Letters

Minimum muddle

Mike Macnair in his article, ‘Minimal symmetrical errors’ (May 23), provided what I previously described as “a highly novel interpretation” of the role and purpose of the “minimum programme” (Letters, June 6), when he stated: “The minimum programme is a programme for working class rule right now” - ie, can only be implemented through working class rule.

Surely we agree that “working class rule” can only come about as a result of a socialist proletarian revolution, so is not Macnair saying the minimum programme can only be implemented after a socialist revolution? I completely get that there is necessarily a long period after the socialist revolution and the establishment of working class power/rule before we, globally, arrive at full communism. Indeed I outlined three sets of factors which need to be overcome before we could possibly get there.

It is these very factors which comrades in the Socialist Party of Great Britain (Letters, May 30) completely ignore when they assume full socialism or full communism can be “immediately” established after a socialist majority has come to power, the state is “immediately” and completely abolished, we all have instant free access to goods and services, and working people have suddenly and comprehensively developed such a high level of social consciousness that they will freely work to produce those goods and services for the good of society.

But for Mike Macnair to state that the minimum programme can only be implemented through working class rule - ie, after the socialist revolution - was genuinely startling and contrary to most communists understanding of its role and purpose.

Jack Conrad in his article, ‘Programme makers’ (June 13, note 23), makes very clear that the minimum programme and minimum demands are part of strategy towards making the socialist revolution happen and be successful; they are minimum demands because “they are perfectly realisable this side of a socialist revolution”.

So we have Macnair, on the one hand, saying the minimum programme can only be implemented through working class rule: ie, after a socialist revolution. Conrad, on the other, (rightly) states it is an essential component of a strategy for socialist revolution - indeed many of its demands are “perfectly realisable” under capitalism. So, is it me in a ‘complete muddle’ or is it the Weekly Worker group, with its two leading (competing?) ideologues speaking with two contradictory voices?

I have to say Conrad’s interpretation of the role and purpose of the ‘minimum programme’ is far more in line with classical Marxism-Leninism than Macnair’s - although we tend nowadays to use the term ‘immediate demands’. However, Conrad in an attempt to score a point manages to add to the confusion even further. He claims I think that the demand for a people’s militia is a maximum demand (Do I? Did I say that?!) because it is in practice a revolutionary demand and will indeed be fully implemented after a socialist revolution - when the capitalist state’s armed forces, including the police, have been fully abolished and replaced by the people’s militia and the general arming and self-organisation of the working people.

This is now a pretty novel interpretation of the ‘maximum programme’ - this time from Conrad! And, of course, it conflicts directly with Macnair, who thinks it is the ‘minimum programme’ which is actually implemented with working class rule.

My understanding of the ‘maximum programme’ is that it is a programme - after the socialist revolution and the establishment of working class rule - for the implementation and development of full socialism and then full communism - to a point where the state, classes, money and all other remaining vestiges of capitalist and class divided society have ‘withered away or otherwise ceased to exist and/or exist only as bad memories.

Is the demand for a people’s militia part of the maximum programme? Well, it will almost certainly exist for a long time under the initial stages of working class rule (ie, socialism) and potentially towards fully developed socialism. It may well be still necessary as we start to approach the stages of full global communism. But surely, almost by definition, the need for its continued existence will decline and fade away as we approach such a state of full global communism. If it is still needed, then the complete conditions for full global communism are clearly not yet fully in place.

It seems to me the Weekly Worker group is trying too hard to prove it is not really infected with Trotskyism and is really ever so opposed to the ‘transitional programme’ and all the practices of the openly Trotskyist groups and sects that its own two leading ideologues have got themselves and their little group into a frightful muddle. Or is it that the Weekly Worker group has lost sight of what communists are actually trying to achieve - namely, the overthrow of capitalism through working class socialist revolution, the establishment of working class power and then the implementation and development, over time, of first full socialism and then full communism? It is not really that complicated, comrades!

Andrew Northall
Kettering

Maximum muddle

I don’t want to pre-empt Robin Cox and Adam Buick in their response to the issue of minimum and maximum, as discussed by Mike Macnair (Letters, June 13), but I will anyway.

