Letters

Brent East

I thought your article on the Brent East election was very illuminating (Weekly Worker September 25). A lot of good comments made.

My own reflection on the lowish vote Brian Butterworth got is this. The left were not united. Rather than vote for Brian, the working class stayed at home. The Lib Dems picked up the anti-war vote because many muslims and Asians are petty bourgeois and don’t like the hard left. They don’t like the term ‘socialism’. Thanks to New Labour, the term is linked with all things evil.

The young don’t bother voting. The new young workers in Brent are only interested in money and clubbing. The Irish youth no longer come in droves, so the level of politics in the capital doesn’t benefit from their input. Many of the youth are children of Thatcher. They have hardly any idea or notion of a collective consciousness or grouping. Their long-term vision is restricted to the next binge-drinking session. Tommy Sheridan benefited from the large grassroots network that Militant used to enjoy. Socialism is not a dirty word in Scotland.

I thought the Socialist Alliance did a good job with propaganda. That is worth its weight in gold. Much better to raise people’s awareness and knowledge than get votes. Votes can be fickle, but class-consciousness is an energy that transforms. Nowhere in the country does the petty bourgeoisie dominate as they do in London. I gather that most working class people in Ipswich don’t want to be or even think about being middle class. Whereas the London region and its hinterland is dominated by the suburban Thatcherite mentality. Life is about the pursuit of status symbols. They know more about designer labels than they do about the country, its history and what it is. That’s not their fault. The products of consumerist capitalism are only valued as consumers.

Most people probably don’t want to know the truth about the governments they vote in, their history and the imperialism which underlies it all, because honesty is not a British virtue. Nor an American one. Tell someone the truth about the war, the government, British imperialism and capitalism and they just go quiet. What self-respecting people would allow a bunch of charlatans who lied to take them into a brutal war and still remain in government? Yes, the British and Americans. Why? Because Bush is a nice Republican, and Tony is a well-spoken, presentable (very middle class) and clever lawyer. And to rebel against the government is a sin worse than death.

To speak out against the British establishment is to be a traitor. Because we are far more interested in our pets, gardens, sports and soap operas than government or politics. We avoid meaningful conversations about anything because then we don’t have to engage in facing up to the reality or truth. About ourselves as individuals, our nation and our communities. Anything that distracts us from the wonderful mission of worshipping money and mammon. The latter is especially true of London.

Brent East
Brent East

Marek's ear

‘The war of Marek’s ear’ was an interesting article (Weekly Worker July 31). But remember that Cymru Goch and Socialist Workers Party members and ex-members have been cosying up for years in Marek’s local domain and mixed in the same circles as Marek.

You say little about the RMT in all this - the local branches now have the freedom to give support to political organisations other than the Labour Party. Bob Crow has given his own support to Marek in the forming of a new ‘socialist’ party in Wales. In November when Marek launches his new party, there will be some other unlikely conversions to the left cause (sic) - and this time it may not be like a moment of madness on a common in London - or will it?

Marek's ear
Marek's ear

Questions

I am an ordinary citizen in China and I am interested in international revolution.

I have some questions. What do you think of Chinese Communist Party (CPC) and the “open and reform” police of China? What do you think of Mao Tse-tung?

I wish you success.

Questions
Questions

May take years

In response to the current debate between Joe Wills and Iain McKay, I would suggest that among the most miserable tendencies are collectivist capital and bureaucratic state capital. The last thing the working class and dispossessed need right now is some sort of ugly collectivist capitalist or state capitalist revolution, whether supposedly ‘democratic centralist’, bureaucratic or based on ‘workers’ councils’.

In any case we are nowhere near a revolutionary situation. Unlike the semi-feudal, weak and crisis-ridden Russian state in 1917, the modern bourgeois state is very strong and very entrenched. To attempt to overthrow it in a political revolution is simply to provoke counterrevolution. And, in attempting to overthrow the state, any revolutionary organisation is forced to impose centralisation, bureaucratisation and militarisation on the movement, which in itself becomes harmful to the actual social and class struggle. Objectively the hard revolutionists end up promoting counterrevolution.

The struggle for communism has to be a communistic struggle. What we need - and indeed what we are seeing - is the growth of a mass, diverse social movement around the world, involving millions of workers and others engaging in a long-drawn-out series of evolutionary struggles. Such a process may take years and at least part of the time it will inevitably involve spontaneity.

