What would Trotsky think?

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Nation, he made it clear, class system would have then it must be accepted won the argument. (He that the analysis was faulty. deduced some fairly pessiGlynis Powell (Nov. 'USSR not a Capitalist State') just won't do. You say 'a better explanation is that developed by Trotsky and in the last 40 years from Trotsky's theories.' You fail to mention that Trotsky always stressed that the analysis of the Sov-. iet Union as a degenerated workers' state, was a provisional theory. That he believed that stalinism was an ephemereal phenomenon. That if this phenomenon proved longer lasting than he predicted, this meant that his theory would be proved to be wrong, and must be junked - thrown in the dustbin of history.

Moreover, Trotsky established two criteria for judging this:First, (in the Revolution Betrayed) he laid down that Stalinism could not survive more than a generation -because it was not rooted in a class system - if it did survive more than a generTHERE has been much talk about helping the development of the Third Worid by introducing "appropriate" technologies, rather than the grossly inappropriate 'improvement" offered by capitalist "development" agencies.

And there is often a lot of head-scratching and agonising when supposedry appropriate technologies fail io catch on and the poor keep getting poorer.

Avalable from SO, 28 Middle Lane, Lon. don N8 for 60p inct. forty five years have passed since he published, and nearly fifty since he wrote, that - i.e. two generations.

Second, (in his Testament, "The USSR in War,' written in '38) that 'if at the end of the War now beginning, there was no world revolution, then those who believed in a new Frequently, this arises through a failure of thé "aiders" to recognise the class relations in Third World countries. But just as frequently, it seems that a failure to recognise sexual oppression is the cause.

Four examples of this are described by Anil Agarwal and Anita Anand in an article in a recent New Scientist called "Ask the Women Who Do The Work"

The first example was of development project pushed by the Indian government. If the villagers of Dungari-Paitoli in the Himalayas were to sell a communal forest to the government to be 'turned into a farm for seed potatoes, then ucisa Toa nezitn such fruits as a road, needl clinic and possibly a would be theirs. The men of the village agreed with this, but the women refused to accept the sale!

Women in this village are totally responsible for such basic family needs as fuel and fodder and already have to walk some 50 km a week carrying about 150 kg of wood in 25 kg loads. All mistic conclusions from this, for the people of his day; it is illogical to assume that they are meant for all time, and now - more years after Stalin's accession to power, than elapsed between Thermider and the Communist Manifesto -new conclusions would be appropriate.)

Thus, the fact that the various Fourth Internationals have for the last forty years insisted on the dogma of the degenerated workers' state, is not a devel opment from Trotsky's theories, but the deliberate and conscious rejection of them. "Trotskyists' have made a dogma of eternal application out of what Trotsky himself called a provisional analysis, and have ignored Trotsky's own provisos. I would remind you that Lenin said that insistence on outdated principles is the worst sort of reformism.

You dismiss as abstractions Glynis Powell's talk of oppression, a few pages earlier, you had published Marek Garztecki, whose account is hardly a matter of abstraction. It is the exploitation and oppression in the Soviet Union that are concrete. Surplus value is extracted. The bureaucracy has a monopoly of use, control and enjoyment of the bulk of soviet wealth - that is it has de facto ownership thereof, and only in English Law is there a concept of De Jure ownership distinct from de facto, a typically English abstraction. All this - as you say - Trotsky saw in his lifetime; he argued that it was a temporary cancer on the revolution, that it was caused by specific conditions, and would be cured within a generation.

Trotsky held that Stalinism was the product of Russia's relative economic backwardness, and by the fact that only a Sixth of the world's surface, and less than a tenth of its population was covered by the Soviet Union. Nevertheless despite this backwardness, despite this isolation, despite the bloodiness of the Stalin regime, he held that working class power -such as it survived there -combined with the workers' movements elsewhere, was sufficient to create an impasse, a balance between workers' power and world capitalist power. It was only on this balance that stalinism could maintain MYYYRU MAILING tion.

This has been explained as being due to the ignorance of rural people of the health benefits of sanitation, but, in fact, women are much more likely to accept sanitary toilets than men. Men, however, make the decisions, leaving women prey to restrictive taboos The fourth example is of community supplies of clean itself. If other countries had a revolution, even under stalinist leadership, this balance would be upset; which was why he believed that the stalinists could not under any circumstances make for allow to be made) a revolution elsewhere and that Red Army occupation of Easter Poland and parts of Finland would destabilise Stalinism now rules at least a' third of the world's surface, more than a third of its population; the USSR has risen to be militarily the second power in the world, through its own manufactures, was the first power to launch rocketry outside the atmosphere. How is it -do you think - that the balance established in 1924 has not been upset? Can you really imagine that Trotsky, if he were alive today, would really entertain such a theory for a moment?

fraternally, Laurens Otter of women and children, so male village heads are less interested in getting community water supplies laid on.

Where these are introduced, though, they seem to have little effect on the diarrhoeas which are a major cause of ill-health -in the Third World - killing six million children each year.

It seems that despite the clean "water, poor personal hygience will still allow enough germs to be transmitted to keep up the rate of diarrhoea.

This is because you need enough water in each house to encourage people to wash their hands after defecation. And fetching water from a stand-pipe. which may be 100m away is women's work on top of all the other things they have to do (like fetching wood!). In some countries (e.g. Bangla Desh) women are kept in purdah so they can only fetch water after dark, making shortage of water during the day inevitable.

so in this last case, the persistence of fatal diarrhoea can be linked firmly to the relations of power between men and women.

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