24.09.1998

One more time

Mark Osborn of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty replies to recent articles by Don Preston

I have been putting off writing this reply. I find the whole ‘discussion’ a bit pointless. It does not seem possible to get far beyond the issue of how to argue. How are we supposed to take the following seriously?

You accuse the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (Weekly Worker, July 16) of supporting the Afghan mujahedeen. We reply (Weekly Worker July 30) that we supported the Afghan people’s rights to self-determination and demanded the withdrawal of Russian troops from Afghanistan; we did not give political support to the mujahedeen. We challenged you to quote something from our press to back your claim that we did; we say such a quote cannot be found.

Then, in Weekly Worker August 20, you - casually, in passing - repeat the claim that our tendency backed the mujahedeen. Again without any evidence to back your point up - after you had been explicitly invited to do so. What am I supposed to make of this? Is this some sort of joke? Your aim is - partly - to influence our members. But let me tell you: we’re all baffled. As one comrade said when he read it: “They expect something to become true just by repeating it over and over again?” (Perhaps your writer does not even understand the distinction we are making between support for the right of a people to fight for their self-determination, and political support for the leaders of that movement. Let me give a simple example: we supported Vietnam against the USA; we did not thereby assume political responsibility for those who were leading the fight against the USA - the Vietnamese Stalinists.)

We complain (Weekly Worker July 30) that you printed a series of slanders and lies about the politics of the AWL in your initial piece, ‘Principled minority’. In reply I said that some of your remarks are false, wide of the mark and so unpleasant that they should make you “feel dirty”. Your reply? “This from a comrade who told workers to vote for Blair’s party on May 1 1997 ... who ought to ‘feel dirty’?”

Let us think about what you have done here. To reply to the point, ‘You’re lying about us’, by responding, ‘the AWL called for a Labour vote’, is one of the most absurd things I have ever read. You are either straightforward dimwits who cannot see the need to string two thoughts together in logical sequence, or you are saying: the CPGB is licensed to lie about anyone who calls for a Labour vote. So which is it? You should either withdraw the allegation you made - specifically you alleged: the AWL’s politics are “virtually indistinguishable from mainstream bourgeois anti-Stalinism”, making us “MI5 socialists” - or attempt to justify the point itself (rather than demagogically declaim about some other matter entirely).

Your very best effort is this: Don Preston writes in Weekly Worker August 20:

“How could I claim that Socialist Organiser’s  ‘anti-Stalinism’ was virtually indistinguishable from mainstream bourgeois anti-Stalinism? For quite straightforward reasons ... [because] Socialist Organiser was organically tied to Labourism.” 

Ha! And there’s more!

“... Every issue of Socialist Organiser had an application form to join the Labour Party ... Attlee’s government has been described as a ‘workers’ government’ ...”

So, let me get this perfectly straight. Your argument is this: despite the vast quantities of material we have published, and political campaigning we have done in solidarity with the workers’ movements of the eastern bloc, despite the work we have accomplished and funds we have raised for the anti-Stalinist and anti-capitalist genuine socialists of the eastern bloc, we are “indistinguishable from mainstream anti-Stalinism”, because we are “organically [no less] tied to Labourism”.

What does ‘organic’ mean here? We have an independent revolutionary organisation. We are not tied to Labour (banned by Labour!) or Labourism politically, methodologically, by habit, discipline, rhythm or routine. We are not passive propagandists. We have organised the left to fight the bureaucracy in the Labour Party - consistently, over the last 25 years. That is why we recruited people to Labour: to help that fight. So. You avoid justifying your claim that our anti-Stalinism is bourgeois by changing the subject. You claim that the AWL is tied to Labourism, which itself remains unjustified and downright nonsensical.

You just drop previous claims without explanation. For example your article in Weekly Worker July 16 claimed we “crawled” in front of the Labour bureaucrats when our organisation was being proscribed in 1990. You said that, under pressure from the Labour right, we pretended we were not Leninists and disavowed Leninism. We replied by quoting extensively from our paper, Socialist Organiser (see Weekly Worker July 30), to show that we explicitly said we stood in the real, unadulterated tradition of Lenin and the October Revolution. Again: we provided facts to refute you. In substance you are left with the fact that we differentiated ourselves from certain toy-town Bolsheviks and kitsch Trots.

Who do you think we were talking to, and for? The ordinary Labour Party and trade union members whose often justified contempt for these groups the Labour leaders tried to use against us. Should we have quietly accepted that, when we were ourselves long-time critics of these groups? This may be hard for abstract propagandists to grasp, comrades, but we were engaged in a fight with the Labour leaders and trade union bureaucrats, trying to muster support against them. Your response to my refutation? You drop the matter without comment (Weekly Worker August 20). Do you, or do you not, accept that your claim of crawling was false? If not, why not? Facts/evidence, please.

To conclude. I think that a lot of your argument ‘techniques’ were learnt in the same school as your continual use of the word ‘Trotskyite’.

To try to get matters on a better footing. I think there are two things Don Preston is doing that it would be worth your tendency mulling over:

Your knee-jerk reactions and prejudices on the question of Stalinism, and your historically held positions on matters such as Solidarnosc, have not been re-examined in the light of your changed position on the question of the class nature of Stalinism. Your past positions need such a re-examination. At the moment the two pieces does not square up.

