Letters

New ways

I think Jack Conrad’s article misses a number of vital points (‘Democracy and centralism’, July 31). Britain in 2003 is not Russia in 1903. The British working class has a long tradition of running organisations, official and unofficial, for itself. It is often rightly suspicious of attempts by professional revolutionaries to take over its struggles and run them not in the interests of the class, but of the self-appointed vanguard.

Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist manifesto that the communists have no interests apart from those of the class. Comrade Conrad’s article, however, reflects the arrogant view of the intelligentsia that the working class are a bunch of thickos who, left to their own devices, can only achieve an economistic trade union consciousness and therefore have to be led by the nose like so many sheep.

A reading of what Trotsky and Luxemburg were writing around 1904 in reply to Lenin’s What is to be done? will prove instructive. Their predictions that the party would substitute itself for the class, the central committee would substitute itself for the party and the leader would substitute himself for the central committee have proven to be all too accurate. The process begun with the ban on factions passed at the 10th Bolshevik Congress (passed in the wake of the resort of the workers and sailors of Kronstadt to the criticism of arms) ended in the dictatorship of Stalin and the GPU.

In the same issue John Pearson wrote: “Once the decision of the delegating body is made though, it is my responsibility if I am elected delegate, to carry out that decision. Where would all the principles of working class democracy, accountability, openness and political honesty be, if we were to act differently?”

We have to look no further than the myriad of the sects run as petty dictatorships by their central committees with their endless rounds of expulsions, resignations, splits and cynical survivors for an answer. Is it any wonder many workers recoil in horror from this nightmare?

Maybe it is time to look at new ways of organising. I remain open to being convinced that democratic centralism can be made to work in practice. However, I am afraid it will take a lot more than comrade Conrad’s article to do so.

New ways
New ways

Too centralist

Jack Conrad’s initial response to our Stockport Socialist Alliance secretary John Pearson’s vote for the branch mandate at a recent SA national council was bending the bow, or bending the stick, firmly towards centralism.

The problem with this approach is that the bow gets bent out of shape, as the history of the Socialist Workers Party demonstrates. Jack repeated myths about Lenin’s organisational proposals in What is to be done? as a party of a new type. But the proposals were essentially about the need to establish a party centre in the absence of democracy and a coherent party in tsarist Russia.

The democratic aspect of democratic centralism - particularly democracy from below in the party - was not emphasised. The pamphlet was also written when Lenin was far too influenced by Kautsky and concepts about socialism as a product of the intelligentsia and workers spontaneously only being able to develop trade union consciousness. It was Lenin’s first word on organisation rather than any fully developed model to uncritically recommend for today.

As Lenin was to write some years later, “We all know the economists have gone to one extreme. To straighten matters out somebody had to pull in the opposite direction.” Many of the centralist exaggerations are not tenable. Lenin developed some of his centralist organisational proposals in One step forward, two steps back (1904). Rosa Luxemburg wrote the best criticism of Lenin’s one-sided centralism in her Organisational problems of Russian social democracy. Her main point was that the proposals contained far too much of the sterile spirit of the overseer, which is not positive or creative. Revolutionary politics were not about the infallibility of the cleverest central committee.

Which brings us to Jack’s other myth, that the democratic centralist organisation is like a military machine or, to use his own words, “Members of the Communist Party act as one under a leadership which can change tactical direction at a moment’s notice.”

Where is the room for open debate and discussion here? It’s not essential. Trust the leader. The communist troops are instructed to turn at the double and they carry out the instruction or, as Harry Pollitt used to say, the members’ job is to follow the party line. Now Jack and the CPGB do not operate like that, but this old military image of the party is used as a stick to beat John Pearson. When abrupt strategic or tactical turns are required, this is usually when minority rights and heated open debate are called for to determine the way forward. Otherwise the only thinking element would be the trusted leaders.

Take the example of the April theses. Before the turn could be put into activity - and this was about the life and death of a revolution in 1917 - the party majority had to be convinced of the politics which justified it. It was the old Bolsheviks with their centralised experience and knowledge that got it wrong. Lenin was compelled to fight the trusted leaders from below - first as an individual and second as a minority.

Now Jack has thought twice about his first response and is saying that “democratic centralism should never be treated as a set of fixed rules and timeless regulations”. Democratic centralism changes with different circumstances. Broadly, very broadly, democratic centralism is about unity around the programme. But this leaves the trusted leader to define what democratic centralism is in certain historical circumstances.

Those who are uncritical of the Bolshevik tradition can dismiss the norms or rules of the democratic aspect only by falling back on the trusted, infallible leader. Tony Cliff could dismiss the democratic rules because the true followers believed he instinctively knew where the class struggle was going. If we are ever to offload this rubbish we cannot dismiss the democratic content of democratic centralism or trust the pragmatism of the leader to determine how much party democracy we can have.

