Letters

Comradely threat

It is all very well for John Pearson to call for the unity of Marxists (Letters, March 20). But on what basis?

During the lunch break of the November 24 CMP conference, comrade Pearson threatened to physically assault another CMP member for having referred to him as a “political idiot” on a discussion list. Pearson has not denied making this threat and indeed appeared to confirm it when conference resumed.

Is it possible to remain united in the same party or pre-party formation with those who consider violence, or threats of it, to be a suitable response to strongly expressed criticism? Not in my opinion. John Pearson must apologise for and renounce this disgraceful behaviour if he wishes to be accepted as a comrade.

It would be useful to hear the views of his comrades in the CMP Trotskyist Tendency, who have elected him as their convenor. Does this mean they approve of threats of violence as a means of settling disputes among Marxists?

Comradely threat
Comradely threat

Socialist Cuba

Devoid of any independent research, James Turley’s article on Cuba constitutes a wholesale and unfounded attack on the Cuban revolution (‘Sunshine Stalinism ends’, February 28). Borrowing freely from bourgeois journalists, social democrats and academics, he speaks of Castro as a “dictator”, says that there are no “free and fair elections” in Cuba, there is an “absence of genuine democracy” and that what exists in Cuba is “Stalinism” with “tough restrictions on dissidence”. In calling for the overthrow of what he describes as “Raul Castro and his military bureaucrats”, he demands the destruction of the Cuban revolution and all it has achieved.

We look in vain for any serious analysis for his standpoint. For instance, he does not describe or assess the electoral process that Cubans have just gone through in order to justify his claim about the “absence of genuine democracy” or of “free or fair elections”.

We are at loss to know what he means by “Stalinism” - there is no explanation, just assertion that becomes mere abuse. He refers to what he calls “third-worldist Marxism” and then comments on “the curious stamina of this kind of dictator”, giving as his examples Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh.

This style is completely anti-materialist: its purpose is to prevent thought by forcing things into abstract, unexplained categories, and through constant repetition create the impression that they must be true. Cuba is Stalinist - why? Because we say so. There are no free and fair elections - why? Because we say so. The Revolutionary Communist Group is “ultra-Castroist” - why? Because we say so. There is no serious engagement with any ideas, just sloganising.

Underpinning this is an intellectual dishonesty. Turley does not present his concept of socialism which finds the Cuban system so deficient. This allows him, for instance, to dismiss Cuba’s world-class healthcare system as something of which the Cuban working class is expected to be “grateful and passive recipients”. So where does this world-class healthcare system come from? Likewise, a world-class educational system? Perhaps they are hoaxes? For if they are real then Turley has a problem: he has to explain how they have been created and sustained by a relatively poor country under an aggressive economic blockade.

That means he has to engage seriously with the claims of Cuba that it places the all-round development of the individual at the heart of society - claims that are consistent with a socialist content and born out by this kind of achievement. He would then have to explain how it is the working class has been disenfranchised from a process which has clearly resulted in a complete transformation of the quality of its life over the past 50 years.

It is not enough to condemn Cuba because of the presence of inequality. Of course inequality exists. No-one has ever suggested it does not exist under socialism. The question has to be dealt with concretely. How has this inequality arisen? What form does it take? Is it recognised? Are steps being taken to tackle it and, if so, what are their nature? This, of course, would require Turley to engage seriously with what Cuban organisations and their political leaders both say and do. This he does not attempt - having dismissed it all as “sunshine Stalinism”, there would appear no need to.

The fact is that Cuba acknowledges the existence of inequality and the forms it takes as a result of the measures of the Special Period. It saw the consequent disenfranchisement of a section of the Cuban people and inaugurated the Battle of Ideas in 2000 to address the problems. This has been followed by other measures: for instance, the removal of the dollar from domestic commerce in November 2005 and the start of the Energy Revolution at the same time.

The Cubans understand socialism to be a process, a constant struggle where there are both setbacks and advances, and that it is not a finished product, a brand that can be bought off the shelf. Thus, Fidel Castro’s frank assessment that it was possible for the Cuban revolution to “self-destruct”; that “we can destroy ourselves and it would be our fault”. Perhaps this is an example of ‘ultra-Castroism’?

If Turley cannot bring himself to use official Cuban sources, he is not so picky about using anti-Cuban social democrats. Thus he quotes from a personal blog - that most trite and complacent of publishing forms - of a minor British opportunist, Dave Osler: “to get to be a bellboy - so I was told by a qualified architect currently working as a cinema usher - you need ‘connections’.” Under other circumstances the line, ‘It must be true - a bloke in a pub (in this case, cinema) told me’, would be the conclusion of a poor joke. For Turley, this is clearly serious stuff.

