Letters

Open book

I was absolutely gobsmacked to read Hillel Ticktin’s nonsense regarding Karl Popper’s alleged claims about the philosophy of Karl Marx: “So Karl Popper is plain stupid when he argues that Marx wanted to subordinate the individual to the state. If he had ever read any Marx he would not have said that, since Marx stood for the exact opposite. Marxism is the only philosophy which really does stand for the individual because it is the only philosophy which is able to reconcile the individual and society as a whole” (‘The transition to socialism’, November 30).

Ticktin has obviously not taken the trouble to read Popper. One of his major works, The open society and its enemies, is a critique of three major philosophers: Plato, Hegel and Marx. Most of the 300 pages of the second volume are devoted to a close analysis of Marxian texts and indeed almost every paragraph is riddled with direct (annotated) quotations from Capital and other texts, all of which are rigorously analysed and discussed - most of the conclusions Popper reaches are exactly the opposite to what Ticktin would cause us to expect.

While I am not defending all of Popper’s ideas, essentially he is not setting out to show that Marx is ‘wrong’: rather to demonstrate that Marx’s work (like Freud’s), is not ‘science’, as it does not generate ‘testable’ hypotheses. Bearing in mind The open society was largely written during the late 1930s, Popper’s exposition of Marx’s concerns regarding human ‘freedom’ and his drawing of a sharp line between what Marx actually said and the manner in which he was ‘misrepresented’ by many of his disciples, show him very much on top of his subject.

Open book

Anarchist candle

I do wish Marxists would try to remember they are meant to be materialists when they critique anarchists. Hillel Ticktin states that a “great deal of Marx’s time was spent in fighting Proudhon, whose ‘socialism’ consisted in a large number of individual artisans competing for a market”.

 Proudhon spent time on artisans simply because most working people at the time were peasants and artisans, as Marx (at times) admitted. For large-scale industry Proudhon was firmly in favour of workers’ cooperatives to replace capitalist wage labour.

Unlike Marx, Proudhon aimed his socialism for the times he lived in and did not think that it had to wait for the complete victory of capitalism. As such, it would be nice for Marxists to accurately reflect Proudhon’s ideas and place them in some kind of historical context before dismissing them.

It would also help if Marxists got their facts right too. Ticktin states Marx “also opposed Bakunin, who argued that one had to rely not on the class as a class, but the underclass, the unemployed”. Except that Bakunin argued no such thing. As he put it, “For the international to be a real power, it must be able to organise within its ranks the immense majority of the proletariat of Europe, of America, of all lands.”

So much for relying on the “underclass, the unemployed”! Bakunin, of course, did point to a “bourgeois-influenced minority of the urban proletariat” and contrasted this minority to “the mass of the proletariat, both rural and urban”. He was not alone. Marx talked about the trade unions in Britain being “an aristocratic minority” which the “great mass of workers … has long been outside”. Lenin argued that “a section of the British proletariat becomes bourgeois”.

I would take Ticktin’s comment that “their alternatives were not worth a candle” more seriously if he did, in fact, accurately state what those alternatives actually were. It would help immensely if Marxists would read some anarchists before commenting on the subject. I would recommend www.anarchistfaq.org as a good starting place.

Anarchist candle

Dreams

Simon Keller accuses the Weekly Worker of not answering his criticisms. In fact the criticisms he makes have all been covered on numerous occasion in the paper. It is simply that he disagrees with us - in part because he clearly does not understand what we say or what we are trying to do.

So, without much hope that it will lead to a meeting of minds, I will make a brief attempt to address the criticisms he raised in his original letter of September 21 - although in all honesty he needs to go back and reread the detailed articles on these subjects that have already appeared.

His first criticism is that the CPGB is not internationalist because we have not set up our own exclusive ‘international’ like nearly every other leftwing group. But these ‘oil-slick internationals’ - the International Socialist Tendency, Committee for a Workers’ International, League for a Fifth International and so on - represent no serious class forces anywhere and actually represent a sectarian barrier to genuine proletarian internationalism. If you cannot build a substantial organisation in your own country, it is useless to imagine that you can build one worldwide.

