Constant Reader Peace Parade _

THE new project of the Soviet bureaucracy, acting through Ilya Ehrenburg, to convene a ‘non-official’ world conference for disarmament, at which the Stalinists and their fellow-travellers will sit down with pacifist notables like Bertrand Russell and Canon Collins, recalls the affair of the Amsterdam Anti-War Congress in the summer of 1932. It was first and foremost for protesting about this that the original British Left Oppositionists (“Trotskyists’) were expelled from the Communist Party.

From 1927 onward the Soviet Government had participated in the official ‘preparatory commission’ for the world disarmament conference, and then in the conference itself, its commissar Litvinov becoming famous for his speeches in favour of peace. In spite of all this, however, at the end of 1931 Japanese imperialism began its conquest of Manchuria and North China, and increasingly threatened the eastern frontiers of the Soviet Union—and the other imperialist powers made it all too plain that they would be far from displeased if war were to break out between Japan and the USSR.

The Trotskyists in this period, functioning as an opposition within’ the Communist Parties, called for a campaign to achieve a united front of all the workers’ parties, in each country separately to defeat the threat of fascism, and on the world scale to bar the road to imperialist war. This was rejected by the Stalinists with ultra-left arguments about ‘not shaking hands with the murderers of Rosa Luxemburg’, which in effect left the Social-Democratic workers in mental captivity to their traitor leaders. Then suddenly the Comintern, which refused to approach the other workers’ parties and the trade unions connected with them, appeared as the promoter of a world congress in which the leading role was assigned to various pacifists, some worthy and some not so worthy, from the world ef science and the arts, such as the writer Romain Rolland. This was a supreme evasion of the real need of the moment, and held the danger of fostering dangerous illusions about how to defend the Soviet Union and prevent imperialist war.

The Amsterdam Anti-War Congress made newspaper headlines for a little while, but the real social fo-c2s continued to unfold regardless of the speeches and manifestos at this masquerade. Japan went on absorbing China and massing armies on the Siberian border, and Hitler came to power in Germany. Within 18 months of the dispersal of the Amsterdam gathering it ceased to be mentioned in Stalinist propaganda, its utter bankruptcy having become too obvious and moves to replace the flirtation with French pacifists by an intrigue with the French general staff were already under way.

So it was, and so it will be. The social forces that matter decisively in the capitalist world are, on the one hand, the imperialist powers, and on the other, the working-class movement. In the last analysis Soviet diplomacy must choose’ between these two, whatever timewasting and confusion-creating rambles it may undertake among the pacifists in its efforts to find a third path after being rebuffed by the imperialists. Insofar as the working-class movement in the capitalist world displays strength, the workers of the Soviet Union will be helped to see where the real allies of their country in its struggle against imperialist war are to be found—and so to recognize the Soviet bureaucracy as the worst enemy of the defence of the Soviet Union.

Weapons Against World Capital Discussing recently with a pacifist friend whether the Soviet Union ought to scrap its nuclear weapons unilaterally, I turned up some notes on the development of poison gas research in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. In the inter-war period ‘chemical warfare’ played a similar part in propaganda against war to that which atom and H-bombs play today.

Writing in the Saturday Evening Post of May 26, 1934, on ‘The Red Army’, Trotsky mentioned that it was ‘no secret that the Soviet Government—incidentally together with the governments of the whole world—did not bank for a moment upon the reiterated intentions to outlaw chemical warfare. Ever since 1921 the first Soviet laboranl

Published by Socialist Labour League, 186 Clapham High St., London, SW4 Printed by Plough Press Ltd. (TU), r.o. 180 Clapham High St, London SW4 The death of Aneurin Bevan marks the passing of a man whom history may well record as the last of the genuine Social Democrats. Bevan passionately believed in the parliamentary road to socialism. Here was his. weakness as a working-class leader.

To Bevan the working class were a means of mass pressure for generating impulses of change favourable to this or that parliamentary political requirement. ‘To the . Marxists, the working class, consciously led by its revolutionary party, is itself the only real vehicle for social change.

‘It was this contradiction in Bevan’s life which con-— stantly shattered the illusions of Left wingers attracted to his political struggles. He was capable of arousing their hopes to the highest pitch on one day and dashing them to the ground the next.

Every time Bevan was required to call upon the working class to play its role in the transformation of society, he ran away. He was mortally frightened that the struggle of the class would get out of hand and upset: his conceptions of the parliamentary road to power.

