Letters

Fascist attack

I have just watched disturbing footage of a fascist attack on the SWP’s Marxism 2025 festival in London. Unfortunately, all YouTube clips of this seem to be from fascist sources, so I will not give the link, but they can be easily searched for using keywords.

The SWP comrades outnumbered the fash, fought bravely and damage seems to be not too bad. But this shows the confidence of UK fascists, given the election of Trump and rise of Reform. Even in the bad old days of the late 1970s and early 1980s groups like the National Front and British Movement never felt confident enough to attack actual Marxist events. That has clearly changed.

Also, SWP security has sadly never been good and protecting their members has never been a priority. One group of SWP stewards who could mix it with fascists back in the day were expelled by Tony Cliff for “squadism” and “laddish behaviour” and famously went on to form Red Action.

I have my differences with the SWP - however, solidarity with them on this occasion.

Paul O’Keeffe
USA

Transition truths

Surely the simple answer to both Adam Buick and Robin Cox (Letters, July 5), who is quoting him, are at least twofold: that, should a majority (which I assume is defined as 50% plus one) vote for socialism (which the Socialist Party of Great Britain defines as full communism), all the necessary preconditions for full communism are absolutely not in place.

In my letter of June 12 I defined this full communism (or ‘socialism’ for the SPGB) as being: “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 people would equally consciously (and conscientiously) choose to access goods and services responsibly”.

What reasonable guarantee could there possibly be that the 50%+ who chose to vote for SPGB parliamentary candidates were all fully imbued with the necessary advanced communist consciousness?

People might vote SPGB for a whole host of reasons other than being completely convinced they should work for nothing and for the good of society and allowing everyone else to literally freely access everything they produce. They might just like the idea of ‘socialism’ without any real understanding of what it actually means. They may think socialism means something very different. They may just like the images of Adam or Robin on the ballot paper.

And what about the up to 49% of those who did not even superficially vote SPGB, let alone allegedly for full communism? How could a full communist society possibly operate with such numbers not persuaded by the case for free labour or for responsible free access to goods and services? Surely, the great majority of the working population would need to be fully imbued with that advanced communist consciousness for such a society to work, and not be fatally undermined by a fairly significant non-socialist minority.

Obviously, one would like such advanced socialist and communist consciousness to develop, become as widespread and as rapidly as possible, but the new working class power would surely have to preside over a lengthy period of time when there remained significant numbers who were assuredly not advanced communists.

Incidentally, no real socialist or communist is suggesting that, when the working class has assumed political and state power, it would then preside over capitalism, or manage capitalism for a lengthy period of time. All we are saying is that at the point of assuming state power, the working class - the new ruling class - would have inherited a capitalist economic and social system. After that point it would, of course, proceed rapidly to socialise the major concentrations of capitalism and place them under the democratic control of the new ruling working class, and start to plan production to meet needs. To assert otherwise is really to be playing with words and silly games.

Robin Cox repeats one of the bases of the SPGB claim for ‘instant full socialism’: ie, there is immediate productive capacity to produce all the goods and services everyone might need or even want. He even repeats the assertion that currently the world produces more than enough food for everyone, and it is simply distributional problems which prevent this being equitably distributed. Simply wrong on both basic counts.

There may be the potential capacity to produce all the socially useful goods and services people may need or want, but there would need to be a huge amount of work both to close down all the current production which is not socially useful (even dangerous or downright destructive) and replace it with socially useful production and to the levels required to ensure abundance. We are surely talking of decades at least.

I have heard the glib repeated SPGB assertion that ‘there is already enough food produced’ many, many times and therefore decided to look into this in more detail. I assume not even the SPGB would be so crass as to suggest we should be sending surplus supermarket ready meals to the third world.

Is there really currently enough food being produced in the world to feed eight billion people? No. We are a million miles from such a position. The truer scientific claim is that there is a theoretical potential to produce enough food, but that would require a series of vast, radical and wide-ranging measures and changes to existing production, which would take an even longer period of time than conversion of all industry to socially useful production

Huge amounts of existing agricultural production has nothing whatsoever to do with meeting the nutritional needs of eight billion people. It is often cash crop production for industry or other purposes - or nutritionally incredibly wasteful and geared to meet the market needs of the minority of the population in the ‘advanced’ capitalist states. It also requires whole sets of radical changes to existing agricultural land to make it more productive and geared to nutrition, and also measures to bring into production whole new tracts of land through land reclamation, irrigation, etc. Such radical changes to world agriculture would require years, if not decades, to come to full fruition.

