Letters

Where next?

The International Socialist Group is facing a crisis with the ball in the court of Derby and Wolverhampton comrades as to where the ISG goes from here.

My own position as the only ISG member in Southampton means I can’t play a leading role. It may be possible to establish an IS Group here in the future, but for the time being my main focus of activity will be the SLP.

The ISG came into existence in 1994 following Andy Wilson’s expulsion from the SWP. I was not a member then, but I understand that Andy and others were encouraged to form the ISG by a group of German comrades who had broken away from the SAG (the SWP’s German affiliate). At the time it was recognised that the ISG would not be able to sustain itself by purely orientating itself on the SWP. This we thought to be a mistake that the Revolutionary Democratic Group had made and that we should not repeat. It was also recognised that the ISG would not be able to conduct independent work for some time because of its size.

This seems to have been the rationale for entering the rapprochement process with the CPGB (Provisional Central Committee), which the RDG and Open Polemic were already part of. Although we were initially dismissive because of the CPGB’s Stalinist history, it quickly became clear that they had made a major break from what the old CPGB represented. It is also true that the CPGB still carries a lot of the old baggage.

However, my impression is that this process has been very badly handled by the London ‘leadership’. I was told at ‘Marxism’ by a couple of the London comrades that we risked losing the Derby comrades by entering this process, but this would be a price worth paying. Yet it seems that very little was done to involve comrades outside London in this process.

Now it seems that the London leadership has unilaterally decided, on behalf of the whole ISG, that rapprochement with the CPGB is not the way forward after all. However, studying the letter in the Weekly Worker (September 26) by Ian and Julian gives me the impression that the process has been judged on the wrong criteria.

Ian and Julian have a number of criticisms of the CPGB which may or may not be correct. This is to be expected, as different groups on the left are bound to have different approaches as to how a revolutionary party should be built. However, rapprochement is ultimately rejected for failing to meet the needs of “homesick communists”.

I believe that this is the wrong approach. The rapprochement process should be judged on whether it is capable of meeting the needs of the working class. This is not to say I do not understand the problems that the left faces. Having spent four and a half years in the SWP, I am well aware how destructive this kind of organisation can be, but to base one’s political perspective purely on undoing the wrongs of Cliff and co is indeed the “politics of the wilderness”.

Having judged rapprochement against their own rather egotistical perspectives and found it wanting, the London ‘leadership’ have left the rest of the ISG, mainly based in Wolverhampton and Derby, to pick up the pieces. No wonder comrades at the Derby meeting were angered, not so much at Andy’s decision to take a back seat - no one expects him to be a martyr - but that they had not been consulted beforehand and had been left to find out after he posted his resignation on the internet. For my part, I have to say that I find very little in Mark Fischer’s commentary (Weekly Worker September 26) that I would disagree with.

We are now in a situation where the majority of the ISG want to keep the group going. At the Derby meeting it was decided that one of our main focuses should be the SLP, and that those not already members should join. In my view this was the right decision, but it will only be vindicated if we have something to say to comrades in the SLP about how socialists should organise.

Many comrades in the Derby meeting felt that we should concentrate on ‘activity’ until something comes up. Our experience of Marxism ’96, where we were largely preaching to the converted, was that we will not be able to seriously orientate to the SWP unless and until there is a significant backlash against the bureaucratic style of the leadership. This happened on a small scale at Marxism ’95 but may not happen again for a couple of years or more.

My view is that if we adopt this perspective, we risk going down the Gravesend road. In 1995 almost the entire Gravesend branch of the SWP resigned in disgust at the expulsion of a Canterbury comrade. These comrades had been very active around the Anti-Nazi League and other issues and took the view that the way forward was to continue this activism but without the SWP. This is no bad thing in itself, and they have a few local activities and produce a local newsletter.

The problem is that they have failed to take up a political argument with the wider socialist movement. These comrades did not think it appropriate to come up to ‘Marxism’ and explain to SWP comrades why they had left the SWP, which is unforgivable in my view. We should not make the same mistakes, and this means developing our politics in order to clarify them.

I am not saying theory is better than practice. I believe they are two sides of the same coin. We should involve ourselves in local issues. We should not adopt the classical Trotskyist position that says, ‘It’s all very well to fight over roads, hospitals, jobs, etc, but really we need to smash capitalism’. The issues working class people fight over are valuable in their own right, but we can also generalise from small issues to big ones that question the way society is run.

Internationally, a number of groups have split from the IS Tendency. These groups have had to completely reassess their ideas. Probably the most important theoretical contributions have come from the New Socialist Group in Canada. They have had to re-evaluate the perspective of ‘socialism from below’ in the light of the current state of the class struggle. It is vitally important that we also re-evaluate our ideas. Julian Alford’s article on Labourism in our latest pamphlet is an important contribution to this process.

I am not in a position to propose much in terms of concrete activity, but I believe that the establishment of a regular journal should be an important priority. Comrades may argue that there are enough papers and magazines on the left at the moment, and they have a point. Indeed, there is no reason why we shouldn’t read, write for and sell the Weekly Worker, which, whilst not perfect, is light years ahead of Socialist Worker or Militant.

