Letters

Gold rush

I was recently walking down my local high street when I noticed a sign in the shop window of a jeweller. It read: “Scrap gold bought here.” That little sign led me to do some research via the internet. Apparently the price of gold has risen from $250 an ounce five years ago to $650 in November 2006.

During my research I came across the nickname given to Ben Bernanke, the newly appointed chairman of the US federal reserve bank, by analysts working on Wall Street and in the City of London. Apparently, Bernanke is known as Helicopter Ben because he has jokingly indicated that the US government will go across America dropping dollar bills from helicopters at the first sign of impending depression and deflation.

If such an event did occur, the price of gold would go up like a rocket, just as it did during the inflation of the 1970s and the hyperinflation of 1920s Germany. Perhaps Robbie Rix should follow the example of my local jeweller and invest a little of his money in some gold?

Gold rush
Gold rush

Simplistic Loach

I agree with much of Lawrence Parker’s analysis of Ken Loach’s Land and freedom, but confess to being somewhat baffled by his assertion that “an ideal film for the revolutionary left” would be “very similar” to Land and freedom (‘Behind the red flag’, November 2). Unless, of course, Lawrence means that it would be an ideal film for the left in its current dismal situation. I find that much of what irritates me about Loach’s work is also part of what annoys me about the left. This is hardly surprising, considering how at home Loach is in the leftwing establishment.

This is not to say that Loach’s films are without merit. As Lawrence writes, Loach is very adept at pulling on the heart strings (while not unduly taxing the brain). The scene in Land and freedom where Bianca gets shot never fails to move me. It is when Loach concentrates on raw humanity, as in Kes (1969), that he is at his best. However, in my opinion it is precisely when he sets out to make a more overtly political film, as also with The wind that shakes the barley (2006), that his political content becomes more hollow.

Sadly I do think this is not unique to Loach. I find many overtly political films equally unsatisfying - another recent example being the Wachowski brothers’ big-screen adaptation of Alan Moore’s Bakuninist wet-dream, V for vendetta (2006). All too often conscious attempts at political film-making seem to lack the creativity and beauty that one finds in the polemics they are attempting to dramatise.

What I find most objectionable about Land and freedom is its simplistic black-and-white morality, coupled with the heavy-handed didacticism of its message. Loach portrays the protagonist and the POUM as socialist saints, true to the holy spirit of the revolution. The simple peasants are a Greek chorus, used to welcome the militia as saviours from on high or wail in lamentation. Meanwhile the Communist Party, the republican soldiers, the church and so on are cardboard cut-out villains. A more interesting approach to take would be to explore the complexities and contradictions that characterised the Spanish civil war, to provoke thought and argument about the issues that tore the country apart. Instead Loach opts for a flippant, romanticised version of events with as much depth as an article in Socialist Worker.

As an aside I also have to comment on Lawrence’s description of Comintern policy in Spain as the “Stalinist betrayal of the revolution”. Members of communist parties, acting under direction from Moscow, crushed the emergent communes, arrested and likely murdered leftwing and anarchist political opponents, formalised the popular militias into an army under appointed communist officers, as opposed to elected leaders, and in short strangled the revolution at birth - all under the rationale that their campaign of centralising authority was necessary to defeat the fascists. I strongly disagree with their actions and the political philosophy that led to them. However, there were principled communists and socialists who did agree with the bloody pragmatism of the Communist Party line without being Stalinist.

It is also worth drawing parallels between the Bolsheviks’ actions from December 1917 onwards and the Comintern position in Spain in 1936-39. In Russia, again with the explanation that the very real threat of counterrevolution existed, the Bolsheviks also centralised political authority at the cost of crushing the nascent factory committees and workers’ councils and arrested and murdered socialist and anarchist political opponents. Again there are principled communists and socialists who believe that these actions were justified in defence of the revolution.

I disagree, but the point I wish to make is that in my opinion there is not such a comfortably sharp divide between the actions of the Communist Party in 1917 and 1936 as is usually suggested by the left, especially those Trotskyists who defend the crushing of the Kronstadt uprising in the same breath as decrying the Stalinists in Spain.

Simplistic Loach
Simplistic Loach

Defend KSM

We vehemently protest to the government of the Czech Republic at the illegalisation of the Communist Youth Union (KSM) on October 12 2006, as an undemocratic attack on the rights of the population to freely express their views and to freely organise. We call on democrats everywhere to add their protests. While capitalism lowers the living standards of the majority, brings unemployment and misery, it also tries to remove democracy, in order to silence the anti-capitalist voices.

