Letters

Unite

When the working class moves to take power it acts like an army and as such it can only have one general if it is to succeed. The first step is convincing the working class that it can seize power and advance to socialism where it will be ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his work’.

How is the working class to be convinced and then led into battle to victory if there is more than one Communist Party? The communists are supposed to be the vanguard, but as matters stand they have let down the working class by being divided amongst themselves.

There can be, there must be, only one Communist Party if socialism is to be won. The dangers threatening the working class are such that if the communists do not unite then a police state will come into existence and the iron heel will descend on the working class, who will never forget the failure of the communists.

Unite

Police bully

Young people have always hung out in the street - ‘knock down ginger’ was our favourite pastime. Now young people are arrested and have anti-social behaviour orders imposed on them.

I have a 13-year-old son who is being intimidated by a particular community police constable. When can I arrange an asbo on this officer? He threatened my son and told him, “Yeah, I’m a bully. I will get you.” So, as bad as some young people are, there are far worse people wearing a uniform and riding a bike!

Police bully

Cheerleaders

James Turley’s reply to me on military/political support (Letters, August 9) managed to somehow avoid the question I directly posed to him in my letter of July 5, and the points he does make shed no light at all on the real substance of our discussion. He seems to have forgotten that this question came up in regard to the issue of what to do about a potential future attack by US-British imperialism on Iran.

James points to some completely egregious political positions - “cheerleading the likes of Nasser or Chávez” and “the Workers Revolutionary Party ‘Jew-spotting’ for Gaddafi” - as supposed proof of the incorrectness of the military/political distinction and how it is merely a cover for opportunism. However, by doing so he shows that he has failed completely to understand the point of the discussion.

Giving military support to Nasser or Chávez against imperialist aggression is based on explicitly not “cheerleading” these bourgeois populists. The fake Trotskyist groups who have done such “cheerleading” are just as much opposed to the idea of a military/political distinction as the CPGB.

It may be that both the WRP and the Spartacists used the term ‘military support’ to justify their positions (respectively dobbing in leftists to Arab regimes and supporting the Polish Stalinists against Solidarnosc), but I would argue that there is a clear difference in the positions that make one of these justifications defensible and one not. Just because a group use Marxist terminology to justify their political practice means nothing per se.

Let us remember the context this question came up in. James and I had a discussion on the UK Left Network email list about how communists should respond to an attack on Iran by imperialism. At the end of that discussion we agreed on the following two points: that ‘the main enemy is at home’ is not an appropriate slogan to use in Iran when the imperialist attack comes; and that the Iranian working class would have a greater enemy in the form of the US-British imperialist invaders and that the independently organised workers should bloc with any other forces, including the regime, to the extent that those other forces also fight that greater enemy.

I noted that James is, correctly, not politically on the side of the Iranian regime in any way and therefore asked what exactly the nature of this bloc is?

It seems clear to me that James must be arguing for a military bloc with the Iranian regime if they fight back against an imperialist attack. I certainly hope that he is not for giving them any political support and therefore “cheerleading” them like the SWP does.

I hope he can provide some clarification on the real question in dispute in his next reply.

Cheerleaders

Balls-up

The left had a golden opportunity to help the postal workers win their dispute but ballsed it up. Tangible help and support for pickets gave many socialists a degree of credibility they hadn’t had with workers for years. Good links were made with Communication Workers Union militants around the country.

Unfortunately, this opportunity for militants and leftists to make a difference was squandered by left groups merely playing a cheerleading role to the deliberately ineffective posturing of the CWU leadership. Regional and national coordination between militants - aided by the left with tools such as strike bulletins - could have begun to cause real problems. A nationally coordinated work-to-rule, not piecemeal or in a rolling programme, but all CWU members carrying it out indefinitely from the same starting date, would have begun to really bite within a couple of weeks.

Instead of criticising the union leadership’s refusal to escalate the dispute before the percentages out on strike begin to dwindle with each one- or two-day strike, the left merely advertised a pointless stunt on August 21 - in some part of London away from the centre, on a Tuesday! The Socialist Party even took a full-page advert for this demo from Hayes and his chums.

Unsurprisingly then, the same issue contained no criticism whatsoever of the CWU leadership’s tactics, which were clearly designed to lead to a shabby compromise at best, a sell-out at worst. Oh, and at a critical stage of this important dispute these full-time revolutionaries still took their annual holidays come what may! That issue of The Socialist covered the period August 9-22, so, please, postal workers, don’t end the dispute before August 22 or they’ll miss it.

