Letters

Party press

Mike Macnair’s contribution to Prometheus’s ‘What is the party?’ series was characteristically useful and thoughtful (‘What sort of party?’ November 21). However, I wanted to respond to his comments about the party press and online publications. There are important problems here, but Macnair does not get to the heart of the matter, and I worry that this reflects a more significant weakness in his outline of the party - specifically a neglect of the party’s organising functions and of its relationship to mass struggle.

Macnair’s claim that an online publication cannot be agenda-setting seems self-refuting - his own article was written as a response to a call-out by an online publication! And there are plenty of other examples - during the Corbyn years, online publications such as Novara Media or Skwawkbox at times had significant impact in setting the agenda for the left. Meanwhile, online rightwing publications, such as Guido Fawkes, have often had enormous effects on setting the agenda for mainstream media.

Macnair says the issue is that, unlike print media, online media “is not fully regular”, but this isn’t strictly true. The practicalities of print production obviously force you into a rhythm of periodic releases of larger bundles of content, and that can certainly help with agenda-setting, but it doesn’t have to be regular. Salvage and Notes From Below are both print publications that are not “fully regular”, operating with a more or less flexible schedule, depending on capacity, priorities, etc. Conversely, there is nothing to stop the editors of a purely online publication from operating a newspaper-style schedule if they thought that was appropriate (albeit there may be countervailing incentives, encouraging them to run a different schedule).

Probably it’s true that print media is generally better at or more naturally suited to agenda-setting, so perhaps this is a pedantic quibble, but I think there is some importance to the nuance.

However, there are much more significant problems in trying to use purely online publications to do the job of a party press, which Macnair doesn’t touch on in this article. Famously, in What is to be done? Lenin talks about the newspaper as a “collective organiser” and as “the scaffolding” used to build the party. This is the root of the infamous Trotskyist obsession with selling newspapers - something which is often treated as the butt of a joke, yet reflects one of the most profoundly consequential political insights of the 20th century.

The functions fulfilled by a national newspaper - and the work and forms of organisation involved in setting up and running it - synergise profoundly with the work of building a national party. You need significant collective organisation even to be able to afford the printing press, and you need to build up national networks, in local communities and connected across the country, to distribute the paper. Running the paper trains party members in basic organisational skills, while writing, reading and discussing the content of the paper helps to train them politically and intellectually. And the newspaper itself helps to communicate essential information, both practical and intellectual - not just to the masses, but also between party members. By building the newspaper, you build the party and, by building the party, you build the newspaper. And on top of all that, the whole operation is self-funding, because you can sell the newspaper for money!

Online publications, on the other hand, do not synergise with the work of building political organisations in anything like the same way that a national newspaper could. This is actually in part because online publications are too cheap, too convenient, too effective. One person on their laptop can act as their own personal party press, dictating their own personal party line, sometimes to an extremely large audience, and they can do this without even needing to get out of bed - let alone having to build a national organisation.

Even in cases where online media is used effectively to mobilise people into action, it often helps lead the organisers away from building real organisations. Why bother doing the work of building a more deeply rooted organisation with local branches and internal democracy if you’re able to mobilise hundreds or thousands of people with an Instagram page and some WhatsApp groups? Momentum’s degeneration into a glorified email list, rather than the kind of ‘party within a party’ which many of us had hoped for, is perhaps the most infamous example in Britain, but there are countless similar cases - it can affect everything from major national organisations to small community groups. Paolo Gerbaudo’s book on The digital party is worth reading here.

Perhaps the solution is simply to return to the newspaper, but there are obvious difficulties there. Certainly it will be much less effective than it was in the 20th century. Nowadays people are much more reluctant to spend money on a newspaper - why should they, when they have virtually free access to almost unlimited content online? Perhaps you then give away your newspaper for free instead, but then the model becomes a drain on funding, rather than a generator of it - self-funding was one of its key advantages.

Or perhaps it’s still possible to find configurations of digital media, or combinations of digital and print media, which are capable of effectively taking the place of the 20th century party newspaper, but it’s not something that’s easy to work out. The almost infinite variation of different possible models and combinations of different digital communications infrastructures makes it dizzyingly difficult to work out the optimal solution here. Certainly it’s not clear that anyone has yet found a good solution. The problem of what can replace the newspaper as ‘collective organiser’ remains perhaps the million dollar question for revolutionary socialists in the 21st century.

