Letters

Truthful explanation

I am pleased to hear that Gerry Cairns has read my pamphlet John Maclean and the CPGB (Weekly Worker 116), but unfortunately he does not seem to have read it very carefully. Gerry accuses me of relying on two prison doctors for evidence of Maclean’s mental state. In fact I explicitly condemn the doctors’ attempt to have Maclean certified insane and argue, along the same lines as Steve Kay (Weekly Worker 115), that their judgement was influenced by political hostility towards a declared revolutionary.

There can be no doubt, however, that during his imprisonment in 1918 Maclean did suffer a mental breakdown which continued to affect him after his release. Gerry Cairns does not mention the main source I use to establish this - the reports on revolutionary organisations compiled for the Cabinet by Basil Thomson of Special Branch. In earlier studies of Maclean these reports have been ignored, quoted only partially or even suppressed outright. They are important in that they repeat almost word for word the descriptions of Maclean’s paranoid behaviour given by Willie Gallacher and other CPers. Gallacher’s statement that Maclean “was seeing spies everywhere, suspecting everybody and anything” is shown to be entirely accurate.

That Maclean’s accusations went beyond mere “ruthless invective”, as Steve Kay puts it, is evident if you read the detailed report of his intervention at the British Socialist Party conference in April 1920, on the eve of the foundation of the CPGB. Maclean got up and announced that the BSP leaders were all police spies and claimed that the financial support which the party received from the Bolshevik government really came from the British state. It was this outburst which caused the break between Maclean and the BSP and led to his exclusion from the CPGB’s founding conference.

Gerry Cairns quotes Maclean’s reply to Erskine of Marr from January 1919 as evidence of Maclean’s stand on the Scottish national question. But this only reinforces my point that, while Maclean supported a form of home rule (his slogan was ‘a soviet for Scotland’), he did not at that stage favour a separate struggle for a Scottish workers’ republic. He applauded Lenin and Trotsky for having established a revolutionary government which recognised the right to self-determination of the oppressed nations in the former Tsarist empire. He sought to emulate the Bolsheviks by establishing in Britain “the Socialist Republic, in which alone we can have real home rule.”

Gerry cites Maclean’s leaflet All Hail the Scottish Communist Republic which does advocate a separate struggle for Scottish independence. But, as Gerry says, this was published in August 1920 - immediately after the foundation of the CPGB. The associated demand for a separate Scottish Communist Party was first raised by Maclean in his paper The Vanguard the following month. This would seem to confirm that Maclean’s new line was a consequence rather than a cause of his opposition to the CPGB. That the national question was not a significant factor in his rejection of the CP is underlined by his subsequent decision to join the equally anti-nationalist SLP.

Gerry says that both Maclean and Gallacher were guilty of ‘slinging muck’ in the course of their dispute. This argument appears particularly ironic when you consider that for years members of the John Maclean Society bitterly attacked Gallacher for engaging in vile slanders against Maclean. Now it turns out that they were both as bad as each other! Anything rather than confront the reality that Gallacher was telling the truth and Maclean was indeed suffering from ‘hallucinations’.

This does not mean that Maclean’s politics can be dismissed as the product of mental instability - they have to be judged on their own merits. My pamphlet analyses Maclean’s criticisms of the Hands Off Russia campaign and his opposition to the Labour Party/TUC councils of action established in August 1920. It concludes that his position in both cases was ultra-left and lacked any conception of the united front tactic. It further argues that, because he shut himself off from the lessons the CPGB was able to learn from the early Communist International, Maclean’s politics degenerated into sterile sectarianism during the final years of his life. I provide evidence of Maclean’s approach to the trade unions, the Labour Party and the organisation of the unemployed to substantiate this claim.

My objective in writing the pamphlet was certainly not to rubbish Maclean’s important contribution to the revolutionary movement, and I fully acknowledge his courageous internationalist stand during the World War I. I was trying to arrive at a truthful explanation of Maclean’s hostility to the CPGB. My conclusions obviously upset many of his supporters. But to have produced the sort of hagiography which would find favour with the John Maclean Society would have done no service to working class history or for that matter to Maclean himself.

Bob Pitt
Author of 'John Maclean and the CPGB'

Paper bans

In the Weekly Worker letters 115, I criticised the Communist Action Group for its attempt to ban the sale of political papers. Concretely, we had the example before us of a clash between the CAG and the Revolutionary Communist Group over an incident on a Cuba Solidarity Campaign event and its aftermath in the campaign’s meetings.

