Letters

One struggle

Mary Godwin seems to have relied entirely on the bourgeois media for the content of her article on animal rights (Weekly Worker February 15). Had she spoken to animal rights activists, I think she would have drawn a different picture.

Schools have not stopped dissection because of threats from extremists. This has been done at the students' request. Shac has not published details of HLS shareholders and employees in order to aid the violent, but so that the public might know who is involved in the horrors that go on there. Is it any surprise that Tony Blair, whose New Labour is the party of big business, should support HLS?

If there were no animal rights activities the secret state would find some other cause to infringe the right to demonstrate. The problem is not animal rights activism: it is the disregard of the ruling class and its agents for democracy. Only a tiny minority advocate violence; many are totally opposed to it. Even the Animal Liberation Front has gone to great lengths to ensure humans and animals are not injured by its actions. That has not stopped the state imposing vicious sentences on its activists. They are just as much political prisoners as members of the IRA.

Animal testing is not vital to the development of beneficial medicines. The physiological differences between humans and rats, mice and dogs are obvious. Many drugs which have tested as safe on animals have proven very dangerous to humans. Remember Thalidomide?

Peter Singer is mentioned as an animal rights philosopher. But it goes back beyond him to pioneer socialists like Henry Salt and beyond that to Shelley, a republican and vegetarian.

Rearing animals for food can be nothing other than cruel, and slaughter always involves suffering and pain. We can live long, healthy and happy lives on a vegetarian diet. So why not do so? Better a veggie burger than McDonalds any day.

Mary uses the word "fanatics". The ruling class often depicts communists as fanatics or loonies. What is need is not name-calling, but informed, rational and - dare one say it? - scientific analysis and criticism. Then maybe communists can get their heads around the truth of the slogan often heard on animal rights demonstrations: "Animal liberation, human rights - one struggle, one fight."

One struggle
One struggle

Inhuman

Mary Godwin repeats the good old common sense 'two legs good, four legs inferior' adage which usually accompanies the retort, 'They care more about animals than they do about people'.

In fact I have never, as a communist and near life-long vegetarian and now Vegan, ever been able to separate out my love for humanity from my empathy and solidarity with animals. The unfeeling, steely-eyed posture of the self-declared Bolshevik cadre chiding at 'petty bourgeois liberal sentiment for all things furry' is in my experience usually accompanied by an equally dismissive view of genuine workers' democracy and control. I once heard it described as "a petty bourgeois fetish with democracy".

I on the other hand could never stand idly by while a gang of men and women with dogs tore a fox or hare apart without my stepping in to physically stop them, and that means using violence. That these hunters happen to be the same species as me hides the fact that in all other aspects of outlook and sentiment they may as well come from another planet. It is not a question of the fox's life against theirs, as my ideology and principles against theirs. There are two humanities here: two views of life and death, both human.

I cannot take an agnostic view to the animal world around me and pretend somehow human beings and their actions towards animals are somehow divorced from our relations with each other and what sort of world we wish to inhabit.

Mary, I suppose, could stand and watch some yob tear the wings off a butterfly: he, after all is a human being; it is simply a stupid, irrelevant insect. He has the god-given right to do whatever he thinks fit to this thing. I disagree, and would be inclined to knock the yob's teeth down his throat.

Now then, is this fanatical behaviour? Are the yob's teeth more important than the butterfly's wings? Whatever the answer, it is not so much counselling the views of the butterfly, or granting it a vote on the issue, as attempting to impose some sanction on cruel and inhuman attitudes among backward sections of our species.

Inhuman
Inhuman

Zinoviev was right

Criticising Lenin's pre-1917 strategy of the democratic revolution does not denigrate or misrepresent the real or historical Lenin and paint him a Menshevik, as comrade Jack Conrad cynically suggests (Weekly Worker February 15).

