Letters

Equality

Gerry Downing is wrong to lay the blame for the defeat of his three motions at the Campaign for a Marxist Party conference on the CPGB. In fact most other people voted against them too. However, we managed to get through a great deal of business in a relatively short time and inevitably one or two misunderstandings crept in.

I do not think anyone voted against the concept of a world party as such. But as a project for a CMP that is as yet incapable of creating basic unity amongst its own members it just seemed a trifle overambitious.

Comrade Downing’s proposal stated that two people could form a tendency and would have the right to political representation on the committee according to the votes received. I think John Bridge’s criticism missed the bit about votes received. By the way, in the CPGB tradition one person can be a faction and we do try to incorporate minorities into positions of responsibility.

Gerry makes great play over the rejection of his third motion to include in the CMP aims: “To organise the working class to lead a revolution to overthrow capitalism in Britain and internationally and build a communist society based on full social and economic equality.” Actually the demand for equality arises from a situation where a section of society has privileges not available to the rest. It is a call for rights rather than equality per se and is enshrined as such in bourgeois law.

If comrade Downing had used the phrase, “From each according to their abilities; to each according to their need”, I and others would doubtless have supported him. People are unequal both in their abilities and needs. As someone (not from the CPGB) pointed out, communism is not about equality, but freedom, and if that is what he meant then that is what he should have said. Comrades suggested that Gerry reword his motion. He refused. It was then voted down on sound political grounds.

I have no idea why Gerry thinks that “To organise the working class to lead a revolution to overthrow capitalism in Britain and internationally and build a communist society” - which I would have voted for - sounds “a lot like Stalin’s USSR”, whereas the addition of “based on full social and economic equality” would have avoided such a comparison. The fact that Stalin distorted correct terms should not lead us to employ incorrect ones instead.

Equality
Equality

Name game

Paul Bennett replies to my point that “Marxists believe that communism can only occur after years of socialism” by saying: “Marxists believe no such thing. The socialism/communism distinction is not found in the writings of Marx. It’s true that he distinguished between lower and higher phases of communism, but that is very different”.

Not according to Lenin. In chapter 5 of The state and revolution, he wrote: “What is usually called socialism was termed by Marx the ‘first’, or lower, phase of communist society.” Lenin used the term ‘complete communism’ for the higher phase. I was a member of Militant/the Socialist Party from 1990-98, and we used the terms ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ - terminology common to most Marxist organisations today, I believe.

Lenin talked of the state “withering away” in the transition from socialism to communism, as people’s prejudices disappear over time and the danger of counterrevolution recedes. Personally, I was never convinced that communism will work, since there would still be crime over issues of love and there would be environmental shortages.

Paul doesn’t care whether the term ‘socialism’ or ‘communism’ is used. We should, because most people think of the societies that collapsed in the USSR and eastern Europe when communism is mentioned. Surely the name ‘Revolutionary Socialist Party’ is far better than ‘Communist Party’ or ‘Marxist Party’ for the organisation the CPGB wishes to build, uniting “communists, revolutionary socialists and all politically advanced workers”?

Name game
Name game

Santa specs

If David Douglass is writing to Santa in the next week or so, can I suggest the comrade requests a pair of reading glasses.

In his dozy and ill-informed response to my review of Ben Harker’s book on Ewan MacColl (‘A “people’s” tragedy’, December 6), Douglass says: “Lawrence seems to suggest that at some stage Ewan accepted Labour Party gradualism and parliament and abandoned revolutionary action and ideology. I’m not quoting verbatim here, but if that is the case it’s news to me and I think Ewan would be turning in his grave to hear anyone saying that” (Letters, December 13).

I’m glad that Dave is not quoting me verbatim because I never said anything remotely similar. In fact, I said something quite the opposite: “He [MacColl] always preferred For Soviet Britain (1935) to the parliamentary reformism of the British road to socialism (1951), eventually leaving the CPGB and becoming a Maoist in the 1960s … MacColl despised the Eurocommunists who led the CPGB in the 1980s and was no great admirer of the opportunist trend that had manacled itself to the Morning Star.” And: “MacColl may well have rejected the CPGB’s growing shift toward parliamentary reformism but failed to see that its cultural policy had the same reactionary assumptions.”

In other words, I was drawing out the contradiction between MacColl’s formal revolutionary political positions and the reactionary assumptions of his nationalist aesthetic.

I’m not actually going to bother with the rest of Dave’s semi-reverential ‘analysis’, as the comrade cannot do me the simple courtesy of honestly reflecting my argument.

