Step nearer civil war

March has been marked by many and varied personal interventions.

These are duly handed out to the Press at the close of the session and the nation is then invited to ponder over their significance rather as the ancient Greeks used to ponder the significance of the Delphic oracle.

Pompidou's latest "little phrase' warning about 'demagogic and partisan overtones' is particularly sinister.

It immediately raises the question of whether the National Assembly is in future to have any power to discuss and amend what the President puts before it.

Earlier this year Pompidou raised the question of depriving the National Assembly of this power.

He put forward a plan to cut the presidential term from seven to five years and at the same time greatly strengthen his powers.

Even the liberal Le Monde' was moved to comment that if this was really the aim of the regime, it would be better to dissolve parliament altogether.

In any case its right of amendment has been greatly restricted by the constitutional changes made in 1958 when de Gaulle established the Fifth Republic.

Pompidou's remarks on †he caused Le Monde to ass"

whether the regime is really whether it is not becoming an elective monarchy!

But the question is not exhausted by an issue of whether or not the Assembly should be able

The posthumous rehabilitation of Rajk does not exonerate Johnstone and his party from the graver charge that they justify the suppression of the Hungariar Revolution and the dissolution of thes Workers' GET YOUR BOOKS, PERIODICALS AND paperbacks THE PURPOSE of the Moscow Trials of the 1930s was to discredit Trotskyism internationally, to declare it counter - revolutionary and disruptive and to justify the campaign of slander and assassination against Trotskyist groups in France, Spain and other countries.

Its main aim was to prevent the political and theoretical rearming and regrouping of the vanguard of the European and American working class. In short, to forestall the formation of the Fourth International.

This is no forensic argument. The question posed by the Moscow I rials is this: is Trotskyism. 'objectively' or in any way, counter-revolutionary?

Is Johnstone prepared to defend the right of the Trotskyist movement to exist as a legitimate political tendency? If So, what does he propose to do about Communist Party general secretary John Gollan's public refusal to support the SLL-International Socialist campaign basic rights on the grounds that the SLL is 'disruptive'? Isn't this the same old smear of 'counterrevolutionary Trotskyism' served up in a trendy, post-20th Congress garnish?

Is the era of Stalinism's 'crimes' over? How does Johnstone characterize the supply of Polish coal to Franco during a Spanish miners' strike, or the relation between the USSR and China on the one hand and the Greek and Spanish regimes on the other? And how does he explain the Soviet recognition of the Cambodian regime? Are we to wait another 17 years for a confession about these?

The posthumous rehabilitation of Rajk does not exonerate Johnstone and his Party from the far graver charge that both he and his Party leaders justified the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution and the dissolution of the Workers' Councils in 956. They gave every possible help to the same leaden fist which later strangled the Czechoslovak CP.

Johnstone no doubt wants to put his conscience on exhibition, but he should be more careful when he does it in the presence of Trotskyists. Johnstone dates his disillusionment with Stalinist frame-ups and murders to 1955 when, like Saul on his way to Damascus, he suffered his first blinding revelation.

The Hungarian Revolution, however, took place in 1956 and Imre Nagy-ex-Prime Minister of Hungary-was foully murdered without any trial in 1957. This alone should have constituted sufficient ground to publicly denounce the Hungarian regime of Kadar and the British CP leaders who covered up for it. Yet to this day Johnstone has done neither.

The truth is that for 17 years Johnstone has been fighting against the truth behind the frame-up of Rajk, the assassination of, Trotsky, the Hungarian Revolution. He remains a Stalinist after all these years, fighting on the same policies and 'theories' which led to the 'crimes'.

Councils in 1956.

Until Johnstone demonstrates in practice his desire to break away from the sordid past of Stalinism, we shall be compelled to repeat what Comrade Slaughter wrote on March 14:

'He is posted by the Gollan clique to mix in revisionist circles and perfect the technique of separating "dissident" Communist Party members from 'He played this role in relation to the YCL and CP opposition in the early 1960s. He repeated it at the CP Congress in November 1969, at which the leadership, deliberately and by prior arrangement with him, kept him off the new executive because he was useful to them as a controlled focus of opposition?

Mr Johnstone tries to evade these questions by pointing a distracting finger at Comrades Kemp and Slaughter. This will not do.

Whereas Johnstone left the Trotskyist movement to slander and distort Trotskyism in the most vulgar and unscrupulous

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way, Comrades Kemp and Slaughter fought uncompromisingly for their principles and were expelled after the Hammersmith Conference of the CP. They joined the Trotskyist movement in order to smash Stalinism and carry forward the programme of the October revolution.

Mr Johnstone, on the contrary, remained on the best possible terms with the Gollan leadership during this period and became a prominent apologist for Stalinism • while setting up a phoney opposition in the Young Communist League which he skilfully betrayed to King Street.

Both Kemp and Slaughter fought the Stalinist Communist Party in complete independence from the rightward opposition of the intellectuals around the 'Universities and Left Review' Unlike Kemp and Slaughter these men wanted, in rejecting Stalin, to reject Lenin and Bolshevism!

Now, it is to this very same liberal opposition that Jolnstone has turned his face ever since Fourth International, and then "The Newsletter,' and then Workers Press, Kemp and Slaughter have fought consistently not only against Stalinism, but also against these middle-class muddle-heads, who in various ways have found their way back to peace with Stalinism, so long as they can share opposition •to Trotsky and Trotskyism.

This is why Johnstone now sits with 'New Left Review' as a trustee of the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Fund.

Of course, here we are at the crux. Johnstone says his defence of the Stalinist trials till 1956 was due to his 'naïve belief that it was not conceivable that workers' states would engage in such judicial murders. Is really a question of naïveté?

What Comrades Kemp, Slaughter and others have to face up • to was that they had been Stalinists and that they would have to re-examine their whole political, historical and theoretical approach, on the basis of the great experiences thrown up by the struggle of the Soviet and east European worker against Stalinism.

It was necessary to learn and through this learning to build the Trotskyist movement, the only movement which had preserved and defended the Bolshevik tradition against Stalinism.

It was not the 'workers' states' which committed the judicial murders, it was the agents of a new, privileged bureaucracy who workers starescence on the first were an state.

Their rise to power was made possible by the isolation of the proletarian revolution in a backward country, Russia. In these historical conditions the struggle of individual against individual to preserve life against scarcity and poverty made necessary the temporary revival of small-scale capitalism.

The isolation of the USSR and the cultural and the economic backwardness of economy provided the social foundation for a state and Party bureaucracy to divide and repress weakened and temporarily disintegrating working class. This bureaucracy built itself privileged positions and fought against Bolshevism and against the proletariat in Russia, and internationally, to preserve these positions. In this way it reflected into the workers' state the pressure of imperialism. Its policies and methods then actually assisted imperialism in administering historic defeats on the working class, as in Germany and Spain.

Johnstone must above all conceal this role of the bureaucracy. He is still a Stalinist-and this is why he says it is a workers' state which commits judicial murder. In this way the Stalinist comes into agreement with every anti-communist enemy of the Soviet Union.

The test of a communist who claims to oppose Stalinism is his relationship to this Stalinist bureaucracy: either join the Fourth International and fight in the life-and-death struggle to resolve the crisis of leadership; or remain a sophisticated 'critic' of its ugliest features, while covering up its real historical role. That is the ditterence between Johnstone and those who left the Communist Party for the Comrades Kemp and Slaughter have demonstrated in practice their break with Stalinism. No apologies or explanations are called for here.

Mr Johnstone, however, has neither fought nor broken with Stalinism. That is the concrete Marxist truth.

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