Letters

Poverty

This year’s United Nations Report on Human Development once again reminded us of global injustice. The 10% richest people on earth earn 124 times more than the poorest 10%. The one percent richest earn more than 57% of the world population combined.

In 2001, the world’s GDP was $45,000 billion. If this wealth was divided equally, a family with three children, be they living in Africa, Asia or in the USA would have a monthly income of €2,260 - enough to have a comfortable life. Every human being on earth would have $14 per day, but 2.8 billion people are currently living on $2 or less, and 1.1 billion people on $1 or less.

One person out of three has no electricity, and one out of five no drinking water. Every day, 30,000 children die of hunger and preventable diseases. More children died of diarrhoea during the 1990s than the total number of people who died in armed conflicts since the end of World War II.

Every year, 10 million human beings die of hunger. Yet, there is an annual surplus of food for at least 600 million people. But 800 million people suffer from hunger: one person out of three in sub-Sahara Africa, and one out of four in south-east Asia. In India alone, 200 million suffer from hunger. However, the solution is fairly easy: saving them would only cost $2 billion - the equivalent of one month of US occupation of Iraq.

The report also notes that only $35 billion would suffice to prevent the annual death of eight million people from preventable diseases like tuberculosis, malaria and diarrhoea. That is less than the $40 billion spent by the US for their war in Iraq between March and April this year.

What is scandalous about those figures is that all this misery is preventable. Compare on the basis of this UN report socialist China and capitalist India, for example. In India, more than 200 million people suffer from hunger and more than 400 million have to live on less than one dollar a day. If India provided the same healthcare as China, every year 1.5 million children could be saved. Proportional to population, China spends three times as much as India on healthcare. India has an illiteracy rate of 35%, compared to China’s rate of 16%. The average Chinese can expect to live until 71, the average Indian 64. India’s infant mortality rate is twice that of China.

In Cuba, there is one medical doctor for 170 people. In the rest of Latin America, the proportion is of one doctor for 613 people. Cuba spends per inhabitant twice as much on healthcare and education than the rest of Latin America. In those countries, the 10% richest people earn 46 times what the poorest ten percent earn. In Cuba, the proportion is five times. A quarter of Latin Americans have to survive on $2 a day or less. In Cuba, less than two percent do. This is a reminder that a more equitable organisation of society is possible.

Poverty
Poverty

ESF bureaucrats

On reading the list of agreed plenary speakers from England to the European Social Forum in Paris, a sad smile came across my face (‘Heavy-handed Socialist Workers Party’, September 4). There is not a worker amongst them - left trade union bureaucrats, academics, journalists and full-time politicians to a man/woman, all of whom live a comfortable, middle class life style. Most are over 40 years of age. I see in the good old English tradition Oxbridge is well represented too.

Now I’m sure these people are all dedicated activists of some sort, but who do they really represent? There is hardly one of them who could, or more importantly would, live on the average worker’s wages and I include the left union bureaucrats so beloved by the Communist Party of Britain.

If those nominated by the other countries involved are similar in class background and employment as our bunch I can see little point in participating in the ESF, as I gave up being a stooge in the audience for such people years ago. Is there anybody on the English left who would be surprised or invigorated by anything this lot said? They are, I’m sad to say, typical of the type that has marched us up to the top of the hill, then back down again for generations. One is witnessing the CPB and SWP link in action when this list was drawn up. Pathetic.

ESF bureaucrats
ESF bureaucrats

Escalation

The decision of the Israeli government to approve the expulsion of Palestinian president Yasser Arafat is already proving to be a disastrous one, endangering further the security of the region and, with it, the lives and safety of Israeli people. It makes the formation of a new stable Palestinian government impossible and thus precludes any possibility of a renewal of the already deeply compromised talks on the road map in the foreseeable future. It increases the probability of a further deterioration of the situation and an escalation of violence in the area.

We therefore call upon the Sharon government not to implement this decision and to immediately stop the violent reprisals which are already being carried out throughout the West Bank and Gaza. We also call upon the international community to prevent such an act, which is a clear violation of the 4th Geneva Convention and should be vehemently opposed, as should the wave of targeted killings Israel has promised.