The strategy of the SPGB is to gain a majority of people on their side before any radical changes take place - long before there is any radical change most people by definition will be on board with the changes that will have been democratically agreed upon. So there will be no need for “forced collectivisation” or forced anything. If there was to be anything forced, it wouldn’t follow on from anything the SPGB would be doing or advocating, as it would be antithetical to their beliefs.

The term used by Macnair, “petty-proprietor classes” (PPC) - composed of small businesses and small landowners (farmers, etc) - is relevant. In my view they may own a bit of capital or land, but they’re basically working class. In fact, they are probably the hardest working people in society. I know that it’s more to do with one’s relationship to the means of production that gives one their designated class, but I just think in today’s world the distinction between having to work for a living and relying on rent, interest and profit are muddied. I would think a large proportion of people gain some income from capital they own, even if it’s just renting a back room out to someone, or they have shares in Unilever, or whatever. What about premium bonds? Am I part of the capitalist class because I own them?

The PPC will be just as keen on societal change as any person firmly embedded within their working class designation. Yeah, Marx got it wrong. Just to reiterate, the ordinary small business owner and the farmer work damn hard. Why wouldn’t they embrace the prospect of a society where they could share in the total wealth? Why wouldn’t they desire a society organised in a far more rational way - cutting out all the non-productive jobs like advertising, to give one example, or banking to give another, that add nothing to people’s health, happiness and wellbeing? Why wouldn’t they want this transformation in society as much as those in the working class supposedly want it?

It’s suggested that the PPC have some truck with the system because of “various forms of subsidy and regulatory preference”. Maybe so, but it’s hardly going to consolidate their support of a system which is rapidly destroying their means of livelihood. Farmers and small businesses are barely surviving the latest disasters to hit the economy - whether it be austerity 2010 onwards, the pandemic, the banking crash of 2008, leaving the EU, spiralling energy costs ...

Most farmers I know need a second income to keep their farming enterprise up and running. Look at the high streets. They’re disappearing. Small businesses are going under at unprecedented levels. The PPC may at one time have been the bulwark of the capitalist system, but not any more - not when that system is bleeding them dry and actually conniving to destroy them. So the ‘maximum’ argument makes sense, in that a majority of people will have to desire it firstly and will democratically choose to go this way without the need for sections of society to be forced into anything.

I would foresee, if a majority of people did desire revolutionary change in the terms set out by the SPGB, that the substantial minority or the rest of the people wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to the same revolutionary aims, but would be sceptical about their achievement, that’s all. So actually a majority of people confident in desiring revolutionary change and knowing that it’s possible would be opposed by a substantial minority of people who, although agreeing with the revolutionary changes, would have some notion that ‘It will never happen’ or ‘They wouldn’t allow it to happen’. That’s how I see things. People won’t need to be won over to the merits of revolution, come the end phase of the struggle: they’ll just need to be reassured and filled with confidence that it will happen.

Saying this, I consider myself a sceptic in the sense that I’m not confident a majority of people will ever favour revolutionary change in the sense the SPGB sees it. The forces against it are so strong. None more so than technologies to produce externally generated frequencies that have been developing since at least the 1950s, which can plant thoughts and perceptions in the minds of people (see the work of Neil Sanders, to give but one). At some point we may not even know if what we are thinking are our own thoughts or someone else’s! That’s what we are up against.

We can all play leftist party politics and enjoy expounding our revolutionary parlance, but the forces against any meaningful progressive change in society are vast and neither democratic centralism, vanguardism, Stalinism or ventriloquism will play any part in achieving a kind of freedom, if our very thoughts are maliciously manipulated in the method just outlined.

Louis Shawcross
County Down

Labour muddle

I would like to comment on the report of the recent CPGB aggregate (‘Focusing our commitment’, June 13). My view is that after July 4 there will be a crisis within all leftwing organisations and sects. This will allow the CPGB to intervene on many fronts and enable it to grow substantially.

In 2011 François Hollande led the French Socialist Party to a landslide victory. The result was that working class people en masse rejected the Socialist Party to such an extent that it now gets just five percent in elections. The same collapse in support amongst working class people in Britain for Starmer’s Labour Party will occur very rapidly. However, there will be no upsurge in the number of strikes under Labour. What is likely is that, as in France, the working class will swing to the right and support Nigel Farage’s Reform Party and its takeover of the Tory Party.

