When the workers of Poland's Baltic ports ose in December 1970, their action and their demands highlighted, with brutal clarity. the truth of the bureaucratic regimes of Easter Europe. A quarter of a century after capitalism had been overthrown and the communist party had taken power, the industrial proletariat rose en masse in Gdansk, Gdynia and Szczecin to burn party and trade-union headquarters and confront the "people's" militia and police. Their first objectives: an end to hunger; an end to cold (in one of Europe's major coal-producing countries the workers could not afford to heat their homes); the right to speak; an end to lies in the press and in party circles, Three hundred of those workers died, even by official figures, in the repression that followed. And although they toppled Gomulka, his successors have still not met their demands-nor will they be able to do so. FROM CLANDESTINITY TO STATE POWER At the outbreak of World War Two, the revolutionary forces throughout Eastern Europe could hardly have been weaker or in greater disarray. Where communist parties existed at all, they barely maintained a tenuous clandestine life (the anti-Stalinist left had no organized presence whatever). The Polish C.P. never very significant, had actually been dissolved by the Comintern in 1938 and its exiled leaders murdered. The Hungarian party had been virtually eliminated from Hungary itself after the defeat of the Commune in 1919, and its exiled leadership too was decimated in Stalin's purges. The Bulgarian party, strong in the carly twenties, was severely defeated in 1923 and driven underground entirely in 1934; it did, however, maintain a certain clandestine presence, and played a resistance role-though not a decisive one-during the war. The Yugoslav party, also strong in the first years after its foundation, from 1919-21, was savagely repressed thereafter, and its exiled leadership once again was almost totally destroyed in the purges it did, however, continue to exist as a clandestine force within the country and was to emerge as the leading force of a successful mass liberation struggle during the war. Albania did not yet have a communist party at all-it was only to be founded in 1941. The Rumanian party was quite insignificant, and there ized force inside Rumania itself. The Czechoslovak party alone enjoyed a legal existence for most of the inter-war period, and remained a mass party; but it was driven underground by the German occupation of 1938 and early 1939, and then paralysed by the MolotovRibbentrop pact. Thus by September 1939, nowhere in Eastern Europe was there a legal. communist party, and only in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Yugosiavia was there even a clandestine organization of any significance. By 1945, the situation could hardly have bee more dramatically different. In Yugoslavia and Albania the communist parties had led partisan wars which had liberated large areas of the two countries, held down important German forces, and won the mass of the population to socialist objectives. In Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and to some extent Poland, communist parties had played significant roles in anti-Nazi resistance and thus won a considerable social and political base; in the case of Czechoslovakia, the previous mass character of the party combined with this resistance role to give it the greatest proportional working-class following ever enjoyed by a communist party in a capitalist country. In Rumania, Hungary and the Russian-occupied zone of Germany. communist party leaders arrived in the wake of the Red Army and were given key positions of power. Above all, throughout Eastern Europe the presence of Russian troops and the terms of the Yalta agreement meant that bourgeois forces were effectively impotent (only in Czechoslovakia were they indeed even really to attempt a fight to hold onto power). TRANSITIONAL SOCIETIES By 1949 the means of production had been nationalized throughout East Europe, and communist parties were everywhere directly in power. It was now clear that none of the countries of the area could any longer be capitalist. But of course they were very far from being socialist. It is a theoretical heritage of Stalin's "socialism in one country" to equate socialism with nation- social and political convulsions which are endealization of the means of production. Socialism means first of all a classless society: even the most fully democratic workers' state does not constitute a socialist society. A classless society requires not only the suppression of private ownership of the means of production (as has already been achieved in the existing deformed workers' states), but also a level of development of the forces of production possible only on a world scale-that would enable commodity production, money and the state (the workers' state) to wither away. While the working class is able to overthrow capitalism in one country, it cannot build socialism in one country, or one section of the world. The societies which it establishes are societies in transition from capitalism to socialism. It was a transitional society that was created by the victory of the October revolution, and will be a transitional society that is installed in the aftermath of revolution here in Britain, Thus, no longer capitalist, the states of East Europe after 1949 embarked on whatgiven imperialist world domination, direct plunder of their resources by