Letters

Obligation

So tens of thousands of Iranian teachers went on strike (‘Solidarity with Iran needs a fight on two fronts’, March 22)!

Today Iranian teachers are attacked directly or indirectly by modern imperialist forces, globalised capitalism and their own theocratic regime, which indirectly helps imperialism and modern capitalism to increase their world domination. This strike proves that the Iranian teachers won’t tolerate the oppression of imperialism and national religious capitalism any longer; they are ready to fight against these evil powers along with Iranian workers and students.

Since we believe in Marxism, communism and internationalism, the left political forces of every country should unite in support of the Iranian teachers, workers and students’ anti-imperialist, anti-national religious capitalism movement. It’s our international obligation.

Obligation
Obligation

Waste of time

Your Draft programme demands a seven-hour day and minimum two-hour rest breaks. This is unreal. Your average worker would have no hope of earning enough money from that. Besides, two-hour rest breaks are a waste of time.

On the European Union, surely it can only be endorsed and progressed with if the trading bloc aspect of this confederate body is dropped. At present the tariffs imposed upon smaller developing nations are widening the rich-poor gap, which already unjustly grasps the world.

The EU is most definitely a route to further internationalism and the union of the world, but surely the elements of the body that promote capitalism and are designed to increase the wealth of the modern bourgeoisie must be removed before the body can be used to further the cause of communism?

Waste of time

Political vacuum

I would like to comment on the articles in last week’s paper by Jim Moody (‘Step up pressure on union lefts to get John McDonnell on the ballot’) and Eddie Ford (‘Tory resurgence and the left’, March 22).

Jim points out that communists campaign for pensions and the minimum wage to be set at £300 a week. I think the figure should be £400, due to inflation and the increase in the average price of a three-bedroom house.

Eddie makes some good points about the possibility of a Tory victory at the next general election, although a hung parliament is the most likely result. The Tory Party over the last year has paid off its debts of £30 million and is now accumulating an election war-chest. In contrast, New Labour is bankrupt, so Gordon Brown will be forced to delay the general election as long as possible.

The Tories are waiting for the residential housing market to do to New Labour what it did to the Conservative Party in the early 1990s. If readers do not believe me, they should look to the USA, where 2.2 million families are predicted to have their homes repossessed over the next five years. Similarly, the next general election in Britain could be held at the very time that home repossessions and personal bankruptcies are at all-time highs.

A Tory victory in the next general election would lead to the Labour Party’s complete financial and organisational collapse as a mainstream political party. This would create a political vacuum which communists could fill provided they do their work correctly over the next few years.

Political vacuum
Political vacuum

Resurgence?

Haven’t you politically illiterate twits noticed that the Tories have been for 10 years, and are currently, in power, albeit under a pseudonym of ‘New Labour’?

Resurgence?
Resurgence?

Good article

Good article
Good article

Myopic

With regard to your article about the recent election meeting of Respect Wales, I’m not your “comrade” (‘Shambolic scramble for candidates’, March 8). I resent that slur! Nor in fact am I a member of a trade union. However, I am a traditional Labour voter; only, like millions of others, I can’t vote Labour any more because they have gone over to the right.

I was strongly opposed to Blair’s wars even before they started and I rightly predicted the likely consequences. I also want to defend our public services from Gordon Brown. That’s why I have been involved with Stop the War Coalition and am chairman of Swansea Defend Council Housing, and that is why I am standing for Respect.

Your article is a complete distortion of reality. If some members of the Socialist Workers Party want to help build Respect, then good on them for not having a sectarian attitude.

You obviously want Respect to have the same policies as the CPGB, but why you can’t see that is astonishingly myopic, to say the least, is beyond me. Despite what you may want to imagine, Respect is not an alternative to the Communist Party of Great Britain: Respect is the alternative to Labour.

By the way, in case you missed it, I have just led a very successful campaign to stop the privatisation of council housing in Swansea - 72.1% of tenants gave a resounding ‘no’ to stock transfer. What have you guys done lately, except carp and whinge about Respect? Anyone would think you don’t really want Respect to get off the ground in south Wales.

