Letters

Volte-face?

Nick Long (‘Broader or greener?’ Weekly Worker June 11) appears to have done a volte-face on the matter of socialist organisations directly affiliating to socialist alliances and on automatic representation of such organisations on alliance committees. In the paper he presented to the Coventry meeting of the Network of English Socialist Alliances on March 21, comrade Long argued for a provisional national committee, upon which “socialist left parties in Britain (SWP, SP, CPB, etc) would be offered seats in proportionality to their membership”, and that “affiliated parties and groups should be able to continue to exist within the alliance”.

I would have thought that it was a safe assumption that what Nick was advocating for the national level of the alliance also held true for the regional level. However, he is now saying that he would “place less emphasis on direct affiliation because it allows organisations off the hook of hard practical work in building local alliances and the luxury simply of political comment”. He is advocating a London SA committee that is “a product of its constituent parts - borough socialist alliances”.

Effectively, what Nick is now proposing is that the alliance concept should only apply at local level. Above this there would be a constituency-based delegate structure. Indeed, he is vague on whether affiliation would even exist at the autonomous local alliance level, referring only to “the plurality and diversity of local socialist alliances [being] reflected in each borough alliance having more than one delegate to the London-wide steering committee - perhaps two or three”.

The only justification Nick can offer for his conversion is to point to his former organisation, the Socialist Labour Party, where “the experience of direct affiliation should serve as a reminder of the dangers”. I think he is clutching at straws here. The experience he is obviously referring to is the hijacking of the SLP’s second congress, in December 1997, by the 3,000 block vote of the North West, Cheshire and Cumbria Miners’ Association. The problem there was not a consequence of direct affiliation, but that of the bureaucratic use of the anti-democratic block vote.

Nick’s new model is no way to forge the unity of his previous target group, “the socialist left parties in Britain”. Sadly, his politics have followed his individualistic and unprincipled exit from the “British socialist left” SLP and his drift into the “small but perfectly formed” Socialist Democracy group, which can only offer him the vista of localised “nuts and bolts” politics.

The problem we face is the political sectionalism that cripples the workers as a class. We need to create one united class party in opposition to the existing state. This is the only way to achieve socialism and this must be the project of the socialist alliances. Unity must be forged at all levels - crucially at the all-Britain level - in order to win the political clarification necessary for success.

John Pearson
Greater Manchester Socialist Alliance

Unthinkable

As one of the Socialist Alliance candidates for Lewisham in the local elections, I have to make a brief response to comrade Nick Long. The comrade writes: “Our performance in the May local elections has clearly demonstrated that if we are going to make a credible impact across London we need ... to draw in socialist greens and working class militants. It is significant that the first election gains for the greens were made in Hackney. An opportunity was missed, as voters were looking for a radical alternative to the corruption and croneyism of the Labour Party locally, but rejected the politics of the CPGB in Anne Murphy’s candidature in North Defoe ward.”

Such an interpretation does not hold water. The plain fact of the matter is that comrade Long himself - also in Lewisham - only got a handful of votes more than comrade Murphy. If I really wanted to, I could argue that the voters of Rushy Green ward “rejected” the politics of the Socialist Democracy Group. All the Socialist Alliance candidates in London got more or less the same percentage of the ‘protest’ vote, regardless of their political affiliation. The greens’ election results in Hackney are as “significant” - or not - as you want them to be. It is all down to the political ‘spin’ you want to put on things.

What has to be vigorously contested is the idea that the greens are somehow our ‘natural’ or ‘automatic’ allies. As comrade Murphy pointed out in the same issue of the Weekly Worker, the Green Party candidate for North Defoe, Chit Chong, is a pro-police reactionary. At the last meeting of Lewisham Socialist Alliance, a green representative unabashedly told me that the “optimum” population level for the United Kingdom was ... eight million. Any more than that posed a serious threat to “nature” - it just was not scientifically, economically and ecologically possible to sustain the current population level. So what is to be done with the other 50 million?

Surely comrade Long would agree that such views, to put it mildly, are problematic for those who consider themselves socialists? More fundamentally still, it must surely be unthinkable for the SAs, whether at a local or national level, to subordinate themselves to and chase after such reactionary political forces. Nevertheless, as comrade Murphy made clear, green groups and individuals who say they are socialists are welcome to join the SAs, but that does not mean a political non-aggression pact.

