Letters

Future unity

Since there is and has been a downright embarrassing, fragmented spectrum of thought and action in left politics up to the present day, we have to accept that ‘unity’ can only be approached now (and always, really) in terms of a ‘united front’. As the old Comintern slogan goes, “March separately; strike together.”

Besides this, a united front presages, in fact, a soviet form of government: which is really, after all, simply a parliament of various parties, tendencies and factions (all formally and actually opposed to bourgeois legality, and so on), each no doubt vying furiously for the affections of the masses.

This starts with all of us realising that none of us, or our factions, are going to become the party or leader of the revolution. We are all going to have to accept sitting in a proletarian parliament of some kind for the foreseeable future.

Future unity

Party elite

Your view on Lenin’s party theory is wrong. What is to be done? was written on the understanding that the working class was incapable of leading itself, but must be led by a party: ie, an apparatus outside the control of the working class (‘Origins of Leninism’, August 31).

All power to democratic elected workers’ and popular councils, not a state apparatus or a party elite.

Party elite

Quiet thought

My dear friend Hugh Kerr really is shameless with his attack on my (and I assume the Weekly Worker’s) support for John McDonnell’s Labour Party leadership campaign.

After the debacle within the Scottish Socialist Party I would have thought a long period of silent contemplation would have been in order. Apparently not.

Quiet thought

Sticking point

Hugh Kerr asks in his latest snide letter what it would take for Graham Bash of Labour Left Briefing to leave the Labour Party.

I might have asked the same of Kerr and the SSP, but then I have more important things to worry about than sectarianism within and between obscure left nationalist groups - namely building a left in the Labour Party that can help John McDonnell’s leadership campaign, but, perhaps more importantly, last beyond that and be a force for socialism within Labour for years to come, not merely make a lot of noise for a few years and get a few MSPs elected.

It looks as if the SSP won’t even have that achievement for much longer so I am sticking with Labour, thanks very much.

Sticking point
Sticking point

Revolutionary

I attended the first day of the SSP conference and found the atmosphere much better than at previous conferences due to the absence of the SWP.

I disagree with the CPGB’s position that the SSP is nationalist and reformist. The presence of a few banners with the slogan ‘Make capitalism history’ underlines the fact that the SSP is dominated by revolutionaries. It was argued in the debate on supporting independence (in opposition to a resolution against the Independence Convention and for a British socialist party) that as well as a capitalist independent Scotland being advantageous in its own right - because the one-third of British soldiers from Scotland could be withdrawn from Iraq and Scotland could be made be nuclear-free - it would make it more likely for socialism to be implemented (due to the Scots generally being more radical) and then spread around the world.

The CPGB’s call for a Marxist party is ridiculous in Scotland. The presence of two large, broad socialist parties dominated by revolutionaries (the SSP and Solidarity) mean that a Marxist party could not take off. However, the call for it in England and Wales is far more practical than the Socialist Party-inspired Campaign for a New Workers’ Party, which is proposing something only slightly more socialist than Respect.

Revolutionary
Revolutionary

Israel’s demise

Pete Manson complains that I don’t seem to be very good at “actually reading, let alone understanding,” arguments I disagree with, and in particular the fact that he “largely agreed with the SWP’s Alex Callinicos”.

I apologise if I didn’t spot this large measure of agreement in the midst of a long article criticising the SWP’s position on the Middle East! Unfortunately I am not a latter-day Kremlinologist. Pete’s criticisms of the SWP’s abandonment of secularism in the Middle East are ones I largely agree with. Coupled with that abandonment of class politics and a commitment to a democratic, secular state in Palestine is the vague and generalised nonsense of Alex Callinicos. I’m surprised that Pete Manson so readily agrees with it.

For example, it is arguable whether Israel is “one of the greatest military powers in the world”, as the recent defeat at the hands of Hezbollah demonstrates. Nor is Israel living in a “permanent state of insecurity” because of Israel’s fear of retribution from those they have driven out or otherwise abused. This is an updated version of the Isaac Deutscher theory that Israel’s behaviour towards the Palestinians was akin to a man who jumps from a house on fire only to land on an innocent passer-by, breaking his bones.

