Liberal reportage and

Workers Press no. 239, 26 August 1970 · scan page 4

Topics: Communist Party and Stalinism, Italy and Germany, France

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gether with the other leaders so-called 'reform moveThe prisons have begun to fill up again. The foul mixture of provocation, political slander and the rewriting of history perfected by Joseph Stalin is once again in full swing in Czechoslovakia.

The second half of the programme consisted mainly of interviews with leading European Stalinists of various political shades.

In an obvious attempt to boost the so-called 'new currents' in Stalinism-like the Italian Communist Party's 'structural reformism' and the right-wing Garaudy tendency in France, Showcross contrasted the Italian Communist Party's 'opposition' to the invasion with the French Stalinists.

Stalinism with a 'human' face obviously appeals to Shawcross.

He gave sympathetic coverage to the Italian Communist Party's ultra-reformist policies, implying that the Party ought to be taken into the government to 'solve' Italian capitalism's constitutional crisis.

The late Palmiro Togliattibetrayer of the partisan struggles in Italy and the man chiefly responsible for the continuation of Italian capitalism after the war-received reverent attention. And Stalinist spokesman Lombardo Radice, holding forth about national roads to socialism, got much the same treatment.

Rosanna Rossanda of the breakaway • 'Manifesto' was also interviewed.

The former partisan leader and Central Committee member said that the Kremlin invasion had 'smashed the hope of reforming the bureaucracy.

But if this is the case, she and her comrades have still to draw the conclusions: to adopt the strategy of political revolution in the degenerated workers' states, which means building independent revolutionary parties and returning to the path of Lenin and Trotsky.

French Stalinist Jean Kanapa, head of the Party's foreign bureau, attacked Roger Garaudy, who also featured in the programme, for having "tried to reconcile Marxism and religion'-an activity in which Garaudy first became prominent during his years on the French CP's own Central Committee.

'You cannot ask our party to stop being a Communist [i.e. Stalinist] Party,' Kanapa said.

Absolutely true. Stalinism can only be destroyed by unremitting struggle to build an alternative leadership in a fight against the bureaucracy.