Letters

True heirs

I read with interest the article on communist strategy and saw the pictures of the totalitarians, Bukharin, Zinoviev and Lenin.

In 1919 Martov issued a manifesto with the same title as Lenin’s What is to be done? He advocated:

l Universal franchise in elections and secret ballots.

l Freedom of speech and press for all working class parties.

l Free elections to government organs for all working class parties.

l Members of revolutionary tribunals to be elected instead of appointed by the Bolsheviks.

l Abolition of the Cheka and death penalty.

l All state officials to be accountable to the working class and not under Bolshevik control.

All these were demands supported by the Bolsheviks before they came to power.

In 1919-20 the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries had grown in popularity. Free elections to the soviets would most certainly have swept the Bolsheviks from power (see Isaac Deutscher The prophet armed).

In 1919 the Bolsheviks shot Khurstalev-Nosar, the first chairman of the 1905 St Petersburg soviet and also the artist who had designed the uniform worn by the Red Army throughout the civil war (see Solzhenitsyn The gulag archipelago Vol 1).

To me the leftwing Mensheviks were the true heirs of Marx and Engels.

True heirs
True heirs

Gross product

I read your excellent ‘Workhouse of nations’ article, which goes some way to correcting the distortion that the US welcomes immigrants.

In reality, the US is grossly exploiting immigrants as a tool to undermine workers’ rights and prop up its weakening economy.

Gross product

Half a world away

In relation to your article on Nepal, I am impressed by Eddie Ford’s ability to prescribe tasks for the communists of a country half a world away (‘Revolution at the roof of the world’, April 27).

This is what the Cominform did for the world’s communists more than 50 years ago, with predictably disastrous results. I await Prachanda taking time off from his life-and-death decisions to tell the CPGB how to suck British eggs.

In the meantime, with reference back to the Comintern/Cominform, what can one say except history always repeats itself - the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

Half a world away

Reasoned

I sent the following letter to the SWP and Respect, but neither replied. They have bigger fish to fry. The Weekly Worker and myself do not agree on the Labour Party or work within social democracy obviously, but I think in the interest of open discourse and reasoned dialogue it is important that the SWP account for the behaviour of its followers - allowing or encouraging them to scream at people in the street is not a reasoned way forward.

“I am writing to both Respect and the SWP, as the largest tendency within Respect, to enquire about how you can justify the behaviour of some of your supporters.

“Whilst out canvassing - for the Labour Party, of course - in St Ann’s ward in Tottenham on Saturday and Sunday, I came across two supporters of Respect, one of whom is an SWP member. I was with a local councillor who is the most leftwing member of Haringey council, Bob Harris. I have to say that the behaviour of Simon Hester - your local candidate - is beyond reproach, but the behaviour of some of your other local supporters in Tottenham is appalling.

“If it is the intention of both Respect and the SWP to win over ‘left’ Labour Party members, then you are going about this the wrong way. Shouting at canvassers in the street and calling them racists, and asking how many barrels of oil Blair has given us is not the height of reasoned political discourse. It will not win leftwingers in the Labour Party to your cause. I think that it is incumbent on the SWP and Respect to encourage its supporters, as socialists, to engage in a reasoned dialogue, not in name-calling and abuse.

“I have been a Marxist socialist for longer than I care to remember, and have been a Labour Party member since I was 16 in 1979. I was a member of the International Marxist Group, the Socialist League and various other groups that were active within the Labour Party since that time. I understand the things that Lenin and Trotsky wrote about the British Labour Party and how workers turn to their own organisations before anything else. It seems that the SWP doesn’t!

“I have no expectation that the behaviour of SWP members will change or that Respect supporters will engage in dialogue rather than verbal abuse and also have no reason to believe that you will respond to this letter either.”

Reasoned
Reasoned

Full-blooded

After reading Tina Becker’s letter I thought it was rather unsporting of Respect not to give the CPGB’s Anne Mc Shane the opportunity of contesting in Hackney on May 4.

However, on inspecting the list of nominations, I noted that Respect is contesting only two seats out of three in each of four wards. This is clearly in line with the CPGB policy of no auto-anti-Labourism.

Had Respect comrades adopted a more full-blooded policy then there would have been ample room for Anne.

Full-blooded
Full-blooded

Housing ladder

John Smithee still misses my point. I know many young people, both black and white, cannot afford to get on the housing ladder and are forced to rely on council accommodation and that the gross shortage of this is the cause of enormous resentment. Yet his relative became homeless not because of the shortage of housing but because of the price of housing.

We need to agitate on immediate issues, but also take our full programme to the working class. We are, for instance, for the public ownership of land and a minimum income that enables all people to participate fully in the life of the country (about £18,000 per head, per year, at the moment, I believe). If the working class was to fight for this, comrade Smithee’s relative would more easily have found accommodation and there would be no need for this silly talk of the BNP putting pressure on Labour to build more houses.

In fact housing conditions are not better for black people and they are considerably worse for the temporary immigrants from eastern Europe. By dividing the class the BNP aids capitalist exploitation, not the workers.

