Letters

SPEW and CPGB

I thank the Weekly Worker for printing my last letter (March 20) and Jack Conrad for taking the time to respond (‘Zionism opens gates of hell’, March 27).

Nonetheless, I must address the accusation (which I do not take personally, as it refers to the strategy of the whole of the Socialist Party in England and Wales) that to have a willingness when forming a new mass party to initially accept a programme which is not explicitly revolutionary is “utterly unprincipled”.

I would say it is simply a recognition of the reality that even most workers who are prepared to break from Labour are not yet revolutionaries. There is an appetite for a new working class party, which, if it is created, could have hundreds of thousands of members. If that happens, we would join it and argue that it should change its programme. We would not hide who we were or what our own preferences for the programme would be at all. How is that “unprincipled”?

We are not “naive” about the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition either. If something better came along, we would support that instead. Socialist Party representatives have been part of negotiations for Collective, in case it turned out to go anywhere, which it doesn’t look like it will. Therefore we have decided to carry on with Tusc for the time being, to contest the council elections this year. Ideally Tusc would already have been superseded by a new mass organisation (with a better name!) by now, but that hasn’t happened.

Comrade Conrad’s characterisation of the type of mass party we wish to see being an alliance between ourselves and the trade union ‘bureaucracy’ is also odd. It is the union leadership, not the bureaucracy, which we wish to see replaced with a different leadership - one which is prepared both to democratise the unions (ie, fight the bureaucracy) and build a new party of the working class. That is why we participate in union elections and the political battles within unions extensively in our paper. The unions have the money and authority to start a new mass party more than any other working class organisations.

It is not “economistic” to recognise their social power exists beyond the workplace. We don’t simply support “routine trade unionism” in the hopes it will magically lead to revolution, as comrade Conrad suggests. Unions have money and can get things done, which is why we work within them to win them over to our positions - not out of “tailism”, which implies that we just follow along blindly behind whatever rightwing union leaders decide without challenging them or starting any initiatives of our own.

Comrade Conrad asks me directly why Israelis and Palestinians would remain in separate states, before concluding his own article by saying that the “Hebrew nation” should be offered self-determination and voluntary federation in an Arab Socialist Republic, “even if it is in the process of realisation”. So he would have what SPEW describes as a “socialist Israel ... as part of the struggle for a socialist Middle East”. Yet, confusingly, he had previously said that this part of the wording of SPEW’s position was irrelevant in my argument that the CPGB’s position is not that different to our own. This is far from a clarification of the differences in the strategic approach or an explanation of how we come from “exactly opposite directions”.

As for this part - “SPEW ... blurs the national division of the working class in Israel-Palestine. In fact, it insists upon treating Israel as a ‘normal’ country. The idea of it remaining a settler state is dismissed out of hand” - no argument or evidence is offered to justify these assertions.

Just as we recognise that not all workers in England and Wales are currently revolutionaries, we also recognise that not all Israelis are currently internationalist. Even if the United Arab Republic was created and it was genuinely run by the working class, Israeli workers would not give up generations worth of indoctrination to fear Arab workers overnight. It would take many years and there would be many transitional state forms along the way. We can argue about what the precise order of events or sequence of transitional state forms might be, but disagreements about these hypothetical questions are not worth maintaining separate organisations over.

My original letter was aimed more at asking the CPGB-PCC to clarify exactly why you think SPEW’s general approach towards building a mass working class party in order to win it over to revolutionary positions is so flawed that you seemingly have no plans of moving towards more unity with us.

I look forward to continuing the debate.

Joseph O’Connor Meldau
SPEW member (personal capacity)

Backward Arabs

With wry amusement I find myself in support of Jack Conrad’s path to a solution vis-à-vis Israel/Palestine/Zionism - only via a socialist active dominance of the Middle East.

Looking at communist intoxication with sarcastic imprecation as the preferred mode (see Mike Macnair), we see that JC’s outlook - using offensive, and probably intentional, insulting corroborative detail - pretends to understand the Israeli public, throwing around the odd Hebrew term, such as ‘mamlachtiyut’ (there is a better, well-understood, accurate English translation - ‘serving the kingdom, not the king’).

His overall review of the Arab world well illuminates another characteristic of communist (and leftwing) inability to address current reality. Looking back through many issues of the Weekly Worker and associated online stuff, I find no serious discussion of tribalism. The Arab world, and with it much of the Islamic world, has been and is (I posit) thoroughly dominated by tribalism. How many communists (or member of the masses) will force their sub-teenager daughters off to be wed to strangers? Or throw acid over them for ‘family honour’? Or participate in their murder for the maintenance of good standing with tribal custom? Not many, I hope. The closest English analogue is the anaemic ‘What will the neighbours say?’ The closest tribal analogy in the UK context could perhaps be support for a football club.

