Letters

Big bro pro

In his recent letter about prostitution (May 3), Jasa Slovjanski groans that, “as communists, how can we possibly fight to expand and legitimise this exploitation [legalisation of prostitution] and then later claim we are for the emancipation of women?”

Jasa, your Stalinism is leaking through. The emancipation of women will come about through the establishment of workers’ states that expropriate the capitalist class in order to lay the basis for a society in which people in general and women in particular no longer have a need to prostitute themselves in order to survive. This is the materialist view of society that genuine communists share.

Unlike disposed Russian Stalinists, we don’t support bureaucratic measures to rectify social coercion, through the spectre of homelessness and hunger, which plays the controlling role in leading some women into a life of prostitution. We are opposed to ‘Big brotherism’, whereby the state tells people what they may not do consensually with their sex organs, and this is why we oppose such laws.

Big bro pro
Big bro pro

Class role

Comrade Slovjanski is certainly right when he again emphasises that communists need to stand in opposition to the exploitation of sex workers, legalised or otherwise. However, where I still feel he is going wrong is that he takes the CPGB’s minimum demand on the legalisation of prostitution to be solely reliant on the intervention of the capitalist state. Legality or illegality in the eyes of bourgeois law courts generally matter very little to us as a form of principle. However, in this case I feel that legalisation would leave ground open for further intervention by the working class.

So far the argument against legalisation has taken the form of highlighting the fact that sex workers are still exploited, still alienated and still at risk from the many dangers the trade involves, regardless of their legal status. This is, of course, true. However, often studies do not account for a positive, pro-working class role in the unionisation of such workers - if only because it has not happened yet on a wide scale, almost certainly due to the current weakness of the workers’ movement in general.

But it’s an issue of tactics just as much as anything. A minimum demand, in this case the demand regarding legalisation, is obviously not an end in itself, but is designed to call into question the entire issue of which it is part of a wider context. By posing the question as part of a wider revolutionary programme, we are highlighting the whole case of prostitution while bringing it into the field of working class politics. There are still entrenched prejudices within our class regarding prostitution, prejudices that will not be helped by calling for the absolute destruction of the trade, despite the fact that that is our eventual aim as part and parcel of the abolition of wage labour and exploitation in general.

The acceptance of sex workers into the working class movement, along with a furious condemnation of those who profit from the trade, will in part be aided by the process of legalisation, but only when coupled with revolutionary politics themselves.

Class role

Pregnant pause

Writing about the Socialist Party’s participation in the forthcoming Irish general election, Anne Mc Shane states that “there is no mention of abortion rights in its election manifesto” (‘Irish left must champion women’s rights’, May 10).

If you look at www.socialist party.net/pdf/pdfs/joehiggins manifesto07.pdf, you would see that actually it is right there in the manifesto: “Support the choices of women with crisis pregnancies, including the provision of abortion facilities through the health service.”

Check your comments first, please.

Pregnant pause
Pregnant pause

Nothing left

What is it about the left when it comes to personal ethics? Greenies take this part of their life seriously - always recycling, reusing, avoiding McDonalds and Coca Cola, buying fair-trade and organic produce, cycling, vegetarian diet, anti-consumerist and anti-car.

However, this appears to be a blind spot for the left. They say that we should have a minimum wage that is enough to culturally reproduce ourselves and lead a human life. So, for example, living in the UK we are bombarded with all sorts of consumerist goods and the left seems to be saying that if capitalist society says we need these things we should demand what they are offering. Talk about keeping up with the Joneses! This approach just perpetuates the commodity lifestyle.

Is the left saying that the populations of developing countries should demand what we have, in which case we would need four earths? That is environmentally unsustainable. What does the left say?

Nothing left

Back next time

Perhaps Mick Hall should be forgiven for his lack of insight into the Scottish parliament elections (Letters, May 10). Tilbury is not the best place to observe events in Scotland even with the aid of the internet.

Of course, part of his analysis is correct. No doubt some voters were put off by the split between the Scottish Socialist Party and Solidarity and decided to ignore both. However, two other factors were the key: firstly, the left, the Greens and independents all suffered in the squeeze between Labour and the Scottish National Party. Secondly, the new ballot forms were deliberately designed by Labour and agreed by the other main parties as an attempt to minimise their losses to smaller parties. Well, they certainly succeeded, but it was at the expense of Scottish democracy, as 142,000 votes were rejected and certainly many of these were votes for the left and the greens.

