CORRESPONDENTS' CORRESPONDENCE
ALEXANDER, DONALD R. SHANOR / ROBERT J.
Correspondents' Correspondence BRIEF TAKEOUTS OF MORE THAN PERSONAL INTEREST FROM LETTERS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS. The View from Slovakia Bratislava—At the memorial...
...A final contrast with the Balkan state is that while ethnic rivals there have taken up arms, the fighting between Czechs and Slovaks has been limited to speeches and media exchanges...
...The Bratislava nationalist lawyer is more pragmatic: "When we join the European Community, we'd rather deal with Brussels on our own than through Prague...
...In his view, the real opponents of greater autonomy for Slovakia are those who run the huge federal superstructure and are worried about losing their power...
...Over the years, the Militant Tendency had succeeded in dominating a handful of relatively small unions and had become influential in some larger ones, giving it in an appreciable voice at annual labor Party conferences...
...Clearly, the purge will be a crippling setback for the British Trotskyites...
...Laborites, whose chances of unseating the ruling Conservatives are at the moment the best that they have been in a dozen years, do not want to be associated with discredited notions in the current run-up period to Britain's next general election...
...This stirred considerable internal dissent among the old hard-liners, and in 1985 they broke away to form the Communist Party of Britain (CPB...
...The traditionalists have proclaimed themselves loyal to Marxist-Leninist doctrine and still fundamentally in support of the Soviet economic and social system established by Stalin, although they criticize it for being "too bureaucratic...
...A wider consequence of the contest has been the launching of a massive drive by Labor leader Neil Kinnock to rid the party of the Trotskyites...
...An aide to President Havel told me the two sides agree privately that dividing Czechoslovakia would hurt both the Czech and Slovak economies...
...Now that the Soviet empire is also collapsing, the Slovaks want the equality they insist was denied them throughout the years of federation, whether the rulers in Prague were democrats or Communists...
...In a Parliamentary by-election in the Liverpool area, their center of strength, they ran their own "real Socialist" candidate against the Labor Party's standard bearer...
...Accordingly, it studiously avoided any action that might provoke its ouster from Labor's ranks...
...The party applauded the changes in Eastern Europe two years ago, and at its 42nd Congress last December was taken over by a group of young people...
...The speeches are peppered with references to the Slovenes and Croats defying Belgrade's tanks...
...At the same time, the Trotskyites have been buffeted by developments at home...
...The Slovaks, currently numbering 5 million, joined fortunes with the Czechs, today about 10 million, to form a nation out of the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918...
...That means they earn the hard currency from sales of finished goods and can buy new technology—and we can't...
...What comforts the supporters of unity and disturbs the separatists is the splintering of political power in Slovakia...
...Donald R. Shanor Britain's Fading Far Left London—The small, fractured British Marxist-Leninist Left is becoming smaller and more divided...
...Today the CPB is insubstantial, but it does publish what used to be the CPGB's newspaper, the Daily Star...
...Whether that approach or, indeed, any of the ambitious reforms proposed—assuming they are adopted in November—will enable the CPGB to find a place for itself in British politics remains an open question...
...The CPGB has lost much of its influence in the trade unions...
...The party claims it is not troubled by this...
...That optimism is shared by other officials I talked to here and in Prague, and by diplomats at the recently reopened U.S...
...This has made it easy for Kinnock to identify his targets...
...The streets of Bratislava and other cities are lined with former state-run stores now up for sale to private interests...
...From then on it preached and practiced the idea that the only way Trotskyism could make an impact was through permanent penetration of the established Left...
...In contrast to Yugoslavia, he notes, "75 per cent of the people in both republics favor federation...
...Moreover, a poll taken by Bratislava's Comenius University revealed that half of those questioned either had no opinion on independence or did not intend to vote in the next election...
...Actually, Labor has an additional incentive to clean house...
...The high rate of inflation, now approximately 25 per cent, is widely considered an indicator of hardships to come...
...and to replace democratic centralism with an open and democratic structure, involving a move toward federalism...
...They have published a draft constitution that would change the party's name to Democratic Left...
...Slovakia has been culturally distinct for over a thousand years, he pointed out, yet save for a brief period of wartime puppet rule established by the Nazis (the target of the 1944 uprising), it has never been a sovereign nation...
...During the following decade it joined the burgeoning Eurocommunist movement and asserted its independence from the Kremlin...
...Its newly declared objective is to work within the labor movement to make it more democratic and responsive to the membership...