Danny Hammill
South London

Capitalism with parks

Lucky me! I’m living and working in an area where people are yearning for change. Reading Nick Long’s article on the Socialist Alliances, one could really get the impression that Hackney is just waiting for our message, a message Anne Murphy as a candidate for the CPGB/Socialist Alliances failed to deliver.

‘Anne, why did you do so badly, where there was such a ready audience?’ he seems to ask. Comrade Long’s only evidence is that two greens got elected as councillors. But the greens are not even trying to present themselves as a radical alternative. Just read their pro-small business programme. It does not mention the working class once or that it is necessary to get rid of the capitalist system. They want capitalism - only with parks.

As a member of Hackney SLP, I actively supported our candidates, distributed leaflets and canvassed. So I did talk to people. Believe me, they have lost their enthusiasm for Blair, but they are not yet “looking for a radical alternative”. In the end they voted for New Labour. It is actually quite remarkable how little the people ‘punished’ the new government.

There were a few socialist candidates standing in Hackney. Peter Morton of the SLP did best. Not because he put more into his campaign. But because there is a certain Arthur Scargill in our party. And even he got only some 200 votes. How many did you get, comrade Long?

Tina Werkmann
Hackney

SML and Kautsky

In paragraph 61 of the document ‘For a bold step forward’, Alan McCombes castigates the Socialist Party executive committee for referring to organisations that “formally adhered to a socialist programme, even a Marxist programme, but do not by any means consistently base their activity on Marxist strategy and tactics”. Alan, who clearly wants to brush aside this remark, demands concrete examples of how this relates to the current strategy and tactics of the Scottish Socialist Alliance.

As Alan McCombes and Alan Green are aware, the SSA has had at least one individual on its national council, who has also been allowed to stand as a parliamentary candidate, whose attitude to our Charter for socialist change was exactly that of Eduard Bernstein (and of dozens of others) to the Erfurt Programme. The Erfurt Programme of the German SPD was taken to be a Marxist programme by no less a revolutionary than VI Lenin himself. Those, such as Rosa Luxemburg, who observed at close quarters the SPD leaders, tried to alert the international movement that they just paid lip service to the programme. Lenin accepted the reassurance of Karl Kautsky, the so-called ‘pope of Marxism’, that Rosa was being ultra-left and impatient, and that there was no problem.

It was only when he attempted to disprove Bukharin’s 1915-16 articles claiming Marx and Engels were in favour of smashing the capitalist state (even a parliamentary republican state with universal suffrage!) that Lenin made a completely unexpected discovery. Far from being the ‘pope of Marxism’, Kautsky had all along been the anti-Marx. He had, over a period of decades, completely distorted the Marxist attitude towards the state. State and revolution was the indispensable by-product of Lenin’s research into everything Marx and Engels wrote on the subject. Not only does Alan draw a veil over this episode, and ignore the book which has been the theoretical light for all genuine Marxists since the formation of the Third International; he even refuses to address the practical activities of the party which adhered to the Erfurt Programme, a programme Alan has explicitly praised as Marxist orthodoxy (paragraph 171).              

It is embarrassing to have to inform Alan, but rather than emulate the Bolsheviks’ strategy and tactics in the 1917 Russian Revolution, the leaders of the SPD crushed the German Revolution in 1918-19, and repeatedly as it re-erupted until finally extinguished in 1923.

Alan may or may not think that ‘Trotskyists’ like him and ‘Stalinists’ like Bill Bonnar (if you dislike this term, Bill, take it up with Alan) no longer differ on crucial issues of revolutionary strategy and tactics. If so, I suggest he reads Bill’s letter on the Spanish revolution in Red (winter 1997-8). Does Alan or does he not agree with Bill that the Spanish Stalinists behaved in a thoroughly revolutionary manner? If he agrees with me that they did not, does he expect Bill to be converted to the CWI position within the next six months (maybe a year), this being what the SP EC considers a reasonable period for the transition of the SSA into a revolutionary Marxist Scottish Socialist Party?

I think we need to bring these debates out into the open despite the fact that I agree with Bill Bonnar that the SSA can not be rapidly transformed into a democratic centralist vanguard party. The model I would propose is the RSDLP. This should act as an umbrella organisation which can promote united fronts, electoral agreements and open democratic forums between the genuine anti-capitalist left. While this party cannot, in the short term, be transformed into a Leninist party, it has to permit all those who aspire to build such an organisation to work openly within it. They should be permitted full freedom to fight for their views. 

Tom Delargy
Paisley