Letters

Back in the USSR

Does Michael Little really believe that the collapse of the USSR was a defeat for the working class? Or real socialism? Given the 50th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian revolt against the USSR, I found his comments particularly strange.

The USSR was not socialist and not pro-working class. Indeed, the workers suffered a dictatorship with a poor economic record for decades. Its leaders killed and jailed thousands of their own people. Cuba and, particularly, North Korea remain sordid, stagnant outposts of a discredited ideology. Who needs regimes based on a 1984 ethos of ‘thought crime’?

We would do well to remember the brave struggle of the Hungarian workers against both Stalinist tanks and murderous secret police. They were real socialists!

Back in the USSR

House of cards

The property boom, along with the credit binge and consumer spending allied to it, is one of the greatest houses of cards ever constructed. When it does finally collapse, it will have a profound impact on the entire economy and on all our lives.

It has not been the ‘sound management’ of chancellor Gordon Brown, but a property bubble, credit and spending in the shops, along with the world market, that have kept the economy afloat in recent times.

The government has looked back over the past 15 years to determine the biggest contributors to Britain’s economic growth, which they never tire of claiming has outstripped all ‘our competitors’. The answer, according to the office for national statistics (ONS), is not computing or internet-based businesses. No, the biggest driver to economic growth has been the rise of the ‘landlord class’.

Economic growth figures are based on ‘gross added value’. The ONS found that the gross added value to the economy from things such as iron and steel, railway transport and textiles had fallen by 50% or more since 1992. But the ‘value’ created by the letting of dwellings rose to £45 billion, a gain of 120%. In modern Britain, it seems, putting up the rent is somehow regarded as economic growth.

While the US still dominates in technology, Germany makes millions of cars, Japan makes consumer electronics, and China is catching them all up, Britain produces buy-to-let landlords. How ‘our competitors’ must envy this economic success.

House of cards
House of cards

Stale attitudes

A newcomer to any left public meeting across the country today is likely to meet with confusion, disappointment at unanswered questions and an uninspiring sense of disillusion. Joe Public off the street attending a meeting of Respect, the Socialist Workers Party and other such parties will feel that they have been let down.

If the person has the courage to bring up an issue of ideology, often he or she will be batted away with historical references from a time when conditions were very different. Members will inform the newcomer of union action in the miners’ strikes, Russian revolutionary tactics and more recently the anti-war coalition. Then, on seeing perhaps a political naivety, they will lecture on the works of Marx, dropping words written a century ago directly onto today’s problems with no sense of context.

Parties such as the SWP are stuck on a political island, scared of losing support to other leftist groups. The failure of the Socialist Alliance is a prime example - the SWP, having the largest percentage of SA members, would have a large say, of course, but its actions ripped apart a meeting of minds on the left. They are too concerned with their own self-preservation - they see themselves as the party of the left - to have any realistic focus about where they are in British politics.

If they looked at themselves they would see the truth: they are ineffective and unable to adapt. They are too scared of the spirited, smaller groups, which they would rather destroy using a variety of techniques than work with to promote common political ideals. I’m sure Tommy Sheridan would have something to say about that. Revolutionary socialist? Hardly.

Possibly our new comrade would seek out Respect as the party to which he could belong. Unlikely. More like he would see an alliance with problems running deep to the core. A party struggling to have any kind of identity separate from the Stop the War Coalition. A party which dilutes its policies in an attempt to court those to its right. A party whose voice in mainstream politics is a ridiculed ‘celebrity’.

So what is to be done? If the proposed new Marxist party goes ahead there must be a focus on encouraging debate. There cannot be the political intrigue that is so evident in the aforementioned parties. Yes, the triumphs of socialism and trade unionism in the past can be related to, but cannot be dwelt on. The past can be used, but must be used in a context that is relevant to society today.

Convincing members of Respect and the SWP can be a noble goal. However, there must be an active programme to encourage those men and women from the streets to come and debate. It seems at times that there is little to no emphasis on this and, even when there is, the support and infrastructure is lacking. Encourage people to join, allow them to debate, question and analyse, no matter what political experience they might have. Show openness, have a goal and strive towards it.

However, if you are wrong, admit that you are and allow for a new and finally democratic party.

Stale attitudes
Stale attitudes

‘Sectarian’ Dig

Robbie Rix wonders whether “5,000 punters have lost interest in Respect and the SSP” in your latest fund column (October 19). I suggest not, but they may have lost interest in your sectarian slant on these organisations.

Robbie Rix should be aware that ‘hits’ are not the same as visits. Your 15,000 hits a week represent far fewer (possibly less than 2,000) visits.

The Respect national website had 329,542 hits (25,519 visits) six days after its conference - hardly a lack of interest.

