Letters
No to censorship
There is a sharp exchange between the Communist Action Group and the Revolutionary Communist Group in the latest issue of the CAG’s journal, Communist Action No8. On a recent Cuban Solidarity Campaign street collection outside a supermarket a CAGer approached RCGers present and told them they should not be selling their newspaper, Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!
At a subsequent NE London CSC meeting he presented a scandalous motion to the effect that no papers or literature apart from CSC material be allowed at the campaign’s events. The discussion in the meeting seems to have ended inconclusively, although the RCG’s letter of complaint to the CAG reports that unfortunately there was “quite a body of support” for what they correctly dub an outrageous act of censorship.
CAG’s argument appears to be that literature from more than one organisation on any event confuses the “general public”. Thus, “Instead of presenting a common front in support of a concrete action ... passers-by would be confronted by a bewildering array of leftwing newspapers. Cuba would be submerged. What would be on display would be the divisions on the left” (CA No8).
Farcically, the CAG actually calls its bureaucratic-anarchist posture “Leninist”. It contrasts its approach to “sectarians”, not only like the RCG, but also our organisation. Answer-ing Red Action’s call for a new organisation of the working class (see Weekly Worker 99), it warns against involvement with the CPGB whose only concern is “self-promotion”. Our greatest sin in this respect? That’s it, dear reader - paper selling!
If we took the potential ‘bewilderment’ of the average Joe or Josephine shopper as our starting point, the only form of street work any of us would indulge in would be charity collections. Without the independent working class perspec-tive, this is precisely what the CAG’s solidarity work degenerates into.
As ‘Leninists’, the CAG would no doubt see its Cuba work as an expression of ‘proletarian internationalism’. Yet Lenin says that the core of genuine internationalism consists precisely in “working wholeheartedly for the development of the revolutionary movement and the revolutionary struggle in one’s own country ...” (Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 24, p.74).
How else do communists do this other than by making their criticisms and their distinctive approach to every question crystal clear? How else but by fighting for their view and seeking to win others to it?
The CAG claims that what marks it out as distinctive is that unlike the rest of the left who only ‘make a noise’, it “makes a difference”.
Communists understand that until the advanced elements of our class are organised into a genuine party, with real roots in the broad mass of working people, then quite frankly nothing we do will make a real “difference”.
Until we have such a Communist Party, we cannot offer meaningful solidarity to the beleaguered Cuban people. Our participation in campaigns or initiatives must start from and be subordinate to that basic understanding.
If that understanding is absent, we are guilty of reducing our work to liberal charity mongering, which relates to and feeds from the existing bourgeois prejudices of Mr and Mrs ‘Passer-by’.
Mark Fischer
East London
Below the belt
Bob Pitt (Weekly Worker 113) says the charges John Maclean made against various figures accusing them of being state agents were without foundation. He then says that either Maclean uttered politically motivated slanders or he was the “honest victim of delusions”.
Like John Bridge, Pitt apparently believes that calling Maclean a madman is the kindest thing to say. But in fact it is not as simple as that. If John Maclean made baseless charges while of sound mind, it would mean that he might have been a courageous and eloquent revolutionary socialist, but also one capable of hitting below the belt in political infighting.
A taste for ruthless invective is a noticeable feature of many politicians - not least on the far left. If John Maclean made false charges, I suspect it proves he was a politician governed by expediency, and not perhaps a very likeable individual. But this would not invalidate everything he said or did.
The trouble with saying that Maclean was mentally unbalanced is that it does tend to discredit everything he said or did, at least potentially. Maclean was one of the few people in Britain to welcome the October Revolution for example, but he was already saying that the authorities had been interfering with his prison food by putting drugs in it.
I believe this claim is one of the reasons Maclean has been described as delusional or paranoid. But if one of the most outspoken British supporters of the Bolsheviks happened to be mad, then what or who else was mad? The permutations are infinite.
Steve Kay
Reading