LET'S GO NOWHERE WITH WILSON

Two of the most energetic opponents of the plan to nationalize Britain's 25 largest companies as part of Labour's next programme have been former 'lefts' Michael Foot and lan Mikardo.

Add to this Harold Wilson telling the combined Shadow Cabinet - National Executive Committee meeting that the Party conference can decide what it likes but the Parliamentary Labour Party will only do what it wants to; and banker Jim Callaghan scorning the idea of nationalizing the banks, and the picture is complete.

The Labour Party is in the hands of men who, whether 'left, centre, or right-wing, will always compromise the movement's socialist aspirations when faced with the 'realities' of office.

And they will continue to do this, whoever such leaders are, for as long as the fight is confined to Parliament is a bourgeois institution which, since the 17th century, has fulfilled a specific function within the bourgeois state machine.

Two or more political parties play tweedledum and tweedledee in and out office in attempts to regulate the economic and social relations of capitalism.

The whole thing is a deception. State power remains firmly in the hands of the capitalist class whoever rules in parliament. All Labour leaders and their trade union counterparts, who abandon the challenge to the ruling class for its state power, are sooner or later completely absorbed by the bourgeois into immersing themselves in the treacherous two-party "democracy' Socialism, and the emancipation of the working class from wage labour, are quickly forgotten and before long the Labourites are deeply enmeshed in company directorships and the other perks of life at the top.

From time to time, the Labour MPs put on a big show of 'socialist conscience' and march with demonstrators or utter some left-sounding phrases in order to cover themselves with the working class. But when it comes to getting something done, there are always endless excuses as to why it couldn't be managed.

This contradiction, a Labour leadership which serves the capitalist system and can do very little for the working class, is becoming more and more acute as the crisis disrupts old-established relations and makes capitalist rule less and less tenable.

It is part of the crisis of leadership of the working class and leads to increasing antagonism and a disruption of old relationships within the Labour Party and trade union movement itself.

But because of the inability of the Labourites to make any serious analysis of the processes taking place within the whole of society and affecting the labour movement, all that is produced compounds their crisis.

The reformists, in short, are stuck as deeply in the mire of insoluble contradiction as they ever were. The younger backroom men write fierce denunciations of capitalism and propose some radical-sounding changes. The older guard, with more experience of living with capitalism, tone things down in order to achieve the maximum 'appeal' to the electorate.

But they all start from the same premise: public opinion must be convinced that Labour ideas are far better than Tory or Liberal ideas. They feel they must get across to the electorate how much cleverer Labourites are than Tories and will run capitalism so much better.

This is largely an illusion. There is little to choose between a set of grammar school and Oxbridge opportunists leavened by some careerist trade unionists on one side and the Eton and Oxbridge opportunists on the other.

Be capitalist class.

There is a lot of graft and corruption and jobs-for-theboys on both sides at every level of operation.

The Labour Party's new policy document starts with a great lie. 'We are a democratic Socialist Party and proud of it. We put principles of demoand socialism above considerations of privilege and market economics.

A few lines later, it adds: 'Crucial levers of financial and economic power are still in irresponsible private hands. Crude market forces are allowed a far too dominant role. This is the main reason for our miserable record, for the scandalous rise in house prices, and for the continuing power of financial speculators to influence national economic policy!

The rest of the 200-page document can be ignored. The whole treachery and bankruptcy of the reformists is contained in these few lines.

The first point to make is that no matter how many Labour Party policy documents and Fabian pamphlets identify capitalism as the enemy, nothangus it by goe Parliamentary Labour Party.

The only 'principle' the PLP will ever observe is never to allow the 'principles of democracy and socialism' to interfere with the age-old busiress of playing verbal games with the Tories in the House of Commons chamber on about 30 days a year each, on average, and on the other 335 days a year attending to their many company directorships, other business interests, free junkets and other trips, and working in their constituency to make sure they get re-elected.

What was democratic, for example, about the 69 Labour MPs who defied Party Conference policy and voted with the Tories for Britain's entry into the monopolists' Common Market, which has since led to intolerable food price rises for the working class?

What service was it to socialism that their undemocratic action allowed the Tories to remain in office when, if the Labour Party and other anti-Marketeers had voted together, the Heath government could have been brought down?

