Letters

Peculiar

I find a bevy of slightly peculiar responses to my article on the US presidential race (‘Voting for the right lizard’, August 4).

Alan Theasby accuses me of neglecting to criticise ‘lesser evilism’, which is odd, since the last 500 words or so are dedicated to exactly that (Letters, August 25). Michael Ellison in the same issue imputes to me the idea that “a Trump presidency would benefit the working class (presumably because he would be so bad that he would usher in a working class revolution?)”. I said nothing of the sort, of course - I made an argument, as a provocation to the likes of Mr Ellison, that Trump could be viewed as the lesser evil on the basis of his proposed foreign policy, not that he would benefit the working class (evils do not, not even lesser ones), never mind spur them to revolution. Ellison enjoins me to read Gramsci, for some reason or other; I will be happy to oblige him, if he can find it in himself to read the articles he criticises in future. Given that he is a Blairite troll with too much time on his hands, we do not hold out much hope.

Directed not so much at my piece, but at the CPGB’s coverage of the US election (and only indirectly, even then), Ian Hartman’s letter is the most substantial (August 25). Hartman appears to hold to the Noel Ignatiev/Race Traitor viewpoint, which grew out of the New Communist Movement of the 1970s: comrade Hartman tells us that America was built as a project of a monolithic “white nation”, provides a very brief account of the history of the American labour movement as poisoned by racism, and argues ultimately that “for a revolutionary communist left to emerge in this country, the white working class must be convinced to betray their race in mass numbers ... [and] declare war on America as a concept”.

It would be silly to deny that race has an important role in American politics, or that it is historically implicated in the failure of the American labour movement to obtain independent political representation (although it is hardly the only factor). Comrade Hartman, rather, gives us a clear lesson in how a deficient political method can lead you from a well-observed fact to an absurd political outlook.

For, in his view, and in the view of that line of inheritors of the NCM, race is so dominant in American politics that it is impossible, or at least impractically difficult, to convince workers to view their interests through the prism of class. Instead, we must accept that they view their interests racially, and then convince the white people among them to become ‘race traitors’. That’s right - for Hartman, it is easier to convince people to act directly against their perceived interests in large numbers than it is to get them to reconsider what their interests are. This is a scholastic riddle, not a strategy.

A last point - Hartman blames our disagreement on that point for the CPGB’s lukewarm attitude to Black Lives Matter. I cannot speak for everyone in the organisation, but I wouldn’t deny for a moment that BLM responds to issues of central importance in American society - the militarisation of police, the half-cocked and half-finished nature of post-civil rights desegregation efforts, mass incarceration and so on. As a single-issue campaign, it is perfectly supportable.

The problem is ... that it’s a single-issue campaign. It is not the first addressed to the issue of police brutality, and we suspect it will not be the last. OK, so we want to stop cops from murdering black people arbitrarily. How do we do that? Abolish the police? Get more black people into police chief jobs? Follow patrol cars around, Panther-style, tooled up with assault rifles? Ask the cops nicely? BLM cannot answer that question. We, and I hope comrade Hartman, would lean towards the first of those options - the proper vehicle for such proposals is a Communist Party, not an ephemeral protest movement. Even if we accepted all of Hartman’s arguments about racial treachery, etc, the limitations of BLM would remain the same.

Paul Demarty
London

Misunderstood

Chris Knight has some serious misunderstandings on the nature of Noam Chomsky’s linguistic work and the research programme of modern generative grammar, initiated by Chomsky, Morris Halle and others at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 60 years ago. In two previous letters, I tried to correct two of them, with no apparent success. One dealt with the US military’s funding of research at MIT in the 1950s and early 1960s (March 18 2010); the other concerned speculation on the origin of human language (February 12 2015).

In his new article, Chris Knight again presents wild and fantastic claims about Chomsky’s scientific work (‘Two Noam Chomskys', September 1). He quotes Chomsky to the effect that a child has “all possible languages in its head” and “As the data comes along, that class of possible languages reduces.” Chris Knight calls this “the most amazing statement”. Well, I think it’s simply a statement of fact.

