WeeklyWorker

Letters

Rosenberg reply

I thank C Duran for the kind words about my Rosenberg article (Letters, October 9)

The name of the Rosenberg’s Fund for children is absolutely correct - and I also contribute to it monthly and appreciate the information they send, which lets us know where the money goes and the purpose for it. From very few organisations do we get that kind of detail and I apologise for my error (brain slower than fingers sometimes!).

On other issues, I absolutely disagree with C Duran. It is not a “working class” issue whether Ethel Rosenberg should be exonerated. She was sent to death by the powers that be (although how far up that went is open to question, given that the question has gone through several presidents), knowing that she was innocent. She was sent to death because the FBI blackmailed her brother into lying on oath. Why? Because the FBI wanted her to persuade Julius to plead guilty - something, as I said, he would never do and she would never try to persuade him to do.

She should be exonerated because her trial and her execution were based on lies, and she, her family and those that demonstrated for them (including my parents, grandparents and me from the age of four!) are owed the admission of the open knowledge of her innocence and the guilt of her accusers.

I also deliberately did not mention the book that C Duran suggests, because I dislike it. There have been many books and articles written about the Rosenbergs, and it is correct that the one suggested is the only one written solely about Ethel. But it is written from a feminist point of view and downplays - at some points almost disparages - her politics. Many communist couples in that era, specifically those with children, chose to have one partner not involved in the political struggle, because of the possibility of arrest, imprisonment, the need to go underground, or even death.

Clearly, Ethel and Julius were a communist couple, and both went to their deaths believing in the principles they stood for. And, in my view, any book written about either one must recognise this and put it front and centre.

Gaby Rubin
London

Radical recipe?

Steve Freeman considers the distinction between social monarchism, social republicanism and democratic republicanism (‘Republicanism and the split’, October 2).

Britain needs fundamental, radical reconstruction. We must develop clear underlying principles from which our policies arise. We can differ over priorities, but not principles. Our fundamental principle must be establishing a level playing field for all - economically and politically. Media reform is an essential precondition for both.

We must go beyond nationalising utilities, to taking over the banks, which we have already paid for. As a minimum, we must establish a national bank, and provide every citizen with an account in it. We must break the stranglehold of inherited wealth and power, with a maximum inheritance of £1 million and 20 acres of land. This will recognise the disproportionate price of homes in the southeast, particularly in London. Hopefully, by increasing housebuilding and driving out foreign property owners, the regional discrepancy of house prices can be improved.

The inherited power in the House of Lords must go now. The monarchy should also be abolished, but retains mass support, so it would be a tactical mistake to go for this in our first manifesto, as this might cost us the election. We must win over opinion on this.

ln our first term, we must get the Murdochs, Barclays, etc out of our national press, reform the BBC and set up our own local radio stations. We must ensure the press is self-financing, not subsidised by commercial corporations. We must have public enquiries into royal finances (Prince Andrew, etc), publishing their reports ahead of the 2029 general election, informing our next manifesto. We will then have the ground preferred for an open and honest public debate.

How much further we should go with nationalisation longer-term are questions over our programme, not our principles. I have no objection to small businesses accumulating wealth, so long as they respect the rights of workers and pay their taxes. After the death of the proprietor and their spouse/partner, death duties should absorb the accumulated wealth into public ownership.

There should be a maximum differential between highest and lowest paid in public companies and workers represented on company boards.

Alan Faith
email

Marx’s ‘mistake’

Marx used ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ interchangeably with ‘working class rule’, but Peter Manson writes that I don’t understand the term. (Letters, October 9). I have a political dictionary which perfectly explains ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and its origins.

As I have pointed out in the past, Lenin also gave a perfect definition of what ‘dictatorship’ means, regardless of class content. I endorse Lenin’s definition completely: it means rule untrammelled by any law. You have a dictatorship when those who are ruling are untrammelled by law and are not accountable to an elected body. If you are accountable and rule within law, then this cannot be a dictatorship, based on Lenin's definition. Dictatorship essentially means anti-democratic rule.

Marx wrote that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat. He was mistakenly using an anti-democratic term, taken from Blanqui, to describe working class rule. Dictatorship is a form of rule and democracy is another form of rule. The essence of class society is class rule which can take either form, depending on the situation. Dictatorship is not the essence of class rule: it is a form of rule.

The term was never used in The communist manifesto, nor do we find it in Engels’ Socialism: utopian and scientific. However, Engels was forced to criticise those who were interpreting it in an anti-democratic way. The reason why this was going on was because the term itself was anti-democratic and lent itself to the abuse of political power. Out of deference to Marx, Engels never pointed out that it was anti-democratic.

And we saw this later in action in the Soviet Union with Stalin. If the Soviet Union had practised democratic socialism, Stalin’s negative side would have been restrained. Without democratic socialism his negative side was given full rein.

The issue is not about the meaning of the term, but why some Marxists insist on using an anti-democratic term to describe socialist rule. One of the reasons is that there is a totalitarian tendency on the left, as well as a democratic tendency. Those who unconsciously represent the totalitarian tendency are usually the ones who insist on the official suppression of factions in the party, and they prefer the term ‘dictatorship’. Lenin mostly gave expression to the democracy tendency in socialism to begin with, but later gave way to the totalitarian tendency, when he sought the suppression of factions in the party.

