Letters

Centrism

It is fair to say that comrade James Harvey’s report of the November 12 CPGB aggregate has not gone down well with our comrades in the Communistisch Platform (CP) in the Netherlands (‘Open polemics cauterise’, November 17). Heated discussion and comment on the ‘Unofficial Weekly Worker Readers and Supporters’ Discord server swiftly followed the paper’s online publication. I do not wish to replicate the criticisms made by the comrades: instead I feel it is my duty, in light of those informal debates, to repudiate the incorrect positions that I took up at that aggregate and which were reported in comrade Harvey’s article.

There has been much criticism of the way in which party aggregates have been reported over recent years. However, on this occasion I believe that comrade Harvey’s piece was more than generous in his coverage of the question and represented my contributions well. I nevertheless feel that I should clarify for readers my position then and now.

At the November 12 aggregate I did defend the CP comrades. I argued that there was no “cosy” or “diplomatic” fudge between the CP and the Mandelites of the Socialistische Alternatieve Politiek (SAP) at the Utrecht conference of De Socialisten on the question of the Ukraine war. I pointed out that the fudged deal had nothing to do with the war: it was specifically about the organisational question of delaying any premature attempts to set up a party. (Although I have now changed my mind on the charge of the CP being “cosy” and “diplomatic”, this point of conference procedure remains a matter of fact.)

I also argued against the characterisation of the CP as “falling into opportunist, specifically centrist, politics.” I criticised the CP for being guilty of prioritising organisational questions over that of programme - “putting the cart before the horse”, as one comrade rightly put it. In my mind the decision to delay the politically substantive debate - including the question of the war - until the second, programmatically orientated, conference was a matter of tactics. I criticised the comrades for the presumed bad tactics, saying that they were “playing good cop when they should be playing bad cop”.

As previously stated, I now believe this analysis to be wrong. It now seems clear to me that what we are dealing with is not a matter of the ‘speed and style’ of their tactical application, but instead a strategy of centrism.

In my informal discussions and private messages with the CP comrades many questionable and outright alarming formulations arose, but perhaps most disturbing was a ‘democratic-centralist’ defence of unity with the social-imperialists. To put it in simple terms, the comrades do not think there is an issue with allowing the SAP in a unity project if they submit themselves to the anti-Nato majority.

To suggest that acceptance of programme and democratic-centralist unity in action is some panacea - that it allows you to skip over potentially caustic debates over basic principles - is at best cowardly centrism; at worst it is rank opportunism. Comrades seem to be repeatedly making the fatal error that winning the vote means winning the politics. Childish approaches that say, ‘If the SAP wants to campaign against Nato despite it not being in line with their International, then let them be’, are nothing short of criminal. If these SAPers are willing to tear up the principles of opposing imperialism and proletarian class independence, how on earth can the comrades assume that they will respect any future democratic centralism?

They take things a step further and imply that CPGB comrades are proposing purity politics - an endless series of litmus tests for unity - and, by doing so, would damn the CP to irrelevancy. Needless to say, this counterposition between unprincipled unity and sectarian purity is false. Aside from an obsession with numbers, the comrades put forward what can only be described as ‘pessimistic centrism’. Comrades lament that in any sizeable organisation you will find people with harmful ideas, but what is the solution? As long as they remain in a minority, ritually attack them and move on.

To be clear, the CP comrades are correct that offensive purges of the right is illusory: the right will spontaneously regenerate, and, as we all know, relying on purging as a strategy places dangerous power in the hands of party bureaucrats. However, they fail to make the crucial distinction between purging the right as an offensive strategy and the defensive tactic of expelling unprincipled elements.

The SAP are not just ‘any old rightwingers’ - they are qualitatively distinct from the rest of the opportunist right, in that their calls to arm Ukraine give a socialist face to Nato’s imperialist war-drive and shatter any sense of proletarian class-independence. This is not a case of ‘That which does not kill us, makes us stronger’: it is seeing a cancerous tumour and leaving it be, in the hope that it will become benign. Not calling for a defensive purge of the unprincipled right - even if this puts you in the minority - is in this case not just centrist: it is outright self-sabotage.