Israel is the only settler colonial state left in the world. All others have either ‘solved’ the ‘problem’ of the indigenous population by either exterminating them, expelling them or reducing them to living on reservations. Only Israel lives cheek by jowl with those they have expelled or occupied. Its “permanent state of insecurity” is to a very large extent self-induced as a means of keeping the populace in a permanent state of war-readiness. It would be idle to quote Zionist leaders such as Moshe Dayan to prove this point: it should be obvious.

Callinicos also misses out of the equation the nature of the Zionist project, which aimed at racial purification - ie, a Jewish state - and which to this day sees as one of its main goals the achievement of the Judaisation of, for example, the Galilee and Negev. It is this internal colonisation, coupled with its external adventures, which characterises Zionism as a racist, colonial project which has sought its place in the sun as a strategic partner of the United States.

Pete Manson suggests that I deliberately introduce red herrings in order to divert attention from the main argument. Why, he asks, should I point to the absurdity of British, French, etc Jews being a nation when he has never argued for such a ridiculous position? Comrade Manson should reread his article, where he states that “There are those who say that there can be no self-determination for Israeli Jews because they are a mere ‘religion’.”

In fact I know of no-one who argues that Israeli Jews are united by religion. It is like saying that there can be no self-determination for Ulster protestants for the same reason. It is understood by the revolutionary left that protestantism was a badge of political supremacy, not the basis for nationhood. Likewise in Israel, where in the absence of the Palestinian question the various Jewish factions - conservative, reform, orthodox, Hasidic, Sephardic, etc - would undoubtedly fall upon each other. This argument has only ever been applied to Jews outside Israel and I took it that Pete had mistakenly inserted the word ‘Israeli’. Indeed this is a fundamental plank of Zionist ideology and practice that Israel is a state, not of its own citizens, but of Jews throughout the world.

Pete Manson is correct to say that the right to self-determination is “fundamentally a demand for equality”. That is why it is utterly absurd to talk about the self-determination of a settler people - it is like talking of the self-determination of Britain or the United States. What does it mean in practice other than a cover for the oppression of others? No-one would argue for the right of the French today to achieve self-determination: it is meaningless, when compared to the crimes of French imperialism.

Israeli nationhood is, however, even more problematic. At least Britain and France had bourgeois revolutions or the equivalent. These societies developed organically, not least through the role of imperialism abroad. Israel is wholly artificial. Its economy wouldn’t last a week without continual support and subventions from the United States. It is a dollar economy. It is, uniquely, the recipient of unilateral transmission of money from abroad and is the arm of US imperialism without being exploited by it. In the words of Richard Nixon, Israel is an unsinkable aircraft carrier.

But Marxists also go behind the curtain and ask, what is it that constitutes this ‘nationhood’? In Britain we can say territory, language, shared culture possibly and economy. In Israel the primary unifying factor is the oppression of the other, the dispossession of the Palestinians. What constitutes the Israeli Jewish ‘nation’ is the quest for racial purity. The question that has bedevilled Israeli social scientists and politicians, since the formation of the state is ‘Who is a Jew?’ - because that defines belonging to the national entity. It is as if we were to accept the concept of an Aryan nation.

What is, however, clear is that a two-state solution - partition in other words - will simply continue the present carnival of reaction on both sides of the border. A Palestinian islamic state akin to that in Iran - the very opposite of what Pete was arguing for - and a Jewish state. It is ironic that Pete rails against reactionary islamists and then proposes a solution which can only strengthen them! There is no other reason for such a border if both Israeli Jews and Palestinians live together. Of course most Israelis cannot conceive of such a situation. Does Pete not remember similar expressions of disbelief amongst the white supremacists of southern Africa? If the conditions are right, the Israeli lion and the Palestinian lamb will lie down together.

Israel’s demise
Israel’s demise

Racist solution

The two-state solution in Palestine is totally discredited. A single state in which all communities can live together - under a constitution that recognises every people’s rights, including their right to practise their own religion as they see fit - is the only possible way forward. In contrast, a two-state solution would divide peoples according to race and would not contribute in any way to a resolution of the problems that exist within the region. It would restrict rights and reinforce divisions.

The principal theoretical aspect of a two-state solution is racism, and in that Guy Maddox’s and Peter Manson’s concept is no different to the one proposed by Blair and Bush. In reality the so-called two-state solution from any perspective does not offer the Palestinians anything except continued oppression and occupation.

