Letters

Elaboration

Regarding my article, ‘Soviet strategy and class collaboration’ (June 5), several points require further explanation. Specifically, I should have elaborated on why the fronts advocated by the USSR were so popular initially and why similar tactics evoke considerable nostalgia today.

As noted, most of the popular fronts I discussed achieved short-term success in boosting support and confidence for the pro-Soviet communist parties. However, a significant problem was their short lifespan, often leading to their takeover by anti-working class forces.

In the case of Iran’s Tudeh Party, I should have clarified that, while the pre-existing communist organisation was very small, Tudeh itself grew to become one of the region’s largest leftwing parties by the late 1940s and early 1950s, commanding tens of thousands of members and supporters.

The core argument of this section was aiming to trace the party’s trajectory: from its initial strategy of popular frontism to its later advocacy for a united front against the shah’s dictatorship. In 1979 the ‘anti-dictatorship’ front involved allying with Shia fundamentalists - an alliance which ultimately led to disastrous consequences.

Yassamine Mather
email

Critical points

A few questions and observations on Mike Macnair’s final article on the transition to communism (‘Capitalism as a star fort’ June 5).

First, while generalised nuclear exchange is a real possibility this century, Mike’s quite pessimistic prognosis also misses out on the impacts of accelerating climate change as a real threat to established civilisations. That said, while being honest in our assessments is vital, it is also the role of Marxists and communists to try to turn the “small hope of a way out”, as comrade Macnair puts it, through a “global alternative driven by an internationalist, proletarian communist movement”, into a more likely outcome. We need to organise and inspire, otherwise we come across as mere armchair observers.

Second, given that Marxists need to organise in order to shift the probabilities in favour of the victory of an “internationalist, proletarian communist movement”, the question of party instantly arises. In his letter to last week’s paper - and elsewhere, comrade Macnair has said it is not the role of the party to “manage and coordinate the struggles” of the working class, but to “promote the idea of a political voice for the working class”. However, to the extent a communist party becomes large and mass, its members will inevitably have to “manage and coordinate” communities, unions, workplaces, strikes and other struggles, as well as pose a general “radical democracy as an alternative to the … regime in the state”.

This will include “extending democracy into the workplace”, as the CPGB Draft programme actually calls for in its immediate demands: “All-embracing workplace committees. Organise all workers, whatever their trade, whether or not they are in trade unions. Workplace committees should fight to exercise control over hiring and firing, production and investment.”

So it is not a question of counterposing these, but of integrating them. If, as comrade Macnair argues, the emergence of communism starts within capitalism, then the working class and its party need to start coordinating and democratising this socialisation process.

Similarly, comrade Macnair’s support for the idea that the trans theses are “written for communists” rather than an “attempt to attract trans people as members” is nonsensical. Replace “trans” with anything else here - ‘unionists’, ‘Labour Party members’, ‘women’ - and you see it is ridiculous. Again, it is not a question of counterposing, but integrating.

Third, while I accept that day-to-day trade unionism in advanced capitalist countries offers no spontaneous pathway towards communist organisation and working class independence, I wonder if comrade Macnair’s formulation here is not dissimilar to the latter-day Healyite formulations of the World Socialist Website/Socialist Equality Parties that condemn the unions as thoroughly bourgeoisified and can no longer be regarded as workers’ organisations: “The workers’ fighting organisations have been turned into outworks of the capitalist state, as the bourgeois communes were turned into outworks of the feudal-monarchical state.”

For the WSWS this means that the unions need to be smashed up by ‘rank and file’ committees and replaced. What is the logical outcome of comrade Macnair’s formulation? That is unclear.

My overall concern in raising these points is to warn against a passive approach to partyism from comrade Macnair and the CPGB - one that merely observes and does not actively engage. Given that the alternative to the success of an internationalist communist, partyist strategy is nuclear war, environmental catastrophe and/or widespread barbarism, that would be a tragedy.

Martin Greenfield
Australia

Draft theses

Martin Greenfield’s letter last week, headed ‘Trans identity’ (June 5), is primarily directed to correcting Ian Spencer’s report of his intervention at the CPGB’s May 25 aggregate discussion on the draft theses on ‘Communism and trans liberation’, which I drafted. There are, however, a couple of points in his letter which raise questions for me.

