Letters

One united party

The dispute between the Communist Party and the Socialist Labour Party has been brought to my attention. I was an original member of the SLP and would like to make my position clear.

I agree that the major task of the left today is to realign and unite our forces. The splits and fragmentation on the left have weakened our movement for too long. I myself had been a Labour Party member for 25 years, but found that membership increasingly untenable to my beliefs. The formation of the SLP may seem to some premature, but people like myself who are passionately committed to socialism felt that it was urgently needed.

The formation of the SLP is a tremendous opportunity that I am glad to be part of. Arthur Scargill was the driving force behind the formation of the SLP. As such it is my belief that it is the only vehicle that can unite the left. Politics is to a certain extent about personality and there can be no argument that Scargill has been the most dominant personality on the left over the last decade. I am not in total agreement with every tactical nuance of the SLP, but I have given up my Labour Party card and socialists should do the same, if we are to build one united party.

This may seem arrogant, but it is not intended as such. It is merely a reflection of the weakness of the left and potential strength of the SLP. It does not have masses of members yet, but this situation will change fundamentally under a Labour government.

Political discussions are of course crucial in the formation of a new party, but this must not hamper disciplined action.

In order to have a political voice the working class needs one party. I counted 33 leftwing publications at the SLP May conference. How wonderful if all those resources were put into one paper.

The left has been self-indulgent for far too long. The only beneficiaries of the continued fragmentation of the left are those forces of darkness we seek to replace. Time and time again we use the political rhetoric of 'Unity is strength'. Let us practise what we preach.

Dennis MacDonald
Tyne and Wear

Fatal ignorance

Comrade Mike Pearn makes the nonsensical accusation that the CPGB’s coverage of the grim events in Afghanistan displays our “incomplete break with Stalinism” (letters Weekly Worker October 17). However, in reality comrade Pearn’s letter makes it abundantly clear that he has not broken one iota from bourgeois-orchestrated anti-Sovietism (itself a conduit for anti-communism) or from national-centred ignorance. This makes it doubly ironic that he tells us that the “revolutionary left cannot and must not ‘paint nationalism red’ ”, which is what the comrade unconsciously actually does - and far worse besides, I would argue.

Comrade Pearn mocks us because we “fantasise” about the PDPA “leading a revolution”. This is not fantasy, but fact, comrade. 1978 was a popular people’s revolution which smashed the old, feudalistic state apparatus and dragged the country into the 20th century. It is a fact that comrade Hafizullah Amin and others in the PDPA led this revolution, whether you like it or not. The Soviets certainly thought so, which is one of the reasons why they murdered him. Comrade Pearn may glibly label the PDPA revolutionaries as “radical elements of the intelligentsia” - but, in a sense, what if they were? It still does not mean that they were not revolutionaries, committed to the goal of socialism (however they may have conceived it). You could also dismiss Lenin and Trotsky as being merely “radical elements of the intelligentsia”, which they most certainly were. For whatever reason, comrade Pearn seems to find it hard to imagine revolution taking place outside the confines of western Europe (if not Britain) and the semi-mythologised Russia of the very distant past.         

Somewhat ignorantly, but taking his cue from the anti-Soviet western media, comrade Pearn writes that the Red Army “invaded” Afghanistan in 1979. This is very easy to say, but is a gross simplification, to put it mildly. The revolutionary PDPA had requested on numerous occasions to the Soviet bureaucracy that they should intervene, or “invade” - faced as it was by the might of international imperialism and counterrevolution, just as the young Soviet state was in the years 1971-21. As we all know, the Red Army eventually intervened, but it did so in a criminal manner by slaughtering the leaders of the Afghan revolution. Comrade Pearn omits this little fact.

Quite cretinously, and disgracefully, comrade Pearn proceeds to inform us that the Taliban “must be seen ... as a legitimate national liberation movement on a par with Ho Chi-Minh’s NLF”. Not only is comrade Pearn painting nationalism ‘red’ here - he is painting medievalist Islamic religious fundamentalism ‘red’, which is inexcusable.

Comrade Pearn - surely you must see the fundamental difference between the Taliban and the NLF? The Taliban is a feudal, backward-looking, anti-democratic force which has been armed and supported by imperialism, while the NLF (for all its faults and limitations) found itself battling against the forces of imperialism and for genuine national unity, a democratic task. The two are polar opposites.

It is a mystery to me how comrade Pearn thinks we can “rebuild the international socialist tradition” by failing to support real revolutions and by defending counterrevolutionary forces. If we employ comrade Pearn’s approach, which relies heavily on a staple diet of imperialist propaganda and narrow anti-Sovietism, we will never be able to reforge or rebuild anything, let alone the Communist (Fourth or otherwise) International - except in our highly evolved imagination. We can see that comrade Pearn is retreating into cosy, feel-good abstractions, as opposed to a serious scientific materialist study of the world - which means confronting the real world, and real revolutions, no matter how unpalatable or ideologically inconvenient that may be.