It is nonetheless important that we try to make our own unique contribution to the battle of ideas in the class through our own publication. Producing such a publication would not be cheap or easy; it may take many months to get off the ground, but it is something to aim for.

The fact that we come from the SWP/IS tradition means we have a responsibility to defend the gains that have come from that tradition. Our orientation to the SWP should be guided by this perspective.

Unlike Julian or Ian, I believe that we should be part of the rapprochement process being led by the CPGB. There are things about the CPGB we may not like, or even find quite repugnant. The RDG may be small, but we aren’t a particularly attractive bunch either. At the end of the day, if we are only prepared to work with people we agree with we will all disappear up our own backsides.

John Bateman
Southampton

Ghost busters

Apologies to Open Polemic comrades. In mistakenly referring to them as an ex-CPGB group, I was confusing individual comrades with the group as a whole.

I was disappointed in Roy Bull’s letter (Weekly Worker October 31). Roy has been a regular reader of the Weekly Worker. He has no doubt read the only real debate between Marxists in the paper on the nature and potential of the SLP as a ‘Communist-Labour party’. He has certainly been at meetings where this was discussed. I’ve been told that at the last Revolutionary Platform meeting this formulation was voted on and carried.

Yet Roy fails to comment on it. This is especially disappointing because this formulation makes positive sense out of the substance of Roy’s own argument. The SLP is not a Communist Party nor has it any prospects of becoming one. Neither is it simply a left reformist Labour Party mark II. We might agree it was centrist. But the theoretical formulation of a Communist-Labour party points clearly to its own contradictory essence, and to the tasks of communists.

I must strongly disagree with Roy’s false accusations that the CPGB have grassed up the ex-IBT. This is nonsense. The RDG would be the first to condemn them if it were true. The IBT comrades couldn’t resist coming out in the open with a polemical attack on the CPGB in their international journal. They cannot shout ‘cheat’ and ‘foul’ if they get an open reply. To be fair to the ex-IBT, I am not aware that they have complained.

In which case Roy is being a bit silly ‘defending’ a non-organisation organisation that doesn’t want to be defended. And since Roy used the words IBT, is he not equally guilty of grassing them up?

So let me defend Roy against the charge of mentioning ‘IBT’ in his letter. Roy, you didn’t grass them up, because you did not identify or name any IBT comrade. But then neither did the CPGB.

We must be concerned with the politics of the IBT, not in guessing at who is or is not a member. If the IBT is dead, then its ghost lives on. But this is not the spectre that is haunting the European bourgeoisie or even Arthur Scargill. At least we are now free to become ideological ghost busters. We want to know what programmatic views the ex-IBT have for the UK. We want to know whether they are revolutionary democratic communists, or economistic communists. The former are putting forward republican demands and the latter are calling for a Labour government (eg, CPB, Socialist Organiser, SWP).

Which leads me back to John Stone’s letter in last week’s paper (November 7). The RDG wants to replace the constitutional monarchy with a workers’ republic. This should be clear. It is just that a bourgeois republic would be the first real step in that direction. It is a transitional demand. John calls for a workers’ republic but is afraid of the hard struggle that this first step entails. He would rather stick with the easy option of voting in a Labour government.

So who is afraid of a bourgeois republic? Certainly the bourgeoisie, who are worried about their property, and the Trotskyists who are worried by their own theory.

Dave Craig
RDG (faction of the SWP)

IBT in Brazil

Some weeks ago the first conference of revolutionary defencist organisations was held in Brazil. The aim was to gather currents which defend the oppressed nations and the degenerate workers’ states against imperialism and restoration.

The Argentinean Bolshevik Party, the Brazilian Bolshevik Internationalist League and the Communist Workers Group from Canada and the USA created the Bolshevik Current for the Fourth International (BCFI).

The two Latin American groups come from the Altamira international current centred around the Argentinean Workers Party. The North American group is a split from the International Bolshevik Tendency.

Previously the IBT had been trying to win the BCFI, but in the end the BCFI influenced important IBT cadres. The BCFI criticised the IBT’s position against the defence of Argentina in the Malvinas war; for not giving importance to the work amongst the industrial proletariat; and for a liquidationist policy inside the British SLP.

Delegates from Poder Obrero (Peru) and Poder Obrero (Bolivia) and the Brazilian Nucleus for Proletarian Emancipation (NEP) were also in some of the meetings.

Discussing the USSR, the BCFI said that Yeltsin re-created the bourgeois state and for that reason revolutionaries should have critically supported the Yanayev hard-line Stalinist coup. The other groups said that Yanayev also wanted to restore capitalism and that workers had to oppose a coup that wanted to attack their freedoms.

On tactics towards the Brazilian PT (Workers Party), the BCFI considered that it was not possible to continue voting for Lula because of his pro-imperialist policies and his commitment to save semi-colonial capitalism under IMF measures. Comrades from the Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International said that Brazil had never had the experience of a workers’ president and that there were huge illusions throughout the continent of the possibility of a Lula government reversing neo-liberal attacks. For that reason it was important to put him in power, aiming to unmask him the better.

Mario Santos
Brazil