The use of the word 'Menshevik' by Jack is a rhetorical device used in an attempt to wall off the CPGB membership from a critical assessment of Bolshevism in general and Lenin in particular. Lenin's understanding of the future revolution in 1917 was obviously not the Menshevik one of expecting the liberal bourgeoisie to lead the bourgeois revolution, but nor was it the correct perspective of the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin held a confused middle position for over a decade.

The Bolsheviks would not restrict themselves to opposition in the national revolution like the Mensheviks, but would share state power with the petty bourgeoisie or political representatives of the peasantry, including the exploiters of the poor peasants, to accelerate the bourgeois revolution and prepare the proletarian revolution in the historical long term. This was a utopian view. When some comrades accused Lenin of revisionist reformism Lenin's response was to say that his critics were mixing up the national or democratic revolution with the socialist revolution. Before 1917 any talk of mixing or combining historical stages of social development (permanent revolution) was anathema to Lenin.

Lenin was influenced in this view by the linear social theory of Plekhanov. Lenin did not propose to stop half way at the bourgeois revolution. The historical stage of the democratic revolution would give way uninterruptedly to the next historical phase of socialist revolution. This was Plekhanov's chronological succession. First the democratic revolution, then the socialist revolution. Jack tries desperately and unsuccessfully to reduce these stages to zero rather than concede the social theory was flawed. But in Lenin's Collected works, volume after volume, article after article, we get the same tale. The task was to clear Russia of feudal relics: the coming Russian Revolution was bourgeois. The peasant revolution would strengthen capitalism. The only way forward was through the constituent assembly and the democratic capitalist republic.

This brings us to the other key influence in Lenin's democratic revolution: Kautsky's theory of the proletariat capturing the capitalist state. We should remember that, because German social democracy had transformed the parliamentary tactic of participation in bourgeois parliaments into a strategy, many aspects of the revolutionary communist tradition were buried or stigmatised. The lesson of the Paris Commune on smashing the bourgeois state was dismissed as anarchist. It is a sobering thought for those immersed in the legend of Lenin that Lenin accused Bukharin of anarchism in 1915-16 for wanting to publish, in a Bolshevik newspaper, the lessons of the Commune.

The impoverishment of Marxism in the Second International (see Kautsky's and Plekhanov's views on the materialist conception of history) affected Bolshevism. Lenin did not appreciate the significance of the soviets in 1905. He did not see them as the institutional basis of the workers' state. The democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry was predicated on the main demand of Bolshevism: the constituent assembly. A national institution for a national revolution. Without understanding the theoretical weakness of Bolshevism before 1914 we will not understand Lenin's theoretical achievement in renewing Marxism after the collapse of the Second International.

I will end on a few more points about comrade Jack Conrad manipulating Trotsky quotes from the period after Lenin's death (when Trotsky succumbed to his old political error of conciliationism), as a support for his view that there were no programmatic differences between the two comrades prior to 1917. It is true that Trotsky minimised his differences with Lenin and accepted the cult of Lenin, but this defensive approach was ineffective. Even without the exaggerations and lies of Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev were easily able to demonstrate the differences, which were significant.

The young Trotsky in 'Our differences' in 1905, did not pull his punches: Lenin was too theoretically timid to draw out the logic of proletarian dictatorship and the 'old man' in 1939, in 'Three conceptions of the Russian Revolution', said the essence of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry was the dictatorship of the peasants with the participation of the workers.

Zinoviev was right
Zinoviev was right

National action

Red Action's exasperation with the British left, frequently aired here and elsewhere on a myriad of subjects, from anti-fascism to multiculturalism, to working class rights, to paedophilia, to Irish republicanism (prior and since the ceasefire), to name but a few, is routinely denounced or misrepresented as 'sectarianism'.

Generally the RA membership respond by claiming that the left have no 'instinct' for politics - working class politics, that is. At least part of the reason offered is that the left is not in the main working class itself. As a consequence it rarely knows whether in the real world it is winning or losing. It stands to reason that such an observation is automatically denounced as sectarianism.

