Panorama

mYTr THE Communist Party appears pleased with the coverage it received in Monday's night's 'Panorama' • The Stalinists were presented as kindly, well-meaning reformers.

They were able to state their case:- Britain will become socialist through a painless 'revolution' brought about by slowly pushing the labour movement to the left.

The Stalinists' perspective is a straight-line growth of their 'influence' on the labour movement through the trade unions until there is a left-Labour/CP majority in parliament to legislate 'socialism'. They would like to be able to join the Labour Party to achieve this.

This 'perspective' is no different from what the Fabian Society has been trying to do for 70 years, or the 'Tribuneites' in more recent years, only without the direct CP participation.

This policy is a complete illusion, and a deception on the working class.

The rapid escalation of the class struggle and the methodical preparations by the Tories for a showdown with the trade unions point towards an all-out confrontation in a General Strike. The Stalinists kept quiet about this.

The extreme seriousness of the dislocation of the capitalist system points to political and economic crisis of revolutionary diReld mensions. From the Stalinists not a word.

Is it not interesting that the most important arm of the capitalist state's ideological weaponry, the BBC, should put on this advertising piece for the CommunParty during such period of political development in Britain?

The . establishment, who have just banned the Poulson programme and countless items on Ireland, do not do these things by accident.

The Stalinists are being groomed for the important role they have to play in the forthcoming revolutionary struggles, to disorient the working class with left phrases while they lead the ight up blind reformist alleys.

This was the Communist Party's role in France in 1968 where they headed off macc political strike movement of immense proportions into harmless wages struggle in order to avoid revolutionary crisis. The question of state power was posed and the reformStalinists deliberately ran away from it.

In order to establish the credentials of the leading Stalinists like Jimmy Reid and Bernie Steer, the BBC and the Communist Party resorted to a mixture of lies and fantasy.

The disastrous sell-out at UCS, where thousands of men were made redundant and private capitalists put back in the saddle by the Stalinists after the working class had shown every willingness to expropriate the whole business and launch a political struggle to spread the fight, was recorded as a triumph.

The release of the jailed dockers was mentioned, but not the disasters of the Devlin and Jones-Aldington plans which the Stalinists helped smuggle in and which have decimated jobs in dockland.

The miners strike was described by Scottish Stalinist William McLea as having changed goverr nent policy. The strike wa i an enormously important step forward but it was precisely because it did not change government policy through not going on to challenge the government for power that the hospital workers and the whole working class are fighting Phase Two today.

And precisely because the deteriorating economic situation now makes it impossible for the Tories to buy off strikers with wage concessions and turns every strike into a political confrontation, so the Stalinists withdraw from even putting up a wages struggle.

Hence the sell-outs at Ford's, on the docks, and the attempt to delay things at last week's miners executive meeting.

That is where the decep tion of workers is so treacherous. Some Communist Party miners from Seafield colliery, Scotland, spoke proudly of the ideological work being the most important because it provided lasting solutions to the problems of the capitalist syster and would avoid the need for the miners' annual wages battle.

The reality of Stalinism is that its purpose is, and always has been, to seek peaceful coexistence between the parasitic Soviet bureaucracy and imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism.

This long history of international compromise and outright counter-revolutionary activity promoted by the Kremlin in Czechoslovakia 1968, Hungary 1956, at Potsdam and Yalta in World War II, in the pact with , Hitler, and the murderous terror against Trotsky and the Left Opposition, was completely ignored by the programme.

One tame intellectual said he would protest at persecution of a writer in the Soviet Union. What hypocrisy.

Stalinism is a cancer in the workers' movement born of the defeats of the 1920s and 1930s.

Stalinism wi. Il have to be exposed and defeated in every country and replaced by a Marxist