11.06.1998
No politics please, we’re Bullites
Around the left
The struggle for human freedom is universal or it is nothing. Under capitalism, as Engels writes,
“a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class - the proletariat - cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class - the bourgeoisie - without at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions, and class struggles” (my emphasis - ‘Preface to 1888 English edition’ Communist manifesto New York 1964, p51).
In other words, the fight for democracy and socialism occur “at the same time” and are one and the same - a viewpoint famously expounded in VI Lenin’s What is to be done?
There is another entirely different conception. One which reduces the fight for socialism down to a straightforward, pugilistic contest at the workplace between the ‘boss’ and the ‘workers’ - with perhaps a bit of politics thrown in now and again. One which just cannot imagine the working class becoming the ruling class in society. From this narrow economistic perspective, “society at large” is either ignored or treated as a rude intruder into the ‘class struggle’. Quite logically, some advocates of this profoundly non-Marxist notion of ‘class struggle’ end up accommodating to and reproducing some of the most backward and bigoted values of bourgeois society.
The most extreme and distasteful example available to us so far of this trend can be found in the shape of Socialist Labour Party member Roy Bull - ex-Workers Revolutionary Party, defeated candidate for the post of SLP vice-president, editor of the homophobic and Trotskyite-hating Economic and Philosophical Science Review, and regular contributor to the wildly eclectic but deadly dull Socialist News. Inthe latest issue of the latter (May-June) Bull “offers his view of the drugs crisis” - they happen to coincide with those of would-be labour dictator Arthur Scargill.
After reading Bull’s article, you almost have to wonder why the ruling class needs its own state when we have ‘communists’ like him and his tiny band of not-so merry sociopathic followers in the EPSR appearing so keen to police the working class and make sure the masses do not get out of hand. Fundamentally, Bull’s approach to the “drugs crisis” is a straight ‘left’ copy of the most reactionary bourgeois - ie, authoritarian and prescriptive. Add this to his ‘more Tiananmen Squares, please’, and his weirdo, auto-erotic, anti-gay, anti-Trotskyite rantings in EPSR, and you have a ‘socialism’ which stands in direct opposition to human liberation.
Thus Bull writes: “The campaign to legalise alternative means of intoxication other than alcohol claims to be about progressive human rights. But the history of class society shows that a proven method of pacifying the masses has been to inebriate them. The right to get high as a ‘challenge to capitalist law and order’ looks different when it is seen as playing into capitalism’s hands” (May-June). The masses, according to this frustrated JV Stalin, are merely passive spectators, whose only function is to act as a stage army and provide the backdrop to the Bullites’ dark fantasies of what they imagine a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ should look like.
People take drugs because they like it - for whatever reasons. This has been true since human history began. It is only in a perverse and irrational society driven by the need for social control that one potentially dangerous drug, alcohol, is permitted - indeed is feted and celebrated by the advertisers and popular culture - while other less dangerous drugs are banned and its users criminalised. Television, West End musicals, pop music, Hollywood films, religion, etc, can also have the effect of “pacifying the masses”, but nobody is suggesting that they be banned. But then again, you cannot take anything for granted with the EPSR ...
Hypocritically, Bull admits: “Deliberately, consciously choosing intoxication from time to time can be great enjoyment and has played a delightful and not dishonourable role in human culture since time began. Dependency on relaxing stimulation can be harmless, but self-deception about routine dependency - whether on drugs or alcohol - is a fool’s game that helps to distract people from seeing the bankrupt nature of the system which surrounds them” (my emphasis). Yes, Roy. But the drug alcohol is legal. Cannabis, however, remains illegal. As part of the ‘war against drugs’ the state has accrued to itself a whole raft of oppressive and anti-democratic powers - some or all of which can be used against us at any time. Yet none of this appears to bother Bull. (The fact that he enjoys a pint or two, or three or four, is of course totally irrelevant.)
The irony is that it is becoming obvious to some sections of the bourgeoisie that the ‘war against drugs’ is irrational, unwinnable and very costly. Last week thousands of influential international figures - ranging from judges, clerics, former drug squad officers to former prime ministers and former presidents - signed an open letter aimed to coincide with the UN general assembly special session on drugs, which starts in New York this week. “We believe that the global war on drugs is now causing more harm than drug abuse itself,” states the letter. The drugs industry - and the war against it - has “distorted economic markets and moral values”, it adds, calling for a total reappraisal of the anti-drugs laws.
The editor of EPSR is not impressed. When explaining why the taking of cannabis, LSD, ecstasy, etc should remain a criminal activity, Bull relapses into shameless ultra-economism:
“This isn’t a question of backing the British government on its drugs laws; the capitalist system is rotten, and deserves no support at all. But it cannot be tinkered with; it must be overthrown, and the ‘legalisation’ issue is a huge diversion” (my emphasis).
Presumably, seeing how the capitalist system “cannot be tinkered with”, the fight to abolish the House of Lords must also be a “diversion”. So too must be the call for a federal republic and the abolition of the constitutional monarchy. The call for a united Ireland and the withdrawal of British troops must also be a foolish “diversion”. The struggle for a decent minimum wage, as opposed to the proposed sub-minimum wage of £3.60 an hour, must be a “diversion” from the ‘class struggle’. Wages are just wages, right? It’s all exploitation. Waste of time doing anything. Read EPSR instead.
Poking through all this nonsense is Bull’s top-down bureaucratic socialism, which views the masses with suspicion - if not fear and loathing. Give them the freedom to consume alcohol or smoke a joint and they will inevitably ‘abuse’ it by becoming sad losers, junkies, addicts and alcoholics. Thank god there is the state - bourgeois, ‘socialist’ or otherwise - to keep them sober and level-headed. And rejoice at the fact that the steely-eyed and beefy proletarians in the EPSR will never allow themselves to be diverted from the course of pure revolution. (On the back page of Socialist News EPSRite Dave Roberts treats us to an enthusiastic little report on Sean Kirkpatrick of Leicester SLP and his London Marathon run, which involved “months of punishing training plus pints and pints of Guinness”.)
Therefore, legalisation of drugs could only unleash chaos and dissolution. Bull asks: “Is there any reason why drug addiction wouldn’t rapidly escalate and overtake alcoholism - bad enough already - among the young?” Absolutely no reason at all - if the young were sufficiently alienated from society. Communists fight to change society, not persecute those who are on the receiving end of state oppression and official hypocrisy. As our vision of socialism is self-emancipatory and democratic, we have no morbid fear of drugs being freely available. We aim to socialise drug-taking, as we do all other aspects of human existence, from the sexual to the cultural. If under our future ‘workers’ state’ a large section of the population were becoming addicted to drugs - whether it be alcohol or heroin - this would only prove that there was something seriously wrong: with the new state, not with the people.
The political struggle to legalise drugs is all part of the battle for human freedom. Bull fails to realise this. Dourly, he warns:
“But, given the worldwide record of drug-induced damage that imperialism has inflicted on individuals and nations, who can recommend regular intoxication as a way of fighting the capitalist system? ... The ‘liberty’ to do something which in no way challenges economic, political and social controls is a false freedom - meaningless under capitalism.”
Communists fight for human freedom now - we do not postpone that struggle until some abstract and reified future. Means determine ends. By fighting in the here and now against all forms of oppression and discrimination, we make our own future. That makes socialism something worth fighting for - rather than leaving it as a utopian ideal or a bureaucratic state nightmare.
Don Preston