Constant Reader Two Books that Light up the Present

_ Two classics of Marxism which are especially helpful to understanding current events in France are “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ (Marx, 1852) and ‘The Only Road for Germany’ (Trotsky, 1932).

Tribune . has. brilliantly employed quotations from ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire’ in its presentation of the French crisis— though what a pity that the worst of available translations. was used, in which some passages become nonsense and the meaning of others is reversed!

' -Perhaps the main reason why “The Eighteenth Brumaire’ deserves study today is not such superficial similarities as exist. between the coup d’état. of December 1851 and that of May-June 1958 (Algerian generals etc.) but Marx's basic: political analysis.

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He comes out against the discussion of what happened in terms of a struggle between ‘reaction’ and ‘the people’-—‘a night in which all.cats are grey’ and which ‘veils the class. struggle’.

La. ae . ea And he shows the fatal consequences for the workers of merging politically with the petty-bourgeois democrats, accepting their slogans and their Jeadership.

United front rejected

Trotsky’s analysis of the passage of the German State through Bonapartism to fascism shows bow the two working-class parties both rejected the united front that alone could have saved Germany and the world from Hitler’s victory.

The social democrats followed the line of the ‘lesser evil’, supporting Hindenburg ‘against’ Hitler (much as the French communists supported Pflimlin ‘against’? de Gaulle), while the communists, operating Stalin’s orders, were in practice helping the Nazis. ;

It was for circulating this and Trotsky’s other writmgs on the 1930-33 crisis in Germany that the first British ‘Trotskyists’ . were expelled from the Communist Party;.they were, so to speak, ‘premature united-frontists’.

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The middle class More nonsense is talked in the working-class movement _ about the middle class than about any other subject.

The Right wing justify their policies of ‘restraint’, ‘moderation’ and all-round half-heartedness with the argument that ‘you mustn’t antagonize the middle class’. ;

Yet the Right wing has in historical fact done just this again and again: see, for instance, what happened with the Labour Governments of 1924, 1929-31 and 1945-51.

Basis for fascism

In fact it is Right-wing policy that drives the middle class into the arms of. reaction.

The Right wing does just enough, industrially and politically, to irritate the middle class, while not impressing them with the power and determination of the workers.

In Italy in the early 1920s and again.in Germany ten years later the hesitant, disunited, indecisive actions of the Labour movement made it seem to the middle sections a. factor capable. of causing disorder and inconvenience without being able to take control and refashion society in iis‘°own way.

This provided the basis for fascism.

General.Strike Lesson

It is when the working class is acting with the maximum militant unity that the middle class begins to swing over-to its side.

This was seen very clearly during the last days of the General Strike of 1926. just. before the sell-out.

It is important for the workers’ organizations to take up the special demands of the middle class, and to carry. on direct work among them (and the Right wing usually neglect both these things, since what dictates their attitude is not really the interests of the middle class but those of the monopoly capitalists!).

But the only road to winning great masses of the middle class solidly to the workers’ side is to demonstrate the immense strength of Labour and its ability to enforce its will upon capital. .

BRIAN PEARCE .

JuNeE 14, 1958 system in Hungary, a refuge for the treacherous and capitulationist Nagy-Losonczy group.

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“Remember the unprecedented speech made by Comrade Tito in Pula, in which he took the rebels in Hungary under his wing, while describing the fraternal assistance of the USSR to the Hungarian people as “Soviet intervention”—a speech which contained direct calls to certain forces in other socialist countries to follow the so-called “Yugoslav road”?

The so-called ‘Yugoslav road’, it may be remembered. was Kardelj’s call for a government based on workers’ councils, ‘Much experience and merit’

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‘That does not exhaust the question, however. If the NagyLosonczy group were preparing to restore capitalism in league with Tito then why have they not been put on trial for these crimes?

And how does this allegation square up with the explicit Statement of Khrushchev elsewhere in his speech:

‘The Yugoslav communists have much revolutionary experience and great merits in the struggle against our common class enemies. The working class and the entire working people of Yugoslavia made a notable contribution to the struggle against fascism in the second world war.’

No matter what differences separate British socialists from Tito—and there are many—they must not let this latest canard go unanswered. And if the Soviet bureaucrats want to apply economic sanctions let them do it to the class enemy, such as de Gaulle’s France, and not to another workers’ State.