Letters

Produce evidence

If innocent people are tortured in prison, does it follow that their judgement on release can no longer be trusted?

Peter Manson (‘Shades of John Maclean” Weekly Worker June 19) answers this question positively. He suggests that the suffering of victims of torture is so dehumanising that their subsequent thinking and behaviour can be dismissed as irrational.

This seems to be the point of Manson’s comparison of the recent court appearance on a charge of theft and carrying an offensive weapon of Michael Hickey (one of the Bridgwater Four falsely accused of murder) with John Maclean’s criticisms of the newly formed CPGB in the early 1920s.

Manson states that “all the evidence” demonstrates that paranoid delusions caused Maclean’s political differences with the leadership of the CPGB. This entails that it is not possible for a victim of torture, such as Maclean, to have retained his sanity. His criticisms of the formation of the CPGB can therefore be dismissed as unreasonable.

Manson’s case would be more convincing if he could produce evidence from Maclean’s writings that, for example, he had accused a founding member of the CPGB of being a police spy or informer.

The person who makes this kind of life-threatening allegation against a member of a socialist organisation is usually intent on demoralising or destroying the whole group. It is one of the methods Stalinists used to isolate opposition and crush dissent. I continue to wait for scholars to discover evidence (perhaps in an unpublished letter or diary?) that proves Maclean made allegations of this nature.

You do not have to be a Scottish nationalist (nor deny that Maclean suffered a nervous breakdown in prison) to judge whether or not Maclean’s criticisms of the CPGB were reasonable. It helps however if, like Maclean’s, your dedication to communism includes a commitment to Marxist education and proletarian democracy.

Manson quotes from Maclean’s ‘Open letter to Lenin’ of 1921 as evidence of his irrationality. I would urge every reader of the Weekly Worker to get a copy of this document. Robert Pitt reprints it in his pamphlet John Maclean and the CPGB. Readers can then judge for themselves whether or not it proves that Maclean was suffering from paranoid delusions.

Maclean wrote the letter at a time when many leading Marxists, including Trotsky, Preobrazhensky and Maclean, were convinced that inter-imperialist rivalry would spark off a second world war between the UK and the USA. Maclean thought that the British government would need a direct or indirect influence over the movement for socialism in Britain. This was necessary to crush any revolutionary tendencies within it and gain working class support for a renewed war effort. Maclean also thought that this influence could only be effectively outwitted by a leadership that was completely Marxist and democratic.

In 1920, the leadership of the British Socialist Party expelled Maclean for refusing to share platforms with the anti-socialist Liberal MP Lieutenant-Colonel Malone. The BSP leadership, including Malone and other establishment figures such as Meynell (a former director of the bourgeois newspaper The Daily Herald), went on to form the core of the new CPGB.

In a struggle against the secrecy surrounding the funding of the BSP, Maclean had exposed the potentially undemocratic nature of the new political formation. Moreover his knowledge of Marxist political economy and of students he had taught, such as William Gallagher, led him to characterise the political orientation of the leadership of the new party as being more inclined to anarchism than Marxism.

His most telling criticism of the leadership of the CPGB was that they had an insufficient understanding of the hold that social democratic ideas had on the consciousness of the British proletariat. They were therefore likely to underestimate the strength of the left of the Labour Party in suppressing the revolutionary potential of the movement for socialism.

In the letter, Maclean also complained that malicious rumours were being spread about the state of his mental health. As Pitt has demonstrated, there was at least one police informer on the central committee of the BSP. It is likely this person was also on the central committee of the new CPGB. Future revolutionary scholars will no doubt discover the identity of this person.

Manson’s position is that Maclean’s criticisms of the leadership of the CPGB were irrational. This assumes that the CPGB was successful in helping the British proletariat to move closer to realising the possibility of socialist revolution.

The problem with Manson’s position is that the party was formed (as was Maclean’s own Scottish Workers’ Republican Party) in a period of defeat for the working class worldwide.

James Hinton and Richard Hyman have argued that by 1926 the CPGB stood to the right of the Third International. In its pursuit of a mass membership, the CPGB’s leaders had sacrificed quality for quantity of cadre. They had been incapable of recognising the power of the reformist institutions of Labourism. Hinton and Hyman could also have added that the CPGB had turned a blind eye to the Independent Labour Party’s destruction of Maclean’s efforts to establish Marxist Labour Colleges. By 1930, the CPGB had become an isolated sect (see J Hinton, R Hyman Trade unions and revolution: the industrial politics of the early British Communist Party London 1975, pp72-74). The Party’s deplorable accommodation to Stalinism in subsequent decades is, of course, well documented.

