Letters
Split shift
Marxists should be encouraged that splits are emerging in the ruling class (Military coups and soldiers rights, October 26). If judges, generals, civil servants, police chiefs and politicians start to disagree among themselves, we should take advantage. The ruling class is weaker when it is split - it could even become paralysed and unable to act decisively.
While large sections of the ruling class are now for a withdrawal of the troops (for their own reasons of course), the Alliance for Workers Liberty still remains pro-occupation! When the troops are forced out, will the AWL campaign against this and demand that they stay in place?
As all serious Marxists know, imperialist troops have no progressive role to play in Iraq or anywhere else. They should get out now.
Split shift
Split shift
Sex work
On one level, I agree with Gregory Butler and his idealised mutual affection man/woman relationship in his reply to Ana Lopes. However, at another level, I also disagree.
However abhorrent people think that sex work and prostitution are, Lopes and all like her should be encouraged. Sex work is similar to any other kind of work and she is carrying out basic trade union tasks.
But there is something more fundamental to her work. If we take a brothel, for example, and transport it back 10,000 years, we would see a very different institution. Women would be combining together in solidarity - maintaining a matriarchal institution where there was not one mother, but many mothers.
This was also the time when culture overcame nature. With the advent of agriculture and the surplus this brought, a farmer could literally go to a matriarchal institution and buy the female of his choice. Thus was born the prototype family unit and the encroachment of private property in all forms of life.
If Lopes takes her work to its logical conclusion, then she will develop male and female relations that will undermine the family unit. Which means that the Scottish Socialist Party statement, that after much debate and discussion, [we] concluded that prostitution by definition was violence against women and therefore harmful to them, is retrogressive.
If prostitutes and sex workers had unions, that would help guard against violence and they would be able to carry out their work in safety. It is not for the state to decide our sexual relations, but us.
Sex work
Switch off
Your piece by Chris Knight starts off with a breathtaking exposition of the masterful Bolshevik strategy and tactics leading up to October 1917 and ends up telling us to vote Labour! (Lessons of October, October 26).
Is this just an intellectual fraud in support of some party line? The old switcheroo?
Switch off
War path
I agree with Hillel Ticktin that it is not possible for absolute democracy to always govern how an organisation functions, particularly during a civil war. A debate and vote on every important decision at rank-and-file level in such conditions would be impossible and counterproductive.
I also agree that the issue of workers having an effective political voice throughout the UK (an effective Marxist party) is more important than republican demands - demands which, although important, could also be absorbed by capitalism.
However, we are now living in material conditions far more conducive to socialism than those in which the Bolsheviks had to function and a future Marxist party would be unlikely to face such terrible dilemmas as Kronstadt or banning other left parties.
War path
SSP Marxists
Peter Burton misunderstood my letter the previous week claiming that the SSP is dominated by revolutionaries. I did not claim that the SSP is a revolutionary party - it is a broad socialist party which brings together revolutionaries and reformists.
Genuine revolutionary socialists and left reformists are on the same side of the class struggle and usually agree with each other, so uniting both within the same party is a worthwhile project. However, this can result in limiting what we say to uncontroversial points, hiding the fact that many SSP members are revolutionaries. Although the International Socialist Movement platform (formerly Scottish Militant Labour, whose initiative the formation of the SSP was) has been disbanded, many of the most experienced SSP members are former members of that organisation and have kept their revolutionary politics, even if they dont express them as much as they could.
The Make capitalism history banners, including one behind leader Colin Fox when he made his televised speech at the SSP conference, were a sign of revolutionaries in the SSP asserting themselves. The word revolution is also being used more often in the SSPs newspaper, Scottish Socialist Voice - for example, in two headlines in the October 20-26 issue.
Peter wrote that Marxist education will also continue to be blocked. The SSP does not specifically promote Marxism, but an advert for a Marxist forum on political islam appeared in the Voice this year.
I agree with Peter that the SSP should do more extra-parliamentary activity (such as direct action) but do not share his pessimism about the partys prospects at the Scottish parliamentary elections in May. According to a poll in the Sunday Mail of October 22, five percent intend to give the SSP their second (PR) vote - one percent more than the greens and four percent more than others (including Solidarity).
SSP Marxists
SSP Marxists
History may judge
Mark Gallagher suggests I am an expert at picking sinking ships in choosing to work for Solidarity in Scotland. Well, Mark, history will judge whether Solidarity grows into an important part of the socialist movement - certainly it is being well received at large rallies across Scotland.
History may also judge that socialists who advocate joining and voting Labour today may have misunderstood history!
History may judge
Morality tale
Graeme Kemp would be well advised to read The revolution betrayed by Leon Trotsky. And, while youre at it, Graeme, may I also suggest Trotskys Their morals and ours in the order given.
Authentic communists have no problem recognising that October 1917 - the collectivisation of the means of production, expropriated from the Russian bourgeoisie by the victorious soviet workers state - was a monumental gain for the international working class. In fact, in country after country the bourgeoisie was driven to make social compromises, so great was their fear that 1917 would be repeated in their countries.
We compared the Soviet Union, a politically degenerated workers state, to a labour union. Do we refuse to defend a labour union because it is run by sell-out bureaucrats, or do we defend the union while calling for its members to oust the bureaucrats? Where do you stand on the question of the defence of wretchedly corrupt labour unions against repression by the bourgeois state, Graeme?
We stood for the unconditional military defence of the USSR against imperialist attack and capitalist restoration, without giving the Stalinist bureaucracy even a shred of political support. We called upon the Soviet working class to carry out a political (not social) revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy.
