Letters

ISG

I would just like to point out the fact that the International Socialist Group mentioned in the article ‘No SLP witch-hunts’ (Weekly Worker April 4) is not the same group as the recently formed group of the same name which has recently left the Socialist Workers Party and of which I am a member.

Our group agrees completely with the CPGB in its argument that faction rights are necessary for a healthy SLP, as our experience as individuals inside the SWP (with its lack of internal democracy) has shown us.

Stanley Webb
ISG

Theory or chatter

Some interesting behaviour occurred when I went to a recent Workers Power public meeting in order to sell the Trotskyist Unity Group’s recent publication on the theoretical issues raised by the split in the LRCI. A member of the leadership of Workers Power told me:

that Workers Power had had its internal discussion on the degenerated revolution, that this position was defeated, and that the content of the discussion was Workers Power’s private property;
that Workers Power will not be making Quentin Rudland’s document on the degenerated revolution available outside the membership of the group since, according to my interlocutor, this is a “defeated position” and “we are not in the business of making internal documents available to other Trotskyist groups with whom we are at war, and so to release the document would be a “breach of democratic centralism”;
that the TUG had “sided with Jose Villa on every question”. In fact the TUG has not ‘taken sides’ but has called for a serious and open discussion of the issue.
that Workers Power has repeatedly told the Trotskyist Unity Group that the TUG is idealist in trying to raise philosophical matters and in thinking that “academics have the autonomy to stand aside from political struggle”.

I entered the room where the meeting (on the beef question) was to start. I was asked by Workers Power why I was there. I said that I had certainly not come to talk about beef, but was there to sell the TUG’s document and briefly exchange ideas about the theoretical questions around the post-capitalist states with anyone who was interested. The person who was to chair the meeting - a longstanding member of the Workers Power leadership - then left his seat and asked me to leave as I was “disrupting the meeting”, which was not due to start for another 10 minutes.

Hiding the content of discussions about the nature of the post-capitalist states has nothing to do with democratic centralism and the TUG will continue to oppose such unprincipled secrecy, primarily by continuing to produce our own theoretical material on the question and by open discussion. This episode is yet a further illustration that unity in action in this period is really about greatly intensifying serious philosophical and theoretical activity and discussion in order to promote collective theoretical development around the most problematic questions facing revolutionaries. The alternatives include chatter about beef or activism around the SLP.

Phil Walden
TUG

University exclusion

I write in relation to the approaching communist school (or, as currently termed, the Communist University).

As a regular reader of the Weekly Worker and a member of Communist Party Advocates, I wish to express my concern at the school’s current title. While I intend to participate in the school (as I believe it to be an essential forum for communists internationally), I cannot help but feel that the title ‘Communist University’ may act as a possible deterrent to other communists.

To many, the term ‘university’ implies education of a bourgeois nature and in practice universities are institutions prone to excluding the majority of the working class from accessing education. Comrades who may not be as developed as others may feel intimidated or somewhat excluded from participating in what is an extremely important school.

Given that it is the responsibility of all communists to educate workers in the struggle for the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system, I find the term inconsistent with our aims.

Anna Dubrovic
Australia

Impaling Jake

I don’t really understand the point of the weekly Julian Jake column, ‘Communist Press’.

Take ‘New Labour, old Labour’ (Weekly Worker April 4). In this, comrade Jake “belatedly” draws our attention to the February/ March issue of Fight Racism Fight Imperialism, paper of the Revolutionary Communist Group. Why, I have no idea.

Julian lauds an article on the Socialist Labour Party which illustrates FRFI’s record of “exposure” of Labour, a record that “cannot be faulted”, according to our astute observer of the left.

For the RCG - a position quoted uncritically by comrade Jake - “any political development which weakens the Labour Party is a very welcome and wonderful thing” (my emphasis - MF). It is a worry that someone associated with the Communist Party could take such infantile, petty bourgeois crap seriously.

“Anything” that weakens Labour could include the victory of fascism, of course. I am not for a moment suggesting that either the RCG or Julian would regard this as progressive. What I am illustrating is their unserious, non-Marxist, petty anarchistic approach to the organisation which dominates the workers’ movement in Britain.

A column that gave us a serious overview of the publications of the British left press might be a worthwhile addition to our party press. I suggest the comrades from the Weekly Worker team put it in the hands of someone who actually knows what they are talking about.