The first is as to “transracialism” and the case of Rachel Dolezal. For what it is worth, I think that the arguments of Adolph Reed on the Dolezal case are broadly sound: Europeans ‘going native’ was an imperial fear in the age of European formal empires; in contrast, the critique of Dolezal is posed by the conception in liberal intersectionality that the right to speak on an issue grows only out of personal experience (I also made the point in a different way in 2018, in ‘Intersectionalism: the highest stage of western Stalinism’, Critique Vol 46, pp541-58).

Secondly, comrade Greenfield says that “sex is binary (though manifests strongly bimodally)”. I don’t think this is exactly right. Chromosomal sex is also bimodal, though the bimodal character is so strong as to look like a binary: there is an intermediate form between XX and XY, XXY (and related forms), although only 0.04% of the population are affected. Rather more people, though still a very small minority, are not obviously male or female at birth, etc.

Rather more fundamentally, what drives the significance to human societies of the biological sex binary/bimodal character is fertility. And about 7% of men and 13% of women are infertile. If we ask what the difference is between a trans man and an infertile cis man, the answer is effectively their different (gendered) upbringing. In this sense, the biological sex ‘binary’ is definitely bimodal rather than binary.

Thirdly, comrade Greenfield argues that “we need a united position for the defence of trans rights that also allows for differences of opinion - and discussion - as to why people are transsexual”. I formulated the draft theses on communism and trans liberation because it seems to me that the framework of ‘rights’ inherently posits both Ronald Dworkin’s ‘rights as trumps’, which override debate, and competing ‘rights’, which is the frame within which the current witch-hunt against trans people is set (but also the frame of ‘white rights’, ‘men’s rights’ and so on).

I don’t think that we are going to have any sort of productive discussion about “why people are transsexual”; we have anthropological and historical evidence of the presence of minorities who wish to live in a sex they were not born in, going back to pre-class societies and through antique and medieval societies, so this is not a novelty which needs special explanation: I have suggested elsewhere that this minority is analogous to redheads or high-performance athletes (‘Gender. class and capitalism’ Weekly Worker February 23 2023); but I do not think that the ‘aetiology’ issue poses political tasks.

What I have just said about the biology in relation to comrade Greenfield’s letter is, in my opinion, also a killer argument against Sean Carter’s case in his letter (also June 5) for demanding a fixed, Aristotelian “definition of a woman”. Comrade Carter claims that the draft theses are a “potential pivot to an anti-materialist position”. On the contrary, it is the demand for an Aristotelian “definition of woman” that will produce a yes/no binary answer that is anti-materialist. The point is made in Friedrich Engels’ 1895 letter to Conrad Schmidt. It is not only that it idealistically insists on the primacy of the ‘concept of woman’: it is also the case that lying behind this demand is actual rightist religious ideology of the relation between the sexes, based on Genesis 1.17.

The second half of comrade Carter’s letter swallows whole the claim of the Republican Party political operatives, who in 2017 seized on ‘gender-critical feminism’ to be the basis of the latest culture-wars smear operation and their Conservative Party equivalents that trans people are a threat to women in general. This, too, is anti-materialist, because it is a plain falsification of material facts: it claims that less than 1% of the population, or around half a million, who are trans, without the sort of financial resources that back the Republican and Tory parties, are a real threat to the 51% (30.4 million) of UK population who are women.

As I put in the draft theses, this is the same method as the Tory press’s exaggeration of the number of false rape claims. I can add that the same method is used by Republican and Tory press exaggeration of the frequency of criminal victimisation of individuals, or of the number of crimes committed by migrants.

Mike Macnair
Oxford

RCP’s growth?

“Over the past two years, the RCI [Revolutionary Communist International] has grown exponentially”, according to one of its leading members, Alan Woods, as he looked forward with enthusiasm to its August congress. However, close examination of annual conference reports from its major affiliates suggests that the initial surge in membership between 2023 and 2024, generated by the ‘Are you a communist?’ campaign, has largely petered out.

The Revolutionary Communists of America reported a membership of approximately 800 in spring 2024 - an increase of “115%” over the past 12 months. Yet the recent 2025 conference also claimed that membership had “more than doubled” over the past two years, which means there has been very little, if any, growth since spring 2024.