Balls-up
Balls-up

New potential

‘Igor’ was right to state that under Stalinism, there was “no money, no food , no freedom” (Letters, July 26). His anger and confusion about “fucking communism” accurately reflects workers’ consciousness during the cold war.

Only the Soviet ruling elite benefited from the regime. This group failed to establish full control over surplus product necessary to maintain its privileged access to special shops, medical facilities, holidays, travel abroad and quality services. The elite now hope that unemployment and commodity fetishism will establish effective control over the extraction of surplus from workers and transform it into a respectable part of the international capitalist class.

Workers on the other hand, had no freedom. They were forced to work in appalling conditions with semi-slave labour status. The parasitism law made sure that anyone who did not work could be deported to Siberia. Many workers died in labour camps. The internal passport system meant they could not move from particular locations. The KGB controlled them through labour books and personal files.

The rouble did not function as money. For workers, consumer goods were rationed. Wages were useless for acquiring an apartment, a car or most consumer durables such as washing machines or televisions. In order to consume workers had to go on a waiting list or belong to institutions with favoured status. This meant they often went without food.

When there was “no money, no food, no freedom”, it is no surprise that Igor seems to prefer a deadbeat capitalism with its commodified sex, pornography and prostitution. But David Morgan’s censorious and outraged response to the publication of Igor’s letter (August 2) shows no understanding of Stalinism.

David mentions his conversations with people over 35 from eastern Europe. He suggests that these people want to go back to Stalinism. I guess David’s friends are not workers but members of the intelligentsia or the ruling elite of Stalinist regimes who lost out in the scramble to accumulate capital and were unable to maintain their former privileges and standard of living.

Eastern European workers now know the reality of capitalism. They now have an opportunity to understand the nature of the system. They can study Marx free from the fear of being incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital or gulag. They have the potential to ally with other workers worldwide to overcome atomisation caused by the market and its bureaucratic administrators. They have the potential to create a world free from economic compulsion.

For 70 years Stalinism made sure that this potential was effectively eliminated.

New potential
New potential

Foot in mouth

A minor correction, but it is a virus and not a bacterium that is the causative agent of foot and mouth disease (‘End factory farming’, August 9). You are right that it is difficult to vaccinate against all known strains, which is why vaccination is possible only when the strain is known in order to limit the spread of infection.

Foot in mouth
Foot in mouth

Moving music

How could anyone fail to be moved by the performance of the young people of the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela at this month’s Proms in the Royal Albert Hall? The show was a sell-out.

Sir Simon Rattle says Venezuela is the most exciting place for music in the world currently and this was endorsed by Radio 3’s Verity Sharp and her studio guests. Music is being supplied free of charge in Venezuelan schools and this might be saying something about the leadership of the country and its policies.

Moving music
Moving music

Ahem

When I remember, I visit the Weekly Worker online. In its own way it is entertaining, covering as it does the tittle-tattle, gossip and rumour concerning the ‘personalities’ among the sectarians. Naturally, in all matters everybody is wrong except the Weekly Worker and its writers, yet nothing constructive is offered bar the odd sound bite or one-liner (often quoted out of context). It is like The Sun of the left papers.

Your piffling, one-sided, undemocratic demand to decide who the Alliance for Worker’s Liberty should send as a speaker to your ‘Communist University’ - whatever that means or signifies - is indicative of the CPGB’s grandiose fancy. I would have thought that tiny, ineffectual sects like you would be happy that anyone would make themselves available for the political pimple that is the ‘Communist University’.

If you are serious in your claim that the CPGB “would relish the chance to debate Sean [Matgamna]”, why didn’t you do so at your ‘Communist University’?

By the way, everyone knows how you normally deal with correspondents who don’t go along wholeheartedly with the CPGB’s - ahem - democracy. This usually entails a letter the following week along the lines that the writer is a member of the organisation you attack and so on. For clarity, I am not, and never have been, a supporter of the AWL.

Ahem
Ahem

Unrealistic

Would any organisation on the left - including the CPGB - let another organisation determine who is sent to speak on its behalf?

Get real!

