Open letter to the Communist

THE 'Morning Star' has made no comment on this week's decisions of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. The British Communist Party leaders have not spoken a word on the matter to their members or to the working class.

Alexander Dubcek, former Party first secretary and Prime Minister, has been removed from the presidium of the Party.

Josef Smrkovsky, his leading collaborator, has been expelled from the Central Committee. Many others have been sacked.

Most important of all, and the major reason 'Morning Star' reports without any comment, is the Czech leaders' decision to annul their resolution of August 1968, which condemned the Warsaw Pact invasion.

This decision brings home more forcibly than any previous event the crisis of Stalinism.

On August 21 last year the British Communist Party's Political Committee said :

Whatever differences of view there might be among socialist countries about developments in Czechoslovakia, in our view military intervention pletely unjustified, is comThe statement added:

•.. we consider that the way to defend socialism and rebuff imperialism is to establish voluntary and mutual co-operation between the socialist states and Communist Parties, based on the national sovereignty and autonomy of each Party and governThe executive committee meeting of August 24, 1968 endorsed this statement and recorded support for the policies of the Dubcek leadership.

The Czech resolution of this week is unequivocal and reflects exactly the dictates of Brezhnev and the Kremlin clique. It says of the invasion:

'Under no circumstances was it an act of aggression against the people. It was not a matter of occupation of Czechoslovak territory and of suppression of freedom and of the socialist order in our state.' A large groyp in the Communist Party as in any case always supported the Soviet intervention.

they will feel their position has been confirmed.

HOW can Gollan answer? If he sticks to the position that the Czech party 'knows best', will the British Party's condemnation of the invasion be reversed?

WILL Gollan then add to the 'absolute principle of national sovereignty' the second principle that opinions are best freely arrived at the point of 600,000 bayonets? monted Party, like the the British Italian and French Communist Parties, condemned the invasion not out of principle, but because they are closer and closer to middle-class 'democratic' and reformist political circles in their own countries. tion Corporation (IRC)-the By the SLL Political Committee 'Left unity, as the CP calls its unprincipled alliance with assorted trade union bureaucrats and parliamentarians would have been endangered by support for the invasion in the old style.

The issue is not one of Stalinism versus bourgeois democracy in any way.

There is a direct connection between, on the one hand, the struggle of the workers against bureaucracy in Czechoslovakia, which was partly reflected through Dubcek and his group, and on the other hand the revolutionary needs of the work-