Letters

Anarchist mine

Andrew Coates’s review of Nick Cohen’s book makes many interesting points (‘Sparks, flashes and damp squibs’, March 22). Most importantly, it is heartening to see a reviewer who has a good understanding of the complexity of leftwing critiques of Stalinism - Victor Serge, who Andrew cites, is a case in point.

But further mention should also be made, in this context, of the whole repressed history of the anarchist tradition that has been rediscovered (too late probably) by people, like me, who in their youth rejected it for reasons which now seems foolish and short-sighted. More effort, then, it seems to me, should be made to bring anarchist ideas back into the mainstream of leftwing thinking and practice.

Maybe, which is quite likely, my reading is too restricted and I have missed such a debate taking place, but Cohen and others who are hostile to the anti-war left (such as Respect) and Andrew Coates, who is also hostile to the ‘third way’ and social democracy, should start to mine the anarchist and libertarian tradition in a more serious manner and truly overcome the still living, albeit decaying, legacy of Stalinism.

Anarchist mine

36 billionaires

Many serious problems have not yet been solved by India’s United Progressive Alliance government after three years in office. It has been unable to apply its common minimum programme for the development of Indian society and the common people, workers and farmers.

Some find ‘India shining’, but most feel miserable and wretched. The present liberal and globalised Indian economy is centralising wealth in the hands of a few rich people. At present there are 36 billionaires in India who have between them captured one quarter of the country’s total gross domestic product and the proportion of GDP under their control is increasing. Yet still a huge part of India’s population suffers from malnutrition and lacks access to pure drinking water.

If the government really wants to change this miserable situation and win the next parliamentary election, it must reject the liberal economic policies that have created these problems.

36 billionaires
36 billionaires

Irrelevant

Fascinating as it is to hear about what the comrades from the Revolutionary League for Rice Pudding and their ilk have for breakfast, has the potential industrial action from the CWU, PCS, NUT, RCN, RCM, Unison and so on passed you by?

Sometimes I get the impression that when the workers reach the barricades the CPGB and assorted sects will be too busy to notice, as they argue (and split) amongst themselves over what colour hats revolutionaries should wear, the politics of Gerry Healey’s haircut and the number of Bolshevik angels you can fit on the head of a pin.

Irrelevant

Pieces of 28

In the interests of research, I bought a copy of The Sun and sat there to compare it with the Weekly Worker and the Morning Star (Letters, June 14).

In The Sun and the Morning Star, I found television listings. I found none in the Weekly Worker. In The Sun and the Morning Star, I found coverage of sport. I found none in the Weekly Worker.

I also note that, despite not fielding candidates this year (they have in the past), the CPGB has exactly the same number of Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly members as the Communist Party of Britain.

In The Sun I found a few pages of misinformed political journalism. In the Morning Star I found ... a few pages of misinformed political journalism. In the Weekly Worker I found informed articles - even the ones I disagreed with.

So I wonder who is producing a version of The Sun? On the strength of the evidence, I would suggest to the readers that it is the Morning Star.

The comrade is mistaken if he thinks there are 28 CPGB members. In fact, I believe that 28 is the average age of party members in the CPGB, whereas by a strange quirk the youngest CPB member I ever met was aged 82!

The CPB are yesterday’s broken-hearted old men. Broken-hearted at the fall of the USSR. Broken-hearted that the tanks did not roll over the Berlin wall from the east and sweep them into power for them to become demagogic labour dictators rather than lost sheep clinging to the coat tails of a fictional labour left.

Pieces of 28

Mod cons

Gordon Downie (Letters, June 14) has accused me of being insufficiently modernist with regard to architecture - a charge that those who have heard my odes to the Unité and spotted a massive photo of Toronto’s John P Robarts library on my MySpace page will regard with some amusement. Apparently, this makes me a postmodernist too (a style which has fallen victim to not a few rambling diatribes on my part).

Sorry, Gordon, I don’t think so. Negation of the utopian aspects of modernism is only half the postmodern story, as you well know. When Jencks and Venturi blast the anti-populist “ugly excesses” of the modern period, their point is not to preserve the popular elements - the idea that built space extends beyond the four walls of a house into the general setting of daily life - but to rubbish the whole thing, to restore ‘normal operations’ within capitalist architecture. The postmodernists replace a partial elitism with a thoroughgoing one. It is the transition from Keynes to Friedman reflected in yet another sphere of human activity.

