Letters

Honour and obey?

My apologies to Dave Craig of the Revolutionary Democratic Group. Had I known he would bruise so easily, I would have pulled my punches. Nonetheless I feel I must respond to comrade Peaches’ ‘Love and honour’ offering on the letters page of Weekly Worker (October 17).

Comrade Peaches haughtily writes that it would “help if Frank understood ... [that the] RDG and the ISG are both factions of the SWP.” He goes on to state that the “first priority [of the RDG and ISG] is to maximise our unity in the fight against the Cliffites”.

Well, comrade, beyond appending it to your name, could you please enlighten me as to what current work of the RDG marks you out as a “faction of the SWP”? Do you have RDG cells in the SWP? Do you have a supporters’ network of SWP members? Or is “faction of the SWP” your security blanket; an anchor to prevent your free fall into ‘the wilderness’?

As for the fight against the Cliffites and - presumably - for revolutionary democracy in the SWP, that, comrade, is a struggle for the whole revolutionary left, not the private property of the RDG and ISG. Which brings me neatly to your accusation of sectarianism.

I do not divorce organisation from theory - they flow one from the other. Nor, however, comrade Peaches, do I rule out different theoretical standpoints existing and clashing within a single organisation. The logic of your mechanical approach to ideology and organisation is that this could not, would not and should not happen. You are the sectarian, not I.

As for your foolish assertion that I congratulated the ISG because “they never mentioned ideological questions”, please tell me where I did this. In fact, comrade, I believe that it is the duty of revolutionaries to raise “ideological questions”. However I do not believe that agreement as to the nature of the USSR is the cornerstone of unity. If you do, then you should say so.

You also accuse me of defending the ISG against the RDG. I wrote: “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.” Put simply, comrade Peaches, the ISG leadership have dishonestly abdicated their revolutionary duty to organise at the highest possible level. If this is a defence of the ISG, I suggest they hire another lawyer.

Finally let me say how glad I am that you enjoy a drink with the ISG. The comrades are indeed “a friendly bunch”. However, unity around a pint is a long, long way from unity around the Party. Bottoms up, comrade Peaches.

Frank Lore
North London

So what?

The report on the first national meeting of Socialist Alliances in Coventry by Anne Murphy (Weekly Worker October 10) was inept and incorrect.

It gave the impression that Kent Socialist Alliance, and me in particular, was regressive and pulled the meeting to a ‘do nothing’ day. This was not the case. I was simply, as delegated by KSA, representing a group of activists - anarchists, environmentalists and Marxists - who do no want a national leadership at present, because we are not good and ready for it. Organisations have to be formed from the bottom up and at grass roots. We are not ready to organise in this manner.

If this makes KSA localist, then so what? A group that is campaigning locally and affecting local people’s lives in a positive way hardly makes localism a dirty word, as Anne Murphy seemed to suggest that it was.

Our group represents a new political movement that understandably shuns and distrusts political leadership, parties and ‘lines’ being imposed from above.

Also, it was wrongly stated that I am a member of the anti-election alliance - I am not. Personally, I see elections as, and only as, valuable propaganda for the left, and for this reason agree and will be supporting Militant Labour’s Eric Segal (standing against Michael Howard in Folkestone) and the Socialist Labour Party’s Maureen Cleator (who is standing in Maidstone). So it would have been wrong to form such a policy at a national meeting of Socialist Alliances.

What did come out of the meeting, and was not reported, was that the debate and theory can be had through actions - and it is the way that KSA will continue to move forward. Unity in action is our strength and is our greatest weapon against sectarianism developing.

Chris Weller
Secretary, KSA

Political renewal

Without revolutionary theory there can be no sustained successful revolutionary struggle. Without a Party of revolutionary theory, there will be no socialist revolution. The wish to build the CPGB into the revolutionary Party is suffering because the idea seems to have died completely of what it means to build a cadre Party of revolutionary leadership.

A battle for understanding and to give political leadership, which essentially will be informed by a grasp of Marxist-Leninist science, should be the overriding concern of all meetings.

If cadres were developing along the correct lines, there should not even be the need to have to fight to make political discussion of the very latest developments in the worldwide struggle of class and national forces the first and most crucial activity of any gathering of revolutionary socialists.

Theoretical education in all the classics of Marxism-Leninism for sure; but a thousand times more important is the struggle to correctly assess the very latest developments in the international struggle, the very highest point of development of the relationship between all the international class and national forces whose conflict and contradictions are the sole reason why there will be socialist revolution, and the sole means of getting there.

