Letters

Vulture

Bob Harding reduces the question of imperialism down to a cosy trade union analogy, but there is a difference between the two (Letters, July 5). Mao might not have been a working class leader, but he could teach Trotskyites a military lesson. He didn’t regard the Kuomintang as an unreliable ally, but fought separately and hovered like a vulture ready at all times to advance his own cause.

Vulture
Vulture

Find Marxists

I can sympathise with Dave Alton (Letters, July 5) trying to make sense of the world via the Weekly Worker. Unless you have followed the debate on the CMP blow by blow, it will be confusing, and if you have it will be just esoteric - more heat than light. The bun fight at the recent conference sounds like an unnecessary wrangle over an unnecessary constitution.

The trouble is that there are people who want to have a Marxist party, and there are those who think they already have one and are only waiting for to the rest wake up and sign up. That is unlikely, as there are too many accumulated reservations about the CPGB, not least in my view over its recurrent enthusiasms for projects on the left - Anti-Nazi League, Socialist Labour Party, Socialist Alliance, and now CMP.

There is a danger of confusing Marxism with the left. The latter covers a huge variety of radical moods and fads, single-issue groups and remnants of the old failed labour movement, perennial protesters and of course numerous sects who have learnt some Marxist phrases along the way. These cannot be reconstituted into a Marxist party. They are an obstacle. We should not be preoccupied with uniting the left.

The recipe for a Marxist party is to find the Marxists, popularise Marxist concepts and conduct serious discussion on their relevance today, win new forces and build roots in the working class.

I favour setting up open discussion forums with the aim of cutting across the existing organisational barriers, giving those genuinely interested in Marxism the opportunity to develop ideas.

Find Marxists
Find Marxists

Excuse me?

Bob Harding writes: “It’s not that Phil Kent isn’t principled about his Marxist theory, but that Marxism isn’t that principled. Whilst the pseudo-scientific posturing may prevent it re-evaluating its assumed values (and tendencies for betrayal), it is its underlying religious nature that causes its failings” (Letters, July 5).

Excuse me? On what basis do you characterise Marxism as having a religious nature? Perhaps you’re confusing Stalinism and Maoism (Chinese Stalinism), with their cultist tendencies, for Marxism, but Trotskyists see all varieties of Stalinism as running counter to Marxism. This is why Trotsky referred to Stalin as “the gravedigger of the revolution”. There are many who claim the pedigree of Marx and Engels only to betray the working class.

But this betrayal doesn’t stem from any fundamental flaw of Marxism, but rather from the fact that we’re dealing with class struggle, and not everyone winds up on the workers’ side of the class line. A Trotskyist (which really means a continuation of genuine Leninism) workers’ party - born out of the splits and fusions that are an inevitable part of the class struggle, politically and programmatically independent of the bourgeoisie, based upon democratic centralism and with a programme for bringing the working class to both social and economic hegemony over all of society - is the best insurance for minimising the betrayals of those who either can’t take the pressure or who were out from the very beginning to subvert the advance towards proletarian revolution.

Excuse me?
Excuse me?

Win and lose

David Walters (Letters, July 5) is very generous in his assessment of my article, ‘Connolly’s strategy and 1916’ (June 28). I also think the point he makes about the military aspect of the Easter rising is a fair one, although I think calling the rebels’ strategy of stationary positions “insane” is going too far.

It’s always vital to contextualise things and in 1916 the concept of fixed positions was the dominant military perspective. It was only as a result of the experience of 1916 that the Irish anti-imperialists realised that this was a hopeless way of fighting a modern imperialist army.

Remember, however, that Connolly actually gave lectures on street fighting, so he did expect the rebels to be doing more than simply sitting in the general post office and elsewhere awaiting bombardment.

The revolutionary leaders expected to turn out much larger numbers, despite MacNeill’s countermanding orders. They expected to have a very powerful ring of positions around the city centre that would hold off the Brits for quite some time, certainly long enough for risings elsewhere in Ireland to be triggered.

The unlocking of the 1916 witness statements a couple of years ago hopefully provides a treasure trove of research for those of us interested in understanding more of the actual nitty-gritty of the rising. So far only one book has been published on the basis of the 1916 statements and its author, Annie Ryan, says that there is much more material in these statements than she could fit in that book.

