Letters

Keith Frogson

Keith Frogson (‘Froggy’) was my next door neighbour for almost 20 years and my family knew him for nearer 40 (‘Murder of a militant miner’, August 12).

What a bloke - always a smile or an old joke, mostly with a swear word or two, but never too blue. A man you could trust to back you up when backs were against the wall, or dig you out in the case of a fall. Many a morn round about dawn I would see him march off, ferret in hand, to check his land (oh yes, it was all his), a couple of rabbits or, if lucky, a hare. He had learned this skill when the strike had made his cupboards bare, but one thing was for sure: Froggy was fair and what he said was what he thought.
I bet he’s marching round heaven, finding old mates long dead. Lord help the gaffers if there’s any up there. But come on, Keith, don’t give ’em too hard a time, they’ve done no crime. What you must do now, old cocker, is go haunt that little bastard who so wanted you dead.

Rest in peace.

Keith Frogson
Keith Frogson

FBU Nightmare

Your article on the Fire Brigades Union dispute was excellent (‘Defend the union, defend the rank and file’, August 12). It was very well informed and shows a knowledge of the underlying issues from both sides that made this dispute such a nightmare. It seemed almost unsettlable due to the hidden agenda of government, employers and union.

FBU Nightmare
FBU Nightmare

Impressed

‘Defend the union, defend the rank and file’ was an outstandingly accurate article. I’m truly impressed.

Impressed
Impressed

Stalin

I am intrigued by the statement in ‘What we fight for?’ which appears to reject wholesale the historic contribution of Stalin and the Soviet Union.

I regard myself as a communist and to my mind this means advocating a world society based on the common ownership of the whole of the world’s resources by the whole of the working class, production for use, and free access to goods and services, given we will ‘own’ them anyway, in a universal classless society.

But the history of the Soviet Union and the role of Stalin is an integral aspect of communism. If we reject these wholesale, we reject our own history and tradition. We don’t reject the first real attempt to establish a working class government, the 1871 Paris Commune, even though this only lasted 71 days and was not explicitly communist in orientation. Quite the reverse, we celebrate the sheer human heroism and the dramatic insights it gave into what a truly democratic and human society might look like.

The Bolshevik revolution and the establishment of the Soviet Union was in effect the second major attempt to establish working class power, being led by people who were undoubtedly socialist, communist and probably better Marxists than Marx and Engels! They were always in a desperate situation and in the absence of revolution in the advanced capitalist countries, they fully expected to be crushed within months. The desperation of an isolated working class state in a pre-capitalist country suggested two ‘obvious’ alternatives. One, an heroic, defiant last stand and then destruction by world capitalism. Two, accommodation and submission to world capitalism. Trotsky and Bukharin respectively.

Against all the odds and assumptions the Stalin-led collective leadership carved out a third way, and not only ensured the survival of the socialist state, resisted and defeated Nazi invasion, but transformed it into a world system and superpower to counter and limit world imperialism. It didn’t collapse in 71 days, several months, or a couple of years, but lasted 74 years!

Nobody would claim this represented the vision of world communism described above, or deny serious mistakes were made, or crimes committed. But to reject the struggle and outstanding achievements of genuine socialists and communists and the world’s first socialist state, is to reject our history and communism itself. We must take a scientific, balanced and positive assessment of the Soviet Union and Stalin, as we do of the Paris Commune. Only a scientific approach to history, revolution and our ultimate communist ideal equips us to make the third wave of communist revolution, which this time will establish a world communist society.

Stalin
Stalin

Farcical

I abhor Stalin. He gave communism the poor reputation from which it has still not recovered. Joseph Stalin was a man with many neuroses such as paranoia. Under the banner of socialism, these flaws surfaced and he was able to do his many evil deeds.

My stomach churned at the witness accounts of death, suffering, abuse and torture, when I watched the August 14 documentary on Channel 4. However, there are many paradoxes. For example, the programme condemned the massive loss of life involved in industrialisation. But, without it, Russia would have been defeated by Nazi Germany. Also, continuing the industrialisation argument, how many innocent victims died during the industrial revolution in Britain? The forced movement of the English rural population into the new industrial towns is not so unlike Stalin’s agrarian policies.

