Letters
Ineffective left
I must say I was somewhat surprised by John Pearson’s letter (‘Post-Fordist’ Weekly Worker May 13), which seems rather misdirected or points to some, as yet to be elucidated, criticism of the Weekly Worker’s developing critique on proletarian versus bourgeois anti-racism.
Calling Eddie Ford a “left-basher” points not to the strength of comrade Pearson’s position, but weakness. As far as I am aware, it is not only the position of comrade Ford, but also of the CPGB, that there can be no effective opposition to bourgeois hegemony by the left as it is presently constituted. I consider this ABC. Hence the importance we place on revolutionary rapprochement. Open ideological struggle is precisely intended to reconstitute the revolutionary left - it is not to cuddle up while things are bad. Comrade Pearson knows this as well as anyone else.
Far from comrade Ford adopting some ‘humanist pure criticism’, à la RCP-Living Marxism-LM, I believe that he holds to our collective project, that the working class is central to the liberation of humanity. LM has jettisoned the working class as useless to their petty bourgeois, individualist, libertarian mission.
Let us look at his concluding sentence in context:
“Until the left even starts to grapple with the political-ideological realities of Britain and high politics, it is doomed to impotency - shouting anti-racist slogans from the sidelines, slogans which the ruling class are only too happy to incorporate into their own vision of an impeccably anti-racist and inclusive bourgeois Britain. This dovetailing makes it most unlikely that any effective opposition to Blairite ideology will come from the revolutionary left as it is presently constituted” (Weekly Worker May 6).
Our ongoing critique of bourgeois anti-racism seems to be the real source of comrade Pearson’s attack. The left is stuck in the past and is reduced to a mere leftwing echo of the emerging anti-racism of the bourgeoisie, which is diametrically opposed to proletarian anti-racism. If there are differences on this, it is far better that they are developed in print and in debate without resorting to attacking the messenger.
Marcus Larsen
South London
Ill-thought
Has the head of Royston Bull being transplanted onto the body of comrade John Pearson? I say this after reading the comrade’s uncharacteristically ill-thought out comments about my “left bashing” and presumably “non-Marxist” article(s).
Slightly tiresome though it is, I feel obliged to put the comrade’s mind at rest. My article was an attempt - inadequate, I am sure - to critique the response of the left to the Colorado massacre and the London nail bombs. Instead of communist analysis we had (Pavlovian) economism and social-pacifism. More specifically, I argued that the left’s anti-racism segues almost seamlessly into the bourgeoisie’s. This poses the crucial question: bourgeois anti-racism or proletarian anti-racism?
It was in this context that I wrote: “This dovetailing makes it most unlikely that any effective opposition to Blairite ideology will come from the revolutionary left as presently constituted” (words in italics indicate the section omitted from comrade Pearson’s quote). In other words, I pointed to the danger of forces from “outside the working class” - to use comrade Pearson’s words - becoming the opposition to New Labourism if the revolutionary left fails to develop a coherent and scientific Marxist programme. The very opposite of RCP/LM-ism, which explicitly rejects the working class as an agency of human liberation. In fact, the LM-ists are anti-socialists who promulgate a libertarian individualism of the most vulgar sort.
Eddie Ford
Middlesex
Tippexed out
Comrades may have noticed that the Socialist Workers Organisation (South Africa) has disappeared from the list of the SWP’s fraternal organisations which is carried in many of its publications. This is because the SWO has parted company with the SWP. This happened some time ago, although no announcements were made by either side (in typical fashion, the SWO was simply tippexed out).
The SWP interference, which was responsible for wrecking a fragile, but promising group of revolutionary socialists organised on a national basis, resulted in the SWO being restricted to Johannesburg, where membership fell to a handful. The SWP once claimed the SWO had more than 500 members and the loud-mouthed Julie Waterson of the SWP central committee claimed they had “more than 2,000 members”.
Earlier this month, what was left of the SWO - seven comrades - joined the SACP and are campaigning for the ANC for the June 2 election.
The International Socialist Movement - the South African group expelled from the SWO in August 1994 on orders of the SWP, and publishers of Revolutionary Socialist - have issued a statement in which they say they are “saddened by what has happened”.
The statement continues:
“The collapse of any of the groups on the left is no cause for celebration. From our own experiences and through witnessing what has occurred with the SWO we have drawn some valuable, if painful lessons. The ultimate responsibility for what, overall, has been a minor tragedy for revolutionary socialism in South Africa lies with the central committee of the British SWP and its crass interference in South Africa. This central committee played an autocratic and manipulative role which was more in the traditions of Stalinism than in accord with the principles of international solidarity.
