Letters
Sweeping statements
Jack Conrad’s ‘Genesis of bureaucratic socialism part II’ (Weekly Worker January 9) has some interesting analysis of the dynamics at work in early Soviet society, but I cannot agree with all the conclusions that seem to be implied.
For example; “By the late 1920s the bureaucracy had no material or moral loyalty to working class interests”. Or even worse: “...Bureaucratic accumulation produced and reproduced the oppression of the workers”. It is these kinds of sweeping statements that characterise much of the theoretical claptrap and misconceptions about Soviet history on the revolutionary left today.
It cannot be denied that by the late 1920s the bureaucracy was in no way accountable to the Soviet working class. But democratic accountability to the class is not the same thing as ‘material or moral loyalty’, which cannot vanish overnight like some lost baggage at Heathrow airport.
The interests of the ruling bureaucracy were still, at this stage, intrinsically tied up with those of the whole working class of which they were a part - the most privileged and powerful part. In fact I would suggest that it took most of the ensuing 60 years for the bureaucracy to divorce itself totally, and more consciously, from the workers as a class - as represented by the array of gangsters, conmen and ex-apparatchik political bandits who wield even more power and privileges in the former Soviet Republics today. More importantly, now they have capital, in big wads, too. Now they can speculate in property, not wait for that promotion with the dacha on the Crimea.
Now many of the same people have capital and property in their own right, not just a few perks and privileges that came with the jobs of officials working in the administration of an enormous state machine. But the process that led to this separation of interests certainly began long before the events of 1989-91.
So in a strange way, Tony Cliff’s theory of state capitalism could almost have been correct – if it were about Russia today, not 40 or 50 years ago. There is really not the space here for me to list all the gains for the working class that were won in 1917 and which developed further for many decades after. Many achievements of the Soviet Union survived throughout most of its history, more despite the bureaucratic deformations than because of them.
Conrad correctly points out that in 1929, far from re-establishing capitalism, “the market was eliminated ...” Although the forced collectivisation of the land and the ending of NEP did not in any way further the actual power of the working class to control its own state, bureaucracy, etc, clearly if “1928-29 was the birth pangs of a new exploitative social formation”, then the birth was too premature to give rise to exploitation based on class-relations.
For a new exploitative class you need both political administrative power (the state) and economic power (capital) in its own right. Perhaps the only ‘exploitative’ relationship introduced circa 1929 would appear to be one of the urban industrial working class over the rural agricultural workers of the land, the peasants. The Bolsheviks were for the voluntary collectivisation of agriculture and wanted the workers and peasants interests to become closely merged together, not separated.
It seems to me, despite all the talk about accumulation, that control of the means of production cannot be divorced from ownership.
Mark Cole
Kent
Correct strategy
It’s good that comrades in Europe are reproducing and discussing our document on the hostage crisis in Peru. We thank Weekly Worker for that. In the letters column last week Julie Hart made some observations about our positions. She suggested that we probably adopted an economicistic view and could accuse the Peruvian guerrillas of being responsible for the repression.
Poder Obrero Peru is a revolutionary communist group. Our strategy is for a socialist revolution of workers and peasants councils and militias. We fight for workers and peasant government and for a socialist federation of Latin American republics. Our strategy is completely opposite to those formulated by both militaristic and parliamentarianist Stalinists which are in favour of a new democratic state and a joint government with the ‘national’ bourgeoisie. The Latin American capitalist class is incapable of breaking with imperialism and overcoming the backward and semi-colonial status of our countries. That is why we think that anti-imperialist revolution must also attack and expropriate the national bourgeoisie and must be led by rank and file councils and militias of the workers and the poor from the countryside and the cities. The militaristic and electoralist Stalinists, despite their huge differences, agree that in Peru they should oppose the creation of workers soviets and militias and create a popular front with and behind some sections of the ruling class.
We are not economistic because we are for a workers state and for transitional demands. We are for the cancellation of the foreign debt and for the renationalisation without payment and under workers control of all privatised companies. We raise democratic demands like the unconditional right of the native population (Quechuas, Aymaras and Amazonian) for national self-determination and we are for the abolition of the presidency and for a sovereign national assembly.
However, the political period in Peru is very much different than Europe. In our country we have the most terrible anti-union laws and lack basic human rights. Most of the population believe that there is no other way than neo-liberal solutions to attract foreign capital and to reactivate the economy. That is why for us there are now very important demands such as job security, an eight-hour day, freedom for all anti-imperialist prisoners, etc.
We don’t blame the guerrillas for being the main factor of the repression. We unconditionally defend them against imperialism and the capitalist regime. However, we need to denounce their counterrevolutionary and anti-working class methods. We will give some examples. The PCP-SL murdered several trade union leaders (including a militant and Trotskyist shoe factory leader, Roberto Chiara), they impose terror in the mass assemblies and physically threaten or exterminate leftwing political opponents. They have destroyed factories, denying workers the possibility to work and organise themselves, they put bombs in workers’ demonstrations and attack left forces, they call for the physical destruction of the main trade union confederation (the CGTP) and the Popular Assembly (a proto-soviet body created in November 1987), etc.
