Letters
Reality beckons
I appreciate the fact that the Weekly Worker publishes letters from all different viewpoints and organisations. I applaud the comrades’ efforts and sincerely wish myself that the CPGB can be re-established. I wish you every success.
Nevertheless I must take issue with the comments in Ben Tulley’s letter last week regarding the dockers’ dispute.
Let me assure him that representatives have addressed over 5,000 meetings in the UK. Yet, though we have received tremendous support, actual physical support has been lacking. We cannot afford to ignore the concrete circumstances that give rise to this problem.
Today workers stand in dread of unemployment. The length and breadth of the country employment contracts now put all workers under the fear of unemployment. In these conditions gaining solidarity strike action, let alone revolution and socialism, has not been on the agenda. This does not mean of course that we do not always raise a voice for the need for political power. It does not mean of course that our trade union leaders should not give us more open support and solidarity, despite the threat of sequestration.
However, if we do not face the stark reality that we are not in a revolutionary situation, we only damage the working class, which is not the job of the dockers.
We must weigh up our strengths and weaknesses. That is why our international solidarity has given our struggle great strength in these conditions of defeat and demoralisation.
Ben Tulley’s views find their echo in the International Communist Party. If comrades think our international campaign is bankrupt, we challenge them to put their words into action and bring their own members out on strike action. Unfortunately practice is not always as easy as theory.
Jimmy Nolan
Liverpool dockers
Love and honour
Poor old Revolutionary Democratic Group. According to Frank Lore (letters Weekly Worker October 10), the RDG wants to be friends with the International Socialist Group, but our love letters are unrequited. The mere fact that we send such an open appeal to the ISG not only proves we are a sad case, but calls into question our relations with the CPGB. He says, “Are your motives towards the CPGB entirely honourable?” Unfortunately rapprochement is not a matter of love, honour or wounded pride, but of definite politics.
It would help if Frank understood some political facts of life. The RDG and the ISG are both factions of the SWP. It is our ‘party’ (ie, tendency). We have never been factions of the CPGB. Our first priority, given our long standing policy of communist unity, is to maximise our unity in the fight against the Cliffites. In relation to the ISG, that means at minimum a united front and preferably fusion into a single organisation. This policy pre-dated any relationship with the current CPGB (PCC).
The CPGB began its moves to rapprochement in a similar fashion. Its first moves were towards other ex-CPGB groups, like the Communist Action Group and Open Polemic. As far as love and friendship with the ISG is concerned, we are all very friendly. We have met and chatted on many occasions. The ISG are a friendly bunch. I have had a drink with them in any number of different pubs. But political engagement between the two organisations has been almost zero. Given the open platform offered by the Weekly Worker,there is no excuse for this. There has been no open ideological debate. The failure to debate our political differences and work for unity is not merely disappointing or even sad. It undermines and weakens the struggle to build a revolutionary party.
Yet the explanation is simple. The ISG has a sectarian policy. Until they adopt a policy of fighting for communist unity and show themselves to be serious about this, they will continue to be a sect. If they want to suggest an alternative explanation, I’m sure the pages of the Weekly Worker are open to them.
We will continue to write to them urging them to drop their sectarian politics and work for communist unity. They will continue to ignore our appeals, but be jolly friendly if we meet them in a pub. Frank will continue to see nothing wrong in this except that the RDG are a sad case for exposing sectarian policies. Naturally, he concludes that “maybe the ISG leadership had a better understanding of Partyism than [the RDG]”.
Maybe his failure to understand or condemn their sectarianism is a reflection of his own predilections. Frank understands rapprochement as an organisational question, not an ideological question. By this he really means, ‘Join my organisation, adopt all its rules and regulations without question, and don’t let ideology stand in your way’.
By falsely conterposing organisation to ideology, he defines rapprochement in a sectarian (or opportunist) way. No wonder he defends the ISG against the RDG. Hence he lectures us, saying, “Please note, comrade Craig - not a word [from the ISG] about state capitalism”. They are good boys because in their musings about rapprochement, they never mentioned ideological questions. Real principled unity between communists is not based on this or that theory, but on programme.
That is of course an ideological question.
Dave Craig
RDG (faction of the SWP)
Incomplete break
Your coverage of recent events in Afghanistan displayed the incomplete break from Stalinism that your organisation can sometimes exhibit.
With the degeneration of the Russian Revolution in the 1920s many revolutionaries were unable to break from outmoded formulas. This led to the capitulation of a significant layer of left oppositional forces in 1928. These forces included individuals as prominent as Karl Radek and Eugene Preobrazhensky.
Their key failure was to understand the international, and permanent, nature of the Russian Revolution. The restriction of the Chinese communists to the outworn ideas of a national and stageist road to revolution condemned their struggle to defeat and failure.
Only the forces adhering to the Left Opposition and later the Fourth International were able to maintain their identity as proletarian revolutionists. This they were able to do due to their understanding of the international nature of modern revolutions. It is noteworthy that many early Chinese communist cadre were recruited in France as migrant workers.
