Letters
Chile defeat
Mike Macnair’s article on Chile 1973 follows a familiar pattern (‘National road to disaster’, September 7). The arguments presented by a range of currents on the left are reviewed, summarised and quoted from, then pronounced deficient: “stories of failure to learn lessons from the experience of the Allende government”.
The logic behind such an approach is, I suppose, as follows. It is necessary to expose the errors of all competing tendencies on the left. When all have been discredited, the masses will have no alternative but to flock to the banners of the correct programme, thus creating the mass communist party. Well, perhaps. But I doubt if I shall live to see it.
In dealing with the Socialist Workers Party, Macnair refers several times to the article by myself and Chris Harman from 1973: ‘Chile: end of the parliamentary road’ (International Socialism September 1973). Now if there are inadequacies in this piece, it would be scarcely surprising. It was written within a week of the coup, and based on such information as we were able to glean from the bourgeois press.
A great deal more information has become available since then, and Macnair makes some useful and valid points. But it is, to say the least, surprising that in his treatment of the SWP position, he makes not a single mention of the various articles by Mike Gonzalez: in particular ‘The left and the coup in Chile’ (International Socialism winter 1984). Macnair can scarcely claim ignorance of Gonzalez’s work - five minutes Googling would have been enough to make it available. If one’s aim is serious political clarification rather than scoring cheap debating points, then surely one should confront one’s opponents at their strongest point, not their weakest.
Thus various writers are criticised by Macnair for “not taking the MIR [Revolutionary Left Movement] seriously”. He alleges that “subsequent SWP authors ignored it”. Yet Gonzalez discusses the MIR at some length and makes a sharp political critique of its role: “Its politics were Guevarist, devoted to the preparation of armed struggle, which would be conducted by a small group of professional revolutionaries ... Thus the revolution could be conducted by the revolutionaries on behalf of an undistinguished mass of ‘the people’ … So, while the MIR declared itself militarily and organisationally independent of the [Popular Unity] UP government, politically it remained fatally dependent on it.” If Macnair wants a serious debate, then he should refer to and confront this analysis.
Likewise Macnair claims the SWP and others “play up the cordones industriales”. Now in our 1973 piece Harman and I had relatively little information on the cordones. Gonzalez, on the other hand, had studied them in some depth. He quotes extensively from the statements and documents issued by the cordones, and refers to their newspaper Tarea Urgente. For Gonzalez the cordones were “the organs of workers’ democracy generated by the class in the struggle”. As he argued, “they did not arise out of thin air. They were the outcome of an upward spiral in the class struggle, the product of workers’ activity that had moved to a higher level in the last two years of the Frei regime and continued to develop after Allende’s election.”
And Gonzalez argues that the cordones offered a potential alternative to the terrible defeat suffered by the Chilean working class: “How different it would have been, had the left achieved roots in the working class movement, which had created what was effectively the embryo of dual power …” Macnair may not accept this conclusion. Fair enough; any discussion of alternatives must be speculative. But at least he should have had the intellectual honesty to confront Gonzalez’s arguments and the detailed evidence they were based on, rather than simply ignoring their existence.
Macnair supports his arguments with reference to Trotsky’s criticism of the “fetishism of soviets”. But the way he cites the point is somewhat misleading. He is honest enough to give a link to what Trotsky wrote in The lessons of October. Here it is quite clear that Trotsky is juxtaposing soviets to factory committees - also products of the self-activity and self-organisation of the working class. In different contexts working class self-organisation takes different forms - in Chile it was the cordones.
I am no longer a member of the SWP, but I would defend its line on Chile precisely because of the importance given to the cordones as a recognition of the centrality of working class self-activity in any revolutionary confrontation.
In the Trotskyist tradition (and this very much includes the SWP) there has always been a tendency to explain any defeated revolution with the formula, ‘There was no revolutionary party’. True, but inadequate. Why do revolutionary parties come into existence - or fail to do so? It is not as a result of an act of will on the part of a minority, but a transformation of mass consciousness and creativity. Parties emerge from specific historical circumstances - in particular the level of class struggle and the self-activity of the working class. Macnair accuses his opponents of neglecting “the role of mass parties in creating and leading the soviets”. But this is a very one-sided account of the interrelation of party and soviets - one which seriously downplays the centrality of working class self-activity and self-organisation.
The emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class itself. That is why any account of the Chilean defeat must put the way in which workers attempted to organise themselves at the very centre of the picture.
Ian Birchall
email
Anti-Semitism
The responses of both Mike Macnair (‘Anti-Semitism of useful idiots’) and Daniel Lazare (Letters, September 14) to the defence of David Miller by anti-Zionists are problematic in different ways.
Both drag in absurd red herrings to excuse their softness on Zionist and imperialist racism, and both excuse the racism of oppressor peoples with logic chopping. Thus, Lazare claims that to accuse the CPGB of “philo-Semitic” racism is to say that the CPGB is “in the pocket of the Jews”. But this accusation bears no logical relation to the point: philo-Semitism is a form of racism that treats Jews as morally superior and incapable of being ‘really’ racist.
Lazare is a defender of the Israel lobby, and considers that Zionism cannot be ‘really’ racist. He clearly supports a variant of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance fake definition of ‘anti-Semitism’. However, when he tries to answer Tony Greenstein, he has no qualms in accusing “heavily armed … black militias” - who have taken to the streets “in America in recent years”, resisting armed white supremacism - of being equally “rightwing” and “racist”, and insists that the racism of the ruling class is “the same” as the anger of those on the receiving end of cop lynchings like that of George Floyd and many others.
That’s why he is hostile to the facts about the material basis of the Israel lobby - the outsize social weight of Zionist Jews in the ruling class (almost all Jewish bourgeois today are Zionist). He compares the citation of these facts to the Protocols of Zion, following the hackneyed path of other apologists for the lobby, including the CPGB. Zionism and racist anti-Semitism both arose at the dawning of the epoch of imperialism in the 1880s, and were rival projects of what Hitler called Lebensraum: the settlement of others’ land in expansionist imperialist projects. The Protocols are a racist caricature of Zionism that tries to drag all Jews, including communist Jews, into their schema of Zionism supposedly seeking world domination.
But Zionism is a racist colonial movement. Its (ultimately) successful bourgeois strategy was always to enable Jews to join the world’s oppressor peoples, which they duly did with the formation and consolidation of Israel and the growth of influence of the ‘lobby’. Apparently to cite facts on this is to echo the Protocols. This again is a variant of the IHRA - a stratagem to try to prevent discussion of relevant social and political facts.
The capitalist property of bourgeois Zionist Jews is way out of proportion to the preponderance of Jews in the population at large (whereas the capitalist property of black bourgeois in America is massively underrepresented, compared to the weight of the black population). A good part of the distinction of oppressor and oppressed peoples is related to their respective weight in the capitalist ruling class, but the Zionist/racist prejudice of Daniel Lazare is expressed in political aversion to this basic Marxist truth.
Absurdly, he takes advantage of the editor’s decision to cut Norman Finkelstein’s words, as quoted by me, to exclude his point that Jews are even more overrepresented in the US ruling class than they are in Britain, and Lazare shoots back: “What’s important about such rich Jewish Brits is not so much the money at their command, but their power in a world ruled by vast capitalist forces. The answer is that it’s nil. Where they have billions, US capitalism has hundreds of trillions. Where they control individual corporations, the US can make or break entire nations and is also capable of incinerating the world in a flash.”
Of course, since Zionist Jews are equally, if not more, disproportionately represented in the US ruling class than here, it logically follows that Zionist Jewish bourgeois have disproportionate power over those ‘hundreds of trillions’ which are part of the US bourgeoisie’s collective wealth. But again, this is not supposed to be discussed. The material facts are deemed to be ‘anti-Semitic’ when they find their way onto the printed page, and so yet again we have a form of ‘cancel culture’ - cancelling Marxism on behalf of Zionism.
Mike Macnair’s circuitous nonsense claiming that no-platforming fascists is somehow connected with the popular frontism of those who hail Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s ‘war for democracy’ (ie, imperialist war) is another, even more feeble, piece of hackery. One example proves that it is not true - Cable Street 1936, when tens of thousands of Jewish and non-Jewish workers joined forces in militant action to deny Oswald Mosley a platform in the East End. According to Macnair logic, they were popular frontists! This is arse-backwards: it is easy to show that the Trotskyists in the 1930s did indeed advocate that militants should ‘no-platform’ small groups of fascists by, among other things, ‘acquainting them with the pavement’.
