WILL PAYNTER: INSTRUMENT STALINISM

'My Generation.' By George Allen and {1.50, 172 pages.

Joseph Stalin was the political spokesman of a privileged, conservative strata of Russian society which developed under the conditions of isolation imposed upon an economically - backward country by the defeats of the revolutionary movements-especially in Germany-at the end of World War I.

Under him, the Communist International ceased to be a revolutionary organization and abandoned Lenin's international strategy of independent communist activity.

Leon Trotsky fought in vain to drive home the lessons of the defeat of the German Revolution in 1923 to prevent the total reliance on the TUC bureaucrats in the British General Strike and the subordination of the Chinese Communist Party to Chinag Kai-shek in 1927.

Trotsky was proved right on all these questions. But great. class defeats are more powerful than correct analyses and the defeats strengthened the conservative forces inside the Soviet Union. By 1933, the Communist International was no longer making 'mistakes' but had gone over to the side of counter-revolution, bearing the main responsibility for the victory of Hitler over the German working class.

Central to this degeneration of the Communist International was the abandonment of the Leninist struggle to train theoretically communist leaders throughout the world.

Thus, a serious worker like Will Paynter received no theoretical training whatever, despite his willingness to devote his life to the communist cause. It is significant, indeed, that Paynter regarded the Communist International not as a directing centre of world revolutionary activitywhat Trotsky called a 'School of Revolutionary Strategy'but as some sort of co-ordinating committee of various Will Paynter. Unwin Ltd. national activities:

'The Communist International, or Comintern as it was called, operated as a central co-ordinating organization for the national Communist Parties.' ('My Generation' p. 55.)

Lack of political training meant that, with one significant exception, Paynter uncritically accepted the Moscow line on all things during these formative years.

For instance, he can blandly assert: 'Fascism achieved power when the working-class organizations of resistance were fragmented by internal divisions.' (p. 50.) But he nowhere mentions the "Third Period' politics of the Communist International which deelared that the real enemy in Germany was not the fascists but the so-called 'social fascist' Social Democracy!

Paynter must know now, if he did not know then, that the Communist International declared in April, 1933, that a Hitler victory in Germany would actually help, the German working class towards revolution!' He must also know now, if he did not know then, that it was only the Trotskyists who called for unity of the German working class against Hitler and that Trotsky was denounced for this the by Kremlin.?

Paynter worked to the best of his ability for the defeat of Franco's fascist forces in Spain. He describes the willingness of British workers -even the unemployed-to give what they could to aid the Spanish 'We could go to the door of any unemployed family in the Rhondda and need only say we were collecting for Spain and without question or exception we would be handed a tin of milk or a pound of sugar or whatever they had to give, and this week after week from the same homes.' (p. 63)

He rightly condemns the 'non-intervention' policies of the British and French governments, but omits to mention that the Soviet Union also signed the non-intervention pact and that Stalin did not Will Paynter begin to send arms to Republican Spain until November, 1936. Even then it was only in sufficient quantity to enable the Spanish Stalinists to defeat their political rivals, never enough to match the being poured into Franco's side by Hitler and Mussolini.

Paynter must know now, if he did not know then, that Stalin had publicly declared against sending arms to Spain unless Britain and France did SO too. This policy was defended by a leading 'theoretician' of the British Communist Party, Emile Burns, in a long article in the November, 1936, issue of the Party's bulletin 'Discussion', in reply to the growing opposition to She BritiSh Parly policy inside Paynter goes into none of this. But he repeats the Stalinist line that workers who took over factories and peasants who seized the land were 'splitters' who would drive away the liberals and thus aid Franco! (pp. 76-77.) In letter to Arthur Horner, published here (p. 68) he refers to a section 'who would promote disloyalty and disunity' but who would be 'dealt with'. They were-by Stalin's murder machine. And the Spanish Revolution was drowned in blood.

Again, Paynter denounces the wester n powers for their policy of "accommodation' towards fascism (pp. 52-53), particularly when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia and Hitler attacked Austria and Czechoslovakia. Yet he does not mention that Stalin sent oil to Mussolini which was used in the attack on Abyssinia!

Of the Stalin-Hitler pact there is not a word!

And the vacillations of the British Communist Party on World War Il get one paragraph:

'The initial months of the war, the Communist Party was seriously divided on whether the war was a "just" or an "unjust" one. ... The support of the Communist Party depended on whether the Party considered it was just another imperialist war or a war against fascism. At first the Party supported the war, then reversed to opposition following discussions with Moscow; later when Russia was attacked, the policy reverted to one of support. It seems obvious now that the Party gave too much weight to the assessment of the Russian Party leaders, a disposition that unfortunately did not end with that experience.' (pp. 120-121.)

This enigmatic phrase 'a disposition that unfortunately did not end with that experience' is like the parson's frock—it covers a multitude of sins.

Does Paynter mean the mass slaughter of almost the entire leadership of the Bolshevik IR.

Party and the Communist International, plus hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the Stalin terror? Because he makes no mention of it. Or does he perhaps mean the support every Communist Party in the world for the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945? For that gets no mention either.

Does he mean the slavish acceptance of the Czech Slansky trials of 1953 (again, no mention)? Or perhaps the Hungarian invasion of 1956this does get a mention, but only from the point of view of the "inconvenience' it caused Paynter's family!

By the end of the 1930s Will Paynter was already a slavish Stalinist. But the one issue on which he did react against, the Party leadership, was just as significant as all those on which he meekly toed the line.

The line from the Fifth Congress of the Red International of Labour Unions, to which the Minority Movement was afhiliated, heralded the sectarian 'Third Period' policies in the unions.

At the tenth congress of the British Communist Party in 1929 Willie Gallacher urged that the party should campaign to get trade unions to disaffiliate from the TUC and affiliate to the Minority Movement instead. Tom Bell called for a policy of splitting the reformist trade unions and revolutionary ones.

In fact, the party did set up a 'revolutionary' miners' union in Scotland, a 'revolutionary' clothing workers' union in England and a • 'revolutionary' London Industrial Council in opposition to the London Trades Council. Each of these organizations quickly became isolated and died The one prominent party leader who opposed this policy was Arthur Horner, who, throughout this period, urged that communists should work within the established trade unions, despite their reformist leaderships, because that was where the organized workers He was violently denounced for his pains and accused of The systematic strikes [Leni is here speaking of the wave of industrial strikes in Russia in the 1890s] represented the class struggle in embryo, but only in embryo. Taken by themselves, these strikes were simply trade union struggles, not yet Social Democratic he.

Communist) struggles. marked the awakening antagonism between workers and employers, but the workers were not, and could not be, conscious of the irreconcilable antagonism of their interests the whole of the modern political and social system.

'There could not have been Social Democratic (Communist) consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries as a communist who has accepted that his primary obligation is to the interests of the union and its members.

'There are occasions do When these two positions do not coincide and where, rightly or wrongly, one has to make a fadeement end stand my it and criticism from one's friends, but the point is that the communist with these responsibilities will think and react to situations in a somewhat different way from the communist without, which can result in opposing stands being taken in given situations. (p. 109.)

The communists in 'different situations' were, of course those in top union jobs and those fighting for wages and Len Neal, ex-big-time official Thursday