new measures to cope with the crisis. Why did Khrushchev’s measures fail? For some the whole trouble lay with collectivization itself and in a number of the East European countries, as in Poland, dealt with in the last chapter, it was simply abandoned. In the Soviet Union such a radical reversal of policy was out of the question. The bureaucracy therefore sought to find some way out within the exist- ing structure by improving output. The contributors to this volume show in particular cases the short- comings of the measures. taken. The Virgin Lands made a big con- tribution to grain supplies but only at tremendous cost and by push- ing cultivation into areas subject to climatic hazards. The drive for maize production, while reasonable in some regions, was made a panacea for all ills and the acreage has now dropped back to some- thing like its pre-Khrushcheyv level. The important crop-rotation ques- tion was bedevilled, as was live- stock rearing, by the pseudo-science to which the bureaucracy was prone because it offered quick results. Thus Stalin consulted Lysenko much as former despots consulted astrologers and the theories about soil developed by Williams were preferred to the findings of com- _ petent soil chemists. More fundamental, as is brought ‘out, for example, in the chapter on sugar beet production, was the way in which agriculture was dependent upon development in other parts of the economy. Although having an enormous acreage under sugar beet Soviet sugar production was below that in countries which cul- tivated a smaller amount of beet. Shortcomings in storage and in transport resulted in big losses in sugar content between the field and the factory. Likewise, an all-round increase in agricultural productivity could not take place without more and better machinery, improved servicing of equipment, chemical aids such as fertilizers and pesti- cides in larger amounts, increased investment in farm buildings, drain- age, water supply and _ irrigation. But commitment of resources on the scale necessary in all these spheres was out of the question: Soviet industry was feeling the pressure from too many directions At the level of human relations the split between the collective farm and party bureaucracy and the peasantry was wide and remains so. The peasants have won some material concessions: higher in- comes, pensions and welfare bene- fits nearer those of the urban workers. But, according to Nove, the peasant is still a second class citizen, he remains sceptical and many of the problems of the farms arise simply from his failure to co- operate willingly with a discipline which seems to him to be imposed from outside and above. Labour productivity is higher on the pri- vate plots (worked to a large extent by women) and a substantial proportion of the produce required to feed the city population—eggs, vegetables, fruit—continues to come from this source. But, if other eco- nomic goals are to be attained and strains placed upon the balance of payments by the purchase of foreign grain alleviated there will need to be a big increase in the coming years in labour productivity. In the agrarian sector’ the bureacracy continues to be in the pincers grip of remorseless eco- nomic restraints on the one hand and peasants and urban consumers on the other who demand results in terms of higher incomes and more and better goods on which to spend them. The contributors to this volume are, of course, — hostile critics, though their hostility is of varying degrees; some are compre- hensive as far as the problems of the bureaucracy are concerned, some are comprehensive of the out- look of the peasants. The Marxist analysis of the present situation and the prospects of Soviet agriculture still has to be made, but the views of these Western experts have a certain value and should not be overlooked. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, NOVEMBER, 1967

[p055] LIMITED PUBLICATIONS PARK NEW 7029 maid S.W.4 London, Street, High ham Q. Cla 186A List Book Free for Write Essential Marxist Reading The New Course By Leon Trotsky A collection of articles written in 1923 during the lull before the great storm “ of persecution which was later to overwhelm Russian Bolshevism. Here Trotsky, analyses the incipient stages of the degeneration of the Communist Party, uncovers its causes and proposes measures for combating its further decline. He here analyses the party in a historical, that is dialectical way, the relationships between generations, social strata, groups, factional forma- tions, tradition and the multitude of factors that go to make a revolutionary party. lll pages, 3/6 Most timely reading for British socialists, this book places the development of British politics in correct historic perspective. Here Trotsky, writing on the eve of the General Strike of 1926, employs his great revolutionary experience to analyse and explain the ideological and moral concepts of the ruling classes and their servants in the Labour bureaucracy. 