Letters

WP censors

I am a member of the Swedish Socialist Party who visited the newly opened (and cancelled) website launched by Workers Power. It was supposed to be an open space for discussion, but these were the ‘democratic’ practices:

Cut, distort and delete messages that did not please the LRCI’s Stalinist leaders. I for one had that doubtful honour.
Show a complete inability to counter the simplest arguments. The overwhelming majority of the political criticisms have not been answered. When questions are raised the LRCI answers with abuse and wild accusations.

The LRCI also accused almost all the comrades that sent in critiques of being pseudonyms for the LRCI’s public enemy number one (ie, Villa). I only discovered the existence of the LCMRCI in that discussion and I do not agree with everything comrade Villa says, but you have to admit that he (and others like the Weekly Worker) has asked some intriguing questions.

In the end the LRCI erased all the messages and the entire discussion site. How can the LRCI lead the international revolution if it is so intolerant and incapable of debating on its own Internet space? How can they fight for socialist democracy with such horrendous Stalinist practices? The LRCI should be ashamed of this behaviour. In the long run it does not do any good: it just helps alienate possible comrades-to-be.

Fortunately, the LRCI is not the only revolutionary alternative available today. After this terrible experience I decided to set up an independent discussion site without censorship (http://www.delphi.com/jonesy) and I invite other comrades to join it.

Jonas Jonlund
Gothenburg

French correction

I want to make a critique of Dave Stockton’s ‘Ten Years of the LRCI’ in the last Workers Power, and also to John Stone’s response (‘Crisis around the LRCI’ Weekly Worker July 22).

I think that Stone made some wrong affirmations regarding what is happening in France. He is incorrect to say that “in France several fractions had started to split from the left of LO and the LCR”. In fact, VDT is not on the left of these organisations and the LCR’s and LO’s factions are still in their parties.

He does not represent very well what happened in the French section. He said that around a third of the French section has gone. In fact, almost half of the French members left the LRCI, including all the youth circles in Paris and Nantes. It is hard to see PO anywhere. They no longer intervene with the sans papiers, unemployed, students, and school struggles.

The French opposition was expelled not only because of differences on electoral tactics and regroupment, but also because the LCR characterised the Jospin, Blair and Schroeder governments as “bourgeois workers’ governments”. The faction said that they were bourgeois regimes.

Dave Stockton said that the best thing that happened with the LRCI after the rupture with the Latin American, New Zealand and Austrian oppositions was “the remarkable growth of our French section, recruiting young comrades and becoming the second strongest section.” He did not mention at all the expulsion of the French opposition.

Arlette
France

Uninhibited

I recently attended the Communist University in London and would like to congratulate comrades on a magnificent effort. It was refreshing to see such free and uninhibited debate. The entire left could learn a lot from the atmosphere which was free of the usual sectarian slanging matches that occur. It is only a shame that more of the far left decided not to attend. I think it would be a good idea if next year a few more groups made an effort to co-organise and promote the week.

The debate on Scargillism was particularly interesting. Whilst I personally disagree with comrade Osler’s line about a party of ‘recomposition’ being the way forward, I think both the CPGB and comrade Osler have realised that eternal sect building of the self-proclaimed vanguard party is not the way. This in itself shows tremendous progress. Socialists must have a relationship of cooperation with each other whilst also having genuine connections with social movements and, most importantly, the working class. Whilst it is not my belief that an electoral alliance of all the small left groups such as the AWL and SPEW is a way forward or that a mesh encompassing left-talking greens and sectarians is a better idea than that, I think that both show a real desire to move forward and recognise the crisis that most of the left is in.

The left needs this kind of attitude, or it will gradually fade away in magnificent self-imposed isolation.

Matthew Willgress
Peterborough

Race card

Britain, according to an extensive survey, has “the most reactionary youth in Europe”, but does not (as yet) have a political party to reflect their opinions. So Anti-Fascist Action’s strategy of addressing the issue while the far-right are ‘small’ should with hindsight be acknowledged as the major factor in Britain, almost alone in Europe these days, remaining a ‘fascist-free zone’. A reality underlined, despite the low turnout, by the staggering 11.2 million votes received by the far right across Europe in the recent Euro elections.

Physical force, or as Malcolm Keane (Letters July 22) chose to describe it, “psychotic violence” is a legitimate tactic. Those who denounce physical force deny the legitimacy of anti-fascism itself. But then, given the increasingly confident attempts in bourgeois academia to suggest a symmetry between communism and fascism, perhaps that is the idea.

Labelling “anti-black” any questioning of the efficacy or motives of the establishment’s anti-racist strategies is as crude an attempt to stymie debate as racist abuse itself. For when the Weekly Worker itself attempted to open up the question of means and ends in regard to anti-racist strategies about eighteen months ago, it too if memory serves came in for similarly strident abuse. Slander, it increasingly appears, is the weapon of choice in defence of the status quo. “Race card”? Never leave home without it.

S Bould
London

State and confusion

In his article ‘The struggle for democracy’ (Weekly Worker July 29), Danny Hamill asserts that “History presents us with a choice between revolutionary democratic communism from below and state socialism from above”.

It is a fundamental of Marxist theory that the world revolutionary process necessitates a state form which is transitional between capitalism and the higher phase. Usually referred to as socialism, a successful struggle for the democratic development of this lower phase of communism concurs with the withering away of the state, until even the resultant state of democracy is transcended by the higher phase of communism. It is in this sense that communism is much more than democratic.

Describing the state form of the lower phase of communism as ‘state socialism’, Hamill incorrectly construes that the existence of a state, in itself, constitutes “socialism from above”. In substantiation, he duly produces a list of ‘socialism from above’ which include Mao’s China, Hoxha’s Albania, Pol Pot’s Cambodia and Sung’s North Korea.

Rather oddly, Hamill tops his sampler with “Labourite state socialism”, forgetting that the Labour Party has never got beyond welfare state capitalism. More importantly however, he leaves out Lenin’s Soviet Union, transferring the responsibility for the establishment of that ‘state socialism’ to Stalin. How neat.

In the absence of proletarian revolution in the imperialist countries and in the absence of working class majorities in the socialist states, the socialism of this century has been characterised by outstanding communist leaders ruling over firstly the party and then the state. It is ‘democracy from below’ within the party of the proletariat which is needed now, not Hammill’s implied notion of dispensing with the socialist state.

Dave Norman
London