Myopic

Too cynical

Phil Kent’s article on the March 20 people’s assembly is far too cynical and loaded with far too fixed a frame of mind (‘Debate SWP won’t have’, March 22).

I’ve been on all the main Stop the War Coalition, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Muslim Association of Britain demonstrations and have acted as coordinator of the Taunton Deane STWC group. We must hold together as many people as possible in the current apolitical atmosphere and we can do it only by keeping as broad a message and image as possible without sacrificing any basic principles of the anti-war, anti-arms (or pro-peace and disarmament) project.

Too cynical

No neo-con

Gordon Downie says I claimed that “John Adams’s music is not pro-capitalist because the composer’s opera, The death of Klinghoffer, was described as anti-American” (Letters, March 15).

I made no such claim. What I questioned in my last letter (March 1) was Gordon’s assertion that Adams is a “neo-conservative composer”, a label for which his only evidence appears to be that Adams’ operas have used “provocative and confrontational themes” that are “beneficial to the successful circulation of cultural artefacts in the cultural market”.

Well, that condemns virtually everyone who earns a living out of music and indeed anyone whose work could potentially be marketed by capitalists: ie, the vast majority of us. We’re all neo-cons in Gordon’s simplistic world.

I have no evidence that Adams is anti-capitalist and I’ve never suggested such a thing. But there’s quite a difference between simply failing to insert anti-capitalist messages in every single musical composition (which would make his output rather tedious, don’t you think?) and being a full-fledged supporter of neo-conservative ideology. Surely there’s a little more to neo-conservatism than that - hence the opposition it has met from many, many people who would never dream of describing themselves as anti-capitalist.

What I do know about Adams’ work is that much of it has demonstrated empathy and compassion for the underdog and a cynicism about the motives of those who rule us. I would rather listen to a composer with a humane agenda like that, who uses music to make people think about issues and question their assumptions, than some politico-poser repeatedly chanting ‘Fuck capitalism’ and telling me what to think.

No neo-con
No neo-con

PR text

It would be tempting to dismiss comrade Favorite and, I suspect, the ‘independent’ youth movement Revo as part and parcel of the self-delusion and bizarre antics of the comically-titled Fifth International. However, I must confess that a member of our Workers Solidarity Movement branch in Darlington had an equally odd and unfortunate experience when she attended a weekend camp of theirs last year.

The Permanent Revolution faction leadership held a meeting in a tent one night after a pretty frosty session and apparently told their members that in order to prepare for the split all personal relationships should be reviewed and if necessary ended by the sending of a text message!

Thanks, by the way, for your paper; it is always eagerly awaited on a weekly basis.

PR text
PR text

Lifeless

Dave Craig builds his multi-layered stages theory on a single phrase, “growing over” - used by Trotsky in his defensive polemic over permanent revolution with the Stalinists in 1928 ‘Stages, not stageism’, March 22. The old Bolshevik Stalin and his supporters taunted Trotsky with the comment that Lenin had fought against Trotsky’s permanent revolution all along the line, but despite this Trotsky did not care and pretended otherwise.

But Trotsky did take care to argue as a follower of Lenin, as a Leninist, in spite of his anti-Leninist past. Whereas in Our differences (1905) he did not pull his punches, describing Lenin’s two-stage theory - the democratic revolution growing over into the socialist revolution - as a utopia at best or a counterrevolutionary theory of limiting working class demands in return for a democratic republic and an alliance with the peasantry in government, he now meekly criticised the majority of Bolshevik leadership for separating the democratic stage from the socialist stage.

He presented himself as the pupil of Lenin and claimed falsely, as the old Bolsheviks were aware, that, when Lenin used the phrase “growing over” before the April theses, he expressed the same idea as his own of permanent revolution. Trotsky was rewriting history within the cult of Lenin to demonstrate that he was closer to the Bolsheviks and Lenin than the old Bolshevik Leninists who had stood shoulder to shoulder with Lenin following the expulsion of Bogdanov from the faction’s leadership. A defining moment for Leninism.