I am not saying I am against dictatorship in all situations: what I am saying is that terminologically it is an incorrect name for socialist rule in a normal situation. It amazes me that some Marxists, after the experience of the communist movement, still want to use an anti-democratic term for socialist rule.

Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Mao all deserve some degree of criticism, as surprising as this may seem to some communist circles. At the political level, the place to begin is Marx’s mistake in using an anti-democratic term for working class rule.

Tony Clark
For Democratic Socialism

Stuck record

Tony Clark is like the proverbial stuck record. Every so often he just regurgitates his pet conspiracy theory on the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’:

Where to begin? Well, as I am sure the anti-Leninists and anti-communists will readily point out, Marx and Engels actually used the term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ very few times. On the relatively few occasions they did, it was always as an explicit replacement of the rule or dictatorship of the bourgeoisie by the rule of the working class and wider working masses. Being based on the majority working class and working people, this rule, or dictatorship, of the working class was inherently a democratic rule or form of governance.

It is true the Marx and Engels team did not use the term in The communist manifesto - a short, hard-hitting, agitational pamphlet, published rapidly in response to the revolutionary upheavals across Europe, to attempt to inject a distinct proletarian communist perspective into these events.

However, the meaning and essence of what became the DoP was clearly established in that document. The “line of march” for the then emerging proletariat lay in “the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie”, establishing “the sway of the proletariat”. The “immediate aims of the proletariat” include the “overthrow of the bourgeoisie, conquest of power by the proletariat”. Later in the text, “the first step in the (proletarian) revolution is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class”.

In summary, the basic tasks of the proletariat were to overthrow the rule, the political (or state) power of the bourgeoisie, and replace it by the rule, the political/state power of the proletariat. It is this state power held by the (majority) working class which Marx and Engels occasionally described later as ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’.

So, for Marx and Engels, the term meant nothing more (or less) than the political rule or state power by the (majority) working class over the rest of society, including the recently overthrown ruling classes, and the wider working masses. Yes, the word ‘dictatorship’ in the 20th century acquired all sorts of nasty connotations with regimes such as Mussolini’s in Italy, Franco’s in Spain or Hitler’s in Germany. But you can’t simply take these more recent connotations, project them back into the 19th century, and assert these are what Marx and Engels really meant when they used the term, ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. They simply meant ‘rule of the proletariat’ as a vital stage to effect the transition from capitalism to socialism and ultimately communism.

Tony, of course, references Lenin’s famous and somewhat brutal definition of ‘dictatorship’ as being “authority untrammelled by any laws, absolutely unrestricted by any rules whatever, and based directly on force” (The proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky, 1918; ‘A contribution to the history of the question of the dictatorship’, 1920).

The particularly assertive - even aggressive - language is hardly surprising, given that Lenin as the leader of the ruling Bolshevik Party and soviet government was ferociously trying to defend the socialist revolution and soviet power (ie, representing the majority of workers and peasants) against far more ferocious attempts to drown the revolution and soviet power in blood - ably assisted by revisionists and opportunists abroad who, terrified by the sight and reality of a real proletarian revolution in Russia, were desperately trying to illegitimise the whole programme, strategy and tactics of the Bolshevik/Communist Party.

But Lenin’s very sharp language, invoked in extremely perilous times, also reflected some basic universal truths and realities. For all classes, the possession of real political power means to have effective control of state power. All states, even the most apparently democratic, are ultimately based on their ability to use force, organised violence, even terrorism, to defend their continued existences.

No sovereign political power basing itself in the possession of material state power can in fact be bound or restricted by any laws - either the ones it ‘inherits’ from a previous state power, or the ones it makes itself.

In generally stable constitutional conditions, the state may most often choose to remain within those laws, especially those it has promulgated itself, particularly if it is attempting to project its rule and legitimacy in the eyes of the people. But, in the final analysis, if required to do so for ‘reasons of state’, it can perfectly well violate or even ignore its own laws wholesale.

Throughout history up to the present day, we have numerous examples of states ultimately relying on force and violence to protect their positions and their classes, and violating or ignoring their own laws if necessary to do so. These flow from being the sovereign powers in their societies.

The important question always asked by true Marxists and communists is in whose class interests does the sovereign state power exist? And how can we change things so it is the working class and working people in command of society? There is a common, continuous thread of thinking from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and communist leaders up to the present day. The (majority) working class must win political (state) power in order to replace capitalism with socialism.

Winning political or state power is to rule over society. As it is the majority class in society, working class rule is inherently democratic rule, in the Greek definition of the original word, meaning rule by the people.

Being the rule or state power of the majority class, this type of rule is qualitatively different from all previous types of rule (or dictatorships) by minority classes. This new rule rests on the collective organisation and power of the majority working people, mainly through their active involvement and consent. But, in the final analysis, it can also resort to using force or even open violence to defend the sovereign power (rule) of the working people. In extreme conditions, it can choose not to be bound by some existing laws, as it in fact made those laws: it can supersede them at any time, as it is the sovereign power.

Andrew Northall
Kettering