Letters

Alternative view

In relation to Danny Hammill’s evaluation of the recent Open Polemic conference, I wish to make the following points.

Firstly, his view that the main divide concerning the SLP is that between active intervention and passivity represents philosophical idealism - the projection of a subjective image of what the SLP ‘should be’ onto reality, rather than evaluating its objective content as a Labour Party mark II based around a bureaucratic constitution and a corporatist right reformist programme.

Secondly, Danny fails to carry out an analysis of the OP editorial board’s theoretical programme, and its rigid adherence to uneven development as the basis of a ‘historically non-specific’ programme. For this standpoint is very historically specific; it is located in the 1928 Comintern programme (mainly written by Bukharin), which, as Trotsky pointed out, provided the atomistic justification for the reduction of the strategic perspective of world revolution to a series of separate national revolutions.

Whether they like it or not, the OPEB are objectively preparing the way for a new Stalinist type of regroupment around the supposed absolute nature of the law of uneven development. Indeed this is why a potential political convergence is developing between Partisan and the OPEB, in their religious quoting of Lenin from a 1915 article which conveniently ignores the Bolshevik’s development of a strategic perspective of international proletarian revolution. As Hillel Ticktin once said, if Lenin was for socialism in one country, we would have been opposed to him in proletarian internationalist terms. Furthermore, both Partisan and the OPEB make no attempt to show the explanatory character of uneven development for understanding contemporary capitalism.

The main point being made here is not that there should be a rigid party view of the past, but that the past has to be connected to understanding the present if it is not to become part of a reactionary and opportunist mythology. In this context the OP conferences have become a focus for intransigent theoretical conflict between Stalinism and Trotskyism. Indeed the TUG would favour the entry of Partisan into the CPGB in order to extend these polemics, and as part of the necessary theoretical process of discerning whether the CPGB is capable of moving towards revolutionary Leninism and resolutely against Stalinism.

Phil Sharpe
Trotskyist Unity Group

Severing links

North Herts supporters branch of the CPGB have decided, in light of the PCC’s statement on the IRA Canary Wharf bomb, to sever all links with the CPGB (PCC).

The IRA bomb was, in our opinion, a cowardly attack on a soft civilian target. A new terror campaign on the British mainland or in the Six Counties will serve no progressive purpose whatsoever. How does this terrorism - blowing up buildings and civilians from Harrods to Warrington to Docklands - further the goal of a united Ireland?

Since when does unconditional support of an avowedly nationalist military force square with communist principles? It does not. How can the PCC give unconditional support to Sinn Fein “in their fight against British imperialism” on the one hand and yet accuse the same organisation of seeking “an imperialist-brokered peace” on the other? It doesn’t make sense.

During the ceasefire a qualitative change has begun in the north of Ireland. The old sectarian divide which maintained the imperialist status quo has started to dissolve. It is this development which will lead eventually to the resolution of the political impasse there, not the resumption of an IRA bombing campaign.

The Irish working class have witnessed during the ceasefire, time and again, deliberate British imperialist/unionist intransigence in starting all-party talks. Major and Paisley now stand condemned by both the Irish and British working class over their wrecking operations.

By their unconditional support of the IRA the PCC have sided with the forces of reaction against the forces for Irish and British working class unity.

Clive Carr
North Herts CPGB

Self-appointed task

From their letters in Weekly Worker 130, concerning the question of advanced workers and theory, it is now quite clear to me that neither Mick O’Farrell nor Ted Rowlands are able to identify anyone who puts forward the concept that “there can exist outside of the working class a theoretical centre that knows the interests of the class better than the class itself”.

Comrade O’Farrell tries to cover his inability to do so by asserting that I insisted that advanced workers must rely upon non-proletarian elements. That is simply not true and anyone who reads my letters will know that it was not even implied. However, both of these comrades still take the view that revolutionary theory comes from “the experience gained by activists in the course of their everyday struggles”.

No Marxist-Leninist would deny that the experience of activists contributes to and informs revolutionary theory. But if revolutionary theory simply came from that source there would be no need for the “theoretical centre” of Marx and Engels, those “non-proletarian intellectuals” from outside of the working class, to produce in the interests of all humanity the fundamental revolutionary theory for the proletariat. That, of course, is our historical theoretical inheritance - our starting point, if you like, in the elaboration of revolutionary theory by Marxist-Leninists today, whether they be advanced workers or non-proletarian intellectuals.