The Second International metaphor of natural development, growing over, did not describe the tumultuous events of the workers’ revolution of 1905 that inspired Trotsky’s break with the two-stage theory of Russian Marxism (initiated by Plekhanov, who preferred to start, not with the lessons of 1848 and permanent revolution, but with the original position of Marx going into the revolution in a bloc with the bourgeois democrats for a democratic republic). Plekhanov turned Marxism into a philosophy of history with a chronological succession of historical stages. Lenin followed Plekhanov until after 1914 when he encountered the ideas of Hegel.

In Results and prospects, where Trotsky formulated the theory of permanent revolution - or uninterrupted revolution, as he put it - immediately, on the very first day of the seizure of power the socialist revolution would be on the agenda. Not “growing over”, but a dramatic violent clash between the workers and capitalists for the control of the factories, the economy and the state would take place. This was repeated in 1917 on a larger scale. Journalistic metaphors of the French Revolution, which is what Plekhanov’s position amounted to, were abstract. Lenin, under the influence of Plekhanov and the model of western development, wrote of the future Prussian or American road for the growing over to the fight for socialism.

To break from these vulgarisations of the view of Marx, Trotsky stressed not textual analysis, but the historical peculiarities of Russian development. His view of the workers’ party seizing power was one of a party as an organic part of the working class directly representing the workers’ fight. This was before his conversion to Leninism. Ironically he became associated with the most extreme centralism following 1917 and an advocate of the old Bolshevik guard guaranteeing the socialist future.

Leaving aside Dave’s new use of the phrase “growing over” and his new Heath Robinson metaphor of “plug and socket”, his two-stage theory with its formidable formal logical structure has remained unchanged for over 10 years. But there is now a difference. Whereas previously the intermediary or transition stage was the constitutional rout of the dual power republic, he now stresses this transition as the dictatorship of the proletariat. There are still two stages and two programmes: the national democratic revolution and the international socialist revolution.

The political revolution and the economic revolution are still mechanically separated, but the democratic revolution grows over in the period of state capitalism or national political revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is stages, but not stageism! In the hands of Dave Craig, the schemas of Lenin’s Two tactics in the democratic revolution, his wrong perspective for the Russian Revolution, are “growing over” to eccentricity in their lifeless abstractions.

Lifeless
Lifeless

Programme

Barry Biddulph takes me to task for daring to criticise comrades Phil Sharpe and Phil Walden in my report of the March 10 national meeting of the Campaign for a Marxist Party ‘CMP steps up a gear’, March 15. Comrade Biddulph states that my report “should have been about the political positions of various comrades in order to clarify the differences, not a personal attack on comrades” (Letters, March 22).

Well, my report did indeed deal with “political positions” and contained not a hint of “personal attack”. I did not refer to the appearance, mannerisms or private lives of comrades Sharpe and Walden, but stated that their view of what a communist programme should look like is “eccentric”. I concluded that, “The discipline of a communist fighting formation is not for these comrades.”

Is comrade Biddulph seriously suggesting that I should refrain from saying what I believe to be true in relation to the politics of those we are attempting to work with? What is “hackish” about that? Should I have pretended that I regard their programmatic proposals as the very epitome of good sense and their attitude towards communist organisation as the height of discipline?

Far from deigning to conceal our views, communists should openly state our criticisms. When those who disagree then reply, as both comrades Biddulph and Sharpe did in last week’s ‘Letters’, it is this process that serves to “clarify the differences” - far more than any diplomatic silence or mealy-mouthed dissimilation could do.

That is precisely why Mary Godwin is so wrong when she insists that the best approach is to “remain neutral as to the correctness or validity of comrades’ points” when writing such reports (Letters, March 8). Should this methodology be extended to reports of Socialist Workers Party, Respect or Stop the War Coalition events? If so, the Weekly Worker would be very dull indeed.

