07.03.2002
Revolutionary semantics
Language is important, argues John Pearson, and communists must avoid using certain words and phrases
As no-one else has joined the debate on the CPGB's slogans and tactics in the anti-war campaign, which I attempted to start with my letter (Weekly Worker January 10), I would now like to respond to the reply I received from comrade Ian Donovan (Weekly Worker January 17). In explaining my purpose, I had stated that I did not dispute that the Party's approach was based upon a sincere attempt to assert an independent and internationalist working class position. In working from this standpoint, it was inevitable that our main opponent was going to be the anti-war movement's de facto leadership, the Socialist Workers Party, since the SWP's approach pivoted on an attempt to promote support for the islamic fundamentalist reactionaries. I had attempted to show that, by "dumbing down" our slogans and by appearing to advance "rhetorical-neutral" positions, rather than unequivocally partisan proletarian politics, we had blunted our cutting edge in taking on the SWP's misleadership. Ian completely misunderstood my argument, suggesting that I was attempting to reconcile the CPGB's consistently democratic and revolutionary politics with the economistic politics of the SWP. He diagnosed my problem as reflecting "a political softness on the opportunist theory and practice of the SWP and an incomplete break with their political conceptions". What I had tried to do was analyse the main counter-positions and to show how we could have strengthened our attack. It is not possible to perform such an exercise without identifying and assessing your opponent's strong points. To do this has nothing in common with reconciliation. However, I will not pursue this point further because I think Ian would not have taken this view but for some unfortunate editing of my original text. I had submitted a very lengthy letter and I expected it to be shortened, but it was not helpful that the following text, in which I gave my judgement on the position of the SWP with respect to their attitude towards the Taliban, was omitted: "If the SWP remains unable to forge an international working class alliance, with the likes of the Worker-Communist Parties of Iraq and Iran, the Labour Party Pakistan and the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan, then it deserves to, and must, lose the leadership of the Socialist Alliance and the anti-war movement in Britain." I had gone on to state my opposition to our use of the word 'condemn' in relation to the September 11 attacks, on the grounds that it was the language of bourgeois consensus and I had opined that we gained nothing by our sustained attack upon the SWP for their eschewal of the use of such language. Rather ludicrously in my view, Ian charges that I was thus demonstrating that I had no problem with the use of evasive language and even with "lying by omission to the working class". Nothing of the sort. I am arguing for an independent working class politics to be marked out by the development of a working class discourse. The professional inquisitors of the bourgeoisie constantly demand of the leaders of the struggles of the working class and the oppressed that they 'condemn' actions taken in the course of those struggles. I only need cite the first few interviews conducted with leaders of Sinn Féin after the lifting of Margaret Thatcher's broadcasting ban. These were a waste of time in terms of learning anything new about the conflict in Ireland, because they consisted merely of the sight of the John Humphreys and Jeremy Paxmans demanding condemnation of the military actions of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. They did not, of course, receive any such bending of the knee. Evasion and concealment of the truth is far more likely to result from insistence upon genuflection before the 'common sense' of the bourgeoisie than it is from the development of proletarian plain speaking. I would of course concede that the September 11 attacks were not actions within the struggle of the oppressed, but were the work of reactionaries, although the question of responsibility had not been answered when I first raised my objection. Nevertheless, had it been known immediately that bin Laden was the perpetrator, this would not have been a reason to abandon independent working class language and to 'talk bourgeois' for this particular occasion. There have been other examples that illustrate my concern about the language used from time to time in the Weekly Worker and I have previously voiced my objections in members' aggregates. In reporting the imperialist bombing of both Iraq and Serbia, our editorial comrades several times felt it necessary to borrow language from the bourgeoisie. This was in the often incongruous references made to the use of 'smart bombs'. I found this type of reporting to be grossly insensitive and insulting to the memory of thousands of working class and poor people - adults and children - who were killed and maimed in these murderous assaults. Gratifyingly, the term was not used in our coverage of the bombing of Afghanistan. Some of our writers, in pursuing the institutional anti-racism argument, have even borrowed the language of the home counties saloon bar bigot, with references to "the race relations industry". There is a world of difference between this sort of language and the instance when we caused a brouhaha by terming the politics of the ex-Committee for a Workers International leadership of the Scottish Socialist Party "national socialist". The latter was a superb example of asserting a proletarian discourse, as we were able to prove in our citation of Leon Trotsky on the subject. Comrade Donovan seems prepared to defer to the bourgeoisie on another front too: that of defining, or perhaps more accurately time-slicing, the paradigm. He comments that my criticism of our non-inclusion of a slogan