I suspect the reason why we are subjected to ‘Julian Jake’ every week is because it has become a de facto second Open Polemic factional column. I note that Bob Smith (Weekly Worker March I4) seems to take this as read when he rumbles darkly about the spiking of one of the ‘Jake’ articles. This simply is not on.

The ‘Communist Press’ column is not a factional one. It should be judged on the basis of each individual piece and included or spiked as its quality merits.

And to be frank, judged on the basis of sound, left-journalistic comment, the majority of comrade Jake’s material thus far would have been blessedly impaled. More power to the editor’s spiking elbow.

Mark Fischer
East London

Shit a brick

In his article ‘Not so simple’ (Weekly Worker March 14), Dave Douglass attempted to promote his ‘latest work’, Pit sense versus the state, in opposition to Jack Conrad’s previous feature, ‘Thatcherism versus Scargillism’. As a faceworker from a fourth generation mining family, and as a grass-roots communist agitator, I have deep reservations concerning the form and content of Douglass’s insistently self-congratulatory position.

This position emerges from Douglass’s petty-bourgeois romantic idealism. This form of belated ‘romanticism’ is merely the 19th century pastoral version, with its idealisation of the pastoral life of the agrarian poor, reworked as an idealisation of the industrial proletariat. This ideology surely emerges from Douglass’s failure to understand the nature of class as first and foremost an economic relationship. Rather, he hypostasises it as a sociological ‘thing’. This is clear from his ‘work’, Pit sense versus the state, wherein he seems to understand the state as some sort of uncomplicated Kafkaesque monolith or institution, rather than as a contradictory amalgam of capitalist interests enforcing themselves at various administered and cultural levels.

This blindness to the insidious quality of the state allows Douglass to set up a binary opposition between the state and ‘the people’, rather than attacking it in the reality of its political roots. That unconscious philosophical idealism is the basis for this notion is evidenced in the very title of Douglass’s work, in. which some sort of mystical workerist es-‘sense’ is pitched against the crude material reality of ‘the state’, from which, presumably, it has always been temporally and spatially detached.

Indeed, would that it were so simple. If it were, we would have no need for a revolutionary party of the working class to martial our struggle for the return of ‘civil society’ to its rightful producers. This woolly-headed romanticism frequently valorises the ‘proletariat’ as a category, rather than realising its class potential for attacking its own productive mechanisms with a view to terminating its own alienated reproduction. It is this oversimplified binary thinking, in opposition to a dialectical mode of political analysis, which probably informs Douglass’s well-documented anti-Marxism.

I’m all in favour of simple clarity, straight-talking, and direct communication, but to allow this to descend into the ‘shit a brick’ parlance of the pseudo-pleb is to debase the role of the activist by condescendingly underestimating the intelligence of his readers and listeners.

Why the artless conflation of discrete and complex terms into grandiose but meaningless one-liners, such as his description of Scargill as “a Stalinist-Marxist member of the Labour Party? Does this clarify anything? Does this advance our understanding of the questions raised by the 1984-85 dispute (in which I was acutely and militantly active)?

A brief outline of the difficulties and limitations of ‘trade union consciousness’ and its paradoxical hybrid offspring, ‘revolutionary trade unionism’, which was itself partly generated by the perceived absence of an alternative revolutionary structure, might have helped clarify matters. However, Douglass seems to have fallen into the trap of nominalism, thinking he exhaustively understands a political phenomenon simply by giving it a name. He then proceeds to give the most truncated piece of political analysis I for one have ever witnessed, as he sums up the ‘true’ meaning of syndicalism in one sentence.

Johnny Lermontov
Sheffield

Leningrad calling

To communist esperantists, to all communists and progressives of the world. Since the year 1991 we in Russia have very little knowledge of the activities of the socialist forces on our planet.

Ruling in our country is a power which puts us in such conditions that all of the newspaper space and the whole of our time and strength are spent on our own battles. Nevertheless we feel a great thirst for communication with far-off friends. We need your experience of opposition, experience of various methods of struggle.

In Petersburg we have decided to found a centre for the study of left forces, to tear down the savage information siege of a bloody power. Help us!

We understand that left forces today do not appear as a united organism, but we call for the cooperation of all who sympathise with us. Communists, socialists, leftwingers, give an echo to our call.

Pass it on to everyone. We await postal addresses, faxes and messages from communist parties, international sections of Youth Unions, regional structures.

Let us reconstruct the international friendship of the left!

Translated from Internaciisto March-April 1996, journal of the Communist Esperanto Collective (KEK).

Aleksandro
Saint Petersburg