Letters

Finland

I was astonished to read what Mike Macnair wrote about the civil war in my country, Finland (Letters, October 16). He wrote that by the end of the year 1917 general Mannerheim and his white guard had killed around 75,000 Finnish workers.

Our civil war, however, began at the end of January 1918 between ‘red guards’ and ‘white guards’ led by former tsarist general Mannerheim. By the end of May 1918 the red guards were surrounded. Some 12,000 died in combat or by execution; tens of thousands of workers were imprisoned in camps, and approximately 12,000 died from hunger and diseases. In a country of three million people this was a huge number.

The victory of general Mannerheim was the first victory of counterrevolution after the Great War. It was an example for the counterrevolutionaries in Russia, as their campaign began later.

Finland
Finland

Bookmarks

Once again we have the argument that socialists should not use “the capitalist courts” in order to defend themselves and obtain redress for libel - or, as Ian Donovan puts it, “to intimidate socialists from publishing their views” (‘Support Bookmarks’, October 16). Are there any socialist courts we could use instead?

Let me confess to a bias. My political outlook isn’t the same as that of Quintin Hoare and Branca Magas, and I don’t know whether I would have taken their action, but I can understand it. I got to know Quintin Hoare and Branca Magas during the Bosnian war, when they gave unstinting support to Workers Aid for Bosnia and the Bosnian Solidarity Campaign, helping us to raise funds for food convoys and assist workers fighting for a multi-ethnic Bosnia against the nationalist ‘ethnic cleansers’. (I also happen to know that Branca Magas’s family in Croatia were among those who stood up to Tudjman, and defended the rights of Serb neighbours.)

During this time we all got used to smears that we were pro-Croatian nationalists, or pro-imperialist. Since all Croats were being labelled “fascist”, and the Bosnian people depicted as “reactionary muslims” or mere puppets of Tudjman’s Croatia and the west, we almost got used to it. Apart from empty calls for “workers’ unity”, the Socialist Worker line on Bosnia merely mirrored that of Tory foreign minister Douglas Hurd - that “all sides” were equally guilty of war massacres, and therefore we should not give any support to the Bosnians.

Socialist Worker would not report Workers Aid for Bosnia or the visits by Bosnian trade unionists to appeal for solidarity from British workers. On the evening news came of the Srebrenica massacre I tried to raise it in the Socialist Workers Party’s Marxism jamboree and was told if I did not shut up I’d be thrown out. We know now that the massacre at Srebrenica was even bigger than first reported. But the SWP-led Anti-Nazi League kept saying ‘Never again!’, while turning its back on the scenes in Europe where it was happening again.

By 1999, the SWP must have realised, as I know others in the labour movement have done, that it might have misjudged its responsibilities on the Balkans. None of us are infallible, and the Kosova war did present more complex choices; but we can wonder that they turned a blind eye to Vojtslav Seselj’s fascists entering a Balkan ‘peace’ march (and threatening to attack socialists), or that they republished Callinicos’s writings without considering they might need altering.

It is a pity that socialist publishers and a leftwing bookshop (of which there are far too few these days) should have to suffer, but Ian Donovan seems to imply it is OK to say what you like about comrades in the movement, and the individuals attacked should bear the cost if they dare take action to defend their reputations. This is not about whether people’s “views” are “correct” or not, comrade, but about the “right” to slander. Or are we to say, you must be careful attacking the capitalists, because they have lawyers and will sue, whereas you can say what you like about fellow socialists, confident that they will not want to use the law courts?

Leaving aside this particular case for general principles, we not only have to consider the undesirability of letting the bourgeois law courts into our conflicts, but the danger that, once you accept anything goes, you open the way for the class enemy, and its state agencies, to plant smears in the radical press which can then be safely picked up and spread by the bourgeois media. Maybe it is time we had a socialist tribunal, accepted and acknowledged across the movement, that could deliver judgements on whether comrades’ rights have been infringed, and whether legitimate debate and criticism has given way to smears or incitement of contempt and hatred. Where and how we would find such an impartial and respected body I don’t know.

In the meantime, the message would seem to be that if you don’t want to risk libel actions, or paying money to lawyers, it’s best to avoid libelling people - especially comrades.

Bookmarks
Bookmarks

Ukraine scam

The Russian internet weekly, Left.ru, has been conducting its own investigation of the Budraitskis-Vernik affair.

While the lessons of this case are primarily political, there remains one crucial, yet unanswered, question of a ‘technical’ nature: what passports did these people use when visiting their western sponsors? Fake or real? What is remarkable about the accounts and the statements of all the foreign groups affected by the stunt is their complete silence on this, potentially the most serious, of all questions - at least for the Russian left.

According to the same accounts, it appears that there was substantial human traffic involved in their relations with the perpetrators. Is it possible that, in the conditions of stiffer border controls following 9/11, the citizens of western countries who invited these con artists from non-western countries did not have basic information about their travel documents? Perhaps they did not. Did they care to know? Probably not.