Recall that the object of inquiry of generative linguistics has always been the human language faculty and its various manifestations in speech or signing. A newborn human has all the possible varieties of (human) language in her head, in the sense that she is predisposed to acquire any one of them - in fact, many of them, if she happens to grow in multilingual surroundings. A child born into a Japanese-speaking family will start speaking Japanese; if she is moved to Cairo and grows up in the local speech community there, she will start speaking Egyptian Arabic, and so on and so forth.

There should be nothing controversial in these statements. They are based on simple observations, and belong to the starting points of the scientific research programme, which Chomsky and his colleagues have been following for close to 60 years now.

Much less, practically nothing, in fact, is known about how growing children pick up the meaning of words or word-like atomic elements of their language. Anatomically and behaviourally modern humans in the Stone Age could not know the meaning of such words as ‘book’, ‘bureaucrat’ or ‘carburettor’, but they had the same mental capacity to know them as we have. Or at least this is the view of many paleoanthropologists. See, for example, Ian Tattersall’s Masters of the planet: the search for our human origin (London 2013).

The claim that Chomsky has separated humans’ intuitive knowledge of language from its material and organic basis, comparable to the separation of software from hardware in computer science, is also wide of the mark. Chomsky has never advocated such a view. On the contrary, he has collaborated with such eminent biological scientists as Salvador Luria and Richard Lewontin. Eric Lenneberg’s classical work Biological foundations of language (New York 1967) contains Chomsky’s essay, ‘The formal nature of language’, as an appendix.

As for human social interactions, politics, communications and culture, surely language is highly relevant for all of them. A human being would not acquire language without interaction with other humans, as the tragic cases of so-called wolf-children show. However, chimpanzees interact with each other too, and still they don’t have language.

In fact, there would not be a human society as we know it without language. But, however much we repeat this truism, it does not help us understand the nature of the human language faculty. Only a rigorous analysis of its manifestations can show the way forward.

The title of Chris Knight’s article is ‘Two Noam Chomskys’, and he criticises Chomsky’s separation of linguistics from politics. I don’t understand what’s wrong with this separation. There are important and interesting formal aspects of human language that are politically irrelevant, and Chomsky’s work is mainly concerned with them.

My friend and comrade, Moshé Machover, who is well-known to the Weekly Worker readers for his progressive socialist views, is a mathematician by profession. One of his areas of interest in that field is mathematical logic. Would it have been a sign of progress if he and his co-author, John Bell, had devoted a chapter to the ‘social and political relevance’ of, say, the axiomatic set theory in their textbook A course in mathematical logic (Amsterdam 1977)? Maybe Chris Knight can tell.

Hannu Reime
Helsinki

White board

Great piece on Noam Chomsky, but it’s sadly ironic that Chris Knight appears to believe that climate change is happening.

Climate change is symptomatic of the dark age we live in, of the long trajectory of capitalist decay, as well as the defeat of working class movements. Not only has capitalism had to erode its own relationship with progress and replace its failures with ahistorical human hubris - but so has the left merged with environmentalism and done massive damage to both. We are neither doomed nor prisoner to a single means of economic organisation. Scepticism is the cornerstone to historical materialism, as well as science.

Knight perhaps needs to step back from the white board and situate climate change in a broader context - as he does with Chomsky.

Andy Welch
New Zealand

Kettling

I note that James Marshall subscribes to the practice of pots calling kettles black when he describes the Socialist Party (the real one, that is, not the Trotskyist organisation that is trying to usurp the name) as an “impotent sect”, as is the customary practice to dismiss the ideas of an organisation that opposes the zig-zag twists and turns of vote-catching and membership-counting (‘End the bans and proscriptions’, September 1.

If by ‘sect’ James means we don’t try to enrol people who aren’t socialists, then he is correct. Our disagreements with other parties are not minor squabbles over a clause of a programme of immediate demands or who possesses the better leaders. The Socialist Party of Great Britain refused to deviate from its principles and has never kidded itself that party numbers were an adequate compensation for compromise.

