The following is a translation of an editorial that appeared in the January issue of Quatrième Internationale.]
Some months after the Soviet Union and its allies sent troops into Czechoslovakia, the Communist parties, which at the outset had declared that the international conference of Communist parties originally scheduled to be held in November 1968 was premature, finally agreed in
November to hold a preliminary meeting ir March 1969 and to hold a congress in May.
Let us assume that nothing happens to upset these plans. Let us assume, therefore, that six months after their meeting in Budapest these parties convene in Moscow. Would we have to conclude from this that the Prague operation, which ran into a political disaster the first week, paid off after all?
Leaderships like those of the French and Italian Communist parties have retreated. Is it true, as a quite authoritative rumor has it, that these leaderthreats that Moscow ships yielded after would attack them directly as "opportunists"? Some delegations are even supposed to have been shown documents already drawn up on this.
It could be concluded that the Kremlin's maneuvers met with a certain temporary success in impressing the Communist party leaderships. But this is only on the surface and does not alter the true state of affairs in the official Communist world, where the convulsions will continue to worsen.
The background to this conference is highly instructive. The preceding conference of the Communist parties took place more than eight years ago. It was concluded behind closed doors with a Sino-Soviet compromise of short duration. Efforts to moderate the dispute got nowhere. Khrushchev hesitated long before giving his support to the idea of holding a new conference. This was one of the contributing causes to his downfall.
His successors, Brezhnev and Co., themselves sought a new compromise. Ihen they decided to conduct a campaign to get the other Communist parties to agree to hold this conference. Ihe preparatory meeting in Budapest was a virtual failure. The Rumanians left in a huff. Then came the Prague affair which we have already referred to. In any case, china, Cuba, Vietnam, Korea, Yugoslavia will not be Czechoslovakia bound bana resence of a there. How much will the and foot mean?
How many of those present will be careful to keep the final resolutions from entailing any commitments?
Furthermore, and this is the essential thing, developments at the leadership level in the Communist parties lag considerably behind developments among the ranks of these parties and in their relations with the masses.
Let us examine more closely what such a conference might be like.
What form will it take and what relationships will it express? A sort of association of states and parties with "equal" rights replaced the rigid and monolithic system of Stalin's time. But this "equality" was formal and these rights had a bourgeois character. Ihe Soviets could choose to send their technicians or withdraw them, to extend or deny cooperation in the economic development of other countries. They, in turn, were barred from reciprocal action toward the soviets. The Kremlin could have nuclear arms. It disputed China's exercising the same right.
With the Prague operation the Kremlin arrogated to itself the right to send tanks and half a million men to change the leadership of a state and a party -- or to modify their policies, if it could_not eliminate the leadership at once. Is this "equality"? The answer is only too clear.
In an attempt to justify this new kind of "equality," the Soviets (Pravda, September 25) have argued that equality and national independence must be viewed from a "class" standpoint. When a socialist country is threatened with backsliding toward capitalism, all the other socialist countries are concerned and are duty bound to intervene.
International solidarity against capitalism may seem to be axiomatic. But, in the circumstances, we must 1ook at what
"theory" of the Kremlin conceals.
this new It by no means cancels out the policy of "peaceful coexistence" with imperialism. It does not at all have the meaning that Fidel Castro wanted to give it of defense Ior Vietnam, Cuba, eto. Inis theory was cooked up after the fact to justify the invasion of Czechoslovakia. And it was just as hard to find a "counterrevolutionary danger" in Czechoslovakia as it was to find the Czechoslovaks who sent the appeal for help.
The Soviet intervention did not attack the technocratic part of the decisions of the January 1968 plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist party of Czechoslovakia. Instead it sought to suppress democratic rights, to restore the censorship, and to bring back police methods, etc.
In support of the intervention, Gomulka argued that there are two kinds of Communist parties -- those in power, which have to make the decisions; and those not in power, whose duty it is to follow. But his argument added little to the "theory" of the Soviets except perhaps where he confirmed that the Communist parties of France, Italy, etc., took their position in August not on principled grounds but out of concern for their relationships with the bourgeois and reformist parties.
This new "theory" of Brezhnev and others hardly covers up the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy. Once again buthe soviet bureaucracy. Once again, through the voice of Gromyko, this reaucracy has told the Americans: "Let us do what we want in 'our part of the world' and we will get along together excellently."
Neither by the deployment of tanks, nor by the conferences of bureaucrats, nor by stillborn "theories" can the great emerging crises be bottled up. If anyone doubts this, he need only think of the breadth of the crisis shaking the oldest, the most reactionary, and the most crafty of institutions -- the Catholic church. And in the very person of its clergy! The bureaucrats cannot prevent these crises; they can only postpone them, making them more painful and more costly. During 1968 great events showed that the worldwide victory of socialism looms on the horizon. The masses are waging an ardent fight. Setbacks and rotten compromises come only from bureaucratic leaderships.
More than 200 opponents of the Greek dictatorship received speedy trials in late January and early February. Representing a wide range of opinions and social strata -- from workers and radical intellectuals to very old military officers who fought on the rightist side in the civil war of 1946-49, the accused had nothing in common but opposition to the regime.
Iwo of those tried, the painter
Ioannis Petropoulos and the building worker Knristos Reklitis, told how, in addition to security police, the dictatorship is now using elite units of the armed forces to torture political prisoners. Both told of being held at the garrison of Dionysos (named after the Greek god of joy).
Reklitis testified that his foot had been broken "to pieces" and that he was beaten so badly that he received a brain concussion and passed blood in his urine. This treatment put him in the hos-
The collapse of the Stalinist edifice is no more a refutation of the idea of a revolutionary proletarian international than was the collapse of the Social Democratic edifice in 1914. To the contrary, in both cases workers parties which were created to lead the workers to the revolutionary conquest of power degenerated because they became infected by a "national virus." This virus of national egoism is what must be unrelentingly combated in the workers movement.
loday, everywhere, the "leftists' nd "enragés" assailine the establishe‹ order are increasing in number. They are opposing the capitalist order in the advanced countries and in the colonial countries and the bureaucratic order in the workers states. Over and above the tactics that must differ in accordance with the specific conditions in every country, these movements need an overall strategy for the struggle (as the American intervention in Vietnam and the Kremlin's intervention in Czechoslovakia, among other things, have just shown).
International demonstrations in support of the Vietnamese revolution have been and remain essential. But because of their improvised, conjunctural, and loosely coordinated character, they are not sufficient. And this is why, in the face of the crisis gripping the old degenerated parties, the vanguard, whose goal is the worldwide victory of socialism, must organize not only on a revolutionary Marxist basis but on an international basis as well.
pital for a month, he said. Petropoulos said his jailers had shaved him bald and beaten him unconscious, not to extort a confession but to force him to shout, "Long Live the [Colonels'] Revolution!" He took off one of his shoes to show that four of his toenails had been torn out.
The high point of the trials was the case of ten young left-wing students and intellectuals who had confessed to bombing the Ministry of Justice building November 30. They repudiated their confessions. One of the ten, Dimitrios Dariotis, said he had signed the statement because his jailers beat him with a pipe and threatened to break his fingers. The state prosecutor Liapis conceded that he could not prove these ten guilty. But he asked four years to life for them because of their admitted left-wing affiliations. Six were given one to sixteen years.
Four were acquitted, including Dariotis, who had been given a sixteen-year sentence in a previous trial.