Letters

Mega-denial

Daniel Lazare is in denial. He is in denial of the colonising essence of the Zionist project; he is in denial of the colonial nature of the conflict between the Israeli settler state and its colonised Palestinian subjects; he is in denial of the vast disparity of power between the nuclear-armed oppressor and its victims; indeed, he is in denial that the relation between Israelis and Palestinians is one of colonial-national oppression. None of these facts are hinted at, let alone mentioned, in his article, ‘Far from pacified’ (December 7).

His depiction of the conflict is symmetric: a clash between two religious/ethnic nationalisms. In support of this travesty he quotes a symmetric description of the conflict between Jews and Arabs from a statement published by a Trotskyist group in Palestine in … May 1948 (and probably written a while earlier).

He follows this by the astounding claim: “Except for the size of the bombs and the number of deaths, the situation 75 years later is unchanged.” He is in mega-denial of the vast changes in the “situation”. In the spring of 1948 the disparity in power between the Zionist settlers and the Palestinians was not obvious: the Nakba was then beginning, and was yet to reach its catastrophic apogee; the Israeli state was yet to be established, let alone revealing its true expansionist, colonising and ethnic-cleansing inner drive.

What was then, in the spring of 1948, a failure of perception by that Trotskyist group becomes, when parroted 75 years later, an exercise in culpable deception.

Moshé Machover
London

Zionist power

The Zionist lobby is more powerful in the US than in Europe. That has been clear for many years, but the vote at the UN security council on December 8 made it clear to billions. Israel calls the shots regarding policy toward the Palestinian people in the United States. Israel matters more to the US than a billion Muslims. No wonder previous US allies, such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, are joining with Russia and China in Brics.

The idea that Israel helps the US to ‘control’ west Asia is shown to be false by Friday night’s conflict in the security council between the US and the United Arab Emirates. Even virulently pro-US regimes such as Argentina under Milei and the Philippines under Marcos voted for the UAE’s motion demanding a Gaza ceasefire, because the sentiment in the global south is so strong and overwhelming in its condemnation of the Zionist genocide. And the UK flinched from exercising its veto by voting against, even though Sunak’s government is itself supplying arms (and covertly even military personnel and intelligence data) to Israel for use against the Palestinian people.

It is clear that the US is prepared to sacrifice its ‘soft power’ influence in the global south because of its servile relationship with Zionism. This might seem strange, and indeed it is unusual and unique. There is a Marxist, materialist explanation for it though, in the economic and political clout of the disproportionately large section of the American ruling class that is of Jewish background and Zionist politics, and sees Israel as their ‘state’ - either in tandem with or taking priority over the ‘national interest’, as conceived in bourgeois terms, of the United States itself. And there is the veritable cult of Zionism among the imperialist ruling classes in North America and Europe that sees Zionist-influenced neoliberal ideologues, such as Milton Friedman, as having saved the capitalist system itself in the severe crisis of the 1970s.

The philo-Semitic, racist remark by Robert Wood, deputy US ambassador to the UN, in his speech to the security council to justify the US veto - that Hamas’s October 7 breakout of the Gaza Strip to take hostages for exchange was supposedly the greatest atrocity against “our people” since World War II - is a clear manifestation of this strange overlapping cult of nationhood among the western imperialist bourgeoisies. It also indicates the hegemony of Zionist racism today - the rate of death of children in Gaza during this Zionist blitz, in excess of 144 per day, actually exceeds the daily rate of murder of children in Auschwitz during the period 1941-45. Evidently, for the US, Palestinians are not ‘our people’ and Jews are far more important than Arabs.

This is the insidious form of racism that has been hegemonic in the imperialist world up to now, and has influenced all kinds of political trends from the far right to the Menshevised ‘far left’. It is the basis for the heresy hunting against its opponents - false accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ - that has convulsed politics from right to ‘left’ over the whole last period. It is now being exposed before the masses by this attempted Zionist holocaust of Palestinians, which is opening up a new era of mass struggles against this latest ‘modern’ form of racism.

Ian Donovan
Consistent Democrats

Political revival

Was the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1989-91 a victory or a defeat for the working class worldwide? Two purported facts support the argument that it was a defeat. Firstly, it did not lead to world revolution. Secondly, it led to a Marxist movement today that is “fast disappearing” and “on its arse”, according to Lawrence Parker (Letters, November 30).

