Letters

Rubbish

In the interests of ‘balance’, I would say that the great majority of Jack Conrad’s articles are excellent, well-researched, well-argued and well-written. I probably agree with the large majority of their content - especially those on Marxist theory, the party programme, the history and practice of Bolshevism, the history of the revolutionary movement in Russia up to 1917 and indeed on the current conflict in Ukraine.

I have to say though, his two articles on the five-year plan and the Stalin-led period in the USSR (‘First plan backgrounds’, June 15; ‘First plan realities’, June 22) were among the worst he has ever written and appalling on virtually all counts. For a so-called communist to write such rubbish is a complete disgrace and Conrad should be thoroughly ashamed of himself.

Conrad litters his articles with quotes and references from a number of professional anti-Soviet writers and historians (‘professional’ because they are or were literally paid and made their careers on the basis of their anti-Sovietism, often funded by the US and its secret state), plus from assorted flotsam-and-jetsam Mensheviks and expelled renegades from the Communist Party. Interestingly and correctly, Conrad links and lumps together the Mensheviks and Trotskyists, including Trotsky, Bukharin and Ravoksky.

For good measure, quotes from Alec Nove, another Menshevik and an advocate of ‘market socialism’, and Trotsky disciples such as Grant, Silverman (never heard of him) and Cliff are also thrown into the mix - although the latter three, being Trotskyists, manage to come to completely opposite and contradictory conclusions about the USSR.

Conrad’s basic objectives were to try and portray the Soviet Union (using his infamous gynaecological language - any psychoanalysts out there?) as some form of “freak”, an “ectopic” formation, an “abortion of a society”.

Anyone with the slightest genuine knowledge or experience of Soviet society or of Soviet people would know not only these are completely absurd and ridiculous statements, but actually deeply insulting to millions of Soviet working people, who achieved astounding feats during Soviet power, and who themselves helped create and build a new society, a new civilisation, based on collectivist and socialist principles.

Conrad’s two articles remind me of some of the most rightwing, reactionary and virulent anti-Soviet writers who emerged in the USSR in the late 1980s during the destructive and nihilistic years of late-stage perestroika and glasnost, when literally almost anything went - the more wild, extreme and hedonistic, the better. We know how that all ended. Some of the extremist language of late perestroika and glasnost included “terrorism”, “the people’s political servility”, “uninspired social vegetation”, “spiritual slavery” and “universal fear” to describe the epoch of the transition to socialism. Is this any different to the tone and content of Conrad’s language?

For a self-claimed Marxist and communist to (deliberately) confuse the entire complex epoch of the transition from feudalism and capitalism to socialist construction and socialism - which through the industrialisation, collectivisation and cultural revolutions took the USSR into the ranks of the world’s great powers - as a “counterrevolution within a revolution”, is a calumny of gigantic proportions. As to what type of society this alleged “counterrevolution” actually produced, Conrad is completely unable to say - he is just left floundering, throwing out absurd and offensive gynaecological terms in place of any serious historical-materialist analysis.

What actually happened was that, first through the political overthrow of the landlords and capitalists in 1917, then through the economic and cultural revolutions of the late 1920s and 30s, millions of working people - led, yes, by the Communist Party - had not only overthrown the exploiting classes of the old order, bourgeois property, the ‘free market’ and the capitalist state, but replaced them by collective and state property, socialist central planning and a socialist workers’ state.

Not only were endemic features of capitalism - unemployment, grinding poverty, glaring inequalities of wealth, sex, ethnic and national discrimination and oppression, etc - subsequently eliminated, but the Soviet people became among the best educated and cultured in the world. And probably with the best and most comprehensive healthcare services as well, with a strong emphasis on ill-health prevention, early years, health at work and in later and older age as well.

I have never claimed Soviet society in any epoch was ‘perfect’ or that mistakes were never made - some with significant, untoward consequences, including political and economic, and some with needless loss of life. I probably became politically conscious from the mid-1970s, and I was clear at the time and since that Soviet socialism was not necessarily the model I would advocate for this country. I have always been consistently clear that from at least the late 1970s, Soviet society and its economy were in major need of comprehensive modernisation, restructuring and democratisation, but on a firmly communist basis and direction.

The real tragedy of the Soviet Union was not the socialist construction of the 1930s, but that Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost lacked any strategic conception of a 21st century model of socialism with which to update Soviet society. They just seemed to dismantle, destroy and denigrate; they helped create and unleashed reactionary, rightwing and nationalist forces - many based economically on corruption and criminality. The old political and economic system was weakened, dismantled and ultimately swept away by anti-socialist, anti-working class and anti-democratic forces.

The genuine socialist and communist forces were simply too weak - disabled, disoriented and divided - to resist the restoration of capitalism and the subsequent catastrophe of the Yeltsin years.