Too centralist
Too centralist

Dictatorship

I am amazed at how Jack Conrad and his associates seem to paint Vladimir Lenin as an icon of freedom and democracy. His ‘democratic centralism’ may have started out simply as a guide to a disciplined regime for a revolutionary organisation, but I agree with Janet Brett (Letters, August 21) that the party under his stewardship became a tool to oppress the workers and add to their difficulties. Far from liberating them from the shackles of capitalism, he helped set the scene for the horrors and atrocities of the working class under Stalin.

At the close of the civil war in 1921, the workers in Petrograd and the other major cities (who were the main supporters of the Bolsheviks) expected that the (communist) government would lighten their burdens, abolish wartime restrictions and introduce some fundamental liberties. The Russian people had gone through the horrors and hardships of the Great War, the revolution and then the civil war, they simply craved the commencement of a more normal life, and some no doubt the materialisation of a utopian dream.

The truth is that Lenin and Trotsky’s government were not willing to give up power. This new ‘workers’ state’ had no intention of loosening the yoke, but continued with the militarisation of labour, further centralisation and the suppression of protest meetings. Strikes were called, and many of the workers (in whose name the revolution had originally been won) were now called traitors and counterrevolutionaries!

The communist secret police were soon making numerous arrests and suppressing labour unions and organisations - Trotsky’s most trusted units were called from the provinces into the city, much to the growing anger and anti-Bolshevik feelings of the population. The Kronstadt sailors were staunch supporters of the revolution and the soviet system, but they were not supporters of a dictatorship of a Communist Party, and this is what was happening. It was not ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’; it was without doubt the dictatorship of the party over the proletariat!

The rest is history, the Kronstadt rebellion and its subsequent bloody crushing. The Kronstadt sailors movement for free soviets was stifled in blood, while at the same time Lenin’s government was making compromises and deals with European capitalists, signing the Riga peace treaty which allowed a population of 12 millions to be turned over to the mercies of Poland, and helping Turkish imperialism to suppress the republics of the Caucasus!

And all this well before Stalin became dictator of the USSR; Lenin and his associates were by 1921 undoubtedly committed to communist power, not communist ideals. They knew best - another example of communism from above!

Dictatorship
Dictatorship

Cynics

Anyone who cannot distinguish between bureaucratic centralism and democratic centralism is hopeless muddle-head in my view. Why do people who should know better persist in confusing the two? It is not, after all, a difficult distinction to understand. There is nothing complicated or sinister about deciding upon action by majority vote and then implementing it in a united way.

If there is no possibility of uniting in a disciplined fashion, on the basis of democratically agreed decisions, then there is no possibility of defeating an utterly ruthless class enemy. There is no hope for humanity. This is simple fact of life. If the working class and the oppressed are not better organised, better informed and more ruthless than the class enemy, they will be butchered.

People who say it is impossible to create a democratic centralist party are cynically writing off the ability of the working class to organise itself in an orderly, comradely, yet effective way. Perhaps they think that it is against ‘human nature’, as the bourgeois demagogues say?

According to Trotsky (in his In defence of Marxism), the secret of Lenin’s success in building the Bolshevik Party was his comradely loyalty towards minorities who had been defeated in votes at party conferences. It was always his policy to be generous towards them, when offering positions on leading bodies and in full-time positions. In this way, he avoided damaging splits.

Cynics
Cynics

SWP and BNP

The SWP needn’t have bothered organising all those coach trips for their Anti-Nazi League/Globalise Resistance/Socialist Alliance followers to the various locations of sitting British National Party councillors. As several of us SA indies said a couple of months back on the e-lists, Nick Griffin’s carefully designed mask will slip before long and the BNP will start to reveal its true face.

We have witnessed the start of this at last by the alleged ‘drink-related behaviour’ of councillor Luke Smith (Burnley BNP) at a gathering of the party faithful. It has been reported in the press as a fracas, in which three other people and a security guard were also believed to have been involved - police were informed but no action was taken. Smith was recently banned from the local football club grounds for yobbish behaviour and has now been suspended from the BNP while the embarrassed Mr Griffin holds an internal investigation.

Luke Smith’s behaviour is unacceptable as a serving councillor. In fact it is every bit as annoying and tiresome as that of the SWP cadre who tried to prevent Weekly Worker comrades distributing their paper at a national event not so long ago - this behaviour is not really a vote-winner, is it? Mind you, neither the SWP nor the BNP are likely to be a threat to the status quo in the future, so no worries of either Stalinism or fascism being established in Britain in the near future then!