the Soviet Union, and their relative economic backwardness combined with political shackling of the working class and bureaucratic mis-management by a parasitical and repressive ruling stratum of privileged funetionaries-was bound to be an extremely longdrawn out process of transition to socialism; a transition whose accomplishment was in any case ultimately impossible within the national confines of the countries in question. The Fourth International, at its 1951 Third World Congress, after a crucially important discussion during the preceding three years, designated the countries of East Europe as deformed workers states. The designation first of the Soviet Union, and subsequently of the thirteen other countries where capitalism has been overthrown, as deformed workers' states has stood the scientific test of history, insofar as it has provided the sole theoretical elaboration on the basis of which it has been possible to construct and conduct a revolutionary political practicenot only towards and within the workers' states themselves but on a world scale. However, the term also contains a crucial ambiguity: while the state for Marxists, is always and everywhere an instrument of the power and domination of one class over other classes in society, what characterizes deformed workers states is precisely the political expropriation of their "ruling class"-the proletariat. This contradiction is the root cause of the particular instability of bureaucratic rule - its vulnerability to the violent mic to it, its oscillations between "left" and "right" policies on both domestic and foreign fronts, its ideological somersaults, ete. The transition from capitalism to socialism has turned out not to be in any sense a peaceful process of cumulative economic growth and consolidation of new social forces and structures. The very con- For 1968 was a turning-point in East as trary has been the case. The experience of East Europe during the past twenty-five years is just one illustration of this. Although over-all advances have been made in industrialization throughout the area, with growth rates which have intermittently compared favourably with the advanced capitalist countries, Japan excepted, even the crude economic record, when looked at closely, is an extremely unhappy one. And of course the incapacity of the bureaucratic regimes of East Europe to develop their countries' economies successfully is a further cause and effect alike of their social and political deformations and vulnerability.
When we turn to the political apparatus of these countries, we see reflected in the nature of the ruling bureaucracy the contradictory nature of the state in the existing transitional SUCCLICS This bureaucracy is compelled to defend the heritage of the social revolutionsocial ownership of the means of productionagainst both the penetration of foreign capital and the growth of private capital domestically, even where these are Frankenstein monsters of its own creation. For it is on the maintenance of that social ownership of the means of production that its own social position and privileges depend. At the same time, the condition for the bureaucracy to maintain its rule is the continued total political passivity of the proletariat. It jealously defends its political monopoly, and moves swif:ly against forces that threaten this-both inside and outside its national boundaries (witness the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia). But its stability is always a precarious onehence the violence of its repressive apparatus. Whenever there is any mass movement against it, there are immediate and widespread repercussions within its own ranks. The inability of this party and state bureaucracy to solve the economic and political problems which confront it has led to a series of events over the past four years which signal that what is on the agenda in East Europe is not some "restoration of capitalism" but the re-entry of the proletariat onto the political stage and the beginning of the end of bureaucratic rule. So long as the working class in the countries of East Europe identifies its state with the bureaucracy that has usurped it, the bureaucracy will be able to buy time. Now, clearly, that time is running short.
FAKE CALM SHATTERED much as in West Europe, and the past four years have seen a continuous escalation of class struggle in the area in sharp contrast
N Russian tanks in Prague put paid once and for all to the theory of "enolution of the to the seeming calm of the preceding decade.
After Stalin's death in 1953, the stability of the East European regimes appeared for a time to hang in the balance. But Russian tanks put down the Berlin workers' rising of 1953 and the Budapest rising of 1956, and the threat of them was a powerful weapon in the hands of the Polish bureaucracy in containing its own internal crisis in the same year of 1956. At the same time, the Stalinist old guard was replaced at the top of the Polish and Hungarian parties (in Czechoslovakia all potential replacement leaders had been killed in the trials of 1950-54; in East Germany the situation was too exposed in the Dulles era-to permit any breach in party unity). By the end of 1956 a new equilibrium had been achieved by the ruling bureaucracies in East Europe which was to last for twelve years (with the exception of the elimination of Rankovic in 1966, no East European regime was to undergo an internal crisis throughout that period).
