28.11.2002
Leeds, lies and Owen MacThomas - part one
One of the hallmarks of authentic Marxism is that it strives to tell the truth about the present and the past. After all the working class movement requires the truth if it is to win the future. So when it comes to factional struggles on the left any scurrilous doctoring of the facts or deliberate resort to outright lies, for the sake of doing down an opponent, should be viewed not only as deviating from Marxism but running counter to the interests of socialism. With these elementary observations in mind we return to the 'Leeds incident'. Doubtless some will think that revisiting this incident a total waste of time and not worth the candle. Understandable but mistaken. Why? Because relations between the leaderships of the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Alliance for Workers' Liberty have soured over this issue to the point of mutual acrimony and total mistrust and have brought forth a flood of lies and distortions about our past and present politics. Though blame for this breakdown lies squarely and entirely with the AWL, I very much regret how things have turned out. After all the CPGB and the AWL have drawn together in recent years. The AWL comrades have half-broken with auto-Labourism, adopted - albeit in an untheorised fashion - the demand for a federal republic and we have cooperated, often very closely, in the Socialist Alliance. So what happened in Leeds? I shall reiterate the course of events as I understand them and where possible elaborate. At the beginning of 2002 Ray Gaston - in his capacity as vicar of All Hallows church in Leeds - decided to organise a debate on 'Marxism and religion'. The date he pencilled in his year-plan was September 20. The place: All Hallows itself. Invited speakers were Ken Leech, a well known Anglican theologian and supporter of many leftwing causes, and Mike Marqusee, author of a number of notable books on sport and politics, at the time a member of the Socialist Alliance's executive and later the Stop the War Coalition's leading media spokesperson. On the basis of the Marqusee invite Leeds Socialist Alliance promoted the meeting. During the summer Sean Matgamna, the AWL's primus inter pares, penned a conventional but trenchant article against religious superstition in their fortnightly paper Solidarity. Ray Gaston not only read the piece with interest but though it an excellent idea to add comrade Matgamna onto his panel. He invited the comrade to speak representing the viewpoint of militant atheism - providing, that is, none of the others objected. No one did. We duly advertised what was now a three-way debate in the Weekly Worker's action column. Ray Gaston joined the CPGB in August during our Communist University. In discussion with him at the time I suggested that his forthcoming debate on 'Marxism and religion' could be made into a useful article for the Weekly Worker. Could he tape the proceedings and edit up the results? The comrade agreed and later put in place the necessary technical arrangements. However, at the last moment comrade Marqusee says he was shocked to discover that comrade Matgamna was due to appear alongside him. He made his strong objections known to comrade Gaston. What to do? The initial panel had been a two-hander. Now one of them was refusing to go ahead with the newly invited, third, speaker. Comrade Gaston decided to get a substitute. As I have written before, perhaps he should have simply told Mike Marqusee that dictating who else spoke was "unacceptable". But this was not a straightforward black and white case. The situation was grey. Marqusee had originally agreed to speak alongside Ken Leach, but says he knew nothing of the subsequent Sean Matgamna invite. Comrade Gaston had only added Sean on the basis that no one objected - now they were. Either way, comrade Gaston was determined that the debate must go ahead. He rang our national organiser, Mark Fischer, explained the situation and asked him to suggest a replacement. That is where I came in. Comrade Fischer contacted me. We only discussed the matter for a minute or two. Certainly we did not seize upon a chance to "no-platform" Sean Matgamna or the AWL. Such an absurd idea - as seriously suggested by a fevered comrade Matgamna - did not, and would never have, occurred to us. The long and the short of it was that I agreed to speak - reluctantly. Why did comrade Marqusee not wish to appear alongside the AWL's paramount personality? Just before the September 20 meeting was due to commence he wearily told me that constantly being branded an anti-semite is simply beyond the pale. He said he was sick and tired of the AWL. Comrade Marqusee advocates the conventional leftwing solution for Israel/Palestine: that is, a single, secular state solution, whereby jews and Arabs peacefully live side by side as equals. As