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1982, commenting on the Cubans' support for the imposition of martial law in Poland, three leaders of the SWP wrote that "the Cubans...believe firmly in the right and duty of the workers in all the workers states to collectively defend their anticapitalist conquests against any attempts to subvert or reverse them. This places the Cubans on the right side of the class barricades."13 As if Solidarnosc was struggling to "subvert or reverse" Poland's anticapitalist conquests! That was the pretext given by the Stalinists for declaring martial law! Can there be any other interpretation than that the SWP leaders have switched sides of the barricades in the Eastern European workers' revolutionary struggle against Stalinism?

The Cuban leadership's mistaken Stalinist conciliationism is not a result of their having been "bought off" by the Kremlin's material aid. If that were the case, they would be conscious counter-revolutionaries, and it would be difficult to account for the internationalism they have displayed in action in aiding struggles from Nicaragua to Namibia.

The Castroists are not betraying revolutions, but they make profound errors that flow from their inadequate theoretical viewpoint. According to this outlook, there are only two major forces in world politics: imperialism and anti-imperialism. On one side are the governments, armies and political supporters of the advanced capitalist countries; on the other side is everybody else.

It is this "everybody else" that frequently leads the Castroists into collaboration not only with Stalinist bureaucrats, but also with capitalist regimes in the neocolonial countries. Fred Feldman described one particularly painful example:

"The Cuban leaders enthusiastically backed the regime of Salvador Allende in Chile. During a diplomatic visit to Chile in 1970, Castro urged the workers and peasants to follow Allende's leadership. By putting his great prestige in Latin America on the scales in favor of Allende's class-collaborationist government, Castro helped to disorient the Chilean masses."14 It is here, above all, that the theory of permanent revolution comes into conflict with Castroist practice. As noted earlier, the Trotskyist view holds that no capitalist government can play a progressive role today in the class struggle anywhere in the world.

This does preclude Furthermore, Barnes explained, "This error leads to dispersing the Leninist organization into some other 'vanguard,' It leads to a search for substitutes for the Leninist party. This false concept always comes down to one simple idea: other forces are bigger, they are heading or have headed revolutionary upsurges, they may not be as pure as we are, but they are an adequate tool. That was Pablo's mistake. It meant a fundamental break with our traditions and theory of party building, a fundamental break with Leninism." 16 That was Jack Barnes in 1974 unwittingly describing Jack Barnes in 1983. One key reason why the 1983 SWP national convention was cancelled and why internal discussion has been suppressed is that party leaders like Barnes and Jenness don't want the rank and file to be reminded of their earlier positions, which stand as powerful refutations of their present course. This contradicts the role of a revolutionary party as "the historical memory of the working class;" it has led to a severe case of programmatic amnesia. A party that avoids examining its past cannot hope to provide leadership for the future.

The American Trotskyist movement has represented the continuity of Bolshevism in this country for more than half a century. Having survived the tests and crises of the Great Depression, the Second World War, the McCarthy witchhunt era, and the Vietnam war, it is now faced with the gravest crisis in its history. 'Our Political Continuity With olshev sm," Doug Jenness, International Socialist Review, April 1982.

'Most of these comrades were framed up on petty organizational charges and expelled. Two were refused permission to rejoin after having bee 1 out of the country for a period of time. One resigr ied in disgust.

*The Third International After Lenin by Leon Trotsky, Pathfinder Press, pp. 184-5.

Rodriguez, writing for a less historically informed audience, allows the sentence to stand as representative of Trotsky's general outlook.

•David Frankel, "The History of the Left Opposition (1923-33)" in The First Three Internationals, Pathfinder Press, 1974, pp. 123-24.

'Robert J. Daniels, Conscience of the Revolution, Simon and Schuster, 1969, p. 249. (Source cited by Frankel,)

"Doug Jenness, Introduction to Leon Trotsky on the Paris Commune, Pathfinder Press, 1970.

'James P. Cannon, "Lenin, Trotsky, and the first World War" (December 7, 1940), in The Socialist Workers Party in World War II, Pathfinder Press, 1975, p. 128.

106There is no special 'Castroist' revolutionary outlook or political current in the world today. That is a myth we should bury for good.... They are communists."