Neither would we, if it were not for the fact that the Ukrainian and, especially, the Russian Committee for a Workers’ International have been playing leading roles in their respective countries’ ‘anti-globalisation movements’. Suffice to say that Ilya Budraitskis figures as one of the organisers of this November’s ‘Forum on the future of the Russian left’, hosted by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Kagarlitsky’s Institute of Globalisation Problems, and Attac Moscow, controlled by Budraitskis himself.

The question of travel documents is relevant to the question of control of this movement of the broad left. Because if they not only misrepresented themselves to their sponsors but also travelled to the west under fake identities, this case will have to be reclassified and may have much more serious political implications. Then the mother of all questions will be, who provided them with fake IDs, good enough to get them through western passport controls?

We are going to address these questions publicly to the Russian and Ukrainian participants of this event and invite them to clear themselves of at least this kind of suspicion. But we also invite the political groups targeted by this gang, as well as all honest leftists, to help us to answer this unanswered question.

Ukraine scam
Ukraine scam

80-20

Previously active in the Socialist Alliance, I find it depressing that the left cannot seem to work together. Ultimately, revolution is up to the majority of workers, but from the point of view of workers seeing different, small leftwing groups parading their rags or being totally oblivious to the left, is common agreement for a united left a pipe dream?

A structure that can have permanent factions, but move like a Leninist party. The 20%, made up of people who are theoreticians, passive supporters or only agree partly, can argue for this or that, but those who show their worth through activity will obviously make up the 80%.

80-20
80-20

Democracy?

In my original letter I argued in favour of libertarian methods and practices. I argued for these in the context of what I see today as being a long drawn out, diverse and social-evololutionary struggle for communism, as I do not see any sort of neo-Bolshevik revolution as either likely or desirable in the foreseeable future. But I certainly was not arguing in favour of anarcho-capitalism or rightwing libertarianism, as John James suggests (Letters, October 16).

Meanwhile, what Joe Wills gives us is just tautology. In so many words what he is saying is that if you want a “democratic centralist”, inevitably militarised and bureaucratic statist revolution, then what you want is a state. This only tells us what we already know. But millions of working class people do not want this kind of revolution, and this is hardly surprising, as in reality we are intelligent enough to know it would make our lives worse, not better. Workers still need to engage in class struggle and social solidarity, but this does not lead to instant revolution.

In historic reality “democratic centralism” has always became a political expression of forces such as collective capital and bureaucracy. You can not detach “democratic centralism” in a utopian way. In practice there never is such a thing as a perfect, ‘instantly revocable delegate’: in reality unquestionable institutional majority rule acts as a form of proprietorship, which functions as part of collective capital.

A libertarian critique of both centralism and democracy is increasingly necessary.

Democracy?
Democracy?

Welcome to SSP

What a pity for Vince Mills that he chooses to attempt to boost the Labour left in Scotland and dismiss the Scottish Socialist Party in the week that the chair of the Campaign for Socialism, John McAllion, announces that he is leaving the Labour Party and thinking of joining the SSP (Weekly Worker October 16)!

Since Vince admits he left the Communist Party to join the Labour Party, I can only suggest he has a habit of joining sinking ships. I attended the relaunch of the Campaign for Socialism in Scotland last year: there were 52 people present, including six journalists. John McAllion made the worst speech I have ever heard him make and he admitted to me afterwards that he no longer believed it was possible to reclaim the Labour Party for socialism.

Now John has acted on that belief and broken with Labour. As he said at the 500-strong SSP rally last weekend, “When you see Labour conference delegates giving a seven-minute standing ovation to Blair and voting for foundation hospitals, then either they are in the wrong party or I am - and I think it is me.”

Vince also points out that he is a member of Kelvin constituency Labour Party and he is pleased with a turnout of 15 members at a branch meeting. Can I tell him that we have recently split our Kelvin branch into two, because, with getting on for 200 members, too many were coming to meetings!

Can I also point out that his Labour MP is just about to be expelled for his opposition to the war. Is Vince going to convince George Galloway that you can reclaim the Labour Party? Is he going to support a New Labour candidate against George at the next election? I’m afraid Vince is convincing no one that Labour can be saved for socialism.

We in the SSP will of course cooperate with anyone on the Labour left to fight for socialist causes, as we have done with John McAllion and Elaine Smith for the last four years, and, when Vince finally realises he is flogging a dead horse, we will welcome him too into the SSP!

Welcome to SSP
Welcome to SSP

History irrelevant

In response to Neil Davidson’s article, I cannot see how what Scots were, or were not, doing back in 1690 affects the ability of today’s Scots to gain national independence and socialism (Weekly Worker October 16).

By the way, congratulations on reaching your 500th issue. Lang may yer lum reik!

