Letters

Ruffled

I see that Alan Johnstone has ruffled some feathers. This can be seen from the petty insults Andrew Northall hurls at him and his party. Suffice to say, these do not strengthen his case, particularly as his assertion that the SPGB is “decaying, demoralised and internally fractious” is far more applicable to the numerous Leninist sects that try to pass themselves off as ‘revolutionary’.

Northall asserts that 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”. Yet support for universal suffrage was consistent throughout his life. From 1852: “Universal suffrage is the equivalent of political power for the working class … where the proletariat forms the large majority of the population ... Its inevitable result, here, is the political supremacy of the working class.”

Northall screams: “Johnstone even denies the desirability of proletarian democracy!” Yet did Engels not proclaim that the “working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat”? Read asserts that the SPGB “has wrongly attached itself to the idea that bourgeois parliamentary bodies can be ‘captured’ and used as a means to revolution.” Yet, as the SPGB correctly argue, this was Marx and Engels position.

As Engels put it, “It is simply a question of showing that the victorious proletariat must first refashion the old bureaucratic, administrative, centralised state power before it can use it for its own purposes.” I will ignore Read’s confused account of the history of parliament, to note that the SPGB, like Marx and Engels, is well aware that “history, logic and common sense tells us that when democratic means ... fail, the real powers behind these come into play.”

Nor did Lenin produce an “outstanding scientific study of the Marxist theory of the state and revolution”. Rather he confused Marx’s notion of smashing the “state machinery” with smashing the state - as Julius Martov showed in his truly outstanding critique of Lenin’s work (The state and socialist revolution). And, as Johnstone noted, Lenin’s “outstanding” work was ignored when the Bolsheviks created an executive above the soviets - which then, a few weeks later, simply decreed legislative powers for itself.

Moreover, Johnstone simply exposes how the Bolsheviks recognised “the desirability of proletarian democracy” only when the workers voted for them. When they lost popular support in early 1918, the Bolsheviks denied “proletarian democracy” by gerrymandering soviets (including the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets) to ensure a majority and disbanding, by force, any which did manage to elect non-Bolshevik majorities.

It does seem highly ironic to see Dan Read attack the constituent assembly for its “undemocratic content” when he ignores the undemocratic actions of the Bolsheviks against the soviets. Apparently, 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”. Yes, how ‘moralistic’ it is to decry the deliberate creation of a dictatorship over the proletariat! Not to, though, suggests that for some ‘socialists’ party dictatorship is perfectly compatible with socialism, assuming the right people are in charge.

Finally, I suppose I should note I am an anarchist, not an SPGB member, and am presenting facts to aid a “scientific perspective” in the face of dubious Leninist assertions.

Ruffled
Ruffled

Ignorant left

Sometimes it is difficult to know where to start when Marxists write about religion, so profoundly ignorant have I found their comments. In relation to the Jack Conrad book reviewed last lesson, I’ll just highlight some of the more obvious howlers (‘Supernatural and material force’, March 27).

The idea that one can get any sort of educated knowledge about islam from hadith alone is incredible; still more the idea that English translations would suffice. You mention as an aside the shia school of fique, seemingly unaware it is older than the four main sunni schools and the real differences between the two traditions.

Your reviewer then lumps together the work of Wansbrough with Cook and Crone despite the fact that Wansbrough’s research was into the linguistic environment of the Qu’ran, whereas Cook and Crone attempted to fashion a reconstruction of the early history of islam.

It really is astonishing that Chris Gray applauds the work of Cook and Crone, as it is well know that their critique of islam, Hagarism, was very near the end of their academic reputation, so full of errors and misuse of the historical sources was it. Indeed, even critics of islam described the book as a ‘joke’ and Crone at least has repudiated the work.

As usual, anyone wanting to conduct serious study of religion is best advised to leave well alone the frankly embarrassing and crassly ignorant scribblings of the Marxist left.

Ignorant left
Ignorant left

Revo review

One year ago, we wrote to inform you about the crisis of Revo, youth organisation of Workers Power and its League for the Fifth International (Letters, March 27). This youth organisation is formally independent but, as many readers of the Weekly Worker will have noticed, in reality it is tightly controlled by the LFI leadership. In order for the LFI to maintain its chokehold they have had to resort to a whole wave of expulsions from Revo.

Last year, we noted that the Revo conference in the UK had been the smallest ever, with just 30 participants. But since then the crisis has deepened, and this year the same conference was just half the size - a new negative record.