I’m surprised that the SWP leadership haven’t started a new front against the outrageously racist muslim organisation, Hizb ut-Tahrir. According to an in-depth report on BBC’s Newsnight on August 22 by Imran Khan, they are a radical muslim political group operating here in the United Kingdom with a racist website and a racist ideology which is working hard to recruit new members from a British university.

Silly me, I forgot - to speak out against a muslim or any minority group, no matter what they preach, is in itself racist, as per the central committee of the SWP! So, best we ignore the more serious threat of backward and reactionary forces who openly preach ‘Death to all Jews’ - and continue to support the SWP fixation with Griffin’s football bovver boys.

SWP and BNP
SWP and BNP

Human nature

I read Michael Malkin’s article with great interest and sympathy (‘What makes us human?’, August 21).

In my (first version) CPGB life, there were two reasons why I found the Economic and philosophical manuscripts difficult to make sense of. Firstly, Stalinist publishers had deliberately distorted Marx’s text, failing to reproduce the first manuscript in the three-column manner in which Marx wrote it. Just look at the EPM at http://home.freeuk.com/lemmaesthetics and you will find you are reading a different document. And Marx’s ideas are so well developed, even in 1844.

Secondly, early English language writers on the EPM (eg, David McLellan) made a dreadful hash of dealing with the text - Marx Before Marxism and all that. It took me some time to realise that Marx himself said, in the much cited preface of 1859, that his intellectual breakthrough was made during his study of Hegel’s theory of the state. Marx told us that he had sorted out his key ideas before he had written the EPM! Sadly, I did not pay attention to what Marx wrote, as I accepted party doctrine (ie, Stalin and Althusser) on the periodisation of Marx’s ideas.

I accepted it rather than reading Marx and thinking for myself. How do we get socialism if we don’t do that, comrades? Ah, if only I had not been such a small-minded CP member in those days and had read Marcuse on the EPM.

Human nature
Human nature

Not reductionist

While Michael Malkin is right to remind us of the central importance of Marx’s ‘humanism’, his contribution is seriously flawed.

His major opponent is identified as Daniel Dennett, whom he introduces as “a prominent advocate of solutions proposed by mechanistic materialists such as La Mettrie and Cabanis”, adding: “Dennett tells us that human consciousness can be reduced to physiological, biochemical processes in the brain and central nervous system.”

Inhis major work L’Homme machine (1749), the non-reductive La Mettrie declared his theory as an extension to Cartesian philosophy; he defined the individual as “a purposively self-moving and self-sufficient system, consisting of dynamically interrelated parts”; and he rejected any notion that mental processes are reductively identical to their physiological causes. Working in the days of the Napoleonic empire, Cabanis made the famous comparison between brain and stomach: “As the latter is the machine for digesting food, so the former is a machine for digesting impressions.” He argued that a study of mind necessitated understanding the “mechanism of language” as the gateway to the “mechanism of the intellect”; like Descartes and Marx he believed (quite falsely) that language is a prerequisite for consciousness.

But the real villain of the piece for Malkin is Dennett, for his “reductionist” approach. Malkin offers the reader half a dozen paragraphs attacking this “ultra-determinism that robs humanity of most, if not all, of its meaning”. In fact, Dennett argues for exactly the opposite! Let the accused speak for himself: “The problem of mind is not to be divorced from the problem of a person. Looking at the ‘phenomena of mind’ can only be looking at what a person does, feels, thinks, experiences; minds cannot be examined as separable entities without leading inevitably to Cartesian spirits, and an examination of bodies and their workings will never bring us to the subject matter of mind at all. Thoughts, for example, are not only not to be identified with physical processes in the brain, but also not to be identified with logical or functional states or events in an intentional system (physically realised in the nervous system of a body)” (Content and consciousness 1969, p189).

In his later, Consciousness explained (1991), Dennett develops this argument further, stating that to “make the mistake of trying to define all salient mental differences in terms of biological functions” would be “to misread Darwin badly” (p460)!

Malkin relates his ‘thought experiment’ of Barbarossa in order to contrast his mythological Dennett with “the Marxist view”: “It seems to me uncontroversial for a Marxist to say that there is a distinct, objective and irreducible reality to the mind - something qualitatively different from the mere operations of the brain, and that the essence of this reality is to be found in the social intercourse mediated through language and other forms of communication,” he says.

Had Malkin read a little more of Dennett, he may have stumbled upon Brainstorms (1978), where, in a satirical essay, ‘Where am I?’ (pp310-323), Dennett carries out his own ‘Barbarossa-type’ exercise, ironically reaching identical conclusions to Malkin (albeit at a rather more refined level of analysis!).

I sincerely hope Michael Malkin is unsuccessful in attempting to discourage readers of Weekly Worker from reading the exciting and informative books of Dan Dennett and his colleagues!

Not reductionist
Not reductionist