History irrelevant
History irrelevant

Real anarchism

Mike Macnair suggests that I take an “ideological” date for the start of the civil war. Instead of May 1918, he prefers December 1917 (Letters, October 16). Yet either date confirms my argument: namely that Leninists should come clean and admit that workers’ democracy and revolution do not go together.

He lets the cat out of the bag when he talks about the Bolsheviks holding “the reins of power”. I thought in a ‘workers’ state’ the workers were meant to hold power? And, no matter the date picked, the fact is that the Bolsheviks gerrymandered and disbanded soviets in the spring of 1918. What does Mike have to say about that? Nothing. Worse, sounding like a leftist Kissinger, he argues that the Russian workers should not be allowed to vote Menshevik or SR. So much for workers’ democracy.

He states it would be “unlikely” that the anarchists could “defend themselves against the White terror”, ignoring the fact that the Makhnoites did just that. Then he smears the Makhnoites, comparing them to Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge (“as the architects of a policy of destruction of the cities”). What nonsense. The Makhnoites were not anti-city. For example, when the Makhnoites liberated towns, the first thing there did was to encourage the workers to form their own class organisations (free soviets and unions). In contrast, the Bolsheviks banned such bodies and imposed ‘revolutionary committees’.

Moving on, Joe Wills yet again distorts the anarchist position on trade unions (Letters, October 16). He talks of “red” unions and that this “has historically proven to be self-isolating, sectarian disaster”. Yet I made no comments on building ‘red’ unions. He states that “Marxists seek not to reject reformist unions, but transform them into organs of revolution”. Yet this has historically failed. If he wants to repeat history rather than learn from it, that is his business, but please do not inflict assumptions on to us anarchists!

He then contrasts “an organised, democratic workers’ party to guide the struggle” to “autonomous ‘direct action’ by unelected cliques and individuals”. Really, another straw man! Direct action means any form of immediate struggle by workers, such as the strike or occupation. Is he really arguing that rank and file trade unionists are an “unelected clique” who should not make their own decisions (ie, be autonomous)?

Wills’s comments on Bakunin and Kropotkin are just puerile and an attempt to hide weak arguments rather than address the issue (ie, he attacks the failings of individual anarchists rather than anarchism). He then tries to raise a serious point by mentioning “the anarchists who led the botched 1872-73 uprising in Spain that was crushed ... due to the rebels’ lack of centralised coordination”. But he uses an example of lack of federation to refute federalism. Suffice to say, he confuses centralism with coordination, a common Marxist failing. It seems he cannot tell the difference between bottom-up and top-down decision-making. Wills states that “the anarchists, in seeming violation of their own ideology, did not rely on the direct administration of the people, but set up ruling juntas in all the regions they took”. There is no contradiction, as ‘junta’ is Spanish for ‘council’. As long as the workers’ council is made up of elected, mandated and recallable delegates, then the people do govern themselves.

Wills then turns to the Makhnoites, noting that they were not “exempt from using authoritarian means”. Nobody said that a revolution was easy and so we would expect the difficult circumstances of civil war to result in some arbitrary decisions. Yet the differences between the Makhnoites and the Bolsheviks are clear. While Makhno sometimes violated libertarian principles in the heat of war, the Bolsheviks turned the ‘dictatorship of the party’ into a key ideological principle. While the Makhnoites tried their best to encourage soviet democracy and freedom of speech, the Bolsheviks crushed both. Which shows the failure of Bolshevism cannot be put down to factors like the civil war - the politics of Marxism played their part.

Wills summarises that “anarchism has never succeeded in surviving for any length of time in an ‘intact’ anarchist form”, yet, compared to Marxism, the anarchist record of “betrayal of principle” is far less than for “power-hungry reds”. The empirical record is clear, so why do ‘scientific’ socialists seem so keen to ignore it?

Wills argues that Lenin thought “civil war following the revolution is by no means inevitable”. Yet Lenin stated in late 1917 that “not a single great revolution ... has escaped civil war”. The so-called “workers’ state” was meant to defend the revolution, was it not? Yet it was this very state which destroyed workers’ democracy in Russia. Feel free to blame the civil war on this, if you like, but logic is against you. If Marxism cannot handle the inevitable without “degenerating” then it should be avoided.

Finally, he states that “the central contradiction of anarchism” is that “the working class can achieve anything, but they cannot exercise democratic control and accountability over their leaders”. Firstly, why should the working class delegate its power to a handful of “leaders” (ie, the Bolshevik central committee)? Can we not make our own decisions? Secondly, in Russia the workers did try to “exercise democratic control and accountability over their leaders”. Their ‘leaders’ simply disbanded the soviets by force. This was to be expected, as the state centralises power into the hands of the few and disempowers the many. That is why anarchists are anti-state.

Wills asserts that “anarchism’s absolute hostility to any form of state is misplaced and a barrier to achieving revolution”. Yet this hostility has been proven to be valid. Every state has been an instrument of minority class rule over the masses. The Marxist state was no exception - as anarchists had correctly predicted!

Real anarchism
Real anarchism