Letters

Republican boycott

I would like to make additional comments to my article in last week’s Weekly Worker (‘Tommy gets his wish’, October 16). There is more to assessing the campaign than the relationship between boycott and abstention. We must judge it against the demands or slogans that we put forward.

The RDG advocated a republican boycott and a republican united front. ‘Success’ must be measured against these aims. It is equally valid to ask not simply how many people abstained, but how many we won to republicanism in general and a federal republic in particular, and whether we were able to build a republican united front. Abstention is a negative ‘vote’ - a vote of no confidence. We argued that we must tie up abstention with republicanism. We were not pure boycotters or ultra-left boycotters. We were for a republican boycott.

From our perspective, the referendum was merely a moment in the struggle for a federal republic. If tying this to the boycott slogan was a mistake, we will not be able to step up that struggle afterwards. We will end up on the defensive, trying to justify the position we took. This was not the case. It is SML that should be on the defensive.

The call for a federal republic is enhanced by the boycott tactic. Hence we must ask more questions - did we convince the masses of the need for a federal republic through our campaign? The honest answer has to be no. We (RDG or CPGB) were not in a position to influence the masses. Did we begin to convince the Scottish left (especially SSA) of the need to unite the working class around the demand for a federal republic? At the moment it is too early to say.

Connected to this was the need to wage war against the left monarchist or left Blairite slogan of a ‘parliament with full powers’, so beloved by the SWP, Workers Power and SML. This slogan was the last refuge of these scoundrels. These organisations were using this slogan to avoid republicanism, whilst making themselves appear radical.

As I said during the campaign, to combine self-determination with the slogan of ‘a parliament with full powers’ is to dabble in the murky waters of nationalism. ‘Full powers’ can easily be mistaken or interpreted to mean ‘nationally independent parliament’. It was not surprising that The Times (accidentally or deliberately) mistook the Campaign for Genuine Self-Determination (CGSD) as “extremist nationalist”.

Had the slogan of a federal republic been part of the platform, and hence on the official leaflets, it would have been much more difficult to make that error. The demand for a federal republic means specifically calling for workers’ unity. It means relating Scotland to England and Wales. The argument for workers’ unity cannot be avoided and must necessarily be central to the federal republic slogan.

The CPGB was fully justified to call for a boycott, and was shown to be correct in the results. However, a mistake was made in forcing that slogan of ‘full powers’ on the Campaign. It is not valid to justify this by suggesting it was supposed to embarrass SML.

Either way, we must assess the correctness of all our slogans - not just the boycott slogan - in the light of the referendum and how we are positioned for the post-referendum struggle.

Dave Craig
RDG (faction of the SWP)

Bit of a laugh

Recently I have been dipping into your website. You seem to be at loggerheads with other groups because you referred to them as “national socialist”. You seem a little surprised and scornful that this has drawn a hostile reaction.

Sorry, but I don’t buy it. When I was in the CPGB, I remember Jack Conrad quite openly saying that certain terms or types of argument would be used to “draw people out” or evoke a response. Use of deliberately provocative and offensive language is one way to do this.

Of course, if you shoot at people, you have to expect some gunfire in return. ‘National socialist’ is indelibly associated with Hitler’s NSDAP, and you knew this perfectly well and deliberately used the term to tar opponents with the brush of Nazism. A bit of a laugh really, because the CPGB had no anti-fascist record to speak of when I was involved with it, and I doubt if The Leninist had either.

I don’t say you should be excluded from meetings; I don’t say you should be beaten up. I do say I am glad I no longer have anything to do with the CPGB, because, to quote Shakespeare, this “smoke and lukewarm water is your perfection”.

Andrew MacKay
Reading

Global system

It seems the great ‘national socialism’ scandal continues in the pages of the Weekly Worker.

I agree that organisations such as Scottish Militant Labour, the Socialist Party and the Socialist Labour Party have a national focus to their politics. I don’t believe however that their aim is socialism. The thrust of both the SP’s and SLP’s policy is that if we nationalise everything we end up with socialism.

What in fact you get is state capitalism with the SP or SLP replacing the capitalists with their own cadre. Workers’ control, as they call it, in fact equates to cushy jobs for themselves.

The German Nazis adopted the word ‘socialism’ for entirely opportunist reasons, and the economy of Germany from 1933 to 1945 was even further from socialism than the post-1928 USSR. Germany remained a capitalist country - calling it state capitalism would not be justified, because individual capitalist concerns continued to operate there. The Nazi aim was for a strong German capitalism.

