Letters
Allegations
Take a look at the draft constitution put forward by the Respect executive for adoption at the conference at the end of October. It does appear, to put it mildly, that the allegations raised by the CPGB that Respect is a “non-socialist alliance” and that it would likely have a “worse internal regime than the Socialist Labour Party” were ill-judged, arrant nonsense.
Note the clear commitment to a society based on common ownership and democratic control, the constitutionally enshrined hostility to the profit system, and the ‘socialism’ in the name of the organisation. Note also the overt, public statement encouraging dual membership, which is the exact opposite of the SLP’s Stalinist constitution. The biggest flaw, I suppose, is the retention of the slate system of leadership election - a flaw that was also true of the Socialist Alliance.
However unusual its origins, this is clearly a socialist coalition that publicly aims at democratic methods of organisation and functioning. Like the SA, of course, it takes no position on the reformability or otherwise of the bourgeois state - which is the kind of flaw one would expect from this kind of project. This is, as we all know, an argument yet to be won by revolutionaries left among the broader left constituency this project, like its SA and SLP predecessors, is aimed at, so is it hardly surprising.
As in all such matters, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and these may turn out to be just fine words that butter no parsnips, as the saying goes. But this draft constitution alone blows out of the water most, if not all, of the idiocies some on the left have hurled at Respect in terms of its alleged ‘non-socialist’ nature.
Ian Donovan
Allegations
Allegations
For secularisation
For secularism
I am looking for 20 paid up Respect members to come forward as signatories to the following conference motion, as required by standing orders (please indicate your support by emailing me at DAVIDLANDAU9@aol.com):
This conference declares that Respect, the unity coalition, is a secular organisation. This means Respect strives for a society in which people of all faiths and none are equal, in which there is a complete separation between religion and the state and any instruments of governance nationally or locally and opposes the coercion by any authority of any person to adhere to a faith or obey the rules of any faith. It means that Respect is open to those of all faiths and none, does not favour and is not beholden to any religion or religious institution.
Conference asserts that this follows from our commitment to equality and socialism, a commitment embedded in our title. As a consequence of this Respect will actively:
- Oppose coercive action by religious institutions, authorities or movements. Oppose the suppression of right of individuals or sections of the community by religious institutions, authorities or movements - for example, gender rights, right to sexuality, right to ‘heretical’ beliefs, etc.
- Support all working class and progressive movements within those communities who stand up for the rights of those under threat from religious institutions, authorities or movements.
- Oppose the persecution and discrimination of people because of their faith. Oppose the suppression of a faith by the state.
- Demand the immediate abolition of the blasphemy laws.
- Demand the immediate disestablishment of the Church of England.
- Demand the end of state subsidies to all faith schools.
For secularisation
For secularisation
Appetite for unity
It seems ex-Red Platform comrades have finally cracked the problem of getting space in the Weekly Worker - by leaving the CPGB! Many, many thanks for your critique of the Red Party (‘Yet another bloody non-sectarian sect’ Weekly Worker September 2).
Mike Macnair closes with his main conclusion: “For all their ostensible non-sectarianism, their actual decision to split and set up a new party was sectarian. It disproves not the CPGB’s approach to differences, but their own.” In short, while he finds no sectarian politics in our arguments, we’re sectarian simply because we left the CPGB.
Firstly, of course, not all of us did. Gerry Byrne was a member of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, and a former national committee member and sub-editor of Solidarity. Rae Hancock was a candidate for the South East group the Peace Party, which came within a whisker of trumping the mighty Respect in the European elections (winning 12,572 votes to Respect’s 13,426 - and on a ticket including republicanism, open borders, and workers’ representation on a worker’s wage! But that’s another story).
More importantly, though the Weekly Worker is a fine paper (which it would be unseemly to praise too highly as, after all, I wasn’t exactly a stranger in it), it would perhaps be overstating its importance to categorise merely leaving the CPGB as sectarian in itself. Let’s face it: people leave groups and join others all the time: are all those who left other groups to join the CPGB also sectarians?
As for those of us who did leave the CPGB, Mike criticises “the comrades’ inability or unwillingness to give any clear explanation of why they have split”, but then rather spoils his case by also criticising the explanation that, well, we failed to give. He accepts the PCC made “mistakes”, and documents and even criticises their refusal to print collected anti-Respect articles, and their decision to shut down the Red Platform column. He denies that these mistakes, though, “actually amount to … suppressing dissent”. Well, with great reluctance, but, as you insist, we’ll repeat what we said at the time: we think they did. You may disagree, but surely you’ve rather undermined the argument that we never explained our reasons?
