Letters

New Blair?

‘The mayor is dead, long live the mayor!’. This appears to be the motto of some comrades in the LSA - or perhaps it should be, ‘The mayor is still unelected, elect the mayor now’.

I say this in response to a resolution which was forwarded to the London Socialist Alliance Ad-Hoc Steering Committee meeting on April 7. The author of this resolution, comrade David Lyons of the soft Trotskyist Socialist Democracy Group, wants the forthcoming LSA conference to directly “elect a representative to stand on the national SA Steering Committee”.

How ironic. Comrade Lyons was united with the CPGB in opposing the “principle” of a directly elected London mayor, as opposed to one appointed by (the democratically elected) assembly. But now he advocates the creation of a LSA ‘mayor’, who will not be accountable to the elected LSA leadership. I wonder if Tony Blair would approve of comrade Lyons’ resolution? 

Phil Kent
Brent SA

No gods

In his documents explaining his recommendation that the SSA becomes positively identified with the cause of separatism, Alan McCombes has sought justification in the writings of two great revolutionary Marxists, VI Lenin and John Maclean (Scottish independence and the struggle for socialism - see Weekly Worker February 19 1998).

No Marxist, not even Lenin, was right at all times on all questions. But on the national question, as on so many others, Lenin has to be our point of departure. Maclean was also a great revolutionary. But on the specific question of Scottish independence he was wrong. Disastrously so. In my humble opinion, the latching on to John Maclean by comrade McCombes has little if anything to do with the strength of his arguments, and a whole lot to do with the country of his birth. If so, this is a mistake of extraordinary proportions.

Comrade McCombes should take note that if the SSA is to endorse John Maclean’s attitude towards Scottish independence then perhaps it would also be forced to endorse some of the views which kept him isolated from the British section of the Communist International - a personal tragedy for Maclean; a serious blow to the workers’ movement in Scotland and the rest of Britain.

We have to recognise that Maclean’s prescription of an independent Scottish Workers’ Republic was built upon a false premise. Maclean’s prescription was for a revolutionary war of Scottish workers to tear apart the United Kingdom. He was thinking along the lines of emulating, on a far grander scale, James Connolly in Ireland. Britain today however no longer occupies the core of the world imperialist system. Any nationalist redivision of the UK territory would not have anything like the consequences intended by John Maclean. It would not aid the struggle of the equivalent today of millions of colonial slaves itching for an opportunity to take on their imperialist oppressors. I can find little if anything in common between John Maclean’s analysis for striking a hammer blow at world imperialism and promoting world communism on the one hand and, on the other, Alan’s proposal that we need a second Scottish National Party (albeit a left-wing version).

John Maclean’s analyses, for all their faults, had their roots in several of the key elements of Lenin’s approach to the national question. Look carefully at The right of nations to self-determination, and many other writings. Maclean was endorsing the prescription Lenin gave to Marxists in oppressed nations - in particular the colonies, areas of the world still awaiting their bourgeois democratic revolutions. The point of such revolutions is to create new centres of capital accumulation, develop the forces of production, and in particular the most important such force - capitalism’s gravedigger, the working class itself.

Alan also has to recognise that while Marxists in a country with a significant separatist movement have a special responsibility (are in effect the eyes and ears of the international socialist movement), they have absolutely no extra rights. They certainly cannot determine, on their own, the socialist attitude to the separatist movement in question. Both the Third International of Lenin and Trotsky and the Fourth of Trotsky insisted all decisions of national sections of the International would be subordinate to the world organisation.

Alan appears to have departed radically from these Marxist norms. He is a leading member of SML which through the Socialist Party is part of the Committee for a Workers’ International. The decision to adopt Alan’s position in Scotland has been taken in isolation from any Marxist outside Scotland. All the indications are that support for Scottish independence within the CWI beyond Scotland is not greater but rather less than it is inside. We have here a complete reversal of the role of revolutionaries inside and outside a country with an emerging pro-independence movement.

Although Scotland cannot even be described as an ‘oppressed nation’, it does have a large, and growing, separatist movement. Marxists in Scotland do therefore need to adopt an attitude towards it, one which goes beyond the crossing of fingers and praying it will go away. But today - and for as long as the majority of Scots don’t register, not in an opinion poll but in a referendum, an unequivocal desire to go down the separatist route - rather than bowing down before the rising tide of separatist sentiment in Scotland, our task has to be to challenge it.