No-one is suggesting that the period following the assumption of state power by the working class and the years - decades - required to implement all the above necessary preconditions for full communism would in any way be ‘managing capitalism’. Or any form of hybrid capitalism and socialism. It would indeed be the ‘lower stage of communism’ - aka ‘socialism’ - as it emerged from capitalist society, as Marx put it.

Through the immediate socialisation of all the major centres of capital, socialism would clearly be the dominant mode of production in the new working class-ruled society, although still having to be based on remuneration for labour and also a sensible rational system for fairly allocating goods and services to people in the absence of the complete abundance of all goods and services. This suggests the existence of some form of monetary system.

I suspect that full communist consciousness will only be developed and among the required vast majority of the working population only after the material conditions have been created, which, as I say, could well take decades. It could indeed take generations for old capitalist behaviour, prejudices and thinking (capitalist and reactionary consciousness) to be largely eliminated from the population.

During this period, you would also have the problem of the overthrown classes and their active supporters, plus the substantial minority of those who did not even vote for ‘socialism’. This suggests some form of state apparatus would be required for an extended period, albeit one in the hands of the majority ruling class. This also suggests a stage of socialism before a stage of full communism, as the latter, by definition, would be stateless.

So a transitional period, which commences with the assumption of political and state power by the working class - transitional in the sense of being between capitalism and (full) communism, but in reality a necessary interim stage of socialism (or lower phase of communism), in which all the necessary conditions for full communism are gradually implemented.

Andrew Northall
Kettering

Transition nuance

Two letters last week (July 3) - from Gary Levi and Moshé Machover - respond to my introduction to Ben Lewis’s translation of Kautsky on the ‘new middle classes’.

Comrade Levi is correct that Kautsky disavows the Zusammenbruchstheorie elsewhere in the Anti-Bernstein and I agree with his recommendation of Simon Clarke’s Marx’s theory of crisis as good reading for leftists on this much-debated topic. That said, I think it is reasonably clear from their biographies that Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel did defend a Zusammenbruchstheorie and that it was important to their strategic conceptions, which actually shaped the politics of the SPD: that is, of building up the workers’ movement and the workers’ political voice under the capitalist regime, as opposed either to coalition politics or to attempting to convert immediate strike or single-issue campaigns into an insurrectionary struggle for power.

The validity of the approach depended on the idea that capitalism would of its own accord fall into Zusammenbruch - that is, into a form of crisis that went beyond a ‘normal’ cyclical financial crisis - so that it threatened the ability of the rulers to go on in the old way (Lenin’s formula). If this was wrong, then the SPD’s, and the Bolsheviks’, “revolutionary but not revolution-making” policy would be indefensible. The only available real choices would then be insurrectionism - either in the form of mass-strikism or of armed struggle - or some form of Fabianism. This was the argument of the cold war former MI6 and CIA authors (Carl Schorske, Peter Nettl, and so on) who used Luxemburg and other left critics of the SPD’s approach as a political instrument in support of Fabianism.

I do not think that the Zusammenbruchstheorie was completely wrong. What I think was wrong about it was the omission of the state order and, in consequence, the place of war in any actual Zusammenbruch.

Comrade Machover’s letter corrects my over-general statement of his oral comment at an Online Communist Forum meeting. This is obviously useful. But I am not sure that it is possible to make such a clean divide between the abolition of capitalism and the supersession of markets as he makes in his letter. The first reason for this is that the withdrawal of capital is a normal day-to-day measure of capitalist coercion of governments and becomes more acute if the capitalist class loses political power. To defeat this unavoidably involves Kriegssozialismus (‘war socialism’): that is, immediate (though unavoidably defective) planning ‘in kind’ of necessary productive activities which capital is refusing to perform.

