Letters

Disingenuous

Although I must agree with Barry Biddulph’s call for democracy and openness in the SLP in his letter to Arthur Scargill (Weekly Worker March 20), comrades in the CPGB must take issue with his claim that: “My politics are incompatible with membership of the CPGB.”

This is not just a matter for CPGB members, but strikes at the heart of how to build a revolutionary Party and is therefore central, not only in the struggle for democracy within the SLP, but the struggle for Party amongst the left as a whole.

Barry goes on to say: “Indeed, I am well known for my polemics against the CPGB.” This is indeed true and therefore, given Barry’s engagement with our organisation, he is being not a little disingenuous to suggest that his politics are incompatible with the CPGB.

In our polemic with left organisations and with Barry himself our central point, as Barry will know, has precisely been that a truly mass, working class revolutionary party must be able to unite comrades with all sorts of differing views. In our struggle to reforge the CPGB we have always maintained that this question must be grasped, not just in the heat of a mass working class movement, but now, if the revolutionary left is to overcome its sectarianism and begin to plant the seeds of democratic, revolutionary, working class organisation.

It is not for nothing that the CPGB agitates vigorously for openness and democracy in the SLP. It is because the working class can only forge itself into a weapon for revolution by debating openly the path of revolution, socialism and communism whilst acting as a fist and thus generalise the lessons of victory and defeat amongst the whole class.

As Jack Conrad said in ‘Party, non-ideology and faction’ (Weekly Worker supplement, December 15 1994) - a supplement I am sure Barry has read - the development of the Communist Party is a process: “It would be wrong to imagine that such a vanguard springs forth ready-made. No class spontaneously produces the party that corresponds to its interests. Social life is complex and full of contradictions.” Therefore: “The Communist Party, in the span of its existence, can contain a whole gamut of opinions and shades of opinion, the extremes of which may be sharply contradictory. After all it is itself part of the working class.”

Membership must be judged, not as in the SLP on what people think, but what they do. Are they prepared to carry out the democratic decisions of the Party as a whole? The Party programme should unite comrades around action, and theoretical debates should be an ongoing and natural part of Party life.

The struggle for democracy in the SLP is nothing if it is not a struggle for Party - where all views can openly contend against the sectarianism and bureaucratism which has permeated the left in Britain for so long and are now taking shape again in the SLP. Why on earth then would Barry think that his “politics” are incompatible with membership of the CPGB? We welcome all SLP members who carry out the agreed actions of the whole - while having full rights and duties to argue against decisions they oppose - into membership of the CPGB.

Lee-Anne Bates
Editor

Stageist?

In the recent article on Scottish Militant Labour (see Weekly Worker March 13) it was argued that SML had views opposed to those of Rosa Luxemburg concerning the necessity for a centralised political party which transcended limited national boundaries. This view, whilst accurate about Luxemburg’s organisational approach, still glosses over Luxemburg’s perspective about national self-determination. She held that it was essentially a bourgeois demand, and the aspiration for national independence could not overcome the domination of capital and imperialism. The only way to challenge and overcome national and cultural oppression was through proletarian revolution.

This standpoint is absent from the CPGB’s thesis on Scotland. The call for a federal republic is considered to be the realisation of a bourgeois democratic stage towards socialism. Furthermore, the centralised British state still remains in place, but in a modified republican form. In historical terms, this stageist approach suggests that the CPGB would consider Bukharin’s call - for independent soviet republics in opposition to counterrevolution in 1918 - as an example of economism, and the denial of a necessary stage of political democracy prior to proletarian revolution. Lenin, in his polemics with Kautsky, argued that both a republic and monarchy were forms of bourgeois state repression directed against the proletariat - and so the struggle for a republic which could begin the withering away of a coercive state is the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The tragic experience of Finland in 1918, when the unconditional granting of national independence facilitated the bourgeois suppression of the proletariat through fierce civil war, led to the Bolsheviks recognising their political mistakes on the national question. They essentially adopted an unacknowledged ‘Luxemburgist’ stance, and it was now admitted that local national bourgeois forces were essentially pro-imperialist, as in the Ukraine. The only way to challenge national oppression was through developing the international dictatorship of the proletariat against the local comprador bourgeoisie and their imperialist allies. This did not mean that the Bolsheviks wanted a state structure in which centralisation was preferred to federalism. Lenin’s dispute with Stalin concerned the attempt to impose Great Russian chauvinist domination over Georgia, and Lenin’s concern was part of a wider recognition of the need for national autonomy within the international dictatorship of the proletariat of the USSR.