Manson and Maddox are also wrong when they argue that Hezbollah and Hamas represents a reactionary anti-imperialism. If anti-imperialism can be reactionary, presumably then imperialism can be progressive. Perhaps Kautsky was right when he argued with Lenin about the progressive aspects of imperialism, as the Europeans struggled to occupy despotic Asia and Africa.

Therefore all that remains for the Communist Party is to invite its old comrade, Jack Straw, to explain the progressive imperialist struggle in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in threatening Iran and supporting Israeli friends in their aggression against Palestine and Lebanon. We can than all return to Labour in its new form and stop marching up and down the country opposing Straw’s war and his racism, as expressed by his abuse of muslims in his progressive struggle against reactionary islam.

Racist solution

Equals sign

Peter Manson seems to want to take us on a journey of reconciliation between the Israeli ‘nation’ and the Palestinian one, in his polemical response to Tony Greenstein. Through twists and turns, Peter brings the reader to a large equals sign between Israel and Palestine. To do this, Peter has to revise the Leninist understanding of self-determination and imperialism.

The Israeli nation is artificial. That’s what one gets with a colonial settler state. The Russian state grew out of millennia of cultural development in a common area, for example; the English nation after centuries of Saxon, Norse and Norman invasions. The same people, interbreeding, class development - generally this is how it’s done.

Israel is totally polyglot, more like the residents of Brooklyn than a homogenous nation. Russian is the first and almost sole language of one million ‘Israelis’. Of course, they are not Israelis at all, despite their citizenship status: they are 100% Russian. This is true for millions of other Israelis, who are in fact members of another nationality, be they Russian, Germans, Poles, Moroccans, Syrian, Yemenis, Ethiopians, etc. What binds them and their children all together is not language or custom, but their settler status.

Settler status, it seems to comrade Peter, is enough to make them a nation. But let’s grant the argument that there is such a thing as an Israeli nationality. Peter takes us from this view, and then presupposes the equal status between ‘Israelis’ and Palestinians, as if there is no difference. That the relationship of the Israeli setter state as an imperialist outpost that came into being by the termination of the Palestinian nation through expulsions seems not to matter to our egalitarian comrade. He accepts this as a fait accompli, with a ‘How can we all just get along?’ proposal.

His view is wrong on so many levels, it’s hard to count. First, the communist view on this question does not stem only from the Lenin-Stalin view that defined the formal understanding of nationality and self-determination. The post-1920 works, especially that of the 2nd Congress of Comintern, make it very clear that there is no equals sign between oppressed and oppressor nationalities. Communists side with the oppressed, period. Because the fulfilment of Palestinian nationality requires the dismantling of the settler-Israeli state, that means a loud ‘yes’ for not recognising the ‘rights’ of the Israeli settler-state citizens.

It means that a majority of the people of the region who trace their direct ancestry back to the expelled Palestinian masses should have the final say over any ‘rights’. This communist point of view does not deny the rights of any religious or linguistic grouping their ability to function within their own ethnic/religious sub-grouping as part of an overall Palestinian nation.

Equals sign

Blame game

Guy Maddox claims that Hezbollah and Hamas “are precisely the reason why the Palestinians have no state: they refuse to recognise the right of Israel to exist, and pledge to destroy it and establish an islamic state”. This is an appalling example of blaming the oppressed for their suffering and is unworthy of a socialist.

In fact, the roots of the present conflict lie in the fact that the Oslo accords, in which the secular Palestinian Liberation Organisation recognised Israel’s right to exist on 78% of historic Palestine, were squandered by Israel’s expansion of settlements and continued theft of land in the occupied territories.

Maddox’s notion that Israel can be absolved of blame for its occupation of Palestinian land and the war crimes it committed in Lebanon are enough to make any half-decent liberal, let alone socialist, wince.

Simon Hughes

Blame game

Migrant trap?

The October 8 migrant rights conference, held at Queen Mary’s University in Mile End, London, brought together long-term political activists, people moved to take action in response to contact with individual migrants, refugees with experience of detention and the systematic abuse of migrants, and people who just wanted advice.

A speaker from the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants gave a brief overview of recent and proposed changes in immigration law and this led to a discussion about regularisation, with an activist from Close Down Campsfield giving a report on the Spanish government’s recent migrant amnesty. This had resulted in large numbers of ‘illegals’ making themselves known to the state, but many were not subsequently regularised.

