Letters

Inadequate understanding

Your article (Weekly Worker September 5) on the current crisis in Kurdistan illustrated your organisation’s failure to understand the Marxist law of combined and uneven development. This must lead you to an inadequate understanding of internationalism.

While rightly condemning the intervention of British and American imperialist forces in the region and correctly implying that there is a need for a united Kurdish state, you do not place the proletariat at the centre of your analysis.

With limited space, perhaps I may recommend some writings to your readers rather than explain this theory. The first section of Michael Lowy’s book, The politics of combined and uneven development, is superb but needs to be read with Alex Callinicos’s review in the International Socialism journal, but there can be no substitute for studying the works of Leon Trotsky, particularly Results and prospects.

If we then examine the situation of the Kurds in an internationalist manner, a different picture emerges. Firstly, we have to note that the region was divided by imperialism in order to prevent the development of nation-states with rounded economies.

For the Kurds this has meant backward undeveloped economies tied to some of the most reactionary states in the region. Were we to a take a stageist view (Menshevik or Stalinist), we would be forced to conclude that only a national revolution is possible.

The truth is somewhat different - only a process of permanent revolution can satisfy the Kurds’ aspirations to nationhood.

A national capitalist state would be a reactionary utopia. Nonetheless, the Kurdish revolution is in its essence international, for not only has imperialism undeveloped large parts of Kurdistan but it has also sucked many Kurds into the proletariat in Istanbul and Izmir in western Turkey.

A first step towards this must be to fight for the unity of all the healthy forces of international socialism as a first step towards the mass Fourth International.

Mike Wallis
Glamorgan

Tired mentality

Comrade Hurrel’s assertion that there is a need for a Scottish revolutionary party (Weekly Worker September 5) would surely only hinder any attempts the Communist Party of Great Britain is making at a rapprochement in revolutionary communist politics.

This tired old ‘Braveheart’ mentality that Scotland is a nation and therefore must have a revolutionary party with tartan trimmings only flies in the face of the current moves toward rapprochement and the creation of a nation wide revolutionary party - uniting the English, Scottish and Welsh working class against the British bourgeoisie.

Comrade Hurrel bemoans the fact that the “CPGB, etc are all British - English parties playing the British card”, and all “are London-based with an English national press and membership”.

Does it matter where the CPGB is based?

It is up to comrades to build the CPGB structure up in other centres throughout Britain, making them equally as important to the London centre, and in doing so a more evenly based press and membership would follow.

It is this communist structure on a nationwide base which is needed and is one hundred times more important than having a revolutionary party based on petty nationalism and chauvinist bias.

Colin McGhie
Glasgow

Maze of contradictions

In a letter to the Weekly Worker (August 1) comrade Roy Bull accused the CPGB of having a defeatist position on Ireland and South Africa. He claimed that we were “fictionalising an IRA/Sinn Fein ‘defeat’ ”, and also alleged that “The CPGB is ... failing to explain how the defeat of apartheid was a ‘setback’ ”.

In my letter of August 29 I wrote that I could not recall any Weekly Worker article that had used the words ‘defeat’ or ‘setback’ regarding the situation in those countries. But, instead of giving us chapter and verse, Roy simply repeated his accusation, saying that our “defeatism” lies in the fact that we see no victories over imperialism (September 12).

To ‘prove’ this he presented an extract from my letter, in which I am quoted as saying: “The dismantling of apartheid ... turned out to be a victory for imperialism ...” I actually wrote: “The dismantling of apartheid was a great victory for the South African masses. But paradoxically, it has turned out to be a victory for imperialism too.” Spot the difference?

For comrade Bull, even if he were to admit that we do see victory in South Africa, that would not be enough. To satisfy him we must recognise that imperialism was “humiliated” and has lost its “bastion”, a “powerful reactionary force throughout Africa”.

I only wish I could see as clearly as Roy this complete and uncomplicated victory. However, unpleasant little obstacles known as facts have the unfortunate habit of blocking my vision. I cannot help recalling that liberal bourgeois opinion within South Africa as early as 1980 was calling for apartheid to be dismantled; that the ‘peace process’ was overseen and cheered on by all the imperialist powers, particularly the USA; that capitalist stability has been re-imposed.