Mick O’Farrell and Ted Rowlands seem to have a problem with this. I imagine also that, if they had been around at the time, they would have been most upset with Marx and Engels - who, with no experience of working class struggle, nevertheless saw it as their “self-appointed task to supply the class with leadership in that struggle”.

John Sandy
For a Permanent Party Polemic Committee

LRCI capitulation

Keith Harvey did not reply to any of my political criticisms of the League for a Revolutionary Communist International (Weekly Worker 122). Neither did anyone from Workers Power see fit to attend the meeting hosted by the Communist Party on the split in the League - despite the fact that they had confirmed their attendance.

Harvey tries to belittle our criticism because we supposedly attacked the LRCI for supporting Nato. We have never said this. We have always stated that the LRCI renounced Trotsky and the legacy of Dave Hughes when they called for the defeat of a people being bombed by Nato and for imperialism to arm its allies in Bosnia.

When the war started in Bosnia, the LRCI correctly stated: “If Croatia or the Bosnian government join an imperialist backed onslaught against Serbia, then we would abandon the position of ‘defeat on all sides’ in favour of the military victory of Serbia against these countries” (Workers Power April 1992).

Later in the year we read:

“Workers should understand that if the forces of Izetbegovic had the upper hand they too would be driving other minorities from their homes. We do not share or support the territorial ambitions of many of the Bosnian leaders to force the Serbian and Croatian minorities into a unified capitalist state of B-H, threatening them with national oppression through forcible integration. On the contrary, we firmly oppose any such policy” (Workers Power November 1992).

In fact, when the imperialists intervened in force to submit Bosnian Serbs to a Muslim-Croat regime, instead of advocating the defence of Serbia, Workers Power/LRCI called for the victory of Nato’s allies. They supported the territorial ambitions of Bosnian leaders to create a unified capitalist state of Bosnia-Herzegovina, threatening the Serbs with national oppression.

When Nato made the heaviest attack in its history, WP/LRCI said: “In the war between Nato and the Republika Srpska, revolutionaries continue to a take a revolutionary defeatist position on both sides.”

In a confrontation between the unified imperialist nuclear powers - states that control the world’s economy - and a tiny and isolated statelet of one million, such dual defeatism can only help the planet’s bosses. Even worse, the LRCI expressed some sympathies with the Nato actions and talked of the progressive nature of some of its actions. “It is understandable,” they stated, “that the beleaguered population of Sarajevo greeted the Nato onslaught by dancing in the streets ... Its self-proclaimed military objective is to break the three-year long siege of Sarajevo by the Bosnian Serb Army.” (Workers Power September 1995). WP even lamented the fact that the imperialists’ attacks had not been stronger.

It is true that WP/LRCI said they were for the withdrawal of UN forces. But, like Thatcher, they advocated that the UN should leave arms and personnel to help imperialist allies in Sarajevo. WP demanded that imperialism and middle east reactionary dictatorships and monarchies send “international volunteers ... missiles, aircraft, tanks and military trainers” to help its Muslim-Croat allies.

“We have no qualms about B-H accepting arms from wherever they can get them. Unfortunately, most firms that make and supply them are multinational capitalist firms and that will have to be the first port of call. Many semi-colonial regimes in the middle east are willing to provide the B-H government with money” (A reply to the split statement of José Villa and Poder Obrero).

WP supported one pro-imperialist ethnic cleanser against another. They even demanded that “the military alliance with Bosnian Croat forces and the Croatian army must be subordinated to the aim of a multi-ethnic Bosnia” (ibid). This was a curiously ironic statement given the fact the Croat army had expelled nearly all Serbs from Croatia and western Bosnia.

All LRCI supporters and members in the ‘third world’ could no longer work with the British academics at the head of the organisation after these capitulations to the pressure of imperialist opinion and media. Since the Latin American and New Zealand comrades broke, we have received the support of other members and supporters of the LRCI in Europe.

We have started to rebuild a nucleus of Peruvian cadres committed to the reconstruction of a group impossible to cohere under the LRCI pro-imperialist policies. The Bolivian and New Zealand groups have maintained their monthly publications and we have also produced ten document packages in Spanish and English.

The LRCI’s political adaptation to imperialism is like a colonialist organisation. If you disagree with it you suffer serious international repression.

WP under Harvey’s rightwing and bureaucratic leadership is a completely different organisation to the one led by Dave Hughes.

José Villa
London