Letters

Bankruptcy

Your latest aggregate report makes clear the bankruptcy of the CPGB on the Ukraine war (‘Experience and expectations’, June 23).

Following the constantly regurgitated articles from Jack Conrad, which lambast all and sundry - pro-Russia, pro-Nato social chauvinists and pacifists alike - you end up with no clear position at all except some tokenistic nostrums about the “main enemy being at home”, but without any realistic perspective about what to do about it.

Calling for some non-existent mass Communist Party to be built without any solid perspective of overthrowing capitalism, or abstractly ‘demanding’ of the bourgeois dictatorship that it allow workers’ militias, while dismantling its own state forces, does not begin to tackle the very real concrete questions posed right now (have any of you even read The state and revolution?). It is actually a capitulation to the great tide of western demonisation and lies poured out against Russia and evades the central question - the need for the defeat of imperialism and its drive to World War III.

Firstly Britain is a leading stooge for the US and a major influence in Nato, pushing this disgusting Goebbels lie, warmongering against the Russian population in Ukraine (for six years already) and against the Moscow support it has finally received. There is no separation between “the ruling class at home” and Nato - they are intimately entwined and defeat for Nato-Ukraine is a defeat for our own ruling class and its US masters. Secondly, whatever the status of Russia, it pales into insignificance against the one great imperialist power which dominates the planet.

The world has moved on since 1914 and has developed - most of all in the relentless concentration of monopoly power into American hands. For decades this was ‘balanced’ by the cold war resistance of the Soviet Union, but even that seeming parity disappeared. An unprecedented concentration of monopoly power stands alone and is the generator of all the hatred, warmongering and turmoil on the planet. Solely its defeat is the crucial question, even if mediated by a junior imperialist power like Russia.

Of course, splits may occur between the US and its ‘allies’ assemblage and something more like 1914 may surface soon as the intractable crisis deepens further - most likely Europe versus the Anglo-Saxons - but for the moment there is only one overriding influence poisoning all life on the planet: US monopoly capitalism. You evade this question by some easy fish-in-barrel shooting of the 57 varieties of claimed ‘leftism’ now exposed on Ukraine.

The gross treachery of the social-chauvinists parallels the betrayals of the Second International at the start of World War I, siding outright with the imperialist warmongering. The social-pacifists also effectively side with the west, however much they decry Nato, by blaming Russia for the war and calling for its withdrawal. But these are just a warm-up for your real target: the pro-Moscow ‘left’. Most are completely confused, but they at least sense the underlying class forces at work.

Presenting these defencists as a mirror image of the social-chauvinists, except coming from the opposite direction, is a nonsense - just a sly sophistry. Certainly they need tackling, but not for their stand against the western warmongering. They correctly declare the Russians to have been provoked into action by non-stop attacks and provocations, which have killed 14,000 in the so-called ‘breakaway’ eastern sectors, which rejected the CIA-run Maidan coup in 2014 and its fascist repression against the Russian-speaking minority. They see (correctly) Putin’s move in support of, first, Crimea (overwhelmingly anti-Kiev), Luhansk and Donetsk, as effectively defensive.

But they have trouble with the simultaneous reality that Russia is capitalist and in many respects behaves and has behaved as an imperialist power. Their difficulty then comes from equating the call for imperialist defeat with support for the other side. To justify supporting Moscow they come up with various ways to deny that it is imperialist. But, even if Russia were solely a minor capitalist power forced up against imperialism - like Iraq or Syria, for example - it would not get them off the hook.

Supporting bourgeois nationalism in itself - as the answer to the world crisis - is to confuse the working class utterly. National liberation movements can strike important blows against imperialism, but mostly they are not going to develop the understanding needed for the complete overthrow of capitalism. So Leninist science says that a blow against imperialist aggression is an entirely separate question to support for the regime carrying it out.

The principle was established in August 1917, during the attempted monarchist coup by general Kornilov against the new bourgeois government in Russia. The Bolsheviks said the workers should stand alongside the treacherous ‘democrat’ prime minister, Alexander Kerensky, to see off the greater threat, but without trusting him further than they could spit, and resuming the fight to overturn bourgeois rule as soon as feasible - in this case just days later.

