Letters

Numbers game

The so-called 40% rule would be a democratically agreed limit on the power of the absolute majority block vote (AMBV). If the CPGB has 51% or more of the total membership, then the CPGB Provisional Central Committee can decide the outcome of all CMP votes at any meeting on everything. When we attend a CMP conference, everything would already have been decided at the previous week’s PCC meeting.

This would not be healthy for CMP democracy or a good way to build confidence in the CMP. It seems that the CPGB aggregate agreed with this and claimed they were not intending to “take over” the CMP. That is what the AMBV means. The CPGB aggregate should be supporting a limitation, not waging an all-out war against it - leaving itself open to the charge of double talk.

Numbers game
Numbers game

Police harassment

On Saturday September 1, Newcastle activists gathered at Grey’s Monument for a rally for democratic rights.

In recent months there has been increasing attention from the police towards political activity on the streets of Newcastle, centring on council regulations regarding collections of money. Whilst activists point to clear exemptions under sections 2 and 17 of the regulations for collections taken at a street meeting, police have regularly demanded names, addresses and dates of birth of activists under threat of arrest, have issued formal warnings to two members of Tyneside Stop the War, and on two occasions have arrested supporters of the Revolutionary Communist Group and seized money and collecting tins, which have still not been returned.

Whilst the police demand that political groups should obtain permits from the council, the council has stated in writing that permits will not be granted to collections for political purposes.

There is a long tradition of political activity at Grey’s Monument, but this is now under threat. One side of the monument has been privatised and fenced off in the last year as a seating area for a cafe, and now the police are trying to restrict political activity in the remaining area.

One of the activists concerned, Daniel Matthews, commented: “Trying to cut off funds necessary for effective campaign work is censorship by the back door, an attempt to drive political activity off the streets of Newcastle. What we are experiencing currently is only a small part of the picture. With ID cards, immigration prisons and so-called ‘anti-terror’ laws which are being used to terrorise whole communities, the Labour government seems intent on silencing all opposition.”

The rally was described by organisers as a positive show of unity against these attacks on democratic rights, which drew a lot of support from local people. Stalls were held by members and supporters of the Revolutionary Communist Group and its newspaper Fight Racism, Fight Imperialism, Tyneside Stop the War, Tyneside East Timor Solidarity Campaign, Tyneside Community Action for Refugees and other activists, all collecting money openly.

Support was also expressed by local members of the CPGB-ML and the Socialist Party. The police stayed well away from the event, not even sending a van to monitor the square, as they do on many Saturdays.

On Monday September 3, Tom Vickers, a supporter of Fight Racism, Fight Imperialism, attended bail following his arrest on July 28 on a charge of ‘obstructing a police officer’. He was released from bail without charge and told that he would receive a summons in the post. Tom commented: “I was arrested as I tried to explain the legal advice we had received to the police, that it was unlawful for them to seize donations. Since the first arrest for collecting money in January no summons has ever been issued. Clearly the police know as well as we do that they would get nowhere in court, but are using the regulations on collecting as an excuse to harass and intimidate activists on a regular basis.”

Police harassment
Police harassment

Taken apart

In regard to Jack Conrad’s article, ‘Frederick Engels and nature’s dialectic’ (August 30), you might like to visit my site, where these tired old ideas have been systematically taken apart - and from a Marxist angle (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l).

My attack constitutes a far, far more serious assault on this Hermetic theory than any other that has been launched against it (including the few you mention) in the entire history of our movement. Don’t believe me? Then you are in for a big surprise. To date, no-one has been able to argue successfully against my criticisms.

Taken apart

Necessary splits

John Antill (Letters, August 30) writes: “When the working class moves to take power it acts like an army and as such it can only have one general if it is to succeed ... How is the working class to be convinced and then led into battle to victory if there is more than one Communist Party? The communists are supposed to be the vanguard, but as matters stand they have let down the working class by being divided amongst themselves.”

If this was a pre-revolutionary period you would witness the predominance of a single party, and its hegemony would be a direct result of the confidence that the working class would entrust in it. This is about class struggle and all you have to do is look at the Bolshevik Party to appreciate the fact that parties come into existence through a process of splits and fusions, as ostensible revolutionary organisations, their programmes and even their leaders are not necessarily all of one mind and purpose.