Unrealistic

Still digging

Peter Manson says I should “stop digging” (Letters, August 16). He seems to think arguing against misunderstanding and misrepresentation will put me in a hole. On the contrary, we need to dig down to uncover the roots of the misleading and false arguments put forward by Eddie Ford (‘Majority rights and minority duties’, July 19).

Of course, I agree with John Bridge. There was no 42% rule. Neither was there was any 40% rule, nor any ‘42-40 faction’ in the Campaign for a Marxist Party. These three were invented by me for polemical purposes to shed light on the real politics that Eddie was trying to conceal.

First, take the so-called ‘42% rule’. I could have proposed a rule change to the constitution for a seven-person CMP committee. I could have added a clause that no one group should have more than three representatives on the committee. This would have represented 42% of the committee. Had I proposed this, Eddie would have condemned it as the worst “anarcho-bureaucratic” limitation on the rights of the majority.

Second, there is no 40% proposal to limit ‘absolute majority block voting’ in the CMP. However, the CMP is a free association of its members. We are free to democratically decide what rules we want to govern our affairs. A 40% rule does not deprive any member of full, democratic and equal rights. It does not ban or limit factions or free speech. It only limits the right to join, not what members can do or say once they have joined. The individual ‘right’ to join is in any case limited, not absolute. This already includes limits placed on it by the decisions of the Provisional Central Committee, CPGB aggregates and, with a different purpose, John Pearson’s attempt to block my membership.

Third, the mythical ‘42-40 faction’ was invented to highlight a political point. It seems that John Bridge and myself were motivated by similar concerns. A small, fragile campaign needs at this stage to maintain a degree of unity. We were not trying to design a perfect democracy.

By ignoring John Bridge’s proposal and focusing solely on what I said, Eddie Ford was trying to promote my e-list musings as motivated by anti-CPGBism. In truth it was no more anti-CPGB than the proposal for the committee put forward by my mythical ‘factional ally’, John Bridge. Both were about reassuring CMP members (in deeds rather than words) that the CPGB was not trying to have an absolute majority block vote on the committee or in the campaign.

The CPGB response is therefore odd, especially in the light of the CPGB aggregate claiming they did not want an absolute majority of members. The CPGB are ready to sacrifice an absolute majority on the committee, but not an absolute majority of members. The former was supported and the latter condemned as the “worst” proposal in the strongest anarcho-bureaucratic terminology.

We are left to ponder on the political implication of this. Is the CPGB playing a double game? Or was it simply that Eddie was really saying, ‘Let’s form a gang of playground bullies and all kick Steve Freeman’?

Still digging
Still digging

Loin cloths

No doubt like many readers, I have been enthralled by the relentless battle of the musical titans that has been rolling on in the Weekly Worker columns. And such titans they are! There’s Mike Pearn, representing the Philistine workerist tendency (in a Trotskyist, rather than Stalinist, incarnation). Apart from workerist punk and workerist rock, I’m sure he gorges himself on a rich diet of Malcolm Arnold accessible-to-workers pieces, brass bands from the appropriate industrial districts and morris dancers expressing the spirit of medieval downtrodden peasants.

And then there is Herr Professor Gordon Downie, who encapsulates the ethical stance of Arnold Schoenberg, with its contempt for the musical rabble - you know, all that tired, late romantic gush, etc. Downie’s unique selling point is that he notates his compositions in a deliberately difficult way, thus challenging performers to “verify” them. But someone who does not read music isn’t even in the loop! Odd, that, but who am I to argue?

Finally, there is Wieland Hoban, another composer, who is auditioning for the role of the reasonable man amidst the extremes. He makes some convincing points: neither Downie’s “notated music” nor “improvised” (or do we mean “free improvised”?) music is “inherently democratic or inherently anti-democratic”! Nor does Hoban see much connection between Downie’s kind of music and “political effectiveness”.

But then he lets the side down. What does he mean by attacking Downie’s “positivism”? I’m not sure, but I do recall that it has become something of a curse word since Lenin wrote some virulent comments a century ago. Does Hoban mean that Downie does not think dialectically about the role of music - and his kind of music in particular - in society? And what does he mean by the awful jargon of “a rigorous parametric rationalisation of music as the solution”? When did Adorno ever use such a vile phrase? And I’m confused as to what precisely Hoban means when he accuses Downie of holding to a “transmedial ideology”.