I also disliked how the programme said Stalin began liquidating his rivals within the Bolshevik Party. I believe Bolshevism died when Lenin died and Trotsky did not succeed him. Bolshevism was the dictatorship of the proletariat, not the dictatorship of the bureaucracy. I cannot forgive Stalin for strangling communism when it had a genuine chance of changing the world. Trotsky’s book, The revolution betrayed summed this up perfectly, and shows how the Soviet Union should have been under its true leader, Trotsky.

Yet the proletariat do not see this, only Stalin, gulags, torture and repression. However, I cannot stand back while the capitalist propaganda works on Stalin when the capitalist system is guilty of the same crimes. The programme castigated Stalin, but blamed communism.

Farcical
Farcical

Tsarist abuse

I would question whether the Bolsheviks were simply engaging in cheap smear tactics when they accused Bishop Palladii of corruption of youth during his trial in 1919 (‘The politics of purity’ Weekly Worker July 22). In view of some recent controversies I find it quite plausible that child sexual abuse by the clergy was a serious problem in tsarist Russia.

Tsarist abuse
Tsarist abuse

Smoking bans

Dave Edwards might think that tobacco “doesn’t have a useful purpose whatsoever, except for making money” (Letters, August 12).

I would be interested in how he could possibly explain the widespread use of tobacco among a group of people who had never heard of money, the native Americans before the arrival of Europeans. The answer I would give is that they smoked it for the same simple reason that millions of us smoke it today - not because of capitalism but because we enjoy it. If we didn’t then we wouldn’t do it.

Another problem that Edwards should try and solve is this: why has the country with the most entrenched capitalist system and almost complete lack of any left politics (America) erected smoking bans in public places, while in European countries with much stronger social democratic and socialist traditions there are no such bans (Ireland excepted)?

Rightwing governments like to pretend that they are standing up to tobacco manufacturers and protecting workers by banning smoking in public places, but in reality they are merely capitulating to the pharmaceutical industry, which needs the government to bully people into giving up smoking so that they can sell their nicotine gum, patches and similar items (these really are products that have no purpose apart from making money).

Smoking bans
Smoking bans

Postpone

Sion Griffiths avoids the real challenge to the ‘personal’ politics of the fake ‘left’ raised by the Economic and Philosophic Science Review (Letters, August 5).

This accuses single-issue reformism (feminism, black nationalism, gay rights, etc) in the very first paragraph of being “the last refuge of anti-communism, which will provide history with the most reactionary, last-ditch defenders of the monopoly-imperialist ‘free world’ system in its final counterrevolutionary debacles. When the personal became the political, it was endless variants of extreme individualist philosophy which were being deliberately aggressively promoted …So-called ‘human rights’ became more successful than ever as a battering ram for the western imperialist controllers’ non-stop worldwide propaganda priority to wipe out communism.”

The EPSR’s point was made in a letter to the Weekly Worker: “Dream on if you think that reforms have banished racism, or reduced violence, or made for happier families, or replaced drugs and booze for discontented youth, or taught society to really value all people equally … or improved the environment, or stopped international imperialist tyranny” (July 22).

It is typical of the subjective politics now dominant that Sion Griffiths ignores this crisis of the ‘left’ in order to make a venomous personal attack because of only seeing some insult to homosexuality in the EPSR piece. But there is no insult; and the real phenomenon of homosexuality itself as such is not the issue. The cynical individualist nihilism of some gay politics (and many other single-issue philosophies) is the problem, typified by the sabotage of the Palestinian march to air the personal feelings of hurt homosexuals.

Gays should feel offended and intimidated by continued barbaric backwardness of international capitalist society on these questions, but a revolutionary world of workers’ states is the only long-term guarantee of real human enlightenment on all the rotten discriminations still prevalent in an insecure, class-divided society. Have you checked out your school playground insults lately?