As in France, where working class young people who don’t go to university now support Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, there will be mass support from non-graduates for Reform, especially as it seems highly likely that Nigel Farage will become the MP for Clacton. It must be pointed out that Clacton includes Jaywick, which is the poorest area in Britain, with 57% of residents receiving state benefits. Farage has spent most of 2024 observing how Donald Trump took control of the Republican Party and he plans to do the same with the Tory Party, Hence the article in Socialist Worker headlined ‘Farage is no friend of the Tories - yet!’

I am now an ex-member of the Green Party - I recently cancelled my membership direct debit. I did this for two reasons - One, after reading a Workers Hammer article criticising the Greens, and two, after the Workers Party put up a candidate for July 4 in the constituency where I live. The CPGB is therefore right to call for left candidates from outside the Labour Party, and to warn that the Greens will support Starmer’s foreign policy, especially over Ukraine.

However, I believe that Jack Conrad and Mike Macnair are profoundly wrong when they continue to describe the Labour Party as a “bourgeois workers’ party”. Labour is now a party just like the Democrats in the USA. It is therefore wrong for the CPGB to call for a vote for Labour candidates, whereas at the same time it opposes any support for the Democrats as a “lesser evil”.

Jack and Mike may ask me when Labour became just another bourgeois party. Well, the rot started with Tony Blair and his renaming of Labour as New Labour following the abolition of the Fabian-inspired clause four, part four in 1994. Dialectically a gradual change has happened over the last 30 years following the name change to New Labour. Now under Starmer a qualitative change has taken place.

Jack and Mike use the description of Labour as a bourgeois workers’ party that can only work because they see politics in a cycle and that one day in the distant future the Labour Party will swing to the left. However, the ruling class had a major heart attack under the Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party. Never again will the ruling class allow the Labour Party to swing to the left. Hence the complete rout of the left in the Labour Party, including the shutting down of all avenues for democratic change within the party.

Jack and Mike point to Labour’s trade union link. However, this is a red-herring. The trade union bureaucracy in the US gives the Democrats $250 million each presidential election year, but has no influence. The result is that working class trade union members go over to support the Republicans. The trade union bureaucrats both in the US and Britain are the labour lieutenants of capital and are now part of the capitalist fourth estate. One just has to read David North’s ground-breaking pamphlet on the subject as published by the International Committee of the Fourth International in 1993.

As Workers Hammer points out, calling for a vote for Labour is to cross class lines and is a vote for a party of big business, as evidenced by the recent letter supporting Starmer’s Labour Party by 120 leading business people. Communists who called for a Labour vote will have their reputation severely tarnished by the inability of Starmer’s Labour government to solve the urgent problems faced by working class people.

John Smithee
Cambridgeshire

Con-Reform

Just a short note on Jack Conrad’s article about needing a programme. I think what’s much more interesting is the lack of a programme by the Conservative Party, as every political party needs a programme of sorts, but they’ve never had one and didn’t think or even know they needed one - such was the worldwide power of the British state before 1947.

Programmes unite large and sometimes very different interests and that’s why they’re necessary. Without a programme and without an empire the Conservative Party may well vanish from history on July 4. Up to 50% of people in various polls that have been conducted said they don’t want them to get a single MP. Now 46% of their supporters want them to merge with the Reform Party, to be named perhaps Conservative Reform Party.

What this means for Britain is unclear, but in the meantime we will have the Labour Party back in government. They are bad enough to inspire a revolution - programme or no programme.

Elijah Traven
Hull

Different picture

Mike Macnair surely has a point about the British and American focus on the status of European colonies, as they planned the post-war world (‘Operation Imperial Overlord’, June 13). But he misses the big picture, when it comes to France. The suggestion that a western front might have been needed to secure West Germany from the Soviet Union understates the case.

The United States and Britain attempted to treat France as a perpetrator state and at one point planned to take her over, as they did Germany. They also, as the French North African territories were liberated, and the status of France needed resolution, tried to curate regimes combining Free French, Pétainist collaborators and assorted nobodies whom they happened to like. Both the eventual full recognition of the French government in exile as an Allied victor nation - after General de Gaulle’s refusal to accept any other status - and the Normandy landings were forced on them by facts on the ground in France.