John continues: “There can be, there must be, only one Communist Party if socialism is to be won.” We are not in the period where there are even, in the Marxist sense, communist parties. Rather, there are assortments of (reversible) communist propaganda groups, disunited because the objective conditions that would force those among them to unite (and split, and even dissolve) simply aren’t here yet.

John says: “The first step is convincing the working class that it can seize power and advance to socialism ...” Gee, I wish it were that easy. Lenin once said that a blow to a worker’s skull from a cop’s baton can be more convincing than all the lecturing from the party can accomplish. The working class will follow the party that it recognises was ‘right all along’, and this can come only from painful experience. It’s the working class who will choose the party, and not the other way around.

The working class hears, though it hasn’t yet moved, and this has something to do with the instinctive discipline that’s engrained within the class.

To lead the class struggle there must be a struggle to lead, and until this happens you are not going to see a unified revolutionary communist party, prepared to lead the working class to social, political, economic and state power.

Necessary splits
Necessary splits

Irrelevance

The British left is exactly as it appears: an irrelevance, a joke that has ceased to be funny. Serious communists should look to the third world, to the experiences and writings of people who are actually striving for revolution, to Maoism. The experience of the Nepali Maoists, of the Indian Naxalites, of the Shining Path of Peru, of the Filipino Maoists, is worth a million times more than any worthless British Marxism that has no successes.

Why is it there has never been a single Trotskyist revolution or success, not even a small insurrection - nothing? Yet, at the same time, Trotskyism has near hegemony in Britain amongst the left and in academia. Genuine communists must realise that the Trotskyist hegemony in Britain is a way to ignore genuine third world communist struggle by dismissing them as ‘Stalinist’ (whatever the hell that means).

The CPGB, AWL, Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Party, Respect, Fifth International (I thought the Fourth International was small) and other Trotskyist boy scout internationals are political failures. I predict with confidence that the Campaign for a Marxist Party will also be a political failure, and it is not worth wasting time over.

I accuse the British left of irrelevance, and also of a mild form of racism. Racism because the British left do not believe that they have anything to learn from the third world, yet they believe they can preach to those in the third world about how to make a revolution. The Maoists are revolutionary in action, whereas the British left is revolutionary in books. It is impossible to make a revolution without realising this: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

Irrelevance

Shit stirring?

Two letters in last week’s issue of this paper take the CPGB to task for its “undemocratic demand” that the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty send only the speaker that we specified “to speak on its behalf” at our recent Communist University (Letters, August 30 - Barney Higgins and Pete Burton respectively).

Comrade Higgins’s peevish little snipe is not really worth commenting on other than to note that his tone suggests he is of that part of our reading periphery that sit and seethe through every Weekly Worker, looking for the opportunity to express solidarity with this or that sect when we confront and expose its crass sectarianism. It takes all sorts ...

Of more interest - precisely because he is an AWL member and generally a comrade not characterised by the snarling hostility to the rest of the left synonymous with some of its central cadre - is Peter Burton’s short letter. The comrade asks us: “Would any organisation on the left - including the CPGB - let another organisation determine who is sent to speak on its behalf? Get real!”

In general, of course not. But then we precisely did not approach David Broder - a prominent comrade of the AWL’s substantial, but minority bloc that opposes the majority’s disgraceful refusal to raise in any form the demand for withdrawal of troops from Iraq - to speak on behalf of the AWL.

We extended an invite to Broder because he does not support this stance - we made this abundantly clear from the beginning. Nor were we on this occasion inviting the AWL “as an organisation” to debate, as Martin Thomas claims (www.workersliberty.org/node/8970#comment).

This spat has starkly revealed two things. First, the constricted limits of real AWL democracy. Laughably, comrades such as Paul Hampton rail against the CPGB for wanting to “shit-stir” for actions which should be perfectly legitimate from the point of view of working class democracy ... and which the AWL has been ‘guilty’ of in the past in relation to the CPGB! Let me remind them.

A number of AWL comrades attended the second annual Communist University of Wales in June 2004. There, the comrades contributed to sharp debates that were then raging inside the CPGB itself, including the correct attitudes to the possibility of allying with reactionary elements against the occupation of Iraq and Respect. In a debate between myself (representing the CPGB majority) and Cameron Richards of the minority Red Platform grouping in our organisation, they heard me describe the RP’s stance as “sectarian and misguided”. They heard comrade Richards characterise “the programme of engaging with the so-called muslim community” as “not only demeaning”, but positively dangerous in that it “further alienated the white working class”.