Nothing could be more socially atomised and aesthetically degenerate than yet another mock-period house built by some yuppie couple on ‘location, location, location’; nothing could be more postmodern; and nothing could be further from my own beliefs on the subject. But we should not let this neoliberal fantasy distort our view of the modern period, any more than the horrors of privatisation should result in nostalgia for Keynes. Nor should we simply extrapolate our own aesthetic judgments into political ones.

It is here that I would like to seize on the challenge vis-à-vis the residents of the various paradigmatic housing projects. In particular, let us consider the case of Trellick Tower, a fine and interesting building. Built in 1972, the tower quickly became infamous for much the same sorts of reasons as many other similar buildings. In particular, it was plagued with crime - lurid tabloid tales abounded of rapes in elevators up the ‘tower of terror’. In case anyone doubts the elitist predilections of the average high-modernist architect, here’s Erno Goldfinger himself on the issue: “I built skyscrapers for people to live in there and now they messed them up - disgusting.”

But recently Trellick Tower has enjoyed a complete turnaround and its privatised flats are in high demand. Why? Because a tenants’ association took over the day-to-day running of the building and rectified the security and other problems. In other words, the precise point of my last letter - that the functionality of architecture does not reside simply in the designs of the architect, but in the day-to-day running of the building - applies more than anything else to Trellick Tower. The very same building is vilified in the 80s and adored in the 90s, even sparking off a mini-revival in the style.

The more ‘socialised’ the living conditions, the denser the population of a building or complex, the more crucial the social support system becomes. Jim Moody’s example of the Karl Marx Hof is also instructive - a building that maintained huge popularity also had a militia running out the back of it. Coincidence? Not likely. In short, I do not accuse modernism of being overly “commit[ed] to function”, but of being committed to function only in an ideological, rather than an actual, sense (the Arbeitsrat fur Kunst notwithstanding).

The high-modern made the same mistakes as every other utopian movement - vastly ahead of its time, it thought that the sheer force of resolve and the sheer breathtaking novelty of its artefacts would carry it through. They didn’t. It may well happen that when we get rid of this ghastly social system we will finally catch up with Corbusier - indeed, that’s another reason to do it.

Mod cons
Mod cons

Consensus

My debate with the CPGB over what the working class should do if or when there is an attack on Iran by US-British imperialism has continued with comrade Jim Grant on UK Left Network, where I believe we finally reached agreement.

Jim and I agree that ‘The main enemy is at home’ is not an appropriate slogan to use in Iran if or when the imperialist attack comes. Jim and I agree that the Iranian working class would have a greater enemy in the form of the US-British imperialist invaders and that the independently organised workers should militarily bloc with any other forces, including the regime, to the extent that those other forces also fight that greater enemy.

Jim is only a supporter of the CPGB, so I am interested to know if this also reflects the understanding of the CPGB leadership.

Consensus

Popular beat

Was John Graham Mellor’s nom de plume ‘Joe Strummer’ a witty reference to guitar technique or an ex-public schoolboy’s cheeky attempt to blend in with the proletariat? Or did this have more clandestine motivations, a nom de guerre adopted to hide the punk subversive’s true identity from the security services? Clearly, not knowing this adds to the mystery of this rock revolutionary’s complex history, and we can only hope that an academic from one of the UK’s cultural studies departments will apply appropriate scholarly effort to resolve this confusion once and for all, so that the name of Joe Strummer can join that of John Lennon’s in the rock and roll hall of fame of the most radical thinkers and activists of modern times.

But the last few weeks have given rock fans an unusual number of opportunities to indulge their nostalgia and fetish for pop juvenilia, whether BBC2’s Seven ages of rock, ITV’s South Bank show profile of Jarvis Cocker, the 30th anniversary of The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper celebrations, Yoko Ono’s Desert island discs on BBC Radio 4, or the Weekly Worker’s review of The Clash ‘rockumentary’, The future is unwritten (‘Politics and lure of fame’, June 7).

Though George Binette claims that this film avoids celebrity worship, his own critical perspective does little to distinguish itself from the customary idolatry that constitutes the vast majority of rock and pop music criticism and gossip. Indeed, we should note that any discussion of rock and pop music neatly avoids any examination of the medium itself, concentrating instead on forensic analyses of the personalities, relationships, misdemeanours and frequent self-destructiveness of the stars.

