Letters

Correction

In my review of John Rees’s Strategy and tactics pamphlet I incorrectly asserted that comrade Rees presents the Timeline political history series on the Iranian regime’s Press TV. The show is actually broadcast on the Islam Channel.

Correction
Correction

No leadership

Your correspondents, Phil Kent and Tony Clark, miss the mark in describing the Socialist Party of Great Britain as anarchist or practising “abstract democratic abstentionism”, whatever that is supposed to mean (Letters, December 2). The left generally fails to understand our position, because the left, ever since the Russian Revolution, has been so poisoned by Leninism.

If you want a name for our position, how about Marxist? Or Engelsist? Towards the end of their lives, both Marx and Engels understood that “… the period for sudden onslaughts, of revolutions carried out by small, conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses, is past. Where the question involves the complete transformation of the social organisation, there the masses must be consulted, must themselves have already grasped what the struggle is about, and what they stand for.”

This is why we oppose political leadership. Some people will have a better grasp of theory than others, some will be in a better position than others to do practical work, and so on. That’s just obvious. But it’s a far cry from saying that those people should take power in the name of the rest of us. When it’s a question of the complete transformation of the social organisation, the class as a whole must know what it wants and where it’s going, and organise democratically to achieve it. The rest is delusion at best. At worst it is the road to another vile dictatorship that discredits the name of socialism for another couple of generations.

No leadership
No leadership

New positions

The Wikileaks surrounding Iran and all the diplomatic manoeuvrings against Iran have led me to solidify two of my controversial positions, both on the premise of class-struggle defencism. Thanks are in order to all comrades who debated with me on this.

The first position is that the Islamic regime itself, or any other regime that would be in charge of Iran, has the ‘right’ to strategic nuclear weapons, strategic electromagnetic weapons, future strategic anti-matter weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, plus adequate delivery mechanisms. This is one of the higher expressions of national self-determination. Moreover, those in charge of nuclear programmes were correct in their assessment that mutual possession of strategic weapons of mass destruction, plus adequate delivery mechanisms, makes warfare between states much less likely: mutually assured destruction. Those who favour disarmament unwittingly make conventional warfare much more likely, as seen in the development of ‘mothers and fathers of all bombs’ by the US and Russia, respectively.

Ahmadinejad, for all his rhetoric, is just a figurehead. Strictly on the question of nukes, ayatollah Khamenei is on the same sanity level as Kim Jong-Il, Leonid Brezhnev or Yuri Andropov: use the nuke card for diplomatic concessions, but never to start a full-scale war. Moreover, no regime has yet used strategic weapons of mass destruction or even tactical nukes on its own population. Nuclear weapons are purely external deterrents, unlike conventional forces (especially ground troops). A workers’ revolution would disavow the use of nuclear weapons in a first-strike capacity and appeal to workers and soldiers of invading countries if the revolutionary period is global enough to have reached them - otherwise their demise would be tragic, but necessary.

The second position is that, considering the need for retaliatory, proletarian WMD deterrents (including ‘proletarian nukes’), the slogan for ‘abolition of the standing army’ should be limited just to the ground forces. Although democratisation and work rights within the standing armed forces is a good thing, there is considerable specialisation and expertise in naval, air, air defence and especially strategic rocket forces (to use the more reliable Soviet division of military forces) that surpass the training of ground soldiers, tank drivers, etc. Revolutionary regimes could use conventional air strikes to aid foreign revolutions, as opposed to pulling off a Napoleon like the Bolsheviks tried with Poland.

Full military abolition can wait until after successful global revolution (note the two adjectives there for the two conditions).

New positions
New positions

Kurds targeted

Peace in Kurdistan has been informed that over the last few days several leading members of the Kurdish community in the UK have been questioned by members of MI5.

As far as we can establish to date, a total of 15 individuals were visited at their homes by officers who identified themselves as British security. They informed our Kurdish friends that their movements had been under surveillance for some time and that some of their activities constituted a breach of UK law. Furthermore they were instructed that they should cease these activities forthwith.

There has been absolutely no suggestion that the individuals involved have been engaged in any concrete criminal or illegal activities whatsoever. The questioning was extremely specific and referred to their relations with their community in London and around the UK and their open solidarity work in support of the movement in Kurdistan.

Peace in Kurdistan is extremely concerned at this latest development, which we believe amounts to a further attempted criminalisation of the Kurds. We note that these intensified security operations come at a time when the home office is reviewing the country’s anti-terrorism legislation and the new coalition government is seeking to impose a system of asset-freezing on individuals it deems associated with ‘terrorism’.

These actions against the Kurdish community are tantamount to psychological warfare, and appear designed to instil a mood of fear among the people and to deter their engagement in legitimate political activity. These incidents once again expose the fundamentally unjust nature of the UK’s current anti-terrorist legislation and its misguided foreign policy, which supports repression abroad in the name of fighting alleged ‘terrorist’ threats.

