Letters

Direct action

I am worried about the current trajectory of the Weekly Worker group (WWG). In his latest of very many and very wordy articles, (‘Going beyond strikism’ February 6), Mike Macnair’s conception of “socialist revolution” is stated as being “the working class offering to lead the society”! “Offering to lead society”? And what if the current ruling class decides not to accept the kind ‘offer’ of the working class to rule society in its place?

I know Macnair basically rejects every policy and action the Bolsheviks took after taking power - he seems to advocate a sort of the SPGB-type late 19th century social democracy, but this highly respectable and academic concept of ‘revolutionary change’ is surely taking the concept of keeping only to ‘high politics’ too far, even for the WWG? It’s not completely accidental that Eddie Ford in the same edition calls for a “mass Communist Party” based on Kautsky, among other pre-Bolshevik Marxists. Of course, it is ‘Kautsky, while he was a Marxist’, but was there nothing in Kautsky’s ‘Marxist period’ in his whole style and approach which indicated his potential future direction of travel - not to mention, his appalling betrayal and support for the First World Slaughter?

Lord save us from any idea or concept of the Communist Party as a “party of a special type”, a weapon of working class struggle, as an organiser and director of current immediate struggles! Whose role is to inject the politics and perspectives of Marxism-Leninism into such struggles, to extend and deepen these, until the question of state power and the continued existence of the capitalist system is raised. No, according to Macnair, the role of the “Communist Party” is simply to provide a “voice for the working class”. How very nice, acceptable and respectable.

Macnair seems to want to strip out from even 19th century Marxism anything or everything which is actually revolutionary. He constantly emphasises the need for ‘high politics’, for nice intellectual debates about ‘the constitutional order’, for ‘electoralism’, and exudes positive contempt for things like mass democratic action, direct action, strikes, general strikes, soviets as alternatives to bourgeois parliaments, etc.

Steve Bloom in his attempted polemic with Macnair was 100% correct: these should all be seen as different aspects or components of the overall comprehensive class struggle. The weight each should have at specific moments or stages in the struggle and how they should be interconnected are matters of strategic and tactical judgments by a real Communist Party.

Macnair rails against the very notion that a Communist Party should have any form of coordinating role of all class struggles, when actually this is one of its main purposes! It is precisely the role of a Communist Party not to show contempt for day-to-day struggles or for economic struggles, but to distil out from all the struggles the necessary political line and strategy to take state power and establish socialism - ‘politics as concentrated economics’.

The SPGB can - and will no doubt - speak for itself, but in my view its central weakness is not its consistent advocacy of socialism/communism (its version is the higher form of communism, which hopefully we all advocate and believe in) - that is actually to its credit - but its complete self-removal from all current ‘immediate struggles’ of the working class against all various aspects and encroachments of capitalism on working peoples lives, on the grounds this automatically leads to ‘reformism’.

Just three quotes should suffice to illustrate the true Marxist approach to the links and relationships between the present reality and the aimed for future:

 “If workers did not press for higher wages when they can by cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement” (Wages, prices and profit).

 “We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence” (The German ideology).

 “The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present they also represent and take care of the future of that movement” (Manifesto of the Communist Party).

Pretty clear and succinct, one might have thought.

Various political programmes and similar documents of the Communist Party in Britain (and in the international communist movement, whose entire history Macnair appears to reject) have always sought to apply the principles of Marxism-Leninism to British conditions, history and circumstances, and how involvement in and leadership of immediate class struggles against various aspects of capitalist rule and its consequences can lead to socialist revolution and the achievement of socialism in this and as many countries as possible.

Macnair’s ‘logic’ and argumentation is all over the place and constantly falls into the traps he alleges of others, like for example, his mechanical counterposing of different forms and aspects of class struggle to others - electoralism to strikes, parliaments to soviets, etc. His polemical counter-positioning of the hard-copy medium to the digital (with Lawrence Parker) was completely absurd.