Likewise, Macnair’s absurd and illogical amalgam claiming that those in favour of the revolutionary Comintern’s strategy of the anti-imperialist united front were supporting Dimitrov’s popular front. The most outspoken advocate of the anti-imperialist united front was Trotsky, who ridiculed Dimitrov repeatedly.
Macnair attempts to elide around this with the following: “Zionism is already an example of what began as ‘nationalism of the oppressed’ turning into ‘nationalism of the oppressor’. But there are many others. And - for example - the Islamic Republic of Iran is both an oppressed country vis-à-vis the USA and an oppressor state vis-à-vis its own population and minority national groups.”
This is simply nonsense, as Israel is a transplanted imperialist entity, and its international dimension - the ‘Israel lobby’ - is in fact a euphemism for the Jewish-Zionist caste within the imperialist bourgeoisie of west Europe and North America. Iran is not imperialist and, whatever forms of oppression exist within it, its ruling class fits the paradigm of Trotsky’s point about “a semi-ruling, semi-oppressed class”.
This is at the root of the third-camp, semi-Shachtmanite politics of the CPGB (AWL-lite, as it were). Refusing to take sides in conflicts between imperialism and its victims has nothing to do with revolutionary politics or opposing popular frontism. It is the politics of capitulation to imperialism.
Ian Donovan
Consistent Democrats
Cancel culture
In a somewhat hysterical article Tony Greenstein states that “cancel culture” is “an ideologically loaded term for those opposed to racists and bigots being given a platform to spew their foul ideas” (‘Placing anti-Semitism in context’, September 7).
Greenstein does not give any definition of cancel culture, but he is definitely for it and anyone who contradicts him is automatically a racist and bigot. This is a 1984 protocol: Big Brother has decided that cancel culture is good speak and anybody against it is an enemy. Because there is no definition, anyone can at any time run into trouble. Free speech for Greenstein is limited to what he agrees with.
And here we come to the crux of the matter: who is it who will decide which speech will be permitted and which banned? Would anyone sane trust someone like the (frankly not very intelligent) narcissist, Greenstein, to be arbiter of their speech?
A problem for the ‘left’ which has increased over the last decade is that every barmy idea is being immediately classed as ‘leftwing’. In the recent period it has been noticeable that the so-called ‘antifa’ brigade wish to normalise paedophilia by relabelling a paedophile as ‘MAP’ (minor-attracted person), which does not sound too bad at all. Sexual grooming of young children is considered a progressive activity. Most of the left press concurrently consists not of any type of Marxist analysis, but rather regurgitated identity politics and intersectionality arguments.
Greenstein’s rantings are a part of this milieu, which, whether consciously or not, is well on the way not only to destroying the remnants of the ‘left’, but destroying rational thought itself. How come that it is appropriate for an “anti-Semite” (the courts’ description, not mine) to be pontificating on free speech? The real reason that Greenstein is against free speech is that he is acutely aware that his ‘ideas’ could not stand up in a rational debate.
Phil Devonshire
email
Climate disaster
The declaration of the latest Group of 20 meeting on climate change is full of the usual platitudes. It states that its member-countries will “pursue and encourage efforts to triple renewable energy capacity globally through existing targets and policies, as well as demonstrate similar ambition with respect to other zero and low-emission technologies, including abatement and removal technologies, in line with national circumstances by 2030” (emphasis added). Crucially, though unsurprisingly, there is to be no deadline for dumping fossil fuels. Inevitably, so-called “national circumstances” (ie, fragmented capitalism’s essential profit-seeking) trump all, as usual.
Recently, UN secretary-general António Guterres rightly called air pollution a “global emergency”. But, however much Guterres rants, the gangs of criminals heading each and every country within the UN are incapable of doing anything but puff hot air, since capitalism is inherently unable and unwilling to accept any constraints on its existential need for profit.