In such a context libertarian methods and practices are far more desirable and useful. Revolutionary central committees are past their sell-by date.

May take years
May take years

Ukraine fraud

We send you the following open letter, addressed to the Committee for a Workers’ International, for your information.

“On September 4 we wrote to you regarding the criminal fraud perpetrated by CWI members in the former USSR on several organisations, including our own. We noted that you had issued a statement on August 29 condemning the fraud and announcing the expulsion of several Ukrainian members, notably Oleg Vernik. You have not responded to our letter or to any of the requests and queries in it. We also note that you have not replied to similar requests from other defrauded organisations. This lack of response calls into question your stated willingness to exchange information and cooperate with all those victimised by your former members.

“We also note at this point that no statement on the fraud has yet appeared on your website. Yet articles by the charlatan Vernik continue to appear there without comment by you.

“Your statement of August 29 indicated that the fraud was limited to Ukrainian CWI members, some of whom you have expelled, notably Oleg Vernik. One of our queries concerned the fraudulent ‘Igor’ or ‘Ivan’, who presented himself to us and to others as a resident of Moscow. We asked whether you recognised and could identify this individual from Moscow.

“Subsequently, photographs identified as that of your Moscow leader, Ilya Budraitskis, have appeared on the internet and in print (for example, in the Weekly Worker of September 4), and he is clearly the same person as ‘Igor’ and ‘Ivan’, who fraudulently misrepresented himself to our and other organisations. Yet, as far as we know, you have not acknowledged that Budraitskis was part of the scam, nor taken any action against him, at least in public.

“Moreover, we now have in our possession a photograph taken at the October 1999 international conference in Moscow sponsored by the Committee for the Study of Leon Trotsky’s Legacy, where Budraitskis presented a research paper. This photo shows Budraitskis together with Rob Jones of the CWI. It is certain that Budraitskis is the same person as ‘Igor’ and ‘Ivan’, and that he is as guilty as the Ukrainian perpetrators of participating in this scam. In the next few days we will place this photo on our website.

“Moreover, all the reports of the Ukrainian scam indicate that the Ukrainian ‘comrades’ never directly asked their supposed western counterparts for monetary aid. This is not true in the case of ‘Igor’. When we met him in April 2003, we were specifically asked to reimburse him for money that he claimed had been robbed from him by customs agents when he left Russia. There is no question that ‘Igor’ - that is, Budraitskis - directly participated in robbery as well as in the political side of the criminal activity engaged in by the other perpetrators.

“The CWI has had ample time to identify Budraitskis and reply to the charges against him. Your failure to do so raises the question as to whether or not the CWI is engaging in covering up the extent of the fraud directed by Vernik, one of its leading members, but not certainly confined to him and his Ukrainian cohorts. It raises the question as to whether or not more CWI leaders outside of Kiev and Ukraine were aware of or directly involved in the fraud.

“Your former and current comrades have already done enough in this matter to drag the name of Trotskyism through the mud. We demand that you expel Budraitskis and condemn him in at least the same terms that you condemned Vernik and the others. Further, we demand that you do so in public: that you publish your statements of condemnation in your press and on your international website rather than just circulating them privately for others to distribute. If you are not covering for these filthy criminals, or seeking to downplay their acts, why won’t you openly do everything possible to warn the workers’ movement of the threat that they represent?”

Ukraine fraud
Ukraine fraud

No authority

Joe Wills asserts that “Anarchist ideology … with its rejection of authority opposes trade unions completely ... and thereby rejects a major portion of the history of working class struggle” (Letters, October 2).

What nonsense. “Anarchist ideology” says no such thing. We do reject bureaucratic and hierarchical trade unions, but we do so in favour of self-managed workplace organisations. To generalise, anarchists are divided on the question of trade unions. Some argue that revolutionary unions are possible and others argue that workers’ councils, not unions, are the way forward. In both cases, we do not reject collective struggle and organisation in the workplace.

