Letters
Anti-black Afa
When Mark Fischer says that the Anti-Fascist Alliance was “bruisingly effective in winning the battle for control of the streets”, forcing the BNP to devise a new strategy by 1994, he is probably correct (‘Learning from the fascists’ Weekly Worker July 1).
What he glosses over is the level of near psychotic violence employed in order to achieve this end. As a member of Afa in the early 1990s I personally witnessed a relentlessly brutal beating dished out to more or less defenceless members of the far right during a rally at Kensington library which horrified far more than me. Repulsed, many - including female members of Class War - left the meeting clearly upset. For my part I, along with others, left the organisation, never to return.
The subsequent criminal trial collapsed amidst unexplained allegations by independent researcher Larry O’Hara of MI5 interference in the judicial process, and the ringleaders walked free.
Accompanying suspicions - particularly amongst anarchists - of some level of state involvement, there are long-term concerns of Afa being ‘institutionally anti-women and anti-gay’ made by, amongst others, Workers Power. Also aggression towards the left generally is more or less routine. Most recently Afa members in London are accused of seriously intimidating the organisers of a benefit for a Czechoslovakian anti-fascist. As I understand it, one member of the audience (who happens apparently to be of Asian appearance) was actually physically assaulted.
Now I see, judging from Mark Fischer’s review, Afa intend adding ‘anti-black’ to their already formidably chauvinist CV.
Widely regarded as a pariah on the left, any genuinely leftwing organisation such as yourselves should be very wary of getting involved with these people on this or any other issue.
‘Learning from the fascists’? All too well, in my experience.
Malcolm Keene
Hackney
Face facts
As a regular reader of both Afa’s Fighting Talk and the Weekly Worker, I welcome the efforts of Mark Fischer to address what are important issues for the left around the question of race. However, Mark Fischer and the CPGB let themselves down on at least two points.
Firstly, just as Mark Fischer gets into the ‘juicy bits’ - ie, the potentially explosive issues raised around ‘equal opportunities’ in a post-Lawrence Britain - he appears to bottle it and signs off with a bland “What is needed is a movement of anti-racism from below, a working class-led fight for unity”.
While Mark Fischer is quite correct, it is surely not too unfair to ask, how? Tackling this crucial question was surely not avoided because of lack of space, given that over two pages were devoted to the navel-gazing of ‘Winning the peasantry’ and ‘Trotsky versus the left Trotskyists’. Instead I fear it had more to do with the orthodox left’s inability to bridge the widening gap between theory and practice.
Secondly, despite the fact that he suggests the left should “learn a lesson from the fascists”, Mark Fischer still feels the need to reassure his readers that the BNP is a “motley crew”. The facts, however, paint an uncomfortable picture for the left and our ‘own motley crews’.
Despite the UKIP taking 6.96% of the reactionary vote, despite the Daily Mirror’s ‘Tyndall and the bomber’ front page a few weeks before the election, and despite not being able to hold a single major public event in years, the BNP still gained 102,647 Euro votes to the SLP’s 86,749. Take away Scotland and Wales, where the BNP did not stand, and the difference grows to 25,837, with the BNP finishing above the SLP in seven out of the nine English regions.
With so many on the left talking of Scargill’s party being the ‘last-chance saloon’ a couple of years ago, it is time to face up to the facts and discuss how we move forward, before someone calls time and shuts the bar for good.
Colin Pearce
North London
Slave mentality
Alan McArthur’s defence of the AWL‘s ‘transitional’ approach to their recent election campaign is a beautiful example of everything that is wrong with the ‘transitional method’ (Letters Weekly Worker July 15).
His division of revolutionaries’ tasks into “two fundamental jobs” is a telling beginning. He argues that, while of course the AWL wants to make revolutionary propaganda by selling their literature and recruiting to the AWL, they “also need a policy for the whole class and movement, a programme of demands around which to organise activity”. The trouble is, this time round at least, their “policy for the whole class” was reformist and they kept their revolutionary propaganda off the election address. The working class as a mass are fed economism, while revolutionary ideas are kept for internal consumption.
Alan says revolutionary demands are “abstract”. Why? Doesn’t the working class need revolutionary ideas in Blair’s Britain in order to liberate itself? How are demands for a minimum wage of £5 or an injection of cash for the health service implicitly “demands to take our class from where we are towards where we want to be”? How does our class know where it wants to be?
The AWL appears to think that by telling people they need better services the transitional process will begin. The working class will - without even realising it - begin the mystical transitional journey. They don’t know where they are going, but luckily the AWL does. How could they know? - you don’t even use the word ‘socialism’ in your election material. You’ve kept that safely up your sleeve for later. All will be revealed when the AWL thinks the class is ready.