The partyism of the CPGB is clear: we have a strategic orientation towards the rest of the revolutionary left, with the aim of coming together into a single organisation though a process of splits and mergers on the basis of programmatic and principled unity. With the CP it is equally clear: drop principle as a precondition for unity in the hope that good programme and diplomacy alone will pave over the cracks.

I hope that the Dutch comrades will take up the offer of meeting with the PCC and open public debate of these issues at an Online Communist Forum. These are serious criticisms and we don’t make them lightly, comrades should expect frank, yet biting, polemic.

Ollie Hughes
CPGB

Fake left

The Nato/Ukraine war on Russia is a war fought on behalf of finance capital - a finance capital based in the USA and which is determined to defend the world domination of the dollar by any means necessary. It is not a war of national liberation or a war for national self-determination.

Ukraine under Zelensky (or any other representative of the Ukrainian oligarchs) is engaged in a war for neoliberalism and for the subordination of Ukraine to finance capital. An ‘independent’ Ukraine will become a semi-colony of the USA, where land and social assets will be acquired by finance capital on the cheap, and ordinary Ukrainians will have to effectively pay ‘rent’ to finance capital in perpetuity. That is the programme of Zelensky and there is no open, legal, mass opposition to that perspective in Ukraine.

Unlike real national struggles against imperialism, there are no progressive, pro-working class demands around land redistribution or nationalisation of industry or demands for social equality. It is no surprise that fascism plays such a prominent role in this war for ‘national liberation’. Fascism is the political destination of rule by finance capital in a period of capitalist decline and decay. The growth of militant pro-imperialist nationalism in Ukraine is not something to be celebrated, as it is in the British mass media, but rather a phenomenon to be opposed by the international working class. Militant Ukrainian nationalism is bringing nothing but death and suffering to the Ukrainian working class. What is needed is workers’ unity against both the Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, plus a fight for a socialist Europe and for the recreation of the Soviet Union minus the Stalinist bureaucrats.

If you can’t see that the USA is waging a proxy war on Russia via Ukraine, it is because you don’t want to see what is staring you in the face. The USA has long planned this war and has been training the Ukraine army since at least the 2014 Kiev coup - which was funded and promoted by US imperialism.

Russia is fighting a defensive war against the US plan of a colour revolution in Moscow and then the US plans a similar move on China. Of course, no socialist supports the Putin government, since it is obviously a capitalist government. We stand for a socialist revolution and a working class fight to end imperialism. The USA is determined to fight to maintain its control of the planet and subordinate all rivals. The potential collapse of the finance capital bubble, blown up by quantitative easing since the 2008 crisis, is driving the US to war as a potential solution to its crisis. The aim is to grab hold of Russia’s vast natural resources, while cutting off its rivals in Europe from cheap Russian gas. Russia is not an imperialist power that lives by exploiting the working class of the world - unlike the USA, the world imperialist hegemon.

Any authentic socialist movement in Ukraine would support the right of self-determination for Crimea and Donbas. Instead what we get from the CIA-funded fake left is nationalist hysteria re fighting to retake Donbas and Crimea with arms and resources supplied by Nato. What a waste of life. At least 200,000 dead on both sides.

In the UK socialists should organise an anti-war movement in every town and city. The central demands are clear:

1. Oppose the war drive against Russia and China.
2. Britain out of Nato.
3. End the sanctions on Russia.
4. Stop supplying arms to the war zone.
5. No to national wars.
6. For a struggle against imperialism and social inequality.