Andrew Northall
Kettering

Class rule

I see that Tony Clark has now modified his opposition to the term, ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, by defining any form of dictatorship as “lawless rule” (Letters, July 27).

This is nonsense. A whole range of dictators, from Napoleon Bonaparte to Adolf Hitler, imposed a series of legislative measures to strengthen their power and suppress any opposition, but this does not necessarily mean that their rule was “unrestricted by law”, as Clark claims. Dictators often impose laws which give them the right to adopt certain measures under particular circumstances, for example.

Previously, as far as I know, Clark limited his description of dictatorship to something along the lines of Wikipedia’s definition: an “autocratic form of government which is characterised by a leader, or a group of leaders, who hold governmental powers with few to no limitations”. But Marxists also use the term in another way: to describe the rule of a particular social class.

Take ‘bourgeois democratic’ states like the UK and USA. Yes, the working class has won a whole series of democratic rights and made other gains, but, at the end of the day, these are limited by the needs of the bourgeoisie: in other words, it is the operation of capital which determines the way forward for bourgeois governments and guides, restricts or modifies every policy they adopt. That is why it is reasonable to describe capitalist rule as a means of ensuring the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

In other words, for as long as social classes continue to exist, governments of any class will impose measures to limit the power of the enemy class. Thus, immediately after any working class revolution, for as long as capitalist production still exists, in however limited a form, we will need to ensure that our own collective interests determine the way forward. That is why the class which forms the overwhelming majority of the population will have to impose its ‘dictatorship’ over the bourgeois minority.

But we must do that in a democratic way: the entire population will elect representatives, who will debate and vote for the appropriate measures - irrespective of the opposition of the bourgeoisie or any other class minority. That is why the Bolsheviks aimed for the establishment of a “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry” - the rule of the majority, as opposed to that of the minority of capitalists and landowners.

Peter Manson
London

Engage

Comrade Mike Macnair has provided more details to the argument for a conscript militia (Letters, July 27). I would like to clarify that in my questioning of this proposal, I did not state that the workers’ movement has never tried a conscript militia: I just expressed a genuine ignorance as to its implementation. So this is not a case of “possibilism” on my part, but a lack of knowledge as to the history of law and its enforcement.

In his article on this phenomenon of possibilism, the comrade rightly argues that what is required is a political voice independent of the capitalists’ framework (‘Blind leading the blind’, July 27). It is within this forum that debates on what our class needs can be debated by the left. Socialist Alliance, Respect, Left Unity, etc were flawed in programmatic terms, but they forced both the confessional sects of the far left and a layer of left reformists breaking from Labour to engage with each other at a political level.

A countervailing tendency to possibilism is impossibilism, which is found within those organisations on the far left that failed to engage with regroupment efforts. Although the votes for these past formations and for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition in the present can be dismissed as derisory, they have been produced via a process which - although it has not succeeded in breaking it - necessarily challenges Labour’s monopoly of working class political representation, albeit only at the level of external pressure at this stage. This raises the spectre of a Communist Party even if most class-conscious workers will opt for Labour in opposition to the Tories.

A political framework centred on electoral intervention can bridge the gap between theoretical discussion among comrades of various groups (which inevitably takes place informally online, on picket lines, at protests and at street stalls) and the inclusion of broader layers, who are reached through the course of an election campaign. But the regrouping of the radical left surely requires a purpose to overcome the organisational barriers to growth.

Regroupment need not involve the construction of a broad coalition for the purpose of governing, but, as seems like a reasonable immediate goal in Britain, the creation of a radical left bloc in parliament which is at least organisationally separate from the bourgeois workers’ party, even if its leadership will face the pressure to enter into coalitions.

Despite past failures, it will be necessary for Marxists to engage with initiatives like Transform and urge the creation of a new workers’ party, which operates without bans and proscriptions of socialist organisations, but the right to form open factions.

Ansell Eade
Lincolnshire

Shape debate

I read your continuing coverage of the Labour Party with a mixture of despair and relief: despair at the continuing degeneration of the policies; relief that the party’s core beliefs are out in the open.

I was excited when Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader, but the following five years ended any misconceptions I had about the ability of Labour to form a popular socialist government, and about the ability of reformism to achieve any lasting change. The hostile environment created by the media and the establishment in those years showed the limitations of the project - not to mention the number of own goals inflicted by the leadership.

A clear goal of the next general election must be removing the Conservatives from power, but we should be under no illusions about an incoming Labour government: this will be an all-out capitalist project with the faintest red hue. The question then, is what do Marxists do next? I am only in my 30s, but I’ve already seen the litany of failed ‘Labour mark two’ projects that have occurred in my political lifetime. What is to be done?