This could be explained as merely musical ignorance on the part of critics or a cynical assumption regarding the intellectual aspirations of readers and listeners. But it may also be that there simply isn’t that much to say. Without the sex and the drugs, there simply wouldn’t be any rock ’n’ roll. In terms of formal and harmonic organisation, despite myriad stylistic evolutions, in substance popular music has remained more or less unchanged since Bill Haley exhorted us to ‘Rock around the clock’ in 1954.

The punk fanzine Sideburns’ injunction, “This is a chord, this is another, this is a third. Now form a band”, illustrates well the crudity and simple-mindedness of this conception. Commonly touted as a form of liberation, these constraints on aspiration are limitations of a kind that no Marxist should find tolerable. And with its emphasis on spontaneity and unorganised action, punk rock was the ideal vehicle through which to channel anarchist agitation, the rudimentary nature of the music only being matched by the rudimentary and elementary political messages being espoused. As Jim Moody correctly observed with regard to Bob Geldof and Bono, whilst pop stars appropriate such roles, they function as an effective means by which dissent and frustration can be controlled, manipulated and defused (‘More poverty, more missiles’, June 14).

Perhaps it is this diversionary role to which critical analysis should be applied, rather than the routine recitation of biographical anecdote and tittle-tattle that George Binette’s analysis seems to offer.

Popular beat
Popular beat

Halfway Marxist

The CPGB line of “no halfway houses” is left sectarian. It is soft on the Labour Party, fails to recognise the nature of the period, the fight for left unity, the needs of the working class movement, and the application of the transitional method to the fight for a Communist Party.

Your reaction to my criticism is a confirmation that what I am saying is basically correct. Left sectarianism is not just a line, but an attitude. A sectarian line breeds a sectarian attitude. You dismiss the case for a workers’ party as being the result of cowardice, stupidity or dishonesty. Everybody else is either a “sect” or “flotsam and jetsam”.

This is not about insults. We can all be upset by offensive remarks. I am not too pleased to be called “either dishonest or just dumb” (‘Campaigning with Marxist teeth’, June 14). But I comfort myself with the thought that left sectarianism is not only anti-working class, but about as politically dumb and dishonest as it gets.

The real point is that left sectarianism works on emotion and prejudice, not science. It is a wrong and indeed anti-working class method. We should be criticising and analysing lines and positions from a class point of view. The call for a workers’ party is a class line. Calling me a liar or an idiot proves nothing about a political line. But it does indicate that losing the argument produces desperate measures.

The CPGB idea of a Marxist party is not what most present-day Marxists understand by this term. That doesn’t mean it is wrong. But the ambiguity leaves it open to misunderstanding. A Marxist party is seen by the CPGB (or is it just Mike Macnair?) as something like the German Social Democratic Party in the 19th century. This was a broad-based workers’ party, which contained reformists (Bernstein), centrists (Kautsky) and communists (Luxemburg).

This party adopted ‘Marxism’ as its official ideology and a minimum-maximum programme. The crisis of World War I led to a three-way split into social democratic, independent centrist and communist parties. The German Communist Party grew out of the German Marxist workers’ party.

If this is the model, then a Marxist party is a halfway house on the road to a Communist Party. All this condemnation of “halfway houses” is an appeal to emotion which obscures the real issue. What kind of halfway house party is best? My argument is that the CMP should campaign for an international revolutionary communist party, not a national Marxist halfway house party.

Halfway Marxist
Halfway Marxist

Two years

Peter Manson states that the only future for the CMP is to merge with the CPGB. The latter “exists already as a campaign for a Marxist party” (‘Where now for the CMP?’ May 31).

Peter suggests, in hindsight, that the founding conference of the CMP was a folly with next to no impact and no forward momentum. He forgets to mention that it represented not just dissatisfaction with a left presently atomised into antagonistic, isolated and powerless small groups and individuals, but also a collective commitment to a struggle for a Marxist understanding of the world free from social democratic and Stalinist forms of consciousness and behaviour. If Peter thought this could be achieved in less than a year, then he is hugely optimistic and unrealistically impatient. I am sorry he has become disillusioned so quickly.

In order to achieve the trust required for a campaign to take off, members need to make a priority of leading study groups, initiating friendly discussion and creating safe environments for critical reflection.

