Yes! Defend Argentina!

Scan page 13

Turkish nationalist figurehead Kemal Ataturk Togliatti and a leader of the F floor and said he had an impo According to documents furni had been a Rumanian spy sin Kun, everyone was aware of socialism, only an hour bef shaking his hand. Yet not or asked for further information. Outside the building, a car fro Bela Kun, who was never seen a I want to cite the exampli tives. They had asked president, and they used stror something to make the repr "we'll murder that counterre' head of the NKVD.

The president of the Comir have no power to do anything the NKVD".

The Bulgarians did not su killed them like rabbits.

Yugoslavs, Poles, Lithuani:

• The Korean section was i india had disappeared, the rep had been arrested.. . the revo system of terror and horror, ridiculed in the name of a executioners still had the effror Leopo expected from his Nazi captors as he worked on his defence.

The trial began in Leipzig on 21 September 1933 with the eyes of much of the world watching. The Nazis hoped to use the trial to brand the communists as terroristic enemies of democracy: but Dimitrov's brilliant defence strategy soon made this aim blow up in their faces.

They tried so hard to convict Dimitrov of conspiracy but his courageous stand against them succeeded in convicting them.

One by one the top Nazi bosses like Goering and Goebbels strutted in to the court room to speak their rehearsed testimonies against Dimitroy and one by one they were exposed as liars by the logic of Dimitrov's As he began to bring out the real purpose of the Reichstag fire, that of providing a pretext for the destruction of Ger: nan French CP. Manuilski took the urtant announcement to make. shed by the NKVD, Bela Kun ice 1921. Everyone knew Bela his devotion to the cause of ore, they had been warmly ne of them protested or even • The meeting was adjourned. om the NKVD was waiting for e of the Bulgarían representang language: eg annie. It you dont do ession stop, " they told him, volutionary, Ejov" ". Ejov was ntern left them no illusions. "1 , everything is in the hands of Icceed in killing Ejov, but he ans Czechs - all disappeared decimated, the delegates from resentatives of the Chinese CP lution had degenerated into a the ideals of socialism were fossilised dogma which the ¡tery to call Marxism." old Trepper, "The Great Game' The view of Stalin towards a united front was not really a united front of workers' parties but the class collaboration with 'progressive' sections of capitalists in the form of the Popular Dimitrov' speech to the 7th and last Comintern congress in Moscow in 1935 referred to the need for la broad popular anti-fascist front on the basis of the proletarian united front.' Although sounding similar to each other united fronts and popular fronts are quite different things with quite different practical consequences.

The united front means unity in action of the working class organisations in order to achieve common aims. It can be positive insofar as it provides a living arena for revolutionary activity in the struggle against, say, fascism.

Thus Trotsky advocateti a united front between the Communist Party and the Stalin pact (with a battalion of the International Brigade named after him) then he opposed the "Imperialist War" of 1939 to June 1941 until following Hitler's invasion of the USSR' it was renamed the "Great Patriotic Democratic Anti-fascist War" of June 1941 to May 1945.

In other words Dimitrov zig zagged exactly according to the requirements of the Soviet leadership. In 1943 Stalin dissolved the Comintern as a sop to Churchill and Roosevelt whom he needed as allies during World War Two. Dimitrov was out of a job.

The last years of Dimitrov's life saw him as Prime Minister of the People's Republic of Bulgaria (when it suited Stalin to socialize that country's economy in response to the cold warmongering of the US Marshall Plan). In this posi tion Dimitrov was beginning to display some revolutionary independence again when he spoke of the need for a Balkan Federation and was possibly discussing this with Tito.

Stalin attacked him for this and his talk of including a Communist Greece in a Balkan Socialist Federation. (This was particularly irritating to Stalin as Greece was an area he had agreed to hand over to British 'influence' and he'd specifically observed this by allowing the British army to crush the Greek Kapitano Communist partisans in 1945/7).

However, Dimitrov was too deeply a part of the Stalinist monolith to seriousđid not have the indepen- challenge his master and dent power base in terms of solid party apparatus which Tito had in revolutionary Yugoslavia.

After falling ill in carly 1949 he was sent to a Soviet Sanatorium where he died on July 2. Stan Crooke's letter (SO88) spills the beans. Now Argentina has been put into the same category as Tsarist Russia, after the previous parallels (SO82 letter by J. Connell) with Czechoslovakia.

Therefore, he concludes, we do not have to support Argentina - even if it were invaded by imperialist forces!

Trotsky and Lenin did not hesitate to call Tsarist Russia and Czechoslovakia imperialist. But now confusionists, trying to cover themselves, come up with a fig leaf term "sub-imperialism"!

Where and how does Argentina export capital? And what does "sub-imperialism" mean scientifically? Is it a new phenomenon superceding Lenin's thesis on imperialism? We have no answer so far.

More thoughtful arguments are presented by Martin Thomas in SO87: "Argentina is now on a level with countries like Portugal, Greece or Turkey."

Strategy

He informed us that in 1969 foreign capital owned 60% of the 160 biggest industrial companies which controlled 32% of industrial production."

After the Second World War, imperialism developed a new strategy towards the countries like Turkey OI Argentina. Direct exploitation of these countries was replaced (as a concession to bourgeois nationalism like Kemalism, Peronism, etc with new economic relations which we might call "import substitution"

Imperialist capital began to involve the indigenous bourgeoisie in their investments, sharing out the fruits of the exploitation of the toiling masses.

The majority of these investments consist producing goods for the internal market - where previously these goods were imported by these countries.

Stan Crooke might be fool enough to believe (and doing so disbelieve the theory of permanent revolution) that these underdeveloped countries have secured their economic independence from imperialism (and themselves become But imperialism has been clever enough to ensure over the last decades that these countries are in fact further subordinated to the interests of imperialist capital Subordination Military dictatorships in Latin America and the 1980 military coup in Turkey followed by subsequent implementation of the économic measures of the IMF offer living examples of the way in which the toiling masses in these countries (unlike Stan Crooke's) have paid the price of this subordination with their blood and flesh.

The actions of the military regime in Argentina may be difficult to understand; but it is equally hard to understand, for example, the 1960 military regime in Turkey. This regime drafted a constitution which allowed trade unions to organise, the right to strike, freedom of expression, etc.

The working class went beyond these formal concessions, to establish its major class organisations such as DISK, the Turkish Labour Party, etc., in the mid-'60s.

Trotsky explained these dialectical relations as follows:

"In the industrially backward countries foreign capital plays a decisive role. Hence the relative weakness of the national bourgeoisie in relation to the national proletariat. This creates special conditions of state power (...) Actually it can govern either by making itself the instrument of foreign capitalism and holding the proletariat in the chains of a police dictatorship or by manoeuvring with the proletariat and even going so far as to make concessions to it, thus gaining the possibility of a certain freedom toward the foreign capitalists."

A victory of Britain over Argentina would certainly guarantee the first one of these options, but a defeat of British imperialism by Argentina would create the possibilities, for the Argentinian working class repeat what the Turkish working class did in the 1960s.

In my view, to abstain in between these options would be the biggest error for the revolutionary Marxist in the present period.

JACK JOHNSON London

Scan page 14

Socialist Organiser, Thursday 17 June 1982 Page 14