Letters

Centralism kills

I read Joe Wills letter in reply to Richard Griffin with interest. Wills dismisses Richard’s comments on liberal electoral democracy as a “nihilist world outlook” that suggests “the working class have not improved their lives one iota since the dark days of feudalism” (Weekly Worker September 18).

I was under the impression that working class direct action had improved our lives, not paternalistic actions by liberal parliaments. Obviously I was wrong to think that reforms were a product of working class self-activity (and the fear it provoked in ruling circles). Thanks for clarifying that - I now know where the real power to change society lies.

Looking at ‘democratic centralism’, Wills argues: “If there is one thing revolutionaries learnt in the 20th century it is this: decentralisation or survival.” Strange. That century suggests the opposite: centralisation leads to minority rule, not socialism. Wills claims that ‘democratic centralism’ is “not necessarily in conflict” with popular democracy, yet his own example (the Russian Revolution) shows this is false. He states that the Bolshevik slogan was ‘All power to the soviets’.

Indeed, it was a slogan, and nothing more. Lenin in 1917 made it clear that the Bolsheviks aimed for party power, not soviet power. And that is what we got. Wills claims that what “disrupted” the power of local soviets was “the civil war conditions created by the white terror of the internal and external armies of counterrevolution”. Sadly, this often repeated claim is false. The Bolsheviks had been disbanding soviets elected with non-Bolshevik majorities from the spring of 1918: ie, before the civil war started (see Samuel Farber’s Before Stalinism). Faced with the choice of soviet power or party power, the Bolsheviks picked the latter. Unsurprisingly, given Lenin’s politics.

Wills argues that, “if there had been no central authority, the revolution would have been instantly strangled”. Yet it was this “central authority” that strangled the revolution. It had started to do this before the start of the civil war with attacks on soviet democracy, workers’ control and opposition groups. Anarchists are not surprised by this, of course, as the state is designed for minority rule.

Then there is the stark contradiction in Wills’s argument. According to Lenin, revolution inevitably involves civil war. Now, if civil war makes soviet democracy impossible, then Leninists should come clean and rip up Lenin’s State and revolution (as Lenin did once in power). You cannot have it both ways.

Iain McKay
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Centralism kills
Centralism kills

Spain 1936

Bob Pitt’s piece on cross-class alliances makes some interesting points, but its comments of the popular front in Spain misses crucial dimensions (Weekly Worker September 18).

Firstly, the nature of the labour movement, the CNT and the anarchist dimension: along the south-eastern coast of Spain, the libertarians were the hegemonic force in the labour movement. Secondly, perhaps most telling, the dynamics of change: one the one hand, Caballero was moving left, but he had a background of working with conservative governments in collaboration with employers, so he had to earn the trust of large parts of the labour movement - he was opposed by a rightist tendency within the UGT and PSOE; on the other hand, a part of the libertarian movement was moving rightwards.

In the libertarian camp adventurists who had tried what they called revolutionary gymnastics - launching insurrections - had got a bloody nose and had been unable to upset the rightwing government - tacitly they accepted that it was useful to vote for the left to get their comrades out of jail. Such a practical objective - getting comrades out of jail - led them to downplay criticism of the popular front policy.

Another perspective had been aired within the libertarian camp - V Orobon Fernandez had argued for a front based on activity by workers to defend their interests. Fernandez died before 1936, and his views were not developed. Thus, although it did discuss self-management and did carry through many of these changes in 1936-37, the libertarian camp had little practical political policy to propose - especially on how it was to work with, through or beyond the UGT/PSOE - and was taken by surprise by the events of the summer of 1936.

Under such conditions the leadership of the libertarian movement ended up in government working with Caballero, partly because it did not know what it wanted or where it was going (beyond reflecting that it would continue the revolution after the war), and partly because it feared defeat if it attempted to rule on its own. Such a view might suggest that this popular front was not so much a Stalinist conspiracy to establish governments with the liberal bourgeoisie to defeat fascism, but rather a product of past defeats of the working class and its political formations.