If the events of 1953-6 were to encourage spontaneist illusions of a mass upsurge that would simply sweep away the bureaucratic regimes and install workers' democracy-illusions developed most clearly in certain mythological exaggerations of the significance of the Budapest workers' councils- the following decade was to encourage evolutionist illusions in the capacity of the bureaucracies for selfregeneration, and defeatist illusions that revolutionary activity outside the ruling parties was impossible. The only consistently revolutionary perspective vis-a-vis the bureaucratic regimes was that based on the complex of inter-related theoretical and practical principles first elaborated in Trotsky's writings from 1933 on and notably in the programme of the Fourth International-principles which have underpinned the latter's analysis of the bureaucracies and its strategy towards and within them ever since. The most important are:
1. the rejection of the idea that Stalin1sm, and the bureaucratic regimes installed by Communist parties in power, were the inevitable result of the victory of the revolution in backward countries do minated by scarcity:
2. the rejection of the idea that the bureaucratic regimes would be gradually liberalized' or 'de-Stalinized" by the ruling strata themselves (or sections of them) under pressure from the masses, economic progress, etc..
3. the rejection of the idea that the parties of the Third International could be regenerated by revolutionaries working within them;
4. the rejection of the idea that the anti-bureaucratic struggle in the USSR, and subsequently the other workers' states, could be waged in isolation from the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggle in the rest of the world.
The four-fold basis of the F. I. position was that a political counter-revolution had taken place in the USSR; that a political revolution was required to re-establish (or establish properly for the first time) Soviet democracy; that a new revolutionary party was required both to lead the struggle for the political revolution and to lead the struggle for socialism after the political revolution; and that the revolutionary struggie, in the epoch of imperialism, is necessarily world-wide-socialism could not be built in one country after the political revolution any more than it can without it. It is important to be clear about these positions, since they constitute not only the correct basis for analysis of, and strategy in, the USSR and the bureaucracies, but also the fundamental point of disagreement with those who are defeatist-characterizing the bureaucracies as inevitable products of their history-,opport unist - looking for change only from the hands of the ruling cliques -, or spontaneist-expressing a "faith in the masses" which in practice means simple passivity.
THE 1968 WATERSHED Since 1968 events in East Europe have borne out the above positions with a vengeance. They have demonstrated the actuality of the political revolution; the way in which "liberalization" unleashes forces which escape the bureaucracy's control and threaten its power; the blind alley of attempts to develop oppositional positions within the ruling parties; the huge potential of working-class combativity and at the same time its ultimate powerlessness in the absence of revolutionary leadership; the emergence of the first nuclei of organized revolutionary opposition to the regimes-nuclei which consciously identify both with the Bolsheviks who made the October Revolution and with the revolutionary vanguards leading the fight to overthrow capitalism and imperialism in the rest of the world. The three fundamental elements in the new situation in East Europe are the impasse of the bureaucratic regimes, the growing militancy and political consciousness of the working-class and the beginnings of the formation of new revolutionary vanguards.
IMPASSE OF THE BUREAUCRACY During the Stalin era apologists for the bureaucracies-hardly able to defend their political order-expatiated rather on their economic and social achievements. In Khruschev's day, they added a pious faith in the political perspectives opened up by "de-Stalinization". Now, all these heady claims ring equally hollow. On the economic front, the bureaucracies were capable of presiding over basic industrialization and "primitive socialist accumulation" -by dint of a repressive organization of production, imposed norms and quotas, and at the expense of the living standards of the masses. But this first phase once completed, the bureaucracy finds itself in an impasse. Whether it clings to some modified version of "administrative" planning or whether it extols "market socialism", its economic performance proves to be meagre and unbalanced. On the one hand, the Novotny years in Czechoslovakia were years of economic stagnation. At the other extreme, the period since Yugoslavia's 1961 and 1965 "liberalizations" of the economy has seen the country slip from the world's fastest growth rate in 1952-60 to a rate below the world average and little different from that of pre-war Yugoslavia (nottospeak of some million workers exported to work in capitalist West Europe and half a million unemployed inside the country even by official figures). On the social front, "liberalization" meansthat increased economic inequality is reflected in the growth of private medicine, a market in housing, and educational stratification. The shortages which have persisted in all the social servicesduring the period of administrative planning are now compounded by the adoption of criteria of profitability in the economy as a whole.