I contend that the first statement is true, but the second is false. I argue here that the truth of the first is consistent with the idea that the end of Stalinism was a victory. I propose that present conditions are causing the re-emergence of a healthy Marxist movement for the first time in 30 years. This could not have happened without the victorious end of Stalinism.

An ahistorical reading of Trotsky led to the fanciful idea that the collapse of the Soviet regime would lead automatically to a political revolution. Trotsky’s optimism, in my opinion, was misinformed. He had no way of knowing how devastating the purges were in destroying the possibility of the survival of a revolutionary Marxist movement. If he was right in believing there was an underground Marxist opposition to the regime in 1933 capable of restoring the gains of the October, by 1937 this had been thoroughly exterminated. It seems likely that Stalinist agents such as Mark Zborowski fed him false information on the extent of support he still had in the former Soviet Union.

Trotsky was, of course, correct to argue that the regime was not a viable social formation. He predicted that it would either be overthrown by its working class or be reintegrated within the capitalist world. Again, not being a prophet, he had no way of knowing that the regime’s continued existence would prove to be so useful to the capitalist ruling class. The Stalinist model proved to be highly successful in controlling the consciousness and collective activity of workers during the cold war. It enabled the ruling class to reflate the economy through arms expenditure. In other words, Trotsky, along with most Marxists, had no idea that the Soviet Union would last as long as it did.

World revolution in these circumstances was impossible. The Stalinist regime was based on a failed attempt to derive an economic surplus from the forced and semi-forced exploitation of workers. Workers’ collective action was so rare as to be non-existent. The only form of resistance was individualised. The political police was so deeply embedded in the workplace and communities that it was able to atomise workers. It prevented them from forming any type of organisation that could advance their interests.

Elsewhere in the world, Stalinist political parties led workers into alliances with the bourgeoisie. They made sure that trade union consciousness replaced class consciousness, and that workers’ struggles were subordinated to Soviet foreign policy. This made all forms of resistance subordinate to the survival of the regime. It drew workers into counterrevolutionary alliances with social democrats and nationalists. The residue of these alliances exists in various forms many of which - documented in this newspaper - continue to influence what passes for the left today.

The conditions for workers’ defeat worldwide originate from the rise of Stalinism and the crazy anti-Marxist doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’ in 1924, not from the events of 1989-91. Stalinism could not have collapsed without workers’ passive or active support. Workers continue to demonstrate they have the potential to create a rationally planned, democratic society worldwide through collective action and organisation. This potential was captured by the slogan, ‘Another world is possible’. It represented a growing awareness of how every struggle in the present requires workers to unite and overthrow not only repressive regimes, but the capitalist interests they protect and enjoy.

Thirty years on, workers’ potential for world revolution has yet to be realised. How do we explain this? What is “fast disappearing” is not the Marxist critique of political economy. On the contrary, the salience of this critique is ever more manifest today than it was. Then, few people recognised the power and relevance of this critique. What is “fast disappearing” is the association of Marxism with sterile Stalinist dogma. Now, most knowledgeable individuals accept that Stalinists and their allies repressed and distorted Marx’s insights. This has made the recovery of a pristine Marxism a fresh and exciting task.

Does this mean that Marxism is “on its arse”? Any answer depends on what that phrase means. If it means that Marxists are doing nothing, then the answer is negative. The recent success of the ‘Why Marx?’ sessions sponsored by the Labour Left Alliance is evidence of a renewed activism around Marxist education. This provides a model which I guess can be copied by other Marxists in the USA, the Netherlands and elsewhere.

However, if it means that Stalinism has knocked Marxists off their feet and they are still to get off the floor, then maybe there is an element of truth in the idea. If true, then the potential for world revolution will continue to be unrealised for the foreseeable future. If false, then Marxists are now in an excellent position to support workers in winning the fight for socialism/communism.

Paul B Smith
Ormskirk

Sect collapse

To be frank, comrade Lawrence Parker’s letter fails to address anything of note in my letter the previous week (November 23). Instead, he attempts to suggest that the belief that Stalinism was an impediment to the world proletariat is guilt by association with “the Socialist Workers Party, which disgracefully connived in the bourgeois rhetoric of ‘the end of communism’”. He seeks to caricature my position as “Once we have dispensed with the burden of being lumped in with this monstrosity, we’ll be able to soar unimpeded across the heavens”. I don’t know whether comrade Parker has noticed, but the proletariat wasn’t exactly soaring anywhere prior to the collapse of the USSR either.