The capitalist government of the Czech Republic publicly announced that it dissolved the Communist Youth Union explicitly for one reason: because its programme declares the necessity to replace private property in the means of production with collective ownership. That aim is “unconstitutional”. The ministry of internal affairs also called the activity of the KSM illegal because it is based on the theoretical foundation of Marx, Engels and Lenin and the necessity of socialist revolution.

It must be pointed out that the KSM is currently campaigning against the proposed construction of a United States missile base in the Czech Republic, collecting 33,000 petition signatures.

The illegalisation of the KSM is an indirect attack against its parent organisation, the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM), made one week before elections at local and national levels. In the Czech parliament, the Communist Party is the third biggest party. In 2002 it got 20% of the votes in the parliamentary chamber of deputies, while in the EU elections in 2004 it won six seats, taking second place. The banning of the KSM threatens the banning of the Communist Party itself - and, subsequently, of other democratic organisations.

The anti-democratic campaign in the Czech Republic is part of a wider reactionary campaign in the European Union. Under the pretext of condemning the crimes of Stalinism, they are trying to legally ban the self-liberation politics of the working class. In January 2006, the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe passed a resolution entitled: “Need for international condemnation of crimes of totalitarian communist regimes”. Not passed, happily, was the call for a proposed Europe-wide ban on Communist Party symbols. However, in Hungary, for example, the red star and the hammer and sickle are both illegal, while in Latvia the Communist Party is banned.

Defend KSM
Defend KSM

Great shame

The abject failure of the leftist parties of this country to support the people’s war in Nepal is a cause for great shame. At best it is ignored, at worst vilified by those who claim to stand for communism.

Elsewhere the revolution continues in Peru, the Philippines and India. In Afghanistan the Communist Party (Maoist) continues its real, two-pronged fight against reactionary islam and the imperialist west. Whilst the people’s war is being fought, the left in Britain stand by and do nothing. The blood of your fallen comrades in on your hands.

Down with the reactionary communist parties of Britain. Support the Unified Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist).

Great shame

No grudges

Hugh Kerr is right to say history will judge both of us - him for following the Solidarity route; me for advocating the more trodden road of what no doubt you would call reformism or left social democracy through the Labour Party.

In the meantime, while it is important to have comradely debate, let’s also build a left movement across party lines. In other words, I hope there’s no grudges on the part of Hugh because there are certainly none here. Life is too short, I have bigger battles to fight and I try not to let personalities come into politics. I originally wrote in defence of Graham Bash because I broadly agree with his approach to the Labour Party, although I have disagreements with it as well. Life is full of such complications, but there you go.

Now, if I may, some general comments about your paper. I read it because I am a socialist and I am afraid also a bit of an anorak when it comes to the left. I would hesitate to call myself a Marxist, a Leninist, a Trotskyist or anything named after an individual human being with all their fallibility. I would describe myself as a democratic socialist with libertarian tendencies. Sorry if that is too complicated. Where I am in the Labour Party and the Campaign for Socialism, Labour Representation Committee and, yes, even the quasi-soft left Compass further complicates matters and also annoys a lot of people too, but such is the nature of politics.

Your paper is best when it allows the widest possible range of voices from across the left, whether it be Scottish Socialist Party, Labour or whoever. Try to make that the case in future.

And John McDonnell for leader!

No grudges
No grudges

Sex rocker

“Sex work is similar to any other kind of work,” Simon Wells asserts. Well, he must be off his rocker.

Sex work - ie, prostitution - is not a moral issue or even a feminist issue for socialists. It represents no less than the worst, most brutal and destructive form of capitalist exploitation, destructive of the individual, the ‘human image’ and human relations. It is the commodification of the human being, the reduction of the body to a product equivalent to the trade in human organs.

That is why it can only be rigorously opposed without compromise.

Sex rocker

CMP dangers

I was pleased at the developments shown in the meeting to launch the Campaign for a Marxist Party and realise the process has already progressed to a certain stage.

