Letters

Not so green

It is great news that PCS overwhelmingly voted to affiliate to Hands off the People of Iran, as Dave Vincent reports (‘Debating pay, politics and Iran’, May 29). This opens up an opportunity to talk to work colleagues on a communist principle: internationalism. Hopi’s opponents, such as the SWP, say that people cannot understand complex arguments on such principles, but this was disproved by the majority at the PCS conference.

Another theme to come out of conference was that the union has to become more green. It appears that the union bureaucracy has bought the government line on the solution to the environmental problems caused by climate change. The government will do the minimum it can to avoid causing harm to those in the city and major industries.

While the trade union climate change conference earlier this year brought activists together, workshops such as ‘greening the workplace’ are not enough. We need to organise to make the environment a political issue and not keep it within the confines of the workplace, where the government will not be challenged.

Not so green
Not so green

Pedantic

Comrade Paul Smith does not seem to be able to grasp the meaning of ‘bureaucratic socialist’ (Letters, May 29). Let me explain: when used to describe the USSR, it means that the Soviet state was not socialist at all.

I cannot detect any evidence that comrade Smith has actually taken the trouble to read what the CPGB, and in particular Jack Conrad, has written on the subject - the content we give to ‘bureaucratic socialism’, for instance. As a result, his letters appear merely as pedantic criticism of Conrad’s use of the English language.

Lenin admitted in 1920 that the revolution was suffering from bureaucratic distortions. So any serious attempt to grapple with the question of bureaucracy within socialist revolutionary theory cannot limit itself just to a critique of Stalinism, as comrade Smith seems to imply.

Pedantic
Pedantic

Bus stop

Three times in the past four years various police forces have seized Brighton Unemployed Centre’s minibus on one pretext or another. The real reason, of course, is that they are unable (yet) to arrest someone merely for going on a demonstration (it’s coming - don’t worry!), so they arrest the bus instead.

They did this at the demonstration against Caterkillar in Birmingham. Earlier this year the same happened at a demonstration outside Agrexco-Carmel in Hayes, Middlesex, which distributes Israeli and West Bank produce. A women’s health collective which borrowed our vehicle was also stopped and had the bus impounded in Leeds last year.

Having been given powers under New Labour’s Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 to prevent any demonstration within a mile of parliament, the police and the Met in particular would like to extend that to all demonstrations. Failing which, they look for any and every excuse. The excuse they have seized on is the absurdity whereby anyone with a driving licence before January 1 2007 needs a D1 license to drive a minibus with more than eight seats.

Something like a MIDAS test. Looking at the DVLA website, however, it appears that the police have been misinterpreting their own legislation, because there is a specific allowance for someone who is over 21, with a driving licence for two years, driving a vehicle “used for social purposes by a non-commercial body but not for hire or reward”.

We have therefore issued proceedings against the Metropolitan Police for impounding our vehicle at Agrexco in February. Rather than allow someone with the right licence to drive it away, they decided instead to take it to the Met’s car pound where you have to pay £105 plus £12 per day. Because there was a massive queue with only two booths operating and, on this occasion, they couldn’t even process credit cards, we had to come back the next day, incurring yet further charges. The Met likes to make it as difficult as possible for people.

I would be interested to hear of other instances where the police have attacked the transport conveying demonstrators in order to harass and prevent lawful demonstrations against the producers of arms and illegal settlement goods.

Bus stop
Bus stop

Failure

Bob Davies takes me to task for stating that the British National Party no longer organises fighting squads (Letters, May 29).

The point of the letter he was responding to was not really about this. What I was trying to get across is that the left’s approach to the BNP has failed. No-platforming no-platforms the left, not the right. Accusations of Nazism do not send the BNP back to the gutter. The left needs to look at itself and its own relationship to society.

The anti-fascist activities of the Socialist Workers Party, etc are popular front exercises. The BNP are an excuse for the left to portray itself as part of mainstream politics and perhaps make a few recruits. The left as respectable British nationalism as against the BNP’s non-respectable British nationalism. It is a betrayal of our internationalism. We need to condemn it because popular front schemes always end up backfiring on the left.