But Sion Griffiths can only make jeering jokes about proletarian dictatorship, typical of current ‘left’ ignorance about, and hostility to, the real, historic-making achievements of the world’s workers-state experiences so far, despite their inevitably “brutal” realities too (as referred to, neither in praise nor admiration). And this single-issue anti-communism will last throughout the whole dying counterrevolutionary era of ‘free world’ degeneration.

All the other issues about ‘politically correct’ crassness on gay questions, and doubts about the phenomenon continuing when society is no longer macho-dominated from class or hierarchical struggle, can be debated academically; but wouldn’t they be best postponed in favour of the world seeing its way to a total Palestinian victory over the whole post-1945 Jewish/imperialist colonisation attempt, one unavoidable key on the way to the world revolution?

Another major EPSR point which Sion Griffiths managed to completely ignore in order to pursue personal ‘homophobic’ venom.

Postpone
Postpone

Secular Iran

Experience of the last 23 years in Iran and the Middle East has proven once again the destructive nature of religion in the public domain. Islamic laws have intruded in all aspects of life in Iran. All public functions are now designed, based and enforced by islamic law. Iranian society has been segregated, based on sexual apartheid, and women are treated as second-class citizens in all walks of life.

The Iranian Secular Society has been formed to publicise the destructive effects of the islamic government in Iran and contribute to bring about: separation of religion from the state; separation of religion from education; prohibition of public funding of religious establishment; prohibition of violent religious ceremonies; equality of men and women in all aspects of life; safeguarding the children under the age of 16 from religion; safeguarding all basic civil rights, including freedom of speech, thought, expression, etc, and against religious intolerance.

Join us to establish a secular society in Iran (www.iransecularsociety.com).

Secular Iran
Secular Iran

Millwall election

The ‘Appeal for socialist unity’ made in the latest edition of the AWL’s newspaper, Solidarity, should not be greeted automatically with the understandable cynicism that sometimes afflicts us when the AWL goes on a ‘left unity’ offensive. However hollow the AWL’s unity-mongering has been in the past, its call for socialist unity at the coming general election should be treated at face value and viewed as a positive contribution to the debate about where the left orientates after the collapse of the Socialist Alliance.

Indeed, it should be an appeal that the CPGB and Weekly Worker are at the forefront of making. Unless we take up this call, we risk two dangers: one is paralysis caused by our ‘wait and see’ approach to Respect; the second is being outflanked by the inconsistent left unity-mongering of the likes of the AWL and Workers Power.

The Respect debate has been a fundamental fault line in our organisation recently. Let’s now put it behind us and demand that the left stands on a genuinely socialist programme against New Labour at the next general election. If Respect can become the vehicle for doing this that would be good. But the Socialist Workers Party’s retreat from class politics makes this unlikely. We were correct to critically engage with Respect and should maintain that engagement. But, as comrade Ian Mahoney has belatedly pointed out in recent editions of the Weekly Worker, Respect amounts to an anti-left unity project. We should not wait till its conference at the end of October or its results in elections to recognise that Respect is not likely to be our project: that is, a project of principled left unity.

Perhaps an appeal to the likes of the Scottish Socialist Party, the new United Socialist Party, the Socialist Party, the AWL and Workers Power will fall on deaf ears. If so, then, at least, they will be exposed as sectarian phrase-mongers whose calls for a new workers’ party is simply hot air. Yet if some kind of unity can be cohered at the general election, it would mean that the limited but real progress made by the Socialist Alliance in 2001 would not be in vain, even if our challenge would be necessarily somewhat smaller. Though in any case it is unlikely that Respect will mount much of a challenge outside its ‘strongholds’.

Indeed it would pose a challenge to some of these organisations to stand on a programme of real class struggle politics - Marxism - rather than hide behind a manifesto not so different than Respect’s, except for the occasional use of phrases ‘socialist’ and ‘working class’ in their literature. Open borders, republicanism, down with the occupation of Iraq, not a penny to ‘defence’ and elected representatives on a worker’s wage should be prominent amongst its demands. Let’s not simply wait and see. Instead let’s put the left to the test now and go on the offensive.

