Letters

No mistake

Chris Strafford’s article, ‘Convention: mistake repeated’, disagrees with the Convention of the Left (CL) organisers that it would be in any way “different” from recent left conferences (July 31). This was something of a surprise to me, and I’m sure it is to others on the organising committee of which he has been an active part, given that Chris has never expressed this view at any of our meetings. On talking to Chris, I gather this headline was dreamt up by the editors.

This assertion seems to revolve around the idea that “the lack of any decision-making structure (no motions, no votes) and the lack of any common intent to move in the direction of a party means that the convention can only be a talking shop”. This is even odder, given that the convention organisers are still discussing whether there will be room for resolutions at the event, but that, in all probability, there will be. Certainly the CL has not agreed to move towards a party, but isn’t that the point of ideological struggle?

The report continues with the unfortunate assertion: “In addition, a repeat of past mistakes is also very much on the cards. Respect Renewal is the big mover in the organisation of the CL and has ambitious hopes for it as the basis from which to conjure up a bigger Respect-type popular front. Well, it worked so well last time, didn’t it?”

Leaving aside the sarcasm, this is in fact the least likely outcome of the CL. Respect Renewal is active in it, but so are the Labour Representation Committee and, as Chris has noted, the Socialist Workers Party have now come on board, alongside the Communist Party of Britain, CPGB, Permanent Revolution, etc. Given that Respect Renewal’s explicit purpose is to provide a left electoral alternative to Labour, how likely is it that John McDonnell, Jeremy Corbyn, the LRC and all these others are going to agree to the foundation of a new anti-Labour electoral bloc?

No mistake
No mistake

Entryist

Steve Freeman and his Revolutionary Democratic Group comrades reject the argument that only Marxism provides a viable alternative to Labourism and put forward ‘republican socialism’ instead. And it gets worse! The RDG has stated that they are campaigning not for a Marxist party, but for a “Chartist party mark two”. Why did the RDG bother joining the Campaign for a Marxist Party?

Paradoxically the RDG applies a ‘stageist’ theory to Britain as though we are a third world country. Both the stageism and the rejection of Marxism prompted my accusation of “Stalinoid petty bourgeois radicalism”. Steve Freeman’s letter serves as a confession that the RDG is using the CMP for ‘entryist’ reasons and is not serious about promoting Marxism (July 24).

Entryist
Entryist

Incorporationist

In response to Simon Wells (Letters, July 31), firstly let me clear up a stupid mistake I made in my initial reply to him (July 24). John Major took 60 million tonnes of British coal production out when he initiated his particular ‘final solution’ to the problem of the miners. It was promptly replaced by 60 million tonnes of imports from abroad. My letter talked of 60,000 tonnes. Sorry.

As to Simon’s further response, it’s just wrong. The Hatfield Main system will take 90% of emissions from the process of burning coal and virtually 100% of CO₂ emissions. This system will be in production within the next five years. I don’t take my information from any government source, but from the fact I was branch secretary and delegate at Hatfield for 25 years and worked down that mine on the coal face for 30 years. The construction process and plan is there for all to see.

The only thing wrong with this process is that it is a one-off. The government doesn’t want clean coal technology; it is dead set on nuclear power and is following a long-term plan outlined in the Ridley report of 1978-79 and initiated by the Thatcher government as part of her plan to break the power of the National Union of Mineworkers, which was part of her wider war on the working class.

Kingsnorth isn’t using carbon capture because it doesn’t have to, and the government has no intention of speeding up the process to make it a viable ‘green’ alternative to nuclear. It is government inertia and government policy that is stopping the carbon capture scheme - not technology.

I’m afraid I just don’t agree with Simon’s anti-union position - it sounds like the tired old ultra-leftist incorporationist nonsense, which is flatly contradicted by such movements as 1926 and 1984-85. In these cases, to name but two, ‘trade union’ struggles took on insurrectionary proportions and posed the deeper question of class power very starkly. I fail to see how they support any theory of incorporation or, incidentally, why closing down Kingsnorth power station temporarily or permanently furthers the class war.

The fact that the NUM is still formally affiliated to the Labour Party masks the fact that the bulk of the membership and many sections of the NUM leadership past and present are thoroughly disgusted by Labour. The continued affiliation is more a symptom that no clear alternative presents itself, although in my view it’s of no earthly use whatsoever.

Incorporationist
Incorporationist

Trots too

Contributors to your letters column have objected to Hillel Ticktin’s exclusion of Stalinists from a Marxist party because they advocate ‘socialism in one country’. That phrase was Stalin’s euphemism for nationalism. Stalin never tried to build socialism in one country, which would have made him an ultra-leftist rather than the counterrevolutionary he was.

