Letters

Carry on campaigning

Chris Weller’s reply to my report on the national meeting of the Socialist Alliances (letters October 24) revealed a clear hostility to Partyism. I am glad to be wrong about his opposition to elections, but sorry to see him dig himself deeper into the trench of Kent localism.

Chris says that Kent Socialist Alliance does “not want a national leadership at present, because we are not good and ready” (my emphasis). Well, I for one do not believe that the selfish individual reluctance of this small group of anarchists and activists in a small part of southern England should be allowed to dominate a national movement of alliances.

The alliances have got the possibility to be a component part in the building of a national working class party. But Chris, thinking as a localist and therefore not as a Marxist, opposes this positive trend. Meanwhile his group “understandably shuns and distrusts political leadership, parties and ‘lines’ being imposed from above”.

So what should communists do, Chris? Wait until you get over your own individual bruised experiences of bad leadership or, as you seem to advocate, simply say ‘so what’ and leave Kent to get on with its own affairs? The answer is obvious. Localism is a divisive and reformist trend in the working class movement which communists have to fight, not accommodate to.

As Dave Craig, your comrade in the Revolutionary Democratic Group, put it in a debate some time ago against the same Kent trend: “Communists participate in the day-to-day struggles of the working class not as left activists, but as communists with a definite programme, tactics and organisation” (Weekly Worker November 2 1995). We unite around a revolutionary programme that poses in the first instance national working class power. You say organisations have “to be formed from the bottom up and at grass roots”. But, again as Dave Craig argued, this is to think

“like a left activist, that the foundations of a party are in local campaigning. Communists think that the foundation of communist work is the programme. And the foundation of the programme is in the revolutionary theory of the international working class.” (my emphasis)

Effective working class organisation is built top down. Communists fight to develop the best theory, to have answers for the working class in struggle. Of course this is a complex and symbiotic process which necessitates the fullest participation in the everyday struggles of the working class. But to underestimate the need for theory or to simply say that it can come out of “actions” like picket lines or paper sales is to reduce our struggle down to a ‘carry on campaigning’ one. It is a picture of a class that will always struggle against the local representatives of capital, but never take on the state.

Marx and Engels certainly did not have a ‘so what’ approach to localism. They fought all their political lives, not simply for working class unity against the state, but for internationalism. They argued against all forms of petty parochialism. Lenin followed with a very successful example of how to build top down. To call yourself a communist and oppose these basic principles takes some explaining.

Anne Murphy
London

Sorry sorts

In response to Nick Heath and the Anarchist Communist Federation - “sorry sorts”, one and all - Nick’s letter of “amazement” caused universal amusement at last week’s Class War conference. That the ACF should take up fisticuffs in a deadly ‘Stalinist/authoritarian’ paper in defence of the Class War team was a well appreciated source of humour in an otherwise heavy and intense conference.

The ACF may say I am discredited, but as far as they are concerned I was never credited in the first place. Who cares? As long as hundreds of thousands of workers with whom I have organised, struck, picketed and rioted over the last 30 years in the workers’ movement hold me as a consistent class fighter, it doesn’t really matter, does it?

I have over the same period remained an active revolutionary. At times, experience has caused me to change my views on how to bring around a revolutionary overthrow of the state, but never whether to. I moved from the Young Communist League to anarchism, briefly to Trotskyism, and now as a revolutionary Marxist in the anarchist camp and as a member of Class War and the International Workers of the World. I am prepared, at the non-sectarian invitation of the CPGB, to bring news and views from the coalfield. I do not happen to believe the revolutionary process is carved in stone or comrades are born with ‘pure revolutionary wisdom’ stamped on their heads.

I will be interested to see where Nick and the ACF are in 20 years, and add up what their contribution to the class struggle has been.

Dave Douglass
South Yorkshire

Critical support

The Trotskyist Unity Group gives critical support to the process of regroupment which is occurring between the Leninist Trotskyist Tendency and the Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International.

However the TUG is aware of important political tensions in this process. The LCMRCI is in favour of open factions as essential to the possibility of building a revolutionary party, whilst the LTT is against open factions. Thus the LTT combines a high level of internal party democracy with a tendency towards bureaucratic centralism.

The LTT/Workers International League has turned down the informal proposal of the TUG to become an open faction. This was because we refused to drop our political sympathies for the politics of the International Communist Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International. In turn there is a great possibility that this process of regroupment will mean that the LCMRCI will turn away from its orientation towards Workers Power/LRCI and the CPGB. Instead they could adopt the opportunist regroupment perspectives of the WIL/LTT, which is for diplomatic regroupment from the United Secretariat of the Fourth International.

In the October/November issue of Workers News there is an article by Barry Murphy outlining the perspectives of the WIL/LTT. This article tries to minimise counterrevolutionary developments since 1989, and instead characterises the present period as neither counterrevolutionary nor revolutionary. This theoretical confusion is connected to a Brit-centred view of revolution, in which the united front is presented as a strategy, and not a tactic for furthering proletarian revolution.