But these reasons explain why we left the CPGB, not why we formed the Red Party. The Red Party was formed to argue that, to be honest, this kind of sectarian bun-fight was perhaps not the best way of filling the hearts of the bourgeoisie with fear. Naturally, in the first issue of the Red Star, we weren’t about to fill it with denunciations of the CPGB - or the AWL, come to that. I must confess that this is the first time I’ve encountered a group complaining that another didn’t run articles attacking them. For this, we’re sectarians? Are you sure about this, comrades?
Mike’s replies to our political arguments are worthy of more serious discussion, but space allows only the briefest replies here.
On our call for humanism inside our groups, he argues that by making great demands on comrades’ time, money, and lives, the “Leninist groups predominate” over humanist ones. But do they? There are perhaps 3,000 members of the British left groups all told. Isn’t demanding an ever increasing amount from an ever smaller membership a recipe for, well, the modern British left - surrounded as it is by a mass of broken, demoralised shells of ex-comrades, muttering ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in their sleep, and wincing their way past Socialist Worker sellers?
We have also argued the left speaks a language most cannot understand, and Mike defends this on the grounds that many groups of ‘specialists’ do the same: quoting the interesting examples of fly-fishermen, mechanics, and “swingers”. I don’t fish, and don’t, um, ‘swing’ (there’s a confession I never thought I’d be making in the Weekly Worker), but I drive very old cars, far too fast, and have had plenty of contact with mechanics as a result. Now think, is some jaw-stroking engineer saying, ‘It’s your castellated grommet assembly - whole thing needs replacing: gonnacostyaguv’ really the best model for socialist propaganda? Yes, mechanics need a special language to talk to each other, but I can’t help feeling that they, like the left, could do better in communicating with those outside their expertise. In the end, we need to take our arguments to those who aren’t yet socialists, and to persuade.
Let’s move on from here. We regard the CPGB, and indeed the AWL, as close comrades - and we note the primary criticism both organisations have made against us is that, well, we’re not part of them. Perhaps this is a good sign. Let’s turn that appetite for unity into wholehearted cooperation, in the Socialist Alliance Democracy Platform and elsewhere, towards building a genuine workers’ party, in which we can enjoy freedom to continue our discussions, while finally achieving unity in action.
Appetite for unity
Appetite for unity
Rights
Three short points on Mike Macnair’s well aimed article on the Red ‘party’.
Firstly, it was not through a decision of a CPGB members’ aggregate that the Red Platform was given a weekly column. That was agreed by the Provisional Central Committee after myself and Mark Fischer persuaded Cameron Richards and Manny Neira that they should publish their disagreements with the majority not outside our structures, but through them. Hence the Weekly Worker column and a website link (we also published letters and a string of other articles written by them and their co-thinkers).
Secondly, the decision to close the column was taken by the PCC because the Red Platform comrades could no longer fill it with anything worthwhile. We do, after all, have a duty to the readers of the paper. The Weekly Worker is not an ‘anything goes’ noticeboard.
Thirdly, and most importantly. Closing the column did not affect their rights as members. They were free to issue their own propaganda (printed at cost price by the Party press) and write, collectively, or as individuals, for the paper - indeed, as far as I know, after the column was closed, the editor accepted everything they submitted. In other words no one was silenced.
Sadly, despite the Red Platform’s claim that they were CPGB “partisans”, the majority of them possessed no understanding of comradeship nor commitment to the norms of democratic centralism. Doubtless, in part that is our fault. But that is another story.
Rights
Rights
SWP and BNP
The situation described in the article, ‘BNP infiltrates SWP’ is not the first time such a thing has happened (Weekly Worker September 2).
In the late 1970s, a tiny, overtly Nazi group called SS Wotan 18 (probably long since defunct) boasted that one of its members had managed to infiltrate the Socialist Workers Party. This was presented by them as being a major feat. Anyone who knows the SWP and its recruiting methods will know that it was not.
SWP and BNP
SWP and BNP
Conspiracy
Royston Bull calls for “a total Palestinian victory over the whole post-1945 Jewish/imperialist colonisation attempt” (Letters, September 2).
As an anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist Jew, I have not been invited to take part. Perhaps Mr Bull can provide the address, so that I can claim my share of the benefits that I have gained from this conspiracy.
Conspiracy
Conspiracy
Smoking bans
I’m sorry I’ve upset Patrick Randall (Letters, September 2). If he reads my letter again he will see that I attacked the tobacco industry, not smokers. The tobacco industry are pleased that you enjoy their product.
They want your money and they couldn’t give a monkey’s about your health or anything else. I agree with him about the pharmaceutical industry: they only care about your health if it can make them money.
