Letters

RDG sophistry

Dave Craig’s insistence that I am a secret admirer of the ‘official communist’/Menshevik theory of the bourgeois democratic revolution is becoming rather tiresome.

Now he says (Weekly Worker letters, June 20) that I have invented a ‘new’ theory just to cover up my true, secretly held beliefs. Why can’t he take what I am saying at face value, instead of trying to ‘catch me out’ with trick questions? How can he expect me to specify for which particular countries I think the democratic revolution should apply, when I have repeatedly made it plain that I am strongly opposed to both the bourgeois democratic theory and the Revolutionary Democratic Group’s equally stageist version?

I stand for the democratic socialist revolution in every country, because the fight for democracy and against capitalism - its state, constitution and economy - is one and the same. This appears to be borne out by the RDG’s own theory, which also states that there is a democratic deficit in every capitalist country. It is still present in post-apartheid South Africa, just as it would be in a republican Britain with separate “parliaments” for Wales and Scotland.

In this context Peter May (Weekly Worker June 20) has misunderstood me when I pointed to the “countless examples of stable bourgeois republics”. I know that the RDG comrades are not interested in bourgeois stability, so I am puzzled as to why they think that the replacement of the constitutional monarchy by a bourgeois republic would necessarily clear the way for socialist revolution.

The RDG states that there must be distinct stages separating the democratic and anti-capitalist elements. Yet, according to Dave, while the Stalinist theory holds that the democratic and socialist revolutions are “different and separate”, the RDG maintains they are “different but connected”. That is just sophistry. In fact, both theories in their own way say that the two revolutions are ‘different and separate, but connected’.

I agree with Peter May that political power cannot be seized at the point of production. But political power in one country - that is, without the spread of the world revolution - will not do us much good in the long run if we cannot use it to appropriate the capitalist power at the point of production. To do so would leave us in control of a small, unworkable part of the transnational whole.

If, on the other hand, the working class, having seized state power, allowed private ownership of industry to continue, then every new democratic institution would soon be undermined by the overriding need to maintain the capitalists’ profit. In this sense they would retain “real power”.

Peter Manson
South London

The Fall

Eric Hobsbawm volunteered his services last weekto the Labour Party (The Guardian, June 20), so that he could tell the truth “which its leaders dare no admit in public before the election”. In so doing Hobsbawm has committed to print a piece of nasty doggerel. Witt important books on empire, nationalism and revolution behind him, how on earth has he ended up writing this?

“Except for a few palaeolithic sectarian survivals, everyone agrees that the future of the European left lies in centre left governments finding a viable mix of private and public interests. If anything, left intellectuals are keener on an alliance, perhaps a coalition with the Liberal Democrats ...”

By using the word palaeolithic, of course, Hobsbawm means to imply that communism is dead - a fossil from the stone age. But he has not considered the palaeolithic age as a period of massive development that saw the emergence and domination of a new type of animal - man. Can fossils be half baked?

Pierre Bourdieu’s book, Homo academicus, perfectly describes the world Hobsbawm lives in and the type of person he has become. Ensconced in comfortable, well ordered surroundings, shielded from an outside world that seems more and more chaotic, yet with all the inducements and encouragement to believe one is an important left intellectual, when all one is in fact is a pink poodle owned by the state.

Hobsbawm yaps on:

“Our ‘tense, mistrustful, anxiety-haunted society’ (David Marquand) finds no adequate political expression. That is why so many of us cannot get rid of the fear that, whatever polls and probability, we could just lose.”

Doesn’t Hobsbawm realise that Marquand’s scaremongering, soundbite society does have adequate political expression - the Labour Party? He invites us to believe the proposition that:

“What separates Labour’s intellectuals from its political operators, is the sheer amount of self-censorship and non-truth telling which is imposed on any party believed capable of winning a general election.”

And that he, Marquand and Hutton - “loyal intellectuals of the left who are more keenly aware that people and politicians have parted company” - will fill this gap with the size of their brains. Because, “When the emperor is naked, someone has to say so.”

This stuff would be funny if it were not so serious. Eric Hobsbawm is trying to stymie any genuine radical historical or scientific analysis. To be a left intellectual, you must agree that “it is undeniable the left must fall back on pragmatic policies”. Try to break out of the white room of compromise and defeat and you suddenly become primitive, with all the dirt and mess around you that seems so tawdry compared to new Labour’s glossy image. Like Shakespeare’s sixth age of man, his view is too narrow for: “a world too wide for his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice, turning again toward childish treble, pipes and whistles in his sound.”