Peter writes as if he does not think it is possible to create a lively intellectual culture amongst Marxists and that they are doomed forever to be confused and directionless. He may be right. The combined influence of Stalinism and social democracy may have destroyed all possibility of Marxists learning from each other. On the other hand, I suspect this is an appearance based on feelings of despair, frustration and hopelessness.

It is obviously true that a Marxist party cannot come into being when there are few people with an interest in studying Marxist literature. It is also unlikely to arise if there is a small group of complacent individuals with knowledge, but an unwillingness to develop theory and its application. These facts may aptly characterise what passes for the organised left in Britain, but do not apply either to CMP or CPGB members.

Peter is correct that any serious campaign requires a leadership free from petty manoeuvrings of a bureaucratic nature. This includes a leadership unwilling to destroy positive initiatives such as the CMP if they are unable to dominate them.

I would add that leaders also need to be fully committed to developing themselves through teaching and learning from Marxist literature. If they can do this whilst continuing friendly debate with leftwing individuals (and organising support and solidarity with workers in struggle), then the campaign will inevitably grow, attract new members and within a few years be able to give birth to a Marxist party with an international character.

Two years
Two years

Defining terms

Peter Manson’s comments about the state of development of the CMP would be all very well if they presented an accurate picture (‘Where now for CMP?’ and ‘It has to go’, May 31; ‘Campaigning with Marxist teeth’, June 14). But they do not.

What is wrong with Manson’s comments? Simple: he characterises the CMP as a fully-formed organisation that, he asserts, isn’t performing as well as might be hoped. This is due to a terminological confusion of which I too have been guilty. That is to say, the November 2006 conference was essentially an inauguration, not a founding. The founding of the CMP will take place at the constitutional recall conference duly organised for June 23, according to the decision last November.

You can argue the semantics if you like, but this point is neither terminological nor pettifogging. The results of the November conference can be summed up as: (1) a declaration of principles; and (2) a statement of intent to found the campaign to work in the light of those principles.

Until duly constituted at a constitutional recall conference, the CMP could therefore only be said to exist on an ad hoc basis, and all ‘committee members’ to be volunteers holding ‘posts’ pro tem until that constitutional recall conference moved the CMP from ad hoc to duly constituted by popular vote. These are the basic principles of democratic free association, are they not?

Defining terms
Defining terms

Obsession

In his article ‘Where now for CMP?’ (May 31) Peter Manson identified members of the Campaign for a Marxist Party (presumably non-CPGB members!) with Bakunin and a campaign for anarcho-bureaucracy.

Some of us objected. He now accuses the objectors of being “thin-skinned” and not used to “robust debate”. We are like the gentle dolphins of the deep, compared to the sharks of the CPGB with their ferocious Marxist teeth.

This is like adding insult to injury. I think it is important, far more important than the CPGB’s obsession with “halfway houses”, to be clear about where the boundary lies between “fraternal criticism” and downright slander. We are after all trying to form a new type of party - open, democratic and comradely - in contrast to the bureaucratic centralism of the normal left groups, where “robust debate” usually means bullying downwards from the central leadership and the local hacks. In my view we should stamp out any attempts at personal abuse or macho arm-wrestling - using “Marxist teeth” where necessary.

Another method used by Peter Manson and his CPGB comrades is constant repetition. If I have read or heard some of the points he and his comrades make once, I have heard them 50 times. They become like mantras or Chinese torture. For example, they complain that the Democratic Socialist Alliance dominates the CMP ‘committee’. The reason for this is quite simple. The ‘committee’ consists of comrades who volunteered to do various jobs at the November 4 conference. DSA comrades volunteered to do jobs without any opposition; CPGB comrades did not volunteer. Whose fault was that? There was no DSA conspiracy because the DSA is an alliance of independent socialists, not a democratic centralist organisation. We were members of the Socialist Alliance, as were the CPGB.

Another repeated complaint of the CPGB concerns the CMP’s first members’ meeting in London in March. First of all, a point not mentioned by the CPGB - why London? Some comrades wanted it held in Glasgow, where we have more members and supporters. But it was felt that London was important as the capital and it would give the CPGB a better opportunity to attend. The same arguments apply to the June 23 conference in London.

Phil Sharpe was chosen as the speaker, complain the CPGB. Well, Phil Sharpe volunteered to do some work on the question of programme, which we had all voted was important. He had done some work and he was invited to present his arguments. What is wrong with that? Comrades were of course at liberty to discuss the points he made. We were opening up the whole question of programme for debate, not closing it down by saying Phil’s conclusions were the last words or that they represented the views of the CMP.