Peace in Kurdistan insists that the root of the problem lies in the failure of Turkey and its allies in the UK and Europe to acknowledge the denial of the basic rights of existence to the Kurdish people under the Turkish constitution and its state ideology. The numerous opportunities for peace between Turkey and the Kurds - offered, for example, by the latest Kurdish ceasefire - and the constructive proposals for a just settlement repeatedly made by Kurdish leaders remain unreciprocated.

At the heart of the problem is the refusal on the part of the British authorities to fully address the legitimate demands of the Kurds for democratic and social rights and their failure to use available diplomatic channels to persuade the Turkish authorities to find a political and negotiated solution to the Kurdish conflict. It is equally vital to understand the nature of the solidarity and cohesiveness of the Kurdish people around their leading organisations and political leadership of Abdullah Öcalan and the Kurdistan Workers Party. The spirit of the Kurdish people cannot be broken by threats and intimidation.

Impartial observers will only construe this intensified targeting of Kurds as an attack on the entire Kurdish community. It may intimidate and disturb many innocent people, but we are convinced that it will take more than this to break the will of the Kurds as a community to stand up for their rights. It will certainly not force them to bow down and accept the historic injustice inflicted on their people.

Peace in Kurdistan is determined to redouble its efforts for a just peace for Kurds in Turkey and calls on the British government to engage constructively with the legitimate representatives of the Kurdish people in the UK and in Kurdistan. We further call on the UK government to realise that its current anti-terrorism legislation, in particular the proscription of the PKK, stands as an obstacle to achieving peace and in fact only criminalises the whole Kurdish community by preventing them from freely expressing their opinions and showing solidarity with their brothers and sisters in the Kurdish movement back in their homeland.

Kurds targeted
Kurds targeted

If only

VN Gelis decries the statement by European Council president Herman Van Rompuy that the “nation-states are dead” (Letters, December 2). As a Marxist, I could only rejoice if such a statement were actually true!

Surely, a basic requirement of internationalism is a view that the nation-state is historically dead, and the progressive solutions we need and fight for can only be achieved over its grave, and on the basis of the development of much wider associations. Previous crises in the European Union have provided the fuel to drive towards much greater integration within it, and it is almost certain that, however much nationalists like VN Gelis dislike the idea, such will be the case this time too.

S/he says that no serious commentator believes that the euro can survive in its current state. That is quite clearly false. Although it’s possible that the euro may cease to exist in its present form, and I have explored the possibility of that myself, the reality is that it most likely will continue to exist in its present form, and there are plenty of serious commentators who hold that view. The reality is that the euro is a political project. At the end of the day, the political forces behind that project will do whatever is needed to ensure it continues. In a recent TV interview, Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapaterro was only the latest leader to spell out what that means: constructing a fiscal union to go along with the monetary union. Already, it has been agreed that next year the EU will issue its own bonds to raise capital in the markets, and that is just another step down the road of constructing a federal European state.

As Marxists, we should welcome such a development, whilst fighting to try to ensure that the basis upon which this new state is constructed is as favourable to workers as we can possibly achieve. But, as a nationalist, VN Gelis cannot think in terms of such an international struggle by workers, because her/his mind is imprisoned within national borders, and as such s/he ends up advocating the preservation of the existing reactionary capitalist states as though that were in some way preferable.

S/he says: “Where national sovereignty is threatened, economic decisions are passed to the control of unelected bureaucrats.” But, within the confines of a global capitalist system, the question of national political sovereignty is irrelevant in such matters, especially for tiny economies such as Ireland. The reality is that both Greece and Ireland were already threatened by decisions made by people who were unelected, other than by their shareholders - not people in the International Monetary Fund or in the EU, but by the managers of the huge global bond funds, who refused to buy Irish debt other than at increasingly exorbitant interest rates!

Moreover, while s/he is right to point out that the officials at the European Central Bank and in the EU commission are unelected (although of, course, the finance ministers who ultimately brokered this deal are elected), s/he fails to recognise that the state officials within any capitalist state, including those who run the national central banks, are likewise unelected. Why does s/he think that an unelected Irish bureaucrat determining Irish economic policy is any better than an unelected EU bureaucrat?

The answer here is not to present national capitals or national state bureaucracies as somehow preferable, but to fight for a consistent democracy within the EU itself. In fact, even a consistently bourgeois democratic EU would be better able to withstand the pressure from specific sections of capital than would an Irish workers’ state. If we really want to talk about exercising democratic control over economic decision-making, then it is inconceivable that this could be achieved on any basis less than something of the size of the current EU. That is one reason we should welcome its development.