Moreover, Manson’s position has implications for the emergence of a revolutionary left today. If it was irrational for Maclean to criticise the ideas of the leadership of the CPGB in 1921, what of those communists and Marxists who criticise the ideas of groups such as the Socialist Labour Party and the Scottish Socialist Alliance today?

Is it irrational to organise legally, semi-legally and illegally separately from and in opposition to the SLP and SSA? Given that a few of these critical communists and Marxists have been imprisoned and suffered torture, perhaps their writings should also be dismissed as the sad products of paranoid minds? Moreover, even if there are mentally unstable individuals on the left receiving psychiatric treatment, does it follow that all their criticisms are invalid? Are they necessarily incapable of constructing a coherent argument?

Paul Smith
Glasgow

Crude attempt

Peter Manson’s comments on John Maclean can be criticised in the following terms.

Firstly, Maclean’s perspective of the Scottish workers’ republic was not related to a nationalist political trajectory. Rather it was connected to his world revolutionary perspective through the break-up of the British empire. The latest Trotskyist Unity Group pamphlet, John Maclean’s principled perspective of world revolution, goes into this point in detail.

Secondly, the formation of the CPGB was upon the opportunist premises of a tame pro-Moscow stance. Maclean shared Rosa Luxemburg’s concern, which she had articulated about the role of German social democracy within the Second International, that domination by a particular national organisation can facilitate opportunism and the undermining of the international struggle for communism. Maclean’s ‘Open letter’ to Lenin makes the case for an open democratic centralist communist international upon an equal political basis. The alternative would be to promote a nationalist ideology based upon the prestige of the October Revolution and the struggle for world revolution.

Thirdly, Maclean’s various statements about the CPGB make no reference to Rothstein and Gallacher being state agents, although he certainly castigates them as opportunists. Maclean’s specific suspicions of state infiltration relate to Lieutenant-Colonel (sic) Malone, who underwent a miraculous conversion to the cause of the October Revolution despite his vicious support for British imperialism during World War I. Maclean was certainly not exaggerated in his remarks about the CPGB acting as tools of the Lloyd George government, given their softness towards the Labour Party, which was an accomplice of the main bourgeois parties in their attempts to undermine the class struggles occurring in the 1918-21 period. Maclean, acting with great political integrity, turned down the lucrative offer from the CPGB to become a full-time worker for the Hands Off Russia campaign, on the condition that he ‘toned down’ his political criticisms of the CPGB.

Fourthly, on the question of the relationship between mental health and politics, Peter implies that mental health problems are identical to political degeneration. This seems to reproduce the dominant bourgeois outlook concerning the ‘abnormality’ and ‘danger’ posed by mental illness. Personally, I do not want to speculate about Maclean’s mental health. In any event, it is completely irrelevant with regards to the thoughtful process required when studying Maclean’s politics between 1918-23. The real subjectivism is displayed by those who object to Maclean’s challenge to the ideologically conformist view that the CPGB represented a golden age of Marxism between 1920-24/29/35. This is why the crude attempt to discredit Maclean takes the place of a serious engagement with his ideas.

Phil Sharpe
Trotskyist Unity Group

Fantasy world

The ‘Road to nowhere’ article (Weekly Worker June 19) raises many issues of great significance to the working class. Eddie Ford has highlighted the pathetic post-general election fantasy world of the majority of the left.

The ‘crisis of expectations’ concocted by the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Party and others who gravitate towards New Labour show they do not know the essence of Blairism and his blinkered party - which is nothing but a rightwing organisation only interested in promoting the interests of the capitalist class.

When Blair changed clause four of the Labour constitution he stated quite clearly: “The way forward for New Labour is not the socialism of Marx or the trade unions but a partnership with the British market economy.”

Prior to May 1, Blair has also stated that there would be a two-year freeze on public sending and for the workforce not to expect wage rises or the restitution of trade union rights.

The Blair government is nothing more than an extension of class collaboration with finance capitalism, which means further assaults on the working class, the unemployed and those on state benefits.

Karl Marx (see The civil war in France) explained quite clearly the nature of bourgeois politics and politicians. What he had to say in 1871 is as relevant to 1997.

Geoff Mansfield
North London

Editorial questions

I am writing to correct my report on the SSA conference (Weekly Worker June 19). In my original report I did not say that Ritchie Venton is “perhaps the most sectarian of the SML leaders”. This was added by the editorial team.

I have no problem with making sharp criticisms of leading SML members. However, I do object to being ascribed views which I have not put forward. If the editorial team wants to argue its ideas and beliefs let it do so itself, not through the article of a particular individual without their knowledge.

Anne Murphy
Glasgow