Letters

Pinch of salt

I don’t want to respond to the general argument of your article, ‘AWL “realists” raise their heads above the parapet’ - there is extensive discussion about slogans regarding withdrawal from Iraq on the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty website if comrades are interested (www.workersliberty.org).

I do, however, want to comment on what the article reveals, once more, about the standards of polemic, or indeed journalism, of the Weekly Worker. The article claims, referring to me: “Clive seems not to have noticed that the ethnic, or more exactly religious, cleansing is already going on under the aegis of the parties of the puppet government supported by the occupiers.”

The article to which it is referring, written by me, says: “The occupation has played a role in fostering civil war - by forming alliances on sectarian bases ... One half of the sectarian civil war is coming from two groups in the government - the Sadrists and the Badr brigades (it takes two sides for a sectarian civil war).”

As usual, readers of your newspaper would be well advised to take almost everything it says with a pinch of salt.

Pinch of salt
Pinch of salt

70s coup?

Papers from 1976 - released under the 30-year rule - add to the growing body of evidence that sections of the ruling class were certainly thinking about a coup at that time. In the final days of the Wilson era, MI5 drafted a contingency paper based on a scenario in which a Labour government, acceding to trade union demands, radicalised its policies against the private sector and the UK’s Nato commitments.

The political landscape was very different from that of 2007. The major industrial relations battles of the first part of the 70s had left their mark on everybody. But, as your average 16-year-old, I was not politically aware. I intended voting Labour, if only because my dad did.

There can now be little doubt that there were coup plots against Harold Wilson, a democratically elected and recognisably Labour prime minister.

70s coup?
70s coup?

Off the hook

According to Jim Moody’s article, ‘Workers’ militia and burning necessity’, the CPGB is in favour of a workers’ militia. He says that “Workers’ militias require communist leadership” and that the question needs to be raised in the workers’ movement now, so as to be not caught unawares by an intensification of class struggle and in order to cement the role of communists as the emergent party prepared to spearhead our class’s struggle.

The key question is - our class’s struggle and workers’ militias for what? Which tasks are at hand? The CPGB’s Draft programme talks of workers’ militias “growing out of the class struggle itself: defending the picket line, mass demonstrations, workplace occupations, fending off fascists, etc”. In fact, a case could easily be made for plagiarism if one compares this to the section dealing with this question in Trotsky’s 1938 Transitional programme - except (crucially) that Trotsky and the transitional method embodied in the Fourth International link the above tasks to “paving the road for the conquest of power by the proletariat”, whereas the ‘communists’ of the CPGB (forgetting or ignoring every serious lesson learnt by Marxists since 1848) seem to be seeking no more than an extremely democratic form of capitalism (whatever that could be!).

Do they want a workers’ militia to defend the gains of the extreme bourgeois democracy they stand for? But the problem is that the arming of the workers necessarily poses the question of power - the bourgeoisie will not tolerate an armed power that is not under its hegemony and would either crush it or, if unable through lack of relative strength, would have to tolerate it (while it built up its own power). The matter then is a question of leadership.

Because the ‘communists’ of the CPGB do not pose or probably understand the question of state power and socialism, were they (in some totally amazing circumstance) in the leadership of workers’ militias, the bourgeoisie would be let off the hook entirely and the workers crushed.

Off the hook
Off the hook

Sex workers

Robert Blatchford’s letter misses the point about sex work entirely. He offers a mishmash contribution of unhelpful feminist rant on the evils of men, ill-informed opinion on drug legislation and perverse attacks on contraception and abortion.

Firstly, we should recognise that there are different types of worker engaged in the sex industry. There exists a huge legal sex industry (an estimated 50,000 PAYE workers in London alone), which would include the production and retail of products associated with sex and pornography, strip and lap dancing clubs, phone lines and internet services and some aspects of escort work. Marxists should have no problem in supporting the organisation of such workers into a trade union in order to improve their terms and conditions.

Ana Lopes and the International Union of Sex Workers braved the wrath of some in the movement who wish to deny the right to organise in a moralistic, knee-jerk manner. Should we deny union organisation to those involved in arms manufacturing, nuclear power, baby milk production or meat slaughter? Of course not, and the GMB should be applauded for welcoming them into its membership and bettering terms and conditions for members at companies such as Spearmint Rhino, where they have a recognition agreement.