Finally, of course it was unfortunate that the split in the SSP happened and the reasons why have been much rehearsed in these columns. However, even without the split, the only person who would have been elected would have been Tommy Sheridan.

In little more than six months, Solidarity has established itself as the strongest socialist party in Scotland. We hope that we can build on that in future and that in a less confused election we will get MSPs elected back into parliament.

Back next time

Wounding insults

Last week Cameron Richards accused me, among other things, of “fundamental dishonesty”. The week before David Broder described me as “foolish” and “sectarian”. Your words wound me. I realise that the culture of both the CPGB and the Alliance of Workers’ Liberty not only condones but actively encourages its members to insult people they disagree with, and that to object to such practice is seen as a sign of weakness. But why? Does it really work? Do you insult people you disagree with in your personal life or at work?

I am in favour of putting arguments honestly and in plain language, and there is a place for insults if you are looking to start a fight, but I cannot imagine it really works if you are actually trying to persuade people to change their mind. Just because Lenin was rude to people does not make it a good idea. Hard polemics supposedly clarify political differences, and I presume toughen up those who play such macho word games. It does not have the desired effect on me: it annoys and upsets me and reminds me why I have chosen to try to distance myself from the political method of argument by insult.

Cameron accuses me of running away from his fight to reform the CPGB. David, despite our having had numerous conversations on this issue, wonders why, having left one Leninist group, I was unwilling to join another one. Fond as I am of the CPGB, I am not a Leninist: I have enough confidence in myself and in our class that I no longer share the goal of building a highly organised leadership that can do our thinking for us. Indeed, I regard a vanguard party as being a hindrance, rather than the prerequisite, to building a communist society.

Wounding insults
Wounding insults

Rejoinder

All I can conclude from reading Mike Macnair’s article, ‘Ten wasted years’, is that all communists should join New Labour (May 10).

Three years ago I applied to rejoin the Labour Party over the internet. Six weeks later I received a letter from the membership secretary of the North-East Cambridgeshire Constituency Labour Party, which stated that I would have to be interviewed by a three-man panel before I could rejoin. After much thought I concluded that the Labour Party was being very cheeky, so I wrote back to the membership secretary politely telling him where he could stick his panel.

Since then I have tried to join the Labour Supporters Network, again via the internet. Although I subscribed to all of the LSN email newsletters, I have received no communications from them. I have even tried to join using my party name, but it seems that my home address is on a Labour Party blacklist. All I can conclude is that the Labour Party does not want my support.

Contrastingly, while chatting to a leading local Tory councillor recently I was asked if I had thought of joining the Conservative Party. A communist joining the Tories: well, that’s a thought! Perhaps I should take them up on their offer?

Rejoinder
Rejoinder

Bollocks

Mike Macnair’s analysis is very informative of the Marxist method (‘No more freaks and halfway houses’, May 3). However, as I believe, the fundamental basis of Marxism is economics. Therefore, when incredibly rich people (like Hillel Ticktin - or any other ‘face’ you care to mention on the ‘far’ left) , begin to preach ‘communism’, it makes me sick. Please feel free to disagree with me, as the British National Party are gaining ground and you are not!

Good luck, ‘comrades’. I wish I was as rich as you. Carry on as you are and the BNP will be in power within a few years.

As for your reports on the May 3 elections, comrades might not be so sarcastic if the state-controlled CPGB had the bollocks to stand candidates.

Bollocks

Fundamental error

Both Simon Keller and Bob Harding seem to have got themselves into a bit of a muddle (Letters, May 10). The issue about the looming attack on Iran by the US imperialists and its allies is not that it will be between an imperialist state and a “non-imperialist capitalist state”, as stated by comrade Simon.

The issue is simply that the regime ruling Iran is actively suppressing the very forces that are truly anti-imperialist - namely independent grassroots organisations run by workers, women, youth, students, national minorities and so on. The regime is doing so actively and systematically. These grassroots organisations are the very forces that can truly resist imperialist aggression.

The workers, the women, the students, the youth and the national minorities of Iran are daily struggling against all odds for their basic democratic rights. They need the help of all progressive forces in the world. By repressing them the islamic regime is weakening the anti-imperialist potential of Iran. That is the crux of the issue.

Add to that the fact that the regime ruling Iran continues the neoliberal economic policies of its predecessors, with privatisation and mass layoffs, and the tasks of anyone with pretensions to being progressive are clear: to actively support these movements alongside fighting the imperialist assault on Iran and the rest of the Middle East. Both are part of the same anti-imperialist struggle, not two separate tasks.