Peter Manson complains that the meeting was badly attended. Well, where were the CPGB comrades? They were attending Steve Freeman’s “halfway house”, the new Socialist Alliance, which had a meeting up the road at the same time.

Obsession
Obsession

Defending Loach

In his article ‘The usable past of left republicanism’, Jim Creegan states that I “would have to agree that Ken Loach is using his fictional rebel band to depict at least some important aspects of a bigger story, that of the tan war and the split over the treaty” (Weekly Worker June 14). The key word here is “some”.

The problem with Jim’s original article (‘Ken Loach’s use of Irish history’, April 19) and his response to my response (‘Coherent strategy’, May 25), in relation to The wind that shakes the barley, is that he overstates his case. Loach’s film nowhere claims that the whole anti-treaty IRA was socialist. Because Jim is so preoccupied with conflating the arguments depicted in the film with the actual/historical anti-treaty IRA per se, he fails to understand what Loach is doing.

Essentially, Loach is trying to show that the treaty represented the triumph of the national bourgeoisie and the only basis on which it could be fought was a socialist basis. Loach doesn’t claim in the film that it actually was fought on a socialist basis. Jeez, Jim, give the guy some credit for knowing this!

Moreover, it is important to understand that Loach is not making a Marxist documentary on the period, but a film for cinematic release to a general audience. I have watched the film several times and showed it to several classes of mine - international students in an undergraduate course and adult New Zealanders in a community education course. The main political lesson they have learned from the film is that unless a national liberation struggle is centred on the working class and rural poor - or unless the working class leads the struggle - the result will be the reproduction of class inequality within a new political state. I think that’s a pretty good lesson to learn from a movie. None of them got any message that the entire anti-treaty IRA was socialist. I think Jim’s antenna is just being over-sensitive.

Moreover, as I said in my article-reply to Jim, I also think parts of the film are a bit clumsy. It would have been easier or more natural to introduce the class question into the film through looking at other events during this period, such as the Limerick soviet, either of the general strikes or any of the other class battles (many of which involved people who were in the IRA and sided against the treaty), but I assume that budgetary constraints ruled out such an option.

I will deal with Jim’s points on James Connolly’s strategy in a future article, and so for now will just make one point. Jim says he is persuaded by Irish SWP leader Kieran Allen’s 1990 argument that Connolly’s world collapsed in 1914 and that this is what led Connolly to insurrection. Unfortunately, Jim does not understand that the Irish SWP view of Connolly changes, depending on what that organisation is up to at any point in time. In that sense, Allen’s book tells us more about the Irish SWP than about Connolly.

Allen and his organisation sat out almost three decades of imperialist armed occupation of the six counties without so much as throwing a rock. In several elections in the north over the past few years they have been part of electoral alliances which don’t even mention the imperialist armed presence, much less call for its withdrawal.

I would suggest that such an economistic-opportunist organisation is very unlikely to have much understanding of the revolutionary course charted by Connolly for Irish national liberation and socialist revolution.

Defending Loach
Defending Loach

Tactical error

Jim Creegan makes a number of excellent points concerning Connolly’s leading the Irish Citizen Army into action during the 1916 rising. I have come to believe that Connolly’s decision may have represented one of the great tactical errors of his career as a Marxist in Ireland; one which his death prevented him from having set right.

Connolly’s writings prior to the rising consistently championed the independent mobilisation of the revolutionary forces of the working class within the struggle for national liberation and, regardless of what may have been his intent, the ultimate impact of his actions tended, instead, to pull Irish working class revolutionaries into the ranks of the republican movement rather than provide for the further development of an independent republican socialist movement in Ireland.

I believe Creegan has grasped the basis for this decision: Connolly’s desperation in attempting to set an example for European workers to turn away from the fraternal bloodletting of World War I and turn their guns on their real oppressors, be they foreign imperialists or domestic capitalists.

Had the Irish Republican Brotherhood not become alarmed by indications that Connolly was prepared to lead the ICA out alone, potentially wresting the mantle of republicanism from them, and pressed him into an alliance, the subsequent history of the Irish revolutionary movement might have unfolded in a very different manner than it did.

Tactical error
Tactical error