...Secretary General Nina Temple, who is only 30, was for a number of years the Young Communist League delegate to the CPGB Politburo...
...By running on the Labor ticket, Militant adherents further managed to win a few seats in Parliament, as well as an impressive number of municipal councillorships and assorted other elected offices...
...at present, in fact, not one important union is under Communist control...
...The View from Slovakia Bratislava—At the memorial to the 1944 Slovak National Uprising in this pleasant city on the Danube, bullhorns blast out the latest demands of extreme nationalists for independence...
...consulate within earshot of the bullhorns...
...Since the 1985 split the CPGB has continued to evolve, despite the fact that its membership has steadily declined...
...In the early 1960s, the basic Militant thrust became "deep entry" into the Labor Party...
...The result was a smashing Labor victory: The "real Socialist" received a mere 6 per cent of the vote...
...It must come from the will of the two partners, not be imposed by one...
...The Trotskyites, meanwhile, are in the process of sustaining a major blow that is likely to cost them the political ground their once careful strategy had gained...
...By early summer the figure had dropped to around 20 per cent...
...Elsewhere in Bratislava and in Prague, a joint CzechSlovak constitutional commission is negotiating, arguing and compromising in an attempt to head off a split or armed conflict in the second of Eastern Europe's federations to face dissolution...
...With the collapse of international Communism, sympathy for Marxist-Leninists of every stripe has virtually evaporated here...
...We are not against federation if someone proves that it is beneficial to us, comments Judge Karol Plank, a Slovak member of the constitutional commission...
...Even some of the nationalists concede that a unified Czechoslovakia is more of a prospect than the creation of two independent states...
...One of Europe's oldest MarxistLeninist organizations, the CPGB always elected at least one member of Parliament from the mid-1920s until 1950...
...This is another difference from Yugoslavia, where the leaders of the seceding republics have strong popular support...
...Economic concerns are exacerbated by the complications of converting a Communist economy to a free market one...
...He added, however, that the emotional aspect of the issue is hard to gauge...
...Although unemployment is low by Western standards or even those of Eastern Europe, it is worrisome in a country that only two years ago had no official jobless...
...Whether we separate or stay together, we are fortunate that this situation exists...
...But in June, without explanation, the Militants violated their principle of infiltration...
...Slovak Deputy Prime Minister Gabriel Zazlos claims those who want independence for financial reasons have the facts backward...
...The present relationship runs counter to all the democratic reforms President [Vaclav] Havel has carried out since the fall of communism...
...The worst is the economic colonialism," he says...
...Whatever happens, the President's aide concluded, violence seems improbable: "The two republics have lived side by side for a thousand years without blood being spilled...
...The country will stay together because Prague will make concessions," says a Bratislava professor active in politics...
...Last spring, when former Slovak Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar broke with Public Against Violence, the eastern arm of Havel's Civic Forum, surveys gave his pro-independence stance a 30 per cent approval rating...
...Now, just as three decades of pursuing its deep entry strategy was promising to also give it a voice in the next national government, Britain's leading Trotskyite party is being blown out of the picture.—Robert J. Alexander...
...The new leaders have called a special 43rd Congress to be held in November, when they will undertake a total political transformation...
...Even after losing its last seat in Commons, it controlled for many years several of the most important national unions belonging to the Labor Party, including the Amalgamated Engineering and the National Miners unions...
...The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) has been undermined by the turn of events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union...
...Slovak Minister of Justice Marion Posluch, the commission chairman, is optimistic that an agreement will be reached...
...Quite typically, the movement here is an assortment of quarreling factions, with the most prominent and powerful of these for the past 20 years being the Militant Tendency...
...The document notes that the 1990 congress agreed "to adopt aims and values that drop Marxism-Leninism and embrace a politics drawing from creative Marxism, feminism, ecology, and other progressive traditions...
...Slovak industry is kept in the status of supplier to the Czech factories...
...When the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, the CPGB began to veer from the orthodox road...
...The separatist wrangling, he warns, "is slowing down economic plans because foreign investors are uneasy about the nation's stability and are hesitant to make commitments...
...During the campaign, Militant supporters throughout the Labor Party, including some MPs, either endorsed the radical candidate or sat on their hands...
...It's a question of democracy versus bureaucracy...
...A Bratislava lawyer and nationalist agrees that if Prague loosened its control a split would be unlikely...
Vol. 74 • August 1991 • No. 9
