Letters

Blank cheque

Jim Blackstock has thrown out previous categorical statements. Instead he substitutes a new one: Ken’s word is a cast iron guarantee. Livingstone will leave the Labour Party and stand as an independent if he loses the Labour election to select a candidate. But the comrade also writes that I should not take Livingstone’s word that he will not fight as an independent. There is nothing like a principled candidate for political clarity (Weekly Worker December 9).

In Jim Blackstock’s cynical opinion, Ken’s place in the New Labour election process is secure: “It would be clearly foolish, while he [Ken] has the chance of winning the party mandate to express anything other than the most committed loyalty to Labour.” These unprincipled words and Livingstone’s principal actions are in Jack Conrad’s phase, “miserable recipes for the opportunist art of the possible” (Weekly Worker June 12 1997).

If Ken does win the gerrymandered election in the Labour Party, comrade Larsen is already laughing at the prospect of the Socialist Party voting for Ken as the representative of a bourgeois party (Weekly Worker December 2). But if that is amusing, what about the chance for some fun at the CPGB’s expense when they vote for a representative of a bourgeois workers’ party in which the bourgeois aspect is dominant? Or a party which, in the opinion of Stan Keable, is the bosses’ Trojan house in the workers’ movement (Weekly Worker May 1 1997). A fine line there, comrades.

But comrade Blackstock does raise a serious question: what kind of break is on the cards? So let’s ask a few questions. How many Labour MPs are ready to split? How many unions are prepared to follow Livingstone out of the Labour Party? How many trade unionists are pledging to join his alternative party? Where is the alternative party? What is Ken’s anti-Blairite programme? In another political life, Jim considered Livingstone as a maverick career politician ... but not any more.

The comrade even claims Livingstone threatens a catastrophic split from Labour. But he can only say, “There is a space to the left of Labour which is there for the taking and ‘Red Ken’ with his past reputation would be more than likely to mould his intervention with that in mind.” The word “likely” is not very strong, nor poses a catastrophic threat to Blair at the moment. Whatever happened to Don Preston’s point that the Blairisation of Livingstone summed up the terminal crisis of the Labour left and was an indication of the success of the Blairite revolution inside Labour (Weekly Worker April 17 1997)?

Whatever happened to Mark Fischer’s points about not relying, like pro-Labour Trotskyists, on the Labour left to do something? In his previous political reincarnation, the comrade refused to give the Labour lefts automatic blank cheques and stated categorically that Ken Livingstone did not deserve the support of the CPGB (Weekly Worker May 7 1998).The political wager that Ken could use his undeserved reputation as a socialist as a focus for the anti-Blair mood does sound rather like a programmatic blank cheque to me. 

Barry Biddulph
London

Auto-leftism

Real, concrete, specific politics decides whether at any one particular time we support, critically or otherwise, “one side” or “personality” against another in an election campaign - whether it be the Labour Party (which still remains a bourgeois workers’ party of sorts despite everything), the Socialist Labour Party, the Socialist Party or any other working class organisation. To deny this is abstentionist auto-leftism and hence effectively a form of apoliticism.

Serious communist politicians acknowledge and welcome the possibilities latent in the anti-Blair, left-leaning illusions that a politically significant layer has in ‘Red Ken’. Far from passively looking on, the CPGB is consciously combating spontaneity, in order to give these mass (democratic) sentiments a communistic and revolutionary democratic shape. A very practical and impeccably Leninist example of merging the communist programme with a mass movement in society.

Danny Hammill
South London

Imagined

Comrade Steve Riley talks about “the frivolous mindset” of the “new CPGB” which jauntily “casts old truths away without regard for the consequences” (Letters Weekly Worker December 2). In particular the comrade refers to Northern Ireland.

I must have imagined the acres of polemical space devoted to the British-Irish debate in the Weekly Worker and the endless hours of discussion at Communist University 99, day schools, seminars, etc.

