Letters

Almost good

Steve Freeman’s proposal for “an international revolutionary democratic communist party” is almost very good (‘New communism versus old Marxism’, November 29). But why should the party limit itself to communists, when Marxists believe that communism can only occur after years of socialism?

In the ‘What we fight for’ column, the CPGB argues for the unity of “communists, revolutionary socialists and all politically advanced workers into a Communist Party”. Surely a revolutionary socialist party is what is required to unite all such people, rather than one that limits itself to people who consider themselves Marxists or communists?

Almost good
Almost good

Blind alley

Enso White totally misses the point of Trotsky’s advice to his supporters in China in 1937 (Letters, November 29). Trotsky’s was the single vote against ‘comrade’ Chiang Kai-shek’s membership of the executive of the Comintern before 1927. The Comintern had abandoned the political independence of the Chinese proletariat and this led directly to the massacre of the Shanghai soviet in April 1927. Stalin and the Comintern refused to acknowledge responsibility for this terrible defeat and now abandoned the urban working class in China completely, never again to attempt to organise them as a force for revolution. Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping built the peasant ‘red army’ instead.

In the words of Trotsky, “The party actually tore itself away from its class.” And he projected the inevitable consequence: “For, should the proletariat continue to remain on the sidelines, without organisation, without leadership, then the peasant war, even if fully victorious, will inevitably arrive in a blind alley” (Peasant war in China and the proletariat, 1932). Can anyone dispute that only the Trotskyists attempted to supply that leadership to the working class after 1927 and who can now doubt that what we see in China today - cheap labour brutally regimented for world imperialism by bogus ‘communists’ via a bogus trade union - is a “blind alley” for communism?

Comrade White’s evaluation of Mao is convoluted in the extreme: “it was Mao Zedong who adopted a far more workable strategy in practice. Not because he was more committed to world revolution than Trotsky. He wasn’t. He was a national socialist. No, it was simply because Mao had a far better grasp of conditions on the ground and therefore what would and what would not work tactically.” Comrade White is adamant he is not advocating Maoism and then endorses it: “Mao was well aware of that and therefore kept his People’s Liberation Army organisationally and politically independent of government forces. He fought the Japanese, but was quite prepared to defend red base areas against the Kuomintang.” No problems there then, if we ignore the consequences.

Comrade White’s contention that “Mao had a far better grasp of conditions on the ground” totally ignores the fact that he cared little for the Chinese or international working class and cared or knew less about them or Marxism. The urban working class must lead the national revolution and straightaway proceed to socialism, linking up with the proletariat internationally to achieve the world revolution, we Trotskyists affirm. And that is the very thing that comrade Macnair cut from Trotsky’s quote: the class independence of the working class. This Comrade White dismisses as “a slightly fuller rendition of Trotsky’s words”. “Without abandoning, for a single moment, [the working class’s] own programme and independent activity” is crucially important because it distinguishes Trotskyism from Stalinism.

There were big differences within Trotsky’s followers in China about the correct tactic to adopt in relation to the Kuomintang. Trotsky’s advice was based on the fact that it was impossible for the Chinese Trotskyists to work within the ‘Red Army’, who murdered them wholesale whenever they fell into their hands. Also they correctly based themselves on the urban working class and sought to mobilise these to achieve socialist revolution.

There was some scope for organisation: Chiang released some 2,000 political prisoners in 1937, including leading Trotskyists. Trotsky advocated the proletarian military policy some years after his 1937 article, when World War II had begun, to take account of mass conscription. Some Chinese Trotskyists did build peasant armies, which were liquidated by Mao. Certainly the path was narrow for revolutionary socialists in those days, caught between Stalinist counterrevolution, world imperialism, fascism and native reaction (see ‘Chen Duxiu and the Fourth International, 1937-1942’, from Revolutionary History spring 1990, for this discussion).

Blind alley

Pointless

Why do you describe the CPB as “the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain” every time you write about it?

I mean, really, people, wake up! You claim everyone else is sectarian, but look at yourselves for a minute (all 28 of you). Your rag, the Weekly Worker, is the equivalent to The Sun newspaper on the left. It’s just something to laugh at if it comes your way.

You have a campaign to create one communist party in Britain (which I read on your website). Okay, that sounds good, so why ruin your attempts by slagging off every other communist organisation, such as the CPB (the largest communist party in Britain), which only makes your existence even more evidently pointless.

Think of the achievements made of a daily socialist paper - something you can only dream about in your sectarian, slagging-match world. Try directing your efforts towards our real enemies, not each other. It just pisses me off when an ‘organisation’ such as yours simply does nothing but further fracture the left. This is true - ask anyone who even knows of your existence. It amazes me how you people think it’s going to go anywhere.