Today with the ever-increasing internationalisation of both capital and labour the same tendencies can be observed. Turkish and Kurdish workers are to be found in both Germany and Britain while sections of their homeland remain underdeveloped. An independent and united Kurdish state can only be realised if unity can be forged in the region. The Kurdish revolution therefore must be an uninterrupted and permanent revolution fought together with the powerful Turkish proletariat. In a Balkanised region revolutionaries need to argue for a Socialist Federation of the Near-East.
Similarly, in Afghanistan, an area which has seen economic retrogression since the 16th century, a successful revolution can only come about with the unity of the oppressed peasantry in that battle-torn country and the workers of neighbouring states.
The PDPA, whom you fantasise as leading a revolution, was not in point of fact a socialist force. The aim of these radical elements of the intelligentsia was to modernise Afghanistan along the lines of the state capitalist Russian state. In isolation this would have been a supportable goal in such a backward country.
However, Afghanistan cannot be viewed in isolation. Sadly, it became a zone of conflict between the imperialist power blocs. This meant that the Russian forces that invaded the country in 1979 played a reactionary role on the international level. The Muslim forces which fought for national independence, including the Taliban, must be seen not only as creations of American imperialism and Pakistan’s sub-imperialism, but as a legitimate national liberation movement on a par with Ho Chi-Minh’s NLF. Revolutionary in so far they fight for an independent national state, but counterrevolutionary with regard to the proletariat’s international project.
Today the weak forces of the revolutionary left cannot and must not ‘paint nationalism red’, but must turn their attention to the rank and file of the workers’ movement. Only by fighting to rebuild the international socialist tradition can revolutionaries demonstrate their solidarity with oppressed nations such as Kurdistan and Ireland. Although we are confined to predominately small propaganda groups today the new world disorder opens the road to a reforged Communist (Fourth) International.
Mike Pearn
Vale of Glamorgan
Sorry sort
I was amazed to read in the Weekly Worker (September 26) a detailed report by Dave Douglass on the recent Class War conference. Now, Douglass is a supporter of the Class War Federation and when he says that “only Doncaster and London” stood out to continue, he means, as a Doncaster supporter, that he was one of this group. It does seem the height of political disloyalty and lack of revolutionary discipline to give a detailed report of a libertarian organisation that he claims to support in a Leninist paper (in fact, this is the first place that people outside CWF can read about it) and to describe some of his comrades as “sorry sorts”.
It is not a fait accompli that Class War will dissolve itself and Douglass has exaggerated the CWF’s imminent collapse. A forthcoming conference has yet to deliberate.
Now, I make no secret of the fact that I am member of the Anarchist Communist Federation and was angered to read that the ACF is “an organisation which, though elitist and vanguardist, makes many democratically centralised teams look like the Green Party”. For a start, this phrase is contradictory and makes no sense. Douglass knows absolutely nothing about the internal working of the ACF, and, were he to do so, he would have to admit that we decide everything collectively, and I mean that. Our forthcoming Manifesto for the millennium was drafted on a collective basis, with every member being able to comment on it through local group meetings, our national delegate meetings and national conferences and our internal bulletin. There is no central committee, and the ACF is in fact an epitome of what anarchist communists mean by a revolutionary federalist organisation.
It does indeed seem strange then to see Douglass, a self-proclaimed libertarian, write a fairly regular column in a paper that is vanguardist (as Leninists, you must certainly acknowledge that) and elitist (in my view as an anarchist communist). His appearance as “vice-chair of South Yorkshire NUM panel” gives a certain cachet (some might think; others not) to the Weekly Worker. Certainly Douglass has made no friends in Class War by revealing the internal workings of their organisation - and a highly subjective view of them at that - in the Leninist press. His actions over the years reveal himself as a self-publicist, a maverick, and one who cannot be relied upon politically and who continues to discredit himself.
Nick Heath
East London
Workers’ web
Revolutionary History is a united front journal. We published our last journal (number 22, Volume 6, no 2/3) on the history of the revolutionary Marxist movement in Britain and Ireland from the 1930s to the 1960s.
We are preparing a next issue on Sri Lanka and later on Cuba and Latin America, and on Russia. We need volunteers to help us in the translation of documents from Spanish and Russian into English.
We are also planning to create a web page and to produce a discussion list on the internet, which will deal with the history of the workers’ and revolutionary movement. Another idea that we have is to print a regular bulletin with the best discussions inside the left lists concerning questions of the history of the workers’ and revolutionary movement.
If comrades or groups want to contribute to those tasks with some ideas or material help they are more than welcome. We are also asking the different papers, journals and groups which published reviews of our previous issues to send these articles to our e-mail address.
Reviews editor
Revolutionary History
Prove it
Greg Dropkin’s article on the mass action in Liverpool on September 28 was great (Weekly Worker October 3). I trust your paper will properly advertise and mobilise for the next mass picket, which will be on November 25 - again at the Seaforth container port and again under the banner of ‘Reclaim the future’. Personally, I would like the CPGB and Revolutionary Democratic Group comrades to be part of the local Dockers’ Support Group meetings or pick up a musical instrument, learn to dance and get involved with ‘Reclaim the streets’. If you think you can provide leadership to the rest of us - here’s your chance to prove it.
Chris Knight
London Dockers’ Support Group