Alan informs us that the “working class will make socialism, not a handful of revolutionaries”. But you are the ones treating the class as wage slaves who can’t be told the truth just yet. You hide your political beliefs behind reformism when you stand in front of them in elections. It is you that behave as auto-sectarians.
Anne Murphy
London
Balance sheet
In the last issue of Workers Power, comrade Dave Stockton published a full-page article on ‘Ten years of the LRCI’. I was hoping in vain to find some self-criticisms, or reports of WP’s interventions in strikes and union/labour organisations or about its theoretical and programmatic changes and achievements.
However, the article concentrated on repeatedly attacking their former Bolivian, New Zealand and Peruvian sections who were guilty of “sectarian” and “Stalinophile” positions. It presented José Villa as the great villain who was the cause of so much trouble within the League for a revolutionary Communist International for many years. His name was mentioned more times than all the others put together!
However, the article did not explain any of the dissidents’ positions. The fact that a balance sheet of an entire international tendency is based on this kind of report shows one of three possibilities: that it was not true when the LRCI claimed in previous years that its splits were not significant; that the LRCI’s leadership is obsessed with the LCMRCI and its criticisms which they are incapable of answering in a real political way; or that the LRCI is not an organisation that has had any serious contributions to make in the workers’ movement.
If the LRCI wants to continue to claim that it is an anti-Stalinist and democratic-centralist organisation, I demand it enters into a public discussion with me and the LCMRCI. They should give over a page in their paper and on their website for our reply, and we could do the same in our publications. We are willing to have a public debate in any place they choose. We should discuss the balance sheet of the same international organisation that we founded and the difference between our two currents.
While we were inside the LRCI we were not allowed to have our international tendency and, when we declared it, all of us were sanctioned, suspended or expelled. We had no right of appeal. The LRCI forbade their members to discuss with us. The LRCI leaders should now show that they are not bureaucratic cowards, afraid of open debate.
José Villa
LCMRCI
Louder and shriller
In the Weekly Worker (July 1) I showed that the political method of economism and that of revolutionary democracy were dialectical opposites.
This was the basic thesis of Lenin set out in What is to be done? Lenin urged revolutionaries “to be ahead of all in raising, accentuating, and solving every general democratic question” (VI Lenin Selected Works Vol 1, p156).
As an international trend, revolutionary (social) democracy had a clear attitude to bourgeois democratic demands and rights, despite the fact that in 1902 there was no bourgeois democracy in Russia. In bourgeois democratic countries the theory of economism produces practical politics that was and is at best democratic reformist and at worst conservative.
In explaining this, I seemed to imply that (Russian) economists had a conservative or reformist attitude to extending existing bourgeois democracy! Obviously there was no existing bourgeois democracy in 1902 in Russia. Either the word “existing” should have been deleted or it should have been made clear that I was referring to economism as it is manifest in bourgeois democratic countries like the United Kingdom.
Tom Delargy (Weekly Worker July 8) was quick to point out that bourgeois democracy did not exist in Russia in 1902. Most people, including myself, are aware of that, but thanks to Tom for pointing it out in his usual polite and comradely fashion, so that I can make this corrective. It has to be said that this changes nothing of substance. If this is the best he can come up with it shows how weak his arguments have become. He is reduced to repeating ad nausiam the mantra ‘Kautskyist’, ‘Kautskyist’, ‘Kautskyist’, despite the fact that he has no facts to back it up. In fact as the debate continues and my opponents’ arguments get weaker, so the mantra becomes louder and ever shriller.
Tom Delargy does have one argument left. He notes that I refer to economists having “a wrong attitude to democracy in general and bourgeois democracy in particular”. Tom is very excited by this, because he thinks at last he has got some concrete proof of Kautskyism. After all he has not produced any concrete evidence so far, and has been reduced to the old Stalinist trick of inventing ideas which he then attributes to me.
So what is “democracy in general”? In the statement above, it is used as a collective term for bourgeois and proletarian democracy. Hence my statement means that economists have a wrong attitude to both bourgeois and proletarian democracy, but I wish to emphasise that it is wrong about bourgeois democracy in particular. There is nothing wrong with this argument, and there is nothing Kautskyist about it either.
Of course at a certain level of generality some democratic rights span both forms of democracy - the right to vote, the right to strike, freedom of expression, free speech and the right of nations to self-determination. In general, we support the right to vote under bourgeois democracy and under proletarian democracy. However, the right to vote in parliamentary elections applies only to bourgeois democracy. It is not a right which a soviet or workers’ republic recognises.