Comrades Smith and Sandy (both supporters of the CP faction ‘For a Permanent Party Polemic Committee’) are obviously very concerned to promote the process of communist rapprochement. That is laudable. However, in their eagerness to castigate my supposed heavy-handed criticism of the Communist Action Group (WW 116), they stray into wrong positions.

First, comrade Sandy. He completes the quote from Lenin that I originally used against CAG. While I emphasised Lenin’s definition of proletarian internationalism as working for the revolution “in one’s own country”, Sandy adds that Lenin also says that internationalism consists of supporting this revolutionary line “in every country without exception”.

As CAG regard Cuba as a “revolutionary socialist country”, CAG is quite “consistent”, he insists.

Nonsense, comrade. There are two sides to the equation - as you implicitly recognise. This is the precise point I actually make to CAG. Instead, it insists that to conduct what they call “solidarity work”, organisations must submerge themselves and lose their distinctive position. Thus, papers must be banned. How this contributes to fighting for the revolution in this country escapes me.

On the question of “making a difference”, comrade Sandy is also confused. CAG claim that while others ‘make a noise’, they ‘make a difference’. It is surely an uncontroversial point to suggest that this is empty posing. CAG - a small group anyway - cannot ‘make a difference’ to Cuba until we have organised the advanced part of our class into a genuine Communist Party.

Sandy equates CAG’s position with the CPGB’s insistence on the importance of programme - don’t we too also claim “to make a difference” with this, he asks?

Not yet to the bulk of the class - no, comrade. The “difference” we make at the moment may be to a small section of advanced workers. We understand that the first job of communists is to organise themselves. Thus our insistence on the fight for programmatic clarity and rapprochement between communists is not the same as CAG’s posture that their minuscule amounts of soft solidarity work ‘makes a difference’ to the beleaguered Cuban revolution.

Comrade Sandy’s factional partner, Bob Smith, accepts this in his column in the same issue. I entirely agree with Smith that tactics in the solidarity movements of the future, when we have rebuilt the Communist Party, are best left to the future.

We are talking about now, comrade. We need to examine the tactics that communists active in the movement pursue today and whether these tactics facilitate our aim of a reforged communist party.

You take me to task for hardness. I reply, you are too soft. The process of communist rapprochement is not an ideological or political truce between organisations. Communist rapprochement must go hand in hand with growing clarity - otherwise our unity has nothing in it useful for communism.

Mark Fischer
East London

Petty bourgeois

I have just read your draft programme with some interest. Most of it makes perfect sense, but some of it most definitely does not.

The bits that do not hang together all seem to be in places where you seem to want to curry favour with the postmodern type of revolutionary who get their ideas from The Guardian and The Independent.

3.10 Women, clause 7 ‘The decriminalisation of prostitution’:

Only last week The Independent ran an article on how the brave, progressive bobbies of Bradford wanted the ‘game’ decriminalised and to have licensed brothels set up to ‘protect’ the girls.

I am rather more cynical. I think that the police in Bradford are rather more concerned about the ‘respectable’ men that under present legislation they have to arrest from time to time for kerb-crawling.

Prostitution is a degrading, inhuman way to earn a living. The answer for communists is not to decriminalise prostitution, but to abolish it. The way to do that is contained, with a bit of confusion, within the draft programme itself.

3.3 The Unemployed, clause 1; and 3.1 Working conditions and wage workers, clause 5: Here you argue for unemployment pay at the rate of the minimum wage (enough to cover the maintenance of one adult and one child). However a minimum wage or unemployment pay that covers only one adult and one child is very little use to a single parent of four. You need to rethink the whole question of the maintenance of children.

If women were not destitute, they would not prostitute themselves. The answer to prostitution is not to decriminalise it, but to give women through work or unemployment pay sufficient money so that the need to prostitute themselves disappears.

Debbie Riatt
West London

Freedom’s banner

Frank Vincent ends his article on Quebecois separation with the view that communists in Canada must fight for the unity of all workers, while at the same time defending the democratic rights of all peoples, including the right to separate.

I feel that the paradox between working for unity and separation simultaneously needs enlarging upon. Communists always fight to maximise the unity of the working class. But people bring with them their historical baggage. More importantly a people’s culture carries with it that people’s human experience and personality. In affirming their own humanity they can empathise with the humanity of others and fight for universal liberation. The fight for liberty should be the home territory of communists.

Frank could have spent more time analysing the tactics of the left to see what lessons are to be learned. We should not be smug over the bourgeoisie being in crisis when it is progressive human aspirations have that been routed. Capitalism entrenches itself through divide and rule: it is the victor here. All round the world politicians are taking the concept of freedom and using it to destroy liberty. As communists we need to be able to understand and combat this. We need to win back freedom’s banner.

Phil Kent
Rochester