Letters

Pathetic parody

I was very pleased to read Arthur Bough’s letter in the September 26 issue of the Weekly Worker and wish to contribute further “auto Trot” material.

It really is amazing that Lars T Lih proceeds with his ridiculous theses that the real leaders of the October Revolution were the Bolshevik rights (Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, Kalinin, Lunacharsky, etc), who opposed not only Lenin’s April theses, but the taking of power itself in October 1917, going to the capitalist press in an attempt to stop it. Lenin had no understanding of the relation of class forces on the ground, so Kamenev and Stalin had to edit his ‘Letters from afar’ and put him right on this when he returned on April 3.

It seems the version of history put forward by Trotsky, Trotskyists and the majority of capitalist academic historians is false, and Lars T is the only one who has discovered the truth (with Eric Blanc as a partial ally) that the rights were the real Bolsheviks and the lefts were a waste of time; Lenin was a cultish figure and Trotsky’s 1924 Lessons of October was a slander on the rights, those true Bolsheviks.

So please do not read Lessons of October, lest you might take the wrong lessons from that book and let us set ourselves on a programme that will ensure we will never again make such a monumental error like the October 1917 revolution. There is no other conclusion we can draw from the outright falsification of the history of the Bolsheviks in 1917, to which ignoble task Lars T has dedicated himself for something like a decade. I have answered him many times, but it is impossible to remain silent in the face of this 22,000-word supplement on September 19.

Let us take Lenin’s words in Pravda No26 (April 7 1917). He was for the immediate convocation of a party congress and the alteration of the party programme, mainly: (1) on the question of imperialism and the imperialist war; (2) on “our attitude towards the state and our demand for a ‘commune state’”; (3) the amendment of “our out-of-date minimum programme”. He was also for a change of the party’s name. His footnote 3 says: “Instead of ‘Social Democracy’, whose official leaders throughout the world have betrayed socialism and deserted to the bourgeoisie (the ‘defencists’ and the vacillating ‘Kautskyites’), we must call ourselves the Communist Party.”

Lenin presented his theses on April 4 first to a gathering of Social Democrats and later to a Bolshevik committee, both of which immediately rejected them. Pravda published them, but carefully noted that they were Lenin’s personal ideas. He got a hot reception from some Bolsheviks; Alexander Bogdanov called out that his speech was the “delusion of a lunatic”. Joseph Goldenberg, a former member of the Bolshevik central committee also denounced him: “Everything we have just heard is a complete repudiation of the entire Social Democratic doctrine, of the whole theory of scientific Marxism. We have just heard a clear and unequivocal declaration for anarchism. Its herald, the heir of Bakunin, is Lenin. Lenin, the Marxist, Lenin, the leader of our fighting Social Democratic Party, is no more. A new Lenin is born: Lenin, the anarchist” (David Shub Lenin, 1948, p203).

The Pravda editorial contained Lenin’s sister, Maria Ulyanova, Aleksandra Kollontai and his wife, Krupskaya; even they did not support him on this in the beginning: “No prominent Bolshevik leader supported his call to revolution, and the editorial board of Pravda took the extraordinary step of dissociating themselves and the party from Lenin’s proposals. Nadezhda Krupskaya concluded: “I am afraid it looks as if Lenin has gone crazy” (Slavoj Žižek, quoting Lenin by Hélène Carrère d’Encausse in the London Review of Books). History correctly records that Lenin won that argument by appealing to the second ranks and particularly to the Bolsheviks on the Petrograd soviet.

Lenin was definitely convinced that things in the Bolshevik Party needed changing. Pravda under Shliapnikov and Molotov was absolutely anti-war, but the line was immediately changed in mid-March to support for the war and the Provisional government: “Under Kamenev’s and Stalin’s influence, Pravda took a conciliatory tone towards the Provisional Government - “insofar as it struggles against reaction or counterrevolution” (Stalin) - and called for a unification conference with the internationalist wing of the Mensheviks.

According to EH Carr (The Bolshevik revolution London 1950), on March 15 Kamenev supported the war effort: “When army faces army, it would be the most insane policy to suggest to one of those armies to lay down its arms and go home. This would not be a policy of peace, but a policy of slavery, which would be rejected with disgust by a free people.” On March 16 Stalin wrote “The slogan, ‘Down with the war’ is useless.”