Spain 1936
Spain 1936

CWU ballot

The Communication Workers Union campaign for strike action was utter bollocks from the start. There was no way we could have matched the amount of crap Royal Mail was sending to individuals and the posters they sent to offices, but Billy Hayes and Dave Ward want pissing off for the amateur way they dealt with things. Thousands of members didn’t receive a ballot paper (14% in my office alone).

Hayes and Ward poked their noses out of their window in Wimbledon, sniffed the London weighting issue and imagined they had the same support everywhere else. At no time did divisional officers visit delivery offices. You could do worse than write an article on how those fucking desk jockeys who have forgotten their roots lost us this campaign.

CWU ballot
CWU ballot

Scamming

Thank you for exposing the Ukrainian scam. However, British parties, organisations and groups have worked some pretty clever scams themselves.

A British Communist Party would go all out to obtain recognition by a socialist country. In order to get the franchise it had to maintain three things: one, there was a good revolutionary solution in Britain; two, it was leading the British revolution; three, all other parties were no good - if not actually counterrevolutionary or CIA fronts.

Once a party had secured recognition, money, literature, free holidays and delegations to international conferences flowed freely. This was all at the expense of the socialist countries who were, on the whole, poor with small reserves of foreign currency.

A classic example was the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), whose paper The Worker at one stage carried the banner - ‘Russia 1917! China 1949! Britain next!’ The parties and governments of the socialist countries formulated their political strategies on the basis of the tales that they were told. This kind of scam was operated throughout the western countries. Parties which were excluded from the feast in the socialist countries often recognised each other.

International conferences were ideal places to meet third world revolutionary leaders. Either that or else party members from the western countries went snooping around in the third world using their party’s international prestige. As anyone could join a western party, intelligence was easily collected in this way and passed on. Small wonder the British left is known internationally as the left wing of the British foreign office.

Friendship organisations also have a role to play. They tell the leaders out there that the British people would like them to moderate their line. Said leaders crack down on the left and moderate their line. The friendship organisation then tells people here that they must respect the decision of the people out there and back the moderate line.

With the Ukrainian scam, tragedy is repeating itself as farce.

Scamming
Scamming

Think bigger

When people complain in your columns about the SWP ‘packing’ meetings (eg, in Birmingham Socialist Alliance) and voting in supporters of their own political trend, as if this were some kind of bureaucratic manoeuvre, I begin to wonder about their own democratic pretensions.

Since when has it been a crime to mobilise one’s own members and supporters to gain leadership positions in a democratically held conference or AGM? Aren’t these complaints against the SWP just sour grapes because they are better organised and command more numerical support than their political opponents?

Instead of whinging about the SWP’s success, and disingenuously portraying their every move as some kind of sinister plot, wouldn’t it be more honest, politically, to accept that the SWP simply won the day? That is, that they “got there the fastest with the mostest”, which a famous American general once described was the secret of his success in battle?

And is it really such a crime to want to reach out to British ethnic minorities in the context of a war and establish a broader base from which to challenge the warmongers? The Brent East result shows just how weak the Socialist Alliance is despite the very best efforts of its supporters. The SA remains a far-left rump which got a joke vote. The Preston result was excellent, but so far it is our only success.

Isn’t it time to try to think a little bigger? To try and seize opportunities created by the Iraq war to make a quantum leap, to create much a broader base for the left alternative to Blairism? If we don’t make the attempt now, comrades, when the Blair government is up to its neck in problems relating to the Kelly affair, then we are fools to ourselves.

Let’s be honest: we are not going to win muslim workers to our politics on gender and sexuality issues overnight. But many of them do agree with us now on a whole range of politically advanced issues related to imperialism and war. To insist that muslim workers agree with us on issues of special oppression before uniting with them is wooden formalism gone mad.

