Why earthquakes?

of the Johnstone type.

The debate itself arose from a 'challenge' by the International Marxist Group of Tariq Ali, Pat Jordan and Bob Purdie to debate on the theme of "Trotskyism'-after the Young Communist League had evaded a political confrontation with the Young Socialists in a debate on the subject "Trotskyism and Stalinism'.

The correspondence between the Young Socialists and the YCL on the subject of a debate has been published in 'Keep Left' (official paper).

A study of this correspondence will reveal that the YCL hoped to set a trap for the Young Socialists, whereby the debate would revolve around discussion on Trotskyism only:

'Dear Miss Torrance, The National Committee of the YCL has accepted your challenge as announced in January Keep Left, which was 'Sheila Torrance, National Secretary of the Young Socialists, informs Keep Left that Monty Johnstone is invited to a public debate on Trotskyism" ' (February 17, 1969. Our emphasis.)

But the challenge was not issued under that heading, as the YCL well knows.

The January 'Keep Left' announcement was, as the quoted statement proves, simply an indication of OUT intention to debate with The National Committee of the Young Socialists is the only body empowered to designate the proposed title of debate in which the Young Socialists are taking part.

The letter of january 1969, from the Young Socialists to the YCL sets out the conditions under which such a debate should take place :

It must be understood that it is the Young Socialists who have initiated the debate. As far as we are concerned the title for thé debate trust be "Trotskyism and Stalinism" since it is absolutely impossible to discuss one without the other'.

At this point, the YCL leadership began to pull out of the debate.

They wanted a set-up in which their opponents would be placed on the defensive from the very beginning, in which the history and nature of Stalinism, and in particular British Stalinism, would be excluded.

Into the trap The crime of the revisionists, of Mandel and Purdie, is that they gave the Stalinists this very type of 'debate'.

The IMG leaders, with their eyes wide open, walked into the trap we very consciously exposed and kept out of.

When it became obvious that the Stalinists were running away from such a confrontation on the history and role of Stalinism, the IMG, in the person of Purdie, stepped in and offered Johnstone a debate on Trotskism alone.

Thus before the debate had even begun, the revisionists were in full retreat before Johnstone. It was Trotskyism, and not Stalinism, that was to be 'on trial'.

Therefore instead of a firm and aggressive affirmation of Trotskyism as the continuator of Bolshevism, and Stalinism as the expression of the defeats of the working class, and the agency for many more, Mandel adopted a miserably apologetic stance.

He began by listing the things that Trotskyism was not: Menshevism, an agency of fascism, defeated tendency, etc., etc.

And when he did get round to saying what Trotskyism was, the retreat before Stalinism turned into a rout.

There was no historical exposition of the programme and theory of the Fourth International.

What had been written and said by Trotsky at that time, Mandel stated, was 'irrelevant to the main problem'.

What counted most was the vote of Krivine at the French presidential elections, the declaration at the second Tricontinental Havana, the ideas of Guevara -these were the confirmations of Trotskyism.

The great political controversies, both before and after the Russian Revolution, did not count.

Mandel listed as the four main features of Trotskyism : support for the 'colonial revo lution' (which he placed first), insistence on the revolutionexposition.

Trotskyism in the hands of the revisionists is so blunted and weakened that it is converted into a critique of Stalinism, and never functions as the main force for its destruction.

Mandel claims that Trotskyism 'upholds' and 'supports' the various demands and struggles he describes in his speech.

On the contrary, it fights for leadership in these struggles and is only able to succeed insofar as its activity is grounded on a rounded-out understanding of all the basic historical questions Mandel dismisses as 'irrelevant'.

Johnstone's approach contrasted sharply with Mandel's.

Here there were no apologetics.

After all, as the title of the debate stated, Trotskyism, and not Stalinism, was on trial.

(This proves how right we were to insist that the debate between ourselves and the YCL be on Trotskyism and Stalinism.)