a very jewish non-jewish jew I presume that comrade Marqusee is particularly sensitive to AWL polemicists on this question. They do after all routinely insist that such a solution - when promoted by leftwingers such as the Socialist Workers Party and the likes of Marqusee (and not the AWL in one of its earlier incarnations) - is a poisonous example of anti-semitism. Once again let me make clear that when I travelled to Leeds on September 20 I was under the impression that comrade Matgamna had, at the last moment, simply dropped out and landed Ray Gaston with the infuriating problem of getting another, substitute, speaker. That is what he did to us at this year's Communist University. Sean "no-platformed" himself - that after we had been advertising him as a speaker for months. Yes, that experience helps explain why the Weekly Worker billed Jack Conrad as "replacing Sean Matgamna". Only after having arrived in Leeds, on the evening of September 20, did I discover that the problem lay with Mike Marqusee. Comrade Gaston assured me he had phoned Sean Matgamna. No Sean - but an answer-machine and Ray recorded a long message of explanation. Comrade Gaston had also promptly contacted the local AWL group in Leeds. Incidentally I am now informed that they gave him a telephone number for Sean in London - but it turns out to be an incorrect or old one and is now disconnected (part of a conspiracy or mere cock-up?). Anyway the meeting went ahead. Comrade Matgamna arrived just as proceedings were about to begin. He said - so I am told by Ray Gaston - that he knew nothing of any message nor Mike Marqusee's objections. Comrade Gaston said he would give him the opportunity to speak for an extended period from the floor and volunteered to pay his travel expenses in full. Leeds AWL must have decided on a boycott: none of them were there - apart, that is, from Jane Astrid Devane, who is also a member of the All Hallows congregation. She - an AWL member - chaired the whole proceedings! Sean decided against intervening from the floor. He departed without approaching either myself or his own comrade Astrid Devane. Introducing the meeting, comrade Gaston explained why the panel was different to one that had been originally publicised. He also chided those on the left who were unwilling to debate with each other and who thereby bring our movement into disrepute. I too, when it came to my turn, said the left should not fear debate and should strive towards creating a healthy culture where differences are openly thrashed out. Till the meeting ended I was not exactly sure who our audience consisted of. I imagined that a clear majority, or at least a good proportion, must be christians and members of the All Hallows congregation. But as the drift of the discussion showed, and comrade Gaston later confirmed, most were in actual fact supporters of the left, not least the Leeds Left Alliance, the Socialist Alliance and the SWP. In other words if comrade Matgamna had deigned to stay any protest he delivered about being "no-platformed" would hardly have proved incomprehensible. He could have made some telling points - but, as is his right, he chose not to. That aside, immediately following the Leeds meeting the Matgamna-Thomas duumvirate - they write under the cover of a single personality called Owen MacThomas - upped the ante in what has turned into a concerted anti-unity offensive. Nothing we say can persuade them that there was not a dastardly CPGB plot to "no-platform" them. I must have spent at least half an hour on the phone to comrade Thomas going over exactly what occurred on and prior to September 20. To no avail. Fortuitously I also encountered comrade Matgamna outside the British Library and engaged him in a long conversation. I patiently outlined to him what happened and what did not happen in Leeds. Far from wanting to "no-platform" him, or anyone else in the AWL, I stressed that our actual intention was exactly the opposite. We had planned to reproduce his contribution in the Weekly Worker. And in any case what motive could we possibly have for trying to silence comrade Matgamna on religion or anything else for that matter? I asked both comrade Thomas and Matgamna to keep their eye on CPGB-AWL rapprochement, file the Leeds incident under 'cock-up', not 'conspiracy' and move on to more important things such as an unofficial Socialist Alliance paper. Neither of them will have any of it. Despite everything, the duumvirate have relentlessly pressed ahead with their anti-unity offensive. A campaign which is in danger of turning into a system and has progressively grown shriller and shriller, and more and more wild, hysterical and dishonest. Their method is reminiscent of the Inquisition and the goal is to have the Provisional Central Committee admitting to crimes it is innocent of and begging the duumvirate for forgiveness. Dream