'Democrat Klugmann carries on Stalinism by JOHN CRAWFORD

This Executive Committee.

'Honesty in politics is the result of strength; hypocrisy is the result of weakness'. Lenin- quoted by James Klugmann.

AT ITS Congress last November, the Communist Party of Great Britain was faced with a split in its top leadership.

One group, led by Palme Dutt, Andrew Rothstein and Sid French, supported the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia. Their followers blamed the decline in the Party on the dangerous tendency to disagree with Moscow.

The majority of leaders, on the other hand, were more deeply involved in the move towards 'left' MPs and trade union leaders, and, through them, towards Wilson.

They have dissociated themselves from the Czech invasion in order ito facilitate this alliance.

Since the Congress, where this division was quite unresolved, not a word in the Stalinist press has referred to it.

But the fundamental crisis in the Party leadership cannot be hidden from the ranks.

As struggles sharpen in industry, 'the worker-members are daily faced with problems which make the Party difficulties impossible to hide.

Gone are the days when awkward questions could be brushed aside with a quotation from Stalin • and a lie about the Trotskyists.

The crisis of world Stalinism is too clearly visible, and Trotskyism is no longer a small persecuted group, but a growing tendency in the working class with its own daily paper.

Someone in the Stalinist head office at King Street must therefore try to find a way of covering up these glaring contradictions. The man who now steps forward is undoubtedly qualified for the job.

James Klugmann was Educational Director of the Party until 1956. He was, and should remain, famous as the author of the book 'From Trotsky to Tito' (Lawrence and Wishart, 1951). The book was 'withdrawn' in 1956, when its lies could no longer be defended, and has never since been referred to by its author.

Describing the trials of Laszlo Rajk in Hungary and Traicho Kostov in Bulgaria, shot as 'imperialist spies' in 1949, the book explains how Tito and his supporters had become 'fascists' and 'agents of American imperialism'. It goes on to talk about the trials of Russian communists in the 1930s and how they revealed Trotskyism to have played a similar role.

"The imperialists hate the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its leader Stalin,' enthused Klugmann, 'because it is the most experienced and clear-sighted of all working-class parties in the world-the greatest enemy of dying capitalism . . .

"Those of us, like myself, who in the early stage were deceived by the manoeuvres of the Titoites, can well understand the gratitude that we owe... to the wisdom of the warnings given by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.' (p. 202.)

Since penning these words, Klugmann has seen many changes.

Now engaged in writing the Communist Party's history (who else?), he spends a lot of his time in the 'dialogue' with the Church. He expresses 'regrets' at the events of the 'Stalin era', without being too specific, and tries to give the impression that the new, 'liberal' CP is far removed from those days.

In 1970, this old admirer of Stalin's murder machine assures everyone, no Labour MP need be afraid to decorate a CP platform: all the GPU bloodstains have been scrubbed away.

But the real situation is quite different. The new model CP leader is a direct continuation old-style Stalinism. Only the form of treachery to the working class has been brought up to date.

The May issue of the CP journal 'Marxism Today' features a report given by Klugmann to the CP Executive Committee on 'Socialist Democracy' He claims, very tentatively, with a great show of modesty, to be making a 'personal contribution', merely 'opening' a discussion on the question.

He warms up with some quotations from Lenin on the importance of communists being honest and critical. He then proceeds to set out an argument carefully designed to spread as much confusion as possible on some key issues.

In a nutshell, it comes to this: a peaceful and 'constitutional' transition to socialism will lead to a democratic workers' state; the corrollary obviously being that the revolutionary conquest of power leads to bureaucracy.

Of course, it is not so bald a fashion.

'Democracy

Great care is taken by this master craftsman to confuse three different ways that the word 'democracy' has been discussed in the socialist movement: (a) the fight for and the utilization of democratic rights by the working class under capitalism; (b) the possibility or otherwise of the constitutional forms of parliamentary rule being sufficient to overthrow the capitalist class; (c) the development of bureaucracy in a workers' state.

It is not hard to find many quotations from Lenin's writings explaining the importance of the battle for democracy. Let us see how Klugmann uses such passages, however.

'The Marxist solution to the problem of democracy is for the proletariat to utilize all democratic institutions and aspirations in its class struggle against the bourgeoisie in order to prepare for its overthrow and assure its own victory.

(Collected Works, Vol. 23, p.

26), quotes Klugmann.

He stopped his typewriter just in time. For, a few lines down on the same page, Lenin makes clear his revolutionary '.. civil war against the bourgeoisie is a democratically organized and democratically conducted war of the propertyless mass against the propertied minority. But civil war, like every other, must inevitably replace rights by violence.

However, violence in the name of the interests and rights of the majority is of a different nature: it tramples on the "rights" of the exploiters, the bourgeoisie, it is unachieveable without democratic organization of the army and the "rear"!