Marxists need to form a vanguard party that allows different tendencies to come together around a core platform. Standing in elections in a first-past-the-post system is a waste of time and resources; instead we must begin to make the arguments that capitalism isn’t working, linking our views with the issues that affect working class people the most: the environmental crisis, the cost-of-living crisis, the changing world of work, etc.

Only then can we start to shape the debate about where humanity goes after capitalism.

George H
email

What is Labour?

The latest horror story is that Keir Starmer would not abolish the bedroom tax, so what is the Labour Party for? It arose out of the determination of the economically productive classes of what was then the richest and most powerful country in the history of the world, first to explain their poverty, and then to defeat it.

If there was one thing about which all Labour people really did used to agree, then it was that the state had a duty to eradicate child poverty. Even if you took the hard-line Blairite view that from the day that you embarked on adult life you were solely responsible for what you did with your Sure Start maternity grant, then you were emphatic that you were entitled to it in the first place. And in fact the last Labour government did a great deal about child poverty - the fight against which was the driving passion of Gordon Brown’s political life. What is there to Labour now? Nothing - absolutely nothing at all.

As a Commonwealth citizen, Julian Assange is eligible to contest a British general election. He ought to do so for the seat of Holborn and St Pancras, which is presently occupied by Starmer. The neighbouring constituency of Islington North is certainly going to return its MP since 1983, Jeremy Corbyn. It is now quite clear that Emma Dent Coad is going to contest Kensington, which she lost by only 150 votes and where she remains a sitting councillor with a very high local profile through the campaign for justice for Grenfell Tower. Should Diane Abbott still be without the whip when the general election is called, then Hackney North and Stoke Newington would be no contest (as it would be if she had the whip, come to that). And so on.

All this and Jamie Driscoll too.

David Lindsay
Lanchester

Transform

Transform - “a call for a new party of the left”, was launched on July 25. Following the launch, 3,000-plus supporters had signed up in the first 48 hours, with 500,000-plus viewings of the launch video. That launch was featured in the Morning Star, The Skwawkbox and The Voice.

The Breakthrough Party, Left Unity, the People’s Alliance of the Left, and the Liverpool Community Independents have come together along with support from people across our movement, including former Labour MP Thelma Walker, national president of the BFAWU union Ian Hodson, and former Labour Women’s Committee and Momentum national coordinating group member Solma Ahmed, to launch and sign this call for a new left party.

It is therefore a pity that Mike Macnair (‘Blind leading the blind’, July 27) mistakenly equates Transform with the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition and the Workers Party of Britain. As most people know, Tusc is a front for the Socialist Party in England and Wales, just like the Labour and Trade Union Group was a front for Militant in Northern Ireland in the 1970s (its current front in Northern Ireland being the Cross Community Labour Alliance).

At the same time, George Galloway’s WPB is just a vehicle to be used, so that he and a new member, former Labour MP Chris Williamson, can use the description, ‘Workers Party of Britain’, on the ballot paper, come the next general election. This follows the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist Leninist) withdrawing from electoral activity and involvement in the WPB in the autumn of 2022 - something described by George Galloway as “pruning”.

Earlier this year the People’s Alliance of the Left cut off all involvement with Tusc following Tusc’s acceptance of someone from the WPB becoming an observer at Tusc steering committee meetings. This was because of the WPB’s transphobia. At the same time, SPEW wants Tusc to become a Labour Party mark two controlled by the trade union bureaucracy. It is therefore for the best that Transform has no involvement from the trade unions apart from individual members.

The right wing has regained control of Labour. Jeremy Corbyn, and his politics that inspired millions across our society, have been cast out. Labour now opposes strikes, rejects renationalisation, refuses to defend refugees, and won’t scrap student fees - or even the two-child benefit cap. Keir Starmer has overseen the driving out of 200,000 Labour members. ‘The many’ who supported Labour politics from 2015 to 2019 are denied a political voice.

We need a political organisation that offers a real solution: one that challenges the system at the root of every crisis we face. Over recent months, organisations and individuals from the labour and trade union movement have come together to discuss a way forward. Now we are taking the next step: inviting all who agree with our core principles to move rapidly towards founding a new party of the left. Together, we can transform politics. The time is now.

John Smithee
Transform supporter

Get wallet out

When conversations about a new left party occur, very often the issue of funding is brought up. Many on the left believe that a new left-of-Labour party could not possibly financially compete with the bourgeois parties unless it managed to secure the financial backing of the trade unions - see, for example, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition’s attempt to forge a new left party by aiming to sway trade unions away from the Labour Party and towards itself.

This, however, puts the cart before the horse. Tusc has had the support of a few unions, whose leadership is to the left of the Labour Party. However, how many members of, say, the RMT even knew Tusc existed, let alone supported or voted for it? A mass socialist or communist party should hopefully have the support of unions, but the support of the unions only matters when it is backed up by support for the party from the unions’ membership. Only when there is a genuine mass socialist or communist party, when the actual membership of these unions are voting for socialist/communist candidates, is getting financial support from unions a viable strategy.

