08.04.1999

Sad but true

Around the left

We appear to have upset the Spartacist League/Britain. How do I know this? Well, the latest issue of Workers Hammer (March-April) contains an article entitled, ‘CPGB: anti-communist pimps for the racist British state’. A bit of a give-away. There are other clues. In the same issue we are described as “charlatans”, “Labourite”, “Stalinist”, “slimy” - and we are also accused of speaking “horseshit” and “peddling the filthy lies” of the British ruling class. What has the CPGB done to deserve such opprobrium?

Our heinous crime - if that is what it is - lies in the fact that we have refused to genuflect before the report of Sir William Macpherson into the murder of Stephen Lawrence and its definition of so-called “institutionalised racism”. It seems that the politically innocent SL/B is outraged by our lack of deference to liberal/official anti-racism and political correctness. Of course, in this respect, we understand the source of SL/B’s fury. No problem. You do not have to be Albert Einstein or VI Lenin to work it out. The SL/B, for all its revolutionary hell-fire and leftist huff-and-puff, believes in and is a slave to the same dogmatic prejudice as the rest of the economistic left. That is, the SL/B is as convinced as the Socialist Workers Party and the Socialist Party that capitalism and hence the whole apparatus of the British and every other capitalist state is inherently racist.

According to Workers Hammer, it is an “elemental truth that the capitalist state is necessarily racist” - presumably including ANC-governed South Africa. This mindless dogma tells the SL/B that when the bourgeoisie talks in the language of anti-racism - or even uses its own state to put out anti-racist propaganda - it must be engaging in some elaborate deception. It is utterly beyond the Sparts’ comprehension that the bourgeoisie is capable of using an expropriated ideology - that of anti-racism, for example - to divide the working class.

Here is the simple moralistic faith of the SL/B - untouched by science or the need for empirical evidence. Something it shares with many other groups on the left. Sad but true. And, as its polemics against the CPGB and the Weekly Worker reveal, in the name of a revolutionary communist ideology the SL/B is quite prepared to defend and reproduce the most shallow anti-racist platitudes of the bourgeoisie and its tame media.

According to the wisdom of Workers Hammer, the CPGB has “bought into the liberal bourgeois hypocrisy about the ‘anti-racism’ of the status quo and the Labour government’s illusions about a ‘new era’ in race relations”. This presumably explains why the CPGB has responded to “the Lawrence inquiry’s exposé of rampant police racism with a strident campaign that the police and the British state are anti-racist” (SL/B’s emphasis). Even worse, the CPGB

“pontificate that, under Labour, the British ruling class are integrating blacks and Asians into British society ... We’d like to see them explain that to an audience of the blacks and Asian descendants of immigrant workers who daily face the brutality of the capitalists’ cops and their fascist auxiliaries.”

Our reply to this is quite straightforward. It may or may not be true that New Labour has “illusions” about a new anti-racist dawn in Britain - presumably that is what our friends mean by “a ‘new era’ in race relations”. Unforeseen and unpredictable circumstances could possibly ignite racist sentiments on a mass scale among some sections of the working class. After all, just take a look at the putrid local press in places like Dover. A near constant stream of muck-raking against asylum-seekers, which often goes beyond anti-outsider chauvinism.

However, this in no way occludes the fact that the official ideology of the British state is now anti-racist to the core. More to the point, Tony Blair and the British state is rapidly developing an inclusive national chauvinistic ideology which incorporates blacks, Asians and whites - who are then supposed to approach the bourgeois state as rival ethnic supplicants. This is why we make, as Workers Hammer puts it, the “astounding claim that the capitalist state is now anti-racist”. Because it is so obviously true. Why be afraid of the truth, members of the SL/B?

It is also self-evident that this corrosively anti-working class anti-racist ideology has gained almost complete hegemony over official society - and naturally the bourgeoisie wants its own ideology to gain mastery over the working class. Not that this worries or even occurs to the SL/B, seeing how it has “bought into” the left myth that the only ideological weapon open to the bourgeoisie is racism. Anti-racism, we have to believe, is the sole preserve of the pristine and sanctimonious left - if you believe Workers Hammer, Socialist Worker, The Socialist, Socialist Outlook, etc.

But this is twaddle. A pathetic self-delusion the left clings to for ideological comfort in a hostile anti-communist world. Blair rode to power partly thanks to the ‘anti-racist’ vote of blacks and Asians. Yet you would have to be slightly out of your mind to think that at this present political-social conjuncture, blacks and Asians - any more than whites - are moving to the left or towards communist conclusions. Bourgeois ideology is dominant. Amongst all sections of society.

So any rational observer should be able to conclude that it is very silly for the anonymous author of Workers Hammer to write that “the CPGB openly defends the racist state” and is an “outfit who are to the right of the Macpherson report and give anti-racist credentials to the racist capitalist class”.