I also recall the revolutionary ferment of the 80s, when the SACP was not limiting itself to Roy’s “bourgeois nationalist revolution”, but was calling for the national democratic revolution to be carried through uninterruptedly to socialist tasks. In the event the revolution - and the victory - stopped halfway. But, according to Roy, “Only the ultra-leftism of academic dilettantes could see socialist revolution as imminent anyway.” And he says we are defeatist. If you limit your sights to bourgeois nationalism, of course you will consider those who set their sights higher to be defeatist.

On Ireland too, Roy is certainly not going to let concrete analysis get in the way of his wishful thinking. Contemptuously dismissing my attempt at weighing up the balance of forces, he prefers unsubstantiated assertion:

“IRA guerrilla war has forced British imperialism to accept that ‘Northern Ireland’ can never be re-established as before, but will have to give way to a snail’s-pace reunification prospect, under pressure from the UK’s more powerful imperialist rivals ...”

Why wasn’t British imperialism forced to accept the inevitable 20 years ago? Why hadn’t its rivals enforced their will before now. Maybe I have missed the IRA military victories - the establishment of liberated zones, the destruction of the occupying forces. I suppose, as in South Africa, imperialism has been “humiliated”. How foolish of me not to notice that it is the IRA/Sinn Fein who are dictating terms to the British, deciding who may participate in the Belfast talks and forcing the British to decommission their arms.

There again, if we only have a prospect of snail’s-pace reunification, perhaps I can be forgiven for not having noticed this ‘victory’. Only the likes of our clairvoyant friend is able to spot this slow but steady progress towards Irish victory, imperceptible to the ordinary human eye.

Comrade Bull’s ‘official optimism’ stems entirely from his world view, which is based on pure, unadulterated Trotskyite dogma. The downfall of the Soviet bureaucracy was “a necessary prelude to an enormous leap forward in revolutionary struggle worldwide”, and “in the long run” the loss of the Soviet Union “will be seen as necessary”.

It is certainly true that the destruction of all the old revisionist and opportunist illusions which ‘official communism’ promoted opens up new possibilities for genuinely revolutionary Leninist theory and practice. “In the long run” we are confident that the necessary communist forces will be constructed. But what about now, comrade Bull?

Presumably my ‘defeatism’ extends to a refusal to recognise the increased strength of (non-communist) revolutionary forces, whose “enormous leap forward” has been due to the destruction of the “worldwide influence of this comfortable CPSU ideological decay” over the world’s communist parties.

Roy never ceases to complain that we “distort” his views. I can assure you, comrade, that I am trying to work my way through the maze of contradictions as accurately as I can, but I never quite seem to grasp their logic.

Like for example why it is that Roy expresses outrage when comrades dare to point out the many negative aspects of the “Soviet workers’ state”, whose disintegration is apparently so positive.

Ted Jaszynski
North London

Delving deeper

I agree with Helen Ellis, in her article on Howard Barker (Weekly Worker September 12), when she says: “His text digs deep into the relationship between the individual and society, between the state, ideology and ideals, imagination and the sensuous.”

Howard Barker is one of the few English playwrights working today who is prepared to embrace a grand vision of contemporary life and who is not prepared to compromise his work to the prevailing laissez-faire, bums-on-seats theatre mentality.

Despite all this, I find his work deeply problematical and in essence reactionary. In Arguments for a theatre (London 1989, p91) Barker sets out his ideas for a Theatre of Catastrophe. Reading it, one becomes aware of the contradiction at the heart of his work. Barker synthesises a negatively objective, historical understanding - the collapse of socialism and the political dominance of the right - with an ahistorical subjective series of solutions to this “catastrophe”.

It is this unequal coupling of the subjective and objective that gives his work power, yet crucially imbues all his dramatic conflict with a brittle solipsism. Like others before him Barker, in the face of ideological tumult, would like to believe that he can cut free of the moorings and sail bravely into the night - with his theatre of catastrophe to guide him and his elite school of “wrestlers” to man the decks. It comes as no surprise that Barker’s work has been steering an increasingly starboard course during the 1990s.

As Helen Ellis suggests, there is a bringing together of imagination and reason in Barker’s work - a rare enough thing in itself today, but this should not stop us delving deeper to understand the problems involved in a dualistic conflation of humanism and nihilism.

John Atyeo
Bristol