Letters

Convention

The Labour Party conference takes place in Manchester from Saturday September 20 to Thursday September 25. Across the road socialists, trade unionists, greens and peace activists will be holding a “counter-conference”, the Convention of the Left.

The Manchester left has come together to discuss and plan the conference. Members of Respect Renewal, Permanent Revolution, the Mornings Star’s Communist Party of Britain, Socialist Unity, Communist Party of Great Britain, Socialist Workers Party, Labour Representation Committee and the Green Party are all involved in its organisation. The Socialist Party of England and Wales declined to get involved and, in a brilliant show of sectarianism, sent instead an invite to the organisers to join the dead-end Campaign for a New Workers’ Party.

There are definitely those who want a new halfway house party or renewed Respect-type ‘coalition’, while others see the conference as an opportunity for the left to achieve limited unity through the adoption of declarations or charters. You would think that the implosion and split in Respect would represent another nail in the coffin for such opportunist politics. But it would seem that some still hope for something just as shallow. Projects to unite the left have foundered because of its failure to take its own claimed programme seriously.

Convention
Convention

Triviality

One thing I must say is that the Socialist Party of Great Britain certainly talks a lot less bollocks than you lot. As a young person interested in class politics, I find most discussion on your letters pages thoroughly disheartening (Letters, April 3).

Is such triviality an inevitable part of a party so directly involved in class struggle? What about the fundamental points, like for example that there is a hell of a lot of people (me being one) who find their labour continually exploited and their lives constantly at risk as a result of capitalism?

Or am I just being an “idiot”?

Triviality
Triviality

Convicted

Whilst, like comrade Dave Vincent (Letters, May 15), I found Mike Macnair’s ‘Anything but Marxism’ article interesting , I think the point being missed is that you can’t try Marxism - because Marxism is dead.

The failure of the 1917 revolution has led to the total discrediting of Marxism. The theory when placed into practice led to the murderous Stalin, the would-be mass murderers Lenin and Trotsky, and ultimately to the barbarism of the Khmer Rouge.

To convince the world once again that communism is possible, Marxism has to be tried and convicted, not just tried. What’s required is a new theory of communism that can be sold to the world, and that will avoid the vulgarity of the failed attempts of the 20th century. Such a theory should start with the question of whether the working class really is a revolutionary class, or whether the seeds of communist organisation may come from other sources.

Convicted
Convicted

Sex and drugs

I read with interest Jack Conrad’s piece on May 68 (‘Workers enter the fray’, May 15). I’m still trying to work out how old he could have been when it “made my heart race and emboldened me in everything I have done since”. You must be a very well preserved chap, Jack, given it was 40 years ago. That or you were a very enlightened young lad.

Unfortunately, Jack’s otherwise good review was spoiled when his Stalinist moralising slip started to show: “... hedonism and crazy happenings. Utopian dreams of autonomy and doing one’s own thing became licence for lumpen thugs, dossers and police spies.” He quotes from Lapassade, some sociologist or other, that in its last week of occupation the Sorbonne’s “cellars were teeming with rats, lice were everywhere, at night the buildings filled with hippies and whores, tramps and drug pushers. The amphitheatres stank of hashish and pot.”

All this is really some bourgeois moralising about the sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll that went hand in hand (and hand in everything else) with the flowering of “brilliant debate and self-organising”. To the public in general, we were all hippies and I doubt if this bloke could tell the revolutionary workers from the drop-outs. I also doubt very much that the “whores” got much trade in the climate of sexual freedom pervading the western world and Europe - or the drug pushers either, given the spirit of sharing joints and acid. Unless this is really just a slanderous labelling of people enjoying some well earned sexual freedom and a little journey into, yes, the utopia we wished to achieve.

You think the students occupying the college should have excluded the “tramps” - doubtless poor folk who had been sleeping rough and came to join in the occupation? What would we have the amphitheatres stink with? Rose water, perhaps? Given the choice between Disque Bleu and the other French brands the intellectuals in their corduroys smoked in those days, I’d take the pot any day. As for the lice and rats, come on, in two weeks or so of occupation we’d opened the floodgates to infestations and the plague? This is just the old News of the World ‘most of them needed a bath’ slander, isn’t it?

Thank god Jack and this Lapassade, whoever he was, weren’t running the show back then. 68 without sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll? We weren’t that crazy (man). That was one of the best parts, you fool.

Sex and drugs
Sex and drugs

Misguided soul

According to Mike Macnair’s ‘Anything but Marxism’ (May 1), people like myself are misguided souls for believing that the Soviet Union was in transition to socialism, a process that turned into its opposite when revisionism gained control of the Communist Party and socialist state under the banner of anti-Stalinism.