In our time and place seduction is often more effective than repression in creating systematic control – Hobsbawm has been seduced by capitalism. Tired and broken by years of trying to reconcile communism with the empirical, liberal demands of history within the social sciences - a neutered category in which the present is only present to serve the past – Hobsbawm cannot see the place he thinks he can fill under Tony Blair is not a gap but an inferno.

Paul Hart
Bristol

Crude justification

It is necessary to make a correction to my review of Mészáros’s Beyond Capital. Where Workers Power is mentioned, it should refer to Workers Press. I do not know what views Workers Power have concerning Mészáros’s work. Workers Press occasionally use it in a crude anti-intellectual manner, in order to justify their own form of economism and a connected refusal to oppose the reactionary role of the trade union bureaucracy. So, whilst paying lip service to the importance of Mészáros’s theoretical work, they also effectively reject the scientific content of his strategic perspective - the necessity to critically evaluate the national terrain of reformist trade union militancy.

With regards to my review, an additional point should also be made that Mészáros’s Beyond Capital is a worthy successor to Marx’s Capital. Its depth and scope exceeds the important contributions made to political economy by Hilferding, Luxemburg and Bukharin. Furthermore, Mészáros’s work represents a creative springboard to re-evaluate the history of the Left Opposition and in particular to gain new insights into the theoretical limitations of Trotsky’s critique of the theory of socialism in one country.

Throughout the 1920s Trotsky continued to view the USSR as the base, or centre, of world revolution, and so never fully recognised the objective significance of the global domination of capital over labour. For the international character of capital-labour relations means that it is an idealist illusion to assume there can be a national centre of proletarian revolution. Hence the Left Opposition, and the Fourth International, was theoretically limited by a form of particularist historical idealism which has an extremely detrimental effect in political terms.

My main criticism of Mészáros’s work concerns his views on philosophy. He carries out a brilliant critique of Hegel’s idealist philosophy of history, and shows how it conforms to the logic of capital. However, this outline of Hegel’s ideological limitations is combined with an effective dismissal of the importance of Hegel’s contribution to the development of dialectical logic.

Thus, in a one-sided positivist manner, the scientific practice of political economy becomes the primary criterion for evaluating philosophical trends, and thereby science replaces the distinctive role of philosophy. Yet Mészáros’s critique of Hegel and Luckacs’s idealist identity reasoning shares an affinity with Adorno’s brilliant dialectical materialist reconstruction of Hegel and Luckacs’s idealist dialectic in terms of the importance of contradiction and non-identity reasoning. Unfortunately Mészáros refuses to recognise this similarity because of his subjective dismissal of the philosophical importance of Adorno.

Phil Sharpe
Trotskyist Unity Group

Much to learn

In Turkey, political prisoners are continuing their hunger strikes, as previously reported in the Weekly Worker.The prisoners are from the Kurdish separatist PKK and the Turkish revolutionary left, and they are mainly protesting against the ‘May 6’ circular, which represents a further clampdown on the conditions of prisoners.

Not all the hunger strikers have been consistently abstaining from food since the strikes began on May 19. The Turkish state is eminently capable of letting its political prisoners die en masse. Back in 1984, three prisoners from Dev Sol - a Turkish revolutionary group - died on hunger strike, along with a prisoner from another organisation. Regardless of this, some of the strikers have now gone 40 days or more without food.

Some members of Dev Sol’s successor organisation, the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Front (DHKC) also went on hunger strike in London to show solidarity with their imprisoned comrades. The DHKC was joined by members of the MLKP (Marxist-Leninist Communist Party), another Turkish organisation.

I actually spoke to one of the DHKC hunger strikers on June l4, a man who looked emaciated after just ten days. I asked how long the strike would last and he said it was “indefinite”. It was possible to go without food for such a period if you believed in what you are doing, he told me.

As it so happened, the DHKC supporters suspended their hunger strikes on June 22. I am glad that the hunger strikes have ended. But they left a deep impression on me. The hunger strikers I saw in London werein a different league from the normal run of British political activity. They had clearly been hardened in the fire of the Turkish state’s oppression. We have much to learn from them.

John Craig
Reading