Letters

Marxist unity

I have been following, albeit not closely, the merger talks between the CPGB, the Marxist Unity Caucus of RS21, TAS and Prometheus. It seems like there have been some barriers to a full organisational merger.

Whether this is from problems of organisational culture, inability to agree on aspects of a full programme or whatever is beside the point - these issues take time to fully hammer out between existing organisations. However, with the formation of Corbyn and Sultana’s party, it is more imperative than ever that these ‘orthodox Marxist’-inspired groups quickly form an agreement around a minimum platform for engaging with the new party. The earlier this platform is hammered out, the better positioned a pro-party tendency will be to set the conversation in the new party.

Initiative is key here. All parties within the merger talks must quickly agree to forming a joint faction - even if outside the party they retain their independent organisational structure (for now). Initiative is something comrade Max Shanly was able to successfully achieve with his draft ‘constitution and standing orders’ for the new left party, based on the constitution and bylaws of the Democratic Socialists of America, with a few tweaks favoured by the DSA’s left wing. Because of his timing, with a document ready to go in the very early stages, he was able to get this in front of the organisers of the party.

If a British ‘Marxist Unity’ faction coheres quickly, it would be ready with a coherent and developed vision for a mass-membership, democratic-republican party. It would be miles ahead of the rest of the far left. As comrades know, this is a rare and historic opportunity. In the US, the Marxist Unity Group has had a great deal of success over the last four years, now best representing the views of about 10% of the DSA’s delegates at this month’s national convention. Delegates passed our resolution, ‘Principles for party building’, and our ideas on partyism specifically are hegemonic within the organisation’s left wing (which was shown to be the majority of the organisation at said convention).

Had we been ready to launch when the DSA first blew up in 2017, we might be much more dominant in the organisation. A British Marxist Unity faction could quickly surpass our successes. A repeat of Labour Party Marxists, or a faction by any one of these particular groups on their own, would probably not be able to go beyond its own artisanal limitations.

It’s imperative all sides of these talks act quickly and decisively. Take the initiative, comrades!

Parker McQueeney
USA

Spart unity

In a letter sent to the central committee of the Revolutionary Communist Organisation, the Spartacist League of Australia, the local franchise of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), expressed their desire to join the RCO.

The letter follows a period of extended polemical discussion between Partisan! (the publication of the RCO), and Red Battler (the publication of the SLA) on the necessity of a communist party and the strategy needed to bring it about. In their response to the RCO called ‘Road to party’, the SLA clarified their disagreements with the RCO, stating that they agree with the need to fight for communist reunification on the basis of a revolutionary programme. However, they maintain that, rather than unity being a prerequisite for an effective fight against state-loyalism in the workers’ movement (that is, the fight to split the working class from the Australian Labor Party), such revolutionary regroupment is only possible through the process of a struggle against Labourism.

Having clarified our differences in strategic approach through open polemics and debate, the SLA has come to the conclusion that, though differences in views remain, those differences are better resolved in the same organisation rather than separately. As such, the Spartacists have requested to join the RCO, understanding that the RCO is an organisation which welcomes political differences and accepts the right of its members to organise into factions.

This is the most substantial vindication of the partyist strategy in Australia thus far, particularly in terms of the culture of discussion surrounding the RCO. The fostering of ties to the Spartacists through joint work in Victorian Socialists and other areas, as well through discussion and socialisation at events hosted by the RCO, evidently helped open the door to unity. This, in combination with the polemical culture of the RCO through Partisan!, has allowed us to clarify our differences with the Spartacists, which in turn has shown the basis for unity between our two organisations. That these are among the most prominent areas of work for the RCO should be taken as a great credit to us as an organisation.

This move towards unity should also be considered in the context of the evolving politics of the ICL(FI). Since the death of Jim Robertson, and the broad failure of their long-time strategy of going straight to the masses, the Spartacists globally have moved away from the sectarian positions they are most commonly known for. Initially, this has manifested in a more traditional entryist strategy with regards to the DSA and the Australian Labor Party, on the basis of a ‘splits and fusions’ strategy. In Australia in particular, however, this manifested last year in a merger with a young and minor orthodox Trotskyist outfit, the Bolshevik-Leninists, who brought some much needed young blood into their organisation.

The publishing of Spartacist 70 earlier this year has further developed this reorientation to the existing left. The latest edition of the Spartacists’ theoretical journal outlines the need to regroup revolutionary forces on a principled basis. Unity with the RCO appears to be the first significant instance of this new strategy being put into effect.

