Letters

Republic

Our anarchist friend and regular letter writer, Iain McKay, dismissively quotes Fredrick Engels (Letters, June 12). What he says is meant to shock the CPGB. Engels recommended that workers in Spain “attack the state” by sending representatives to parliament.

Comrade McKay says that history “was not kind to that strategy”. But this is one-sided quote-chopping. Evidently comrade McKay, like other anarchists, eschews democratic elections and has no idea of combining parliamentary methods with other tactics.

The CPGB has no problem here. We do not fetishise any particular tactic. Nothing is automatically ruled in, nothing automatically ruled out. I believe Engels took a similar approach.

Comrade McKay then goes on to field what he no doubt considers to be a killer from Engels: “Our party and the working class”, says Engels, “can only come to power under the form of the democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Comrade McKay asks: “Does the CPGB not mock the Socialist Party of Great Britain for holding this quintessentially Marxist position?”

No, comrade McKay, the CPGB does not mock the SPGB for holding to this position. As an organisation there is doubtless much to mock about it. But not this. Indeed, if comrade McKay would care to read contributions by leading CPGBers over the years he would discover that they advocate the working class taking the lead in the battle for extreme democracy and the call for a democratic republic.

This, as we have explained again and again, would be the “form” of the dictatorship, or rule, of the working class.

Whether this can be achieved peacefully or whether civil war will prove necessary is no principle for us. But the aim of the democratic republic is clear and so is the content we want to give it.

Republic
Republic

Misinformed

I do not know where comrade Ivor Kenna got the idea that John Pearson was expelled from the CPGB for organising for “the goals of a broad organisation within the CPGB” (Letters, June 12). He was expelled for refusing point blank to abide by a democratic resolution that was acceptable to everyone else but him. You cannot get much narrower than that.

He has been suspended from the Campaign for a Marxist Party for claiming as a matter of principle that he has the right to hit anyone who he feels has insulted him, unless the CMP polices the language of its members to his personal satisfaction. In other words he puts his personal vanity on an altogether higher plane than concepts such as freedom of speech and democracy. Which are essential to building a Communist Party.

If you think this behaviour is caused by the strain of being in close proximity to the CPGB you should consider his behaviour in his version of the Socialist Alliance, where as moderator of their email list he rusticated almost the entire membership for disagreeing with him.

The Trotskyist Tendency within the CMP have removed him as their convenor because of his behaviour. In my opinion they should suspend him as a member until he relinquishes his avowed right to hit people. Otherwise I do not see how they, or anybody else, can take them seriously as Marxists of any sort.

Misinformed
Misinformed

Permanent Spart

Someone casually perusing Torab Saleth’s articles on theory of permanent revolution (June 5 and 12) could easily come away with the impression that Trotsky arguedfor, rather than against, a stageist conception of revolution in countries of belated development. In fact, Trotsky is famous for his prediction that the Russian Revolution would consist of a single, uninterrupted process, culminating in proletarian power.

While Saleth allows that the October revolution, like any revolution in a poorer country then or now, must combine socialist with bourgeois tasks (like the resolution of the land question) he seems to have difficulty with the temporal aspect of Trotsky’s theory: that the bourgeois revolution “grows over” into a proletarian dictatorship. Was not 1917, asks Saleth, simply a proletarian revolution with combined tasks? And will this not be even more true of ‘third world’ revolutions today, considering that pre-capitalist ruling classes are now largely extinct?

What Saleth seems to miss is Trotsky’s implication that the different tasks faced by ‘third world’ revolutions also imply a different political starting point. Such upheavals almost never begin with a pure, proletariat-against-bourgeoisie consciousness, as they may in metropolitan countries. They rather start, much as the French Revolution did, by counterposing the autocracy or a colonial occupier to ‘the people’ as a whole. Only by proving itself the class most capable of accomplishing the tasks the ‘people’s revolution’ sets for itself - the democratic political participation of the masses and (often) national self-determination - can the working class expose the vacillations of the big and petty bourgeoisie, place itself at the head of the most oppressed strata and assume a leading role. This is a process that unfolds over an interval of time, however brief. This, as I understand it, is what Trotsky meant by “growing over”.

Reappraising Trotsky in light of contemporary conditions is something that his self-professed followers (epigones) have never excelled at, and it is a good thing that Saleth is giving it a try. But the theory of permanent revolution may require more than the relatively minor clarification Saleth proposes.

While there is indeed a clear line of separation between advanced countries and the rest of the world, the ‘third world’ comprises a variegated reality, ranging from destitute countries without a working class (eg, much of sub-Saharan Africa) to countries like Brazil and South Africa, with substantial industrial development.

Even in these countries, the working class does not stand in the same relation to other classes as it did in Russia a century ago. It is doubtful that a single revolutionary formula can encompass this complexity. And although a few pre-capitalist despotisms are still around (Jordan, Saudi Arabia), the capitalist classes of most poor nations have adopted at least the formal trappings of parliamentary democracy. Democratic questions, while certainly not irrelevant (witness Mexico and Pakistan), present themselves in a somewhat different light.

