Letters

Episodic

In the Weekly Worker (July 15) comrade Phil Sharpe raised the question of the relationship between Trotsky’s revolutionary politics and bourgeois democracy. One of his points was that Trotsky did not simply defend bourgeois democracy or the democratic republic. In his writings on the struggle against fascism in Germany, Trotsky asked the question, what does the Communist Party defend? He answered that it should not defend the Weimar constitution.

This was because he believed the profound crisis of capitalism in the inter-war years in Germany was undermining parliamentary institutions or becoming incompatible with bourgeois democracy. One form of Bonapartism succeeded another, as the bourgeois republic degenerated into fascism. The parliament became a screen for counterrevolution.

What Trotsky defended was not the bourgeois democratic framework of the Weimar republic, but workers’ democracy built up within it, so that the workers could go on from defence of their gains to the socialist offensive. In Trotsky’s own words:

“The Communist Party must call for the defence of those material and moral positions which the working class has managed to win in the German state. This most directly concerns the fate of the workers’ political organisations - trade unions, newspapers, printing plants, clubs, etc” (L Trotsky The struggle against fascism in Germany New York 1987, p72).

Trotsky’s call for a united front was based on preventing the physical destruction of the of the above workers’ organisations and workers’ democracy within the Weimar republic. Trotsky ridiculed the combination programme of Hilferding. Since Hilferding had beaten up his brain in 1918 to find ways of combining soviets with the Weimar constitution without damaging the republic, Trotsky now imagined Hilferding working his brain to find ways of combining fascist barracks with the Weimar constitution.

Trotsky’s metaphor for fascism and bourgeois democracy was that the electricity wires of bourgeois democracy could not take the voltage of the tensions of capitalist crisis and decay. He had argued the same point against Kautsky in Terrorism and communism to justify the dissolution of the constituent assembly: “In reality only two forces existed: the revolutionary proletariat, led by communists, and counterrevolutionary democracy, headed by generals and admirals” (L Trotsky Terrorism and communism London 1975, p64). For Trotsky, parliamentarianism, however radical or democratic, had lost its capacity to follow the course of revolutionary consciousness.

Trotsky was clear that Marx did not put the principle of democracy above the dynamics of class struggle: “Kautsky’s ship was built for lakes and quiet harbours, not at all for the open sea, and not for periods of storms” (ibid p104). In the fight against fascism in Germany, Trotsky said the workers would only succeed if they did not settle for a democratic republic, because

“the formulas of democracy, freedom of the press, the right to unionise mean for us only incidental or episodic slogans in the independent movement of the proletariat, and not a democratic noose fastened to the neck of the proletariat” (L Trotsky The transitional programme New York 1983, p141).

Barry Biddulph
South London

Ridiculous

Anne Murphy’s letter and Peter Manson’s rant against the AWL/myself in the Weekly Worker (July 22) suggest that they haven’t quite got their heads round the question of how revolutionaries use reform demands and the concept of transitional demands.

1. Would Tony Blair’s government tax the rich to make a massive cash injection into the NHS - to use an example that seems to upset Peter particularly - because: a) Tony’s a nice bloke; b) for a laugh; or c) because the working class made them do it?

2. Would the movement that forced this concession be: a) “slightly more radical than the Liberal Democrats” (to quote Peter), and have persuaded New Labour to put people before profit by being very polite; b) have sneaked funding the welfare state in as part of the whole 70s revival thing, perhaps disguising it in an Afro wig; or c) a working class movement that had moved from the defensive to the offensive on principles - people before profit, an equal right to life and so on - that are basic building blocks of socialism, and advanced as a political, ideological and industrial force?

Revolutionaries raising reform demands and reformism are clearly not the same thing. As the 3rd Congress of the Communist International (1921) put it,

“The alternative offered by the Communist International in place of the minimum programme of the reformists and centrists is: the struggle for the concrete needs of the proletariat, for demands which in their application undermine the power of the bourgeoisies, which organise the proletariat, and which form the transition to the proletarian dictatorship, even if certain groups of the masses have not yet grasped the meaning of such proletarian dictatorship.”

