Ry livin Maitan
Countries, which claim to be Marxist- Leninist, and where capitalism has been overthrown, are and have been involved in military operations or even partial wars against countries of the same social character.
This raises at least two questions: What are the causes of these conflicts? Is it possible that in future other conflicts of this kind will develop and take on the dimensions of a war unlimited in time and space?
Trotskyists characterise a series of European and Asian countries (not to mention Cuba, which is a very specific case) as transitional societies. But at the same time they specify that these societies have all suffered a profound bureaucratic degeneration or deformation.
This bureaucratisation consists of two basic elements: the absence of socialist democracy allowing the effective participation of the masses-and in the first place the working class—in political leadership, and the construction of "socialism" within the limits of a single country.
In other words, if certain structural elements are absent or are completely deformed, the society being built concretely takes on very specific characteristics, and it is inevitably drawn into a different dynamic from that of a society actually advancing towards socialism.
The absence of socialist democracy means that the working class and the mass of working people in general are excluded from political leadership. It means, for instance, that decisions on war or peace can be made without the masses being able to express their will and make it count.
The building of socialism in one country means that the national state-inherited from the bourgeoisie-becomes the framework of socialist construction. This is even necessary and preferable according to the theorisations of half a century (from those of Stalin/Bukharin in 1924 to those of the Communist parties today) and in the practice of the existing workers states.
This is a central element. The national state as such is presented as the foundation of the transitional society: in fact, it is the source of the bureaucracy's power.
Can one say that this has economic roots? Only in a mediated form, in the sense that the bureaucrats conceive of economic construction within this national framework.
But the source of bureaucratic power is control over the state apparatus-and the party apparatus which is essentially integrated into the state. That is why the basic motivation is a political one, which flows from the logic of a state constructed within a national framework, inherited from capitalism.
Conflicts between workers states are inevitable once one accepts such a framework and such a logic—once one denies what, for Marxism and as far as working class interests are concerned, is the absolute prerequisite for real socialist construction: an international economic unity which involves from the start the breaking down of existing national limits.
These conflicts can be fuelled by, among other things, different or even opposed economic interests. This was the case in the immediate post-war years in relation to the mixed societies between the USSR and the countries of Western Europe; and it could arise now in the event of certain specific choices made by Comecon.
But the fundamental causes are to be found on the political level: what international policy should be adopted in a given period, what agreements made and what alliances sought, what form of military preparation and defence should be chosen.
An example is the decisive importance at the start of the Sino-Soviet conflict of the problem of detente and relations with the United States (at the time the positions held were the opposite of what they are today) and the question of nuclear weapons (the Chinese refused to accept Moscow's thesis that the USSR was and should remain the nuclear shield of the entire "socialist world").
From the viewpoint of "socialism in one country" it becomes logical to accept and even to advocate a division into spheres of influence; and therefore to become preoccupied with the defence-and eventual extension—of these spheres. Border questions in turn acquire an importance which far exceeds their intrinsic significance.
In fact a terrible logic is unleashed which can escape the control of the bureaucratic leading groups themselves and carry them further than they would wish.
How can such disputes, based on the existence of different "socialisms in one country," become transformed into armed conflicts?
On the basis of what has already occurred, one can outline three possibilities:
1. A bureaucratic leadership intervenes militarily when it considers that there exists a short-term danger of capitalist restoration in another workers state, whose leadership seems incapable of confronting the danger.
As we know, that was Moscow's justification for its interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. But in fact this theoretical hypothesis has yet to be translated into reality.
2. A bureaucratic leadership intervenes with its army to prevent or destroy mass antibureaucratic movements taking on a dynamic of political revolution. This is what happened in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
In these cases what occurred was more exactly civil war, where a "foreign" bureaucracy intervened against both the masses and sections of the native bureaucracy, because Moscow considered that the latter were incapable of warding off the threats to the bureaucratic regime itself, or were involved in an extremely dangerous dynamie of concessions.
3. Bureaucratic leaderships engage in military conflicts without there being any danger of capitalist restoration or political revolution because of the logic of competing interests of "socialisms in one country"-in other words, the defence or extension of spheres of interest, the maintenance of control by one country over another which seeks to win greater independence for itself, etc.
This is what happened with the Sino- Soviet conflict, especially in the present phase and with the current conflicts in Asia.
This article does not aim to draw conclusions as to political orientation or to advance precise slogans. What it is concerned to underline is that the logic of socialism in one country-just like the bureaucratic denial of socialist democracy-has to be fought from a revolutionary position, from the perspective of a political revolution for the overthrow of the ruling bureaucratic caste.
This does not exclude the adoption of temporary tactical positions in response to particular attitudes or moves by this or that section of the bureaucracy.
But, from the strategic point of view, revolutionaries must fight-today more than ever-against all the bureaucratic regimes, whatever their specific characteristics and whatever the ideological/political justifications they put forward.
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