Sandy McBurney
Glasgow

Living horror

To tour with David Weiss of the Neturei Karta group before Muslim religious audiences, as Pete Gregson is doing - for the purpose of destroying the Jewish people’s religious attachment to Israel with irrelevant pseudo-science - is a living horror. It requires no metaphoric simile with any other pogromist or anti-Semitic event from the recent or historical past: it stands on its own and is not subject to rational rebuttal.

It was always my understanding that the basis of the left’s world view was: ‘This is wrong, and that is right. Upon that basis we will analyse the wrong, formulate what is right, and set out proposals as to how to move from here to there.’ I see no grounds for discussion here. If people who claim to have built their politics in sympathy with common decency cannot immediately see that this tour is an unconditionally disgusting moral perversity, utterly and viscerally unacceptable, then a fundamental breakdown in how the left views life has been demonstrated.

If the left can accept this as falling within the parameters of their sense of right and wrong, a deep corruption of their worldview has surfaced. And the age-old justification for the pre-packed suitcase lurks back with us: ‘Better get born someplace else. Move! Shift! Go!’ Therefore, even if from outside the world of Marxism, I call upon you to reject this programme. Let me mention a quiet prediction and warning - by this you will be judged.

For those of you of a curious nature, Neturei Karta is a 30s cultic splinter group (with maybe about 40,000 members) from the Orthodox-Jewish Satmar Hasidim. It will be interesting to watch how the virulently anti-Zionist bi-factional Satmar (several hundred thousand) react to this. All can be found on the net.

One other topic, which I have never seen discussed in the Weekly Worker or similar, concerns the fact that the progressive left seeks the destruction of the Zionist entity. But how will such a destruction happen? Will the border forces stand down? If it happens, who will move across the Jordan, fly in or pour off the boats at the ports? Will the returning refugees be monitored (which implies that some can be rejected)? If so, who will do the monitoring (if any)? What will be the criteria for acceptance or rejection? How many? Over what period of time? Will there be public order, or just a big rumble (translation: slaughter and grab for the goodies)? Which faction will command authority - Hamas, Isis, Hezbollah, al Qa’eda, the Muslim Front for the Liberation of Women?

What about me? Must I now seek Lithuanian citizenship (or even worse - Belarusian)? Or should I rent a single-end in Dunbartonshire? So many questions!

As I say, no-one has put forward a detailed programme yet (not in English at any rate). Do tell us, so we may know what to expect.

John Davidson
Israel

Irrational

Steve Cousins feels obliged to defend the irrational, hypocritical and absurd aims and tactics of ‘Just Stop Oil’ (Letters, November 17). Not surprisingly in doing so I am subjected to a stream of incomprehensible irrational spew. What is clear is subjecting political aims and motives to actual ‘concrete’ conditions of real life and where we actually are is something which seems to annoy him.

As a very young communist, I learned that analysis did not proceed from the imagination and ideals we could think up in our heads, but politics and society is formed from the material conditions in which we live. We proceed from the world we are actually in now and not one we have invented in our heads. Cousins clearly doesn’t like such a proposition: ‘Away with actual material conditions. Just think up a scheme and click your heels.’

I am not incidentally a “climate sceptic” (let alone a “wretched, vulgar, progressivist”!) - the changing climate is, as said, hard-wired into the Earth’s existence . What I am sceptical of is climate catastrophe hysteria and the doomsday conclusions of cults like Just Stop Oil (who just use oil to get to the protest against other people using oil).

One simply cannot without manifest hypocrisy fully engage in the use of oil for all aspects of your life, while demanding everyone else stop using it. It’s not just a matter of what oil-based clothes, electronics and gadgets, etc they use daily: it’s the whole fabric of almost everything we do. Applied to veganism, it would mean not eating meat, but happily wearing leather shoes and sheepskin jackets - you can’t preach one thing for everyone else, but carry on regardless yourself. I guess Cousins’ aversion to concrete - which is another substance, like oil, that the world is not going to abandon any time soon - is due to it being made using coal, like turbines and solar panels, etc. I could do with someone explaining to me how Ed Miliband and the Extinction Rebellion mob’s clamour for wind turbines is to be met if we ‘just stop oil’ in the meantime. Turbines are made using concrete and steel from coal, and the blades are bi-products of the petro-chemical industry, of course.