He then asserts that “Both the Labour left and supposedly ‘non-Stalinist’ organisations were negatively impacted by the collapse of ‘official communism’.” That there is an interdependence between Stalinism and the ‘Labour left’ is undeniable, as we see, for example, with Jeremy Corbyn’s relationship with the Morning Star. What I do not accept is that the existence of Stalinism had a beneficial effect on the workers’ movement worldwide or on ‘non-Stalinist’ organisations.

In fact, one of the striking things about many of the Trotskyist sects is just how Stalinoid they were and remain so. This includes their antipathy to democracy or any kind of independent Marxist thought, and has included, at times, violence or the threat of it. Stalinism continues to exert an influence, not least because some on the left, like comrade Parker, fail to understand that Stalinism was no part of ‘the left’ - if being on the left is fighting for a worldwide society of freely associating producers and the ultimate realisation of what it is to be human.

Of course, individual members of, say, the Communist Party of Britain may have an honourable intention of defending working class interests. However, the continued attachment to authoritarianism and state control of the means of production means that their allegiance to communism is at best illusory and at worst absurd, from a Marxist point of view. I daresay there are some who were demoralised by the end of the USSR. That such people will be committed to worldwide proletarian revolution is highly unlikely.

Comrade Parker then tries to support his assertions with reference to some unpublished theses by comrade Mike Macnair - which. of course, I could not have read. Fortunately, comrade Macnair did me more courtesy by sending me his unpublished theses, as well as a well-crafted article from Critique. In my opinion, none of this work supports comrade Parker’s assertions and is, by contrast with comrade Parker’s letter, well argued and thoughtful.

Explaining the “reactionary politics of the last 30 years” is part of what a serious Marxist organisation should be doing and the reason why I am in the CPGB. Indeed, it is one of the most important parts of any party project. It is likely to be painstaking and to take some time. I suggest comrade Parker rejoins the party and contributes in a meaningful way, rather than satisfying himself with his blog and the Discord app.

Ian Spencer
County Durham

Factions

In his response to Mike Macnair, Andrew Northall offers no defence of his idea that a ban on factions is an integral part of democratic centralism. Instead, he puts forward the notion of a mass socialist party, to which the Communist Party should be able to affiliate.

Would this not create a de facto open faction, albeit on a formal basis?

Ansell Eade
Email

Word games

I generally don’t bother reading Andrew ‘Trotskyism is a disease’ Northall, whose mind seems to be a veritable junkshop of bad ideas from ‘official communism’. However, comrades on Discord brought my attention to this amusing passage from his latest letter (December 7).

Northall says: “I do apologise if … I have failed to adequately distinguish between a socialist party (and socialist unity) and a Communist Party (and communist unity). I do not have the luxury of multi-page articles and thousands of words to go into any great detail” (my emphasis).

Is he taking the piss? Briefly and with the help of a glamorous AI assistant, I calculated the number of words in Northall’s combined letters in 2023. It comes to around 17,000. For the uninitiated that equates to three double-page Weekly Worker spreads and one single-page article. So, when Northall complains that he doesn’t have the luxury of thousands of words, we can see that this is precisely what he does have.

Northall’s rather hilarious aside does give me the hope that lurking beneath that over-verbose ‘breaking a few eggs’ exterior is another pithier and more concise version of himself. But I won’t hold out too much hope on that front.

Lawrence Parker
London

Argentina myth

Comrade Paul Demarty claims that “the US succeeded in offloading the cost of an investors’ ‘haircut’ to the periphery” in the Argentine debt crisis of the late 1990s (‘Don’t cry for Milei, Argentina’, November 30). This is so imprecise as to be inaccurate.

Firstly, it is simply not true that US investors insulated themselves from the financial impact of the debt “haircut”. The vast majority of overseas holders of Argentine debt took part in an exchange which cost them around 70% of bond face value. These were genuine losses, which caused a certain amount of turmoil on Wall Street, as well as disrupting the orthodox acceptance of dollar-denominated direct investment into emerging markets, both in the US and in the ‘periphery’.

