Lacking real political perspectives themselves, and aborted in their efforts to establish viable international links, the International Socialism group is currently turning all its venom against the one consistent revolutionary current in the world today, the Fourth International. This anti-Trotskyist position is, of course, not accidental but is consistent with the political approximation to Stalinism which has been such a feature of I.S.'s intervention in the intensified class struggle in present-day Britain.
Unable to reply coherently to the theoretical criticisms of their "State Capitalism' by Ernest Mandel and others, I.S. have now turned to searching for skeletons in the closets of the Fourth International. They have now disinterred the "last testimony" of Trotsky's widow in a pamphlet entitled, Natalia Trotsky and the Fourth International. Retailing at 7%p, these 11 pages of type can only be classified as a bad buy.
The facts of course are not disputed. Natalia Trotsky did break with the Fourth International over the question of the class nature of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European states.
So did many other forming leading Trotskyists, under different pressures and for a variety of reasons. These include Max Shachtman, who was personally very close to Natalia and who is now to be found on the extreme right of the American Socialist (sic) Party; James Burnham, a staunch defender of American imperialism in Vietnam; and Tony Cliff of I.S. who stated when he broke away that he and his co-thinkers would "fight for the building of the Fourth International as a genuine Trotskyist organisation" and who since then has consciously moved further and further away from fundamental Trotskyist positions.
The fact that Natalia was Trotsky's widow no more immured her from outside pressures than any of these other back-sliders. Lenin's widow, Krupskaya, who played a much more active political role than ever did Natalia, herself capitulated to Stalin and joined in the denunciations of Trotsky.
Natalia's criticisms of the policies of the F.I. contained in her letter to its Executive Committee of 9 May, 1951, contain many vald arguments, but the conclusions she drew from these placed her squarely outside the main stream of Trotskyism. She writes: "There is hardly a country in the world where the authentic ideas and bearers of socialism are so barbarously hounded.....Yet you continue to say that under this unspeakable regime Russia is still a workers' state.....They are the worst and most dangerous enemies of socialism and the working class."
Was the Stalinist regime more unspeakable and more reactionary in 1951 than in the 1930s, the years of the Moscow Trials, when a whole generation of Bolsheviks were wiped out; when hundreds of thousands of workers found themselves in Stalin's slave camps? Were its policies, at home and abroad, more counter-revolutionary than when it was liquidating the Spanish revolution, concluding the Stalin-Laval and the Stalin-Hitler pacts? Yet during all these years Leon Trotsky steadfastly maintained that the Soviet Union remained a workers' state and that its defence against imperialism remained the primary duty of all revolutionaries. Of course, the defence of the Soviet Union was never confused in Trotsky's mind with the defence of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Quite the contrary! As he wrote to Shachtman in 1939: "Unconditional defence of the USSR signifies, namely that our policy is not determined by the deeds, manoeuvres or crimes of the Kremlin bureaucracy but only by our conception of the interests of the Soviet state and world revolution." (In Defence of Marxism, p. 39)
Natalia had every right to her views on the class nature of the Soviet Union but that they had little in common with those of Leon Trotsky is only too apparent.
The best part of the pamphlet is the Statement from the Executive Committee of the Fourth against her criticisms. As the statement con"It is not easy to separate with Natalia who after so many years has become the victim of pressures stronger than her. The revolutionaries, the continuators of Leon Trotsky, have no choice. We can only repeat the famous maxim he liked to quote: "Neither laugh or cry, but understand. In the early part of the current offensive three major fronts were established: in Quang Tri, in the Central Highlands and around An Loc. In each case, major administrative centres were threatened and cut off. In the case of Quang Tri the unexpectedly rapid collapse of the Saigon forces led to the liberation of the entire province. In June and July we have seen the much trumpeted Southern counter-offensive. Are we to interpret this as a setback to the offensive, as most of the Western press has done?
MAKE THEM FIGHT To answer this we need to remind ourselves of who it is that is fighting, and what they can hope to achieve. Firstly, how important are the specific territorial gains of the liberation forces to their strategy? The answer is, not really very important. The liberation forces do not advance from one fortified position to another: their lines of communication already cover the length and breadth of the Indochina peninsula. The real importance of threatening the Saigon forces positions is that this obliges them to fight, and to squander their relatively small back bone of reliable troops. Seen in this light, the counter-offensives of the Saigon forces are merely a continuation of the liberation forces" basic strategy: to make them fight with their best men where they are at a disadvantage. The objects of the Saigon counter-offensive are not centres of particular strategic importance to Thieu, nor are they particularly easy for him to retake. They were after all chosen in the first place by his opponents. But to those who invented Vietnamisation the Southern counter-offensive was an ideological necessity. So the South Vietnamese troops find themselves bogged down for months on Highway 13 to achieve the reconquest of An Loc, by then a militarily worthless pile of rubble. The NLF claim that in the 100 days between 5 April and 15 July they put out of action 22,000 US and puppet troops on Route 13.
QUANG TRI: THE PARAS' GRAVE The most deadly conflict during July and into the first week of August has been the battle for Quang Tri city. Thieu ordered that this be retaken to offset the series of military disasters suffered by the Saigon armies in the first two months of the current offensive. The puppet forces began their counter-offensive in the first week of July, initially meeting light opposition. As casualties began to mount B-52 strikes were called in and the Seventh Fleet poured thousands of shells into the hostile Vietnamese earth. As the first Saigon forces entered Quang Tri city it became clear that the Liberation Forces -that is the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam and the North Vietnamese Army - had "a man in every tree and in every house", their 130 mm. cannon and tanks were entrenched in deep bunker positions and their precisely targeted artillery pounded rank No.l to the city from Hue along which the main body of supplies and reinforcements were routed.