Neither is it helpful to imagine that all will be fine, once we establish socialism with Promethean features: in other words, pretending that technological might conquers all, including nature. The idea that the revolutionary class, once in power, can somehow take control of technology and (if Trotsky were to be believed) literally move mountains to solve climate change threats in the here and now is cloud cuckoo land. Such efforts in Soviet times produced ecological disaster. This dream-cum-nightmare will lead the world to hell. We need to gain clarity and understanding of the gargantuan tasks humanity faces from climate change and work soberly toward overcoming them.
Nonetheless, we certainly must use technological means to the fullest to begin reversing global warming. In this emergency, there must be a rapid and drastic reversal of dependence on fossil fuel, including for vehicles and power generation. The current nonsense about simply ‘replacing petrol and diesel’ vehicles must be rebutted: the energy required to produce electric vehicles is so inordinately high, it makes them only justifiable for use as public transport.
We must campaign for a gigantic increase in public transport provision. And we need an infrastructure to match, integrally including accessible, direct and safe routes for cyclists and pedestrians. As for air travel, it is unregulated from the perspective of its contribution to pollution and climate change and it requires immediate restriction. It is clear that the overwhelming majority of air journeys are unnecessary, and are merely taken for pleasure purposes.
Massive change is also necessary when it comes to sea transport, with rapid replacement by wind and solar power of the means of propulsion of the world’s commercial fleets of ships. Goods now moved by sea are brought by vessels powered by the foulest, most polluting oil-based fuel: as a result, one ship’s voyage typically pollutes more than the equivalent of many thousands of cars. The question of whether goods should be transported thousands of miles must be tackled in tandem, raising the further question of whether particular goods need to be manufactured at all.
For Marxists, it cannot be denied that the crisis of climate change is upon us. But if we do not bring about working class-led change for the benefit of the whole of humanity, capitalism will do its damnedest to ensure that its ruling class stays in control by implementing drastically undemocratic means to tackle climate change. Barbarism instead of socialism.
The challenge for working class politics is to lay out the way forward in such a way that our class takes the lead in environmental questions; it is impossible to leave it to bourgeois ideologues and their truly dreadful technological ‘fixes’, which will lead to reducing and reviling democracy and certainly curtailing working class advance toward revolution.
It is socialism/communism or barbarity - that is the naked truth. This fightback starts now, and through organisation in communist parties it needs the overwhelming working class majority to ensure the job is done in the interests of the whole of humanity.
Jim Moody
email
Utter hypocrisy
So now we see plain as day what those ‘green jobs’ look like - 1,500 new jobs recycling old steel at the expense of 5,000 jobs making capital steel lost, along with the second-last steel-making plant. This is Labour’s much vaunted ‘green steel’, as well the Tory new deal on steel.
It’s not actual primary steel used for capital projects - just recycled existing steel, They like it because it does not require coal (or those damn bolshie coal miners) - the coal has already gone into the old steel, which is then recycled. You can make a new bike and a new wok, but not a high-rise block of flats, a suspension bridge, a ship or railway chassis. So is this the ‘just transition’ they all boasted about? Well, 4,500 workers - and thousands more ancillary and service workers - will now be thrown onto the scrapheap.
And what is it for? Britain is the sixth biggest economy in the world, producing 1% of the world’s CO2 emissions - 2% of that 1% is from steel-making! So on this all-party crusade to kill CO2 emissions, close down coal and steel (and, if they have their way, petrol and diesel cars, oil and gas, boilers and holidays abroad), what have they achieved? They will close down capital steel-making in Britain, and for now 80% of steel production will be recycled old steel - this made using the widely misunderstood electric arc, which does not produce CO2 in resmelting old steel.
But it doesn’t produce the quality of steel we need for most big vital projects either. So not wind turbines, not planes, trains, ships, flats, bridges, etc - these require blast-furnace steel. So that steel will be made abroad - using coal, of course, and sending skyward our emissions in someone else’s country. The steel will then be imported here. With any luck the coal will be from our new mine, shipped to Europe for them to make our steel.
Makes you feel all clean and green inside, doesn’t it? No, it’s utter hypocrisy. The steel unions were kidded along with this green steel capper, but they don’t seem to have been aware (certainly their members weren’t) that this means the end of steel-making in its usual meaning - 80% of the world’s steel and 100% of all capital steel is made using blast furnaces, but Britain will be the only major economy in the world not to make its own primary steel and entirely depend on imports.
