Letters

Fund translations

Is Marxist unity possible? No, not if self-defined Marxists hold on to the illusion that socialism in one country is realisable. Nor if they ally with leftwing nationalists. It follows there can be no unity with, for example, the Communist Party of Britain, George Galloway’s Workers’ Party, the Revolutionary Communist Group or the Scottish Socialist Party (amongst others). Entryism to split and win members from these groups is another matter.

So how can unity be achieved? Contributors to this newspaper have argued correctly that there is no alternative to education and debate. They have pointed out this is a continuous process subject to an ongoing review of goals and the means of achieving them.

An example of this is the widespread disagreement on the distinction between socialism and communism. Some individuals and groups claim to follow Marx and Engels. They argue that the terms, ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’, have identical meanings. Both refer to lower and higher post-revolutionary ‘phases’. Others cite Lenin and Trotsky to state that socialism refers to a temporary, transitional stage on the way to communism. Socialism comes after the working class has taken power. It is now the ruling class. According to the stageists, socialism is a global society, in which planning exists uneasily with the market and the state has yet to ‘wither away’.

Alongside these differences, Marxists continue to disagree about the nature of Stalinism. Following Trotsky, some people think that the regime’s nationalised property and abolition of commodity relations were progressive. They were transitional to socialism. Others argue that, in the absence or workers’ democracy and control on a global scale, nationalised property relations are typical of corrupt, militarised, bureaucratic regimes. An elite dominates these and tries to pump a surplus from workers’ labour-power.

In the light of these differences, I suggest the goals of socialism and/or communism take priority in discussion and debate between Marxists. This includes a clear focus on how the working class can overcome the barriers of commodity fetishism and abolish national, economic, religious, ethnic and other divisions. It entails discussion of how to build a mass communist-socialist party and the role programmes play in this.

Towards globalising these tendencies, it would be helpful if the CPGB were able to fund the translation of its programme into a variety of different languages,

Paul B Smith
Ormskirk

Bankrupting dues

This letter is written from an unaffiliated communist who took part in the UK Marxist Unity Reading Group, which read the first edition of the Cosmonaut reader and was also involved in organising one of the ‘rank-and-file’ conferences this past summer which Mike Macnair mentions in his article, ‘It’s good to talk’ (September 28).

The primary thrust of comrade Macnair’s article is correct - as an ex-member of Socialist Appeal, I could talk for hours about how the group’s full-timers stifle any intellectual curiosity of newer members wanting to explore writing by other comrades outside of the narrow funnel which they have built. It’s also true that my knowledge of the internal factions within RS21 only exists from who I know and conversations held at the pub at events like Troublemakers or The World Transformed. I also know that one of the “rival far-left initiatives”, Troublemakers at Work, has reached out to the other conferences to try and work together - this came off the back of a trades council motion calling for it do so. So far, no-one else has replied.

Given all of that, I find myself slightly frustrated that the comrades in the CPGB-PCC obscure the main difference between their organisation and others: namely the 10% of your pay packet a month in membership dues. When I and other comrades conducted the UK Marxist Unity Reading group there was some genuine interest in joining the CPGB-PCC, but all of us balked at the idea of losing that much money a month to what is essentially a Zoom discussion group and a website. Is it any wonder that comrades are joining discussion groups like ‘Why Marx’, ‘Talking about Socialism’ and RS21 instead of bankrupting themselves?

It would be useful to know whether the CPGB-PCC has conducted any internal self-reflection on the proliferation of these groups with very similar political commitments and, if the organisation hasn’t, then why not? Comrade Macnair argues “... it is disorganising, because unwillingness to take the time to fight through the political issues results in unprincipled splits which cannot be explained to the larger movement and tend to reduce the movement to political gravel.” I would argue that the CPGB-PCC is guilty of this itself. If you were to read the pages of the Weekly Worker, listen to the organisation’s podcast, the Communist Forum, or read comrade Macnair’s excellent book Revolutionary strategy, you would have no idea of the huge financial burden placed on its membership and could be convinced that it is the rest of the left that is ignoring the open arms of the CPGB-PCC.

Finally, I would like to mention that I have spoken to many a comrade who has enquired about joining the organisation, and have been told a similar story that they either get no email back or just a curt message from Jack Conrad, who from what I understand is the group’s full-timer and part of the reason for the high dues. Again I’d like to stress the only way I know that Jack Conrad is a full-timer is through gossip between comrades. If the comrades are serious about growing the organisation, then I would argue that comrade Parker’s recent piece, ‘Unity and it’s discontents’ (September 28), offers some useful recommendations around reaching out to other groups and individuals.