The IUSW/GMB works alongside the English Collective of Prostitutes in campaigning to get the legitimate health and safety concerns of workers engaged in the currently non-legalised sex industry, which ranges from individual or brothel working and unofficial escort services to ‘street work’. It is the latter that is at the sharp end of the industry, as it is the most vulnerable and its workers likely to be motivated by drug addiction.

For trade unionists, Marxists and progressives, the issue is one of protection and safety. My union, the T&G, was instrumental in campaigning for a gang-masters bill following the deaths of illegal Chinese workers at Morecombe Bay. We should want and demand regulation for all vulnerable workers, regardless of whether they are illegal migrants or those who sell sex illegally.

Amsterdam’s red light district, with its acceptance of ‘window brothels’, increases protection, provides health checks and regulation that goes a long way to addressing some of the vulnerabilities that prostitutes in Britain face when engaged in either flat or street work. It reduces the impact of drug addiction as a motivation and violence from pimps. We should support a review of what the Dutch experience could offer such workers in Britain.

Those who deny union membership to legitimate sex workers and/or seek to prevent implementation of protective regulation simply because they are engaged in illegal sex work are both cowardly and irresponsible.

The women who were murdered in Ipswich were workers who deserve our solidarity and sympathy - but also our determination to do everything we can to ensure action on behalf of those who are forced to sell themselves so cheaply.

Sex workers
Sex workers

Tolerant

According to the Weekly Worker, George Galloway objects to having strip clubs and lap dancing establishments close to places of worship (‘SWP puritanism’, January 11).

In a way I can understand why some customers of these entertainments may not like having worship going on nearby. Worship is a deliberate degradation of the human spirit, by people who imagine there are tyrannical intelligences with power over human beings that people have to grovel to and appease.

Although it is right that we should campaign to prevent children from being exposed to this “iniquity”, in reality worship only damages the people who engage in it, and does not affect others in adjacent buildings. Therefore, customers of lap dancing and strip clubs should be more tolerant of religion going on nearby, however perverted it may seem to them.

Tolerant
Tolerant

Mix-up

Unfortunately, because of a mix-up over the correct draft of my article in last week’s Weekly Worker, a key paragraph was omitted, highlighting the difference between the views of Lenin before and after April 1917 (‘The April theses and permanent revolution’, January 11).

In his preface to the 1908 edition of The development of capitalism in Russia, he drew the conclusion, explicitly spelled out: “With this economic basis the revolution in Russia is, of course, inevitably a bourgeois revolution. This Marxist proposition is absolutely irrefutable. It must never be forgotten. It must always be applied to all the economic and political problems of the Russian Revolution.”

At the time Lenin thought the stage of capitalist exploitation was unavoidable.

Mix-up
Mix-up

April theses

The general thrust of Gerry Downing’s remarks about permanent revolution entailing economic as well as political freedom is correct.

For Marx, the permanent revolution meant a fight to abolish classes and put production in the hands of the workers. The lessons of the defeat of 1848 were that the proletarians must organise independently for their own interests as exploited wage labourers. The workers and their party would fight for socialism from below against the bourgeois state:

“Alongside the new official government they must simultaneously establish their own revolutionary workers’ government either in the form of local executive committees and councils or through workers’ clubs and committees” (Karl Marx The revolutions of 1848 p323). Their aim would be not to implement a minimum programme or improve society, but found a new one.

Compare the above with Lenin’s perspectives for the coming Russian Revolution prior to 1917 and the April theses. Lenin’s aim - citing Kautsky’s authority - was to establish a special kind of capitalist state with plebeian methods to create the best democratic conditions to advance to the second stage of socialist revolution. Following Plekhanov, Lenin could not envisage ‘skipping’ the bourgeois democratic framework, which could only mean Russian populism.

But Marx had made it clear that social development in western Europe could not be transformed into a philosophy of history whereby Russia was destined to go through the same pattern of development. There could be leaps of social development which would not require a fully fledged capitalism as a requirement for socialism.

Down to 1917, Lenin repeated many times the following points: there is not nor can there be any other path to real freedom than the path of bourgeois progress and bourgeois freedom; the rule of capital will remain even in the most democratic republic; and the democratic revolution will be completed before the socialist revolution. It would be too tedious to cite all the references in his Collected works, so we will restrict ourselves to a few examples.