After ridiculing Mandel's anti-Marxist, un-historical exposition of Trotskyism, Johnstone moved on to deal with three main questions.

Old formulation In both his contributions, he devoted much of his time to the nature of the first Russian Revolution of 1917, insisting that Lenin never discarded the 'old Bolshevik' formulation of the democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasantry the Tohnstone claimed that Provisional government created by the February 1917 revolution carried out the tasks of the democratic bourgeois revolution, and that the October Revolution solved not democratic tasks, but purely socialist ones.

Johnstone thus gives to the Russian, and indeed all capitalist classes of underdeveloped countries, a power which they cannot possess; that is, the ability to defeat feudalism and imperialism, and solve the key problems of the land, democratic rights, and all the other tasks associated with the democratic revolution.

This theory of the two-stage revolution, an integral part of Stalinist strategy in the backward countries dominheed by peristome as the followed through the Carter a suitable lapse gonnstone approach to in the underto defend the programme his own Party, 'The British Road to Socialism'.

He defended the parliamentary road to socialism in Britain just as he defended the identi in the While French that of sur solu strike, substance have Deer betrayals situation Stri real continuator of Leninism.

This is, of course, an implicit attack on the basic theory of Marxism, which insists that capitalism is a system of crisis, which periodically presents the working class with the opportunity of taking power.

Johnstone, by claiming that capitalism has rid itself of these revolutionary crises, attacks the very essence of Marxist theory.

The most significant contribution from the floor in the debate came from Tariq Ali, a leader of the IMG and also editor of 'Black Dwarf'.

Replying to a Maoist speaker, Ali attempted to correct him on the date of origin of 'Soviet revisionism'.

It was not 1956, the year of the 20th Congress of the CPSU, said Ali, it was the period of the great purges and the Moscow Trials.

In other words, according to Ali, Stalinism began in 1936, 12 years after Stalin began to revise Leninism with the theory of 'socialism in one country.

Like Johnstone, Betty Reid and Purdie, Tariq Ali separates the purges from the theory of Stalinism.

The crimes of Stalinism'revisionism' as Ali calls it— Mandel began in 1936 with the murder of the Left Opposition, and not in 1924, with the attack on the principles that the murdered oppositionists defended.

The common ground shared by the revisionists and Stalinists such as Johnstone is plain for all to see.

Each in their own way, as the debate proved, present Stalinism as purges, show trials and slanders, but not as a political tendency that inevitably leads to these things.

So when Mandel began his contribution by 'clearing' Trotskyism of the charge of counter - revolution, he was pushing on an open door as far as Johnstone was concerned, though even here, Mandel let Johnstone off the hook by failing to deal with Johnstone's own record as one of the worst slanders of Trotskyism when he wrote for and edited the YCL journal 'Challenge' in the early 1950s.

We have already stated that the IMG is grovelling before Stalinism.

The contempt felt by the Stalinists for the Purdies, even as they reach out to embrace Stalinism, was clearly revealed in the course of Johnstone's second contribution. Hitler (as he had done as Editor of 'Challenge').

But he did state quite firmly that the policies advocated by Trotsky aided who, Johnstone claims, engineered the whole uprising of May 1937.

All that has changed is that from being conscious and direct agents of imperialism, Johnstone now states that Trotskyists were and remain unconscious and indirect agents of the class enemy.

It is this small 'concession' on the part of Stalinists like Johnstone (a 'concession' that involves not the slightest re vision of past Stalinist policies) that now serves as a bridge between • the revisionists and the 'soft underbelly' of Stalinism.

The revisionists crave to be "legitimised' by the most bitter enemies Trotskyism-the Leadership of the working class in a fight against Stalinism is not the aim of Purdie, Ali or Mandel at all.

Instead, as Mandel made clear, they hope that their group will form one of the many nuclei that will come together to create a new international, some time in the future.

And as their programmatic documents make explicit, this new international will not be the Fourth International of Leon Trotsky.