"Lest it be forgotten, it was Barnes himself, in 1974, who explained: "We can expect more and greater betrayals of the world revolution by both Moscow and Peking... that is the historical logic of Stalinism." Jack Barnes, "The Unfolding New World Situation," in Dynamics of World Revolution today, Path finder Press, 1974, p. 80. "Fred Feldman, "Stalinism and Internationalism (1935-73)" in The First Three Internationals, Pathfinder Press, 1974, p. 201. Emphasis added. The entire quotation is of interest: "Castro's incomprehension of the nature of Stalinism was brought into sharp relief when he supported the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and denounced the movement for socialist democracy as counterrevolutionary. Although Castro made criticisms of the Soviet bureaucracy that distinguished his endorsement from those given by hardened Stalinist parties like the vietnamese CP!, this position still placed him on the wrong side of the barricades in a struggle between the workers and the bureaucracy."

''Steve Clark, George Novack, and Larry Seigle, "An exchange of Views: How to Aid Workers' Struggle," Intercontinental Press, March 1, 1982. Emphasis added.

"Feldman, op, cit., p. 202. To subscribe, fill out the following coupon and mail to:

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Peng Shu-chih, a founding leader of the Chinese Communist Party and later the central figure of Chinese Trotskyism, died in the United States Nov. 28 at the age of 88. (Through an early error in the transcription of his name, he is known to the English-speaking Trotskyismovement as Peng Shu-tse.) In a statement issued in Paris Dec. 7, the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, the world Trotskyist organization, declared: "The Fourth International honors the memory of Comrade Peng Shu-chih as that of a firm defender, until death, of the principles of communism."

Peng Shu-chih was a historic figure of the Chinese Communist movement. No serious history of Chinese Communism omits his name. The Biographic Dictionary of Republican China, an encyclopedia of 20th century Chinese political and cultural figures, devotes no less than four full pages to him.

Peng made an indelible impression on friends and enemies alike. Mao Tse-tung, his lifelong political rival and opponent, included an attack on him in 1971 in one of the last public speeches Mao ever gave.

He was born in 1895 in Hunan province. The Kuang-hsu emperor was still on the throne of the oldest monarchical state in world history. A month before Peng's 16th birthday, a nationalist military rebellion toppled the imperial court and dragged China into the 20th century.

Peng Shu-chih was among the first Marxists in China. He was a founding member of the first Communist group in the country, the Socialist Youth League, set up by Comintern representative Gregory Voitinsky in Shanghai in August 1920. A few months later he went to Hunan, where he helped Mao Tse-tung organize the first chapter of the SYL there.

In the spring of 1921 he went to Moscow, where he attended the University for the Toilers of the East. He was elected secretary of the Moscow branch of the Chinese Communist Party, and served as a delegate to the Fifth Comintern Congress. On his return to China in 1924, he rose rapidly into the top leadership of the CCP and emerged as one of the five members of the Political Bureau, which at that time did not include Mao Tse-tung. He became editor-in-chief of both of the CCP's two main publications, its weekly newspaper, the Guide, and its theoretical magazine, New Youth.

It was in that same year that Shu-chih first met Chen Pi-lan, his future wife and lifelong companion. Pi-lan had been a party member for three years and had already worked in Hunan, in Shanghai, Peking, and Moscow. She was then editor of the magazine Chinese Women.

Shu-chih was the first of the Chinese Communist leaders to maintain that the impending revolution in China could be led by the working class. He advanced this position in an article in December 1924, when the Comintern had already declared that the coming revolution would have a coalition two-class character composed of the CCP and the procaPeng Shu-chih in exile - 1970.

by that time had begun its retreat from Leninism, argued that Lenin's Russian strategy was not possible in China. They maintained that it was necessary to return to an earlier idea Lenin had employed before he became convinced that Russia was ripe for socialist rebellion: to call for a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry, with the Kuomintang assigned to play the role of the peasant component of the coalition.

Throughout 1926 and the crucial spring of 1927, Ch'en and Peng several times reraised their criticism of the alliance with the KMT, calling for the withdrawal of the CCP from entry work inside the Kuomintang. This was not a theoretical abstraction. The Kuomintang held power only in a portion of South China centered on Canton. As its Northern Expedition armies marched northward in the spring of the 1927, worker and peasant uprisings erupted ahead of the arrival of Chiang's troops, posing immediately the question of the relationship between these communist-led insurrections and the bourgeois army. On March 21, 1927, after a previous defeat, the workers of Shanghai, the country's largest industrial city, rose in rebellion and ousted the local warlord government. Shu-chih and Pi-lan told me once that the insurrection was planned in their apartment.

Shanghai under workers' rule had to decide quickly if it would welcome Chiang's troops or prepare to resist. Shuchi advocated preparation for resistance. The Comintern demanded that the Communists and the trade unionists bury their arms to avoid a "provocation." Chiang entered the subdued city in the first week of April and on April 12 launched a massacre of the CCP and the labor movement.

