Not so fast!

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To join or affiliate, write to Chris Richardson, 21 Devonshire Promenade, Lenton, Nottingham NG7 2DS. £5 for individuals, or for affiliated organisations, per 1000 members. £2 for low-waged individuals. £1 for unwaged. Add 50p if you want the I THINK David Harris (report from Amsterdam, SO 136) is jumping to conclusions a bit too quickly.

From a report of a union meeting in Rotterdam which decided on a two-day transport workers' strike, he moves to a criticism of the Dutch Labour left paper Ofensief for not making "any specific call for the linking up of action meetings such as that in Rotterdam . . a call to build towards local soviets and a national soviet."

Between a militant strike meeting and soviets - workers' councils, implicitly posing a revolutionary challenge to the capitalist state - there is a great distance.

Revolutionary levels of struggle cannot be developed simply by Marxists calling for them. If Marxists respond to every militant strike by calling for soviets, then surely we are more likely to discredit the idea of soviets than anything else.

So I think David Harris's criticism of Offensief on this point is misplaced. As to the aptness of Offensief's policy apart from that, I cannot judge - but I am made sceptical by the fact that despite the different conditions Offensief uses exactly the same slogans and tactical formulas for the Netherlands as Militant uses for Britain.

MARTIN THOMAS Islington special issue of Gay Socialist. Campaign for Gay Rights

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Last week's article on the 30th anniversary of the East German workers' uprising of June 1953 charted the explos ive events and their immediate aftermath.

But the strikes and street battles arose as a result of a long history of Stalinist activity in East Germany, which meant that among those purged for their leading role in the uprising no less than one third were veteran members of the Communist Party since before Hitler's rise to power in Part 1 wo 1933.

In this concluding article, of Stalinism in Germany.

HAD those old Communist Party members in East Germany who rejected Trotsky's views been in a position to examine objectively the conduct of their own leadership during and after World War 2, they would have found ample evidence to confirm its counter-revolutionary nature and the need for its overthrow.

The 1930s had begun with the criminally divisive and sectarian line which decreed that the Social Democrats were worse than the fascists. - "social fascists" . In Germany this split the working class and allowed Hitler to power in 1933. But by 1939 Stalin was in an alliance with Hitler - an alliance which was to leave the Soviet Union almost fatally vuinerable to the Nazi invasion of 1941, and which summed up the cynical nature of Stalin's "antifascism"

Those German Communists who had survived Hitler's Gestapo and Stalin's previous purges were now told to cease any mobilisation against the Nazis. Many who resisted this line or who were thought unreliable were cold-bloodedly handed over to the Gestapo. Only after 1941 were they given the green light to fight the Nazis.

In 1943, on the other hand, Stalin ordered Walter Ulbricht, Wilhelm Pieck and other old CPers in exile to set up an embryonic government in exile based in Moscow. Its personnel included bourgeois, forces and former Nazis among captured German military men.

Later Ulbricht was to concentrate on shaping up a ruthlessly dependable gang of bureaucrats to implement Stalin's plans for Germany after the war.

Stalin's initial objective had nothing to do with the extension of socialism into Europe: it focused exclusively on defending the Soviet Union by military and diplomatic means.

For this reason he set out to go through the motions of implementing Allied plans for the "democratic reorganisation" of Germany as a single state, while in fact determined to ensure that at all costs Germany be prevented from reemerging military the USSR.

At first Stalin leaned towards the establishment of a Communist-Social Democratic government in a unified Germany. But when that proved less and less feasible, he came down firmly for the partition of Germany as a second option.

And to assist the reconstruction of the ravaged Soviet economy and take advantage of German technologs. Stalin wanted to seize and ship our as much industrial plani as possible.

To achieve ihis. be better a govemmert in the Sower zone which would - with Red Army support - be able to hold down capitalist elements, while at the same time containing the working class.

The militancy of the working class was a real problem in this scheme: they had seen the arrival of the Red Army as the start of a revolutionary struggle quite the opposite of Stalin's plan for establishing a bourgeois coalition government.

In Saxony, Halle and Magdeburg and even some sectors of Berlin, the first reaction of the workers was to occupy the factories, set up plant committees and establish workers' control. Red flags were hoisted over most of the factories and in working class housing districts.

Repressed

But the independent initiatives of the rank and file workers were repressed, or allowed to peter out by the Red Army administration established in the Eastern zone. The rank and file anti-fascist committees were dissolved. The Communist Party was forcibly merged with the Social Democratic party, and then extensively purged to produce a monolithic. utterly bureaucratic formation; opponents of the merger were arrested. And the Stalinists even set up new, artificial bourgeois parties.