We are not in a period where counterrevolution or socialist revolution are on the agenda. We need policies that are relevant to the present period and the theoretical ability to be aware when social conditions are changing.

For the time being the BNP has no choice but to continue pretending to stand up for the interests of unskilled white British workers. Those that feel they have been deserted by the Labour Party. As indeed they have. This sector is sceptical about the willingness of mainstream politics to deliver anything, except out of fear. But the BNP is trying to get into mainstream politics and they love the rich much more than the poor.

The left is well aware of the bread-and-butter needs of this sector of society but, despite well-meaning and persistent efforts to defend their social conditions, the left has failed in this task. And will continue to fail until it has a communist programme that puts it in clear opposition to mainstream bourgeoisie politics.

Failure
Failure

Who needs party?

Last week Jack Conrad concluded his series on the events of May 1968 and I for one wasn’t holding my breath as to what conclusion he would draw on why it didn’t all work out. I could have guessed before he starting writing the article that it would be the need for a mass Communist Party.

I know that because that’s his conclusion, whatever subject in whatever period we care to look at. When we debated 1926 on the anniversary two years ago, I pointed out that here was a failure when you had a mass Communist Party. Well, in that case, I was told, it wasn’t mass enough. In this case you had a truly massive mass Communist Party, only in this case it wasn’t the right kind of mass Communist Party. Leave aside the Russian Revolution itself, which apparently had all the ingredients and still failed, and we might draw the conclusion that the presence of such a party was only incidental to a wealth of other features as to why so many revolutions have failed, although it must be concluded the presence of those parties was one of the ingredients of the failure.

Although ten million workers were on strike in France, only about four million of them were actually in unions and had any sort of organisation at all. That was the most crucial factor. Revolutionary consciousness was widespread and spreading, but it had no means to express itself as an alternative centre of power and administration, such as would have been the case with comprehensive shop steward committees, soviets or industrial unions. Organisation did fail to meet the hour, but it was something more basic than the political party form. What was needed was direct workers’ control and direct workers’ power through rank and file workplace and community councils and committees, which could have challenged the timidity and treachery of the French Communist Party.

In many ways, the shortcomings were similar to Britain in 1926, where, although we had the semblance of rank and file control through councils of action shop stewards, trades councils, etc, our ideologies had been limited and spiked. The CPGB had no intention of taking up the reins, knowing that it lacked the authority to limit the direction of the revolution, which was moving to its left. The same was true of the French CP during 68; it lacked control of a movement that ideologically was again moving to its left and it didn’t want to put itself in a position where it unleashed forces it couldn’t control. Far from it being the absence of the communist parties that stemmed the revolutionary process, it was actually their presence that did so.

I also disagree strongly that the situation in Britain would not have moved rapidly in the direction of a French 68. 1968-69 saw mass movements of the rank and file through unofficial actions and occupations quite unparalleled in British labour movement history. We saw the rise of the most militant anti-imperialist armed resistance in occupied Ulster for decades. Armed struggle was starting embryonically too in England and Wales outwith the IRA. Here, though, the Communist Party had a tighter grip on the rank and file through both official and unofficial bodies, and the far left had little organisational resonance among the working class.

The spirit of syndicalism and unofficial rebellion was kicking down all restrictions and would have posed the same contradictions for the CPGB and its role in any revolutionary process. The British state was terrified that armed insurgency in Ulster would meet up with militant trade unionism here and make the organic and ideological connection. Sections of the working class were already preparing for some sort of armed resistance, and links across the Irish Sea were already underway. Those of us on the left of the workers’ movement at that period expected a betrayal was being prepared within the CPGB should the situation present itself.

We were busy trying to construct direct organs of power at industrial and community level as organs of duel power within the labour movement, to challenge all those, including the CPGB, who would try to put the dampers on events.

One clear lesson of history, wherever you look, is that at any moment of revolutionary upsurge the Communist Party will seek to derail or restrain that movement. Sorry, Jack, but that’s the clear message of history and not just for May 68. The workers must take and hold control themselves directly and be very careful and distrustful of whomever they place authority in.

