Letters

Liquidationist

Dave Craig condemns the CPGB for “liquidationism”: to “preach the collapse of the Socialist Alliance is to demoralise the fight for a workers’ party” (Weekly Worker April 8). Is this the same Dave Craig who absented himself from the whole afternoon session of the SA’s March 13 conference? Is this the same Dave Craig to did not move his group’s conference motion (the CPGB took the initiative and presented it).

That aside, surely the SA’s “collapse” is now beyond debate. It is a simple statement of fact, and will demoralise no one except those who are easily demoralised. As for his Democracy Platform of the SA, we do not “refuse to work constructively” with it. Any serious proposals for cooperation or joint action will get a sympathetic hearing from us.

Liquidationist
Liquidationist

Witch road

I agree with the CPGB’s draft programme that religion should be a private matter - I myself am a witch. But I believe it should be made clear, so as to bring more people into supporting the CPGB, as some will be religious.

I think that religion should be only for the person concerned, and should not be forced upon their children, so as to end brainwashing. I used to be a christian, but that was because of my parents. I didn’t enjoy it. So I think religion should play no governing role, nor be forced upon others.

Witch road
Witch road

Subjectivism

Manny Neira’s latest contribution to the debate on Respect, replying to my own article ‘Communist tactics or sectarian subjectivism’, makes considerable use of his capacity for humorous commentary to give his argument the appearance of coherence. Unfortunately, on this occasion, it does not succeed in disguising the lack of substance.

Manny does not really come up with any new arguments as to why it amounts to “giving up” any aspiration to “win Respect to a revolutionary perspective” for the CPGB to offer critical electoral support to Respect candidates in the June elections based on their agreed electoral platform. Nor does he give any further elaboration as to why such a tactic amounts to “electoral populism”. His claim that my arguments are meant to “confuse him to death”, and his word games with the term ‘conditional’ to imply that the CPGB leadership is in favour of support for Respect come what may, with no conditions whatsoever (even that it continues to adhere to the basic class elements in its platform that are the basis of our critical support, that it does not abandon those demands, etc) are just playing with concepts, not a serious argument.

In fact, Manny’s claim of ‘confusion’ about this, and his pretence that my formulation on the conditional nature of our electoral support is comical and meaningless, are simply the product, unfortunately, of a certain degree of cynicism and ignorance of principled communist tactics. All communist tactics involving critical support for non-communist political formations are conditional, and are capable of being withdrawn if a formation renounces the elements in its programme that are the basis of such support. That was our position, for instance, when we gave critical support to Ken Livingstone in 2000. If Livingstone had executed a complete volte-face before that election, and announced that after all he supported the Blair government’s privatisation of London Underground, then we would have withdrawn our critical support very sharply indeed. And we would not have been alone in doing so, indeed by such a tactic we would have found a ready audience among large numbers of disillusioned Livingstone supporters.

Manny’s latest article is mostly repetition of arguments he has already made, dressed up with journalistic witticisms. But such witticisms, however pleasing to the reader, cannot substitute for political substance, any more than can more conventional forms of spin. And the one question that Manny does not even begin to address is the simplest one of all. Why does he advocate different criteria when dealing with Respect than in all other cases of leftwing forces standing against New Labour and its Kinnockite predecessor over the last decade and a half - since Lesley Mahmood’s candidature signified the eruption of the crisis caused by the deLabourisation of Labour into the electoral field? Why in his view is it principled to vote for Militant Labour, the Socialist Labour Party, today’s Socialist Party, Ken Livingstone and even elements of the Labour left standing on a record of fighting Blairism, but not Respect? None of the former stood foursquare for Manny’s holy trinity of open borders, republicanism and workers’ representatives on a worker’s wage. So why was it OK to give these people critical support, as they stood for many of the same things that are in the Respect platform, and why is it unprincipled to apply the exact same approach to Respect in elections?

Subjectivism
Subjectivism

Like a shot

In reply to Louise Whittle’s letter, I would like to clarify a few points (Weekly Worker April 8). The views of West Midlands Respect candidate Majid Khan were made in his own personal capacity. He pointed out that when he was helping to organise coaches to an anti-war demo he pushed for separate coaches for men and women, but added that he was defeated on this issue by his left co-organisers. The point of his anecdote (I think) was to illustrate that muslims and non-muslims could put their differences to one side in the spirit of unity.

It goes without saying that Khan’s views are not those of Respect. The national declaration unambiguously states its “opposition to all forms of discrimination based on race, gender, ethnicity, religious beliefs (or lack of them), sexual orientation, disabilities, national origin or citizenship” and supports “the right to self-determination of every individual in relation to their religious (or non-religious) beliefs, as well as sexual choices”.

