May 1968 the group explained: "Those social groups command- programme for resolving the problems of the Czechoslovak and the top layer of the intelligentsia-can move away from the vak working people with those of the Kremlin bureacracy.
them as manipulators, monopolistic employers and social mana- is a brutally harsh one: either the road of clandestine organisation Dubcek was also seized by the Russian military. But because of the mass resistance of the Czechoslovak peoples, including the great bulk of Communist Party members, who held the 14th Party Congress clandestinely in occupied Prague, Brezhnev was forced to release Dubcek and his colleagues.
Alexander Dubeek would not welcome comparison with Imre Nagy, who is still vilified in CP circles throughout the world as a counter-revolutionary. And Dubcck still evidently hopes that the expelled leaders of the Czechoslorak reform movement will be able one day to return to their places at the head of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. He hopes that the path of peaceful and gradual reform started in January 1968 can eventually be followed again by the Crechoslovak Coinmunist Party. explicitly refuses to describe the present regime as traitors to the Czechoslovak working class, instead be gives them labels which would allow future coexistence in one Party: he calls them "sectarians' and "dogmalists'. He does not explicitly acknowledge the existence of Communist and Socialist politi cal prisoners, nor does he demand the release of such men as Sahala, Hubi and Mueller, Most strikingly of alt, he identifies the Kremlin, not as the organiser of the counter-revolutionary feroes in 1968. but as the linchpit of any socialist foreign policy for Czechoslovakia.
Dubcek has not been ahle to combine a defence of the Reform movement with a convincing answer as to why it failed, for to do so would involve going beyond pliases about the system of "personal power in Crechoslovakia. The forces that crushed the upsurge of the Czechoslovak masses in 1968 were more than just a handful of unscrupulous politicians and time-servers: they were and are a distinct social caste of bureaucrabs, whose power rests on the socialised property relations of the workers' states but who possess sharply different interests from those of the working masses themselves. This point was thoroughly grasped by the Association of the Revolutionary Left. In a memorandum to the 14th Party Congress written in ing the nationalised means of production-the party bureaucracy and possibly the cco nomic-technocratic plant managers concrete interests of the producers and finally turn against gers. Because this escapes Dubcek he is able to indulge the fond hope that the problems of the working masses in Eastern Europe can be resolved through gradual, peaceful reforis, without the convulsions of political revolution.
WORKERS DEMOCRACY Since the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR the Leninist slogan of Soviet Power has been drained of its radical, democratic content by the official Communist Parties. The Reform movement in 1968 ended press censurship and allowed a free expression of grievances by the masses at public mectings and within their organisations. This was enouglt to provoke the Warsaw Pact invasion, but it was still a Long way from reorganising the state into a system of democratic workers councils on the lines of the Soviets of the October Revolution: and Duhcek, who has not attempted to re-tlink the history of the revolutionary workers' movement since Lenin's days, retains the framework of the 1968 liberalisation.
A different spirit is contained in the Manilesto of the Party of Workers' Councila, written in 1974: "We shall prepare for the establishment of workers councils. When the workers take over power in the factories, we shall not wait for the workers" council to be confirned by the ministry of the intetior or any other organ of the present regime." Only through the building ramune and to co-ordinate our campaigns with those of other parties with similar programmes. We are aware of our affinity with the whole of Eastern Europe.
The crime of the Soviet burcaucracy does nor simply lic, as Dubcek's letter suggests, in its rejection of the partienior, peculiar foreis of development to socialism in each country. It lies in crushing the buste consent of proletarian democrucy and socialist development in every country under its sway. Its crime does not lie in trying to export a form of development only valid for the USSR. That for of development is above all not valid for the USSR itself, und never has boen. Furthermore, the politics of the East Puropean regimes are not simply "sectarian' and 'dogmatic': the Kremlin's poicy internationally has trampled on the basic doctrines of Marxism-Leninism, not least in its thoroughly class collaborationist policy in relation to imperialism.
SOCIALIST OPPOSITION Dubcek's letter will give new confidence to thousands of Socialists and Communists resisting the vicious dictatorship in Czechoslovakia. But he has not been able to advance a positive masses. There is to possibility of a re-run of the 1968 Reform movement being able to reconcile the interests of the CzechosloThe choice facing the expelled Communists in Czechoslovakia and struggle for a thorough-going political revolution throughout Fastern Europe; or the road of the Gomulkas of Eastern Europe: the road of providing a left face for the bureaucrucy in a future as Gomalka did in Poland in 1956 - only to be discredited in the eyes of the masses and finally overthrown in ignominy, as the shipyard workers of Poland disposed of Gomulka in 1970 Whichever road is taken by the Czechoslovak Socialits Oppusition, our task must be to demonstrute our revolutionary solidarity and to take its defence throughout the British work ing class movement.
Cliver MacDonald