Letters

No conductor

I agree with Tom Delargy: his article, ‘Bring back Tommy’, made sense (Weekly Worker November 25). In my opinion, though, this fiasco can be summed up in one word - careerism. In the past I and many other members in the party have witnessed this type of behaviour - perhaps on a smaller scale, but just as distasteful all the same.

Tommy drew me to the SSP - I don’t think I need to spell out why. However, it slowly became clear that, while the party as a whole was worth belonging to, there were (and obviously still are) small groupings within it that were more interested in power (personal and political) than concentrating on the job in hand.

Even while comrades close to me were being attacked, I reasoned that the SSP was far larger than the cliques involved and carried on supporting it as a whole in order to secure RMT affiliation to the SSP - which was a personal goal and the driving force behind my membership. I wanted to help gain and develop a political voice for the RMT.

I thought then, and still do, that the SSP is the only party that can give workers the political voice they need. However, the infighting and double standards that existed in my area could not be overcome, at least not by me, and I finally severed links. For unrelated reasons I have now also left the rail industry and sadly the RMT.

I knew though that those comrades I assisted in gaining RMT affiliation were more than capable of developing the SSP into a major political ally for trade unions and their members. Now I am beginning to wonder.

I hope that the SSP can sort this mess out - I would also like to see Tommy return. Sure, the SSP isn’t a one-man band, but can the orchestra afford to be without its conductor? I think not.

No conductor
No conductor

Bilge

Your article ‘A curious sort of revolution’ is an astonishingly poor piece of journalism (Weekly Worker December 2).

Mr Macnair purports to quote an organisation called Global Security regarding US involvement in attempts at regime change in Ukraine. In fact, the quotation offered by Mr Macnair is from a November 26 article by The Guardian’s Ian Traynor. The passage only appears on Global Security’s website as an attributed quote from Mr Traynor.

In trying to attribute this quote to a “US think tank” Mr Macnair is either a liar or an incompetent. It amazes me that your editor allows this kind of bilge into your newspaper.

Bilge
Bilge

German slander

In her article on the first conference of the new left party in Germany, the WASG, Tina Becker did excellent work translating and summarising two articles from the Frankfurter Rundschau. The part which she wrote herself - about the left wing of the party - was less impressive (‘Socialist or welfare state party?’, November 25).

For example, she claims the German section of the League for the Fifth International, Arbeitermacht, is “boycotting the new formation”. Where did she get such an idea? She seems to be applying what she learned at the JV Stalin School of Journalism: slander first, research later.
A brief glance at our website (www.arbeitermacht.de) would show that our members are active in the structures of the WASG all across the country, including as delegates to the conference. In her article she actually quotes one of our supporters speaking in front of the WASG conference (“I don’t want another social democracy ...”). Strange “boycott”!

On our website she could find some 10 articles we have produced about the WASG since the summer, including a seven-page draft programme for the WASG in opposition to the draft programme from the leadership. Our document is well known in the WASG, since it is the only one that has yet been proposed that is in clear opposition to German imperialism and in simple language explains the need for workers’ councils and a workers’ militia to smash the bourgeois state. Even Axel Troost, chief theoretician of the WASG leadership, quoted our programmatic document in front of the conference, as the only one of the many proposals “we will certainly not discuss”.

Does Ms Becker agree that revolutionary programmes should not be discussed, should be laughed at? Would she support a revolutionary programme in the WASG? We can only guess. (Notably, the CPGB did not support the revolutionary programme Workers Power proposed at the founding conference of Respect.) As one would expect from the Weekly Worker, there are plenty of attacks on left groups, but almost no political perspectives.

In fact, besides “socialism”, “going beyond the defence of the welfare state”, and an “organised approach”, she has nothing to criticise in the WASG’s reformist programme (not even the defence of the pro-capitalist constitution or ‘humanitarian’ interventions of the German army!) She nods towards the SAV (German section of the CWI) as “revolutionary socialists”, even though they, in their gradualist logic, explicitly reject fighting for a revolutionary programme in the WASG because this “goes too far for the workers’ consciousness”.