However, I do feel that there are many dangers manifest already. In particular I was concerned at the absence of any reference to Marxist philosophy as one of the three component parts of Marxism, or so Lenin believed, any reference to the Labour Party and to what I saw as a very definite Stalinophobia in some quarters. I feel that this will have a very negative effect on the discussion on programme and will marginalise those of us who hold to the method of Trotsky’s Transitional programme as the ‘template’ (to use a controversial term) for the epoch. That being said, there is clearly enough democracy and enough openness within the gathering, and in the CPGB as the most ideologically coherent group present, to allow healthy debate.

To take these points in reverse. Stalinism was never ‘counterrevolutionary through and through’. As a movement based on the working class balancing between imperialism and the peasantry in the deformed and degenerated workers’ states, it was obliged in its own interests to lead peasant-based revolutions against imperialism. What it would never do was lead a mass movement of the working class to overthrow capitalism.

However, at the end of World War II the mass base of the Italian Communist Party had not been Stalinised, but continued to hold the Bordegist ultra-leftist, but nonetheless revolutionary perspectives of the early 20s because of the weakness of the Mussolini dictatorship. So Togliatti had great difficulty in betraying that revolution on Stalin’s behalf. Similarly in Greece and elsewhere. The advance of the so-called Red Army did spark revolutionary uprisings - for instance in Warsaw, Slovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece and Italy - confirming Trotsky’s analysis of the nature of the Soviet Union, the necessity of the proletarian military policy to work in the armies and resistance movements rather than fetish factory committees and strikes in those circumstances.

Stalinophobia equates the ranks with the counterrevolutionary leadership and makes impossible all serious approach to CP members and sympathisers.

Similarly the absence of reference to the Labour Party seemed to mean the writing off of the Labour ranks and by implication Labour voters if they did not see the error of their ways. This appears to me to be frustrated revolutionaries seeking to short-cut the historical process of the raising of the consciousness of the working class. Is it now definitely the case that the Labour Party has become ‘thoroughly bourgeoisified’ and is no longer the contradictory phenomenon described by Lenin: a ‘bourgeois workers’ party’? Was the ‘historic defeat of clause four’ the crushing blow to the class consciousness of the British working class that Blair hoped it would be and are we now back in the position of the US working class, where the tactic of calling for a new workers’ (Labor) party is the appropriate way forward?

If that is the case, the organic ties with the unions must have been broken, it is no longer possible to put pressure on the Labour Party from that source and the bourgeoisie have inflicted a world-historic defeat on the British working class. This, in my view, is not the case: Keir Hardie made it clear from the beginning that socialism was not really on the agenda for the Labour Party. It was never the case that it could be won to socialism, as Ted Grant (and the entryist Gerry Healy) proposed. Nor, however, is it the case that this contradiction is now finally eliminated, as Taaffe insists. It is those continuing organic ties fuelling the contradiction that makes it still a bourgeois workers’ party. Although it is practically impossible for Marxists to do serious internal work in the Labour Party now, this is a question of tactics alone. It may become possible again.

The real problem lies in the fact that a combination of defeats compounded by the anti-union laws have consolidated the union bureaucracy’s hold over the working class - union membership is now only seven million, compared with 13 million in the late 70s. Blair is their creature, just as much as TUC leader Barber is. In that respect it was highly significant that the RMT launched the initiative to set up a national shop stewards network on November 4 and that a raft of union general secretaries spoke in favour from the platform.

The contradiction is, comrades, that without militant shop stewards the unions die, the right wing are too successful and the ‘new left’ are propelled into office on this premise and are forced to open up some space for a fightback. I will stress that since the defeat of the miners’ strike there have been many false dawns but they have run into the ground in the face of the bureaucratic stranglehold the anti-union laws have given union bureaucracies over their ranks. I would urge all serious shop stewards to participate in this movement, which I predict will be far more significant that the Respect gathering of November 11.

And this brings me to my last point. Briefly the dialectic of Marxist philosophy teaches us to look for the active contradictions in all phenomena. We can never set the base against the leadership and so develop revolutionary consciousness if we condemn all Stalinists, see the Labour Party as dead and do not look for the real movement within the unions which may revive the working class and with it the revolutionary left.

CMP dangers
CMP dangers

Let in Stalinists

Hillel Ticktin again dismisses Lenin’s important theoretical formulation of the ‘democratic dictatorship of the working class and peasantry’ as a “nonsense” abandoned in 1917.

The concept of the ‘democratic dictatorship of the working class and peasantry’ was developed for a point in history where an immediate transition to socialism would not be possible or otherwise premature. But it would give the working class a clear leading role within a broader coalition of allied forces, clearing away immediate obstacles to socialism, such as feudalism and medievalism, establishing democratic and national rights and a basic level of economic development. Measures consistent with and demanding of a further onward transition to full socialism - ie, a working class monopoly of political, state and economic power.

