WORKERS OF EAST AND WEST

The capitalist Press is howling about the Socialist Labour League’s proposal for the establishment of workers’ defence squads. It is seeking to turn attention away from the fascists’ brutality.

The Socialist Labour League makes it absolutely clear that these proposed defence committees and defence squads would not be for the purpose of attacking anyone.

They would simply be a means of self-defence for the workers against fascist provocation and fascist thuggery. Most discussions of the seven-year plan consider merely technical aspects. Are the targets realizable? The physical possibilities are there. So is the technology. Continued investment yields constantly increasing levels of output, so more goods can be produced for consumers even without reducing the ratio of new investment imposed by the goal of catching up with capitalism.

Purely in these terms, it can be said that sooner or later the

Soviet Union will become the leading industrial country. This is a world-shaking fact which will dominate the history of the next twenty-five years.

Some apologists of capitalism—the American National Association of Manufacturers, the State Department’s anticommunist publications—have ‘naturally tried to minimize the evidence for growing Soviet economic power.

Even those who have resigned themselves to the economic challenge. and utter platitudes about how to meet it, have seldom got to grips with the political consequences.

What it amounts to is this: the world relationship of forces will become continually less favourable for capitalism. Even economic prosperity, which has been faltering in the last year or so, provides no guarantee against long-term decline and weakening.

Colonialism is going overboard in a political sense. The growth of the working-class movement, in the undeveloped as well as the advanced couniries, will be spurred on still In these circumstances capitalist stability is an illusion.

So far even the more realistic capitalist politicians have been assuming some permanent settlement with the USSR on the This. is the last in the series of articles by Tom Kemp, lecturer in economic history at Hull University, on aspects of the seven-year economic plan in the USSR. Previous articles in the series appeared on February 21 (pp. 54-5), February 28 (pp. 64-5), March 14 (p. 81) and April 18 (pp. 117-18).

basis of the indefinite prolongation of the existing balance of forces. But that is an impossibility. Their hopes are built on sand.

The Soviet leaders feel uneasily the highly explosive nature of the course they are pursuing.

By the logic of their position they have to challenge capitalism, but they do not want to provoke the capitalist countries to war.

Hence they propose ‘peaceful competition’. The working class in the capitalist countries must put pressure on ‘their’ governments to accept Soviet proposals and are offered a ‘choice’ between the two systems.

Big advantages for Khrushchev Undoubtedly an arrangement with capitalism offers Khrushchev inestimable advantages. By enabling the arms budget to be reduced, and by expanding trade with the capitalist countries, the burden of catching up can be considerably reduced.

Capital equipment from the west . will provide a short cut to increasing the flow of consumer goods in line with the demands of the people for better living more quickly.’ It will be possible to attain plan targets with less strain.

Soviet leaders call for credits to buy equipment for which neither goods nor even gold are available at the moment. They even say to the capitalists: ‘It will be in your interests to make us such loans’!

Indeed there is a network of contradictions. The Soviet .

leaders are clearly worried, and a certain inconsistency appears in their public statements.

The faster they go economically the more difficult it becomes to make the increasingly powerful machine obey their commands. Every move forward is a threat to capitalism. But they are asking, and desire, that capitalists should help them on their way.

* * * These international problems are interlocked with equally delicate domestic issues.

Some adjustments have been made since the Twentieth Congress under the pressure ‘of the workers, peasants’.and intellectuals, after a difficult period of trial and error. There have been appreciable improvements in living standards.

Outwardly the leadership is ebullient. Khrushchev rides the wave of successes and promises, with plenty of courtiers to tell him how good he is.

But the bitter attacks on the ‘anti-party group’ point to seething hates and jealousies just below the surface. One error or major failure could raise the tension and precipitate a new So far the factional fights have been behind closed doors, but there is no guarantee that the masses of the people will not enter the arena on the next occasion.

What of the changes which have convinced some that there has been a ‘liberalization’, or even a movement towards democratic participation by the people?

Descend from on high There are, of course, ‘nation-wide discussions’, but the themes descend from on high and are translated into practice without major change. A purpose has been served. The social pulse is felt; a limited measure of dissidence is allowed on lesser points; a feeling of participation is induced.

This is a response to pressures from below, but the numbers who effectively contribute to decision-making are not greatly increased.

Control remains concentrated at the top. It is still arbitrary and centralized. There is no sharing of power. Forms are different: so-called ‘legality’ has replaced the irresponsible power of the secret police.

But the limits to such changes are narrowly set by the unresolved contradictions and conflicts of Soviet society.

* * * Things would be very much easier if it were true, as Khrushchev glibly proclaims, that ‘the Soviet Union is no longer in capitalist encirclement’.

Yet in the next breath he has to admit that there is no guarantee against the possibility of capitalist aggression. In fact modern weapons and strategy have changed the meaning of encirclement.

If not, why the complaints about the chain of U.S. air bases throughout the world, or such matters as the establishment of west German military depots in Norway?

The threat of anti-Soviet war remains real enough. Utterances by western military chiefs which show this are frequently quoted in Soviet propaganda.

The Khrushchev policy is to gamble on the ‘peaceful’ capitalist politicians making a deal on the basis of the existing division of the world. In fact a summit meeting cannot settle the future.

For one thing, whether or not they want to, by their decisions on the economic front the Soviet leaders are producing the conditions for the further undermining of capitalism.

The last-throw stake on a preventive war to save capitalism —conceived, perhaps, in the first instance, as a limited war— may become not less, but more, attractive.

‘Peaceful coexistence’ no guarantee Similarly, irresponsible adventurism cannot be ruled out in the Kremlin—or in Peking.

On any sober assessment a new war could destroy millennia of human achievement and wipe out a large part of mankind.

At first sight this stands as the major force behind the arguments for ‘peaceful coexistence’. But reflection will show that as it is at present conceived of it gives no guarantee, even of a breathing space, since it means the continued possibility of a desperate gamble from one side or the other.

In fact there is only one safeguard—that is for the working-class movement to use its strength both in the capitalist countries and in the USSR.

Khrushchev offers no way out. He makes, and can make,

no call of this kind to the international working class because of his own internal position. And if he did it would cut no ice.

The safeguarding both of peace and of the USSR lies with the socialist and Labour movement bringing the working people into action. But this can be done only as part of a conscious battle for their own rights on terms which they can understand, not as expendable pawns of the Soviet leaders.

There is no easier way. banal assertions about coloured people’s dignity and excellence.

There are in this film isolated moments in which prejudice ‘is depicted with integrity. But having merely shown that racialism exists, the film as a whole simply states that it will take a long time to eradicate—and then, one gathers, through the individual efforts of ‘good’ men and women and the impartial operation of ‘justice’.

DECEPTION

At a time when a race murder has happened in our midst a film which sets out to explore this problem will have to go deeper than this to merit serious consideration.

For racialism is not the expression of an _ individual’s