STALINISM BRITAIN

Workers Press no. 241, 28 August 1970 · scan page 4

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HINGS A TROTSKYIST ANALYSIS pooh-poohing any idea that Hitler would invade Russia.

They proved absolutely incapable of rendering the slightest support to the Soviet working class in the period when Hitler was building up his forces ready to strike.

On the eve of the invasion, the Young Communist League paper carried the headline 'Why is Ambrose's band being taken off the air?'—a commentary on just how seriously the Party prepared its members for the turn in the war.

The invasion was the signal for a 180-degree turn by the Stalinists: from being opponents of British imperialism they became its most ardent advocates. Strikes were broken all over the country and the Stalinists became the leading advocates of the production drive'-developing many of the class-collaboration techniques which have since stood their former members like Will Paynter in such good stead.

After the war, too, as the book shows, the Party leadership continued their slavish support for Churchill: opposing the return of a Labour government after the war and continuing their collaboration in the tactories during the 'postwar reconstruction'.

These leaders backed to the hilt the efforts of the Italian, French and Greek Stalinists to perserve capitalism according laid Three, justified the aroppin of the atomic bomb on Tirc shima and became the chief advocates of the division of Germany and the policy of making all Germans pay for the war by stringent reparations.

Anyone who wants to understand the present policies of the CP in the trade unions will find ine chapters of Black's book which detail the Party's productivity drive in the factories and the mines during and after the war extremely illuminating.

This book is important not simply as a chronicle of Stalinist treachery, but because the Party's history must be understood by all those workers Its present Report for the top trade who are trying to break from union leaders and from the parliamentary road to socialism.

The chapters and appendix on the 'British Road to Social. ism' give an extremely full account of the development of this openly reformist perspective under the impact mands from Stalin and the bureaucracy.

There are also extremely important chapters on the Party's attemps to justify the show