Fundraising and organisational questions obviously play a vital role in keeping the party machinery turning, but what defeats the ruling class in the end is the building of a party of all-round, confident understanding, better able to give leadership to society in all questions of social and political development - economics, science and culture - than the ruling class.

Why? Because the exploited of the capitalist system can never be free of the destructive demoralising influences of the non-stop bourgeois ideology which helps to keep the imperialist democracy racket running.

Between one socialist meeting and the next, every participant will have had to wade through constant, deliberately confusing informational distortions and half-truths, and equal torrents of emotionally sapping distractions and diversions - pouring out of every educational, news, entertainment, cultural, and social outlet of the free market. It is a constant battle to stop political workers from sliding back into scepticism, cynicism, defeatism and demoralisation, and to stop their personal problems from getting on top of them.

The simple demonstration of this is the role played by a revolutionary party’s newspaper. Without regular publication, there is not even a hope of holding a party together.

But what sort of party is being built depends on how deep the political education goes in that publication’s attempts to keep the party organised around the current front-line developments in the international class struggle.

Even more importantly, it depends on how well the party’s own structure obliges all contacts and members to struggle themselves to make the party’s assessments of new developments their own assessment too - independently arrived at and grasped in the course of constantly struggling to debate out the most recent world and national events, with or without the benefit of having read the latest party paper line on things.

All knowledge must become active knowledge, and the only way political understanding is fully grasped is by discussing it.

Without political renewal, a party meeting will make decisions and resolutions about fundraising, newspaper sales, administrative organisation, etc, in one way. After an inspiring discussion about the latest imperialist catastrophes in the Middle East; about the latest monstrous class-collaborating demagogy from Blair and Labour; over the savage reminder of white terror in Kabul as the essence of reaction, butchering communists; about the degenerate graft and corruption which is the essence of the bourgeois parliamentary system, etc - matters might be resolved with much more determination, dedication and confidence.

Where the time is really wasted is in business agenda routines which always ought to be concluded in a quarter of the time. The tragically bankrupt theoretical preparedness of the British workers’ movement is eloquent testimony to the age-old vices of agenda activism and single-issue spontaneity.

Such backwardness and opportunist manoeuvring are inseparable in the sad sectarian ‘left’ corner of British labour movement history.

In the end, the political culture of the whole class has got to be vastly elevated from where it is now, and this is going to have far more importance for the long-term fate of revolutionary socialism than any immediate manoeuvring successes.

Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party was a classic case of sectarian manipulation, in reality dominating over the serious fight for theoretical development in spite of all the superficial bluster which the WRP put into its ‘dialectical materialist education’. Utterly divorced from Marxism-Leninism - studied primarily from an all-party struggle to constantly interpret and re-interpret every latest development in the international class conflict - Healy’s colossal investment in ‘theory’ ended up in total strict censorship of any meaningful discussion of the more and more barmy policy opportunism the WRP took up in a totally servile and cowed mass membership, which miserably fragmented into many slivers.

The whole tradition of ‘education classes’ is suspect, relegating the study and application of the classic scientific breakthroughs of Marx, Engels and Lenin to at best a static history lesson, and at worst a completely meaningless vague summation, which could even do more harm than good by totally missing the essential class war thrust which informed the original work.

The history of class struggle science mostly needs to be made to come alive by being applied to the international conflict and balance of forces as they are happening now. Marx, Engels and Lenin should be read mostly in the news columns and polemical debate of the Weekly Worker, as applied to illustrate current arguments, very much in the style that the Economic and philosophic science review has pioneered.

The CPGB standards on cadre training, meetings, culture and newspaper work need to be driven through the roof.

Ben Tulley
Manchester

Lack of understanding

It is always good to read political reports and analyses which correctly state the reality of the Labour Party, namely pro-capitalist and anti-socialist.

However, when the Weekly Worker (October 10) writes that “New Labour is shedding its Old Labour skin” with the implication that something fundamentally new is emerging, there is a lack of basic Marxist understanding of the origins of the formation of the Labour Party and its continuous historical function in British politics. There is no New Labour - only ‘New’ Labour, an opportunist, spin-doctors’ gimmick.

Pete Jordan
Bristol

Mistake

In his letter (Weekly Worker October 17) Dave Craig writes that the first moves of the CPGB (PCC) were “towards other ex-CPGB groups, like the Communist Action Group and Open Polemic”.

He is mistaken. Open Polemic is not an ex-group or anything else of the old CPGB.

Open Polemic