During the miners’ strikes they killed opponents in the middle of rank and file assemblies and destroyed factories against the wishes of the workers and gave the army the pretext to intervene. The PCP-SL caused the death of poor peasants and civilians and these action alienated the population. Their violence didn’t express the working class and it created demoralisation. Some of their actions were explicitly targeted at the proletariat. One of the reasons why Fujimori and the army have some popularity is because the most poor sections of the population (like the shanty towns) think they could stop ‘terrorism’.
The MRTA attempted a less sectarian policy. However, they killed the leaders of four factions and they organised individual terror action which gave pretexts to the repression to attack the workers. Today ‘Chairman Gonzalo’s’ PCP-SL and the MRTA are trying to offer their services for a “national agreement” with and behind the capitalist repressive state. The fire makers are becoming firemen for the system.
This is the same path of the FSLN, FMLN, M-19, MIR and other petty bourgeois guerrilla movements which became supporters of imperialist and militarised ‘democracies’. This is the tragedy of petty bourgeois anti-imperialism. In their incapacity to break with private property they end up defending it against the working class and in alliance with the ruling class.
We are not pacifist. We are for revolutionary proletarian violence. We, for example, supported the Bolivian miners when they captured the army’s weapon and defended themselves against the repression. Nevertheless, we don’t advocate individual terrorism and elite guerrillaism. We defend them against the state but we think that they disorganise the workers’ movement. We are calling on the MRTA and PCP-SL not to give up their arms to the state but at the same time to abandon their sterile ‘guerrillaist’ strategy and to subordinate their weapons and fighters to the self-defence tasks which the workers and peasant rank and file assemblies decide upon. We call on them to join an anti-imperialist united front.
F Parra
Poder Obrero (Peru)
Wrong conclusions
Robin Blick (Letters January9) and his co-thinkers drew the wrong political conclusions from the experiences of the Workers Socialist League, and the Committee for Revolutionary Regroupment has no hesitation declaring its bitter hostility to what they now represent. A ‘turn to the mass’ is always necessary for revolutionary communists, but to its head and not to its rear end. Not to the backward, anti-communist prejudices which The Sun likes to portray as the essence of the working class, but to its proud tradition of struggle and sacrifice against the capitalist system.
Below is a short extract from What happened to the WSL, which is the assessment written by Tony Gard of the Revolutionary Internationalist League and published (in a revised and amended form) internally in the United Secretariat of the Fourth International by former CRR members when we were in Tendency B. Though we had big political differences with Alan Thornett when in Socialist Outlook neither he, nor other former WSL members still active in revolutionary politics, became the anti-Leninist, anti-working class reactionaries that Robin Blick and the late Adam Westoby became, despite their still historically valuable contributions to Marxism in books on the history of communism in Britain and Westoby’s Communists against revolution when they were revolutionaries.
“From its emergence as an opposition in the Workers Revolutionary Party in 1974 through to 1980, the Thornettite tendency remained overall a dynamic, consistent Trotskyist organisation, in fact the most significant tendency to reassert the Trotskyist programme in practice in Europe. The WSL had taken the most positive steps to break out of the national isolation which had undermined other battles for Trotskyism - the formation of Trotskyite International Liaison Committee (only the GBL in Italy had developed a similar perspective).
“Nevertheless, it had failed to resolve a series of related political weaknesses arising from its origins within the International Committee tradition. However, it would be idealist to view the WSL’s subsequent political degeneration as the inevitable working out of its bad ideas over time. The WSL did not simply have some good and some bad features, the former predominant in its earlier period, the latter in its later period. These contradictory features of the WSL’s political development were intimately related. Crucially, for instance, its positive commitment to a fight for leadership based on transitional demands in mass struggles had as its other side, its opposite, the failure to recognise the educative (propaganda rather than agitational) role of the Transitional programme in winning and consolidating the political vanguard”.
Gerry Downing
CRR
National question ignored
An important criticism was missing from my report on the Socialist Alliances meeting in Manchester on January 11. While quite rightly I berated Kent Socialist alliance for their localist dismissal of the national question I did not take up Militant Labour’s response on the day.
ML has a formal (internal) position for a socialist federal republic, but no importance has been placed on fighting for self-determination for Scotland - or Wales - in England. In fact, one of their comrades on the day informed us that although self-determination for Scotland and Wales was an important question it would not be something they would be raising on the doorsteps in England. Instead ‘bread and butter’ issues would be discussed with ‘ordinary workers’.
I made the point that workers were and would be discussing such questions, and in fact the bourgeois parties are already making such questions a central part of their election campaigns. Do we leave it to the likes of Labour and the Tories to take up the national question in England or do we fight for working class politics on such important issues? The answer is obvious.
ML in England appears to have a mixture of economism and passivism on self-determination for Scotland and Wales. Indeed, as is made dear by the complete silence on the Scotland movement in Peter Taaffe’s ‘Perspectives 1997 (Militant January 10) it is leaving it to Scotland to do the fighting (see Weekly Worker January 23).
Such opportunism plays into the hands of nationalism - both Scottish, Welsh and English. ML has warned about the dangers of a rightwing nationalist force to fill the vacuum in working class politics, but do nothing to combat it.
In order for the Scottish and Welsh people to achieve real self-determination the English have to take up the fight. This is a fight for all revolutionaries and partisans of our class. To be silent is to unconsciously collude in the creation of separatist and right wing forces.
Anne Murphy
London