Lenin's Position Not So Clear

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that whoro the wnman can honoraine to tham durino JACK Johnson's letter (S089) finds a worthy successor in Geoff Robertson's (SO91). The only difference is that the latter is that much cruder.

It is necessary first to take up his amazing claim that Russia was 'the carrier of capitalist relations and the dominance of finance capital into the parts of the world which it dominated"

The Russian bourgeoisie was in fact so weak that it could not even develop capitalism in Russia, never mind anywhere else. In the opening chapter of his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky points out that "from time immemorial' foreign capital took the lead in developing Russian industry. It was precisely this combination of a weak Russian bourgeoisie with a strong working class icreated by foreign capitalist investment) which made the October Revolution possible.

It was for this reason that Trotsky in Lessons of October pointed out that if the February revolution had not been the prelude to the October revolution it would have 'thrown Russia back into a semi-colonial existence. " (My emphasis).

And if Robertson claims that the above quote refers to the Russian state, the Russian banking system, etc., rather than the Russian bourgeoisie itself, as the "carrier of capitalist relations", then his argument is even more invalid. For isn't it one of the characteristics of the Argentine state, the Argentine banking system etc., to do just that today? An analogy between Argentina and Russia thus becomes even more valid.

Robertson goes on to argue that 'when Indian capitalists buy a Swiss concern, they are not asserting national dominance over Switzerland or turning India into an imperialist power." This is true. But also utterly irrelevant. The Indian government does not have any territorial claims in Switzerland, nor does it organise military coups against the Swiss government, nor does it send military aid and advisors to a Swiss d'Aubuisson.

But Argentina does make territorial claims outside the borders of Argentina, it was involved in the recent coup in Bolivia, it does send support to the El Salvadorean junta, etc., etc.

Then Robertson serves up the following quote from Lenin to show what a muddlehead I am, unable to tell the difference between oppressor and oppressed nations, and no doubt Stork and butter as well: ''The world has been divided into a handful of usurer states and a vast majority of debtor states."

If this is the criterion for determining which countries are oppressor and which oppressed, then one arrives at some strange conclusions indeed. The Arab oil states, for example, amongst the leading creditor states in the world today, would be in the camp of the oppressor nations. Saudi Arabia, instead of being a feudal backwater, would be the world's leading imperialist power.

On the other hand, Tsarist Russia would have been an oppressed state, given that it was up to its ears in debt. And Britain could be classified as an oppressed country as well, because of its debts to the IMF, etc., and the fact that the majority of holdings in the City of London are no longer British.

Colony

(This is, of course, the essence of the Bennite claim that Britain is really a colony of American imperialism. How ironic that Robertson, strutting around as an oh-so-orthodox Leninist, falls in with the political arsenal of Bennite reformism).

I would not go so far as to call Lenin a muddlehead, as Robertson suggests 1 and episiotomies - cuts in should, but Lenin's writings on imperialism are certainly not as clear cut as Robertson makes them out, so that his simplistic approach can cope with them.

Stage For example, Lenin wanted to define imperialism as a stage in the development of capitalism, hence the title of his work, Imperialism - the Highest Stage of Capitalism. At the same time he (correctly) defined Russia as an imperialist state (although it was also a debtor state).

But Russia was a million miles from having reached "the highest stage of capitalism" . On the contrary, it was still clawing its way out of feudalism.

In conclusion I would just like to explain why Robertson's letter is steeped in Menshevism. The Mensheviks rejected the idea of proletarian revolution in 1917 on the grounds that Marx had written that position, when the monoproletarian revolution would occur first in the advanced capitalist countries (Germany, Britain, etc), whereas Russia was still in the first stages of capitalist development and therefore "unripe" for revolution.

Lenin criticised them for raising Marxism to a set of "supra-historical laws" for ossifying it into a dogma and thereby depriving it of any revolutionary content. Robertson follows the same approach as the Mensheviks. Oppressor and oppressed nations are raised to a set of suprahistorical categories unrelated to reality.

"The laws of history have nothing in common with a pedantic schematism" wrote Trotsky. And the pedantic schematism (oppressor nations there; oppressed nations over hereof Robertson has nothing in common with either reality or Trotskyism.

STAN CROOKE Glasgow being part of a mass movement seemed to overcome the widest differences at this stage." Surely however the differences about how the threat of nuclear war is to be averted are fundamental. We must not go along with the illusions of those who think the threat can be averted by peace conferences, disarmament, etc., whilst capitalism continues in existence.

The report concludes: "A tremendous ovation was given to Fenner Brockway... who proposed that next year, the conference should be held in Berlin and that we should organise a mass demonstration to coincide with it." But the utter bankruptcy of Lord Brockway's politics was already shown, before he entered the House of Lords but when his views were essentially the same, by Trotsky in the 1930s (see Trotsky's 'Writings' published by Pathfinder).

this is not the sort of lead we should be following.

DAVID HARRIS Amsterdam nappens ∞ we ишшь