24.10.2001

Unleash many weapons

Bob Pitt asks Ian Donovan why it is okay for him to quote a couple of passages from Lenin, in order to back up his position on the war against Afghanistan, while complaining about others ?dusting off? their copies of Trotsky to justify a contrary position. The answer is of course that it is okay as long as it is used to opne not close debate.

A cursory glance through Weekly Worker will prove that it has, over and over again, called for this important debate to take place on the basis of fully theorised thought, and openly. In the page opposite Bob?s article, we find Eddie Ford arguing the following: ?has it never occurred to the Workers Power majority
that Trotsky might simply have got it wrong? Whatever the case, all this is - or rather should be - subject to open, public debate where
we hear both sides of this vitally important argument?.

As the publication of Bob?s article proves, debating these issues is encouraged by the CPGB. Our charge against the likes of Workers Power and the Socialist Workers Party is their unwillingness to participate in such open  debate. In the case of the former, some kind of debate is clearly taking place.

Unfortunately, the minority is being gagged. The carrot held out to such dissidents is that in the event of their winning a majority inside their organisation, they can exact their revenge by acting in a similarly authoritarian manner! It does not seem to have occurred to either side that it might be better for their cadre to act like grown ups.

Neither Lenin nor Bukharin would have tolerated such restrictions on their rights during World War I, nor did they try to gag each other. They knew that their differences were  too important not to be debated in front of class conscious workers. Members of Workers Power should follow their example. Comrades, please don?t check in your brains when you turn up at Socialist Alliance meetings. If  you disagree with the majority position of Workers Power, then refuse to peddle a line  you think is flawed or nonsense.

Whatever criticisms can be laid at the door  of Workers Power, at least they are debating these questions internally. The SWP appear  to be preventing their rank and file doing even that. What is worse (much, worse) is that they are doing their best to impose such bureaucratic straitjacket on the rest of the Socialist Alliance (they have been unable to  get away with this inside the Scottish Socialist Party). They cannot be allowed to get away with it.

The Socialist Alliance must debate all matters relating to the post-September 11 events. Not for sectarian purposes (which seems to  be the charge made by the SWP tops). No, debate is essential in order most effectively to defeat our own government and its reactionary war aims. While comrade Bob Pitt  tries to paint the CPGB as indifferent to British (and  US) imperialism (if not actually supportive of it!), we have made it plain: the main enemy is at home. We work to defeat ?our? government
in this war, and if we paint the Taliban regime in a less than flattering light, that is because we don?t want to discredit our just cause.

Comrade Pitt tacitly accepts just how tactically incompetent it would be for him to ask the anti-war movement to publicly support the Taliban regime. The CPGB is more honest than  that. We do not hide our politics. We support the Afghan people in their just struggle to replace that regime. We know that to do otherwise would be both a betrayal of the Afghan people, and it would be an albatross around the neck of the anti-war movement.

While it is true that the SWP, Workers Power and Bob Pitt all have a point when they say that US and British imperialism are responsible for far more deaths of innocent people across the planet than the Taliban or Osama bin Laden, we can forgive large sections of  the Afghan people for having a somewhat different perspective. Half the population, women (educated women in particular) have an existence that has been compared to being buried alive. Gays, ethnic and religious minorities, trade unionists etc, all suffer the  most monstrous oppression at the hands of the Taliban. Despite his disgraceful accusation, it is not comrade Ian Donovan who is  being racist towards the Afghan people, but Bob.

How else are we to interpret his suggestion that all these people have to lay down their  lives in support of their oppressors, when British and US workers demand so much more  for ourselves? We must support these people fighting for their rights, even during this war. If the SWP leadership, and Workers  Power majority, agree with that, they are faced with the following problem.

As Lenin pointed out, struggling for democratic rights in time of war cannot but facilitate military defeats. It is interesting to note that Trotsky was the main target of Lenin?s  wrath in one of his particularly pertinent articles, ?On the defeat of one?s own government in the Imperialist war?. Lenin wrote: ?The  phrase-bandying Trotsky has completely lost his bearings in a simple issue. It seems to him that to desire Russia?s defeat means desiring  the victory of Germany. Had Bukvoyed  [someone else who took this position - TD]  and Trotsky done a little thinking they would have realised they have adopted the viewpoint on the war held by governments and the bourgeoisie?.

