20.08.1998

Criticism of the past

Don Preston rebuffs criticisms from Mark Osborn of Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (Weekly Worker July 30)

Mark Osborn seems very upset by some of the comments made in my ‘Around the left’ column (Weekly Worker July 16). Our comrade from the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty accuses the CPGB of “shitespeak”, even “high-octane shite”, and of indulging in “blatant lying” about what the AWL believes in. Comrade Osborn also seems to feel that the offending article should make the CPGB “feel dirty”, so great were its crimes. This from a comrade who told workers to vote for Blair’s party on May 1 1997 and presumably is happy to be a member of New Labour. Who is talking “shitespeak” and who ought to “feel dirty”?

In reality, the column was doing nothing more than pointing to a few home truths about the AWL and its political past - in the shape of its not so wholesome predecessor, Socialist Organiser. It should also be apparent that my plain speaking was not motivated by some sectarian - and puerile - desire to notch up quick and easy points. Rather the article contained praise for the AWL’s internal regime and support for the Osborn-Matgamna ‘minority’. In other words the criticism was constructive and comradely.

Having said that, on some issues the AWL is open to polemical devastation. Which brings us immediately to the question of Ireland. When it comes to this issue, if no other, the AWL is up to its neck in imperialist economism. Comrade Osborn may rage with righteous indignation at the statement that the AWL is “pro-imperialist” and thinks that the “civilising influence of British imperialism provides the only hope” for Ireland. Yet the evidence for precisely such a sentiment within the AWL is legion. Look at the pro-May 22 British-Irish Agreement nonsense peddled by the AWL ‘majority’ - lambasted by none other than comrade Osborn. Just for the record, that does not mean that the CPGB believes that the AWL, and SO before it, were consciously plotting with MI5, the RUC or the SAS. It merely means that the SO/AWL’s methodology, if logically unfolded, leads it into the arms of British imperialism and counterrevolution. The AWL ‘majority’ in this respect were being perfectly consistent. As was the decision to give pro-imperialist loyalists a platform and space in Workers’ Liberty.

We can see a softness towards imperialism clearly in the SO’s 1990 platform, We stand for workers’ liberty. Comrade Osborn in his Weekly Worker article urges us to read this document. Indeed we have. In it, we are told that SO advocates “some sort of federal Ireland ... British withdrawal without such a settlement would not, we believe, mean a united Ireland, but a protestant-Irish drive to secure their self-determination against the Irish majority, sectarian civil war, and bloody and permanent repartition” (p6). In other words, SO/AWL implicitly ascribes a progressive role to British imperialism - whose sheer presence, it seems, prevents a descent into “sectarian civil war” and a general bloodbath.

If truth be told, the comrades from AWL are permanently distressed by the fact that Irish politics are not like good old British politics - ie, primarily, and normally, conducted along trade union or ‘bread and butter’ lines. Irish politics deviate from the ‘healthy’ economistic paradigm supplied by the Labour Party and the TUC. If only Ireland could be more like Great Britain. At the CPGB’s Communist University earlier this month, comrade Sean Matgamna of the AWL confessed as much, telling his audience of his hope that “normal class politics” would one day visit the Six Counties.

Naturally, if you aimed for “normal class politics”, then all those forces that seemed to impede or hinder its realisation were the problem. The defining and counterrevolutionary role of British imperialism, to put it mildly, becomes occluded. The evidence is incriminating. The AWL wishes the IRA “had never existed”. It opposes the call for the immediate withdrawal of British troops. If this is not pro-imperialism it is certainly the next best thing.

Comrade Osborn will no doubt be glad to discover that I generally agree with his assertion that the “point surely is to develop what Trotsky called the ‘third camp’: independent working class politics - in this case independent of Russian imperialism and what you refer to as the MI5 camp”. If the ‘first camp’ is defined as capitalism/imperialism and the ‘second camp’ as bureaucratic socialism (ie, anti-socialism), then I am fully in favour of comrade Osborn’s “third camp” - though of course there is no ‘third way’ between world capitalism and world communism. The 20th century has amply confirmed this.

