HO CHI MINH AND THE REVISIONISTS VIETNAM

self goes into crisis along with imperialism.

From the Marxist standpoint, the only defence of the gains of the October Revolution is through the evolutionary struggle for power of the working class in every other country.

Because the Communist Parties are agencies of the Soviet bureaucracy, they adopt political policies of compromise which are calculated to make imperialism easier for the bureaucracy to negotiate and to exist with.

As soon as the working class moves towards overthrow of imperialism, then the Communist Parties devote themselves to blunting and thereby preparing major defeats for the working class.

In France in 1968 the Communist Party led the workers away from the fight for power that was in their grasp.

In Czechoslovakia, the working class was moving towards the political revolution, the overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucracy. The Soviet leaders' reaction was to suppress the workers by force, and to accelerate their open return all the worst methods of Stalin.

Thus Stalinist parties, while appearing to be the scene of debate and 'freedom of criticism' unprecedented in Stalin's day, are poised to play their most counter - revolutionary role.

That is the meaning of the British Stalinists' support for the 'left' opportunist trade union leaders who are helping the TUC right wing and the Labour government cripple the working class.

Cover-up Revisionists are those who employ the use of Marxist and Trotskyist phrases an idealist, empiricist cover up the betrayals of the opportunists.

Purdie, of the 'International Marxist Group', instead of seeing Stalinism's present role as we have described it above. concluded that ' .. the new dominant features of these [Communist) Parties' is their organizational fragmentation and political diversification', so much so that in this respect • the term Stalinist has lost its usefulness'.

In other words, precisely when a new international generation of workers can and must be trained as Marxists in bitter conflict with the counter-revolutionary actions of Stalinism, Purdie and the revisionists insist that the Communist Parties are not 'dominantly' Stalinist, but are arenas of 'fragmentation' and 'diversification'.

The role of these revisionists is exactly this: to allow Stalinism once again to help capitalism over its crisis, despite the revolutionary upsurge of the working class.

They represent the pressure of imperialism and the Stalinist bureaucracy on the revolutionary movement and on the youth who turn to revolution.

This was the role of the revisionists in the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. From 1967 onwards thousands of students and youth in many countries were attracted by the heroic struggles of the Vietnamese workers and peasants.

The revisionists of Purdie's group led the VSC into a series of demonstrations, many of them irresponsible adventures, along political line which capitulated to Stalinism and ended in the virtual dissolution of the VSC's following. ( On the death of Ho Chi Minh, the politics of the IMG, and of Purdie in particular, were thrown into sharp relief, and it was a clash with the 'state capitalists' which produced this clarification.

Divisions amongst them began 1968, and have already been analyzed in "The Newsletter'.

At the London memorial meeting for Ho Chi Minh attended by all sorts of revisionists and opportunists, chaos followed a speech by Chris Harman, representing International Socialism'.

It must be said that Harman made a correct and necessary reference to Ho Chi Minh's actions at the end of the Second World War in murdering hundreds of Trotskyists in Saigon and the rest of Vietnam.

Purdie and the IMG, who have never exposed or attacked STALINISA the rotten, anti-communist politics of the state capitalist' group, suddenly erupted with a frenzy of accusations against Harman making an isolated correct point!

The IMG journal, 'International' (October 1969) describes the September 20 memorial meeting in an editorial article Unity and Vietnam'.

According to the editorial, 'Harman's speech was provocative and in complete contradicition with united front principles.' This was, of course, their argument against the Socialist Labour League at the very start of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign.

For years we had campaigned for Victory to the National Liberation Front', but when the revisionists set up the VSC they tried to ban us from criticising Stalinism!

The essence of the matter was-and is still-that without the fight for the independent revolutionary party against Stalinism, there can be no fight against imperialism.

And the essence of Pabloite revisionism here is that it covers up for Stalinism against Trotskyism and against the working class. The 'International' editorial goes on:

'We will not deal with the question of the Vietnamese Trotskyists in this editorial. Because of the interest in this matter we have commissioned material which will give a full picture of what happenedthe truth is a lot more complicated than the IS leaders seem to think' (My emphasis.)

This can only mean the IMG think that in the circumstances of the end of the Second World War, Ho Chi Minh's murder of Ta Tu Tao and the Vietnamese Trotskyists had some justification.

It prepares the way for saying that the Trotskyists obstructed those who were really carrying forward the socialist cause in Vietnam— Ho Chi Minh and the The logic is inescapable, as we saw in our last article: (Workers Press, October 28)

Fourth International should never have been formed, and the proletariat's needs can be answered by a new development within Stalinism.

We, the Trotskyists of International Committee the Fourth International, KYISM, SLOW lieve on the contrary that Stalinism was and remains counter-revolutionary, and can be defeated only by Trotskyism.

If anyone thinks that this conclusion is exaggerated, let him read the speech of Bob Purdie on the death of Ho Chi Minh, published in same of "International'.

"The death of comrade Ho Chi Minh is a bitter blow ...

Already the tone is set: we are banned in advance from any objective appraisal of the relation between the Vietnamese revolution and its Stalinist leadership, by this Worse comes immediately:

'We had in our thoughts of the future imagined him enjoying the reward of his long life of struggle, the only reward he asked, and the only reward appropriate for that life, the reward of seeing the Vietnamese people at last defeat imperialism, and in a peaceful, re-united Vietnam construct which Ior has been imply to achieve the right to determine their own future...• This sickening, typically British, sentimental claptrap has always the same function and intention: to cover up the real lessons of every experience and every struggle.

Purdie is here • attacking attacking Trotskyism with Because Vietnamese workers, like workers all over the world, fell under the leadership of the Communist Parties of the Stalinist Third International, represented in IndoChina (Vietnam) by Ho Chi Minh, their great revolutionary struggle was subordinated to the interests of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR.

Every forward step of the Vietnamese revolution like every step forward in China, has been possible only to the extent that the workers and peasants broke through the Stalinist framework.

The completion of their struggle ('the kind of society' referred to so cautiously by Purdie) can come only when Stalinism, the main counterrevolutionary force on a world scale, is defeated, and a Trotskyist leadership takes the working class to power in the major advanced capitalist countries, alongside successful revolutions in the colonial countries and a political revolution against the Stalinist