Purdie has reserved a place in this new international for Stalinists like Johnstone, not on the basis of programme or principle-Mandeldebate that stated Trotsky's fight for these things is now irrelevant'.

It is simply because some Stalinists no longer refer to Trotskyism as a fascist or counter-revolutionary agency.

This middle-class, subjective craving for acceptance in the eyes of the bureaucracy has nothing to do with a fight to expose and denounce all the slanders of the . Stalinists against Trotskyism.

That fight has to go on as part of the overall struggle to build the revolutionary party and the Fourth International against Stalinism and revisionism.

Far from Johnstone's 'concessions' encouraging us to draw a little closer to the Stalinists, we pile on the pressure even more, seeing these manoeuvres as a sign of deep crisis and weakness.

The debate exposed all those tendencies that took part in it as being tarred with the same opportunist brush.

Principles, theory, programme and the fight for leadership-all were brushed to one side in a united attack on genuine Trotskyism.

The movement of the working class towards revolutionariving hard towards the right, towards Stalinism.

That is why Johnstone could treat Mandel with such contempt, and Purdie with such condescension.

In any 'contest' between the revisionists and the Stalinists, the Stalinists prove the masters.

They can only be defeated by the most implacable defence of principle, history and programme, and the application of all these things to the building of revolutionary leadership.

That is the task of the Socialist Labour League. MAN'S knowledge the solar system in which he lives and ability to take tenta live steps away from Earth's surface has advanced greatly since late 1950s.

But the destruction by earthquake of more than 60 per cent of the industrial town of Banja Luka in central Yugoslavia only a few weeks ago emphasises his lack of understanding i of the processes developing within the interior of the earth itself.

Within the space of 24 hours, 13 tremors killed at least 20 people, injured 400 more and caused extensive damage to the town's most important industrial plants.

The last tremor was comparable in its destructive power to the earthquake which devastated Skopje Core 1,330 mlles thick Diagram showing the internal structure of the Earth. 1963, killing more than 1,000 of its inhabitants.

Yet neither of these Yugoslay quakes match in either destructive power or actual destruction the worst that have taken place over the last 450 years, the period for which reliable information is available.

On November_1, 1775, the city of Lisbon, Portugal, was struck by an earthquake which was felt over an area more than 700 miles in radius, extending from the Azores to Italy and from England to North Africa.

Out of the city's 230,000 inhabitants, nearly 30,000 were killed according to conservative estimates. shock was followed by a 'tidal wave' (tsunami) and by fire.

The Lisbon quake is one of the most disastrous on record and provided ample material for the moralists and wits of the day.

Voltaire in his book 'Candide' says of the Lisbon earthquake:

'The University of Coimbra had pronounced that the sight of a few people ceremonially burned alive before a slow fire was an infallible prescription for preventing earthquakes; so that when the earthquake had subsided after destroying three-quarters of Lisbon, the authorities of that country could find no better way of avoiding total ruin than by giving the citizens a magnificent auto-da-fé.' Magnitude 2.50 5.50 5.75 6.00 8.90 9.00 Europe has not since suffered a disaster on the scale of the Lisbon earthquake, but we can confidently state that the auto-da-fé has had little to do with it!

Earthquakes are by no means rare events. The relatively slow motion of huge masses of material takes place continuously within the earth's interior.

Major quakes take place on the average once every two or three weeks, but do little damage as most of them originate below the continental slopes.

Since the beginning of the 16th century some 300 of them have been reported as affecting centres of populaHowever, 1903 is the first year for which reasonably accurate and complete instrumental magnitudes are available.

Precise measurement and analysis only became possible with the development seismograph.

Basically, this instrument works on the principle that a heavy weight suspended in a box tends to remain at rest when the box participates in an earth tremor.

The relative motion of the weight and its container is then suitably magnified and used to produce a wavy line on a revolving drum.