If any slight talk is said in other organisations, such as the CPB or Respect, you run home and put it in the weekly rag. Don’t you have your own news or are you one of those inevitable little organisations that will exist and be laughed at and continue regardless of their pointless situations (which for you is pretty bloody dire)?

Pointless

Wretched camp

We note with interest the recent debate in the letters page of the Weekly Worker on the question of the advisability of a military bloc with the Iranian regime if it were to fight back against an attack by US imperialism. This debate touches on a long-standing difference between the International Bolshevik Tendency and the CPGB over the question of whether the two distinct categories of political and military support exist or not. This letter brings some new evidence to that debate.

An important historical example of this disagreement is our different interpretations of Lenin’s position concerning the Kornilov-led revolt against the provisional government in Russia in August 1917:

“Even now we must not support Kerensky’s government. This is unprincipled. We may be asked: aren’t we going to fight against Kornilov? Of course we must! But this is not the same thing; there is a dividing line here, which is being stepped over by some Bolsheviks, who fall into compromise and allow themselves to be carried away by the course of events.

“We shall fight, we are fighting, against Kornilov, just as Kerensky’s troops do, but we do not support Kerensky. On the contrary, we expose his weakness. There is the difference. It is rather a subtle difference, but it is highly essential and must not be forgotten” (VI Lenin, to the central committee of the RSDLP, September 12 1917).

The IBT understands Lenin to be explaining a type of bloc that communists can be involved in that is of a purely technical/military form and involves no political support - where we are on the military side of one political enemy against another political enemy for the period of their military conflict.

The CPGB, on the other hand, understands this to mean that there was no bloc of any kind between the Bolsheviks and the provisional government against Kornilov in 1917 because every bloc where you take a military side must also necessarily involve political support. Lenin explicitly says there was no political support; therefore, for the CPGB, there cannot have been a bloc of any kind.

However, this leaves the CPGB unable to explain the following description by Lenin of the relationship between the Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in the fight against Kornilov:

“The alliance of the Cadets with the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks against the Bolsheviks - ie, against the revolutionary proletariat - has been tried in practice for a number of months, and this alliance of the temporarily disguised Kornilovites with the ‘democrats’ has actually strengthened and not weakened the Bolsheviks, and led to the collapse of the ‘alliance’, and to the strengthening of the left opposition among the Mensheviks.

“An alliance of the Bolsheviks with the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks against the Cadets, against the bourgeoisie, has not yet been tried; or, to be more precise, such an alliance has been tried on one front only, for five days only, from August 26 to August 31, the period of the Kornilov revolt, and this alliance at that time scored a victory over the counterrevolution with an ease never yet achieved in any revolution; it was such a crushing suppression of the bourgeois, landowners, capitalist, Allied-imperialist and Cadet counterrevolution, that the civil war from that side ceased to exist, was a mere nothing from the very outset, collapsed before any ‘battle’ had taken place” (VI Lenin, ‘The Russian Revolution and civil war’, September 29 1917).

The IBT and CPGB both agree with Lenin’s insistence that there is no question of any political support to the SRs and Mensheviks in the fight against Kornilov - and yet he describes the relationship during the opposition to Kornilov as being an “alliance”. This is obviously consistent with only one of the two understandings outlined above - Lenin can have only be referring to a military alliance.

However, the point of this letter is not to indulge in some apparently abstract point-scoring over the historical record. We expose the CPGB’s revisionist interpretation of history because mistakes in understanding the theory and programme of Bolshevism have very real concrete consequences in the here and now.

In this case the wilful inability of the CPGB to recognise the distinction between military and political support forms an important part of the ideological justification for their refusal to take a side in imperialist wars of aggression against non-imperialist capitalist states - eg, Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Because the CPGB (correctly) gave no political support to the Milosevic regime, the Taliban and Saddam’s dictatorship, they were (incorrectly) opposed to taking a military side with these non-imperialist regimes against the imperialist aggressors.

The debate in the pages of Weekly Worker makes it clear that the CPGB are set to continue this wretched third campism if US imperialism attacks Iran by refusing to take a military side with the Iranian regime if it fights back against that attack.

Wretched camp
Wretched camp

Monster

Reading Paul B Smith’s letter on Louis Althusser, one may be left with the impression that what we are talking about is not an influential professor from the École Normale Supérieure, but some sort of Quatermass-esque B-movie monster. His sole purpose in life was to apologise for the Soviet Union, destroy Marxism and “train bureaucrats”!

