Letters

SLP openness

I notice that the leadership of the Socialist Labour Party are happy to grant themselves rights they deny to the rank and file.

For instance, Brian Heron may well think that the British Road to Socialism contains an “immensely powerful” and “attractive” analysis (Capital and Class, No 59, p140). It is his right to think this and to publish his favourable impressions of the programme. I and thousands of other comrades on the other hand believe that the BRS is not worth the paper it is written on. Where can I openly express this view?

I spent a large part of my political life fighting the BRS and its corrosive influence in the Communist Party of the past. Now I have the same battle ahead of me as an SLP member. Fair enough. The struggles of the past often return to engage us in different forms. But will I - as an ordinary SLP member - be allowed to openly state my views in the pages of the publication of my choice? Can I write in Militant, the Weekly Worker, Capital and Class or any other journal of the workers’ movement that comrade Heron is spouting arrant nonsense; that the BRS is a deeply reformist document that must be buried still deeper, not resurrected?

Of course not. This would be branded as an act of ‘disloyalty’ by the leadership and punished accordingly.

Thank god for the Weekly Worker and its brilliant open fight for working class principle. It is the forum where BRS-reformism in its contemporary reincarnation can be fought and re-interred.

Daniel Wells
London

Ultimate expression

In response to Pete Manson’s article, ‘One and the same’ (Weekly Worker June 13), I would like to make a few brief comments. First, “real power” does not reside at the “point of production”, but in the state. The state is at bottom an armed force that ensures the legal forms which determine who has the right over the economic product: the owners of capital. Political power cannot be seized in the workplace. Secondly, if “economic issues ... provoke the strongest feelings against the ruling class”, then these are relevant in as much as they are expressed politically, and translated into democratic demands.

Thirdly, comrade Manson speaks of “countless examples of stable bourgeois republics”. The RDG is not interested in stability. When the bourgeosie recognises the need for reforms to its state and political systems, the working class must realise that power is a class question and put forward its own programme for change.

The questions of the future of the present bourgeois UK state, and its political system - the constitutional monarchy - are increasingly presenting themselves. The question of relations with other bourgeois states and the European Union is also intervening in the problem of bourgeois power. That these are living questions, and manifestations of bourgeois political crisis is nothing to do with the influence of communist/revolutionary socialists, nor directly, the power of the working class. These questions, nonetheless, present themselves, and affect the lives of the working class.

If communists have any real relevance, it must be in our ability to understand this political crisis for the capitalist class, and to work out and agree the tactics by which the working class can take advantage, exasperate and exploit the political instability in its own interests. The RDG does not believe in stages as necessary historical phenomena, but only as theoretical abstractions. We are supporters of the permanent, uninterrupted revolution. We believe in the historical necessity for proletarian revolutionary democracy to manifest itself as the ultimate expression for the democratic revolution, for the emancipation of humanity. The democratic revolution is pregnant with socialist revolution in the battle for democracy.

Stable bourgeois republics are not our aim. Please understand this, and please appreciate that the RDG is trying to make what contribution we can to the advancement of socialist theory.

Not knowing what will spark the British revolution is fair enough. But understanding what it is and what it means would surely represent an advance on all those who simply counterpose the ‘socialist revolution’ to any attempt to relate theory to concrete reality.

Sometimes I wonder if most of the people I’ve met on the revolutionary left have any serious belief in revolution as a potential reality at all.

Peter May
Oxon

Cover up

A brief reply to Peter Manson (Weekly Worker June 13) on the relationship between democratic and socialist revolution. I can identify three options:

1. Democratic and socialist revolutions are different and separate (Stalinist and stageism)
2. Democratic and socialist revolutions are different but connected (permanent revolution). In the RDG version the connection is the dictatorship of the proletariat
3. Democratic and socialist revolutions are “one and the same” (Peter Manson).

Let me suggest that this new theory, that the democratic revolution is the socialist revolution, has been invented by Peter to cover up his Stalinist/stageist theory.

Before investigating the problems of Peter’s new theory let me go back to the questions I asked before and which Peter avoided answering. Is democratic revolution the correct perspective for a)UK and USA; b)South Africa; c)Iran; d)Saudi Arabia?

The Stalinist theory predicts democratic revolutions for Iran and Saudi Arabia, but not for the UK, USA and South Africa because they are capitalist economies with bourgeois democracy. The RDG considers democratic revolution is appropriate to all these countries.

