28.01.1999

Raging Bull

The SLP vice-president replies to Jack Conrad

Your ‘principled’ response that “communists should resolutely expose Bull’s thinking” (Weekly Worker January 21) as an alternative to the Revolutionary Democratic Group’s demand for my expulsion from the SLP, will not get far by calling me “huckster” - a ‘peddler of small wares’, ‘a petty greedy tradesman’, ‘one engaged in the advertising business’.

Your problem is that the Economic and Philosophic Science Review just keeps trouncing you with its vastly better grasp of Marxist-Leninist science, and its greater ability to make the most successful tactical use of that greater understanding. You would do better with a ‘coherent’ response, at least, but your ill-concealed emotional spleen against the ‘cut-and-paste’ EPSR (which your ‘Around the left’ columnist was once rebuked for ‘paying too much attention to’) always gets the better of you.

You correctly report my interest in political cooperation with the CPGB in 1996, but you still pretend to misunderstand the reason for the split, and you forget the role your arrogant abusiveness played in drawing harder EPSR attacks than you might have otherwise suffered.

You were just wrong about the SLP, and you remain wrong. It was not a vehicle for organised entryism, and history did not require that sort of swamp-alliance either. A regular party had to be built, and it will hopefully still happen, even if I get expelled.

It was because of falling out over the SLP (which we were all then members of) that you subsequently fabricated this nonsense about me wanting articles in the Weekly Worker in return for cash, a silly distortion about a completely separate argument entirely (over journalistic ethics as differently affecting a paid capitalist journalist compared to a voluntary socialist journalist when it came to commissioned articles - as your twisted recollection at least makes clear in spite of itself).

Your lying perversion of this record is worth mentioning only to expose your Goebbelsian ‘big lie’ method, clear also in your slanted versions of SLP history, WRP history, and how ‘splendidly’ Phil Sharpe is supposed to be doing in his polemic with the EPSR. This ill-tempered emotionalism then means you lose your aim completely.

Carelessly, you deride EPSR-think with the words: “Thus the collapse of the so-called workers’ states in eastern Europe and the USSR is explained away by the weakness of the means of oppression. The KGB should have been ‘stronger’. The Berlin Wall ‘higher’,” and imagine you have said all there is to say with this sneer. And Sharpe joins in with his own faint-hearted insincere ‘acceptance’ of the dictatorship of the proletariat by requesting one “based upon the highest forms of democracy”.

You academic philistines simply refuse to study. Expanding on Engels, Lenin explains in State and revolution that “Democracy is a state (end of chapter four) … an organisation for the systematic use of force by … one section of the population against another.” Lenin approvingly quotes Engels’ plea for a communist party “whose ultimate political aim is to overcome the whole state and consequently democracy as well”.

In The proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky, Lenin adds:

“The proletariat cannot achieve victory … without forcibly suppressing its adversaries, and that where there is ‘forcible suppression’, there is no ‘freedom’, there is of course no democracy” (original emphasis).

Lenin’s apparent contradiction, here using ‘democracy’ in its undialectical Sharpian sense, meaning ‘freedom’, only emphasises your problem. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the only true democratic state, only withers away through the successful strengthening of its dictatorship, or forcible suppression of its adversaries: ie, when world bourgeois-class influences (ie, all bourgeois ideological nonsense) have been utterly defeated in the world.

Marxism wants proletarian dictatorship based on the ‘highest forms of democracy’ to mean the most successful forms of repression against adversaries so that all forms of the state can then disappear. You want to set up forms of ‘democracy’ in its daft ‘freedom’ sense, to soften the dictatorship, ending up exactly where the philistine Gorbachev did. You spell this out with Sharpe’s dismissal of China for its “one-party, oppressive rule”, which shallow muddle Lenin answers below. But the proof is self-evident. The Chinese workers’ state lives on to fight another day. Gorbachev is history’s biggest ever joke, not just surrounded by imperialism, but wiped out by it.

In his 1975 [sic - editor] letter to Bebel, Engels adds:

“As the state is only … used … in the revolution to hold down one’s adversaries by force, it is sheer nonsense to talk of a ‘free people’s state’. So long as the proletariat … still needs the state, it does not need it in the interests of freedom, but in order to hold down its adversaries.”

And in Leftwing communism, Lenin explains that: “The mere presentation of the question ‘dictatorship of the party or dictatorship of the class; dictatorship (party) of the leaders, or dictatorship (party) of the masses’, testifies to most incredibly and hopelessly muddled thinking … Classes are led by political parties; political parties as a general rule are led by more or less stable groups composed of the most authoritative, influential, and experienced members, who are elected to the most responsible positions, and are called leaders”, and so on.

