Letters

Muddled

Yassamine Mather’s article is ‘correct’ in stressing the need to maintain Left Unity’s political independence, while orienting to the new situation in (and around) the Labour Party (‘Join fight to transform Labour’, October 10).

Unfortunately, she omits two vital things: the other clauses in the CPGB motion, and the other motions that have a ‘Labour without liquidation’ orientation. The full CPGB motion is, in my opinion, muddled and misguided, particularly in the hints of ‘Labour to power on a socialist programme’ and asserting that Labour must not take office until there is a European-wide majority based on class struggle (the motions on Greece are also based on this latter premise, less obviously as slices from the original CPGB motion).

Alan Theasby
Middlesbrough

Halfway house

Jeremy Corbyn’s move towards a halfway house project has finally torpedoed the CPGB’s theory of the same name. Of course, Labour remains a broad church. But if the Labour left is going to win a general election, they will have to win the class struggle in the next few years. Then they will have to get rid of the divisive back-stabbing liberal democrats, which Thatcher might have called “the enemy within”.

The CPGB’s error has been to dabble in a kind of left communism. Leftwing communism sets the maximum programme against the united front of the ‘social democratic-communist’ party. Their argument is that, in an era of working class defeat, social democracy, like trade unionism, is a declining or disappearing force. Why make concessions to a defeated social democracy? Communists must stand firm, go it alone and make no compromises.

Applying left communism to Left Unity leads to the following line. Suppose LU - a relatively new social democratic-communist, united-front party - is made up of 900 Marxists and 100 social democrats. The left communist line is that Marxists should simply outvote the 100 social democrats and adopt a revolutionary communist maximum programme. The 100 social democrats can then leave LU or convert to true Marxism.

Of course, LU rejected the CPGB’s version of a maximum programme. Left communism sees the problem within the 900 Marxists. The story goes - there are only about 50 true Marxists and the rest are cowardly, compromising Marxists who support a united front programme. So the 50 true Marxists are being thwarted by the 850 who want to keep the 100 social democrats on board.

The irony is that the CPGB were so busy dancing to their own maximalist tune that they did not fight for the minimum republican programme. The dominance of Labourism in LU must be blamed in large part on the CPGB failing to fight for its own republican minimum programme by playing at maximalism.

Now, with the victory of the Corbo-left, all this compromising with halfway housing must end! This is a logical, but bizarre conclusion. It is true that a small party with 900 Marxists and 100 social democrats can only remain united if the Marxists are sufficiently disciplined not to drive them away by imposing a maximum programme on them. But the real problem with leftism is its failure to recognise the real state of class-consciousness in a period of defeats.

LU is not a random sample of working class consciousness. It is a biased sample. Marxist ideas may far outweigh social democratic views in Left Unity, but in the working class movement it is the other way round. The Corbyn movement settles the question. The 250,000 voting for Corbyn are people moved to support a social democratic programme. These are not Marxists - and not even cowardly Marxists, scared to say who they are.

Mass consciousness is social democratic and the only way LU could become a mass party would be to have a kind of social democratic programme which makes sense to a mass of people. In a wider sense the ratio of social democracy to communism is more like 250,000 to 2,000 (or 125:1). We can discuss and change these estimates, but a mass party of the working class in current conditions can only be a broad church or a halfway house.

Therefore social democrats and communists should be uniting against the liberal democrats. That is halfway-house politics, not broad churchism. What is true is that Left Unity can not survive as an independent left Labour party. The choice for Left Unity with the rise of Corbyn is change or die, which takes me back to my Bermondsey election campaign and the points I made during in it.

Steve Freeman
LU republican socialist and anti-unionist

Posh words

If God turned out to exist and I went to hell, I would undoubtedly be doomed to sitting in a 20th century history classroom for the rest of eternity. Because when you are already drowning in essays and you also happen to be a Marxist, trust me, that classroom is the last place you want to spend your Friday afternoon. Or any time, for that matter. Not because the teaching or the subject is bad, but because a 20th century history lesson is the perfect opportunity for anyone who so wishes to spout unimaginable amounts of every logical fallacy you could possibly think of, when talking about anything remotely related to socialism. And if you think internet trolls are annoying because they constantly misrepresent your position … well.

So naturally I spend most of these lessons resisting the temptation to pull a Ramón Mercader on myself, but the last straw was when we started to discuss the ways in which the Nazis incorporated socialism into their politics (‘Of course they were socialist: they called themselves National Socialists!’). There is so much I could have said to refute the ridiculous idea that the Nazis were socialist in any way, but I decided to describe how the ostensibly anti-capitalist economic policies they did have were obviously of petty bourgeois, as opposed to proletarian, character. Not exactly impenetrable, right? Apparently it was.

