Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Salient. Newspaper of Victoria University of Wellington Students Association. Vol 41 No. 6. April 3 1978

From Krushchev to Panmure

From Krushchev to Panmure

The FCP and the SUP are both part of the flotsam of revisionism that was set adrift by Krushchev and his followers when they attacked and defeated marxist politics within what was then the international communist movement in the late fifties and early sixties. Krushchev, using the great prestige of the Soviet Union and its hegemony over Eastern Europe, dictated a new line for the communist parties of the west. Preparation for violent revolution was condemned (as was preparation for violent counter-revolution) and the not so new theory of "peaceful transition to socialism" was substituted. The leaders of the FCP eagerly propagated this new line but within the Communist Party of New Zealand an extensive mass debate began. It ended in the total defeat of the Krushchev line and gradually the pro- Krushchev elements left the party to form the NZ Socialist Unity Party in 1966.

The new revisionist line of acheiving socialism through the ballot box has now had twenty years to prove itself. It has had no successes and has suffered several defeats. At the cost of over a million lives the Algerian people won their war of independence against France after the Soviet Union had refused to support them as they were not being peaceful. A more tragic defeat for the theory of peaceful transition was the disaster in Chile five years ago where a peaceful, disarmed Chilean working class saw an armed military topple the democratically elected government and institute a reign of terror. The official revisionist line is that the Chilean workers were not peaceful enough!

The new peaceful way has been turned by its adherents into a oft-used excuse to scab on the struggles of workers and oppressed peoples. Part of the peaceful road is "convincing" the bourgeoisie that they should also be peaceful — therefore all struggle against the bourgeoisie should be moderated in case a violent response is engendered.

The SUP and FCP have scabbed with the best of them. In 1968 the FCP did its best to sabotage and limit the student/worker uprising in Paris and elsewhere. Through the party-controlled trade union federation, the CGT, it fought against the spontaneous strikes and factory occupations and encouraged everyone to "go back to work".

Photo of people sitting in a car park

Auckland stopwork rally for the unemployed.

In the last year the SUP leadership has managed to condemn shop workers who struck against the Shop Trading Hours Bill as "wasting their time", to undermine mass actions at the start of the anti-SIS Bill campaign (everywhere but Wellington where page 7 its support was minimal but still SUP union officials tried to limit action by refusing to call stopworks on the legislation when requested), to oppose and destroy chances of a full-scale harbour stoppage during the Pintado visit and to undermine the struggle against redundancies at Todd Motors by big talk backed by deliberate non-action.