Letters

No brolly

Contra Stan Keable’s letter (July 30), the CPGB appears to have adopted the strategy of retreat, triggered by Jeremy Corbyn’s meteoric rise in the Labour Party leadership contest. But how does this square with your existing strategy to build a Marxist party, whose first task is the attempt to reorganise the far left? Otherwise Marxists have no hope of reconnecting with the class struggle and transforming it into a struggle for socialism.

Where does this leave the CPGB and Left Unity? At the moment you seem to be distracted by an unexpected eruption of left populism (admittedly an unusual phenomenon in British politics, after Thatcher and Blairism). As a result, the struggle to build Left Unity must go to the back burner. (This is unsurprising, given the political challenges posed by a fragmented left, which is tainted by Stalinism’s poisonous legacy; even bourgeois ideas, such as intersectionality; all of which are divisive and threaten to undermine the whole project.) But, thanks to the unexpected success of Corbyn, we see a new opportunity. This is theorised via the resurrection of the old argument that the Labour Party is still a bourgeois party with a working class base; as if nothing has changed.

At a deeper level, does this mean that the CPGB has lapsed into an ahistorical approach to reality, whereas a historical, concrete perspective is what is required, however daunting this might be for a small revolutionary group? Based on this perspective, the Labour Party today should be recognised for what it really is: a bourgeois party with a greatly diminished working class base; reflecting the fragmentation and atomisation of the class itself, after decades of neoliberalism, which Blairism itself helped to create. This includes the rump of old Labour, both inside the parliamentary party and in the trade unions, who are unwilling and unable to make a radical break with the past. Corbyn is not likely to buck this trend.

Despite this, Stan (and his Labour Party Marxists) now declare that, given Corbyn’s position as the ‘frontrunner’ in the leadership contest, “A leftwing Labour leader from below [represents] an unprecedented development, opening the way towards making the party into an umbrella organisation for all trade unions and all working class and socialist organisations to affiliate”.

This is illusionary. Corbyn’s unexpected success does not mean that the working class has suddenly lurched to the left; hence we have a groundswell of popular protest from below, which is altering the balance of forces inside the Labour Party, “opening the way towards making the party an umbrella organisation for all”.

We are not experiencing a groundswell of popular protest against austerity. If so, this would be characterised by strikes and demonstrations (as in Greece, sans the leadership of a revolutionary party). Rather, what we have is a protest based on atomised individuals, which is passive in character and largely based on the new media. This includes the trade unions. In previous decades they offered the possibility of collective struggle, by means of a majority vote in the workplace, in order to defend workers’ interests, despite the labour bureaucracy’s ability to keep the economic struggle separate from that in the political one. Stan himself alludes to this in his reference to the Labour Link leaders who have emailed all their members urging them to register to vote in the forthcoming election of Labour’s leader. (But what about the other two thirds of Unison’s membership? Furthermore, doesn’t Unison back Andy Burnham - who supports austerity - as its second choice?)

Stan ignores the fact that this strategy springs from an acceptance of the status quo; it does not attempt to radically alter it - ie, it is an adaptation to the passivity of the membership, which is not a viable alternative for the objective need to mobilise British workers collectively in a struggle for socialism.

It is dangerous to make predictions. Nevertheless, I can only see two outcomes to the leadership contest, both of which would leave the CPGB’s new ‘umbrella’ strategy in tatters.

Firstly, in the unlikely event of a Corbyn victory, he will immediately extend an olive branch to Andy Burnham. (Note: Channel 4 News is already on his case. In a recent interview, he was asked if he would consider making the latter his shadow chancellor!) Corbyn is also calling for an investment bank to restimulate the economy. This sounds like old Labour, not socialism. In other words, he is already showing a willingness to moderate his opposition to austerity. He is mindful of the need to silence those scaremongers who argue that a win for Corbyn amounts to a ‘suicide note’ for Labour - ie, the party will become unelectable for decades to come. Of course, such people are reformists who think that there is no alternative to capitalism and its state. This includes old Labour and - ultimately - Corbyn himself. First and foremost, one has to save the party! Then return it to the glory days of 1945, etc.

