Letters

Anarcho-Brexit

Paul Demarty assures himself that Brexit was a largely Tory affair (‘Breaking the mould’, May 8). I’m sure that seven out of 10 Labour constituencies voted ‘leave’, but doubtless he’ll correct me. Certainly, in the rust-belt industrial towns and areas - coal, steel, heavy industry - ‘leave’ was the dominant trend.

Traditional left leaders of unions and the Labour left were very public ‘leavers’, while at the same time the whole of the establishment - from the Confederation of British Industry to the leaders of all three political parties, the heads of the armed forces, the police, the EU, the International Monetary Fund - all wanted Britain to stay, as did Nato, the US president, etc. The conclusion that this Brexit lark was just a Tory scam and that the ‘great and the good’ wanted to stay within the EU wasn’t the case up here, Paul - the CPGB ought to get out of London a bit more.

Meantime Jack Conrad gives us the latest on efforts of various lefty liberal groups with revolutionary titles, who are busy constructing a workers’ party (‘Programme ’n’ chips’, May 8). The structures are elaborated, a constitution hammered out, but the central ingredient is missing: the workers! Jack et al believe they can knock together a workers party in their London backyard - it will then be pulled out for ‘the workers’ to join. This, like the Hillman Avenger of old, is ‘the car you’ve all been waiting for’.

Pardon me (an anarchist and no lover of parties), for commenting, but surely a truly working class organisation must be built by the workers themselves, and be fashioned from their demands. The new lash-up will strike little more resonance with the industrial, traditional working class if it offers more of the liberal, eco, climate panic, and anti-industry, identity-obsessed politics of the current London left.

Apart from Labour’s utter betrayal of trust of the relatively small number of working class voters who took a chance and sang ‘Just one more chance’ and despite themselves voted for Starmer and his outfit of misfits and oddballs, all true socialists and anti-war MPs have been kicked out or left.

Reform is picking up huge swathes of working class votes because its slogans are the ones the workers themselves are demanding. Scrap ‘net zero’, rebuild industrial infrastructure, return to steel, coal, build on oil and gas, etc - these slogans may be cynical on Farage’s part, but they are the ones which the industrial worker wants advancing. Nobody except Galloway is saying it. This, much more than immigration, is what’s striking a cord. But with immigration too, we cannot keep telling people to shut up, to stay quiet, do what you’re told.

So without any consultation, without any consent, widespread changes - which are affecting people’s families, their streets and society - are taking place all round them. They are rendered utterly powerless, while the biggest changes in their lives are happening all around them. We can look at this philosophically, ideologically, but this doesn’t wash with many - they demand a say. It does no good adopting the Socialist Workers Party response and shouting ‘Racist scum’ and ‘Fascist’ at bewildered working class communities.

So don’t be too surprised at recent election outcomes. The only trip wires I see for them is the open political identification with Thatcher and the rightwing Tory brand - that would be a step too far for working class voters. At present they are voting for slogans and policies which make practical sense. Try and sign them up behind the banner, ‘Regroup the right, unite the right’, and they may blow it!

Dave Douglass
South Shields

Neo-Maoists

Over the last 10 years or so, the Belgian Workers Party (PVDA-PTB) has been making steady headway. It currently holds 10% of the seats in the national parliament, and even stronger representations in the Wallonia and Brussels assemblies. The party’s rapid growth seems to be drawing the attention of many soft-left parties in Europe, including most recently the British ex-Corbynista left, as offering a credible road to building a party left of Labour. This is, of course, based on a fundamental ignorance of the party’s background or its practice.

The PVDA-PTB was founded in the 1970s as a Maoist organisation under the name, All Power to the Workers, and managed to become one of Europe’s largest groups of that political shade. Its political activity was heavily based on drawing people into front organisations and campaigns, notably through its network of free healthcare centres (which is still being maintained to this day). Whereas most similar groups, like the Dutch Socialist Party, abandoned Maoism in the 80s, the PVDA-PTB held on to its hard-line position until well into the 2000s.

However, in 2008, the party held a ‘reform congress’, which abandoned the more orthodox positions and embraced what they call a ‘neo-Marxist’ position. In practice this meant cutting its more openly problematic ties with foreign organisations such as the North Korean Workers’ Party. Further, it redefined its programme to focus on ‘Socialism 2.0’ and formulated an approach that was ‘closer to the position of the working class’. Effectively this meant adopting a reformist programme and language more in line with other European left populist parties.

