Letters

Barbarism

It is a great pity that an important discussion article by Sean Matgamna of the AWL could not be fraternally debated by Mark Fischer and company in the Weekly Worker. (‘Threat of Israeli nuclear attack on Iran horribly real’, August 7). If the Weekly Worker wants to be known for genuine debate, it will have to learn not to misrepresent and distort the position of those with whom it seeks to debate.

The far left has been compared to an “ultra-left disorder” (Lenin), and it is regrettable how little the British far left has come since the 1920s in overcoming its chronic sectarianism and inflation of differences in order to recruit on the basis, not of a higher order of rational politics, but of hating one’s political rivals and feeling superior to them. Thus the far left require psychoanalysis: they constitute a “host of messiahs who are not on speaking terms”, who indulge in “the narcissism of small differences”.

I hope, for the sake of the future of socialism and humanism in the 21st century, that the Weekly Worker forgets its insults and baiting of comrade Matgamna and opens its pages to him for the ‘right to reply’; and thus indulges, instead, in some respectful, comradely debate; to inspire confidence that socialist democracy works in practice, and not just in the dusty abstract textbooks and the ‘Where we stand’ columns of the ultra-left press. Otherwise, comrades, socialism is lost, ultimately, to barbarism.

Barbarism
Barbarism

Marxist classic

Graham Taylor trots into the letters page on his mangy Socialist Party of Great Britain nag to tilt at more anti-communist straw windmills (Letters, August 7).

No real communist I know or have known has ever advocated ‘socialism in one country’ as a primary, let alone a final, objective. Genuine communists advocate the world revolution to overthrow imperialism and capitalism, establish the rule of the world working class, the world dictatorship of the proletariat, as the necessary transition point to a world communist society. Pretty clear, one would think.

The collective leadership headed by Stalin did not want socialism only in the Soviet Union. But, having established working class state power over a sixth of the globe and in the absence of revolution in the west, what were the realistic options? Give up? Throw in the towel, as the various right and ‘left’ deviationists home and abroad seem to have wanted? Invite the imperialists to come in and commit a holocaust, as followed the defeat of the Paris Commune? Or do what they did - ie, defend the revolution, forge an alliance between the working class and the working peasants, utilise and develop the vast human and material resources available to the new power and build in the direction of socialism, pending the outbreak of revolution elsewhere?

The construction of socialism in the USSR was never in place of working for world revolution, but was an indispensable condition for it. The very existence of the Soviet Union provided an invaluable moral, political, material, military and financial resource for the world revolution. Defending existing states of working class and people’s power, especially People’s China, is an integral part of defending the struggle of the world working class for its emancipation on a world scale.

Slagging and slandering the working class and the peoples of the USSR, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Korea, Nicaragua, eastern Europe, Laos, Cambodia, etc, who through their partial successes in defeating imperialism and capitalism through revolution achieved a million times more than their sisters and brothers in the advanced western capitalist states, seems more than a little pathetic.

Today’s right and ‘left’ revisionists claim that ‘socialism in one country’ was impossible, for reasons which owe more to mysticism than materialism, and yet the working class and their communist parties ignored these unseductive sirens, achieving socialism not in one country but over a third of the globe. The people who should be criticised for not achieving world socialism are surely those in the countries which have conspicuously failed to carry out a proletarian or people’s revolution, not those who have.

It would be (truly!) fantastic if increased sales of Socialist Studies could ignite a worldwide insurrectionary process, leading to the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of world socialism, but ... er ... the SPGB and their increasingly close friends at the Weekly Worker instead advocate the use of bourgeois democracy, periodic general elections, winning majorities in parliaments, legislating in socialism, and keeping such institutions in socialism. Hardly a credible commitment towards proletarian revolution and by definition more than a hint of a ‘national road to socialism’.

Finally, regarding Taylor’s highly superficial comment on capitalist money relations, every class-conscious worker should read Stalin’s Economic problems of socialism in the USSR. Not only will they find a most clear exposition of the history of commodity production, its role under feudalism, capitalism and socialism; they will find a most clear explanation of how commodity production was being restricted, diminished and eliminated as part of the construction of socialism in the USSR, and the specific, practical and concrete steps being undertaken to advance towards the higher phase of communism - an object even the SPGB might agree with.