Lenin went on to explain that fighting for the overthrow of reactionary governments in time of war facilitated military defeats, and that without working for such defeats it was impossible to work for bringing down such governments. In his writings on China, I don?t think Trotsky fully took on board the lessons Lenin was trying to teach here. It is true that  in the war between China and Japan, Trotsky  called for his Chinese followers to work for the defeat of Japan. Yet he did so on what was  effectively the Bolsheviks? minimum programme. He also called for the arming of the workers and peasants.

And he argued the following: ?To arouse the workers, to organise them, to give them  the possibility of relating to the national and agrarian movement in order to take the leadership of both: such is the task that falls to us. The immediate demands of the proletariat as such (length of the working day, wages, right to organise etc) must form the basis of our agitation. Only these three slogans can raise the proletariat to the role of the head of the nation: the independence of China, land to the poor peasants, the constituent assembly?. (?For a strategy of action not speculation?).

Trotsky?s problem was that he failed to recognise that these demands could be little more than propaganda to expose the reactionary Chaing Kai Shek government. Trotsky?s programme was, and presumably he was aware of it, a programme for the overthrow of this reactionary government. The same has to be said about Afghan socialists raising similar demands today.

According to comrade Bob Pitt, any Afghan socialist who raised such demands, and fought for them in a manner calculated to undermine the war effort of the Taliban, would be guilty of desiring the victory of western imperialism. Nonsense. Any puppet government imposed by Bush and Blair would be worthy of overthrow by the Afghan people (with assistance from socialists across the globe) as much as the existing Taliban government. Anyone remember the Paris Commune? Having been defeated by the Prussian army in 1871, the French government gave way not to German rule, but to the armed workers in Paris. They did not welcome their disarmament by the Germans. Neither should the Afghan people allow themselves to be disarmed by US or British troops.

A genuinely democratic, secular Afghanistan (especially along the lines of the Paris Commune) would deserve the support of socialists internationally. But victory for the Afghan people against the counterrevolutionary Taliban government, and any imperialist imposed puppet government, would prove vastly more difficult if we in Britain (and the US, etc) paint ourselves as indifferent to the democratic rights of the Afghan people.

To help bring about the military defeat of ?our? government, we are not short of a good many weapons: we know that Blair will have difficulty maintaining support for escalating ?collateral damage?; we know that it will (with our help) sink in to the British working class that this military adventure will lead to hundreds of thousands dying from cold and starvation; we also know that many of the more far sighted sections of the ruling class themselves can see how counterproductive it would be for the west to impose a puppet government in Afghanistan if, as a consequence, they hand power to pro-Taliban elements in the neighbouring nuclear power, Pakistan, or hand Saudi?s oil reserves over to an islamic fundamentalists, or (even worse from their point of view) hand power to the Saudi working class. Then there is Egypt, Indonesia etc.

The socialist resistance to British (and US) imperialism have many cards to play. But the pro-Taliban, pro-Osama, pro-?Islamic-state for-an-Islamic-people? is not one of them. Any member of the anti-war movement in Britain who thinks otherwise is shooting us all in the foot. To stop compounding the misery inflicted on the Afghan people by the Taliban, to stop bombs raining down on them, socialists need to know how best to play our cards. That is why debate inside the SA is so important. And that brings me to Bob?s last outing in Weekly Worker.

In the transcript to his Communist University speech, comrade Bob Pitt quoted (from memory) a passage from the Communist manifesto. What Marx actually wrote was: ?The communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.? Bob interpreted this to mean that socialists in Britain should participate in New Labour, and not dream of standing candidates against it! What he ?forgot? was the following definition of what (for Marx) constitutes a working-class party. ?The immediate aim of the communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: Formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat?.

Seriously, Bob, does this sound like Tony Blair?s New Labour? Of course not. But it begs the question: how will Bob advise workers to vote in next May?s local elections if Blair is still bombing Afghanistan, using his ?war on terrorism? to take away our democratic rights etc? Marx?s definition of the relationship of communists to the rest of the working class is not at all pertinent to those, like Bob, hanging on to the coat-tails of bomber Blair. It is, though, vitally important to the Socialist Alliance.

If there was ever any doubt about the proposal for transforming the Socialist Alliance into a democratic and effective party before September 11, they should have evaporated by now. All attempts by the SWP to strangle democratic debate inside the Socialist Alliance, all attempts by Peter Taaffe?s Socialist Party to ignore majority decisions, or to stand (or threaten to stand) candidates against the rest of the left, and all attempts of Workers Power (or anyone else) to gag their own members as they participate in the Socialist Alliance - all of this nonsense has to be put to one side. This must all be swept away as part of the embarrassing pre-history of the Socialist Alliance.

Tom Delargy
Workers? Unity Platform of the SSP
(personal capacity)