Letters

All kudos

Recently a number of articles and letters in Weekly Worker have implored us to refound Labour “as a united front of a special kind”. I assume the phrase has been elaborated in the Online Communist Forum or Online Communist University discussions as I’ve not noticed an explanation in the paper. Given my phobic disposition toward online meetings then, the meaning of the phrase remained a mystery to me until I found Labour Party Marxists’ James Marshall had recently published an eye-opening article on the LPM blog (‘Labour as a united front of a special kind’ September 20 2021).

James traces the concept back to the earliest moments in Labour’s foundation in 1899, and goes on to outline how the party has nearly always preoccupied itself with witch-hunting leftists, ever since becoming established as a viable parliamentary force. I’ve not managed to hermeneutically trace the phrase to any source in particular, and the comrade doesn’t offer this either. That’s just as well, as we should choose political slogans that are directly meaningful rather than euphemistic. The provenance of set phrases and terminology is commonly invoked among the so-called confessional sects to justify articles of faith - Trotsky said X, so you’d better blindly accept the authority of the central committee’s proposition or you’re no real revolutionary. I share CPGB’s view that points of debate are to be discussed and developed, not taken as scripture.

Why James’s article hasn’t been published in WW for a wider readership remains to be seen. For my money it’s the most instructive theoretical work thus far produced out of the abundant debate over Labour and the role of communists within and without it. All kudos to him! It does frustrate, though, that comrades seemed to unwittingly lapse into mantra-chanting over recent weeks without offering what exactly ‘Labour as a united front’ means.

Alastair Thomas
Email

Liquidation sale

The allegation against Tony Greenstein of ‘liquidation’ of Labour Against the Witchhunt into the Labour In Exile Network (the unified group is now known as the Socialist Labour Network) is a fetish. LAW is not a revolutionary party. It is meaningful to talk of liquidating a programme or a revolutionary party, but ‘liquidating’ a single-issue campaign is a nonsense. LAW was conceived originally as a united front of different forces to oppose the witch-hunt within the Labour Party under Corbyn.

Jack Conrad is making a fetish of LAW simply because it is a political status symbol. In fact they did not run LAW as a genuine united front even within the Labour Party. They did not seek to unite all victims of the witch-hunt, they expelled some who did not fit in with their third-campist politics.

One manifestation of this was the exclusion of Socialist Fight, and also Peter Gregson, for supposed ‘anti-Semitism’. Despite admitting that neither of these individuals/trends actually hated Jews, so their exclusion could only be justified with the self-contradictory characterization of these as ‘politically but not personally anti-Semitic’. A foolish and self-contradictory formulation that denies human agency and in reality is an excuse for political cowardice. It really signified that LAW became not a united front, but a ‘front’ for the CPGB and its third camp politics in the manner that Stand Up To Racism is a front for the SWP’s politics.

But now it has come apart because of its own contradictions, as the bulk of its hoped for constituency has been radicalized by experience far to the left of these third camp politics, and the Labour Party leadership is destroying the left in the party in a manner going way beyond Blair, and destroying the party itself as an alternative for workers.

This has led to a change in Tony, and a breakdown in his relations with the CPGB. So I was excluded from LAW by the CPGB and Tony in 2018, but I was invited to join in LAW discussions online a few months ago by Tony. That is a change from 2018 and in Tony, which is to be welcomed.

Derek James’ recent article in Weekly Worker (‘weapon forged in lies’, September 9 2021) bemoaned this.

“Thus, whilst correctly identifying the politically motivated exaggeration of the nature and extent of anti-Semitism, some comrades enter into a sterile game of competitive oppression, in which racism directed towards black people or Muslims is contrasted unfavourably with the rather different contemporary experience of the Jewish population. Such denialism is ultimately rooted in the ‘beggar my neighbour’ politics of identity: it is not only politically wrong on all counts, but is also totally counterproductive, as it only gives further ammunition to the witch-hunters in the Labour bureaucracy and the media. It also adds further grist to the mill of those who provide the ‘intellectual’ cover for the big lie identifying the left with anti-Semitism, such as the ex-leftist turned conservative commentator, Brendan O’Neill, or the social-imperialists of the misnamed “Alliance for Workers’ Liberty.”

The truth is that contrary to Jack Conrad’s profession of opposition to ‘confessional sects’, he is building a confessional sect around Draperism and Kautskyism.

This rightist element is manifested in the denunciation of David Miller in Weekly Worker, reluctant defence of him and the allegation that he is a propagator of conspiracy theories.

Another manifestation of this is the idea of the Labour Party as a united front of a special kind. This is the old Chartist group’s position, the Labour Party as a soviet, in effect. A real liquidationist position. A soviet is a united front of a special kind.

LAW-LIEN is similar in some ways to the Socialist Alliance but on a higher level, not dominated by sects. More open to an intelligent revolutionary group that seeks to persuade and educate, not dominate. The CPGB was involved in the Socialist Alliance and other similar things like Left Unity, only not involved in Respect for third-campist and Islamophobic reasons, but actually both Respect and Left Unity have or had similarities with this.

This is where left activists are at today, there is nothing unusual about this. You have to work alongside them to win influence for your programme. The CPGB fear them because subliminally they fear that this left-Corbynite milieu, because of their experience of Zionist witch-hunts and its linked Islamophobia, will be spontaneously to the left of the CPGB’s third campism.

