LARKIN DECLINE

At the Congress, Larkin supported the thesis put forward by Lenin before his death concerning the British Communist Party. At the end of the Congress, was elected to the executive committee of the Communist International.

But in Ireland, the right wing was gaining ground in the transport union executive. In March 1924, Larkin was expelled from the union after a legal action by him against changes in the union rules had failed.

WEAKENED While Larkin was in Russia, his followers attempted to form a new union - the Workers' Union - and won over 16,000 Dublin workers (about two-thirds of the Dublin membership), but only 20 of the 300 branches of the union outside Dublin.

Then the Workers' Union was greatly weakened by the Coal Merchants' Association • lock-out in 1925 — with the employers being assisted by the transport union leadership.

Trotsky The whole Irish trade union movement was being weakened by such employers' attacks. By 1926 there were only 95,000 trade union members in • Ireland compared with 130,000 in 1923.

In February 1928, Larkin made his last visit to the Soviet Union to attend an executive meeting of the Communist International.

This was a decisive meeting. The witch-hunt against Trotsky was under way and during a full Comintern discussion, Larkin was invited to speak on the question. According to Emmet Larkin, he refused saying:

'The issue was one concerning the men and women of Russia' and that it would be an impertinence on my part to take sides.' He did address a meeting of the Moscow Soviet, however, on the Irish question and he wound up by asking the audience to 'hold up the hands of Stalin'.

During this visit Larkin had several discussions with Bukharin on the question of Catholicism. Larkin insisted that he had faith in God and he could not be shaken from this.

Then Larkin, despite his earlier support for Lenin's line (mentioned above, went along with Stalin's Third Period. theory ushered in after 1928. This policy was disastrous for the Top: James Larkin addressing a labour meeting In Upper •'Connell Street Dublin after his Irish working class. Reduced in America In 1923. Bottom: Stalin (left) at Kirov's lying-in-stale 1934. Larkin (ramalnad numbers, divided and short of purges, murders and trials were going on. treated as its elder statesman, he took no part in its activities and never wrote for its paper.

While never making a public recantation, Larkin in practice had dissociated himself from the international communist movement by 1934. A word from him against the murders, purges and trials would have carried great weight in the working-class movement throughout the world-but it was never forthHe kept his silence, and in the years of defeat, reaction and the growth of Stalinism, silence meant decline.

joined the fish Lab our Party aid was later selected as its candidate for N Dublin. The Irish Transport Union executive — now indistinguishable from any British right-wing union bureaucracyobjected to his candidature.

The once-great Larkin did his upmost to placate these bureaucrats-the sort of men he had spent his life fighting:

REGRET 'I assure you most sincerely that I am willing to work loyally with any member of the Party regardless of previous differences and antagonisms,' he promised, 'and I shall at all times accept the judgement of the Administrative Council' Ta the Transport Union bureaucrats, he wrote:

'If in the heat of past conflicts statements were made by me, I regret having made those statements, if today they appear as obstacles to a united effort by all members of the Party.'"

Larkin died on January 30, 1947. A lion of the labour movement, he was a monument to its suffering, its determination and its courage.

Writing about another workers' leader who was subsequently destroyed by Stalinism - Willie Gallacher-Lenin declared:

'People who can give expression to this temper of the masses, who can arouse such temper, must be prized and every assistance must be given to them. At the same time we must openly and frankly tell them that temper alone is not sufficient to lead the masses in the great revolutionary struggle...' The writer of the letter [Gallacher's letter against parliamentary activity] is imbued with noble proletarian hatred for the bourgeois "class politicians" [This] is the beginning of all wisdom, the very basis of every socialist and communist movement and of its success.

'But the author fails to take into account the fact that politics is a science and an art that does not drop from the skies, is not acquired for nothing, and that if it wants to conquer the bourgeoisie, the proletariat must train its own proletarian "class politicians" who will be as skilled as the bourgeois politicians. "12 This was Lenin's method. To welcome and assist workers who wanted to fight as communists, but to fight for their political development against the conceptions that they brought with them from outside the communist movement.

Larkin possessed the same 'proletarian hatred' for bourgeois politicians, the same - indeed, greater - ability to arouse and express the temper of the masses.

But Stalinism was more than the physical liquidation of Bolsheviks.

It was an attempt also to liquidate the theory and method of Bolshevism. The struggle to train proletarian fighters as revolutionaries in theory and practice was the exact opposite to Stalinism. Willie Gallacher's fate was one of the fruits of Stalinism.

So was Larkin's. return Emmet Larkin, op. cit., p. 290. nt while Emmet Larkin, op. cit., p. 300.

Lenin 'Left Wing Communism'

He reaches this conclusion from an examination of the theory of state monopoly capitalism, used to explain the latest developments in capitalism and to justify the 'peaceful road to socialism'.

As he says, this theory smacks of Bernstein's revisionism developed at the end of the last century and the theories of right-wing Labourites like Strachey, Crosland and Jay, worked out in the 1950s.

Although the theory of state monopoly capitalism has only been current in its present form since the mid-1960s it represented no big change for the Stalinist movement.

While the explicitness of this revision, or rather rejection, of Marxism may do something to bring theory closer to practice, that since the early 1930 haat all the evidence of history shows least, the Stalinist parties opposed revolution.

Kissin cites the case of France in 1936 as though it was someUnwittingly much pamphlet how present-day Stalinism and Fabianism have it common and how bitterly opposed both are to Marxism.

Kissin passes in review Mandesry and dron revolutiont del's industrial revolution wish, like state moro bo talism, have failed to explain the development of post-war capital. ism and offer an excuse for re formist policies dressed up 'left' phrases.

BOOM all Kissin's own distortions of deal in detail here with Marxism aid of Lenin's theory of imperialism would be impossible, just as it would to expound the Marxist analysis resent-day capitalism. This mus egin with the crisis of revoll capitali ma de hire he bled February