What business interests went undeclared when those 69 Labour MPs voted for the businessmen's coalition of the EEC.

What are the Labour leaders going to do about Lonrho, surely a case of irresponsible private hands'? The one thing Wilson won't do is make a pledge to nationalize it.

And what happened when Anthony Wedgwood Benn repeated Labour Party policy over the case of Rolls-Royce Motors, which the Tories plan to sell off to private interests after the parent company had been rescued from bankruptcy with millions of pounds of public funds?

Wilson instantly repudiated the pledge to renationalize the company without compensation when Labour returns to power.

As for being democratic, the Labour leadership shows more treachery on this issue than on almost any other.

Whenever real socialists have developed a movement inside the Labour Party, they have quickly been expelled and proscribed. It happened to the young Communist Party in the 1920s when the organization still had some links with Bolshevism: it happened in 1959 when the successors to the revolutionary tradition, the Socialist Labour League, were declared anathema; and it happened again in 1964 when the supporters of 'Keep Left' had won a majority in the Young Socialists for the second year running.

But throughout the Labour Party's history, right wingers of every description have not only been allowed to continue within the Party, but have frequently risen into the top leadership. Some have actually joined the Tory Party. Others have limited themselves to the most right-wing reactionary attacks on the trade union movement.

Ramsay MacDonald, Lord Robens, Lord Shawcross, Lord George-Brown, Ray Gunter and Sir Oswald Mosley are only the more notorious. The present Shadow Cabinet is full of the most Tory-minded men whose whole life is dedicated to the capitalist system, known deceitfully as the 'mixed economy' Roy Jenkins, Dick Taverne and company remained in the leadership up to quite recently, although their support for the capitalist system and their wish to divert the Party from the socialist-trade union tradition was well known.

The Labour leaders are the agents of the capitalist class within the workers' movement. They act as the transmission belt for bourgeois thinking, which holds back trade unionists from ever challenging the ruling class for state power.

They can, and must, be exposed in this treacherous role so that the working class can break from reformism.

This can only come about in the struggle to bring in socialist policies as a solution to the economic crisis.

Useful reforms have been won by the strength of the working class during various Labour administrations in the past, but that period of history 1s now over.

With the ending of the long Bretton Woods inflationary boom, the capitalist class all over the world is forced inevitably to increase its attacks on the working class in its quest for more profits.

The future now facing the working class is not one of making reformist gains through compromises with the employers, but of fighting to defend every past gain including its most basic democratic and trade union rights.

To defend these gains from the Tory government's onslaught in the courts and corporatist institutions like the Pay Board, a completely new level of struggle is required.

Only by a determined campaign to mobilize the strength of the trade union and labour movement for the removal of the Tories and the adoption of policies to nationalize, without compensation and under workers' control, all major industries will the Labour Party leaders • be completely isolated and discredited.

The 12 million workers who vote Labour have nothing in common with the bourgeois opportunists who comprise the Party leadership. Only by uniting and winning those workers in the fight for socialist demands will the parasiteleaders be forced off the back of the working class.

Since May-June 1968, the Soviet Stalinists have been haunted by the spectre of revolution in western Europe and the growth of Trotskyism in the advanced countries in the west. Feariul of losing their parasitic privileges at home and their control of the labour movement abroad, the Soviet bureaucracy has begun a campaign to once again discredit and distort the principles and history of Trotsky's struggle for the regeneration of the USSR and the world-wide revolution of the working class. The Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central committee of the Communist Party of the soviet Union in 1972 published 'Against Trotskyism', a compendium of documents, articles, extracts, speeches and resolutions aimed at discrediting Trotskyism and distorting completely the truth about the relations between Lenin and Trotsky. In this series of articles MICHAEL BANDA replies to this book.

When Lord Curzon, the memories of Great Russian British Foreign Minister. repression under the Tsars, Pross, PART TEN proposed on July II, 1920, that Britain should mediate between the Red Army and the badly. battered Poles, who had tried to invade the Ukraine, the Bolshevik leadership rejected his offer by a majority.

Trato Tanin favoured 6.. insteau, Lenin lavourea a furious speeding-up of the offensive on Poland'.

Trotsky, who opposed Lenin on the Politburo, favoured halting the Red Army at the Curzon line previously proposed as the frontier by the British Foreign Minister and making a public peace offer.