I think what we have to oppose is nationalism, even if it understandable in the case of the oppressed. Stalinism proposed a policy of popular fronts with the nationalist bourgeoisie. But if we pose it as I have, we will have to exclude some Trotskyist groups as well, given they too often advocate support for nationalism and popular fronts.

Trots too
Trots too

Falsifications

I read Hillel Ticktin’s article, ‘Who are the Marxists?’, with interest (Weekly Worker July 24).

In my view there aren’t the same attacks on Lenin as on Trotsky because for 70-odd years we have had the thoughts, actions and writings of Lenin turned into some sort of semi-religious scriptures and any attempt to develop and evaluate his ideas were seen by the party quacks in the Kremlin as an unspeakable heresy.

On the other hand, by early 1923 there was already a whispering campaign being cultivated amongst significant sections of the Bolshevik old guard against Trotsky and his views. This grew into a general attack on anything he said, leading ‘Trotskyism’ to be equated with ‘bourgeois deviationism’ and culminating in the ludicrous assertion that Trotskyism was in some way an offshoot of fascism.

This state of affairs left an indelible footprint in the sub-consciousness of Marxists the world over, distorting their ability to objectively form a coherent view of Trotsky. It is now imperative, with the demise of the Soviet Union, to look again at the events of the early 20th century leading up to the 1917 revolution and to correct the Stalinist falsifications.

Falsifications
Falsifications

Must do better

For the edification of Robert Clough (Letters, July 31) and others of a ‘Stalinist? Moi?’ bent: Stalinism is the advocacy of individual roads to socialism primarily based on long-term diplomatic alliances with sections of alien classes. Third worldism is the belief that the revolution will break out in the (semi-)colonies and then spread to the metropoles. Put them together and you have the delectable brew, ‘third worldist Stalinism’, which converts itself into a left PR team for anti-colonial bourgeois nationalists.

Must do better
Must do better

Garbage can

I have been reading with interest the discussions in respect to the latest wacky piece of chauvinism from the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty.

I had some time ago decided not to bother looking at the AWL website again because I had decided that they were a basket case with absolutely no significance to the labour movement. It was only after reading your article (‘Excusing nuclear Armageddon’, July 31) and one on the Permanent Revolution website that I decided to risk putting my toe back into the polluted water.

Although I did not agree with everything either the CPGB or PR had to say, I did find myself once again agreeing with the response to the Sean Matgamna article by Dave Broder. Seeing things only from the outside, I have to say that Dave Broder seems to be one of the few healthy elements in a rapidly decaying corpse. As I say in my latest blog (http://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/israel-iran-and-reason.html), the danger has to be that such elements will suffer the same kind of abuse and rudeness currently reserved for non-AWL comrades, if he and the minority were to gain any significant support within the organisation. That experience might result in their demoralisation and being lost to the movement.

This latest event is just another sign of the rapid degeneration of the AWL. Their politics are increasingly those of Stalinism. Their methodology is thoroughly subjective, characterised by rudeness and bureaucratism rather than rational debate.

On the national question they have collapsed into bourgeois nationalism. Their defeatism in relation to the working class has caused them to adopt a position of undeclared popular frontism with imperialism and bourgeois democracy: eg, their position in relation to Yeltsin’s counterrevolution, Serbia, Tibet, Kosovo and of course Iraq. Their two-states position in respect of Israel-Palestine overtly requires a solution to be implemented by imperialism and the national bourgeoisies, and has nothing to do with independent working class politics, which they profess is the cornerstone of their third campism. The latest outpouring is just the logical extension of those reactionary politics.

But there is another aspect of the AWL closer to Healyism than to Stalinism. Trotsky said that some small sects become comfortable in their existence, and so consciously or unconsciously act to perpetuate it. They promote their own isolation by being perpetually at odds with the movement.

It is a great pity that an organisation I was once proud to belong to has come to this, because I know that many of its comrades now and in the past were very able and committed revolutionaries. But life goes on, and there is no room for sentimentalism. The task must be to salvage what is salvageable from the organisation, and hasten the rest into the garbage can of history.

Garbage can
Garbage can

Distortion

Tony Clark tries defending ‘socialism in one country’ (Letters, July 31). For all his talk of tactics and dialectics, Clark misses the essential point. Capitalism is a global system, so a lone, so-called socialist country would not be able to abolish the capital-wage labour relationship and would find itself forced to adopt capitalist measures. This is the reality and there is a historical precedent - Soviet Russia, where Lenin was arguing for state capitalism.

