Penderyn, your main gripe seems to be another group called the demo rather than your own, hence your endless trolling. And you seem desperate for people to unite around a left wing unity project under your groups hegemonic leadership, which is fine, but you don't like left unity if it's on someone elses terms (which is only natural). But accusations of dishonesty are not helpful.
Plans are afoot for moving things forward, naturally the activists who attended the demo will be consulting with each other (a wide spectrum for a small protest including socialists, green party, union reps, two AMs, Plaid, Labour, and language activists) as a preliminary to setting up a suitable forum where appropriate tactics and strategy can be debated, there is also talk from people like McDonell MP of a national initiative around fuel poverty. There is also another related initiative of a different kind that I have been kicking around with some comrades of mine formerly around
Class War for a more direct action campaign around food prices, that will hopefully be launched at the anarchist bookfair (watch this space) that I'm sure will blow people's minds and revive the very British tradition of the unruly mob. (read Edward Thompson on 'the moral economy of the english crowd" for some background). This important struggle will also be part of the package.
Udo, on TC: the old IS built themselves on the back of the Prague Spring and massive disillusionment in the Soviet Union. The slogan "Neither Washington or Moscow but international socialism" was a winner in those circumstances. But the Trotskyist position was always to defend the post-capitalist property relations of the USSR against imperialist attack, while calling for the revolutionary overthrow of the bureaucratic caste to restore workers' democracy
As to the theory of State Capitalism, it has the virtue of moving debate away from abstract disussions of property relations onto the very concrete question of "are workers in the saddle"? And the question of workers democracy.
One senses the weakness in Penderyn's theory. For example, how would you "restore" workers democracy in Cuba? There never was workers democracy to start with, what we had was a popular nationalist movement that toppled Batista, but there were no workers councils, factory committees and other organs of popular democracy as seen in many other revolutions and uprisings (for example, Argentina at the beginning of the century saw 'Popular Assemblies')
Another consequence of Penderyn's rejection of the theory of state capitalism is to see regimes like Vietnam, China, Cuba, North Korea, Eastern Bloc as essentially workers states but deformed and dominated by a red bureaucracy.
How do you replace these regimes with socialism? Trotsky falsely argued that all that was needed was a 'political revolution'.
But actually, creating socialism in these stalinist regimes requires exactly the same kind of revolution as in the capitalist west. The workers can't just lay hold of the existing state regime and use it for their own purpose, they have to smash it and replace it with a new form of democracy based on workers councils etc.
The refutation of penderyn can be seen in Hungary in 1956. As Edward Thompson put it, "The Polish and Hungarian people have written their critique of Stalinism upon their streets and squares. In doing so, they have brought back honour to the international Communist movement"
The attempted Hungarian revolution threw up workers councils, the same soviets that had been the engine of the russian revolution. The experience of Hungary was that exactly same process of revolution was necessary in this country as in a western country.