In the meantime, however, Jamie Driscoll has already proven what can be done by the left in terms of funding. His mayoral-election GoFundMe campaign had already raised over £120,000 in just over a week. There is clearly support out there for campaigns to the left of the Labour Party: people want an alternative and are willing to get out the wallet for that alternative.

Bernardo Credali
Oxfordshire

Critique

The first point to make in reply to Dan Lazare’s letter (July 27) is that Critique is a peer-reviewed academic journal and the editorial board is not in a position to decide which article is published. Every article we receive is sent to two academic reviewers, and the editorial board has always included members with wide-ranging views. It is not a politburo and Critique has never claimed to be a party journal.

When I referred to the pro-Soviet policies of the Trotskyist left in the article to which Lazare replied (‘Fifty years of socialist theory’, July 20), I am not referring to Trotsky, but the political organisations which identified themselves as Trotskyist, including the Fourth International. There are many examples, from supporting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to supporting Iran’s Islamic Republic in 1979.

Leading figures of the Fourth International were heralding the Islamist slogan, ‘Allah-o Akbar’, as an anti-imperialist slogan in London and elsewhere, at a time when the regime was killing leftwing activists. The only justification was the Soviet Union’s position on the Islamic Republic, declaring it a country that was no longer in the ‘imperialist camp’.

Yassamine Mather
email

Free Kagarlitsky

On July 26, the Russian FSB security service detained Boris Kagarlitsky, a well-known leftwing theorist, activist and commentator. Following his arrest, he was transferred from his home city of Moscow to a pre-trial detention centre in Syktyvkar, the Komi Republic, where he will be held until late September (at least). Kagarlitsky has been charged with “justifying terrorism” and could face up to seven years in prison. His colleagues from the YouTube channel Rabkor have also been interrogated in Moscow, Yekaterinburg and Penza, and their apartments searched.

To us, it is clear that Kagarlitsky’s arrest forms part of a new, large-scale repressive campaign launched by the Kremlin to purge all critics of the war from the political landscape. Since February 2022, Boris has explicitly condemned Russia’s aggression and we are certain that this was the only motivation for his arrest.

Kagarlitsky’s political career began over 40 years ago and has been far from flawless. In the early 1980s, he was a member of the ‘young socialists’ underground group and subject to repressions by the KGB. Since the early 1990s, he has played a prominent role in the leftwing opposition - first to Yeltsin’s and then to Putin’s regime. His numerous books and public statements have greatly influenced several generations of Russian leftists, which is why Kagarlitsky should bear high responsibility for his assessments.

In 2014, he actively endorsed the annexation of Crimea and the creation of the so-called ‘people’s republics’ in eastern Ukraine. Unfortunately, his position contributed to the disorientation of a part of the Russian left. These, as well as many other episodes in Kagarlitsky’s trajectory, are utterly unacceptable to the Posle collective. Our fundamental disagreements remain unresolved, and we are willing to discuss them with Boris after his release.

It must be underscored that, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Kagarlitsky was one of the few Russian leftists who, while remaining in the country, condemned Russia’s war publicly. Until now, presumably, it was only Kagarlitsky’s public stature that had kept the authorities from persecuting him. His arrest suggests that the Kremlin has expanded the scope of repression, and that even more activists are presently at risk.

This is why we are calling for an international campaign to support Kagarlitsky and all political prisoners in Russia.

Posle Media
email

Poison

Steve Cousins, clearly has no shame. Having failed to retract or defend any of his previous lies and slanders against me, he simply uses a letter responding to Michael Roberts, as a vehicle to just slip in yet another lie and slander. In the space of a sentence he calls me a “catastrophist Marxist”, a “pro-imperialist”, and “neoliberal” (Letters, July 27).

The first lie is ridiculous, given the amount of time I spend attacking ‘catastrophism’, and pointing out its lack of any foundation in Marx’s or Engels’ writings on the economy, and the fact that, as a trend, in general, it is the stock in trade of Malthusians, and petty-bourgeois socialists (Sismondists), as Lenin also describes.

The second is also ridiculous, given the amount I have written attacking actual ‘pro-imperialism’, including currently the role of petty-bourgeois, moral socialists, whose campism, lesser-evilism and ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend’ approach has led them into becoming supporters of either the Nato/Ukraine imperialist camp, or else the Russia/China imperialist camp!

The third is also ridiculous, and just a slur that Cousins throws out repeatedly without a jot of evidence to support it, despite me repeatedly challenging him to do so. His approach has become more like that of an internet troll than even that of the shameless Stalinist liars we have all come to know and despise, as a poison in the labour movement.

Arthur Bough
email