There is no coherent Marxist justification for the CPGB’s abstention from movements like LAW-LIEN other than this cowardly fear of the left-Corbynite layer. Not entirely different to the hostility that is seen towards it from Andrew Coates and the AWL, but given a more superficially leftist phrasemongering.

This is ironically justified by a position of Labour Party fetishism that is similar to things the CPGB denounced in the early 2000s in the Socialist Alliance. The kind of thing that Socialist Appeal and Bob Pitt did in those days, supporting Blairities against the left. Will the CPGB support Starmer against, say, Chris Williamson today if Labour is challenged? That seems like the logic of the argument.

Ian Donovan
Consistent Democrats/Liaison Committee for the Fourth International

Counting

Weekly Worker published a shortened version of my letter on December 2 2021. Bits that were cut amounted to a 49% diminution, from 992 words to 489. Space considerations was the reason given. Significantly the cuts defended the ‘dual role’ of the bureaucracy, as Trotsky put it, defending the nationalised property relations at home as the source of their privileges whilst pursuing appeasement and counterrevolution abroad. Cut, too, was the role of Stalinism and the NKVD in the Spanish revolution where Orlov, with the able assistance of Palmiro Togliatti and others, organised the assassination of revolutionary anarchists, POUM members and their leader Andreu Nin and Trotskyists after the counterrevolution that was the Días de Mayo in May 1937. Without that balance the letter could then be slated as no better than that of bureaucratic collectivists, state capitalists or outright reactionaries like Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Robert Conquest; the grisly truths they exposed only served imperialism’s agenda.

On January 6 the Weekly Worker afforded Andrew Northall 1,323 words again to praise Stalin as a “socialist” and defend the great purges: “despite their negative aspects, as having helped promote and develop a new cultured Soviet intelligentsia (like himself, no doubt!) by ‘clearing away a lot of the old crap’, ‘people of the past’, and seeing a new Soviet people forged in the heat of the class struggle.”

Almost all Lenin’s remaining 1917 Central Committee members were shot to appease imperialism, and 800,000 others executed secretly without a trial: a bullet in the back of the head. From August 1937 to November 1938, 50,000 executions a month, 1,700 a day for nearly 500 days. Photographs online show the reburial of 559 Soviet citizens at Katyn Memorial near Smolensk, on October 30 2019, one of the many mass graves of the Stalin era now excavated. What a nightmare world Andrew and his Stalinist mates have in store for us if he manages to recreate that epoch!

Gerry Downing
Socialist Fight

Debate

I listened to last Sunday’s Online Communist Forum debate between Jack Conrad and Tony Greenstein with a great deal of interest. The ins and outs of what has been going on in Labour Against the Witchhunt (LAW) and the decision to merge with the Labour in Exile Network escaped me a little, but the wider issues in the discussion between the two comrades were important and I hope others will comment on them in future debates and articles.

Beyond the debating points, it seemed to me that the central question was clear: what is the correct strategy to win the working class to the socialist transformation of society? I pose the question in this way because it was very apparent from comrade Greenstein’s comments that he would not frame the issue in terms of class at all. His arguments about ‘the decline of the working class’ in the developed capitalist economies of Europe and North America seemed to me to echo the oh-so-familiar refrain of right-wing Labour politicians, media commentators and bourgeois sociologists from at least the early twentieth century.

In searching for some other social and political force to transform society, Tony Greenstein is following in the historical and rather discredited footsteps of some of the most reactionary pro-capitalist political leaders that the workers’ movement has thrown up in that period. If the basis of the Marxist programme and strategy is the self-emancipation of the working class, then, on the showing of this debate, comrade Greenstein has abandoned this perspective and seems to be returning to some form of utopian socialism of the type that Marx and Engels intellectually defeated in the 1840s and 1850s and continued to counter subsequently in the First International and the emerging workers’ parties in Germany and France in the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s.

Tony seems to be identifying the proletariat solely with the particular forms that developed during the growth of industrial capitalism in the 19th and 20th centuries. He finds no place for the contemporary working class of North America and Europe, employed in services and other types of production, who are still ruthlessly exploited by capitalism. Moreover, he plays down the emergence of the working class in the developing economies of Africa, Asia and Latin America, and the ways that the increasingly globalised and integrated world economy draws ever more sections of the population throughout the world into capitalist social and economic relations, and so strengthens the working class as an international class.

As history has shown, exploitation and the relations of production within capitalism will tend towards creating a degree of collective consciousness and class struggle in which the working class initially resists and attempts to change the terms of this exploitation. If capitalism creates the conditions for class struggle in this way, then the job of conscious socialists is to take the struggle forward, beyond mere conflict over the price of labour and trade union rights, by agitation and propaganda that raises the fundamental issue of the transformation of society. This type of classical Marxism places the raising of socialist and revolutionary consciousness centre stage and argues that the proletariat remains the key, truly universal revolutionary class whose self-emancipation as a class will also begin the process of general human liberation.

The confused, utopian politics advanced by Tony Greenstein may suit reformists and faint-hearts who have lost self-confidence, but those of us who believe in the revolutionary project and the historical role of the proletariat choose the Marxist programme and strategy.

Aiden McGowan
Kent