Letters

Voluntary fetish

In his ‘Party Notes’ column (Weekly Worker September 12) concerning the appropriate organisational tasks of revolutionaries at this embryonic stage of communist rapprochement, Mark Fischer draws a line between those groups possessing “qualitatively lower levels of discipline” and the CPGB (sic) which will fight in principle to persuade these comrades to become cadres of an organisation presently organised on the basis of democratic centralism in a broader struggle to reforge a party - the CPGB - that does not yet exist.

Mark argues it would be nothing less than “shamefaced Menshevism” for principled communist unity to take place now on any other grounds.

Before returning to this question and the CPGB’s (sic) idea of their role and purpose in the process of communist rapprochement it is salutary to compare the founding of the original CPGB in August 1920 with the present rapprochement process.

The CPGB was broadly speaking the product of two factors. Firstly, a native process of class formation spanning three decades of intense class struggle and, secondly, the decisive impact of the October Revolution and the Bolsheviks’ initiative in founding the Communist International in 1919.

Although the CPGB was never a mass-based party unlike many of its continental sister parties, it did at least organise a significant minority of the working class vanguard for the overthrow of the bourgeois state, before its fate as the putative revolutionary party of the working class was rapidly sealed by domestic class defeats, the failure of international revolution and the rise of the socialist revolution’s gravedigger - the Stalinist bureaucracy.

In contrast, though the return of capitalist crisis to the metropolitan heartlands in the late 1960s promised a revolutionary reunification of theory and practice, it eventually proved to be the transmission belt of a profound crisis of working class morale and organisation.

Paradoxically, it is the present conjuncture - marked by two decades of workers’ defeat, the rightward trajectory of social democracy/Labourism and the collapse of the regimes in Eastern Europe - that has partially exposed the bankruptcy of ‘marginalised Leninism’ and compelled a tiny minority of communists to begin a critical reappraisal of their various traditions.

However, as yet this process is at its earliest stage. If “concrete utopia” is presently not visible on the horizon, neither is it visible in the eye of many communists.

After the debacle, ruthlessly facing up to what went wrong and a sober analysis of the nature of the epoch has barely begun. Leninism itself would be an object of this process of clarification - less to ‘revise’ Lenin - but rather to expose the real aporias that exist while retrieving Lenin from the bureaucratic distortions of ‘marginalised Leninism’.

Clearly we are far from the relatively favourable conjuncture of 1920. If a Communist Party rooted hand and brain in the working class vanguard and organised on the authentic basis of Leninism - democratic centralism - is required, then it is true that presently this Party does not exist while the potential working class vanguard is in a state of decomposition.

Though the process of reforging this Party is a conscious task of communists, the Party itself will not be finally reconstituted without a significant revival of the working class.

However, the International Socialist Group would agree with the comrades of the CPGB (sic) that though a revival of the working class is an absolutely indispensable precondition for the project of reforging the Communist Party to finally come to fruition, it is false to simply believe that an ‘organic’ process of class formation or recomposition will alone deliver this Party. Nonetheless, communists should be prepared for the long haul.

This brings us back to Mark’s argument and the appropriate organisational basis of unity between the groups involved in the process of communist rapprochement.

In common with the other groups involved in this process, the CPGB (sic) is objectively no more than a faction (in this case a faction of the now defunct CPGB). Yet despite its rhetorical recognition that the Communist Party will only finally be reforged in the future, Mark’s group has elevated democratic centralism into a fetish - inappropriately organising its cadres as ‘professional revolutionaries’ on a cell basis - a state of affairs which smacks of nothing less than wish fulfilling voluntarism.

Despite its subjective seriousness, the group’s overriding ‘Partyism’ has led it to eschew any genuine engagement with the process of communist rapprochement - and, as weak as this process currently is, it does resonate wider than the debate in the pages of the Weekly Worker - but instead conduct in practice a narrow organisational process of headhunting (or what Trotsky described as the “primitive accumulation of cadres”).

Therefore the ISG declines the seduction. We believe homesick communists will find only false consolation if they choose to join the circle of a redemptive esprit de corps’which secretly believes it is the Party.

Julian Alford & Ian Land
International Socialist Group

Overtly negative tone

After reading last week’s section of the Weekly Worker commenting upon the launch of Socialist News, I feel that I must indicate my displeasure at the overtly negative tone of the piece.

Although the paper is obviously lacking, there is nothing within it that is offensive. In fact we are selling it at a fair rate to all sorts of people (which does not of course make it a great paper).