Among crucial phrases censored out of Lenin’s ‘Letters from afar’ was his charge that “those who advocate that the workers’ support the new government in the interests of the struggle against tsarist reaction … are traitors to the workers, traitors to the cause of the proletariat [and] the cause of freedom.”

In 1949 Stalin allowed the publication of Lenin’s ‘Letter on tactics’ (written between April 8 and 13 1917, but not translated into English until 1964). Here we find the arguments against old Bolshevism, Lenin’s central target in his April theses:

“The person who now speaks only of a ‘revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ is behind the times. Consequently, he has in effect gone over to the petty bourgeoisie against the proletarian class struggle. That person should be consigned to the archive of ‘Bolshevik’ pre-revolutionary antiques (it may be called the archive of ‘old Bolsheviks’).”

He finished his piece with an unambiguous attack on Kamenev (Stalin had somewhat backpedalled by then and had nothing of substance to say again until he saw Lenin in his final stages in 1923):

“It seems to me that these words betray a completely erroneous estimate of the situation. Comrade Kamenev contraposes to a ‘party of the masses’ a ‘group of propagandists’. But the ‘masses’ have now succumbed to the craze of ‘revolutionary’ defencism. Is it not more becoming for internationalists at this moment to show that they can resist ‘mass’ intoxication rather than to ‘wish to remain’ with the masses - ie, to succumb to the general epidemic? Have we not seen how in all the belligerent countries of Europe the chauvinists tried to justify themselves on the grounds that they wished to ‘remain with the masses’? Must we not be able to remain for a time in the minority against the ‘mass’ intoxication? Is it not the work of the propagandists at the present moment that forms the key point for disentangling the proletarian line from the defencist and petty-bourgeois ‘mass’ intoxication? It was this fusion of the masses, proletarian and non-proletarian, regardless of class differences within the masses, that formed one of the conditions for the defencist epidemic. To speak contemptuously of a ‘group of propagandists’ advocating a proletarian line does not seem to be very becoming.”

Lenin himself accused Kamenev and Zinoviev of treason four days after the successful revolution on October 25 (they had leaked the plans for the uprising to the capitalist press):

“And now, at such a moment, when we are in power, we are faced with a split. Zinoviev and Kamenev say that we will not seize power [in the entire country]. I am in no mood to listen to this calmly. I view this as treason. What do they want? Do they want to plunge us into [spontaneous] knife-play? Only the proletariat is able to lead the country.

“It is not easy to discover an explanation for such shameful vacillations of the comrades Zinoviev and Kamenev. The revolutionary party has no right to tolerate vacillations in such a serious question, as this little pair of comrades, who have scattered their principles to the winds, might cause a certain confusion of mind. It is necessary to analyse their arguments, to expose their vacillations, to show how shameful they are … They say, ‘We have no majority among the people, and without this condition the uprising is hopeless …’

“Men capable of saying this are either distorters of the truth or pedants, who at all events, without taking the least account of the real circumstances of the revolution, wish to secure an advance guarantee that the Bolshevik Party has received throughout the whole country no more nor less than one-half of the votes plus one. Such a guaranteed history has never proffered and is absolutely in no position to proffer in any revolution. To advance such a demand means to mock one’s audience and is nothing but a cover to hide one’s own flight from reality.”

I think everyone must acknowledge this is Lenin in his best fighting revolutionary form handing out a merciless ear-bashing to the rights, whom Lars T Lih would like to try to persuade us were the real heroes of the Russian Revolutions. It is clear that Lenin and Trotsky led that revolutionary struggle and not Lars T’s pathetic conciliators.

Gerry Downing
Socialist Fight

Unbalanced

I agree with Tony Clark (Letters, September 19) that we should take a balanced approach to all leading figures in the world communist movement. The exact balance sheet of positives and negatives for each should be a matter of legitimate discussion, debate and judgement.

Tony is mistaken, however, to claim that “in Khrushchev’s view, Stalin was all bad”. On the contrary, Khrushchev regarded Stalin as a highly complex and contradictory character (much as he was himself), with both immense positives and immense negatives.

Very brief examples from Khrushchev’s memoirs (translated from Russian): “We no longer looked on him as we had when ‘enemies of the people’ were first being unmasked, when it seemed he could see through iron and stone ... But, after smashing Hitler’s forces, he still had an aura of glory and genius about him … he remained a Marxist … did everything in his power for the victory of the working class .... I have to give him his due … everyone who knew Stalin admired this gift and was therefore proud to work with him ... Especially when he was sober and in sound mind, he gave the people around him good advice and instruction. I’ll say it straight: I valued him highly and strongly respected him.”