At least comrade Sharpe himself does not accuse me of making a personal attack or failing to be sufficiently neutral. Having repeated the utterly unfounded and unsubstantiated allegation that the CPGB is “trying to dictate to the CMP”, he reiterates his proposal that a polemical, propaganda programme is required. He says there must be “an attempt to understand contemporary capitalism” and that it is “vitally important to show why present society represents the potential for a historical alternative”.

Far from believing that such tasks are “superfluous”, “futile” or “unnecessary”, as comrade Sharpe states, I regard them as absolutely uncontentious. But is it the specific role of the party programme to fulfil them? Hardly. Polemic, propaganda, theory - these must constantly be carried out in a variety of party publications. But in our view - one that is in complete accord with that of Marx, Engels and Lenin - the purpose of the programme is rather different.

The communist programme is first and foremost for the party itself - it establishes the basis for agreed action and is the reference point around which voluntary unity is built. New recruits are asked to accept it as the encapsulation of our demands, principles and aims, and the membership uses it to hold party leaders to account - are they acting in accordance with those demands, principles and aims or not?

It is, by the way, completely wrong to crudely describe the CPGB’s Draft programme (which we are in the process of redrafting) as an “action programme” - just as it is equally false to describe the Bolsheviks’ 1919 programme as a “propaganda tract”. If comrade Sharpe would care to take a look at the current version of our Draft programme, he would see that it begins with a section describing the nature of ‘Our epoch’, followed by a description of ‘Capitalism in Britain’. It then proceeds to outline our ‘Immediate demands’ and goes on to sketch the ‘Character of the revolution’ and the ‘Transition to communism’. It ends with the essential role of ‘The Communist Party’.

Nobody is proposing that our redraft should ditch the nature of the epoch and contemporary capitalism, but we are all agreed that brevity and concision is of the essence. Engels correctly argued that “All that is superfluous in a programme weakens it” (quoted in J Conrad Which road? London 1991, p239).

By contrast, if the programme were to contain polemic, as part of some extended theorisation, directed against the views of the latest bourgeois academic trend-setter, it would rapidly become outdated and would certainly be useless for the purpose stated above.

But what is the purpose of a party programme in comrade Sharpe’s view? His article in Marxist Voice, the CMP’s new journal, describes its main elements: it should contain aspects of “an action manual” and feature “propaganda and understanding of the present character of capitalism”, as well as the “role of the polemical” and “theoretical discovery” (No1, March-April). Try as I might, however, I cannot find any explanation of what it is that marks out a programme, as distinct from any other communist publication - a party paper, for example.

In my CMP report I remarked: “In reality comrade Sharpe is not proposing a party programme at all, since he believes there is no basis for mobilising around Marxism at present.” My notes of his speech at the March 2006 founding conference of the Socialist Party’s Campaign for a New Workers’ Party seem to bear this out. In opposing the CPGB’s call for the CNWP to campaign for a party based on Marxism, he said, according to my notes: “The programme doesn’t matter - the working class doesn’t have to have a conference to know what it supports. The main task is to get the organisation off the ground - it’s not about socialism from above.”

Comrades Sharpe denies that he and comrade Walden have acted as “uncritical cheerleaders” (his words) for the CNWP. He claims they have called for democracy and accountability within it (he does not say where and when). All I know is that they both made enthusiastic speeches at the formation’s founding conference that were totally in tune with the SP’s proposals and were warmly applauded by the SP-dominated audience.

Programme
Programme

Socialist law

At the Campaign for a Marxist Party London meeting last Sunday I was interested in what the speaker, Mike Macnair, said about the difference between possession and legal ownership, and how there can be no legal ownership without a state to enforce the laws.

This raises the question in my mind as to what the forms of ownership will be in a socialist state, in which the working class is the ruling class. Will the state own everything, as the Militant Tendency used to assume? Or, if private ownership continues to exist, how will the working class prevent the private owners, who presumably will either be capitalists or be able to become capitalists, from using their economic power to reverse the revolutionary changes and restore capitalism? That is, what will be the legal system of a socialist society?

