30.10.1997

Upholding the banner of Stalin

Scargill comes out of the closet

Some 400 people gathered at the Dominion Centre in Southall to celebrate the October Revolution. For the second year running this rally was organised by the Committee to Celebrate the October Revolution, under the slogan, ‘Uphold the banner of communism’. Like last year, the main speaker was Arthur Scargill, acting general secretary of the Socialist Labour Party, who addressed a mainly Asian audience.

Another key speaker was meant to be Viktor Anpilov of the pro-Stalin Russian Communist Workers Party. But he was denied a visa by the British authorities. The entire workers’ movement should protest against this denial of the democratic right to free movement. Anpilov should be allowed to say what he likes - where he likes, a point forcefully made by Harpal Brar, who chaired the meeting. Comrade Brar is editor of Lalkar, the bi-monthly paper of the Indian Workers Association (GB), the main instigator behind the Committee to Celebrate the October Revolution and a prominent member of Southall SLP.           

Another feature carried over from last year’s rally was the very low SLP profile. There was no SLP stall yet again and only a few - unenergetic - Socialist News sellers. There was however a relatively wide variety of Stalinist stalls and material to choose from. The little seen or heard of Communist Action Group made a rare appearance, as did supporters of the Communist Party of Peru (Shining Path). Interestingly, Scargill’s dysfunctional witch hunters of the Economic and Philosophic Science Review had their own stall - which consisted mainly of literature from the ‘dissolved’ International Leninist Workers Party, but there were no copies - sadly - of EPSR itself. South London SLP members Adrian Greenman and Rod George were among those proudly displaying ILWP material.

You could call this the ‘out of the closet’ rally - as the name of JV Stalin was frequently evoked during the evening. This new ‘openness’ applies especially to Scargill himself. His comments on the Soviet Union in the previous year had been brief and circumspect - “It would be a foolish man or woman to suggest that the USSR was a failure,” was all Scargill said on the matter.

At Southall ’97 Scargill was more direct. He said it would be a “mistake to talk about the events which led” to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Instead we should dwell on the “achievements” of the Soviet Union, which are “there on a permanent basis”.                

He emphasised how Marxism - contrary to what we are told - described the “real world”. Referring to the recent financial instability in Hong Kong, Wall Street and the City, Scargill stated that the “ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin” help us to explain such phenomena.

Scargill hammered home the message that the workers’ movement needs to “relate the struggle to today” - not to yesteryear. Gesturing to the rostrum, he said that “ if Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin were here today they wouldn’t be talking about theoretical problems”. No. They would discussing what “real struggle is about”, and “fighting alongside the Liverpool dockers and the Hillingdon Hospital strikers”.

He recalled how, as the industrial organiser of the Young Communist League, he went to Moscow and met Andrei Gromyko. Gromyko told the young Scargill that the “struggle against the Soviet Union would intensify”. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, maintained Scargill, “demonstrated the correctness of that statement”.

He went on to say he was “sick and tired of people telling me we can’t strike anymore.” Detractors aside, “In every struggle the SLP will be alongside the strikers,” he said, and invited everyone present to join ‘his’ party, which is “committed to bring about socialism”. “The SLP does not exist merely to contest elections,” Scargill reminded the audience. “It understands the need for direct action.”

He recalled the two proudest moments of his life. The first was standing in Havana’s Revolutionary Square with Fidel Castro in 1975, when the news was announced that the Vietcong had defeated American imperialism. “We celebrated the defeat of capitalism by socialism,” Scargill said with emotion.

The second was when he delivered his first ever speech, which was four minutes long. He shared the same platform with “the great” Harry Pollitt. After listening to the unknown Arthur Scargill’s speech, Pollitt proclaimed with a gesture towards him that there was “no doubt about the future”. Similarly, concluded Scargill, we must “give youth a chance”.

In the Weekly Worker we predicted that the speakers at this rally “will present an impeccable defence of Stalinite orthodoxy” (October 9). We were not disappointed, even if Anpilov could not turn up. Indeed, most of the other speakers were even less inhibited than Scargill.

This was certainly true of fellow SLP member Jimmy Nolan: “Joseph Stalin was one of the greatest men ever to have lived,” comrade Nolan informed us. “He consolidated socialism” and without the existence of the USSR “fascism would have prevailed”. He exhorted us to “study Joseph Stalin”, something the Weekly Worker would certainly not disagree with, nor with his comments to “seize Marxism again”.

The main part of Jimmy Nolan’s speech dealt with New Labour. “At one point you could distinguish between Liberals, Tory and Labour”, but now they had “merged into one”. Blair’s Labour Party has “ceased to be socially reformist”, thought Jimmy.

Seeing how “representative democracy has been taken away from the working class”, comrade Nolan concluded: “We have the right to participate in revolution.” It is the “responsibility of the SLP to carry on the struggle”, now that the Labour Party has sold out.

He warned John Monks of the TUC that he had until November 5 to unequivocally support the dockers. From that day on, they would start to occupy union buildings. The dockers will also call for the resignation of Bill Morris.

On a more esoteric level, Ella Rule of the Society for Friendship with Korea reassured us that North Korea was not “something from science fiction” - do not belief that it is an “awful and terrible place”. Quite the opposite. The country was “full of working class people who had seized power”. It also had “wonderful hospitals”.

She admitted that there had been “problems” building socialism, and also mentioned that it was “undergoing difficulties” at the moment - but she hastened to emphasise that was due to “disastrous climatic problems”.

For all of its current “difficulties”, gushed Rule, North Korea gives us an image of “what we are all fighting for”. The system in Britain and elsewhere that “replaces capitalism will be like North Korea”, she opined. In view of the undeniable fact that North Korea is on the verge of collapse, this was a less than inspiring message.