But the main reason for writing on this occasion is not to pointlessly debate these issues with someone like Cousins, but to put my annual Christmas book sale offer back in print.

My historiology, Stardust and coaldust, is the three-part account of the Durham and Yorkshire miners coal communities from the post-war period to the last stand of the miners in 1992-93, against the backdrop of national and international political developments - as witnessed and narrated by my good self. The book set is only £10 for the three, and anyone within reach of Tyneside can arrange to meet me to collect them, or it’s another £10 if you want me to post them. Just drop me your name and address at douglassdavid705@gmail.com. Thanks.

David Douglass
South Shields

Trotskyism virus

Just when Jack Conrad has finished his three-part ‘demolition’ of Trotskyism, which followed the Communist Party of Britain’s similar effort, the Morning Star chimes in again with ‘The political cul-de-sac of Trotskyism’ on November 20. A division of Labour?

In the Star article one John Green reviews John Kelly’s new book The twilight of world Trotskyism in such a way that we do not know if Green is giving us his own take on Trotskyism or Kelly’s. He refers to Kelly just four times in his full-page article. As an extra, the Star prints a photograph of “Kronstadt sailors summarily executed on March 21 1921” - subtlety implying that Trotsky was guilty of this ‘crime’.

One of the Kelly references is to reproduce this: “Trotskyism and Stalinism cannot be reduced to a crude counterposition of a heroic Bolshevism and a Stalinist tyranny that have nothing in common.” Well, revolutionary violence to defend the dictatorship of the proletariat against White Army counterrevolution, on the one hand, and Stalin’s mass executions of the main leaders and participants in the greatest single event in human history, the October 1917 Russian Revolution, on the other, is all violence - supposedly to be equally condemned by “scurvy pacifists”, as Trotsky dubbed them.

And we also have the CPB and CPGB defence of Kautsky against both Lenin and Trotsky. Clearly a great effort is needed to vaccinate youth and critical theoretical Marxists against the virus of Trotskyism.

Gerry Downing
Socialist Fight

Bolshevik strategy

I would like to thank and congratulate Jack Conrad on an outstanding series of three articles marking the anniversary of the Bolshevik October revolution. He has demonstrated with absolute clarity that Bolshevik leaders such as Lenin, Stalin, Kamenev, Molotov, etc were incredibly united around key Bolshevik principles, programme and strategy, as expressed in the concept, “the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry”.

Yes, of course there were differences - these are normal and expected within a healthy, genuinely revolutionary Communist Party, genuinely rooted in the working class. But most often these were differences of emphases, differences in perspectives between leaders returning from exile and those on the ground - and differences of nuance, which can so easily appear to be more significant than they really are.

Yes, of course Lenin criticised those who mechanically repeated the above formula after the February revolution. Fuller rather than selective quotations from the April theses and the ‘Letter on tactics’ would reveal Lenin’s view as being: (1) yes, the revolution had in many ways gone much further than the ‘classic’ bourgeois-democratic revolution, with the establishment of dual power and elements of direct proletarian power in the form of workers’ and soldiers’ soviets across the country; but also (2) that many ‘classic’ tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution still needed to be implemented. Jack summarises these as “eliminating every last vestige of tsarism, enacting sweeping land reform, putting in place full democratic rights, defeating bourgeois counterrevolution”.

This meant the strategy of the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry had produced a highly novel, complex, unstable and temporary situation in Russia after February - it did not mean the entire strategy should have been or was abandoned by the Bolsheviks - as some lunatic Trotskyists claim.

