Constant Reader Does K Read T?

WHENEVER Khrushchev says something more or less sensible, a little investigation often shows he is paraphrasing Trotsky. The latest example of this occurs in his remarks at Bucharest in reply to the dubious Leninism put out from China. In this case the ‘source’ could well be Trotsky’s article in the News ‘Chronicle of March 25, 1940, where he wrote: ‘By anticipation it is possible to establish the following law. The more countries in which the capitalist system is broken, the weaker will be the resistance offered by the ruling class in other countries, the less sharp a character the socialist revolution will assume, the less violent forms the proletarian dictatorship will have.’

This was in flat contradiction to Stalin’s 1937 doctrine that ‘the closer we are to socialism the more enemies we shall have’, that ‘as we march towards socialism class ‘war must grow sharper’, which Khrushchev repudiated in his 20th Congress secret-session speech but which apparently remains orthodoxy in Peking.

Khrushchev rightly claims that his rocket threat played a major role in stopping the Suez war in 1956. (He might have acknowledged the contribution made by American policy, too; and perhaps mentioned the demonstration in Whitehall, though this ought not to be seen out of proportion.) But why was it necessary, through holding back the Iraqi Communists in 1958-59, to offset by political means what had been gained by military means in 1956? Why are there still U2 bases in the Middle East? * What Tito Did John Archer’s argument that the political concessions made by the world Communist movement during the second world war, under Soviet direction, were not necessitated by the military alliance between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies is confirmed by what happened in Yugoslavia. For a long time the Soviet Government refused not merely to send help to Tito’s partisans but even to give them recognition, or at the very least to stop supporting the ‘Royal Yugoslav’ government of King Peter and General Mikhailovich, who collaborated with the invaders. The Soviet leaders urged the Yugoslav Communists to remove references to the Communist Party from their proclamations (including, on one occasion, the slogan: ‘Long live Comrade Stalin!’). The Tito policy of combining the national struggle with the class struggle was condemned as hurtful to ‘Allied unity’.

Yet in May, 1943, a military mission was sent to the Yugoslav partisan headquarters by Allied HQ, Middle East, and a limited amount of aid from that quarter began to come through to the partisans. The British imperialists needed the help the Yugoslavs could give them in connection with the campaign in Italy, and were prepared to go further than the Soviet leaders believed (or pretended to believe?), for the sake of getting this help. In the autumn of the same year, learning of the meeting to be held in Moscow between the foreign ministers of the Allied states, Tito warned the Soviet Government that the Yugoslavs would on no account recognize the ‘Royal’ . government; and what was in effect an independent Yugoslay government was set up by the partisans. This was treated by the Russians as a stab in the back, a spanner thrown into the works of Allied unity, etc. But no one in the West seemed terribly upset; and at last, in February, 1944, a Soviet military mission was sent to Tito— months after the British officers had begun working with him.

The Yugoslav ‘Communists called the bluff of both the Western imperialists and the Moscow bureaucrats during the second world war. By so doing they ensured both the national and the secial liberation of their people. A sorry contrast was provided by what happened in the same period in Greece, where the Communist Party blindly followed Stalin’s disastrous directives. There is an illuminating pamphlet in which the Greek experience is examined comparatively with that of Yugoslavia—How And Why The People’s Liberation Struggle of Greece Met With Defeat’, by S. Vukmanovic, published by the Yugoslav Embassy in London in 1950. Though the title is not exactly snappy by our standards, this little work is well worth asking for through the public library service.

Japan, Russia and Germany _ Gerry Healy made the point in these pages last week that events in Japan are of exceptional world importance because Japan is an imperialist country, and revolution there would therefore have especially deep repercussions. The Russia of 1917 was, of course, also an imperialist country, and one which had much in common with Japan—the interweaving of mediaeval relations with modern, the intimate connections with Asia, etc. Trotsky forecast that the first imperialist country to take the path of revolution as a result of the second world war would be Japan, and it looks as though his prophecy may now be in sight of coming true. _ There was a phase a few years after the war when it was official Stalinist doctrine that Japan, through having lost her colonies and being occupied by foreign troops, had ceased to be an imperialist country and become a colony. This was, of course, to provide ‘theoretical’ justification for some projected manoeuvre in Japanese politics. It was disturbingly reminiscent of the trend which appeared in Comintern policy in the 1920s to consider Germany as a ‘colonial country’ as a result of the Treaty of Versailles. Discussing certain moves made at the time of the French invasion of the Ruhr in 1923, a speaker at the Fifth Congress of the Comintern (1924) could comment that ‘Comrade Thalheimer appeared to base the tactical lines for the Communist Party on the assumption that all class contradictions had disappeared in Germany, and that in connection with the occupation of the Ruhr Germany had reverted to the economic primitivism of social conditions in Morocco’. Everyone knew that behind Thalheimer stood Radek and Bukharin, influential figures in the Soviet Communist Party who favoured a wager on the revenge-seeking element in the German capitalist class rather than on the German But in today’s very different conditions the most jingo sections in Japanese politics appear to be lined up with American imperialism, and room for wilful misunderstanding of the nature of the struggle in Japan is therefore much smaller.

In It .

It is to be hoped that current discussions about whether Marx has been proved wrong by recent history will lead to closer attention to what Marx actually wrote. other day a friend told me Marx said that the workers had nothing to lose but their chains— whereas, he triumphantly pointed out, the workers (or anyway, quite

a lot of them) have cars, houses, washing-machines, TV sets, etc.

Fortunately he was a reasonable type who agreed that the Communist Manifesto was originally written in German, and he could read that language. So I was able to JuLty 2, 1960 show him that the passage in question actually runs: ‘Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. In it the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.’

Which is not the same idea at all.

BRIAN PEARCE