No-one could come away from that Marxist classic with any doubt that the foundations of communism had been laid in the USSR, that it was moving in the direction of full communism and would have continued to do so, had the spirit and content of the Stalin leadership continued after 1955.

Marxist classic
Marxist classic

Lenin started it

My letter to the Weekly Worker drew some ultra-left fire (July 31). However, I stand by my argument that socialism in one country was a tactical imperative based on the strategy of world revolution and that this policy was derived from Lenin.

Graham Taylor accuses me of missing the “essential point”, which is that capitalism is a global system and therefore socialism in one country would not be able to abolish the capital-wage labour relationship. This relationship is just another name for capitalist production for profit, which can be abolished within one country. Were this not the case, the Soviet Union would have experienced the same economic depression as the capitalist world in the 1930s, but instead saw a huge expansion of production.

Taylor’s appeal to the Communist manifesto against socialism in one country is ignorant of the fact that Lenin raised the possibility of the latter on the basis of his study of imperialism, an era which came after the 1848 Manifesto, and which Lenin regarded as the eve of the socialist revolution - hence the possibility of socialism in one country as part of the world revolutionary process on the basis of uneven development.

Lenin’s defence of socialism in one country, proving it was possible, was aimed at pre-empting those opportunist leaders of social democracy who would justify betraying revolutions in their own countries on the grounds that revolution had to be international. Trotsky brought this social democratic thinking into the Bolshevik Party and deployed it against Stalin.

Earl Gilman, another ultra-leftist, claims that Stalinism proposed a policy of popular fronts with the nationalist bourgeoisie. He is totally unaware that it was Lenin and other leading communists who put forward the policy that the national bourgeoisie should be supported to a certain degree if it fought against imperialist domination.

On the other hand, Colin McGhie wants us to look again at the events leading up to 1917, and to correct the Stalinist falsifications. I am all for correcting falsifications, of course, and the most glaring is the one committed by Trotskyists, claiming that Stalin was the originator of the theory of socialism in one country instead of Lenin.

From 1924, this issue has divided the Marxist left, which defended the Russian Revolution. Anyone who now talks about left unity and forming a new Marxist party, while avoiding the question of how this theory came to divide the revolutionary left, cannot be taken seriously. The first step towards unity of those who claim to be Marxists must be resolving the issue of socialism in one country, its origins and consequences.

Lenin started it
Lenin started it

Slander

Tony Clark’s letter of July 31 is a good example of how Stalinism continues to impede attempts to build an effective left worldwide.

Clark defends the doctrine of socialism in one country on the grounds that it is a realistic tactic in the strategy for world revolution. Put differently, he thinks that the former Soviet Union and regimes modelled on or influenced by it (such as Cuba and Venezuela) are stages on the road to socialism and should be supported uncritically. He insinuates that leftwing criticism of the Cuban and Venezuelan regimes is pro-imperialist and will lead to their overthrow. It follows that Marxists who criticised the former USSR were in reality enemies of socialism.

Moreover, Clark defends socialism in one country on the grounds that it originated with Lenin. This is, of course, a gross distortion of history. There is absolutely no evidence to support Clark’s belief. This allegation is consistent with those made by the right (including anarchists), who argue that a Marxist leadership of a proletarian revolution leads inevitably to totalitarianism and barbarism. It reproduces the slander that Lenin was responsible for Stalin’s crimes against workers and humanity.

I doubt whether Clark’s thinking is typical of the majority of members of the Campaign for a Marxist Party, but if it is then Marxists wanting to be part of a new leftwing organisation need either to be active in raising members’ consciousness or thinking of breaking free and starting afresh.

Slander
Slander

Sectarian

I read your glowing appreciation for Brian Keenan (‘Prisoner B26380’s dilemma’, July 31). Surely not the very same Brian Keenan who ordered the worst Provisional IRA sectarian massacre in Ireland’s more recent history?

In 1976, as a response to loyalist paramilitary assassinations of nationalists in South Armagh, Keenan ordered the PIRA, under a flag of convenience, the South Armagh Republican Action Force, to react by killing protestants. The result was the murder of nine textile workers.

The workers were returning from their job when they were stopped by a paramilitary road block. The gunmen ordered the only catholic, Richard Hughes, to step forward. Hughes’s workmates thought then that the armed men were loyalists, come to kill Hughes, and tried to stop him from identifying himself. When he stepped forward, however, he was told to leave and the remaining workers were shot.