In the second week of July the parachutists, one of the elite divisions of Thieu's army, advanced on the citadel of Quang Tri itself and at one point claimed to have opened up two breaches in it. But the defensive fire has been murderously accurate and the paras soon found they were losing 150 men a day. In the fourth week of July they withdrew from the area of the citadel which was left and still remains in the hands of the Liberation Forces. The paras in 20 days had lost the equivalent of a regiment in the citadel alone.
THE TRAP At the same time the tactic used so successfully at An Loc is being repeated on Highway No. 1 linking Hue with Quang Tri. A few hundred men in deep bunkers on either side of the road systematically pound all the supply columns, only ANTI-INTERNMENT LEAGUE Public Meeting IRELAND: WHAT HAS TO BE DONE?
Speakers: Frank McManus, M.P.
Bowes Egan and guest speakers CONWAY HALL, Red Lion Square (near Holborn tube)
WEDS. 9th AUGUST 7.30 p.m. NLF gunners in Quang Tri province allowing them to go through irregularly to a terminal point which is — a besieged town. In An Loc and Quang Tri many of the most effective fighting units of the Saigon army are now being decimated to try to achieve a sparkling political coup for Thieu in Saigon. But the coup is never realised and meanwhile the defences of Hue and Saigon are systematically weakened by their own High Command!
Fighting continues at lower levels of intensity all over the country. At the beginning of August the huge US base at Bien Hoa was hit by 70 rockets from out of the blue one morning. Two men were reported killed and 52 wounded. The defensive perimeter of Hue is constantly under attack and 10 days ago a police station in Saigon was blown up.
SAIGON NEXT STOP!
We can expect in the next 4-8 weeks, as the Presidential elections of November become imminent, an even greater intensification of the Vietnamese struggle, a new wave of the offensive. Having stripped the Saigon forces of some of their best fighting men, large scale attacks on one or more cities will be seen. The most obvious targets: Hue, Da Nang and Saigon. Now is the hour of the furnaces. Let there be nothing but light!
Duncan MeNiven Frank Pais INDO CHINA 7 Issues for 60p including postage Orders for over 5 copies on sale or return I enclose 60p for subscription Please send copies on sale or return I enclose a donation of € - P Cheques etc payable to 'indochina' Name Address 182 Pentonville Rd., London N1 182 Pentonville Road, London N.l.
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Address: Liquidation as a political tactic is not so well known in this country as in India. The police there are quite adept at effecting the removal of political militants without making much publicity about it. This is the tactic they-are most likely to try to use against comrade R. Kuchelar, leader of a rank and file trade union movement in the Tamil Nad, the southernmost state in India.
This rank and file movement is of extreme importance in the politics of South India. Beginning with a strike of the Simpson workers in Madras, it has heralded a definite break for large sections of the working class with the Dravida Munetra Kazagam, a Tamil bourgeois party which came to power on a pseudonationalist platform. This party's hold has meant that until now this part of India has seen nothing to parallel the level of the class struggle in, for instance, West Bengal. Comrade Kuchelar was at one time a member of the so-called Marxist Communist Party, until that party's particular electoral pact with the DK came into conflict with the effective conduct of a strike at the Swedish-owned Wimeo plant in 1968. For his service to the workers in this struggle comrade Kuchelar was expelled from the CP(M) and branded as a Naxalite, thus inviting the police to initiate political repression against him.
SOLIDARITY Kuchelar is not of course merely a trade union militant. He has vigorously attacked the pseudo-nationalism of the DMK and was the only Indian trade union leader of note to denounce the massacre of the Ceylonese youth by the Bandaranaike regime. Now he is on the run from a frame-up charge of murder, the culmination of a whole series of legal frame-ups and physical attempts on his life. Publicity is the only answer to the undercover methods favoured by the Madrasi police. That is why international solidarity with comrade Kuchelar and his movement is so vital if the designs of the Tamil Nad bourgeoisie are to be thwarted. Anthony Fernando INTERNATIONAL MARXIST GROUP (British Section of the Fourth International)
I would like more information about the IMG.
Over the past few weeks, the London AntiInternment League has maintained consistent activity reflected in the greater success of the AlL committee in drawing members of individual branches into Central political activity Not unnaturally, the British army's invasion of the Bogside and Creggan called forth the immediate response of a protest picket outside the Home Office on Monday night. About 100 people from AIL, ISC, Provisional and Official Republicans as well as other organisations picketed and then about 30 marched to the Irish Club in pouring rain to take up certain questions with SDIP M.P. Gerry Fitt. Having been tipped off in time, he didn't turn up. The AlL is also holding a protest meeting and march at 3p.m. this Sunday, 6 August, at Speakers Corner, Hyde Park.
Future activities are a public meeting to commemorate the anniversary of internment on 9 August in Conway Hall, Holborn. Speakers will be Frank McManus, M.P., spokesman for the Northern Resistance Movement, Bowes Egan, Bob Purdie, Republican and other speakers. On Saturday, 12 August, local AIL branches will be picketing Army recruiting offices and barracks. Also planned is a demonstration on Sunday, 3 September, and a mass demonstration for the end of October. The AlL annual conference will take place at the beginning of October. Information about these latter events will be supplied in detail at a later date.
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International Socialism and the Fourth International
International. This is a dignified reply to Trotsky's widow and a defence of Trotskyism
WITCH-HUNT IN SOUTH INDIA
IRISH ACTIVITY IN LONDON