We must go into every theatre of revolution expecting that leaders will betray us and make organisational structures and checks and balances to prevent that happening. Unless we do, it will happen time after time, as night follows day.

Who needs party?
Who needs party?

Althusser

An otherwise interesting article by Jack Conrad (‘A lost opportunity’, May 29) is marred slightly by typically cheap comments on Louis Althusser - typical not of comrade Conrad, but of the general approach shared by most anti-Althusserians, including in book-length ‘critiques’ (viz Simon Clarke’s One-dimensional Marxism).

Althusser catches flak from comrade Conrad for being “conveniently ill” at the time of the May-June events. It is difficult to gauge exactly what is being insinuated here, but to say this about a man famously crippled with bouts of depression and in and out of institutions more frequently than you or I go to our GP is a little tasteless.

Althusser’s claim - dating from the mid-70s rather than the 1960s, although less astringent variants appear in and after 1968 - that the only works of Marx totally free from humanist influences are the very final ones is presented as nakedly ridiculous (and, inaccurately, as about Hegel per se, rather than Feuerbach, who for Althusser represents a theoretical regression from Hegel, as well as the basis for the early Marx).

All I can say is that this appeal to the obvious is an awfully ‘convenient’ way of avoiding the real issue at stake here, which is: what exactly is the point of Marxism? What makes it so special? This problem does not really exist for Hegelian Marxists, for whom the philosophical component of Marxism is simply Hegel’s dialectic, ‘inverted’, picked up and plonked down on the class struggle and political economy, where once it simply traced the development of the Absolute Idea.

The most ‘obvious’ reason for supposing this to be false is simply that it is clear that the other two parts in whose terms Marxism’s genesis is often placed - ‘French’ socialism and ‘English’ political economy - were certainly not simply lifted from their own domains and left, unreconstructed, as elements in the Marxist corpus. Marxist socialism is rigorously distinct - antithetical, even - to the grim utopias of his predecessors; and Marx’s readings of classical political economy clearly represent a severe break. These are not tinkering reforms - the Marxist ‘utopia’ is by all accounts a vastly different beast to Fourier’s or Saint-Simon’s, even if details tend to be thin on the ground. Yet Hegel is supposed to come out of all this with just a few tweaks! Not likely.

Althusser is more generous on this score than many Hegelians would have you believe, citing Hegel as the primary source of the (Althusserian) Marxist notion of history as a process without a subject or goal(s). But the point is that this involves a rigorous labour of transformation, a total purgation of teleology - not a minor matter in a philosophy so assuredly teleological as Hegel’s.

The issues here are complex and numerous, and the work of a monograph rather than a missive. Still, what there is in Jack’s article just doesn’t add up. So Althusser’s capitulation to the Parti Communiste Français line is rooted in his “charlatanry” - but the PCF line was cooked up by the likes of Roger Garaudy, a man who gives bureaucrats a bad name … and a leading light of Marxist humanism. Althusser is criticised for praising the PCF’s “order of priorities” - first the general strike, then the students - since, as a line, it underestimates the importance of recruiting students and other ‘auxiliaries’ to the workers’ movement. Fine, but of all the sins of which one can accuse Louis Althusser not recruiting enough students is the most bizarre. This simply lumps him in with the entire PCF majority line, which isn’t an accurate view of the matter.

What does his capitulation tell us, then? Most importantly, it tells us that the manner in which his opposition to the PCF bureaucracy was conducted at least down to 1968 - that is, almost entirely on the level of abstruse theory - was absolutely not up to scratch, and left him at best disarmed at the crucial moment, at worst politically rudderless. When he criticises John Lewis in 1972 for not talking about politics, it is also very much a self-criticism.

It makes it impossible therefore to simply be an Althusserian - it is necessary to negotiate a position between the pioneering but icily theoreticist early works and the shifting emphases of self-criticism, and also to acknowledge the collective nature of the Althusserian project with reference to Balibar, Macherey, Poulantzas and others. The work of Marxist theory is never done - in this corner as much as any other.