The anti-imperialist struggle demands that we fight both imperialism and any force that smoothes its path - wittingly or unwittingly. This has been the clear message of Marxism and the “giants of our movement”. To quote the letter of Lenin (or any other revolutionary leader), while ignoring the spirit of their struggle and philosophy, would be called fundamentalism - if it was uttered by the follower of some religious sect.

Fundamental error

Sneaky

Simon Keller is an evasive creature. After misrepresenting the CPGB’s third campism, he dismisses disputes over small matters, such as - oh - the evidence he offers for his vulgarisations, as of secondary importance. Though his concession as to the veracity of this particular claim is welcome, one is tempted to risk flippancy in asking: if there are no particular instances where you can find the “blatantly anti-Marxist” straw method supposedly used by the CPGB at work, in what sense is it their position?

Comrade Keller also evades, in producing a paragraph of cant about how brilliant the leaders of our movement have been all round (true enough), my claim that he is - worse than vulgarising the CPGB’s position - vulgarising Lenin. Comrades will remember he used a quote suggesting that anti-colonial resistance is always supportable in some way. Trimmed from my last letter was an additional response to this point (May 3).

Keller does something very sneaky here. Faced with a list of colonised and coloniser nations from Lenin (Morocco and France, India and England, etc), he then uses this as a justification in itself, with conflict looming against “the most powerful imperialist country”, for siding with the “clearly” non-imperialist country of Iran.

Firstly: non-imperialist? Fine. “Clearly”? That’s a simplification. This is not India under the Raj, but a fully industrialised capitalist country with formal political independence. Iran certainly is a victim of imperialism. Nevertheless, it has had, since the days of Rafsanjani, the displeasure of neoliberal restructuring policies foisted upon it.

But here Keller’s argument turns rather nastily in on itself: who are the victims of this policy? The workers and poor of Iran, with whom the CPGB, Hands Off the People of Iran and myself express solidarity. And who are the agents of this policy, the venal compradors in the pay of the west? None other than comrade Keller’s pin-up heroes of the day - the mullahs, the military and all their reactionary coterie. Since the CPGB and Hopi openly prefer the defeat of the imperialist country in such a dispute and always have, and the debate is in practice over the open and uninterrupted expression of solidarity for the oppressed, together with criticisms and calls for the destruction of the reactionary and substantially pro-imperialist Iranian ruling class, Keller can only be suggesting that we should in fact back up these treacherous collaborators against ... er ... their paymasters. Side with Vichy against the Nazis!

In this whole line of argument, there is an undercurrent pulling it together - an oppressed nation magically stops being a class-divided entity by virtue of imperialist fiddling. I will call this what it is - naked class-collaborationism, the kind of policy that leads to catastrophes like the Kuomintang’s obliteration of the Chinese Communist Party in the 1920s and, needless to say, the horrific massacres of leftwing elements in 1980s Iran. It’s a nationalism, and a simplistic, selective one at that. (I wonder how an oppressed internal nationality like the Ahwazi Arabs - marginalised, ghettoised and repressed by the Farsi majority - feels about being lumped into a homogenous “Iranian nation”. Not, one imagines, too chuffed, after 25,000 arrests and 160 executions since 2005.)

Incidentally, this is also a problem with Bob Harding’s position: “our support for oppressed nations is not conditional on the nature of their leadership”. It still, for no good reason, considers the nation for our purposes identical with its leadership. What, are we supposed to ‘forgive’ the Iranian working class for being oppressed by reactionary scum? The difference between Scargill and Ahmadinejad is obvious - Scargill is from our class and Ahmadinejad is not. This is really basic stuff.

Sneaky
Sneaky

New sparks

Mike Macnair claims that Lenin and Trotsky did not foresee the reasons for the collapse of the “bridge” built by the Bolshevik revolution, and that it requires hindsight to explain this collapse.

When Lenin talked of a “workers’ state with bureaucratic deviations” was this evidence that there is a necessary continuity between these “deviations” and full-blown Stalinism? Lenin also talked about the New Economic Policy as ‘state capitalism’, yet in very different terms than the Shachtmanite theory that Trotsky was to reject later. For Lenin it was still capitalism under control of a workers’ state.

Surely these comments show that Lenin, like Trotsky, understood that the ‘success’ of the Bolshevik revolution was tenuous, and that it would degenerate without a successful German revolution or, failing that, revolution in the east. The “bridge”, then, could not be built from the Soviet side alone, but had to be built from both sides.