Meanwhile, it’s important to remember that, unfortunately, sometimes - indeed, too often - our side just happens to lose. It’s not always the result of sell-outs and crap strategies. Indeed, up until the revolution, we will probably lose far more often than we will win.

Win and lose
Win and lose

Commodified art

Chris Wilkins wryly and rather curiously suggests that my own creative work would achieve market success if it were combined with Reichian minimalism (Letters, June 28). But such a combination would be nonsensical from all aesthetico-technical considerations, primarily from the perspective of how each paradigm - of which they are each representatives - views the role of repetition.

Highly abstract work, of which my own is an instance, includes no literal repetition, and is based upon the employment of more or less rapid rates of change. Minimalist music, on the other hand, is based upon manifest repetition and the exploration of very slow rates of change. The mapping of one to the other would result, therefore, in considerable structural contradictions, whereby the manner in which surface-level incident was controlled would have no correspondence to lower-level structural organisation.

There are primarily two ways in which the paradigms could be combined. Firstly, unintentionally, whereby a composer’s incompetence or inexperience hides from them this incompatibility, and secondly, intentionally, whereby a composer deliberately seeks to exploit the absurdity that results from their combination for Dadaist or surrealist effect. Clearly, composers in the first category can claim motivation by the second category in order to mask their technical deficiencies and aesthetic misunderstandings, but such sleight of hand can never be verified.

Mr Wilkins further claims that I have a “detestation of any art that is capable of being reproduced and commodified by the capitalist market system”. In outline this is accurate, but I would rephrase this to emphasise my rejection of art that sacrifices the medium for market success. To achieve market success (ie, sell a lot of product or attract a big audience) any given cultural artefact will need to conform to certain priorities that are imposed by capital.

For aesthetic artefacts, this includes ease of comprehensibility, because to consume a cultural product is to understand it. Thus, cultural products that do not manifest this quality will be deemed harder to sell, a waste of marketing resources and a threat to profit margins, whether real or symbolic. Cultural products that do manifest such qualities, by using more or less familiar aesthetic and technical norms that aid ease of assimilation, will be easier to sell and market.

Thus, work that achieves market success can only do so by compromising the autonomy of the medium and by sacrificing complexity. Art that achieves market success is thus mediated art, and collaborates with capital, as it is more or less a product of it. And if a given cultural artefact that does not conform to market priorities is refused access to the networks of dissemination offered by mass marketing, the result is the de facto censorship of artefacts of this kind.

There will always be examples of cultural artefacts that attempt to straddle the border between these positions, and they are very common in our epoch. They are often invoked and celebrated by left apologists for the market, whose detestation for capital is only equalled by their detestation for work they deem elitist because it refuses to abide by those norms they consider are not a construction of capital, but a deformed and commercialised image of either genuine worker culture or some romanticised notion of human subjectivity.

At this point we can add a third category to the taxonomy enumerated earlier, in which a composer may combine otherwise incompatible paradigms in order to exploit the market advantages that may accrue from juxtaposing more accessible forms with less accessible forms. This strategy is given intellectual respectability by being labelled eclectic, crossover or postmodern. And a composer employing such a strategy may be conferred legitimacy by the left if, in addition, it is claimed that the strategy is driven by a desire for accessibility.

Commodified art
Commodified art

Market quotes

Gerry Downing writes that the Soviet Union’s “economic base, the planned economy, remained until 1991. The law of value was suppressed and production was not for the market but for the plan” (Letters, July 5).

So continues the myth that Russia was somehow on a stage towards socialism. Exchange value and the market remained and the worker had his surplus value extracted by a possessing class.

To quote Paresh Chattopadhyay: “The adherents of the non-capitalist tendency deny the capitalist character of Soviet labour on two grounds: the alleged absence of a labour market, and the existence of job security with full employment ... Labour-power as a commodity exists … whenever labour-power is sold by the labourer to an individual employer of labour-power, irrespective of the particular way its price is determined, administratively or spontaneously ...”

