Letters

Cuba invites

Please thank the participants in the Communist University ’98 for the warmly received revolutionary greetings which they sent to the 11th conference of the International Communist Esperantist Collective (IKEK).

Our organisation aims to link communist Esperantists together and to use the international language to assist international relations in the labour movement, especially the communist parties and other class struggle parties. IKEK and its bi-monthly journal Internaciisto are open to all tendencies in the workers’ movement.

I am pleased to invite readers of the Weekly Worker to learn Esperanto, contribute articles to Internaciisto, and participate in the 12th conference of IKEK, which will be held in Cuba at the end of 1999.

Mayra Núñez Hernàndez
IKEK secretary, Cuba

CWI parasites

I read with great amusement your article on the Committee for a Workers International in Scotland split (Weekly Worker November 18).

So what’s new? We are treated to the same cliché-ridden, turgid arguments and fantasy perspectives that they have been using all throughout the history of Militant Tendency, Militant Labour, the Socialist Party, CWI, or whatever you want to call it - this ‘thing’ whose existence was once so vehemently denied.

They are the politics of parasitism. Nothing has changed. Their documents show what they really are and always have been - an organisation that finds a larger organisation, enters it and becomes parasitic upon it. They have been constantly incapable of forming an autonomous party. Having left the Labour Party in the early 90s, they have been wallowing around ever since, looking for a larger social democratic organisation in which to dissolve themselves. Finally, not being able to find one suitable, they have had to form one themselves! This attitude exposes them as left Labourite reformists, looking to hide in a social democratic organisation to avoid giving themselves a form and content of their own because they have not got one, nor do they appear to want one, because they are afraid of its revolutionary implications.

In the extracts from the documents the words ‘Marxism’ and ‘Marxist’ are thrown around in a meaningless manner, as if simply to give spice to a bland dish or to create a veneer or illusion that they are Marxist, when there is precious little Marxism in their thinking. Perhaps this is to appeal to the profoundly ignorant or politically naive, which they seem to recruit in great numbers.

The extracts go on to talk about some mysterious entity called “genuine socialism” - as if there was something called ‘false socialism’. This is one of their most irritating clichés. It is tempting to think that the ideas of the ‘CWI organisation’ may become diluted due to contact with the ordinary membership of the Scottish Socialist Party, but a moment’s reflection shows that their ideas are already diluted to be on the path that they are.

It must be remembered that the most influential and notorious hour of these people was when they were firmly entrenched within the Labour Party. Perhaps they are desperately trying to recreate those conditions. Those days are over and the tactic is no longer viable. Unfortunately they will continue with this practice - that is where they belong, because they have the same form and content as the organisations upon which they prey.

I think it would be a dark day for mankind if these people were ever to gain control of the world: everywhere they go they create a mess and someone has to pick up the tab. They can only consume; they cannot create.

Martin Pinder
Coventry

New CPGB

I cannot help but be put out by the attitude of the Conrad-loyalists. The debate about self-determination for the Six Counties Protestants shows all the symptoms of the comrades running away from principle, of hiding behind bluster and invention. The short but pointed article by comrades Downing et al (Weekly Worker November 18) restates the points made repeatedly by defenders of the right of the people of the whole of Ireland to self-determination. It places this right firmly in the context of the class struggle in Ireland.

Responding against this view, Andy Hannah (Weekly Worker November 25) replies that we should fight against the “reversal of the poles of oppression”. I would like Andy to say when exactly this reversal took place. To what extent has the nationalist and republican movement become the new oppressors? How are the endangered unionists, in their workers’ organisations or otherwise, raising the demand for the right to secede? Clearly the comrade is working to a hypothesis based on seriously flawed conjecture. Not for this alone, however, but for conformity to the leader’s three-line whip, the good comrade is willing to junk the principle of many years. Sad times in a period of reaction.

Ian Donovan, whom I have known for less time, but who is versed in the Spartacist school of ‘the equality of orange and green terror’, becomes incoherent himself in the same issue. Comrade Donovan tortures his readers, bending the phrases he uses to disguise their real meaning.

In his attack on thesis 1, Donovan manages to hide from himself the fact that self-determination is always subordinate to the class struggle, and in the Irish context this means any national aspiration of the (non-national) protestants are forfeit to the need to defeat imperialism. Thesis 2 is denounced as outrageous, because the Welsh are not English. He inconspicuously substitutes the word ‘English’ for ‘British’, and thus the Welsh are made different and in need of secession. Against thesis 3 he says it is absurd to compare the situation of white slave-owners to protestant supremacists, when indeed it is more than cogent to do so. In fact we could also include the Zionists and the supremacist Afrikaners in the same round-up of bigots.

