Letters

Modern-minded

Let’s be honest: any organisation regarding itself as genuinely leftwing and properly socialist which highlights its unequivocal support for the insights and responses to the current trumped-up ‘anti-Semitism’ row in the UK provided by professor Norman Finkelstein on his blog site will be doing nothing much more than living up to their basic humanitarian obligations, not to mention remaining appropriately faithful to their internationalist principles. Most notably the smears relate to accusations directed against Corbyn’s Labour Party and - it could well be said, far more damagingly and therefore even more scandalously - against the new president of the National Union of Students, Malia Bouattia.

The CPGB has very astutely abided precisely by that genuinely progressive outlook. For my part, I admire the organisation for that. Moreover, in light of such consistent, solid and arguably somewhat courageous positioning, I continue to see the CPGB and the Weekly Worker as a prominent and essential element in the ongoing struggle to raise the consciousness of working class partisans.

The purpose of that process, needless to say, is to finitely expose capitalism’s sickeningly double-dealing and hypocritical practices; its immutably aggressive and imperialistic structure; its fundamentally undemocratic - not to mention disgracefully inhumane - nature and substance. Both thereby and thereafter to achieve a modern-minded Marxist-Leninist party that will secure capitalism’s revolutionary overthrow.

Bruno Kretzschmar
email

Obsessed

Twenty pages of Socialist Appeal’s May edition and nothing on the anti-Semitism nonsense. Twelve pages of Weekly Worker and we get six pages of it (including the letters page). Are you becoming a little obsessional?

You are following the main media tune. They decide what you’re writing about. It was good to read the articles but you have other obligations as a supposed workers’ paper. It had no effect on Labour’s vote. As I told you, no-one in the chattering masses is taking about this at all. We have a complete disconnect between the national media and the common people. It’s a media system that the people aren’t listening to. Imagine large newsreel broadcasts in cinema halls around the country. And they’re all empty. That’s our national media today.

The crime syndicates behind this insane media are funding a system that is not delivering for them. Let’s wait and see. The Labour vote is not cracking. It’s secure and disciplined. The enemy state is cracking up. It has a party in power that can’t get its major legislation through the houses of parliament. Its extreme legislation can’t be pushed through with the slender majority they have and a determined Labour Party opposing them alongside the Scottish National Party and Liberal Democrats. The Lib Dems may have only eight MPs, but they have over 100 lords. A government that can’t enact its legislation is a government without a mandate.

Defeat after defeat after defeat despite the most totalitarian news system in the world can only lead to one end: the resignation of the government and early parliamentary elections. This could come by the end of 2017. No wonder their media is bombarding the Labour Party. They are frightened of a defeat at a general election they must know is coming sooner than most people think.

Labour don’t have to win a majority; they could rule with 270 seats in an ad hoc agreement with the SNP. As long as the Tories lose their majority - that must be a key aim for Labour. Then everything is up for grabs. It’s about stopping an extremist government in its tracks. Surely we should all be concentrated on that. Let us choose our own tunes.

Elijah Traven
Hull

By the book

I’ve just been reading two books: Why the Tories won: the inside story of the 2015 election by Tim Ross, and Five million conversations: how Labour lost an election and rediscovered its roots by Iain Watson.

Both are very interesting. However, whilst the book by the BBC’s Iain Watson gives a day-to-day account of Labour’s 2015 general election campaign, Tim Ross’s is the better of the two, giving an insight into the secrets behind the Tories’ success.

Labour’s ill-fated campaign is summed up by Will Straw, Labour’s parliamentary candidate for Rossendale and Darwen in Lancashire, who between 2010 and 2015 knocked on 20,000 doors in snow, sleet, rain and summer heat. These 20,000 conversations didn’t make any difference. Will Straw failed to win the seat.

The book by Tim Ross explains the highly secret, behind-the-scenes work of the Australian, Lynton Crosby - more commonly known as the ‘Wizard of Oz’ - who was the Tories’ campaign guru and strategist, having been given complete control by David Cameron. The Tories targeted 100 seats - 50 Tory marginal and 50 marginal Labour and Liberal Democrat seats - by using direct mail, telephone calls and sending thousands of mainly young volunteers to these 100 seats at weekends. Lynton Crosby shrewdly saw that the way to getting a Tory majority government was to destroy the Liberal Democrats, especially in the south-west of England, but also in seats where the Lib Dems had substantial majorities.

The Tories were helped by the largely unknown campaign to target potential supporters via Facebook. By spending £100,000 a month on adverts on Facebook, the Tories gained the email addresses and postal addresses of 1.5 million potential Tory supporters. Of these 1.5 million, 100,000 mainly young people became volunteers. At weekends, the Tory Party sent thousands of these young volunteers to the 100 target seats by coach and train. They were put up at hostels and hotels on a Saturday night and were supplied with a curry and beer following a day’s canvassing and delivering direct mail in one constituency in the morning and another constituency in the afternoon. The cost of putting up thousands of young volunteers at hostels and hotels on a Saturday night together with curry and beers has already led to eight Tory MPs being referred to the police for undeclared election expenses.

Iain Watson’s book explains the disastrous campaign by Labour, with its so-called ‘five million conversations’ on the doorstep being a waste of time, because canvassers were only interested in finding out where confirmed Labour supporters lived rather than trying to win over floating voters. Watson also explains the disastrous decision to rule out a pact with the SNP, who said that “together we can lock David Cameron out of Number 10”. Similarly, the famous ‘Edstone’ was seen more like a gravestone with its bland statement of Labour’s six key election pledges.

