Letters

Learning democracy

I was interested in Yiannis Ivrissimtzis’ conclusions (letters, January 9) to the problem of the Soviet Union - that we only learn how to be a ruling class by being one.

No doubt a certain truth, but I hope, this does not mean we have to repeat the “chaotic stumbles” of the Soviet Union.

I would assert that the working class learns how to be a ruling class through struggle. We cannot of course anticipate the exact course of the international revolution or the specific problems that will be raised in the conditions of that revolution.

Nevertheless by being consistent fighters for democracy both in theory and practice, the working class takes the first steps in learning how to live and organise society for the benefit of human beings. It takes the first steps in understanding its alienation and so how to liberate itself.

We have already seen glimpses of workers’ organisation that hopefully point the way to the future. The self-sacrifice of the dockers and their families, the Miners Support Groups and Women Against Pit Closures and the communal organisation of each other’s well-being that took place during the miners’ great strike.

By linking these specific experiences with a general programme which champions democracy for all oppressed sections we can surely through our organisations learn how to live in a fundamentally different way.

The major task of any new revolution, assuming it is not isolated and so doomed to failure if it cannot spread the revolution, will be to extend democracy to fundamentally reorganise our lives, something workers’ organisations should be doing now. Technical problems of production are in that sense a secondary problem that cannot be solved bureaucratically, but only through this extension of democracy.

I would go further in Yiannis’s definition of socialism, to say that the working class must not only be in power but must be continually striving to extend democracy, to extend social control over society, until democracy (ie, majority rule) withers away - a very different concept to “public ownership”. That is why bureaucratic socialism is not a wholly unuseful term, since it expresses a contradiction. Socialism is nothing if it is not extending democracy. Russia had a revolution with socialism as its aspiration. That aspiration turned into its opposite under Stalin’s bureaucracy, though the economic counterrevolution back to capitalism was a longer process which is still not complete.

Dawn Lewis
Bristol

Socialism and the state

I think Yiannis Ivrissimitzis is right to draw the logical conclusion from Jack Conrad’s meticulous analysis that, if the objective conditions for socialism did not exist in Russia in 1917, then we shouldn’t confuse the issue by describing the system created by the Bolsheviks as some form of socialism.

Both Jack and Yiannis describe the process and inevitability of a new ruling class in Russia after 1917 and both make clear that this was a class ruling over the working class and not the working class in power.

I feel however that Yiannis’s definition of socialism as a society where the working class is the ruling class is too narrow and limiting and does not convey what socialists and communists truly stand for.

It is a cardinal principle of Marxism that the working class by emancipating itself emancipates the whole of humanity. If the whole of humanity is emancipated it follows that there is no section of humanity remaining in subjugation to a ruling class. Therefore, in the society we aim for, there should be no role for the working class to be a ruling class and indeed it will not exist as a class.

The concept of the working class as a ruling class was developed at a time when a transition period between capitalism and communism was felt necessary due to the facts that the working class did not constitute a majority of humankind and that the productive forces were not sufficient to meet all the basic needs of society. The theory of the ‘transition’ and the dictatorship of the proletariat was of course hijacked by official communism to justify the powerful repressive machinery of the state used to preserve the continued existence of the Russian ruling class.

My feeling is that the original reasons for supporting a ‘transition’ no longer exist, given the predominance of wage labour throughout the world and the capacity of the world’s existing productive forces to meet all the basic needs if so directed. Therefore, the period when the working class will also be the ruling class should be very limited and highly temporary, if at all, as most of the tasks which were originally set for the dictatorship of the proletariat have already been achieved under capitalism.

I think that if socialists and communists are going to make an effective basic case against capitalism, we need to do it by saying what we want to achieve rather than focusing exclusively on how we intend to get there. There is no point in trying to persuade someone to follow a certain set of road directions if you do not bother to say what they will find at the destination.