In particular the European Union, as a member of the quartet, has a special responsibility for making its voice heard clearly in opposition to these developments.

Escalation
Escalation

Ukrainian nonsense

To paraphrase Trotsky, if there were only five revolutionists in the entire world, they should immediately set up an international tendency.

A nationally isolated revolutionary organisation must either immediately seek out international collaborators and co-thinkers and establish an international organisation or face the prospect of national chauvinist degeneration. I don’t recall exactly where Trotsky wrote this, but it was the gist of his argument and it has always struck me as a ‘given’ for present-day socialist organisation.

Mark Fischer talks a lot of dangerous nonsense in attempting to ridicule those organisations that were victims of the Ukrainian scam (‘Attack of the clones’, August 28). At least these organisations had tried to do something to build in the former eastern bloc. The fact that they were conned by time-wasting idiots is neither here nor there. What has Fischer done?

Let us face the facts, comrades. Since the collapse of Stalinism over a decade ago, the record of the western left, in providing assistance to the revival of the revolutionary socialist left in the former eastern bloc, is a nothing short of scandalous. And this includes the CPGB and the other minuscule components of the British socialist chattering classes. What has the CPGB done? Next to nothing, as far as I can see. Therefore, what right has the CPGB to mock the efforts of others?

The largest Trotskyist organisation, the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, which had perhaps the most resources for undertaking this task, has essentially sat on its backside and done next to nothing. It managed to lose its only existing eastern European section in Poland. In contrast, the Grantites have at least made some efforts in this direction by collecting, and making available on the web, translations of key Marxists’ works in many of the eastern European and central Asian languages. And both the Grantites and the Committee for a Workers’ International have made sustained efforts to establish socialist organisations in the former eastern bloc. It is a pity that their notion of democratic centralism is more akin to bureaucratic centralism and this means that their efforts have largely been stillborn.

Why is it essential to organise on an international level from the outset instead of “building the walls first before putting on the roof”, as the Cliffites (and seemingly also the CPGB?) have always maintained? It is because genuine international democratic centralism is the only organisational structure that minimises the effects of local, national chauvinist pressures on national sections. Only a common decision-making process at the international level, at international conferences and meetings, and a common international discipline based on political (not bureaucratic) methods - remonstration, political argument, moral pressure and dialogue - can avoid a nationally distorted view of the world and a consequent national chauvinist degeneration.

Socialists see things differently in different parts of the world because of the differing material and ideological pressures which act upon them. In countries where Stalinism has been the dominant ideology in the workers’ movement (former eastern bloc, France, Italy, Spain, Greece), there is one set of pressures. In countries where liberalism, social democracy and Labourism is the dominant force (Scandinavia, US, Britain, Australia and the English-speaking world generally) there is another set of pressures. There are different pressures again in third world countries, where national bourgeois or radical petty bourgeois influences predominate. Generally speaking, there are different pressures that stem from a given organisation’s location in relation to the so-called first, second and third worlds.

In Britain the main pressures acting on the revolutionary left are left Labourism, left liberalism, narrow syndicalism, ‘Guardianism’, pacifism and ‘NGOism’ - the ideological outlook of various organisations that try to help the third world. In reality, these NGOs act as transmission belts for good old-fashioned British ‘democratic’ imperialist ideology (aka left liberalism) from the first world to the third world and increasingly the second. They also transmit it to the far left.

Another source of pressure on the left is the British academic milieu - from which many of the leaders of the British far left originate. Only by discussing and deciding positions in relation to key world events, at international conferences and meetings, can these national distorted views be synthesised into balanced, fully rounded assessments and positions. That is why international democratic centralism is so important and why Fischer is so wrong to scoff at the efforts of others to establish it, in however caricatured a fashion. By all means scoff at the caricature, but not at the idea of trying to establish an international organisation.

Of course, we have all seen the various caricatures of international organisation that have existed over the years. The bureaucratic planet-satellite model of the Healy-Lambert ICFI/OCRFI, Lutte Ouvrière’s ICU, the International Militant Tendency/CWI and the British Socialist Workers Party’s IST. The USFI once had a rather loose, ramshackle international democratic centralist organisation of sorts, but they have now abandoned it - wrongly and stupidly identifying international democratic centralism with ‘Zinovievism’.

