Growth Stalinism traced

science with the class struggle of the working class, enabling the workers to destroy the state power of the capitalists and establish the dictatorship of the working class - that is the essential task of our epoch.

It can be accomplished, as it was by the Bolshevik Party in Russia, only by a revolutionary party devoted to the struggle for power through every aspect of the experience of the workers, and developing Marxist theory through this struggle.

For such a party to be constructed in Britain requires a bitter fight against the built-in agencies of capitalist ideology in the labour movement, especially strong in Britain because of the historical priority of British capitalism and the long pre-eminence of British imperialism.

the 1920s began as little more than an amalgamation of the propagandistic sects already existing. The elements who came in from the militant shop stewárds' movement which had grown up during the First World War, such as William Gallacher, became victims • of New pamphlet reviewed by CLIFF SLAUGHTE Later, when numbers of those associated with the Opposition in earlier stages went back to Stalin, Trotsky wrote:

•.. the great majority of the capitulators (to Stalin)

were not sure and firm in the Chinese and the Anglo-Russian question. That is very characteristic!..:

Trotsky refers here to the glo-Russian Committee:

•... a joint committee of the British and Soviet TUC General Councils formed in 1925 to promote world trade union unity in general and closer relations between British and Soviet trade unions in particular, for the common cause of Labour' Pearce shows how the alleged 'pro-Soviet' sympathies of the TUC 'lefts' on this committee led the Communist Party to accept them as left allies and to foster illusions about them in the working class, which proved fatal. The Communist Party leadership had been brought to this position only as part of their joining, in 1925 and 1926, the side of Stalin against Trotsky in the International.

Middle-class commentators, so typıcal ot the left-wing' journalistic world, invariably see Stalinism as the natural successor to Leninism. They like to identify the bureaucratic centralism of Stalinism with the discipline and firmness principle which characterised™ the Party of Lenin. This is why they find it necessary to portray the history of the British Communist Party without analysing the life-and-death struggle between Stalinism and Bolshevism, led by Trotsky.

Zinoviev and Stalin saw the Anglo-Russian Committee as a substitute for the revolutionary party, and it was precisely this point at which Trotsky hammered. From the beginning of 1925 to the latter part of 1927, Stalin and his factior in the leadership of the Comintern acted on the basis of a perspective of capitalist stabilisation, with revolutionary actions by the proletariat ruled out.

Under these circumstances, said Stalin, 'the workers' confidence in our State'-and not the mobilisation of the masses on the road to power-was 'the fundamental antidote to imperialism and its interventionist machinations' With this perspective, it became a priority to encourage those in positions of influence in the labour movement to PAMP of the create a buffer between imperialism and the Soviet state.

If the independent mobilisation of the class behind revolutionary leadership, requiring exposure of all opportunists, offended these elements, then such independent mobilisation must not take place. Indeed it would be condemned as 'adventurism' In this way the British workers were handed over to the traitors of the General Council, and the Chinese Communists to the tender mercies of Chiang Kai-shek and his gangsters in Shanghai.

Pearce's invaluable work shows_that Trotsky had consistently fought for an alternative. This is why the British CP, / when it finally brought out an edition of Trotsky's 'Where is Britain Going' (after the General Strike), omitted the preface written by Trotsky to the American edition in May 1925.