The PVDA-PTB finally broke through in national politics in 2014, winning a small number of seats in the Belgian parliament. At the time, it led an electoral coalition from a wide range of small left formations, including the Communist Party, the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (Mandelites) and its Flemish equivalent, the SAP, as well as drawing support from Belgian branches of the International Socialist Tendency and the Committee for a Workers’ International. This meant the party effectively ended the electoral splintering of the far left, but this coalition was promptly abandoned after it served its purpose of springboarding the PVDA-PTB to national prominence.

Although it focuses officially on building roots in workplaces, communities and social movements, this does not mean that the party is a collection of bottom-up initiatives or has any other kind of federal or democratic structure. Instead, it adheres to a strictly centralised apparatus and a model of bureaucratic centralism where individual members are discouraged from expressing independent thought. There is no right to form public factions, no open debate of political differences.

In terms of its programme, the party positions itself strongly in favour of the unity of the Belgian state and identity against the particularism of the Flemish and Wallonian parties - which means the PVDA-PTB is the only unified party in the Belgian parliament, representing both Flemings and Wallonians.

While maintaining an official ‘neo-Marxist’ moniker, the current programme is supposed to be a clever tactical and strategic approach to develop the class struggle: the party focuses on ‘bog-standard’ left-reformist demands like the need for higher taxes, the strengthening of workers’ rights, increasing pensions and decreasing the retirement age to 65, and supports expanding the welfare state.

In reality, however, this leads to an ebb and flow of contradictory positions. Especially in the Wallonian press, the party is not afraid to use terms like ‘Lenin’ and ‘communism’ from time to time, though it also distances itself from the Soviet Union, when pressed by bourgeois journalists. Its international relationships too reflect this ambiguous political stance - the party continues to maintain relations with the Communist Party of Cuba and via the campaign, ‘Cubanismo’, is openly in solidarity with that ‘socialist’ country. On the other hand, when it comes to some other countries, it has dropped the ‘official communists’ in favour of more palatable, and relevant, alternatives: ie, in Germany it has dropped the German Communist Party in favour of Die Linke; in the Netherlands the NCPN for the Socialist Party. In regard to Britain, the party is happy to play both sides - hosting Corbyn at its official events, whilst at the same time sending general secretary Peter Mertens to speak at events organised by the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain.

In the last few years especially, various European parties have been looking at the PVDA-PTB as a model. During the most recent election campaign in Germany, Die Linke borrowed heavily from its playbook and, for example conducted a ‘listening exercise’ (during which it knocked on tens of thousands of doors), which led it to pose left, but not really moving much in that direction. Similarly, the Austrian Communist Party is making increasingly large breakthroughs on the regional level, deploying a strategy of coalitionism and ‘base building’ closely resembling the earlier breakthrough moment of the PVDA-PTB.

The party is sensing that it is experiencing a moment in which it has the opportunity to reshape the European left. Last week, it officially joined the Party of the European Left, after a long ‘back and forth’ period. The chances are that understanding the party’s character and origins will become more and more urgent, as it leads the charge in a new wave of left populism - a very long way indeed from what is actually needed.

Bart Harnett
Communist Platform, Netherlands

Korean solution

Despite the passing of the Leasehold and Freehold Act in 2024 by the last Tory government and promises of more reforms - even the abolition of leasehold by the present government - leaseholders continue to be ripped off and cheated by freeholders, giant property monopolies and dodgy property management companies.

Really the best solution to the leasehold problem is for all urban property not owned by its occupier to be nationalised without compensation - leasehold would be abolished at a stroke. Any repairs or works could be taken care of by the state at a nominal cost or free of charge. This should be the demand of the left!

An excellent example of socialist housing is People’s Korea, which is building mega-streets of new housing and giving it to its citizens free of charge.

Dermot Hudson
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Tony’s senses

Cliff Connolly describes himself as a Marxist and Protestant, seemingly oblivious to the contradiction between the two world views (Letters, May 8). True, the founding fathers of Christianity supported the idea of communism almost 2,000 years before Karl Marx and other modern communists before him. For instance, in Acts 2: 44-45 we are told: “All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold their property and possessions to give to anyone who had need.”

Holding property in common and distributing according to need is clearly a communist principle, but we can’t ignore important differences between Marxism and Christianity. Also Connolly doesn’t seem to be aware that Catholicism and Protestantism, whether consciously or unconsciously, have suppressed the fact that Christianity’s founders practised an early form of communism.

