Letters

Decomposition

Thanks for Stan Keable’s review of The kick inside, which was an accurate précis of the book’s contents (‘Hidden from history’, November 22).

My only mild criticism was I thought that Stan would have commented more on my assessment of the development of The Leninist trend. Stan says: “Stopping at the dissolution of the party in 1991, comrade Parker leaves until another day the transformation of the Leninist faction into the Provisional Central Committee and the tortuous struggle for revolutionary unity in a reforged party, amid the continuing decay of the old left.”

It is true that I stop at 1991, but I do give some pointers to why that struggle has precisely proved to be “torturous” for the CPGB PCC since then. My overall assessment of The Leninist (informed by interviews with comrades from The Leninist/CPGB, which were brutally frank and honest by the bland standards of the present-day left) was that the group distilled the experience of previous revolutionary oppositions into a situation where it was unable to have a real material impact.

Thus the comrades of The Leninist refused the semi-underground status of previous oppositions and the opportunist compromises involved in the ‘We’ll win next year’s congress’ approach of the likes of Straight Left. The Leninist openly confronted the reactionary ideological trends (Labourism, Eurocommunism, pacifism, economism and so on) that were polluting the party, and began a serious attempt to address the ‘official’ CPGB’s Stalinist legacy (without quite escaping from it until the 1990s).

But by the early 1980s the rotting ‘official’ CPGB was, in hindsight, extremely difficult terrain for these politics, so that, while The Leninist became a must-read newspaper, the group struggled to rescue anything healthy in terms of cadre.

Arguably, the CPGB PCC finds itself with the same issues. The fact that the Weekly Worker is read by its worst political enemies is testament to its political impact. But the CPGB has to relate principled revolutionary politics to an ageing left in a state of rapid decomposition. Ironically, this left by and large repeats the politics of the old ‘official’ CPGB in vastly reduced circumstances.

There has been nothing inevitable about these developments, but the fact that the CPGB PCC started from such a slender material base has significantly marked its development. To that end, it still functions as a ‘school of thought with activists’ rather than as a fully-fledged political organisation. There is nothing to be ashamed of in this and I still scratch my head that anything principled came out of the ‘official’ CPGB.

Perhaps a lesson that is worthwhile working even in what are apparently the most dire political circumstances.

Decomposition
Decomposition

Favoured refuge

I did not claim that Terry Liddle was living in “never-never land”, as he writes (Letters, October 18). What I wrote was that his proposed tactic for engaging youth in revolutionary activity was to invite them to propagate and regenerate a nostalgically invented utopia where “solidarity between the generations”, complemented by authoritarianism and puritanism, would bring about socialism.

In so doing he does paint a rosy picture of the past. Such portrayals are perforce a favoured refuge for the reactionary. In spite of his denials, Terry’s description of today’s society is remarkably similar to David Cameron’s “broken society”; it also has much in common with John Major’s ‘back to basics’ campaign and is not terribly far from Margaret Thatcher’s plea for a return to Victorian values.

To answer two of Terry’s questions to me - (a) Why “do [a small minority of people] drink themselves into stupidity?” and (b) “Do such people have the ability to fight for the freedom of their class?” - I concede that (a) a tiny minority of the small minority do it because they feel directly alienated by capitalism; and (b) no, they do not, but some of them might - when they sober up!

In answer to Terry’s other question as to where I live, it is certainly not in Hogarth’s Gin Alley. Today I live in a rather pleasant part of Hampshire. This does not make me oblivious to the fact that some of us live in blocks of insalubrious council flats - as Terry does. I was brought up in Willesden, north west London - not exactly a leafy, middle class suburb, as Terry will know. I, like Terry, was influenced by the Cuban missile crisis as a teenager. This influence was nurtured and developed by many of my work colleagues in the clothing trade in the West End, many of whom were committed communists.

