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joim the ORGANISER Party ORGANISER bunt Ву Нату WAGE-CUT. PLAN IHeffer ONE OF the strangest, saddest and most bizarre events among organisations calling themselves Trotskyist in recent years has seen the transformation of a arge section of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International [USFI] into more or less uncritical supporters of Castroism.

Whatever it was in the past, Castroism is today a variant of Stalinism, from any point of view you choose to look at it.

Cuba is ruled by a bureaucracy modelled on that of the Stalinist states. Freedom of the press and speech, to dissent and to organise a political opposition, the right to form independent [i.e. real] trade uniona and anti-Castroite, anti-Stalinist workers' parties — these rights do not exist.

It seems that Castro still has great popular support, but nevertheless the Castro group have created a totalitarian state in Cuba, completely dependent, because of US hostility, on subsidies from the Soviet Union.

It is this Stalinist Cuba he new Mecca of the American 'WP and those who follow its ead in the other sections of he USFI.

In the British Socialist League formerly the IMG], something nore than one-third of the irganisation has gone over to Scargill gets it right Get SOCIALIST Castro with a Sandinista leader Castro-Staliniam including people who have been in the organisation'e central leadership for more than a decade.

When you meet such people, who are outwardly rational, they tell you with shining eyes about Cuban democracy, where no labour movement independent of the state is allowed, and about 'free' elections in which there/ are no opposition candidates.

The SWP is no insignificant organisation. Founded in 1928 by James P. Cannon (who died in 1974] it was for long a leading force for unfalsified international Marxism. For decades its press educated generations of Marxists throughout the world.

Workers Review is published by a group of US Marxists, the inside NUM ATGWU Women •JOBLESS KEY TO Tebbit Kent's Stoma appeal -LL ORGANISER each week delivered to Proletarian Tasks Tendency. Its September 1003 issue comments on the present state of the SWP.

THE leadership of the Socialist Workers Party, under Jack Barnes, is actively engaged in the expulsion and suspension of all oppositionists within the SWP, and any members who have doucts as to whether members of the opposition should be expelled.

From an early position of critical support of the Castro leadership, including attacking the SW has no veg to a poition of unmitigated, and uncritical support of the present Cuban leadership.

Why do we call the SWP Stalinist? Let's take a look at what Stalinism is. Stalinist parties deal with opposition with organisational measures, rather than political debate. So does the SWP. Stalinists who have lost any hope of revolution in their own country become uncritical "cheerleaders"' of revolutions in other countries, the Soviet Union, Albania, etc., to the point of losing any perspective of mobilising their own working class for a revolutionary upsurge. So does the SWP.

Stalinists tailending the union bureaucracy, oppose the efforts of rank and file union militants to struggle for better contracts and union democracy. So does the SWP. Stalinist parties do not allow for factions and tendencies. In effect, neither does the SWP.

The liquidation and breakup of the SWP offers a new opportunity to reconstruct the Trotskyist movement in the United States. While Trotskyism is not a large force in the United States, it is the only path: the working class has between Stalinism and the pro-capitalist trade union leadership. Every effort to reconstruct and reunite the Trotskyist movement should be worked towards.