Given the tenor of Smith’s letter, one would expect to find in the writings of this veritable Creature of the Black Lagoon repeated phrases hailing the great achievements of ‘socialism’. Alas, it is not so - the only time he dealt directly with the issue, to my knowledge, was in the Reply to John Lewis, where he does the standard soft-tankie/hard-Trot contortionist act to describe how Stalin’s regime could be both reprehensible and objectively “progressive”. Stalinist, yes - particularly Stalinist, no. Apart from that, we have only the odd symptomatic reference to “democratic Germany” and the “socialist countries”.

It’s really quite amusing to watch anti-Althusserians tie each other up on this point. The Marxists Internet Archive, in its more subtle hatchet job biography, implies deviously that he was responsible not for hard defencism, but for Eurocommunism! Which is it to be, comrades?

The relationship between Althusserian and Marxist philosophy is far too vexed a question for a brief letter - suffice it to say that Paul Smith’s letter relies entirely on bald assertions, which betray not much more familiarity with the subject than I have with the local dialects of rural Kenya. The complexity of that theory of ideology is dismissed in a sound-bite condemnation that only works - natch - if you have already accepted Smith’s soft-as-a-Slush-Puppy variety of Marxist humanism anyway.

And as for ‘training bureaucrats’ - this really is plum! The French Communist Party bureaucrats hated Althusser, because he was ‘training’ people who fought tirelessly against reformist opportunism. At the 1978 PCF congress, who was opposing the dropping of ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’? The Althusserians!

Monster
Monster

For Althusser

I fundamentally disagree with Paul B Smith’s contention that “there is nothing that anyone can learn from reading Althusser” and that “his books deserve to be thrown into the dustbin” (Letters, November 29). I will reply here to Paul’s accusations, and if possible will later engage in a full defence of Althusser’s project.

Paul argues that Althusser “distorted some of Marx’s terms into a form of meaningless jargon” and “had no desire to understand or communicate Marx’s method”. Far from it - Althusser’s symptomatic reading was to make explicit the method implicit in the texts of Marx and others: engaging in the systematic interrogation and clarification of the basic concepts of historical materialism and their reconstruction into a more coherent theoretical structure; exploring the theoretical space created by the crisis of Hegelianism.

Paul adds that Althusser “argued that subjectivity was completely determined and controlled by ideology. He was an anti-humanist who denied the possibility of liberation.” Althusser’s attack on the category of the subject and his argument that social relations rather than individuals are the “subject” of historical processes does not empty human practice of either its complexity or its capacity to transform society. In Althusser and the renewal of Marxist social theory (1992), Robert Paul Resch has shown that Althusser’s concept of “interpellation” - the process by which individuals become social subjects - is both complex and contradictory.

Interpellation does not imply functionalist equilibrium; rather, as Goran Therborn’s work amply demonstrates, it allows us to conceptualise the contradictions between the different ways we all are interpellated as members of a society, as well as the tensions between the forces of submission, inherent in our conformity to the roles which we are assigned by society, and the enabling power that comes from our qualification as social subjects through these same roles.

In the hands of Pierre Bourdieu, the concept of a social agent does not define human beings as some kind of robots, but rather as decision-making players within a rule-bound, yet open-ended, interactive system of dispositions, discourses and interests that Bourdieu calls the “habitus”. The habitus, in other words, is a historically specific and class-basis “generating-enabling” structure whose complexity cannot be reduced either to the free will of “man” or to a mechanistic reflection of the relations of productions (cf Resch, pp216-225).

Paul also alleges that Althusser “was a structuralist opposed to dialectics”. While Althusser acknowledged a “flirtation with structuralist terminology” in his earlier work, he clearly rejected the “structuralist ideology”. Paul would have been on stronger grounds had he argued that Althusser was a Spinozist (rather than structuralist) opposed to Hegelian idealism. That said, the critique of transitive and expressive causalities, the concepts of differential and plenary time, as well as those of contradiction, uneven development and over-determination, are strongly dialectical.

Paul writes that Althusser “was an apologist for the former Soviet Union”. Althusser was in fact critical of the Soviet Union. However, the problem was that his criticisms tended to be weak (for example, to attribute the errors of Stalin to “economism-humanism”) and his politics oscillated from Maoism to Eurocommunism.

However, Althusser’s work is of continuing relevance for its intervention on the questions of the autonomy of culture and politics; the scientificity of historical knowledge; the nature of social subjectivity and practice; the concept and determination of power; the production and reception of art and literature; the distinction between scientific, philosophical and ideological discourses; the class function of the popular-democratic state in capitalist societies; and the relevance of class struggle and economic determination to pre- and non-capitalist social formations. Last but not least, it is a concrete example of a Marxist political intervention in the field of theory.

For Althusser
For Althusser