Fairu tales about Russia

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'LEFT Press' this week looks at a paper which many Socialist Organiser readers will not know - 'Fighting Worker', a small sheet published in Detroit, USA, by a group called the Revolutionary It is a paper which should, in justice, make it to the text books of political pathology and sectarian boneheadedness. Supporting Solidarnosc, it responded to martial law in Poland in December 1981 with a front page headline opposing... US invasion of Poland!

One can learn many lessons from a study of its characteristics are frequently to be found in a less developed its characteristics are frequently to be found Workers' League. who are jailed' and such in a By Chris Health care? Minimal provision for the workers, luxury clinics for the bureaucrats .. and 'mental hospitals' for rebels and militants.

Official food prices are low -if there is any of what you want left after you have queued for an hour or more. Otherwise you have to pay higher prices on the black market. The bureaucrats have special shops, which carry goods completely unavailable to the workers.

The education system is brutally authoritarian. Access to higher education is dominated by the children of the bureaucracy. They have, in reality, massive educational privileges.

LEFT The USSR is not a basically healthy economy, slightly "impeded" and with a few political distortions. It does sufier crises. Its growth, especially since the 1970s, has not been specially fast in comparison to capitalist economies.

The bureaucratic management of the economy is probably as wasteful as the anarchy of the profit system in the West. The regime in the factories is brutal, close to slave labour: and the workers respond, of course, with sullen, passive resistance, which makes for low productivity.

The distribution of income is at least as unequal as in the West.

Not only the RWL's facts, but their whole approach is wrong. With the same method, they could easily - and with less violence to the facts - write a hymn of praise to social democracy in Scandinavia. Welfare services, labour protection laws, women's rights, civil liberties, high wages... what progress!

The method and criteria are those of socialism from above, in one country. The criteria of working class internationalist socialism are different.

Even if all the RWL's facts were right and workers' material standard of living in the USSR were much higher, that would tell us nothing about how the USSR stands in relation to the fight for a new mode of production.

Socialism is about the working. class appropriating all the material and cultural riches of society and moving to the free development of individuality a grouping, for less developed TO through the democratic, cooperative organisation of production.

In many ways the USSR is much further from socialism than those capitalist societies with strong labour movements and relatively developed welfare services and civil liberties. The working class is enslaved more brutally and totally. The savage, systematic and relentless repression of any stirrings of an independent labour movement in the Stalinist states means that DRESS the workers there are shackled as they have not been shackled anywhere under advanced nonfascist capitalism.

In respect of free speech, free assembly, freedom to organise - in other words, freedom to think and live as a class - the workers in the USSR are infinitely worse off even than workers in PATCO-busting Reagan's USA. For the RWL to tell US workers that this fact must be 'balanced' by low rents in the USSR is to give a completely wrong picture of what socialism is about.

The article is written in 'Easy Stories for Little Readers' style. But not only the facile style, but also the facile content, must repel any critical-minded US worker.

The US worker - like the British - values his or her individual freedoms. And rightly so. She is told by the media that those individual freedoms do not exist in the USSR, and that that is socialism.

We have to convince that US worker that the media are right about the barbarity of the Stalinist regime and wrong about that regime being socialism.

But the RWL skates round the issue of individual freedoms in the USSR - 'anti-communist propaganda', , they say reproachfully - and relies on a sickly appeal to the US worker to see the 'good side' of the Stalinist states.

The RWL would say that they are continuing Leon Trotsky's policy of "defending the Soviet Union". • They interpret 'defend' in the sense of 'justify, apologise Stoke. Contact: 328198. for, reject criticism ot' Trotsky did speak of 'defending the USSR' - but he meant something diametrically different by it.

In his book Revolution Betrayed' he did start by listing the achievements of the USSR in the way of industrialisation between 1917 and 1935. But he examined the official ciaims critically: and warned: 'The progressive role of the Soviet bureaucracy coincides with the period devoted to introducing into the Soviet Union the most important elements of capitalist technique. The rough work of borrowing, imitating, transplanting and grafting..

With five years' further facts to go on, he wrote in May 1940: ''The Moscow trials ... revealed that the totalitarian oligarchy has become an absolute obstacle in the path of the country's development. The rising level of the increasingly complex needs of economic life can no longer tolerate bureaucratic strangulation...

"Semi-starved workers and collective farmers among themselves whisper with hatred about the spendthrift caprices of rabid commissars..

In his "Transitional Programme' (1938), he wrote of • fascist countries, from which Stalin's political apparatus does not differ save in more unbridled savagery"

A somewhat different tone from the RWL - and that at a time when, unlike now, attempted military conquest of the USSR by capitalist states was an immediate issue.

Trotsky would no more have dreamed of justifying his 'defence of the USSR' by prettifying the condition of the working class under Stalinist rule than Marx of substantiating his argument about the progressive role of capitalism by claims that the workers did very well out of it.

Trotsky's idea was that despite the terrible bureaucratic counter-revolution, certain basic economic relations of nationalised property remained. The totalitarian terror regime prevented the progressive potential of those relations being realised, but still the relations should be defended.

In his later writings he insisted that Marxists must be very clear about what they defended in the USSR - the nationalised property, not the regime 'as a whole' _ and how - by class struggle, not by any let-up in criticism of the regime.

Trotskyists after World War 2, with the facts about the Stalinists' rapacity in Eastern Europe and the ten millions in slave-labour camps in the USSR before them, refined Trotsky's argument further. 'Defend the Soviet Union', they argued, was a misleading slogan: 'defend what remains of the conquests of the October 1917 revolution' was better.

They were right. In the name of defending Trotsky's slogan, the RWL are defending politics diametrically opposed to Trotsky's.

Paul Barnett, WALES AND WEI Bristol.

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