As for the perspectives for political evolution of the bureaucracies" the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia made clear that they are gloomy indeed. Under very considerable mass pressure, the Dubcek regime had decided to carry through certain fundamental political reforms. The projected new party constitution established the right of tendency, and legalized revolutionary organisations independent of the party. Censorship and centralized control of the media had been virtually aholished and the beginnings of workers" control were appearing in the factories. These reforms meant The end of the enforced political passivitv of the revolutionary activity. This-and not some imaginary danger of the restoration of capitalismwas the motive for the Russian invasion, and indeed for the complicity in that invasion by a wing of the Czech bureaucracy. It offers, too, the explanation for the subsequent course of events. It was popular militancy organized at the factory level against the invasion that forced upon the Russians a change of tactics: instead of installing those who had invited them in power, they were forced to turn back to the liberal wing of the party in order to diffuse the mass revolt. Furthermore, the abject capitulation of the Dubcek leadership in the face of the invasion made clear both where its true interests lay when forced to choose between the Kremlin and the Czechoslovak masses, and why it is that genuine militants in the communist party were compelled to recognize that any revolutionary opposition in the future could only be organized outside the party-(as Jiri Pelikan makes clear in his interview New Left Review 71).
That is why today they are either in exile or in Czech prisons together withother militants.
PROLETARIAN RESURGENCE
The impasse of the bureaucratic regimes on economic, social and political frontsalike coincides with a qualitative change in the degree of militancy and the political consciousness of the East European proletariat. On the purely economic level, Popov's article (translated in International, 7) gives a unique account of strikes in recent years in one East European countryYugoslavia. But the really important change by comparison with the demands raised by the German, Polish and Hungarian workers in 1953-6 has been in the political character of working-class action in the last few years.
It is true that the East European proletariat has by no means freed itself from all the consequences of the long political expropriation which it has suffered. Decades of political repression, lies, falsified history, caricatured Marxism, censorship and opportunistic foreign policies in the name of proletaran internationalism could hardly fail to reduce workers to a cynicism and despair that cannot be dispelled overnight. Moreover, it is not just the sheer weight of their experience of Stalinism that impedes the formation of revolutionary consciousness in the working class of East Europe. There is also the fact that the workers are committed to the gains they have won through the overthrow of capitalism; they do not want a return to capitalism and will if the occasion arises take to the streets to prevent it. But they often identify the bureaucratic state that expropriated the bourgeoisie and nationalized the means of production with their own state. Such an identification permits cynical manipulation by party leaders. The confrontation between Gierek and the workers of Szczecin (see New Left Review, 72) offers the most blatant example of this, in which Gierek shamelessly plays on his working-class origins and on the objective nature of the state as a workers' state to demobilize the workers intransigence. Tito, too, has shown himself a master of the tactic of mobilizing the working class to defend "its" state against rebellious students-the very students who raise demands for the reappropriation of political power by that same working class. This is doubly paradoxical in that it is the workers and not the students whom the Yugoslav bureaucracy really fears; as Tito said a propos the Zagreb student strike of last winter, "Today the students, tomorrow the workers".
But despite these obstacles to the development of a new revolutionary consciousness among the workers of East Europe, the events of the last few years have shown that in fact when the working class begins to move, cynicism and despair quickly disappear and thereisa rapid development, indeed an effervescence, of political consciousness and activity. The events of 1968 in Czechoslovakia saw the beginnings of democratic election of trade-union leaders and steps towards the transformation of factory councils into real organs of democratic workers' power. The fruits of this were demonstrated by the key role played by these bodies in organizing resistance to the Warsaw Pact invasion. But the most dramatic and significant case is that of Poland. When the workers rose in the Baltic ports in December 1970, they presented not just a few economic demands to 'their party and government, but issued a political programme. They demanded: 1, separation of party and state; 2. independence of trade unions; 3. democratic election of workers delegates; 4. democratization of the party statutes; 5. limits on the mandates of those elected; 6. freedom of the media. Moreover, the workers' organization created during the strike in, for example Szczecin assumed full control of the political and economic life of the city.