Terry and I therefore have more in common than he probably thinks. Where we part company is when he tries to extend John Bridge’s quite logical call for a ban on drinking at political meetings to the prohibition of alcohol for the whole of society. And when he extrapolates the deprived conditions he observes in teenagers in his block of flats - causing some of them to abuse alcohol - to the entire working class youth of today. He then aspires to recruit youth to a Taliban-style revolutionary militia, which will enforce a temperate socialist society.

In order to create the kind of society which Terry and I both surely want, we must accept the fact that for every young person living in the awful conditions he daily observes, there are dozens who live in comfortable semis, with plenty of food available (although perhaps not up to Terry’s grandmother’s cuisine). Many of these will use alcohol (some might abuse it), but the offer of prohibition is the last thing that will get them on our side.

Favoured refuge
Favoured refuge

Resolutionitis

The Campaign for a Marxist Party seems to have fallen into ‘resolutionitis’ (‘A rough guide’, November 22). I thought it was formed to discuss and deepen the theory of the revolutionary party.

A resolution is not a discussion: in small groups the victory of a particular resolution is often just an accident. And a resolution often is a way to cut off discussion ... when the discussion has barely begun.

We need to decide whether the model of the Bolshevik Party is still relevant today. We need to discuss whether we want to build a ‘world party’ or a federated international. If we haven’t learnt anything since 1902, we’re in trouble.

Resolutionitis

Bin it

James Turley recommends readers to adopt the ideas of Louis Althusser as a guide to Marx’s method (‘A load of old Balzac’, November 15).

He forgets to mention that Althusser was an apologist for the former Soviet Union who distorted some of Marx’s terms (eg, ‘modes’, ‘forces’ and ‘relations’) into a form of meaningless jargon. He tried to destroy the unity of Marx’s intellectual and political project. He was a structuralist opposed to dialectics. He argued that subjectivity was completely determined and controlled by ideology. He was an anti-humanist who denied the possibility of liberation. Put differently, Althusser was anti-Marx.

Althusser had no desire to understand or communicate Marx’s method. A Stalinist fraud, he chose to spend his life training bureaucrats how to use language as a means of social control and trying to isolate Marxist intellectuals who challenged the Soviet Union. A dishonest academic, he hid the fact that he had not studied texts, such as Capital, he was supposed to be an authority on.

There is nothing that anyone can learn from reading Althusser except how desperate and dull his thinking was. His books deserve to be thrown into the dustbin - along with all ideas of recreating the inhuman regime he supported so loyally.

Bin it
Bin it

Defend Eddie

On November 22 the Child Support Agency management dismissed Eddie Fleming, PCS branch chairman at Hastings, on the basis of trumped-up charges relating to his representing union members.

Eddie was suspended and charged without being allowed the right of union representation and the case heard whilst grievances made by him against managers for bullying and harassment of him had not been investigated.

Indeed the manager hearing the case had himself got a bullying complaint against him from Eddie and knew it, so could not be considered impartial!

Hundreds of messages of support have been received by Eddie who has been overwhelmed by the kindness and solidarity shown. All levels of the PCS union are fully behind Eddie and the branch committee.

Defend Eddie
Defend Eddie

China dogma

Gerry Downing gets a great deal wrong in his criticism of Mike Macnair (Letters, November 22). But this is especially so when it comes to Trotsky and China.

Comrade Macnair dared suggest that both Stalin and Trotsky advocated a flawed strategy in the 1930s. Of course, whereas Stalin was trying to further the narrow interests of the Soviet elite and bureaucratic socialism, Trotsky’s mind was always centred on world revolution.

Nevertheless, while he generally paid lip service to Stalin, it was Mao Zedong who adopted a far more workable strategy in practice. Not because he was more committed to world revolution than Trotsky. He wasn’t. He was a national socialist. No, it was simply because Mao had a far better grasp of conditions on the ground and therefore what would and what would not work tactically.

Comrade Downing says that the Trotsky quote used by comrade Macnair to illustrate his argument had been mangled - chopped out of all recognition. And to prove his point he gives a slightly fuller rendition of Trotsky’s words.