Now in the ongoing polemic, two names have been conspicuous by their absence. Of course, it is ludicrously anachronistic of me to make mention of Marx and Engels, as if they had anything to say of the slightest relevance to the contemporary music scene. But being an old fogey fundamentalist, I don’t have any problem in invoking such quaint, if discordant, voices. In any case, few Weekly Worker readers will be familiar with the musical thoughts of the two old buffers.

Marx in the Grundrisse discusses travail attractif, the question of how work becomes “the self-realisation of the individual, which in no way implies that work is pure fun, pure amusement … Really free work - eg, the composition of music - is also the most damnably difficult, demanding the most intensive effort.” Musical composition seems, then, Marx’s chosen paradigm of “really free work” under communism.

In the Economic manuscr­ipts of 1857-58, Marx can’t help mentioning that “the pianist stimulates production; partly because he gives a positive, vital tuning to our individuality”. His Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844 are rich with suggestion: “Music awakens in man the sense of music” - although “the most beautiful music has no sense for the unmusical ear”. The musical potential lies dormant in human nature, clearly.

Capitalism is the scene of non-social man - men atomised, fragmented, men “in collision” with one another; and for Marx “the senses of the social man differ from those of the non-social man”, whilst “the forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present”. The ear - one of the senses - will be quite different for “social man”, man under communism. There is hope yet for Downie’s sort of music in the great open-endedness of history. “Only through the objectively unfolding richness of man’s essential being,” wrote Marx in 1844, “is the richness of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for the beauty of form …) either cultivated or brought into being.”

The pace of modernisation has accelerated in recent centuries so that new musical models have hardly arrived, before being dismissed as passé. Even the Second Viennese School and Anton Webern already seem ancient and remote cultural products. A full understanding of them would require something we have unavoidably lost: absorbing their Zeitgeist by actually living through it. Marx, in a letter to Ferdinand Lassalle in 1861, made an observation which is perhaps relevant to Downie’s plight. He wrote that “the three unities, as theoretically construed by the French dramatists in Louis XIV’s day, rested on a misconception of Greek drama … it is ... certain that they understood the Greeks in a way that corresponded exactly to their own active needs ... The misunderstood form is precisely the general one. It is the one that lends itself to general use at a certain stage in the development of society.” Downie’s problematic, I would suggest, is symptomatic of a general misunderstanding of a certain milieu in high modernist music.

Marx’s sharp eyes saw that high art has deep roots. In the Grundrisse he talks of how mythology overcame and dominated nature “in the imagination and by the imagination”. He explains that “Greek art presupposes Greek mythology - ie, nature and the social forms already reworked in an unconsciously artistic way by the popular imagination”. High art is, we deduce, not compartmentalised from the popular imagination.

Engels was music-mad when a young man, and seems to have got an orgasm from hearing Beethoven’s 5th symphony in March 1840: “What a tremendous, youthful, jubilant celebration of freedom by the trombones,” he reported. Engels was into the Greeks, too. Writing about the Rhenish Festival in May 1842, he explains: “If with the ancients it was the presentation of comedy and the contest of tragic poets that attracted the people to the Panathenaean festivals and bacchanalia, in our climatic and social conditions music alone can play the same role. For just as music which is merely printed and does not speak to the ear can give us no enjoyment, so tragedy remained dead and strange to the ancients unless it spoke from the thymele and orchestra [where the Greek chorus stood] through the living mouths of the actors.” Whilst “for the Hellenes the stage came alive only at great festivals”, for the moderns the spread of the book everywhere, the reading of plays, meant that “drama can no longer serve as the centre for great assemblies”. A “different art must help, and only music can do that; for it alone admits of the participation of a great multitude”.

As we read further on in Engels’ article, we realise that the bacchanalian aspect of the festival was for him of great significance; that the music festival fulfilled an ancient function, communal enjoyment being at the very heart of it.

In such a light, we must ask whether Gordon Downie’s musical practices come in any way close to Engels’ envisaging of practical community, or whether Mike Pearn and the Rotten Elements are in some intuitive way closer to Marx’s and Engels’ ideal of “social man”. Surely, two thousand years ago, the Pearns and Rotten Elements of the day would have been seen gambolling through Grecian glades, dressed only in loin cloths, thrusting their phalloi in all directions! Can Downie match that?

Loin cloths
Loin cloths