If the CPGB-PCC held themselves to the high standards they hold others to, then I would argue they need to be far more transparent about the joining process, the 10% of your wage dues, and how that money is spent and why. They also need to actively reach out to other organisations or reading groups and try and discuss these issues face-to-face rather than expecting everyone to come to them.

Sam Turner
email

Whole left

Lawrence Parker’s article, ‘Unity and its discontents’ (September 28), helpfully reminds us that the CPGB’s unity initiative in 1994 (some time before I became a member) had positive results, even if they were on a very small scale. They lay primarily in identifying which groupings that claimed to seek to reconstruct a Communist Party were not really interested in doing so in practice.

Comrade Parker is, I think, probably right to warn us of the danger of passivity, and from this point of view to criticise some of my formulations; but I don’t think he is right to say that our approach to the splits in the Socialist Workers Party 10 years ago was passive. The reality was that we did approach both trends in the split, but both refused outright to engage with us - as far as we could see, due to opposition in principle to our insistence on political transparency (including publishing material from the SWP’s internal debates).

More generally, the idea of a “patient strategy” (more exactly, a “strategy of patience”) is not a strategy for us alone, with which we could approach the masses, but for the left as a whole. Nor have we, in fact, been passive over the past 10 years. We intervened vigorously in Left Unity to push the conception of building a communist, rather than a broad-frontist, party. In 2015 we turned sharply to the Corbyn movement and actively set out to intervene in it via Labour Party Marxists - again with considerable effort and initiative.

This was a more difficult project, because the Corbyn movement was on a mass scale, but heavily involving flash-in-the-pan ‘clicktivism’ and unwillingness of the larger part of the newly self-identified leftists to persist with political action in face of the bureaucratic control of Labour Party organisations by the right, as well as dominance of ‘official’ lefts who were determined to steer them into non-confrontation with the right. Intervening was a duty, but it was the same sort of duty as attendance at large TUC demonstrations or strike support work: necessary, but unlikely to have much immediate political impact.

After Corbynism, what? We are by no means the only people to be asking this question, but most of the answers are ‘more of the same’: eg, Left Unity and its co-thinkers’ attempt to rebrand yet another ‘broad left party’. The SWP is continuing with Stand Up to Racism; the Socialist Party in England and Wales with more ‘Labour Party mark two’ stuff, and so on.

Socialist Appeal’s Marxist Student Federation, with its “Are you a communist? - then get organised” campaign, is no more than superficial coloration, imitating the stunt-imagery of the Young Communist League. YCLers appear masked at the Tory Party conference, and their banner offers merely the low-level, left-Labourite slogan, “Resist Tory rule”. I agree with comrade Parker that we need to find ways to engage with this stunt-imagery; but it is not clear that it poses the immediate possibility of the sort of regroupment appeal that CPGB comrades initiated in 1994.

I agree with comrade Parker that “1994 was not quite 2023”, but not, I think, for the same reasons. It is not that the CPGB has lost confidence in our party conception. Rather, we are in a somewhat different situation after a prolonged engagement with a left that appears to be in fairly severe political decline, relative to where it was in the middle 1990s - not in numbers or in fragmentation, but in decreased political education and increased tailism of mainstream bourgeois ideas.

The next step needed to break open this logjam is not immediately obvious - and I would note that neither comrade Parker nor comrade Catriona Rylance in her letter actually offers positive alternative proposals for present tasks.

Mike Macnair
Oxford

Severe punishment

Tony Clark writes yet another confused (and confusing) letter (September 28). He gets into a terrible tangle trying to prove that the concept of ‘dictatorship’ within Marxism is somehow opposed to the achievement of true democracy for the working class. In fact, it is an essential condition.

In a previous letter, Tony boasted he is the only person to have noticed that that Marx was hijacked by Blanqui and that Marxism was diverted by Blanqui’s concept of ‘dictatorship’. It doesn’t seem to occur to Tony that the reason why he is the only person to have ‘noticed’ is not because he is super-insightful, but because he is completely wrong!

Tony mixes up the different meanings of ‘dictatorship’, leading to the confusion in his letter. On the one hand, he says he acknowledges that Marx and Engels and subsequent Marxists used the term in the sense of meaning class rule, as opposed to its more present-day meaning of anti-democratic rule. At the same time, he claims Marx’s use of ‘dictatorship’ meant he was anti-democratic. But these are two different meanings. Either Marx did indeed mean ‘class rule’ or he was advocating abolition of democracy and democratic rights. Both cannot be true at the same time. I suspect Tony is really opposed to the concept of working class rule, of the political and economic power of the working class - of socialism.

I am not sure Tony understands the word ‘dictatorship’ in either sense. Apparently, Franco’s Spain was a dictatorship, but not totalitarian?! This is a distinction without a difference. Franco’s regime shot, imprisoned and otherwise repressed hundreds of thousands over the years, who I am sure nonetheless would have been highly appreciative that it was a dictatorship rather than totalitarian.