The reason the concept was replaced, specifically in respect of Russia in 1917, was not because it was ever a “nonsense”, but because actual events and politics developed beyond it. The February revolution, in practice, resulted in gains much further in advance than envisaged by the theory of a ‘democratic dictatorship of proletariat and peasantry’: eg, armed workers organised within emerging soviet forms of power - embryonic forms of the forthcoming dictatorship of the proletariat.

How could this invalidate the ‘democratic dictatorship’ slogan as the only conceivable forward line of march at the time prior to the 1917 February revolution? What were the alternative options available at that time? An immediate proletarian socialist revolution in a country where capitalism was in the early stages of development and the industrial working class a minority of the population? Should Russian socialist revolutionaries have forgotten about Russia for a hundred years or so and concentrated instead on Britain and Germany?

The people’s democratic systems established in the countries of eastern and central Europe after World War II in fact owed a great deal to Lenin’s teachings on the ‘democratic dictatorship’, as well as to the resolution of the Communist International on the appearance and tasks of a popular front government.

The concept and practice of democratic people’s power proved highly successful in establishing the necessary economic, social, political and cultural conditions for a subsequent full transition to socialism, where political power held collectively by a number of political parties, representing different national strata and classes, became increasingly assumed by those representing the working class and of a socialist orientation.

The theoretical and political shortcomings of those who wish to exclude whom they are pleased to describe as “Stalinists” from the Campaign for a Marxist Party will simply mean they will fail to establish a Marxist party worthy of the name.

Let in Stalinists
Let in Stalinists

Bolshevik blame

What was the point of defending a “degenerated workers’ state” like the USSR, as Michael Little suggests? I don’t think anything degenerate needs our support!

The initial gains by workers after the Russian Revolution were short-lived. One-man management rapidly replaced control by workers - and the Bolsheviks must take the blame for their Stalinist offspring.

Contrast this to real successes by workers in Spain 1936, and Hungary 1956, in building genuine socialism and repelling the attacks of ‘official communists’, who wanted to derail the workers’ movements. These political - and social - revolutions in Spain and Hungary remain inspirational.

Bolshevik blame

Forever oppressors

Pete Manson’s embarrassment at the support of an open Zionist, Guy Maddox, a supporter of Israel’s bombing of Lebanon, for his two-state position is understandable. However, those who make their own bed must lie in it. A two-state solution in Palestine must, by necessity, involve an imperialist solution to the oppression of the Palestinians.

Instead of tackling the fundamental cause of the dispossession, expulsion and murderous oppression of the Palestinians, to say nothing of Arabs in the surrounding states, Pete Manson’s solution seeks to accommodate Zionism and its settler state behind an artificial and arbitrary border. Why should there be separate Jewish and Palestinian states, rather than a unitary non-racial state, as in South Africa? The only, inescapable answer is the desire of Zionism to achieve a racially pure Jewish state.

That is why Guy Maddox is correct to describe the call for a democratic, secular, unitary state - a socialist, anti-Zionist position - as “a veil for the demographic destruction of Israel”. Unfortunately Pete Manson refuses to see that the logic of his position is merely a variant of an old, utopian version of Zionism, the binational position of Judah Magnes, Martin Buber and Brit Shalom. It sought to establish a racial state whilst eschewing racism! If it was irrelevant in the 1940s it is positively absurd today.

Part of the problem for many people in understanding what is happening in Palestine is that the root of the problem are the politics of Zionist racial supremacy. The fact that Zionism created the Palestinian people is merely accidental. Zionism is hostile to any non-Jewish presence in Israel, regardless of its nationality. Zionism arose not merely as a reaction to anti-semitism, but to the very idea of the emancipation of European Jewry.

Where most Jews saw the fall of the ghetto walls and integration with the non-Jewish population as a good thing, Zionism saw it as potentially disastrous, heralding the disintegration of the Jewish people. It is little wonder that the leaders of Zionism saw in anti-semitism a force for good. Their rejection of the non-Jew found its expression in a state which consciously sought the exclusion of the indigenous people - first from the land and economy, and then from the state altogether.