The SP, SLP, etc are for a British state capitalism similar to Cuba’s state capitalism.

Socialism cannot exist within any other context than a global economic system developing into world communism. You cannot have a ‘national socialism’, ‘socialism in one country’, a bureaucratic socialism or a ‘local socialism’. The only words you can accurately attach to ‘socialism’ are ‘world’, ‘international’ or ‘global’ (“Socialism is international ... or it must be something else” - J Conrad Weekly Worker October 9).

A question for Dave Craig, who alleges that the Socialist Workers Party think that Russia was the only socialist revolution in one country (October 9): do you seriously think, Dave, that working class revolutions have taken place with a positive outcome anywhere else in the world?

And, comrade ‘Faction of the SWP’, on what do you base your assertion that the SWP is, as you call it, “revolutionary national socialist”? The SWP is, as he probably knows, an organisation within a wider association of groups internationally all striving for revolution. The class struggle does not occur evenly around the world, so it’s quite likely that one nation’s revolution will occur before or after another’s.

What alternative is there than to accept that fact?

William Osborne
West London

Bolshevism?

I read Richard Brenner’s article, ‘Democratic centralism and the LRCI’, in your Weekly Worker (October 2). Highly entertaining reading.

Brenner’s is a world where everyone has a secret “party name” - because that’s an ultra-serious Trotskyist thing to do (not because there is a coup round the corner, or that they are bothered about being expelled from the Labour Party); no one has a sense of humour or irony - because this would be adequately kitsch-Trotskyist; everyone is very, very pompous - because this is very, very ultra-Trotskyist.

Apparently, as Brenner states, “Lenin often explained democracy means the subordination of the minority to the majority”. Workers Power’s “principal activity” is “to campaign in a disciplined manner for our politics and programme. Members who publicly campaign for something else [he’s previously been very careful to explain - through cunning use of dialectic - that campaign means anything from speaking to doing] ... violate the democratic rights of the majority.” And so he is able to justify the expulsion of José Villa from their organisation for speaking against (“denouncing”) their organisation’s line on Bosnia (“in Brixton”, of all places).

Brenner presents as a self-sufficient reason for Villa’s expulsion the fact that he spoke publicly against their majority position. He believes this act - in and of itself - is a “gross violation of party discipline”. It seems this is Bolshevism.

What Brenner would make of the real thing - for example, the Bolshevik left opposition to Brest-Litovsk, who published a public, daily paper in 1918 is not clear ...

Obviously a socialist group needs to have coherence; it needs to be able to act. However - and this is sometimes forgotten - it also needs to be able to think. It must encourage and develop a critical-thinking membership. And demanding socialists - particularly new members - to say things they don’t believe in, is corrosive.

Maybe in certain situations this is a price that has to be paid. But I can’t see Britain of 1997 comes into that category. Certainly one clause in our Alliance for Workers’ Liberty constitution says: members “should not pretend to hold opinions contrary to their real ones”. We seem to manage this and act as an organisation capable of doing things in the workers’ movement.

We regularly debate other groups and have no absurd rules which aim to prevent other tendencies selling their publications inside - let alone outside - our meetings (or speaking or giving out leaflets). In addition debates take place and minority views are routinely expressed in our press, along with comments and contributions from other groups and individuals. I can’t see what the problem is here - unless we have so little confidence in our ability to win an argument that we need to seal ourselves off. Of course, if I believed, as comrade Brenner does, that the ruling class in North Korea is the working class, I’d be pretty quick about sealing myself off from “the pressure of petty bourgeois public opinion”, “bourgeois common sense”, etc. I wouldn’t want my parents to know either.

The nature of group ‘regime’ is part of the ‘party and class’ question and is a political - and should be a public - matter. I fail to see how any group organised as a semi-monolithic entity, around a guru or small committee, which denies democratic rights to its own membership, can be an effective force fighting for human liberation - and isn’t that the character of most of the far left?

Finally, I have to laugh at Brenner’s comments - his chest puffed out - about the Workers Power ‘International’. By this point in his article I was reading chunks out to the various people wandering through our office. I got to the bit where he declared that they had a new “section” in Australia. One of our people - who had just returned from there - commented, “Yes, their section is called comrade —”. If Brenner were to reply, ‘Comrade, we have two/three/five members in Australia’, I’d have to say, ‘Brother, you’re missing the point’.

Mark Osborn
AWL