Even if lacking in any kind of programmatic perspective, at least Ms Becker’s article answers one question that has been plaguing the left for years: does the CPGB enjoy slandering the League for the Fifth International? Yes!

German slander
German slander

Identikit

How encouraging for our erstwhile comrade Ian Donovan that he seems to have found an identikit thinker in the form of Brian Miller (Letters, December 2).

Ian normally ploughs a lonely furrow in Respect, a political formation that has caused the comrade to slip his political moorings and drift dangerously close to some very nasty-looking rocks. Of course, in the case of Ian this is done using the excuse that “however unusual its origins”, Respect is “clearly a socialist coalition” (Letters, September 9).

It must have been uncomfortable for him that Lindsey German - a comrade with rather more influence over the political shape of Respect than he will ever have - was at pains to tell Respect’s conference in October that it was not socialist, that it must resist any temptation to adopt a clause “which inserts socialism as a defining characteristic” and that she would not even have considered joining Respect “if it was just socialist” (Weekly Worker November 4).

I want to make just two other brief points.

First, the CPGB does as a general principle uphold the “right to self-determination of an occupied and colonised people”. However, it does not follow from that that we are indifferent to the political complexion of the forces opposing imperialism, specifically in this case in Iraq. Brian himself appears to partially recognise this when he writes that revolutionaries seek to “use their political influence to maximise the influence of socialist and working class forces in any anti-colonial struggle”. But, idiotically, because we actually do that he then implies that the CPGB “[places] conditions” on our opposition to the occupation of Iraq.

Brian should talk to Ian (or the other way round). This accusation is a carbon-copy of a Donovan original which has already been answered by Peter Manson. Our comrade cited a motion passed by the CPGB’s July aggregate that declares that “communists work for the defeat of British and US imperialism”; “our programme of action for workers in Britain and the US is to force the occupying troops out”; “the working class in Britain must focus on organising the defeat of ‘our own side’”; and “we would prefer the defeat of imperialism rather than its victory, even if it were at the hands of the al-Sadr militia or other islamists” (Weekly Worker July 29). Forgive me, comrade Miller, but this would seem to be pretty straightforward to me.

Indeed, neither Ian or Brian are able to get it into their politically co-joined head that calling - as we have consistently - for foreign troops out of Iraq now is by definition an unconditional demand. That is, we do not call for troops out when ‘civil society’ is a little more developed, or when the trade unions are more active. We demand it immediately, without such conditions, because we recognise imperialism as the main enemy.

My second point concerns Brian’s sad defence of the vote against secularism at the above-mentioned SWP-packed conference. Brian seriously expects us to swallow the idea that this shameful episode occurred because the assembled ranks were so outraged that it could even be implied that they were in any way equivocal on the question. So they punished the movers of a resolution on secularism that they all agreed with by … er … voting it down.

This is bilge. I don’t know if comrade Miller was in the audience (comrade Donovan certainly was), so I cannot say whether he heard the arguments used by the SWP’s Chris Bambery to malign and distort the notion of secularism. According to him, ‘secularism’ was used to justify the state ban on the hijab in French schools - so we should have nothing to do with the term. The SWP even objected to a secular Palestine. They said it was only being brought up as a Trojan horse for islamophobia.

Yet the real reason why the motion was defeated is clear - the SWP wants to align itself with reactionary “muslim activists”; patronisingly muslims - all muslims - are caricatured as being opposed to secularism as a matter of principle. Nonsense, of course. In France, for example, many muslims have demanded genuine as opposed to bogus secularism. That would mean ending the restrictions on the religious practices and requirements expected of pious muslims.

Naturally, being secularists, we support them in this. Can Respect?