To take us back to our starting point, I fear that Macnair’s neglect of the role of the party press as a ‘collective organiser’ for the party reflects a neglect of the role of the party as an organiser for militants. He makes dismissive reference to “the common far-left idea of the party as coordinating ‘struggles’”, and his outline of the party seems to have little space for any direct involvement in or connection to mass struggle. Readers may be forgiven for thinking, on the basis of Macnair’s article, that the party does nothing except engage in parliamentary politics and publish propaganda around a programme of policies it would enact in government.

I wonder if this stems from a more fundamental oversight in how Macnair defines the point of a party. This borders on a truism, but the most fundamental purpose of any political party is to achieve its political objectives (ie, for a Communist Party, communism!). It therefore must do whatever needs to be done in order to make it possible to achieve those objectives, and it must be capable of working out what needs to be done. Everything else flows from this.

While Macnair is correct to emphasise the importance of the political tasks he lists in the article, this is not an exhaustive list of the party’s important functions. Coordination across different struggles is certainly something that’s necessary for any successful revolution, and inevitably is something which the party would have a role in - since there are no other organisations capable of or interested in coordinating revolutionary struggle across all different fronts. Even just in terms of propaganda, the Comintern defined ”participation in struggles by the trade union and political workers’ movement” as one of the three main forms of communist propaganda and agitation, and therefore as one of the most important tasks of a Communist Party and of its militants.

Perhaps this is merely a question of emphasis and of language, and that Macnair is just ‘bending the stick’ to counterbalance prevailing narratives, which neglect these more specifically political functions. But the relationship of the party to mass struggles outside of parliament is still essential - not just as a theoretical consideration for future party-building efforts, but also for our role now as propagandists, making the argument for the necessity of the party and the importance of political struggle.

While Macnair is correct that large sections of the left in Britain fetishise social struggles divorced from political struggle, these people are not going to be won over except by demonstrating the connection of the party and the political struggle to those social struggles, and by demonstrating the necessity of the party for fulfilling their potential.

Archie Woodrow
RS21

Secular Israel

Andy Hannah has a point in focusing on a contradiction in CPGB policy on Israel-Palestine (Letters November 7). He asks some important questions about socialist borders, Zionist settlements in the West Bank and what happens to the Palestinians.

Israel-Palestine is two nations in the territory from the river to the sea. Jack Conrad seems to agree (Letters November 14), but fails to mention the Israeli nation and differentiate from socialists who want to liquidate or destroy it. Jack should have mentioned again that he is not a liquidator of any nation. The issue at the heart of this is whether the two nations can find a peaceful coexistence with democracy and freedom. The best and most democratic answer is for two nations to coexist in a voluntary federal, secular republic.

Against this Jack proposes a maximum programme of socialism in the form of a pan-Arab socialist republic. He refuses or fails to address the question of the democratic republican minimum programme or does so only partially. He says: “In terms of immediate demands we would certainly say that Israel should cease seeding the West Bank with colonists and withdraw from all occupied territories: ie, Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights.”

If we add to this the end of the Zionist republic, the recognition of two nations (an Israeli, not Jewish, nation) and a rejection of the imperialist ‘two-state solution’, we have arrived at a democratic, secular, federal republic. Yet the failure or reluctance to fully embrace the democratic imperative leaves open the questions raised by Andy.

We should add the failure to recognise or defend the rights of Arab Israelis, who are discriminated against and oppressed by the Zionists and normally forgotten by everybody. If we accept the existence of an Israeli nation, then Arab Israelis must never be forgotten or ignored, and must be fully equal Israelis in a ‘non-racist, non-Zionist’, democratic Israel.

Jack asks Andy, “Does he agree that the slogans, ‘Down with the war’ and ‘the main enemy is at home’, are the right ones to use?” The answer is surely yes, but it needs qualification. ‘Down with the war’ between the Zionist state and the Palestinian people - certainly, but a real democratic peace between the Israeli and Palestinian nations, rather than simply a ceasefire, requires the replacement of the Zionist state by a democratic, secular Israel in a free association with the Palestinian nation.