I am now beginning to see why comrade Pearn, and his ideological cohabitees, are so opposed to ‘socialism in one country’ - they do not believe socialism is possible anywhere, or even that it is particularly desirable. This seems to explain the comrade’s cold-blooded and neo-aristocratic attitude to the Afghan revolution and Taliban barbarism - ‘Real people? Well, they just don’t live up to our expectations.’ In which case, why not do away with them altogether and keep on hugging that Marxist ‘classic’ instead? 

Eddie Ford
South London

Turning fink

The SLP is not remotely describable as another bourgeois Labour Party mark II. Nor is it remotely useful to describe the SLP as the product of the defeat of the working class by imperialism and therefore as a purely negative phenomenon.

The SLP is the opening up of a new centrist arena of struggle where the best ideas can prove themselves to the working class. It is a coalition of disparate forces which it would be pointless to regard as having been brought together in order to fail to build the SLP. Success is the aim.

The struggle to build a larger-scale workers’ party for socialism than has been open to communists hitherto will be its own reward, even if the SLP does end up being swamped by TUC Labourism mark II, due to the historical situation being less advanced than has been anticipated.

None of this potential broad front SLP activity should involve revolutionary socialists in the slightest retreat from Marxist-Leninist understanding of imperialist crisis and the further developments of the international class struggles.

Equally, there is no point in trying to win the battle for a Marxist-Leninist understanding of socialism within a broad front organisation by manoeuvring for the exclusion of rightwing elements. The more elements that abandon TUC-Labour ‘reformism’ to take up the SLP’s challenge to abolish capitalism the better. In the end, communists have got to win a majority of the working class to something close to revolutionary socialist consciousness, no matter from how much backwardness they have to be brought forwards. What better place than in the SLP?

Some self-proclaimed revolutionary socialists insist that the SLP’s constitutional ban on the affiliation of other parties within the SLP makes a struggle for Marxist ideas to prevail in the broad front party impossible. What they really mean, of course, is that they think the revolutionary takeover of the SLP is now impossible.

They are wrong - on two counts. First, it was a completely silly idea that Scargillism would be launched and would immediately allow itself to be taken over by sectarian centrists. Secondly, any such frustrated affiliates would have been kidding themselves about their ‘Leninist’ revolutionary credentials anyway in the light of such a poor piece of analysis.

All would-be Marxist-Leninists cadres could easily work within the SLP by simply abandoning any attempt to build a party within a party. Secret sectarian entryism owes more to Walter Mitty than Karl Marx, and it is hard to discern what is lost to Marxist-Leninist circles that is gained by a tiny sect posturing as the revolutionary party.

In the absence of established factional rights within the SLP, it is senseless to conduct public propaganda and agitation for an anti-leadership platform at such an early stage of the party’s development. By all means let like-minded SLP communists have a drink and chat together as often as is valuable for developing the strength and achievements of the SLP - but all public posturing as an alternative platform is just more self-delusion from the same Walter Mitty stable which envisaged taking over the SLP as the revolutionary party to start with. It is all the wrong game, and all at the wrong time.

It makes no sense for now to insist on building the SLP in only one direction and down only one narrow path. All such approaches are just sectarian revolutionary fantasy and have missed the point of the SLP’s development entirely.

Contemptuous dismissals of ‘liquidationism’ provide no answer to the foregoing arguments. The CPGB has just attacked the IBT Spartacist breakaway for “their deep entryist opportunist burrowing” into the SLP, and for “being drawn to the right in pursuit of power in the SLP”, and for “the crass hypocrisy of this sterile little sect” for publicly liquidating in order to join the SLP “under instructions from North America”, and for it remaining “crystal clear ... from the behaviour of their comrades in the SLP [and from their own self-described - RB] clumsy designation of these people as IBT ‘supporters’ that the IBT continues to exist as an organised group in Britain”.

This is a monstrous deliberate fingering of the IBT, every bit as bad as the McCarthyite informing and witch hunting which the CPGB accuses the SLP of. None of the IBT’s polemical criticisms of the CPGB which the Weekly Worker has drawn attention to can remotely warrant the CPGB turning fink on the IBT. It looks as if the CPGB’s hurt pride at being challenged over its SLP policy has caused the Weekly Worker to turn stool pigeon.

This is a truly alarming development for all who have attempted a comradely polemical relationship with the Weekly Worker. What is really “wretched” (the Weekly Worker’s headline) is not the IBT’s arguments for liquidating into the SLP, but the CPGB’s treacherous reply.

Fingering comrades for wanting to discuss a different approach to SLP work than the half-and-half measures the CPGB tried, would also indicate that the CPGB has now given up on its relationship with the SLP via the “comrades who have joined the SLP as a direct result of our call”. This savage back-stabbing of the IBT seems to signal abandonment of Weekly Worker concern that “the witch hunt in the SLP has been exclusively directed at purported CPGB ‘members and supporters’ ”. Turning fink on the IBT is just asking for trouble.

All this would seem to confirm that the CPGB was confused from the start about the SLP and got its tactics in a muddle. It would seem to confirm that there really was an illusion that the SLP could become the revolutionary party, a daft analysis.

Roy Bull
Manchester