I suspect one element of the problem is Macnair aiming to become the “dominant intellectual force” in the Weekly Worker group. Good luck with that (I think it has one already). The other part, I fear, is the mechanical and confused concepts of the ‘minimum programme’ held by the WWG - its confusion, relation and separation from the socialist revolution itself (and the actual achievement and implementation of a socialist and communist society).

If it is not all clear how a whole shopping list of “immediate demands” in section 3 of the Draft programme can actually translate into socialist revolution and socialism itself, it is not that surprising that some members will fall on one side of this created gap or the other, rather than treat the communist programme as an integrated whole.

If you really want communist unity and a much larger Communist Party, then it might be a good idea to actually join a real Communist Party, or at least support it on a more ongoing basis.

Andrew Northall
Kettering

No transition

Mike Macnair’s article begins with an analysis of the Socialist Party of Great Britain’s contribution to the Prometheus journal. As an SPGBer myself, I would like to respond. There are two main points that I would like to address, but before doing so might I deal with Mike´s point about ‘vanguardism’?

The SPGB, as most people here probably realise, is resolutely opposed to the principle and practice of vanguardism. We hold that it is fundamentally elitist, undemocratic and antithetical to the Marxist principle that the emancipation of the working class must be carried out by the workers themselves: it cannot be done by some enlightened minority, however well-meaning.

Mike, unfortunately, misunderstands what is meant by ‘vanguardism’. He comments: “Equally, a ‘vanguard’ is merely people who get somewhere first: SPGB comrades claim that they are right (as against the large majority who disagree). If they are, indeed, right, and the rest of us come to agree with them, they will ipso facto be a vanguard - however much they wish to deny it.”

No, Mike, this is not what the argument against vanguardism is about. Of course, one can legitimately talk about a group being a “vanguard” in the sense of being a minority ahead of its time. The expression ‘avant-garde’, for instance, originated from the French military term meaning ‘advance guard’ and came to be used in other contexts, such as avant-garde art, where the artists concerned were considered to be ahead of their time in terms of innovation. You could, I suppose, call the SPGB a vanguard in that sense - as prefiguring what will hopefully become the outlook of workers in general.

However, vanguardism as a political theory means something quite different. What it means is a political party hoping to achieve socialism by capturing political power in advance of the working class itself becoming socialist in outlook, and presuming to take steps, once it has taken power, to nudge workers in the direction of socialism or introduce socialism behind their backs. Such vanguardist thinking is very clearly expressed in the writings of people like Lenin and Trotsky.

We in the SPGB have argued very strongly against such thinking. We concur with Engels on this point that “The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of masses lacking consciousness, is past. Where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organisation, the masses themselves must also be in on it, must themselves already have grasped what is at stake, what they are fighting for, body and soul” (Introduction to Marx’s Class struggles in France 1848-1850).

SPGBers are not superior to any other workers who are just as capable as us of becoming socialists and understanding what socialism is about. The fact that we are socialists, and not them, is purely a matter of contingency and accident. We are not special and we see our role as essentially one of just propagating an alternative vision of the future among our fellow workers, not to lead them in any way. We absolutely recognise that, unless a majority of workers become socialists who want and broadly understand what is meant by socialism, there can be no chance whatsoever of realising a socialist society. In order to work at all, socialism needs to be understood and embraced by the majority.

In the absence of majority socialist consciousness, the fate of any political organisation seizing political power - even one sincerely desiring to establish socialism - would be to administer capitalism by default. But there is only one way in which you can administer capitalism - and that is in the interests of capital. Inevitably that means siding with the interests of the capitalists or constituting yourself as a new (state) capitalist class in the process.

This brings me to my first point. Mike refers to the SPGB´s attitudes towards reforms. This is very often misunderstood, unfortunately. The SPGB is not opposed to reforms as such, What it is opposed to is ‘reformism’ - the political approach of trying to attract workers to your organisation by advocating certain reforms that you feel might encourage them to join and so enlarge your support base.