So, despite his tearful disclaimers of Stalin's crimes, and despite (perhaps we should say because of) his close associations with the church these days, Klugmann in 1970 is up to his old tricks.

All his learned-looking quotations from Lenin are attempts to hide and distort Lenin's idea: the working class needs democracy in order to mobilize the maximum force to smash the capitalist state. From Belfast to Ohio, this lesson is driven home by the actions of imperialism.

Just when the international crisis of capitalism involves the sharpest clashes between the working class and the state power all over the capitalist world, the Stalinist leaders are fighting for the line that the ruling class can be persuaded to leave the historical stage quietly and peacefully.

Klugmann, in trying to dupe workers into accepting this idea, brings to bear all his experience as a Stalinist distorter of texts.

But his task today is much harder than it was 1951. One difficulty in particular faces those who want to disclaim Stalin and recommend the Fabian line of 'The British Road to Socialism': the inspiration for the conception of : British, peaceful roac to socialism came trom--). Stalin Another of Klugmann's quo tations raises a similar point.

'For many of us it was an eye-opening experience when Georgi Dimitrov, in his great 7th Congress i the Communist Internation 1 1935, quoted Lenin's incisi declaration that "the proletariat cannot prepare for its victory over the bourgeoisie without an all-round, consistent and revolutionary struggle for democracy"!

We have already seen what Lenin meant by this statement But it is also worth remembering the context in which the quotation was made. Dimitrov's speech launched the 'People's Front' policy, whose author was Klugmann's late master, Josef Stalin.

'Discussion'

British Stalinists have conline, distinct from, if not in actual opposition to that pursued by Stalin himself. Hence the frequent references to his speeches at the 1935 Congress.

Dimitrov's reply to the 'discussion' cited by Klugmann in fact ended with Manuilsky declaiming:

'Long live the faithful and tested companion-at-arms of the great Stalin, long live the helmsman of the Communist International, Comrade Dimitrov.' (Seventh Congress Documents, p. 32.)

Dimitrov himself was one of the most fanatical adherents of the 'Stalin cult, which is now belatedly condemned by Klugmann. On Stalin's 60th birthday, Dimitrov wrote this of his hero, AFTER his murder of all Lenin's closest comrades.

'There is no greater honour for the proletarian revolutionary than to be . .. a real Stalinist [emphasis in original] •.. there is no greater happiness for the Communists than to fight under the leadership of Stalin. . . . Not everybody can be a Stalinist.' ('Communist International', January 1940.)

This then was the helmsman' for Stalin's Popular Front'.

Inseparable trom this policy, which enrolled duchesses, bishops and Tories in the fight for 'democracy', was the destruction of thousands of communists in the blood purges by order of the same Stalin. Without the Moscow, Trials and the campaign of anti-Trotskyist slander of the period 1936-1938, the line set out by Dimitrov could not have been carried out.

Here it is necessary to point out that the murder of the old Bolsheviks was not just a crime of Soviet Stalinism. Each of the three Moscow Trials was publicly endorsed by Klugmann's Party.

After the third "trial' Klugmann's Party leadership endorsed the following resolu'We express our full confidence in our brother party of the Soviet Union and in its great leader Comrade Stalin, in Comrade Yezhov's determination to root out the last remnants of the anti-Soviet conspiracy, and in the judgment of the Soviet Court on the assassins and wreckers who formed the "Right and Trotskyist bloc"! (March 5, 1938.)

This resolution-and many others like it-have never been repudiated by the leadership of the British Communist Party.

So when Klugmann begins to warn against whitewashing' the crimes of Stalinism, he is careful to avoid his own Party's record in this respect.

The 'democrat' Klugmann has to cover over the deep connection between the crimes of Stalin and the alliances of the Stalinists with 'democratic' forces in the 1930s.

Buried

But the history of that period cannot be buried by the Stalinists: Klugmann, like the rest of the CP leaders, tried hard enough after 1956. The stench of Stalin's corpse is not hidden even by the incense provided by Klugmann's clerical friends.

Going through the motions of considering these issues, Klugmann asks:

'How could it come about that, under Stalin, so many innocent people, some of them well-tried Communists, were arrested or killed, that false evidence was often concocted, that the role of mass organizations was deeply curtailed, that the power of decision fell more and more into the hands of a small group, at times of a single man, that inner-Party democracy was 50 sadly reduced and thwarted?' thwarted?' Excellent questions, Mr Klugmann! What a pity they did not strike you in 1951, when you wrote:

'When you read of the secret agreements between the Trotskyists and German fascism, the plans for the internal sabotage of the Soviet regime, for the assassination of the Soviet leaders, and for the restoration of Russian capitalism subservient to German imperialism, you read of the precursor of the Titoite agreements with the successor of German fascism — American imperialism.' ('From Trotsky to Tito', page 85.)