Secondly, I think Don Preston has just repeated some of the standard abuse about our tendency, without giving it much consideration (we are “pro-imperialist”, Zionist, Labourite, buried in the Labour Party, etc). A lot of this slander was picked up from the kitsch Trotskyist left 10 or 15 years ago. I think it’s about time you grew up.

Finally, about our campaigning work on Eastern Europe. I concentrate on this because of the issue of Stalinism itself, but also because I think the way the AWL has worked illustrates another important difference between our tendencies - and that is the issue of how revolutionary socialists relate to mass movements.

The Campaign for Solidarity with Workers in the Eastern Bloc (CSWEB) was set up at a conference on November 7 1987 - deliberately to mark the 70th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. CSWEB’s Honorary Presidents were the late Eric Heffer MP, the Russian socialist Boris Kagarlitsky and the Polish leftwinger Jozef Pinior.

Over the next four years CSWEB raised money for small anti-Stalinist, anti-capitalist socialist organisations in the eastern bloc. We raised hundreds of pounds, we took duplicators over to Poland, we organised many speaking tours and meetings in Britain, we organised pickets, petition drives and protests in their defence.

But we did more than that. We aimed to influence the British labour movement as a whole. We aimed to make solidarity not only with the real socialists of the eastern bloc, but with their emerging labour movements too. In Britain many unions - led by both right and ‘left’ - were linked to the official, so-called ‘unions’ of the eastern bloc.

These state-organised ‘unions’ were the opposite of unions. They were mechanisms for the ‘socialist’ police states to control the workers. We worked for the British labour movement, at every level, to break with these ‘unions’ and make solidarity with the independent workers’ organisations and the oppressed nationalities of the eastern bloc.

Although CSWEB was our initiative we got sponsorship from Labour rightwingers like Austin Mitchell. Robin Cook opened the first conference. The problem in Britain was complicated because the left in the unions - people like Arthur Scargill - were often the worst pro-Stalinists. Scargill went on his free trips to the conferences of the Soviet miners’ ‘union’. And by doing so he scabbed on the Russian workers. And because of that Scargill helped to discredit the NUM, the British left and the cause of real socialism.

When the Russian miners struck in 1989 they were ignored by Scargill, but they received messages of support from the scab British miners’ ‘union’, the UDM. Everything was turned on its head. Everything was screwed up by years of Stalinist propaganda which said that the jailers of the workers in Eastern Europe were socialists, and by the Stalinists and semi-Stalinists of the west who backed them up. The mess was made worse by the hypocritical verbal support of Thatcher and Reagan for all types of dissidents in the eastern bloc.

It is hardly a surprise, then, that some of the emerging workers’ movements in the eastern bloc, at the end of the 80s, were in a very general sense pro-west and ‘anti-socialist’ (their oppressors called themselves ‘socialists’).

So what should socialists say? ‘We’re not helping you until you accept our programme’? Our tendency said this would be absurd. The British left must champion the independent organisations of the workers in the eastern bloc and by doing so earn the right to a hearing. CSWEB aimed to counter the effect of people like Scargill. We had - for example - campaigned for the independent miners’ leader Vladimir Klebanov who had been imprisoned and tortured in a Soviet psychiatric hospital for campaigning for workers’ rights in the USSR. We wanted to show, to whatever extent we could, that the real socialists in the west backed the independent workers’ organisations, that we stood for workers’ liberty, east and west. If the British left had been less Stalinist, more united and less sectarian, we would have done better.

You mention Yuri Butchenko in Weekly Worker August 20 - a (not particularly leftwing) representative of the workers’ organisations which organised mass strikes in Russia at the end of the 80s. He hated Scargill - whom he rightly saw as a good friend of his ruling class. Who could blame him? He thought the UDM were better than Scargill - well, they’d sent support ...

We organised a speaker tour for Butchenko (together with Workers Power, who had joined CSWEB late, in 1990, after a big conference we organised in January 1990 in solidarity with the eastern European revolutions of late 1989). When the Stalinists in the British labour movement kicked up a fuss about Butchenko’s visit, Workers’ Power panicked, retiring early to change their Y-fronts (an endearing and entertaining feature of this particular group is their tough talk, followed by a quick exit at the first sign of trouble, shouting slogans like ‘Set up soviets’ and ‘Fight the police’ at the rest of us - as they dash off to replace their underwear).

You will find statements - the detailed truth - about this matter in Socialist Organiser nos 452/3, June 1990.

The CPGB’s idea that the left should not work with such people as Butchenko has two sides:

1. a false appraisal of Stalinism which has led you to defend so-called ‘socialism’ - in fact, police-state tyranny - against the action of the working class itself;
2. a propagandist, sect-like existence which means that you are only prepared to work with workers who are already socialists.

To end with Solidarnosc. Even if it is true (and it is radically false of the organisation of 1980-81) that Solidarnosc is what you and the kitsch Trotskyists say - rightwing, catholic, pro-capitalist - still, even then, we would defend and champion this movement - emerging from the underground, 10 million-strong, occupying the factories - against the bureaucrats of the police state. We would defend even rightwing unions - for example in America - against the use of troops to occupy their headquarters, the use of the police to beat their members, the use of the courts and prisons to jail their activists, the use of the legal system to ban their organisation and seize their funds.

So why not in Poland?