There is a strong similarity between Turley’s arguments and those in a recent Socialist Worker article (March 1). This is perhaps because both have a common ideological source, Samuel Farber, whose interview in Against the Current (January 2007), a publication hostile to Cuba and sympathetic to the British SWP, apparently provides the basis for Turley’s speculations on the influence of the Cuban armed forces. Farber himself left Cuba in the early 1960s for reasons that have never been clear, but swiftly allied himself with the SWP’s ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow’ position. However, Farber’s qualification is that he is anti-Cuban, and that makes him fine for Turley’s purposes.

There is of course a material basis to Turley’s position: it lies in the privileged position of an upper section of the working class in the oldest imperialist country in the world, and the resultant tendency amongst this stratum towards a petty bourgeois political standpoint. Turley expresses this par excellence in his sneering intellectual idleness. The recent Rock Around the Blockade tour attracted thousands of young people to meetings at which three generations of Cubans spoke. Neither Turley nor the Weekly Worker came along to confront or condemn these presumed representatives of a repressive dictatorship, or to oppose the ‘ultra-Castroism’ of the RCG.. Given the quality of this article, it is as well they saved themselves the embarrassment.

Socialist Cuba
Socialist Cuba

SPGB time-warp

I was intrigued by the letter from Alan Johnstone of the Socialist Party of Great Britain (March 20).

Over the past 20 years or so, the ‘Socialist Party’s’ house journal has become a shadow of its former self, having been transformed into a coffee table glossy, containing long, rambling, self-indulgent articles on the state of the world and the individual, denuded of any study of Marxism, or need for revolution, or the role and changing nature of the state in any such process.

Johnstone’s party in its reverence for parliamentary bodies is trapped in a time-warp and unable to find a way out. It has ditched its former, strictly defined identity, but failed to develop one relevant to the 21st century, which is why it is decaying, demoralised and internally fractious.

It is true that Marx once maintained, between 1870 and 1883, there was a possibility of a peaceful transformation of bourgeois democracy into proletarian democracy in the United States and Britain (Johnstone even denies the desirability of proletarian democracy!). At that time monopoly capitalism did not exist, imperialism had only just been born and bureaucracy and militarism were not yet highly developed. Later, in 1917, Lenin stated - in his outstanding scientific study of the Marxist theory of the state and revolution - that this exception was outdated and non-existent and that in these two countries too the destruction of the bourgeois state machine and its replacement by a new one was the indispensable precondition for the proletarian revolution.

Parliament did once function as the executive of the capitalist class in its struggle against feudalism. But with the development of monopoly capitalism, parliamentary democracy - democracy for capital - lost its validity. The dominant section of the ruling class could no longer control events through this machinery. A new apparatus of government was developed: a cabinet and prime minister with supreme power; increased use of ‘orders in council’, statutory instruments and other powers to ministers; a well organised civil service, central and municipal; a police force and a standing army. Other instruments of coercion such as the judiciary and prisons are complemented by the ideological apparatus of the educational system, the mass media and, lastly, parliament.

‘Democratic’ methods are always preferred by the capitalist class as being more effective, but history, logic and common sense tells us that when democratic means and other methods of influencing opinion start to fail, the real powers behind these come into play: the repressive machinery of the law, the police and prisons in individual cases, the armed forces when the threat to capitalist policy and safety is on a large scale.

The conclusion is that the only way to solve the contradictions of capitalist production, to put an end of class conflicts, international wars and environmental destruction, which are inseparable from capitalism, is for the conscious organisation of the working class to take power by revolutionary action, to destroy the capitalist state machine and carry through the change to socialism, on the basis of which a communist society can develop.

SPGB time-warp
SPGB time-warp

Lenin haters

In an attempt to cut this short and cease cluttering the letters page, I’m going to get right to the point. My original argument was that the SPGB - in its attempts to dismiss the soviets as an organisational method towards political power - has wrongly attached itself to the idea that bourgeois parliamentary bodies can be ‘captured’ and used as a means to revolution. In its historical blunderings this has caused it to support the constituent assembly over the soviets; a shockingly incorrect position, given the undemocratic content of that body, the details of which I have already gone into.

