Letters

Pox on ’em

So the Scottish split from Your Party has happened. It’s been on the cards since the February Dundee conference, which voted in favour of both party and national separatism, and was accelerated by crass, bureaucratic HQ manoeuvres.

Some, including members of the Democratic Socialists of Your Party and Grassroots Left, have put out statements of solidarity with the interim Scottish executive committee, whose members have resigned en masse and are now making plans for a new party. Whilst, of course, recognising the appalling anti-democratic behaviour of the Corbyn leadership, what they have done is to make the left nationalism that is rife up here even deeper-fried. Neither the national leadership nor what was the Scottish CEC has anything positive to offer the working class in Scotland and beyond, with both projects doomed to failure. I say, a pox on both their houses.

I think back to the hopes I had early in the year that the YP cultural bloc being planned, with comrades in Hackney and Haringey proto-branches, could take off as part of the election campaigns in May, working with and helping develop branches across the country. This was intended to be announced at the Dundee conference and put straight into action. But, once it became clear that there was to be an overt nationalist turn in Scotland, and that HQ had no desire for branches or an election campaign, all those hopes were dashed.

What a wasted opportunity.

Tam Dean Burn
Glasgow

OCF clarity

Donald Trump’s decision to impose a blockade on the Strait of Hormuz has understandably surprised many observers, given his prior insistence that Iran ought to reopen it.

A small circle, however, appears less shocked: namely, those associates of the president who, by remarkable coincidence, have placed rather well-judged wagers on his ‘unpredictable’ turns. One is also reminded that Jack Conrad will doubtless be entirely unsurprised. He has long maintained that Trump, like any reliable servant of capital, will ultimately act in its interests.

In light of these developments, could the Weekly Worker clarify whether Sunday’s Online Communist Forum will proceed as scheduled? Or should readers prepare for the necessary adjustment in start time to accommodate different time zones, with comrade Jack presumably addressing us remotely from a Maldivian beach (perhaps courtesy of a timely flutter on Polymarket)?

Carl Collins
Stamford

Red capitalism

Some comrades have expressed an interest in the inner workings of China, so the best place to go is China’s economy by Arthur R Kroeber - a 30-year expert working for a think tank in China. As it’s written for the generalist, any Marxist can cut through the book easily.

A segment of it will be of interest because of the differences with the Soviet Union in how the Communist Party of China approached the economy. In 1979 the Chinese central planners controlled the allocation of 600 commodities, while Soviet central planners had allocated 60,000 commodities and set millions of prices. The USSR had 40,000 state-run factories, many directly run from Moscow. China had 883,000, of which 90% were run by city and country governance.

Although the Communist Party of China controls things, many foreign company enterprises have favourable access in ‘special economic zones’ and I aim to further critique the book, along with another called Tiger head, snake tails by Jonathan Fenby, for whom joining the Communist Party is not for any ideological reasons, but is “a good career move”!

So, as a nice contrast to Tony Cliff’s ‘state capitalism’ in Russia, we have ‘red capitalism’ in China!

Frank Kavanagh
email

War opponents

Next to Mike Macnair’s article last week (‘Not a clean, but a dirty split’, April  ) we see a famous group photo of the delegates to the 1910 International Socialist Congress held in Copenhagen; two women, holding hands in the front row, are claimed to be “Alexandra Kollontai and Clara Zetkin”. That is not the case! In a 1910 issue of the New York Call Sunday magazine, they are positively identified as members of the American delegation to the congress. Unfortunately I can’t find anything in my notes giving their names, and the microfilm reel has long since been sent back to New York.

I have no doubt that my memory is correct in this instance however, because standing between the two women is the unmistakable Morris Hillquit - a popular socialist orator in three languages, an author known even outside socialist circles, and perennially elected leader of the Socialist Party of the United States at home and its International representative abroad. He can be spotted in the front row of just about every international congress, from Amsterdam 1904, to Stuttgart 1907, to here at Copenhagen 1910. Besides Hillquit, the SPUS sent three women delegates.

Moving beyond that trivial matter, I’d like to supplement comrade Macnair’s article with some contextual comments on how members of the Socialist Party of the US responded to the outbreak of World War I. As is fairly well known, the SPUS was one of the few major socialist parties not located within the Russian empire that could proudly say they opposed their state’s entry into the war. This anti-war stance reflected the views of the overwhelming majority of the ‘broad workers’ vanguard’ of politically active party members, which confirmed the programme of the 1917 emergency anti-war convention in a referendum with well over 90% in favour, despite draconian laws to crack down on dissent, like the Espionage Act already hanging over their heads.

What is not well known is that this anti-war stance by the broad workers’ vanguard was made against the advice of an alarming percentage of the party’s established writers and leaders, which (in reference to comrade Macnair’s point) could not be categorised according to their politics before the war.

As you might expect, from the start a large number of the party’s rightwing ‘constructive socialist’ writers (but seemingly not their rank-and-file readers) abandoned the party to support the war: WJ Ghent, AM Simons and John Spargo as party intellectuals, joined by celebrity muckraking journalist Charles Edward Russell and 1916 Socialist presidential candidate Allan L Benson. What you may be surprised to hear, however, was that some of the leading voices of the party’s mass-action left wing also argued for US entry into the war on the side of the Entente.

The three most famous were Frank Bohn, the theoretical co-author of Bill Haywood’s plan for Industrial socialism; Robert Rives La Monte, long-running author of pithy and well-informed Marxist theoretical articles, who wasn’t scared to be called a syndicalist; and William English Walling, the most prolific American socialist theorist of his day, who, if you can make it through his staid and congested prose, is revealed to be what Emma Goldman once called “the reddest of the red”.

