Don't back disarmers

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• fighting in the Labour movement for lesbian I WANT to deal with the way that Stalinism has been dealt with in some recent articles in Socialist Organiser.

The Trotskyist movement was formed out of a struggle against Stalinism and so to be confused or wrong on Stalinism negates the very basis of our existence.

This is not to say that the reason for our existence is to fight Stalinism. We are here to overthrow capitalism. But only by understanding reformism and fighting it was it possible for the Bolsheviks to overthrow capitalism. Today, we have also to understand and fight Stalinism, the product of a later degeneration of the workers' movement.

Stan Crooke's articles in SO 149 and 150 on the peace movements in Eastern Europe show the wrong way to approach Stalinism. In fact they show the wrong way to approach any question - to deal with it as an abstraction.

Historical 'He separates it out from the overall world situation and from its historical context.

You cannot look at the peace movements in any country without first trying to understand the driving forces towards war.

The first and second world wars were imperialist wars. They were not fought because 'militarists' took control of society but because capitalists came into conflict over the control of world markets and set their armies to fight over them.

Where do Russia and East Europe fit into this?

The Russian Revolution was a great material gain for the working class and remains a great material gain, despite its later degeneration. It took Russia out of the control of the capitalist class. The drive for profit was ended and with it the drive to imperialist war.

Russia and later Eastern Europe do not have the same drive to control the world economy as do the imperialist states.

In their drive to rectify the falling rate of profit, the imperialists are driven to attempt to retake control over such countries as China.

The aggressive force, on a sorld scale, are the imperialist posers.

As Marxists we defend the Ezis Forkers have made and * a= defend the nationalised =get I the Soriet Union and Easter Europe from imperialist Richardson This, of course, does not mean we support the bureaucratic clique in power. Quite the opposite. We say that they are always endangering the property relations by their actions and specifically by the fact that they have usurped the power from the working class and have initiated their own dictatorship.

Through their actions they strengthen reaction internally and externally. By refusing to fight for world revolution they disconnect the Russian working class from the only force that can really assist them against the imperialists, that is the working class in the imperialist coun tries.

Because they wish to defend their own privileges the Eastern bureaucracies have their own methods of defending the nationalised property relations in those countries. diTomacy. Part of tholomacy* anen method is to use world developments to defend the status quo.

They sell arms to all kinds of reactionary regimes in order to curry favour with them and play them off against the major imperialist powers.

They provide arms and "advisers" to "progressive" nationalist forces who by the fact that they are fighting imperialism are attracted towards Russia.

The Russian bureaucracy only does this as a counterweight to the imperialists and thus to only a limited extent. They also drop allied regimes or forces for example, Arafat has been dropped because of their relationship with Syria.

This is why you often find the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and now Cuba backing "progressive" anti-imperialist forces and this, of course, makes for a complex world situation.

How does this bring us to where we are today?

There are often changes taking place between the Eastern bloc and the imperialist powers. It is not always just straight Cold War. Even the imperialist powers would prefer things to stay the same at particular times.

But the real contradictions within the world, based on the contradictions within the capitalist system keep breaking through.

In the early and mid-70s, there was a period of detente.

But under the surface the struggies continued and a major change took place with the victory of the Vietnamese terolution in May 1975.

This strengthened mass anti-imperialist struggles all over the world. It was followed by the victory in Angola against the Portuguese, that sparked the overthrow of the fascists in Portugal. Imperialism was reeling and received a whole series of defeats, culminating in Reversing Of course imperialism has not given up and so they set China against the Soviet Union and to try to set about isolating Russia again through the renewal of the Cold War. Through this process the US government planned to rebuild its internal strength to the point where the imperialists could start using their forces throughour the world again.

This Cold War led to the Sureaucracy defending itself in ise sat mar it sons hor. The is borders. the = Aftanian and the Unilateral nuclear disarmament in Russia would lay it open to imperialist attack. (Before Russia had the Bomb, Truman seriously considered a nuclear attack on China at the time of the Korean War).

Stan Crooke's arguments can only be read as supporting unilateralism in Russia.

But more than this he backs up the unofficial peace movements' demands that in opposition to military service there be "community peace service" He attacks the East German government because they 'have not responded to such a proposal."

This means disarming East Germany altogether. He even opposes war toys.

What is more, he argues that we must show these independent peace movements that their real allies "are not warexistence) we defend these movements' rights to exist and express their opinions.

Obviously many people will have been driven to support their ideas by bureaucratic actions such as the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and because of attempts to destroy Solidarnosc in Poland.

In this, solidarity with their right to exist we would hope to influence them to the view that the task is the overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucracy.

Our attitude to Solidarnosc is something quite different. It has a progressive direction and a mass base. Despite the confused ideas of some of its leaders, it was on the verge of overthrowing the bureaucracy.

The real attitude of the right to Solidarnose was that they tried to make anti-communist Get The USSR's tanks in Czechoslovakia propaganda out of it while at the same time they called on the banks to bail out the regime. The church stifled the movement.

In our attitudes to opposition movements we have to push them in the direction of overthrowing the bureaucracy and defence of the nationalised property relations.

Stan Crooke pushes them in the opposite direction.

In his classic work, "Revolution Betrayed" , written after he called for a political revolution to overthrow the bureaucracy, Trotsky argues what kind of army, i.e. one based on a militia, was necessary. I could understand it Stan Crooke was arguing against the bureaucratic control of the army, but not disarmament.

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about reversing this process. This included moves to play off