AWL reporting on the event identified Tina Becker and myself as proponents of a “reactionary ... lesser-evil position” in relation to political islam. “Fortunately”, the AWL comrade noted, “Mike Macnair and Cameron Richards ... stressed that the choice was not between islamists and occupation, that support for the workers against both poles was possible.”

And the AWL follow-up? A personal invite to Mike Macnair to debate the related issue of the nature of contemporary imperialism at the organisation’s 2004 school - a subject on which the group identified (probably incorrectly) that Mike would have a minority position within our organisation. As we have also noted, we have previously invited specific AWL speakers because of their controversial minority views inside their own organisation - specifically Sean Matgamna to Communist University 2004 to defend his self-designation as a “Zionist”.

We regard this as perfectly normal. We raised no objection whatsoever to comrade Macnair attending the AWL meeting to expound his views. Indeed, neither did the AWL leadership to our direct invite to comrade Matgamna. Which leads us - neatly - to the second fact that has been illustrated by the AWL’s hysterical reaction to the prospect of a member of its Iraq occupation minority speaking on a platform provided by the CPGB.

Despite David Broder’s claim (or perhaps forlorn hope is more accurate) that the division lines in the AWL on Iraq are no more than “tactical” nuances, this is a fundamental issue of principle. More experienced cadre in the group are well aware of this and have sought to minimise potential damage by limiting the public exposure of the debate and by attempting to demonise the organisation that campaigns for transparency and clear lines of political demarcation on such questions in the workers’ movement - the CPGB.

Shit stirring?
Shit stirring?

Hysterical

It was with great interest that I read Mark Fischer’s article about how the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty ducked out of a debate on Iraq and its Stalinist insistence that David Broder was not allowed to take part in such a debate (‘Coming home to roost’, August 30). I have posted the following contribution on the AWL’s website in response to Sean Matgamna’s absurd and hysterical article on the subject:

The reply by Sean Matgamna, ‘An open letter to a confused anti-imperialist’, is simply embarrassing. Why the need for personal abuse - Jack Conrad’s ‘beautiful mind’, etc? Does this add to the argument or posing as a ‘friend’ of the CPGB in the AWL? What purpose to these silly games other than as a diversion?

The argument was about calling and campaigning for troops out of Iraq. No more and no less. The question of Afghanistan and who supported what is neither here nor there. I didn’t follow the CPGB/The Leninist’s position on Afghanistan 25 years ago, but I am aware that unlike the AWL they didn’t support the mujahedin and political islam!

I can give my position if that helps. I opposed the invasion of Soviet troops but opposed calls for them to withdraw. The overthrow of the monarchy was an attempt to install a regime based on liberal, middle class elements in the cities. The Soviet Union didn’t wish a reactionary feudal regime to come to power for geo-political reasons and intervened to support its friends in Afghanistan. Given the choice between support for the United States and its allies in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan - because that was who the main backers of the mujahedin were - then, of course, one backed the regime in Kabul. Al Qa’eda and the Taliban incidentally were formed by the Saudis and the Pakistani secret service.

But what has this little diversion got to do with Iraq? Equally irrelevant is the history of the CPGB, as opposed to the Weekly Worker/CPGB. We all know the crimes of Stalinism, but my understanding, not being a member, is that the present CPGB rejects that history, including, I would assume, both the third period and the instructions to the German CP to do nothing on the rise to power of Hitler.

But Iraq is the issue that Sean tries to duck. A country where upwards of one million people have been killed already. It is a basic principle of socialists that we support self-determination of peoples. How can this possibly be squared with the invasion by the US in its pursuit of the control of oil? The ‘bloodbath’ theory of colonialism and imperialism - that, once having occupied a country, then that occupation must be supported for fear of something worse - was the traditional standby of social democratic apologists for colonialism. It is no coincidence that the AWL has adopted it in its search for a third way.

And to argue that the CPGB ducked a debate with the AWL on Iraq when they specifically invited David Broder to such a debate is absurd. Why is the AWL fearful of a supporter of a minority position within the organisation taking part in a public debate?

Hysterical
Hysterical