We propagandise for a party in Britain, which we envisage would be a component of a genuine international, and have produced a Draft programme that could act as a starting point for the unity of communists on that basis. This may just be empty words to comrade Keller, but without this development we will continue to be trapped between ultra-left sectarianism and popular frontism, which always leads to our defeat. We are also for a Communist Party of the European Union - the slogan appears on our masthead every week.

Comrade Keller’s second complaint relates to the CPGB’s participation in Respect. In particular he states that our two motions to the 2006 annual conference did not refer directly to the working class or put forward a “vision of an alternative socialist society” (November 30). This is a very narrowly based criticism. Our whole engagement within Respect is premised on the need to put forward such a vision - which we do, consistently, in the Weekly Worker.

The handful of motions we are able to get onto the conference agenda are just one small part of that and we are forced to prioritise what we are able to raise each year. In 2005, for example, we called on Respect to commit itself to working class socialism, and we have also proposed motions on such basic socialist principles as secularism, open borders, a workers’ representative on a worker’s wage, a woman’s right to choose an abortion and republicanism.

The truth is, though, that comrade Keller is not really interested in the best motions to put to Respect conference. He thinks that no-one should touch popular fronts with a bargepole. We disagree - the best way to fight opportunism is from up close: criticisms from the outside are less pointed and less effective.

Dreams
Dreams

Sickening

Hah! Respect’s got 2,000 student signed up members? Nonsense! They only rallied 100 people to their Respect student conference. Pathetic! Their membership is dropping! Ha-ha, diddly-dee! No democracy, no democracy!

Is it just me, or do these sound like the rantings and ravings of a tiny sectarian marginal group that has failed to achieve even a quarter of the amount Respect has achieved over the past five years?

For an organisation that claims to support the Respect coalition in practice against other electoral alliances, the CPGB and the Weekly Worker seem to have a completely irrational, emotionalist disregard for their own logical party stance - not to mention a lack of party discipline.

Respect and the Socialist Workers Party have failings - it is true and most members of these organisations will accept that. But if the CPGB is to be a member of Respect in any meaningful form and expects to actually influence what is the most significant left movement in this country today, then it must be in the spirit of membership and not simply out of a lack of anything more productive to do.

Certainly, to see the reporters of the Weekly Worker revelling shamelessly in the lack of purity within the Respect movement is a sickening and horrific sight.

Sickening

Political remark

In her report on the Socialist Party annual school, Helen Broadhurst says SP comrades are “almost incapable of understanding that these [political] issues require political rather than simply trade union-style answers” (‘Islamists and infidels’, November 30).

Why then does the SP stress constantly the question of a new political party to unite all sections of the working class? Its material links the fight against racism to the fight against capitalism and the necessity of a socialist society. Isn’t this political?

Political remark
Political remark

Elitist CPGB

Lawrence Parker, in reporting on a session at the SP’s recent school, says: “To simply call him a bourgeois politician (despite the deep flaws in McDonnell’s politics) is an evasion” (‘Dead ducks and labour pains’ November 30). Who called John McDonnell a bourgeois politician? I must have missed this.

Parker goes on: “Star of the show was Jackie Bury from Medway SP, a young comrade” who told Andrew Fisher of Labour Briefing that, as he was a Labour Party member, she and her mates would not “smile at him in the street” because “we fucking hate youse”.

The general point being made was that young people will not be persuaded to join Labour because they hate it (and all other establishment parties). Maybe this was crudely put, but it illustrated a correct point. Clearly, Labour does not have a youth membership, which is a serious problem for those who want to transform it.

What the elitist CPGB really object to is normal working class people joining in a debate and putting points in their own words.

As an aside, Lawrence doesn’t take up the argument about the class character of the Labour Party and argue why it is still a bourgeois workers’ party. Maybe this is for a future issue?

Elitist CPGB
Elitist CPGB

Modest hopes

In her introduction to your coverage of the SP school, Tina Becker writes: “The comrades were hoping for masses of disillusioned Labourites, left reformists and trade unionists to join the campaign to set up a Labour Party mark two.”