This sectarian massacre, like the Darkley Hall massacre by the Catholic Reaction Force - a cover name for the Irish National Liberation Army - had more in common with catholic defenderism than either republicanism or Marxism.

Sectarian
Sectarian

Unpaid advisor

Sean Matgamna recently demanded a debate with the CPGB over his attitude to the likely Israeli attack on Iran, having been accused of favouring such a crime. He protested his innocence, of course, but his latest rant digs a deeper hole, as he tries to erect barrier to a reasoned exchange of opinion (‘Why the left must say no to the mullahs’ bomb’, www.workersliberty.org/story/2008/08/09/no-”mullahs-bomb”).

Hysterically, he raises the old fears of a nuclear holocaust. The crazy mullahs, it seems, want to turn Iran into a suicide bomb to take us all to paradise. There may be some who are mad enough to dream of this - as mad as some Zionists, perhaps. One complication to the scenario is that they do not actually have a bomb, are probably not even developing one and, if they are, it will take years to develop enough bombs to make a plausible threat to massively armed Israel.

An armed conflict, with or without the nuclear dimension, would be yet another tragedy. States and ruling classes will do what they have always done and defend their interests. We have to deprive them all of the weapons and the power, and create a world based on the common interests of the working class and exploited masses. These are tasks for the workers themselves to accomplish, but Matgamna does not even mention this. His words are addressed to others. They are probably intended to inoculate his own supporters against the less-than-nuclear menace of his political rivals, but can only serve to sow confusion among opponents of war and give encouragement to the militarists who are openly debating the merits of an attack on Iran.

The real reasons for a ‘pre-emptive’ strike on Iran are hidden behind the talk of an Iranian threat - Iran as an obstacle to US hegemony in the region, Israel’s role as US proxy and its desire to settle its difficulties with Palestine and Lebanon on favourable terms. Fear of an actual attack by Iran is in a poor third place, but helps to focus Arab resentments against Iran.

Matgamna is not for disarming the Zionists. He wants them to use their power to impose the US-sponsored ‘two states’ solution. On August 3 he posted: “We criticise Israel for oppressing the Palestinians, and for not using its present position of strength to reach a settlement with those in the Arab and islamic world with whom a settlement can be reached.” So Palestine can be carved up between the Zionists and the Fatah clique, and deals cut with anyone else deemed to be amenable.

Not long ago, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty was reserving its position on Hands Off the People of Iran, having found practical rather than political reasons not to join it. In a situation where the anti-war movement has failed so abjectly against the Iraq war, and barely raised its hand against the Afghanistan invasion, Hopi could emerge as an alternative channel for building the anti-war movement on a principled basis. From being denounced by the Stop the War Coalition as aiding the imperialists when Hopi attacked the theocracy, we are now accused of the opposite offence: of endorsing the mullahs’ wildest fantasies. Matgamna is attempting to score points against the CPGB and others, including probably his own members.

Speaking from what I regard as a Trotskyist point of view, I urge that the working class be put in the forefront of the discussion. The common interests of workers lie in opposing existing leaderships, Zionists, islamists and all shades of nationalism. The perspective of a Middle East united on socialist lines is utopian in Matgamna’s view, but provides a framework for treating all the people of the region as equal and opposing imperialist plans. It is certainly preferable to becoming an unpaid advisor to the Zionists.

Unpaid advisor
Unpaid advisor

Syphilitic

Given the AWL’s position of not condemning Israel were it to launch an attack on Iran, I was interested to see what they would have to say about Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia and the Russian response.

After all, this is an organisation that advocates the right of self-determination for Tibet and for Kosovo without regard for what the consequences of that might be for workers’ unity in these areas, and which puts forward no programme based on proletarian internationalism as a means of resolving these issues. It is an organisation that in the case of Kosovo considered the issue was so important that it thought that the bombing and cruise missile attacks on Belgrade by US imperialism were “good” in trying to bring an end to them. Surely, an organisation that tells us it is one of “consistent democrats” would be consistently democratic in condemning Georgia’s ethnic cleansing of South Ossetia, and would tell us that the Russian response was “good” to stop it, wouldn’t it?