I’ve also been known to enjoy cigarettes. In fact I only gave up because I needed the money for other things - like keeping a roof over my head.
Smoking bans
Smoking bans
Not socialist
Comrade Andrew Northall writes that Stalin made a contribution to the establishment of socialism. I disagree, although I agree that it is necessary to study Stalin and the Soviet Union.
Comrade Northall refers to the Soviet Union as being a “socialist state”. He is aware that this can only be a contradiction in terms. A state is an instrument of class rule. Stalin, whom comrade Northall admires, himself wrote: “Future society will be socialist society. This means, primarily, that there will be no classes in that society ... Where there are no classes, where there are neither rich nor poor, there is no need for a state” (Works Vol 1, p336).
Stalin also argued that in socialism “buying and selling will also be abolished”. Comrade Northall knows perfectly well that there was buying and selling in the ‘socialist state’ of the Soviet Union. Comrade Northall is an admirer of the Russian Revolution. But I was unaware that he held that Stalinism was a proletarian current, and that in the Stalinist states the working class held power.
Comrade Northall refers to a working class state in the ‘pre-capitalist’ Russia. In The German ideology, Marx demonstrated that the working class in the advanced countries would lead the workers in the backward countries in the development of communist consciousness and the establishment of communism. Comrade Northall’s claim that socialism can come to a backward country before an advanced country is a complete rejection of dialectical and historical materialism.
I agree with comrade Northall that we must consider the Russian Revolution scientifically. Doing so, from the analysis of material relations of production, and the social formations which arise from this, I can only conclude that Marx was correct, and comrade Northall is incorrect.
Not socialist
Not socialist
Stalin
Stalin
In last week’s issue, two letters appeared sequentially regarding Stalin, each offering perspectives on the nature of the Soviet Union and historical support for its politics (September 2). Both letters contain a number of conflating and contradictory strands, subjectively deforming history in order to excuse some of the actions of the bureaucratised Soviet Union - an angle reminiscent of orthodox ‘official communism’.
DM Picard, in spite of his self-professed ‘abhorrence’ of Stalin, nevertheless provides a rather dubious defence of Soviet collectivisation; the benefits of hindsight and polemic enable him to excuse the forceful immiseration of the masses for the sake of constructing a bulwark defence against an expansionist Third Reich. Andrew Northall approaches this same defence from a different angle, though the perspective is largely the same: in spite of everything, Stalin symbolised a progressive force in Soviet politics in the face of hardship, isolation and economic adversity.
Such a viewpoint is not only an absurdity, but stands in stark contrast to the impetus behind a socialist movement in the first place: that of forging a society on a higher social, cultural and economic basis than that preceding it. Regardless of Russia’s underdeveloped economic base, one cannot defend Stalin’s actions by way of a comparison with western (British) industrialisation - to conflate the economic developments in western Europe at the turn of the 20th century with Soviet forced collectivisation is to essentially refrain from any form of concrete analysis of economic and social relations, and to dislocate the political from the economic.
Quite how anyone - especially someone professing to be a Marxist - can put forward an argument along such lines is remarkable indeed. Picard’s perspective of Soviet industrialisation simply fails to appreciate the purpose of socialism as an economic system: that it offers itself as a more highly advanced mode of development than its forerunners, not a mere effigy of them. Northall and Picard’s failure to appreciate this is indeed what is “farcical” here.
Unfortunately, Northall goes further than this with his odious apologetic. Apparently, ‘we’ need to make ourselves aware of the “historic contribution of Stalin” - a request which is followed by a generic and sketchy ‘vision’ of communist society. Thank god (or perhaps the Man of Steel) for the visionaries! This approach is reminiscent of Stalinist scribes prefacing all their works with a re-assertion of ‘diamat’ to confirm that they are operating within a sound and acceptable general line. What follows might seem mechanistic and drained of progressive categories - but that’s excusable, for Northall has provided us with his vision to legitimate his diatribe.
We are told that Stalin is an “integral aspect of communism’, and in refusing to acknowledge such, Northall proffers, we are rejecting “our own history and tradition”. As if to validate his claims, Northall juxtaposes the Paris Commune with Stalin’s USSR - another reflection of his conflationary thinking. Indeed, no-one is disputing the validity of Bolshevism or the Russian Revolution; instead, we reject the counterrevolutionary bureaucratisation and caste rule from a party elite that emerged in the wake of Lenin’s death.