The second reason concerns the transition to capitalism - and the point the Marxist economist, John Harrison, made in 1978, that Capital describes a counter-factual, purified capitalism, with a view to the critique of the Proudhonists and the left Ricardians who imagined a market economy without capital (by different means). Capital volume 1 among other features shows that small commodity production, by the laws of monetary market relations themselves, tends through marginal differences in personal productivity and luck to evolve into small groups of proto-capitalists and proto-workers. This dynamic has been empirically shown at work in studies of late medieval peasant and artisan production. Hence, by socialising large capital we have not wholly eliminated capitalism.

In consequence of these two points, I think that a messy transition, with a certain amount of ‘waste and chaos’, is unavoidable.

Mike Macnair
Oxford

Irrelevant?

Tony Greenstein is one of the most tireless, indefatigable fighters in political life. On the street, on the rostrum, on the road he risks health, wealth and freedom for his cause. And then we have his regular blog and his excellent book, Zionism during the holocaust.

But in a letter to the Weekly Worker (May 1) he announced that he has cancelled his subscription because we “seem to have lost all sense of direction and perspective”. He goes on to describe the hazardous times we live in and contrasts that urgency with the CPGB’s attempt at forging communist unity. This is apparently an error, because “One thing is very clear. We are not in a revolutionary or pre-revolutionary era” - nothing like Russia after three years of war, I suppose.

He writes of the unions, the Labour Party and the climate crisis and contends: “Yet, instead of engaging with these questions, the Weekly Worker and CPGB have turned their backs on the living political struggle in favour of an irrelevant unity project. The idea that revolutionaries, Marxists and reformists should unite in one mass party is rejected out of hand in favour of an unrealisable sectarian project.” A clue here as to what he thinks we really need - “revolutionaries, Marxists and reformists should unite in one mass party”. He fails to tell us how well that has worked in the past.

In the Weekly Worker of July 3, however, it seems that, happily, Tony has not cancelled his connection to the CPGB after all. There is a certain triumphalist note: “I accused you of turning your backs on the living political struggle in favour of an irrelevant unity project. It didn’t surprise me that no-one in the CPGB wished to engage with my argument, because to do so would raise too many uncomfortable questions.” And now, problems with Talking About Socialism show that he was right all along, it seems. Again we see the times we are living in and the indifference shown by CPGB to all that’s going on.

I’d have thought that Tony might just have noticed some of the articles lately in the Weekly Worker. He could have seen reports and pictures of the Palestine demonstrations, articles on Gaza and Iran, on freedom of speech, on climate change - there’s quite a lot of stuff, Tony, not just FCU. Thousands of copies of the paper are distributed at the demonstrations too!

There are urgent questions facing the working class, and the whole of humanity, now and there have been for quite some time. For instance, currently: Gaza, Sudan, Haiti - plus, of course, the UK and USA. Since, say, 1950 Korea, Kenya, Vietnam, South Africa, Iraq … and many, many more. Should we drop everything and concentrate on one at a time?

There is a link to all this, Tony: it’s called capital - profit for the sake of profit, accumulation for the sake of accumulation. What is needed? The end of capitalism. How can this be done? By the efforts of the organised working class. How can the working class be organised? By the building of a mass Communist Party.

But Tony doesn’t seem to be so keen on resolving everything we can at once. He ends his latest mail with his way forward. “Our first and foremost task is preventing a far-right government and rebuilding the left.” And “The distinctions between reformism and revolutionary socialism are theoretical abstractions today, when the need to defend democratic gains won in past ages, such as freedom of speech, are all too obvious.”

So we don’t need to move forward: we need to regain what has been lost. Well, good luck with that, Tony - perhaps Corbyn and Sultana can help you out.

Jim Nelson
Email

Programme

Tony Greenstein suffers from what most of the Trotskyoid left suffers from: the belief that the Marxist programme is only relevant during a r-r-revolutionary situation. In the meantime we should just bring the left together around some sort of warmed-over left reformism and keep our ‘Marxism’ for Socialist Sunday School speechifying.

