Letters

Optimism

Living as I have done through the period of the rise and fall of the USSR and the defeat of the communist parties’ of Europe attempts at revolution, one could be forgiven for developing a degree of despondency. To see one’s early hopes and results of subsequent struggles vanish almost overnight can have a traumatic effect on anyone. I remain however completely optimistic that the working class will eventually succeed in the task of forming a classless society.

My attendance at the CPGB’s meeting to celebrate the Great October Revolution helped to strengthen that optimism. To see former antagonistic groups coming together and endeavouring to find a way forward was something I had never expected to see again. I believe we must examine the past most thoroughly, but in doing so we should also show a little humility when assessing and apportioning blame for mistakes and defeats, by asking what our own reactions would have been living through and having to face up to the problems of those times.

The discussions going on in the Weekly Worker are long overdue in the movement and will need to be continued as long as classes exist. Those groups claiming to be revolutionary who are under the impression that theirs is the only way forward are living in cloud cuckoo land. Theory may be a guide to action, but once workers are embroiled in struggle that struggle creates an impetus of its own. Without the guidance of a unified communist party, it could end up in disaster.

Bob Smith of For a Permanent Party Polemic Committee seems to have fallen into a muddy puddle and got himself into a bit of a mess, since he apparently thinks he has joined a party that is not; or if it is, he wonders whether it is an old one or a new one. Surely the position is that a party going through the process of being reforged cannot be a finished article. It can be neither old, nor is it completely new.

Ted Rowlands
Bishop Auckland

Consensus

Communist Party seminars are characterised by an honest attempt to get to the truth.

Last week’s London discussion on nationalism and the democratic counterrevolution quickly focused on the nature of the Soviet Union itself.

Where else could you find comrades from such different political backgrounds genuinely striving to get to the heart of the matter? ‘Official communists’, Leninists, Trotskyists and supporters of the state capitalist theory all expressed their view in a spirit of tolerance.

But what was most striking for me was not the sharp differences you would expect from such a gathering, but the degree of consensus that we are able to achieve.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the bitter divisions of the past are gradually being transformed into shades of opinion.

Genuine communists are united in their hatred of capitalism and their desire for a communist party to lead the revolutionary movement to smash it. So what is keeping us in separate organisations?

Peter Manson
South London