Of course, many criticise Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ (with the hindsight of 70 years) to the closed session of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956 as being partial and inadequate, indeed - seeking to cover up his own complicity in the events and the excesses of 1937-38. But it was nonetheless monumental, extraordinary, devastating and transformative in its own right. It was very far from certain that Khrushchev would ever have become Soviet leader, that he would ever make such a speech, or that he would survive the negative consequences of making it.

In my opinion, among Khrushchev’s own achievements were: the removal and elimination of Beria; the restoration of the leading role of the Communist Party in the Soviet state and society (Khrushchev was senior secretary and then first secretary from September 1953); the effective launch of deStalinisation; the restoration of full socialist legality; the replacement of one-man rule by a collective leadership; and, as he said himself, the removal of conservative opponents from the leadership between 1955 and 1957, without their subsequent liquidation. Khrushchev’s own peaceful removal from office in 1964 was itself testament to those achievements.

I agreed at the time and still agree with Monty Johnstone in his March 1985 Marxism Today article, when he said: “Stalinism had been undermined by its very success in carrying through a major industrial and cultural revolution. The needs and aspirations of a great industrial state with an expanding planned economy, an increasingly educated population and an avowed commitment to Marxism conflicted with [Stalinist rule].

“A more realistic appraisal was publicly made of the lag in Soviet industry, and particularly agriculture, in comparison with the west. Steps were taken to stimulate more initiative from below. A much greater emphasis was placed on the production of consumer goods, and very important material concessions were made to the peasantry.”

I think this shows both the materialist conception and dialectics of history in operation: the underlying progressive material and economic factors impacting on the growing cultural, educational and aspirational needs and wants of the Soviet population; and the role of the extraordinary individual - in this case Khrushchev. What may have been effective and appropriate in the 1930s and 40s was no longer so in the 1950s and 60s.

It fell to the Gorbachev leadership in the mid-1980s very late in the day (too late?) to try and complete the stalled process of deStalinisation and launch a comprehensive and wholesale process of democratisation, renewal and revitalisation of the Soviet economy and society, taking full advantage of the scientific and technological revolution, which would influence the coming 21st century.

Gorbachev, despite the radicalism of his thinking and political, economic and social programme, also made a very careful and balanced assessment of the very tremendous achievements of Soviet society under both Stalin and Khrushchev, the positive political and personal qualities of both individual leaders, as well as a trenchant critique of their negative aspects. (Read, for example, his address on the 70th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution.)

So, I would argue in response to Tony, it is completely core and basic to the mainstream communist tradition to take a fully rounded, balanced and dialectical view and assessment of our collective history, and indeed of the conditions, prospects and options for socialist revolutions in the advanced capitalist countries.

Andrew Northall
Kettering

Kimist Stalinism

Tony Clark writes: “For a long time, most of the communist movement have based themselves on an anti-dialectical view of the past, with the partial exception of the leadership of the Communist Party of China under Mao, following Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin back in 1956.”

To be charitable, this is a very oversimplified view, which ignores certain key facts. In fact Khrushchev’s attack on JV Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was not just opposed by the CPC, but also by the Workers Party of Korea under the leadership of president Kim Il Sung and, to be fair, also Albania and a number of non-ruling communist parties. In fact probably the bulk of the international communist movement did not accept the denunciation of Stalin - it was only supported by those parties under the control of the CPSU and those parties in Europe and elsewhere that were beginning to show signs of liberalism and right deviationism.

Delving deep into the matter, we find that in fact the CPC actually initially accepted the line of the 20th Congress of the CPSU but later switched to opposition. Enver Hoxha and the Albanian Party of Labour also initially accepted the line of the 20th Congress, only to very vocally oppose it later. However, the Workers Party of Korea refused from day one to accept Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin. At the 3rd Congress of the WPK, held in April 1956, there was no mention of criticising Stalin.

