Letters

Prissy Marxism

After his article last week (‘Riot no answer’ Weekly Worker June 24) it’s maybe time for Alan Fox to have a rest. With good cause the CPGB have characterised this period as one of ‘special reaction’, pointing to the fragmentation of the labour movement and the barely beating heart of working class consciousness. A vital time for communists to re-evaluate and discard tired categories and deterministic modes.

And yet a week after an admission that the CPGB was “beyond London and the North West virtually non-existent” (Weekly Worker June 17), we find Alan Fox delivering a prissy Marxist sermon.

To begin by saying the J18 protest “received almost sympathetic coverage in sections of the bourgeois press” is mind-numbing enough. But to then go on and deliver just such hack “almost sympathetic coverage” make his words appear as ash. Fox says that the protesters were not only ‘alone’; they were also “disparate”. There was “vandalism”, they wore sandals, they were “declassed”. Their mood was “abandoned” and of course they were drunk. What would Alan Fox make of being called a puritanical moralising philistine?

And it’s the ‘we Marxists know best’ line - before, during and after anything, everything, anywhere. After all “assaults on symbols represent not the slightest threat to the bourgeois order”, do they? What symbols? The state? The monarchy? Money? Language? Culture? I think Alan Fox thinks that at this moment of ‘special reaction’ only being a member of the provisional (symbolic) CPGB can represent a threat because only the CPGB can become the mass Communist Party. What we have with Alan Fox is an anarchy of time, size, theory and voluntarism.

For Fox is was Thatcherite capitalism (my emphasis) that has “created a permanent or semi-permanent mass completely alienated from” the system. A group that includes “the young unemployed, the under-25s denied housing, the street-dwellers, those in receipt of care in the community, the travellers, those who reject the soulless 9-5 world”. These “constitute an embittered social stratum”. No word of the failure of Labourism, or of Marxism, or specifically of the three-year-old New Labour government for that matter. And what of that list? You could add the over-25 unemployed, single mothers, disability allowance claimants. And if this lot are the ‘drop-outs’, the lumpen driven by blood-curdling anarchist feeling of revenge and destruction, a group outside the parameters of Marxist persuasion and science, then what are we left with? - those who don’t reject the alienated world of 9-5 jobs, and the CPGB!

Either the CPGB engages, understands, tries to convert the most radical contemporary currents and learns, teaches, makes mistakes or it will die. Because what you’ve got isn’t it. How could it be?

Phil Rudge
North London

Riot on

Riot no answer? That depends on the question! If you mean riot is no answer in itself to global capitalism, OK. But who said it was? However, as a feature of resistance to the system; as a demonstration that the state and its endeavour to create a stupefying illusion of complicity can be challenged - riots, like strikes and demonstrations, are fine.

It is a pity we could not have pulled off a well-organised riot against the recent war in Serbia, but, coming as it did right alongside Blair and Cook’s self-congratulations, it could not have come at a better time.

Dave Douglass
Doncaster

Anarchism in Shrops

In your argument against anarchists you assume two fallacious points.

You make a lot of the fact that these were limited, partial actions, not involving the mass of the workers. You suggest that that is all anarchists want to see. It may have escaped your notice, but we are not in a revolutionary situation. Neither you nor we can conjure up a general strike out of thin air.

The question therefore is not in the first instance how you make a social revolution, nor even a major working class advance, but how you spread the idea of workers’ self-liberation and the consciousness of the evils of class society. In that the demo was an imaginative illustration of how (even with low numbers) an impact can be made that illustrates the evils of class society. It achieved more than any Marxist group has done for a long time.

You talk as if the only reason anarchists do not want a workers’ state is impatience to get to the end result. Certainly it may be that Bakunin was ultimatistic and the reason a lot of Marxists initially turned to anarchism at the end of the 19th century was largely a matter of impatience. But the mainstreams of anarchism, whether syndicalist or anarcho-communist, have not argued that social transformation will be instantaneous.

No. We reject the concept of the transitional workers’ state because we believe that the idea that socialism can arise from it is utopian and anti-scientific in the extreme.

Marxists - whether reformist, Leninist or ‘impossibilist’ (SPGB), intend to put a body of people, drawn certainly (predominantly) from the working class, but by definition alienated from their class origins, into power. That means they are put in charge of what they agree initially is a capitalist society.

They first insist that those members study economics, philosophy and other subjects in great detail, so that inevitably they think they know better than the workers from whom they sprang how social change should be made. They then take on a role, which Marxists concede is designed to further capitalism. No doubt, at this stage, they will be sincere in believing that what they do is in the best interests of the workers. This is why Lenin, immediately on taking power, took major industries (petrol, the railways, iron) away from workers’ control, vesting power in the state. Why he imposed one-man management on the rest of industry, drastically reducing the power of the soviets.

Once the state had power over the soviets there were people with an interest in the preservation of class divisions. Eventually this new elite forged for itself roots in the economic infrastructure, creating a new social system with new relationships to the mode of production.

Anarchists are not motivated by impatience. We just deny that the working class can ever afford to delegate power to a governmental minority, however honest and dedicated to the abolition of class society that minority may be.

Laurens Otter
Shropshire

Attack on all

On Saturday June 19 DHKC (Revolutionary People’s Liberation Front) supporters were distributing their weekly newspaper in London. They were confronted by PKK (Kurdish Workers Party) supporters and one of them snatched and stamped over the newspapers. The DHKC supporters protested and said, “What do you think you are doing? Your own martyrs are mentioned in this paper. You have no respect for your martyrs!”

The attackers said: “You are fascists, against our guerrillas”, and attacked the DHKC supporters with sticks. They defended themselves and the attackers ran away.

The next day a public meeting was held, where it was underlined that this attack was not only targeting the DHKC, but all revolutionaries, democrats and patriots.

Only cowards try to censor newspapers, thought and conscience. The fascist regime in Turkey has already banned and censored our newspaper. As far as the fascist regime is concerned, this approach makes sense. But the same approach cannot be adopted by those who call themselves revolutionaries and patriots.

Our people have the ability and conscience to separate right and wrong. DHKC do not consider those who take the side of the people as enemies. DHKC considers them friends. But we will not tolerate attitudes and actions that serve the enemy. Those who insist on such actions will get what they deserve.

Devrimci Halk Kurtulus Cephesi (DHKC), Devrimci Halk Gucleri, Revolutionary People’s Forces
Britain

Icons

Michael Farmer is concerned that Marx and Lenin have been ‘modernised’ out from the Communist Party’s website (Letters, June 24). Further, that the hammer and sickle was noticeably absent from our European election stickers. Perhaps Peter Mandelson is weaving his dark magic on ‘old communism’?

True, many left organisations ditch symbols as they slide into opportunism and liquidationism. Keen to distance themselves from an - undoubtedly - unpleasant past, they dump soiled icons. And go on to repeat many of its mistakes - usually on a lower, more miserable, level.

However, history has shown that icons are not prophylactics. Nailing Marx’s picture above the door does not keep you safe from vampires. Hammers and sickles do not protect from werewolves. And intoning the holy texts does not guarantee your place in heaven.

No, what matters is the strength of your politics. This is not to say that symbols are unimportant. But they do not have magical powers. Presumably, comrade Farmer, you have had sight of the Party’s EU elections manifesto. No hammers, no sickles, nor pictures of Marx or Lenin. Yet infused from start to finish with Marxism, with Leninism and with revolutionary politics.

Beware pigs in pokes, comrade Farmer.

Andy Hannah
South London