Unity with the Spartacists also has significant implications for the direction of the RCO. Beyond just being a vindication of partyism, it is also likely to further develop the informal factions which already exist within the RCO, as the Republican Communist, Marxist-Leninist, Left-Communist, and now Trotskyist elements form more formal tendencies. This is at once a challenge and opportunity, as we will be put to the test regarding whether we are capable of existing as a truly multi-tendency organisation. Most exciting, however, are the implications for our relations with other sects, particularly ones we are already friendly with. If we succeed in bringing about unity with the Spartacists, whose name has historically been a byword for fierce sectarianism, it bodes well for the chances of unity between the RCO and other sects on the Australian left.

We are excited to report on further developments to our international comrades.

David Passerine
Revolutionary Communist Organisation

Stainless banner

Comrade Yusuf Zamir of the Union of Turkish Progressives argues that Lenin in State and revolution mistakenly supposed that bourgeois law, and therefore the bourgeois state, would continue in the first stage of communism (Letters, July 24). He says that “in Critique of the Gotha programme, Marx never uses the term ‘bourgeois law’ in his analysis of communist society. He refers only to ‘bourgeois right’.”

This is a common translation mistake. Marx’s German original refers to the continuation of bürgerlicher Recht in the first phase of communist society. The German word Recht is translatable either as right when it refers to an individual right (like a right of private property or a constitutional right) or as law when it refers to a general body of legal doctrine - thus Strafrecht (criminal law) and Deutsches Recht (German law). And thus bürgerlicher Recht (bourgeois law).

Lenin’s further step from bourgeois law to the bourgeois state reflects the fact that the theories of law that were overwhelmingly dominant in the 19th century, which were forms of ‘legal positivism’, denied that non-state law could properly be called law.

We cannot, in fact, be confident that Marx would have rejected this step, since careful students of Marx’s references to law in his writings have found instances of his making ‘legal positivist’ claims, as well as of his using variants on Hegel on law, and also his using interpretations of law as part of the ideological superstructure: eg, M Cain and A Hunt Marx and Engels on law (Cambridge MA 1979); P Phillips Marx and Engels on law and laws (Oxford 1980).

The underlying issue is that it is a mistake to try to find a pure ‘stainless banner’ of Marx hidden behind the ‘stained’ banner of the 20th century left, or, conversely, a moment of original sin which offers a simple explanation of failures - the 1875 Gotha unification as taken to lead to the political collapse of the Social Democratic Party of Germany in August 1914, or Engels’ alleged vulgarisation of Marx to August 1914 and to Stalinism, or State and revolution to Stalinism. We need to construct a 21st century communist understanding on the basis of both the progress of human understanding of the world (Marx’s and Engels’ ‘scientific socialism’, thus including modern biology and anthropology, and prehistory, as well as history, as studied since the 1880s) and the full range of the experience - positive and negative - of the workers’ movement.

Mike Macnair
Oxford

SPGB confusion

Andrew Northall accuses me of being “confused and confusing about the necessary conditions for the transition to socialism and communism” (Letters, July 24). How so?

I have stated quite clearly that for a socialist (aka communist) society to materialise, what is required is (1) the productive capacity to meet the reasonable needs of the population and (2) mass socialist consciousness based on the desire to implement such a society and a basic understanding of what it means. What is so confusing or confused about that?

Andrew states: “On the question of ‘50% plus one’, I could easily quote from a number of SPGB publications over a good many years, where it is stated this is indeed all that is required to democratically establish socialism.” If that is the case, why does he not provide the evidence to prove his point? I provided direct evidence to show that, on the contrary, the Socialist Party of Great Britain envisages the need for a substantial majority to be in place before you can have socialism.

He asks what would happen if there were just a simple majority of socialist delegates in parliament? Well, there would be no question of the SPGB “taking office” to administer capitalism in these circumstances. The SPGB has no interest in becoming another capitalist government.

However, we would be interested in ensuring that support for a socialist society was sufficiently broad-based - not just in the UK, but globally - and one can think of technical procedures one can employ to ensure this outcome, such as only contesting some of the parliamentary seats, rather than all, until the movement felt support for socialism was sufficiently substantial.

Andrew asks (presumably rhetorically): “Has the SPGB never come across Marx’s classic observation that ‘the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas of society’”? Of course it has, but what of it? That may well be why “socialist and communist ideas have really struggled to take hold in anything like a significant part of the working class under advanced capitalism”, as he says, but it does not alter the fact that you are not going to get rid of advanced capitalism unless and until a significant majority want a genuine alternative to advanced capitalism.

