Letters

Setting the record straight

We feel that it is important to reply to comrade Fischer’s points in last week’s ‘Party notes’ regarding Scotland. Party members and supporters need to be made aware of the type of work we are engaged in at this time and the context of our work, given comrade Fischer’s remarks.

It has been over two years since the national organiser visited Scotland. Such a meeting would clearly be beneficial as we attempt to clarify our tasks. We are part of an all-Britain party, but must recognise that Scotland is different in terms of its political development to other parts of Britain. The national question is of utmost importance here.

We feel that we have been left in isolation while the Party organisation at centre has, correctly, pursued its involvement with the SLP. At the same time however, it has not come to terms with the failure of the SLP to get off the ground north of the border. The SLP in Scotland is unfortunately, at this time, a meeting point for a tiny and disparate bunch who for one reason or another have been determined to ignore the Scottish Socialist Alliance (SSA) and its roots in the working class.

While comrades are always ready not just to accept but to welcome criticism of our work, that must surely go hand in hand with the leadership accepting criticism of their failure to give direction. If our articles for the paper have been “low level campaign news”, then this should have been conveyed to the comrades earlier. However, if comrades in England find the success of a school closures campaign at stopping £2 million-worth of cuts in Glasgow unnewsworthy, then we think they are wrong. The campaign was organised from the communities, without the support of the trade union bureaucracy and involved thousands of people in direct action. The Edinburgh Council were so afraid of the same thing happening that it ditched its plans. These developments were against Labour councils and have played a significant role throughout Scotland in breaking sections of the working class from the Labour Party. Low level campaigns - we think not.

Our focus on Dundee has been quite deliberate, as that is where many of our comrades are based. It is important to show people that we are working with them, and that their struggles have a wider significance and are reflected within the Weekly Worker.

The sharpness of our intervention within the SSA is an area that we are happy to give attention to. At SSA meetings, our contributions have always been sharp and distinct but we may not have reported them clearly enough for the Weekly Worker. Part of the reason for this has been that some comrades at the same time as working within the Alliance, were attempting to forge the embryonic SLP into something that it was unlikely to become in Scotland, given the history of how the Alliance evolved. Hence, comrades were working carefully and did not feel it appropriate to publicise every step along the way.

However, we take on board the NO’s criticisms here and feel that the debates within the SSA around the draft Charter for socialist change will allow cadre to act as a clear communist pole of attraction, as our ideas will contrast dramatically with those of opportunists and reformists alike (see report in Weekly Worker July 11).

We can assure comrade Fischer that there is nothing ‘cosy’ about putting forward a communist perspective on the national question or the electoral tactic in a room of 400 SSA members. It is necessary however, and comrades have not flinched from the task. Perhaps they need to blow their own trumpets a bit more.

Scottish comrades have strongly resisted any liquidationist trend within the Party and have continued to organise weekly CPGB meetings and made political interventions both locally and nationally. In no sense have we been submerged into any other organisation. We are not sure that this has always been the case with other sections of the Party.

We accept that a “deep critique” of our opponents in Scotland is necessary and this is currently being developed. We would go further and say that we need to develop our commitment to a federal republic and consider how the current political context in Scotland allows us to intervene more effectively in breaking a nationalist stranglehold on much of the left. This is however the duty of the whole party, not just those living in Scotland. The forthcoming Communist University, like all our schools, will of course, be a great opportunity to debate the way forward and for all comrades to “overcome these weaknesses”.

Scottish Committee CPGB

Dubious pleasure

I have recently had the dubious pleasure of being shown a copy of a duplicated circular entitled Revolutionary notes.

This document is unsigned and carries the name of no organisation. The author says that he has resorted to producing it after a long period of “utter frustration in dealing with the leftwing press”. He complains that his letters are mutilated or just ignored, but amazingly he cites the Weekly Worker as one of the main culprits (the other being Workers Press).

Even the occasional reader of the Weekly Worker will know that it publishes all sorts of hostile and critical letters and articles. The most notable recent example was the regular column of Open Polemic’s Bob Smith, whose contributions were often antagonistic in the extreme to the views of the Party majority and leadership. But comrade Smith’s faction had a right to have its views heard and not one word of what he wrote was ever cut. It is relevant to point out that he was very disciplined in keeping to the required length.

So whose letters have not been published in the Weekly Worker? I can think of one writer, some of whose contributions have been cut - and others not published at all. I am referring to a certain Paul Conlon, one time ‘Independent Communist’, whose style of writing, not to mention economistic politics, bears a remarkable similarity to that of the anonymous author of Revolutionary notes.

It is certainly true that we frequently have to cut letters for publication. Sometimes for reasons of security, more often because of the space available. Over the years many ‘works’ originating from the pen of comrade Conlon have appeared in our press: some have been interesting; others rather less so. Some of them we have edited down to length, as we have with hundreds of others, including those of our closest supporters.