It would be meaningless for Marxists to deny the importance of parliamentary activity in a country with as long a history of capitalist democracy as Britain. Moreover, the flexibility of the ruling class in its manipulations of the state and Parliament allowed Bevan scope for his undoubted oratorical talents which might well have earned him long years in jail in some other European countries.

Aneurin Bevan’s talents assumed a greatness that can find few parallels (apart from the historic days of the tories producing poison gases and other substances have functioned systematically upon the basis of an ever more extensive international information and with the assistance of qualified specialists. This work has never been halted for a single day.’

Trotsky knew a lot about this matter through having himself been Commissar for War between 1918 and 1925. When, at one of the notorious Moscow trials, an attempt was made to represent the secret collaboration between the Red Army and the German Army (which began in 1921 and continued until 1933) as a private conspiracy by Trotsky and his friends for factional purposes, Trotsky pointed out that it had been a decision approved by Lenin himself. In the New York Times of March 5, 1938, he wrote: ‘Vitally concerned to improve military technique, we could expect then co-operation only from Germany. At the same time the Reichswehr, deprived by the Versailles treaty of opportunities for development, especially in the fields of heavy artillery, aviation and chemical warfare, naturally aimed to make use of the Soviet military industry as a test field.” A number of German officers came to Russia—among them, by the way, there appears to have been a certain Speidel—and, ‘in turn, several representatives of the Red Army visited Germany, where they became acquainted with the Reichswehr and with those German military “secrets” which were graciously shown them.’

An interesting glimpse of this phase of Soviet military history is given in the autobiograhy of the scientist V. N. Ipatiev, ‘The Life of a Chemist’ (1946).

More Anti-Humbug The Daily Worker follows up its tears for Harry Pollitt with greetings to Eva Reckitt on her 70th birthday. In the interests of clean living, let us temper any sentiRegistered at the GPO as a mewspaper By G. HEALY Russian revolution) when they became a tribune for the real grievances of the working class. It was on occasions such as this that the ruling class feared Bevan.

He had the ability to hold tens of thousands of people spellbound, especially when he described the wicked injustices of the capitalist system and the little men who did its dirty work. His inside knowledge of the system and its inherent weaknesses made him a-man to be feared in ruling-class circles. Until the day he died they were never quite sure of where they stood with Bevan. They were always frightened lest the forces he was capable of unleashing got out of hand.

His weakness lay in the fact that whilst-he. was capable of arousing great emotional feelings, he was always frightened by the real power of the working class to change society. Long years in Parliament nad slowly but steadily undermined his relations with the class. He saw Parliament not as an instrument of the capitalist state, but as a means of changing society. It was here that he differed fundamentally from the Marxists.

The limitations of Parliament were acknowledged by The Times in its editorial on his death. ‘There have been plenty of British administrations’, wrote The. Times, ‘led by men without coherent political ideas.” True enough. Real power has never rested in Parliament but behind the scenes in the hands of the men of finance and property.

History is more and more verifying Marxism and rejecting the outworn social-democratic conceptions so sincerely held by Aneurin Bevan.

mentality over these two by recalling the case of Rose Cohen.

Rose was a devoted worker for the Communist Party and its associated organizations through many years, during which Pollitt and Eva Reckitt (who founded Collet’s Bookshops) were among her closest friends. She went to Russia to work, married and settled down there. In 1938 it was announced that she had been arrested for ‘counter-revolutionary activity’ and sentenced to 2 long term of imprisonment. Among those who conspicuously refrained from helping in the campaign to save her were Harry Pollitt and Eva Reckitt.

Let me quote, from the account of his own efforts in this affair given by Eva’s brother, Maurice Reckitt, in his book ‘As It Happened’ (1941), what he says about the reaction of some of Rose Cohen’s erstwhile comrades when asked to do something to help her in her ghastly predicament: ‘A few offered the lame pretext that it would be better for Rose if everyone kept silence; others added the barefaced assertion that Soviet justice could in any case be relied on (in fact Rose was kept in custody for more than a year before being permitted the privilege of sampling it). Others, again, still more scandalously asserted that no individual’s fate was of consequence if they came into conflict with the interests of the Soviet Union.’

This was, writes Reckitt, ‘literally the most shocking experience I have ever undergone, and made an impression on me which will never be wiped out.’ Unfortunately, he attributed the behaviour of those who let Rose Cohen down to the. effects upon them of ‘Communist ideology —an example of how Stalinism serves to discredit the ideas which it distorts, and provides ready-made arguments ‘against Communism’.

BRIAN PEARCE