If only
If only

Ben's drivel

I really must thank Ben Lewis for his surreal review of the latest splurge from magister ludi John Rees (‘Illusion of being a master of strategy’, December 2). You see, I hadn’t read ‘Towards a methodology of the problem of organisation’ by Georg Lukács for 10 years and, by the end of it, I suspected that that was around the last time Lewis had done so.

We are told that, for Lukács, the party assumed “the status of a semi-deity, the only conscious factor in a successful revolutionary upheaval” (original emphasis). This initially struck me as decidedly odd, given that, from my past readings of History of class consciousness, Lukács spends a considerable amount of time knocking down such undialectical abstractions. Lewis appears to imply that Lukács counterposes party and the majority of the proletariat.

And a rereading of the ‘organisation’ essay confirmed my suspicions: this isn’t John Rees in disguise. In fact, Lukács drew out the idea of ‘the party’ being a process of proletarian unity: he simply doesn’t hold up a “semi-deity” party and class as two fixed poles. He says: “The party as a whole transcends the reified divisions according to nation, profession, etc, and according to modes of life (economics and politics) by virtue of its action. For this is oriented towards revolutionary unity and collaboration and aims to establish the true unity of the proletarian class.” Neither is Lukács, in the manner of modern-day Trotskyism, keen to portray the party as some kind of organised conspiracy behind the backs of the proletariat. Even an issue such as the early 1920s purges in the Russian party, he says, “illustrates the most intimate internal relation between party and class at a higher stage of development of the Communist Party”.

As for the idea that the party is the only conscious factor in revolution, such an idea is immediately problematic for Lukács in what he sees as the “uninterrupted dialectical interaction between theory, party and class”. However, other passages make the pinning of this charge on Lukács even more absurd: “The party’s process of maturation, its inner and outer consolidation does not, of course, take place in the vacuum we find in the case of the sects; it takes place within the bounds of historical reality, in an unbroken, dialectical interaction with the objective economic crisis and the masses which the latter has revolutionised.”

Despite the comrade’s ignorant critique of Lukács, it is clear to me that Lewis is angling for essentially the same thing: revolutionary politics based on proletarian unity rather than conspiratorial politics, where the relationship between party and class has been ruptured by a self-proclaimed elite trying to ‘trick’ the masses into action with ‘transitional’ demands and the like.

So, actually, the debate narrows down as to whether the party is pictured as a vanguard minority or comprises the majority of the proletariat. This is a rather sterile, pointless debate, given that it is fixing and defining moments in a process towards what, surely, should be the politics of the majority. However, as Lewis appears to initially comprehend, this is politics for the minority for a significant period to come - but then he bamboozles us with a paragraph where 15,000 people turn into a million with but a few taps on his keyboard. This over-excitable, idealistic drivel has the potential to become disorientating for a tiny organisation such as the CPGB, in that it could strip away its enduring strength: a small, self-activating group that punches way beyond its weight. That’s minority politics and it needs to be activated by an idea of a ‘vanguard’ that is something more than an end in itself.

Finally, I dislike the thought processes by which the likes of Lewis try and introduce the ‘revolutionary not renegade’ Kautsky to the deluded inhabitants of the modern revolutionary left. It goes something like this: ‘Uncle Lenin and his band were big fans of Kautsky and German social democracy right up until 1920; if you all love uncle Lenin then you really need to love uncle Kautsky too. Go on, give him a big kiss for uncle Lars.’ This is not a particularly sophisticated argument and plays on the fact that, for sections of the left, Lenin is a semi-deity (a real one, this time). My response to this strand of argument is that Lenin made a lot of critical mistakes and an enduring regard for German social democracy was one of them. I’ve already got enough uncles, thank you.

Ben's drivel
Ben's drivel

Get on up

Since the present government took office and announced its plans for austerity, we’ve seen various strikes, rallies and actions. But the largest and most notable have been carried out by the student movement in their fight against the rise in tuition fees, education cuts and the slashing of the educational maintenance allowance.

In times of immediate struggle and political unrest, unity projects naturally arise, and in the student movement the organising body which has recently come about to try to mobilise the kind of numbers that the National Union of Students can bring to a demo is the London Student Assembly. This is formed by students from universities across London and comrades from groups such as the Socialist Workers Party, Counterfire, Workers Power and the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, as well as from student fronts and campaigns like the Education Activist Network, Coalition of Resistance, National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts and the Socialist Party’s student front, Youth Fight For Education, have attended. Sabbatical officers, NUS and University of London Union representatives have also been present at the meetings I went to.

Meetings are held in a democratic way with the chairs and minute-takers elected at the previous meeting. A leadership has yet to be elected, but, as far as I can tell, this is due to happen next Sunday amid discussion on democratic structures. This model obviously has potential. It is for coordinated action, planned and discussed between all participants in an open manner. It is obvious that something like this is needed to coordinate London-wide and hopefully it can spread to get a real nationwide network, where rank and file members of these groups can participate. Tasks such as flyers, Facebook and so on are allocated to attendees, with people from different groups working together on different projects and on the floor people pointing out when comrades from their own party are wrong.

