09.10.1997

1930s revisited?

Around the left

We have always stressed that we regard those left groups whom we regularly polemic-ise against as opponents, not enemies. However sharp or astringent our criticisms may be of left publications - The Socialist, Socialist Worker, Workers Power, etc - we regard them as comrades, sincere partisans of the workers’ movement.

Whatever our differences, the same even applies to Lalkar, organ of the Indian Workers Association (Great Britain). Although his name does not appear in the latest issue (September/October), Lalkar is edited by prominent Ealing Southall SLP member Harpal Brar. Indeed his publication is apparently blessed, or at least tolerated, by Arthur Scargill himself - and at last year’s ‘Uphold the banner of communism’ rally in Woolwich, Scargill shared a platform with Brar, and other assorted Stalinites.   

Lalkar is usually mind-numbingly dull and lifeless, full of uncritical, if not downright unthinking, worship of ‘actually existing socialism’ and JV Stalin (which seems to present no conundrum for the ‘editorial board’ - ie, comrade Brar), along with a cult of North Korea.

However, even though that is still its general tenor, Lalkar has been prodded into life by events in the SLP. Thus, we find an interesting article on Hong Kong/China in the latest issue - and not purely because it reads like a period piece from the Stalinite Soviet Union of the 1930s.

Anybody who has read the article by ‘Don Hoskins’ (aka Roy Bull) in the latest issue of Socialist News - entitled, ‘A ‘loss’ we can only welcome’ (September/October) - will find the tone of this Lalkar excerpt rather familiar:

“Counterrevolutionary Trotskyist ravings of the Weekly Worker

“... we cannot but draw attention to, and condemn most resolutely, the following utterly reactionary remarks which appeared in the July 3 1997 issue of the Weekly Worker, the scandal-sheet of the counterrevolutionary Trotskyist sect masquerading as the CPGB, while doing its best to infiltrate the Socialist Labour Party for the purpose of disrupting it:

Hong Kong’s re-absorption into the ‘motherland’ significantly boosts this capitalistic momentum. This city state has massive concentrations of capital, and China overnight added somewhere in the region of 20% to its GDP. By a splendid paradox, the removal of imperialist control over Hong Kong and its reunification with ‘socialist’ China has objectively aided the expansion of world capital.

The Hong Kong handover points to the wider tragedy of the Chinese Revolution. Its proletarian head cut off in 1927, Mao and his followers pursued a non-proletarian ‘socialism’ - developing a fundamentally utopian ideology which followed the contours of Stalin’s anti-socialist socialism, but located it within a rural framework.

“As is to be expected of these supercilious counterrevolutionary Trotskyist degenerates, they put inverted commas around the words motherland and socialist, as if to say that the Chinese people have no motherland requiring defence against imperialist butchers and that their social system, being only a primitive capitalism, is hardly worth preserving. This is ‘CPGB’ Trotskyists’ ‘socialist’ way of providing ideological support for imperialism’s virulent campaign against China. The ‘CPGB’ Trotskyists are doing the same on the China question as they are doing on the questions of Ireland, Palestine, South Africa and others. Everywhere they are busy in a filthy campaign of slander and vilification against progressive forces - be they national liberation or socialist - engaged in a life-and-death struggle against imperialism. If indeed the reunification of Hong Kong with China has ‘objectively aided the expansion of world capital’, as is the assertion of our Trotskyist nitwits, why is international imperialism not enthusiastic about it? Why is it, instead, doing everything within its power to prevent the smooth absorption of Hong Kong into - yes - the motherland?

“The fact of the matter is that imperialism is genuinely alarmed at the growing might of China, to which the return of Hong Kong has added considerably. It is not for nothing that this year saw the publication of a virulently anti-Chinese book, The coming conflict with China, by two former Beijing news bureau chiefs, namely, Richard Bernstein, now working for the New York Times, and Ross Munro, presently director of the Asia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Describing China’s growing economic and military strength as a threat to US interests in Asia, the thrust of the book is that Washington’s prime objective in Asia should be to destabilise China and disrupt its economic development. This book has been reviewed in important publications in the US and actively promoted by significant sections of the US ruling class.

“It would appear that the miserable ‘socialists’ of the Weekly Worker agree with the above-named reactionary authors of the Coming conflict with China, with the difference that these authors openly advocate their beliefs, whereas the incurably sick petty-bourgeois Trotskyites hide behind ‘revolutionary’ phrases and rhetoric to hide their counterrevolutionary yearnings. Thus there is a meeting of minds between the open and cynical ideologues of imperialism and the opportunists in the working class movement. They both ardently desire the collapse of the People’s Republic of China. One cannot help feeling that Bernstein and Munro are honest, if cynical, advocates of imperialism, whereas the Trotskyists of the Weekly Worker, while equally cynical, are thoroughly dishonest and have to hide their support for imperialism beneath a barrage of ‘revolutionary’ phrases, which help them to confuse a few novices in the working class movement and secure funding from hostile classes for the weekly publication of material defamatory of national liberation and proletarian movements and regimes.

