THE COUNTER- RECORD

BOOKS THROWN INTO deep crisis by the movement of the international working class and the growth of the Fourth International the British Communist Party is today unable to answer any of the fundamental questions about its own history now increasingly being posed inside and outside its own ranks.

Instead it is forced back upon the same slanders and distortions of history that did duty during the 1930s, when Stalin's GPU was engaged in the physical extermination of Bolshevism and of the revolutionary party built by Lenin.

But while Stalin was able to physically liquidate the leaders of Lenin's Bolshevik Partyincluding Leon Trotsky - he was unable to exterminate Bolshevism and the Fourth International, which today continues in a vastly more favourable situation, the work and struggle of Lenin and Trotsky.

Main barrier

Stalinism today is the chief counter-revolutionary force.

It is the main barrier between the working class and the achievement of working-class power; not only internationally, but in Britain as well.

'Stalinism in Britain', published next Monday, is a 'must' for all those, both inside and outside the Communist Party, who want to understand how the party-founded fifty years ago almost to the day as a section of Lenin's Third International-became the counterrevolutionary and reformist organization it is today.

The book began as a reply to a slim booklet published by the Party under the title "UltraFlorida's citrus groves. BRITISH STALINISM: Leftism in Britain'. Written by veteran anti-Trotskyist Mrs Beproduced, in tvery slightly the pamphlet updated form, all the slanders against Trotskyism which her mentor J. R. Campbell retailed during the 1930s.

But 'Stalinism in Britain' does much more than simply refute Mrs Reid's lies.

Drawing on material from the Stalinists' own publications and speeches, Workers Press foreign editor Robert Black shows how the leaders of the Party participated to the full in every betrayal of the working class carried out under Stalin's leadership.

He traces their slavish adherence to the criminal politics of the Soviet bureaucracy not only overseas -- in China, Germany, Spain, Italy and Greece--but inside Britair itself. And above all, the book lays the ghost of the Stalinists' favourite myth: that everything they did was with the aim of assisting the Soviet Union and maintaining the conquests of the October Revolution.

As Black shows with the aid of quotations from impeccable Party sources, its Stalinist leaders consciously served the interests of British capitalism when they broke strikes during despite vacillations of political The book shows line-from the 'third period' to the popular front and from period of the 'imperialist war' to the 'war for democracy' -the content of the CP leadership's politics remained counter - revolutionary and directed towards preserving British capitalism and strengthening the Labour bureaucracy, as well as preserving bureaucratic domination over the Soviet working class.

Black begins by systematically demolishing the Stalinist myths about Trotsky's relations with Lenin and his part in the October Revolution. He establishes that not only were HALINISMI IN BRUTAI JUST REVIEWED. HERE_BY rubishedi byNew Planki Prubliciation Pirice 225 6d (softacover) OUTI JOHN SPIENICE R

BETTY REID

Trotsky and Lenin in political solidarity on the basic questions after Trotsky's adherence to the Bolshevik Party in 1917, but that, in the last period of Lenin's life, this solidarity was directed against Stalin.

Lenin's final political act before the stroke which led to his death was to establish a bloc with Trotsky to fight against the growing bureaucracy headed and nurtured by Stalin, and to break off all relations with Stalin.

The book contains ample textual evidence, drawn from Lenin's works, to show that Lenin at no time accepted the theory which later formed the cornstone of Stalinism - the reactionary nationalist conception of 'socialism in one country':

Having thus demonstrated the fundamental political and theoretical solidarity between Lenin and Trotsky, the book goes on to show how the Stalin leadership carried through its betrayals in China and in Germany—-and in Britain during the 1926 General Strike--and, This cartoon appeared on the front page of the Dally Worker of Friday March 6 1953—the day following Stalin's death. The headline read: 'STALIN, THE ARCHITECT OF SOCIALISM IS DEAD' just as important, now the leaders of the Communist Party not only accepted but glorified these betrayals.

Black shows, too, the conscious character of the betrayal Stalin carried through in Germany—the betrayal which led to Hitler's seizure of power in 1933. As he demonstrates, responsibility for this crushing defeat, which set the German and world working class back several decades and made the Second World War almost inevitable, lies fairly and squarely with the leaders of the world Communist Parties - and the British Party bears its full share of this responsibility.

The so-called 'Popular Front' period which followed the defeat of the German working class in 1933 is regarded by present Party leaders as a kind Forget of 'golden age'.

When they are busy attacking genuine revolutionists as 'sectarians and splitters', they prefer to quietly forget the disastrous errors of the "Third velopment too without DaulkPeriod', when Stalin's bureau- ing. Until the invasion of the cratic sectarianism led to the Soviet Union in 1941, they crushing victory of Nazism. castigated British imperialism Instead, people like Reid, -which previously they had Matthews, Gollan and their exalted as 'democratic' — and ilk extol the virtues of the maintained discreet silence class-collaboration policies fol- about the position of German lowed by the Stalinist parties imperialism. during the 1935-1939 period.

Black thoroughly exposes the policies with which the Stalinist parties took part in the so-called 'People's Fronts'. He shows how this period sprang out of the 'Third Period' and how it served precisely the same counter - revolutionary ends.