Secondly, if Corbyn loses the contest, it is unlikely that he will then organise a principled split from the party, taking the rump of old Labour (and the Marxist entryists) with him, in order to form a new ‘umbrella’ organisation. After all, at the very least, he and his supporters should have split from the Labour Party back in the 1990s, following the abolition of clause four.

Either way, this would lead to a demoralisation of the protest movement against more austerity, which sprang up in the wake of Labour’s election defeat last May. Given its atomised character, this will evaporate very quickly. If this happens, how will Stan and his Labour Party Marxists react? What then for the CPGB’s new ‘umbrella’ strategy?

Rex Dunn
email

Grotesque

Last Saturday, Jeremy Corbyn visited Preston to talk about his bid for the Labour Party leadership and his vision for the country. Around 200-300 people came to hear him speak - much more than anticipated, as the room booked wasn’t big enough, forcing the organisers to move the event outside. A few weeks prior to this meeting, I attended a Q&A session with Yvette Cooper, one of Corbyn’s rivals, and the two events could not have been more different. The turnout for Cooper was a fraction of that for Corbyn and, whereas the vast majority of Cooper’s audience was middle-aged or older, Corbyn’s was relatively youthful.

When Corbyn delivered his speech, he had garnered the most CLP nominations of all the candidates, he had the two biggest unions in the country endorsing him, and he was the favourite with the bookmakers. It was therefore unsurprising to find an atmosphere of confidence and optimism. Jeremy’s left-reformist policies - such as increasing corporation tax by 0.5 % to abolish university tuition fees and restore maintenance grants, creating a National Investment Bank, increasing the top rate of income tax, repealing the government’s welfare reforms and scrapping nuclear weapons - were all met with loud applause.

Corbyn’s candidacy has really put the cat among the pigeons within the Labour Party and, with two opinion polls showing he is set to win, it is imperative for all Marxists, where possible, to sign up and vote for Jeremy to ensure he has enough votes to cross the line. To not get involved in what could soon prove to be one of the most important battles in the Labour Party’s history, on the pretext that Corbyn is not a revolutionary socialist, would be an act of grotesque ultra-leftism.

Thomas Staples
Preston

Dishonest

Matthew Caygill has managed to convince 12 Left Unity members in Yorkshire to sign a very strange letter published in last week’s Weekly Worker (July 30). He claims that a report by myself and Michael Copestake on his efforts to boot out Workers Power from Left Unity in Leeds (‘Sectarian anti-sectarianism’, July 23) aimed to “publicly chastise and bully individuals who do not agree with the minority views of the CPGB”. The letter states: “Personalised attacks on named individuals are misguided, disrespectful, and they are incompatible with the aims of Left Unity - these attacks must cease.”

Firstly, despite the blustering language, there seems to be nothing factually wrong with our report. So Matthew Caygill did orchestrate the split of the Leeds LU branch along political lines. He did write the three motions, which were aimed at getting rid of Workers Power for the crime of being a revolutionary trend within Left Unity. And, while he succeeded in having the LU national council recognise his sectarian splitter branch, he did fail with his rather amateurish attempt to eject Workers Power.

The alleged “personalised attack” seems to be related to the fact that we dared to report what happened and who made it happen. This should be regarded as normal political criticism, which comrades should welcome, instead of dishonestly claiming we are trying to “bully” them. By “congratulating” LU members “like Matthew who seek to develop geographical branches local to their membership, through their commitment to furthering the aims of Left Unity”, the signatories show that either they have not actually read what they were signing, they were misled by comrade Caygill or they are prepared to join in his efforts to rewrite history. A handful of rightwingers split away from the Leeds branch for purely political reasons.