To the extent that there was any consensus, it was summed up by those who emphasised that we should be fighting under the slogan of ‘Regularisation for all’, and that it would be the strength, make-up and needs of the actual movement which would determine how much could be practically gained at any time. The important thing is to help build the movement.

Migrant trap?
Migrant trap?

Wrong John

John Smithee sums up what is wrong with the British left (Letters, October 5).

No, John, a victory for the Conservative Party in the next general election would not be “the best possible outcome”.

Wrong John

Correction

There was an unfortunate transcription error in my article, ‘Fight on two fronts’ (Weekly Worker September 21).

It is incorrect to say that military personnel “could not vote” in elections in the first years of the islamic regime. Military personnel were not barred from voting (which they were in the time of the shah) - indeed they participated widely. However, if they wanted to stand for election or political office, they had to resign from the military. Many did.

Correction

On the periphery

I agree with the comments of Mark Fischer, reported by Dave Isaacson, that the left is politically peripheral and has no real roots (‘A lesson in Stalinism’, October 5).

Contrary to the assertions of comrade Mike Macnair, one of the most striking aspects of recent years is how little you encounter the members of the Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Party in the workplace - even in local government, where they are considered to be stronger. There is no class-wide division of labour between the class and the activists of the sects.

Mike claims he raised the issue of the ‘2,000 members’ as this would be the numbers required to prevent the SWP or the SP hijacking the Campaign for a Marxist Party. But it is essentially a question of politics. The analogy with what the SWP did to the Socialist Alliance is misplaced.

Any campaign for a Marxist party will not be pretending to be reformist, looking for a Labour Party mark two, putting forward a reformist programme or a call for a welfare state such as People before profit. Nor will it campaign on a cross-class, populist basis. Any sect members disillusioned with Respect or tired of looking to the past for a mythical ‘socialist’ Labour Party would have a pole of attraction.

Once again, Mike Macnair follows Lenin’s one-sided polemic in separating politics and economics. I have previously compared Marx and the Lenin of 1902 on the relationship between politics and economics.

Let me this time counterpose the Lenin of 1887 to the ultra-polemical Lenin of 1902 on the relationship between economics and politics: “Social democrats take part in all the spontaneous manifestations of the working class struggle, in all conflicts between workers and capitalists over the working day, working conditions, etc. Our task is to merge our activities with the practical, everyday questions of working class life.” And “Both economic and political agitation are equally necessary to develop the class consciousness of the proletariat.”

In What is to be done? Lenin was polemically focusing on the expected bourgeois revolution as the first stage to socialism, so fighting for all classes oppressed by the autocracy was stressed and the workers’ class struggle downplayed in comparison. Lenin recognised that socialist consciousness could develop through economic struggle. He did not elevate the political struggle for democracy and the bourgeois republic before the economic aspects of class struggle. In the distorted argument with Rabochoye Delo, who were not economists in the way Lenin claimed, he lost the historical perspective of a more rounded understanding of party and class.

Mike referred me to Lars T Lih and Lenin rediscovered, an inordinately long review of What is to be done? Lih shares comrade Macnair’s respect for Kautsky and his disrespect for the Trotskyist dismissal of the Second International. The bulk of Lih’s enormous tome is what he regards as the importance of German social democracy for Lenin and Bolshevism.

Mike’s stress on democratisation of the capitalist state, or extreme democracy, echoes Kautsky, as does his point about the power of the vote or elections, which he often refers to as “winning the majority”. The classical Marxist view of an alternative commune state based on workers’ councils is dismissed as the economism of the mass strike strategy - although Mike is not denying the importance of the role of the mass strike, and extreme democracy can also mean armed workers’ organisations and the right of recall.

On the periphery

Bold outline

Barry Biddulph’s recent letters to Weekly Worker have been signed off with the description ‘Democratic Socialist Alliance’ under his name, instead of his home town, as is the case with most other letters to the paper. Readers may have been misled by this.

Barry has been contributing to a debate initiated by Mike Macnair’s response to the call by Critique for a conference to initiate a campaign for a Marxist party. The DSA has co-sponsored the Critique call. Comrade Macnair, however, has suggested that what the initial co-sponsors appeared to be really calling for is a new Trotskyist party. He has made particular reference to Barry’s arguments in seeking to sustain this suggestion.

