Blood Heffer

takes action THE ORDER of priorities of 'left' Labour MP, Eric Heffer in vealed very clearly yester day.

Although he was unsuccessful in the parliamentary ballot for Private Members' Bills, he hopes a successful MP will push through a Bill to make all blood sports illegal.

I am convinced that a comprehensive Bill is the only way of tackling this subject' he told "The Times' on Thursday.

'My Bill will cover harecoursing, fox-hunting, stagbantin-digenter he said. otter-hunting and No comment is needed on Mr Heffer's choice of the most urgent social problem needing legislation in the coming session. cut coal. But he did not.

Mr Brown's constituency is, of course, Belper, Derbyshire, a mining constituency.

REPLY There could be no better reply to Brown than the letter sent to the Workers Press by Can you sew? knit? paint?

. give something towards our bazaar?

IN AUGUST 1969, the British Communist Party published a 60-page booklet by Betty Reid entitled 'Ultra-Leftism in Britain'.

Though she touches on the activities of anarchist and 'Maoist' groups, Reid's main concern is to discredit Trotskyism in general and the Socialist Labour League in particular.

The Workers Press publishes the last of five extracts from a larger work dealing with all the main principled differences The extracts have dealt with five specific issues raised by 1. The Popular Front and the Transitional VICTORI : BULD: DAILY gramme of the Fourth International.

The Second World War: The Stalin-Hitler The Second World War: 'The Big Three'.

British Trotskyism today: Stalinism and the BARACIALISM TROTSKYISM by Robert Black R Stalinism EXPOSED nany rank-and-ile party militants pressed for a change in the Ci line after the war, but the Party leaders, following Stalin's lear in his alliance with Attlee and Truman (the post-war 'Big Three' seen above at Potsdam) insisted on continuing the wartime PAGE TWO between Trotskyism and Stalinism.

Reid's attack on the Fourth International:

visionists.

The fight for alternative ist record-and ours. WHILE REID and the British Communist Party leaders are able and willing to build alliances with the revisionist groups she describes in her booklet, unity with the Socialist Labour League is excluded on principle: And why?

•.. there is no reason for putting demands which are the basis for genuine united effort and struggle, since the possibility of any positive result is already ruled out. What in Trotskyist language are called "transitional demands" [and also, as we saw in part one, the language of the Third Congress of the Communist International] are always demands which they make deliberately on the assumption that they cannot be realized within the capitalist system. These demands have the purpose of educating and mobilizing the more advanced cadres, and will ultimately "weld together the working class into a force capable of smashing the state machine". (Transitional Programme.)' (p. 19 of Reid's pamphlet.)

(Reid quotes from the "Transitional Programme of the Fourth International", available from New Park Publications, price Is.)

Reid and all British Stalinists fight the Socialist Labour League precisely Tene. cause they do not want to weld such arce canane o smashing the capitalist state machine. The prosamme. Communist Party programme, the "British Road TO Socialism', explicitly rejects cuch Leninist. revolutionary perspective:

'In this way, by political action, using our democratic rignts to transiorm traditional [i.e. capitalist] institutions, narliament can he made into the effective instrument of the this wording was proposed by Stalin' (Our emphasis -'Soviet News', Friday, January 18, 1963, No. 4797, p. 41.)

And sure enough, if we check back to the first draft of the programme, published in 1951, we find the identical Fabian formulation:

• . British Communists declare that the people of Britain can transform capitalist democracy into a real People's Democracy, transforming parliament, the product of Britain's historic struggle for democracy, into the democratic instrument of the will of the vast majority of her people.' (January 1951 ed, p. 14.)

The Socialist Labour League denounces this programme and theory as a reformist fraud. It is because we uphold the Leninist theory of the state, including parliament, as an instrument of class rule, that we also uphold the Leninist theory of the vanguard party, which fights for leadership within the class, throwing down its challenge to all other tendencies and parties within the workers' movement.

Stalinism, here in the person of Reid, rejects both these Leninist principles.

Reid seeks to transform the capitalist state through left unity with all those that share her reformist outlook; Lenin fought to smash the capitalist state machine, including its parliaments, through the independent action of the working class, led by the Bolshevik Party * NATIONALISE ThE BANK S NOV! SUPPOR DISEM: DEPORT BOSES NO. brought out within the working class, a process that is essential for the training of leadership and the raising of working-class consciousness.

Tied to the parliamentary road, and therefore sharing the same political conceptions as the Labour Party right wing as well as the trade unions, Communist Party militants in the factories are deliberately held back from striking out on a communist road of leadership.

Everything is subordinated to winning 'allies' in the machine, and in the last analysis, through the labour bureaucracy and its ruling-class masters, to Kremlin diplomacy.

