Letters
Have a vision
While I am not going to quibble with a minimum wage of £285 (anything between £200-300 sounds approximately right as necessary for people to reproduce themselves in this society), I think you are considerably missing the point when you suggest it for a 35-hour week. An individual certainly cannot be fully socially involved if working more than a 20-hour week (I hope you are not suffering from the dual puritanism of the nobility of labour).
An example of the alienated society we live in is when the government - or even yourselves - talk of the need for childcare professionals to be provided for working class families, which of course is necessary when you are working so hard; when the social solution is for crèches to be formed so parents can take turns looking after one another’s children. This is an example of the money economy and is an indictment of our society, and the overworked/impoverished existence of the working class.
Likewise with students, who live one of the most alienated existences going. I don’t see why there should be this social separation in a progressive society. We should be able to work for our living and also study if we so wish. If people are that interested in fulfilling themselves in the study of things that are not part of the economic operation of society, they should not be doing it on the backs of the proletariat (and it should be quite possible to work 20 hours and study).
If we are going to have peoples’ militias to police ourselves and defend ourselves - a must for all communists/anarcho-communists - a 35-hour week is not truly practical.
£300 a week and a 20-hour week is quite possible at the moment, given the level of production in the UK or European Union (whether it is possible within a capitalist system I do not know). We should only demand the possible - otherwise we look like a bunch of Bohemian dreamers. If it is not possible for capital, it proves we need a more efficient way of organising our economics. Have a vision.
James Walsh
Class War paper group (London)
Exaggerated
In his notorious review of Donald Sassoon’s One hundred years of socialism in Red (summer 1998), Bill Bonnar attempted to enlist Antonio Gramsci as a precedent for his ‘neither revolutionary nor reformist’ - ie, centrist - strategy.
This is an unforgivable slander against a great revolutionary and Bill should withdraw it unreservedly. Anyone who has actually read Gramsci’s writings, rather than the scholastic commentaries on them by those not fit to lick his boots, and is aware of his political struggles, will know that he did more than anyone (apart from Lenin and Trotsky) to develop the strategy and tactics we need to build democratic centralist vanguard parties capable of leading our class to power.
Bill’s other heroes of centrism, the Austro-Marxists, are however exceedingly well chosen. Since Alan McCombes has been boasting to Peter Taaffe about how he converted Bill to Trotskyism, let’s look at Trotsky’s assessment of Bill’s heroes. In Terrorism and communism (New Park 1975) we find the following, less than flattering, critique:
“While the real teaching of Marx is the theoretical formula of action, of attack, of the development of revolutionary energy, and of the carrying of the class blow to its logical conclusion, the Austrian school was transformed into an academy of passivity and exclusiveness, because of a vulgar historical and conservative school, and reduced its work to explaining and justifying, not guiding and overthrowing. It lowered itself to the position of a handmaid to the current demands of parliamentarianism and opportunism, replaced dialectic by swindling sophistries and, in the end, in spite of its great play with ritual revolutionary phraseology, became transformed into the most secure buttress of the capitalist state, together with the altar and throne that rose above it ...
“What characterises Austro-Marxists is repulsion and fear in the face of revolutionary action. The Austro-Marxist is capable of displaying a perfect glut of profundity in the explanation of yesterday, and considerable daring in prophesying concerning tomorrow - but for today he never has a great thought or capacity for great action. Today for him always disappears before the wave of little opportunist worries, which later are explained as the most inevitable link between the past and the future.
“The Austro-Marxist is inexhaustible when it is a question of discovering reasons to prevent initiative and render difficult revolutionary action. Austro-Marxism is a learned and boastful theory of passivity and capitulation” (pp183-4).
First Bill praises the Stalinists in the Spanish Civil War (Red Winter 1997). Now he praises the Austro-Marxists’ theory and practice generally.
All this proves, beyond a shadow of doubt, that the rumours of Bill’s reincarnation as a Trotskyist have been greatly exaggerated. Given that Alan McCombes is now oblivious to any fundamental differences between Bill and himself, on questions of strategy and tactics, programme and organisation, is it possible that it is not Bill, but he, who has undergone the conversion?
Tom Delargy
Paisley
Cliff hanger
In last week’s paper (Weekly Worker July 9), Don Preston gave a reasonable going-over of Tony Cliff’s ludicrous defence of his theory of state capitalism. Claiming infallibility and the truth of History, Cliff says that “one cannot be sure of one’s own ideas unless the test of events confirms them” (Socialist Review July-August) and then goes on to claim that the events around the collapse of the Stalinist regimes confirms his thesis.