Occasionally we do not print a letter because its contents in our opinion are of no interest to our readers. For example, if contributors write lengthy letters complaining in great detail about our editing of their previous submissions, they will be disappointed if they expect such items to be published.

Above all, we never forget the reason for our existence: to promote the cause of communism. If that means publishing mistaken or even reactionary views in order to argue out what we believe to be correct, then we will do so. But if the publication of an item would serve only to gratify the vanity of its author, that can hardly be said to further that cause.

It is good that our anonymous friend has ventured into print himself. He will be able to write whatever he likes at whatever length. Unfortunately however, individuals cannot change the world alone - unless they unite into a single revolutionary organisation and fight to build a Communist Party.

Some people, including ‘independent communists’, are incapable of submitting themselves to the discipline that entails.

Peter Manson
South London

Postmodern Euro 96

In reply to John Atyeo’s critique of my article on Euro 96, I would argue, firstly, that he underestimates the philosophical significance of these events.

John suggests that I have fetishised the significance of Euro 96 as a media event and spectacle, and thereby obscured its mass participatory aspects from an essentially postmodern perspective. My actual intention was to challenge the postmodern ideological aspects of Euro 96.

In the book Ideology by David Hawkes (Routledge 1996) a dialectical philosophical critique of postmodernism is outlined. Postmodernism is considered to be a contemporary form of mechanical materialism, which is combined with a subjective idealist acceptance of egotistical impressionism. Hence postmodernism uncritically reflects the hegemonic bourgeois ideological construction of social reality as virtual reality, and so upholds the connected denial of the possibility to elaborate an alternative oppositional non-idealist philosophical subject, because ideas are held to mechanically reproduce the prevailing dominant ideology.

Frederick Jameson and David Harvey have tried to show why the important structural changes within world capitalism have led to mass acceptance of the fragmented, individualistic and narcissistic world view of postmodernism, and the connected ideological imagery of instant impressions and instant forgetfulness. In this ontological context, Euro 96 is not an event which can be somehow celebrated as the spontaneous creativity of the ‘pure proletariat’, as John seems to argue.

Instead hegemonic postmodernism is the starting point for understanding the ideological limitations of spontaneous class consciousness, and this connects to the stage-managed nationalism and media-manipulated aspects of Euro 96. This includes the ideological impact of the ‘three lions’ song, in which the message of ‘Football’s coming home’ equates the concept of a mythical essence and centre of football as a sport with a symbolic transformation of the exhausted and antiquated ideological representations of British imperialist ideology.

Secondly, John’s emphasis upon the contradictory character of mass popular culture glosses over the hegemonic bourgeois ideological tendencies within contemporary music and sport. This is not to deny the significance of oppositional forms. We could argue that Paul Weller’s music represents the call for the formation of a cultural proletarian intelligentsia in musical form and lyrics, but which is eclectically combined with a romantic lament for the lost era of John Lennon. But even these potential oppositional forces are still fleeting and maginalised.

Does this mean I am effectively endorsing Adorno’s pessimistic view about popular culture, which I think John is suggesting? Adorno’s later work makes a philosophical retreat with his increasingly obsessive attempt to construct a pure cultural aesthetic, as an alternative to the regressive dialectical transformation of social phenomena into opposites, which effectively close off the possibility for social transformation.

The philosophical tension between his brilliant epistemological emphasis upon non-identity for understanding the relationship between subject and object is combined with an ontology of oppressive identity, which precludes the possibility of oppositional non-identity. This means Adorno accommodates to Schelling’s view that the reconstruction of a nostalgic cultural aesthetic is the only sphere of emancipatory and philosophical creativity.

Roy Bhashkar’s elaboration of dialectical critical realism attempts to tackle Adorno’s philosophical dilemmas. In his work Dialectic (Verso 1995) Bhaskar attempts to develop an ontology of non-identity and absence, and this is linked to the premises of a sustainable, non-idealist, philosophical subject, which epistemologically attempts to uphold non-identity.

Hence, Bhaskar tries to avoid an idealist equation of his initial philosophical premises with the open, plural and non-identical processes of social reality.

In other words, Bhaskar is attempting to uphold a strategic perspective of praxis, but without ideologically fetishising the potential subjects of revolutionary change, and without accommodating to Adorno’s pessimism. In this philosophical context, John’s polar opposition to sceptical and elitist postmodernism and Adorno’s ontological pessimism expresses another form of philosophical rigidity - a mechanical materialist reliance upon the imperatives of spontaneity to resolve the philosophical and ideological problems involved in developing revolutionary class consciousness.

Phil Sharpe
Trotskyist Unity Group