Above all other groups, the CPGB talks about unity on the left and not wrongly. Yet, when it comes to a genuine unity project with real potential and a more democratic structure to work under, comrades are nowhere to be seen. In fact, the CPGB has been surprisingly uninvolved in the student movement altogether. At a time when so many students are becoming politically aware and the potential for unity is greatly increased, it is surprising to see such a lack of input from a group which places such emphasis on unity. You do not need to be a worker to be involved in the workers’ movement, you do not need to be unemployed to join an unemployed workers’ union and you do not need to be a student to participate in the student movement.

Comrades from the CPGB would prefer to listen to a celebrity of the left talk about some date in history than attend the most recent Right to Work conference. I think this stems from a deeper problem than just lack of numbers and not enough people to cover everything. It seems to me more likely to do with priorities. Obviously, you think that the way your group goes about things is the best way to input and affect the movement, but I think this needs to be rethought.

Communist politics is not a hobby and it shouldn’t be a discussion group constantly debating theory and tactics, but never implementing them. I am not underplaying the importance of theory, but a communist party is supposed to consist of theory and action, implementing the two, linking theory to action and action back to theory, and making sure that everyone engages in both. However, there is a distinct lack of any action in the CPGB. I know the CPGB isn’t a party, but a group should be modelled on the party it wishes to create, just as a party should be modelled on the society it wishes to create.

Reading Mike Macnair’s article in last week’s paper, it rang true with the student movement at the present time and I’m sure this argument needs to be made to students (‘Arming the resistance’, December 2). Unfortunately, most students don’t read the Weekly Worker. Mike says: “Our immediate aim is therefore to have united campaigns at local level.” Whose aim? The CPGB’s? They don’t help to build these campaigns and don’t really get involved in them when they are set up unless it would make an interesting article.

The problems with the London Student Assembly and the student movement in general are exactly those which Mike addresses in his article. Most of the focus is concentrated on action, to keep the movement going and, obviously, they are right so far because the numbers attending the demonstrations have been consistently large even in the face of cold weather and snow. The danger with this action-action-action plan is that of COR and Stop the War Coalition: that numbers will start to dwindle and marches of a few hundred will sedately proceed across London, a ghost of what they used to be. With no real politics being provided to these students, bar hatred for the Conservatives, I fear that students will drift away, with no real answers and feeling alienated from the movement.

The main politics which need to be provided are, firstly, internationalism. While many oppose the idea of only addressing issues that arise on a national level, they just say, ‘Look at the inspiring example the students and workers present in France or Greece: we need to be more like them’ - not ‘We need to unite with the students and workers of the world against the capitalists.’

And, secondly, although the false politics that the left seem to be providing cannot be described as outright lies, the implication is that these cuts are particularly bad because they’re coming from Eton and Oxbridge, which avoids the question of the Labour Party. I think this needs to be one of the first points we address; Conservatives, Labour or Lib Dems on their own would have all brought in these cuts. There is no obvious alternative and people starting to question the system can only prepare themselves for an uncertain future.

Mike also writes: “We need broad mass unity to fight them. But if this broad mass unity is to require the far left, which in theory does advocate the overthrow of the existing capitalist system, shutting up about this for the sake of unity, and serving as bag carriers for those who advocate national solutions, it is actually a waste of time. It is true that people may be mobilised and so forth. But at the end of the day it will not prevent the cuts or result in the political defeat of the cuts project. It will be mere protest, ultimately ineffective.”

It is a pity that this argument cannot be brought to the platform because I think it is the right one. We have to have these arguments within these assemblies, and anything else that emerges. The limited unity that the London Student Assembly now maintains will dissolve if we are not honest about our politics. But, overall, I’m optimistic.

Mike states: “What we want to see is a democratic campaign, which means that the national organisation and leadership has to be based on delegates from the united campaigns in the localities and be answerable to them.”

I see this as the future for the London Student Assembly - if it can manage to build a national structure, start to involve more of the students who are attending the protests and the rank-and-file membership of the organisations, in particular the SWP. At the moment, the campaign is very much controlled by Clare Solomon (Counterfire, ULU), and tasks and duties are performed by volunteers instead of an elected steering committee.

At the last meeting I attended, ironically SWP members were handing out a statement on democracy. However, this should be supported and I think a limited form of democracy will be achieved, as there are many groups involved that would not want to be marginalised and so will fight for democracy in this space. EAN did not want to participate in NCAFC, as they were not involved from the start and felt they would not be represented fairly. We need a genuine united front with real potential and a space where finally groups are willing to operate together. It will be hard to maintain accountability and democracy, but the London Student Assembly is moving in the right direction and I would encourage all comrades to get involved.

Get on up
Get on up