The study of tribalism is long, constantly being updated, and is currently a flourishing research field. The literature is fascinating and compelling, with new tools for measuring ‘tribal loyalty’. So compare and contrast tribal identification with working class identification across multiple societies. I think that the ‘masses’ (a disgusting, ruinous word) come out a far and distant second to tribal loyalty.

It is here that I can passively smile upon JC’s proposal that a working class socialist revolution is the essential event needed across the Arab and Muslim world for evil Zionism to fall. Cos it ain’t gonna happen.

John Davidson
email

Not clear

When the We Demand Change ‘summit of resistance’ on Saturday March 29 was first announced, many assumed this was just a new Socialist Workers Party front. Having attended the event and had some conversations with some of the organisers, I think it certainly isn’t merely a new SWP front, but what exactly it is still doesn’t seem completely clear.

Clearly it was an attempt to address the vacuum of joined-up political organisation for the left in Britain, and our inability to present an effective political opposition. The original statement announcing the event said that it was intended to “begin to construct through debate and discussion a network of activists across sectors”. Subsequent communications were much more vague and seemed to abandon the suggestion that a new organisation would be built at the summit.

The original initiative for the conference seems to have come, if not from the SWP directly, certainly from the sections of the left where the SWP and Counterfire have strong links - particularly, for instance, with many signatories and speakers from unions such as the National Education Union and the University and Colleges Union, and with the summit officially sponsored by groups like Stand Up to Racism and Stop the War Coalition.

However, there does seem to have been a recognition that the event needed to be much broader than this. The full list of partner organisations is available on their website. From what I understand, the key lead organisers for the event itself were drawn from Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project, from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and from SUtR (itself famously an SWP front). But the official partners also included groups like Disabled People Against the Cuts and Just Stop Oil, and the event itself featured stalls and speakers from an even wider array of groups.

Clearly there was also a recognition that the event needed to be more dynamic than your standard lefty rally - not just the same old top-table speeches from the same old top-table speakers. There were still rallies to open and to close the event, but the bulk of the event consisted of 12 ‘workshops’ on different topics spread across the day. I think the organisers made a creditable attempt to make the event more dynamic, more participatory, more practical - and to some extent they succeeded - but there are limits to what you can do when you’re trying to fit in so many speakers from so many different groups, and when you have more than 2,000 people in attendance (meaning each ‘workshop’ has hundreds of participants). In many ways, the event was reminiscent of The World Transformed festivals from the Corbyn years.

What was it all for? Did it succeed? What did we achieve from it? What happens next? I’m not sure.

I think the spectre of the party and the question of political organisation hung over the entire event. It came up repeatedly, whether from the floor or from the panel, at all of the sessions I attended. But there was only an hour and a half of the day dedicated to discussing it directly - clearly not enough time. Ben Beach, one of the organisers of last year’s Party Time events, did an admirable job of trying to chair that discussion and to draw out some points of agreement, but the allotted time was nothing like sufficient. There seemed generally to be consensus that we need some kind of new organisation - probably it should be some kind of party, probably it should be engaged in social movement campaigning rather than focusing purely on electoralism, and it should be democratic, and it would at least need some sort of electoral agreement with the Greens (although Greens Organise made some spirited arguments for entryism), but that was about as far as we got.

It was encouraging that several of the keynote speakers emphasised the necessity of any new organisation being meaningfully democratic - including Richard Boyd Barrett (of People Before Profit, but also a cadre of the SWP’s Irish sister organisation) and Andrew Feinstein - but there wasn’t really any more detailed discussion about what this might mean in practice.

Several comrades argued from the floor throughout the day that We Demand Change needed to become the new organisation, and in some cases even expressed their intentions to start local branches or to stand as candidates under that banner (several local We Demand Change social media pages have already been set up). By contrast, most of the panellists’ contributions were expressed in totally abstract general terms. The national organisers have since announced somewhat vaguely that “summits” are planned “across the country”, that there should be “a mass campaign calling for Welfare not Warfare and taxing the rich, to win a fairer society for all”, and that there must be “a set of demands from the movement, for the movement - shaped by people like you”.

The other spectre haunting the event was the SWP itself. Clearly their cadres provided the organisational backbone of the event - helping with stewarding, promotion, etc - and they were the only significant tendency visibly intervening from the floor. They had their stalls outside the event, but not inside. Presumably they weren’t listed as an official sponsor of the summit, because the other sponsors understand that their reputation is poor enough that it would have seriously damaged the event to be directly associated with them.