Although the October revolution was classed as a proletarian socialist revolution - because it brought the Bolshevik Party and the industrial working class to state power - it is extremely clear from reading Lenin after October 1917 that concrete steps towards full socialism in industry had to be cognisant of the very low level of capitalist development of the productive forces. In the countryside, progress depended on increasing class differentiation over time among the mass of the peasantry - between the emerging class of capitalist farmers and the majority who were oppressed, exploited and would increasingly become proletarianised.

Andrew Northall
Kettering

Hail McClusky

Prior to the 2019 general election, a realistic outcome was a Labour government which would begin to close the morally and scientifically reprehensible parasitic chapter of human history, and begin the overdue transition from university-institutionalised political strife and wars, and profitable pollution of our planet’s ecosystem, to perpetual peace, so that culturally diverse populations may continue their symbiotic recreation on the only planet so far known to be capable of unconsciously creating them for as long as humanly possible.

The leader who made this naturally necessary transition realistic was Unite the Union’s first general secretary, Len McCluskey. It was his 2014 threat to launch a working class party to rival Labour that spurred Labour MPs to select a leader who recognised such necessity. Despite McCluskey’s staunch championing of the leader they selected, Britain now has a shamelessly racist government with an increased majority, and endlessly increasing pollution is making all human existence on earth increasingly precarious day by day.

In 2012, McCluskey founded the Centre for Labour and Social Studies (CLASS) after the prime minister declared his intention to deliberately downgrade workers’ safety, because it “hampered business growth”, and the home secretary announced her plan to deliberately downgrade refugees’ safety by creating “a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants”. CLASS’s mission was “to shape and champion left analysis and policy debates”. It received £100,000 per annum funding from sympathetic trade unions, and retained nearly 50 professional academics, MPs and trade union leaders as its advisors.

In 2016, McCluskey declared his internationalist working class opposition to Brexit. For reasons best known to themselves, CLASS did not advise all Labour Party members that internationalism is the politically and scientifically enlightened precondition for workers’ worldwide self-emancipation. If they had, Corbyn could have been mandated to oppose Brexit, the 52:48 referendum outcome would have been different, and grassroots activists’ confidence in their ability to defend human rights without racial prejudice would have been considerably strengthened throughout the world.

In 2017 Unite’s executive changed its rules to permit members to collectively defy anti-union laws to protect their collective interests - laws which Labour governments have rigorously enforced since they were pushed through parliament after the trade unions brushed aside Labour’s 1969 White Paper, ‘In place of strife’. Although this bold decision of the Unite executive to uphold members’ right to collectively defy civil laws to protect their collective interests was broadly supported by the TUC, CLASS did not publicly advise all Labour Party members to support it.

Corbyn launched his For the many, not the few manifesto the same year, Labour Party membership doubled, and the organisational coherence and confidence of all political activists opposed to sexism, profiteering, racism, wars and pollution was demonstrably and significantly strengthened. And in 2018 Greta Thunberg made the first of her many fearless calls for eco-savvy teenagers throughout the world to defy civil laws in defence of Earth’s increasingly polluted ecosystem. Thousands of British students, and millions elsewhere - most of them too young to join the army, start university or vote in public elections - courageously took their first acts of collective political defiance.

As every experienced political activist opposed to profiteering and racism should have expected during Corbyn’s general election campaign, self-serving, Oxbridge-educated millionaire MPs went into apoplectic overdrive, freely assisted by high-tech, multi-media channels, owned by offshore oligarchs - many of them ex-Soviet bureaucrats. These amoral guardsmen of profitable parasitism attacked Corbyn with every lie they could dream up. For reasons best known to themselves, CLASS advisors didn’t collectively offer any useful public advice for Corbyn supporters throughout his election campaign.

After 10 years of study, CLASS issued a closing statement with nothing to show for its £1 million trade union funding. The publicly elected leader of the official opposition to the current unashamedly corrupt, gerrymandering parliamentary executive is unashamedly calling on God to save the unelected commander of British military forces, so that he may use his executive authority to maintain what he believes is proper public order.

Steve Ballard
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