Millwall election
Millwall election

IWCA potential

The farcical reports of the ‘Campaign for a Mass Party of the Working Class’ just prove what many of us have known for some time: the left is a hopeless shambles digging its own grave.
The Independent Working Class Association, which won three council seats in Oxford, has demonstrated the benefits of building the kind of solid base of support in working class communities that no post-war socialist party has achieved. They rightly say that the people they are trying to win over, rather than some committee of the ‘politically advanced’, should participate in the engineering of a new political movement, its programme and its policies.

The IWCA has shown the potential of an unashamedly working class organisation, with a pro-working class agenda, free from orthodox Leninist dogma. Our Liverpool comrades should take note.

IWCA potential
IWCA potential

Livingstone

Pretty obviously if Ken Livingstone is making such a whopping contribution (from the council tax of Londoners’ like myself) to the European Social Forum, that money is going to come with some strings (‘Ken pays the piper and now calls the tune’, August 5).

Elsewhere in the Weekly Worker you comment that the left, and many organisations within it, are not going through the best of times. This weakness is exacerbated by giving charlatans like Livingstone the time of day, and in particular by taking their money. £300,000 could do a lot of good in a deprived borough like Haringey - why waste it on the ESF? If the left wants to be taken seriously as defenders of the working class, it should be campaigning against, not accepting, such donations.

Livingstone
Livingstone

Red party

I was initially sorry to read that a minority within the CPCB had split to form an organisation called the Red Party. Out of curiosity I looked at its website.

I was astonished to find there this declaration of principle: “The essence of socialism is simple. It is the fight for true democracy. Current British society allows us to determine the constitution of parliament by vote ... However, [this does] not constitute democracy: not true ‘government by the people’ ... And parliament is not the seat of true power. The unelected senior civil servants, the House of Lords and the monarchy all exist to defend and perpetuate the basic shape of our society. And, behind them all, the corporations control our working lives, our conditions, and what is done with the things we make and the services we provide. This small minority of our population, wielding power in a dozen different and unaccountable ways, represent a ruling class.”

This has no connection with Marx’s work at all. Marx demanded an exact concept of capital. He wrote: “What imprints the character of capital on money or the commodity is not their nature as money or commodity, nor the material use-value of the commodity as subsistence and means of production, but the circumstance that this money and this commodity, these means of production and subsistence, confront the labour-power, denuded of all material wealth, as autonomous powers, personified in their possessors.”

So, according to Marx, the whole productive world is privatised property as against the wage workers. The workers live in this nightmare world of their own creation; a world that is hostile, that will only feed them if they will make it grow even more powerful. A world in which their only rights are to stand in the public streets (but not loiter) and, of course, to seek work (provided you are British).

This is more than a lack of democracy. Marx started as a fighter for true democracy but moved quite some way beyond that. The Red Party’s platform is so vacuous that the reign of Richard II could be caught by its main attack as much as the reign of Blair. So could the reign of the Tang emperors. Marx’s forensic dissection of capitalist society is made with razor-sharp intellectual tools. Manny Neira can only manage broad blows against the democratic imperfections that mar the face of the bourgeois state.

To start, as Neira does, with the rulers and then move to the ruled is the exact opposite of Marx’s approach! For Marx, the capitalist is merely an adjunct of capital. Capital is the creation and recreation of the working class, the producers who are constantly driven away from the means of life (the land and the means of production).

The Red Party’s platform is unadulterated liberalism. Even Bernstein would blush at it. It states that all we lack is the perfecting of the French Revolution. The nature of capital itself is avoided. This is the classic strategy of reformists. Where do we see expounded the true horror of capital, human lives devoured by the machines and social relationships working people themselves sustain? For Marx, the vampire is the iconic image that captures the relationship between workers and capital. How anaemic is the Red Party’s claim that our problem is a “small minority of our population, wielding power in a dozen different and unaccountable ways”!