‘Sectarian’ Dig

Sinking ships

Well done to Hugh Kerr for leaving the Scottish Socialist Party, but it is a shame he had to swap one sinking ship of opportunistic and sectarian left nationalism for what promises to be another (Letters, October 19).

And don’t worry about me, Hugh - I am a member of the Labour Party, which means that I am always prepared for disappointment. I just don’t want to go looking for it like you seem to do.

Sinking ships
Sinking ships

Wait and hope

I would be grateful to Guy Maddox if he refrained from referring to my arguments in favour of two democratic secular states in the Middle East in order to give credence to his own (Letters, October 19). The implication is that our two positions are very similar.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Maddox’s pro-Zionist, pro-imperialist two-state ‘solution’ is, as far as I can tell, virtually identical to that of Bush and Blair. By contrast the CPGB stresses the struggle for revolutionary democracy, under the leadership of the working class. This is directly opposed to the imperialist aim of imposing a more stable exploitative order on the region.

Unfortunately, the confusion appears to be shared by most Weekly Worker correspondents who favour a unitary state of Palestine, not least Tony Greenstein (Letters, October 12). Because the Zionists (and quite possibly Guy Maddox) uphold the notion of a world Jewish ‘nation’, comrade Greenstein thinks (by his own admission without reading what I actually wrote) that I must uphold it too.

My argument is that over the last 58 years an Israeli nation - totally different from the imagined global Jewish commonality - has come into being. Like the British nation, it was born in a sea of blood and slaughter, but, for all that, there exists, to use comrade Greenstein’s words, a common “territory, language, shared culture … and economy” in both cases. I can certainly accept that for Israel a “prime unifying factor is the oppression of the other”, but that is hardly unique to Israel. We do, after all, talk about oppressed and oppressor nations.

It is true that oppressor and imperialist nations do not generally have a problem with determining their own future. As comrade Greenstein states, “No one would argue for the right of the French today to achieve self-determination.” But what about in 1940-45? France was under German occupation, while formally retaining control over much of its colonial empire. It was simultaneously an oppressed and an oppressor nation. The position of genuine communists was to demand freedom for the colonial peoples from the French imperialists and the freedom for the French people from the German imperialists.

If France were to be threatened today by invasion and occupation, would we not oppose those threats (not to be confused with taking sides in an inter-imperialist war, of course)? In the case of Israel there is no real and current material threat to its independence, but that does not stop the Israeli ruling class from inventing one in order to provide a pretext for its latest act of brutal repression. The problem is, that invented threat is widely believed - which is what keeps the majority of the Israeli people tied to their rulers.

If we are to have a hope of ending Zionist state terror and achieving liberation for the Palestinians, we must aim to cut those ties. We need a strategy to unite the Israeli and Palestinian masses against their misleaders and against imperialism - not one that drives them even more closely into their arms.

But the refusal to acknowledge the national rights of the Israeli people does precisely that - as does comrade Greenstein’s wishful implication that, once the US pulls the plug, Israel will simply collapse and the Palestinians will just walk back in and take over (with the aid of neighbouring Arab regimes, no doubt).

What a dismal, hopeless prospect. The Palestinians cannot defeat the Zionists because of imperialism, so all they can do is wait and hope that the imperialists go away. While we are about it, perhaps the next crisis of capitalism will cause its final collapse and deliver us world socialism on a plate.

On the other hand, perhaps the working class needs to organise across the boundaries of state and nation, on the basis of championing the rights - including national rights - of each of its component parts.

Wait and hope
Wait and hope

Sex change

While I support Ana Lopes’s efforts to unionise sex workers, I am somewhat troubled by her theoretical outlook (‘Victims or workers’, October 19).

Lopes seems to think that, for all time, sex has been a commodity sold by women to men. Apparently, she learned this in school (I guess they never had Engels’s On the origin of the family, private property and the state on the syllabus).

Instead, they taught this curious idea that women have always sold sex, even though private property has only existed for 5,000 years - and modern male/female relations begin with the establishment of inheritable male property - at that point, female virginity becomes a commodity, and we get the three sides of modern sexism: marriage, prostitution and rape.

Further, Lopes seems to believe that, for all time, male/female relations will ultimately boil down to a crass equation of ‘cash for ass’, with only the question of the price (how much the guy has to pay, and how much access to the woman’s genitals he will get in return) being open for discussion.

This is sad ... not to mention uncommunist. Whatever happened to the vision of a world where sexual relations between men and women (and, for that matter, between men and men, and women and women) are governed exclusively by mutual affection, and the ugly question of price never even comes up?

How about a world where all three sides of the commodification of women are gone forever? That is my version of communism, comrade Lopes, not the continuation of the commodification of sex for all eternity.