It’s easy to see why this ‘conference’ was poorly attended: though it’s officially the “highest body” of a “democratic centralist organisation”, it lasted only half a day. The programme was more like that of a rally, with speeches against imperialism and appeals to build Revo, but no kind of collective reflection about the development of the group in the last year - which might be appropriate in light of the ongoing expulsions and disintegration. Who wants to go to a conference that can only rubber-stamp decisions made beforehand by the LFI leadership?

We are not sectarians who take pleasure in seeing leftwing groups destroy themselves like that. If the Revo conference was just a quarter the size of the conferences a few years ago, it means that dozens and dozens of young people who were at first attracted to communist politics have been driven away again by the LFI’s bureaucratic and paternalistic methods.

Revo review
Revo review

Not homophobia

Some several months ago I signed the founding statement of Hand Off the People of Iran, believing, perhaps naively, that, though I disagreed with the ‘third campist’ politics of the initiators of Hopi, there was nothing actually objectionable about their stated aims: ie, opposing the war drive against Iran, while at the same time supporting struggles of workers and the oppressed against the Iranian regime.

However, the recent intervention of Hopi on the March 15 anti-war demonstration and afterwards, and the attack on George Galloway over the Mehdi Kazemi issue flowing from that, are in my view reactionary, slanderous and do not correspond with my views. Therefore I have requested they remove my name from the list of sponsors.

Hopi wrote, in their recent ‘statement’: “That is why Hopi condemns those within the anti-war movement who are using Kazemi’s case to attack LGBT activists in Iran and Britain. Respect MP George Galloway said on The Wright stuff (Channel 5) on March 13 and 14: ‘All of the papers seem to imply that you get executed in Iran for being gay: that’s not true.’ He then stated that Kazemi’s boyfriend was hung ‘not for being gay, but for committing sex crimes against young men … What I can’t accept is the propaganda that says you get hanged for being gay in Iran: you don’t.’

“This apologia led him to suggest that Hopi steering committee member Peter Tatchell represents the ‘the pink end of the khaki war machine - that’s what Peter Tatchell has become, by attacking Iran in the way that he does’. He repeated those charges at the March 15 anti-war demonstration in London.

“Hopi utterly condemns this appalling homophobia and rejects the implication that if one supports the LGBT community in Iran, one also supports imperialism.”

This is appalling, slanderous rubbish. It implies that Galloway supports the deportation of Kazemi, or the execution of gays in Iraq, or that that he is in some ways hostile to gay rights either here or in Iraq. This is, of course, a complete lie - George Galloway was one of the relatively few Labour MPs to support the equalisation of the age of consent for gays long before the LP leadership was prepared to support this openly, for instance. He has made clear his support for gay rights on many occasions since. The implication that Galloway is hostile to gays - ie, ‘homophobic’ - because he is concerned to counter the use of gay rights as a weapon of war propaganda against Iran, is pro-war propaganda, merely at one remove.

Actually, I believe that comrade Galloway may have made the mistake of confusing this case with others. Though even this is not clear since the information coming out of Iran about this case has been contradictory and may have been distorted both by the Iranian regime and others with a different kind of agenda aimed at gathering support for punitive action against Iran. That the Iranian regime does sometimes falsely accuse gays of ‘sex-crimes’ to justify deadly acts of repression is no doubt true, but it also punishes people more straightforwardly convicted of crimes such as rape in a similar manner. Socialists oppose both types of executions, but that hardly makes them the same.

In dealing with questions such as this in the face of a war threat, it is important not to simply accept such claims at face value. Otherwise, one risks parroting stuff like the allegations of Kuwaiti babies being thrown out of incubators by Saddam Hussein’s troops.

In fact, Hopi’s accusation is a manifestation of islamophobia and prejudice at one remove; since Galloway associates with and outspokenly defends muslims against islamophobia, who are deemed irredeemably homophobic and backward, then Galloway must be homophobic also. This is reactionary ‘logic’.

Not homophobia
Not homophobia

Good rules

In 1099 a horde of bandits pillaged Syria and Palestine, eating local babies and massacring thousands. They were named crusaders after their aggressive political uniform. In 1933 Nazi activists wore brown shirts and swastika armbands. Today one sees another aggressive political uniform: the all-enveloping burqa and veil. As in the other cases, the effect and purpose of the uniform is to intimidate. Burqas also come in handy as disguise for armed robbers. All societies enforce rules about dress, sometimes with good reasons: in the FE college where I work hoods are forbidden.

