SOCIALIST LABOUR

LEON TROTSKY ™ Three prefs. +s The Decline of Britain Is Mr. Baldwin and Gradualism Certain ‘Peculiarities’ of BRITAIN British Labour Leaders The Fabian ‘Theory’ ox GOING?

The Question of Revolutionary Force Two ‘Traditions:

PRICE: 7/6 17th-century Revolution and Chartism Publication date : erie ae Trade Unions and Bol186 Clapham High St., shevism S.W.4 LEAGUE - LONDON Mi Prospects Profitable sections of the industry—machine installations, coal distribution, etc.—are still privately owned. While miners are much better oii than in the old days, nevertheless they have no say in the running of the industry, which is geared to the needs of capitalism. This leaves the workers open to repeated attacks by the management, and a recession in the industry can undermine all the gains made since nationalization.

The Campaign to extend nationalization to the whole economy—under workers’ control—takes on flesh and blood when seen through the Upton strike.

Second. The permanent officials at Barnsley are hand in glove with the management against the men. In fact, many strikes in the pits are aimed more at the union officials than at the management. They are often the only way to get these officials to take up the men’s case.

It is clear that any militant movement in the pits will have to challenge the union leadership.

Third. Despite the failure on this occasion, this strike was a move in the right direction. The action of the Upton branch officials in offering to resign, and the setting up of a rank and file strike committee shows that miners are realising that a rea] fight is impossible within the framework of NUM officia machinery.

A new, important form of workers’ organization is springing up, which is bound to affect future struggles.

Fourth. Above all—the need for preparation. It is not enough to seek support in other pits once a strike has begun. The links must be created in advance. Militants in Upton must start now developing permanent contacts with rank and file militants all over the coalfields.

To refuse to do this because some militants were unable to get their pits to support them this time would play into the hands of Barnsley and the NCB.

The situation in the coalfields is still explosive. And the union bureaucrats are still sitting on the powder kegs.

eee erences annum. AA AE A CL Constant Reader Co-existence 1T may come as a surprise not only to Stalinists but also to others that there was a time when Trotsky was reproached by the Stalinists with. propagating the idea of ‘peaceful co-existence’ between: the Soviet Union and the capitalist world. This was in 1930, in a period when mass unemployment in the advanced capitalist ‘countries coincided with intense industrial construction in the Soviet Union (the first Five-Year Plan). ‘It was a period, too, when the politics of the Stalinised Communist Parties consisted merely of frenzied shouting about immediate revolution, coupled with adventuristic strikes and demonstrations which merely discredited the Communists and isolated them from the working class.

Trotsky, who in those days was stiil working, though already in exile, as the leader of an opposition within the Communist International, put forward in March, 1930, a plan to help the Communist movement break out of its isolation and find transitional slogans by fastening on to the universal demand for work and the widespread interest in what was happening in the Soviet Union. The workers’ organizations, particularly the trade unions, should be urged to draw up and popularize a comprehensive plan for economic collaboration between the capitalist countries and the Soviet Union. The right-wing social democrats then ruling in Britain and Germany would ‘find it more difficult to defend themselves from an agitation based on a concrete plan of economicaiiy advantageous collaboration with the Soviet Union than from the shrill outcries on the theme of “social-fascism”. . . . The whole essence of the campaign proposed by us lies in the fact that it can bind by a new and firm knot the need of the Soviet government for foreign products with the need of the unemployed for work, with the need of the proletariat for the alleviation of unemployment. . . . The political aim of the campaign is to attract to the side of the Soviet Union those workers who are at present indifferent to it or even hostile.” From the standpoint of the Soviet Union, the success of such a scheme as was outlined in Trotsky’s ‘World Unemployment and the Five-Year Plan’ would ensure the supply of agricultural machinery and manufactured goods which was needed to facilitate the collectivizing of agriculture, both technically and politically.

