Letters

Preaching

As a member of the Socialist Workers Party since late 2004 my attention was recently drawn to your article, ‘What kind of “new left”’, by a comrade who has been on the left in the Labour Party (July 10 2003). I was obviously concerned by his idea that people I previously admired - Lindsey German and John Rees - would be championing the embrace of anti-gay groups, such as more reactionary religious groups. But from reading these transcripts I don’t think they said that at all.

Being against the “shibboleths” was not agreeing with anti-gay sentiment from ultra-orthodox members of the muslim community (as exists in the majority of religions). It was, and is, understanding that the major victims of the war on terror are Middle Eastern people, a majority from islamic backgrounds, who are scapegoats for the next stage of western imperialism.

Engaging with people from Middle Eastern groups of islamic heritage - some progressive, some moderate and some reactionary - will always contain contradictions, just as it does, for example, with catholic members of Amnesty International, whose clergy denounces abortion or homosexuality as sin. The socialist will always stand for gay and lesbian rights, and never hides this position, yet understands that real progressive change comes from mass support.

Unity on opposition to imperialist war invites all to more broadly comprehend the oppression of ‘free market’ capitalism and its necessary divisions of working people. Allowing anti-war people with perhaps sexually suppressive views to join in protest is indeed vexing, but it holds true to the basic socialist tenet that so much of our class derision is imposed by our alienation from each other, either via petty competition or searching for a faux moral superiority (religiously) in the absence of social equality.

Gay and lesbian rights are central to anyone on the left. Yet our broader political goals will not be achieved by preaching to the converted.

Preaching

Shocked

As an organisation that rightly rejects bourgeois society, surely joining in their rightwing media witch-hunt can only hurt us all. How are we to hold our heads up amongst the left after that?

Shocked

Sloganising

Sloganising

Defend Iran

In choosing its name, Hands Off the People of Iran has ditched defence of Iran as an oppressed nation. In the list of demands on Hopi’s website there is no mention of the defence of Iran. Question these omissions on Indymedia Ireland and you run the risk of being branded an apologist for the Iranian regime by Hopi’s supporters.

The defence of oppressed nations from imperialism by socialists has never meant support for the regimes controlling these nations. By implying that it does, Hopi makes a dangerous concession to imperialism. Socialists should ask themselves which name would Condoleezza Rice be happier with - ‘Hands Off Iran’ or ‘Hands Off the People of Iran’?

Defend Iran

Support CWU

We should all support the Communication Workers Union action against the post office. The significance of this fight cannot be underestimated. What is often forgotten is that the dispute is a product of neoliberal globalisation - in short the strategy of forcing the market onto every area of society. In a decision ignored by the media, the European commission has forced postal services in every EU country to open up to competition.

Multinationals are cherry-picking the easiest mail runs and driving postal services into the ground. The post office has to make a profit to compete, which has meant huge cuts in the service. Remember when there used to be two deliveries a day, when you didn’t need different stamps for different shaped letters? And now Sunday services are going out of the window.

Post office workers are threatened with job cuts and their pensions are at risk and they will be made to jump through all sorts of hoops to reduce costs. More junk mail, fewer post offices - it’s all about profit and we all have to support the fight for a public service. The recent RMT action shows that unions can fight for workers’ rights in the face of privatisation and deregulation, but wider solidarity is vital.

Support CWU
Support CWU

New Model Army

Although I’m now at an age where I’m more likely to take part in pensioners’ demonstrations than a youth movement, I can assure Tommy Teutel that I’m deadly serious (Letters, September 13).

In many working class communities the social relations that bound them together have now broken down. Several generations used to live in the same street, if not the same house. Now youngsters rarely see anyone older than their parents or teachers. And old people barricade themselves into their homes in fear of violent crime. We need to restore solidarity between the generations - thousands of young people marching on pensioners’ demonstrations; thousands of older people marching for a better deal for youth.

Arthur Lawrence writes of self-confident working class communities, but for many their confidence has been destroyed. With traditional industries gone, and with them trade union organisations, they struggle to survive by acting as casual labour, fiddling the benefits system and turning to petty crime. We need a new generation of agitators and organisers to rebuild working class confidence and combativity.