Of course, it will still be made, and there will still be CO2 emissions - only not by workers here. They have been sacrificed on the altar of the Church of the Burning Earth, along with anything resembling common sense.
David J Douglass
South Shields
Unity shouters
A letter writer to Weekly Worker back in December 2012 reiterated this Engels quote: “One must not allow oneself to be misled by the cry for ‘unity’ ... Those unity fanatics are either the people of limited intelligence who want to stir everything up together into one nondescript brew, which, the moment it is left to settle, throws up the differences again in much more acute opposition ... or else they are people who consciously or unconsciously ... want to adulterate the movement. For this reason the greatest sectarians and the biggest brawlers and rogues are at certain moments the loudest shouters for unity. Nobody in our lifetime has given us more trouble and been more treacherous than the unity shouters.’
Caitriona Rylance seeks input on unity (Letters, September 14). To quote Wilhelm Liebknecht, who covers this subject at great length in No compromise, no political trading, “When common interests exist … no compromise, fusion or contract is necessary.”
Jon D White
Email
Great mix-up
The great mix-up in the debate over the class nature of the state in the USSR, eastern Europe and China results from the identification of the economic basis with the superstructure.
A workers’ state came into being in Russia in October 1917, despite the fact that the economy remained in capitalist hands until the months after January 1918 - the political intentions of the Bolsheviks and the fact that they held state power left no doubt on that. The only question was how that transition was to be implemented. They were forced to take control by diktat, as grassroots workers’ democracy was not sufficiently developed, and later the best and most class-conscious Bolshevik workers were fighting and dying in the civil war.
Ted Grant has a 1948 article placing transitional demands on the communists in Czechoslovakia, where there was a Stalinist Communist Party with substantial ranks, because a far stronger tradition of workers’ control existed there. In his article, ‘Czechoslovakia: the issues involved’ (April 13 1948), Grant writes:
“Lenin reduced the essence of a workers’ state to four fundamental principles. After the expropriation of the capitalists and the statification of the means of production, there would be: 1. The election of soviets with the right of recall of all officials. 2. No official to receive a wage higher than that earned by the average worker. 3. The abolition of the standing army and its replacement by the armed people. 4. No permanent bureaucracy. Each in turn would fulfil the functions of the state. When everyone was a bureaucrat, no-one could be a bureaucrat.”
He goes on to explain: “The backwardness of Russia and the isolation of the revolution rendered this process impossible. But on the basis of the cultural level in Czechoslovakia the advantages of communist methods would be apparent to the whole world ... Czechoslovakia under Stalinist leadership will develop in the same direction ... All the rights which the workers still possess will be strangled and an uncontrolled bureaucracy will ride roughshod over the masses, as in Russia.”
And that’s what happened, although it took until 1948-49 for Stalinism to crush that movement.
Jack Conrad objects that he is not a state-capitalist despite picking the same date for the overthrow of the workers’ state (1928-29) as Tony Cliff. And, although he does not champion the state capitalists, it is clear he prefers the right bureaucratic collectivists like Max Shachtman, etc, to them (better again are the left bureaucratic collectivists like Hal Draper) - until eventually Sean Matgamna shouldered the Shachtman burden and raised the flag of ‘genuine Trotskyism’ after about 1983, he claimed. This impressed the CPGB so much that the left bureaucratic collectivists waltzed in the early 2000s into that famous fusion attempt.
In distinction from all these and agreeing with Andrew Northall up to when he credits Stalin with any of this from any motives other than preservation of his own privileges, we hold that there were five successive phases of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the USSR from October 1917.
In some cases Stalinists conquered territory and never overthrew capitalist property relations at all (Austria, Finland and Afghanistan, to name but a few). In some cases, they only did it after attempts to maintain capitalist property relations failed (eastern Europe from 1945 to 1948, China in 1951-53).
It was never the case that the degree of nationalisation determined the class character of the state. We must appreciate how essential the subjective factor is; how the Bolsheviks and then the Stalinists were capable of creating workers’ states when they controlled the entire state bureaucracy. But Lenin’s state was based on the programme of the world revolution; the Stalinist states were based on finding a compromise with world imperialism to maintain their own privileges in their own bailiwick.
Gerry Downing
Socialist Fight