The call is made for a united front between the trade union bureaucracy and rank and file in the situation of the election of a Blair-led Labour government. In other words, the Labour Party of Blair is fatalistically considered to be a distorted road to socialism. The LCMRCI has quite rightly criticised Workers Powerfor tail-ending the Labour Party - but will they make a similar critique of the WIL’s Labourism? They have also criticised Workers Powerfor having confusing perspectives, but remain silent about the LTT, who have more confusing perspectives, in that they formally acknowledge counterrevolutionary developments, but then deny their significance in their eclectic characterisation of the period.

The dogmatic acceptance by both the LTT and the LCMRCI of the view that programme corresponds with reality means that they cannot tolerate differences in perspective, and so these differences are diplomatically suppressed. This approach can only hinder the process of durable revolutionary regroupment.

Phil Sharpe
TUG

Liquidationist retreat

Comrade Roy Bull (Weekly Worker October 31) berates communists within the SLP for behaving as communists, for organising themselves. And he defends the weakness of politics which has caused erstwhile communists to reduce themselves to individuals.

It is all well and good that Roy calls for a correct “Marxist-Leninist understanding”. But since all he wants to do is “have a drink and a chat” about it, he demonstrates clearly how trivial is his own. Roy is on the same liquidationist trajectory as the rest of the sorry bunch he is attempting to defend.

All serious communists organise wherever they are. They organise in whatever forms are appropriate to the time and the place. In fact a measure of the strength of the working class itself can be gleaned by gauging the strength of its communist organisations.

Unfortunately the past 10 years have seen these collapse across the globe, one after the other. This is one of our major conditioning realities today. The SLP was not launched on the high of the class struggle, but instead on the occasion of the loss by the Labour left of its pews in the ‘broad church’. And while communists welcome the long-awaited realisation by (as yet) small sections of the working class that Labour is not a suitable vehicle for working class interests, we have yet to convince of more.

Communists must create the conditions for building a mass, revolutionary party of the working class, not the doubly dilute “larger-scale working class party for socialism” which Roy looks forward to as his reward. This is, to coin a Mancunian phrase, ‘well sad’. Because of the conditions of the birth of the SLP, there is precious little class confidence in struggle and militancy. There is however great confidence in the scheming and manoeuvring of the various left bureaucracies, since it is this method of work that has kept them where they are today. It is the organisation of communists and revolutionaries which can reach class confidence in parties that a “drink and a chat” can never reach, no matter what beer it is you are drinking.

So it is doubly sad for Roy to preach such tender concern for the “rightwingers” under threat of being “excluded” by “sectarian entrists” in their “revolutionary takeover bid”; to prattle on about “silly” “Leninists” failing to realise that the SLP leaders want to monopolise the party, and how “senseless” is “public propaganda ... for an anti-leadership platform at such an early stage”. Better maybe to allow the anti-communists and anti-democrats a free hand to shape the party and the class in their own image. Are you sure you don’t want to defend the ‘moderates’ against the ‘loony left’, Roy?

By these statements Roy has abdicated his duty to fight against the witch hunters. If he wishes to leave this field of battle, I personally would regret his passing, but we don’t buy it when he hides the reality of retreat behind liquidationist justifications.

A wee reminder, Roy. Fisc is a secret sect at the top of the SLP. It has declared that no other organised group can join. It is conducting an anti-democratic witch hunt. It wrecked Manchester branch of the SLP. It won’t print your letters in the party paper. It is sectarian and worse than centrist.

If revolutionaries reduce themselves to individuals within the SLP then all their efforts at party-building will be to the glory and edification of the leadership. That is precisely why they wish to atomise us. All forms of liquidationism play right into their hands. All talk of clever game play and biding time is just so much smoke to cover retreating rear ends.

Indeed, why should individual left members campaign for parliamentary candidates in a party which won’t even print their letters? But there are 100 reasons why organised revolutionaries should campaign for SLP candidates, in the full knowledge that organised revolutionary politics inside the SLP is building for the class. Helping to create the conditions through which the mass revolutionary party will be rebuilt.

Steve Riley
Manchester

Correction

There is much confusion over the position of the Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International on Scotland. I hope to write a longer piece on the question.

The small article on Scotland (Weekly Worker October 17) which was signed John Stone and replied to by Nancy Morelli(Weekly Worker October 24) was not written by me but by Graham Cee (a member of the Workers International League).

I agree with Nancy Morelli when she wrote, “The referendum questions are an insult and cannot in principle be backed”. Referendums are a non-democratic method because the population cannot participate directly in the posing of the questions.

The LRCMI’s position is in favour of a constituent assembly in which the Scottish people would discuss and decide their future and their relation with Britain. Nevertheless we do not think that any parliament (ie, a bourgeois institution) will give to the Scottish people genuine self-determination. The workers will achieve this with a revolution based on workers’ councils and militias.

The only way to solve the social and national problem is with the overthow of the capitalist class. We are for workers’ council republics in Scotland, Wales and England, and for a socialist federation of Great Britain and Europe.

Our disagreement with the Revolutionary Democratic Group’s position is that they are in favour of a bourgeois federal republic. We do not want to replace the British monarchy with a capitalist federal state like Germany or the USA, but with a workers’ commune-like semi-state.

The CPGB is in favour of a federal republic without a class content. In our society nothing could be without class content. If the CPGB is in favour of smashing the capitalist state, it should be in favour of a workers’ and socialist federation.

John Stone
London