In 1905, the Menshevik, Martynov, taunted Lenin by saying that if the Bolsheviks became involved in state power they would be compelled to put into effect a utopia in Russia: the maximum programme or the socialist revolution. Lenin dismissed such talk as anarchist, saying that the problem with Martynov was that he “confounded the democratic revolution with the socialist revolution, and the struggle for a republic with the struggle for socialism” (VI Lenin CW Vol 8, Moscow 1977, p85).

Jack Conrad puts a gloss of permanent revolution on a single phrase of Lenin’s in 1905 that the two paths cross: in the actual historical circumstances the past or the bourgeois revolution becomes interwoven with the future or the socialist revolution. But this was simply a point about political and social process not being neatly separated as in a theory. This is why, following this comment, Lenin spelled out his base line: “We all counterpose the bourgeois revolution and the proletarian revolution; we all insist on the absolute necessity of strictly distinguishing between them” (CW Vol 9, p85). As late as 1915, Lenin thought Trotsky’s point about a class-based revolution in Russia was a joke. It was to be national or nation-based revolution (see Two lines in the revolution).

In Results and prospects (1905-06), Trotsky made the point that it was not a matter of historical analogies with the French Revolution, but an assessment of actual social forces in real historical conditions. 1905 had shown that in the coming revolution the workers would be compelled by the course of events to seize power. The workers would come to power in an economically backward country before the advanced countries. This would place collectivism on the political agenda and end private property: this was permanent revolution.

Gerry implies that Trotsky envisaged the participatory democracy of the commune state following 1905. But Trotsky made the break with stages theory due to his theoretical lightness. He ignored textual debates and did not relate his views with Marx’s theory of permanent revolution. He does not appear to have read Marx’s address to the Communist League in 1850. In Results and prospects he cites Kautsky’s authority about proletarian methods and talks about state ownership rather than workers’ power in the workplace or the commune state.

Lenin’s slogan and strategy of the ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’ (DDPP) stressed the class alliance rather than the specific class nature of state power or the specific political form of the revolutionary government. With this slogan Lenin did not live up to his reputation for a concrete analysis of a concrete situation. The fudge on workers’ power or the political vacuum at the centre of the slogan allowed it to be filled with differing political content.

1917 redefined the two stages and changed the politics from the 1905 version. After 1917, in the debate on soviet power with Kautsky, Lenin redefined the two stages again to deny that the Bolsheviks had broken with the minimum programme in 1917. In that version, 1917 became the bourgeois stage and 1918 became the socialist stage. But the tragedy of the defeat of the Chinese workers’ revolution in 1927 exposed the potentially counterrevolutionary nature of the slogan and strategy of DDPP.

Trotsky had predicted the slogan could lead to a betrayal of workers’ interests in his ‘Our differences’ polemic against Lenin in 1905. Lenin’s slogan dissolved the logic of class struggle or workers’ government into a general coalition of classes in a democratic government where the workers’ representatives could be in a minority or would limit working class demands to preserve the alliance of classes.

The thrust of the April theses was that the minimum programme, or the democratic republic, would be a step back compared with the socialist potential of the soviets. The April theses began to overturn the previous theoretical foundations of Bolshevism - the call for a special bourgeois republic.

The February revolution had been an aborted proletarian revolution. As Lenin explained, insufficient class consciousness and organisation prevented the realisation of workers’ power. The political content of the two stages changed so that the aborted workers’ revolution had placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie; the next stage was to place it back in the hands of the workers.

But, as Kamenev and Zinoviev pointed out, power had not passed over to the bourgeoisie in the situation of dual power, which Lenin conceded. Almost all the veteran Bolshevik leadership considered that Lenin had abandoned the longstanding Bolshevik aim of achieving the democratic republic. The constituent assembly had not even been convened and Lenin was writing letters about the need for a commune state.

Arguing from within the parameters of the two-stage theory in order to convince his comrades educated in it, Lenin tried to make the DDPP fit the unity of the peasants and workers in the soviets. But, as the old Bolsheviks knew, the old slogan envisaged a democratic coalition based on the constituent assembly. Lenin was compelled to acknowledge that things had turned out differently and the old theory of the DDPP was not a guide to action. It did not explain reality. The soviets were potentially the commune state previously denounced as anarchism.

Lenin did clearly state that those who only spoke of the DDPP had gone over to the petty bourgeoisie, which makes Trotsky’s comment that Lenin came out against the DDPP correct and Jack Conrad’s claim that the DDPP was valid in 1917 wrong.

April theses
April theses