Now sectarians are most often condemned for picking fights for reasons other than those stated, and for picking fights most of all with people from whom they otherwise appear (and are) politically indistinguishable. For most sects to be 'distinguished' in such a fashion is their raison d'être. Not so with RA. As things stand, RA finds itself quite effortlessly at odds with the orthodox left on practically everything. If anything, over time the distances between us appear to be accelerating. Take this recent passage from an article, 'No Immigration controls', from the Weekly Worker (February 8).

"In a contribution from the floor Tina Becker (CPGB) suggested that the demand for 'No immigration controls' was essential. Louise replied that as a lawyer involved in the field of immigration and asylum law, she was 'in favour of the removal of all immigration controls'. She condemned the affluent west's attitudes to those in 'third world' countries, noting that, 'If there's oil we will go in and milk it. But we'll keep its poor people out.' There was a spontaneous cheer around the room when she pointed out that the logic of abolishing border controls pointed to the ending of nation-states. However such a vision is not for public consumption, it seems" (my emphasis).

Hardly surprising on the one hand, and yet quite unbelievable on the other. And there's more: "Louise Christian concluded her speech by remarking that the policies now portrayed as radical were mainstream Labour Party ideas in the 1980s. This point was echoed by comrade Bradley who thought that, "We are not marginalised any more. We have the majority of people behind us, because our politics are common sense now."

When considering that comrade Bradley probably 'spontaneously' raised the roof as well during the proceedings, the idea that the call for "common sense" politics and the abolition of nation-states can be considered at all logical - much less, that such sentiments have 'majority' support - is frankly startling.

Delirium aside, the collective instinct on display does deserve attention. What does it really tell us about the state of mind of what's left of the left in the present day? Quite a lot actually. In the first place there is the striking lack of inventiveness.

The London Socialist Alliance think that by stealing Labour's old clothes from the 80s, the majority will automatically fall in behind them - conveniently forgetting in the process that when Labour wore them, Labour didn't have the majority behind them! Even worse, now that the LSA is the only party claiming to be socialist in most elections, the votes being accrued are little better than the likes of the Workers Revolutionary Party, Socialist Workers Party, Communist Party and so on were getting in the 70s. No longer "marginalised"? Not in the real world.

Lack of instinct and analysis apart, the other striking thing about the left is the absolute lack of honesty. For instance, along with liberal fellow travellers, they claim stridently, as is the fashion, that refugees fleeing tyranny, etc, should be welcomed and allowed certain dispensations amounting to preferential treatment over ordinary migrants and (whisper it) the indigenous working class, for whom despite the hand-wringing and crocodile tears, there is little genuine affection.

Then we are informed that economic refugees should have parity with political refugees. Now it is revealed that the whole enterprise is a stratagem pointing toward the "ending of nation-states". They don't care, do they? Even the BNP wouldn't normally make that one up. Now they don't have to.

And if of course the call for 'open borders' is supported, not for humanitarian reasons as is claimed, but is instead part of a conspiracy to destabilise nation-states, such a revelation totally undermines in the eyes of the public the case for an enlightened attitude to immigration. Furthermore by denouncing as racist anyone who has the temerity to question the underlying rationale, the left goes some distance to undermining broader anti-racism as well.

All this, and much more, has been pointed out many times before to little effect. However, the "spontaneous cheer" ups the ante to a different level. Now that the cat is out of the bag, perhaps at last we can have an 'adult debate', so to speak, on the wider implications. So here are a few questions to kick it off.

1. If nation-states are now 'a legitimate target' when was the 'principle' of national self-determination dispensed with?
2. If people are not organised on a national basis, then is it not also obvious people will not be organised on a democratic basis either? Any problems with such a scenario?
3. If there is no formal democracy and therefore no political accountability whatsoever, does this not make the world, with the active connivance of the left, the playground for transnational corporations?
4. If nations-states are now deemed a legitimate target, what is to replace them?
5. Considering that socialism exists in recognisable form nowhere on the planet, might it not be time to consider why the right is winning and the left is losing?

Finally, if the left is not 'shaping the future', is it running the danger of being shaped by those who are?

National action
National action