Letters

Be my friend

What a sad little article we got from the Revolutionary Democratic Group’s Dave Craig last week. The impending/actual disintegration of the International Socialist Group is a matter of grave concern for revolutionaries. However, of equal concern is the mechanical and sectarian understanding of the rapprochement process exhibited by comrade Craig.

The hard journey to unity is, for Craig, fundamentally about ideology. He moans: “Whilst the leaders of the ISG have taken the first steps towards rapprochement with the CPGB, they have not yet gone that far with the RDG.” The comrade is irked. Apparently, because both the ISG and the RDG “share a state capitalist view of the former USSR”, they “should be in a more advanced state of rapprochement”. Why? Surely at root the rapprochement process must be about Party and programme, not this or that understanding of the USSR. Organisations built on common-denominator politics do not lead revolutions; they split.

Craig asks the ISG comrades: “How [could you] consider unity with the non-state capitalist CPGB and not talk to the RDG?” Well, comrade, maybe the ISG leadership had a better understanding of Partyism than you display in your article. Perhaps they understood that the process was not about labels or ideologies, but, fundamentally, what we all as revolutionaries understand by democratic centralism and Party.

Confirmation of this can surely be found in their letter to the Weekly Worker. Revolutionaries must organise at the highest level. The ISG comrades understood this and retreated. To cover their retreat they accused the CPGB of fetishising democratic centralism and claimed it to be inappropriate at this point in time. Please note, comrade Craig: not one word about state capitalism!

And what about you, comrade Craig? Your unrequited love letter to the ISG left an unpleasant taste in the mouth. Are your motives towards the CPGB entirely honourable? Or are you fast approaching your sell-by date and afraid of being left on the shelf?

These are not easy times for revolutionaries. The tide of history is against us. Principled unity based on a genuine and developing understanding of Party and programme; that is what is key to our survival as objective - rather than armchair - revolutionaries. Not desperate lash-ups built on ideological sand.

Frank Lore
London

Dream on

The anarchist and environmentalist circus which joined forces with the Liverpool dockers dispute to “take action against the system of injustice” sums up all that is best and worse about spontaneous struggle.

The sit-in trashing of the Customs House building on the waterfront is a problem - not because of its destructive chaos in itself or because of its nihilistic culture so frightening to middle class values - but because of the continuing background of political bankruptcy.

The purposelessness of it all, and the rambling incoherent individualistic graffiti, merely remind class-conscious workers of the glaring absence now of any revolutionary Party at all.

But the unbreakable enthusiasm of such gatherings, and the guaranteed regular resurfacing of this spirit of struggle throughout the whole history of class war, re-inspires everyone that reaction and conservatism are always going to be challenged anew - whatever the degree of atomising, brainwashing repression and exploitation that has been imposed.

Eventually, a party of serious revolutionary theory will be rebuilt to ultimately lead mass protests into successful revolutionary action, to overthrow capitalist injustice in the only way possible, through the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Dockers’ leader Jimmy Nolan has told the Weekly Worker that a common starting position of Marxism-Leninism is the way for the class to be organised together for a revolution.

But clarifying a precisely accurate analysis of the present condition of the class struggle in Britain and internationally is exactly what divides the working class too, and Nolan’s confused, revisionist CPGB background is still the problem.

With most of the vexed questions of living working class history still unresolved, Jim is quoted as hoping that “common objectives and common work” around an SLP affiliation to the Socialist Alliances could help heal “old divisions, like those between Trotskyists and Stalinists”.

No chance. What has been good or bad in revolutionary history still has to be fought out. That is why there is no revolutionary party left with any authority in the working class.

The dockers’ dispute is a living example of the continuing theoretical confusion. A letter to the Weekly Worker from the London Support Group (September 26) got everything wrong in accusing the Weekly Worker of “abandoning class action” in favour of “theoretical chatter and navel gazing”. Much Weekly Worker ‘theoretical’ coverage has indeed been purely empty formalism, but clearly the correspondent is expressing hostility to Lenin’s insistence that without revolutionary theory there can be no successful revolutionary practice (class action) in the long run. And his vague remarks about comparisons of the “massive historical significance” of the current dockers’ dispute and the 1984 Miners’ Strike reveal not a scrap of understanding of either.

The 1984/85 fight was the end of the boom period of closed-shop trade union struggles to preserve job prospects, living standards, perks, and privileges on a class-collaborative basis - symbolised by the fatal NUM political backwardness of dreaming that the boom time Plan for coal could be revived in the approaching imperialist slump and sharpened class war period, and even more of dreaming that if the Tory government would not capitulate then a Labour government would, misunderstanding that it would be only imperialist-crisis burdens on workers’ heads from every party in bourgeois parliament henceforth.

The 1996 dockers’ dispute is even more of an anachronism from this point of view. It is a freak that the class-collaborative employment agreements with the trade unions have lasted this long. Cut-throat capitalist competitiveness will eventually sink any major employers who do not get on the reactionary bandwagon of cost-cutting and speed-up superexploitation.

This is the reality of the inter-imperialist crisis epoch the world now lives in, and the only possible solution - socialist revolution - needs to be explained and discussed from the start.

This has not happened in Liverpool because of the lack of the necessary political leadership and because no supporting political movement has given any Marxist-Leninist analysis at all - all tailending the rank-and-file feelings of solidarity, and nothing more.

Socialist Alliances and the SLP have tentatively raised the question of the rotten role of the Labour Party and the TUC in this dispute and every other vital battle threatening the livelihood and well-being of the working class. But where do they stand on their union’s treachery to the working class in continuing to support the Labour Party? Where do they stand on individual Labour MPs who may have cuddled up to the dockers, but who nevertheless still try to pull the wool over the eyes as a whole about the serious danger to workers that a new Labour government will represent?

Old forms of trade unionism struggle may well play an important role in the road to socialist revolution, but not without the theoretical understanding being put in place first - by deliberately political means of clarifying all of Marxist-Leninist struggle, and then building an authoritative party of revolutionary leadership.

Ben Tulley
Manchester

Contesting names

Throughout the summer you have been reporting in the Weekly Worker that Militant Labour is considering changing its name to ‘Socialist Party’. Quite apart from any other considerations, this option is not open to them, as this name already exists and has been used by us since we were founded in 1904.

We have contested parliamentary elections under this name since 1945 and shall in fact be standing five candidates (at Glasgow Kelvin, Livingston, Jarrow, Easington and Brixton) under it in the coming general election.

Janet Carter
General secretary, The Socialist Party