What would the sow who insists on wearing a cross over her work uniform, or the veiled sluts who look out through slits, think when their kids’ nursery teacher, a devotee of the Sacred Order of Tit-Flashers, insists she must show her nipples at all times? Michael Little (March 13) is right: sticking up for people who demand to be allowed to wear religious trappings in our schools is a seriously silly thing for a socialist to do.

Phil Kent (February 28) says that “the driving force behind religious belief is alienation”. Nice intellectual word, ‘alienation’ - Marx used it: it must mean something. But I don’t know what, and I don’t believe Kent knows either. But he clearly has some psychobabbling theory that religion is something individuals turn to for some sort of solace. In the real world, almost all monotheists had their ‘faith’ imposed on them in childhood, when they would be punished (by family, school or state) for dissent from it. Christian and islamic clergy routinely make clear their belief that, if they were deprived of their ability to coerce and intimidate, their faith communities would crumble away: and who can say they’re wrong about that?

Michael Little also has a theory: “religion is rooted in the nuclear family”? Oh yeah? I suggest it may be even more deeply rooted in extended families and higher collectivities such as, er, congregations. He seems to favour action “to drive a wedge between children and the family” (the memory bank of counterrevolution). But will working class parents, without whose support a proletarian revolution can’t happen, like having wedges driven between them and their kids?

Wouldn’t it be better tactics for the revolutionaries to allow organisations such as the National Secular Society (to which I belong) to berate and mock religion independent of the (new) government, whose policy would be to establish a ‘level playing field’ between the faiths and atheism? In practice Leninist parties in power never allowed our secularist organisations to function: their opportunist denial of our right to combat false, foul, filthy faiths has contributed powerfully to the long-term historical failure of Leninism.

Good rules
Good rules

Achilles' heel

While the parliamentarian approach of the SPGB has its limitations, I think the comments by Dan Read and Andrew Northall are a little unfair and amount to throwing the baby out with the water (Letters, March 27).

Granted, parliamentary democracy today is a fraud and sham, but does that invalidate the method of using the parliamentary process as a means of socially legitimising the revolution and emasculating opposition to it? No, it does not. I see the parliamentary option as potentially the Achilles’ heel of capitalism. What is the alternative? To take on the armed might of the state in combat? That would be folly in the extreme. And if you can get a mass working class to take up the armed struggle, why would they not want to vote for socialism in any case? Why make things more difficult than they need be?

The problem with Dan and Andrew’s views on the subject is the lack of any kind of historical imagination. We have to imagine what kind of circumstances are likely to prevail by the time the socialist movement is indeed a mass movement. By that time, socialist ideas will have penetrated every corner of society - including the armed forces - and the political culture will have altered radically and in a way that would unquestionably facilitate the democratic capture of state power.

The strong probability is that the form of capitalist governance in this last phase of capitalist society will be an ultra-democratic one. A kind of natural selection process will come into operation as the socialist movement grows, which will weed out the kind of opposition that is likely to resist the will of the movement when it comes to capturing state power. Only claptrap conspiracy theorists would maintain that a clique of disgruntled generals would shut down parliament should the movement for socialism ever reach this point. Look what happened in the state capitalist regimes of eastern Europe.

I don’t find the objections to the parliamentary approach at all convincing.

My gripe with the SPGB is, ironically, that it too ignores or overlooks the effect that a hugely expanded socialist consciousness might have in aiding development of alternative non-capitalist socio-economic relationships and institutions that prefigure a communist future. The parliamentary approach based on abstract propaganda for socialism is not going to take us very far. It needs to be complemented by other approaches that involve creating a material substratum in which socialist ideas can take root.

Achilles' heel
Achilles' heel

Pro-bolshevik

On an historical note, an anti-war declaration written by Lenin was published by the Socialist Standard - the only journal that would. In early 1918, the Bolsheviks were praised in the Standard for holding true their promise of taking Russia out of the great shambles. Utter scorn was reserved for the expeditionary forces that invaded. Hardly the actions of “Lenin haters”!

The SPGB certainly looked at the soviet. One seminal article from the Standard in May 1920 echoed The communist manifesto when it said the means for working class emancipation depend at all times on prevailing material circumstances.

