Letters

Sexless soviets

Are we to conclude that Igor is getting all the sex he wants now that the Soviet Union is no more?

Sexless soviets

Squeaky-clean

Following a fairly unfruitful discussion on the UK Left Network email list, Simon Keller seems vexed by the idea that the International Bolshevik Tendency may have a less than squeaky-clean record when it comes to the Socialist Labour Party and its bureaucratic regime of ‘voidings’, bans and proscriptions (Letters, July 26).

Comrade Keller asks how it is possible for the Weekly Worker - in its report of the SLP’s December 1997 conference - to describe the IBT as part of the “democratic opposition” to the Scargill bureaucracy, if “only a few months earlier” it had been “alibying the witch-hunt”.

Quite simple really. The fact is that the IBT maintained a profoundly ambivalent attitude towards the witch-hunt - sometimes staying quiet, sometimes speaking out. At the time, Scargill’s chief witch-hunters were the wretched Fourth International Supporters Caucus (Fisc), primarily the now thankfully forgotten Brian Heron and Patrick Sikorski. Naturally, their principal target was the CPGB, which had tried to mount an organised rebellion against the Labour-type anti-communist regime.

And what was the IBT doing during the ‘great terror’? Why, it was pretending to have dissolved its organisation, masquerading as the ‘loyalist’ Marxist Bulletin non-faction faction, and then hypocritically lecturing the CPGB about why it should do the same. Hence the IBT’s dreary 1917 journal said of the CPGB that the “time, resources and energy required to maintain a separate organisation and publish a weekly press could be better spent getting the SLP off the ground” - and even, believe it or not, “the internal life of the SLP is on the whole quite open and democratic” (No18, 1996).

When the SLP Democratic Platform was set up in 1997, it was picketed by supporters of the leadership, warning that anyone who took part would be guilty of “factionalism”. However, the Scargillites were joined in their condemnation by the IBT, who described the Democratic Platform as an “anti-SLP lash-up”. Such language, needless to say, was virtually identical to the sort of invective regularly deployed by the Fiscites (although, ironically, within a year the IBT had walked out of the SLP).

Yes, the sheer force of events dragged the IBT into outright opposition. And, yes again, individual members of the IBT spoke out at various times against the ‘voidings’, the closing of dissident branches and so on. But that organisation’s whole history in the SLP had been to stubbornly oppose any united fightback.

Squeaky-clean

Health problems

I feel bound to respond to a few points in Simon Wells’ article, ‘Debating programme’ (July 26). To say that privatised schools or hospitals won’t close if they fail to make a profit is quite clearly wrong and perhaps points to a possibility that the capitalist rulers might have ‘humanity’ or something because “the provision of those services is based on need”.

With what craziness should I begin? What do you think the recent spate of closures across the national health service means? Why were there closures and job losses? While it’s not an actual market that is causing this, it is most certainly the marketisation of the service. Capitalists, on making an investment, only want profits. You should know that if you are really the CPGB.

In actual fact, if you knew anything about the educational ‘academies’ (eight to open soon in Birmingham), you might know that there are no contingency plans for a company running an academy going bankrupt: perhaps the Tory-Lib coalition on the city council agree with that idea of yours.

“Based on need”, yes, but whose need? The needs of the bourgeoisie, of course! Free education and other ‘reforms’ came after World War II, partly in order to head off demands for further socialisation, such as taking control of the means of production (though I am not sure that was on the cards) and were done in a way that they benefited the capitalists in a shattered economy.

I am glad that I am not at your draft programme discussions!

Health problems
Health problems

Unbelievable!

Michael Little’s reply (Letters, July 26) to my previous letter imagined I’ve been misled by lies and carry Stalinist baggage after being terribly hurt.

Unbelievable! I’ve read a lot of Trotsky, but nothing of Stalin, and I’m very familiar with the 57 varieties of Trotskyists. I don’t know which variant encourages him to think I’m an “anti-communist” who “lashes out”, “dribbles” and “babbles”!

He wrongly imagines the one and true party will be totally different to all the others. He imagines ‘the party’ will perfectly reflect the working class, while dozens of other parties will reflect either one or the other classes. The Bolsheviks lifted ‘All power to the soviets’ from another party, then brutally crushed those at Kronstadt who raised the slogan again. What was the enormous difference between Lenin’s, Trotsky’s and Stalin’s position on this?