The International Socialist Bureau was informed by the SPGB in 1905 of what distinguishes a socialist party: “Socialist bodies accept the essential principles of socialism: socialisation of the means of production and distribution; union and international action of workers; socialist conquest of public powers by the proletariat organised as a class party, recognising and proclaiming the class war, running all candidates upon this basis, and adopting an attitude of hostility, under all circumstances, to all individual members and sections of the capitalist party.”

At its inception, the Socialist Party rejected the reformist tactics of the other workers’ organisations. We predicted that these parties would fail to solve the problems faced by the working class. Nothing has happened since to persuade us to change our mind, and plenty has happened to make us even more resolved in our hostility to the Labour Party and its cheerleaders on the left. We don’t relish the fact that we are a small party, which does not include millions of workers in its membership. We are certainly not complacent or proud about the fact that we are small. But we are proud of the fact that we have been consistently correct about what we have said. The SPGB is not a sect, but a revolutionary party which adheres to principles.

James ends by saying, “We certainly have within our power the possibility of once again establishing the Labour Party as the united front of all working class organisations in Britain.” However, those who advocate the policy of alliance with a capitalist party do not realise that they always have to pay a heavy price for the capitalist support and they are invariably fated to early disappointment.

The effort to solve problems inside capitalism creates uncertainty, mistrust, apathy and despair among the workers, who have cherished false hopes, and it correspondingly helps the Conservatives later on. Perhaps, James as an advocate of forming a united front with non-socialists and anti-socialists, can cite where the working class were materially helped, or of the socialist cause being aided, by such a policy.

Alan Johnstone
SPGB

Who’s the scab?

For the second issue in a couple of months, an article in the Weekly Worker takes issue with Robert Griffiths and his correspondence with the Labour Party. James Marshall describes a “spineless” Griffiths “grovelingly” writing to Iain McNicol to “assure” him that the Communist Party of Britain does not engage in entryism. Well, they don’t. He then takes issue with the fact that Griffiths points out that the CPB’s call for Corbyn to be defended at all costs is a “rhetorical flourish and cannot, obviously, be taken literally”. Comrade Marshall says: “So the CPB should not be taken at its word. It will not defend the Corbyn leadership ‘at all costs’.”

That’s right, James. The CPB will not wage a violent jihad to defend Jeremy, nor will they stand outside parliament and self-immolate. Neither will the CPGB, the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Party in England and Wales or anyone else. Yet they would all say, ‘Corbyn must be defended at all costs’ or something similar; it is a commonly used turn of phrase that we would all use and would all understand what it means.

Marshall continues by describing “this excuse for a communist leader”, Griffiths, “prostrating” himself before McNicol by saying: “Should you or your staff have any evidence that Communist Party members have joined the Labour Party without renouncing their CP membership, or engaged in any similar subterfuge, please inform me, so that action can be taken against them for bringing our party into disrepute.”

Marshall writes: “Let us be clear about what is being said here: in the middle of a brutal civil war, with the Labour left facing a concerted witch-hunt, the CPB’s Robert Griffiths wants to be seen as standing shoulder to shoulder with Iain McNicol. He even offers to help McNicol out in hunting down any CPB member who has decided to become a registered Labour Party supporter.”

Very dramatic, and a good story, but it doesn’t ring true. All I can see Griffiths doing here in the middle of this brutal civil war is giving Corbyn a bit of breathing space by denying Communist Party of Britain involvement in the leadership election. What should he have said, in the midst of the biggest rightwing media hatchet job we have seen in years? ‘Yes, the CPB has members within the Labour Party and we will be operating behind the scenes to ensure that our man wins.’