Obviously we cannot prescribe to the working class how it will exercise state power, but we can make suggestions. Presumably, ideas about the legal system of a socialist society will be part of the maximum section of the CPGB’s revised Draft programme, which I hope can be jointly agreed with the CMP. May I suggest that comrade Macnair, as an expert in law, be asked to write or speak about law in a socialist society, perhaps at Communist University.

Socialist law
Socialist law

Internet slander

On March 15 you printed a letter by the so-called ‘Johnny Favorite’, who claimed to be a school-student member of Revolution who had been persecuted by Workers Power.

This is a complete lie. ‘Johnny Favourite’ is not a member of Revo and never has been. We have never met him in person ­ at an event, meeting, protest, etc ­ but only have the privilege of him posting on our internet web board. He is one of the strange breed of people, spawned by the age of global communications, who thinks it is amusing to invent alter-egos and post rude and disruptive messages on web boards. Anyone who has ever gone onto Urban 75 will be familiar with them. A term has even entered the English language to describe it: ‘trolling’.

He was recently banned after one of the moderators found a post on another web board where he admitted to being a 50-year-old bloke. In addition to his rude and insulting behaviour there are obviously security issues with old men pretending to be school students in chat rooms and web boards for young people.

We would ask that you are a bit more careful about what letters you print in future, as you have a responsibility to ensure you are not simply printing slanderous accusations. By chance our national council was meeting last weekend and agreed this short reply. Before any cries of ‘Workers Power stitch-up’ are made, we should point out our leadership has a majority of non-Workers Power members.

Internet slander

Revo reverse

We can’t comment on Johnny Favorite’s letter about Workers Power and its youth organisation. But we can provide some information about what’s going on with Revo internationally.

Revo is, according to its programme and constitution, an independent youth organisation. But, as just about anyone who has dealt with this group will have noticed, all the leading members of Revo are in WP (or its international tendency, the League for a Fifth International). In fact, a few honest LFI members have admitted that around 70-80% of the total membership of Revo is in the LFI.

The LFI faction in Revo works on the basis of precise instructions from the LFI’s leadership. So, when Revo holds a conference, the LFI’s top brass works out the documents beforehand and gives them to its faction to push through. Since they have about a 75% majority at conferences, the documents are decided on before the conferences even open.

This leads to absurdly undemocratic practices. For example, Revo’s international constitution was written by the LFI leadership, which meant that 75% of the delegates at the Revo conference were obliged to vote for it. This majority faction simply forgot to give the draft constitution to the 25% independent delegates or the rest of the membership (why bother if it had already been decided on anyway?), so this constitution was decided on after a 10-minute discussion - naturally with a 75% majority - but without base members ever having seen it.

This is a standard practice for the LFI. When they were first confronted with criticisms, they denied it categorically. But then the LFI split and their internal documents were published. Now it is beyond dispute that the LFI makes all important decisions for Revo: ie the constitution, the balance sheet, etc - they have simply redefined the term ‘independent’ so this practice fits with Revo’s programme.

When the LFI began to expel independents from Revo (their 75% majority just wasn’t enough!), all independent Revo groups and even all independent members participating in the discussion formed the tendency iRevo. We produced a pamphlet outlining the importance of independent youth organisations in the history of the communist movement and were summarily expelled.

This is not just a problem of democratic methods or basic honesty. Bureaucratic structures have a way of destroying themselves. The LFI’s youth group hasn’t just lost its ‘renegade’ sections: the loyal sections are suffering as well. According to a public report (in German), Revo UK’s last conference in Leeds was attended by just 30-40 members and guests, making it the smallest such conference in years, with just half of the official membership. No explanation is given for this.

The LFI’s model youth group in Austria is doing even worse. This group, led by a 40-year-old LFI full-timer, officially has three dozen members. But only one third of this number attend public group conferences! The Revo groups who formed the iRevo tendency, in contrast, have been having modest successes, establishing new branches and a new section in Switzerland.

We are convinced that an independent revolutionary youth organisation (one that debates and decides its own policies) is not just possible, but of strategic importance for building up a worldwide communist party of the working class. We still hope to convince the LFI of this, some day.

Revo reverse
Revo reverse