WORKEnS' TORY BANKERS NEWSLETTER HUL THE FOUNDING UI 3IL HALA 4TH INTIANA TIONAL assisting in the efforts to increase coal output . • winter the union appointed a national production officer and in the districts eight production officers whose salaries were paid out of the funds of the national union.

'A national production campaign • was launched, posters and leatlets prepared and meetings organized to explain to the miners the need for doing everything possible to increase output. The National Union of Mineworkers spent approximately €20,000 in this campaign, which gives it the distinction [!] of being the only trade union in this country ever to have utilized its funds to advance production'.

Or, put still more bluntly, the only union bureaucracy ever to have used its members' contributions to heighten their exploitation.

This was written in 'Labour Monthly' for January 1947— two years after the Nazis had been cleared from Soviet soil.

Strike-breaking The excuse given to Party members that strike-breaking and speed-up helped the Soviet Union must have been wearing a little thin by 1947.

The NUM was not the only union to be weakened in this way by the Stalinists.

Camel 1945 writing in the September number of 30 YEARS SINCE MARTIN TODAY SUPER (ENGINEERS PPORT CTRIKE the Labour government began its attacks on the trade unions through the Prices and Incomes Act and its now withdrawn penal clauses against strikers.

Who are the spearheads of this government policy today? today?

Two who must take pride of place are Leslie Cannon of the ETU and William Paynter, ex-secretary of the NUM and now a member of the Labour government's Commission on Industrial Relations on a salary of £6,500 a year.

Who initially gave political training to these spokesmen for the Wilson government?

In both cases, without a shadow of doubt, the Stalinist leadership of the British It is not hard to see how they developed the positions they hold to-day.

Certainly Paynter, and with him many other CP miners' leaders and officials, learned his class-collaborationist, production-boosting outlook from his long training inside the industrial section of the British Communist Party.

From 1941 till 1947, leading Communist Party members such as Horner and Paynter worked in joint harness with the right-wing trade union bureaucracy.

While the Kremlin and British imperialism found their boosting and Trotskyistbaiting became a way of life.

But when the alliance of the Big Three' finally broke up in 1947, torn assunder by the contradictions between the property relations of the two bination insid this unholy combination the trade unions was placed under tremendous strain.

While the Kremlin and the Attlee government remained on good terms, the Stalinists and right wingers in the unions were able to collaborate.

When the conditions that produced the alliance broke up, the CP militants were thrown into a state of more and more confusion.

If they remained loyal to the Party (and many, course, did not—-it had been stepping stone to a soft union job) the anti-communist witch-hunt of the 'cold war', accelerated by the Korean war in 1950, forced the Stalinist trade union leaders to clash with the pro-Attlee right wing.

Millions of workers were now confronted by Communist Party trade unionists who for six years or more had seemed identical with the right wing now taking up 'left' positions against the Labour government, and particularly its policy towards the Soviet Union.

They could no longer depend on retaining office through support from the right wing.

Anti-communist feeling was whipped up in the rank-and-file by the press, radio and right-wing groups active in Previously appearing to be safely entrenched in the leadership, their position now became desperate.

Their Stalinist training became decisive. The CP leadership, and particularly its industrial department, had never trained its members to fight as Marxists in the trade unions.

They have never been encouraged to use Marxist theory and principles as weapons for fighting the right wing and raising the political level of the workers under their leadership.

'Marxism' had been used, but only to justify the betrayals, crimes and zig-zag policies of the Soviet bureaucracy.

Instead, the CP leadership encouraged a series of adaptations to the bureaucracy (begun in 1926, but checked the "Third Period' and later by the Stalin-Hitler Pact) which became cruelly exposed once their 'allies' in the trade unions stood out for the special interests of British capitalism and its Labour servants.

It was precisely because the CP militants could not understand the historical process that had led to this new crisis that many were now driven to corrupt activities in certain unions where the Communist Party was under attack from the right wing In the ETU, the Stalinist leadership held onto office by ballot-rigging, branch 'disqualification' and bureaucratic repression of union democracy.

Ás we have already noted, the ETU leadership| had set was later to play a vital part in the unseating of the Stalinist ETU leadership.

Then, in 1956, the Kremlin again took a hand in the affairs of the ETU Stalinists.

Its brutal repression of the Hungarian workers' revolution disintegrated the ranks of the ETU faction, many of them deserting the Party to go the right wing.

This was the logical outcome of whole decades of political degeneration, in November British The ETU was effectively broken as a fighting force in the class struggle.

The door had been opened for the right wing by the The Socialist Labour League was in the forefront of the campaign against the ETU Our defence of the union was a principled one.

We never condoned corrupt practices, we insisted that such activities were reactionary and played into the hands of any right-wing group looking for opportunities to begin a witchhunt again militants within the