Andrew criticises me for saying that it was Lenin who invented the distinction between socialism and communism and that this was not to be found in Marx and Engels. Confusingly, he quotes the Communist manifesto and the Gotha critique, which refers to the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. He misses the point completely. The dictatorship of the proletariat is emphatically not what Marx and Engels meant by socialism. Socialism is a classless society, which, by definition, the DOTP is not.

The SPGB holds that it is necessary for a working class majority to capture political power to establish socialism. We don’t see the need for this class to perpetuate its own existence as a new ruling class (an incoherent idea anyway, since you cannot administer an exploitative society in the interests of the exploited class, namely the proletariat). For us in the SPGB, the capture of political power is tantamount to, or synchronous with, the self-abolition of the proletariat and hence the abolition of capitalism. The transition is what we are in now, not what follows after we have abolished our status as an exploited class.

Andrew avers: “Robin bizarrely asserts I am ‘inadvertently advocating a form of capitalism in this transitional phase’. No, I explicitly stated I was not advocating the continuation of capitalist society and the working class in power would move rapidly to socialise the main means of production and distribution subject to the democratic planning of society. So in what possible sense is the great majority of the working class still subject to “an exploitative, class-based society”?

This is quite extraordinary. Andrew does not seem to grasp the simple point that the very existence of the working class is itself proof positive of the existence of capitalism. That’s precisely why what he proposes amounts to the continuation of capitalism.

He even advocates the continued use of money in this class-based ‘transitional’ society of his. Granted, the existence of money per se does not signify the existence of capitalism, but what is absolutely clear is that the existence of money is completely incompatible with the existence of a classless socialism.

This was the point I was making about Marx being at pains to explain that labour vouchers were not money, since they did not circulate. Money is not just a means of “effecting rationing”, as Andrew naively assumes. It is also a social relationship, signifying private property, and it was not for no reason that Marx was critical of the labour money schemes of Ricardian socialists like John Gray

Also, contrary to what Andrew claims, the SPGB does not ignore the “threat posed by a recently deposed capitalist class and all of its supporters”. If a recalcitrant minority seeks to obstruct the wishes of the majority, then we say forcible measures will be needed to deal with this.

However, unlike Andrew, we hold that, when the working class becomes more and more socialist in outlook, this will massively impact on the social climate in a way that will progressively diminish the strength and influence of the shrinking proportion of the population that still actively opposes socialism. By the time most people are socialist, you can bet that most of the rest of the population would be well on the way to becoming socialist themselves.

Finally, I cannot let Andrew get away with the nonsense he comes out with about food production. Where does he get the bizarre idea that I am suggesting “the peoples in the ‘advanced’ capitalist countries should as part of worldwide socialism have their own calorific intakes radically reduced to just above subsistence levels”? That’s ludicrous. On the contrary, I pointed out very clearly that already more than enough food is produced today to adequately meet the needs of everyone. Global output is 2,800 kcal per person per day. Global requirements per person is 2,200 kcal per person per day on average. Go figure.

The truth of the matter is that an enormous amount of food is simply wasted under capitalism - somewhere between 30% and 40%, and more than enough to banish hunger everywhere and completely. It’s the same with housing. There are four million empty houses in Spain, 15 million in the USA and over 60 million in China.

Capitalism´s structural waste is truly colossal. Most of the work we do today is completely socially useless and is only needed to keep the capitalist money economy ticking over on its own terms. All of this wasted labour and resources will be made instantly available to boost socially useful production, come socialism.

I think I’ve mentioned this point to Andrew at least two or three times before, but still he seems determined to ignore the argument and put the most pessimistic neo-Malthusian gloss on the prospects of socialism happening. I wonder why?

Robin Cox
SPGB

SPGB time

I note Andrew Northall’s lengthy response to the letter by Robin Cox about the interminable length of time it will take us to get anywhere near ‘full socialism’. Methinks Andrew - a former member of the SPGB himself - doth protest too much. This is evidenced also by the vehemence of his phraseology (“confused and confusing”, “breathtaking”, “exceptionally foolish”, “utter fantasy”, etc.). Well, I won’t attempt to compete for length or rhetoric, but I will try to make some salient points for him and other readers to consider.