What about the right of nations to self-determination? This is often called a bourgeois democratic demand. Is it a right recognised by bourgeois democracy alone? In my view the right of nations to self-determination is a general democratic demand, applicable to both forms of class rule. It would be implemented by a workers’ republic, whereas the bourgeoisie only recognise it occasionally - and then hedged in by various restrictions.
By way of contrast Kautsky uses the concept of “pure democracy” “mendaciously”, because he wants to argue that bourgeois democracy is superior to proletarian democracy. “Pure democracy” is set against the “dictatorship” of the working class. In reply Lenin says that “proletarian democracy is a million times more democratic than any bourgeois democracy. Soviet power is a million times more democratic than the most democratic bourgeois republic” (from the Proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky). All revolutionary democratic communists agree with Lenin’s statement in riposte to Kautsky. The RDG and the CPGB have stated so “a million times”. But since left Trotskyists are so determined to prove their false and entirely bogus thesis that we are Kautskyists they are either blind and deaf or thoroughly dishonest.
Kautsky was arguing for bourgeois democracy to replace workers’ democracy. He was for the bourgeois Constituent Assembly to replace or subordinate the soviets. Nobody, and certainly not myself, is arguing that non-existing British soviets should hand over power to a constituent assembly. We are arguing that a democratic republic should replace the constitutional monarchy. This political act should be carried out by the revolutionary democratic working class and not the counterrevolutionary and royalist bourgeoisie. Our opponents are shouting about ‘Kautskyism’ as a smokescreen to conceal the fact that they want or expect the royalist bourgeoisie to do the republican biz.
I have always made clear that I fully endorse Lenin’s exposure of the hypocrisy of Kautsky. I have never criticised the Bolsheviks’ decision to close the Constituent Assembly in 1918, as Phil Sharpe has done. I would appreciate it if Tom Delargy would desist in his practice of telling lies and slandering me as a Kautskyist for no other reason than the fact that I have argued consistently that abolishing the monarchy is in the interests of the working class, and that a democratic republic is in general more democratic than a constitutional monarchy. This basic Marxist thesis has been endorsed by the entire history of Marxism (see for example Lenin’s State and revolution) but not by anarchism and ultra-leftism, which are violently opposed to it.
Dave Craig
London
Stronger ‘ism’
I was mildly bemused by the actions of the IBT’s Gary Henson at my last National Union of Journalists branch meeting. The meeting, dominated as usual by the Socialist Workers Party, was a fairly run-of-the-mill affair - a workshop on Fairness at Work legislation followed by two motions.
The second motion was for the branch to support the September ‘lobby’ of the Labour Party conference: a motion I supported though wished to amend. I moved that two clauses be deleted which I felt would remove the most Labourite aspects of the motion. One clause was: “The only way to achieve the things millions voted for in 1997 is to build a mass campaign, led by the trade unions, and pressure New Labour to deliver.”
As I needed a seconder, I thought it likely that comrade Henson would support me, knowing his organisation’s purported anti-Labourite politics. Alas, I was disappointed and needed to rely upon one of the sacked West African journalists to support me. As I expected, I lost the vote, with the SWP and other auto-Labourites opposing. Unfortunately, comrade Henson’s anti-CPGBism seems stronger than his anti-Labourism and he couldn’t bring himself to vote with me.
Marcus Larsen
South London
EPSR guru
Opportunities for serious debate about the crisis of capitalist society and the struggle for a socialist alternative have never looked better as increasing sections of the fake ‘left’ fall apart in turmoil.
The EPSR support is itself experiencing the same surge of doubt and new thinking, but cannot wait to drive home the advantages of such conflict, which fit exactly into the EPSR’s long-standing conviction that a revolutionary ferment of discussion - about everything - will have to take place before the next serious great phase of anti-imperialist class war begins to make organised progress.
The fake ‘left’ 57 varieties are of course pushed into controversial discussion along with the rest of society, but disruption, collapse and closure are the noticeable pattern in this area, predictably because they have either never seriously entertained divisive polemics before, or else have harboured so much unthought-out political rubbish (as a result of not having really conflicting debate) that the new mood of inquiry and challenge into everything is totally demolishing their shoddy sectarian philosophical foundations to start with.
At the time of the astonishing CPSU self-liquidation and dismantling of the Soviet workers’ state in 1990, the EPSR explained - as a sideshow on the main event - the strange paradox that the Trotskyite 57 varieties of anti-communism would eventually be plunged into as much chaos by the disintegration of the USSR as all the revisionist CP groups around the world would be.
