Veteran Trotskyists conclude successful 12-city tour of U.S

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... Czechoslovakia upsurge 14 SOCIALIST ACTION DECEMBER 1989 By FINAMORE Three veteran revolutionary MarxistsEsteban Volkov, Nadezhda Joffe, and Pierre Broué—successfully completed their October speaking tour of the United States sponsored by Walnut Publishing Co. and Socialist Action. All three spoke in Boston and New York, with Volkov and Broué also speaking in San Francisco and Los Angeles. In addition, Broué spoke in Baltimore, Chicago, and Minneapolis.

Other participants in portions of the tour were Professor Paul Siegel, Ralph Schoenman, Susan Weissman, and Carl Finamore, all of whom recently visited the Soviet Union to request that Leon Trotsky's name be cleared of all the false charges hurled by Stalin and his successors and that the Soviet government publish and widely distribute Trotsky's complete writings. The delegation to the Soviet Union represented the surviving family members of Leon Trotsky.

The October speaking tour of the United States coincided with the mass upheavals in Eastern Europe and drew enthusiastic audiences in every city. Interest in the ideas of the original Bolshevik opposition to Stalin is now greater than ever. The speakers pointed out that this renewed interest was not only an academic, historical curiosity. The ideas of the Left Opposition, they noted, are key to (continued from page 1: “Czech general Stalinist gov't”) register on East Europe's workers and prepare them to pick up the thread now being sewn into the historical process by the Czechoslovak proletariat.

Neither will these events fail to make their impact on the entire world's workers.

It would be wrong to oversimplify the great problems which must yet be solved by Czech and other East European workers. There is no conscious revolutionary proletarian party yet in existence that can lead the workers to victory over the bureaucratic dictatorships that remain in power.

The bureaucracy cannot be displaced by a process of democratization led by intellectuals and other representatives of the radicalizing middle classes. Only the workers can do this.

But the indispensable contribution of students and others trained to take ideas seriously A biweekly magazine published by the Fourth International.

One year: $47. Write to: rue Richard Lenoir, 93108 Montreuil, France. understanding today's events and charting a course toward genuine workers' democracy.

Several meetings attracted over 150 people, many hearing the Trotskyist program for workers' democracy for the first time. Over 175 autographed copies of "Gorbachev's USSR: Is Stalinism Dead?" were sold. The new Walnut Publishing Co. release contains articles by the tour participants.

Several newspaper interviews were arranged with the speakers including a Los Angeles Times article which received national circulation over their wire service. Meetings and seminars were sponsored on university campuses by a number of Russian and Eastern European Studies departments, including Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, University of California (Berkeley), UCLA, and Brown.

In addition to young activists, many veterans of the socialist movement attended the meetings. Often they would comment how pleased they were that millions throughout the world were rebelling against the totalitarian Stalinist regimes, which previously had so easily dismissed the lone Trotskyist voice of opposition.

Now it was the Stalinists, they explained, who were isolated and condemned, not through bureaucratic slanders, deceit, and violence-as the Trotskyists had suffered—but by the verdict of history rendered by a jury of millions of working people mobilized throughout the world.

cannot be underestimated. The turn by Czechoslovak intellectuals to the workers, identifying with them as the decisive force in modern society, opens up two possibilities. Either the workers will be co-opted by the radical wing of the petty-bourgeoisie, or a wing of the revolutionary-minded students and intellectuals will embrace the cause of the workers as their own.

The latter, a revolutionary-proletarian marriage of intellectuals and workers is the road toward creation of a mass workers' political party that can conquer the bureaucratic dictatorships and establish the political rule of the working class.

What next after the strike?

A longtime dissident, the playwright Vaclav Havel, seems to have emerged as one of the more far-seeing spokespersons of the radicalizing intelligentsia. He was a key speaker at the 500,000-strong rally on the day before the general strike.

Havel articulated the prevailing viewpoint of Civic Forum, for which he spoke, that does not go beyond the goal of reforming the bureaucracy and establishing a parliamentary democracy in Czechoslovakia.

But Havel also went far further in his remarks than any other prominent figure to date. He first posed the question of "what will come after the strike?" He then declared: "The Civic Forum suggests that the strike committees remain on permanent alert and turn themselves into forums that will be the indepenprotesting the treatment of three opposition

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