The same principle held true for Margaret Thatcher’s war on Argentina, which various letters on your pages have invoked - all getting it wrong, either by ‘not taking sides’ or by supporting the Buenos Aires government. In that case the critical issue was defeat for the task force sent by imperialist Britain and with an additional element that the Malvinas islands certainly did (and do) belong to Argentina. But not a whit of support for the Galtieri junta was implied nor needed.

Throwing some light on the current Weekly Worker position is the line taken initially by the Workers Revolutionary Party of the time, which called for the downfall of Thatcher’s government, but evaded the specific call for its defeat in the ‘Falklands’ - the concrete way in which its weaknesses could be sharply exposed. That was opportunism then and it is now too. Concrete defeat for the gross Nazi warmongering of western imperialism holds true now in Ukraine. But, in this specific situation alone, there is no comparison between the junior imperialist aspirations of the restorationist Russians and the overwhelming dominance of the US empire-led imperialist coalition.

Interestingly your professed openness to debate has thrown up an interesting attempt to get to grips with the contradictions - namely that from Sandy McBurney (Letters, June 9) who battles with the dialectical contradictions by declaring the war to be defensive and then asking if a Russian victory should be supported or not, correctly pointing out that Putin’s government is anti-Leninist, anti-working class and fosters Greater Russian nationalist ideology. He too falls back on resolving the problem by declaring Russia to have no imperialist identity or ambitions, even though he says it needs to be watched in case it ‘goes beyond’ the Donbas (which would be imperialist).

He also misses out the other crucial factor, which is the catastrophic collapse of world capitalism and the need it imposes for war - any war - for the ruling class to escape. The Kiev warmongering is being deliberately driven by capitalism as the next stage in the drive to world war, begun with the barbarous blitzing of Serbia in 1999 and destroying half a dozen countries so far.

It could be a useful polemic. But all this only reveals the limits to the CPGB’s ‘no censorship’ perspective - a petty bourgeois, ‘freedom of speech’ eclectic soup, which never resolves anything, rather than the encouragement of a polemical battle to reach a conclusion and establish a leadership line, as Lenin’s Bolsheviks did.

Don Hoskins
Economic and Philosophic Science Review

Tipping points

I have enormous respect for Jack Conrad in his ability to combine utter determination to hold to Marxist principles with forensically exposing the dangerous failings of so much of what passes for the left these days. I agree wholeheartedly with his and the CPGB’s position on the need for programme to be at the heart and head of everything.

But I have to come back again to my doubts about the CPGB Draft programme, as it stands, given what needs to be done in the face of climate catastrophe. This is surely a qualitative change that has never been faced before and demands an entirely different approach to what life on earth will mean for humanity. A “full and decent life” for all, as called for by comrade Conrad must surely take on board the levels of literal and metaphorical firefighting that we face for the foreseeable future, for us to have any hope of survival.

I’ve been feeling that this all ties in with the war drive we are suddenly in and I have raised this in regard to Weekly Worker articles on the war in Ukraine, which failed to see climate connections. No-one else seems concerned in taking this up, but I’ll try once more. What I’m trying to grapple with is that a different attitude towards pacifism is required when it’s militarism that is the most dangerous climate bootprint of all right now and so demands complete opposition.

It’s becoming clear that the war drive is also intended as the means to deal with the climate catastrophe by military means. This is something that has been raised previously by comrade Conrad and I’d like to quote him extensively on this and hope it can encourage some discussion in the light of the war drive and on the need for an emergency programme.

This is from ‘Hadean to capitalocene’ (Weekly Worker October 7 2021):

“… So climate socialism imposed by a firefighter capitalist state - maybe urged on by Friends of the Earth, the Green Party, XR and CCC demands for the declaration of a ‘climate emergency’, maybe with ‘beyond politics’ green advisors, enlightened technocrats and the armed forces playing a leading role - such a state could conceivably impose draconian restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions by reorganising industry, transport, housing and agriculture.