Tony claims his concept of ‘democratic socialism’ does have a class perspective - but nowhere does he describe how or where. ‘Democratic socialism’ may have developed within the British labour movement, but it was precisely as a non-class, reformist, social democratic doctrine for a reformed, ameliorated capitalism - a capitalism run for the benefit of all classes.

The essential difference between Marxism-Leninism and classic social democracy is that the former outlines the need for the capitalist class to be first overthrown and then held down by the new rule of the majority working class: ie, the dictatorship of the proletariat. By yet again ignoring these essential and basic class perspectives, Tony is indeed taking a completely non-class, reformist approach.

To accuse Trotsky of advocating “democratic socialism” is frankly to make nine cats laugh out loud. I personally have no time for Trotsky whatsoever. Those who quote him in the Weekly Worker are just embarrassing. Even the selected quotes are eclectic, obscure, confused and contradictory. He was a complete charlatan, a renegade and remained in essence a Menshevik. If he had ever taken power in the USSR, he would literally have been a labour dictator and would have presided over the destruction of soviet power and the restoration of capitalism. His whole nonsensical ‘theory’ of ‘permanent revolution’ was comprehensively ridiculed and demolished by Lenin in the years before the 1917 revolutions (ie, before Trotsky actually deigned to join the Bolshevik Party), and later within the Soviet Communist Party, as essentially a Menshevik, social democratic ‘theory’, which preached defeatism and a complete lack of faith in the Soviet working class and the working people in being able to establish a socialist society.

I do not find it at all surprising that Trotsky and subsequently Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, etc - having had their defeatist and rightwing social democratic views on the question of being able to build socialism in the USSR defeated and routed within the Communist Party, faced with the indubitable reality that socialism was indeed built within the Soviet Union - resorted to increasingly desperate, illegitimate and ultimately illegal methods of trying to undermine that very power which was building and consolidating socialism. If you conspire with enemies of the Soviet state to bring about a coup d’état, install a ‘coalition government’ of rightists, Mensheviks and capitalists, to open up and dismember the USSR between the Axis powers, then frankly you deserve to receive the most severe punishment.

Yes, Lenin did refer to the dictatorship of the proletariat as “absolutely unrestricted by any rules whatever, and based directly on force”, and was right to do so, most effectively in The proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky.

Tony never acknowledges this was written during the Russian civil war when 14 allied powers were attempting, in Churchill’s lovely words, “to crush the Bolshevik baby in its cradle” - both through direct military force and via the reactionary resistance of the overthrown landlord, monarchist and capitalist classes within Russia. The Bolshevik regime, the working class power, was fighting for its life. Had reaction won, the death and destruction which would have been wreaked by the revanchist forces would have made the massacres after the defeat of the Paris Commune look like the proverbial vicar’s tea party. But, for Tony, defending working class power is ‘dictatorship’ and therefore bad.

How can a sovereign power be constrained by any laws or rules? That makes no sense. The sovereign power makes the laws or rules and therefore cannot be constrained by any such. The proletariat, the working class, having established its sovereign power, its sovereign rule, is fully entitled, through the moral and material forces of history, to defend that rule against (almost) inevitable attempts of the overthrown classes turn back the clock, restore their rule and drown the revolution in blood.

That is where the ‘dictatorship’ element comes in - the threat, deterrent or actual use of force to suppress attempts by the overthrown classes to restore their rule. This exercise of ‘dictatorship’ is what enables the majority class to exercise its political and economic rule, to exercise its sovereignty and its will: the rule of the majority, a genuinely true democracy. The two apparently opposite concepts of ‘democracy’ and ‘dictatorship’ are in fact dialectically united through the concept of class, and the basic question of which class rules. That is why I say Tony has a completely non-class approach to this question.

Finally, I do not question that there is an increasing energy and climate crisis. That is completely obvious, as is the fact oil is a finite and probably diminishing resource. What I emphatically reject is Tony’s unique (uniquely wrong) notion that capitalism is completely dependent on cheap oil and that when oil runs out, as it will, capitalism is somehow doomed. No, capitalism is perfectly capable of revolutionising itself and developing new and alternative forms of energy. Capitalism will either be overthrown and superseded by the working classes and peoples of this world, or it may well destroy the planet we live on. But we can be pretty sure it will not grind to a halt simply because it has run out of oil.

Andrew Northall
Kettering

Prison rights

Readers may remember that I have been corresponding with a prisoner interested in Marxism. Unfortunately for him, he has been relocated to Woodhill prison. Comrades who read The Guardian will have seen the article some weeks ago which described Woodhill as one of the worst prisons for the conditions of inmates.

