Letters

Bureaucracy and corruption

No comrade talks as much about democracy as Steve Freeman (Letters, March 13). Yet like some other comrades on the left, when faced with an intensification of the witch hunt in the SLP, he equates the witch hunted with the witch hunters. In other words he seeks the middle ground. This is the diplomatic least line of resistance.

Those who are bold enough to call for the reinstatement of Barry Biddulph and John Pearson risk voiding. But cautious Steve hedges his bets. He defends Barry and John and ... Tony Goss! The comrade advises us to “make sure that we base ourselves on a sober estimate of known and provable facts”. But he then goes on to say that Goss was threatening outside Conway Hall. However, according to Steve there is a difference between threatening to do something and actually doing something. True. But since he goes on to say he was not a witness to the Conway Hall incident, which facts does he base his defence of Tony Goss on?

As a witness to the incident at Conway Hall there was no question that Goss simply threatened to assault a Weekly Worker seller. He launched himself into a physical attack. The only reason blows did not land and inflict bruising was the physical intervention of a number of comrades. For those who know the facts or witnessed the events there was no doubt that only the intervention of the comrades prevented a violent assault.

It is completely unprincipled for comrade Freeman to minimise the violent behaviour of Goss. The attack and the threats to other comrades was unprovoked. It is true that factually based reports have been published in the Weekly Worker and other publications about the behaviour of Tony Goss in and out of the Labour Party in Southwark in the 1980s. But Goss has never circulated publicity denying these reports. He does not need the Weekly Worker to do that.

Tony Goss is not a victim of a witch hunt like Barry Biddulph and John Pearson. He is a witch hunter. He does not need defending by comrade Freeman. As Steve admits, Tony has influential friends who started the witch hunt against comrade Biddulph in the South London Branch.

Goss refused to accept that he was a minority in the South London branch. He could not tolerate comrades talking back or democratic debate. Scargill had spoken and that was that. Anyone who got in the way could be threatened, bullied, shouted at or accused of membership of the CPGB.

And this is the problem with bureaucratic methods. They depend on blind loyalty or orders. If comrades do not accept the orders and are critical, then what’s left but intimidation, threats or actual assaults? Scargill is not saying to Tony Goss and others, ‘Go out and threaten and assault this or that comrade’. But in effect this is where his undemocratic methods lead.

To misquote the English king, the logic of the witch hunt begins with this question: who can rid me of these turbulent comrades?

The problem with Tony Goss is not one man behaving badly, but the destructiveness of bureaucracy in the workers’ movement. The only way to root out this cancer is to stand up for workers’ democracy and categorically and unequivocally give solidarity to the victims of bureaucratic methods. It is opportunism to attempt to reconcile the democratic with the bureaucratic or seek a compromise between the witch hunter and the witch hunted. The witch hunt and its perpetrators should be opposed outright rather than seeking a moderation of its worse aspects.

Dave Hume
London

Common mistake

James Hancock (Letters, March l3) makes a common mistake in posing “the unity of the working class” in opposition to the CPGB’s call for a federal republic. I know, because it is a mistake that I myself previously made. The whole point of the demand is to overcome national divisions and strengthen working class unity.

Although nationalism is negative in as much as it envelops the working class in its divisive, centrifugal force, it nevertheless can have a positive content. In Scotland that shows itself in a healthy rebellion against the state. And for good reason. The British ruling class is so concerned about maintaining its power that it cannot contemplate any notion of the mass of people exercising genuine democratic control over their own lives. Self-determination must be ruled out.

But we communists are the champions of self-determination and all democratic rights. We do not uphold them simply because they are desirable in themselves, but because we know that it is the way they are fought for which is decisive. Should the British state continue to deny the Scottish people their democratic aspirations - expressed in the call for a parliament with full powers - then the possibility arises of a full-scale revolt with revolutionary potential.

However, it is not enough to rebel. That movement must be given a positive, working class programme. It must not only be against the state, but for our class. If it became so strong that workers began to form their own democratic committees - councils of action - then their new found power would become an end in itself. The demand for a bourgeois parliament would be superseded.

In order to give the demand for a Scottish parliament a more explicitly all-Britain content, we combine it with the call for a voluntary, federal union of the Scottish, Welsh and English people. By demanding that the Scottish and Welsh people have the permanent right to complete separation - to be exercised through their own assemblies - we make it unlikely that that right will be exercised in practice.

In order to win English workers to fight for democratic change - for the whole class, not just the Scots and Welsh - we link the national question with a full frontal attack on the constitutional monarchy. Hence our call for a federal republic. If there are Scottish separatists who are also against the monarchy, we say, ‘good’. It is their nationalism we oppose, not their republicanism.