Mike says that if this idea was true this leads to the question, “Why have the true revolutionaries, the Stalinists, been so utterly incapable of organising an effective resistance to this takeover, given that ‘socialism’ in their sense covered a large part of the globe and organised a large-part of its population?”

Mike’s attempted answer to this question is that these countries had no institutional safeguard against counterrevolution, and the working class had no independent organisation on which the anti-revisionists could base themselves. In this sense, he argues, the Stalinists who opposed counterrevolution faced the same problem as the Trotskyists.

I think that idea is superficial because, while the Stalinists stood for exposing, fighting and purging the revisionist counterrevolution within the Soviet bureaucracy, the Trotskyists outlined a struggle to ‘overthrow’ the bureaucracy - an ultra-left position, since bureaucracies, generally speaking, cannot be ‘overthrown’.

I disagree with the view that there are institutional means to avoid counterrevolution, or that turning to the masses is a guarantee against capitalism returning to power in a country on the socialist road. Both approaches were tried in China, yet capitalism returned. The defeat of socialism in the 1980s and 90s was an ideological defeat, the result of a prolonged ideological struggle waged by imperialism against socialism. The question we should ask is, what were the factors which enabled the capitalists to succeed in this struggle, temporarily?

In attempting to answer this question I would include the existence of a revisionist leadership in the Soviet Union; the long post-war boom after 1945; threatening the socialist countries with nuclear Armageddon by the United States and Britain, to which the Soviets had to respond to by diverting valuable resources to the defence sector; and Reagan and Thatcher persuading the Saudis in the 1980s to increase their oil production to bring down prices from $30 a barrel to $10 a barrel, leading to the collapse of the Soviet economy, which the revisionists had made dependent on oil exports.

These are some of the factors which help to explain the defeat of socialism. However, the imperialists had to provide an alternative, which could compete with the idea of socialism, and this came to be known as consumer capitalism. Spurred on by an abundant supply of cheap oil and credit, consumer capitalism, and its latest expression in neoliberal economics, was held up as the highest stage in human socio-political evolution, bringing about, in Francis Fukuyama’s view, the end of history: in other words, liberal capitalism had won the ideological struggle against all opposing trends and any opposition was regarded as reactionary - a view which, among other things, ignored the fact that capitalism was an ecological disaster destroying the biosphere of the planet, a development which was intrinsic to the logic of this system.

With the neoliberal capitalist ‘utopia’ increasingly in tatters, the left can confidently assert the need for an ecologically sustainable socialist society based on planned production for need to replace the nightmare to which capitalism is leading and soon to be visited on those in the imperialist countries, where living standards will begin to plunge towards third world levels, as the consequences of peak oil becomes the dominant reality.

Misguided soul
Misguided soul

Tradition

What on earth is this “Judeo-christian tradition” that Henry Mitchell is on about (Letters, May 15)? The only christian tradition that most of us know about was that of a pogrom every Easter, which was why people like my grandparents fled god-fearing Russia for relatively irreligious countries like France, the United States and even Britain.

As for the Jews and christians in Palestine and the Middle East, they suffered alongside muslims from the ravaging crusaders, who came for plunder but bore the cross. In Spain, too, persecution led by the church drove Jews to flee, and most of them went to muslim lands.

Of course, some christians turned back to Old Testament tradition, though Luther was not happy when accused of ‘judaising’ religion, and himself turned on Jews and those who he felt were going too far towards their tradition. Later, some christians saw a role for Jews in supposedly fulfilling tradition by settling in Palestine and assisting the second coming (as well as strategic plans). This christian Zionism, with the added promise of Jewish conversion and Armageddon, or something called ‘rapture’, which seems to involve a nuclear holocaust, is now powerful in the United States, which frighteningly, unlike Ahmadinejad, has nuclear weapons enough to kill us all.

It seems to me that the phrase “judeo-christian tradition” has been invented by some neo-cons to separate Jews and christians from wicked muslims, cement an unholy alliance and disguise the frightening aspect of their new crusade. Wasn’t friend Mitchell the same guy arguing for Israel’s policies and saying Palestinians only have themselves to blame if they are occupied or under siege? Fat lot that owes to Hillel, the biblical injunction to deal kindly with strangers or the Sermon on the Mount!