“Of course, that, or something like it, would have to happen in all the major countries if the rise in global warming is to be limited to ‘well below’ 2°C, or even to 1.5°C. Adding to that little difficulty, the global hegemon, the United States, is in visible decline. So there is no effective power that can enforce the general, capitalist interest. Indeed, in the attempt to reverse its decline, all the signs are that Joe Biden will hypocritically use China’s increasing greenhouse emissions to further demonise it in the eyes of ‘world opinion’ and block its rise through yet further sanctions and trade barriers. Combating global warming thereby becomes a weapon in big-power rivalry. War is the logical outcome.

“Even on a purely national level, we should have no illusions about any eco- or climate socialism, introduced, overseen and enforced by the capitalist state (or for that matter the Xi Jinping regime). As with war socialism, there will be monumental blunders, severe restrictions on democratic rights, attempts to drive down popular living standards - all accompanied by endemic corruption and corresponding opportunities for well connected insiders to enrich themselves beyond the dreams of Croesus.

“Nor will such a climate socialism evolve peacefully and smoothly into proletarian socialism. True, we reach a partial negation of capitalist production - the outer limits of capitalist society. But, because there is a swollen, parasitic, aggressively repressive bureaucratic state, what we have is the extreme opposite of proletarian socialism. Nonetheless, there is a relationship between climate socialism - in reality capitalism attempting to save itself on the back of the working class - and proletarian socialism.

“After all, in the paragraph above, substitute for the firefighter capitalist state the working class organised as the state power. Such a state based on extreme democracy, closely coordinating with other similar states across the globe, that radically reorganises power generation, industry, agriculture, transport and housing; a state that reduces greenhouse gas emissions to net zero and then below; a state that subordinates production to need. Then it is clear that such a state is nothing more than capitalist climate socialism that really does benefit the whole of humanity - and therefore represents the negation of capitalism and the first step towards a classless, moneyless, stateless and ecologically sustainable communism …”

That last sentence is quite mind-blowing in its possibilities, but is the one before, which seems almost the condensed programme, actually grasping the enormity of the emergency and the tipping points we may well have passed already?

Tam Dean Burn
Glasgow

Clarity

In the interests of truth and my own reputation and sanity, can I just explain that the letter appearing in last week’s paper under my name has some serious errors in the last two paragraphs.

I never wrote a letter. I wrote a full article on Calderdale Trades Council’s decision to attack our efforts in support of opening a new steel coal mine in Cumberland. The editor, it seems, couldn’t understand those last two paragraphs and the article was anyway too long. So, he decided off his own bat to cut it down and cut and paste it into a letter, without letting me check if it was still factually intact - the result of which is that the last two paragraphs are seriously misrepresented.

Firstly, let me clarify that I was talking about energy charges per megawatt hour (MWh). The Don Valley scheme would have provided emissions-free coal power at by far the cheapest MWh in the country and probably the world. It would also have started a ‘dash to coal’, and a regeneration of the coal industry and the National Union of Mineworkers, so it got strangled at birth.

Let me clear up some other points. Wind power in Britain absorbs two thirds of our power bills and produces just under a quarter of power to the grid (24%). The last four power stations in Britain with imported coal produce 4%. But that 4% is more valuable than much of the turbine power, because it is ‘base load’. It is there night and day, regardless of wind, sun, rain or cloud. So, if you’re going under the surgeon’s knife, you better hope those old coal power stations are up and running in case the wind drops, as the first incision is made.

Wind turbines are made from blast-furnace steel worldwide. Blast-furnace steel requires coal to make coke to produce steel. Wind is renewable, but turbines are not: they are made using coal. Indeed, all renewables require coal to make them, so Jim Moody, writing in last week’s paper, needs to tell us how they make this alternative to coal power if the coal is left in the ground, as he advocates?

The mine at Whitehaven doesn’t make the CO₂ the greens complain about: the steelworks does. Not opening the mine will not stop the production of CO₂, since the steel is currently being made, but using imported coal for coke. Britain produces 1% of total world CO₂ emissions, and 2% of that 1% is derived from steel production. But included in that figure is 0.5% generated by the transportation of coal across the Atlantic in diesel-powered ships to the steel works. Using British coal on our own doorstep at least gets rid of that element and therefore reduces the amount of CO₂ produced in the process.