Read the above-mentioned books, Graeme. And that goes for any other moralists out there who fail to comprehend that the USSR (like the labour unions) were built by and always belonged to the working class.
Morality tale
Morality tale
Red roots
I have a particular interest in the discussion on Critique and the proposed campaign for a Marxist party, as I was around the journal when I was a student in the mid-1970s. There was discussion of the idea even then and I actually penned a modest paper on the subject. It seems that times have changed more than we have.
Then, as now, I could not see a development taking place from a cluster of individual academics to a party with roots in the working class. First, it is necessary to create a Marxist culture within the working class, using Marxist concepts to challenge existing political trends and champion the independent class interest of the workers.
Implicitly, it is essential to make a decisive reckoning with the legacy of Stalinism - not just over the historical Stalin-Trotsky issues, but the baneful influence of popular front policies. For most of the radical left, the idea of a programme is little more than a shopping list of campaigns to support, rather than the steps necessary to mobilise for power.
Red roots
Official enquiry
The call by Hillel Ticktin for a conference to consider what kind of party the left needs raises questions regarding the schisms that erupted as a consequence of the slow demise of the Communist International under Stalin and the way the debate needs to be conducted today.
I think the discussion needs to be broadened: what is needed is an honest inquiry into what went wrong, not just with the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik Party, but also with the efforts of the official communist parties, and the Trotskyist groups since World War II.
The French and Italian CPs have had significant popular and electoral support - their successes and failures could be studied and discussed (alongside an analysis of how Trotskyist groups failed to made any real inroads into national political life). This would allow for the discussion.
Official enquiry
CPGB Anschluss?
Mike Macnair and Barry Biddulph both oppose the Democratic Socialist Alliances proposal to the projected Campaign for a New Marxist Party, that it will use as a template for the democratic development of a programme the Socialist Alliances 2001 programme People before profit.
The two comrades give differing reasons for reaching the same conclusion and their alternative approaches also differ. All of their reasons and their alternatives are wrong. To deal with the alternatives first.
During the DSAs own discussions on developing its proposals for the November 4 CNMP conference, comrade Biddulph unsuccessfully proposed the following formulation: We are against elitism and sectarianism, which can only result in putting the party before the class or substitutionism. Socialism cannot be brought to the workers from outside their struggle. We do not make a fetish of the programme, which will be developed in class struggle. Effectively, Barry was counterposing a blank sheet of paper to the use of PBP as a template: ie, proposing that we should not have a written programme. Barry was advocating a Cliffite position that Mike Macnair correctly attacks in his article. The absence of a written programme actually disenables party members from holding their leaders to account. It serves the development of bureaucracy.
Comrade Macnair outlines the CPGB alternative as follows: When the CPGB (PCC) proposes to the November 4 conference that the organisation it founds should enter into fusion discussions with the CPGB (PCC), we are in effect proposing that our Draft programme should form one element of the discussion about what programme to adopt. We do not think that our programme is the last word and we are ourselves going to discuss it and how it might be changed; but we do think that it is broadly correct in its approach and that it is a more useful starting point for a struggle for a Marxist party than People before profit.
Mike had previously described how another intention of the proposed fusion discussions is to discuss the conditions under which the CPGB (PCC) would either wind up the Weekly Worker in favour of a new paper of a common organisation, or under which we might hand over the Weekly Worker to be the paper of a common organisation, controlled by that organisation. This is a bold proposal that I will certainly argue for the DSA and for the November 4 conference to respond to positively.
But if the fusion talks were to result not only in the Weekly Worker becoming the paper of the new proto-party, but in the elected leadership of the Campaign for a Marxist Party also accepting the CPGBs offer of its Draft programme as a starting point for developing the draft programme for the new party, we would have what would surely look like an annexation by invitation - an Anschluss! I dont think that such a development is the best way to ensure the unity of Marxists.
Turning now to Barry and Mikes reasons for regarding use of PBP as a template as inappropriate, Barry argues that PBP was a mish-mash of old Labour reforms and socialist rhetoric. Mike is slightly more generous. It includes some Marxist ideas as well as old Labourite politics, he says, but it was not a strategic long-term programme and both the world and British politics have changed very significantly since September 11 2001.
Granted, for both of the reasons Mike gives, PBP will need a lot of development. That is precisely what the term template implies. The CPGBs Draft programme, a document nearly a decade older than PBP, would also, I suggest, need substantial development and indeed Mike concedes this point in his article. The beauty of PBP is that it represents an unprecedented high point of common achievement of the erstwhile seriously split socialist movement of the working class in post-1945 Britain. It carries the mantle of inclusivity and of democratic determination, something that needs to be preserved from the Socialist Alliance experience.
And PBP does address the needs of the working class. Yes, this takes the form of demands for reforms. But this is not something to be counterposed to revolutionary politics. Only revolutionary politics is capable of winning reforms in the new capitalist order that Mike has described in his latest and previous articles. And the pursuit of reforms that meet the needs of the working class is precisely the way in which the class is going to be developed as the class for itself, the agent of socialist revolution.
None less than Marx and Engels recognised the importance of such an approach. They gave extremely high priority to the demand for shortening of the working day. Workers who were exhausted, physically and mentally, from grinding wage-slavery were not in a fit condition to make a permanent revolution.
By picking up PBP and democratically developing it, in dialogue with the struggles of the working class, we stand a chance of drawing in former SA militants who are Marxists. The alternatives of starting from the CPGB programme, or from a blank sheet of paper, will not do this.
CPGB Anschluss?
CPGB Anschluss?