While comrade Preston went some way in debunking this nonsense, he left out some important issues. Fundamentally, the events of 1989-91, if anything, disprove Cliff’s thesis and fly in the face of his expectations.
In State capitalism in Russia (1988 edition), Cliff argues that ‘state capitalism’ is “the highest stage which capitalism can ever reach” (p188). And again the fusion of economics and politics in Stalin’s Russia “is characteristic of capitalism in its highest stage” (p191).
To further bolster this ‘highest stage of capitalism’ thesis, Cliff argues that it is impossible for private capitalism to ever be restored in Russia without imperialist invasion and occupation. He writes: “Before the experience of World War II, it was an understandable, if incorrect, assumption that private capitalism could be restored in Russia without its occupation by an imperialist power. But the victory of the concentrated, statified Russian economy over the German war machine silenced all talk of such a possibility” (p326). The test of events have clearly proved Cliff wrong in “denying the possibility of the internal forces [of Russia] leading to private capitalism” (p326).
If the USSR was the highest stage of capitalism, why did it collapse so ignominiously in the face of competition with a less evolved capitalism? How does Cliff explain the restoration of private capitalism overwhelmingly due to internal contradictions? All these problems are swept under the carpet.
A hack job trying to prove himself ‘right’ may massage his ego in the waning years of his life and keep the SWP ranks happy that all is well in the world, but it will not stand up to any rigorous theoretical examination.
What Cliff displays is not unique. Since the collapse of the USSR the left, of all varieties, has remained amazingly and stupidly content with its own ‘theories’ on the nature of the Soviet Union. Such religious belief, whether of a Trotskyite, Cliffite or Stalinite denomination, is an abomination of the Marxist method.
We, after all, must be the most ruthless and honest critics of our own failings, as Marx and Engels were after the defeat of the Paris Commune.
Martin Blum
South London
All or nothing
Eddie Ford foolishly describes me as “prominent” and “influential” in Socialist News and the SLP, but then characterises me as someone who sees no need for a workers’ party and political struggle (Letters, July 2). Is this you contradicting yourself or an intended sarcastic joke?
You then give credit to the SLP for its trade union work and its support for single-issue reforms, implying I cannot endorse either because of my view that a drugs legalisation campaign is a reformist diversion.
You muddle different things. Abortion, gay rights, feminism, cannabis reform, etc are all changes in bourgeois society which do not necessarily threaten the capitalist system. To believe that the best way to approach capitalism’s growing contradictions is to overthrow it by proletarian revolution is not to say that bourgeois society has ceased evolving or developing. That was Stalin’s mistake (Economic problems 1952).
But to pile energy into such social reforms is a diversion. Such reformism will go on anyway, whether people who claim to be ‘communist revolutionaries’ actively take up these causes or not. I remain openly critical of the SLP getting too diverted by single-issue social-reformist campaigning. Barbaric prejudices affecting women, ethnic minorities, gays, the disabled, etc never stop evolving under capitalism, but can never vanish because of the continuously vicious and divisive nature of that society all the time that exploitation and private enterprise remain its sole governing morality.
Wages struggles are slightly different, but not much, and it would be “economism”, as you allege, if my attitude had not been made clear a thousand times that the political programme (for party organisation of the working class to overthrow capitalism) must always be the best contribution any support can make behind workers in struggle.
Your ‘basic logic’ is flawed. To call the legalisation campaign a diversion is not remotely the same as endorsing capitalist laws banning drugs. All capitalist law is muddled by class bias and prejudiced confusion, and all of it must be dumped.
Your lecture on Leninism misfires. It is you who fail to see the importance of “splits and divisions within the ruling class”, and the EPS Review, which has explained - on Ireland, for example - how the demise of British imperialism has undermined and split the colonial bourgeois society in the Occupied Zone of Ireland, making a colossal triumph possible for the national liberation struggle - an understanding it would be important to convince the SLP of (still trying).
And your grasp of crisis is simply un-Marxist. Subjective (party) input for leading the revolution is crucial. But objective crisis conditions alone make the revolution possible. Read into your Communist manifesto just as far as page 6 about crisis: “Suddenly … momentary barbarism … famine … universal war of devastation … enforced destruction”, etc. You distort my words into a “grim and semi-apocalyptic scenario”, but their real flaw is that they pale by comparison to the original.
Royston Bull
Stockport