If France had liberated herself, which she surely would have done, given time, help from overseas, and the collapse of the Nazi war effort on the eastern front, the post-war regime might easily have been either Stalinist or Tito-style socialist. De Gaulle saved the Anglo-Saxon allies from themselves by making possible a capitalist and democratic France, where, as in Italy, communists were tolerated, in part because of their war record of sacrifice and resistance, but held at arms length from power. The history of Europe in the second half of the 20th century might have been very different, had he not done so.

Jack William Grahl
email

Profound Gerry

Jack Conrad has taken more than 7,000 words to get to his real point: that, although the SWP rejects having any programme at all, Trotsky’s transitional programme (TP) was so bad that Trotskyists are as bad as him (‘Programme makers’, June 13). At least that is what I could understand from that very convoluted argument, which designates the Tony Cliff-led SWP as model Trotskyists to be exposed as charlatans.

Trotsky’s 1938 document, The death agony of capitalism and the tasks of the Fourth international, was just plain wrong, he assures us: “Events had, after all, beached Trotsky’s 1930s expectations. Stalinism did not collapse with the Nazi invasion. Nor was capitalism in its ‘death agony’. In fact, it was the Trotskyites who were spiralling into crisis. As Cliff wittily put it, guided by Trotsky’s 1938 transitional programme, they were like people trying to navigate the Paris metro using a London tube map.”

This passage speaks of a profound misunderstanding of the whole point of a revolutionary socialist programme. It presents the socialist revolutionary capture of state power as an objective process, independent of political leadership and intervention - in fact exactly what the old German Social Democratic maximum-minimum programme did and what Stalinists and centrists do today.

Outside of the brief period of a revolutionary situation - a few weeks or months at the most - the revolutionary party intervenes in the class struggle with transitional demands, using the transitional method of the workers’ united front to prepare the vanguard of the masses with its educational propaganda and the masses themselves with its agitational slogans; they are part of the subjective struggle for the ear of the masses, particularly its more seriously-thinking vanguard. The April theses for the vanguard, ‘Land, bread and peace’ for the masses - that is the usual example. This was elaborated first in the Third Congress of the Comintern in 1920; “The centrists want to divert the workers from the real, vital struggle for their immediate goals by holding out the hope that industrial forms can be taken over gradually, one by one, and that ‘systematic’ economic construction can then begin. The social democrats are thus retreating to their minimum programme, which now stands clearly revealed as a counterrevolutionary fraud.” Trotsky did not invent the TP in 1938: he merely elaborated it for that time.

Once the revolutionary situation arrives, which it did in September/October 1917, then bold action like the storming of the Winter Palace for the capture of state power is on the immediate agenda. The subjective factor of the revolutionary leadership then becomes a part of the objective forces of the revolution, whereas previously it was merely the subjective part of the preparation.

Of course, we know that Kamenev and Zinoviev, backed more cautiously by Stalin and others, opposed this, and went to the Menshevik press to stop what they regarded as a mad, ultra-left adventure. Had they succeeded, there would be no lack of serious historians today proving it was never possible in the first place - look at the number of troops surrounding Petersburg and Moscow who were still loyal to the Provisional government. It turned out they were not loyal at all - the period of dual power from March to October allowed the soviets to win them over, while the Petrograd soviet, under Trotsky’s leadership, succeeded in winning the allegiance of the ranks of that army.

Inspiration for the SWP/Cliff confusion-mongering clearly came from Leon Trotsky, Jack assures us. He goes on: “Here, the ‘transitional method’ is taken to the point where democratic questions, both in the workers’ movement and society at large, go ignored, along with the attitude towards the middle classes. The tasks of the workers’ movement are thereby reduced to trade union politics. As to the ‘final aim’ of working class rule, socialism and the transition to communism - that is, yes, left to spontaneity.” Anyone who has read the TP knows this is just nonsense - he’s hoping his readers won’t take the trouble to check it out.

