[And Marx's very definitions: of communism and socialism…]

Scan page 10

And Marx's very definitions: of communism and socialism have been stood on their heads in efforts to rationalise the nationalistic policies, and actions of the bureaucracy, while the backward Soviet economy - for all its advances since 1917 - still lags painfully behind the developed economies in the West.

Workers in the Stalinist states are not so easily taken in by such propaganda: this is one reason why the bureaucrats dare not trust to their 'Marxist' ideology, but maintain a vast police/military apparatus to repress the working class, and a Party machinery which rests not on the revolutionary commitment of its members but upon the material privileges and power on offer to the holders of a 'Communist Party' card.

Hence in the 'Soviet Union', the soviets as organs of actual workers' democracy have not now operated for 60 years. And behind obscene professions of 'Marxist' orthodoxy, cynical bureaucrats use brute force where — as in East Germany 1953, Hungary 1956, Czechoslorakia 1968, and Poland, 1970, 1976. and 1980-1 — the working elass shoes sigos of asserting its independent strength.

Cliches

Just as the capitalists and imperialists use the once remolutionary banners of 'freedom' and democracy" to mask their brutal ensiaremenr of the mass of morkers and peasants to a lifetime of exploitation and porert, so generations of Stalinis: bureaucrais the world over have COmE Io uje the cliches of a neutered •Marxism' 10 corer their betrayal and containment of tbe international workers morement.

The retrieral of ine revolutionary spirit of Marx. Engels and Lenin is a task that now falls to Trotskyists in the struggle to build a new proletarian leadership capable of leading the overthrow of capitalist property relations in the West and the political overthrow of the degenerate Stalinist gangsters in the hideously deformed workers' states. IN A cruel twist of history, Stalinism ba not only misled thousands of militants into mistaking bureaucratic manipulation of the working class for 'Marxist leadership', police-state repression for working class self-discipline, but also given a new leasé of life to pre-Marxist Marx commented on the 'social deme crats' of the 1840s that they "want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and the dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements... By changes in the material conditions of existence, this of the working class.

A delay in revolution elsewhere created the conditions for the degeneration of the USSR; and that degeneration, in turn, led to a massive regression of the world workers' movement, and further delay for socialism.

In the Third World, the 'Marxism' of the Stalinist bureaucrats has been co-opted by bourgeois nationalists, who use it to channel the working class into the role of foot-soldiers for the construction Socialist Organiser is not just a paper. We fight to organise workers in the May Day in Petrograd, 1S By Martin Thomas of national state capitalisms.

Many of the ideological battles fough by Marx and Engels have to be fought over again - and under conditions where the opponent ideologies have powerful organisations and bureaucracies within the workers' movement.

But the laws of history are stronger than the bureaucratic apparatuses. And the heritage of defeat is being thrown off. Genuine Marxism is reviving in the workers' movement.

----- pull-quotes -----

Socia list Organiser Alliance Socialist Organiser Alliance Or