136 pages, 7/6 The Draft Programme of the Communist International by Leon Trotsky This is part of the author’s criticism of the draft programme submitted by the Executive Committee of the Third (Communist) International to the 6th Congress of the Comintern which was held in July 1928. The manuscript of that criticism was written by Trotsky during his exile in Alma-Ata (Central Asia). It was sent to the Congress in Moscow together with an appeal for reinstatement into the party from which he had been expelled a few months before by the Stalinist faction in 1927. Stalin and his supporters had invented the theory of ‘Socialism in one country’, which was made party policy in 1925 and converted into an article of faith to be defended by the world institutions of Stalinism. It is this theory which Trotsky criticises in these pages. 64 pages, 1/- This document 1s a landmark in the developrient of 20th century Marxism. It sums up the experience of an entire period of struggle against the Soviet bureaucracy. This _ Platform also represents the highest point in the fortunes of the Joint Opposition (Trotskyist-Zinovievite) to Stalin. It is the programme of the last of the Bolshevik-Leninists who insisted that they remained communists despite all the per- secution, jailings, violence and slander inflicted on them. But this document also represents a watershed=the end of “ one phase and the beginning of another—in the evolution of left Ds Ollie Trotskyist politics. 112 pages, S/- .""™ 3 This is a polemic against Radek in 1928. Trotsky examines the arguments against his pre-war theory of the permanent revolution (as expounded in Results and Prospects) and takes up the history of his differences with Lenin before 1917, of which Stalin and his henchmen made so much. Trotsky shows that it was Lenin's criticisms of his attitude to the centralised Marxist party, which he afterwards understood and accepted, that kept them apart, and not their differences on the permanent revolution. 254 pages, 15/- soft cover, 25/- hard cover Printed by Plough Press Ltd. (T.U.), r/o 180 Clapham High Street, London, S.W.4

[p056] Subscribe to Fourth International FOURTH INTERNATIONAL is the theoretical journal of the International Committee of the Fourth Inter- national. FourTH INTERNATIONAL continues the work of Lasour REviEw. which concluded its 12th year of publication with its issue of Summer 1963, the fifth number of volume 7. FouRTH INTERNATIONAL continues the work and traditions of Revolutionary Communism since the death of Lenin. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL represents the unbroken chain of theoretical journals in the Bolshevik tradition, whose continuators were the Left Opposition led and inspired by Leon Trotsky. FourTH INTERNATIONAL follows in the traditions of that Opposition and in the traditions of the Fourth International of Leon Trotsky. FouRTH INTERNATIONAL is the product of decades of continuous struggle of Marxists in the Inter- national Labour movement against Stalinism, Reformism and Revisionism. FouRTH INTERNATIONAL represents the successful fusion of Marxist trends in this International Labour movement, from Trotskyist to Com- munist, Social-Democratic and Trade Union movements. . FouRTH INTERNATIONAL, With this issue, commences a new period of activity in the International Labour movement and simultaneously prepares and equips the Marxist movement for its future intervention in the battles of the working class which promise to eclipse and transcend all pre- vious struggles both in their depth and scope. To: New Park Publications Ltd., 186a Clapham High Street, London, S.W.4 I enclose cheque/postal order/money order /draft for £ s. d. to pay for issues of FourTH INTERNATIONAL. Volume.... No..... Price 4/- (postage 6d. per issue) ean eewenananmeaseanmeeneeenaewan nen eananeennaneeene Some writings by Leon Trotsky The First Five Years of the Communist International Vol. 2 (soft cover) 12s. 6d. (hard cover) 18s. Od. The New Course 3s. 6d. The Permanent Revolution (soft cover) 15s. Od. (hard cover) 25s. Od. Draft Programme of the Communist International . A Criticism of Fundamentals, 1928 As. 0d. Where is Britain Going? _ 7s. 6d. Whither France? 5s. Od. Stalinism and Trotskyism in the USA ls. 6d. Stalinism and Bolshevism 6d. Radio, Science, Technique and Society Is. Od. - I Stake My Life! ‘(Dewey report of the Moscow Trials) 6a. The Russian Revolution (The Copenhagen Speech) 4d. Culture and Socialism and Art and Revolution 2s. 6d. Death Agony of Capitalism (Transitional Programme) 1/- The Intelligentsia and Socialism As. 0d. In Defence of Marxism (soft cover) 10s. 6d. (hard cover) 21s. Od. Platform of the Left Opposition 5s. Od. Through What Stage Are We Passing? 2s. Od. Young People Study Politics Is. 9d. The Struggle for State Power (1917) 2s. Od. To: New Park Publications Ltd., 186A Clapham High St., London, S.W.4. I enclose cheque/postal order/money order/ draft for £ s. d. to pay for POCO HOSE SE SSEE SEEDS SORESCHSEE SESE OREO TEERSES HEHE SESE HAEHE SHE TEHESOSEEH ETE OE SENSES HEHOESEE REDE TEDE