As for Trotsky’s view of the bureaucracy, it does not depend upon splitting into two factions to be correct. This split was not an objective necessity. Like the union bureaucracy in the capitalist countries, the ‘left’ faction would turn left only in response to pressure from the workers below, and the failure of workers to mobilise for a political revolution and split the bureaucracy does not invalidate the existence of the bureaucracy.

On the contrary, it reveals the depths of the defeats suffered by workers at the hands of imperialism and the bureaucracy. Moreover, the primary responsibility for that defeat rests with the failure of revolutionary leadership in the imperialist countries, first evident in the German revolution, and then in the betrayal of the Comintern in the face of fascism.

All of this was well understood by Lenin and Trotsky, who saw the Bolshevik revolution as the spark for the world revolution. That spark was snuffed out for reasons well understood by Lenin and Trotsky in their lifetimes.

Both would see the legacy of Bolshevism today as that of breathing life into new sparks that set alight the rotten structure of global capitalism.

New sparks

No soothsayer

Both of Mike Macnair’s letters (May 10 and April 26) betray a lack of revolutionary perspectives. We will look first at his take on the failed post-World War I German revolution. Mike says: “Conversely, if the German revolution had led, not to the rise of Hitler, but directly to modern German welfare-state capitalism with a strong socialist party, no-one would judge that the defeat of the German far left and the council movement in 1919 was a historical ‘failure’: it would, on the contrary, appear to vindicate the stand of the SPD majority against the left.”

But that scenario was never possible. In the first place it was the failure of the German revolution - ie, the counterrevolution - which led to the rise of Hitler. Secondly, the chief agent of that counterrevolution was German social democracy - Noske, Ebert and Scheidemann organised the Freikorps that murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and massacred the revolution. Thirdly, speaking of “the defeat of the German far left and the council movement in 1919” suggests it was not the revolution that was defeated, but some stupid putsch.

This tends to excuse the enormity of the crimes of the Second International traitors, who performed this service for world imperialism throughout central and eastern Europe, particularly in the former Austro-Hungarian empire. The post-war German revolution was never going to produce “modern German welfare-state capitalism”, but either revolutionary socialism linked to the Soviet Union or fascism. The balance was tipped in favour of fascism by the Social Democrats.

Now we really come to the point where the struggles of the working class are permanently written out of history. Comrade Mike tells us that “the post-war welfare state system is not a proof of the truth of the policy of the social democracy”, but is “an artefact of US policy towards the USSR”. But these gains were won by the wartime radicalisation of the European working class and the fact that the strength of US capitalism enabled it to buy off that radicalisation with the Marshall Plan.

This dispensed with the services of Stalinism, which was ensconced in some five or six European post-war governments to ensure the defeat of revolutionary upsurges. This was a continuation of the wartime allied policy, with Stalin as an enthusiastic partisan of mass bombing civilian cities - Dresden, Warsaw, Hamburg, Berlin, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Milan, Turin, etc - to prevent revolutions; or actually put them down when they broke out - Warsaw, Athens, and northern Italy, etc. If the bridge fell down it was completely undermined by those who falsely claimed to be its original architects.

When Trotsky was asked why he did not use his position as leader of the Red Army to crush Stalin, his (undogmatic) response was along the lines that ‘If I did that I would have become Stalin’. I have no problem with critical examinations and severe criticisms of Lenin, Trotsky, etc. But please focus on the international defeats which isolated the Soviet Union and caused the rise of the Stalin/Bukharin-justifying ideology of ‘socialism in a single country’ and consider what they should have done to advance the cause of the world revolution in those appalling circumstances of the early to mid-20s.

Finally, Trotsky’s perspectives for political revolution in the USSR were closely linked to his revolutionary perspectives for Europe. He did not put forward a soothsayer’s prediction of what the likely post-war outcome might be. He sought to mobilise the subjective forces of the revolution to extract from the objective situation its revolutionary potential and orientate a leadership for that revolution.

Despite the utter barbarism with which both armies treated their prisoners of war on the eastern front in World War II and the counterrevolutionary dedication of both Hitler’s Nazis and Stalin’s ‘Red Army’ to wiping out all signs of working class revolt, the obvious necessity for revolutionary socialist leadership in those circumstances (and the potential for one if it could have been built in time) is a cause for optimism for the future - an affirmation of the capacity of the working class to make revolution, which should refute all pessimism about the causes of defeat.

No soothsayer