Lenin outlined the perspective in his last political statement, ‘Our revolution’, in which the struggle for national self-determination expressed an anti-imperialist content, and was an essential part of the world socialist revolution. This approach was problematic insofar as the class content of Lenin’s perspective remained ambiguous, and instead Lenin relied on the conception of the centre of world revolution shifting to the East - in particular India and China - to provide a gloss over this ambiguity. The long historical balance sheet of bourgeois-led anti-imperialist struggles has not ended national oppression and neither do they pose a lasting threat to imperialism. The domination of capital over labour remains in new forms. The most intransigent national bourgeois revolutions - such as in Ireland, China, Vietnam, Algeria, Cuba, Angola, Mozambique and Nicaragua - have not been able to overcome the problems of economic and political isolation, imperialist pressure and the continued hegemony of capital over labour on a world scale. Hence these partial exceptions to the rule, in terms of being anti-imperialist bourgeois forces, still show the validity of Luxemburg’s view that national oppression can only be overcome through proletarian revolution.

How do these historical lessons apply to Scotland? The struggle to develop political democracy in Scotland - as represented by the call for an accountable constituent assembly, in contrast to Blair’s bogus parliament - cannot be advanced by the strengthening of the bourgeois state through the establishment of a federal republic as part of a UK bourgeois state. This will only enhance the forces of bourgeois democratic counterrevolution against the proletariat, because the existing state apparatus remains intact. Rather the struggle for proletarian revolution in order to establish a Scottish Workers Republic, as part of an international dictatorship of the proletariat, is the basis to achieve political democracy and realise national and cultural aspirations.

This approach does not mean that political unrest in Scotland should be dismissed as a petty bourgeois diversion. In his election address (International Worker March 8) Steve Johnstone of the Socialist Equality Party upholds the continued centralised integrity of the British state on the grounds that Scottish nationalism is essentially a petty bourgeois aspiration to be a minor partner in the transnational exploitation of an independent Scotland. In a demagogic manner he dismisses the call for devolution as a reactionary separatist tendency. In these economistic terms, which are dismissive of the aspiration for wider political democracy, Johnstone and the SEP have decided in advance of proletarian revolution what should be the required forms of a workers’ state. In other words, a state based upon a centralised British entity, in which the possibility of federalism is denied.

In contrast to this Brit-centred dogmatism, the international struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat can take many political forms, including that of federalism. Consequently, at the time of the Paris Commune, in order to address regional distrust of centralised government from Paris, a federal political structure was advocated. Only the actual and unforeseen outcome of proletarian revolution and the smashing of the bourgeois state can be the basis of new political structures. The undecided outcome of class struggle can be the only objective criteria to decide the actual balance between centralisation and federalism. The reactionary class content of the SNP can be challenged not in demagogic, Brit-centred terms, but by showing that their pro-imperialist character is a denial of political democracy and its essential link to the struggle for proletarian revolution.

On the other hand, it is still vitally necessary to oppose the tail-ending of existing consciousness on the Scottish national question. Such opportunism is evident in the recently modified position of Workers Power (editorial, March). In this editorial the “democratic rights” and “will” of the Scottish people for an assembly are linked to the right of self-determination, including separation. Although in eclectic terms, they are not for the independence of small capitalist states, but are also for Scotland not staying in the British state against the “will” of its people. This eclecticism is probably an expression of Workers Power’s fervent economistic desire for the rejuvenation of traditional mass struggle on a British basis, which they hope will dampen the aspirations for independence of Scotland.

In the meantime they adapt to existing consciousness by putting forward a perspective which amounts to putting pressure on the Labour Party. Thus they call for a better assembly than that proposed by Blair, with the capacity to tax the rich, nationalise industries under workers’ control, and with the ability to block anti-working class measures from Westminster. This approach is still parliamentary and constitutional, and with the stageist illusion that a Scottish parliament is the road to socialism. There is no mention of the need for revolutionary struggle as the means to smash the bourgeois state and bring about a democratic constituent assembly. So, in changing from their previous Brit-centred stance and the fetishising of the British state, Workers Power now adapt to existing illusions in an assembly in a ‘left form’. They hope that by putting Labour and the SNP to the test in Scotland ‘revolutionary consciousness’ can be developed. In effect, Workers Power’s opportunist stance towards the Labour Party is now transferred to Scottish nationalism in its Labourist form.

In summation, it is almost surprising, if it were not sadly predictable, that the errors of opportunism and economism are repeated on the Scottish national question. This can be linked to the rejection of the call for a Scottish Workers Republic, which contains the relationship between the specific and the general, and shows the utmost necessity for a protracted period of the development of revolutionary class consciousness.

Phil Sharpe
Trotskyist Unity Group