In the 1960's and 70's, as the working-class became stronger, and rebuilt its organisations, it, necessarily led to the revolutionary organisations, themselves, also, growing and riding on this rising wave. Yet, here, too, the continued strength and implantation of Stalinism, and its Left, Labourite periphery made its mark. Rising militancy, in conditions where labour shortages meant that employers, frequently, conceded, after short wildcat strikes, encouraged syndicalist ideas, and transferred to the political sphere, via the social-democratic parties of the workers, into reformist ideas. The Left advanced during this period, but still within the constraints of syndicalism and Left social-democracy. When the long wave turned, in 1974, to the crisis phase, those ideas proved increasingly bankrupt. Syndicalism and more militancy had no answer when employers no longer quickly conceded or closed down.
The Labour government of Callaghan responded, not by supporting workers, or even supporting the logic of the needs of socialised industrial capital, for greater planning and regulation, but by abandoning those limited advances made, and instituting fiscal austerity, slowing the economy, to the advantage of fictitious capital, rather than real capital. Its attacks on workers, in The Winter of Discontent, opened the door to Thatcher, who completed that task more ruthlessly, and a similar course was followed in North America and Europe.
“The Chinese revolution was an examination of the new role of Stalin – by the inverse method. Having conquered power in the USSR with the aid of the strata who have been breaking away from the international revolution and with the indirect but very real aid of the hostile classes, Stalin automatically became the leader of the Comintern and by that alone the leader of the Chinese revolution. The passive hero of the behind-the-scenes apparatus mechanism had to show his method and quality in the events of the great revolutionary flow. Within this lies the tragic paradox of Stalin’s role in China. Having subordinated the Chinese workers to the bourgeoisie, put the brakes on the agrarian movement, supported the reactionary generals, disarmed the workers, prevented the appearance of soviets and liquidated those that did appear, Stalin carried out to the end that historic role which Tsereteli only attempted to carry out in Russia.” (p 301-2)
The bourgeoisie presses down on social-democracy, and social-democracy presses down on the revolutionaries that have accommodated to it, in search of cross-class popular fronts and forays into assorted liberal good causes, in search of new middle class recruits. In Marx's day, the First International was permeated with state spies and provocateurs. We saw that in the 1970's and 80's the British state had hundreds of trades union and Labour Party officials and politicians on its payroll. We have, also, seen organisation of the left take money from Libya, and undoubtedly there are individuals, if not entire organisations, taking money from Russia, the US, Israel, and elsewhere, all being utilised to further the interests of the bourgeoisie in these various states. The smaller the sect, the easier for these external forces to control them.
When Tsereteli proposed to sell out Russia, to be carved up by various imperialist powers, the Bolsheviks were there to call this betrayal to account. Today, the social-imperialists sell-out the Ukrainian workers, whose future exploitation is discussed by the imperialists at conferences in London, over their heads, but, today's Tseretelis are to be found in the ranks of those that still call themselves Trotskyists, whilst implementing the policies of Stalin and the Mensheviks.
“Stalin, however, acted in China primarily behind the scenes, defended by a powerful apparatus and draped in the banner of Bolshevism. Tsereteli supported himself on the repressions of the power of the Bolsheviks by the bourgeoisie. Stalin, however, himself applied these repressions against the Bolshevik-Leninists (Opposition). The repressions of the bourgeoisie were shattered by the rising wave. Stalin’s repressions were fostered by the ebbing wave. This is why it was possible for Stalin to carry out the experiment with the purely Menshevik policy in the Chinese revolution to the end, that is, to the most tragic catastrophe.” (p 302)
And, that was repeated on numerous subsequent occasions, as the Stalinists slaughtered thousands of Vietnamese Trotskyists, and with similar tragedies and betrayals in every national independence struggle, whilst the so called revolutionaries, in the West, continued to act as the cheerleaders of these anti-working class butchers, purely on the basis that they were leading a struggle for the merely bourgeois-democratic goal of national self-determination! Trotsky, who warned that Stalin's betrayal would prepare the ground for future catastrophes, would be appalled that those future catastrophes were facilitated by those that claim to act in his name!
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