Finally, in Proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky, Lenin again stresses: “Dictatorship is rule based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws.”

Repeatedly, Marx, Engels and Lenin declared that the dictatorship of the proletariat would have to last throughout the entire period between capitalism and communism (and the withering away of the state). Due to the pattern of history, and explained a thousand times by Lenin before he died, the Soviet workers’ state would have to get on and construct the socialist order as best it could under the dictatorship of the proletariat, and not just do nothing while waiting for the completion of the world socialist revolution.

By 1990, the philistine revisionist degeneracy had become so stupid that the Gorbachev bureaucracy deliberately dismantled the dictatorship of the proletariat in the delusion of ‘faster, market-led growth’. All that was inevitably achieved was bourgeois counterrevolution - hardly surprising in a still imperialist-dominated planet.

Marxist science says the Soviet bureaucratic debacle was finally the weakening of the dictatorship of the proletariat, exactly as Marx, Engels and Lenin insisted a thousand times must never be allowed to happen. Your petty bourgeois emotionalism cannot resist misdescribing this as “the weakness of the means of oppression”, and jeers the KGB.

And it is emotive language which distorts your otherwise almost correct (surprise, surprise!) characterisation of the ‘political correctness’ problem at least. You write:

“His press carries dark warnings about homosexual cliques. Their predilections for children. Their unnatural vices and practices. But he is not out to unnecessarily persecute or discriminate. That is, if homosexuals shun campaigning, hide their sexuality and join the Scargillite crusade in the sure knowledge that capitalism will remove the sordid breeding ground for the homosexual ‘perversion’.”

I would translate: “PC and gay pride campaigning can help partially educate society away from primitive homophobic backwardness, but disastrously helps sow, under capitalism, the illusion that reformist pressure can cure all ills.” Along with feminism, black nationalism, etc, it is the last great stand by reformist ideology, rescuing a system which otherwise under modern conditions would by now be being seen as intolerably unequal, class-ridden, unstable, envy-creating, crime-disposed, dumbing-down, backwardness-breeding, sexist, chauvinist, racist, warmongering, degenerate nonsense.

The previous great ‘reformist’ pretences by bourgeois ideology rescued capitalism via the New Deal and the fascist New Order in the 1930s; and via social democracy welfare-stateism after 1945. Neither can be revived in that form. The last great wave of ‘reformism’ to steer social revolt away from revolutionary Marxism is the entire PC/single-issue ‘revolution’ of feminism, gay pride, etc, etc, etc. It is already being used as the great diversion to protect anti-communists (such as Fisc) from being exposed on matters not even connected with the single issues themselves. It will increasingly be used as the last refuge for ‘left’ anti-communist scoundrels.

But paradoxically, it is only the ‘end of capitalism’, which single issue reformist politics now usually deliberately obstructs (examine New Labour’s close embrace of PC attitudes) that can guarantee any long-term human freedom at all, including the flourishing of any and every one of the endless variety of human sexual responses. Only such a society could possibly stand a chance of recreating stability in whatever forms of family and social relationships moves onto when freed from capitalism’s impossible contradictions and psychological damage; so only then will the dubious ‘normality’ of homosexualism, with all its obvious disadvantages for any species in evolutionary terms, be able to be judged and appropriately related to.

Dismissing the potential reactionary role politically of any single-issue, ‘reformist’ lobby is very short-sighted indeed. All dying societies in history notoriously lack all-round, model-representative hero-leaders by the end. All kinds of cults and exaggerated chip-on-the-shoulder behaviour begin to be the only driving forces - the Rasputin effect, Adolf Hitler, all kinds of gurus, astrology, and holy men; worshipped entertainment stars, who then turn political; Peter Mandelson, etc, etc. But what are the unusual driving forces? What are the specialised personal connections? Is the BBC run by a secret Mafia? Is New Labour? To pretend indifference out of PC posturing just toadies to reaction. All freemasonries under capitalism are bad news.

Lastly, emotional and sexual instability and frustration are obviously an infinitely more widespread phenomenon within disintegrating capitalist society than just concerns the problems created for homosexualism, but that this is a phenomenon does not get altered just because persecution and discrimination by capitalist-society backwardness has to be ridiculed and fought against, or unjust laws defeated; or just because the gay community can bring outstanding creativity to their ‘glad to be gay’ philosophising (which objective analysis might show to be flawed with wishful thinking, as is the single-issue reformist ideology itself). The psycho-sexual damage to everyone from capitalist society is better constantly universally denounced rather than selectively declared “only a problem for homophobes masquerading as Marxists”.

You think you’ve done well with your joke, but beware its shallowness bouncing back on you eventually.

Royston Bull