Much of the discussion was focused on the need for a new socialist party, but there was almost no acknowledgement during the day of the socialist parties that already exist and were present and involved in the event. A naive participant might wonder, why don’t we all just join the SWP? Even the SWP’s own members didn’t seem to be arguing openly for this - as if even they recognise the inadequacy of their own organisation.

For anyone new to the left, understanding the political dynamics of this conference must have been impossible. A front that isn’t a front, trying to build a party that might not be a party, or might be a front for a front for another party - and everyone politely agrees not to talk about these peculiar details!

Perhaps the most useful intervention in the whole day was one comrade arguing from the floor about the necessity of a delegate congress, bringing together different organisations of the left (including the SWP, Greens Organise and others) to discuss concrete programmes and to start building a pre-party formation. This would probably be an enormous step forward from the current model, where public rallies and ‘workshops’ end up talking round in circles with platitudes and generalities, while the practical discussions about programmes, structures and strategy happen in the utmost secrecy.

Archie Woodrow
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Stalin fanboy

Gerry Downing’s letter (March 27), apart from being a classic example of Trotskyist ultra-leftism, claims that we are seeing the construction of a fascist state in the US, which will be followed by the AfD in Germany, if we don’t stop it. Before I comment on Downing’s interpretation of events, I would like to say something about the Trotskyist world view.

It was born from ultra-leftism. This can be seen in Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, which wasn’t the result of a concrete analysis of the situation in each country, but the most generalised, abstract theorising, devoid of concrete content, which is then applied to all backward countries with belated capitalist development. It is this lack of concrete analysis which constitutes the methodology of ultra-leftism - or Trotskyism in general.

All ultra-leftists have one thing in common which forms the foundation of this tendency in communism. This is the failure to recognise that the class struggle of the working class goes through two interrelated, but distinct, stages: the stage of reform and the stage of revolution - or defensive and offensive struggles. Ultra-leftists confuse the two stages.

For the ultra-leftists the only stage of the class struggle is the offensive. This is why Bukharin wanted a revolutionary war against Germany in World War I, when the Bolsheviks were facing a potential collapse of their regime if they didn’t make peace with Germany. What was Trotsky’s position? ‘No peace, no war’ - a position devoid of a concrete analysis of the situation. The German army continued to advance, and it was only then that Trotsky capitulated. I bring this up because the ‘No peace, no war’ position contains the very essence of Trotsky’s methodology, which nearly brought the defeat of the regime. Communist officials had their suitcases packed, ready to flee at a moment’s notice.

Confusing the two stages of the class struggle - ie, reform and revolution, or the defensive and the offensive - is at the heart of Trotskyism past and present. This is why they attack the wartime Labour Party and CPGB for forming an alliance with Churchill to defeat Hitler and the Nazis.

Facing a Nazi invasion, no sensible communist would have opposed the British government locking up the Trotskyist leaders, whose ultra-leftism was objectively serving the interest of Hitler. After all, Churchill had Moseley and his wife, Diana, who was one of the Mitford sisters, interned. Hitler fan Unity Mitford was persona non grata, when she returned to England from Germany. The other sister, Jessica, was a communist and was free to come and go as she pleased.

Stalin’s alliance with America and Britain to defeat the Nazis was totally correct. While it is true that a popular front arrangement can lead to opportunist mistakes, this doesn’t mean the arrangement in itself is wrong. Nor does it follow that, if Stalin was wrong on this or that question, it means Trotskyism was right.

The popular front, coming after the disastrous Comintern third period, when social democracy was denounced as social-fascist, represented a defensive stage of the class struggle. Trotsky had previously fought this ultra-left mistake, but he did so from another ultra-left stance, which would have strengthened fascism.

After the fascists were defeated, with the Soviet side losing about 20 million dead, we can debate whether Stalin went too far in making concessions to his western allies, but no-one can deny that what the Americans did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the atom bomb must have concentrated Stalin’s mind. There was no need to use the atom bomb - it was done to terrorise the Soviet leadership, and it worked. Stalin was effectively blackmailed with nuclear attack if he supported communist uprisings outside of the Soviet zone of occupation. All this the ultra-left ignore. After this blackmail, the race was on under Lavrenty Beria for the Soviet bomb, to prevent this happening again.

On the question of fascism what Gerry Downing and most of the left fail to see is the new contradiction between finance capital and old-style fascism. Today, finance capital has a globalist agenda. What they want is a world government. Old-style fascism, based on a nationalist and racist narrative and the strengthening of the nation-state, is the opposite of the globalist agenda of finance capital today.

I am not saying that finance capital is opposed to fascism: what I am saying is that they are opposed to old-style fascism, based on nationalism and racism. Donald Trump can pose as an anti-globalist, America First and Make America Great Again campaigner, but if he does anything which seriously opposes the agenda of finance capital, or doesn’t come to heel, they will get rid of him. This is why the left needs to understand the new contradiction between finance capital and old-style fascism.