“What is the meaning of their obscure assertion about Mao following ‘the contours of Stalin’s anti-socialist socialism’? It can only be a reference to building socialism in the former USSR. It has been the constant refrain of Trotskyism that socialism cannot be built in a single country, let alone a backward country. Lenin successfully refuted this reactionary thesis; and the history of socialist construction in the USSR and many other countries has provided a fitting rebuttal for this thesis. It is not Stalin’s theory, it is Lenin’s. If the Trotskyists of the Weekly Worker, or of any other variety, want to take up the cudgels against this theory, they should direct their blows against its real author. Have you got the guts, gentlemen? Or will you continue, with characteristic cowardice, to attack Lenin while pretending to be attacking only Lenin’s foremost pupil, Stalin? This, as Lenin would have put it, is mutiny on one’s knees, gentlemen!

“Whatever the carping, wingeing [sic], whining and sniveling [sic] gentry from the several dozen petty-bourgeois counterrevolutionary Trotskyists, the so-called CPGB included, may say, the salvos of the Great Socialist October Revolution in Russia and the miraculous feats of socialist construction in the glorious USSR exercised a powerful invigorating influence on the development of the Chinese revolution. No less a person than Mao Tse-tung, the leader of the Communist Party of China - a party that mobilised hundreds of millions of Chinese people in the cause of national liberation and socialism, unlike ‘our’ Trotskyist poseurs who can hold a meeting in a telephone kiosk and still find plenty of empty space - describe the path traversed by the Chinese Revolution, in the wake of the October Revolution, in ... splendid terms ...”

Of course, on one level these comments could be dismissed as simply comical - we could just treat it as Lalkar engaging in Stalinite business as usual. However, given recent developments in the SLP, perhaps we need to take it more seriously - particularly the accusation that the CPGB is “doing its best to infiltrate the Socialist Labour Party for the purpose of disrupting it”.

Such a Stalinite accusation dove-tails with Scargill’s recent statement in Cardiff that things started to go wrong in the USSR after Uncle Joe died. You do not have to be a conspiracy theorist, or be suffering from an excess of imagination, to get a sniff of something afoot - perhaps the Trotskyist members of the NEC should watch their backs.

Ironically, Harpal Brar is a ‘Third Period’ Stalinist who believes that left social democracy is indistinguishable from fascism - so what does that make Arthur Scargill, I wonder? Brar is also from the no-nonsense, no-questions-asked tradition which in the 1960s and 1970s denounced ‘capitalist roaders’ like Deng Xiaoping - and argued that China had been taken over by ‘counterrevolutionaries’ like Deng and become capitalist. So, Lalkar’s love for the current regime in China sounds a bit curious.

It is also worth noting that in this article the Weekly Worker is challenged to “take up the cudgels” against the theory of socialism in one country - which Lalkar claims is “not Stalin’s theory, it is Lenin’s”; and, as we know, Stalin was “Lenin’s foremost pupil”. “Have you got the guts, gentlemen?” inquires the unnamed author.

Well, er, yes. But it is a bit like being asked to prove Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, or why the sun does not orbit our planet - where do you start? Suffice to say, Lenin’s whole strategy pivoted on the necessity for world revolution - which meant revolution in the advanced capitalist states, particular Germany. For example, in March 1918 Lenin declared: “At all events, under all circumstances, if the German revolution does not come, we are doomed.” Or, in November 1920, “Until the revolution takes place in all lands, including the richest and most highly civilised ones, our victory will be only a half-victory, perhaps still less.” Quotes to this effect could be replicated almost endlessly.

Lenin’s prognosis proved correct. The revolution was destroyed - working class power became its opposite. There was never full or real socialism in the Soviet Union: the proletarian-peasant revolution was socialist only in the sense that socialism was its aim. We saw a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat - which came to power on the back of a democratic revolution - guided by a party whose programme was for world revolution, the essential prerequisite for socialism. This was the orthodox Marxist understanding, and Lenin always subscribed to that position. To say anything else, to boast retrospectively of Russia’s ‘socialist’ credentials, is to suffer from what Lenin called “communist conceit”.

It was, in fact, Stalin and Khrushchev - sorry, Arthur - who broke from this fundamental Marxist tenet and proclaimed that it was possible to build socialism, even communism, within the confines of the Soviet state. As the saying goes, socialism in one country meant no socialism for anyone else. 

It is very unlikely that you will hear such views at this year’s ‘Uphold the banner of communism’ rally to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the October Revolution later this month in Southall. Scargill will be speaking there along with Viktor Anpilov of the Russian Communist Workers Party; Ludo Martens of the Party of Labour, Belgium; Teja Singh Sahota of the Association of Communists, GB; Avtar Jouhl, general secretary of the IWA(GB); Ella Rule of the Society for Friendship with Korea; and Red Youth, a wing of the IWA(GB). They will present an impeccable defence of Stalinite orthodoxy, along with a good dose of weirdness - Ella Rule never lets us down on that front.

This is the sort of company Arthur Scargill now keeps: Harpal Brar, Anpilov's Communist Workers Party, etc. Who knows where they will take him, or where he will take them.

Don Preston