Santa specs
Santa specs

Drug tests

To add to my article last week (‘Support soldiers who want out’, December 13), a report has now appeared on the large number of Iraq-serving soldiers expelled from the army because of drug-taking. The report leaves no room for doubt that many are taking drugs only before imminent tests, in order to get themselves thrown out.

Drug tests

Marx v Engels

In his article ‘Powerful because it coherently explains’, Jack Conrad emphatically asserts that there were no important political differences between Marx and Engels. However, this is not the case.

The Japanese Marxist theoretician and founder of the Japan Revolutionary Communist League, Kuroda, has shown clearly what these differences were. They are explained in his book Engels’ political economy - on the difference in philosophy between Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.

Kuroda shows that there were two important differences. The first of these concerns epistemology (theory of knowledge). Engels asserted in Anti-Dühring, Ludwig Feuerbach and other works that, since material reality behaved in a dialectical manner, and since all thought reflected this material reality, therefore thought must be dialectical. This outlook, of course, carried with it the implication that thought represented a passive imprint of the material world.

In contrast to this, Marx put forward his “method of political economy” (Grundrisse), which clearly Engels never understood. In this work Marx insists that human perception should be an active process. This implies that, starting from the superficial appearance of things, it is necessary to descend in thought to the essence (or to what is essential) of what has been initially perceived. Thought then should re-interpret what was initially perceived in terms of the essence. Kuroda has since refined and developed Marx’s “method of political economy” into his “descending/ascending dialectic” (see his What is revolutionary Marxism?).

The second important difference concerns the development of capitalism. Engels maintained that this depended primarily on the development of commodity production throughout history (this theme is still echoed by many Stalinists). Marx, however, showed, in Capital that the decisive factor leading to capitalism was that of primitive accumulation.

Marx v Engels
Marx v Engels

Shagged out

I see in the latest Weekly Worker that you guys are having a serious discussion (‘Ways forward for the paper’, December 13). It’s none of my business really, but I’ll throw in my tuppence worth anyway. It is based on comradely feelings towards the CPGB and a lot of time in far-left politics.

Weekly Worker is easily the most interesting paper on the Brit left but I think you miss out something when you talk about the function and regularity of the paper. For instance, in the report on the CPGB’s aggregate discussion you’re cited as pointing to the important role of the paper in terms of helping organise the group around a weekly tempo. But what is missing from this is the tempo of the class struggle at present.

The class struggle is at a low point. There is little new happening week to week, so trying to put out a weekly paper - it seems to me - is very much artificial. I still recall an interesting talk on the revolutionary press by Mike Freeman at one of the Revolutionary Communist Party summer schools. He held up a bunch of weekly left papers and showed how week to week they had the same frontline headings (a lot of them were to do with saving the national health service). He pointed out that they weren’t really weekly papers in any meaningful sense. They just recycled the same headlines and articles each week because they thought they needed to have a weekly publication.

While Weekly Worker is better than this - your superior politics mean you have a wider range of articles, so it is part agitational paper and part theoretical journal - nevertheless I can’t help thinking that the weekly schedule is artificial and that instead of deploying a massive amount of human and financial resources attempting to publish a weekly paper in a period of protracted downturn, wouldn’t it make more sense to bring out something bigger less frequently? Even if you went to a fortnightly 16-pager, it would make more sense.

By the way, in the report of the aggregate discussion, one of the arguments was that you are in competition with the Socialist Workers Party and the Socialist Party in England and Wales and therefore you had to have a weekly A3 paper because they did. I was gob-smacked that any of your comrades would think like this. Surely, what the ‘competition’ has should be just about the last consideration on your mind?

Aren’t the more important considerations the objective reality of the class struggle (and lack thereof) and the requirements of Marxist party-building or cadre-building within that context? My fear is that you will exhaust yourselves in the downturn (!) and you’ll be so friggin’ shagged out by the time the upturn comes, you won’t be able to take advantage of the new situation.

Shagged out
Shagged out

Disillusioned

I have now received two invitations from you to renew my subscription to the Weekly Worker. However, I had decided prior to the first one arriving to allow my subscription to lapse.

There is much to commend in the paper, especially the theoretical articles, but too much, for my point of view, is inward-looking and narrow. There is a preponderance of articles on halfway houses (for and against), the errant ways of various sectettes, but especially the depressing analyses of the goings-on at Respect and the SWP.

The titles may have changed, but essentially it seems to me nothing has moved forwards since the days of the International Marxist Group, International Socialists et al back in the 70s. The letters page reflects this with a repetitious mix of the banal (by which I mean the constant restatement of unflinching positions) and the esoteric (the revolutionary nature of arpeggios). It has got to the stage where I simply glance through and read very little.

