Are we sectarian to criticise Castro?

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JACK BARNES is National Secretary of the Socialist Workers' Party of the US - once the key organisation supporting the politics of Leon Trotsky, supporting his fight to build a new revolttionary international that would uphold the principles and programme of Marxism against the Stalinist bureaucracy that had risen to the head of the degenerated 'Communist' International, and (in the initial post-war period) a maior comnonent of the formed the view that this struggle was unnecessary.

He and the SWP leadership have drawn the conclusion that Cuba is a healthy workers' state - and that in Nicaragua and Grenada there are workers' and farmers' governments. The leaderships in each case, they conclude, are revolutionary leaderships - in the case of Cuba, "proletarian internationalists'.

In consequence of this, those Trotskyists who are critical of these regimes, and fight for direct workers' rule through workers' councils, must be condemned as 'sectarians' with no understanding of the real' world.

The way forward for Barnes is not through the development of Trotskyist parties: and -since governments are involved - the SWP rejects any notion of recruiting their new-found comrades to the banner of the Trotskyist international. But if the mountain won't come to Mahomet, Mahomet must go to the mountain; so Barnes gamely declares the SWP's availability for fusion, discussion collaboration' with Castro and co in some new regroupment.

As his speech reported on this page points out, Barnes writes off those Trotskyists who reject this course. Singling out Socialist Organiser for special mention, he describes 80-90% of Trotskyists as "hopeless, irreformable sectarians" . Barnes also tries to discredit Trotskyism in general by throwing in a parallel reference to Gerry Healy's totally degenerated WorkLIm Advertisement i An analysıs of the polnical evolution of the American SWP MUPE Mas SociNisT IdEViEW 70p plus postage from WSL, PO Box 135, London N1 ODD. after the death of Trotsky. By Harry ism', he tells us, was an invention of Stalin - designed to mask Stalin's own opposition to Lenin's politics.

But the whole matter is reduced in this way to an ideological debate between two individuals. What was really at stake was the struggle against the bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian Revolution, and against the subsequent misleadership and sabotage of revolution on a world scale by the Stalinist-led Communist International.

Liquidated The Trotskyist opposition was the material challenge to this -brutally liquidated wherever possible by the secret police of Stalin and his heirs, but constantly reemerging as a threat because it represents the independent revolutionary strength of the international working class.

Trotskyists are critical of Castro precisely because however "left' his rhetoric, the Cuban regime does not rest on independent workers' councils or soviets on the pattern of the October Revolution: rather - with huge economic subsidies from the Kremlin - it has consolidated itself as a privileged, unaccountable bureaucracy above the working class.

This is not a 'model' of the type of revolution Marxists Lenin: The April Theses that we have to go through using the mixed economy the SWP's Intercontinental Press', 19.11.79)

Castro with Grenada's Bishop should fight for: it is a model for left-talking - and possibly less repressive - replicas of the bureaucratic regimes of the Stalinist countries. And it is a 'model' which also depends upon the largesse of the Kremlin leaders.

By seeking to turn back the clock, and to focus study on the works of Lenin - all completed before the emergence of Stalinism as a virulent counter-revolutionary force in the workers' movement - Barnes is disarming Marxists in the face of Stalinism, and reducing Trotskyism from a life and death struggle to a set of rich political writings', the kernet of which, Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, is according to Barnes "not correct and not useful".

Central to permanent revolution is the insistence that the working class needs its own revolutionary political leadership, programme and perspective if it is to lead the peasant masses in the underdeveloped countries beyond national liberation and democratic demands to the completion of the socialist revolution.

Barnes does not agree: he feels that a leadership sponsored by the Kremlin bureaucracy, and "model' based on Stalinist regimes, are adequate for the -working class. This is why he belittles Trotsky and attacks his theory.

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Trotskyism or Castroism?

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