Canada’s Revolutionary Communist Party grew quickly in its first year, from 400 (May 2023) to 820 by May of the following year. But its most recent conference (May 2025) set out a plan to recruit “hundreds more communists” in order to reach a membership target of 1,000, implying that, as in the USA, membership growth over the past 12 months has been minimal or non-existent.

Britain’s RCP grew from 800 members in spring 2023 to 1,150 by spring 2024, but one year later its membership total had increased only marginally, to 1,206. Finally, the Danish RCP has experienced a similar phenomenon: rapid growth between 2023 and 2024, from 100 to 247, but over the past year its membership has yet to reach 300.

For the past three years the RCI has been using dubious survey data to claim there are “millions of young people” convinced by the virtues of communism and that its vigorous recruitment drives will quickly build mass parties numbering thousands - and, before too long, tens of thousands of members. The evidence suggests that rapid growth has already given way to the pattern common to Trotskyist parties everywhere: the slow, patchy, incremental recruitment of very small numbers.

John Kelly
email

CPBer’s advice

I think that in a lot of the exchanges between Talking About Socialism and the Weekly Worker group (WWG) there has been far too much talking at cross purposes, which doesn’t help clarity and is not helpful in finding grounds for genuine political or organisational unity. This ‘cross-talking’ may or may not be deliberate, but does seem to be a bit of a sectarian habit, marking out why one group or faction is ‘right’ and the other ‘wrong’, but it doesn’t really take the overall discussion forward.

One set of examples are the questions of defining socialism and communism. The TAS group (now) chooses to use the words interchangeably, but when they talk of socialism/communism, this does not appear to be what (say) the Socialist Party of Great Britain or the WWG in its Draft programme would define as ‘communism’: ie, a stateless, moneyless, free association of producers, where people would work voluntarily as a pleasure, choose to produce the necessary goods and services in relative abundance to enable all needs and wants to be met, and people would freely access all the goods and services they require. People would consciously choose to work responsibly and would equally consciously (and conscientiously) choose to access goods and services responsibly.

This would seem to me to require a very high level of socialist/communist consciousness and among a very high proportion of the population and I suspect would take a number of generations of what communists would generally call ‘socialist society’ to be able to meet all these necessary conditions of full communism. (Incidentally, the question of full communist consciousness is one the SPGB comrades conspicuously fail to respond to, when challenged on their own version of the “world socialist revolution” and “immediate transition” to full socialism/communism).

What the TAS comrades describe as socialism/communism appears to be what I would term developed socialism: ie, it doesn’t yet have the above features of full communism, but is where the great majority of the means of production and distribution are socialised and democratically controlled by the working class.

There does appear to be a genuine difference between TAS and the WWG on the question of the transitional period (I would generally favour the arguments of the WWG, and Jack Conrad in particular, on why this is the case), but the constructiveness of the discussion is hampered by the fact that the two groups are talking of transitions to two different stages of society. The WWG assert the TAS group are advocating a virtually instantaneous leap to full communism, when in fact they seem to be advocating (a still unrealistic) very quick transition to developed or full socialism.

I do feel the TAS people are being unfair when they characterise the WWG position as being to “manage capitalism” for a significant length of time. I think all the WWG are saying is that, at the point when the working class comes to power, capitalism will be the current social and economic system, which is taken over. The working class “as the new ruling and majority class” would move very quickly to expropriate the big capitalists and place the great majority of the means of production and distribution in the hands of the working class.

The ‘commanding heights’ and indeed the great majority of the economy would need to be rapidly socialised and in the hands of the working class, who would be able to start to plan the production of goods and services to meet needs. Obviously, as Jack in particular has stated in a number of articles, this does not mean that every single fish and chip shop or curry house will be immediately in state ownership or communally owned by local communities.

However, it would surely be incorrect and highly misleading to describe this stage of the revolutionary process as either ‘managing capitalism’ or ‘capitalism coexisting with socialism’. One form - socialism - would clearly be very dominant and could heavily suppress, even redirect, the market impulses of any sectors remaining in individual or private ownership. The law of the plan would clearly predominate over the law of value.