Compare The Red Party programme with this one: “Our party’s founders decided that wealth and social status were not an entitlement to rule. They believed that wisdom and compassion could be found within every individual and a stable government must be built upon a broad popular base.” The Democratic Party website provided that statement. I suggest it is not at all distant from the platform the Red Party describes as “socialism”.
I wrote to the Red Party to suggest that the party appeared to have little to say about the class slavery that lies behind the poverty and war that plague the world. The website invites those who feel they cannot join the Red Party to write to tell them why. Neira read my letter but neither replied nor published it in the Red Star (for which, in edition one, the pressing issue of the day is ‘Did crime start in the 1960s?’. That will stir up the class war.) He almost exactly meets his own party’s website definition of a sectarian. Unlike the CPGB.

I’m not a member of the CPGB and I’m not going to become one. But I have to admire the CPGB/Weekly Worker commitment to honest socialist debate and engagement. And the CPGB are a party who appear to know what socialism means. You are better off without your liberals.

Red party
Red party

Free Trade

I should like to comment on Mike Macnair’s excellent articles. Although there always was an international component to capital, at the same time there was intense competition between nation-states.

The simple explanation for this was that the financial centres within the most successful nation-states were in intense competition to dominate markets in goods, investment and finance. There simply wasn’t room for multiple successful centres to co-exist if profits were to be maintained at the right rate of return. This means that the imperialist free trade theory of a certain organisation which shall remain nameless is a load of bullshit, but if they were tipsters I would put never money on their favourites as they have a very bad track record of getting it wrong.

Free trade was always used by the dominant economic and political power to secure its position. For example, by the 1860s it was clear that capitalism was in decline in Britain in terms of manufacturing and they turned to finance capital. Hobsbawn and others are excellent on this - there is an enormous literature - and the 1890s were “the climacteric of British manufacturing”. In other words other centres had emerged.

But enter stage-right a group of strategic theorists and policy-makers. These were the liberal imperialists and geopolitical theorists. It is of the uttermost significance they should emerge in Britain at this time, complete with their own guru, Sir Halford MacKinder, and thus we have our very own geopolitical theory.

The AWL have once again, by an amazing coincidence, come up with a theory which directly aids imperialism and confuses the left. But, as Mike Macnair has explained, there would be winners and losers, and countries would have to adopt economic policies that essentially favoured the British empire, as well as political and military ones: examples being Argentina, as well as Egypt and - wait for it - Iraq.

All this has been revived today as the ideological basis for this activity and not just American foreign policy being corporate-driven. They had their ideologists and always had from that date. It has been brought back and can be seen in such books as Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The grand chessboard: geopolitics and the American imperative and the Second American century project. Brzezinski is a leading ideologist for these theories.

I would urge the Weekly Worker to study this aspect of imperialism and the ‘free market’, which has been overlooked and for which a considerable literature and items on the web exist.

Free Trade
Free Trade

Internationalism

What Mike Macnair has to say about internationalism is not only very little indeed but provides no indication of its present form nor any guide to its possible future.

At present, I would argue, we are passing from ‘socialist and working class internationalism’ (inter-nationalism) to a ‘global social-movement solidarity’. This is revealed in the actions of the self-named ‘global justice and solidarity movement’ - something that may include but which simultaneously surpasses the class-limited, national, party and union inter-nationalisms that once dominated but now exercise declining attraction and capacity.

Give me equal space to Mike and I could argue this at length.

Internationalism
Internationalism

Testing times

Testing times
Testing times

imperialism

Mike Macnair’s recent articles on the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and imperialism were pedestrian and superficial. And despite his urbane tone, Macnair prefers to smear the AWL than engage with the substance of our position.

First, Iraq. The AWL is against the occupation of Iraq, for the self-determination of the peoples of Iraq, for immediate elections and for troops out. And we are first and foremost for the development of the Iraqi workers’ movement, as the only progressive, democratic and potentially socialist force in the country.

Macnair doubts our commitment to Iraq’s freedom because we don’t screech ‘now!’ at the end of every demand - yet his own position is not for troops out ‘now’ either. His fundamental argument is that: “The call for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of troops ... is a proposal for fighting for action by the British workers’ movement to force withdrawal” (Weekly Worker July 29). Right now the British labour movement is not in a position to force immediate withdrawal. It might be at some point in the future, but it isn’t at present. If Macnair’s perspective depends solely on the activity of the British labour movement, then it’s not a demand for immediate withdrawal.