It is not so much that reforms cannot sometimes be of benefit to workers that concerns us, but rather that all such reforms - even if they are successfully implemented - are enacted in the context of a society that must necessarily operate in the interests of capital and therefore against the interests of wage labour. Once you go down the reformist road, you are locked into an inexorable logic that will incrementally push you ultimately into embracing capitalism. This was the fatal mistake that broke the back of Second International - the nonsensical assumption that you can somehow strive to both mend capitalism (the minimum programme) and, at the same time, strive to end capitalism (the maximum programme of socialist revolution). The anti-Labour Party of Keir Starmer is the completely predictable outcome of embracing such reformist thinking.

Another way in which the SPGB’s outlook is so often misunderstood is with regard to what is actually meant by reforms or reformism. Engaging in militant trade union activity, for example, is not reformism, but an economic necessity for workers, which they dispense with at their own expense in the field of industrial struggle. SPGBers are also trade unionists, as it happens. As with the question of vanguardism, we feel compelled to clarify that what we specifically mean by reformism amounts to legislative measures enacted by the state to ameliorate some or other social problem arising from the capitalist basis of society. In other words, the field of reformist activity is essentially political, in contrast to trade unionism, which is an essentially economic and defensive struggle - a distinction also, incidentally, made by Marx. It is in the political field that we are best able to register our opposition to, or support for, the existing social order - not the economic field.

Finally, Mike refers to the question of the transition. Look, this whole question is really quite straightforward. If socialism depends on a majority wanting and understanding it and if we can clearly demonstrate the attainment of this majority politically, or by electoral means, then where is the need for a transition beyond that? We would have fully met the preconditions for establishing a socialist society - the other precondition being the technological potential to satisfy the reasonable needs of the population, which potential has been around for at least a century, if not more.

I really don’t understand the left’s obsession with this idea of a ‘transition period’. We don’t need a transition after we are the majority and Marx only talked of the need for a transition between capitalism and communism because the productive forces were not sufficiently developed at the time to support a communist (aka socialist) society. That is not the case now.

Actually, in a sense we are (hopefully) already in the transition period right now. What we need is simply an appropriate exit strategy to move from capitalism into socialism - not some feeble excuse for perpetually postponing the latter - putting it on the back boiler and pretending to pay lip service to it as some kind of vague ‘long-term’ goal. As Keynes said, in the long term we will all be dead.

Robin Cox
email

Marginal force

A few small clarifications regarding comrade Macnair’s article in the latest issue of your esteemed publication.

I did not claim that small parties can’t win seats in ‘first past the post’ (FPTP) elections (Letters, January 30). I was quite specific in my wording: “electoral parties usually need to function as broad fronts” and “electing even a single MP is usually prohibitively difficult when the left’s vote is split”. The risk of splitting the left’s vote is the more fundamental issue here than the nature of the party in question - how its structured, what its politics are, whether it is big or small, broad or narrow, etc, since there are a number of different factors that can affect whether or not or to what extent the left is likely to be split.

It might be that there is a formal or informal electoral alliance between separate parties agreeing to each stand candidates only in specific constituencies, or the different political tendencies might coexist within one electoral party and use that party’s structures to select a single candidate in each constituency, or it may just be that the specific balance of forces in a specific constituency and election means that there is obviously only one viable candidate. The present weakness of the left in Britain, and especially of the communist left, means that, at least for the time being, that latter case rarely obtains in our favour.

I confess I don’t understand comrade Macnair’s insistence that it is “nonsense” to describe the Green Party of England and Wales as a “broad front” party. It is a party which contains conservatives, liberals, socialists, even some communists. It’s a party which seems to have little in the way of internal discipline, and whose elected officials and local branches often diverge wildly from one another in their politics. And it’s a party with a platform of standard social democratic policies hardly distinct from that of Corbyn’s Labour or from the umpteen different left-of-Labour projects over the years - and I don’t see any reason to assume that the new electoral formation which many on the left have been pushing for since 2019 will have a substantially different platform. In fact, it’s entirely conceivable that a new post-Corbynite party may end up with an almost identical policy platform to the Greens, but with substantially less internal democracy.