I hope this clarifies the situation. Carbon capture, by the way, is the only rapid and efficient way of reducing CO₂ emissions in a world where coal production and consumption is rising. It can’t “leak”, as Jim Moody imagines, for the obvious reason that, if the vast caverns in which oil and gas were trapped leaked, there wouldn’t have been any fuel in them in the first place. It would have drained away over the subsequent 180 million years of their production.

David J Douglas
In support of Woodhouse Mine and NUM

Wrong again

Gerry Downing says: “Arthur Bough defends Sean Matgamna’s dual defeatist line in the Malvinas war ...” (Letters, June 23).

Actually, I didn’t, I simply pointed out that Downing’s claim that Matgamna and the Workers Socialist League majority’s position was “support for the fleet” was untrue, and so the claim that the position of Thornett and the WSL minority was dual defeatism was also wrong. Downing now proceeds without acknowledging even that the basis of his letter was false! That says a lot about his methods and analysis, now.

Downing claims that Argentina was a “semi-colonial country”, but provides absolutely no socio-economic data to justify such a claim. You do not have to accept the concept of ‘sub-imperialism’ to reject the nonsense that Argentina - a rich and developed economy - was certainly not a “semi-colony”. But, even if it were, what would that have had to do with the war - not in Argentina, not to impose British rule or ‘semi-rule’ on Argentina, but solely on the Falkland Isles and its immediate waters and air space? A war that arose precisely because of Argentina acting not as a “semi-colony”, but as an expansion aggressor and coloniser itself!!

Downing claims that in some way failing to support Argentina was a failure to adhere to the Trotskyist programme, but again fails to say on what basis he makes such a claim. What he actually means is that it is a failure to support the anti-imperialist programme of petty bourgeois nationalism, which has nothing to do with Marxism, Leninism or Trotskyism, but has guided petty bourgeois socialists like Downing in their idiot ant-imperialism, which involved supporting any number of reactionary, anti-working class movements and regimes. It is quite at odds with the position of the early Comintern, and Lenin’s ‘Theses on the national and colonial questions’, which states clearly that we do not support such reactionary forces, but only truly revolutionary forces engaged in struggles for national liberation:

“… the Communist International should support bourgeois-democratic national movements in colonial and backward countries only on condition that, in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties, which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks: ie, those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations.”

The question of whether Russia today is imperialist or not is moot. The point is that it is at war with another capitalist state. Neither are workers’ states, and so Downing’s claim that there is something “objectively” progressive in Russia’s attack (what exactly?) is simply wrong. There is nothing progressive on either side of the conflict, just as was the case in the war over the Falklands - which is why socialists should apply the principle that ‘The main enemy is at home’, and oppose the butchers on both sides.

Arthur Bough
email

Abuse

I too witnessed the Young Communist League performance on the June 18 TUC demo, but drew very different conclusions from Lawrence Parker (‘A name that spells trouble’, June 23).

Lawrence regards Stalin as a “revisionist” only and not a dedicated counterrevolutionary, who mass-executed all the remaining leaders and participants in the Russian Revolution (1934-39) and those who sought socialist revolution in Spain (1936-39), so perhaps they were not so wrong. A revisionist is not as bad as a counterrevolutionary, the crime the Trotskyists and all others were accused of. And Khrushchev was also a revisionist, the YCL and Maoists believe, despite the brilliant tactical alliance between Mao and Nixon after the ping-pong diplomacy of 1972 saw the USSR designated as the most counterrevolutionary of the two ‘great imperialist powers’.

Mao can never clear his name of supporting the apartheid regime front in Angola against the USSR/Cuba-backed MPLA. Mao excused Pinochet’s mass executions of the vanguard of the working class of Chile - only Soviet imperialists - and many other acts of gross class treachery against world revolution before Deng took all this to its logical conclusion.

Nonetheless the YCL were at least subjectively revolutionaries, as opposed to the “sclerotic bureaucracy” of Tony Chater and Mike Hicks, we learn. Of course, there were other CPGB leaders even worse: Martin Jacques and the Euros, who repudiated the struggle for socialism completely (the WRP’s own Alex Mitchell was in the forefront of supporting the Euros against the ‘tankies’ - a totally unprincipled position).