Northall, like so many of the old ‘official communists’, simply fails to grasp the qualitative shifts in the structure and nature of the Bolshevik Party throughout its existence, especially in the wake of the civil war. For exclamatory effect, we are also informed that the party leadership were “better Marxists than Marx and Engels!” (sic). This fetishised viewpoint speaks for itself, followed by a crude portrayal of the roles of Trotsky and Bukharin in the 20s. So much for Northall’s “scientific approach to history, revolution and [the] ultimate communist ideal”.
Northall is not alone in his retrospective rewrites, however; Picard has his own share in this historical Alzheimer’s. His lamentation that Channel 4’s documentary on Stalin made reference to the Bolshevik Party by name is purely arbitrary: the Bolshevik Party was still called the Bolshevik Party, no matter how much Picard would like to re-pen history in order to clarify nomenclature for today’s movement. Indeed, he is correct when he states that Bolshevism did die “when Lenin died and Trotsky did not succeed him” (or rather, was marginalised in the mid-20s) - this however is besides the point. His portrayal of Trotsky as the Soviet Union’s “true leader” subsumes concrete analysis. Trotsky was clearly a logical successor on the basis of intellect and aptitude, but this does not amount to the same thing as being historically predetermined as leader. Here we find the (by now unsurprising) conflation of concrete circumstances and flirtations with desire once more.
The prevailing themes of these two letters, exemplified by Northall’s need to defend the USSR’s position with regards to its limitation of world imperialism, conveniently forget the Soviet Union’s own expansionist tendencies in the post-war period. But, of course, that’s okay - it was presumably of a more noble and ‘heroic’ nature. The left needs to wake up and stop apologising for the crimes of Stalin and the rape of theory under the yoke of the Stalinist legacy. The documentary did indeed “castigate Stalin, but blame communism”. Unfortunately, that’s the nature of hegemonic liberalism - ‘he who controls the terminology controls the ideology’, to paraphrase Mr Herbert. For this reason, it is even more necessary to distinguish Stalinism from Marxism instead of making crude excuses on the basis of ‘progressive property relations’ or similarly dubious categories that these two letters exemplify.
Stalin
Stalin
imperialism
The three letters in last week’s paper responding to my articles on imperialism have very different characters (Weekly Worker September 2).
Richard Roper makes important points about both competition between financial centres and the revival of overtly pro-imperialist geopolitical theories. I should emphasise that, for all of the 15,000 words or so in the three articles, they are no more than an outline approach to the issues, and are addressed specifically to the ‘anti-imperialist’ line of the Socialist Workers Party and, the other side of the coin, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty comrades’ use of the ‘imperialism of free trade’ idea to defend their line on Iraq. There is a lot of valuable theoretical work on the present evolution of imperialism being done, and a lot which still needs to be done.
Pete Waterman invites the Weekly Worker to give him substantial space to defend the idea that the “global justice and solidarity movement” may include but “simultaneously surpasses the class-limited, national, party and union inter-nationalisms that once dominated” (emphasis added). It may well be worthwhile for the paper to do so: similar ideas are very widespread on the left, and a clear exposition of them would sharpen up our own response. For myself, I do not see more globalism in the “global justice and solidarity movement” than the internationalism of the radical youth expressed back in the late 60s in the slogan, ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh/We shall fight, we shall win/London, Paris, Rome, Berlin’. And ‘surpassing class-limited politics’ is commonplace old-style ‘official communism’ ... and Blairism.
Paul Hampton’s letter is classic AWL. First, we get the assertion of the AWL’s Trotskyist dogmatic orthodoxy, based on finding ‘support’ for AWL positions in casual comments, as opposed to the main lines of texts and resolutions formally adopted: ‘the classics also said imperialism is progressive’. This is a theological-legal approach to argument - what Stephen Jay Gould called ‘citation grazing’. The AWL would be a lot more scientific if they admitted openly that it is necessary to correct the errors of the classic authors on imperialism which led to the failure of prediction in the 1940s-50s. Similarly, comrade Paul conflates “the views of Kautsky, Hilferding, Luxemburg, Lenin and Bukharin” into a single theory which was “more or less adequate”, paying no attention whatever to the differences between these views.
Secondly, the letter is evasive. The core of the argument of my articles is that the role of the state and states is central both to any theory of imperialism, and to the question of defeatism - which has been a critical element in the CPGB’s differences with the AWL over Iraq. To this argument comrade Paul simply and blankly fails to respond. Presumably he thinks substituting dismissive or abusive assertion for argument is a sufficient response. This practice - a kind of political Tourette’s syndrome - derives ultimately from Sean Matgamna’s original Healyism.