So why the rejection of the soviet? The Bolsheviks never invented a new scheme; the soviet was an established fact of Russian organisation and a product of the undeveloped conditions pertaining there. Furthermore, the Bolsheviks never seriously had to worry about the armed forces, since the war had all but destroyed the standing army. As it turned out, the Bolsheviks called for workers to vote for labour parties from 1920 onwards, if only that they might learn about the ineffectiveness of those parties - so much for the much vaunted soviet.

If anyone is in a time-warp, it’s the left, who have always called for votes for Labour, even as recently as Tony Blair’s time as leader.

Pro-bolshevik
Pro-bolshevik

Blinkers

Dan Read describes the SPGB “in its historical blunderings”, then cites “the exodus from the cities” as one cause of the failure of the Bolsheviks. Well, if he wishes to “cut this short and cease cluttering the letters page”, he himself should place events into perspective and apply what research has been done into the subject.

I suggests he reads Urbanisation and de-urbanisation in the Russian Revolution and civil war by Diane Koeniker, which concludes: “The proletariat declined in the city, but it did not wither away. It appears that the Bolshevik party made de-urbanisation and de-classing the scapegoats for its political difficulties, when the party’s own policies and its unwillingness to accept changing proletarian attitudes were also to blame ...”

Dan Read continues the well trodden path of making excuses for the cul-de-sac of Bolshevism. Equally, his previous assertions can also be easily challenged. The bogeymen of the white generals cannot explain why the Bolsheviks emasculated workers’ self-organisation before that danger materialised and continued the suppression after the threat had receded.

And, no, Dan’s refutation of the democratic credentials of the constituent assembly does not hold up, since the results were later mirrored in various other elections. Nor did it happen, as he claims, that the constituent assembly’s dismissal met with no resistance. There were indeed demonstrations and several protestors were killed. The struggle for the re-convocation of the assembly continued and was included in the demands of the conference of factory representatives, for instance.

Bolshevik blinkers once again. But historic facts pass by the apologists of the Leninist dictatorship. Less parroting of party lines and more objective reading, Dan.

Blinkers
Blinkers

Cuban Stalinism

Robert Clough is extremely piqued (Letters, March 27) by my less than enthusiastic write-up of Raul Castro’s accession to the Cuban presidency (‘Sunshine Stalinism ends’, February 28).

He even offers a “material basis” for my “sneering intellectual idleness”: “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”. It is with some despondency that I note that this is exactly the same “material basis” pointed to by all sectarian tendencies with regard to their opponents. When has one’s opponent ever not been petty bourgeois?

I suppose I should work on that “intellectual idleness”, but this seems to revolve around my reliance on “social democratic and bourgeois media sources” and - worst of all - one Samuel Farber, a petty bourgeois leftist, instead of consulting “Cuban sources”, as any properly rigorous academic would. Of course, the bourgeoisie, social democrats and that Samuel Farber have all “consulted Cuban sources” - Farber even wrote a book about the whole thing. What Clough actually wants is for us all to listen uncritically to the Cuban state for an evaluation of its own performance.

He quotes me sneering at Cuba’s famous health and education services, of which the workers are to be “grateful and passive recipients”. The stamina of comrade Clough’s brain seems to fail him here, as he thinks I was implying that, in the terms used by Castroites, these public services are poor. One cannot argue with high literacy rates and doctor-patient ratios. The question is one of agency. To that question, the answer is simple - the agent of these changes is a party-state institution formed from a bourgeois-nationalist movement and a Stalinist party with a particularly egregious record of prostration before Batista. It is not beyond the means of the typical result of such a union - a left-nationalist formation in the Soviet sphere - to provide public services of some value. It is not a matter of how a terrifically poor country has pulled them out of the hat, so much as who is doing the pulling.

Cuban Stalinism
Cuban Stalinism

Mistakes

Criticisms of Fidel and Raul Castro are often confused with opposition to the Cuban revolution. I believe the discussion should centre on how we can best defend the Cuban revolution, but a failure to criticise the mistakes of the Cuban leadership is how not to defend it.

In a monarchy it may be obvious that the king’s brother will be appointed to succeed him. But this is amazing in a workers’ state! I find it difficult to believe that the ‘election’ of Raul Castro to take Fidel’s place was only a coincidence. These kind of appointments weaken the Cuban revolution.