on. Disgustingly the AWL has vomited out a whole series of unfounded claims to the effect that comrade Matgamna had been "ambushed and mugged", that the "leadership of the CPGB 'planned' to embarrass and mug Sean", that "collectively" the CPGB "acted in part out of spite, as a response" to the 'analysis' of the politics of the CPGB which comrade Matgamna produced early in September. Lies, lies, lies, nothing but lies. With equal erroneousness, comrade Thomas maintains that all the above stems from our congenital "Stalinist morality" and deep-seated Stalinist politics. Thus Owen MacThomas writes of my "glorifying Stalin". This sort of deceit and self-obsessed conspiracy-mongering is worthy of the fantasies concocted by Mikhail Bakunin or in more modern times the ravings of Gerry Healy's Workers Revolutionary Party and Jim Robinson's Spartacist League. Indeed, as new depths are plumbed, the more I am inclined to believe that the Leeds incident was welcomed as a heaven-sent (no pun intended) opportunity to put a halt to CPGB-AWL rapprochement and inoculate AWL ranks against infectious moves towards unity. That is why accusations are made of "no-platforming" and "mugging" - it implies premeditation, criminal intent, violence or the threat of violence. Of course, those who brazenly peddle lies and fling about false accusations in order to discredit opponents for the sake of what they see as narrow factional advantage are not only moving away from Marxism but face eventual bankruptcy. The AWL as a whole must put the record straight and would do well to publicly renounce the "Stalinist morality", "no-platforming" and "mugging", etc canards put about by the Matgamna-Thomas duumvirate. Falsification As indicated above, besides turning the Leeds cock-up into a "no platform" conspiracy, the AWL's duumvirate attempt to give a 'theoretical' underpinning to its anti-unity offensive by manufacturing a whole literature of falsification directed against our supposed political positions, methods and origins. This has taken many forms - resolutions voted through by the AWL's executive and national committees; comrade Matgamna's 10,000-word 'Critical notes' on the CPGB; his supplementary 3,500-word letter, 'Jack Conrad on Leeds: karaoke democracy?'; an Owen MacThomas feature, 'Why no right of reply?', in Solidarity; and countless Martin Thomas letters and articles in the Weekly Worker and Solidarity (leave aside email exchanges). In a rather pathetic flanking operation comrade Thomas has also sought to whip up a campaign to demand that the CPGB alone should print - in full - Sean Matgamna's 'Critical notes' and his 'Jack Conrad on Leeds' diatribe. The campaign has not only met a brick wall but has fallen flat. Comrade Thomas pretends that the Weekly Worker promotes itself as the "paper of the left" and as a kind of universal depository for any and every half-baked polemicist. Owen MacThomas therefore writes that to "the 'no platform' the Weekly Worker group have now added a ban on Sean Matgamna's right of reply" (Solidarity October 31). Actually the Weekly Worker is the "paper of the CPGB" and publishes only that material which in the opinion of the editors promotes in some way the aims of the CPGB. We have printed most of comrade Thomas's letters. But our press does not exist to provide an automatic platform for the leaders of other organisations, especially when they send us material the length of which would require a four-page supplement. Naturally we expect them to use their own papers and journals. Of course, that the AWL is against carrying what they stupidly call "gossip" in any of its own publications is a cross entirely of their own making. Another indication showing just how apolitical that organisation is becoming at the top and how much it is in thrall to the narrow outlook and concerns of economism. Basically the main thrust of the AWL's anti-CPGB literature is to set up Sean Matgamna as the master of Marxism and the prophet of modern-day Trotskyism (its name being Matshachtmanism). In contrast the CPGB is portrayed as a "wildly eclectic and incoherent" "Mickey Mouse outfit". Our ranks contain such a contradictory mix of "politics and traditions" so as to make it so "untenable" that it "requires a Keeper of the Mysteries, a high priest", to maintain any coherence (Solidarity October 31). Comrade Matgamna writes darkly of a secret group operating behind the facade of democracy and accountability. Pure fiction. Not surprisingly, in the inside-out world of the AWL duumvirate, the CPGB with its emphasis on politics and its criticism of economism is actually guilty of cod Leninism. We merely mimic Bolshevism, whereas the AWL (under the aegis of that sage and mentor, comrade Matgamna) alone has noticed and come to grips with the actual conditions in Britain - which, of course, requires playing down or