20.05.1999

‘Disappeared’

Party notes

We invited Harpal Brar to present a session at this year’s Communist University on ‘The USSR: before and after Stalin’. Comrade Brar is on the Socialist Labour Party list for the Euro-election in London and is this country’s leading apologist for Stalin. To the extent that his politics allow, the man is coherent, well argued and relatively sophisticated.

Unfortunately, he has verbally declined the offer, as he does not think it would be “useful”. This is a pity, as many comrades found his introduction in last year’s school very useful indeed. The comrade’s defence of the contribution of Stalin prominently featured quotations from Trotsky and Isaac Deutscher, much to the discomfort of orthodox Trotskyist comrades in the audience, some of whom dismissed the whole session as “a waste of time”.

Far from it. Their uneasiness spoke volumes. Our purpose in staging the exercise last year was not so much to expose the manifest absurdities in the world view of Stalinism. That would be a little like straining to highlight the anomalies in the evidence presented to the Salem witch trials - one hardly has to be Perry Mason. In this context, I heartily recommend comrade Brar’s semi-surreal Trotskyism or Leninism? (London 1993 - £10 from the CPGB address).

In a lengthy regurgitation of the ‘evidence’ presented to the Moscow trials, comrade Brar employs the type of literary trick employed by US ‘thriller’ author Raymond Chandler. In pursuit of his dastardly plans, Yagoda for example turned to “a gang of specially trained murderers and poisoners” (p234). This shady company of hoods slip unheralded into the story in much the same way as an armed and dangerous stranger in a Chandler novel. They also perform the same essential function - to keep the fantasy moving along.

No, the point of the Brar session was to underline to our Trotskyist friends just how much common ground exists between them and those they regard as their mortal political enemies - the Stalinists.

Of course, by writing this I am in no way equating the two political tendencies historically. Stalinism has been in a position to do incomparably more harm to the international workers’ movement, to waste the lives of millions of revolutionaries the world over. Trotskyism’s struggle against the degeneration of ‘official communism’ was - despite its flawed politics - generally an honourable one.

Yet comrade Brar was not simply being mischievous in deploying (admittedly selective) Trotskyist quotes to bolster his Stalinist world view. However one characterises the USSR, it must be conceded that Trotsky’s critique shares key concepts with that of Stalinism - the inherently progressive nature of nationalisation, the existence of ‘planning’ in the Soviet Union, the gains for the proletariat embodied in the five-year plans, and so on.

The external pressure exerted by an immensely more powerful enemy moulded the contours of Trotskyism in a way that actually came to replicate in miniature the very thing it was fighting. This, combined with important distortions introduced under the direct influence of the founder of the movement, has meant that the international Trotskyist movement has been characterised from its origins by sectarianism.

The examples of bureaucratic centralist internal regimes among the Trotskyist sects are legion. It is incredible, but true, that today’s Socialist Workers Party actually has less democracy in its ranks than the 1970/80s Communist Party under the Euro opportunists. Wherever you look among the ranks of these organisations, you see crass denials of members’ democratic rights, politics treated as conspiracy, narrow-minded schisms and heresy hunts. In other words, precisely the same ugly traits that are meant to characterise a ‘Stalinist’ organisational culture.

There is even a rather uncomfortable parallel with the Soviet bureaucracy’s crude rewriting of history. Purged communists in the 1930s were systematically expunged from party records, removed from the historical picture - literally in some famous cases of forgery.

In a letter to the Weekly Worker (March 18) Ian Mahoney wrote of the pronounced reticence of our erstwhile bloc partners in the Socialist Alliance to even mention our name, instead covering us with “and others”. The Workers Power group simply chose to ignore our presence in the SA altogether, name-checking every single other organisation apart from ours.

As Ian writes, “This is outrageous behaviour for a workers’ newspaper. It is wilful misreporting, a deliberate attempt to mislead its readers”, a repulsive trick that “reveals a rather deeper political problem”.

There is a circular historical neatness to the fact that the Trotskyists are now trying to ‘disappear’ the communists, but that makes it no more principled. Of course, WP’s crude attempt to rewrite history is dwarfed by the monstrous lie machine available to Soviet state. Nevertheless, it underlines how low the culture of the British revolutionary left actually is, its offensive contempt for honesty and democracy.

For this reason - and for many others - it is a shame that comrade Brar will not be able to make it to this year’s Communist University - although I dare say there are some comrades who will be breathing a sigh of relief.

Mark Fischer
national organiser