Enter, in Britain in 1999, transitional demands such as defending and extending the welfare state and the fight for free trade unions. Or, in Russia in 1917, bread, peace and land. Or, in 30s America, the sliding scale of wages and hours.

Clearly, the reform demands we seek to organise the working class around need a political perspective, summed up now in the fight for a workers’ government (another transitional demand) - but the idea that an obsession with Britain’s constitution is the only “political” approach and all else is “economism” is ridiculous. The democratic demands Anne and Peter list are all very reasonable, but they are hardly the cutting edge of reviving the British working class.

Peter says I “did not dispute [his] remark that any Labour politician, left or right,” would have agreed with the demands raised on AWL election material in the recent Churchdown by-election “20 years ago”. I didn’t “dispute” it as it misses the point somewhat. Bread, peace and land wouldn’t be exactly revolutionary demands in 1990s Britain: in 1917 Russia, however, I’m sure you’ll agree, they were pretty sharp. You can’t just transpose a set of demands made in one set of circumstances to a totally different set of circumstances.

The idea that advocating a Labour vote in Britain would “logically” “oblige” one to have advocated voting for the Falangists in Franco’s Spain would be insulting if weren’t so absurd.

The answer to both the above questions is c), by the way.

Alan McArthur
Alliance for Workers’ Liberty

Bamboozled Lenin

In his otherwise good critique of Labourism (Weekly Worker July 15) Jack Conrad makes the mistake of saying that Lenin was right to define the Labour Party as a bourgeois workers’ party. I have raised the reasons why this was a mistake before with Jack, but he must have forgotten, so this is a reminder.

Lenin was misled by a member of the British Socialist Party who visited the Soviet Union and falsely told Lenin that the British Labour Party permitted organised tendencies and factions within its ranks. On the strength of this Lenin - who had no first-hand experience of the Labour Party - assumed that such an internally democratic organisation must have a revolutionary element within it, even if the politics of its leadership and most of its membership were bourgeois. There is no question that Lenin would not have given the epithet ‘bourgeois workers’ party’ to the Labour Party if he had not been misled in this way.

Lenin had been badly advised, and Sylvia Pankhurst of the Communist Party admonished those who took Lenin’s line (and who in many cases had no excuse) that a policy of entry into the Labour Party would result in British workers being diverted from revolutionary politics and being hegemonised by bureaucratic trade union reformism. This is what happened in the period up to 1926.

Thus the position of orthodox Trotskyists such as Workers Power, the United Secretariat of the Fourth International and the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty is a now archaic continuation of a line that fails to recognise the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the Labour Party’s internal regime, something that was also wrongly ignored by Trotsky himself (with more excuse, since Labour had not been in power umpteen times). The orthodox Trotskyists are still convinced that it is possible to split off a portion of the Labour Party and win it to revolutionary politics. But their understanding of their beloved label for the Labour Party - ‘bourgeois workers’ party’ - is purely sociological, with an appeal made that we should note the trade union and worker base of the party. This ignores the key philosophico-political points that need to be grasped, such as, following Lenin, the idea that you assess the class nature of a party by looking at its policies and its leadership, not by conducting a sociological analysis of its base.

On these lines Lenin would have concluded, if he had not been misled, that the Labour Party was a straight bourgeois party and indeed always had been since its inception. Jack does a disservice to the rest of his argument by endorsing the view of a bamboozled Lenin and ignoring the view of the most dedicated fighters for the fledgling CPGB.

Phil Walden
Oxford

On the ball

With regards to the article, ‘Learning from the fascists’ (Weekly Worker July 1), in an otherwise accurate review of Anti-Fascist Action’s Fighting Talk Mark Fischer makes one important error of judgement. Mark states that Afa’s journal “lacks an understanding that rightwing popularism-fascism need not come in a specifically racist form” and may adopt “anti-racist robes”.