That would have been just what Corbyn needed, wouldn’t it? No, it wouldn’t. Perhaps Griffiths thought that an effective way to support Corbyn at present would be to not let the media have more ammunition to attack Corbyn by being able to talk of a communist plot. Maybe he thought that by not directly intervening he was actually helping, and I can well understand that. In the midst of the attempted coup a few months ago, Corbyn held an impromptu rally in Westminster. It was well attended and provided much needed support when his leadership was at its most vulnerable. Yet the next day in the news, and at my place of work, discussing this rally, much talk was of the SWP placards that were in the crowd. Commentators could freely speculate that much of the crowd probably weren’t even Labour Party members and talk of far-left infiltration. Some of my colleagues who would be vaguely supportive of Corbyn mentioned those placards and said in slightly more proletarian language, ‘What were those idiots doing there?’ What Griffiths is doing, in my opinion, is what those well-meaning SWP comrades should have done. Attend the rally, support Corbyn, but maybe leave the SWP banners at home for the day.

Marshall accuses Griffiths of offering to “hunt down” any CPB member who has become a registered supporter of the LP. Does anyone really believe this? Does anyone actually think the CPB are going to start ‘hunting down’ registered Labour supporters within their ranks? What Griffiths seems to be doing is, again, putting some space between himself, the CPB and the LP for totally understandable reasons. It would play into Tom Watson’s chubby hands to have the CPB openly claiming to be intervening in the election. That should not be so hard for James Marshall to understand. Indeed, I assume he understands it only too well and simply disagrees with the CPB’s way of supporting Corbyn. That is fair enough - James has his own ideas of what should be done at this crucial juncture - but it doesn’t excuse the ludicrous and venomous attacks on Griffiths.

But James doesn’t go as far as comrade Dave Lynch (‘Which side are you on?’, July 21). For Lynch, Griffiths is a scab. In his article criticising the CPB for not being larger and for not doing exactly what he thinks it should be doing, Lynch has a picture of Griffiths with the words “Robert Griffiths: scab” underneath it.

The first line on the ‘What we fight for’ section of the CPGB website states: “Our central aim is the organisation of communists, revolutionary socialists and all politically advanced workers into a Communist Party”. Now, do James Marshall and David Lynch think the best way to do this is to call comrades from other organisations scabs? Of course, they disagree with Griffiths’ idea that it might be best not to be seen to be intervening directly in the leadership contest at the moment. That’s fine. But does it make Griffiths a scab? Have comrades Marshall and Lynch heard the expression, ‘playing the ball, not the man’? Criticise Griffiths and the CPB, yes, but calling its general secretary a “scab”, an “excuse for a communist leader” and a “junior cockroach monitor” only demean any argument Marshall and Lynch may be trying to make. Indeed, in both articles they make some valid points and criticisms, but the hysterical use of words like “scab” (a serious accusation - in my eyes there is not much lower than a scab) are pointless and counterproductive.

Do comrades Lynch and Marshall not envisage an occasion where the CPGB might be working with CPB members in some capacity soon? Perhaps in a broad left, in a trade union or in organising some local demonstration to support the NHS. Do they think their use of words like “scab” would be helpful and conducive to advancing communist politics within that? Or might they reflect that it would totally alienate and isolate them? I write this not as a CPB member, but just as an occasional reader who thinks that mixed in with often excellent analysis is needless vitriol about others on the left with whom your writers disagree.

Robert O’Connell
email

Trots spotted

Jim Grant’s article on Trotspotting and infiltrating the Labour Party was entertaining (‘Trotspotting: A field guide’, August 25), but gave away some basic truths.

Jim attempts to cast doubt on Tom Watson’s apparent allegation that Labour Party Marxists is an offshoot of the CPGB (ie, the Weekly Worker group) and that either are Trotskyist.

Any external objective assessment of the WWG’s view on the Soviet Union and of Stalin in particular, and having to decide whether it fell within either the mainstream communist or the Trotskyist tradition, would clearly have to place it in the latter. The WWG holds that the Stalin revolution of mass industrialisation and collectivisation in the 1930s, which really established and consolidated socialism in the USSR, was in fact a ‘counterrevolution’.