The same thing happens on the concrete question of Iraq. I do not in the least insist on “screech[ing] ‘now’! at the end of every demand”. I object to the fact that the AWL argues positively that Marxists should not campaign (participate in campaigns) for the immediate withdrawal of British troops. The fact that the AWL argues positively against campaigning for immediate withdrawal would not appear at all from comrade Paul’s letter.
Comrade Sean’s original Healyism and the extent to which the AWL political culture models itself on comrade Sean’s has the effect that the AWL can’t simultaneously walk and chew gum (participate in Respect and oppose its class-collaborationist politics; fight both for the immediate withdrawal of British troops and for solidarity with the Iraqi workers’ movement). Tough. AWL comrades engage in polemics aimed to prove that simultaneously walking and chewing gum is impossible. I am not persuaded.
I said in my final article that the AWL was right to reject the strategy of the anti-imperialist front and the SWP’s cruder version of it, that they were right to insist on an internationalist approach to Europe, but that they were wrong to reject defeatism as a strategic approach to the British state’s military operations.
Comrade Paul concludes from this that “All Macnair is left with is the CPGB’s mantra, that the AWL is fundamentally wrong.” This is, frankly, a pretty strange interpretation of what I said. I would be happy to respond to a serious critique of what I wrote and might be led to shift my position. Comrade Paul’s response is not such a serious critique.
imperialism
imperialism
Emotional
The Weekly Worker chose to publish a letter which, by heavy sarcasm, accuses the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty of being in the pay of imperialism (September 2).
A certain Richard Roper claims that in our writings on imperialism: “The AWL have once again, by an amazing coincidence, come up with a theory which directly aids imperialism and confuses the left.” If this means anything, it is that some hidden connection or influence (there must be one, otherwise the “coincidence” would be too “amazing”) ensures that on every issue (“once again”) the AWL’s efforts “directly” (not indirectly, not inadvertently) “aid imperialism”.
Open debate is not the same as an open sewer, into which any slander can be thrown. Print Mr Roper’s views on imperialism, by all means. But any responsible editor would refuse to print this old-CP-style insinuation of corruption, made without evidence.
Just what Mr Roper wants to say about imperialism, theoretically, is unintelligible from his letter, but his emotional bias is clear: he is very, very, very hostile to the USA. The Weekly Worker has a problem. For many people on that Yankophobe wavelength - which dominates its chosen environment, Respect - you are almost as bad as the AWL. You support Sadr only hesitantly; you did not side with Saddam Hussein in the 2003 war until the last minute; you did not side with the Taliban in the 2001 war at all; in your time you have headlined “Oppose Sharon and Hamas”. It’s rather like the ‘centrist’ groups in the 1930s - “in the middle of the road”, as Trotsky put it - who had been shaken free from Stalinism and social democracy, but then tried to keep themselves in the swim by joining the denunciations of the “shrill”, “sectarian” or “disruptive” Trotskyists.
But your recent experience, with defections in both sceptical-of-Respect and ultra-pro-Respect directions, suggests that clarity is better.
Emotional
Emotional
Oh Happy Day
Nobody can deny that communism made its greatest advances when the international communist movement was under the leadership of Joseph Stalin. This applies also to the Daily Worker, now known as the Morning Star, which had a circulation of 121,000 in 1947.
Readers will therefore be interested to learn that a new party, the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist Leninist), was founded on July 3 2004 at the Saklatvala Hall in Southall. The CPGB (ML) bases itself on Leninist-Stalinist principles, viewing itself as “the natural progression of the CPGB of the 1920s and 30s”.
Oh Happy Day
Oh Happy Day
Gay Victory
The organisers of the Music of Black Origin (Mobo) awards cancelled the nominations of reggae superstars Elephant Man and Vybz Kartel after they refused to apologise for their lyrics inciting the murder of lesbian and gay people.
The two singers had been nominated for an award in the ‘Best reggae’ category, but protests from the gay rights groups Outrage and the Black Gay Men’s Advisory Group forced the Mobo organisers to reconsider the nominations. The singers’ refusal to apologise is indicative of their unrepentant violent homophobia.
For example, Vybz Kartel in Bedroom slaughteration, uses the lyrics, “Bow cat, sodomite, batty man fi gat assassination” (“Oral sexer, lesbian and queer must be assassinated”); and in Pussy jaw: “Faggot fi get copper to di heart” (“Faggot must get copper [bullet] to the heart”). Elephant Man, in A nuh fi wi fault, exhorts: “Battyman fi dead!” (“Queers must be killed!”) - a lyric repeated in We nuh like gay.
We applaud the decision to drop these artists. Incitement to murder should never be rewarded. The Mobos have taken a lead and we hope other promoters, sponsors, and record companies will follow their positive example.
Gay Victory
Gay Victory