AcTioN Between its founding in 1921 and 1927 the CCP had grown from 50 members to more than 50,000. It had taken the initiative in building trade unions which by early 1927numbered more than 2,000,000 members.

In those years Peng met and worked with the entire central leadership of the Chinese CP and many figures of the international Communist movement who were assigned by the increasingly bureaucratized Comintern to work in China, such as Ho Chi Minh, the future head of North Vietnam. He recruited the future president of China, Liu Shao-ch'i, to the CCP.

After the defeat of the revolution, the Stalin machine sought to make scapegoats of the very leaders who had tried to resist Stalin's fatal policy of compromise. At the August 1927 Emergency Conference of the CCP Ch'en Tu-hsiu and Peng Shu-chih were purged from the leadership.

The Chinese Trotskyists Two years later, when they first received copies of some of Trotsky's criticisms of Stalin's line, they realized that they had independently been fighting for the same conclusions. In 1929 they founded the Trotskyist movement in China. They were soon expelled from the CCP and established their own organization.

Many of their comrades were killed by Chiang Kai-shek. Shu-chih along with Ch'en Tu-hsiu and other leaders of the new organization spent five years in Chiang's prisons before they were freed in 1937 after the Japanese invasion of China. Peng's younger brother, Peng Tao-tse, died in the same prison.

Shu-chih's life can be seen in three parts: the years in the leadership of the CCP; the years between 1929 and 1948, as the central leader of the Chinese Trotskyist movement; and his years of exile, in Hong Kong, Vietnam, France, and the United States, when he contributed to the central leadership of the Fourth International.

From 1951 onward, living in Paris, Shu-chih and Pi-lan became leaders of the Fourth International. For the next 32 years, Shu-chih divided his time between his continuing absorption in following and interpreting the socialist revolution in China for his comrades and for the world, and the work of the political orientation of the world Trotskyist movement on other questions. In a steady stream of articles and interviews in which he took the measure of the Maoist leadership, Peng acknowledged the many advances made possible by the overthrow of Chiang Kai-shek, but focused on the unresolved problems of socialist construction in China. Above all, this was the problem of the newly entrenched bureaucracy, which stifled the right of ordinary people to make the smallest SUBSCRIBE NOW decision about their future and met every outspoken dissent with brutal repression.

In the late 1970s, I had the unforgettable experience of working with Peng Shu-chih to collect his post-1949 writings for publication in English. These were issued in 1980 by Pathfinder Press under the title The Communist Party in Power. Two volumes of a projected four volume set of his collected works have appeared in Chinese, published in Hong Kong by the October Bookshop. An edition has also appeared in Japanese. At the end of last year, the first volume of his memoirs was published in French by Gallimard under the title Memoires de Peng ShuZhi-L'Envol du communisme en Chine, written in collaboration with Claude Cadart and Cheng Yingxiang.

In the last few years, Shu-chih told me, and I am sure others who knew him, that one of his central concerns was the preservation of the unity of the Fourth International. He was pained when Nahuel Moreno and the Argentine Trotskyists left the world movement and he was fearful that further defections would weaken the movement in which he continued to place his confidence.

Like Trotsky, Peng Shu-chih died as an exile, disgraced and reviled in his native country by a government that claimed to represent the socialist future. Trotsky's biographer, Isaac Deutscher, assessing the outcome of the StalinTrotsky fight 20 years ago, entitled the last chapter of his work "Victory in Defeat." That optimistic conclusion has yet to be proven for Leon Trotsky's ideas in the Soviet Union. They are in some ways more justified in predicting the judgment of history on Mao Tse-tung and Peng Shu-chih.

In a discussion with Shu-chih last December, he told me that he considered the Chinese dissident movement today to be far more widespread than the Soviet dissident movement has ever been. But more significant, he felt the dissidents to be on a higher level than even the Polish Solidarnosc. Most of the more than 100 dissident underground magazines published in the late 1970s and early 1980s openly described China as a dictatorship of the party bureaucracy, not a proletarian state. In Szechuan, three years ago, one of the magazines had begun a study of Trotsky's ideas on the nature of bureaucracy. While the editors have been jailed, the mood of opposition has continued.

For anyone who knows what China was like in the regimented years of the Mao era, these changes lend weight to Shu-chih's opinion. Mao has already been toppled from his pedestal. It is not unreasonable to believe that in the future Peng Shu-chih will be given his rightful place in Chinese history as a founder of the present state and a champion of a socialism that rests on freedom as well as power.