Nor do the anarchist positions on trade unions have anything to do with the “rejection of authority”. Rather they are based on an analysis of the role of unions in society and their actual activities. Indeed, it can be argued that the “major portion” of the history of trade unionism shows it to be reformist at best, and subject to bureaucratic betrayal at worse. This suggests our analysis has validity and that the workers’ movement needs to fundamentally change in order to be effective, never mind revolutionary. Anarchists, including those active in their trade unions, are trying to encourage such a change in favour of rank-and-file control of struggle and the use of direct action and solidarity as the means of achieving real change.

Wills’s summary of “anarchist ideology” on the unions is so flawed that, when he writes, “We Marxists take a different view”, anarchists can only smile at the straw man arguments he presents.

Turning to the Russian Revolution, Wills argues that I think it happened “in a void”. Far from it. As an anarchist I am aware, like Bakunin and Kropotkin, that any revolution breaks out “in a hostile bourgeois world”. As such, “counterrevolution” is taken as inevitable and does not cut it as an excuse for Bolshevik authoritarianism.

Now, he argues that by “civil war” Lenin meant “the conquest of power by the proletariat”. So Wills is arguing that Lenin defined “civil war” to mean something else than what everyone else on the planet thought it meant! Does that mean Marxists invent the meaning of words as and when it suits them? But assuming that Wills is correct, what does that imply? That Lenin thought that a revolution would happen without a civil war, counterrevolution and imperialist intervention? If so, then Lenin was extremely naive, which I doubt, suggesting that by “civil war” Lenin meant what most people mean by the term.

Wills asserts that he stands by his “original claim that the ‘civil war’ disrupted soviet democracy” and ignores the facts I raised in favour of quoting Stephen Cohen from 1973. Yet quoting an opinion made long before the research I summarised does not hold much water. To repeat, it was not in the civil war period that “much of the popular control exercised by local soviets and factory committees was lost”. Soviets were disbanded, the factory committees undermined, solider democracy destroyed, as I indicated, prior to the civil war and as a result of deliberate Bolshevik actions. Ignoring these facts will not make them go away - sorry.

Given this, to state that “centralism was essential in Soviet Russia to defeat the whites” is simply not good enough. Centralism in Russia saw the de facto dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party arise before the start of the civil war. Centralism destroyed popular democracy, as anarchists predicted. Why repeat the same old mistakes?

Wills states that “Anarchists never explain, in manifest terms, how without a state it is possible to defeat imperialism and internal counterrevolution.” From Bakunin onwards anarchists have argued that a revolution required a federation of workers’ councils to succeed and that this would organise the defence of the revolution by means of a workers’ militia. Exactly the approach of the Makhnovists in the Ukraine and the anarchists in Aragon during the Spanish revolution.

As for the other aspects of revolution he thinks anarchists do not explain, well, does he expect me to expound on them in a letter? Particularly when the part of my previous letter on defence of the revolution was not printed due to space considerations? But if anyone is interested, visit www.anarchistfaq.org for details.

Wills then asserts that “the anarchists have supported all revolutions except the ones that actually succeed”. Sorry, which Marxist revolutions succeeded? Where did one result in socialism rather than state capitalism, popular democracy rather than party dictatorship, workers’ control rather than controlled workers? With ‘successes’ like these, we do not need failures! And anarchists have supported all revolutions, until Marxists monopolised power. Then we supported the real revolution: the working class in its struggle against the new boss class. Needless to say, we paid the price for defending what socialism is really about.

Wills finishes his own inaccurate diatribe by quoting another: namely Engels’s On authority. This appeal to authority hardly impresses. We can see why by looking at the quotes provided. Engels states that a revolution is “the most authoritarian thing there is”, because “one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part”. Yet in class society this happens all the time - the capitalist class oppresses the working class. Therefore, revolution is an act of liberation for the working class. Stopping someone oppressing you (by force of arms, if necessary) is not ‘authority’: it is exercising and defending your liberty. As such Engels does not look at revolution (or society) from a working class perspective. That Marxists like to parrot this warmed up liberal nonsense without thinking is sad, if not surprising.

As the Russian Revolution shows, a ‘revolutionary’ government centralises power into a few hands and definitely does not empower the many. Such a situation can only spell the death of a social revolution, which requires the active participation of all if it is to succeed. It also exposes the central fallacy of Leninism: claiming to desire a society based on mass participation it favours a form of organisation - centralism - that precludes it. We need to organise in new ways to build a new world.

No authority
No authority