My teacher reminded me to “Keep it simple”, and my classmates had no idea what I was talking about despite the context - or, more likely, stopped trying to have any idea as soon as I said “petty bourgeois”. The same sort of thing happened in a very heated debate with some non-socialists over union laws, in which we got quite theoretical and they thought I was acting the intellectual because I said that bourgeois and proletarian class interests are diametrically opposed and irreconcilable. Whenever I use socialist terminology with non-socialists, I am perceived as being pretentious or ‘flexing my vocabulary’ - and I imagine I am not alone here.

But, of course, that is not why we use those words. We use them because they are the best fit for the phenomena we are describing, which, although often specific to Marxist thought, are not necessarily complex concepts. Leftwingers (particularly the socialists who were part of Occupy and similar ‘big tent’ movements recall their preference for ‘mainstream’ terms like ‘the elite’ and ‘the 99%’) often avoid using Marxist terminology or talk about swapping it for more everyday or ‘modern’ words as an effort to make their message more accessible. This is well intentioned, but generally these everyday words end up distorting the message instead.

Take the terms ‘working class’ and ‘ruling class’. In the past, these words could have been used interchangeably with ‘proletariat’ and ‘bourgeois’, leading people to believe that they are just more colloquial words for the same phenomena. When most people think of the working and ruling classes today, though, they think of an income divide, rather than the divide between the capitalist class and those who sell their labour. This reinforces the already widespread misconception that socialism means equal or more equal distribution of income and not the end of the whole concept of ‘income’. And that does not help us at all.

Whether any given word is ‘intellectual’ or not is subjective and based on personal perception, and also on which language is being spoken; while I was bonding over mutual hatred of Marine Le Pen with my French exchange host family, I could talk about la bourgeoisie without any accusations of intellectualism. Because of this subjectivity, discussing what sort of language socialists should use in order to get the reaction we want from people is about as useful as discussing whether the hammer and sickle is a pretty enough symbol. We use symbols because of what they mean, and then proceed to make them look good - but don’t worry too much about the latter, because what looks good is subjective. The same applies to language: we should use certain terms because of what they mean, and then proceed to clarify their meanings as much as we can, so as to demonstrate that they are not just fancy words.

Those who think that it would be a good idea to reform Marxist terminology to make socialism more accessible sometimes also want to change the labels we use to describe our politics, like the word ‘socialism’ itself, in order to keep people’s perceptions of the movement ‘clean’ and untarnished by loaded terms. In one way it makes sense - if the language we use really does shape the way in which people think about our movement, the last thing we would want to do is to use terminology which conjures up images of indebted welfare states, sprawling bureaucracies and gulags.

The problem is, people are not stupid. If we decided to rename communism ‘rainbowism’ and got the public really pumped about this new ideology which promises to liberate the workers and abolish the state, the class system and money, someone, sooner or later, would realise that what we were talking about is in fact communism. Not to mention that, for all its past failures, the communist movement has a rich history and a lot of lessons to teach us, and it would be a shame to be in denial rather than facing up to and finding the causes of our past failures.

This entire debate around discourse comes down to whether the priority of our movement should be clarity or popularity, and I think it should certainly be the former. A popular movement which is thoroughly ideologically confused and has swapped revolutionary rhetoric for more ‘crowd-pleasing’ liberal rhetoric - which is what all this usage of ‘elites’, ‘the 99 %’ and similar terms are - is utterly useless.

All of that being said, concern about socialism being perceived as intellectual (in the negative sense of the word) seems to me to be somewhat valid. Theory is important, of course, but it has to be put across in a clear way which does not feel like some sort of academic debate and which directly relates it to praxis. And that is something which some socialist literature fails to do, particularly when it relates to philosophical concepts and the like. This is where language does come in, for the simple reason that obfuscatory language, more than ‘fancy words’, always makes concepts inaccessible. Academic Marxist projects - post-Marxism, analytical Marxism, structural Marxism, etc - tend to fall at the other end of the scale from movements like Occupy, in that they will use such specialist and philosophical terminology that they end up feeling overly abstract and not linked closely enough to practice. This makes them seem ‘intellectual’. However, this is not because of the language they use: it is because of the way in which they use language, which makes it difficult for laypeople to deduce the meanings of unfamiliar words.