By 1948, though there had Khrushcher and Ulbricht introduced. But still the workers were denied any direct power or democratic control in the "Democratic Republic"

In August 1949 however the Stalinists tried once again to sound the note of class collaboration, issuing through the 'National Front'an appeal for unity to:

"All Germans from the east and from the west, capitalists and workers, former members of the Nazi party and those who were persecuted by the Nazi regime.

Once again this failed to entice the imperialiss. But the Kremlis leaders bai so nild 0. 9'56 g It epicalist Goa: -Lurch So while Ulbricht's leadership embarked in July 1952 on a new lurch towards 'Sovietisation' -forced industrial development, squeezing living standards and sacrificing production of consumer goods - the Soviet leadership was not so enthusiastic.

Ulbricht ran into hot water with this scheme - which was opposed by the Stalinist unions. He appealed in 1953 for Soviet aid: but it was not forthcoming. Instead he was told, shortly after the death of Stalin, that he should alter course, slow the industrialisation, provide more consumer goods and make some 'liberal' concessions to the middle classes, the peasantry and the clergy.

Among • these concessions were a halt to the collectivisation of farming; an abandonment of "coercive tax collection methods"; and the provision of "ample" short-term credit for craftsmen, retail and wholesale traders, private builders and transport undertakings - in the, hopes of improving the output of privately-produced consumer goods. The state plan for heavy industry was "corrected" and output of consumer goods boosted.

With this rather feeble bait, coupled with the tokenistic freeing of 4,000 political prisoners on short sentences and liberalwas to the capitalists and petty bourgeoisie that the Stalinist attentions were devoted.

The reason? They hoped even at this late stage to forestall the impending commitment of West German troops to the developing anti-Soviet NATO alliance: the question of preserving the nationalised property relations in East Germany or the prospects for socialism in Germant as a whole were seen as completely subordinate to the militart and diplomatic needs of the Sories Union.

Small wonder thas mint dais as a background. so mans longsanding Gara Communists Small Fonder aiso inat the Stalinist slanders against the demonstrators - who were branded _ 86 "fascists" and imperialist agents - rang particularly hollow inside East Germany.

In fact the 1953 revolt was solidly proletarian in its support and in its methods, and contained not a hint of demand for the restoration of capitalism or even (surprisingly) for the withdrawal of the massive Russian army of occuation.

In contrast to the Stalinist leaders, the workers looked to working class action and class unity to reunite a divided Germany, under a workers' government.

Though after the event, the imperialists obviously attempted to exploit the uprising for their own propaganda purposes, they were plainly as unprepared and startled by the struggles as the Stalinists themselves.

Hesitant

Not a little alarmed that a reemergence of militancy in the East and an open appeal for class action to reunify Germany under a workers' government might strike an echo among the proletariat in the West, the imperialists were hesitant on how to respond.

Though approached directly by a delegation of strikers, the American radio station RIAS in PazE workers seeking to join it saücarity with the Eastern scrikers Though the imperiats response to anti-bizadoncá struggles has becor DcrE sophisticated brougi siberGuland apel Czec osorail1 remains the case thai erplasiccs of proletarian anger coctai a revolutionar: drari vi alarms the imperaliss seaty e* muct as the bazaIa!

Reaget E=E Nectes soppct se Pist SobdrDiSi FE 1 =5EI E2 SPT IDEe: =TE t FaDiT sEEn I tni E Pora Cabia CE ISE ITOLDEET SEiT E Di I BOROE = =: = TErDE mxser GEDE S I I FUZE DOCKI give a huge imperus to ibe cacse struggle on a world scale.

Species Yet the most immediately endangered species in such struggles is the Stalinist bureaucrat, whose power and privilege rests not - like the capitalist class — upon their ownership of wealth and property, but upon their ability to retain office through the containment and repression of the working class.

1953 marked the start of a new period in which the apparent stability of such bureaucracies - which had caused many former Marxists to draw wholly pessimistic views that the Stalinists had somehow consolidated as a new ruling class — was shaken, and the class struggle reemerged as an obvious factor in the East as well as in the West:

It was not only in Germany that such resistance to Stalinist rule emerged. Driven on both by economic pressures and political grievances, and encouraged by the death in March 1953 of the blood-stained supreme bureaucrat himself, Joseph Stalin, workers in Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Hungary also took action, while July 1953 even saw strike action by the political prisoners in the Vorkuta slave labour camp in the Siberian waste.

This telling confirmation of

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division of Germany

Harry Sloan looks at the record ¡ Harry Sloan