Socialism in one country is a distortion of a key idea, but then the two German guys who penned a manifesto in 1848 were probably ultra-leftists in the eyes of the Stalinist school.

Distortion
Distortion

Don't believe it

Peter Manson takes up a whole page of the Weekly Workerworrying about the ‘purge’ of the Trotskyist Groupe Communiste Révolutionnaire Internationaliste from the new anti-capitalist party (NPA) in France (‘New party purged before its launch’, July 31).

Apparently, despite the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire’s proclamations in favour of a “democratic, pluralist, anti-capitalist party”, the CRI Group is unable to participate in the NPA process. The LCR’s attitude is compared to that of the SWP in Britain: “But, if the CRI is to be believed, the LCR’s NPA project is marred by all the bureaucratic failings that we in Britain have come to expect from the Socialist Workers Party - control-freakery, manipulation and an underhand, manipulative way of working” (my emphasis).

If indeed “the CRI is to be believed”, one could well understand and approve of Peter’s warning to the far-left organisations engaged to one extent or another in the NPA committees: namely, la Fraction of Lutte Ouvrière; the Gauche Révolutionnaire, sister of the Socialist Party; and finally the Prométhée group. All should be concerned that one day they will be treated the same way by the LCR.

But what if the CRI’s declarations are not quite correct? What if its dossier - which is clearly the only source of Peter’s article - gives only one (grossly exaggerated) side of the story and is at odds with the facts? In that case the CRI Group would have scored some useful points in its campaign to be painted a victim of bureaucracy, to monopolise discussion by focussing on its own, highly marginal intervention in the NPA committees, and to sow suspicion and division in the movement in order to attain its real, openly stated objective: to win new recruits to its programme for “the construction of a Leninist-Trotskyist party as part of the reconstruction of the Fourth International, based on the Transitional programme …”

Either the thousands of NPA committee members recognise that this revolutionary programme is the only acceptable one and rally to the enlightened leadership of the CRI (not very likely); or they follow the ‘treacherous bureaucrats’ of the other tendencies and it will be down to the CRI to proclaim its own new party - having gathered the maximum number of members and contacts from the enemy ranks. Everyone knows the words of the song.

It is precisely in order to avoid giving the CRI a platform for this diversion that the various other far-left currents taking part in the NPA committees chose not to comment on this subject. Was this the right decision? Their silence, after all, has allowed the rumours to continue unabated.

As for the Prométhée Communist Collective (the only group apart from the LCR that has fully engaged with the NPA committees - la Fraction and the Gauche Révolutionnaire are only taking part as observers), I, like several other members of the organisation, have been solicited individually by the CRI in emails asking for my support. Instead of addressing the Prométhée Communist Collective as such, the CRI has tried to entice individual members - a debatable method, but one considered astute in relation to Prométhée.

Our collective consists of comrades from various communist backgrounds and is not a 100% politically homogenous group: there is an important common basis of agreement among members, but they also have the right and the obligation to express different or disputed positions on numerous questions (this writer, for example, makes no secret of his general political agreement with the CPGB, which the majority of Prométhée comrades do not necessarily share).

As a Marxist activist engaged in the construction of the NPA, who will be participating as such, along with other comrades from France, in the debate at Communist University on ‘What kind of party are we fighting for?’, I thought it necessary to reply quickly to Peter Manson’s article. The CU session must not be diverted into debating a genuinely marginal theme. It would be a real waste of time and energy to come to London to discuss … the CRI Group!

Let me sum up briefly the ‘CRI affair’.

1. Yes, it is true that two or three members of the CRI were excluded from the Paris 5-13 local committee of the NPA. This regrettable decision was taken by local members, exasperated by the CRI’s style of working and its incessant ‘lessons’. While their decision was understandable, it was wrong: they should have waited patiently for the CRI itself to withdraw from the process, as it most certainly would have done sooner or later.

2. No, it is not true that the CRI has been “purged” from the NPA. Its members are still taking part in various committees. They were present and had a delegate at the June 28-29 convention outside Paris. Not only does the CRI continue to express itself fully inside as well as outside the NPA committees, but CRI members are also registered on the NPA internet discussion forum, where they have unlimited space to make their criticisms and to debate freely with other comrades. Even if it is unpleasant to be under permanent pressure from hostile people, it would be neither possible nor desirable to exclude the CRI from the self-governing NPA committees.

What I have written above has been approved by my comrades and so represents the position of the Prométhée Communist Collective.

Don't believe it
Don't believe it