Anyway, I’m not presenting an argument here about how we must approach electoral work, but I think it’s vital that we’re totally clear-headed about the extent to which FPTP represents an obstacle for marginal communist forces seeking to transform themselves into a political force on the national level without diluting their own politics in order to break through that electoral hurdle. When others on the left repeatedly return to the idea of a lowest-common-denominator broad-left electoral vehicle, this is not merely stupidity or conservatism (which is not to say that stupidity and conservatism don’t play their part): it is an objective tendency of Britain’s electoral system.

For whatever it’s worth, my instinct is that the most likely path out of this is by acting as a communist ‘party within a party’ within some broader electoral formation (whether it’s the Greens, Labour or some other party or coalition), while pushing for electoral reform, but I remain open-minded. Whatever the ideal electoral strategy may be, it nevertheless doesn’t change the fact that our priority is regrouping our forces within a unified communist organisation, where we can work out the way forward collectively!

Archie Woodrow
RS21 North London

Broad alliance

I was pleased to read Mike Macnair’s critique of my Prometheus essay in his latest article. The comrade is correct that I argued in ‘One big party?’ for something like the Socialist Alliance to be recreated.

Far from being possibilist in abandoning constitutional demands, when it came to intervention in the 2001 general election, the manifesto of the Socialist Alliance did not gloss over principles of democratic republicanism. The SA called for the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords and the introduction of proportional representation for elections to the Commons. The inclusion of these democratic demands will have been down to the participation of the CPGB and others.

This suggests to me that it is possible for a democratic-republican conception of socialism to be fought for - even within electoral formations which are of a broad-front character.

My article for the Prometheus journal was written before the start of the Forging Communist Unity initiative, which, although a welcome development, is unlikely to directly reach the militants of the larger leftwing groups at this stage. If it is successful, there will be a larger campaign for a mass Communist Party. But there will not be a mass Communist Party.

The task of programmatic unity cannot be counterposed to participation in an electoral alliance of the left.

Ansell Eade
email

Spart critic

Having undergone a recent reorientation, Spartacists now want British communists to adopt a strategy akin to third-period Cominternism. They want us to break all links with reformism, trade union bureaucrats, liberalism, the Corbyns, and the Greens (Letters, February 6).

It appears that the Sparts may have done a complete reversal of their strategy, which has landed them in the camp of ultra-left communist sectarianism. Where did these types of policies, or strategy, lead to in the past, especially in Germany during the Weimar period? It led to Hitler being appointed chancellor and the defeat of the left, and communists being murdered in Nazi concentration camps.

All this tragedy for the left resulted mostly from communist sectarianism of the third period. What is needed is not more sectarianism, which the Sparts are calling for (albeit unconsciously) nor the endless calls for a new party. We don’t need a new workers’ party in Britain at this stage. What is needed is a campaign for democratic socialism and a mass anti-fascist movement. This is the road to left unity, which can lead either to winning the Labour Party over to socialism, or a new party if necessary.

My own view is that Labour can be won over socialism. The Corbyn episode proves this, and he became leader even without the collapse of capitalism. The period where the right wing dominated the party is coming to an end. The real danger we will face in the future are clueless sectarians taking over the party, when the right are forced to step down or decamp. Even the Corbyn movement held the danger of turning Labour into a sectarian rump ...

The sectarian line being presently advocated by the Spartacists also ignores the fact that the working class cannot take power and hope to hold it, if the mass of the petty bourgeoisie or middle class is opposed to working class rule. Our task is not to turn our backs on these strata as the Sparts suggest, but rather make links with them.

Finally, in the advanced capitalist countries, communists are unlikely to come to power outside of a global crisis of capitalism. In other words, for the left to come to power two things are necessary: a correct, non-sectarian strategy and the coming collapse of capitalism. We can expect such a collapse around the end of this decade.