It seems that in reality the letter-writer (Caygill himself?) is upset about the fact that we caught him red-handed. After all, he did try his best to keep his shenanigans secret. He purposefully arranged the Leeds aggregate to take place after the regional council, “partly to avoid inflicting Leeds’ problems on other people, but also to avoid forcing sudden decisions on anyone” (as he wrote in his email to members of LU in Leeds).

In other words, he tried to stop the regional committee from overriding any decisions taken by the Leeds aggregate. As LU membership secretary Simon Hardy pointed out in the committee meeting, the LU constitution clearly states in point 19b that one of the (few) tasks of a regional committee is to assist branches to “resolve” any internal issues they can’t sort out themselves. A spilt of an LU branch along political lines and an anti-red witch-hunt seem rather big “issues” to us.

We tried to attend the Leeds aggregate as observers, but comrade Caygill managed to convince the majority (basically all those who had split the branch alongside him) to vote against our presence. His assertion that our report is “diminished in its legitimacy by the use of hearsay” is therefore rather disingenuous. Nevertheless, other attendees of the aggregate checked our report for mistakes (which is why Caygill cannot find any).

The Weekly Worker’s “attacks” will only “cease” once people like Matthew Caygill “cease” their witch-hunts. Until then, the Weekly Worker will do its utmost to expose and embarrass all those who believe in censorship and banning opinions they don’t like. Transparency, democracy and honesty about our political backgrounds and political actions are, in our view, a much better way to “promote and widen the membership of Left Unity” or any other working class organisation. In fact, they’re the only way to do it.

Tina Becker
Sheffield

Centrist period

It is disingenuous to suggest that the split in Leeds Left Unity came about because members of the breakaway group that formed the Leeds North and East branch “could not always get a majority in meetings”, as stated in your article, ‘Sectarian anti-sectarianism’, and the implicit parallels with McCarthyite witch-hunts made with the accompanying photograph is a deliberately provocative misrepresentation of the position taken by the group.

In August 2013, prior to the dispute breaking out into the open, Workers Power used the opportunity of the rotating chair to hijack a Leeds Central branch meeting in an embarrassingly shambolic manner with a stooge emergency motion on Syria calling on fantasy, non-existent Syrian “revolutionaries” to be armed (by whom they did not say) at a time when parliament was debating whether or not to bomb Syria, which would have been to the benefit of the real imperialist-provoked and -armed (via the monstrously backward semi-feudal stooge Gulf monarchist regimes or otherwise) anti-Assad death squad opposition at that time. Workers Power’s motion was essentially providing a ‘left’ cover for imperialist, fascist, warmongering aggression. To find the disruptive and ill-disciplined tactics of these smug revolutionary poseurs “intolerable”, and to wish to distance themselves from them in order to get on with the business of party building is a rational initial response to take in the absence of the philosophical framework and perspective necessary to defeat the pernicious influence all these petty bourgeois ‘revolutionary’ sects have historically had on the workers’ movement and still do today.

The great difficulty here is that Left Unity is not a centrist party - a mass workers’ party which talks of the complete abolition of capitalism - but limits its struggle to reformist organisational methods and ideology, and one in which Marxists have the freedom to openly battle for the acceptance of an agreed revolutionary perspective on national and world developments through polemical discussion and debate to determine the truth, whilst agitating to build the party. Instead, its hallmark has been one of censorship and shutting down of any debate on contentious issues through various bureaucratic, organisational mechanisms and ‘safe space’ policies (which Workers Power themselves have used to ban the sale of the Economic and Philosophic Science Review at its Leeds Central Left Unity public meetings); as well as hostility towards the workers’ states that have successfully abolished capitalism, from the heroic, decades-long revolutionary example of Soviet Russia onwards. And so any attempts to successfully create a mass workers’ party with the potential to abolish capitalism around Left Unity will, at best, be frustrated and knocked down at every turn.