The CPGB would be out of Respect like a shot if it ditched these principles. We have stated week in and week out our opposition to any form of compromise with political islam. We rightly hounded the SWP’s Lindsey German when at last year’s Marxism event she hinted that gay and women’s rights could be discarded as “shibboleths”.

Like a shot
Like a shot

Twitchy

At the risk of seeming ‘twitchy’ may I comment on two of your reports of my recent Respect meetings (Weekly Worker April 8). Your correspondent from Havering and Redbridge gave a full account of our rally but strangely no acknowledgement of how many attended. Could this be because it was standing room only with several hundred people present?

Equally you report that I had “a hard time” during the question and answer session at Brookes University in Oxford. It might have been more honest to say that this was so only in as much as I insisted on defending Cuba and its socialist revolution against a claque of eastern European anti-communist émigrés.

Twitchy
Twitchy

Foredoomed

Marcus Ström’s article, ‘Respect and Europe’, is based on the false presumption that the unity coalition may decide to adopt the CPGB’s programme on Europe.

However, the SWP-International Socialist Group bloc is trying to isolate the CPGB in Respect. The recent experiences of Anne Mc Shane are proof of this. The SWP-ISG bloc will prevent the coalition from adopting any CPGB policies. Therefore the tactic of critical engagement is pure moonshine.

Anyhow, Respect is foredoomed to collapse in ways similar to the Henry A Wallace-led Progressive Party, which contested the US presidential election in 1948. To paraphrase Lord Byron, ‘The best prophet of the future is the past’.

Foredoomed
Foredoomed

BNP nationalism

Carl Badger says: “The German for ‘nationalist’ is Nazi.” Correction: the German for ‘nationalist’ is ‘nationalist’. ‘Nazi’ is an abbreviation for the National Socialist German Workers Party (National-sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), which was coined by that radical middle class stalwart, George Orwell. He probably thought the full thing was a bit of a mouthful. So being the wordsmith that he was he came up with the word ‘Nazi’.

It is a pity that Orwell obscured the former because Hitler gave his Party this name in order to attract and lure large sections of the German population, particularly the working class who were traditional but disillusioned supporters of the Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party. Large sections of the European and American ruling class supported and financed the Nazi Party, thus aiding and abetting its rise to power. They saw in the Nazis an opportunity to crush the threat of Bolshevism in Germany, thus directing attention away from the crisis of capitalism by scapegoating one percent of the population, namely the Jews. From the point of view of international capital the dictatorship of the Nazis was infinitely preferable to the dictatorship of the proletariat. However, like all capitalism’s monsters this one got well out of hand.

Many things led to the rise of Nazism. There was the humiliation of Versailles and the crippling war debt that ensued, making the economic crisis in Germany even more severe than in the rest of the world. There was also the inability of the Social Democratic Party to overcome its reformism and social chauvinism in the face of the collapse of the capitalist economy. There was also the ineffectual nature of the Communist Party which (had they been more astute in their timing) could have seized the opportunity and mounted an armed insurrection. Amongst other things the Nazi Party would have been strangled in its cradle.

As a communist I am opposed to racism and will fight it wherever I find it. Quite apart from basic human decency, communists fight racism because it creates divisions in the working class, thus enabling capitalism and imperialism to maintain hegemony. The British National Party is fuelling racism in this country and even though its membership comes from the (exclusively white) working class, it functions as an auxiliary of the capitalist state as do much of the press and media and is therefore to be considered by all genuine communists and socialists as an enemy.

I have some words of advice for our young BNP supporter: you have a lot to learn and you will learn nothing from Nick Griffin and his cronies in the BNP. They call themselves the British National Party. Even this is a lie - Britain is an island containing three nations: England, Scotland and Wales. You say you are a nationalist. Are you an English nationalist, Scottish or Welsh, or is British nationalism code for English nationalism, white and Anglo-Saxon?

BNP nationalism
BNP nationalism

Popular front

In his reply to Manny Neira’s article, ‘No unconditional support for Respect’, Ian Donovan claims Manny’s piece is “riddled with inconsistencies and faulty logic” (April 8). To these sins, I feel Ian, instead, ought to plead guilty. Let me expand.

Ian sarcastically notes that “one slight saving grace” of Manny’s article is that it didn’t claim that Respect is a popular front. Fair enough, one would suppose, given that Ian has been the most consistent supporter of Respect in the CPGB. Yet, in the very next paragraph, Ian, our toughest fighter against ‘sectarian positions’, gives a little credence to the popular front nature of Respect himself.

He writes that such a notion “was not entirely unreasonable initially because of … the possibility of dropping elementary demands for women’s and gay rights as ‘shibboleths’”. What explains the apparent inconsistency here of Ian recognising the potential popular front thrust of Respect in its earlier incarnation, Peace and Justice? A mere slip of the pen? Or has Ian changed his mind?