Paresh asserts that not only was there a market for labour in the USSR, but markets existed between the individual competing enterprises - competing capitals. He does, however, accept that it was a bastardised form of capitalism in the sense it was a “mobilised economy” - ie, a war economy that actually shared certain similarities with the US economy of World War II, and no-one except the far-right libertarians have ever described that as non-capitalist.

He adds that “the absence of the spontaneous market process in the economy … is clearly seen not only in the case of wartime economies of the so-called classical capitalism ... but also in the case of another ‘war economy in peace time’ - pre-war Germany of the late 1930s, showing striking similarities with the peacetime Soviet economy in the mode of its functioning ...”

Market quotes

Keep mouth shut

In his article ‘Unity and opportunism’, Peter Manson argues that the first step to a Marxist party is agreement with the CPGB’s understanding of democratic centralism: “By democratic centralism we mean, on the one side, the right of minorities to openly struggle to become the majority, including their right to speak out publicly against majority positions; on the other side, the duty of such minorities to unite behind agreed actions and strive to ensure their success. This can be summed up by the slogan, ‘For the right to criticise, for unity in action’” (Weekly Worker June 28).

I had thought that this slogan was developed by Lenin to explain the approach of communists to united fronts with reformists and that the Leninist understanding of the party in the imperialist epoch (ie, after the betrayal of social democracy at the outbreak of World War I) involves a higher level of unity than this. One of the consequences of this higher level of unity being that minorities do not have the “right to speak out publicly against majority positions”. I had thought this was accepted by virtually every organised political tendency claiming to be Marxist today.

Of course, this abstract understanding of the Leninist position is applied with all manner of bureaucratic centralist distortions, but that dichotomy between formally correct position and deformed application is also true for virtually every other aspect of politics as applied by ‘Marxists’, so is not an argument in itself for revising the Leninist position and reverting to a pre-imperialist-era understanding of party unity, as the CPGB appear to want to do.

The CPGB portray themselves as so different from all the “confessional sects” and yet they are laying down as a non-negotiable basis for political unity in a common party with anyone else their distinctive understanding of one aspect of the Marxist programme - the organisational form. Surely a case of the pot calling the kettle black, I would have thought.

Keep mouth shut

CMP confusion

As the tone of Barry Biddulph’s and Dave Spencer’s letters indicates, the Campaign for a Marxist Party conference on June 23 was an extraordinarily bad-tempered affair (Weekly Worker, July 5). But what does the content of the letters actually reveal about the role of the CPGB?

Dave’s main complaint is that a large number of CPGB members came along to the conference. Didn’t the Yorkshire organiser and magazine editor want a high turnout? What is wrong with the CPGB doing its bit to make that happen? Dave does point out that not everyone at the conference was a member of the CMP. I agree with Dave that only members of the CMP should really have been allowed to vote on the day. The problem is that at the CMP committee meeting that took place two weeks before the conference the committee decided to obstruct the membership applications from the CPGB that had already been received (I think they were ultimately approved) and to close the doors to further membership applications before the conference. As far as I know, almost all CPGB members present had already paid their membership dues. One comrade who had not yet joined tried to submit his application on the door. He was turned away.

Committee members were obviously terrified of a CPGB ‘takeover’ of the CMP - whatever that would mean. But to try and block a political manoeuvre, as they see it, by bureaucratic means is reminiscent of exactly the kind of sect behaviour Barry and Dave object to. Every previous meeting of the CMP has allowed supporters to join on the door. The CMP after all is a campaign. It is not a party or a proto-party. It is a relatively loose organisation - having no powers of discipline over its members - that brings together people working towards a specific and limited goal. In the case of the CMP, that goal is to campaign amongst socialist and working class activists for a Marxist party and to explore whether there is any basis amongst those who have joined the campaign to form such a party.

It simply was not appropriate for the committee of this campaign to impose a bureaucratic application procedure - without any consultation - that means members have to be vetted by the secretary and approved at a committee meeting. Thus no one can become a member until the committee next deigns to meet. It is a membership procedure, moreover, that its author, John Pearson, intends to use (as he made clear at conference) to exclude his old sparring partner, Steve Freeman. Interestingly, the procedure makes no provision for appealing against a rejection of membership by the committee.