Eddie Ford
Middlesex

Essence

The latest letter by Phil Sharpe (Weekly Worker December 2) constitutes a plea for revolutionaries to decommission our minds and bodies, our hearts and souls, to reconcile ourselves with the world as it is and always shall be, to retire to our armchairs and content ourselves with incessant navel-gazing.

Of course it is true that voluntarism has constituted a problem for Marxists in the past. Our attitude to the problem can be captured in the aphorism, ‘Man makes history, but not in circumstances of his own choosing.’ It is in this sense, and this sense alone, that we have to ‘recognise’ the law of value and other facts of life - the contemporary state of the class struggle, the economic climate, and the political consciousness of our class. Yet not one of these facts are determined absolutely by rigid and immutable laws.

Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Lukács, Gramsci, etc all stressed that even the law of value only operates as a consequence of an historically conditioned set of social relations. These have not always existed, and they can be consciously transcended. Not by the action of isolated individuals of course, or even of a large sect. This is going to take the combined efforts of the entire working class.

Consider the poll tax. It could not have been defeated by any number of scattered individuals taking a moral stance to refuse to pay it. Had it not been for the farsightedness and courage of a very small number of activists, had it not been for their determination to subject to a practical test their hypothesis that circumstances existed to build a campaign of mass non-payment, John Major would not have abolished it.

Those who built the anti-poll tax movement could not have predicted in advance whether or not they would succeed. It is only in the process of engaging with the struggle, in a practical dialogue with our class, that we make ourselves as Marxists, as fully conscious revolutionaries. And, in the process, we assist our class in winning the odd battle or two, giving them both the appetite and confidence to fight on more and more battlefields.

This, Phil, is neither pragmatism nor voluntarism, but the essence of Marxism, its revolutionary core.

Steve Bennett
Glasgow

SSP purge

My article ‘Action stations’ (Weekly Worker December 2) - in which I interpreted the Committee for a Workers’ International in Scotland document ‘Marxism in the new millennium’ (Weekly Worker November 25) as a portent of a purge of the Scottish Socialist Party left - has elicited a response.

James Robertson (Weekly Worker December 9) reacts with a literary shrug of the shoulders. We ought, in James’s opinion, to have patience. Our fate will be revealed at next February’s SSP conference.

Alan McCombes’s document argues that his CWI group cannot organise closed meetings, as this would cause “suspicion and resentment” amongst non-CWI members. But what is unacceptable is for Alan McCombes to imply that Socialist Outlook, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, Republican Communist Network and Peter Taaffe’s loyalist CWI supporters have to reciprocate. Not one of these aforementioned SSP factions would tolerate a situation where they can do nothing to stop Bill Bonnar, Hugh Kerr, Alan himself infiltrating their meetings.

I am far from impressed by the notion that we have nothing to fear on account of our being so small and ineffectual. James might want to express gratitude to Alan McCombes if he promises to leave revolutionary factions in peace, which he may well do - on condition, of course, that we fail to recruit in sufficient numbers, that we prove incapable of posing as a credible alternative leadership. While James might be so inclined, I most certainly am not.

I would urge all SSP revolutionaries to contact the Republican Communist Network with a view to joining it. The RCN, whatever its weaknesses, has the potential to serve as an umbrella group for all the existing factions, providing each and every one of us with the forum we so desperately need to hammer out a united position on questions of revolutionary strategy and tactics.

Tom Delargy
Paisley

Groundless

The hagiography offered by Royston Bull as a defence of the tactics of Sinn Fein and the IRA is erroneous to say the least (Letters Weekly Worker).

For example, the claim that ‘no surrender colonialism’ has been defeated by what he claims to be “the launch at last of the completely new cross border economic and political settlement is groundless. As the cross border bodies that have been set up are hardly representatives of revolutionary changes.

His position neglects many aspects of the ‘economic situation’ caused by partition. Does Royston really think that the IDA and the IDB will combine and seek a united approach to drawing in foreign investors? I think not.

Declan Carolan
County Down