It is not possible to say simply, ‘Political clarity first, organisational unity second’. However tidy and attractive that formula may sound, it fails to understand the real problem and oversimplifies the solution. Political clarity must be won in the course of a struggle for organisational unity, as organisational unity must be won in the course of a struggle for political clarity. In his May 5 1875 letter to W Bracke, Marx wrote: “Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.”

This observation is used by opportunists to justify their abandonment of the revolutionary programme, but its real meaning is that there is an indissoluble connection between ach-ieving theoretical clarity and building the revolutionary movement - a dialectical unity of opposites. Theoretical clarification not linked to building a political organisational alternative is an unimportant exercise.

Think bigger
Think bigger

Broken slabs

Stan Keable says the SWP’s Brian Butterworth stated of the mainstream parties at a Brent East Socialist Alliance election meeting: “All they can talk about is broken paving slabs.”

Well, all I can say is, no wonder the Socialist Alliance performed so badly at the Brent East parliamentary by-election and at various council elections since May 2003. The SA has been getting about two to three percent of the vote, which is pathetic. But then they cannot relate to the electors. Believe it or not, the war in Iraq is not the only thing on people’s minds. People do care about what is happening where they live: they do care about broken paving stones, do care about crime in their area, do care about rubbish on the streets.

The British National Party certainly have realised this and are reaping the electoral benefits, as they are campaigning on these issues as well as race. But the SA do not have a clue and consequently are in terminal decline.

Broken slabs
Broken slabs

SW platform

I wish the SWP in Scotland would make up their mind. If they are in the Scottish Socialist Party, they should help to build the party. If they are in it to build their own platform, they will not succeed. I have talked to many non-platform people in the SSP and they are fed up with the actions of the SWP platform.

Grow up or get out.

SW platform
SW platform

AWL and Zionism

We should welcome the report by Jack Conrad that Sean Matgamna/O’Mahoney has issued a ruling that members are now to describe themselves as fully-fledged, rather than “a little bit” Zionist. It is far better that they are honest, open and transparent.

No one should be under any illusion that Zionism is any different a creature to that which was founded by Herzl in 1897 and Pinsker in the 1880s. Racial purification, using religion as the criterion, is as much a part of the Zionist project as it has always been.

Or did Matgamna not notice the new mixed marriages law that says that Israeli Arabs must leave Israel if they want to marry Palestinians? Or is he not aware that Judaisation of the Negev and Galilee is as much a part of official ideology as it was in the 1950s?

Israeli Arabs are not merely second-class citizens, as, for example, Amerindians or Aborigines are. Their status is circumscribed in every aspect of the state, its organisations and policies. Even child benefits are greater for a Jewish woman (to increase the Jewish birth rate) than they are for non-Jews. Zionism took as its starting point a rejection of the French Revolution and its ideas of liberty, fraternity and equality. Theirs is a politics that looks fondly back to the ghetto.

Where the CPGB and Ian Donovan go wrong is in their belief that the solution is two states. As an article in The Observer noted, Palestinians are increasingly realising that two states is a chimera, a cover for continued apartheid occupation (September 14). The fact is that two states cannot now happen. The extent of settlement, the pillaging of water and other natural resources is too far gone. What is needed is a demand for equal national and individual rights within one state. The demand for two states acts as a camouflage for continued apartheid discrimination, the confiscation of land, the military closure of villages, the lack of basic legal rights, etc in the West Bank/Gaza.

It is also incorrect to assume that, because Israeli Jews have a common language and culture (debatable), they are a nation. Their defining characteristic is antagonism to the Palestinians. Any attempt to form a state based on being Jewish - and even the most secular Zionists always rested their claims on the ancestral biblical claims to the land - will end up being expressed against the Palestinians.

It is time for the CPGB to rethink the two states slogan, otherwise they will be accepting the logic of the AWL position without the politics that lead to it.