What absolute nonsense! This ludicrous notion essentially implies that Leninism was no different from (or gave rise to?) Stalinism. The mechanism for the degeneration into the planet-satellite model is the fact that money and resources exist unevenly throughout the globe. The US, European and Japanese sections always have far more resources than the second and third world sections. Historically, this has led to a kind of reflection of the international economic divide within the international organisations of the left. The sections with the money are able to use it to control what happens in the international tendency as a whole.

A key aspect of establishing genuine international democratic centralism, therefore, is for all monies available for international work and activities to be placed under the control of an elected international body. And of course the wealthier sections must contribute more than the poorer sections. Without this, international democratic centralism is meaningless. The other requirement is of course for the right of tendencies to exist for as long as is necessary within the international organisation. The British SWP is wrong to attack this model of internal organisation. It erroneously attributes the fragmentation of the USFI British section (International Marxist Group) to this form of internal organisation. But the SWP fails to explain why the USFI French section, the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, which had essentially the same tendency-friendly internal regime, has survived while the SWP/IST French section has collapsed and its remnants have joined the LCR!

The free clash of internal tendencies was always taken for granted by Trotsky and it is the SWP’s wrong-headed notion of internal organisation which is currently preventing it from uniting and strengthening the British left. The fact that its Scottish organisation is now a long-term tendency in the SSP surely contradicts its historic notions about party internal regime where tendencies may only exist in pre-conference periods?

Ukrainian nonsense
Ukrainian nonsense

Dirty Den

For anyone who is still kidding themselves that the Labour Party can be transformed from within, they must be smarting from TB’s recent remarks at the TUC conference.

One wonders, often in pure amazement, at how difficult it is to get the scales to fall, or in this case be ripped, from people’s eyes. The abolition of clause four, one would think, had sent shock waves through the relationship. But these people are like Angie Watts in her abusive relationship with Dirty Den - however much bile and venom he poured upon her, she kept putting up with it. The real problem facing people in this situation is they are unable to see any alternative to this destructive relationship and so remain within it, putting up with greater and more vicious assaults as time goes on.

The trade union leaders, party rank and file and ‘revolutionaries’ within the Labour Party or who still call for support for Labour are now so far out on a limb there is nothing left to grasp at but thin air. Blair has put in plain English what every other Labour leader has acted out in practice, but been too embarrassed to say: “The idea of a leftwing Labour government as the alternative to a moderate and progressive one is the abiding delusion of 100 years of our party. We aren’t going to fall for it again.”

Tony’s clear about where he’s going: now it time for us to decide too.

Dirty Den
Dirty Den

Democratic SA

A few years back there was a Campaign for a Democratic Scottish Socialist Party, set up in response to ‘delegate-based’ proposals for the SSP annual general meeting made by the International Socialist Movement-dominated SSP leadership. The proposals were not really delegate-based, given that ‘delegates’ could vote the way they wished at the AGM.

The campaign had some initial success, with the proposals being defeated at the first SSP AGM they were made at, before being carried at the next AGM immediately prior to the SWP entry into the SSP.

How about a Campaign for a Democratic Socialist Alliance with its own website and UK-wide discussion forum? The website could contain down-loadable petitions and leaflets agreed by the democratic socialists within the alliance and put pressure on the forces of darkness within the SA.

Democratic SA
Democratic SA

Centralise

In Richard Griffin’s letter (‘Mind the gap’, September 11) he states that neither liberal electoral democracy nor democratic centralism “have advanced the interests of the working class or led to genuine freedom”. This nihilist world outlook would have us believe that the working class have not improved their lives one iota since the dark days of feudalism! With regard to democratic centralism, if there is one thing revolutionaries learnt in the 20th century it is this: decentralisation or survival.

Griffin contrasts democratic centralism to anarchist “genuine democracy from below”, but the two are not necessarily in conflict. The Bolshevik revolutionary slogan was ‘All power to the soviets’. Following the dissolution of the constituent assembly in January 1918, a move welcomed by the anarchists and left SRs, the local and regional soviets exercised almost undivided power. What disrupted this power was not the centralised rule of the Bolsheviks, but the civil war conditions created by the white terror of the internal and external armies of counterrevolution. If there had been no central authority, the revolution would have been instantly strangled.

