NOBODY CELEBRATED

One date in the calendar went by with little notice this year, both in the Soviet Union and in the communist parties.

That date is December 9, the birthday of one Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili, better known to history as Stalin. Until his death in 1953, it had been for a quarter of a century the occasion for effusive praise of a type seldom accorded in history to any other individual.

Not, of course, that adulation of Stalin was reserved for the anniversary of his birth. Indeed, it was obligatory on every occasion. Both in the Soviet Union and in the leadership of the communist parties, writers and orators vied with each other in their effort to attribute miracle - working powers to the genial leader of the whole of humanity Leading figures the British, as in every other Communist Party, extolled Stalin's unexampled qualities as Marxist dialectician, an economist, an historian and even as a scientist.

Thus R. Palme Dutt, in his 'Labour Monthly' editorial for December, 1949. the occasion of Stalin's 70th birthday, excelled himself:

This month the tribute of honour, affection and gratitude, on the occasion of his 70th birthday, will be paid to Stalin, the leader of mankind in the change from capitalism to socialism, by hundreds of millions of men and women in every country of the world. In all the records of human society there is no precedent for such a universal tribute to high service in the cause of humanity, recognized and acclaimed already, it may be said without exaggeration, by the majority of the human race within the lifetime of its subject. This is something new in human experience and consciousness; it is a sign of the new world which we are entering?

At the same time that Palme Dutt was paying this obeisance to the Stalin cult the Congress of the Communist Party of Great Britain passed a special address of greetings to the old dictator which expressed 'our heartfelt greetings, our warmest love and deep respect' "It was you,' the British Stalinists went 'who • initiated the Stalin Five-Year Plans, guided the Soviet peasants on the road to Soviet agriculture, and smashed the agents of imperialism, the Trotskyites and wreckers. 'It is the Soviet Union', the address continued, growt strong under your guidance that has made possible the great victories of the workins people in the People's Democracies of eastern Europe, and the glorious triumph of the Chinese Revolution.

This year 'the towering genius of the whole of humanity' will go uncommemorated by King Street or by the 'Labour Monthly'. The 'revelations' of Nikita Khrushchev at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956 put paid to what became known as 'the cult of the personality'.

In one passage Khrushchev said:

"The cult of the individual acquired such • monstrous size chiefly because Stalin himself, using all conceivable methods, supported the glorification of his own person. This is supported by numerous facts. One of most characteristic examples of Stalin's self-glorification and his lack of even elementary modesty is the edition of his "Short Biography", which was published in 1948.

'This book is the expression of the most dissolute flattery, an example of making a man into a godhead, of transforming him into an infallible sage, "the greatest leader, sublime strategist of all times and nations". Finally no other words could be found with which to lift Stalin up to the heavens. 'We need not give here examples of the loathsome adulation filling this book. All we need to add is that they all were approved by Stalin per sonally and some of them added in his own handwriting to the draft text of the book.

Khrusher was able to carry his explanation no further because he had merely replaced Stalin as the boss of the same parasitic caste which still continued to rule and enjoy its privileges at the expense of the Soviet working class.

The distortions of history which had done service in Stalin's time were simply continued-without Stalin.

The communist parties, including that which operates from King Street, have abandoned Stalin, but they cling all the more fanatically to Stalinism. Stalinism was not only mass crime: the destruction of the Bolshevik Party and depoll traces of opposition, deportation death of millions of people.

On this score, of course, Stalin has a place in history as one of the bloodiest mass murderers of all time. When Palme Dutt wrote the words quoted above, and when the British Stalinists churned out their quota of nauseous adulation, Stalin's crimes were well known to them.

They knew that under the guise the fight against Trotskyism, in which Khrushchev took a leading part in the Ukraine, not only were the supporters of the Left Opposition exterminated, but most of the leadership of the Bolshevik Party in Lenin's day and hundreds of thousands of loyal party members.

To this day the Stalinists of King Street have never made a reckoning with this past. They have not retracted their support for the 1930s Moscow Trials and the purge of the Red Army. They are still branded with Stalin's crimes.

They hope that people have short memories and that they can absolve themselves by simply not referring •LO the tyrant once lauded to as always, the path the Soviet leadership. Brezhnev and Kosygin, as representatives of the Soviet bureaucracy, try to conceal their own origins by erasing Stalin's name from the historical record The fact that cracy today dare not embark upon the wholesale repression which was characteristic of the Stalin era does not mean that it has changed its nature or abandoned Stalinism.

The essence of Stalinism consists in its fundamental revision and abandonment of Marxism through the adoption of the theory and policy of 'socialism in one country' '. It marked, when it was put forward in 1924, the beginnings of a degeneration which was to grow rapidly in the next few As the representative of the bureaucracy, Stalin placed the defence of its own privileges and power before the extension of the revolution to other countries. The working class and the communist parties were seen as no more than useful adjuncts in realizing this aim.

After imposing on the German Communist Party after 1929 a policy which could only lead to defeat and disaster, Stalin passed to the side of the defence of the bourgeois social order. He was ready to enter into alliance with and support those bourgeois governments concerned with maintaining the status quo.

Only the unwillingness of the governments of Britain and France to enter such an alliance before 1939 led Stalin back to the rapprochement with Hitler which he had sought when the Nazi dictator had first come to power on the bones of the vanguard of the German working class in 1933. It is this heritage which the Stalinists continue today. The pact between Brezhnev and Nixon, the conspiracy against the Vietnam revolution, the policy of a European Security It was at one time obligatory for Communist Party leaders to give adulation to Stalin on every possible occasion. Above: Chinese rally in the tradition of the 'Stalin Cult. Below left to right: Poster for First Five Year Plan depicts Stalin at the head of Soviet workers. Stalin and Ribbentrop after the signing of the pact with Nazi Germany. Molotov, Khrushchev and Stalin at a May Day parade.

Pact, the support for coalitions with bourgeois parties, as in France —these are all fully in the Stalin tradition.

Stalin may no longer be praised or even mentioned in the Press of the Soviet Union or the Communist Party. Khrushchev, too, may have passed into oblivion. But Stalinism lives on as a malignant cancer in the workers' movement which must be destroyed.

Following the articles 'Renegades from Trotskyism' dealing with the situation in Ceylon, JACK GALE now examines the British section of the revisionist Unitied Secretariat of the Fourth International, The International Marxist Group (IMG).

Thursday By February, 1971, the American Socialist Workers' Party's Political Committee was writing off the International Marxist Group in Britain, as a body within which genuine discussion could not be conducted.

What further evidence of total political war within the ranks of the Unified Secretariat and its co-thinkers is required than this assessment of the IMG by the SWP? • SWP POLITICAL COMMITTEE MOTION Adopted February 5, 1971 The Political Committee of the Socialist Workers Party Between the July, 1970, letter from the IMG to the SWP and the latter's 'Political Motion' of February, 1971, a prolonged and tangled correspondence took place, for which the word 'acrimonious' is hardly adequate.

Joseph Hansen is particularly adept at this sort of thing.

Boasting that 'in the antiwar rallies in the US the most extreme slogan used by cadres associated with an SWP headquarters bookstore has been 'Get Your Trotskyist Literature Here' , he evades Jordan's complaint about hidden subsidies by blandly asserting that 'Pathfinder Books has no connection with the SWP as far as its business affairs are concerned'. HOME NOW! THE WAR:

No COLIMITA OPPRESSION! TO ENO THE WAR A