Editorial

[p004] > _ EDITORIAL AS WE GO TO PRESS, the French franc once again enters the world economic scene as the immediate major source of instability and imminent crisis. The Pompidou Government takes unprecedentedly severe measures to actually halve public expendi- ture in a whole series of departments, all in response to a flight from the French reserves of nearly £500 million in one month. What better in- dication could there be of the confidence of the French bourgeoisie in their own regime in France and of the new President and government who have replaced de Gaulle? What better proof is needed of the analysis made by the International Committee of the Fourth International and its sections: that the survival of de Gaulle after May- June 1968 could only postpone the crisis and the development of the revolution in France; that the November currency crisis was the inevitable con- sequence of the Gaullist failure to settle matters with the working class; and that the fall of de Gaulle in the April 1969 referendum was a great blow struck by the proletariat not only at the French but at the European and the United States capitalist classes, as well as at the counter-revolu- tionary Stalinist bureaucracy and its international policy? All the major capitalist countries are confronted with the same changing relationship of class forces whose results we have seen in France. With Wilson’s acceptance of the TUC’s pro- posals for industrial discipline, and the abandon- ment of the Labour government’s proposed anti- union legislation, a new stage is marked in the political relations between the classes in Britain. Undoubtedly, the ruling class and the Tories intend to return to the question of anti-trade union laws when they are returned to office. They calculate that the TUC leadership’s actions in industrial disputes, together with the disillusion- ment in the Labour government, will divide and confuse the working class in the intervening months. Then they hope to take advantage of the threatening crisis and unemployment, together with the possibility, as they calculate, of one or two heavy strike defeats for important sections of the workers, to inflict new reactionary penal laws on the trade unions. Editorial However, the perspective for the coming months is decided above all, not primarily by the em- ployers’ plans, but by the actual relation of class forces, against the background of the developing economic crisis, together with the intervention of conscious political leadership basing itself on a Marxist estimate of this relation. The employers and the Tories had previously worked on the assumption that the Wilson government would leave them with a body of anti-union legislation which would have effectively paved the way for their own plans. In the past six weeks they have been compelled to recognize that Wilson could not achieve this. Together with the prices and incomes policy, the anti-union legislation has been pushed aside by the strength of the working class emerging from the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s. Finally, the capitalist press and political spokesmen openly advised Wilson to drop the legislation and leave it to the Tories, or even to combine with the Tories to carry it through. They were responding to an international trend in the working class, which is connected with the world economic crisis. Neither in France nor in Britain nor in any other advanced capitalist country has the bourgeoisie found a way to deal politically with the undefeated working class which has gone through the post-war years and the boom. This is the content of the utter collapse of incomes policy and Labour government legislative reform as methods of controlling the working class in Britain. Eighteen months ago President Johnson was talking about the USA, in view of growing balance of payments problems, turning to an ‘in- comes policy’ solution of the British type. The strength and combativity of the working class in all the advanced countries has combined with the development of the monetary crisis and threat of recession to push the ruling class necessarily back into considering more ‘classical’ solutions: trade war, unemployment, wage cuts, and the imposition of political repression. But they are faced in Britain, as everywhere else, with a real political crisis. They have seen only the beginning of the power which the working class can bring to bear. In Britain for example, the incomes policy was smashed by a series of t