Firstly, the established position of the SPGB is that we will need an overwhelming majority of workers to develop socialist consciousness before a socialist society can be established - not the “50%+1” Andrew says the party is looking for. This being the case, Andrew’s idea that “a recently deposed capitalist class and all of its supporters” would not give up “their vast wealth, privilege and power” without a fight, while not entirely unfeasible, is surely somewhat unlikely. After all, such a group would constitute a tiny minority, pitting themselves against a population with developed socialist consciousness and intent. But, if they did attempt what Andrew calls “recalcitrant actions”, one can only agree with him that force might have to be used to deter them.

Secondly, on the old story of the two stages of post-capitalist society (ie, a lower one called ‘socialism’, where the state, money, wages, etc will continue to exist, and a higher one called ‘communism’, where they won’t), as espoused by Lenin and repeated by Andrew, no warrant for that distinction exists in Marx, as others here have pointed out. To insist on such a distinction has the effect of pushing into some far-distant future the realisation of a classless, stateless society of democratic self-organisation and free and spontaneous access to goods and services.

Thirdly, key to Andrew’s conception is the notion that there simply won’t be enough to go round in the initial stages of socialism in order for free access and a comfortable existence to be available to everyone. He is critical of Robin’s reference to the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s figures on food sufficiency on grounds of practicality and distribution. But a plethora of sources conclude not just that enough is already being produced to satisfy everyone’s needs the world over at ‘advanced’ capitalist level, but that many times that could be produced, if it were not for the massive waste inherent in production for profit and the obstacles placed in the way of production by the market.

To cite just one example, Carolyn Steel’s well-informed book, Sitopia: how food can save the world (2021), points to feasible ways one third of the global food supply could be saved, which would be enough to feed the world’s hungry 23 times over. It also talks about the potential of “vertical farming”, describing, for example, a vertical aeroponics farm in a disused steel mill in Newark, New Jersey, which already has year-round production, multiple growing layers and up to 30 annual harvests of all imaginable crops, giving yields 130 times greater than a conventional farm - and all without soil, sun, rain pesticides or tractors.

So, in insisting that years or even decades of development would be needed before everyone could be supplied at a comfortable level, Andrew seems to be denying that the technology that now exists to produce an abundance of food and the other necessities of life for all couldn’t very quickly be available in a society that had consciously opted for a world of cooperation and shared resources without borders, without states, without leaders and without alienated labour.

Marx’s time was relatively primitive in terms of techniques of production and distribution, so it’s hardly surprising that he should have voiced some notions of initial rationing. But this has changed radically since then, so that there can be little doubt that the means to establish very quickly indeed a completely-free-access society will reach the “practical and realistic” level Andrew refers to. After all, detailed plans will no doubt already have been made for it within the latter stages of capitalism by a population increasingly ready to welcome a new society and preparing to join together collectively to bring it about on a world scale. That will be the real ‘transition’ Andrew says we need.

To see it any other way is to be unduly pessimistic and to ignore the mental flexibility of human beings and their ability to embrace change and social cooperation.

Howard Moss
Swansea

Your Party joiner

I was pleased to read about the launch of Your Party.

Because of this I issued a press release complete with my photo to the Fenland Citizen calling on Your Party supporters in Fenland to contact me. This featured in the print edition and also on its website. I also posted the press release to a dozen Facebook pages covering Fenland.

With 800,000 people nationally registering an interest in joining Your Party, I guess that there are several hundred Your Party supporters in Fenland. Yet not a single one in Fenland has contacted me. I can only conclude that the working class in Fenland are more interested in supporting Reform UK.

I think that Paul Demarty in his article in the Weekly Worker has illusions in the Labour Party continuing to be a major party with hundreds of MPs (‘In for the long haul’, July 24). Paul underestimates the hatred that working class people have for Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government, and are therefore turning en masse to Reform UK.

I can see the election of a majority Reform UK government at the next election. Just as Jack Conrad failed to foresee the election of Donald Trump as US president, I think that he fails to foresee the prospect of Nigel Farage as the next prime minister. At the same time, the Tories will have hundreds of MPs.

At the next general election I think that Labour will be lucky to get 50 MPs. At the same time, Your Party and the Green Party will each win around 10 seats. The trade union barons will continue to fund the Labour Party, which will trundle along. This will be while the majority of trade union members vote Reform UK.

Marxists should engage with Your Party. The people behind it - a collective consisting of 20 leftwing groups and the WhatsApp group consisting of advisers to Jeremy Corbyn - model Your Party on Podemos, Syriza and Die Linke. But, after some success, these parties are in crisis and in decline.

Whatever the long-term prospects of Your Party, Marxists should use it to train a new generation of Marxists who will see the need to build a mass, democratic communist party in Britain and across Europe.

John Smithee
Cambridgeshire