Mistakes
Mistakes

Political idiot

Peter Manson has a nerve. He asks if the Campaign for a Marxist Party Trotskyist Tendency “approve of threats of violence as a means of settling disputes among Marxists” (Letters, March 27). Yet he knows full well that at the CMP conference last November, TT members voted without exception for the resolution calling for a code of conduct for the CMP. This resolution would have ruled verbal and physical abuse out of order and would have been a basis for establishing comradely behaviour amongst Marxists. It failed because Peter Manson and his CPGB comrades voted as a bloc against it!

So the question should be, do the CPGB approve of verbal and physical abuse as a means of settling disputes among Marxists? If they do not, then why did they vote as a matter of party discipline against the resolution on a code of conduct for the CMP?

On the question of John Pearson, it is clear to me that John reacted to a deliberate provocation - the verbal abuse from Lawrence Parker. I also was on the receiving end of Lawrence Parker’s verbal abuse. I would find it difficult to threaten him even if I wanted to because I haven’t a clue who he is. Strange that somebody you’ve never met or worked with politically finds it in order to dish out verbal abuse. How to explain that?

In my opinion, you have to look at the context in which Lawrence Parker was operating. The context was that the CPGB had declared open season on the CMP committee in a series of articles in the Weekly Worker. We were called variously Bakuninites, drunks, Bonapartists, etc, and I was accused of using the CMP journal, Marxist Voice, for factional purposes. All of these were lies and misrepresentations. Lawrence Parker as a loyal CPGB member decided to join in the fun by verbally abusing the CMP committee. That is what I think.

Political idiot
Political idiot

Exterminism

Peter Manson alleges that John Pearson threatened to physically assault a CMP member for referring to him as a “political idiot”. If this is true then Peter’s request that John apologise for his behaviour is correct. Peter is right to ask whether violence or the threat of it is ever a “suitable response to strongly expressed criticism”.

The threat of violence is never an appropriate response to name-calling. On the other hand, is describing someone as an “idiot” a form of criticism? Could it not also be a type of arrogant rudeness intended to silence a disagreeable voice?

The argument that it is legitimate to use “idiot” to criticise opponents appeals to the authority of Lenin, the Bolsheviks, Marx and Engels. They used “idiocy” to refer to reactionary or backward forms of thinking. If it is one of the traditions of Marxist polemic to use words to vent feelings of contempt for certain ideas and opinions, then “idiot” is as useful and informative a term as any. It has a respectable provenance within the body of Marxist literature.

Does the term “idiot” now have different connotations from the times of Marx, Engels and Lenin? As is well known, thousands of ‘idiots’, ‘imbeciles’ and ‘morons’ died in Nazi extermination camps. The justification was that, if they were allowed to breed, they would lower the intelligence of the national population. Similar eugenicist reasons were used to confine them in large hospitals in Britain and other countries. These institutions had features in common with concentration camps.

The denial of people’s intelligence is useful in maintaining systems of oppression within a capitalist division of labour. It is therefore arguable that to refer to someone as an “idiot” in a post-holocaust world implies that they are congenitally stupid, incapable of oral or written communication and deserving of physical liquidation. If so, then to call someone an idiot is not a form of criticism. Criticism assumes that the person criticised is intelligent, capable of learning from their mistakes and deserving of life.

Peter is right to ask the question on what basis Marxists can unite. Disunity is not inevitable, even if comrades are disrespectful or contemptuous of each others’ ideas and opinions. Marxists have a long history of disputation. Sharpness of expression can be helpful in clarifying political and intellectual differences.

On the other hand, unity requires the assumption that disputants - however ignorant and uneducated - are intelligent and capable of learning. Moreover, whilst there is clearly an important distinction between rude language and the threat of violence, the two are often confused. A culture influenced by Stalinism has corrupted both the language used to identify political difference and the tone used in its expression. It continues to encourage both rudeness and threats of violence.

Whether or not the allegations against John Pearson are true and he apologises, unity between Marxists of different educational, class, ethnic and gender backgrounds is clearly possible. However, unity also requires a recognition that, if antagonisms are to be superseded, explanations go beyond the moral, psychological, cultural or linguistic. They need to include some agreement on the nature of the political economy of capitalism in the present.

Unfortunately, the content of John’s letter to this paper on March 20 inclines me to think he rejects the possibility of such an agreement. Given his pessimism over the unfavourable objective conditions he thinks exist for the formation of a Marxist party, the antagonism between him and the majority of the CMP is, in my opinion, likely to grow.

Exterminism
Exterminism