To illustrate this point we can look to Engels’s example of the uprising in Spain in 1872-73 in which anarchists seized power in municipalities across the country. At first, the situation looked promising. The king was forced to abdicate and the bourgeois government could only muster a few thousand ill-trained troops. Yet this ragtag force prevailed because, as Engels put it, “The fragmentation and isolation of the revolutionary forces ... enabled the government troops to smash one revolt after another” (Marx, Engels, Lenin - anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism: selected writings New York 1972).

The same is true in Argentina today. The heroic factory occupations by the militant working class are being defeated one by one by the armed police. The only guarantee of defence against counterrevolution is the centralised dictatorship of the proletariat. The ‘pure communist’ alternatives are ahistorical. Whatever these puritans say about the ‘deformation’ or ‘betrayal’ of this or that revolution, they seem to provide no viable alternative except to slam every organised attempt by revolutionaries to defend their revolution.

Centralise
Centralise

Closet Trotskyism

Jack Conrad’s conflation of the industrialisation and collectivisation of the Soviet economy with Stalin’s subsequent assault on the Communist Party as a “bureaucratic counterrevolution within the revolution” is historically wrong and, I suspect, reflects Jack’s closet Trotskyism (‘In defence of democratic centralism’, September 4).

His schema falsely separates the economic revolution of the late 20s-early 30s from the political revolutions of 1917, and ignores the fact that the mass attack on the party and society in the period 1937-38 was a distinct and separate set of events, and did not automatically flow from the three revolutions.

At best the new economic policy (NEP) of the 1920s left the Bolshevik-controlled state attempting to manage capitalism. Stalin’s economic revolution of the late 1920s recognised this policy was temporary and in fact would lead to an intensification of the class struggles with capitalist elements, without giving the Bolsheviks the economic and therefore political means for fighting it. To continue with the NEP was ultimate suicide for the regime. What alternative did any regime claiming to be socialist have than to implement rapid industrialisation and collectivisation, overcome its internal class enemies and develop a powerful and modern economy as a counter to the hostile imperialist encirclement?

By the time of the ‘Congress of Victors’ in February 1934, the rapid development of industry, especially heavy industry, had been largely achieved, as had collectivisation. The battles in the party and in the countryside had been won and were dying down. The rise of Hitler in Germany was casting an ominous shadow of war and many hitherto leading ‘Stalinist’ figures in the party advocated moderation and consolidation.

The congress itself is regarded as representing a compromise between the increasingly minority Stalin group and the majority moderates. Many defeated oppositionists - eg, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, Rykov - were allowed to speak and were heard with respect. The targets in the second five-year plan were significantly more modest. Of the members elected to the new nine-person politburo, only two (Kaganovich and Molotov) could be relied on to support Stalin in any more extreme policy.

Throughout the subsequent year, there were clear examples of the extremists being restrained and a new course being steered in respect of economic and security policies. Stalin himself was downgraded from general secretary to secretary.

The launch of the murderous attack on the party two years later in August 1936 - which became known as the Yezhovshchina - was effectively a coup d’etat by Stalin and the henchmen he had manoeuvred into key positions in the intervening period - mainly Yezhov, Malenkov and Khrushchev. It was precisely because a majority of the party and its leaders in the politburo and central committee now felt the economic revolution of industrialisation and collectivisation had been successfully carried out and that the new course should therefore be peace, consolidation and a relaxation of discipline, that the attack was launched. There could be no place for a Stalin in conditions of peace within the Communist Party and society.

The Yezhovshchina was therefore not a component of the 1929-33 economic revolution, but a subsequent coup d’etat carried out by the then minority Stalin group to avoid the political consequences of the successful implementation of that economic revolution: namely the ascendancy of a more moderate leadership, perhaps headed by Kirov. Most party leaders - including 70% of the 1934 central committee members - were murdered precisely because up until that point collective leadership and democratic processes were providing a check and a limit on Stalin and his entourage and a very different political course would have more naturally flowed from the economic revolution.

Closet Trotskyism
Closet Trotskyism