We are not worried by the SL/B’s insults. In fact, we take it as a sort of back-handed, and very cack-handed, compliment. The CPGB does not defend or give any “credentials” to the bourgeoisie. We are for the revolutionary democratic overthrow - or smashing - of the bourgeois state. However, as Workers Hammer has noticed, unlike the rest of the left our response to the Lawrence inquiry was not to attempt to out-Macpherson Macpherson - ie, go onto politically correct overdrive. From day one we pointed to the dangers of uncritically accepting the report and its definition of so-called “institutionalised racism”. Why? Because Macpherson and co want the working class to bow before the bourgeois state’s ‘benign’ anti-racism. The left’s ‘Macphersonism’ robs the working class of an independent political voice. Astoundingly, we do not think this is a good or progressive idea.

It is hardly surprising that this is all way above the head of the politically unsophisticated SL/B. As an organisation it has been accused by its own international leadership of “malign neglect” of its victimised members (see ‘Party notes’, p2). It is crystal clear that the SL/B is also guilty of malign neglect when it comes to theory.

But even the SL/B should be aware of the political axiom that if you are in a hole then stop digging. Yet Workers Hammer continues furiously in best Stakhanovite style, writing:

“The CPGB shares a fundamental premise with the Labourite left whom they polemicise against, which is that racism can be addressed within the framework of the capitalist state. The SWP and SP argue that by pressuring the Labour government to reform the cops, the state can become less racist, while the CPGB maintains that the state is already anti-racist. All of them rule out mobilising the proletariat behind a revolutionary programme and party to smash racist and fascist terror, which is a necessary part of the programme for socialist revolution. But this requires mobilising the working masses against the existing Labourite misleadership, a perspective these organisations necessarily reject because they capitulate to Labourism and the bourgeois state” (original emphasis).

A wealth of misinformation. You could quite easily fill up an entire edition of the Weekly Worker just by chronicling the inaccuracies, distortions and lies generated by a single issue of Workers Hammer. The CPGB, in its draft (revolutionary) minimum programme, in countless articles and in all its publications, in its election material, etc, has constantly made the propaganda call for workers’ militias. And for doing so we have been repeatedly attacked by the auto-Labourite Trotskyite left. Instead they offer up their dismal economistic shopping list - always proudly announcing this to be evidence of the vastly superior method of the ‘transitional programme’. Yes, SL/B members, the SP, Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, Socialist Outlook, etc do indeed “capitulate to Labourism and the bourgeois state”. Their ‘critical support’ for the Macpherson report amply demonstrates this ... and it seems that the SL/B, to put it mildly, also has an uneasy and ambiguous relationship with Sir William Macpherson and his liberal-reactionary definition of “institutionalised racism”.

Frankly, when it comes to polemics, the SL/B favours the kangaroo court approach - with the faceless hacks of Workers Hammer doubling up as amateur Vyshinskys. The CPGB must be found guilty of being slimy, Labourite pimps for the “racist” British state. In its endeavours to prove its ‘case’, the SL/B polemics resort to comical clumsiness, seasoned with extreme cynicism.

In true Spart style, the CPGB is accused of “filthy lawyering” for Le Pen. On what basis is this charge made? Here it is:

“As for Le Pen’s ‘opinion’ that the holocaust was a ‘detail’ of World War II, the CPGB actually concurs: ‘In one sense the mass murder of six million Jews is a “detail” of the carnage which costs the lives of 50 million people’ (Weekly Worker October 29 1998) ... To justify their outrageous stance, the slimy CPGB cites as ‘evidence’ the fact that the holocaust is not what the imperialists fought World War II over: ‘Although the death camps were obviously of major significance, World War II was not fought over the Nazi’s policy of exterminating Jews. It was primarily fought over the relative position of Germany in a world imperialist struggle’” (original emphasis).

Is the SL/B suggesting that the democratic imperialist powers who fought Nazi Germany in World War II did it for noble anti-Nazi sentiments? Perhaps the SL/B have “bought into” the anti-fascist propaganda surrounding World War II? No, of course not. As Workers Hammer says:

“World War II was inter-imperialist carnage fought to redivide the booty of capitalist profits. Revolutionaries were for the defeat not only of fascist Germany but of all the blood-drenched imperialist ‘democracies’, including Britain, through proletarian revolution” (original emphasis).

This is of course exactly the position of the CPGB/Weekly Worker. Not that Workers Hammer can admit this to its deliberately and criminally misinformed membership. But it gets worse. The paper also takes us to task for pointing out that

“it is seldom possible to destroy an argument by suppressing it. Only when it is brought into the light of day through mass discussion can the argument be shown to be fallacious.”

Workers Hammer bellows: “The question of fascism has nothing whatsoever to do with ‘free speech’ and democratic ‘rights’.” When the bourgeoisie resorts to counterrevolutionary fascism it will attempt to win over large sections of the population, including millions of workers, using all kinds of false arguments based on widely held prejudices. This was certainly the case with Nazi Germany. Does the SL/B really believe that communists should not try to expose wrong ideas if they happen to be propagated by fascists? Apparently it does. Just as it appears to support the German bourgeoisie’s ban on disputing the six-million holocaust figure - the original “argument” we saw no harm in airing.

Everybody in the workers’ movement knows who and what the SL/B are. They are renowned for falsifying their opponents’ positions in order to protect their own followers from alternative ideas. Despite that, it would be edifying if the SL/B could somehow, god knows how, muster up a serious reply.

Don Preston