ignoring issues such as the monarchy, Scotland and the constitution in favour of the "real movement" of the working class (ie, trade union politics). Sad to say, the anti-CPGB literature of Owen MacThomas and the AWL duumvirate consists of a highly pretentious and arrogant combination of unintended gaffes and cynical invention. In his 'Critical notes' comrade Matgamna candidly admits that he is not a regular reader of the Weekly Worker. Manifestly and demonstrably he has not bothered to go into the AWL's archives in order to research his intended subject. Instead he relies on half-digested snippets and a fetid imagination. As a result he frequently wanders off far and wide from what anyone in the CPGB says or believes. Eg, our supposed commitment to the completion of the bourgeois revolution and a two-stage programme for socialism, our unwillingness to countenance transitional demands, a belief that revolutionary continuity was to be found, till about 1990, through the 'official' CPGB, an obsession with names and symbols, etc. Embarrassing, yes - for the AWL duumvirate. No one is stung by the sloppy mess. Nor does anyone seek revenge. Frankly I feel sorry for the author. Maybe he is losing his touch. Certainly 'Critical notes' displays a laziness, vindictiveness and pointlessness that one does not normally expect to find in the writings of comrade Matgamna - or for that matter comrade Thomas. Employing its Inquisitional approach, the AWL demands that I recant my Stalinite record in the 1980s on the basis of deracinated quotes and unfounded inferences taken from the book From October to August - reprints of speeches and articles on bureaucratic socialism made by Jack Conrad over 1983-1991. No one denies my past. Not least myself. It is public knowledge. In the late 1960s at the age of 14 or 15 I joined the Young Communist League and then the CPGB itself when I was 18. Like many others I was inspired by the Chinese cultural revolution, the Paris events of 1968 and the NLF in Vietnam. Throughout the 1970s, yes, I was what one might call a "left Stalinist". Opposition to the programme of 'official communism', the British road to socialism, support for the USSR and an eclectic admiration of the likes of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, Angela Davis, Ho Chi Minh and, of course, the movement's giants - Marx, Engels and Lenin. After a brief membership of the sclerotic New Communist Party, I was expelled, in 1979, along with a small band of three other comrades, I joined the Communist Party of Turkey. We parted company with the CPT a year later in order to work on publishing The Leninist, the first edition of which came out in November 1981 as the voice of an open faction in the CPGB. Contrary to what comrade Thomas disingenuously suggests, neither our existence as an open faction nor our politics were quietly tolerated within the old CPGB - neither by the Marxism Today faction, nor the pro-Moscow Straight Leftists, or the Morning Star. Together these opportunists banned The Leninist, tried to silence us and drive our comrades out. Why? Our politics were revolutionary. Eg, yes to workers' soviets and no to popular fronts, parliamentary socialism and illusions in the trade union bureaucracy. Strange though it may seem, the AWL duumvirate do not target my real Stalinite past. True, that would be delving into antediluvian history and akin to child abuse. Instead Owen MacThomas invents The Leninist's Stalinism in order to string his lies. Owen MacThomas indignantly complains that we still circulate a book "glorifying Stalin and supporting the suppression of the Hungarian revolution in 1956 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968" (Solidarity October 31). In his 'Critical notes' comrade Matgamna says that our faction welcomed the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979. Elsewhere comrade Thomas insists that we were to be counted amongst those who enthusiastically greeted Wojciech Jaruzelski's party-army regime of 1981, as well as being semi-supporters of the State Emergency Committee anti-Gorbachev coup in 1991. What is the truth? Our position during the 1983-1991 period covered by the book From October to August - which, yes, we still circulate - was to critically identify with the "left groupings of the 1920s" - which broadly corresponded "to the long-term interests of the proletariat" - and to oppose both the forces of capitalist restoration and bureaucratic socialism (J Conrad From October to August London 1992, p35). In other words, whatever their shortcomings, we looked back to the Left Opposition and then the more weighty United Opposition of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, etc. How did we assess Stalin? Did we "glorify" him? Comrade Owen MacThomas can cut and trim as much he likes but the truth will out. Take an important speech of mine