Considering that strong lager tastes like a cross between metal polish and syrup, there can be little pleasure in getting drunk on it. To me it seems more like a desperate attempt to escape from a harsh reality people feel they can’t change. And there are many things people can do with their leisure time other than get staggering drunk. Listening to the life stories and struggles of older people would be a start. I learned much of my socialism from my grandfather, a militant in the Yorkshire area of the National Union of Mineworkers. In my other grandfather’s house I read the Daily Herald and the Daily Worker and heard my grandmother’s stories of the general strike and her work at the Woolwich Labour Club. This is one of many activities a youth movement could organise to teach young people self-confidence and discipline and forge them into front-rank fighters. The Young Communist League, which I joined at 15, could have been such a movement, but it was destroyed by the Eurocommunists.

It is fashionable to deride puritanism, but without it the New Model Army would not have been built and Charles Stuart defeated. We now need our own New Model Army, of which a youth movement would be an integral part, to establish our class power. Its name would be whatever its members chose to call it.

New Model Army
New Model Army

Unmitigated

Comrade Terry Liddle gives us an interesting strategy for recruiting young people to a “disciplined, uniformed youth movement that will act as a proletarian self-defence force” (September 13). He gives us examples of some socialists, communists and progressives of the early 20th century, to justify the inclusion of prohibition as part of a socialist programme.

Terry is quite right that such luminaries did indeed advocate temperance in order to remedy the “devastation that alcoholism had created in working class families and communities”. Adopting the highest of moral standards, they observed a major social problem - the misuse of alcohol by a minority of the working class - and invoked a simple solution: prohibition. Unfortunately for them, history since then has shown that simple answers to complex problems are for simpletons! All attempts to impose prohibition have been unmitigated disasters, the worst one being in the USA back in the 20s. The most aggrieved and alienated victims of that misguided policy being the very proletarians who Terry hopes to represent.

If only these labour leaders had taken the trouble to read Marx and Engels and the Manifesto of the Communist Party. In their critique of “conservative, or bourgeois, socialism”, they warn us against “philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind” (my emphasis). In summation: a bunch of non-revolutionaries!

Terry’s vision of a movement “as hard as steel” might act as a recruiting sergeant for the Mormons or the Taliban, but it would destroy all chances of building the proletarian force needed to bring about a socialist society forever.

Unmitigated
Unmitigated

Weakest link

Two small corrections or additions to my recent series on ‘permanent revolution’ and associated questions.

The first is on ‘transitional demands’. In the first article in the series, I referred to the resolution On tactics of the 3rd Congress of the Comintern (1921). There is, in fact, a more immediate source. In Lenin’s Collected works Vol 42 (pp427-28) there is a draft resolution adopted at a meeting on November 20 1922 between Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek and Bukharin. It includes the propositions that: “3. The necessity of fighting for transition demands [and] subject to appropriate reservations making these demands dependent on concrete conditions of place and time should be stated explicitly and categorically in the national programmes ...”; and “4. The theoretical basis for all such transition or limited demands should be definitely stated in the general programme ...”

The footnotes indicate that the draft was slightly amended and adopted as a resolution of the congress. For some reason it does not appear in Theses, resolutions and manifestos of the first four congresses of the Third International (1980) or in the Marxist Internet Archive’s compilation of early Comintern material, though JT Murphy’s report of the Congress (which is available at the Marxist Internet Archive) referred briefly to the debate (Murphy understands “transition demands” as ‘minimum demands’).

I draw attention to this point not out of pedantry, but because it illustrates the danger of believing that ideas which appear peculiarly ‘Trotskyist’ (or in this case ‘orthodox’ Trotskyist) are in fact peculiarly Trotskyist, as opposed to being ideas of the early Comintern. In this case, in my opinion, the early Comintern leaders in 1922 were as wrong as Trotsky in 1938.