The nature and content of any socialist revolution may be such that in the course of organising and asserting itself as ‘a class for itself’, the actual revolutionary struggle of the working class and the unfolding revolutionary process could itself result in severe, if not total, paralysis of capitalism and may well have de facto taken over large proportions of the means of production before assuming full state power.

The immediate steps for the working class in power would absolutely not be to ‘manage capitalism’, but to complete the necessary socialisation and democratisation of the economy, the state and its own class rule, and start to create a new planned socialist system of production and distribution to meet needs. Naturally, one would hope - indeed expect - given the international and interconnected nature of current capitalism, that the socialist revolution would be fairly international, at least affecting a number of the major capitalist countries.

It would be (perhaps literally) fantastic if socialist revolution could take place simultaneously across the whole world, or at least across its major imperialist centres. However, one must at least provide for the case that the working class may find itself in power in some countries and not in others, and the new socialist economies would need for a period of time (years? decades?) to trade with countries which continued to be capitalist. The WWG with its very Eurocentric view of the world talks of a continental socialist revolution being required, but even Europe is hardly self-sufficient in even basic respects and does need to trade with countries right round the world.

Again, this would hardly amount to the working class in power ‘managing capitalism’ or, worse, for it to have to relinquish state power on the grounds that ‘the world proletarian revolution’ has not yet arrived - or not to have even bothered carrying out the socialist revolution in the first place.

Andrew Northall
Kettering

Slander?

Maybe David Douglass could take some time to reflect on his reply to John Smithee last week (Letters, June 5) - most particularly bearing in mind the generally equivalent one made to a published letter of mine a few years ago.

I don’t remember all the finer details, but I do recall very clearly how the comrade replied to it with purportedly hard-nosed proletarian fury against ‘comfortable southerners’ - apparently people like me, who can have no concept of what it meant to live in circumstances where his own daughter as a child had to endure the indignities of having to use an outside toilet in their north-east England home.

All of this was in the context of my having tried to point out how his promotion of industrialised development and economic growth, irrespective of inevitably consequent social and cultural (and even spiritual?) damage caused, was not in fact a dandy idea - certainly not a progressive stance for anyone to hold in terms of the dangers presented by global warming, etc (even if in his case it was being made not by a communist, but a self-defined “anarchist”.

Now Dave Douglass virulently complains about being labelled as a supporter/promoter of Nigel Farage’s Reform, (calling it “completely unacceptable” and a “slander”, no less!) - an example of where expressions like ‘a pot calling a kettle black’ and ‘people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones’ positively leap to any unfettered mind!

For his benefit, unashamedly I’ll admit here to being an example of a largely untrained Marxist. However, that hasn’t diminished any ability to recognise the historical need to secure for humankind genuine socialism: ie, a non-Stalinistic communism. Dave Douglass needs to learn how coming from a family background of well-educated, middle class ‘professionals’ does not preclude a seriousness or dedication to those things. On the contrary, as in my own case, it provides a potential capability to rise above the small-mindedness of petty ‘tribalism’ - the stuff that is so painfully typical of traditional, stale, stagnant, head-banging ‘working class’ politics!

Comrade Douglass should take a moment or two to think about what amounts to his ‘inverted snobbery’, his simple bigotry: most specifically of all, those undiluted industrialist stances he persists with to the exclusion of all more modernist understanding and duly developed class-consciousness. Down that road he would discover himself to be a hugely valuable ingredient in the creation of a newly relevant Communist Party - something that the easily maligned ‘Aunt Sally’ editor of the Weekly Worker and others in the CPGB seem to me to be committed to.

Bruno Kretzschmar
email

Apostles’ creed

Following a rabid misinterpretation of one my posts, it becomes apparent that I needs must recite a form of apostles’ creed, before launching any comment on current affairs.

Firstly, I hold the principle that any worker who can’t get their worth in their own country can up stakes and move anywhere they think there’s a chance of improving their standards of life. I’d prefer they stay and organise, and fight for change where they are, but realise this isn’t always possible: they might be fleeing from repression following attempting to do just that.

The practical application of that principle however, needs organisation and attention. Huge influxes of hundreds and thousands of people, mostly young men, descending on communities and no plan to deal with them is the path of utter chaos and predictable tensions. Local people - not all of whom are white - are, of course, worried about housing, about schools, about cohesion. Shouting ‘racist scum’ and ‘fascist’ at them is hardly an intelligent plan. Worse, it inoculates people at large against such terms, to the point where such insults become meaningless. A dangerous development, when real racism and real fascist gangs are in the wings.