Sex change
Sex change

Paradoxes

As regards Mike Macnair’s article in the last issue of Weekly Worker, I agree with a lot of it (Developing a Marxist programme, October 19). Clearly we need to discuss these issues in the most friendly manner possible.

Barry Biddulph’s letter in the same issue attempts to highlight a series of paradoxes in my writing. I do not doubt that there might be inconsistencies in what I have written over the years, but the ones he is attempting to highlight are not them.

First, I argued that the demand for socialism ought to be immediate and unmediated. Barry points out that Lenin would not have qualified as a proponent of such a demand, judging by his early writing. Indeed, I have argued that Lenin’s theory of a first stage of the ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’ is a nonsense. Since he clearly abandoned it by 1917, I do not see its relevance, particularly as no-one has managed to explain the nature of such a stage. Still less can I see its relevance to the UK, where there is no peasantry, apart from the odd crofter in the highlands.

Barry cites a number of organisations that he claims have a two or more stage programme, and which will be excluded from a Marxist party. That is so, insofar as they do have such a programme. I thought that was obvious. The real point, as Barry knows very well, is that Stalinism and its derivative forms have introduced multiple stages to socialism, all of which are little more than a means of avoiding the overthrow of capitalism. We need to bring an end to this charade. We also have to be honest and not have a superficial programme behind which hides a more profound upheaval.

Second, Barry brings up the question of democracy, arguing that I have supported Bolshevik policy in the period 1917-21 and even the concept of Trotsky taking power in order to prevent the advent of Stalinism. Barry is right to raise the issue because it is not properly, consistently and honestly thought out.

The interests of the proletariat and the peasantry clashed at that time and one has to decide whether one stands on the emancipation of the working class or on formal democracy. Today, very few people have much respect for politicians because it is clear that formal (bourgeois) democracy does not provide a mechanism for genuine control from below. In other words, using the term loosely, ‘parliamentary democracy’ is not democratic.

Nonetheless, it is also true that under conditions of war and civil war in Russia, a series of working class institutions, from workers’ councils to trade unions, were relegated to secondary roles or even effectively abolished in that period.

Whether one regards that as a betrayal of socialism, a step in the wrong direction or an unfortunate necessity has divided the left since. No-one, including Lenin and Trotsky, actually proclaimed it a socialist policy, at least after 1921, whatever the absurdities of the supporters of war communism as a global policy.

As I understand it, the socialist goal is one in which the working class takes power in order to abolish itself as a class and introduce the society in which everyone can exercise their talents to the full as part of that society, both in administering it and as part of a division of labour, which they control instead of being subordinate to it.

That society is so different from what now exists that it is wrong to talk of it being an extension of democracy, even if we think of it as being the only society where there is a genuine rule of all by all. We will not get there by gradually extending the domain of democracy. Nor will we get there simply by force of example.

The subordination of the population is enforced through a thousand and one social, economic and political forms under capitalism. We are all moulded by those forms and hence our organisations are necessarily defective. In other words, the process of movement to socialism is necessarily distorted by those forms.

We cannot have a socialism before we have a socialist society. Any individual conforming to a personal socialist ethic or value system, as under socialism, will either end up in deep psychoanalysis or in absolute poverty. The same is true of socialist organisations.

The question is where we draw the line. Stalinism and socialism in one country are ruled out because they are inherently anti-socialist. De facto delegation of power to forms of centralised control by socialists with a long record of self-sacrificing honesty under conditions of absolute necessity, as during periods of war and civil war, is acceptable, as long as there is a restoration of democratic forms when possible.

In the case of the USSR, that did not happen, largely because of the failure of the revolution in the west, the rise of Stalinism and the doctrine of socialism in one country.

Barry raises the question of my support for Trotsky hypothetically taking power, as suggested by Antonov-Ovsienko, the top political commissar of the Red Army at the time. He overlooks the fact that, when I argued that the world would have been a better place, I did not argue that it would be a socialist world.

In fact, Deutscher made this argument, and the wife of German communist leader Mayer - whose first husband, Levine, leader of the Bavarian uprising, had been executed - also made the point to me, as against Trotsky. She felt that he had let them down by not taking power. There would have been a number of Marxists, Bolsheviks and so on, who were looking to Trotsky to remove Stalin at the time.

The point is not a democratic or undemocratic one, as Stalin did not assume power in the Communist Party through democratic means and, of course, the Communist Party was not in power democratically. Indeed Trotsky had considerable support - among the youth, in the army and in the proletariat.

Trotsky opposed the taking of power on the grounds that such an undemocratic act would have led him to be another Bonaparte or possibly similar to Stalin. That is an interesting discussion, but I did not argue that point in the article quoted.