Of course, there have been individual christians who opposed anti-semitism and racism. But when Jewish workers and catholic dockers united to resist Mosley’s fascists in the East End, it was largely under secular and communist leadership and on a class basis. I don’t doubt that the Christian People’s Alliance opposes the BNP - it is a rival party and it has to appeal to black voters, far more of whom are churchgoers than among the whites. But is it appealing to liberation ideas - or is it trying to divide the oppressed along religious, rather than racial, grounds?

Workers with religious ideas, even priests, mullahs or rabbis, if they agree with us on what needs doing in this world, can and should find their place in the socialist movement. It is always a different and suspect thing when religious political parties are formed, whatever their brand or persuasion.

Tradition
Tradition

B52 bombers

Henry Mitchell accuses me of taking him to task for stating that “the Christian People’s Alliance argued robustly for opposition to the BNP”. Actually, I did not take him to task for this, as I know his statement to be true. I challenged Henry for maintaining that there is a Judeo-christian tradition of “friendliness to the stranger”, giving good, historic grounds for my challenge.

I also accept his premise that there could, at some time in the future, be good grounds for a united front of socialist, communist and progressive forces, including some individuals of a religious persuasion. Where he and I part company is when Henry makes the vainglorious claim - so typical of christian apologists and proselytisers - that the “universalistic humanism of socialism is rooted in the tradition of Jesus”.

Henry continues with his christian hubris to claim that this tradition “was also behind the inspiration for the abolition of slavery”. According to this thesis, he will no doubt claim that the American civil war was a battle between the christian north and the atheist south! The fact is that slavery and feudalism had been rendered historically and economically obsolete by the development of capitalism; traditional slaves - so readily accepted by christians for over one and a half millennia - became wage-slaves.

Henry then advises us that the crusades were really fought to “liberate” the holy lands. He is quite right that the forces of islam were spread at times by the force of arms. What else should we expect from a fellow Abrahamic religion with a similar propensity to forcibly proselytise as christianity?

After all, both faiths claim to be in possession of a divine truth which must be forced on all humanity by any means open to them. This does not alter the fact that christian kings in Europe created christian armies which were sent to foreign lands to slaughter innocent men, women and children.

Then, of course, we are treated to the usual ludicrous equation of Nazism and socialism. so beloved of christians - and, of course, capitalists - that both have been guilty of the persecution of christians.

Henry, you really should go back to your history books! Nazism had the full support of the christian churches, to the extent that the Vatican had a pact with the German Nazi regime. There were no doubt christians who fell foul of the regime, but this had nothing to with their membership of any church - rather their refusal to cooperate with Nazi forces; which may or may not have been because of any spiritual commitments on their part.

As to the ill-treatment of christians in the bureaucratic socialist countries, this is often vastly exaggerated by christians and capitalists. Given the natural animosity between these states’ alleged commitment to a material philosophy - as declared Marxists - and the christian idealist philosophy, any oppression of christians was rare, and tolerance of religion was enshrined in these states’ constitutions.

Indeed the Polish United Workers Party was so tolerant of catholicism that 99% of the population were baptised. The regime also allowed one Karol Wojtyla to emigrate to the west. As pope Paul, this rightwing demagogue then did more damage to the bureaucratic socialist bloc than a fleet of B52 bombers would have done!

B52 bombers
B52 bombers

Revo zigzags

I suppose it is a good thing that Workers’ Power’s youth front, Revo, decided to attend the Reclaim the Campus conference (Weekly Worker May 15). But it is a strange decision, given that just two months ago they expelled members for working with the Education Not for Sale campaign. Now, presumably, they would expel members for not working with ENS.

As anyone who’s dealt with this group will know, the Revo front is meticulously controlled by the WP leadership - and if there’s any doubt on this point, the relevant documents have been published. WP’s organisational method, known as the ‘everybody has to say the same thing’ rule (which they erroneously refer to as ‘democratic centralism’), means that all their members in Revo have to do exactly what the leadership tells them.

And since WP members make up at least 75% of Revo - at the last conference it was even 100% - its line is carried ‘democratically’.

When a youth organisation has an older leadership which is totally unaccountable to the members, the thrust will always be towards blind activism and recruiting, with the occasional political swerve to account for expectations of growth that seldom materialise - straight from ‘No collaboration with ENS!’ to ‘Join ENS!’ in this case. Constant zigzagging like this is an almost automatic product of Stalinist-style, monolithic ‘democratic centralism’.

This might explain why just about every WP article on Venezuela is accompanied with a new line about the PSUV - ‘Join!’, ‘Don’t join!’, ‘Join!’, ‘Don’t join!’ - but they have still held no open debate on the question.

Revo zigzags
Revo zigzags