Who cares about the differences?

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Wing itselt between a return But so what? Who cares? towards socialism" . It's OK and power is the same in I read John O'Mahony's article on corruption in the Soviet Union with interest. He correctly documented tha latrich nirivilares that WaL members of the Soviet elite (read members of the CPSU) enjoy compared to ordinary workers. But why all the surprise?

Wasn't it the case in Ancient Greece, the France of Louis XVI or capitalist America today that a small handful of people control the state apparatus to extract an economic surplus •for themselves from the labour of the vast majority of toilers?

There is no difference at all in any significant sense between these regimes and the soviet Union. Inere may be differences in productivity of labour and technology - but not at all in terms of the content of oppression and exploitation of the working people.

This is why I find it so surprising that O'Mahony is still giving us this old material from Trotsky about "a bureaucratic caste balancto capitalism and moving sayıng this twenty yeats after the revolution as Trotsky did - but seventy years on, and it's wearing a Dit thin. .°. 11.:..

The essential point is that the Soviet Union's ruling class, in today's integrated world economy, have to produce goods for sale on the international market place - just as the US or British capitalists have to.

OK, the form is different - you can't actually own factories in the USSR.

• The imbalance in wealth the USSR as in the West. Workers experience the same alienation • and • lack of control as in the West. Any moves towards democratisation like in Poland will be met with the same fusillade of bullets as in the West.

And I am sure that the many political prisoners languishing in Brezhnev's jails will be pleased to hear there's a "qualitative difference" between the gruel in the Lubianka compared to San Quentin.

Trotsky himself argued just before his death that the analysis of the Soviet bureaucracy "as a collective Bonaparte" balancing between capitalism and socialism could only be held to for a short time. The problem with the bulk of the left is that they've failed to move on.

The Soviet elite is a nardened-out ruling class -like in the USA. It's here to stay for the long-term, foreseeable future, and it's just plain_myopia or naivety to try and maintain otherwise.

Let's face it. If the USA or the USSR were to go to war tomorrow, the outcome would not benefit workers on either side. If the USSR won, they would impose a brutal totalitarianism - if the USA won, we'd all probably be cinders anyway.

When you talk of "defending the gains of October" you are really talking of defending formulae that possess no substance at all. It is inconceivable that workers in the West can ever be won to supporting the bureaucratic totalitarianism in the East.

GLYNIS POWELL, Horwich optimistic 'world strategists and fantasists who spread the lie that Stalinist Cuba is i working class democracy car fail to understand how im portant the link is. Unl people with no sense proportion or of what i! important can be deflecte from active support for the working class in the Stalinis states by the fact that i Ronald Reagan (or a Frani Margaret Thatcher or Chapple) makes hypocritica noises to the same effect.

Support for our own side and opposition to their opp ressors, is as basic as no crossing a picker line in & strike. Socialist Challenge knows about picket lines. Bur it is increasingly incapable of keeping its class line clear when it comes to the inter national class struggle that traverses the imperialist/ Stalinist divide.

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he wrioes - Central Commit Poland and the crisis in the USSR