Where did the SP say the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party was going to attract a mass basis immediately? Where did it say it was going to launch a party on its own and in the immediate future? I heard SP comrades being positive, for sure, but nonetheless modest and realistic about its immediate prospects. Clearly the prospects for a new party to develop are linked to many factors, not least the level of class struggle in society, as well as other subjective factors.

Where did the SP call for a Labour Party mark two? I have never seen this written or heard it call for this. This is just your interpretation. Why not phone up the SP and ask them if they call for a Labour Party mark two, then print their reply - and then your reply to this?

Modest hopes
Modest hopes

Support act

I was pleased to see the Weekly Worker recently publish letters supporting the plight of Industrial Workers of the World/National Union of Journalists members previously employed by Tommy Sheridan and Rosemary Byrne in the Scottish parliament before Byrne and Sheridan split from the Scottish Socialist Party.

The fact that socialists are unwilling to honour contracts with their workers is nothing short of disgrace, as are attempts by Solidarity to portray the IWW as “taking sides” with the SSP.

Support act

SSP smears

Simon Young and Rob Blow are among many on the left who have been taken in with the disinformation propagated by the SSP on possible job losses among their staff as a consequence of the split with Solidarity.

The truth is that when the split occurred Tommy Sheridan and Rosemary Byrne made an offer to redeploy staff that would have resulted in no redundancies. This offer was described as very reasonable by the Scottish parliament and the NUJ, but was rejected by the SSP staff.

What the SSP wants is for Tommy and Rosemary to go on paying for a full complement of staff for six MSPs to work for the four remaining SSP MSPs. This is not only illegal under the rules of the parliament: it is politically plain daft.

Having rejected this reasonable offer, the SSP was warned three months ago by parliament that it should either accept the offer or take alternative action. It has chosen to do neither, thereby creating its own crisis. It is as if it wants to be martyred, so it can then attack Tommy Sheridan, which appears to be its major preoccupation at present.

The NUJ did not give full backing to the SSP, as it claims, but asked its Scottish organiser to negotiate to try and save all the jobs; this he is trying to do with the full cooperation of Tommy Sheridan and Rosemary Byrne.

Comrades on the left will understand that in any split there are always two sides to the story (there is a full account of Solidarity’s position on its website).

Tommy Sheridan and Rosemary Byrne have a lifelong commitment to trade unionism and workers’ rights, and smears such as these are a serious attack on their reputation as socialists and trade unionists.

SSP smears
SSP smears

Mortal danger

Fascism, primarily represented in the UK by the BNP, embodies a mortal danger to the working class.

‘No platforming’ fascists, or denying them any opportunity to distribute their filthy ideas is not a tactical question at all, as Simon Wells states. Rather it is about strategy and whether we are in favour of defending someone’s bourgeois democratic rights while they carry out their violence, ultimately against the working class and its organisations.

Those on the ‘left’ who oppose ‘no platform’ - usually in order to ‘defend free speech’ or some other variant on bourgeois democratic norms - expose themselves in front of advanced workers for the charlatans that they are.

Mortal danger
Mortal danger

What’s in a name?

In response to your article on Exeter University’s christian student society, the dispute over the name of the Evangelical Christian Union is far from being a matter of “hot air” (‘No bans on christian fundamentalists’, November 23).

The so-called ‘christian unions’ based in universities and colleges exclude and discriminate against the vast majority of mainstream christians. They systematically block non-evangelical christians - including catholics and orthodox christians - from speaking at their meetings or standing for committee positions. This discrimination is explicitly written into their constitutions.

It is ludicrous for christian students to be denied freedom of speech and the freedom to stand for election at societies calling themselves ‘christian unions’. This is why it is of the utmost importance for ‘christian unions’ to be renamed to reflect their true nature, as has happened in Exeter.

Recently, the independent christian think-tank Ekklesia released a report entitled United we stand?, which contains the following recommendation: “If CUs continue to pursue a narrow doctrinal basis, they should change their names to something more appropriate. This will help to avoid misunderstandings in the future, but also make it clear that they are one christian society among many.”

The turbulent situation in Exeter is a direct result of a dispute over the society’s misleading name, and so it is important not to underestimate the significance of what the society is called.