[p005] separate working-class struggles which, while ex- tremely militant, were basically defensive—they did not yet go beyond the traditional wages frame- work; the Merseyside dock strike of October 1967, the threatened rail and engineers’ strikes. of 1968, and the Fords and Leyland disputes of 1969, while having political implications in relation to government policy and the fight for leadership in the unions, were at the same time the mature ex- pression of the organized strength of the British working class on wages questions. The essential point here is that even this level of struggle, with the strength and political weight of the class so far expressed only obliquely through the treach- erous TUC General Council and the Parliamentary Party’s divisions, effectively halted the govern- ment’s plans. Now the employers and the Tories are un- doubtedly vulnerable to the impact of this same strength, and they will have to encounter it under conditions where the revolutionary movement will have unprecedented opportunities for carrying for- ward its struggle against Stalinism and _ ll varieties of opportunism. Nothing substantial what- soever has been handed to the next Tory govern- ment by the Wilson administration. On the con- trary, as some Tory commentators have antici- pated, the workers are encouraged by this failure of Wilson to hand them over bound hand and foot to the Tories. Notwithstanding all the disadvan- tages for the working class which arise in condi- tions of unemployment (and unemployment is a certain result of the world economic crisis and Jenkins’ policies) we can say that, within the working class at its present level of strength and confidence, the growth of unemployment will be a radicalizing factor in the workers’ movement. The first lay-offs and the first serious threat of large-scale unemployment, coinc#ding as it will with the prospect or the fact of a general election, will give great impetus to the basic force of anti- Tory feeling in the working class. Having thrown back the plans of Wilson and Castle, the working class will make big political experiences in the struggle to find the political road to defeat the Tories and the employers in a direct confronta- tion. When we say, therefore, that we start from the world economic crisis, we must emphasize that it is not a matter of calculating only what the ruling class will be compelled to inflict on the workers, and then how the workers will or will not be able to resist. We are already at a certain stage, a relatively advanced stage, of the political effects of the crisis. The political relationship of forces 2 now does not flow only from the immediate eco- nomic crisis and its changes, but also from the results already established by the successful resis- tance of the working class in France and Britain, which is itself now a major factor in the capitalist crisis. * * * * THE INTENSIFICATION of the crisis of the Soviet bureaucracy, of which the invasion of Czechoslo- vakia was the sharpest expression since 1956, takes place in close inter-relationship with the crisis of capitalism. World imperialism seeks to find a way between monetary collapse and a new depression by solving its problems at the expense of the working class. The resulting intensification of class conflict, especially in Western Europe, places the socialist revolution on the order of the day. The mounting offensive spirit of the European working class is as menacing for the Stalinist bureaucracy as it is for the bourgeoisie. The whole policy of ‘peaceful co-existence’, based upon the division of the world into spheres of influence and an agreement to maintain the status quo, would be exposed and smashed if the work- ing class won major victories in either the East or the West of Europe. At the same time, the Soviet bureaucracy passes on to an open offensive against the Chinese Revolution, and seeks, in agreement with Nixon, to impose a compromise settlement in Vietnam. Thirty years ago the signature of the Germano- Soviet Pact caused little more than temporary confusion and a few defections in the Com- munist Parties. Most members accepted the pact aS a necessary tactical turn to defend the con- quests of October, whatever their doubts. At the same time the ‘democratic’ and ‘left’ allies won to the Popular Front from the middle class deserted in droves to become defenders of the ‘democracy’ of their ‘own’ nation-states. Stalin’s opponents had been exterminated in- the Soviet Union and isolated and slandered everywhere else. The working class stood at the end of a decade of unemployment, demoralisation and defeat and faced a new and murderous war. The prestige of Stalin stood high and grew still further after the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in June, 1941, and during the war. As a force in the working-class movement the Communist Parties then went through a period of rapid growth in influence and organisation under the leadership of the hand-picked cadres chosen by Moscow in the late 1920s and 1930s. Under the command Fourth International, Summer 1969

[p006] of men like Thorez and Togliatti the decisions of Yalta and Potsdam were carried through with- out question. The Communist Parties in Western Europe thus played an indispensable part in the re-establishment of the bourgeois state and the salvaging of the capitalist economy. In the East European countries occupied by the Red Army the old property relations could not survive and, though under bureaucratic and military control, property relations consistent with the rule of the working class were established. To look back at this period and to examine the situation of the world communist movement today is to measure the full extent of the crisis of Stalinism. No longer do the national party leaders accept unquestionally the needs of the Soviet bureaucracy as the guide for their own policies. Even weak parties like the British display an unaccustomed ‘independence’, which amounts in fact to an adaptation more directly to their own ruling class and its reformist agents. In Eastern Europe, first Tito and then, a decade later, after the Hungarian Revolution, other Communist lead- erships began to break out of Moscow’s leading- strings. The Rumanian Stalinists have gone fur- thest on national lines, despite their one-time com- plete dependence on Russian support. Most signi- ficant of all was the development in Czechoslo- vakia with the removal of the docile and obedient Novotny leadership which had managed the country for 20 years. Very rapidly, in the early part of 1968, all the signs of maturing political revolution began to become manifest in that country. The brutal irruption of Soviet and other Warsaw pact troops in the early hours of August 21, despite the efforts of Dubcek to hold the tide in check and find a modus vivendi with Moscow, gave evidence of the depth of the crisis which now besets the rule of the bureaucracy. The suppression of the political revolution in Czechoslovakia has closed the door to the only way out of the economic, social and_ political crisis of the bureaucratic regime. Inevitably, the Stalinist ruling caste must now re-impose police and censorship measures on the working class and its allies. At the same time, economic measures are taken which bring unemployment and above all a drastic rise in the cost of living. The conditions are prepared for an even more explosive confron- tation between the working class and the bureau- cracy. What has happened in Czechoslovakia re- flects a fundamental crisis not only in that country but throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself. The mounting vocal opposition of writers, historians and others, their insistence