The International Monetary Fund was paid in full - and it is hard to see bond funds which were “haircut” as more culpable than the IMF in what followed in Argentina. Ultimately the behaviour of the IMF in the late 90s led to a reluctance by central banks in newly industrialised nations to facilitate its work, and left it almost without a purpose until the euro crisis a decade later. The 7% of private investors, or their vulture fund assignees, who didn’t accept the bail-in ended up being paid in full, but that unexpected legal result in 2018 did not cause Argentinian hardship in the early 2000s.

Moving on to the wider economic impacts of the crisis, these are more properly seen as impacts of devaluation against the dollar, and not of debt default. While the effects in Argentina were profoundly negative, analogous devaluations did not play out in the same way in other countries, undermining the suggestion that debt default had inescapable macroeconomic consequences. Indonesia and Thailand suffered economic shocks, tempered by positive political change. The story was the opposite in Russia, where political change was clearly regressive, but the economy rebounded with a reduced dependence on foreign capital. And the more highly industrialised Asian economies, such as Taiwan and South Korea, enjoyed progressive political change, as well as a huge economic boost in the longer term, as they found themselves able to compete in higher-value export markets.

The claim that Argentina was punished or avenged for its debt defaults is a myth, resting on three shibboleths, which we should be keen to reject. Firstly the bourgeois moralistic notion that borrowers are violating a norm if they refuse to honour unaffordable or usurious debt. This is the logic which led African National Congress-led South Africa to repay the foreign debt taken out to fund the apartheid era government’s war against the black population. Secondly the inaccurate claim that bond markets will refuse to lend again to those who have defaulted in the past. Many market observers have used the example of Argentina, repeatedly finding renewed access to credit despite a string of defaults, to empirically discredit this type of warning. Lastly the attitude of the (often culturally hegemonic) upper middle classes that the lifestyle shock they suffer when devaluations hit at their consumption of imported goods is the only type of economic pain that matters.

This attack on devaluations, whether planned, unplanned, judicious or reckless, should not be privileged in Argentina any more than against governments untainted by corruption, short-termism and populism.

Jack William Grahl
email

Still committed

I was not suggesting in my previous letter (November 23) that Mike Macnair’s article, ‘Unity based on solid principles’ (November 2), was defensive, I was making the more general point that having critiques of political/organisational culture is not the same as rejecting sharp and direct polemic.

The specific critique of was of political cultures (far from unique to the CPGB) in which individuals are brittle to questions or criticism, take it personally as an attack and therefore respond defensively. But that was not my main point. My point in direct reference to Mike was more simply that, if political clarity is the accepted standard we aim for in our own ways, why take the approach of arguing against something that someone has not said?

I gave one example of this (on the question of ideological polemic) primarily because it was the most stark: ie, it was easily highlighted with a direct quote (indicating I thought ideological polemic was fundamental rather than that we should move away from it). I didn’t mean though to accept or avoid arguments on the remaining points. Given that Mike has raised these remaining points again (Upfront, sharp and personal’, November 30), though, I will address them more substantially.

First, Mike identifies that I have argued that the failure of the CPGB to grow or recruit demonstrates the failure of the project and therefore the need for its reassessment, particularly in the light of other (activist-orientated) organisations that have grown. I didn’t argue this. I haven’t discussed the size of the CPGB or recruitment to the CPGB anywhere. I know this has been raised as an issue within the organisation itself, but that was not my argument. My concern was with the project of the CPGB and the approach to it - recruitment isn’t how I would measure the success of this.

I think the measure of its success would clearly be in the effects it is able to have upon the left. Depending on the specific approach, this might look like organisations fusing together, breaking apart or reconstituting in new forms (if the approach at the time was directed towards organised intervention in larger formations or wider regroupment projects) or it might look more like the proliferation of the ideas of the CPGB - these being taken up and fought for by others within their organisations (if the approach at the time was more discreetly focused on polemic through the Weekly Worker and targeted interventions within the left as a whole).

Membership here is only of specific relevance as a more secondary point then, in the sense that it provides the resources to further the project. It clearly relates directly to the basic ability to reproduce itself, sustain its tasks and develop cadres capable of taking over leadership of the organisation. I’m not sure that is the case for the CPGB now, I’m not sure there is that basic replicability - which is an issue in terms of the long-term viability of the organisation. But, no, it is not a measure in itself of the success of the project - because clearly the CPGB is not understood as a proto-party that grows itself into the party.