Althusser
Althusser

Anarcho-elitist

Robbie Folkard’s letter is a good illustration of why Marxists should not be scared of putting forward Marxism, as Communist Students did at the Reclaim the Campus conference (May 29).

Comrade Folkard decries communist parties as “elitist”, yet he fails to realise that the actions of the anarchists, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and Revo were absolutely elitist. We see Marxism as something that can be universally understood and universally applied, not something to be kept for the anointed few. Comrade Folkard and the other anarchists came with no vision for the student movement, no proposals and, quite frankly, no politics. The project of building a movement for radical social change needs more than a loose anti-capitalist network. Lots of anarchists recognise that, and I doubt they spent hours using consensus decision-making to decide it.

Folkard asks: “What anarchist would be ‘won’ to this [Marxism]?” Well, many actually. The history of the anarchist movement is one of tailism, be it to the bourgeoisie or to sections of the workers’ movement. This, coupled with an inability to arm the working class with the necessary organisation and ideas to achieve workers’ power, has enabled Marxism to win workers from anarchism and other immature trends within the workers’ movement time and time again. Those of us in Communist Students are confident that we can do the same again.

As early as 1873 anarchist followers of Bakunin discredited themselves with their actions during the Spanish bourgeois revolution (1868-74).

Engels wrote: “As soon as they were faced with a serious revolutionary situation, the Bakuninists had to throw the whole of their old programme overboard. First they sacrificed their doctrine of absolute abstention from political, and especially electoral, activities. Then anarchy, the abolition of the state, shared the same fate. Instead of abolishing the state they tried, on the contrary, to set up a number of new, small states. They then dropped the principle that the workers must not take part in any revolution that did not have as its aim the immediate and complete emancipation of the proletariat, and they themselves took part in a movement that was notoriously bourgeois. Finally they went against the dogma they had only just proclaimed - that the establishment of a revolutionary government is but another fraud, another betrayal of the working class - for they sat quite comfortably in the juntas of the various towns, and moreover almost everywhere as an impotent minority outvoted and politically exploited by the bourgeoisie” (‘The Bakuninists at work’, 1873). The anarchists in Education Not for Sale will play a similar role - exploited and used.

When in practice the anarchists set about revolutionary change, the inevitable failure of their enterprises usually leads to workers abandoning anarchism and moving towards something else. At times this has been towards a Communist Party. It is the task of communists to ensure that the working class acts independently to achieve the necessary hegemony for revolution. The early period of the Russian Revolution is a prime example of how Marxists in action can win the working class to a Marxist programme, to the necessity of taking power and to the need for a Communist Party.

So when we came to Reclaim the Campus proposing the formation of a radical students group led by Marxism, we came openly and honestly. We did not hide or water down our politics for sectarian gain. No other group did this; no other group came to build genuine left unity, because they already have their own sects.

Another thing that comrade Folkard highlights is the need for action. It is true we need action; we need a movement that can strike with an iron fist. However, there is something just as important as building a movement that can strike with an iron fist, and that it is making sure we are punching in the right direction - hence our insistence on Marxism as the guiding light of our movement.

Folkard also fails to understand what ‘direct action’ is. It is not sporadic stunts taken by a few activists; that is elitist. Direct action is “working class self-activity independent of the state, the employers and the labour bureaucracy” (CS political platform). An example of actual direct action is the recent refusal of dockworkers in South Africa to unload arms bound for Zimbabwe. After World War II it was the CPGB that led actions to seize empty houses for the homeless. Now that, comrade, is direct action. The role of the Weekly Worker, then, is to facilitate the creation of a movement that can actually take direct action. Surely, propaganda by the deed should have died a death in our movement a long time ago?

Communists should unashamedly fight for Marxism. Narrow opportunism for short-term gains has led the left into disaster after disaster. Surely, the implosion of the Respect project should be a most recent and obvious reminder that such a method cannot build the movement, or the Communist Party we need.

Anarcho-elitist
Anarcho-elitist