For such comrades, Marxism is a parody or some sort of Storming the Winter Palace Re-enactment Society. Either that or it involves a dishonest and patronising approach to the working class: let’s trick people into a revolutionary crisis and then - tah-dah!, we reveal the Marxist programme. Of course, by then it will be too late, and counterrevolution will be the most likely outcome.

Classical Marxism and a genuine communist programme does offer a framework and strategy for addressing the immediate concerns of the working class and connecting this to the battle for working class state power through a minimum and maximum programme. It is comrade Greenstein who proposes these be disconnected by suggesting a fight for reforms in the here and now (and the future be damned).

Comrade Greenstein says the priority is to prevent a far-right government and to rebuild the left. But what sort of left? To do what? None of the problems he outlines can be solved positively under a left reformist capitalist government. He outlines the genocide in Gaza, the attacks on democratic rights, a lack of working class industrial militancy. Will warmed-over left reformism answer these problems?

Since the defeat of the Miners’ Great Strike we have seen attempt after attempt to lash together a left that thinks the distinction between reform and revolution is a chimera or a “theoretical abstraction”, as comrade Greenstein puts it: Socialist Labour Party, Socialist Alliance, Respect, Tusc, Left Unity, und so weiter, ad nauseum.

For comrades like Tony, there is no connection between the working class leading and winning the battles for free speech, opposing imperialism and itself conquering state power. It is not ‘unity between sects’ that will alter the balance of power: it is winning the working class to an understanding it needs its own party to take state power. Only a Marxist programme offers that possibility. Maybe we should try that for a change?

Martin Greenfield
Australia

Liquidate!

I am very sad to hear that the Forging Communist Unity talks have broken down. I, and other comrades here in the Netherlands, have been following the talks with decreasing enthusiasm over the last months. The biggest drop in enthusiasm for many of us was the pulling out of the RS21 comrades, who represented by far the largest group in the talks.

I want to urge the CPGB and the pro-fusion faction in Prometheus to start to work in, strengthen and eventually fuse with the Marxist Unity Caucus (MUC) in RS21. Certainly they can use your experience and knowledge on organising and Marxism. In doing so, I don’t care whether you keep the name and organisational structure of the CPGB or not. Certainly I think it would be a good idea to keep the Weekly Worker fully as it is now: a paper for open polemic on and for Marxist unity, and one which I very much enjoy reading every week.

You have repeatedly assured us that, if it came to be so, the CPGB would have no problem being a minority and fighting for your points. I say, fight for your points together with the MUC in RS21, which is by far the biggest organisation in Britain that has any hope of becoming the (proto-) party formation which you seek to build.

Of course, it could be the case that the MUC has some fundamental disagreements with you, such that you don’t wish to work inside the caucus (factions within factions). In that case, I say fight alongside them on the points you agree with in RS21! I repeat, they can certainly use your knowledge and experience (both RS21 and MUC).

This letter is my own opinion and not sanctioned by any organisation.

Elise van der Doelen
Revolutionary Socialist Party and ROOD

Bring it on!

Within his other central dissections, Jack Conrad provides both an extremely clear and very helpful outline of the CPGB’s stances around how to secure a successful Marxist revolution in these complex modern times of ours (‘One step back’, July 3).

However, when it comes to how that scenario is to be reached in the first place there’s a glaring lack of recognition, a peculiar absence of simplest understanding about what can only be called factors and forces of a ‘real’ world - where very wrongly indeed he dismisses the importance and powerfulness of revolutionary success or even just progress in one country providing encouragement in others (even, yes, being ‘inspirational’). It’s just normal to human behaviour, and certainly where a huge dollop of well-grounded/intelligently derived optimism amounts to lifeblood in the building of any Communist Party or overall movement.

Counterrevolutionary forces and activities of the capitalist-imperialist status quo - of its ruthless and when necessary outright brutal measures for self-preservation - will exist and be deployed regardless of any cleverly conceived plan to avoid that onslaught. So the immediate application of extensive socialist measures will be required. Objective factors and imperatives will dominate over any subjective others. In short (nonetheless in worldly completeness): ‘Bring it all on!’ ... ie, when or wherever given that utterly magnificent chance.

