What are these Communist Parties? What is the nature and degree of this recent 'critical! independence they are exhibiting? Where does it come from? What are these political person -ages who are going to be sharing cabinet posts sooner or later?
It is worth stepping back and laking a broader look at what has happened in the world Stalinist movement. This will bring forward the question that is being debated by radicals around the world: can the CPs still be considered, characterised & treated as Stalinist parties? Haven't these parties, which 'dogmatic' Trotskyists, insist on referring to as Stalinist, really become something else? Aren't they well on the road to becoming facsimiles of Social-Democratic parties in some countries, and in other, more rad -icalised countries, aren't they now really centrist • formations that may even project a revolutionary orientation and be pressurised into leading a struggle for power if the upsurge of the masses and the 'far leftl is strong enough to make them swing in that direction?
For answers to these questions, one cannot simply look at these parties as they appear today. We have to begin with the Stalinised Comintern, with the theory of Socialism in one country and its correlative of class collabor -ation. We have to see the disintegration and weakening of world Stalinism since 1956, caught between the rise of proletarian revolution in the West and those forces moving towards pol¡tical revolution in the degenerated & deformed workers states. From this historical viewpoint, the 'historic compromise in Italy, of independence of the CP in France or Spain, are further steps down a well-established road.
Dissolution Long before the Comintern was dissolved, Trotsky predicted it could not last. He insisted that the rise and bloody consolidation of the Soviet bureaucracy... the establishment of a nationalist socialist outlook as the guiding' ideology of this formation and the direr! material and political corruption of the Conimunist Parties around the world spelled the doom of the Comintern.
Trotsky has been proved right. The last congress of the Comintern was the in 1935. In 1943, as a little present to Roosevelt, Stalin junked the Comintern. That was the first overt organisational sequence of the logic and practice of national bureaucratic socialism on After the Yalta and Tehran period, marking the settlements of WW i!, a post - war makeshift replaced the Comintern. In September 1947, an organ entitled 'For a Lasting Peace, for a Peoples Democracy' announced the birth of the in late 1949, announced that Tito and all his colleagues, as well as the indigenous Stalinist rulers in Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania, Poland and Czechoslovakia were assassins, bourgeois spies, Zionists and infiltrated by Trotskyists. Moscow-type trials swept the capitals of Eastern Europe. That was the last act of 'proletarian internationalism' performed by the Comin Beginning in mid - 1953 and ending in 1956, explosions took place in East Berlin, Poland & Hungary. This was followed by the first Iworld gathering' of Communist parties. The Stalinised Comintern couldn't last through the second imperialist war and the Cominform survived for three meetings. The subsequent world gatherings! of Communist Parties were convened only twice. The first meeting was in 1957. The second world gathering came in 1960. At that meeting, the Chinese attacked the Yugoslavs. The Soviets attacked the Albanians. Both were surrogates for the real targets aimed at by Moscow and Peking....
Subsequent semblances of 'world gatherings!
degenerated into invitations to attend Soviet CP congresses as 'honoured guests'. The Twenty-First Congress in 1959 was followed by the Twenty-Second in 1961 which featured sharp open attacks on the Chinese CP. In 1967, 1971 & at the just-concluded Twenty-Fifth Congress of 1976, each has witnessed a further evolution of the 'polycentrism' of the national socialism of the bureaucracies, accentuating the weakness of world Stalinism as such....
From Comintern to Cominform, to fraternal gatherings of world CPs, to invitations to the congresses of the CPSU. Such have been the milestones in the disintegration of that world force headquartered in Moscow pretending to fight for the workers and their allies.
Second, all the Stalinist parties accept the Soviet bureaucracy's thesis that, in view of the extended character of this epoch of transition from capitalism to socialism, the sine qua non of the march towards socialism is detente, peaceful co-existence, peaceful competition with ism. Above all, what is necessary is time for the Soviet bloc to demonstrate what a socialist economy can achieve, gain more and more authority in the world. This, and not the international socialist revolution, is the paramount goal. The class struggle the world over must be subordinated to these goals.
What are the 'theoretical ' underpinnings of these general Stalinist positions?
First, they all accept the theory of socialism in one country. They believe it is possible and imperative to establish socialism in a single coun-