Barry’s views, of course, are not so much ‘Trotskyist’ as ‘young Trotskyist’. He argues that the 23-year-old Trotsky, who found himself temporarily aligned in 1903 on questions of programme and party organisation with the Mensheviks, had things mostly right, whereas the 40-year-old Trotsky, the co-leader of the greatest revolution in human history, had things mostly wrong and that they got even more wrong thereafter.

Barry’s views have been arrived at after a great deal of reading and after a very lengthy period of involvement in revolutionary socialist politics. He argues his views well and he is entitled to try to win others to them. But they are not views held by the DSA.

The DSA is not calling for a Trotskyist party. We are calling for a democratic workers’ party, based upon the fundamentals of Marxism. The ‘givens’ in terms of principles are that the emancipation of the working class must be the task of the working class itself; that the working class must organise independently of other classes; and that the working class’s struggle must be international in dimension. In organisational terms, the givens are a unitary democratic party, with rights of faction guaranteed and with the right of public criticism. We will be elaborating these principles and organisational formulae in the two motions that we are submitting to the November conference 4. The text of these will shortly be published on our website.

I am pleased that the CPGB has agreed to co-sponsor the conference. I only hope that this positive move is not cancelled out by the submission of a defensive proposal that the Campaign for a Marxist Party should join the CPGB rather than the CPGB join the campaign. I hope instead that the CPGB will display the sort of thinking that we saw in December 2001, when it proposed a plan for an unofficial pro-party weekly paper for the Socialist Alliance.

I confidently predict that such a bold move would bring former Socialist Alliance comrades and many other Marxists flocking to the Campaign for a Marxist Party.

Bold outline
Bold outline

New conditions

In his extraordinary two-page article last week Mike Macnair spends most of this space attacking myself and Barry Biddulph for our letters in previous issues (‘Campaign for a party - or another sect?’, October 5). Given the positive move of the CPGB in supporting the November 4 conference to launch the Campaign for a New Marxist Party, I had hoped that perhaps Mike might put forward some positive proposals to take the initiative forward.

I might agree with some of Mike’s points on the way the far left has operated in the unions and the necessity to introduce politics. However, Mike tends to look at all the organisations he covers in his article as fixed in character rather than as dynamic entities which evolve socially and politically. In passing Mike also takes a swipe at Trotsky’s Transitional programme, claiming it is “economistic” and Trotskyists suffer from “fetishism of the strike weapon”. While very few would argue that the Transitional programme is the programme for all time, it does contain plenty of what Mike would term, in his crude division, “political demands”.

However, he does have a point about the Trotskyist tradition. It is clear that the impact of the ruling class move to the imperialist model in the last quarter of the 19th century, on the one hand, made material concessions to the working class and, on the other, incorporated the new bureaucratic layer of the workers’ organisations, particularly the unions. This strategy of control was given added impetus by the Russian Revolution of 1917 and reached its full bureaucratic flowering after 1945. In Britain in particular it meant that the workers’ movement could be stripped of much of its political cutting edge. Thus the British working class has been militant, but in a depoliticised and sectionalised way rather than expressing its interests as a class. The most radical expression of the post-1945 workers’ movement was undoubtedly the Trotskyists, but in large part they adapted to their depoliticised environment rather than challenge it.

However, the material conditions that brought this about are no longer present. The ending of the grip of the Stalinist bureaucracy after 1990 plus the crisis of imperialism mean that a repoliticisation of the workers’ movement is not only necessary, but far more possible.

I would maintain my original point about the sterility of the sects (specifically the Socialist Workers Party and the Socialist Party/Committee for a Workers’ International) - this is self-evident to any serious observer or activist. Moreover the organisations that Mike seems to be fixated on can only be described as tiny - it is not as if they actually have either the numbers or the cadre to obstruct the organisation of any alternative to them. Mike is pessimistic and claims that any organisation has to dedicate the majority of its time to debating with these sterile remnants. In fact they are not present in most workplaces or in many geographic areas even in major cities. I am not proposing that the Campaign for an New Marxist Party should ignore these outfits - far from it - but they should not be the sole or even the main priority.

New conditions
New conditions