AWL and Zionism
AWL and Zionism

SA opposition

I do not understand why John Pearson and Mark Fisher saw my contribution to the Socialist Alliance ‘Open forum’ conference as “negative” (Weekly Worker September 18). After all, I voted for all of the resolutions which they applaud in their article and even for Dave Church’s resolution, which advocated a campaign towards a party and was defeated.

John and Mark claim that I am opposed to loyalty to the SA and that I stated that the Socialist Workers Party will not change. I have been on the organising committee of the Coventry SA since it started in 1992 and have stood as an SA candidate in local elections. Surely that is commitment enough to the SA!

However, I have always seen the SA as a stepping stone towards a workers’ party with a democratic constitution, as in Scotland, not as an end in itself. In 1996, when the Socialist Party showed an interest in the SA, we had a number of discussions with Allan Green and the Scottish Socialist Party. It gradually became clear that the SP in England and Wales did not want to follow the lead of their Scottish comrades and form a party. We only found this out through the pages of the Weekly Worker. The SP’s departure from the SA in December 2001 was the culmination of their failure to make the Scottish turn.

Now we have the SWP who appear to want to dominate the SA and not to transform it into a broad, open, democratic party. To me their behaviour in Birmingham was bureaucratic, sectarian and totally out of order. And it came from the top, not from some over-enthusiastic regional organiser. It is a form of gangsterism, going around giving the boys a kicking to show who’s who and what’s what.

Some comrades have said that the SWP made a mistake or went too far in Birmingham, or with Bob Whitehead that it was a “pyrrhic victory”. These arguments miss the point. The behaviour expressed the SWP’s organisational beliefs and methods, which are organically linked to their politics. I do not say that the SWP will never change, but they have been using these methods for over 30 years. There are hundreds of thousands of activists and workers who have experienced the SWP and the other “ghastly sects”, as Jack Conrad calls them. And, as Lesley Mahmood pointed out in her introduction, there is a limit to how many times you go back into an abusive relationship.

In my opinion workers do not disagree with the political programme of the groups so much as the bureaucratic centralist manner of organising. As Steve Godward stated at the meeting, this manner is very similar to the bullying and manoeuvring we find every day in our workplaces and trade unions. Jack Conrad calls it Stalinist, but to me it mirrors normal personal relations within capitalism - as straightforward as that.

I agree with John and Mark that we should stay in the SA and fight. But that is not the key question for me. The key question is, what are we fighting for? That has to be for a workers’ party with an open, democratic constitution, respecting the rights of minorities. That means that we must reserve the right to look outside the SA for allies, as Lesley Mahmood’s resolution makes clear. It also means we reject bureaucratic centralist methods of organisation and attempt within our own ranks to create a culture of comradely respect and trust: not an easy task.

SA opposition
SA opposition

Bold and strong

To describe Margaret Manning’s chairing of the SA open forum as uninspiring is some understatement.

When John Pearson stood as secretary of the South Manchester SA on the basis of democracy and minority rights, with meetings to be conducted democratically, with agendas to be circulated beforehand and put openly to meetings, the SWP found a candidate who did not run meetings or function democratically. That person was Margaret Manning.

But, to be fair, we were halfway through the morning before the meeting began to realise that it had been decided that the comrades could let off steam and there would be a short period at the end when we could decide to meet again! The problem with just letting off emotional steam is that without concrete political alternatives it would just be a safety valve.

As Steve Freeman said, we had to discuss what we were for and not just what we were against. There was an enormous amount of preaching to the well informed, experienced and converted about the awful machinations of the SWP. Dave Church galvanised the majority of the meeting by good humoured remarks about what a hopeless lot we were, seemingly incapable of taking things forward with specific proposals. The majority showed their resilience by insisting on proposals being taken and voted on, despite the opposition of the chair, who attempted to postpone the proposals to the next meeting.

Bold and strong
Bold and strong