Letters

Contentious

My first feeling on reading Muriel Green’s report of the CPGB’s March 12 online aggregate was one of relief that I hadn’t been in such a tedious meeting (‘Drawing clear lines on Ukraine’, March 17). But then I remembered that I had been in attendance at the aforementioned gathering and, while the first section on Ukraine was uncontentious, the second part was a mostly interesting debate on the organisation’s culture (focused around a number of specific resolutions) that many comrades spoke in. The relationship of the actual meeting to its subsequent report was akin to inserting a pretty necklace into the top of a drainpipe and seeing a dead rat plop out the end.

When elements of the CPGB’s internal politics and aggregates became contentious in early 2020, the subsequent way in which some of these events were framed in the paper were, to my mind, ridiculous. One particularly tense affair in March 2020 was placed under a standfirst of: “We remain united despite a resignation.” Having attended the meeting myself, I thought that act of framing was - how can I put this? - a somewhat oblique take. Recently, after the leadership’s version of events was challenged, aggregate reports have retreated into a more studied empiricism. This hasn’t changed the poor estimation of such reports among some CPGB members and supporters and, for my part, it’s getting to the point where reading the Weekly Worker to find out what’s really going on in the CPGB is a fool’s errand.

While György Lukács didn’t approve of the method of reportage when applied to fictional literature, he was more enthusiastic about its journalistic use. Writing in 1932, in an article entitled ‘Reportage or portrayal?’, he said: “Reportage is an absolutely legitimate and indispensable form of journalism. At its best, it makes the right connection between the general and the particular, the necessary and the contingent, that is appropriate to its particular purpose. Genuine reportage is in no way content simply to depict the facts; its descriptions always present a connection, disclose causes and propose consequences.” When we turn to the most recent aggregate report, these aspirational qualities for reportage are almost entirely lacking. In fact, we find almost the opposite qualities, what Lukács called a “fetishistic dismemberment of reality”.

The second part of the March 17 report starts: “The second session began with Ollie Hughes introducing four amendments to the previously agreed perspectives document.” So we have the barest bureaucratic context for these amendments: no explanation, positive or negative, of the state of the organisation, or of what motivations, causes and connections are at play. We then read some fragments of what comrade Hughes told the meeting, including: “An organisation that doesn’t care about its past doesn’t deserve a future.” A bold and angular statement that one might expect to be dissected or discussed in some way. But not here.

Mike Macnair, as the allotted spokesperson for the CPGB’s Provisional Central Committee, is given slightly more explanatory scope with his interesting observation about the “milieu of defeat” and his correct conclusion that resolutions about recruitment, etc don’t solve anything in and of themselves. The rest of the article degenerates into ‘he said/she said’ that resolves itself into a hysterical babble of individual opinions. Looked at in the cold light of dialectical day, how much does the following passage advance our understanding of the political ideas at work in this discussion or even what these comrades are meant to have said? “Next up was Sarah Stewart, who spoke about ‘clicktivists’; Jim Nelson about how he was recruited; Gaby Rubin about the centrality of programme; Vernon Price about how it is important for the organisation to adapt to changing conditions. He also agreed that the Weekly Worker website was in need of improvement.” In this instance, more is clearly less.

The alternative to this empiricist jumble sale would have been to construct the piece around a clear narrative spine of the key issues at stake and to pull a reiteration of the more important interventions into that narrative. Even if, as usually happens, the writer ends up as a partisan of one side of the debate, an attempt to explain motivations, causes and connections generally ends with a deeper understanding and, by foregrounding the issues, makes the party’s internal debates transparent and attractive to outsiders. (An excellent example of this method at work can be seen in Mark Fischer’s July 16 2020 report of a CPGB members’ meeting, headlined ‘Judge tactics in the concrete’, which passes the Lukács reportage test with flying colours.) Muriel Green’s piece has precisely the opposite effect: making the central issues opaque and the CPGB sound like a bunch of incontinent dullards.

The March 17 report is slightly stronger on consequences, given that I presume the PCC resolution on ‘Our web work’ agreed the day after the aggregate is connected to the decisions of the previous day. Not that the article can narrate that, of course; rather the reader infers that from an act of juxtaposition in the layout. And by allowing the March 12 meeting to be reported in a singularly flat and conservative manner means that its importance is very subtly downgraded, given that little attempt is made to explain its emergence or outcome.

I would issue a challenge to the PCC and the Weekly Worker: stop drowning aggregate reports in empiricism and give them to your better writers. Be bold about it and be prepared to encounter, on occasion, slightly uncomfortable things. When debates have been very contentious, why not run two reports counterposing shades of opinion in the CPGB?

The consequence if you carry on in the present mode is that people will simply go elsewhere to read about the internal life of the party. If you need an example of how that plays out, you might care to remember the ‘compulsory openness’ your own organisation was able to inflict on some of its rivals on the revolutionary left in the 1990s.