What I asked at Communist University was how the CPGB itself would measure the relative success/failure of its approach in the current period. There was no real answer on that (not to say that there isn’t one). My question was really aimed at gaining some clarity on the approach of the organisation in this period: how it sees itself in the current context and what the way forward looks like. From what I can gather, based on these and other exchanges outside the Weekly Worker, in the current period the CPGB leadership identifies that we are in a situation of retreat on the left, and that to a degree the organisation needs to weather this storm, protect a Marxist perspective (even perhaps insulate it against deviations in the wider movement), batten down the hatches and wait for the situation ‘out there’ to develop.

If this is the case, then in this context there is no real positive strategy for this period, nor a vision of what a way forward for communist unity and the partyist project looks like in the present. This is what my question was driving at - to get some clarity on this. Maybe I am totally off the mark, but, if the assessment above is correct, should it not be stated clearly and out in the open when having these discussions around communist unity, to emphasise that this perspective is what underpins the approach in this period? This would allow those who might disagree to then articulate alternative assessments of this period and therefore alternative approaches for progressing forward with the project of communist unity. Perhaps this could be clarified through a fuller articulation of exactly what the CPGB leadership’s approach of how to take this project forward is.

Mike suggests that I am arguing for the CPGB to be more like a coordinator of class struggle and am therefore advocating by implication a Bakuninist conception of the party. Firstly, a conception of the party is not directly the same as an idea of the tasks involved in fighting for a party, I was not discussing the conception of the party but the struggle for a party. Secondly, and more importantly, what I was arguing was not Bakuninist. My concern was about how we give ideological polemic traction - the implication being that such polemic is the motor driving the process of reconstituting the left into a party. And, fundamentally, how the Weekly Worker can avoid the real danger of becoming an organ detached from the left and the wider movement, polemicising into the void.

I was not advocating that the CPGB embraces the approach of the far left in general: my argument was in terms of being where the far left are, being in the wider movement in a substantial way in order to advance these arguments around the party and communist unity. In this sense, clearly, to be in a broad front doesn’t make you a broad-frontist - it is about what you are doing there, how you are doing it and why.

In the absence of some larger formation like the Socialist Alliance, what does it mean to be where the left are? Where are they? Maybe it doesn’t look like being a part of the movement, but what does it look like in this period instead? Surely this is a reasonable and fairly important discussion to have in a period in which we don’t really know the way forward and in which there is a conservative impulse to insulate away from the mess of the movement and the left.

Finally, on the related question of resources and the idea that being in the movement entails drawing resources away from the production of the Weekly Worker. As a statement in itself this seems to express a resigned and zero-sum perspective - and sidesteps the fact that the CPGB, plenty of times, has been able to put resources into other work: into campaigns like Hands Off the People of Iran, regroupment projects, etc, as well as producing the Weekly Worker. And these activities are clearly not mutually exclusive: when you are where a real part of the left is, this will both inform and enrich the paper’s polemic, and give its arguments more purchase.

The point on resources is actually somewhat revealing, because it indicates something important about the organisational approach more generally: ie, the weakness in organising and structuring party work beyond the production of the Weekly Worker. In reality it is a small number of comrades who work (diligently) on producing it, but what is the substantial role of party work for those outside of this cell? From my own (anecdotal) experience plenty of good, skilled comrades have expressed frustration at not having party work to do, not being given a clear idea of what this is or a clear avenue to apply and develop their skills in order to contribute to the party in different ways.

I’m not raising these different points as some random scatter-gun attack on the various weaknesses of the organisation - these points are clearly all connected. And neither am I trying to highlight these problems without purpose. My questions and criticism have not been motivated by trying to get one over on or attack the CPGB. I remain committed to the project the CPGB outlines and I don’t think it would be remotely positive for the organisation to disappear - that is precisely what has motivated me to engage.

Caitriona Rylance
Bolton

Gratuitous

In response to Citizen Downing’s gratuitous insult (Letters, November 30), I seem to recall him making a big song and dance about being expelled from the Labour Party a few years ago and wanting to remain a member of this party - which exactly fits his description of “a pathetic reformist groveller to the capitalist establishment”.

Not being a specialist in Trotskyite sectarianism, I don’t know if he still wants to be a member.

Adam Buick
Socialist Party of Great Britain