Comrade Johnston has now completely abandoned any kind of scientific perspective in ascertaining the reasons behind the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and has instead fallen back on moral outrage. For instance, the earlier attempts to link the erosion of soviet democracy with the destruction and chaos of civil war is now said to be a “myth”. The mass slaughter of the Russian working class, its exodus from the cities, the crippling of the soviets underneath a vast layer of militarised bureaucracy clearly had no effect on government policy or the ability of the working class to assert its revolutionary interests.

No, comrades, concerning ourselves with such practical and earthly matters will not clarify anything. The real end of soviet democracy took place right after the Bolsheviks attained power and set their dastardly plans in motion (the SPGB seems unaware of the coalition government that marked the early days of revolutionary power). This is the real crux of the matter, not the rampaging armies of Kolchak and Denikin and its massacres of the organised working class. Clearly, being dead will not remotely infringe on your class’s ability to rule politically.

Comrade Johnston then claims that if the Bolsheviks really did have such high levels of popular support, then they would have won a majority in the constituent assembly anyway. But I have already covered this before when stating that the convening of that very assembly was based on electoral results obtained before the dispersal of the provisional government - an act that was subsequently endorsed by the soviets as an expression of the proletariat organised as a class for itself.

A quote from Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution also rears its head. Unfortunately, like most things, it has to be put into its proper context. The comrades at the SPGB will no doubt interpret Trotsky’s words to indicate support for a draconian process where the workers have to do absolutely everything the party says, as if this is ideal. It’s more the case that, assuming the reciprocal and intertwined nature of party and class is intact, the working class can express itself politically through its revolutionary party (or parties), which can in turn be reflected in the grassroots organs of popular rule, the soviets. Obviously, this ought to be a two-way process; otherwise the entire system can become top-heavy and democratically defunct. But it has to be said that Trotsky had some strange conceptions on how the working class can exercise its dictatorship, ones that I don’t agree with in the slightest.

However, the SPGB refuses to come to terms with such thinking and will instead fall back on conspiracy theories. Yet such theories have little basis in reality, no matter how many quotes are torn out of context or a passionate hatred of Lenin is offered up in place of objective analysis.

Lenin haters
Lenin haters

False allusions

In my letter (March 13) regarding Jim Moody’s article (‘All-Arab solution needed for Palestine’, March 6), I polemicised against his ambivalence between Arab nationalism on the one hand and Marxist jargon on the other.

Unfortunately, I initially summarised and characterised this ambivalence in the vernacular, hence quotation marks, unintentionally giving the impression that these were Mr Moody’s words, for which I apologise. Perhaps this is why I am labelled a “Zionist liar”, which is far from conducive to fair minded debate (Letters, March 20). But the context of these preliminary remarks should be clear if both Mr Moody’s article and my letter are read together.

However, the central point I made has not been addressed by Mr Moody in his response to my letter, which is the blind spot of the left: the legacy of Stalinism and the degeneration of the terms of reference which derive from Stalinist and islamic Arab nationalism: ie, Zionist = Nazi, incursion = invasion, IDF withdrawal from Gaza = occupation/imperialist colonial expansionism, defensive operations = genocide/holocaust (actually, the word shoah was used by Israeli defence minister M Vilnai as ‘disaster’, in this context), and Gaza is characterised as a ‘ghetto’, etc.

The Orwellian use of words (and hate speech by some groups on the left) is clear: the impression fostered is that the Zionists/Jews are Nazis (a term I’ve heard in leftwing discourse of late: ‘Jewish-Nazi’ = hate speech for ‘Zionist’). Nathaniel Mehr reports that the tiny Stop the War Coalition demonstration the previous Saturday had a high proportion of conspiracy and anti-semitic banners (Letters, March 20); this is what I noticed back on the first anti-Iraq war demonstration around this time in 2003! Clearly, many leftwing groups have failed to learn from their mistakes and move on. The multitude of self-appointed ‘leaders’ of the working class have failed to deal with the legacy of Stalinism and anti-semitism.

Finally, the Palestinians are clearly victims in Mr Moody’s world-view and not responsible for their own misleadership by reactionary islamic forces. Actually, Gaza is not a ‘ghetto’ (another false allusion to Nazism) imposed by Israel. After Israel withdrew from Gaza, Gaza was ruined by a coup d’etat by Hamas and a civil war against Fatah. Mr Moody, who appears to be some kind of communist, would do better to attack Hamas for its islamist ideology and its human rights abuses, as an obstacle to democratic socialism in the Middle East.

But we are advised to defer to Hamas extremism because it has been elected and because president Bush (and the European Union) have pointed out the obvious fact that Hamas is an obstacle to a just and peaceful settlement of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

False allusions
False allusions