Housing ladder
Housing ladder

Core values

I read your concise and well argued article, ‘Communist strategy and party form’, with interest.

I believe this subject goes to the root of the socialist dilemma and without an answer I do not believe socialism as a vehicle is achievable. I guess it was too much to expect for there to be a clear conclusion, but I applaud you for the open and critical way you approached it.

I believe one of the key issues is the question of whether a socialist party is a vanguard or a mass party and how the two elements link, together with accountable state power, without leading to either opportunism or a bureaucratic dictatorship.

Yes, it’s true that the bourgeois parties have a vanguard in that they have elements of a distinct political programme. It may be simplified, but in Britain it could be said that the Tories are there to protect and conserve the status quo, the Liberals stand for free trade and expression, while Labour’s programme has been mainly based on welfarism and by extension formal social democracy. In the final analysis it’s the core values that define a party and these parties can exist in opposition and retain some support based on their core values, unlike the wipe-out of the socialist left, unfortunately (the Liberals can even live in a permanent state of opposition).

So what are the core values of socialists? Maybe equality or the utopian idea of satisfying needs by organising abilities, but it could be argued that equality is too woolly a concept, while joining a charity could answer the second and satisfying needs could also support Labour welfarism. The argument also emerges of transforming society through the workers acting as a vanguard and through a socialist party as the vanguard of the advanced workers.

The trouble in making the core value the struggle for an ideal society is that the adherents of this could be accused of idealism or utopianism, so to counter-balance this it is argued that no-one can know what the ideal society will be until it is nearly there. We must be objective, but the result is we have idealism without ideals. No wonder the bureaucracy got control and the Bolshevik Party was denigrated - they were simply surplus to requirements.

If this bland solution is rejected, the question becomes, what is the mission for socialism and how can it can turn around the current rejection of socialism by the majority of people? It is not unreasonable to argue that the world needs cooperation, not competition - you only need to look at the environment for evidence of capitalism’s fallout.

The socialist mission has to be linked to how to get there, what organisational form is needed and what freedoms need protecting in a party and from the state. But it has to be rooted in people’s consciousness as a rallying call, which can be transformed into an action plan of a democratic and vibrant Socialist Party.

Core values

Arms control

Ian Mahoney writes: “The call for the dissolution of the army and the arming of the people was part of the minimum programme of Lenin’s party - ie, those demands realisable under capitalism. At moments of heightened class struggle, the Bolsheviks actively agitated for workers’ defence militias against the tsarist state forces”.

In the revolutionary events that took place in Russia, arguing for and helping to set up armed workers’ militias was obviously correct. This demand applies to the whole period of revolutionary upsurge and not just after October 1917, of course. Armed workers were key to the success of the October revolution itself, forming the basis of the Red Army that won the civil war.

Likewise, arguing for and helping to establish armed workers’ militias in Venezuela today to defend against counterrevolution and to drive the revolution forwards is correct. I do not think there are any serious Marxists who would disagree with this.

However, in today’s situation in Britain, is Ian Mahoney suggesting that a local election manifesto should contain the demand for abolition of the police and army, and for the establishment of armed workers’ militias? How does this demand relate to the concrete situation and to the consciousness of the working class?

It is important that articles dealing with revolution - either current revolutionary situations or historical ones - highlight the importance of creating armed workers’ militias by explaining their importance for dealing with any initial resistance from the capitalists and their state, and then to defend the revolution from capitalist counterrevolution and imperialist intervention. There should be no avoidance of this strategic question.

However, in my view, demands for the abolition of police and army and for the establishment of workers’ militias would be abstract and ultra-left demands to include in a contemporary election programme. Without the explanation or context that can be given in a lengthier exposition it would achieve nothing other than to isolate Marxists from the wider working class.

Arms control
Arms control

Future tense

Mike Macnair’s ‘Communist strategy and the party form’ article is superb. It deserves widespread distribution among those engaged in activities aimed at creating a world freed from existing barbarisms.

As one of thousands who progressed over half a century, through Stalinist, Trotskyist and anti-war movements, ending, in my case, in the libertarian/socialist Solidarity group of the 1960s (a group many joined because we disagreed with it least), I found Mike’s brief overview of the history of the development of the vanguard party concept not only accurate, but especially useful in its skilful linking of historic battles with the tactics of today’s numerous sects.

References to the current ‘popular’ approach of the Socialist Workers Party are most appropriate. A possible weakness of Mike’s brief account is the failure to register the universally professed ‘double-think’ of bureaucratic leaderships (especially Gerry Healy) - declaring, for example, the right of factions to exist, while at the same time vigorously repressing them in practice.

The contribution Solidarity constantly made to this crucial discussion was that, in any meaningful sense, the revolutionary body must prefigure the revolutionary society. Mike’s article pinpoints the inevitable outcomes of the anti-democratic development of post-1921 Bolshevism. Our revolutionary organisation of the future, where, quite literally, every cook learns to govern, must be structured so that it prefigures within itself the communist society of the future. An anti-democratic/bureaucratic organisation can never serve as a catalyst in the creation of a truly communist society.

Future tense