The use of ‘Stalinist’ has become meaningless, and perhaps always was. If socialism can be derailed by one man, then its chances of success must be minimal. Surely, what happened in the Soviet Union from the 1920s onwards cannot be divorced from what occurred during and after 1917. The Soviet government continued to be opposed by substantial forces that did not simply disappear with the end of that civil war and there was sabotage and anti-Soviet agitation often at the behest of the capitalist encirclement. Socialism in one country may well have been doomed from the outset, but essentially a political system that is at war with the rest of the world was never going to be a blissful utopia of civilised debates and untroubled economic, social and political progress.

This is not to excuse many of the dreadful things that undoubtedly occurred, but rather to understand (or attempt to) how a society under extreme pressure can be affected. Socialists had better develop an understanding that revolutionary change can lead through very difficult and unpleasant times and is not an instant benign solution to present problems. The forces at work in the Soviet Union need to be analysed and understood, not just shuffled conveniently aside and written off like a bad debt by the expedient usage of the word ‘Stalinist’.

I’ve written the above to illustrate the kind of somewhat broader and far-reaching analytical articles that need to be written. I can accept the Weekly Worker fulfils a rather different role, being the medium for the revolutionary left to argue and quibble for time without end. Someone new to politics could, in some editions, be hard pressed to realise the left is actually opposed to capitalism, not each other.

After four decades of (increasingly less) involvement with socialist politics I think I’m teetering on the brink of total disillusionment. In a society where the working class seems more concerned with voting for who will win X factor/Come dancing/Big brother/I’m a celebrity … than for engagement with politics, a left paper can only talk to the left, as no-one else is listening.

Disillusioned
Disillusioned

Falsification

Gerry Downing manages to miss a lot of points in his two letters on the communist attitude to imperialist war (November 22 and December 6).

The resulting exchange has become unduly focused on China (which has the convenient effect of taking the heat off Gerry where he is more vulnerable), so let us get this out of the way first. Whatever textual jiggery-pokery Mike Macnair inflicted on Trotsky’s quote is irrelevant to the point he makes, which stands regardless of the disputed section. Even if the Comintern had been ‘Trotskyist’ (that is, still revolutionary) at that point, and the Comintern disregarded the military fight against Chiang entirely in favour of that against the Japanese, no amount of “political independence” would have saved them from the former’s butcher’s knife.

Bizarrely, Gerry attempts to paint Mike as an advocate of peasant guerrilla warfare. Now, that is a great example of falsification by word association - because Mike presents a positive assessment of one specific aspect of Mao’s policy, he must therefore be a “Maoist”, and because he is a Maoist, he must therefore worship the peasantry. This is completely idiotic, and I am surprised comrade Gerry believed anyone would fall for it. It is not even an accurate portrayal of actual Maoists in the imperialist countries, who certainly weren’t forming peasant militias. Suffice to say, the only aspect of Mao’s strategy lauded by comrade Macnair, in that article at least, is the acknowledgement of the necessity of total separation of the communist forces from the Kuomintang, and their battle-readiness with regard to both the Japanese and the nationalists.

If Gerry is right about the threat of physical liquidation being greater from the Comintern (which I see no reason to doubt), then Trotsky’s advice was correct in that specific conjuncture. But, had the Chinese ‘official’ communists followed it, they would have been utterly slaughtered.

On Abyssinia and the ‘Brazil hypothesis’, Gerry is shakier still. In fact, his case seems to consist entirely of haughty huffing and puffing over Macnair’s scandalous suggestion that Trotsky might not have been fully aware of the backroom dealings between Haile Selassie and the British government (perhaps Stalin was right after all, and the cabinet were telegraphing him the minutes?).

Trotsky’s line was, according to Downing, that “defeat for world imperialism would strengthen the working class internationally, that we had to be unequivocal about that and seek the defeat of our imperialism without for a moment neglecting to fight for the class independence of the working class in the semi-colonial country under attack. In inter-imperialist conflicts we would be defeatist on both sides.” But this says nothing about the Abyssinian conundrum - ie, an inter-imperialist war where one side fights via a proxy regime - Trotsky suggested the proletarian vanguard should support the proxy. This is no sort of class independence, and there is no possibility of a “defeat for world imperialism” within the terms of the conflict as posed, because both sides are imperialist.

No possibility, that is, unless the workers movement crushed both ‘official’ combatants. This is the main point Mike made, but it is a point comrade Downing ignores completely.

Falsification
Falsification