Since the same thing is true of the US labour movement, the only forces that could bring about the immediate withdrawal of troops are inside Iraq itself. Should the resurgent Iraqi labour movement force withdrawal, we would all rejoice, but right now it is also too weak to do so. Ironically Macnair says he supports this labour movement, but his position is purely verbal. I know of no concrete action by the CPGB to make solidarity with the Iraqi working class - beyond a few platonic phrases. In contrast, the AWL is virtually the only socialist organisation trying to work with other like-minded trade unionists to get a solidarity campaign organised in Britain.

However, there are other forces that might force withdrawal - such as al-Sadr and other islamists. But of course these forces are also viciously anti-working class and opposed to the emerging labour movement. The problem for the CPGB is you can’t support both. The idea of an alliance between the emerging labour movement and the so-called ‘resistance’ against the occupation is deeply flawed - such an ‘alliance’ would surely cut the throats of the labour movement, just as a similar ‘anti-imperialist front’ did in Iran in 1979-80. This is what the AWL is trying to grapple with - and, faced with a choice, we prioritise the workers’ movement.

Secondly, imperialism. Macnair appears not to have understood what the AWL says about earlier Marxist theories of imperialism. We think the views of Kautsky, Hilferding, Luxemburg, Lenin and Bukharin were more or less adequate to explain the drives that led to World War I, but they no longer explain the structure of the world economy, the relations between the great powers or indeed the reasons for modern wars.

Yet much of Macnair’s critique of these Marxists, such as the inadequacies of Lenin’s ‘labour aristocracy’ theory based on colonial superprofits, is largely a pale shadow of our own criticisms. Macnair is entirely disingenuous in presenting our view that imperialism can be progressive as some kind of break with classical Marxism. It was after all Lenin who wrote: “There is evidence that even today the indisputable fact that imperialism is progressive” (Preface to Bukharin’s World economy and imperialism, 1915); and: “No Marxist will forget ... that imperialism is progressive compared with pre-monopoly capitalism (‘A caricature of Marxism and imperialist economism’, 1916).

Trotsky expressed a similar idea: “Imperialism represents the predatory capitalist expression of a progressive tendency in economic development - to construct a human economy on a world scale, freed from the cramping fetters of the nation and the state” (‘Imperialism and the national idea’, 1915). And it was Rosa Luxemburg who wrote: “Imperialist world domination is an historical necessity, but so too its destruction by the proletarian international. Step for step there are two historical necessities in conflict with one another”; and “in this sense imperialism ultimately works for us” (The Junius Pamphlet 1915).

Macnair smears us with holding the views of Kautsky during World War I, yet goes on to describe the world after 1950 in ways very similar to Kautsky’s picture (ie, of a great power cartel, of exploitation of the ‘third world’). We think the world since 1950 is significantly different, in terms of social relations, relations between states and indeed the drive to war to warrant more serious discussion of the meaning of imperialism than simply parroting the Comintern view from 1920.

Macnair says he agrees, but what of his own views? They are striking for their lack of originality. His principal argument is that capitalism has “epochal limits” - a fact so entirely uncontroversial, I wondered whether he had simply missed all our references to the ‘age of barbarism’. His supplementary point that capitalism is in decline is not substantiated with any facts nor discussed with any great insight. Nor does he spell out the great practical conclusions that follow from such a characterisation. Macnair also makes an entirely crass comparison between the US and the other big capitalist powers since 1950 and the relations between Britain and Portugal in Lenin’s time. Such half-thoughts, wedded to his attempt to breathe life into the corpse of dependency theory, take the discussion nowhere.

All Macnair is left with is the CPGB’s mantra, that the AWL is fundamentally wrong. But then factional hatred towards the AWL is presumably the only way the CPGB can ingratiate itself with its new friends in Respect.

imperialism
imperialism