Identikit
Identikit

One party

Pontificating recently on which among the vast plethora of Marxist-Leninist parties at Britain’s disposal to which I should align myself, as a young-up-and-coming crazed lefty, I was struck by an interesting thought. Wouldn’t it be marvellous if no choice was necessary? Reading your Weekly Worker, I have begun noticing that the primary target of your derision is not so much the capitalist class and their divisive, economically anarchic and oppressive state, but rather the Socialist Workers Party.

I do not suggest that the SWP isn’t overridden by a bureaucratic elite which spits in the face of democratic centralism; but, this aside, surely our focus as socialists should be unity against the common and much more formidable enemy. There can be no progressive revolution or even reform unless the far left consolidates itself under the banner of a single party. Not a coalition or an alliance, as these are generally not unified enough to meet with success, with each included party pulling in the direction of its own agenda. Whatever success they do achieve will be transient (Socialist Alliance, anybody?).

What we need is a single and massive party attractive to all Marxist-Leninist groups, based on a generic constitution of core values, such as a woman’s right to choose, republicanism, democratic centralism within the party, internationalism and open borders, the inclusion of which would be welcomed by most parties and serve to kick the SWP up its proverbial arse.

Obviously there would be quarrels, as there are now, but parties as they stand would be the factions inherent in any organisation governed according to democratic centralism; the leading committee would consist of those at the helm of each faction, and an overall leader would be elected by every member of the party, with direct democracy employed in order to decide on major policy issues. The Bolsheviks were a party, and in spite of internal squabblings they were successful in 1917.

In 2004, success shall evade British attempts at international communism, just as it has done since the formation of the original CPGB back in 1920. The dogmatic skirmishes which divide the left at present are as naught compared to the fundamental skirmish we all need to win: that against capitalism. Lenin warned against ultra-leftism, partially because it divides the left needlessly on matters of principle, while they should unite fruitfully on matters of political supremacy, like the fight for universal human emancipation.

Idealism? Maybe, but if we study my argument dialectically then surely the socialist redundancy of Britain’s past and present must highlight the need for a strong force in favour of Marxist-Leninism, and the only possibility for the realisation of such a force would be the unconditional convergence of the left: the membership of the SWP, Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, Socialist Party, Communist Party of Britain and Red Party, to name but a few, would immediately accept the same core principles as you in the CPGB, given the potential for such consolidated revolutionary efforts, as well as numerous non-aligned socialists. The resultant membership would be colossal compared to that of any given existing socialist party, and the inevitable power of the movement might even go on to attract those on the left of the Labour Party and the Green Party; probably also the Scottish Socialist Party, if it can shed its nationalist tendencies, perhaps even the trade unions.

Comrades, the communist community must no longer be divided into singularly insignificant sects, but rather it should evolve into the Communist Party. Each sect would then be rendered a worthwhile faction amid the collective, which would in turn not only represent the fight for social justice and a planned economy, but would actually do so successfully.

One party
One party

No thinkers

Whilst your account of the crisis in the SWP (a long time in coming) is interesting, I am somewhat bemused by your pointing out that the SWP tend to be reticent about providing membership figures (‘Decline, paranoia and discontent’, December 2).

Hardly unusual on the left for that, are they? Whilst it is the case that the SWP undoubtedly has severe problems, so do the SP, the AWL and all the others who have proved utterly unable to recruit anyone or build anything of any significance over the last two decades (they have either shrivelled to their core or failed to grow).

Whilst the SWP breaking up would frankly be a good thing, there doesn’t appear much evidence that the membership contains enough critically minded thinkers to develop much out of the wreckage sadly - something they share with most of the rest of the left. Doesn’t bode well for the future, does it?

No thinkers
No thinkers

Show the way

In ‘Decline, paranoia and discontent’, your correspondent notes that it is “amazing” that data on SWP membership “is not given out as a matter of course”. Quite so. Perhaps the CPGB will show the SWP the way by revealing the size of its own membership?

Show the way
Show the way