Both Marxism and Christianity are based on the idea of the coming downfall of the present system. In Christianity this is symbolically referred to as the fall of Babylon the Great in the book of Revelation. For Marxism it is the downfall of capitalism, but this is where any similarities between Marxism and Christianity end. Marxists believe that humanity can solve its problems on its own, whereas for Christians an outside agency or intervention will be necessary to prevent humanity from destroying itself.

The Bible and Christianity are essentially about a coming extraterrestrial intervention in human political affairs, which is presented as a religious narrative by the biblical seers, Christians and bible scholars. According to Christian eschatology, this intervention will come after the end of the church age, which began with Pentecost around AD 33 in the 1st Century, and ends with the Rapture, which is the removal of the followers of Christ from the earth, so they don’t have to experience the horrors of the tribulation period, which will last seven years.

Christians believe the Rapture can happen at any time now. Please don’t ask me how the Rapture is possible, because I am unfamiliar with the technology behind it. For Christians, the extraterrestrial intervention, or the second coming, takes place in the latter part of the tribulation period, which will threaten the very existence of human life on this planet with nuclear war: ie, Armageddon. The return of Christ, or the ‘second coming’, is to put an end to Armageddon, and establish rule from heaven: ie, from space.

Unlike Christians, the Marxists don’t have any idea of an extraterrestrial intervention in human affairs and only future events will prove whether the Christians are correct about the extraterrestrial element. The fact that they present the prophesied otherworldly intervention as a religious narrative is secondary to the actual content of the intervention itself. Obviously the ancient seers and bible writers had no option other than presenting an extraterrestrial, alien intervention as a religious narrative.

During World War II, when the Americans set up bases in Papua New Guinea to fight the Japanese, the native peoples, who had never seen aircraft landing and taking off before, actually started religious cults to worship the airmen, who they regarded as gods. These became known as cargo cults. This is how ancient people would have regarded mysterious flying objects, whether viewed directly or through precognition.

Essentially, everything depends on whether you think the prophecies in the bible will come true or not. In other words, the question is whether prophecy is fact or fiction. Prophecy scholars argue that bible prophecies have come true in the past, so why should those relating to the future not come true as well? The bible writers combined prophecies with religion and here you have the foundation of Christianity and the other related religions. But what needs to be understood is that prophecy - ie, foretelling the future - and religion are two different things.

The Encyclopaedia of biblical prophecy by J Barton Payne lists 1,239 prophecies in the Old Testament and 578 prophecies in the New Testament - a total 1,817. According to prophecy scholars and Bible commentators and students, many of these prophecies have already come to pass. Cliff Connolly is not wrong to dismiss the ‘opium of the people’ theory of religion as superficial, but he does this without making any attempt to transcend religion.

If you are a hardened philosophical materialist, you may not want to take prophecy seriously. But, in my view, the type of philosophical materialism on which Marxism is based has long been semi-obsolete. Lenin’s statement in Materialism and empirio-criticism that “matter is that which is given to us in sensation” has long been refuted by science. Today we know that realities exist beyond the frequency range of the human senses. We are unable to see, feel, smell or sense in any way even something as common as radio frequencies.

19th Century philosophical materialism was based on the absolutisation of the human five senses. Today, this position is untenable. Marxists need to update their views. The same applies to Christians in relation to biblical prophecy. If the biblical seers saw an extraterrestrial intervention in our future, we no longer need to present this as a religious narrative.

Tony Clark
For Democratic Socialism

Style and tone

Mike Macnair’s warnings around any insistence upon use of soft language and flabby attitudes, etc are completely correct, insofar as that constitutes an indirect, but still entirely real, complicity in the distractive techniques relied upon by capitalism (‘They come with thorns’, May 8). In its time-honoured watering-down and neutering via sly manipulation (or periodically even by brute force), it engages in diverting, coopting, commandeering any potencies available from both undiluted focus and unfettered class-consciousness.

My own style in wording here, of course, has an underlying tone that I regard to be an absolutely essential ingredient in the development of worldliness - ie, in distinction to any insulated and comfortable parochialism - arguably indeed a laughably ‘feather-bedded’ view of what in fact is that cruellest conceivable reality created by the prevailing structures of power and control.

Bruno Kretzschmar
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