Letters

SLP caucus

Your readers may be interested to know that the first meeting of the Revolutionary Caucus of SLP members in the Manchester area was held on Tuesday evening. The meeting was initially called for by revolutionaries to discuss the May 4 conference, but it was quickly agreed that there was a need for revolutionary members of the SLP to coordinate and organise on a permanent basis.

To this end the Caucus decided to establish itself within the North West region and to hold monthly meetings, the first being on May 10 to discuss the outcome of the conference.

At the conference the leadership-recommended slate and controlled motions will not be the only platform. The Manchester Revolutionary Caucus has endorsed three candidatures on a revolutionary platform based around the demands for a federal republic of England Scotland and Wales, for a united Ireland, for workers’ democracy and for a workers’ Europe.

It is a strength that revolutionaries in Manchester organise openly, and have consistently put forward a revolutionary position against opportunism and rightism in the SLP. Revolutionary politics is widening its support in the Manchester branch, and more comrades still are watching with keen interest to see how things develop.

Steve Riley
Manchester SLP

Restraining debate

I have been following the various articles and discussions regarding the SLP in the Weekly Worker over the past couple of months and I thought readers may be interested in the SLP East London branch school which took place a couple of weeks ago.

Debate, any debate, among socialists is good. It develops ideas, clarifies thought and challenges misconceptions. The SLP has the potential to do all this but, from my recent experience at the school, it is beginning to fall foul of such practice.

I found it quite interesting to be placed in a study group which included within it an SLP ‘leader’. Now, I’m for discussing with anyone their ideas of socialism, communism, what the SLP represents, what its politics should be, etc. As such I found it a touch amusing to be told by the ‘leader’ that raising questions - What is a genuine communist party?’ - are irrelevant, and being frowned upon for using words such as “revolutionary” and “communism” for fear of intimidating newer members.

Restraining debate over such words and the ideas they generate does not bode well for the future of the SLP and its ability to attempt to get to grip with the main question that concerns the practice of any organisation which calls itself socialist - ie, understanding the nature of the state and how the Party should tackle it. The question of reforms or revolution cannot be avoided. All members of the SLP, whatever their stage of political development, will repeatedly, and naturally, come up against this issue. It cannot be ignored by avoiding words which may intimidate some members of the organisation. It cannot be avoided by limiting democracy.

If the SLP is to be a genuine political alternative to new Labour, it must develop political debate around the broadest and widest parameters. Open discussion is a benchmark for any healthy socialist organisation.

Bob David
East London SLP

How was that?

I don’t pretend to understand a half of what John y Lermontov, whoever he is, was on about, but perhaps that’s because I’m not actually a pseudo-pleb at all. What I do know is he didn’t understand my letter in response to Jack Conrad’s reasonable attempt at analysing particular features of the miners’ strike.

I was not “offering [my] book, Pit Sense, in opposition” to Jack’s piece at all, simply drawing attention to the fact that some of the events he deals with are actually dealt with in first-hand detail in that book, the reading of which would avoid any need for speculation on these specific events. Facts aren’t private property, no matter who sets them down. Because I happened to record the events first hand, and then have them published, I should not refer to that work when the debate comes up on pain of being seen as “insistently self-congratulatory”.

My reference to Arthur’s political positions and membership of the LP at that time were in refutation of Jack’s categorising him as a syndicalist. When did I ever suggest that specific and contextual disagreement over political description was aimed to “advance our understanding of the questions raised by the 1984-85 strike”? It didn’t because it wasn’t intended to anyway - what do you still not understand about that strike, is there some mystery still unresolved?

A thing which puzzles me no end is how after three years of being blacklisted from the industry and banned from even entering colliery sites, only managing to get two or at best three days’ work a week, I have suddenly become petty bourgeois. I don’t know which way you define class, John, but it isn’t according to Marxist definitions.

Another thing, if you are a fourth-generation face worker (as I am) and were “acutely and militantly active” in the 1984-85 strike, how come to the best of my admittedly fading memory I never heard of you? Prominent militants on the left who were actually part of the strike were not that numerous so as to remain anonymous.

I apologise if my response has insulted the obviously carefully cultured speech you are used to, by descending into “the ‘shit a brick’ parlance of the pseudo-pleb”. Perhaps I should just say “Bollocks!” and leave it at that.

Dave Douglass
Doncaster

Factions

Bob Smith raises some interesting points in his column when he talks about the ‘Leninist’ faction and indeed the ‘third faction’ of comrades who left the organisation in 1993. They may in a manner of speaking represent a possible faction.

Many other groups, organisations, sects and individuals will have differences of all sorts and may possibly represent future factions or leadership (minority to become the majority). To suggest that unless particular individuals are won back, the process of rapprochement will be derailed would represent a gross over-statement of the situation.