The comrade’s imagination gets the better of him in countering thesis 4. He believes that there is a movement for self-determination among the Six Counties Protestants to be compared with that for re-unification of Germany. The man’s head is stuffed somewhere other than on his shoulders! In countering thesis 5, Donovan descends into throwing garbage in the hope that some will stick. Dishonest and disreputable tactics, comrade - grow up and face the argument: “Winning unionist workers through a programme of revolutionary socialist transformation” (Downing et al) does not equate “protestant people are irredeemably reactionary” (Donovan).

Thesis 6 is countered by restating the strained and tarnished two-nations theorem, and against thesis 7 Donovan can only wield hyper-bollocks. In theses 8-12 Downing and his comrades press some dodgey side issues on the Malvinas and the KLA, yet Donovan still fails to redeem himself.

There is a frivolous mindset at the heart of ‘New CPGB’ policy on Ireland which casts old truths away without regard for the consequences. The modernisers started with the ‘slave society’ analysis of the USSR. They continued with the removal of the Party banner from the Party paper. They exhibit sheer embarrassment when the Party anthem is sung, and would like it to be forgotten. They have removed Marx and Lenin’s images from the Party website. It has now come to promoting the revival of the Labour left - Trojan horse in the workers’ movement. Call me hidebound or sentimental if you like, comrades, but whither The Leninist?

Steve Riley
Manchester

Sheep-like

Pat Carlin (Letters, November 25) asks whether anybody at the Scottish Socialist Party ‘Socialism 2000’ event in Glasgow earlier in November questioned Progressive Unionist Party/UVF spokesman Billy Hutchinson’s claim to be a “socialist”. The answer is that some would have done so if offered the opportunity. However, the debate was arranged in such a way that there were no chances offered to the audience to put any questions to the speakers from the floor. I understand that in the workshop he spoke at afterwards, Hutchinson did receive some kind of grilling, but I personally attended John McAnulty’s workshop as I wished to hear a republican socialist viewpoint, so I cannot confirm what happened in the other place.

Perhaps two-thirds of the audience at ‘Socialism 2000’ were SSP members or sympathisers and the rest were either ordinary people or from other organisations. I was reminded of an occasion described by George Orwell when Oswald Mosley was speaking in the 1930s. Orwell said Mosley was a very good speaker and went down well with most of the working class audience. Orwell thought the audience’s ignorance made them unable to see through Mosley. However, one or two people who did heckle were roughly dealt with by British Union of Fascists stewards. Perhaps we have become even more sheep-like since the 1930s.

James Robertson
Linlithgow

New motor?

The united front between Jack Conrad’s draft theses on Livingstone and Mark Fischer’s ‘infinitely flexible’ tactics does not come over as the authors might imagine - think of Christopher Cauldwell’s infinitely variable gear stick. Instead, they potter up behind the reformist tailback hoping to cadge a lift, because the van’s battery is flat and the guard needs a light.

Also, Eddie ‘Hurricane’ Ford’s position of holding the reserved parking record for the shortest membership of the SLP - accelerating into his first SLP branch meeting shouting, “Get your Weekly Worker” - might encourage other comrades to peer through the exhaust fumes and see the old banger they are hitching a ride on.

Phil Rudge
London

Philosophy

With regard to Delphi’s criticism of Steve Green, and implicitly Roy Bull, concerning praxis humanism, dialectical materialism, scientific determinism and epistemology, Delphi’s stance is characterised by unreflective dogmatism (Weekly Worker November 18). Delphi’s praxis standpoint, which is similar to Gramsci’s opposition to Bukharin’s historical materialism, is based upon a subjective voluntarist denial of objective laws because they are held to be rigid, immutable, and justify a predetermined end.

But who would deny the continuing importance and significance of the law of value? Does this recognition make us puppets of capitalism? Or, as Plekhanov and Bukharin argued, an understanding of objective laws, which are independent of our intentional consciousness, does not mean we are rigidly governed by necessity, but is instead the way to understand how we develop freedom.

But, Delphi could reply and argue, that the rigid acceptance of the objective primacy of historical laws leads to fatalism and passivity and the corresponding denial of the need for revolutionary class struggle. Hence the score is 1-1 between orthodox dialectical materialism and the praxis approach.