A few months later, in August, 1930, in connection with propaganda around the anniversary of the first world war and the need to defend the Soviet Union from imperialist attack, Trotsky pointed again to the value of a practical plan along the lines he had proposed: ‘The workers drawn into the campaign around this live and acute question of unemployment will, in the future also, come forward as the defenders of the USSR in the event of a war danger. Such methods of mobilization of the workers are far more substantial than the repetition of bald phrases about an imminent intervention.’ Looking back in April, 1931 (‘Problems of the Development of the USSR’), Trotsky regretfully reflected: ‘World unemployment made the question of developing the economic relations between the capitalist countries and the USSR a vital problem for broad masses of the working class. Before the Soviet Government and the Communist International there was opened up a rare opportunity to attract the social-democratic and non-narty workers on the basis of a vital and burning question. so as to acquaint them with the Soviet Five-Year Plan and with the advantages of the socialist methods of economy. Under the slogan of economic collaboration and armed with a concrete programme, the Communist vanguard could have led a far more genuine struggle against blockade and intervention than through the repetition of one and the same bare condemnations. The problem of planned European and world economy could have been raised ic «..j:recedented heights and in this manner could have given new nourishment to the slogans of the world revolut:on.’ _ Fe. the last time (so far as I know) Trotsky advanced what the Stalinists then called his ‘counter-revolutionary’ proposals in September, 1932, in connection with the striving in Germany for planned reconstruction of that country’s ruined economy, Jung 4, 1960 a striving which the Nazis were soon to harness, through the - failure of the Social-Democrats and Stalinist alike to anticipate them. ‘The incoherent and cowardly state-capitalistic projects of the social-democrats must be’ countered with a general plan for the joint socialist construction of the USSR and Germany... . . ‘The discussions about planned economy so widespread in Germany, reflecting the hopelessness of German capitalism, remain purely academic, bureaucratic, . lifelesspedantic. The Communist vanguard alone is capable of drawing the treatment of the question out of the charmed circle. The socialist construction is already in progress—to this work a bridge must be thrown over the state frontiers.’ (‘The Only Road’.) ”

King Street and the Bomb At our Denison House meeting on the Summit talks and . their aftermath, a speaker from the floor questioned my linking the Communist Party’s recent about-turn on unilateral nuclear disarmament with the breakdown of the summit talks. He pointed out that the new ‘line’ on the H-bomb was voiced by Gollan already in his May Day. speech.

1 may well have made my point a bit crudely, and it ceriainly deserves closer treatment. The changed attitude of the Communist Party came out even earlier than May Day itself —it was in the party executive committee’s May Day maniYesto, published in the Daily Worker of April 29 (‘the British Government should stop now the manufacture of nuclear weapons’). What is most interesting, though, is that there was no hint of it in the statement by Lauchlan, the party’s national ‘organizer, in the Daily Worker of April 22, only a week earlier, on the results of Aldermasion and preparations for May. Day.

‘At some moment, it would appear, during the last week - of April, somebody made up the Communist Party’s mind for it in the sense of declaring for Britain’s unilateral nuclear disarmament. Now let us turn to the Soviet Union: it was on.May 5 that Khrushchev made his historic declaration about the American spy-plane, which foreshadowed the collapse of the summit talks. He stated that the shooting down of the plane took place on May 1. The decision to do this and to make an issue of the matter was doubtless taken some days earlier, especially since he mentioned that a similar spy-plane had been observed but not attacked on April 9.

The sudden change of line of the British Communist Party may very likely be seen by future historians as one of the symptoms of a swing in the policy of the Soviet Government on summit talks, due to who-knows-what pushings and pullings inside the Soviet camp.

Anti-Humbug Department

For the attention of certain newly-baked fanatics for ‘the old traditions of Trotskyism’, herewith some remarks by James P. Cannon, founder of the Trotskyist movement outside the Soviet Union, which appeared in the New York weekly The Militant for June 11, 1932.

‘“TLeadership is a necessary condition for any common action”, says the resolution of the Third World Congress of the Comintern. This principle, which does not at all exclude rank-and-file control of the leadership, implies, however, a selection of persons for leading functions. And it has the same force whether the persons selected are professional leaders or rank-and-file workers elevated to leading positions or committees. In every organization and in every action the question arises at once and inescapably: who is going to lead? You can answer, this group or that group, this committee or another. But if you wish to be taken seriously, do not say the rank and file is going to lead the rank and file. And do not try to pass the problem off with a statement that the rank and file will control. That is not the same thing... .

‘Wiiat does democratic centralism mean?’ On the one hand it means democracy in the organization. On the other hand —as against the anarchistic and I.W.W. idea of “no leaders”— it means a recognition of the function of leadership. This leadership, in the Communist conception, is not some kind of a clerical staff or information bureau. It is invested with real function and powers, that is, it is given the possibility to lead... .’ BRIAN PEARCE.

: Toe NEWSLETTER Jung 4, 1960