[28 Middle Lane, London N8. No longer than…]

Scan page 12

28 Middle Lane, London N8. No longer than 400 words please: longer letters are liable to be cut. TONY RICHARDSON'S line of argument against the Western left supporting the demands of the unofficial peace movements in Eastern Europe is representative of a whole tradition within Trotskyism which attempts to oppose Stalinism without being prepared to take the risks, which a serious revolutionary challenge to the bureaucracy necessarily involves in terms of disrupting the existing organisations of the workers' states.

This strategy was demonstrated in all its nuances in the period between 1923 and 1945, when the Soviet leadership first crippled the attempts of the international working class to resolve the crisis of the capitalist order and thus avoid the outbreak of a new worid war and then took part in that war, drawing ón the support of battered remnants of the world revolutionary movement, in a global popular frontist operation which led to an enormous strengthening of the Soviet state.

While the USSR does not initiate war, the bureaucratic order is deeply dependent on the existence of the war danger and radically hostile to the construction of a really effective peace movement, which would undermine the bureaucracy's reason for existing. Its message to the peace movement is "forget all this crap about international mass action, only the workers' bomb can sto the imperialist war drive.

In reality, however, the danger of war results trom the inner needs of the capitalist mode of production which are irrational and thus the Soviet strategy works to destroy the only forces - the forces of the working class movement -which can save the USSR itself from nuclear destruction.

The Soviet leadership, too, puts its own short-term power interests above those of human survival.

What is to be done? Comrade Richardson says there must be a political revolution to replace the bureaucracy in the USSR and Eastern Europe. But for him "political revolution" is an abstract slogan to be counterposed to the real oppositional movements in the Soviet bloc. The real political revolution will gröw out of the discontents which permeate these societies, among them distaste for the militarisation of daily life, with all its attendant fear of democracy and sexism.

gains labour movements and relatively developed welfare services and civil berties" "advanced non-fascist capital'ism"

He even says the USSR is 'in many ways further from socialism (my emphasis) than these countries" • In reading The Revolution Betrayed, Reynolds seems to have avoided noticing that Trotsky says that the material basis of the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy is scarcity, mainly attributable to the backwardness (''underdevelopment'") of Russia and the imperialist encirclement of the Soviet state.

Trotsky never ceased to point out, on the other hand, that the material basis of the "democratic" character of the imperialist countries (and of the other benefits received by workers in those countries compared to the colonial and semicolonial Third World) is the exploitation of the colonies (Third World) by the imperialists. How is living off exploitation and politically