On this basis it is possible to define the magnitude of a shock accurately by relating it to the maximum displacement of the trace of a standard seismometer at a standard distance from the epicentre (the point of strongest shock on the earth's surface).

The table below relates various magnitudes of energy to their equivalent amounts of TNT explosive.

TNT Ib. kiloton 6 kilotons 20 kilotons There are over 125 quakes every year of intensity equal to, or greater than, the Skopje shock and some 100,000 with magnitudes between 2.5 and In principle, the use of seismographs in analysing shocks is straightforward, The focus (origin) of a quake can occur up to 450 miles below the earth's surface.

When it occurs, waves of two types travel rapidly outwards from the focus at different speeds.

A measurement of the time lag between the received signals then yields the distance of the receiver from the focus. Using three seismographic stations the geographical position of the epicentre and the depth of the focus can fixed with precision.

The measuring process is more complex than this because of the non-uniform nature of the earth's constituIn reality the waves change direction in passing through layers of different densities and are also partially reflected in this process.

The signal received is less clearly defined, but it allows the geophysicist to test our various theories about the structure of the earth.

The picture that emerges is shown in the diagram where the crust varies in thickness from five miles under the oceans to possibly 50 miles under some mountain ranges.

Oil companies, in particular, have used this method of analysis to detect oil-bearing strata which produce a characteristic signal when reflecting shock waves. In this form of prospecting the quakes are produced artificially by means of explosives.

The advent of nuclear weapons provided a powertul too seismological research, but this soon became secondary to nuclear test detection.

It was at this stage that large amounts of government money became available for earthquake research.

In the United States, over seven million dollars was spent on the Large Aperture Seismic Array at Billings, Montana.

This consists of 525 seismometers grouped into 21 clusters covering an area of a hundred miles square.

The signals are transmitted by micro-wave link to two computers which analyse the results.

In spite of the existence of such equipment, the problems of when and where the next major earthquake will occur remain as intractable as ever.

However, some light has been thrown on how they occur. The view generally held is that the tremendous forces responsible for building the mountains and other features of the earth's surface are also the cause of earthquakes.

Stresses build up in rocks until they are strained to breaking point, when they suddenly rupture and move.

The energy released in a quake can therefore be compared to that involved in the rapid unwinding of a spring.

The difficulty in making precise predictions as to wher his will occur arises because the triggering mechanism can take many forms.

When the rocks are nearly at their breaking point, an earthquake may be triggered off by a high tide, heavy rainall or flood, a nearby tremor or H-bomb blast The planned use of satellites could make a huge contribution to man's understanding of these processes.

A world-wide satellite system could continually monitor conditions in the atmosphere, the oceans and the earth's crust to the begin- nings of Provide 'early-warning' Yet the appalling loss of human life that accompanies great earthquakes in highlypopulated areas are mainly Smallest shock felt Smallest damaging shock Agadir, 1960 Skopje, 1963 First atomic bomb Chile, 1960 (biggest quake yet recorded)

due to secondary causes such as the collapse of buildings and fires.

Gas mains are torn open and, once started, fires rapidly spread beyond control, since the water mains are wrenched apart.

The Sagami Bay earthquake of 1923 occured just as the housewives of Tokyo and Yokohama were cooking the midday meal.

Fire broke out in all directions and over 250,000 lives were lost.

In most quakes, the collapse of building accounts for the majority of casualities.

Research has shown that it is not difficult to construct buildings that can resist the vibrations set up by the periodic shock waves.

Of course, considerable funds would be necessary to implement such a building programme in all the main centres of population affected by earthquakes.

Many of the cities and towns affected are in underdeveloped countries condemned by imperialism to poverty and stagnation-manmade disasters that overshadow those inflicted by nature.

The main obstacle is the rule of capital.

Its removal will provide man with the means to make a huge leap forward in his understanding of the powerful forces that drive the selfmovement of the earth's interior.

PAGE FOUR WORKSAR ORSES Thureday, November 13, 1969