At the same time, in Palestine the time is long overdue when wounded children are evacuated wholesale to British hospitals. I wouldn’t advocate this for the general population as a whole, as this would play into the Israeli master plan, but in the case of wounded and crippled adults it’s long overdue.

I do not support parliamentary political parties, or the party form of organisation in general. Though obviously some are more progressive than others. I don’t vote in general - though that’s a tactic, not a principle. I am an anarcho-syndicalist and have been for 53 years in 63 years of active political revolutionary struggle. As such I believe in a world commonwealth, in which wealth and labour are shared - the regulation of things rather than the government of people. I’m against the state - all states, though I realise they are not the same and some are worse than others. All states have the potential of becoming rogue or oppressive.

Needless to say. I disagree with Carl Collins (Letters, May 29) and Lenin, that workers only achieve “trade union consciousness” in those organisations. I’ve written about this theory - as opposed to the ideas of anarcho-syndicalism and the fact that workers can and do achieve class consciousness, regardless of the formal structure of various kinds of organisational structure - in my book, All power to the imagination, published by the Class War Federation. It is available from me for £8, inclusive of post (contact me at douglassdavid705@gmail.com), so I will not repeat all those arguments.

I started this thread in response to reported plans of building a new workers’ party, and the meeting in London (of course!) of various revolutionary left groups to elaborate a programme and theory, etc. I made the point that surely you must respond to the needs of the working class, with its own demands and perspectives - at least as an equal priority. Top of which is to address the ‘net zero’ obsession and its deindustrialisation effects. This might not ring any bells in London, but in the so called ‘red wall’ areas, the industrial communities, the rust belt of mining, steel, manufacture, it does.

The demands that reactionary doctrine be dropped is a workers’ demand. The fact that Farage and Reform have cynically adopted it doesn’t make it less authentic as a demand - likewise removing the cuts in welfare benefits and the nationalisation of essential utilities and services, such as rail, etc. A revolutionary programme declaring the abolition of capitalism and the institution of workers’ and consumers’ control of the means of production, etc is academic if there are no basic means of production and building infrastructure.

I was arguing that the new outfit meet workers and communities where they are, not just geographically and materially. Never in a million years did I think some poltroon would conclude I was in support of Farage and Reform by this observation. That level of cretinism I wasn’t expecting in the Weekly Worker. It’s clear that some people are only used to mouthing the latest slogan and see anything different as being in the enemy camp. I must be getting sensitive in my old age, because that remark hurt and upset me (‘Ah diddums’, I hear you say). My daughter - sensible lass that she is - has suggested that my posts do sometimes cause confusion and are not what would be expected (really?).

I was making the point that the migrant issue is not the cause of Reform’s surge of support, among those who were once the bedrock of trade unionism and socialism. The offshore oil and gas workers threatened with industrial genocide are not switching to Reform because of concern with immigrants - it’s not in these workers’ agenda. The surge in Durham and Doncaster, in mining areas and industrial centres - now places of social deprivation - is motivated by somebody (anybody) raising what seems obvious solutions.

I have personally campaigned for eight years for the proposed coking coal mine at Whitehaven, only to have climate secretary Edward Miliband withdraw backing for it and the 2,000 jobs in mining and associated projects. If Reform stands candidates in local council or parliamentary elections, do you think this would be their demand or ours? If they run on a ticket of opening the mine, do you think the job-starved area will then reject the mine and jobs because it’s Reform who’ve jumped onto the bandwagon? Of course not, but all I’m saying is it’s the left, whoever that is, who should be setting this agenda, not leaving the field open for opportunists. When you’ve finished shining up the revolutionary manifesto, leave some room for practical and immediate demands of the class itself.

Although I argue that the bulk of the surge to Reform isn’t prompted by racism, I am acutely aware that within their ranks (or behind their cloak) racists and outright fascists will use them as a beachhead and use that surge as a means of opening up their platform. But don’t, for god’s sake, lose all sense of perspective and proportion.

David Douglass
South Shields