The committee made no effort to place the procedure on the agenda of the conference to seek the wider approval of members. It is precisely because the committee was seen as behaving illegitimately that conference voted to scrap any membership requirement at all. I think most of those at the conference were members. And almost all the rest would have joined if the committee had encouraged them to.

Indeed the whole conference was very badly organised and run. The papers were simply a print-off of the motions and amendments as received by the secretary, with no attempt to organise them in a logical order - for instance, with motions and their amendments being placed together. This certainly left me mostly in dark about what was going on through much of the day.

Dave may be an experienced chair, but his constant stage whispers about the dark intentions of the CPGB did not inspire confidence in his impartiality. It is possible I was interrupting when Dave told me to shut up (I thought I was making a point of order), but the chair made it clear from the off that he saw all attempts to question the committee’s decisions about the conduct of conference as a frustrating plot by the CPGB.

Dave’s commentary on the voting on Matthew Jones’s motion does hint at a somewhat paranoid state of mind. Hands ‘mysteriously’ infiltrated by the CPGB are supposed to have appeared only when the vote was counted. I was able to see the whole room from my vantage point at the back and I have to say that I saw no difference between the first and second votes on the motion. Dave simply misread the balance of votes the first time round.

We now come to a crucial misunderstanding. Dave can see no difference between the behaviour of the CPGB and that of the SWP and Socialist Party in organisations they dominate. We can dismiss the comparison with Arthur Scargill and his 3,000 paper votes at the Socialist Labour Party conference. The CPGB only wants votes for those of its members who turn up - for real people that you would expect the CMP committee to be eager to recruit. However, the CPGB has never complained about socialist groups exercising their rights as a majority or dominant force, as long as they allow minorities the space to struggle to become a majority.

On the contrary, the CPGB’s critique of the SWP and Socialist Party is that they do not advance the politics they profess to believe in. Surely, the CMP has been launched precisely to challenge these groups to fight for Marxism rather than a variant of social democracy (and a fairly watered down variant at that). We don’t want them to advocate lowest-common-denominator politics that keeps everyone happy. Why would you expect the CPGB to behave in this way within the CMP?

The CPGB wanted to win its motion to define the Marxist politics of the CMP. Otherwise, we saw little point in remaining in the CMP. The overwhelming vote in favour is an indication of how far the CPGB has won the political argument against halfway houses.

Yes, as Barry points out, the CPGB did compromise - accepting amendments and accommodating the concerns of others - throughout the day. I see that as an indication of the good faith of the CPGB. The spirit of compromise extended to the committee slate that the leadership of the CPGB agreed with Hillel Ticktin. However, we certainly should think about making the committee - to be agreed at a recall conference - even more representative. Nor does presenting a slate to conference preclude others from nominating other candidates.

I think the CPGB did make a number of mistakes on the day - driven admittedly by the high degree of confusion. First, we should have pushed for the membership procedure to be overturned and for comrades to be allowed to join at the conference. Second, we should have voted for the business of conference to be completed rather than adjourned. The motion passed at the CMP launch conference on November 4 explicitly called for the recall conference (supposedly by May) to agree a new constitution. There would have been time on June 23 to discuss all the constitutional motions. Third, in the absence of a debate on all the constitutional options it was a mistake to try to push through the CPGB’s preferred committee structure. Voting for a new committee should have been to the temporary structure that was put in place on November 4.

Instead we are left with a committee that is not representative of the membership of the CMP and gives far too much weight to the Democratic Socialist Alliance. More to the point, it has not shown itself to be effective in pushing forward the CMP project.

Does the CMP have a viable future? The conference was not a particularly good omen. But the campaign does have a full agenda of political debate ahead of it. It is those political discussions that will ultimately determine whether the campaign is a success.

CMP confusion
CMP confusion

Sincerely wrong

Comrade Phil Sharpe is sincerely attempting to understand and engage with CPGB politics, as he demonstrated in his letter last week (July 5). But he has yet to grasp what the CPGB is trying to achieve in relation to the Socialist Workers Party.