Phil Waincliffe
EPSR supporter, Leeds

Kiss and make up

I was present at the third Leeds Left Unity meeting mentioned in the jointly penned report-back from comrades Michael Copestake and Tina Becker. I have been on many a political outing with members of the two branches in organisations such as the Socialist Alliance, Stop the War Coalition, Socialist Workers Party, etc, so as a known quantity to them I hope what I pen here is seen as being constructive and in good faith.

As far as the particulars of how the two-branch system came about in Leeds, I am going to ignore that right now. I was not active in the Leeds branch while all this was happening. The real question is how to take things forward. Will Left Unity in Leeds, or even anywhere else, just fracture every time a sizeable organised grouping within it emerges or is active within it? If this is true, there is going to be no hope for the project of fashioning an organisation of all Marxists that is going to be a challenge to the British state.

In the meeting in question there was ego on both sides. I for one am really glad of the role played by comrades Hudson and Hardy. Left to their own devices, Caygill, Owen and Jones vs Workers Power would potentially have ended up set to death-match mode, but they were forced to look into each other’s eyes and see each other as humans. Through the course of patiently talking to each other, no matter how much things hurt, there was much more comradely restraint and signs of some willingness to work with one another. Unbeknown to Becker and Copestake (through no fault of their own, as they had left before the start of the Leeds aggregate), they did not see this happen - I am one of the people to blame for that, as I should have written into the Weekly Worker, or at the very least have published something online.

Ultimately, what was decided was for the two-branch system to provisionally remain, albeit more territorially formalised, so that newly recruited members would know which branch they belong to, instead of joining two factions of an organisation which never meets. This needs to be overcome: the two need to become one, but systematically and patiently. There is already a tacit agreement for an all-Leeds steering committee to be made up of delegates from both branches and a proposal for a newsletter to be published by this steering committee in time for collaborative work timetabled for the 2015 freshers’ fare.

The two branches are two different species at present. From what I have seen, the level of politics discussed in Caygill’s camp at the moment does not seem to be at a particularly high level, with ‘Shall we commit to go to events?’ (and not ‘What should our political intervention be?’) bunging up the agenda of branch meetings. On the Workers Power side of things there seems to be political dogma - perhaps what comrade Jones referred to at the meeting as ‘a rehash of old arguments to do with reform and revolution’. I think what he meant by this is that Workers Power are forever droning on in the abstract, and that their revolutionary ideas need to be transformed into the here and now, but I’m still a little confused.

Real problems of organising in Leeds were highlighted in the meeting. During the election period there was no real joint work across Leeds to support candidates backed by Left Unity. There was duplication. Both ‘branches’ had their own ‘Where now after the elections?’ meeting in the same week, with little to no crossover of membership from each attending the other’s event. Each had their own public meeting on Greece, which would probably have attracted more people had they worked together. Another problem with Leeds is that, yes, it’s a big place. One comrade mentioned she probably would not be able to make meetings during weekday evenings owing to her own geographical locality. For me, Workers Power has been stubbornly waiting for this situation to correct itself and by itself it will not. Start sending members to both branches.

Sachin Sharma
email

Keep ’em out

The capitalist offensive against workers the world over includes unleashing vast foreign auxiliaries of former third-world peasants to join the industrial reserve army as wage undercutters. Only middle class do-gooders or ultra-humanitarian posers raise the demand, completely novel to the socialist movement, that all border controls be abolished. So it must appear to any class-conscious worker.

It is dismaying, then, to find so little in the way of argument for the poison pill of open-borderism. Marxists seek the strongest opposing arguments and meet them truthfully. I’ve found substantially stronger arguments for open borders than appeared in response to my letter - contained in several polemics by leading CPGB comrade Mike Macnair. Three arguments are noteworthy, although only the third ultimately merits any weight.

Comrade Macnair intended his first argument to support the CPGB’s Draft programme, which claims free movement of labour (like democracy) is a Marxist principle. I’m unsure as to whether democracy should be called a principle, but at least the argument for that claim rests on the democratic republic being a need of the class. Comrade Macnair instead bases his argument for a principle that labour should move freely on the need to adjust to the labour market by going where the jobs are individually.