As a reader of Fighting Talk for some years now, I can only conclude that Afa have been well aware that British fascism could adopt this particular ‘respectable’ path, converting from the ‘bootboy’ image to the ‘Euro-nationalism’ of the French and Austrian varieties, where the issue of race has been put on the back burner.

In addition the fact that Afa have picked up on the BNP’s support around the Countryside Alliance, lorry drivers and cleaning up churchyards in the West Midlands suggests that they are on the ball regarding the danger of the growth of ‘non-racial’ fascism.

Ivan Doyle
London

Crazy

Some of the new thinking exposed in the controversy at the CPGB aggregate over visions of a revolutionary Ireland have some scary implications as well as false perceptions (Weekly Worker July 15).

Firstly Jack Conrad seems to have stumbled on the old English misunderstanding of the Irish war. ‘The Protestants’ in Ireland do not constitute a nation - they are a religious choice. There are almost as many Protestants in the 26 Counties as the occupied Six, so, if we are to talk about “self-government autonomy up to and including the right of separation”, then logically it must include the Protestants of the 26 Counties. Suddenly this starts to take on tragic divisions of Pakistan vis-à-vis India, then Bangladesh, now Kashmir.

It strikes me Jack Conrad is being a bit coy - “the right of separation”? Surely, if you are going to make such a demand, it is the “right to self-determination” - which includes unity with the British imperialist state: ie, loyalism. So in effect you are now arguing for the ‘right’ of some Protestants to support imperialism and oppose republican anti-imperialism. Did not Zionism start as a political viewpoint that ‘the Jews’ not only constituted a ‘nation’, but that the nation had a land (originally any old piece of land, but then Palestine because it was god’s gift to the chosen people), which, despite its occupation by others, would now be taken over as theirs.

If we are now to call for self-determination for the Protestants, then we have to support the same for the Jews - ie, their ‘right’ to seize Palestine. This is an ill worked out and utterly reactionary formulation.

However, religions do not constitute a nationality: these are choices within a single nationality. The Protestants of the Six Counties are not “British-Irish”: they are Celtic people of identical ethnic origins to the rest of Ireland. Certainly they came as planters via Scotland, but the Scots, as all but the most ignorant will know, are from Ireland. The founders of the modern Irish republican movement were Protestants from Ulster. The divisions on the island of Ireland are political differences in relation to the British state’s occupation - loyalist versus anti-imperialist; they are not ethnic or national.

But the idea is even worse, looked at closer: if you are to support the right to self-determination up to and including separation from the rest of Ireland, won’t you then have to support those who fight for it, like you did with the KLA in Kosovo? This means support for the UFF and UDA! The last group to come to this crazy conclusion was the British and Irish Communist Organisation, who became the promoters of the two-nation theory and the ‘left’, ‘Marxist’ wing of the loyalist military.

Where the hell are you going?

Dave Douglass
Doncaster

EPSR trouble

What “reading between the lines” was forced on Steve Edwards by the articles in the Economic and Philosophic Science Review which show there is a “spot of bother in EPSR land” (Weekly Worker July 15)?

My article polemicised against “former EPSR supporters” and Roy Bull’s articles on SLP degeneracy have said : “A fully conscious stab-in-the-back hostility to EPSR theoretical pummelling emerged almost painlessly from the entire SLP coalition of Trots, Scargillites, museum-Stalinists, and the single-issue fanatics of every description - plus, sadly, a few EPSR supporters as well” (EPSR June 23).

“How long-standing EPSR supporters can supportively watch the SLP’s Scargillist backwardness stage a Mickey Mouse repeat of laughably discredited Stalinist censorship, and expulsion of ideas and theoretical analysis, is a slightly surprising phenomenon, to say the least” (EPSR June 30).

Which should be clear enough that no one has had to “read between the lines” to know that there is a dispute within EPSR circles. Indeed, articles have been invited from the few comrades who stand by the SLP as a worthwhile socialist vehicle as it is, but not a word has been submitted for publication.