One of Michael Little’s letters talked about fighting not only imperialism, but reactionary anti-imperialism that would eventually murder socialist revolutionaries. The forces of Nestor Mahkno did just this during the Russian Revolution.

Unbelievable!
Unbelievable!

End of religion

Bob Harding is correct to note that Marxism appears to many workers as a religion. Certainly anyone who reads Soviet-influenced literature on dialectics and historical materialism will be repelled by a mystical doctrine, aspects of which were intended to be learned by rote and recited as dogmatic statements of belief.

Bob, however, forgets that this nonsense has been challenged and rejected. Students of Marx’s political economy may disagree concerning the truth of the labour theory of value, but they are unlikely to mistake this for religious doctrine.

It is also correct to suggest that a Stalinised left has fossilised the notion of ‘the party’. The party as an organisation that denies, distorts and attempts to suppress both the intellectual development and the subjectivity of its members in order to advance the interests of a ruling elite is also a product of Stalinism. The leadership of an organisation that expects its members to be uncritically devoted to its structures and discipline is not Marxist.

But Bob also forgets that many Marxists today reject this model of organisation. Some of them are struggling to create a campaign that will support workers and intellectuals to think creatively about the nature of a Marxist party in a post-Stalinist future.

End of religion
End of religion

Facile abuse

Why publish such facile abuse as the letter from ‘Igor’ (July 26)? Just because it allegedly comes from Russia doesn’t make it valid comment.

If you talk to people aged over 35 from eastern Europe who remember life under ‘formerly existing socialism’, they will speak nostalgically of the lack of social pressures: everyone had a secure job, free housing, healthcare, education to university level, at least one month’s holiday, cheap transport ...

Today, under capitalism, the criminal mafia runs amok, they have drugs and alcoholism, pimps and gangsters are running most of the countries, and even families from professional classes sell their daughters into prostitution just to make ends meet.

Is it ‘Stalinist’ to believe that the Soviet era was better? I don’t think so.

Facile abuse

No shock

A year ago (Letters, May 11 2006) I quoted Gordon Downie in a 2004 interview: “Given that the proletariat are themselves a product of capital, and represent a low revolutionary potential, I would advocate a model along the lines proposed by Isaac Deutscher and others, in which a radical intellectual vanguard guides this process through enlightened leadership. No current organisation of the left dare advocate such a programme publicly, because of its Stalinist and Maoist overtones.”

My letter then asked Gordon whether he still agreed with this statement, but unfortunately as yet he’s been unable to come up with an answer. And, although now Gordon sniffily compares the Rotten Elements with critics of Boulez and Stockhausen who vulgarly conflated aesthetics and politics, the Rotten Elements have uncovered the DOS networking his musical and political theory. Namely, that there’s a wi-fi connection between the deeply conservative, dangerous nonsense quoted above and Gordon’s neurotic, authoritarian approach toward humans producing sound.

Last week, Gordon got really strange when he claimed that improvisation was “inherently anti-democratic” and started banging on about the “verification of the creative process” and improvised musicians’ inability to be “made accountable for their creative actions and decisions”, offering “significant opportunities for deception, pretence and fakery” (‘Art and commodification’, July 26).

Now this is Philip K Dick paranoia! What frightens Gordon is that improvised music asks big questions about the kind of objects that have come to represent music-making - like the score, the record and the social relations contained within them. For all his whizz-bang claims for state of the art complexity, Gordon can’t and won’t dialectically turn over his fetishised record of music. Today, you can make a digital recording of some humans making music and then use software to produce a faithful ‘score’ of what they played. A fractal beauty some of it has too.

Lying on the horizon of this back-to-front process is the question of why we need, and why there is so much investment in, hearing music played exactly the same over and over again.

Gordon will criticise musical trends and composers, but those who ask bigger, more totalising questions of the reified relationships between the composer, the score, the conductor, the orchestra, the concert hall, the repertoire, the academy and so on have “a critical perspective that even a first-year music undergraduate would be embarrassed to utter”. Politics students tend to be shy of muttering the word ‘Marxism’ too, but that doesn’t make it wrong.

No shock
No shock

Muso hubris

James Turley got one basic thing wrong in his letter last week (July 26). There’s a difference between musicians sounding like someone and being influenced by them. Thus, Gordon Downie’s music is ridiculous because of its mediocre thraldom to Anton Webern: marimbas lobbed in, woodblocks, tom-tom, rasp of snare, piano note, lone horn. It all meets, pisses off, collides along micro-dramatically, second time farce enough. In contrast, Derek Bailey was influenced by many, but was always able musically to be Derek Bailey. Which is not as easy as it sounds.