Comrade Macnair bases his second argument on an analysis of capital’s motives in controlling state borders. Comrade Macnair identifies the capitalist motive as creating a stratum of workers with diminished rights. Notice that on this analysis, immigration controls adversely affect the class struggle due to the gap between immigration law and its enforcement. It is due to the under-enforcement of border controls! (It is true that complete open borders would necessarily close this gap, but we all know that complete open borders under capitalism is utopian and must calculate the effect of the demand on the actual class struggle.) This ‘enforcement paradox’ is a sign that the analysis is misguided, being apparently an effort to artificially impose the schema of racism on protectionist practices.

If the ‘principled’ argument is bad doctrine, this analysis of capitalist motive is simply wrong. It is untrue that relaxing immigration controls advantages the working class. Even if you ignore Peter Turchin’s considerable research on the historical effects of immigration controls - which function to correct extreme levels of economic inequality to achieve social peace - even then surely the lesson of the European Union is that open immigration serves as another neoliberal measure, arguably the most potent such measure, and mass immigration has done nothing to advance the class struggle and unify European workers. Glaringly, most everyone on the left now seems to ignore the role of mass immigration in destroying Greece.

But the third argument should be taken seriously. Comrade Macnair observes that solidarity within a multi-ethnic working class requires that the class defend immigrant workers. The premise doesn’t lead inexorably to conclude that communists should demand open borders (or even demand the better tailored ‘End all deportations’), since the workers will necessarily defend immigrants against retaliatory deportation for class militancy. But the open-borderist demands (it might be contended) are a strategy to unite the working class across ethnic lines.

We do need, as the third argument implies, a strategy toward workers who are part of the current mass immigration. But does citizenship rights in the country they’ve migrated to correspond even to the migrants’ aspirations? As Earl Gilman points out in a recent letter, most potential migrants would prefer to stay where they are. Yes, and most recent mass migrants would prefer to return to their native lands. The advanced countries owe reparations to the countries they have exploited. Reparations are also owed to individual migrants seeking repatriation. Communists should demand repatriative reparations for migrants. Primitive ‘pro-immigrant’ and ‘anti-immigrant’ attitudes ill suit us.

Stephen Diamond
USA

Of course not

We have just crossed the Channel, and words cannot really describe the revulsion we felt, as we came off the ferry to witness fortress Calais. Somehow we have to challenge and change the attitudes so prevalent throughout Britain and most of Europe that migrants are a problem and have to be dealt with as if they were vermin.

We drove past miles of high fences topped with barbed wire, as if we were travelling past concentration camps like Dachau or Auschwitz. How has it come to this? It will be even worse at the tunnel and, if David Cameron gets his way with sniffer dogs, more fences, police and even the army, it really will look like a country under siege.

Are the migrants a physical threat? Of course not. Are they an economic threat? Of course not. They are desperate people, fleeing from poverty, persecution, disease or all three, in many cases caused by the actions of other countries, including Britain. Why would they risk their lives, crossing the Mediterranean or the English Channel, unless they were desperate?

Pete McLaren
Rugby Tusc

Greek problems

There are a number of problems with Daniel Harvey’s article, ‘Syriza and the left’ (July 30).

First, no evidence is offered that “Syriza was always looking to implement some form of austerity, even before it took power”. Second, the article implies that Yanis Varoufakis is close to Syriza’s Left Platform, which he is not, and never was.

Moreover, the LP was not advocating the issuance of scrip (a Greek euro) and, if an immediate Grexit, which the LP was indeed advocating, required being bailed out by Putin, it would be something Russia probably doesn’t have the capacity to do, short of redenominating the Greek economy in roubles. And if the Greek government even made tentative steps in that direction, it would have certainly invited the Greek economy to be subject to the same Nato sanctions imposed on Russia.