“The SWP, as much as any other group, needs to examine what happened and to learn the lessons, or it will simply continue, like so many sects in the past, to repeat its errors. The issue should not simply be buried. As Trotsky once noted, ‘The inheritance of the past is interwoven with the shoots of the future.’
“We ignore our past at our peril.”
Dick Rogerson
Cape Town
No guarantee
In reply to Sandy McBurney (Weekly Worker April 22), I did not write nor attempt to write a detailed report of the Glasgow Marxist Forum. I simply used the meeting as a device for critically explaining the three basic positions of Scottish communists, which I claimed were unionist, democrat and nationalist.
Sandy seems to be upset that I characterised his position as unionist-communist. So let me explain again my reasons for identifying Sandy’s position as unionist, which Sandy says is “outlandish” and “ludicrous”.
The union of England and Scotland is not a voluntary union. It was not formed democratically. Scotland is not a republic and therefore its people are not the sovereign authority with the right to decide for unity or secession. The Scottish people do not have a legal-constitutional right to self-determination.
All unionists argue that the Scottish people already have the right to self-determination. All they need to do is vote for it. But this is false. The absence of a legal right to self-determination is shown by the convoluted methods that must be used instead. First Scottish people must vote SNP in sufficiently large numbers. They have to align themselves with its anti-working class politics. They must hope that the British ruling class will not bribe the SNP or threaten violence, that it will simply stand aside. This is not the right to self-determination, but ‘keep your fingers crossed and hope’.
The Bolsheviks did not leave self-determination as an abstract principle. In their ‘Theses on the national question’ (VI Lenin CW Vol 19, Moscow 1977, p244) they spell it out as “the settlement of the question of such secession only on the basis of a universal, direct and equal vote of the population of the given territory by secret ballot”. Later the Bolsheviks’ central committee described self-determination as “the constitutional guarantee of an absolutely free and democratic method of deciding the question of secession” (ibid p429).
Self-determination means that the unity of Scotland and England is a voluntary union of sovereign peoples. That means a republic with the democratic constitutional means of peaceful separation. There is no “constitutional guarantee” of self-determination within the current constitution.
Scotland is a small nation tied constitutionally to a much larger nation. Without a “constitutional guarantee” there can be no meaningful political equality between the two. So when Sandy asks whether “the lack of a written constitution guaranteeing Scotland’s right to self-determination is a form of national oppression”, my answer, and that of the Bolsheviks, must be ‘yes’.
On the question of the republic, I claimed that Sandy is soft. He is a liberal republican, not a revolutionary republican. A revolutionary republican is a militant anti-monarchist who is totally intolerant of the monarchy and is prepared to advocate mass action and force to rid society of this vile abomination.
I see no reason yet to change my characterisation of Sandy as a liberal republican. But I would welcome a statement from him to clarify his position. The roots of his liberal republicanism or, if you like, more tolerant view of the monarchy lie in spontaneity. Sandy thinks the working class is conservative. We could win them to socialism, but we will never persuade them to abolish the monarchy!
Dave Craig
South London
Subordinated
According to Phil Kent (Weekly Worker May 13), the slogan, ‘Stop Nato bombing’, is a “call for action by the working class”. If that is not a demand on government, what does he have in mind - surface-to-air missiles launched off the channel ferry by a couple of militants working in the arms industry?
Apparently, the ‘CPGB’s’ call on the workers to take a stand against inhumanity is the “reason why we cannot allow Nato to hijack the slogan, ‘Stop ethnic cleansing’.” But the Nato media machine has already done so, and specifically - to mean, ‘Stop ethnic cleansing by the Yugoslav government’. That is the reason why the slogan cannot be generalised into a ‘stand against inhumanity’ at the present time. Or can we forget about such a stand when it comes to the KLA’s appointment of Agim Ceku, a planner of Croatia’s ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Serbs, as its new military commander, and still call for arming the KLA as an ally of Nato within Yugoslavia?
Phil Kent asserts that the ‘CPGB’ has not described either Iraq or Yugoslavia as imperialist states, but it doesn’t have to. By absolutising the theory of ‘revolutionary defeatism’, it makes them so.
When I argued that the principle of self-determination has to be subordinated to the principle of unconditional opposition to global imperialism, I was referring to the case of Kosovo. However, Phil Kent is right in pointing out that self-determination is part of unconditional opposition to imperialism - provided, of course, that he is referring to self-determination for Yugoslavia.
Dave Norman
London