This book, it is true, vanished from the shops in 1956. But that was 14 years ago; now, Klugmann has decided it is time to 'open' a discussion.

The delay was not due to refusal to accept criticism. In the same book, Klugmann wrote indignantly of the Yugoslav CP:

Is it possible to think of an honest Communist who would not be proud to receive criticisms from the Parties whose leaders were Stalin, Dimitrov, Rakosi, Togliatti or Thorez?' (p. 25.)

The pretended 'answers' Klugmann gives to his questions are, not surprisingly, feeble. Where Khrushchev blamed it all on to the defects of Stalin's personality, Klugmann tries to make it look a bit more scientific.

According to his account, what he calls the 'aberrations' under Stalin resulted from wrong attitudes to democratic forms of organization. These, in turn, were made more likely by the historical conditions prevailing after the RevoluAnd so, even though he repeatedly warns against 'explaining away' or 'whitewashing' these 'errors', , his pretended 'analysis' is intended to do nothing else.

'So, says Klugmann, 'sometimes the pace of building socialism had to be forced in an almost inhuman way.

Sometimes the most cruelly rapid centralization and industrialization was a question of life and death.

Concentrations of power in the hands of a few, or the special authority of the Party, or measures of censorship, or of security, could of necessity become a habit, and, no longer necessary, become a danger.' This sort of 'explaining' will fool no one. The greatest flowering of democracy in history took place precisely in the hardest period of the Civil War. It was after the war was won, in 1922-1927, when industrialization was at its slowest, that the bureaucracy consolidated its power in industry and in the Party machine.

This privileged layer, increasingly separated from and hostile to the Soviet and the international working class, grew up largely after the period ot War Communsm' and before the first Five-Year Plan.

Klugmann would never put it so plainly, but the implication of his argument is that it was in Lenin's time that the conditions for the rise of Stalinism were laid.

In this, he is at one with the 'state capitalist' theories of International Socialism' as well as every anti-communist who wants to warn against the 'terrible results' of getting rid of capitalism.

The last thing he wants his readers to remember is that the first fighter against Stalinist bureaucratism was Lenin.

Klugmann's 'explanation' of the 'aberrations' of Stalinism attributes them to the efforts of "building socialism'. But this raises the question: what is his idea of socialism?

'One of the theories of Stalin, often used to justify his most repressive measures, was that with the growth of socialism, the class struggle would intensify inside the took place in 1956. But it was in 1968 that Khrushchev's successors organized the invasion of Czechoslovakia, to suppress the Czech working class, using the same kind of excuse as had been employed when Khrushchev sent his tanks into Budapest (with Klugmann's approval) and by Stalin before that.

Klugmann avoids having to explain how Stalin's methods were being applied 12 years after the CPSU had 'rejected' them, for his report on "Socialist Democracy' does not mention either the Czech invasion or the Hungarian crisis 'Marxism Today', edited by Klugmann, has shown the same remarkable amnesia with regard to Czechoslovakia. In May 1969, an article appeared Otto Sling, one of the victims of the 1952 Slansky purge in Czechoslovakia entitled: 'Why Did It Happen? Some reflections on the Czechoslovak Trials of the Fifties.' Comments While it did not get very far in answering the question, it did at least pose it.

In December 1969, Maurice Dobb wrote expressing surprise that no one had commented on the article. A further note, by F. Gee, was printed in March, but these are the only Party members who have ventured to comment on this question, or at least whose comments have appeared.

Klugmann, Gollan and company, despite all their 'democratic' pretences, are the continuators of Stalin's heritage of lies. Workers who want to understand the destiny of the October Revolution, and the way the working class must build the party to spread it to the rest of the world, cannot find clarity through the 'explanations' of men like them.

Klugmann tries to give the impression that Stalinism. was something that happened a long time ago in a far-off country. This is false, as he well knows. Stalinism was a GEORGE DIMITF tendency that developed in the international communist movement, eventually destroying the Communist International which Lenin and Trotsky had founded as the 'World Party of Socialist Revolution'.

Klugmann's methods are part of this development. Theoretically, they are founded on the conception that the transition to a socialist society could be, and was, in fact, completed within the borders of the Soviet Union.

All the lies and distortions of Stalinism flow from this fundamental departure from Marxism. Klugmann's contortions thus reflect the degeneration of the Soviet state, in the course of which the working class was expropriated from political power by the bureaucracy.

Stalinism : was not a matter of wrong methods' or bad 'habits' or organization, but of definite developments in the class struggle.

In the conditions of isolation of the revolution, surviving only through the struggle of the Soviet and the international working class, the bureaucracy arose as the transmission mechanism of the pressure of world imperial'theory' that socialbackward country, expressed the tendency of the Soviet bureaucracy towards accommodation with the capitalist class.