Tony Clark
For Democratic Socialism

Spart fan

Just reading last week’s letters page, which as usual was highly communicative, I don’t think that any kind of assault should be made against the Workers Hammer writer. His letter doesn’t erase the discussions the CPGB are promoting, but complements them by bringing a more generalised outlook to the necessary narrow format that the CPGB is arranging.

We need both - and the letters pages of the Weekly Worker brings both to the table.

Elijah Traven
Hull

Time to jump

Poor old Stevie Freeman. Speaking in the discussion during the Why Marx? forum, ‘Why are we fighting for a Communist Party?’, comrade Freeman said the future for Marxist regroupment is coddled inside a fantasy mass social democratic party. Indeed, there are “tens of thousands” of people in Britain who could be in such a party, he told us.

And he pointed to the failure of communist rapprochement between the CPGB’s Provisional Central Committee and his Revolutionary Democratic Group (which split from the Socialist Workers Party sometime last century) as evidence why comrades can’t fight for a mass Communist Party in the here and now.

Of course, there aren’t thousands and millions of people in Britain who see a parliamentary road to the overthrow of capitalism. Instead, Corbynism was a left expression of ‘managing capitalism’ in the interests of ‘ordinary people’. Fund the NHS, tax the rich - that sort of thing. While not leftwing, there is a party of hundreds of thousands based on the trade unions already aimed at reforming capitalism in the ‘interests of ordinary people’. It is the Labour Party.

And why did communist rapprochement between the CPGB and RDG fail? I think Steve needs to buy a mirror to answer that question. Like a nervous horse at the Grand National, he approached every hurdle and asked for it to be moved a little bit further away before organisational unity was possible. Nearly 30 years later, he still balks.

In stark contrast, I commend Nick Wrack’s serious and mature attitude in the meeting, where he said that sometimes you lose a vote.

Steve, after 30 years it’s time to jump. Otherwise, as Jack Conrad said, best of luck to you.

Martin Greenfield
Australia

Firewall

I can easily imagine a coalition between the Christian Democrats and the AfD (Alternative for Germany) after this month’s German general election. The so-called ‘firewall’ against the far right is a myth - the Christian Democrats’ anti-immigration resolution places them where the AfD once stood and, in some respects, even goes further. The other main parties all go along with the anti-immigration theme, offering ‘constructive criticism’ at best. What separates the political establishment from the AfD is foreign policy - specifically, its stance on the Nato-Russia proxy war in Ukraine.

AfD represents the national manufacturing capital, which suffers from the sabotage of Nord Stream and the German self-embargo against Russian gas - it needs cheap energy to survive. The German political establishment, on the other hand, has so far followed the lead of its American master, even when that master blew up the vital pipeline.

If the election results favour a coalition between the two parties, I could see things going one of two ways. Either the Christian-Dems use the coalition to try and tame the AfD on foreign policy. This is how I concluded my presentation at a Rete dei Comunisti event last June:

“Of course, the establishment could identify a ‘reasonable’ personality or faction within the AfD willing to accept the fundamental interests of the United States - someone like Meloni. It would be surprising if they were not already trying to find such a faction.”

Alternatively, now that Trump is openly positioning the US as a competitor to the EU, Germany’s precarious position might necessitate a different path: the Christian Democrats could follow the AfD’s lead and, for reasons of competitiveness, reopen negotiations with the Gazprom energy corporation. A risky move, but how else could they facilitate Germany’s ‘reindustrialisation’, which they call for in their current platform? Surely not on the basis of expensive US fracking gas.

If Trump were to reach some agreement with Russia, that would favour the latter outcome. All the bluster about ‘fascist Putin’ would be forgotten for the time being. But, overall, I think option one - Germany’s economic degradation under the auspices of comprador politicians - is more likely. We’ll see.

Maciej Zurowski
Italy