So it has proved, and the paralysing doubt crippling the Trot groups now arises because these crucial unresolved questions of proletarian dictatorship are creeping back onto the agenda as the crisis of free-market economics and of all capitalist society relentlessly deepens, and as the achievements of the Soviet workers’ state look more and more to be the only direction forwards.
The necessary combination with party-building limps along everywhere because post-Soviet theoretical chaos cannot even get a movement onto square one. It is pure cynicism, presumably born of getting nowhere, that sneers (Letters Weekly Worker July 15) that the theoretical workshop that the EPSR has been running on the SLP’s wretched failings is due to the editor’s “fit of pique after his shabby treatment by Scargill”.
The opportunity to remain vice-president of the SLP was there throughout and was urged by a surprising variety of different quarters (including a Weekly Worker representative who suggested, “Just withdraw your resignation offer” when Scargill’s ludicrous ‘disciplinary procedure’ first got stuck in the mud. At different stages of this whole farce, this advice took other forms, such as “Just tone it down for a while”, and even “Just pay your dues”, when Scargill’s hatred of theoretical struggle reached that degenerate level of pathetic back-stabbing.
But this problem facing the workers’ movement has nothing whatever to do with being or not being vice-president of the SLP. It remains exactly the same problem which the EPSR set out to grapple with when it was founded 20 years ago - the need to build and clarify the fight for revolutionary theory by the working class internationally before the fight for socialism can take off again.
Remaining vice-president of the SLP was precisely what Scargill was offering, not taking away. ‘Stay as vice-president, but either close down the EPSR or avoid mentioning the SLP’ was the deal.
And the response was immediate: ‘No, you can have your vice-presidential position back. What is vitally needed for the SLP and the working class is a full discussion about the role for revolutionary theory and polemic in the building of a successful party and the successful building of a socialist state’. Scargill’s answer was just to step up his dirty expulsion racket.
Cynicism about a non-existent “EPSR guru” is making the same philistine mistake as Scargill’s nonsense.
After Scargill’s assassination attempt on the EPSR, no one need be in any doubt about the ability of ideas to have a decisive impact. Stalinist philistinism has had the last laugh inside the SLP, but it is welcome to it. The collective fight for revolutionary theory is the decisive battle, and as long as that fight is kept going, the ultimate struggle to build a triumphant mass new Bolshevik party is guaranteed success.
Royston Bull
Stockport
Left templates
The debate about the protest in the City (June 18) grows apace. Was it an orgy of lumpen behaviour or an incipiently revolutionary protest against the system? From my distant perspective, I would say it was both.
Much though they would like to, none of the left groups are really serving as a focus for protest against the system, and they seem a million miles from giving direction to the spontaneous outbursts that inevitably break out. And many people, especially at this point in history, react at the individual level.
Crudely class struggle behaviour has been present in many places and on many occasions in history, sometime intermingled with impulses towards drunkenness, bloodlust, looting and so on. Russia and Ukraine in 1917 provide examples. With the breakdown of tsarism, peasants, often drunk, moved against landowners in many places, frequently amid scenes of bloodshed. Landowners, and those associated with them and with authority, such as village policemen, would be killed with a variety of farming implements and their houses burnt down. Sometimes their families would be killed too. The outbreak of peasant anger would sometimes manifest itself in additional ways, say, with anti-Jewish pogroms.
This kind of thing expressed long-standing resentments - some class-based, some not - as well as the purely destructive impulses of individuals. It had little or nothing to do with the agitation of political groups. Yet it played its part in the destruction of the tsarist order.
The Russian civil war also saw a lot of behaviour that was both crudely class-conscious and highly brutal. A good description of the atmosphere of the period can be found in the novel by Isaak Babel, Red Cavalry. Babel, a Jew, joined a Red Army cavalry unit and took part in the civil war and the Soviet-Polish war of 1920. He describes the brutality of the war and the casual violence practised by both reds and whites. Babel later died under arrest during the Stalinist period. He does not depict red cavalrymen as civilised proponents of Hegelian dialectic, but, to hear much of the contemporary left talk and write, you would think that they were, rather than vodka-swilling illiterates, whose wantonly destructive impulses were only just about held in check by their commanders.
The class struggle takes forms that are out of place in the editorial offices of leftwing newspapers in Britain. It may not fit the templates laid down by small leftwing groups. We should understand that that is the case.
James Robertson
Linlithgow