Well, actually, no. Almost a week went by before the AWL could find words to give us a “provisional” response. In the meantime, long-time AWL cadre Jim Denham did come out with a response fairly quickly in his Shiraz Socialist blog. But rather than condemning Georgia’s murderous attacks on South Ossetia, which the United Nations now says have created around 150,000 refugees or about half the South Ossetian population, he quotes from an article by David Clark in The Guardian, which says: “By any reasonable measure, the impact of Russian policy has been uniquely destructive in generating political divisions in the Caucasus ... Whatever his faults, [Georgian president] Saakashvili is no Milosevic - and wild Russian allegations of genocide have no independent support.”

Denham tells us that he finds this argument “a lot more convincing than the crazed anti-American conspiracy theories and pro-Putin triumphalism”. In other words, it is a blatant attempt to minimise the murderous attacks by Georgia on South Ossetia. Worse, even after TV had been showing pictures of the devastation in South Ossetia caused by the Georgian action, and the vast number of refugees forced to seek refuge in Russia, Denham argued with me: “Arthur: all your last statement is just bullshit and bluster (as I suspect, you know full well): even if (as I don’t, in fact, believe) what you say about Georgia’s role in South Ossetia is true, it still doesn’t justify Russia’s actions ...”

But the incident is a good example of AWL politics. Denham later suggested that I was in some way afraid to reply to him. When I pointed out that the reason I had only just then replied was that that was the first I had seen of his posts, Denham accused me of lying. This was followed by the now usual AWL bureaucratic tactic of suppressing an argument if you can’t defeat it, and a threat to ban me from the site - I’d only ever posted a handful of posts there anyway - in addition to the AWL’s previous decision to delete my posts from their website.

This is now clearly a very degenerate Stalinist organisation. Trotsky called Stalinism “the syphilis of the labour movement”. We should treat the AWL accordingly.

Syphilitic
Syphilitic

No exclusions

Our attention has been drawn to both Peter Manson’s excellent article, for which we thank you emphatically (‘New party purged before its launch’, July 31), and Jean-Michel Edwin’s letter in response, made on behalf of the Prométhée Collective (August 7).

We understand very well your concern to publish the point of view of your Prométhée comrades on the exclusion of members of the Groupe Communiste Révolutionnaire Internationaliste (CRI Group) from the process leading to a new anti-capitalist party (NPA) in France, and more generally on the CRI’s participation in the NPA. However, we would like you to note the following comments.

Jean-Michel Edwin writes: “I, like several other members of [Prométhée], 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 …” In fact, the CRI Group sent an official email “To the Prométhée group” on July 3, to ascertain its “assessment of the results of the national [NPA] meeting, but also [its] position concerning the exclusion of two of our CRI comrades from their local NPA committee …” The only ‘reply’ from Prométhée has come to us via the Weekly Worker!

J-M Edwin and his comrades also falsify reality when they claim that Prométhée is “the only group apart from the [Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire] that has fully engaged with the NPA committees - la Fraction [of Lutte Ouvrière] and the Gauche Révolutionnaire are only taking part as observers”. In reality Prométhée is the only group to have asked (last autumn) to be integrated into the LCR … and for that reason has accepted the bureaucratic conditions imposed - notably to stop publishing after 20 years the paper version of its bulletin (which is why, for example, Prométhée was absent from Lutte Ouvrière’s fete this year - a first!).

What is more, it is a lie to claim that la Fraction and the Gauche Révolutionnaire (not to mention the CRI Group, which Prométhée has obviously ‘forgotten’, and the comrades around the Carré Rouge publication) have not “fully engaged with the NPA committees”: while these different groups have expressed a certain number of reservations, notably about their final participation in the NPA itself, on the contrary their members have participated in the committees from the beginning. As for la Fraction and GR being “observers”, in reality it was the LCR leadership that accorded this status to their representatives on the national committee.

J-M and his comrades further claim that 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”. This method of speaking on behalf of others in order to have us believe they basically think the same way as Prométhée is not correct.

In reality, not only did those responsible for Carré Rouge, without sharing our positions, write immediately to the LCR leadership and the NPA national committee condemning the exclusion of our CRI comrades and asking for their reinstatement; but la Fraction, also without sharing our positions, has let us know that it too condemns the exclusion and intends to say so at the next national committee meeting (only the suppression of this question by the LCR leadership from the agenda at the first national NPA conference prevented la Fraction from intervening on this point).