Tony Clark
For Democratic Socialism

Dermot’s Korea

Recently, the US imperialists and south Korean puppets staged the ‘Freedom Shield 2025’ war exercise against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). The war exercises ran from March 10 to March 20. These aggressive and provocative war exercises, which are nothing but a rehearsal for the invasion of the DPRK, took place despite talk of “improved relations” by Trump and some speculation about DPRK-US summits or negotiations. It shows that the talk of peace by the new administration of the US is just talk!

The DPRK foreign ministry commented on March 10: “Lurking behind the above-said war exercises, traditionally staged by the US and the Republic of [South] Korea, is the persistent and unchangeable aggression ambition of the US, which seeks to propagate the American-style view on value and the Yankee-style liberal democracy into the inviolable territory of a sovereign state and finally to overthrow the DPRK government and its social system, just seen through the operational name, ‘Freedom Shield’, and of the ROK following the US.”

What was noteworthy about ‘Freedom Shield 2025’ was that it was greater in depth and scope than before. Also it included a joint special warfare drill to destroy the DPRK’s alleged “secret underground tunnel network” and remove the DPRK’s nuclear weapons by mobilising armoured and special warfare forces, reconnaissance drones and artificial-intelligence attack-robots from March 17 to 20.

Moreover, 10 pro-US countries that were members of the so-called ‘UN Command’ in south Korea participated in the exercises. These countries were Belgium, Canada, Colombia, France, Greece, Italy, New Zealand, Philippines, Thailand and - to our shame - Britain.

At a time when Britain is facing spending cuts and council tax is being increased, it is shameful that taxpayers’ money is being wasted on a military exercise on the other side of the world which has nothing to do with Britain and is directed at a socialist country, People’s Korea.

Britain should not be a party to US aggression against People’s Korea. The shameful past of the UK with regard to Korea should not be repeated!

Dermot Hudson
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State money

The issuing of currency is an act of the state, which is literally the creator of all money. As a sovereign state with its own free-floating fiat currency, the United Kingdom has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect - means that therefore need to be under democratic political control. The responsibility of the government is to ensure the supply of goods and services to be purchased with that currency.

It is impossible for the currency-issuing state to run out of money. Money ‘lent’ to the treasury by the Bank of England is money ‘lent’ to the state by the state; such ‘debt’ will never be called in - much less will bailiffs be sent round (call this the ‘magic money tree’ if you will). There is no comparison between running the economy and managing a household budget, or even a business. There is no ‘national credit card’ to ‘max out’. ‘Fiscal headroom’ is only the gap between the government’s tax and spending plans and what would be allowed under the fiscal rules that it sets for itself (and changes frequently).

That is what both fiscal policy and monetary policy are for: to give the currency its value by controlling inflation to a politically chosen extent, while discouraging certain politically chosen forms of behaviour, and while encouraging others, including economic equality, which is fundamental to social cohesion and thus to patriotism. The treasury, which is the state, has issued bonds to the Bank of England, which is also the state. Even if those bonds were held by anyone else, then the state could simply issue itself with enough of its own free-floating fiat currency to redeem them. Say it again that there is no debt.

Taxation is not where the state’s money comes from. Nothing is ‘unaffordable’, every recession is discretionary on the part of the government and there is no such thing as ‘taxpayers’ money’. Within and under that understanding, a tax of one to two percent on assets above £10 million could abolish the two-child benefit cap 17 times over, while merely taxing each of Britain’s 173 billionaires down to one billion pounds per head would raise £1.1 trillion - an entire year’s tax take. The taxation of unearned income at the same rate as earnings, as was the case under Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson, could easily abolish the two-child benefit cap, as advocated by Nigel Farage and Suella Braverman, restore the £20 per week uplift to the two in five universal credit claimants, and extend that uplift to disability benefits, all of which would inject money directly into the consumer economy. And so on.

There is no case whatever for cutting the benefits of the sick and disabled (as if that would cure them or find them jobs); for retaining the two-child benefit cap; for withdrawing the winter fuel payment from anyone; for increasing workers’ bus fares by 50%; for failing to freeze council tax; for threatening to abolish the single-person discount; for increasing employers’ national insurance contributions, so as to destroy charities and small businesses, while making it impossible for big businesses to take on staff or to increase wages; for forcing working farmers of many decades’ standing, who formally inherited their parents’ farms, to sell them to giant American agribusinesses; or for any other form of austerity.

There is an unanswerable economic and moral case for the full compensation of, among others, the victims of Orgreave, Grenfell Tower, the Windrush scandal, the post office scandal, and the contaminated blood scandal, as well as the WASPI women.

David Lindsay
Lanchester