Leading writer Jack Conrad goes so far as to describe the Soviet Union as an “abortion”, an appallingly crass and offensive wording, and incredibly insulting to the highly advanced, progressive, well-educated, cultured Soviet population, which was the product of Soviet socialism and is still evident, today despite 25 years of real counterrevolution and restoration of capitalism.

I am aware of, but have not the patience to have studied, the various twists and turns, and evolutions and throwbacks, which constitutes the history of Trotskyism, and that these include a wide range of depictions as to the true nature of Soviet society. Generally, one can say they are all overwhelmingly hostile and negative, and some strands of Trotskyism even went so far as to prefer the military defeat of the Soviet Union by the Axis powers in World War II, and subsequently by the United States during the cold war.

The 1,000th edition of the Weekly Worker infamously carried an image of Trotsky and a banner calling on workers to join the Fourth (Trotskyist) International. Leading writers and supporters feel the need to include lengthy (and often ridiculous) quotes from Leon Trotsky, which add precisely nothing to their arguments, but are part of the genuflection to their idol.

It is probably true that Labour Party Marxists is not an “offshoot” of the WWG. It is fairly obvious it is a rebadging and renaming of the leading members of the WWG who have now entered the Labour Party. You are not even very subtle about it.

Jim rounds off his article by ecstatically proclaiming “the Trots” as being the saviours in every single respect of the Labour Party and expressing the hope that Tom Watson will continue to do “us” such favours. I am probably old-fashioned, but I think if you join a political party you should do so on the basis of agreeing with its basic principles, aims and values. If you don’t agree, form your own group or party and test your views against those of all others.

Infiltrating another political party holding diametrically opposed views to the majority of the existing membership, and using deceit, subterfuge and manipulation to get your own way and to try and change that party into something completely opposite, is reprehensible, and deservedly attracts the opprobrium of most decent working people.

Trotskyism, and its disgusting and reprehensible behaviours and actions over the decades, is one of the principal reasons why leftwing socialist politics has so little traction with the mass of working class people in Britain today.

I remain completely optimistic that advanced, democratic socialism will be established across Europe in this 21st century. I think every home will one day have somewhere on display some form of depiction or representation of one Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin as a key figure of the 20th century, who made 21st century socialism possible.

Andrew Northall
Kettering

Bucket

The Weekly Worker’s coverage of the referendum has been less hysterical than most on the left, but Mike Macnair still seems forced to resort to stereotypical political profiles for those on the left who voted ‘out’ (‘After the Brexit vote’, August 25.

Has anyone, left or right, ever argued that Britain could become ‘self-sufficient’? And I know of nobody on the left who voted out because they think they can achieve a British (or English) socialist republic independent of worldwide class forces and politics. Last time I looked the island hadn’t moved. It still is in Europe and the world. We still live in a world dominated by multinationals and international finance and speculation, underscored with American imperialism. All that leftist outists have argued is that the EU state would block any achievement of fairly fundamental moves to nationalisations of rail, steel, post, ending privatisation in the NHS, developing a more rational energy policy, including clean coal power, regional subsidies, etc. That effecting reforms here under the current parliamentary system is easier than under the EU dictatorship, which is basically the direct political wing of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and EU Bank.

The struggles of the European masses go on in tandem with our own, as do in other forms the masses of USA and the rest of the world; they are inextricably linked and co-related. That hasn’t changed and no-one expected it to. One bonus of the exit (and, contrary to the paper’s line, the UK will leave the EU in its current form, although obviously must and will develop some other relationship) is that it has stopped the EU’s headlong expansionist drive.

It has thrown a bucket of cold water over plans for the EU armed forces to develop outside any popular controls and constraints, and stopped the criminal march to war with Russia, at least for the moment. But the struggles across the world and our part in them carry on in exactly the same way.

David Douglass
South Shields

Exiting UK

Last Saturday the Wakefield Socialist History Group held a very interesting and informative meeting on James Connolly and the 1916 Easter uprising. A range of speakers - O’Connor Lysaght, Allan Armstrong, Robin Stocks, Bernie McAdam and Adam Buick - highlighted different perspectives on these events.