The second correction is on imperialism’s “weakest link”. I referred in a footnote to James D White’s argument in Lenin: the practice and theory of revolution that, contrary to a very widespread belief, this was not Lenin’s view. Professor White has kindly pointed me to the sources he cited for this point. Bukharin developed the argument, which is summed up as ‘The imperialist chain breaks at its weakest link’ at some length in Economics of the transition period (1920), chapter 11. Lenin’s marginal notes on his copy of the book were published in Russian in 1929. They are reproduced at the end of the translation of Bukharin’s book published by Bergman Publishers in 1971 (not, however, in the more recent translation by Tarbuck and Field). In particular, Bukharin wrote: “Therefore, the collapse of the capitalist world system began with the weakest systems in terms of political economy, with the least developed state capitalist organisations” (p165).

Lenin’s marginal note on this sentence in the Bukharin translation was: “Untrue: with ‘average weakness’. Without the granted height of capitalism it would not have happened.” Professor White in his book translates this as: “Untrue: with the moderately weak. Without a certain level of capitalism nothing would have happened here in Russia” (p166).

Bukharin wrote that “… the process of world revolution begins with the partial systems of the world economy which have a lower niveau [level] where the victory of the proletariat is easier but the crystallisation of new relationships is more difficult; the speed of the assault of the revolution is in inverse proportion to the maturity of capitalist relationships and the level of the model of revolution” (p167). Lenin’s marginal note on this passage was: “Risky: he should have said ‘not from the higher’ and ‘not direct proportion’.”

I don’t think that these marginal notes establish that Lenin never used the tag, ‘The imperialist chain broke at its weakest link’. Their disagreement with Bukharin is more limited than would be needed to show that. But they do show that if he did use it at some unrecorded meeting (it is not in the Collected works), he cannot have meant it in the sense that it has since been interpreted to mean: ie, the strategic primacy of the colonial revolution. In fact, even Stalin in Foundations of Leninism (1924) is also more cautious on this point than Bukharin’s formulations in Leninism (1940, pp20-22).

Of course, what Lenin thought is entirely secondary to the question to what the right answer is. Up to the fall of the Soviet bloc and the pro-capitalist evolution in China, it was not unreasonable to maintain the strong version of ‘The imperialist chain breaks at the weakest link’. After the fall, it is now clear, on the contrary, that revolutionary processes which do not involve a short-term breakthrough in the imperialist centres are driven towards bureaucratic degeneration and the eventual victory of capital. The lesson: we have to develop the international united action of the working class under capitalism, rather than hoping for a ‘socialist breakthrough’ in some single country somewhere in the world.

That means abandoning ‘The imperialist chain breaks at its weakest link’; and if it helps to know that the argument was Bukharin’s, rather than Lenin’s, professor White has done us a service.

Weakest link
Weakest link

Sharpe arguments

In his reply to Paul Smith’s letter that had been critical of the polemics between the CPGB and the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, Mark Fischer argues that polemic is an essential part of party-building (‘PC language and the fudging of differences’, September 20).

Mark seems to be claiming that the approach of science is infallible, because of the very fact that it is science. Not only that - he also argues that only the CPGB represent scientific truth among the competing forms of Marxism. An audacious claim indeed!

His comment about the need for “intellectual toughness, courage and boldness” represents a psychological approach - the resoluteness of party militants will resolve any actual or imaginary crisis; the determination of the cadre will realise scientific truths.

Real revolutionary partisanship can only be explained with advances in theory, the compass of developing principled practice. It is this truth that the CPGB want to obscure. At present only the Democratic Socialist Alliance has attempted to develop such a programme, subject to its own process of discussion and revision.

For the CPGB the issue of programme becomes sidelined, and instead the CMP is subject to the purity test of what type of party organisation we favour, because the implication is that only the Leninist model will advance the revolutionary process. The CPGB seems to be more concerned about its own version of heresy-hunting, which has become ever wider. First, it was the DSA, and then it widens to include Paul Smith and Matthew Jones. Who will be next - Ticktin himself?

It is time to end this destructive process, and instead to concentrate constructively on developing a programme that the CMP can use to convince working people and the left of the need for a genuine Marxist party. Only then can we convincingly argue that polemic is connected to scientific truth. For then theory will be about the advance of knowledge in order to advance the tasks of constructing communism, and partisanship will not be a primary, but a secondary aspect of the tasks of proletarian revolution.

Sharpe arguments
Sharpe arguments