Lenin and the Politburo maiority favoured carrvine the pursuit of the Poles into Warsaw and beyond. Trotsky correctly feared that an invasion even by the Red Army would inflame •Polish nationalist sentiment and. enable. Pilsudski to rally the peasant masses on the basis of bitter Lenin hoped that the ked Army intervention in Poland would spark revolution there and that the arrival of the Red . Army on Germany's frontier would have a similar effect in Germany too.

These hopes proved illusory: the Soviet forces, as Trotsky had feared, were defeated and routed on the Vistula before Warsaw. The offensive owed its, failure, not only,to the unta vourable polltical conjuncture and to its adventuristic character, but also to the personal, subjective ambition of the political commisar in charge of the southern invasion army, Joseph Stalin.

Stalin wanted to cover himself in glory by entering : the town of Lvov at the same time as Tuchachevsky, commanding the northern wing of the armv. was entering Warsaw. This ambition ran completely contrary to the requirements of the plam of battle because it opened a widening gulf • between the two wings of the Red forces.

Demands from Moscow to close the gap were ignored by Stalin and it was into the gap between the two armies that Pilsudski-advised by Marshal Foch-aimed his successful counter stroke.

Contrary to Stalinist legend, Lenin did not believe in the conception that socialism could be built in a single country. He was prepared to gamble for high stakes in the hope of provoking revolution abroad and assisting the workers of the west to come to the aid of the Soviet Union by overthrowing their own bourgeoisie.

His position contains not a traro of the hunaarmantin LaLE UL nationalist prejudice embodied in the Philistine concept of 'peaceful co-existence'.

The Polish episode alone gives the lie to the version of the Brest-Litovsk events put forward by the editors of 'Against Trotskyism'. It demonstrates that Lenin's thought was dominated by the "Trotskyist' idea that revolution in the west was essential nava dha Carind Tlainm sun. lo save une soviet union from degeneration and defeat and that he was prepared even to undertake sally into Poland to try and hasten this process.

The defeat on the Vistula in the west enabled the White Guard forces of General Wrangel to invade the Caucasus in the south. As a result the Soviets signed a provisional peace with Poland in October 1920.

This peace proved extremely precarious because Pilsudski, backed by the entente powers, hoped to nutlify it and resume 'hostilities. If the Soviets had fallen for Pilsudski's intrigues, the consequences for the USSR would have proved far more serious than those which might have attended Trotsky's refusal to sign the BrestLitvosk treaty.

All the calumny and distortion of the Soviet Press and historians cannot hide the fact that it was Trotsky's unbending determination to avoid another disastrous advance onto Warsaw which alone saved the Bolshevik regime and enabled it to meet the severe challenge of the transition from War Communism to the New Economic Policy Isaac Deutscher in the 'Prophet Armed' describes the curious reversal of roles between Lenin and Trotsky in this historically-famous episode.

Trotsky relates that Lenin was at first inclined towards war, but only half-heartedly. At any rate, Trotsky insisted on péace and on the loyal observance of the provisional treaty with Poland; and once again ne Iouna nimsell in danger of being outvoted and reduced to the dutiful execution of a policy he abhorred.

'From this he at last shrank. He decided that the differences went so deep that this time he would not feel bound by any majority decision or by Politburo solidarity and that, if outvoted, he would appeal to the narty against its leader. ship. shite used 'He used a threat similar to that which Lenin had, with overwhelming effect, used in; the controversy: over. Bresti and.-he, too, - achieved. his... Polish commander, Pilsudski. Above: Trotsky addresses Red Army troops before they leave for the Polish front to fight Pilsudski. purpose ... for now Lenin deserted the war faction and shifted his influence to back Trotsky. Peace was saved.' ('The Prophet Armed', , Oxford University Publishers, 1954, p. 469.)

Far from weakening the USSR the controversies between Lenin and Trotsky on tactics and even aspects of strategy did strengthen the collaboration of these leaders and contributed to the strengthening of the Soviet state and party leadership.

The Polish events are, in this sense, the most damning exposure of the Stalinistidealist attempt to portray Lenin as an impeccable Pope of Communism and Trotsky as an, incortigible ' Beezebub'. of anti-Bolshevism i -CONTINUED FOMORROW...

Thursday 31, PAGE