Bruno Kretzschmar
Email

Starmer out

There is no-one on the left who wouldn’t sympathise with John Price’s sentiments on the open treachery of the present Labour leader and those who support him (Letters, June 26). However, calling on Labour MPs to resign from the Labour Party is not the way forward. Starmer, who I suspect is a deep-state plant, just happens to be the most rightwing of the post-war Labour leaders. This strange person came from nowhere and is now carrying out the most extreme attacks on the working class.

But the odd thing is, although everyone on the left opposes Starmer, they have allowed him to get away with his crimes. Where is the anti-Starmer campaign which the working class is crying out for? Starmer on his present course is leading the Labour Party to defeat in the next general election, where many Labour MPs are going to lose their seats, if the Labour Party doesn’t get rid of him. So what should the left do?

We shouldn’t be calling on Labour MPs to ditch the party. Rather, what is urgently needed is a short-term ‘Starmer out’ campaign. Just as the Labour right conducted an effective campaign with the support of the establishment press to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn, we should be calling on the left inside and outside the Labour Party to initiate a campaign against Starmer, with the support of the left press. We need to get rid of this fellow as soon as possible - meaning put pressure on the Labour and trade union establishment to remove him from the leadership.

The way to get him removed from the leadership is to start a ‘Starmer out’ campaign.

Tony Clark
For Democratic Socialism

Responsible

First of all, calling for “Death to the IDF” is not going to solve any problems in the world. Free speech actually includes the proviso that it’s used in a responsible way. Otherwise it’s a millstone around our necks with every performance in every theatre in the country - for example, being disrupted indefinitely because irresponsible people think it’s their right to shout ‘Fire!’ whenever they want. Rights and responsibilities go hand in hand and we shouldn’t forget that.

As Anne McShane’s article last week pointed out, Bob Vylan clarified his statement later by saying, “We are for the dismantling of a violent military machine!” (‘Well done, Kneecap and Bob Vylan’, July 3). That makes more sense and brings the debate away from just trite, throwaway statements to the issue at hand, and to reason rather than irrational emotionalism.

Let’s remember that Israel Defence Forces soldiers are as much part of the mass ideological manipulation as everybody else. Members of the IDF, like the rest of us, have been brainwashed from birth to accept the divisive, malevolent system we live in today. Israeli children are raised, if not to hate Palestinians, at least to see them as a separate people, not deserving of the same rights and privileges. I lived in Israel for lengthy periods and the Israeli children would tell you the most horrendous stories about Palestinians - the very worst stories about the very worst acts allegedly perpetrated by Palestinians, which could just as well have been made-up propaganda. One of the first Israelis I ever spoke to warned me not to go into the occupied territories, as I would be “raped” by Palestinians. So this is the ideological setting for people growing up in Israel, or for people visiting Israel (I did eventually visit the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, and had very positive experiences).

Undoubtedly, the IDF have committed war crimes. They have targeted young children - a sniper bullet through the head is their preferred method of murder. They target pregnant women and boast about how shooting them means ‘killing two people with one bullet’. There’s no equivocation about IDF war crimes, which a lot of the world has accepted and justified, but the members of the IDF are as much a part of the ideological brainwashing as Hamas.

The eradication of the IDF would not get to the heart of the matter, which is that, from day one most people - through whatever cultural and maybe even some well-meaning initiatives - are taught in one way or another to hate a certain other people and to accept the systems of finance, economics and government that respectively indebt us, enslave us, and manipulate us.

If we want to support the Palestinian cause, we should support Yvette Cooper which is an organisation founded on the same day that Palestine Action was closed down and that wants to use militant direct action in order to undermine the Israeli military war machine and Britain’s participation in it. Isn’t it the irony of ironies that practically on the same day that Palestine Action was proscribed as a ‘terrorist organisation’, foreign secretary David Lammy was photographed shaking hands with the interim Syrian president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, whose proscribed organisation, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, forms a major part of the present transitional Syrian government.

I support Yvette Cooper and wish them all success. It’s the activities of Yvette Cooper that have the potential to bring about positive change in Gaza and elsewhere - not trite statements by sham artists jumping on bandwagons.

Louis Shawcross
County Down