NEW VANGUARDS But the Polish workers' rising of December 1970 also demonstrated the ultimate impotence of spontaneous working-class revolt in the absence of revolutionary leadership. The third crucial element in the new situation in East Europe is the emergence for the first time of nuclei of an organized revolutionary opposition to the bureaucratic regimes. Since Kuron and Modzelewski wrote their Open Letter to Communist Party Members in 1965, successive student manifestoes in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Poland, above all since 1968, have aimed to furnish a programme for proletarian overthrow of bureaucratic rule.
These manifestoes have demanded the replacement of the bureaucratic state by a workers' state organized on the basis of councils of workers' deputies; an end to the political monopoly of the communist parties; the abolition of the political police and the replacement of the standing army by workers" militia;
an end to censorship; an end to inequality; independent trade unions; a foreign policy based on proletarian internationalism.
Of course, these manifestoes are limited by the very fact that they are the work of students -and the bureaucracy uses all the resources of state power to isolate those students from the working class. The security police who keep "outside agitators' away from the factories of East Europe are no less determined than the guards at the Renault works in France. But the role which can be played by universities as centres of revolutionary organization under repressive regimes-from China in the early twenties to Belgrade in the late thirties to Latin America today- needs little stressing. And when the working class begins to move, as was clearly shown in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and in Poland in 1970, the divisions between students and workers are quickly overcome and the workers put forward very similar demands to those which appear in the student manifestoes.
The essential point is that its total political monopoly is a life and death matter for the bureaucracy. A margin of freedom of political expression inevitably leads on to a margin of freedom of political organization, for which it is a necessary precondition. The Russian bureaucracy demonstrates its awareness of this by the ferocity with which it represses the slightest expression of political opposition.
But this is the weakness, not the strength, of the bureaucratic regimes. The Polish insurrection of 1970 showed how vulnerable they are if they go on in the old way. The Prague spring, or the events in Croatia last year, showed that the political consequences of "liberalization' are fatal for the bureaucracy's hold on power. Thus the room for manoeuvre of the regimes of East Europe is extremely limited, and they can only try to steer a middie course which holds out no rosy long-term perspectives.
PERSPECTIVES But there is a further lesson to be learnt from the Prague spring, and it is one about which the revolutionary vanguards of East Europe are in no doubt. It is that the bureaucracies maintain their own deformed variety of internationalism, even if they deny it to the workers. The Prague spring, like the Berlin uprising of 1953 and the Hungarian explosion of 1956, was crushed by Russian tanks. The Russian leaders cannot extend their policy of peaceful coexistence to the fraternal countries of East Europe. In Rumania and Yugoslavia too, the threat of Russian invasion is cynically manipulated by the regimes to maintain 'national unity and domestic order. The Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia showed clearly that events will not be able to develop to a point where political revolution is on the agenda within the confines of a single East European country. The overthrow of the bureaucratic regimes will require concerted action by the proletariats of East Europe, whom their rulers bend every effort to insulate from each other. Finally, it remains only to stress that the struggle of the proletariat of East Europe is an inseparable and vital part of the world-wide struggle for socialism. We have seen that 1968 was as much a turning-point in East as it was in West Europe. A revolutionary upsurge in the East will shake not only the bureaucratic regimes, and the Russian bureaucracy in particular, but also the communist parties in the West. The establishment of a real workers' state in East Europe would pose as much of a threat to imperialism as to the Kremlin. In the last few years, Vietnam and Cuba, France and Italy, Czechoslovakia and Poland, have been separate fronts in a single global conflict. Those fighting for the political revolution in the bureaucracies and those fighting to overthrow capitalism in the rest of the world are fighting a single struggle, in which a victory anywhere is a victory everywhere.
and more politicised than in its best years of struggle before 1969.
What part did the LCR take in these mobilisations?
The LCR participated in certain workers' struggles, such as Commetsa in Barcelona, where the including CP members and quite a number of young workers.
In view of the extent of all these actions, how do you envisage the forthcoming struggles, and in particular May Day?
The present political situation is very tense, and