Peter Manson
Herts

Hot spot

Albania is becoming Europe’s hot spot. The state, the army and the police have collapsed. In the south every family has a gun. The insurrection is now spreading into the north and has arrived in Tirana.

The Albanian rebellion is marking a new step in the post-Cold War world. It is the first popular revolution against an open anti-communist capitalist regime in one of the post-Stalinist countries.

Since 1989 many upheavals have shaken China. All the collapsing degenerated workers’ states in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have been transformed into incipient capitalist states. A social counterrevolution has occurred under a democratic and neo-liberal cover and was supported by considerable layers of the population which wanted to achieve the living standards and bourgeois democratic rights of the western imperialist countries. Everywhere the bureaucracy decided to abandon their previous regimes and to dismantle the nationalised and planned economics and the state monopoly of foreign trade, finance and big industries. The state apparatus and ideology became servants of imperialism and the new emergent property class.

In every country the Stalinists supported that project. The former communist parties were re-created as social-democratised socialist parties, committed to a market economy. The working class, ideologically disarmed and very confused, was incapable of stopping the return of the capitalists to power.

Albania is something different. It is a spontaneous insurrection against a former popularly elected democratic president. Berisha was considered the Balkan Havel. He was presented as a cult leader who led a velvet revolution which overthrew Hoxha statues in Tirana in 1991-92. Like Yeltsin, he was also a former secretary of the Stalinist ruling party who became a born again, anti-communist neo-liberal.

These are not demonstrations led by the pro-imperialist opposition and the church against the socialists, like in Serbia. Rather, it is a war against one of the most western post-Stalinist regimes. It is a subversion against the anti-communists: a spontaneous anti-anti-communist revolution. It is the first European mass armed, general mobilisation which is officially being labelled as led by red terrorists, the far left and communists.

The Albanian revolt was not organised by any political force, and no one political party is leading it. It is a spontaneous explosion, similar to the revolutions of Russia in February 1917, Bolivia in 1952 or Rumania in 1989. The toilers are not mobilised around any socialist demands.

An article published in the New York Times (March 15) suggested that they are driven by an unlikely coalition of unreformed communists and the Albanian mafia that threatens to plunge the country into civil war. Berisha and many imperialist papers are accusing the revolution of being a mafia-Marxist plot. It was the Albanian regime and police which had several links with the mafia.

The areas under rebel control are not in a state of barbaric anarchy. Local councils are being formed and they are organising militias and the distribution of basic goods. The people there are more free and safe than those living in Tirana.

We need to examine the mass movement itself and in which direction it is going. The rebels are using red flags and are under attack for being far left.

The Albanians are using the classical proletarian insurrection methods: strikes, mass demonstrations, disarming the police and the army, assaulting barracks and creating local councils and militias. Marxists have to intervene in this process - try to prevent the new dual bodies from becoming bureaucratised, destroyed, dissolved or re-integrated into the system.

All the delegates should be elected and recallable in rank-and-file assemblies. The armed militias should only recognise their authority. The new bourgeoisie and former security agents should be expelled from them.

Albanian workers have a big problem. There is no revolutionary party. The few Albanian Trotskyists were heavily persecuted by the fascist occupation forces and by Hoxha’s Stalinists. The only Marxist tradition is the one created by Hoxha, who imposed a model of complete autarky and isolation even against the rest of the so-called socialist states.

In August last year the former Hoxha party, the Socialist Party, dropped the term ‘Marxism’ from its programme. It is indispensable to create the first nucleus of genuine Marxists who should advocate the strategy of an internationalist revolution of workers’ councils and militias.

Two important questions are being raised with the Albanian uprising. First, it is the first signal that spontaneous insurrections could be the answer to many years of market experiments. Secondly, it shows the workers of France, Britain and Germany and other European countries, which are ruled by rightwing governments which were part of the same international as the Albanian Democratic Party, that there is a revolutionary way to react against so many attacks.

John Stone
Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International

Dual power

Eddie Ford’s article in the Weekly Worker (March l3) characterises the Albanian uprising as regionalist and liable to succumb to backwardness, banditry, etc. This view seems to be over-influenced by the Western media, who have described people who have taken arms from army and police barracks as looters.

This distrust of an armed people is because such a situation shows the objective basis for the formation of a disciplined workers’ and peasants’ militia. The revolt has spread to all areas of Albania and represents a real basis to oppose capitalist restoration, which is what the western media are actually concerned about. Only the secret police can patrol Tirana because the army and police are now unreliable components of the state apparatus.

The situation is reminiscent of Romania a few years ago where the miners’ protests against attacks on their living conditions led to a dual power situation, in which only the limits of spontaneity stopped the possibility of developing proletarian revolution.

Phil Sharpe
Trotskyist Unity Group