Ironically, this only goes to reinforce comrade Macnair’s criticism. Trotsky urged communists in the 1930s to join the army of the Kuomintang and work “under the orders” of Chiang Kai-shek. For Trotsky the first priority was to defeat the Japanese imperialists who were intent on conquering the country and that could only be done by uniting militarily with the Kuomintang bourgeois nationalists.

That does not make Trotsky an advocate of the popular front. But it does mean that we should at least learn to think when it comes to contemporary questions such as Iran. Just repeating what Trotsky said as if it was holy script is worse than useless.

Concretely, in the 1930s for communists to have handed themselves over to Chiang Kai-shek en bloc would surely have been to invite a rerun of the 1927 Shanghai massacre. It would have been a stupid act of revolutionary suicide. Mao was well aware of that and therefore kept his People’s Liberation Army organisationally and politically independent of government forces. He fought the Japanese but was quite prepared to defend red base areas against the Kuomintang.

Comrade Downing concludes that we are advocating Maoism. That is unfounded. Neither comrade Macnair nor any other CPGBer envisages a peasant-based party-army in Iran that first establishes itself in the countryside before surrounding and then taking the towns. Nor do we advocate ‘third worldism’ and the national road to communism. We are Marxists and therefore internationalists.

Under certain circumstances it could well be advisable for communists to join the state’s army in order to bring forward our goal of world revolution. That is a calculation. But to turn Trotsky’s flawed strategy in the 1930s into some kind of universal principle, at least when it comes to the so-called ‘third word’, reveals a dogmatic poverty of thought that would have Trotsky spinning in his grave.

China dogma
China dogma

Correction

I was just reading your coverage of Socialism 2007 and discovered that I had been put down as “Jim Smith”, when in fact my name is Thomson (‘Half-hearted support’, November 22).

I was the comrade that represented the Socialist Party at the Hands Off the People of Iran fringe meeting and, while the rest of the article remains mostly correct, my name was not.

Correction
Correction

Puppets

Edward Eisenstein and David Broder both wrote letters on the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion. It’s good that this topic is discussed in the pages of the Weekly Worker because it’s an important point.

But it throws up more questions. When did Stalinism start? Did the Russian Revolution fail? Can a line be drawn from Lenin over Trotsky to Stalin? Also now, while we celebrate the 90th anniversary of the great Russian Revolution, Kronstadt is used by the enemies of the working class against the Russian Revolution and Bolshevism. I have no room to answer all these questions in a few words. So I will just try to focus on a few important omissions in the two letters mentioned above.

The Kronstadt sailors and soldiers were not the avant-garde of the proletariat any more. The best men left Kronstadt to wage the civil war against imperialism. During the civil war Kronstadt was a calm area, far away from the front. So no wonder that sons of rich peasants let themselves transfer to Kronstadt because they didn’t want to fight for the new soviet power. Reports called them “unsatisfactory, exacting, undisciplined, unreliable in battle and doing more harm than good”. They had a higher living standard, better food, warmer clothes, etc than the average Russian worker.

It was not a workers’ uprising, but a petty bourgeois one. They fought for their privileges. In early 1921, just months after the civil war, such an uprising could only help the counterrevolution. The Social Revolutionaries’ or anarchists’ myths of a ‘third revolution’ are just lies.

There are reports that the workers on the mainland in St Petersburg heard the sound of the bullets while working, but they didn’t care because the Kronstadt mutineers didn’t come from their own ranks.

And what was the role of the White Guard? In the very moment the mutiny began, White Guards, Mensheviks and tsarists started a huge campaign called ‘For Kronstadt!’ They sledged money, food, clothes and, of course, propaganda material to the small island. At least the propaganda material must have been produced the days before the mutiny began. And indeed in bourgeois exile papers already from February (more than a month before), one can suggest that they prepared an uprising in Kronstadt. That’s no coincidence.

This unhealthy mix of petty bourgeois men under the direction of the White Guard from Finland made the mutiny into a counterrevolutionary uprising. Whether the Kronstadt sailors knew that or not, they were puppets of the White Guard.

Puppets
Puppets