Therefore it was not surprising that in August 1956 revisionist elements in the WPK, with the backing of outside forces, tried to overthrow the leadership of president Kim Il Sung. Of course, they failed because the Korean people were solidly behind him (some steelworkers even asked the president to send the factionalists to them so they could throw them in the furnace!) Two things were significant about this; firstly it was not just pro-Soviet factionalists involved, but also the pro-Chinese ‘Yanan’ faction; secondly, some of the factionalists ran away to the revisionist USSR and later after 1991 became open agents of the fascist south Korean puppet regime.

There needs to be a far greater appreciation of the anti-revisionist role played by the Workers Party of Korea.

Dermot Hudson
London

Psychobabble

On September 20 John Wedger said on the online Not the BCFM politics show: “If the white middle classes in this country knew the state of our young citizens of inner-city areas they would be horrified. They are borderline moronic, some of them. They can’t articulate. They’re ignorant. I cannot believe the ignorance of them. One of them the other day asked me what was Glasgow … and I told him it was a city in Scotland. And then he asked me, were there polar bears walking around the streets there? A grown man!”

When I heard him speak these words, I thought, how do we achieve socialism in these circumstances? How are we going to organise to create a better society? This is where the vanguard party comes into play - and predominantly Leninist thinking. The vanguard party practising ‘democratic’ centralism will lead the working classes to the promised land, as such.

But what if the vanguard party gets infiltrated and hijacked, as happens to so many movements? There was Roger Windsor of National Union of Mineworkers fame. Lenin himself was accused of being a German agent. Oops! Keir Starmer within the Labour Party - he once pretended to be a Jeremy Corbyn supporter. Mark Kennedy, aka Mark Stone, gained fame for infiltrating several protest groups, acting as an agent provocateur and simultaneously finding time to have sexual relationships with several women he knew, whilst pretending to be someone he wasn’t.

In a socialist society I believe we will have a better formal education, and overall education will be a continuous process from cradle to grave, in my opinion - in the sense that working people will have every opportunity to study and take time off without experiencing a decline in living standards and without voluntarily indebting themselves to a bank for life. But that’s after we achieve socialism.

My thoughts of a vanguard party lead me to thinking, ‘Why not embrace the idea of a benevolent dictator?’ We’ve just as much chance of success believing in a benevolent dictator. Who do we trust? Marx said it was the job of the working class to achieve socialism. But what if the working class are becoming increasingly moronic? On top of this we have artificial intelligence to contend with. It will be used maliciously against revolutionary movements, or I should say movements which on the face of it seem just to be formed to allow its members to pontificate political/revolutionary psychobabble to one another, as if it’s meaningful in any way.

As AI is not under democratic control by working class organisations, I shouldn’t think it will ever be used to better the conditions of life for working class people. It will be used to create a whole new industrial landscape with greater opportunities for profit accumulation.

I went to school for 12 years and met many a moron - not all of them teachers, I should point out. I went to school with some perpetrators of the Sean Graham bookmakers massacre (Belfast, 1992). So I know all about moronism. I’ve witnessed the most base of what humanity has to offer.

So how do we navigate ourselves out of this morass? I do have a soft spot for the Socialist Party of Great Britain (They’re probably thinking, ‘Just our luck to have a moron like him as a supporter!’). But really, to me this is the crucial question surrounding all revolutionary activism. How do we achieve a socialist society through peaceful means, through intellectual enquiry, through conscientious endeavour, through working within mass organisations, etc, etc, when a large proportion of the population are as good as moronic?

People may have the potential to become a Mozart or a Shakespeare, but what about the guy who didn’t know what Glasgow was?

Louis Shawcross
County Down

Seminal truth

Was I alone in recognising how last week’s article from Mike Macnair, and letters from Brünnhilde Olding and Arthur Bough, shared between them a simple but seminal truth: the fact that what is required of Marxism-Leninism/Trotskyism is to be inspirational, and within that provide attractive templates for successful party-building and proven programmes?

Bruno Kretzschmar
email

Fossil fool

With the high court decision to quash planning permission for the new mine, Woodhouse, near Whitehaven, we have seen the last bullet in a war which began in 1980. It has changed and widened its aims, as it went on and switched its flag from the Tories to Miliband’s and Starmer’s Labour.

It is the war against coal and its real target, the miners. At the risk of sounding like one of John Cleese’s black knights, determined to fight on minus arms and legs, we may yet stage a new beachhead. After all, over the last six years the various flat-earthists and friends of the Stone Age have thrown all kinds of legal hoops and barriers in the way, and we’ve cleared the lot. The simple fact being that this is a steel coal mine; its extract will go for coke. We still use steel made with coke/coal by the million tonnes.