The basic case against capitalism is simple. We want to replace it by a society based on the common ownership of the means of production and distribution, where goods and services will be produced and made freely available just to satisfy the needs of the people, rather than for sale on a market or to make a profit. If we convince enough people of the basic case for a truly socialist - ie, communist society - the issues of transition will be addressed and resolved when that time comes.

Andrew Northall
Northamptonshire

Fuelling repression

The article by Poder Obrero (Weekly Worker January l6), while giving a useful analysis of the situation of revolutionaries in Peru, drew some debatable conclusions. My major concern would be the method of the author in blaming the action of Tupac Amaru for fuelling the “repressive forces” in Peru.

Whilst the hostage taking did seem more of a desperate act than any real mass programme for political organisation in Peru, surely the task of the working class is to defend those taking a stand against the regime and actually fuse their action with a political programme.

We would of course have to look closely at the activity and programme of Tupac Amaru, and I would agree we should be critical of both. But blaming them for repression reminds me of the attitude some ‘left’ groups take towards the IRA, blaming them for taking up arms against the British state. These groups brand both nationalists and unionists as sectarian and fail to distinguish between those fighting imperialism and those supporting it.

They also take a pacifist stand, wanting the IRA to end its war with British imperialism so we can get back to normal ‘bread and butter’ politics.

There was no small hint of this attitude in the same article by Poder Obrero. Against Tupac Aramru’s “putsch” all they can pose is “revitalising our unions and to mobilise mass resistance to these attacks”. Further we must “mobilise demands for the release of all political prisoners, employment stability, full employment and defence of the social demands of the workers”.

All of course very necessary. But as socialists and communists surely it is our task to raise the sights of the working class a little higher, to actually challenge the state and become the hegemonic class in all struggles for democracy. It sounds a little like Poder Obrero wants to leave the workers of Peru struggling for economic demands.

Nowhere in the article is posed the need for political organisation around a communist programme which includes all economic demands, as well as demands which liberate the whole of humanity.

Rather than simply handing over their guns to the workers’ surely the experience of the guerrilla movements should be fused with the workers’ economic struggle to forge organisation, in Peru and internationally which not only makes demands on the state but can actually through the struggle overthrow the state. No mean task I admit, but in articles such as this I think we must centrally raise the need for political organisation over and above economic struggle and blame the oppressors for repression, not those taking a stand, however desperate, against it.

Julie Hart
London

Stalin’s Realpolitik

After reading Martyn Giscombe-Smith’s letter of resignation (Weekly Worker January 9) from Camden SLP chair, I share his concern of the running of the SLP.

However, some of his analyses about the Soviet-Nazi pact which “doomed Poland to invasion and the world to the inevitability of World War II” in my view leave a lot to be desired to say the least.

Stalin chose to sign an agreement with Germany, not because of some woolly, half-baked theory of leftwing and rightwing dictatorships eventually becoming undistinguishable, but because of Realpolitik.

With the majority of the Red Army high command purged leaving the military in the hands of incompetents and the industrial and agricultural spheres of the economy in turmoil, Stalin viewed an alliance with Germany as more beneficial to the interests of the USSR and the already well established bureaucracy.

Germany, Britain and France were all potential aggressors, although a Soviet-Nazi alliance offered Moscow the opportunity of high tech German plant and machinery to aid Soviet industrialisation. Secondly, it created a buffer zone: eastern Poland, the Baltic states and eastern Romania, which gave Stalin some time to breathe, and to protect the USSR from what Stalin hoped would be an Anglo-Franco-German war.

The alliance was a defensive one, not one which inevitably led to war. Just because Britain and France were parliamentary bourgeois democracies did not make them any more palatable to Stalin. Britain declared war on Germany, Germany on the USSR. The last thing Stalin wanted was a war just at this moment in time. War was inevitable - but don’t blame Stalin.

Finally, apart from Stalin’s anti-Semitic ravings of the late 40s and 50s, it was Soviet and Czechoslovakian arms supplies to the Israeli’s which eventually led to the formation of the Jewish state, combined with Soviet diplomatic support for the partition of Palestine. This ran parallel to his anti-British policies.

Colin McGhie
Glasgow