These sentiments are based on a reactionary and irrational despair as to the progressive potential of the English working class. Alan himself has clearly fallen victim to these prejudices. Alan’s ambitions for the anti-capitalist left in Scotland, and even more so in England and Wales, are extremely low. His horizons for several years ahead seem to be limited exclusively to contemplating the ebbs and flows in support for the four capitalist parties. He entertains little, if any, hope of making substantial inroads into the electoral base of any of these parties - not at any rate without making opportunistic accommodations to the nationalists. If Marxists adopt such a pessimistic attitude, ours will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I feel I cannot duck the question, ‘Can Scotland achieve socialism before England?’ This is a non-question, but one to which Alan answers in the affirmative. He should acknowledge that when Stalin redrafted his Foundations of Leninism he produced a theoretical counterrevolution every bit as earth shattering as anything introduced by Eduard Bernstein. In his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky argues that it is forgivable that in 45 thick volumes of his collected works, Lenin made two careless statements which did imply you could have socialism in one country.

Alan has not learnt this lesson. In his Scottish independence document, there were ten times more such careless remarks than in Lenin’s entire political career. If Alan has not been converted to ‘national socialism’, or Stalinism in the narrow sense of endorsing the idea of socialism in one country, then he has to learn to be a damn sight more careful in what he writes in the future.

Tom Delargy
Paisley

Morning wars

I would like to use the letters page of the Weekly Worker to add a few points on the Morning Star strike. When the strike for editor John Haylett’s reinstatement began on February 25, Haylett characterised the dispute in The Workers’ Morning Star No1 as “a totally needless self-inflicted wound.” Near the end of the strike, when the independent appeal tribunal dismissed the charges against him, he called on management to return the paper to “a state of normality.”

According to this scenario, a totally pointless conflict came out of the blue, threatened the very existence of the so-called Communist Party of Britain’s “priority number one”, and then, thank god, melted into thin air. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, “normality” now reigns.

The factional struggle within the CPB leadership is “normally” not on display. For at least four years it festered behind closed doors, concealed from the CPB rank and file, “the left” and “the broad labour movement” which the Star claims to serve. The tit-for-tat sacking of Hicks as CPB general secretary and then Haylett as Star editor forced the civil war into public view.

Now the strike is over, and Rosser, Hicks and their collaborators can be blamed, the winning faction apparently does not see the need for a political explanation. It was all due to personalities, “unhealthy elements”. These are being removed, and the CPB can resume ploughing its British road furrow.

This reminds me of Kruschev’s 1956 denunciation of the ‘personality cult’ around Stalin. Despite the list of ‘errors’ and crimes, fortunately the problem was, he said, only superficial. The general line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and of Soviet society had been correct all along. How lucky! How unlikely. How un-Marxist not to recognise the foul nature of the leadership of the CPSU as a direct product of its fantasy of communism in one state.

Likewise with the liquidation of the ‘official’ CPGB. True, the Euros (misnamed ‘Eurocommunists’) who came to dominate the Party executive were directly culpable for organisational liquidation, but merely blaming them misses the point. A programme for national socialism logically leads to accommodation with one’s own state: it produces liquidationists. Parting company with them, while retaining the programme, as the CPB has done, guarantees a re-run, albeit in miniature.

Hicks and Rosser were part of the anti-Euro Morning Star faction in the 80s. Now that camp has divided against itself. Once again comrades were called upon to take sides in confusion, on the basis of blind loyalty to this or that leader, trying to read between the lines to divine what on earth the conflict was all about.

“Normality” for Haylett means attempting to put the lid back on the pot of festering differences below the surface of the CPB’s superficial unity. This may prove difficult, because although the strike has ended, the battle for control of the Star is not over, at least until the “unhealthy elements” have been ousted. In any case, limiting debate is the wrong method. CPBers who fear that the open clash of ideas may disperse their fragile organisation are quite right. Yet openness, freedom of criticism in public, in print, is the only route to durable communist unity in practice.

Opening the Star’s columns to all shades of opinion on the left could make it into a sharp weapon for overcoming the dogmatic differences which at present divide the advanced section of our class into sects, and organising it again into a Communist Party in which normality is established as ‘unity in action, freedom of criticism’.

Ian Farrell
North London