Without doubt there are two current factions within the CPGB. The Leninist group who started life in the old party as a faction and has moved to the leadership of the present organisation. On the other hand there are the Open Polemic comrades who came into the organisation as a clearly defined faction. What I believe Bob Smith wants is to make explicit what is already implicit. On this point clarity would be helpful: let these people draw a line in the sand.

In addition there are new comrades in the organisation who belong to neither camp. While they may not have taken steps to join the Open Polemic faction, they should not simply be aligned with the Leninists, until their position becomes concrete. The only present gauge of intention is that of noting if comrades support or reject specific leadership initiatives by use of written or verbal interventions and in the ultimate test - that of voting behaviour.

Kevin Newton
South Manchester

Strange article

I was at a loss to understand Bob Smith’s column in last week’s Weekly Worker (April 25).

He began by stating that relations between his Party faction, Open Polemic, and the majority ‘Leninist’ faction (by which he means all who were CPGB members before OP came along) “have reached a low ebb”.

Yet he makes no attempt to shed any light on what has caused this deterioration. What specific dispute? What particular action?

Bob simply goes on to repeat the same criticisms that OP has stated time and time again ever since (indeed before) taking up representational entry into the CPGB.

Firstly, we “insist on imagining” we are a party and “worse still ... the continuation of the Communist Party of Great Britain”. As you well know, Bob, we state in ‘What we fight for’ every week in the paper that our central aim is to reforge that Party. Yes, we believe we have won the right to its proud name and at present our organisation provides the nucleus of its future rebirth.

But we do not insist that our comrades have a permanent right to direct and control the Party. All trends and factions must have the right to become the majority. All must have access to the Party press and all should be represented on the PCC.

OP complains that it has “never been invited or coopted” onto the PCC, although it is “debatable” whether they would take this up. Everybody knows that they want to keep a safe distance between that body and themselves.

We have warmly welcomed the OP comrades into the Party, offered them full rights and willingly published all their criticisms and suggestions. Why is OP dragging up all these tired old arguments? What is behind his strange article?

Roger Dickson
West London

Purges

The contradictory nature of the struggle against Soviet bureaucracy undertaken by Stalin under definite historical concrete circumstances has never been grasped by those on the left ‘educated’ by Trotskyism. This is the inevitable conclusion we draw when we read Phil Sharpe’s article ‘Great terror and opposition’, in the Weekly Worker (March 28).

Sharpe puts over the usual Trotskyist view that the purges of the 1930s were counterrevolutionary. No attempt is made to relate these purges to the previous purges in the Lenin period. However, professor Rogovin is wheeled in by Phil Sharpe, to support the argument that the purges under Stalin were counterrevolutionary.

While Robert Conquest’s examination of this period in Soviet history is correctly dismissed as anti-communist, Sharpe waxes lyrical about professor Rogovin. Not only has the latter made a welcome contribution towards “developing our understanding of Stalin’s terror and purges”, argues Sharpe, but he has also showed that, “the purges were a political response by Stalin and the Soviet bureaucracy to the increasing mass support for both the left and right oppositions”. That is to say for ‘the bloc of rights and Trotskyites’.

Although there is more than hyperbole here about ‘mass’ support for the bloc, we are left in the dark about the basic class nature of this support. Sharpe makes the usual Trotskyist mistake of thinking that the 1930s purges were directed simply against Stalin’s political enemies out of consideration by Stalin to retain power personally.

Those who have this bourgeois view will never understand Stalin, let alone the purges. The more objective scholars not blinded by bourgeois hatred for Stalin, although by no means pro-Stalin, come closer to the truth. For instance, professor of history, Sheila Fitzpatrick, arrives at the following view:

“... it seems likely that Stalin - and for that matter, the majority of Soviet citizens - saw the cadres of the mid-l 930s less in their old role as revolutionaries than in their current role as bosses. There is even some evidence that Stalin saw them as Soviet boyars (feudal lords) and himself as a latter-day Ivan the Terrible, who had to destroy the boyars in order to build a new nation state and a new service nobility.”

If we disregard the terminological form of presentation, professor Fitzpatrick has arrived at our own view of ‘Stalin against the Soviet bureaucracy’. The difference is that she has gone further than us in that she argues that Stalin may have seen himself as one who had to “destroy” the boyars - ie, the bureaucracy: an interesting point which we cannot examine in this letter.

The purges went beyond removing Stalin’s political rivals. People like Trotsky and Bukharin were only removed when their two-facedness and double-dealings were exposed. For Stalin, getting rid of these people did not form the essence of the purges.

In the middle of the purges, October 1939, Stalin remarked, “Bosses come and go. Only the people is eternal.” In the purges of the mid-1930s Stalin took on the Soviet bureaucracy head-on. We have to understand why he did this while being the ‘prisoner’ of circumstances, one of which was, of course, the Soviet bureaucracy.

Tony Clark, Ted Hankin
Partisan