I also doubt Saleth’s implication that the opportunism of most epigones concerning the Iranian revolution had its roots in some (inaccurate) interpretation of the permanent revolution. Opportunism seldom derives from theory. In this case, most self-proclaimed Trotskyists viewed an insurrectionary mass movement against a US client regime as a long-needed tonic for their battered hopes, and drank deep without a lot of further reflection. They were not unlike most other leftists in this respect. The epigones distinguished themselves only by the theoretical acrobatics they performed to justify their enthusiasm.

There was, however, one honourable exception that I know of: the Spartacist League (US) and its overseas satellites in the International Spartacist Tendency. The Spartacists refused at the time to give one iota of support - political, military or ‘material’ - to ayatollah Khomeini, proclaiming instead, “Down with the shah! Down with the mullahs!”

A series of withering polemics in their newspaper, Workers Vanguard, castigated the rest of the left, Trotskyist and non, for abetting islamic reaction. They ridiculed the widespread notion of an anti-imperialist movement spearheaded by sexually segregated mass demonstrations, in which women paraded in head-to-toe veils chanting, ‘Allah is great!’ They warned Iranian leftists that they were digging their own graves.

I parted company with the Spartacists 22 years ago on less than friendly terms, to say the least. But credit should be given where it’s due. It was the fearlessness of this group in standing up against mainstream leftist opinion in the name of what I had come to understand, more or less on my own, as the Trotskyism of Trotsky, that moved me to join them despite their bizarre cultish behaviour, apparent at the time.

Permanent Spart
Permanent Spart

Fighting squads

The problem with Phil Kent’s reply to me about fighting squads and the British National Party is that it avoids answering the questions I originally posed about the issue (Letters, June 5).

I accept that Phil’s original comments on the BNP were highlighting wider issues about the left generally and its strategy and tactics on how to deal with that organisation. Yes, raising no-platforming into a hard and unyielding principle that cannot be applied tactically to a specific set of circumstances often means the left no-platforms itself; yes, simply rehashing and subsuming its politics within a popular framework and not providing a clear, principled or radical alternative to the agenda of mainstream parties means that the left can often blur the essential political basis for the existence and, under certain circumstances, the flourishing of fascistic ideology and its associated organisations. But my question about fighting formations still remains pertinent.

If Phil sees such squads as ”the defining characteristic of a fascist party”, then, for all the reasons stated in my initial correspondence on the issue (Letters, May 29), the BNP falls into such a remit. To repeat, the BNP may not have ‘fully rounded’ fighting formations, as other fascist organisations had in the past, but fighting squads, however sporadic and small in comparison, do exist within its ranks. How else can they be defined?

As others have pointed out, if we don’t acknowledge this we are in danger of characterising the BNP as something that is a variant of, and only slightly worse than, the likes of Ukip when, in reality, the nature of the beast is more insidious. Bearing this in mind then, I ask Phil once again how he defines a fighting squad and whether he still believes the BNP, as currently constituted, “no longer organises” such bodies?

Fighting squads
Fighting squads

Isolated

‘New Labour terminal crisis demands radical rethink’ was the headline of the report about the recent CPGB aggregate (June 5). Missing from the discussion was any mention of the three non-Labour-affiliated trade unions - the PCS, RMT and FBU - forming a new union-based political party.

Activists are struggling to convince people not to rip up their union cards, after union members were sent letters calling for support for Labour in recent elections. In London, many members of the old TGWU section of the Unite trade union are joining the RMT, given the latter’s more militant attitude to pay and conditions.

I am sure that there are many isolated readers of the Weekly Worker, living outside London, who would jump at the chance of joining a new union-based party. Such a party would allow geographically isolated socialists like me to come together in an all-British party and hence end their demoralising political isolation.

Isolated
Isolated

Arbitrary

It is good to note the support from comrades John Smithee and David Walters (Letters, May 29) for Jim Moody’s article on drug legislation (‘Legalise, not reclassify’, May 22). However, I must take issue with some of David Walters’ comments.

He opens by stating that “Drug use is bad for the human being. Drugs are drugs, whether it is marijuana or cocaine or alcohol”. Neither statement is true: drug use can and does save human lives; drugs are indeed drugs, whether they happen to be illicit, or are tea, coffee, over-the-counter medicine, alcohol, tobacco products or medically prescribed drugs. What David has done is to generalise about the perceived effects on their users of those drugs that are illegal.

It is certainly a fact, as David points out, that the alcohol ‘problem’ is the biggest and costliest. But it must be added that this is in absolute rather than relative terms. Crack cocaine is indeed one of the most expensive and dangerous of the currently illegal drugs, but it is no more ‘instantly addictive’ than tobacco.

Sorry to be pedantic, comrades, but if we are to campaign for the removal of senseless sanctions on the use of a rather arbitrarily selected assortment of recreational drugs, we must be conscious of all the relevant facts.

Arbitrary
Arbitrary

Joke

Yet again Iain McKay details just how far back the ‘Marxist’ tradition of conflating and substituting ‘the party’ with ‘the class’ goes (Letters, June 12). The same letters page explains how “it will be necessary for communists to rebuild working class consciousness, including standing in elections”.

While this may be a joke, I’ll treat it as a serious point. As you’ve tried this before, can I ask how it went? Did you rebuild the class-consciousness of all the working class? Or was it just a majority? Or a significant minority?

Joke
Joke