Given the enormous destruction wrought by Stalin, in collectivisation, in the 1933 famine, in the purges and in the prevention of a united front against Hitler, millions would not have been killed without the horrific policy of Stalin and the Stalinists.

In fact, I doubt that there would have been a world war. The groups mentioned above would have remained Trotsky’s base and even if his policy did not lead to socialism, it would have been, at the very least, humanist, as compared with Stalin.

My viewpoint was purely hypothetical to illustrate the alternatives, looking back at history with the hindsight obviously unavailable to Trotsky.

Another interesting discussion implicit in this is the role of great men in history. Marxists are not anarchists. They recognise that individuals play a role in history, particularly at certain turning points. Great men and the opposite of great men, whatever that may be, can play an enormous role at a time when socio-economic systems are in change. It is, therefore, entirely possible that, had Trotsky taken power, he would have been able to change Comintern policy and assist the revolution in Germany.

Had he still been in power by 1929, he would have had a considerable opportunity to change the course of history. However, we will never know.

None of these arguments clashes with my view that, under conditions of comparatively free discussion and organisation, such cases constitute no precedent for the absence of democracy, in the sense of maximum control from below with full and free discussion throughout a communist organisation.

Barry points out that I have suggested a limited goal of organisational cooperation, while others have gone further. I support them, but worry that we might need to go slower in order to achieve our goal.

Finally, I have to say that I do not believe in justifying present-day policy by quoting from the Marxist classics. We live in a radically new period - we have to evolve a politics and an organisation to suit that time. Our method has to be Marxist, our theory has to be Marxist and, while we can learn from the past, our strategy and tactics have to be our own.

Paradoxes
Paradoxes

Let’s pretend?

Like some other members of the Democratic Socialist Alliance, I agree with Mike Macnair that the Socialist Alliance People before profit programme is not a template that is appropriate for the Campaign for a New Marxist Party (‘Developing a Marxist programme’, October 19).

People before profit was a mish-mash of old Labour reforms and socialist rhetoric. In the words of Dave Nellist of the Socialist Party, it was not an alternative programme for government, but was designed to raise issues in the context of pressuring New Labour.

People before profit was not a document with historical resonance for Marxists, but essentially a reformist manifesto against injustice and for a fairer and more equal society. The guts of the programme are the priority pledges, which are reformist demands, such as stopping further privatisation and renationalising the railways.

Motion 2 from the DSA to the conference for the CNMP correctly states that “we reject a strategy of pretending to be reformist in the hope of winning a wider audience”. But this is precisely what People before profit was all about.

Let’s pretend?

Japan lesson

The current discussion in the pages of the Weekly Worker on what kind of Communist Party needs to be built and how to build it is timely. However, I feel this important question requires that consideration be given to an important communist organisation that has been built in Japan.

I refer to the Japan Revolutionary Communist League, or JRCL. This organisation has been able to build deep and extensive roots amongst rank-and-file trade unionists. It has the leadership of the Japanese student movement, Zengakuren, and also has built a significant anti-war movement. It represents a significant challenge to the Stalinist and social democratic misleaders of the Japanese trade unions. The basic unit of the JRCL is the factory cell.

One of the principal reasons for the successes of the JRCL is its ability to link its own development with actual class struggles. Members of the JRCL initiate and enter these struggles, forming what are known as ‘fractions’. These fractions are bodies of militant workers who are prepared to fight on specific issues, such as speed-ups, wage cutting, victimisations and so on. They are mainly composed of non-JRCL workers, but are led by JRCL comrades. The JRCL also forms Marxist study groups to parallel each fraction. Fraction members are invited to participate in such groups and the best of these are recruited to the JRCL.

The struggles of the fractions as a matter of course lead to militant workers coming into conflict with the trade union bureaucrats. This helps to regenerate the trade union movement on class-struggle lines, thus weakening the hold of the bureaucrats on the unions. In this way the fight to regenerate the trade union movement is interlinked with the building of the JRCL as the vanguard party. The two processes represent two sides of the same coin.

The political situation in Japan has now reached a critical stage. Important sections of the ruling class have as their aim a return to the pre-1945 form of Japanese fascism. They seek to militarise the nation and to strengthen the US-Japan military alliance, effectively destroying the trade unions. The trade union bureaucracies have all but capitulated to the offensive of the ruling class. Only the JRCL is capable of defeating the treachery of the union bureaucrats, regenerating the trade union movement and defeating the military plans of the ruling class.

Surely there is a lesson here for us in Britain. It is hereby suggested that readers of Weekly Worker read some of the many JRCL books that have been translated into English. The JRCL’s English website, which gives a summary of the contents of their weekly paper, is at www.jrcl.org/english/e-lb.htm.

Japan lesson
Japan lesson