I don’t want to make it sound like all the leaders of the left wing became pro-war - Marcy, Fraina, Rutgers, Eastman, Lore,  etc remained resolutely against it - but the fact stands that the US had a pro-war left, the same as continental Europe did. Unlike Europe, their arguments don’t need to be translated for us. That makes their articles an overlooked field of study, ripe for critical dissection.

The most surprising case of all comes from the most powerful figure of the party’s right wing: Victor L Berger. Leading up to 1914, he had made a name for himself as an open supporter of Eduard Bernstein’s state-loyalist revision of Marxist political strategy (which didn’t stop him from styling himself as the defender of ‘Marxism’ against pro-Industrial Workers of the World ‘anarchists’). William English Walling rightly devoted several chapters of his 1912 book, Socialism as it is, to lambasting Berger’s “opportunist state socialism” from the left.

When war erupted, however, while Walling had already begun to call for an Entente victory in the name of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, Berger established himself as one of the most vocal and visible opponents of the war - a war he maintained would never have started if the socialist parties had succeeded in establishing a citizens’ militia (another socialist principle that both Bernstein and Berger deemed too important to compromise on). Berger was punished for bravely holding to his anti-war principles, with 20 years in prison for speech crimes under the Espionage Act - a sentence so appalling that the supreme court felt compelled to rescind it after the smoke had cleared in 1921.

I haven’t fully figured out whatever theoretical common threads there are between these disparate pro-war renegades, or exactly which political lessons to draw. But this letter is already too long, so I’ll sign off with these two points:

• First, La Monte and Walling were both rich ‘millionaire socialists’, who were only able to write so much because they lived off dividends from capital.
• Second, and more importantly, the socialist press in the US had an avowed and an actual culture of open debate that made it possible for the broad workers’ vanguard to go against the advice of so many of their current leaders.

Key publications like the New York Call, the International Socialist Review and the New Review were cooperatively managed and funded, which allowed for their vibrant letters pages to dismantle the arguments of any pro-war features that appeared. And, unlike the socialist press in Europe, they did not need to worry about the acute shock of losing advertising or trade union funding, because they barely had any to begin with (not that the right wing didn’t still bend over backwards to solicit it).

As a result, the vast majority of the US socialist press stayed true to anti-war socialist principles in a way that most of the bureaucratised socialist press of continental Europe did not, and even continued to fight under a regime of state repression on a scale that may have been worse than the Kaiser Reich.

Bill Wright
USA

Bloomin’ roses

To my comrades across the pond in the United Kingdom - I have been observing the quagmire of the radical UK left since the announcement of Your Party. Myself and every other American socialist I know were overjoyed at YP’s political potential and its intervention into a political landscape that seemed like it had the momentum to stop the fascist Reform Party.

After that immense joy came the sinking feeling, ever growing, until all I could feel when I looked at Your Party was sadness, horror and a deep despair. What has been unfolding has been the genuine nightmare scenario we members of the Democratic Socialists of America have had in the back of our heads for years, and seemed possible with the 2021 term of the DSA national political committee. We have avoided this fate and our rightwing socialists are reasonable comrades that believe in coexistence.

You have not been so lucky: your political home is being taken from you before the windows are even installed. Despite best-faith efforts on your part, YP has been taken by an outdated politician, and his clique of bureaucrats, who fails to have an internal or external vision for the organisation where he is not ‘God King’. Now the uncomfortable conversation starts - one, I suspect, many of you have already been having: what now?

To tell you the truth, as an American organiser and DSA member observing across the Atlantic, I do not think Your Party has a future. However, I do think you can have a future. Realistically I see you, the Grassroots Left and other disaffected elements have two paths forward, neither of which involve staying in the Corbyn sham:

• Option 1: you dissolve your organisations into the Green Party.
• Option 2: you use the connections you have made, and go make Your Own Party.

Now many of you will sneer at the first option, and it is not my favourite personally, but it is what many American socialists will tell you though. And for the immediate, it’s valid - push the party left, link with the left greens. But you have to dissolve your individual organisations, become an entryist force and end up tying yourself to a party that will potentially face great difficulty, when faced with structural and ideological limitations.

It is my opinion, and the reason I write this letter, that the best long-term option for the radical British left is to form their own democratic, mass socialist party. And make it with the expectation that it will not be a mass socialist party starting out: it will be small and it will be weak, but that’s OK.

What you require is a decade-plus of party building. You will start with the disgruntled and sects, and you need to turn that into a foundation for a mass party - one where the sects put their shibboleths aside - and the earnest desire for a membership-based socialist organisation that you brought to YP initially. And let there be one split - the split from authoritarians at YP. Carry the spirit of political potential we saw when this started, when you organised for convention, and please build the multi-caucus democracy you fought for.

The DSA was an irrelevant social democrat sect from the 1980s till 2016. The Green Party was a joke for decades, but now they are in their strongest position ever. It will take a long time to bear the fruits of this project.

To succeed, you need to not only focus on internal democracy, but external power-building also. Build relationships with working class organisations, be a welcoming space to everyone who isn’t a bigot. Running electoral campaigns, building up labour solidarity, bringing the moms and activists in, merging with the anti-war movement, etc. You get the point, but the key to success here is to shape your own party into a mass party. Your discourse, and your decisions as an organisation, whose politics are popular, should be based on results, not personalities - and not abstract theories, but concrete growth and development. You need experimentation and the honest examination of the ideas you believe to be true.

It will be hard, it will be lonely, and it will be difficult. You must cast aside dogmas and feelings of ideological superiority, and you must all work together as a Grassroots Left. But I believe that, if you do, a greater rose will bloom.

Nick Woodfin
USA