Against it Trotskyism continued the fight within the international workers' movement for Lenin's principles.

The revolution was betrayed, but was not destroyed. The Soviet Union continued to exist on the basis of the property relations established in 1917, its industry developed on the basis planning, despite the bungling, oppressive rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy.

This was not socialism, but a society mid-way • between socialism and capitalism.

Which way it goes, depends on the revolutionary struggle of the working class. Inside the USSR, the bureaucracy threatens to destroy the heritage of October. Its removal by the working class in a political revolution, restoring workers' democracy, is bound up with the spread of the revolution to the advanced countries.

Central to the development of the revolution is the construction of the international revolutionary leadership, building on the experience of the Third International destroyed by Stalinism. This is the Fourth International, founded by Trotsky in 1938.

Only Trotskyism grasps the rise of Stalinism and its overthrow as class movements. According to Klugmann, on the contrary, its appearance, and especially its disappearance, are events outside the objective course of history.

ended with a pect rom t leading bureaucrat Khrushchev.

The whole purpose of Klugmann's long article is to direct attention away from the crisis and bureaucratic regime within the British Communist Party.

He makes great play of the fact that own Party opposed the trial of the Soviet writers Daniel and Sinyavsky:

"There is, in my opinion, a need for a clear demarcation between dissent and subversion. ... To treat the dissent of the working people as subversion is no solution at This applies with equal force to the internal regime within a Communist Party.

But here Klugmann upholds the bureaucratic principles of Stalinism, which for more than 40 years have masqueraded as 'democratic centralism':

•... in between Congresses all have a right through the channels of the Party to raise points of disagreement, but not in the form of fractions or factions ...

Faction

Bolshevism itself began as a faction within the Russian Social Democratic Party at its Second Congress in 1903. And even within the Bolshevik faction, shadings and groups arose expressing genuine differences over policy, programme and philosophy.

Yet Lenin • never raised the question of bureaucratically excluding them by applying a ban on factions.

As we have already emphasized, right through the Civil inside the Bolshevik Party.

The ban introduced at the 10th Party Congress in March 1921 was only intended to be temporary. It explicitly upheld the right of tendencies to be formed and to elect their leaders onto the Party Central Committee - on the basis of clearly defined oppositional platforms.

This right was denied the Dutt-French minority at the last CP Congress. In fact, the chairman of the Congress insisted that all discussions between delegates had to be stopped-though this did not, of course, prevent the Party leadership securing the election of a new National Executive which, as far as is known, does not include a single supporter of the Dutt-French gryet this group secured around a quarter of the votes in the resolution condemning the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

There is a faction in control of the British Communist But like its prototype in the Soviet Union, it rules in the name of the entire Party, upholding a fictitious 'monolithic unity'. A faction is only a faction when it is in opposition!

Klugmann's formulations on 'democratic centralism' smack of that favourite Stalinist slogan of the 1930s 'criticism and self-criticism'. This catchword was never more popular than when Stalin's GPU were hunting down Lenin's old comrades and framing them as 'Hitler's agents'.

Griticism was the top downwards, with those below only being permitted to apply the other formula-'self-criticism'.

This is the type of Party regime that developed in Britain and throughout the Communist International following the death of Lenin and the consolidation of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union. It is a product of the working-class defeats. . The internal life of a Party cannot be separated off from the class struggle and the development of Marxist theory and philosophy. But this is precisely the task Klugmann has set himself.

His article is a carefully constructed cover and apology for the bureaucratic regime of Gollan and Matthews. At all costs, the peaceful road and the alliance with • the labour and trade union 'lefts' must be preserved.

Protected

And as more and more Party members experience the treachery of the latter and the counter-revolutionary nature of the former, attacks on the Party leadership will increase. Gollan and company must be protected from their own rank and file.

That is Klugmann's - and also Monty Johnstone's-job.

In the 1930s, the grip of the bureaucracy on the international workers' movement made it possible to twist Marxist theory in this fashion with the GPU to deal with awkward questions. Today, the fight for Marxism becomes too strong to allow anyone to get away with such distortions.

When the French workers engaged in struggle with the Gaullist state in 1968, the treachery of the Stalinists was clearly seen by thousands of workers and youth, and not only in France.

• When the Soviet leaders make agreements with the Spanish fascists or the Greek colonels, Trotskyists demonstrate the class significance of these actions, and are heard by workers all over the world, even in the countries ruled by the bureaucracy.

Klugmann continues the fight for Stalinism, but under conditions where he cannot go unchallenged.

As the working class breaks free from the bureaucratic stranglehold, the Fourth International clears away the mountain of lies and slanders manufactured by Stalinism and opens the road for Marxism theory and leadership and the conquest of workers' power. Available from NEW PARK PUB 186a Clapham High Street, London, S.W.4 Price 12s. 6d.