This will be the first time we lost. I say ‘we’ not only because the National Union of Mineworkers were keen advocates of the mine, not simply because we had every indication that the NUM would be reborn at this mine, but because I gave evidence both at county council enquiries and the national independent enquiry held with every form of expert.

This time they hit on an obstruction for all seasons - the same magic puzzle which had dumbfounded the enquiry into the development of new oil reserves and stopped their development. Had all previous enquiries taken into account the emissions which would be made in the lifetime of the mine? Well, no, they had never raised that and, if they had, so what? It’s a question that is easily answered. But, because it had not been asked, we would have to start again - only this time with Miliband as the obsessive Joan of Arc anti carbon crusader in a highly hostile environment. The Labour government made it plain to the court that it did not want the mine and that it had no objections to the rejection of permission for its go-ahead. With West Cumbria Mining - which has invested £181million on 500 miners’ jobs and 2,000 associated ancillary jobs, not to mention the upgrade to the main Whitehaven-Carlisle railway line - must be wondering: is it really worth the effort? No doubt prospects at winning at least one million tonnes of rich coking coal per year seemed rewarding. This was so, even when ‘net zero’ had meant they only had 25 years before they packed it in.

So there is this insoluble question then: what is the point? Will the answer mean that because of all these emissions we will no longer use new steel, which is essential for virtually everything we use every day? That can be the only point of the question. Otherwise we find out the net worth of future emissions and either choose which has less - coal from Whitehaven or from Appalachia in the US? Coal tankered across the ocean, or else supplied from next door? A choice between unregulated strip mining, with no environmental safeguards, using the worst mining method yet devised, run by non-union firms? Or else heavily monitored, environmentally controlled production in an equal employer-union mine? That would be the point.

Unless we use the dreaded question just as a means to stop the Whitehaven mine, knowing all the while that coal for the coke will enter European blast furnaces from America, with emissions not recorded. Who will care that the plague of wind turbines, which will cover the British Isles, will have been made with a veritable fog of emissions, or indeed any of the hundreds of thousands of tonnes of steel we use every day, or steel products will have been made without the slightest enquiry or thought as to their environmental impact. The question was never meant to be asked of every producer - only British ones, because then we can say, ‘We’re net zero’. It won’t mean anything in fact, except unemployment for miners and steel makers here. We will still be causing the emissions, we still will be buying the produce of the emissions, but we will export the emissions abroad. You call that a victory?

Meantime a battlefront nearly as wide and of equal importance as the miners has opened up against the oil and gas rig workers. With manic determination, the aim is to run down and turn off all oil and gas in UK waters. The only country in the ‘Group of Seven’ to stop making its own steel is now determined to shut down oil and gas too. Needless to say, this is exactly the same fight as the miners’. We sit in bombed-out villages and towns, rotten with deprivation and unemployment, with dead-end jobs for the ex-miners, their kids and grandkids. The loss of jobs on the rigs, the refineries, and terminals, in transport and ancillary associated work has seen put conservatively at over two million. Will there be a wave of depression and hopelessness not seen since the 30s?

Even the TUC declared support for the workers resisting the closures. With the notable exceptions of the National Education Union and Unison, they voted at the TUC congress in favour of Unite and GMB resolutions and argued: ‘No ban without a plan’. No cutbacks and closures without some alternative work and social fallback for the workers. In the meantime the Socialist Workers Party distinguished itself by wheeling out two ex-miners, who declared that they wouldn’t be used in the cause of fossil-fuel capitalists wanting to pollute the world. Such hypocrisy, when we had demanded ‘Coal, not dole’, and insisted that all reserves which could be mined safely should be mined. We produced 180 million tonnes per year, and we wanted to carry on producing that.

Ah, but the workers were the flavour of the month then, and the roots of the class lay in industry. Not so now, and the SWP clearly feels more at home with the eco-warriors and the middle class than the sons and daughters of toil. Let me say, I’m proud to stand alongside gas and oil miners in this new battle front of deindustrialisation and the war to eliminate industry and the proletariat. We hear a lot about being on the right side of history. But it’s more important that we stand on the right side of the picket line and barricades - on the side of the working class - and history will take care of itself.

Dave Douglass
South Shields