Tim Ross’s book explains how Lynton Crosby earned his keep by masterminding the Tory campaign. Crosby had access to highly secret private polls, which said that the Tories were ahead in the 100 target seats. He kept his nerve when other public polls said that Labour and Tories were neck and neck, which turned out to disastrously wrong.

Labour needs to learn from these books. In 2020 it needs to target voters in these 100 marginal seats, using Facebook with real conversations and targeted direct mail and phone calls to both Labour supporters and, more importantly, floating voters.

John Smithee
Cambridgeshire

Airbrushed

Miah Simone writes praising the Communist Party of the USA, which formed with 20,000 militants and calling for a ‘party of the working class for socialism’ (Letters, May 5). Typical!

It is only by starting the clock in 1919 that the Socialist Party of America can be airbrushed from our history. The SPA reached 120,000 members and 6% of the national vote at its peak in 1912, beating even the CPUSA peak membership of 80,000 in 1944.

Miah’s “criminal destruction of a great opportunity” might be an apt description of what the CPUSA tried to do to the SPA, including CPers beating SPA members at the SPA’s 1934 Madison Square Garden rally (although the most damage to the SPA was done by World War I).

There’s more to be learned from the SPA presidential campaign than from the CPUSA, not least candidate (and Bernie Sanders’ avowed hero) Eugene Debs’ famous quote:

“I am not a labour leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else. If you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the Promised Land if I could, because if I led you in, someone else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition; as it is now, the capitalists use your heads and your hands.”

Jon D White
Socialist Party of Great Britain

No plan B

Jack Conrad asks the important question of why Lenin made a 180-degree about-turn between 1914 and 1915 in relation to the ‘United States of Europe’ slogan (‘A highly serviceable political weapon’, May 5). Lenin started off by supporting the slogan and later opposed it.

The answer to Jack’s question is both political and economic. The general consensus was that the war would lead to revolution, something which the opportunists were not looking forward to. Opportunism began to hide behind the argument that socialism must be international for it to succeed. The end - ie, international socialism - was being used to avoid making revolution in one’s own country, because, you see, socialism must be international. For Lenin, a correct position related to the end became incorrect when related to the beginning.

In Lenin’s new position, the United States of Europe slogan misled the left into believing that “the victory of socialism in a single country was impossible”, and Lenin argued that it may also create misconceptions as to the relations of such a country to the others (CW Vol 21, p342).

In the post-Lenin period, Trotsky and his followers used a similar argument to oppose those building socialism in one country and later founded a movement on this basis. For Trotsky it was either socialism in one country or world revolution. He lacked a dialectical understanding of the relationship between the two - ie, the particular and the universal - and was viewed, by those who gathered around Stalin in the party, as a dangerous defeatist, in a situation where the world revolution was moving slower than expected. Trotsky was removed from power because his defeatist position was a direct threat to the Soviet regime: ‘If we can’t build socialism in one country, why are we here?’ Trotsky had no plan B in a situation where the revolution was delayed.

Having made the above points, this doesn’t mean that Lenin’s withdrawing support for the ‘United States of Europe’ slogan in 1915 is still valid today, in 2016. The struggle for a democratic socialist society is both national and international in a global situation where the significance of uneven development is far less important than it was 100 years ago in Lenin’s day.

Tony Clark
Labour supporter

Centenary

I have offered to help Suzi Weissman publicise the documentary she’s making on Trotsky, which will coincide with the centenary of the October revolution next year.

I thought you might be interested in the film’s website and the Kickstarter campaign to raise the money to finish the film off. The links are: www.trotskyproject.com; and www.kickstarter.com/projects/trotskyproject/the-most-dangerous-man-in-the-world.

If you feel you can make a small donation I am sure this will be welcome.

Paul B Smith
Merseyside

Engagement

I read Miah Simone’s letter last week with interest - and I’ll confess that I was somewhat confused by it! If I understand it correctly, her position is that the American left is mistaken to continue to pin their hopes so exclusively to Bernie Sanders.

In that much I can agree with her. It would be entirely wrong-headed to see Sanders as the messiah of American socialism, which is clearly how some have come to view him. Though the Socialist Alternative petition seems opportunistic, Sanders remains a current figurehead for socialism on a mainstream stage. We cannot ignore the fact that it’s via his campaign that so many have become politically activated. Would this have occurred with another left candidate? Perhaps, but, with things as they are, he is the star attraction for an audience whose loyalty is still mostly tribal rather than cognisant - consider the indiscriminately angry Sandernista, Jim Marchwinski, from my article, ‘Don’t support Clinton’ (April 21).

Sanders has, thankfully, opted to fight Clinton all the way to the convention. The importance of consolidating the gains of his campaign after that point is, of course, indisputable, but it would be foolish to think that he should have absolutely no part to play in this himself. No, we don’t think we should forget ourselves and get on board the Bernie bandwagon, but we do encourage him to leave the Democrats (his campaign has already been conducted almost entirely outside of party structures) and engage in dialogue with those of us to his left.

It is only through such an engagement that we as Marxists can hope to expose those activated masses to broader political ideas - transforming them from tribal Sandernistas into educated and well-prepared socialists.

Tom Munday
@Tommundaycs