Letters
Left reformist programme?
Most of the demands in the CPGB Communist Manifesto are supportable. However, the big problem is the demands absent from the statement. The CPGB comrades are not raising any anti-capitalist measures.
In the introduction to the Manifesto, the CPGB talks about what socialism should be. However, in all of its platform demands, which is the main part of the document, there is no mention at all of smashing the bourgeois state, socialism or revolution.
Their programme doesn’t want to bypass bourgeois tasks and their main strategic aim is to replace the English monarchy with a British federal republic.
Britain was the first fully industrialised nation and is one of the biggest imperialist powers. This country is completely mature for socialism and only a socialist revolution could overcome the problems that are facing the working class.
One of the main targets of any proletarian revolution, especially in the imperialist countries, is to expropriate the ruling class and its multinationals, monopolies and banks. We need to eliminate the main sources of class privilege and polarisation, and to put the finances and the means of production in the hands of the workers.
Only a nationalised and planned economy, administrated by workers’ councils could increase the living conditions of the toilers. A regime that doesn’t touch the property of the ruling class is condemned to maintain the capitalist state and society.
A left administration that preserves the big bourgeois companies is condemned to serve their interests or be replaced through electoral or military means (like Chile or Indonesia). Nevertheless, the CPGB manifesto doesn’t stand for these fundamental anti-capitalist aims. Their programme doesn’t want to touch the private banks and the big monopolies. They only want to “nationalise unprofitable industries faced with closure”
Many capitalists would be in favour of receiving some payment for their bankrupt companies and many governments nationalise unprofitable enterprises. The point is to nationalise the most profitable companies which exploit the workers and the majority of the population. We want to get rid of the system based on profit and not simply the non-profitable enterprises.
A government which has to fulfil the CPGB programme is not committed to any serious measures against the big bourgeoisie. The City, the stock exchange, the billionaire multinationals and the capitalist market and system will survive.
They will not have to face even the threat of workers’ control. The CPGB Manifesto is not even asking for the re-nationalisation of the companies privatised by the Tories (like gas, phone, public transport, etc).
The most elementary proletarian demands are for workers’ councils, factory committees or workers’ supervision of production. None of them are in the CPGB Manifesto.
Most of the profits made by the City and Wall Street are from the foreign debt of the semi-colonies and the former degenerated workers’ states. They prey on them with the aim of achieving more concessions for their bandit investments.
An elementary task for any revolutionary government has to be the cancellation of the debt of all the countries oppressed by imperialism. Not even that demand is raised in the CPGB Manifesto. In that sense Scargill’s SLP programme has more leftwing demands than the CPGB, because it is demanding the renationalisation of all the privatised companies without compensation and the cancellation of the third world debt.
It should be no surprise that the words ‘revolution’ or ‘socialism’ are completely absent from the Manifesto. This is a programme designed to be applied by a British (bourgeois) federal republic. We don’t want to change the political system of the capitalist system from a parliamentary monarchy into a federal republic like Germany, the USA, Brazil, Argentina and other bourgeois states. We want to replace the capitalist social order with a new society in which the workers should be the owners of the means of production.
The CPGB is standing on a left Labourite platform. It is a programme for reforming and not for overthrowing capitalism. The CPGB comrades, who in many respects have broken with Stalinism in a progressive way, need to make a rupture with the conception of a minimum programme based on demands that could be achieved during capitalism.
We are for a transitional programme which connects the present needs and struggles of the workers to the necessity of overthrowing the system and building workers’ councils to take power.
The CPGB is calling for a vote for the candidates of the Socialist Party, the Socialist Labour Party and the Scottish Socialist Alliance. In the areas where they don’t stand (which are around five sixths of all the constituencies) the CPGB say: “Voters should only give their support on the basis of the following demands” - all of which are, as they recognise, pure bourgeois democratic and republican tasks, which are only trying to reform, not destroy, capitalism.
Most of these republican demands were imposed by bourgeois parties in western Europe and could be endorsed by some leftwing candidates of bourgeois parties like the Greens, Liberals, or the Scottish and Welsh nationalists. Instead of trying to move the workers to a class-against-class vote and a break with the capitalist parties, the CPGB does not close the door to the possibility of voting for bourgeois politicians and making popular fronts with them.
The CPGB doesn’t understand the Leninist method of critical support. We raise a revolutionary programme and work alongside the workers and most of their vanguard that are voting for what they regard as their historical party, without giving it any political programmatic support, and with the aim to assist them to bypass their leaders.
The CPGB replaces a revolutionary anti-capitalist programme with a left Labourite and reformist one, while at the same time proposing to give a kind of political programmatic support vote to any bourgeois-republican candidate who could be in favour of some minor social reforms.
We hope that the CPGB comrades break with stageist conceptions and fully endorse the Leninist-Trotskyist strategy for socialist revolution and an anti-capitalist programme for Britain.
John Stone
Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International
Male ammunition
The Weekly Worker (April l7) had a report of the last conference for democracy inside the Socialist Labour Party. The article made some interesting and good points. However, there is one point which needs to be criticised.
The last aggregate of the SLP’s Left Network adopted, nearly unanimously, a resolution demanding that all members refrain from publicising those present at the meetings or naming members. The aim was to protect the participants of those meetings against the witch hunters.
The only comrades who voted against where a couple of Socialist Labour Action supporters, because it was this current that was being censored for already naming people in their publication.
However, the report of the conference mentioned some names and implied that one comrade was associated with the Workers Power group.
Comrades must attack the political positions and methods of groups such as the SLA in the SLP, but must not give the bureaucracy more ammunition for its witch hunt.
In this way we can win over all comrades, from whatever organisation they have been in in the past to the campaign for democracy in the SLP. Ex-members of Workers Power are good allies in this campaign, as they clearly do not want to go back to Workers Power, which now calls for a vote for New Labour’s Tory Howarth in Newport East against Scargill.
Martin Thomas
South London
Disgusting event
I am writing to both yourselves and other leftwing groups to petition members to complain against the BNP broadcast on the BBC. This insult on decent people should not go unforgiven. I hope the Weekly Worker will speak out against such a disgusting event from television propaganda of capitalist and now fascist rightwing rubbish. I hope communists can work together against the common enemy.
Ray Hancock
Berkshire