At this stage Harpal Brar felt the urge to attack “socialist scribblers whose only job is to publish defamatory material against socialism” - and remarked that Ella Rule’s contribution “will no doubt be described as weird”. This was a reference to Don Preston’s article in the Weekly Worker, who had warned us to expect the rally to have “a good dose of weirdness - Ella Rule never lets us down on that front” (October 9).

Indeed, Brar’s jibe against “socialist scribblers” constituted one of the main themes of the evening. Those leftwing groups which criticise Stalin and the achievements of ‘socialism’ are “nothing but agents of the bourgeoisie in the workers’movement”, as Harpal Brar delicately phrased it on one occasion. It is interesting then that the most ‘conciliatory’ speech came from comrade Avtar Jouhl, general secretary of the IWA (GB). He said the “time has come to reflect on Marxism” and that all revolutionaries must come to a “common collective viewpoint” - we must become “part of the working class”, not retreat into “our brand of socialism, with each in their own little group”. 

Brar’s own speech was markedly different from comrade Jouhl’s, despite the fact that they are both members of the IWA (GB). It consisted primarily of demagogic haranguing of ‘anti-Stalin’ socialists/communists. Some of the characteristic traits of these “shameful socialists”, as Brar sees it, consist in not supporting “the Great Patriotic War” - as World War II was always referred to at the meeting - and not supporting the ‘socialist’ states - ie, North Korea.

Stalinite nonsense aside, many of the points made by Harpal Brar were quite correct. “Anybody who does not celebrate the October Revolution is not a socialist but a scoundrel,” he remarked. He pointed to the dangers of “ignorant workerism” and stressed that, “We must educate. We cannot leave amorphousness in people’s heads.” He also exclaimed in some frustration: “For god’s sake, why can’t we get together and form a single revolutionary party?”

However, the comrade spoilt these fine sentiments by immediately attacking “disrupters in the SLP” - ie, those left forces which are struggling for democracy. He also launched an ill-informed attack on the SWP, accusing them of not supporting the Hillingdon Hospital strikers or the Liverpool dockers. Describing Blair as the SWP’s “paymaster”, he ended up denouncing revolutionary left groups like the SWP as the “most determined enemies of our movement”.

Such sectarian comments are always to be regretted. Whatever our strong disagreements may be with many of the things said by some of the speakers, we would never accuse them of being insincere in their support for the Hillingdon Hospital workers, Liverpool dockers, etc.

The Red Youth speaker delivered a wooden speech riddled with Stalinite clichés about “Khrushchevite revisionism” and claimed that Lenin’s theory of uneven development “proves” you can have socialism in one country. He also put forward the notion, as did some of the other speakers, that the defeat of the Nazis during World War II was “only made possible by the rapid transformation and industrialisation of the Soviet economy” - all thanks to the ‘far-sightedness’ of Stalin.   

He also presented the Southall audience with an ultra-idealised view of the Soviet Union almost straight from a 1930s Soviet textbooks. The USSR had got “rid of the contradictions” which plague capitalism; it had been transformed from a prison house of nations into a place where the different peoples “lived happily together”; “the Soviet economy passed from strength to strength”; it “laid the basis for the liberation of women”; lended “every support” for all national liberation movements”. It was never made clear whether the state of bliss described by the young speaker applied post-or pre-1956, the dark year in which Khrushchev spilled the beans and did the dirty on Uncle Joe.

For Red Youth the “example of Soviet socialism inspires us today”. He concluded with the customary dire warnings about those “bourgeois agents” who try to “attack Leninism from within”. To this end an unpleasant leaflet had been circulated by Red Youth. For example, it stated that the outstanding revolutionary, Leon Trotsky - founder of the Red Army - was an FBI agent.

Ludo Martens of the Party of Labour (Belgium) delivered the longest speech. Arriving at Southall directly from Cuba, his meandering - if not monomaniacal - speech was concerned with exposing the crimes of “Khrushchevite revisionism” and plugging his book, Another view of Stalin (the citation on the back describes Stalin as the “great genius of the 20th century”).

He treated the audience to an eccentric and near comical ‘history’ of the Soviet Union. He attacked the “revisionists” - presumably people like Andrei Gromyko, to whom comrade Scargill referred so approvingly - for betraying the workers’ movement. These people, according to Martens, “took full advantage of the strength of the Soviet Union” to propagate their pernicious doctrines and generally undermine socialism.

Needless to say, attacks on Stalin are only “manoeuvres” intended to “destroy Lenin and Leninism”. It was Stalin “who made Lenin’s ideas materialise”. Martens also made the assertion that JV Stalin “led the Bolshevik Party by 1922” and that there was “no doubt” that if Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev or Kamenev had defeated Stalin, it would have produced the “downfall of the proletariat and socialism”.

Martens also attributed all the blame for the bloody debacle in Chile 1973to the “revisionists” - with their belief in a peaceful, parliamentary road to socialism. The comrade is quite right in many ways. But it would be fascinating to know if he happened to mention this to Fidel Castro when he was in Havana last week. It is not exactly a secret that Castro gave his full backing to Salvador Allende’s very peaceful, very parliamentary, ‘Chilean road to socialism’.

Still, consistency and logic is not something you expect from Stalinite organisations.

At the end of the meeting, just before the Internationale was sung, Brar reiterated his dislike of “whingeing, whining and snivelling” socialists. That may be so, but those honest and sincere revolutionaries and militants gathered at Southall deserve better than Stalinist hagiography/demonology and personality cultism - features alien to genuine Marxism.

Danny Hammill