in 1983. What to we find? Stalin and his 'second revolution' "strengthened socialism economically but weakened it politically". The first five-year plan was the programme of the left but was carried out using "barbaric" methods. Stalin "turned to terror as a standard political and economic weapon". There was an "increased differentiation" between the mass and the top labour bureaucracy who "came to enjoy and expect luxury" (ibid p41). What of Stalin's society created by the five-year plans? Soviet society was characterised not by "overproduction", as under capitalism, but "bureaucratic irrationality, generalised inefficiency and the underproduction of use-values in virtually all spheres" (ibid p44). Workers exercised "negative control over production", but that went hand in hand with the abolition of rights, including collective bargaining and a system of "police measures". Bureaucratic socialism substituted "qualitative free labour for quantitative unfree labour" (ibid p45). Who was the ruling class, as I saw it in 1983? The "working class can only be considered to remain the ruling class because of where Soviet society had evolved from and because the impulses in the bureaucracy for a return to capitalism were weak" (ibid p46). Socialism was therefore formal. What of the bureaucracy? Did it rule? Yes and no. "Having turned the bureaucratic dictatorship on the proletariat, the bureaucratic dictatorship turned on the bureaucracy. Stalin sought to eliminate all possible opposition to the bureaucracy; as this had become the rule of one man, eliminating all possible opposition to the bureaucracy became the elimination of all possible opposition to himself within the bureaucracy" (ibid p49). Did the Stalin system die with Stalin. No, those who "denounced the 'cult of the individual' and its 'negative consequences'" are the "direct descendants of Stalin" (ibid p52). Alone the working class "fights to democratise the socialist state in order to leave it behind and negate democracy itself ... that is why the proletariat needs its own party" (ibid p65). If that is to "glorify" Stalin and an example of the Stalinite approach to the history of the USSR then it is clear that Owen MacThomas believes he has the power to order the world whereby words mean only what he says they mean, and what passes for normal, socially established, language can simply be ignored. But that is Owen MacThomas through the looking glass! Not the reality inhabited by the rest of us. The objective reader will find no difficulty in recognising that my basic approach during this 1983-1991 period was broadly in line with what Martin Thomas has called "commonplace" Trotskyism. That is, defence of what I then thought were the "historic gains" of the working class - but through advocating socialist democracy and a political revolution against the bureaucracy. Yes, as everyone knows, since 1991 my ideas have undergone radical development. I now define the bureaucratic socialism of Stalin's USSR as anti-socialism and a counterrevolution against the working class within the revolution. But to describe me in the 1980s as a Stalinite is akin to calling red white or white red. We took as our general starting point Leninism and the idea of the Soviet Union as a socialist - workers' - state which had undergone extreme bureaucratic degeneration. Our position was therefore essentially no different from Leon Trotsky when he was alive. He fulsomely praised the first five-year plan and considered defence of the USSR a matter of the highest principle. Let us now touch upon Hungary 1956 and Czechoslovakia 1968. "For many leftists in Britain there was only one possibility in the socialist countries - a Trotsky-type political revolution. We always thought that things were more complex. As shown in the past there was also a danger of counterrevolution" (ibid p66). Hence, when looking at the events of 1956, we had no problem in admitting that the slander about "lynching and book burning" repeated by the Morning Star did not accord to the truth. What happened in Hungary? "A large section of the Hungarian people revolted against the Communist Party leadership and were only quelled after bitter fighting with Soviet armed forces." The Rakosi leadership "imposed many of the Soviet Union's worst bureaucratic deformations", lack of democracy, terror, cliché-ridden Marxism, etc. At the time - writing in 1986 - my opinion was that such countries faced the danger of capitalist restoration unless a communist cadre can mobilise the "working class, organised in workers' councils, in battle to consolidate socialism under the banner of Marxism-Leninism and socialist democracy". Soviet intervention was assessed as a "heavy-handed and bloody solution" which "cost the name of communism in Hungary and the world as a whole dear". Nevertheless "it was clearly a failure not of genuine