The conflict in Palestine is not primarily a national struggle, such as between the Czechs and Slovaks, but between a racially exclusive body politic and the indigenous. It matters little whether the latter are Palestinians, Israeli Arabs, Druze or Bedouin or indeed Lebanese shi’ites. That is why the idea of a Jewish secular and democratic state makes as much sense as a virgin mother, Mary notwithstanding. It is a complete contradiction and from that contradiction flows all Pete Manson’s other errors.

It is therefore irrelevant whether or not the Israeli Jews are a nation, oppressor or otherwise. Even were they a nation, which I dispute, that would still disqualify them from forming political structures that cannot help but involve the oppression of other peoples. We need to look at the content, however, of that ‘nationality’, prime among which Pete accepts is the oppression of the other.

However, the Israeli Jews are not a nation like France or Britain. Israel was not organically created over centuries as a result of struggle between different classes and a bourgeois revolution. The Zionist entity was deliberately implanted in the Middle East as a colonial movement and then sustained first by British bayonets and then by US arms and dollars. It is unique in the world, not only because it is the last surviving example of settler colonialism, but because it is financed by imperialism rather than being exploited by it. That is why France, and Scotland, can be both oppressors and oppressed at the same time. The Israeli Jews as a collective can only be oppressors because that is the political form that their identity takes. Even their culture is Americanised.

Pete Manson talks about a strategy to unite the Israeli and Palestinian masses against imperialism, but making concessions to the racist nature of the Israeli state is unfortunately not the way to do so. It is also necessary to be both honest and realistic. There is no example in the history of imperialism where the settler working class has forsaken its settler identity in favour of an alliance with the oppressed masses of the indigenous population. Everywhere that working class has allied with its own ruling class. It was not only in South Africa that the white Afrikaner working class were the most racist and chauvinist section of society, the ‘bitter enders’. In Canada, Australia and Ulster - to name but a few examples - the working class preferred to see the immigrant or the native as the enemy.

Nor is this merely academic. In The Guardian survey of four countries - Britain, Mexico, Canada and Israel - 71%, 89% and 73% respectively in the first three opposed the Iraqi invasion, whereas in Israel only 34% did (November 3). And if Israeli Arabs are excluded from the latter figure, opposition to the Iraq war even today falls to 27%. For the same reasons Israel was unique among countries in the western world (which is what it sees itself as) in having no movement against the Vietnam war. It has a Labour Party which is now in government with the openly racist transfer Yisrael Beitenu party of Avigdor Lieberman.

I do not imagine that Zionism will simply collapse because the US pulls the plug, but there is no doubt it will be severely weakened. The key to the overthrow of Zionism, given the isolation of the Palestinians, will be the destruction of the Arab regimes by their own working classes and this is indeed likely to coincide with the abandonment of Israel by US imperialism. Is it seriously suggested that when Zionism is on its knees socialists should attempt artificial resuscitation?

Forever oppressors
Forever oppressors

SWP split?

The absence of any report or comment in the Weekly Worker on the recent Sunday Times article revealing that George Galloway is preparing to launch Respect in Scotland if Tommy Sheridan is tried for perjury is a cause for some concern.

Instead, rather than spelling out that Galloway’s back-street driver - surely John Rees of the Socialist Workers Party - is planning to destroy the non-SWP left in Scotland, the Weekly Worker has focused in recent weeks almost exclusively on the admittedly reprehensible McNeilage tape and the complicity of the Scottish Socialist Party leadership.

Not so long ago, the SWP was cheerleading Sheridan’s attempt to wreck the SSP. Not any more. After narrowly losing the vote to erase the word ‘socialist’ from the moniker of Solidarity, the SWP is now preparing a split from the ‘majority’, including its erstwhile ally and partner in crime, Sheridan himself.

This is surely spelt out in the current Socialist Worker, with Iain Ferguson ominously warning that, “There is still a long way to go before Solidarity can achieve its aim of being a political home for all those fighting against neoliberalism, poverty and war” (November 11). He goes on to say that “The potential is there, however. There is a real audience out there for Solidarity, if it is able to engage with other campaigns in a non-sectarian way.”

The writing is on the wall. The intent is obvious if the SWP does not get its way. Rather than simply seeing the evil doings of the Murdoch empire and the spooks of MI5 at work, the Weekly Worker should note that the SWP too has now joined the forces of anti-socialism.

The SWP’s weird conversion to the anti-working class, popular front politics of ‘orthodox communism’ is nearing completion.

SWP split?