Lawrence Parker
London

Disappointing

It is disappointing that the report of the discussion on perspectives at the March 12 aggregate was so brief and devoid of detail about the contributions made. There were a number of important issues raised, including the negative impact that our involvement in unity projects and the Labour Party has had on our attitude to recruitment. Another argument was over the long-term perspectives for the organisation, with a number of comrades raising the need to develop younger comrades for positions of leadership.

Organisational perspectives arise, of course, from politics and, while there is no major programmatic difference within the organisation, there are nonetheless differences, which need proper ventilation for progress to be made. Otherwise they remain at the level of frustration, personal tensions and defensiveness on the part of comrades being criticised.

We have always stressed that socialist and communist groups need to have their differences out in front of the class; that the movement has the right to know what the issues are and how the organisation operates. We need to consider this question ourselves now when reporting on members meetings, and ensure that the reports properly reflect our debates.

Anne McShane
email

Who cares?

I’d like to comment on the quote in the aggregate article in last week’s paper: “the pretence of the US and its Nato allies to care so much about the Ukrainian people, when they do not even care about their own people”.

The truth of this is borne out every day, even in the mainstream media. In the UK, for instance, we have 800 P&O workers flung out of their jobs with no notice. The odd minister has commented on this, expressing disquiet, but decades of government policies have made this possible and I’m sure that ministers only believe it should have been done more politely.

We also have the news that almost 800 medical graduates will not be able to proceed to further training in the NHS; at the same time the second biggest private hospital in the UK is due to open soon in London. We continue to have people living on the streets, and the number of people using food banks seems to be rising exponentially - and we are in the early stages of the worldwide fuel crisis and the Russia/Ukraine wheat crisis. A sort of throwaway line is the choice families have of ‘heating or eating’.

And that’s just the UK; what about the USA? Even more on the streets, or in prison - the US does, after all, have the highest incarceration rate in the world. And the US government doesn’t even care about their ‘veterans’. A story in Jacobin (‘The VA needs more funding, not more privatisation’ March 17) outlines how Biden is going back, step by step, on promises he made about the Veteran Affairs department in his election campaign.

They write of the capital funds needed for VA infrastructure and the proposed destruction of its integrated hospitals and clinics along with its relatively well-structured mental-health facilities. To quote, “As Jacobin has previously reported, incremental privatisation of the VA began under president Barack Obama, continued under his Republican successor, and is now occurring on Biden’s watch.”

The medical industry and its partners in pharmaceuticals already rake it in hand over fist from those who can, just or nearly, afford healthcare; but the medical oligarchs want more - of course they do. So, whoever the president is, they’ll get it.

In the US - as in the UK and pretty much everywhere else - capitalist accumulation takes priority over the needs of ‘their own people’. In housing, education, health, working conditions - in every sphere of life - the needs of nearly everybody are of trivial concern to the ruling class. As I say, we can read of the crimes committed against working class people every day even in the mainstream media: in fact The Guardian and the BBC, for instance, seem to think that by reporting these things they have done their bit.

But, that’s ‘their own people’ - what about the Ukrainians? One useful piece of help would be to cancel Ukraine’s debts. These - to the International Monetary Fund and various banks - continue to mount and even a recent ‘aid package’ is not just a giveaway. The UK government has its own bit of ‘care’ - refugees are not welcome here. Or, rather, they are (of course they are!), but we do have to be careful.

But money is so very important! Just as the UK government manages to pay back some stolen money to Iran, to get some much needed applause from the public, Joe Biden has stolen even more ($7 billion) from Afghanistan. OK, Afghan puppets can steal what they like, with their suitcases bulging with money, as they board their helicopter, but the US needs money more than starving Afghanis do.

So I would suggest that “the pretence of the US and its Nato allies to care so much about the Ukrainian people, when they do not even care about their own people”, is just a reminder that the main enemy is at home! And, much as we deplore the invasion of Ukraine, we need to build the mass party of the working class to end capitalist rule and hence end war.

Jim Nelson
email

P&O and the EU

P&O is in fact state-owned, but not just by this state. DP World is owned by the emirate of Dubai - that is, of course, one of the United Arab Emirates, where trade unions are illegal.

But, whatever has made possible the outrage at P&O, it is not Brexit. In 1972, could balaclava-clad private security guards have wielded handcuffs and teargas, as they evicted workers from their workplaces (which for the duration of their work were also their homes), with absolutely no notice whatever? All of the anti-union legislation was enacted while Britain was a member of what was really always the European Union, and the biggest ever attack on British workers’ rights, the Trade Union Act 2016, was brought to us by the prime minister who not only campaigned for ‘remain’, but who resigned when ‘leave’ won.

David Lindsay
Durham