Our friend wanted to have lessons in both English and maths, so that he can take exams, possibly working towards a degree (his written English is excellent). He said the following: “You’ll be unsurprised to learn that I have been stonewalled yet again by the retrogressive surrogate for common sense … It was said by the education department that I was too proficient for their maths class and that I was studying more towards an academic level.” Therefore, he was not allowed to attend the class. He goes on: “How they came to this conclusion evades me … because of staff shortages they did not have the time to evaluate me.”

There were only five people in the maths class and the same was true of the English class. Out of 500 inmates, he says, there are just five spaces for students in English, and only one learning level (he was refused permission for the English class as well). Apparently there are several civilian staff employed, but few are used for teaching, since only 10 students are being taught at any one time.

Other information he gives is that letters take one month to be received by him. The prison has decided that, in order to decrease drugs being smuggled in on ink blots or pencil, all letters will be photocopied and only the photocopies given to the prisoner!

There are serious staff shortages in the prison, and there is a high level of violence. He explains: “I’m just one of thousands who have been in my cell 23+ hours a day for over two years ... Just about everything that is done by the establishment is done for control. Control at all costs, contrary to any human rights.”

He goes on: “They won’t allow me to have anything else sent either - books, etc.” Comrades may remember the attempt in 2014 to forbid prisoners from being sent books - such a ban was legally challenged, and it was ruled unlawful!

Part of the problem with not being able to receive books or attend classes is that this will affect his chances of parole: “Parole from Woodhill is questionable,” he writes. The parole board is heavily influenced by what the prison administration writes about inmates in reports - reports that are not disclosed to prisoners.

Nevertheless, he asserts: “I find that writing resurrects my spirit and allows me to flourish mentally … And, although my life may appear to be pitiful and concreted in criminality, I do have a desire to change that and to inspire others to do the same.”

So, of course, we will keep on supporting and writing to him.

Gaby Rubin
London

Cancel visit

It was recently announced that Yoon Suk-yeol, the puppet fascist ruler of south Korea, has been invited to visit Britain in November.

Yoon is not welcome in Britain! Yoon is a new Hitler and a war maniac. The visit will be at the expense of the British taxpayer and is a complete waste of money. South Korea is not an independent country, but a fake country - a colony of the US. It is also becoming increasingly dependent on Japan. Of all the puppet rulers of south Korea, Yoon is the worst ever. He is an extreme, Yankee-loving sycophant, who sang the song ‘American pie’ in front of the Yankee imperialist war boss, Biden. Yoon is also kowtowing and grovelling to the Japanese imperialists, the sworn enemy of the Korean nation.

Yoon is a millionaire several times over and is exploiting the south Korea people. He has declared the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and its Korean People’s Army as the principal enemies of south Korea. He is scheming to carry out an attack on People’s Korea in cooperation with the US and Japanese imperialists. Yoon has formed the so-called ‘Nuclear Consultative Group’ with the US and is planning to have US nuclear submarines permanently deployed in south Korea.

Yoon has reduced inter-Korean relations to nothing and is bringing the outbreak of a second Korean war and a nuclear war closer. Domestically he is reducing living standards and also repressing the trade unions, as well as pro-reunification patriots and followers of the Juche idea.

By inviting Yoon, the British authorities are dragging Britain into a possible conflict on the Korean peninsula. In the interests of peace the visit should be cancelled! The Korean Friendship Association (KFA) of the UK plans to organise protests against Yoon’s visit. We hope that the broader labour and peace movement will support these.

Instead of the old ‘Good luck with that‘ or ‘Oh, that’s the KFA - don’t go there’ attitude, the British left and progressives should give active support to KFA UK’s campaigning against the south Korean puppet fascist regime!

Dermot Hudson
Korean Friendship Association

Abolish Ofcom

The home secretary being interviewed by a deputy chairman of her party is not journalism. But, whatever disagreements we may have with Lisa McKenzie, Aaron Bastani, Paul Embery or James Schneider, we are not holding our breath for any of them to appear on the BBC or Sky. Between 60% and 80% of the electorate, depending on the issue, supports an active industrial strategy, renationalisation of the rail service, renationalisation of the utilities, renationalisation of Royal Mail, and much more besides. The domestic policy touchstone of centrism is NHS privatisation, public support for which is negligible. Yet try telling any of this to any broadcaster apart from GB News.

Left and right should be united to demand the abolition of Ofcom, along with all the other uniparty enforcement agencies, such as the Equality and Human Rights Commission. “We have never had propaganda channels”? Is that supposed to be a joke? No, these people are so biased that their prejudices are invisible from within their utterly closed subculture. They really do think that everyone is like them. In reality, almost no‑one is.

David Lindsay
Lanchester