Finally, just to clarify a point of fact: the original change of name from ‘Christian Union’ to ‘Evangelical Christian Union’ took place after a christian student brought a motion to the student guild’s 2006 AGM, which was passed by those in attendance. The name change was not ‘unilaterally’ brought about by the guild.

What’s in a name?

Specific point

I must insist that VN Gelis gets his facts right. Then he might be able to address his political problems with immigrants.

He says: “The TGWU has a specific policy of agreeing to the recruitment of workers on lower wages or not doing anything to stop this”. What “specific policy”? In what document or on what website is this to be found?

Of course, the “specific policy” of the TGWU and all unions is to totally oppose all this, as is the logic of their position as recruiters of oppressed workers. In fact, they have launched specific campaigns against this very thing. You may claim that they do not do enough, but that is a very different matter.

As for the News Line piece of November 15, VN Gelis says: “Newsline [sic] recently reported that eastern European workers are on £7 an hour instead of £10.63 [the correct rate is actually £10.33] at the Holloway bus garage.” News Line did no such thing.

What happened was they interviewed a driver who apparently said his name was Robert Chang (there have been instances of drivers giving the names of others to reporters to avoid victimisation or to target others in this dispute) on the Willesden garage picket line on November 14 and after a number of good points the paper quote him saying the following: “They employ Polish workers, pay them £7 an hour and then take three of those pounds for accommodation,” adding, “he alleged” to cover themselves (www.wrp.org.uk/news/1693).

This is one of those wild rumours spread by those who resented the employment of a large number of Polish drivers at the end of the summer in garages throughout London because this reduced overtime opportunities. I had to scotch such rumours in my own garage to defend the Polish drivers on more than one occasion. It is totally, utterly and completely untrue and to repeat such a thing as fact in this distorted form without checking is disgraceful.

Specific point
Specific point

Simple question

I asked Phil Kent a very simple question in relation to the possibility of the Israeli Jewish working class allying with the Palestinians. Can someone give an example of a settler working class that has allied with the oppressed masses of the indigenous population?

Phil has, however, provided one. The United Irishmen of 1791. Now I am second to none in my admiration for Wolfe Tone and this wonderful example of a section of the settler protestant population joining hands with the oppressed catholic peasants, but a movement of the protestant working class they were not.

Simple question
Simple question

Self-deceptions

Jack Conrad’s ‘Programming the Russian Revolution’ recycled some very old myths on Bolshevism, but these were interwoven with some self-deceptions.

According to Jack, Lenin and the Bolsheviks had a programme of permanent revolution before 1917. Conrad acknowledges that “Lenin held to an evolutionary schema similar to that which informed the Mensheviks”. Lenin had a variation of the Menshevik theory of historical stages: first the democratic or bourgeois revolution and then the socialist revolution. Jack claims this bad theory did not get in the way of revolutionary practice.

This wrong theory did get in the way of revolution in 1917, when Bolshevik leaders in Russia did not realise the significance of workers’ power and the soviets. They were fighting for the Leninist minimum programme of democratic revolution. They had been trained in Lenin’s harsh polemics against Trotsky and his theory of permanent revolution.

One phrase about uninterrupted revolution in 1905 does not make a theory. It simply meant the two historical stages were not watertight compartments, but there would be a transition from one to the other. As the comrade concedes, “the Bolsheviks envisaged a phase of controlled development of capitalist production and economic relations”.

Lenin’s theory of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry left vague the specific nature of political power flowing from the alliance of the proletariat and peasantry. This was a weakness, not a strength, leaving the Bolsheviks without a clear understanding of the nature of the Russian Revolution until the April theses of 1917.

The Bolsheviks did not fight their way to power in 1917 with the minimum programme, as Conrad asserts. They fought their way to power against the minimum programme and the constituent assembly. They built the soviets, but theoretically supported the sovereignty of the constituent assembly, not realising the fundamental clash between them. They dispersed the assembly against their long-standing minimum programme.

Self-deceptions

Not transitional

Jack Conrad suggests that the demand for a federal democratic republic in Britain is transitional to socialism (‘Our republic, November 23). He thinks that unless working class leaders adopt this demand socialism will be impossible. This is because the demand entails “draconian inroads into the sacred rights of property”.