As is well known, Party leaders of the British were among the most slavish supporters of the Moscow Trials, which took place precisely at the time when they were trying to ingratiate themselves with their own bourgeoisie - with Liberals and 'patriotic' Tories—in the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy's foreign policy. "Black is able, with the aid of quotations from the Stalinist press of the time, to show how the campaign against Bolshevism inside the USSR combined with the politics of international Stalinist class-collaboration.

Stalin's turn towards Hitler in 1939 caught the British Stalinists unawares.

But they swallowed this deIn Germany, the reverse applied.

East German premier Walter Ulbricht, then a functionary of the German Party-in-exile in Moscow, made the following incredible statement :

' When the middle - class papers declare in one article that England is fighting for freedom and report in another article in the same paper the arrest of fighters for freedom, the muzzling of the workers' press, the establishment of concentration camps and special laws against the workers, then the German workers have the proof before their eyes that the ruling class in England is carrying , on the war against the woking class, and that, if Germany were conquered, German working class would be treated in the same way!

Unprincipled

Those who might think that Ulbricht had plumbed the ultimate depths in the period of the Stalin-Hitler Pact were to see some even more unprincipled action from the British Stalinists during the next period of the war, after the invasion of the USSR.

Once again the abrupt change of line caught the British Stalinists unawares.

Indeed for weeks before the invasion, the British CP press devoted a good deal of space to MINERS FIGHT ON TENS of thousands of US miners have been engaged in bitter unofficial strikes in recent months not only against the naked corruption of union leaders but also the open collusion of the Nixon administration with mineowners.

One strike, involving 60,000 miners swept through three states-Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia-closing 50 pits.

To say that the miners are in a life-and-death struggle is no figure of speech, but fact.

Just before the 50-pit strikd the Nixon administration announced proposals to slash $40 million from the mines' safetyresearch budget. This takes place against the background of a continuous fight to get even the rudimentary standards of the newly-enacted Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act enforced. To give just one example, the limit of gas emitted daily is supposed to be 100,000 cubic feet.

Yet this exceeded in 200 tion to the Army, the war, draft and military discipline.

When one Marine threatened to report his comrades for pot smoking, he was nearly killed by a grenade rolled under his bed.

Drug-taking also provides the Army with a convenient explanation for outbreaks of fighting between different groups of US servicemen, and even for Us troops shooting at their own' helicopters — an event which, apparently, is not uncommon.

However, the Pentagon says, while drug-taking is a problem, it has not in any way impaired military readiness or morale.

IN pits, with some of them producing millions of cubic feet of dangerous gas each day; miners have had no alternative but to strike against such conditions.

The response of the United Mine Workers' Union leadership?

To negotiate a contract with the mineowners which forbids strikes over safety questions. The miners' only official recourse is to arbitration and even here the UMW-under its president W: A. "Tony' Boyle-has not been eager to get off the mark, to say the least.

Boyle's willingness to accept a 'no safety-strike' clause has a simple explanation.

Under the contract between the UMW and the mine-owners, the employers contribute 40 cents to the union funds for each ton of coal mined!

The Boyle clique's personal interests are therefore tied directly to high productivity, which inevitably leads to extremely hazardous conditions.

In these circumstances, the union's move to avoid giving free hospital treatment to retired and crippled miners out of the coffers of the pension fund helped considerably to spark the recent Miners' leader Joseph Yablonski put up a strong challenge to the existing leadership, winning the support of thousands of miners sick of years of graft and corruption; he was probably defeated in the UMW presidential election only by ballot-rigging.

But shortly afterwards, Yablonski was murdered along with his wife and daughter.

Yablonski's son-also named Joseph-is continuing his father's fight, and, like his father, has come hard up against the government on several occasions. He was barred from Interior Department hearings on mine safety after UMW officials had opposed his attending.

Mine-owners used the hearings to press for a loosening of the safety regulations, protesting as usual that this was the only alternative to closures. NEW PARK PUBLICATIONS trials of the 1950s in East Europe.

The CP's support for Stalin in his slanderous attacks on the Yugoslav Communists is also well documented.

Important

One of the most important chapters in the book is that on 'Stalinism and Idealism, in which Black takes up its revisions not only of Marxism, but its attacks on the very basis of Marxism-materialism — in which the Communist Party has played a leading One almost unbelievable quotation from the so-called 'Red Dean' of Canterbury gives the flavour of the chapter: "To the materialist, mind is merely a function of matter .. That belief is now dead None indeed opposed the materialist view of life more resolutely than Lenin himself.' While the Communist Party was breaking strikes on the railways, this man was a member of the editorial board of the 'Daily Worker' and the book from which this quotation was taken became required reading for thousands of Stalinists and their supporters.

It is a tribute to the growing strength of the Trotskyist movement that it is able to answer in the most decisive manner possible the slanders aimed at it by the Stalinists. The material comrade Black has gathered into this book is political dynamite for the Communist Party and its leaders.

Young Socialists and trade unionists must read this book and ensure that it gets into the hands of CP members, who must be made to face their Party's black record of be.

trayals book is a weapon in the fight for Marxism, which cannot be undertaken without a thorough understanding of Stalinism and an unremitting struggle against it.