Marxism-Leninism but of centrist 'official communism'" (ibid p69). Our attitude towards Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1981 and 1989 is more or less the same. The Soviet Union "acted with great-nation arrogance" and invaded Czechoslovakia "against the will of its people and government" (ibid p70). The reasons given by the Soviet Union were "pure invention". Yet Dubcek's 'socialism with a human face' pointed in the direction of market socialism and strengthened the forces of "capitalist restoration". The Soviet Union temporarily blocked that road but what is needed is the organisation of the working class "at the highest level". In 1989 we warned of what we called "peaceful democratic counterrevolution" - peaceful because the "restoration of capitalism will not mean the smashing of the state". "Democratic because ... the masses will not lift a finger to defend the old order" (ibid pp99). Remember, we are repeating these arguments here not because anyone in the CPGB still thinks they are correct. But because we wish to show that the charge that we were some kind of Stalinites is inaccurate to the point of constituting a big lie. Again that can be illustrated by reiterating what we said about Afghanistan (a subject we shall return to again at a later date). What did we have to say? The Soviet Union "went into Afghanistan because, as a great power, it could not tolerate a hostile regime on its borders". It had nothing whatsoever to do with proletarian internationalism. We "unreservedly" condemned the 1979 Soviet intervention. Soviet forces massacred the leftwing Khalq leadership of the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan. Nevertheless in the 1980s we were opposed to "any Soviet deal with imperialism which will involve its withdrawal". Such "appeasement" could "only lead to the collapse of the government in Kabul, the reverse of the gains of the April 1978 revolution (not least the ending of the enslavement of women) and the wholesale massacre of the PDPA membership" (ibid p123). Like the capitalist restoration in eastern Europe that is indeed what happened. Our warnings proved to be well founded and accurate. Lastly let us deal with the August 1991 anti-Gorbachev coup and the Yeltsin countercoup. Were we "semi-supporters" of the State Emergency Committee? No, this is untrue. The State Emergency Committee, we said, had "put off the counterrevolution, but contradictorily it has also made it easier when it came." How did we assess the State Emergency Committee? It has "no programme apart from 'law and order'". What is needed is a "programme of political revolution", a return to the world revolutionary line of Lenin, Sverdlov and Dzerzhinsky. Ousting Gorbachev is not enough to stop the slide towards the "counterrevolutionary abyss". Indeed in discarding all democratic pretensions and legitimacy, in bringing the army and the KGB to the fore, the State Emergency Committee has "enhanced the standing of the main counterrevolutionary personality, Boris Yeltsin" (ibid p252). That is why we stated that communists must operate independently from the State Emergency Committee: "They must struggle to remove it and the thick layer of bureaucrats and revisionists who now dominate their party, the CPSU" (ibid p253). So on this subject we were distinguished from Trotskyism in that, where they generally welcomed what I would now call the 1991 counterrevolution within the counterrevolution, we did not. Like them we argued for a political revolution and socialist democracy. But we highlighted the danger of capitalist restoration which Workers Power, Militant, the Workers Revolutionary Party, Spartacists, Fourth International et al dogmatically ruled out as impossible without a violent civil war. Amazingly some International Socialist Group and Workers Power comrades still consider Putin's Russia as some kind of workers' state. Undaunted, comrade Owen MacThomas still equates our 1983-1991 approach with 'Stalinism'. Presumably he and the AWL have their own special, sectish, definition of Trotskyism and Stalinism. Trotskyism equals all things the AWL thinks are good. Stalinism equals all things bad. By self-designation the AWL is Trotskyite. But because they thoroughly despise them, their Trotskyite opponents are demonised as Stalinites. As I have said before that makes rational dialogue rather difficult. Owen MacThomas knows I have never described myself as a Trotskyite - and since 1991 my views have considerably changed. By the same measure I find it difficult to classify the AWL under the heading of Trotskyism. The ruling ideology in the AWL is Shachtmanism, a political trend hounded out of the Fourth International and branded a "petty bourgeois deviation" by Trotsky himself. That presumably makes Trotsky a Stalinite, according to the warped logic of Owen MacThomas. Jack Conrad
Worker