against Zionism in our anti-war material disregards "the fact that neither Israel nor the Palestinians were combatants in the war we were protesting about". This observation came a few paragraphs after Ian had accused me of undermining our stand against reactionary islamic fundamentalism by my suggestion that we had laid too little emphasis on the erstwhile imperialist sponsorship of the Taliban. No-one could credibly accuse the Iranian clerical regime of being pro-western, Ian correctly stated. But sorry, wasn't Iran a non-combatant too? The war - of which we have currently witnessed only the first phase - is a war for the consolidation of the US hegemonic 'new world order'. How could any champion of independent working class internationalist politics deny that the Palestinian question is central to this war? We of course recognised that the war had no boundaries with our excellent slogan, 'For secularism and democracy everywhere'. I asked why Ian, writing in the Weekly Worker (December 20), sought to exclude Palestine from this recommendation. In response, he has referred to the call for "a democratic and secular Palestine" as "the SWP's slogan". It is, of course, no such thing. Virtually the whole of the significant left, including ourselves, used to support this slogan. Ian's move to the 'two states' position reflects another deferment to the bourgeoisie, just as it did in the case of the incumbent leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, who have imposed it from above upon the Palestinian people. Incidentally, comrade Danny Hammill is wrong when he states that, along with the Alliance for Workers' Liberty, "the CPGB also advocates the two-states solution" (Weekly Worker January 31). The appearance of a succession of latter-day signed articles in our paper does not hold the status of signifying a change in policy. I asked Ian to explain why he thinks that jews and Arabs cannot live side by side in the same country as equals. He declined to answer, glibly asserting that my question was "disingenuous". Well, if that's not a prime example of linguistic evasion, I haven't seen one. Perhaps a more demonstrable instance of disingenuity came, though, with Ian's charge that those of us who support the demand for a democratic secular Palestine are making "the assumption that Israeli jews are 'really' part of the same nation as Palestinian Arabs and can therefore be absorbed into a common Arab national state" (my emphasis). The only assumption here is Ian's own: ie, that a democratic secular Palestine means an Arab national state. He can offer little evidence, other than that the name 'Palestine' is that used by the Arabs, as well as by the rest of the insurrectionary population. For my part, I regard the name as provisional and subject to agreement at a future date by the working class of the liberated territory. I support it and advocate support for it in the here and now, in the same way as I favoured 'Azania' over 'South Africa', or 'Zimbabwe' over 'Southern Rhodesia'. It is the nomenclature of the oppressed in struggle, as against the title imposed by the conquering ruling class. Its use therefore is something we do as part of the communist task of educating the working class into the thinking necessary if it is to become the class-for-itself, capable of liberating the whole of humanity. Here, I think, we are beginning to approach the nub of the problem. The educational need of our class is, on the one side, seen as that of its learning to become the champion of all oppressed human beings: ie, an education in universalism. On the other side, it is viewed as a need to learn to respect the 'national rights' of oppressor nations as well as oppressed nations (Mike Speed Weekly Worker January 24, as well as Ian Donovan, January 17). The latter view, clearly one which seeks to promote a positive attitude within the working class towards particularist projects is, I think, the product of profound pessimism. It stems from a lack of confidence in the potential of the working class to liberate humankind. Karl Marx would be livid! The workers have no nation. Isn't that what we should be pointing out to the workers of Israel and Palestine, whether they be jews, Arabs, christians or none of these. No, the demand for a democratic secular Palestine is not the advocacy of the creation of an Arab nation. I know why Ian has to pretend that it is. Precisely because of his own support for the recognition of the "national rights of Israeli jews" (my emphasis). Within the present boundaries of Israel and the territories occupied by the forces of the Israeli capitalist state live people of a multitude of national origins and a number of religions. For comrade Mike Speed at least, with his advocacy of the right of return of displaced Palestinians, that mixture would become much more heterogeneous. To separate out the jews and Arabs (and where does that leave the poor christians?) and to somehow assign to them territories in which they are to be respectively hegemonic is a shabby and pathetic backward-looking exercise. What is more, it is reactionary in terms of the communist project - a perversion of Leninism. Finally, I note that comrade Donovan did not take space to differ with me over my criticism of our slogan, 'Solidarity with victims of terror in the US and around the world'. I had pointed out that we had not only failed to define "terror", but that we had avoided explaining that the violence of oppressed peoples cannot be equated with the violence of the oppressor. I take it that my point has been won and I look forward to corrective action in the context of our intervention in the future phases of the war. Returning to the point about a working class discourse, by the way, shouldn't we stop referring to the so-called 'war against terrorism' and call it what it is - a war of capital against labour; a war of humanity's alienated past and present against its liberated future?
Worker