In conclusion, how we say it is more important than what we say. Our ideas require clear communication without too much academic and overly philosophical language. But clear communication does not just mean ‘Let’s use “in” words - saying “proletariat” is sooo 1848!’ It means using whatever words will most adequately represent the message we want to convey. And if these words sound a little antiquated, so be it. If we persist in using and clarifying them, we can turn them from being seen as obscure ‘posh words’ to those describing phenomena which significantly affect everyone’s lives.

It is our perceptions which shape language, not the other way round.

Commissaress
email

Idiotic policy

I was astonished to read Eddie Ford’s dismally confused analysis of the problem with Tsipras’ electoral strategy earlier this year. Eddie writes: “Syriza was always going to become an agent of austerity, once it ‘took the power’ - as the British left foolishly urged it to do” (‘Managing a debt colony’, October 8).

It really is exasperating how an otherwise experienced comrade can make such an elementary terminological mistake. Anyone who has read Lenin’s State and revolution will know that for revolutionary Marxists winning office in parliament is not - repeat not - the same thing as conquering state power. Bearing Lenin’s distinction in mind, the problem is not that Tsipras struggled to win an election and go on to assume office. The problem is that he did so without mobilising his supporters to confront the state, dismantle its institutions and translate office into power.

I very much hope that Eddie will acknowledge that his formulation is plain wrong. My anxiety is that if he does not retract, he may consider his critique of Tsipras to be applicable equally to Jeremy Corbyn in Britain. If so, then presumably he will be urging Jeremy to announce that Labour has no intention of winning the 2020 general election.

Or perhaps Eddie’s idea is that we should participate in the election, but refuse to assume office even if we win? Either way, I can hardly think of a more idiotic policy.

Chris Knight
email

Missing point

The unexpected election of Jeremy Corbyn represents a great opportunity for the left in Britain if they know how to use it, but I think Labour Party Marxists miss the point (‘Two years to take control’, October 8).

The task of the left in Britain should be to win Labour over to a vision of a democratic socialist society. This is different from those who see the goal as winning Labour over to ‘Marxism’, which is a more sectarian and outdated project.

With all due respect to Marx, modern industrialised capitalist society was not made possible by the circulation and accumulation of capital and the existence of wage-labour, as Marx suggested. Money and labour existed for thousands of years without leading to an industrialised capitalist society. Modern, industrialised capitalist society become possible because of the discovery and use of massive supplies of cheap energy, primarily in the form of fossil fuels. It is this scientific fact which is missing from Marx’s 19th century analysis of capitalism. Only the ignorant would seek to impose on the Labour Party Marx’s money-centred view on how modern capitalism became possible. Unfortunately, there are many such individuals still around.

When we leave the economic level and go to the political level, we see Marx calling for dictatorship, rather than the democratic rule of the people on the basis of socialism. Lenin defined dictatorship as rule unrestrained by any law. Trotsky never opposed this view, as far as I am aware, and yet they one-sidedly blame Stalin for everything negative in the Soviet attempts to build socialism, including the rise of bureaucracy.

Tony Clark
Labour supporter

Bleak

I believe that it is too late for Labour to regain the trust of the majority of the Scottish working class. The approach of Corbyn’s Labour Party to Trident, the monarchy, austerity, etc has split the Scottish party. It is no longer seen as the way to safeguard the Scottish working class from the rest of the UK returning a Tory government in the future.

64% of 16-34-year-olds see the Scottish National Party as the natural protectors of the Scottish people. Labour’s only hope is to acknowledge the fact that their game is up and call for a Scottish party of Labour fully committed to the removal of Trident and the monarchy, land reform, etc. It might be able to gain the respect of their class.

If not, its future is bleak.

Angus Meiklejohn
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Arm’s length

I’d like to propose that CPGB institute a sort of halfway house or arm’s length arrangement for membership of the organisation.

As both an immediate outcome and direct consequence, any such new set-up for supporters and friends (in distinction to full-timers) would enable the CPGB to operate in a far more accessible fashion, as well as thereby become more ‘engaging’ to those people who, in general terms, may be extremely interested in and thereby drawn towards your specific Marxist-Leninist position, but would only want to get more closely involved if it wasn’t going to be unacceptably demanding and/or inappropriately burdensome.

Going a bit further, I would suggest that just such an entry-level membership arrangement would open up an entirely sensible, solid, regulated and formal, but in equal measure a far more relaxed, avenue for the development of more substantial involvement. Most significantly of all, this constituting an avenue for involvement and/or providing relative ‘outsiders’ with a feeling of connection that otherwise does not exist. Surely, also one which would make any such associate or second-level member far more likely to have the CPGB and Weekly Worker pop into their mind when opening their pay packet or inspecting the balance of their bank account.

Bruno Kretzschmar
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