Trotsky was not the new Nostradamus: he was not projecting a course of events that was inevitable, but a programme for the revolutionary party to put into practice to lead the revolution. Stalinism did not collapse, but in the same issue of the paper Mike Macnair gives us a potted version of the history of World War II and what happened on the eastern front; the siege of Leningrad, the Battle of Stalingrad, the break-out from Kursk, etc. But there is no political characterisation of the nature of this war: merely that Operation Overlord, the D-Day Landings, were not where Hitler’s Nazis were defeated in the main: that was indeed in the east and by the Red Army.

But this was totally different to the civil war fought by the Bolsheviks, which was a revolutionary onslaught against the forces of reaction and imperialist intervention. Stalin’s war was ‘the great patriotic war’ embracing the Orthodox church and glorifying the tsarist wars with no mention of the great heroic revolutionary tradition of the civil war. Stalin fought the war in this way to appease imperialism; both were dedicated to preventing revolution breaking out, as it did in 1917.

Jack quotes Tony Cliff: “The basic assumption behind Trotsky’s transitional demands was that the economic crisis was so deep that the struggle for even the smallest improvement in workers’ conditions would bring conflict with the capitalist system itself. When life disproved the assumption, the ground fell from beneath the programme.” Of course, when capitalism had stabilised itself after the war, because the Stalinists and the imperialists had formed their popular fronts to defeat the revolution and assassinate the revolutionaries, it was necessary to change the parts of the transitional programme that foresaw the coming crises. When the revolutionary opportunities that arose were crushed by the Stalinists in alliance with the imperialists - in Warsaw in alliance with the Nazis - then it was necessary to change that programme, whilst retaining the method. Infamously James Cannon in the US kept declaring that the war was not over in order to retain the bits that were now outdated and Gerry Healy maintained the revolutionary catastrophism in the cult that was the WRP, with the revolution always just around the corner.

The left split of Alan Thornett in 1974 reaffirmed the validity of the TP and method, despite the later degeneration of that group into Pabloism.

Gerry Downing
Socialist Fight

Dave Spart

Don’t worry, comrades. It will take more than defending a vote for Starmer’s Labour to ‘hammer’ the Spartacist League! (see Jack Conrad, Letters, May 30).

We would have been glad to attend the Communist University. The reason we can’t is that, given the election campaign, we had to rearrange the rest of our work and priorities for the whole summer, which leaves no comrades available in early August.

However, we would like to propose another debate in the autumn. We would suggest the theme, ‘How to build a new Communist Party’. This would allow for a broader and more fundamental debate on communist strategy in Britain and would get to the heart of our disagreements. Apart from benefiting our two organisations, it would also be of interest to the whole left.

We would insist this time on holding it in person (with live streaming, if you wish, for those who cannot attend). An in-person debate will facilitate discussion between ourselves and others who attend. Would a Saturday in October or November work for you?

Vincent David
Spartacist League

Bad influence

The founding conference of the Revolutionary Communist International has just ended and has been described by the organisers as a “resounding success” - an event of “world historic importance”. Whilst it is certainly true that the comrades grouped around this tendency should be congratulated for promoting communism and organising new layers, some habits die hard.

Alan Woods, who later described the conference as the most inspiring he has ever attended, ended his keynote speech with reference to the … “erm, what do they call it? Yes, the Weekly Worker.” In time-honoured tradition, Woods proceeded to write off the rest of the international Marxist left as sects on the fringes of the labour movement and a waste of time.

Readers of the Weekly Worker should though take heart in what can be seen as a back-handed compliment. It is without question that the claimed growth of the Revolutionary Communist Party/RCI is a good thing. However, parodies of what others say suggests a distinct unwillingness to admit that the rebrand operation is little more than a cynical marketing operation that relies on half-lies and lies.

In an age of instant communication, following the presumed infallibility of central bodies on all questions, the RCI seems likely to come a cropper sooner rather than later. A tension already exists within it. One foot is firmly stuck in the dull Labourite writings and statements of the past, while the other foot seeks out r‑r‑revolutionary pastures new.

Presumably, the apparatus running RCI worry about the free exploration of ideas. Ironically introducing Alan Woods, comrade Fred Weston explained how younger people access information and correctly identified their tendency to explore all avenues open to them. Hence, the concern that their youthful intake will be ‘corrupted’ by publications such as the Weekly Worker.

Paul Cooper
email