In reality, the LP was simply seeking a better loan architecture from Russia than it could extract from the troika, and it had nothing to do with the scenario depicted in Harvey’s piece. Approaches to Putin, in retrospect, were probably never anything but a bargaining tactic.

The CPGB’s overall approach to electoral politics - ‘never form a government until there’s a majority for socialism in most of Europe’ - is ably taken apart by Hillel Ticktin in his interview with Mark Fischer (‘You can’t just sit and wait’, July 30). For an approach to Syriza - and the Greek left generally - that doesn’t involve ‘sitting and waiting forever’ I would suggest paying close attention to what Barry Finger has to say in his recent piece for New Politics, ‘What next in the Greek crisis?’

Jason Schulman
New York

New thing

I would like to take issue with at least one statement by Rosa Lichtenstein in her letter on dialectical thinking (July 30). She calls the definition of qualitative change “hopelessly vague”, because it refers to something turning into a “new kind of thing”. Using an example, she remarks that, “since water as a solid, a liquid or a gas is still H₂0, no ‘new kind of thing’ has emerged.”

I suppose it depends what purpose is served by the recognition of change. Noting the chemical or physiological nature of a thing may be enough for a science writer, but to someone thirsty it might matter whether something has the quality of steam or liquid.

An ape is a kind of mammal, as is a human being. A lizard is not a mammal, but a reptile, as is an alligator - a larger kind with an added quantity of teeth. Or is it only the basic taxonomy - mammal or reptile - that counts? The difference in mammals between ape and human was enough to satisfy the interest of Charles Darwin.

Nor does anyone deny that the Soviet Union was a society of human beings with a politics and economics, but whether it was a qualitatively different one, with or without some capitalism, was a question fiercely debated, as each position implied a different political approach.

Mike Belbin
email

Fold up shop

In recent years, there has been a growing emphasis in the animalist movement on ‘intersectionality,’ by which is meant consideration of human issues such as class, gender and race. This is obviously a worthwhile endeavour on its own terms. And simply from a strategic level it’s good in that a more inclusive struggle will be bigger and thus more effective.

But I’d argue that recently some animalists have ceded too much ground, so much so that animal issues have taken a back seat to human ones within the animalist movement itself. And for our efforts we have received very little in return. If the broader left is more open to consideration of anti-speciesism than it was a few years ago, the change is hardly noticeable.

Let me first say that I have arguably been a part of the problem. In as much as anyone in the anti-speciesist movement is familiar with me, it’s through my writing that sought to foster dialogue between socialists and animalists. Coming primarily from the latter perspective, some of my criticism was internal. For instance, I criticised what I saw as ineffective, ‘individualist’ strategies employed by the animalist movement, such as emphasising the personal boycott of animal-derived products and relying on acts of sabotage or violence carried out by small groups. But I believe the majority of my criticism was aimed externally, at the anthropocentrism of the socialist left. Don’t get me wrong. Internal criticism is necessary for the health of any movement. But recently I believe the ratio of external to internal criticism has gotten out of whack.

Jon Hochschartner
email

Mouths of babes

It was in the very deepest of bewilderment, closely followed by utter confusion, (but soon all overlaid with my crinkled wry smile), that I came across the letter from Gerry Downing of Socialist Fight (July 30).

In the course of his submission, he refers to just some of the organisations of the UK ‘principled’ far left: a list which included Left Unity, Socialist Resistance, Workers Power, Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, Socialist Party, Socialist Appeal, International Marxist Tendency, as well as yourselves at the CPGB and, of course, his own Socialist Fight. I recalled the final paragraph of my own letter, which appeared in the July 16 issue. In this I talked about the left’s “visceral and vitriolically held divisions; your lack of any productive cooperation/sensible practical collaboration and/or effective unity of operation amongst and amidst those variously paraded outfits”.

Whether foolishly naive or simply grindingly unsophisticated in these matters, I would just like to remind everyone of the commonly held adage: ‘Sometimes out of the mouths of babes comes the truth!’

Bruno Kretzschmar
email