None of these are likely, given, as I have already noted, that Ian’s position has remained consistent throughout. He gives the game away when he adds that such notions proved to be “erroneous - no wing of the ruling class is involved in Respect, nor are there any signs of aspirations to bring in such ruling class forces”. Note the inconsistency here. Ian’s true position is that a popular front can only exist when a bloc is made with fully fledged bourgeois forces. For Ian it is not the programme of a bloc - for example, dropping women’s and gay rights - that is crucial.

As an aside, which ruling class forces, in any case, would, have blocked with Respect had it dropped these demands? Rather Ian is playing attorney for others in the party - above all, Jack Conrad. For Ian knows full well that the leadership, during the Peace and Justice stage, more than toyed with labelling Peace and Justice a popular front.

Permit me to quote Jack Conrad at some length. Last summer Jack wrote that in “swapping auto-Labourism for auto-anti-Labourism and now an electoral alliance with a section of the mosque, the Socialist Workers Party has retreated from flawed class politics and is in danger of adopting the fatal politics of the popular front” (Weekly Worker July 3 2003). Indeed Jack then asks the pertinent question: “What is a popular front? It is not, as some erroneously suggest, any and all examples of cross-class cooperation, let alone marching on the same demonstration as muslims. Such brittle sectarianism is completely alien to the tradition and practice of Marxism.”

He goes on: “A popular front is typically a bloc of parties in which the working class component practically limits itself to achieving a ‘progressive’, ‘just’ or ‘peaceful’ capitalism. Those not contented with the hollow promise of such a capitalist utopia become a problem to be surgically removed or brutally crushed - the logic of the popular front is counterrevolutionary.” Splendid stuff. And there’s more: “The Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain forgets nothing and learns nothing. Robert Griffiths, John Haylett and Andrew Murray - the CPB’s leadership - laud popular fronts retrospectively and yearn to see them again. Not surprisingly then, SWP and CPB tops nowadays are at pains to emphasise how much they have in common.”

So there we have it. According to our leading theoretician, the SWP was heading in a popular front direction last summer with Peace and Justice. It didn’t matter to Jack that there were no sections of the ruling class involved in Respect. Above all, it was the liquidation of the SWP’s cherished principles to court non-working class forces - for example, sections of the mosque - that was decisive. No wonder sections of the leadership of the CPB thought there had been no better time since the 1930s to execute its popular front strategy.

Yet it has to be noted that since last summer Jack has not taken forward this analysis of the popular front. In fact nowadays, in meetings of the CPGB, Jack is heard to echo the Ian Donovan line that a popular front must have within it the forces of the ruling class. So what went wrong?

The truth is that the party buckled at the time of the Monbiot-Yaqoob document. Having thought it had seen off the Peace and Justice project, the leadership of the CPGB were surprised when this ‘new’ initiative arrived. Initially, the party was armed with the analysis that it had developed in the summer. Peter Manson, the editor of Weekly Worker, put it bluntly: “Delegates must reject any notion of some green-liberal-pacifist coalition that will take the working class movement precisely nowhere. The irony of the Yaqoob-Monbiot-SWP ‘peace and justice’ hogwash is that it is likely to be ignored by voters even more than the Socialist Alliance itself was in last month’s Brent East by-election” (Weekly Worker October 16 2003).

Yet very quickly the tone of the Weekly Worker changed. The most consistent advocate of the new course was Ian. He wrote: “The Monbiot-Yaqoob draft programme is a classic hodgepodge, but it is also something that communists and revolutionary socialists need to engage with, albeit critically. It is still quite feasible that this could be the basis of something that could give a positive political expression to the mass anti-war movement, whose evident political potential has so far only been expressed (as a complete travesty) by the treacherous Liberal Democrats” (October 30 2003).

Fair enough, perhaps. Only comrade John Pearson (now expelled from the CPGB) disagreed with critically engaging with Respect. Yet the popular front designation given to Peace and Justice was not applied to Respect. Apparently, the vaguely worded statement about equal rights in the Monbiot-Yaqoob document and the subsequent Respect statement of principles were sufficient to satisfy our leadership that what we were engaging with was a populist coalition of largely pro-working class forces. In this sense, then, the leadership saw something qualitatively superior in Respect over Peace and Justice. Yet a cursory glance at Jack Conrad’s earlier article showed that the popular front nature of Respect was alive and well. Has the working class component of Respect - chiefly the SWP- practically limited Respect to achieving a capitalist utopia? Yes. Have those in opposition to this ‘bonfire of principles’ - the CPGB - become a problem to be surgically removed? In practice, yes.

Popular front
Popular front