This inadmissible method is aimed at disguising Prométhée’s basic approval of the reasons given for our exclusion, which is judged to be “regrettable” only in the form it took. According to Prométhée, those who carried out the expulsions should just have waited for the CRI to leave of its own accord. But their decision was “understandable”, since they must have been “exasperated by the CRI’s style of working and its incessant ‘lessons’”. That being so, Prométhée seizes on formal pretexts, which nevertheless fail to hide the bureaucratic character of a wholly political exclusion.

J-M Edwin and his comrades repeat for their part the myth of the ‘local’ character of this affair. True, other CRI members are for the moment able to continue participating in the committees. But the LCR leadership, in its July 8 internal circular, justified the exclusion of the CRI members and explained that the CRI Group as such had “no place in the NPA process”: clearly the aim is to prepare politically for the exclusion of other CRI members and intimidate them in the here and now.

The Prométhée Collective says not a word about this circular, of which it is perfectly aware. Worse, it takes up some of the ‘arguments’ of the LCR leadership when it claims the CRI Group is “hostile” to the NPA process, is trying to score “some useful points in its campaign to be painted a victim” and is using the process to pick up a few recruits before clearing off … We have already replied to these ‘arguments’ in our July 15 statement (see http://groupecri.free.fr for all relevant documents) and will not repeat them here.

As for the fact that a CRI comrade was able to speak at the national conference of the NPA committees, Prométhée ‘forgets’ to point out that she was not intervening as a CRI representative (the LCR leadership refused to allow the CRI Group to speak in its own name, unlike la Fraction, the GR and others), but as a duly mandated delegate of her NPA committee (she spoke both on the type of party to be built and against the exclusion of the two CRI comrades). Yes, she exceeded her speaking time by perhaps a minute - a real transgression, if minimal, but made all the more visible by the fact that the session chair counted down her time much more strictly than she had for other speakers.

However, other CRI delegates mandated by their committees were refused the right to speak, along with some other delegates. Prométhée is quick to condemn a slight exceeding of the time limit, but does not protest against the LCR decision to deny a platform to these delegates - nor indeed against the other anti-democratic aspects of the conference (see our statement on the June 28-29 national meeting).

Then there is the participation of CRI members on the NPA internet forum. Prométhée would have us believe that this is an “internal forum”, whereas in fact it is a public forum to which anyone can subscribe, post messages and respond to other users, with the sole condition that they do not abuse anyone else. To try to prove from CRI participation on this forum that there is no ‘purge’, current or in preparation, is lamentable.

Finally, J-M Edwin and his comrades conclude their letter by declaring that, despite the claimed ‘hostility’ of the CRI Group to the NPA process, “it would be neither possible nor desirable to exclude the CRI from the self-governing NPA committees”. In that case, we hope that the Prométhée Collective will now do what it has not yet done (to our knowledge) and come out publicly against the exclusion of the CRI comrades and in favour of our right to participate fully in the NPA process.

We are extremely disappointed by the behaviour and position of Prométhée. Up to now we have always had (or thought we had) fraternal relations with this group and most of its members, several of whom, including Jean-Michel Edwin, subscribe to our journal and even to our limited-circulation electronic bulletin, Les Échos du CRI, aimed at our sympathisers and close contacts. In our view these are normal relations between revolutionary organisations, which the Prométhée Collective has now seen fit to break, without even having the courtesy to tell us directly, while repeating the arguments used by the LCR leadership to justify the exclusion of CRI members (even if Prométhée considers them “regrettable” and “undesirable”).

This decision marks a turning point in the evolution of the Prométhée Collective. If in this way it hopes to emerge from the crisis which has gripped it for several years and reduced it to a handful of militants, it is mistaken. In view of our past fraternal relations, however, we sincerely hope it will reconsider this decision and halt its descent down the slope which leads to complete political capitulation to the LCR leadership. Hopefully the CPGB and your Communist University were able to contribute to such a reconsideration on the party question!

By the way, in his July 31 article, Peter Manson refers to us as “dissident Lambertists”. Certainly the founders of the CRI Group were excluded from the Parti des Travailleurs in 2002, but, far from adhering to Lambertism as a specific political current, we claim to have broken with it completely.

No exclusions
No exclusions