Names have not been mentioned only for two reasons: personal security, for whatever that is worth, and because in polemics it is the ideas that are being tackled, not the person necessarily. The EPSR has no problem with internal conflict - just the opposite. The EPSR has a 20-year record of relishing conflict as the highest level of the struggle for Marxism-Leninism. Arguments are never hushed up; instead, all comrades are encouraged to give their opinions on all matters at any time.

This struggle for the best possible objective understanding of all political developments is the life-blood of Leninism - and its primacy in the battle to end monopoly capitalism’s rule is, of course, the very issue at the heart of the internal EPSR dispute over relations with the SLP. Or to put it another way, the question is: is the SLP now a degenerating lash-up of museum-Stalinism and class-collaborating ‘left’ trade unionism which the working class need warning off, because it will utterly stifle the fight for theory? - or is the SLP still a useful vehicle for developing socialist ideas in the working class capable of taking the working class forwards?

Reading the latest issues of the Weekly Worker, it is striking that every ‘left’ group is rife with disillusionment and disaffection over the way the membership are treated by their ‘leaders’; people are fed up with the contempt for proper inner-party discussion at a time when the members are more puzzled by political developments than ever (due to imperialist warmongering, Ireland’s peace deal, the wretchedness of the SLP, but most of all the liquidation of the USSR by the fag-end of revisionism).

The only starting point for getting any of this right - and to keep the fight permanently going for the anti-imperialist interests of the working class, all the way to fully rational communist society - is to struggle for objective truth, and draw people into that struggle by honest and open discussion.

Disputes are bound to arise with practically every major political development, but a bureaucratic stifling of debate (as opposed to the sometimes unfortunate necessity of curbing aggressive factionalism) is what killed the CPSU, and will always kill off the fight for Leninist science.

Chris Barratt
London

Rise and fall of Roy

My letter of July 15 was concerned with questioning the EPSR’s inference that the SLP has undergone qualitative degeneration as a result of Scargill’s ultimatum to Roy Bull, in conjunction with the SLP’s social chauvinistic Euro election campaign. (Letters July 22).

In the EPSR of July 7, Chris Barratt stated that the SLP campaign should be seen as “a deliberate break with any previous inclination to take on capitalist crisis”, and is thus a retreat from the SLP’s founding aim of the “abolition of capitalism”. Aside from the fact that the SLP leaders would no doubt still express this intention, is the EPSR suggesting that the Euro broadcast and leaflet was significantly different from that of its general election campaign?

I am not saying that the political evolution of the SLP was preordained, but surely its ‘little Englander’ socialism was implicit early on, and certainly well before the rise and fall of Roy Bull’s involvement. Furthermore, the method of effectively ‘voiding’ Bull’s membership was hardly a new development for the SLP, as countless examples elsewhere reveal - including the Stockport branch, which I believe Roy was involved in. I do not wish to seem cruel to animals or gurus, but sometimes the sound of cages being rattled is quite amusing.

Steve Edwards
Ludlow

Watson’s the matter

Phil Watson took nine months to reply to me (Weekly Worker July 22). The original dispute has thereby rather faded. Nevertheless there remains what comrade Watson calls “modest differences”. Apparently my insistence that “matter is primary in the last analysis” means I am “theoretically incapable of grasping” the “conundrum” whereby workers thought of the Soviet Union “as something other than a giant prison camp”.

Prison camp hyperbole aside, there is no automatic correspondence between the object (in this case the Soviet Union) and consciousness. Neither myself nor anyone else to my knowledge seriously proposes such an absurdity. On the contrary Marxists seek to accurately reflect - ie, grasp - objective reality in the mind through painstaking work on theory. The Soviet Union was, and still is, largely untheorised. The result - illusions of one sort or another. Comrade Watson’s “conundrum” vanishes into a philosophical fog.

Finally am I right to infer that comrade Watson believes that consciousness is primary in the last analysis? If so our differences are far from “modest”.

Jack Conrad
North West London