Connolly is usually seen in an Irish context. His roots and involvement in the Edinburgh working class movement is either forgotten or ignored. Allan Armstrong’s research and talk was rebalancing our appreciation of Connolly’s politics for Scottish republican socialism today. Nevertheless it was in Ireland that republican socialism established its credentials. The declaration of the Irish republic on the steps of the Dublin post office was the trigger for the Irish democratic revolution. For Connolly, achieving a republic was the beginning of the revolution, not its final act.

Republican socialism is the republican road to socialism. The relationship between republicanism and socialism is transitional. Achieving a republic opens the door to social transformation. Winning a republic is not a single event, but a highly contested battleground which does not guarantee the victory of the social revolution. This much connects Connolly to Lenin. In 1916 Connolly tried to establish a republic and failed. In February 1917 the republic was won by Russian workers and Lenin returned to Russia determined to make a republic capable of moving towards socialism.

Republican socialism is alien to the left in England. ‘Labourism’ or British reformism is connected with the Fabian idea of gradualism. A republican break with the old order is not necessary. The present political laws and institutions of the crown-in-parliament are not a barrier to socialism, but the means of achieving it. Keir Hardie was not a republican socialist. Like Jeremy Corbyn today, he was a republican and a socialist. In England these are two separate and disconnected policies. In Ireland Connolly fused them into a single strategy.

Connolly was accused by Fabians and ultra-left sectarians of abandoning socialism for national revolution. They labelled him a petty ‘nationalist’. Lenin rejected that. He understood the internationalist implications of the 1916 Easter uprising. In the middle of an imperialist war, in the year of the mass slaughter on the Somme, the Irish rebels were beginning a European revolution, which would spread to Russia and Germany.

The EU referendum promised sovereignty for the people. But it has served to highlight divisions in a broken Westminster system. England and Wales voted to leave the EU, and Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain. The right to self-determination means that the Scottish and Irish people have a right and a reason to leave the UK and negotiate to remain in the EU.

Prime minister May emphasised that “Brexit means Brexit”. Yet the unintended consequences of Cameron’s EU referendum gamble may be that Brexit comes to mean ‘Exit from Britain’. In 1916 Ireland was the first place to try this kind of ‘Brexit’. Today Northern Ireland and Scotland may join the queue to the exit door. It would be ironic if the triumph for UK Independence turned the UK into Little England and Wales. It is not what Cameron, Ukip or the Tory Party intended.

Steve Freeman
Rise and Left Unity

Firebrand

Nature of the beast is the result of two years hard work by a small group of committed independent filmmakers in Liverpool.

Director Daniel Draper, already a supporter of socialist politician Dennis Skinner, had the idea for the documentary after interviewing Dennis for a previous project. With Dennis on board, the small team was assembled, including his producing partner and editor, Christie Allanson, and friend and DOP, Allan Melia. Filming began around the country, funded out of their own pockets and donations from the public.

The film follows Dennis from early years to the modern day - his entry into politics, his high and low points, his rebellions against the party, whilst naturally highlighting the wit and passion that has earned him the nickname, ‘Beast of Bolsover’. Woven into this narrative are more personal moments: Dennis’s schoolboy cross-country days, his love of musicals and the outdoors, his relationship with his family. Interviews with his four remaining brothers and some of his Bolsover constituents pepper the film and help reveal the unseen side of the man.

Having finished principal photography, the team now need to raise the funds to pay for archive footage, images, and post-production sound. A Kickstarter campaign is being launched at the end of September and we are hoping to raise the £17,500 needed to complete the film. After two years of graft on a shoestring budget, and the crew working for free, the money is needed now to pay for necessary post-production costs and to complete and release the film.

The Dennis Skinner page on Facebook has over 62,000 likes - if each of those people gave just 30p, the total could be reached. Donors receive rewards ranging from a credit in the film, to premiere invites and exclusive artwork.

More information can be found at www.dennisskinnerfilm.co.uk, by searching for the film on Facebook, or by following @DSkinnerFilm on Twitter.

Chris Howard
email