This does not set the minimum democratic programme against a socialist maximum. The first leads towards the second or is transitional to it, rather than setting up an artificial left-communist position, with the maximum programme fighting against the minimum. In England, of course, the main enemy is the United Kingdom and what does the minimum republican programme have to say about that?

Steve Freeman
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Further right

Following three regional elections in September, the German ‘Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht’ (BSW) party has now agreed to participate in two regional governments, as a minority. In Thuringia, the BSW will govern with the social democratic SPD and the conservative CDU - the first ever so-called Brombeer Koalition (blackberry coalition). In Brandenburg, the BSW and the SPD have enough votes to go it alone.

In both federal states, Wagenknecht was clearly eager to show how ‘responsible’ she is, ahead of the early national general elections in February 2025, caused by the collapse of the German coalition government. The populist BSW has moved further to the right in record speed and Wagenknecht’s so-called ‘red lines’ have gone up in smoke. A mere month ago, she insisted that BSW government participation was dependent on coalition agreements that seek to use the states’ votes in the Bundesrat (the second German chamber) to oppose sanctions against Russia, the stationing of US medium-range weapons and arms exports. But the text agreed in Thuringia, for example, merely states: “We view the stationing [of US weapons] and use without German input critically.” And presumably we will do nothing to campaign against it.

Sanctions against Russia - a key reason driving up already high German energy prices - are not opposed in either contract. Instead, the BSW has agreed rules to help small businesses that are hit the hardest. Wagenknecht also dropped the BSW’s insistence that Covid sceptics (many of whom voted for the BSW) should no longer be on the official watchlist of the German spy agency.

In both states, there will be no blockade on the establishment of new arms companies. Previous demands by the BSW were removed from the agreements. In fact, the planned expansion of the Holzdorf air base in Brandenburg and the stationing of anti-aircraft missiles there remain entirely unaffected by the coalition agreement.

However, some of Wagenknecht’s promises did make it into the coalition agreement: Brandenburg will campaign at federal level for tax exemption for pensions under €2,000. And, the crowning glory: the future coalition also promises to campaign for the “containment, prevention and rejection of irregular migration”. This includes more border controls, accelerated asylum procedures and the strict implementation of the ‘Dublin 3 Agreement’ (which prohibits asylum-seekers from applying in more than one country of the European Union).

This almost makes you wish that the dire Die Linke party, from which Wagenknecht split earlier this year, was not going down the pan. But years of chasing government participation at all costs and keeping their mouths shut, when it comes to the Ukraine war, means that Die Linke will be very, very lucky to even get back into parliament on February 23. Many of the smaller opposition parties will not be able to run, because, with the early election call, they are unable to gather the required 2,000 signatories in each of the 16 federal states.

A truly dire choice for socialists in Germany.

Carla Roberts
email

Kevin tribute

Further to the recent tributes to Kevin Bean, can I add one more? This is the role Kevin played as a dedicated Marxist educator and organiser.

Kevin was an early member of the Merseyside and West Lancashire Socialist Theory Study Group. Initially this was based in the basement of Liverpool’s radical bookshop, News from Nowhere, but the group later moved to a room in Jack Jones House - the local Unite building. It went online under the impact of Covid in 2020.

Kevin attended meetings regularly. He quickly became a prominent leader, volunteering to introduce a series of study sessions about Marx’s writings on the 1848 revolution. Under his guidance, the group addressed the concept of permanent revolution and its relationship to actual political and social revolutions. We learned a lot from Kevin and the texts he selected for us to study.

In 2016, Kevin organised a meeting on Brexit, at which Jack Conrad and Sandy McBurney spoke, and in 2017 he was pivotal to the success of a day of talks and discussion to celebrate the centenary of the October Revolution in Russia. Hillel Ticktin spoke about its relevance to today’s world and Raquel Varela on the Portuguese revolution of 1974. These events took place in Liverpool’s Central Library. They were well attended, informative and lively.

Kevin’s legacy as a Marxist educator and organiser live on in recordings of the talks he gave for the Why Marx? initiative. His delight in sharing his knowledge of the history of struggle for working class emancipation and his thoughtful contribution to establishing the classless, stateless, moneyless society of the future will not be forgotten.

Paul B Smith
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