He writes: “… the CPGB do effectively gloss over the extent and the effect of the opportunist degeneration of the SWP, in order to argue that the SWP could potentially constitute the basis of a hypothetical and future revolutionary unity.” First, let me say that it is unMarxist to discount the possibility that the core of a future revolutionary party might arise from a struggle within the SWP. For example, the current CPGB has its origins within the ‘official’ Communist Party, rotten though that was, and, rather obviously, we believe we have a role to play ourselves in a process of Marxist unity.

We cannot predict where the core of a Marxist party will come from, any more than we can predict the precise circumstances that will act as a trigger to bring such a party to fruition. But we can identify the present main obstacles to Marxist unity - and one of them most certainly is the SWP as currently constituted. For that reason, far from ‘glossing over’ the SWP’s opportunism, we ceaselessly struggle to expose and defeat it. The reason this battle cannot be avoided is because of the SWP’s influence, however modest - in the anti-war movement, amongst radical youth and on the far left as a whole. The SWP is able to take over and dominate any left initiative if it wishes to do so, and our task is to undermine the influence of opportunism by engaging with it wherever possible.

What is the source of that opportunism? Comrade Sharpe locates it firmly within an incorrect theory - primarily over globalisation, it seems. This cannot be correct. SWP “degeneration” did not begin with Alex Callinicos’s 2004 Anti-capitalist manifesto. Opportunism arises not primarily out of a faulty or inadequate theory (frequently it is the other way round - ‘theory’ is invented or adapted to excuse opportunist practice). It arises and constantly recurs as a result of the pressures of bourgeois society itself.

While an incorrect theory will inevitably lead to the adoption of incorrect tactics and even strategy, it does not necessarily lead to reformism. Take comrade Sharpe’s example of the theory of imperialism. He states that the SWP “adhere to it very dogmatically, and argue that capitalism is still primarily nation-based”. But it is perfectly possibly to argue that “capitalism is still primarily nation-based” (a phrase that is open to several interpretations) and remain a principled Marxist. Why should such a position necessarily entail the rejection of international revolution? As I have previously argued, differences over the nature of imperialism and globalisation (as with just about any point of view within Marxism) not only could but should be contained within the same party.

I did not state that the “main problem” with the SWP is its lack of democratic centralism, as comrade Sharpe claims. I specifically said that the left had to overcome the three evils of bureaucratism, disunity and opportunism and that “the struggle against each cannot be separated from the struggle against the other two” (‘Unity and opportunism’, June 28).

However, comrade Sharpe himself most certainly underplays the importance of democratic centralism. He referred to it as a “shibboleth of Leninists” at the May 26 Manchester day school organised by the Campaign for a Marxist Party. Which is presumably why he ludicrously rejects my definition of partyism as an “ultimatum”. I wrote: “The central point for partisans of genuine Marxist unity is not some narrow, confessional agreement [such as over the impact of globalisation], but partyism. Are our prospective partners prepared to … unite around democratic centralism in a Marxist party of the whole class, where contending views are fought out in the open?”

How on earth can that be construed as “ultimatism”? On what other basis should Marxists unite (apart from as “a sect around a particular line”, which comrade Sharpe denies he is advocating)?

Instead of democratic-centralist partyism, comrade Sharpe appears to be suggesting a vague “process of give and take” with which to approach groups like Permanent Revolution. He writes: “If the CMP conference had passed the DSA resolution calling for discussions with Permanent Revolution … we could have asked Permanent Revolution whether they would be prepared to argue for their ideas within the CMP.”

In fact the rejected Democratic Socialist Alliance motion did not call for discussions with PR. It called for the distribution (on an official or semi-official basis) of a document authored by comrade Sharpe, in which he advocates unity talks with those like PR whose analysis on such questions as globalisation he happens to agree with.

The CPGB favours discussions with PR or any other group that is prepared to accept principled unity, as outlined above. In fact I personally approached a senior PR comrade at the SWP’s Marxism school over the weekend. Despite the rejection of the DSA motion, I asked the comrade whether PR might be prepared to cooperate with the CMP. I am afraid that his response was not one of unbridled enthusiasm.

The CPGB also favours the “elaboration of theory” (as should be evident from a cursory glance at the Weekly Worker). But that is a task that can never be completed and it would be foolhardy to delay small concrete steps towards Marxist unity - such as a CMP-CPGB merger - on that basis.

Sincerely wrong
Sincerely wrong