And Sid French’s ‘anti-revisionist, Marxist-Leninist’ Communist Party, not to mention The Leninist, which devolved into the present-day CPGB - “For the IRA, against the British army”, I remember on demos, before the ‘right to self-determination of the British-Irish in Ulster’ transformed that into something more acceptable to the British establishment.

Lastly, scoffing at the self-proclaimed Trotskyist groups on the demo as having “the vigour of a sweaty Bernard Manning in a Turkish sauna” is really beyond the bounds of political polemics. None of these can be compared to the racist monster, Manning - he never used the word ‘wog’, he protested, but admitted to using the words ‘nigger’ and ‘coon’, when two black women successfully sued him for his outrageous racism in a northern working man’s club. And his vicious anti-Irish racism contributed to the loyalist/British state murders of nationalists in the north of Ireland.

The Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Party of Great Britain, Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, and the rest on the demo, are very determined anti-racists - Stand Up To Racism does excellent work. We can all have our political and tactical difference with these Trotskyist centrist groups, but we must forge a united front with them and all others against racism and fascism, and not degenerate into this level of abuse.

Gerry Downing
Socialist Fight

Women’s rights

Thanks to Anne McShane for her provocative presentation on the woman question (‘Women, wages and reproduction’, June 16). I’m familiar with the issues, but have a lot to learn. Some thoughts, if I may.

While I would agree with Lenin that women’s rights need a material basis, I think that view might obscure the fact - if true - that he was against the idea that women should have their own (including men) feminist organisation within a larger socialist organisation. I would support the idea of an autonomous organisation; Kollontai, Zetkin and others supported that idea; I don’t know if Luxemburg would have.

Kollontai and Zetkin would probably not have agreed with Anne’s criticism of the term, ‘socialist [or Marxist] feminism’ (Luxemburg might have). I’d be proud of the title, ‘socialist feminist’ and feel it’s a necessary statement against the marginalisation of feminist issues, as is usually the case - including in the Soviet Union after 1917. However - thanks to Alexandra Kollontai to a great extent - ie, her great achievements regarding collectivisation and women’s rights - there was never a more advanced time for those rights (as far as I know) than during the Bolshevik revolution and afterwards (her role in the Stalinist government is another matter). A proletarian family might be ‘liberatory’, but there’s obviously no liberation for women within capitalism (I realised that in 1969).

Anyway, these are some of my reactions, but not carved in stone.

GG
Email

Fishing

Rising diesel prices are causing real problems for the working people of the UK, apparently with some now unable to afford their drive to and from work, including many of those regarded as ‘key’ workers during times of Covid pandemic - public transport, healthcare, cleaners, teachers: that sort of essential function.

Because I live very close to the fishing fleet harbour of Newlyn in Cornwall (incidentally, one of the last few remaining in full operation), I know a little bit about these matters, as they affect that sector of UK industry. Also of note is how it retains almost feudal employment structures, where payments for labour are made by the vessel’s captain on a sliding scale, according to status: starting with his own share (they are almost exclusively male), through to experienced fishers, then downwards to the newest or youngest deckhands - moreover, all based not on any guaranteed ‘contracted’ hours, but on when boats can go out in terms of weather (or otherwise time laid up for repair/maintenance); then a share of the cash value of each fishing trip’s ‘take’, once sold at harbourside auction. Typically that will be 60% for the vessel’s owner, down to 10% or 12% for the captain, bottoming out at 4% for the most inexperienced workers. The auction company takes its bite from the wholesale prices before the fish are trucked off to restaurants, etc in faraway towns and cities - with, incidentally, about 70% destined for western European countries.

The harbour company also takes a share, and there are costs for leasing the boat, food and other expenses. But fuel is the main cost. Again by way of example, it was reported last week in The Guardian that one Brixham fisher had one of his “best catches of the year”, fetching £87,000 at auction. But that came after many days out at sea, and his large bottom-trawling boat needed “40,000 litres of diesel, where the cost has gone from about £20,000 a trip to £45,000”.

Bruno Kretzschmar
email