The attitude of comrade Osborn and the AWL to the USSR in this respect is a welcome contrast to those dogma-encrusted Trotskyists who refuse to entertain the notion, as a matter of faith, that the USSR was an exploitative social formation - on the block-headed grounds that to admit to such a self-evident truth immediately catapults you into the arms of blackest counterrevolution. Or as comrade Ian Donovan, editor and chief contributor of Revolution and Truth, puts it: “For if the former Soviet states were ‘exploitative societies’, what is there to stop the CPGB from retrospectively adopting the position of most ostensibly Trotskyist centrists and left reformists in saying that it was correct to support Solidarnosc on the basis that what was involved was workers fighting against an ‘exploitative politico-socio-economic formation’?” (Weekly Worker July 23).

So how could I scandalously write that “Socialist Organiser’s ‘anti-Stalinism’ was virtually indistinguishable from mainstream bourgeois anti-communism”? For quite straightforward reasons. Comrade Osborn appears to be suffering from acute political memory-loss syndrome. Socialist Organiser was organically tied to Labourism, a form of virulent pro-imperialist anti-communism. Labour was its party - every issue of Socialist Organiser had an application form to join the Labour Party. In this spirit the 1945 Attlee government has been described as “a workers’ government” - a government which helped form Nato, broke communist-led strikes and banned May Day demonstrations.

Unsurprisingly then, SO breathed in the anti-communist oxygen which surrounded - and nourished - it. This led to the situation where SO attacked The Leninist (predecessor of the Weekly Worker) for locating the organisational hub of the Stalinite journal Straight Left in the ‘official’ CPGB. We were branded “witch hunters” for telling this truth. Guided by such a method, SO praised the loathsome rightwing Labourite Frank Chapple, leader of the former EETPU and a notorious red baiter, for “having a good line of international questions”. Not surprisingly then SO backed the medievalist mujahedeen in Afghanistan - along with Kinnock, Hattersley, etc. The PDPA-led revolution was dismissed and the counterrevolution which was to foresee the darkest reaction enthusiastically supported.

In reality, SO had a pseudo-third campist position. Due to organic ties to Labourism it was inexorably drawn to the ‘first camp’ - over and over again. SO failed to articulate and develop truly independent working class politics. Instead it tailed anti-communism - whether it be the spontaneous anti-communism of the atomised masses in the USSR and Eastern Europe or the venal, self-interested, calculated anti-communism of the labour bureaucracy. So, yes, for genuine communists the boundary lines between the ‘anti-Stalinism’ of SO and the anti-communism of the bourgeoisie was very fuzzy.

Take Poland during the 1980s. Resistance to the Soviet-sponsored regime of general Jaruzelski and to martial law was channelled into the ‘trade union’ Solidarnosc - an organisation whose world view, from top to bottom, was a reactionary mixture of Polish nationalism, catholicism and anti-semitism. Whatever we may think of Arthur Scargill’s politics, he was undoubtedly correct when he labelled Solidarnosc “anti-socialist”.

SO championed the cause of Solidarnosc, Thatcher’s and Reagan’s favourite trade union. Comrade Tom Rigby in 1988 analysed the ‘Polish experience’ in the following terms: “Though many on the left criticise Solidarnosc for being too nationalist, in an important sense they were not nationalist enough. The Solidarnosc leadership should have prepared from the very beginning for the inevitable conflict that was to come. They should have clearly stated their commitment to fight for Polish independence” (original emphasis Reform or revolution in Eastern Europe? SO pamphlet, September 1988). We have seen where Soldinarnosc’s real nationalism led an independent Poland - to capitalism and Nato.

Yet another example of SO’s “third camp” politics?

We will spare the AWL too much embarrassment by not lingering upon the ‘Yuri Butchenko’ scandal of 1990. With its former ideological and organisational bedmate, Workers Power, SO cobbled together the Campaign for Solidarity with Workers in the Eastern Bloc (CSWEB). As part of its duties, CSWEB touted organisations like Fighting Solidarity, as well as rightwing individuals like Yuri Butchenko. Butchenko insisted that his British tour should be organised with George Miller, a British representative of the pro-fascist National Workers Union. In effect, CSWEB quickly became a rolling anti-communist roadshow, and just as quickly disintegrated amongst much acrimony and bitterness (WP somehow managed to blame Scargill for the whole fiasco).

All these antics were impeccably ‘anti-Stalinist’ - but third camp politics?