So, how do we arbitrate between contending theoretical claims that seem to have equal validity? The role of dialectical philosophy would be to show that reality itself is open-ended, and there are never any definitive answers because of the very changeable character of reality. Hence the rigid, scientific and evolutionist historical materialism of social democracy led to counterrevolutionary degeneration, and the praxis activist humanism of Trotskyism has not established an effective alternative to the hectic instrumental praxis of counterrevolutionary Stalinism. In contrast flexible dialectical philosophy allows for open enquiry, and its potential non-dogmatism is the basis for objective evaluation of the contending types of historical materialism (scientific and praxis) in a manner which will not lead to rigid and closed answers.

Delphi equates praxis with the realisation of a utopian, ethical and humanist society. The dogmatism of this claim is its very negation. For Delphi does not acknowledge the problems with praxis - a potential for transformation into a counterrevolutionary opposite - and utopianism can justify prescriptive rigid blueprints that have corresponding authoritarian principles, as with the utopian socialists of the early 19th century.

What is necessary in order to clarify these complex questions is reflective dialogue. Thus, can utopia inspire transformatory class struggle, or is the concept of utopia an effective denial of the complexity of an uncertain and unpredictable historical future? For example, what would be the status of ethics in this utopian socialist society? Are ethics about what we cannot do, or what we could do, and do we need more laws under socialism than capitalism, or less laws?

Furthermore, is ethics about constraints on human behaviour, or is it about the removal of these constraints? Hence, what is the relationship between responsibility, obligation, duties and rights under communism? In order to establish a starting point for discussing these questions we need to develop a philosophical consciousness that needs to be fluid and not closed, because we cannot rigidly justify definitive answers in advance of revolution and the transition to communism. On the other hand we need to say something about ethics because the proletariat constantly inquires about ethics in spontaneous terms.

The theoretical development by a revolutionary party of an ethical understanding is connected to an important and constant philosophical problem: are ethics conditional, relative and subject to constant change, or are they universal, and virtually absolute? This complex philosophical question became an important practical problem for the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks lacked an ethic of restraint, and the class struggle was rationalised as a universal absolute in order to justify their actions. This approach was utilised by Lenin to justify the struggle against counterrevolution and to uphold the perspective of world revolution.

However, this absolutist and untheorised conception of ethics was turned by Stalin into the nihilistic ethic of the omnipotent god. Bolshevism became the effective denial of love, trust and solidarity between comrades, and this paved the way for the consolidated hegemony of an anti-ethics (the absolute dictates of god) which Stalin enforced upon an atomised party. The confident revolutionary rejection of Kant’s perspective of the importance of transcendental moral truisms became the pretext for justifying expediency. The whims of the leader were an expression of the personification of the party, and was sufficient reason for the actions of the party.

If the Bolsheviks had developed a philosophically coherent ethics this would not have necessarily meant that Stalinist degeneration could have been avoided, but the elaborated ethics of the party could have helped to deny the ideological legitimacy of Stalinism. This would have facilitated the struggle against Stalinism, and possibly brought about a unity between the conflicting Bukharin and Trotsky oppositions in ethical terms. It is significant that Bukharin’s recently discovered novel outlines a secular ethic that opposes idealist and dictatorial omnipotence.

Some bourgeois ideologues have proclaimed the end of history. This perspective expresses a justification of rigidity and closure about history and social relations. Unfortunately this bourgeois triumphalism (an expression of an empirical adaptation to what is) has led to defeatism and demoralisation within revolutionary Marxism, or, alternatively, attempts are made to justify a hollow and superficial Marxist triumphalism, which is based upon the construction of a leftwing teleology in order to oppose rightwing teleology about history.

The confusion within Marxism about global counterrevolutionary developments indicates not only the need to elaborate historical materialism and political economy, but also suggests the need for philosophical revolution: a return to the pre-1845 stance of Marx (hopefully on a higher level) based on the understanding that philosophy expresses the revolutionary character of the proletariat. This means we need to develop a philosophy of openness, contradiction, negation, critique, ethics and opposition to instrumental activity at the level of society, human action and consciousness: the rejection of the expediency of pragmatic idealism.

The merits, or problems, of praxis humanism and scientific dialectical materialism, or any other Marxist theoretical trend, can only be evaluated through a process of self-criticism. In this context Delphi defends ‘epistemological guarantees’, or an inherent truthfulness for his philosophical stance (praxis is revolutionary class struggle), and so denies its problematical content. Primarily he refuses to recognise that we are still only at the beginning of our necessary philosophical tasks: the development of revolutionary dialectical philosophy.

Phil Sharpe
Nottingham