Similarly, but spectacularly more inappropriately, the increasingly wearisome Gordon Downie argues my suggestion that his music sounds like an Anton Webern tribute band is “akin to suggesting that what Marx wrote in 1876 is not relevant to conditions in 2007”. This verbiage-mangling of logic and hubris is all we’re going to get out of Gordon.

Gordon calls the Rotten Elements “light-hearted and cheerful”. He’s right; how could we take seriously the old Stalinist apocalyptic rhetorical trick Gordon employed at the end of his article last week that “any discussion” of the “supersession” of Gordon Downie/Anton Webern’s music is “counterrevolutionary and reactionary”?

Muso hubris
Muso hubris

Art vanguard

So thousands of working class homes are underwater and the Labour Party remains committed to building ‘cheap’ homes for the poorest on flood plains. Postal workers are involved in a dispute that is a gift for communists who want to expose the absurdity of the capitalist system, while Royal Mail has allowed its new competitors to cherry-pick the best parts of the business and struck a deal under which its employees will still be expected to deliver the mail that has been surrendered to the competition.

No doubt the CPGB has deemed involvement in the strike ‘economistic’ and beneath them, so that they can ponder the commodification of art rather than the issues that are currently affecting the working class they pompously proclaim themselves to be the vanguard of.

Art vanguard

We agree?

Peter Manson’s latest letter provides some clarification about the party project of the CPGB (July 26). Peter maintains that the CPGB is for uniting “where we can”. However, the terms of this unity still remain obscure. Apparently what is being proposed is unity around partyism and the model of this unity is the very establishment of the Campaign for a Marxist Party.

Consequently, Peter seems reluctant to address the question of how the CMP develops and grows. Dave Spencer and the Democratic Socialist Alliance proposed resolutions to address this important question at the recent CMP conference, but they did not receive an enthusiastic response. In other words, to the majority of the CMP - which is presently represented by the CPGB - it would seem that things are satisfactory.

The point being made is not that the majority established by the CPGB is a problem. Rather the issue is, what are the politics that enable the CMP to realise its maximum potential and actually facilitate the formation of a Marxist party? Dave has raised the issue of electoral alliances, and relations with non-aligned independents, and this is an important avenue that the CMP could explore. Unfortunately, the June 23 conference stalled this initiative because of the spectre currently stalking the CMP - the halfway house. Any attempt to get the CMP moving is being tested by our equivalent of political correctness.

Any relationship with green socialists, the Labour left and Permanent Revolution - or anything suggested by the DSA - is to be dismissed as a concession to the halfway house standpoint. In contrast, the standpoint of the CPGB is understood as not making any concessions to the halfway house approach, even if it involves organisational relations with populist groups like Respect.

My standpoint, which is not necessarily that of anyone else in the DSA, is outlined in the proposed draft programme. It asks the question about what do if developments arise that create the conditions for the formation of a genuine workers’ party. Do we abstain, or do we relate to this development? On this question, the CPGB is actually in agreement with me: they are for a principled intervention.

What is actually important is whether we effectively struggle for a Marxist programme within this new organisation, or whether we accommodate to what might be the prevailing reformist consciousness. Once again, the CPGB seem to agree with me on this point. However, an artificial difference has been created on what is essentially the mythical issue of a halfway house.

Why has this artificial difference been created? The answer is that the CPGB is desperate to discredit the proposed draft programme of the DSA. Peter maintains that the CPGB are happy for us to take part in the process of revision of their programme, and that will they be happy to consider proposals from others for the formation of a CMP programme. But apparently what is too dreadful to contemplate will be open and honest competition between rival programmes. Hence, the possible DSA programme has to be discredited by ‘any means necessary’.

What we have is a breakdown in trust, because at least half of the CMP - the CPGB - already consider that the struggle against opportunism begins in the CMP. The logic of this standpoint is that the CMP will only be truly purified and revolutionary when the opportunist minority are driven out, or at least have become silent. In other words, the CPGB only trust themselves.

The minority has been demonised as being opportunist, supporters of halfway houses, anti-democratic and against the principles of the CMP. Thus, we do not have factions that divide around particular issues and yet are united around the party project. On the contrary, we have the largest faction that considers the minority faction to be against the party perspective. How can such a suggestion of bad faith maintain a united CMP?

We agree?
We agree?