Popular Front of Judea
31st August 2013, 01:25
A blast from the past ...
Then raise the workers’ bomb on high,
Beneath its cloud we’ll gladly die,
For though it sends us all to hell,
It kills the ruling class as well.
When the first phase of the struggle against nuclear weapons began to gather momenturn in the late fifties, the [British] Communist Party faced a dilemma.
Although, under the hammer blows of 1956 (Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing Stalin, the Hungarian revolution and the near-revolution in Poland), it had begun very slowly the process of destalinisation, it was still unthinkable to the party leaders that they should actually deviate publicly from the Russian line in international affairs.
The USSR had detonated its first atomic bomb in 1949 arid its first hydrogen bomb in 1953 – a ‘breakthrough’ which CP spokesman Palme Dutt called “a powerful advance for the peace movement.”
Now, the newly born CND was calling for an end to all atomic weapons and, specifically, for unilaterial nuclear disarmament for Britain (first hydrogen bomb detonated in 1952).
This the CP could not accept. The Russian line was for multilateral disarmament by international agreement. Such agreement was the only way forward, declared the CP.
The question is what policy will unite the greatest number of people to get rid of the bomb. Experience has shown that unilateralism only divides the movement and diverts attention from the real issue, namely international agreement to ban nuclear weapons. This is the only way to banish the menace of nuclear war and also the issue on which the greatest number of people agree (Marxism Today, May 1959).
It was exactly the argument that James Callaghan put at the Labour Party conference this year – and which Hugh Gaitskell (and Aneurin Bevan) had advanced at the Labour Party conference in 1959.
When “the unilateralism (which) only divides” became a mass movement as CND grew, in spite of CP opposition, the party leaders began to realise that they would have to swallow their words and change the line. In May 1960 the CP executive reversed the (unanimous) decision of its previous congress, came out for unilateralism and called on all party members to join CND. It beat the Labour Party to it by just five months – for in September 1960 the unilateralists carried the Labour Party conference.
No more paeans of praise for the Russian bombs appeared in the CP press. The Russian build up of weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction became an embarrassment to the party, to be brushed under the carpet if possible and faintly defended as “purely defensive” if the issue could not be avoided.
However, enthusiastic defence of Russian nuclear weapons did not die out. This cause was snatched, so to say, from the faltering hands of the CP by what was in those days the biggest Trotskyist organisation, the SLL (now the WRP).
Their argument went like this. The USSR is a workers’ state because industry is nationalised and planned. It isa degenerated workers’ state because the workers have no power at all but are suppressed by a ‘bureaucratic ruling caste’.
This degenerated workers’ state must be defended against imperialist powers. The Russian hydrogen bomb is a necessary instrument for this defence. Therefore it must be defended too. It is the workers’ bomb.
Nuclear disarmament by the USSR must be actively opposed, as must the “treachery” of the CP in downplaying “unconditional defence of the USSR” and the “renegacy of the revisionists” – the forerunners of the SWP and others – in “abandoning the conquests of working class”, including the workers’ bomb.
One of the several versions of the satirical song quoted at the head of this article put the ‘case’ for the Russian nuclear bomb succinctly, cruelly and entirely accurately:
Degenerated tho’ it be
It’s still the workers’ property.
Other self styled ‘orthodox’ Trotskyist groups, including those in the tradition now represented by the IMG in Britain adopted the same general view. Indeed, a tendency developed in the Fourth International which took matters further. Led by a certain Juan Posadas, it called on the rulers of the USSR to use the workers’ bomb in a ‘preventive’ nuclear strike to destroy the imperialist powers and establish a world workers’ state (the degenerated version, of course). In fairness, it must be said this was too much for most of the FI people and so Posadas set up shop with an FIof his own.
The Return Of The Worker' Bomb | Marxist Internet Archive (http://www.marxists.org/archive/hallas/works/1980/12/workersbomb.htm)
Then raise the workers’ bomb on high,
Beneath its cloud we’ll gladly die,
For though it sends us all to hell,
It kills the ruling class as well.
When the first phase of the struggle against nuclear weapons began to gather momenturn in the late fifties, the [British] Communist Party faced a dilemma.
Although, under the hammer blows of 1956 (Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing Stalin, the Hungarian revolution and the near-revolution in Poland), it had begun very slowly the process of destalinisation, it was still unthinkable to the party leaders that they should actually deviate publicly from the Russian line in international affairs.
The USSR had detonated its first atomic bomb in 1949 arid its first hydrogen bomb in 1953 – a ‘breakthrough’ which CP spokesman Palme Dutt called “a powerful advance for the peace movement.”
Now, the newly born CND was calling for an end to all atomic weapons and, specifically, for unilaterial nuclear disarmament for Britain (first hydrogen bomb detonated in 1952).
This the CP could not accept. The Russian line was for multilateral disarmament by international agreement. Such agreement was the only way forward, declared the CP.
The question is what policy will unite the greatest number of people to get rid of the bomb. Experience has shown that unilateralism only divides the movement and diverts attention from the real issue, namely international agreement to ban nuclear weapons. This is the only way to banish the menace of nuclear war and also the issue on which the greatest number of people agree (Marxism Today, May 1959).
It was exactly the argument that James Callaghan put at the Labour Party conference this year – and which Hugh Gaitskell (and Aneurin Bevan) had advanced at the Labour Party conference in 1959.
When “the unilateralism (which) only divides” became a mass movement as CND grew, in spite of CP opposition, the party leaders began to realise that they would have to swallow their words and change the line. In May 1960 the CP executive reversed the (unanimous) decision of its previous congress, came out for unilateralism and called on all party members to join CND. It beat the Labour Party to it by just five months – for in September 1960 the unilateralists carried the Labour Party conference.
No more paeans of praise for the Russian bombs appeared in the CP press. The Russian build up of weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction became an embarrassment to the party, to be brushed under the carpet if possible and faintly defended as “purely defensive” if the issue could not be avoided.
However, enthusiastic defence of Russian nuclear weapons did not die out. This cause was snatched, so to say, from the faltering hands of the CP by what was in those days the biggest Trotskyist organisation, the SLL (now the WRP).
Their argument went like this. The USSR is a workers’ state because industry is nationalised and planned. It isa degenerated workers’ state because the workers have no power at all but are suppressed by a ‘bureaucratic ruling caste’.
This degenerated workers’ state must be defended against imperialist powers. The Russian hydrogen bomb is a necessary instrument for this defence. Therefore it must be defended too. It is the workers’ bomb.
Nuclear disarmament by the USSR must be actively opposed, as must the “treachery” of the CP in downplaying “unconditional defence of the USSR” and the “renegacy of the revisionists” – the forerunners of the SWP and others – in “abandoning the conquests of working class”, including the workers’ bomb.
One of the several versions of the satirical song quoted at the head of this article put the ‘case’ for the Russian nuclear bomb succinctly, cruelly and entirely accurately:
Degenerated tho’ it be
It’s still the workers’ property.
Other self styled ‘orthodox’ Trotskyist groups, including those in the tradition now represented by the IMG in Britain adopted the same general view. Indeed, a tendency developed in the Fourth International which took matters further. Led by a certain Juan Posadas, it called on the rulers of the USSR to use the workers’ bomb in a ‘preventive’ nuclear strike to destroy the imperialist powers and establish a world workers’ state (the degenerated version, of course). In fairness, it must be said this was too much for most of the FI people and so Posadas set up shop with an FIof his own.
The Return Of The Worker' Bomb | Marxist Internet Archive (http://www.marxists.org/archive/hallas/works/1980/12/workersbomb.htm)