Conrad’s vision of transition is open to the objection that these aspects of democratic republicanism have already been realised elsewhere. For example, people in the USA and other parts of the world are armed. Civilian militias play an important role in the politics of contemporary Iraq, Somalia and Sudan. Similarly religious institutions and state are separated in France, Turkey and the USA. Moreover, in the former USSR and states modelled on it, such as Cuba, land has been nationalised. By attempting to extract a surplus from workers through bureaucratic forms of control, it is arguable that the Soviet regime made “draconian inroads into the sacred rights of property”.

Yet, despite measures that Conrad thinks are essential to socialism, workers remained atomised and divided. People’s militias, nationalisation of land and the abolition of private property brought workers no closer to realising liberation within a planned, democratic alternative to capitalism.

If Conrad wants to prevent discussion of the historical contribution of Trotsky’s Transitional programme to Marxism, he will fail. This remains as important a document for educational purposes as Engels’ Critique of the Erfurt programme.

Conrad is, of course, correct to state that working class rule will be democratic. The democratic forms workers create from below will, I predict, exclude the notion of an elected monarch. However, I reckon he will be more successful in attracting workers to the movement for socialism by calling for the abolition of wage-slavery than the abolition of the British monarchy.

Not transitional
Not transitional

Soviets

I’m a little confused as to how the CPGB views the practical process of revolution if it doesn’t necessarily believe it can only come via soviets or other forms of popular working class resistance and control.

To my understanding the revolution of 1905 and later the October Revolution showed Marxists the most effective method of working class rule to date: the organisation of the class based on workers’ councils that have organically sprung up in the course of struggle. This development nailed the lid on the coffin of those socialists who continued to make a fetish of the idea of gaining a majority in parliamentary organs, as opposed to the organisation of the class on the ground, or those who adopted a purely ‘socialism from above’ partyist stance. It truly gave us a first-hand view of how a workers’ republic could effectively be organised on a democratic and accountable basis.

So, is the soviet system now to be discarded because the Russian workers’ republic, during the course of civil war and the bureaucratic expansion of the state, mutated into what I view as a form of state capitalism? I think not, and I do not believe the CPGB is arguing this. However, I am slightly perturbed as to the notion that we should not fall into the “trap of fetishising the soviet form” (‘Turning unfortunate necessities into virtues’, November 18 2004).

We should not make a fetish of anything, but if the history of the workers’ movement is anything to go by, it has shown us that the soviet method, coupled with the existence of a revolutionary party, is the most effective mechanism of class organisation on the field of higher working class politics, and ultimately the conquest of power.

Soviets

De St Croix

A small correction to my ‘Three political commitments’ article (Weekly Worker September14).

I wrote that (among other reasons for not committing any new party to Trotskyism as theory) we should recognise that “the work of Hill on the English bourgeois revolution, of Hilton on medieval peasant struggles, or of de Ste Croix (Class struggle in the ancient Greek world) are genuine contributions to Marxist theory in spite of being written by authors who were politically Stalinists or fellow-travellers”.

Comrade Cliff Slaughter has told me that he knew de Ste Croix well in the latter part of his life, when he wrote Class struggle in the ancient Greek world, and that at this time he “was in no sense whatsoever a Stalinist or fellow-traveller”. I am happy to accept the correction.

However, my underlying point was that we have to take seriously theoretical work produced by people who accept politically a part (at least) of the basic theoretical ideas of Stalinism. I do not think the validity of this point is affected by the fact that de Ste Croix is not an example of it.

De St Croix

You decide

Peter Burton misunderstands my point entirely.

I concede that the new Campaign for a Marxist Party has no policies at the moment. However, the campaign decided on various principles, one of which was to create a truly democratic organisation. This means comrades are encouraged to join the campaign precisely to discuss its programme and policies over a period of time in an open and democratic process. Decisions will be taken at a special conference called in a year’s time.

Peter seems stuck in the time warp of bureaucratic centralism, where policies are decided on by small cliques and percolated downwards to the members.

You decide
You decide