I would like Peter to explain with reference to the above (a-d) whether democratic revolution is an appropriate guide for the revolutionary programme?

Dave Craig
RDG

LRCI rival

In December 1995 Weekly Worker sponsored a debate on the LRCI crisis. More people attended that meeting than any Workers Power meeting, but not one WP supporter came. Despite all the letters published in the Weekly Worker, WP has never replied politically.

In April Workers News published José Villa’s ‘The fight inside the LRCI’ and another critique on Workers Power concerning regroupment. In Workers News (May-June) Workers Power had a one-page reply. Nevertheless it did not contain one single answer to any of the fundamental political points raised in Villa’s article. Weekly Worker readers can see that the only way in which WP reply to our political criticisms is dismissing our importance and with insults, distortions and character assassinations.

The LRCI said that they only suffered “a very minor split” constituted by “the defection of the Bolivian group and one member in Britain (there was no ‘Peru section’, nor has any Peru member left the LRCI)”.  This is another complete falsification. After the August 1995 congress the majority of the Austrian youth section and half of the biggest continental branch (Vienna) left the LRCI. In September the core of the New Zealand section and next all the Latin American members and supporters left. The LRCI lost five of its 24 full and alternate members of the International Executive Committee. It lost all its members in the third world and the great majority of its comrades that created industrial proletarian cells. The people around the splinter groups equal around one third of the actual LRCI membership. The Communist Workers Group in New Zealand manage to publish a regular monthly journal and Poder Obrero (Bolivia) a monthly paper.  The comrades in Britain have published five collections of documents. More of these have been sold than Trotskyist Bulletin (the LRCI journal). We are publishing number four of Guia, our Spanish journal. Two members left WP and, with other former members and supporters in Europe plus PO (Bolivia), PO (Peru) and CWG (New Zealand), we created a Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International (LCMRCI). The Austrian comrades have produced at least five books since their split, but they are not in the LCMRCI.

We have more Peruvian comrades in the LCMRCI than, for example, there are German, Irish or Australians inside the LRCI. When Keith Harvey of WP visited Peru for the first time, he wrote how surprised he was to see a group that, despite the repression, the huge poverty and 85% unemployment and under employment, was able to gather more than a dozen experienced comrades. For him the LRCI had in Peru its best section after Britain and Austria.

It is true that PO (Peru) entered a very difficult period after the 1992 Fujimori coup that produced a most severe defeat for the workers’ movement and the left in South America. Despite such a difficult situation, the Peruvian group became the vanguard of the opposition inside the LRCI. PO (Peru) was the first section which challenged the line of defending the freedoms and parliaments of the bourgeois forces inside the workers’ states. In 1992 the LRCI characterised the CP in Russia as a fascist party that it was not possible to defend against Yeltsin’s repression. One year later the LRCI advocated voting for the same CP. PO denounced the policy of united fronts with the clerical fascists in Algeria, the Serbian monarchists, and Yeltsin and the capitalist parties inside the USSR and the workers’ states.

One of the reasons we co-founded the LRCI was to create an organisation that would staunchly defend every workers’ state and semi-colony against imperialism. The London academic leaders broke with that principle. They advocated a pro-imperialist policy in Rwanda, Haiti and Yugoslavia.

Although they characterised Serbia as a workers’ state, they said that they advocated its defeat when Nato bombed it; they said that some imperialist military actions could have a “progressive” factor and that imperialists would do better if they sent warplanes, missiles, tanks and men to support its Bosnian puppets. The LRCI leaders took many bureaucratic actions and did all they could to demoralise the most oppositionist sections. Most of our comrades could not stay in an organisation with such rightwing positions. By mid-1995 all the Poder Obrero members and supporters considered that the LRCI leaders had capitulated to imperialism and we decided to reconstruct Poder Obrero outside the discipline of an organisation that did not allow us the right to fight for our positions inside it. Today the LRCI does not have anybody that supports its policies in Peru or Bolivia.

We are a very small nucleus (just as the LRCI is throughout the world). Nevertheless after the split our tiny circle is much healthier and we have now no less than three times more Peruvian members than when the LRCI was founded. The LRCI has made a lot of fuss about one Peruvian comrade who left our current. This person even now tells us that the LRCI sold out Bosnia and that he shares most of our positions. He has dropped out of politics.

Pedro Puka
Lima