As you note, the task now is to make the paper more democratic. We need to develop the paper through:

1. A letters column (which can include a critique of the SLP’s policy or articles in SN).
2. A column where controversial questions (ie, immigration, criticism of Fidel Castro’s regime) can be discussed and debated.
3. A ‘where we stand’ box.

All of this will be written in the light of the need for a democratic SLP. Unfortunately, the piece in last week’s paper, because it was so scathing, may well have the effect of prejudicing the NEC further against such moves.

Please concentrate on constructive criticism. We want a democratic SLP; we want a democratic paper. But there are ways and means of fighting for this, and please note I have no intention of burying my head in the sand like sections of the left in the SLP. I feel a little tact is called for here. Obviously, if the paper fails to become democratic, we all have a duty to slam the bureaucrats on the NEC. In the short term we need to negotiate space on the basis that we are the ones selling the paper.

Paul Ellis
York

Long way off

I wish to address two points raised by Frank Vincent in his article about child abuse (Weekly Worker September 12).

Firstly, he poses the question, “What is paedophilia?” The literal definition of paedophilia is ‘love of children’ - which neither he, nor the tabloids, nor indeed The Observer are referring to.

The use of the correct term, ‘child abuse’, would clear up any confusion. Any sexual act to which one of the parties does not consent constitutes abuse, regardless of the age or gender of the victim. This definition precludes any association with sexual orientation or the age of consent.

Secondly, he refers to the fact that Trevor Holland (the convicted child abuser who escaped while on a day trip to Chessington) is “mentally ill”. I would hazard a guess that the majority of child abusers, if not all, suffer from some form of mental health problem. The abuse of children is not a symptom of a healthy mind.

That aside, while I accept that Holland “desperately needs” and has the right to medical treatment, children also need and have the right to protection. The decision to take him to a place designed specifically for children was inexcusable.

While Frank Vincent is correct when he says that “it is only the fight for the revolutionary transformation of society that can really deliver the goods”, that is still a long way off. The abuse, exploitation and oppression of all members of the working class (even the smallest) must be challenged whenever and wherever it exists.

Julie Mills
West London

Awful long way off

The Revolutionary Platform’s statement (Weekly Worker August 29) takes an indefensibly reformist view of Marx’s famous phrase “to win the battle of democracy” by quoting it to support a shopping list of democratic demands under capitalism.

“To raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy” (Manifesto 1848) does not at all correspond with the RP’s reformist approach. Marx’s resonant revolutionary expression meant that the only way the working class could win the battle of democracy and truly express its will was first overthrowing the capitalist class and establishing its own political supremacy - ie, to raise itself to the position of ruling class.

Winning the battle of democracy is a consequence of winning political supremacy, flowing from the overthrow of the capitalist class. If Marx meant to say something different he might have said something like the working class must first win the battle of democracy in order to raise itself to the position of ruling class. But he did not.

RP clearly think you can win political power (if indeed they have this object) by first winning the battle for democracy, which is not at all different to what the Eurocommunists were saying in the 1980s - ie, that socialism (if indeed they had that object) could be achieved by expanding democracy under capitalism until it ‘in effect’ becomes socialism.

That is why the RP’s statement is concerned with democratic demands to be made under capitalism with no mention of revolution.

The communist revolutionary proceeds from the view that genuine working class liberation can only be achieved under socialism, that capitalism must be overthrown in order to be replaced by socialism, and that capitalism cannot be pressured or reformed into serving working class interests. The RP has an awful long way to go. The SLP even further.

Andrew Northall
Northamptonshire

Theoretical chatter

Why does the Weekly Worker fill its columns with interminable theoretical chatter between tiny grouplets, meanwhile completely ignoring what is actually going on in the working class?

Take the 12-month old dockers’ dispute, whose anniversary is being celebrated in Liverpool on September 28. You have done absolutely nothing as far as I can see to mobilise for this historic event or for the mass picket of Seaforth Container Port planned for the morning of September 30. Yet you have known about all this for weeks; indeed, you long ago published an article of mine on the subject.

How cut off can you get?

The dockers’ struggle in its current phase has massive historic significance. Your comrades played a valuable role in the 1984/1985 miners’ strike, in the more recent pit closures campaign, in the picketing of Timex and in many other struggles. Why this recent abandonment of class action in favour of theoretical chatter and navel-gazing?

Chris Knight
London Support Group for the Liverpool Dockers