Letters

Book token

I read Phil Kent’s article on labour tokens (‘Transition to communism’, September 4). The question of labour tokens/labour credit and actually abolishing money-capital itself is indeed very important, as noted by comrade Paul Cockshott’s Towards a new socialism.

You may be interested in my to-be-published work The class struggle revisited, critiquing Lenin’s non-abolitionist conception of ‘socialism’ (which as a term is too vague), posing the party question as going beyond even comrade Mike Macnair, asking hard questions about class relations and so on.

Book token
Book token

Left formation

I find anarchists better allies than reformists and thus think the initiative by the French Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire to launch a revolutionary anti-capitalist party a positive development in the wake of the problems experienced by the various broad socialist organisations (and some so broad they also welcome non-socialists), such as the Scottish Socialist Party, Solidarity, Respect Renewal, the Left Alternative and the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party.

However, for a far-left formation to take off, it needs to be seen by the electorate as credible, which probably requires splits in mainstream parties (specifically Labour in Britain, with the Convention of the Left during the upcoming Labour Party conference being an ideal opportunity to prepare for such a split, or the Scottish National Party in an independent capitalist Scotland, which is highly likely if the Tories win the next general election), as well as a severe enough economic crisis.

Left formation
Left formation

Pakistani Trots

Since people from all tendencies read your press, may I appeal through you for information about what is happening among the various groups of Trotskyists in Pakistan?

Pakistan is an enormously important country: it is armed with nuclear weapons, its military are deeply involved with both Afghanistan and Kashmir, and it is suffering from economic meltdown. Huge political convulsions are taking place there, but I really cannot work out what attitude, what demands and what strategy the various bits of the Marxist left are adopting, and whether these demands, attitudes and forecasts are similar or different. (If similar, why the hell are they not getting together? Once again I repeat in jest, ‘Workers of the world, unite’.)

The largest group, perhaps easily the largest group, are the Struggle or Jeddo Judh comrades, affiliated to the International Marxist Tendency and entrists within the Pakistan People’s Party.

On their website I found an article about their comrades’ work in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir dated July 26, but this is over a month ago. There was an interesting article four days earlier about the Pakistani army and an analysis of the class pressures within it and over the past two years a whole number of informative reports about strikes and workers’ struggles. There is a report about their participation in the recent elections, but nothing or little about the disastrous loss of their sympathetic MP. Again I would have expected some detailed analysis of this and the negative consequences, and maybe such does exist in Urdu. I would also expect some argument about entry into the PPP, as the Bhutto clan seem to be moving in a more and more pro-American and reactionary direction.

The International Socialists, affiliated to the International Socialist Tendency, had interesting material about strikes in Lahore on August 4 - rather more recent - and I was glad to see they were supporting another small group of comrades from a different tendency (Communist Mazdoor Kissan Party) who were being persecuted by the police in the textile strike. They were also clear - whether correctly or not I do not know, but I tend to agree with the IS comrades - in supporting the reinstatement of the dismissed chief justices and in joining demonstrations for that. At least I knew where they stood on the issue. They claimed a branch in Swat - a pretty hairy place for Trots, I would have thought - and mentioned an eyewitness to the army operations there. I had the feeling that they were very small, even if active.

The Labour Party Pakistan, the ex-Committee for a Workers’ International group, also has a website. They had a conference on August 3 that discussed strategy, but again it was not clear to me what that strategy was. I did have the feeling that the LPP was less literate in English than the other two groups, which made me think that its leading members would not come from quite as privileged backgrounds, while its size was somewhere between the Struggle and the IS group. Again I do not know.

Finally, it is disappointing that we are so unclear about what is happening to the left and what it should be demanding. But I and all of us would be interested to learn what these groups, and any I may have omitted, are doing.

Pakistani Trots
Pakistani Trots

Endorsement

Jim Creegan’s article appears to give the impression that the CPGB is endorsing independent Green presidential candidate Ralph Nader (‘Capitalism with a human face’, August 28). I hope you will correct that impression.

Jim Creegan is correct in writing that socialists have to break the lock-hold of the Democratic Party over the American working class. But I question that we can do that by endorsing reformists like Nader. This kind of ‘transitional programme’ thinking leads revolutionary socialists into the left wing of reformism. As revolutionaries we keep falling into this ‘critical support’ trap, hoping to bring left reformists little by little to Marxism.

I don’t believe we can break the working class from the Democratic Party through electoral politics - in fact one of the central tasks of revolutionaries is to expose bourgeois electoral politics. I think the way we do that is through the old-fashioned class struggle. The problem in the US is that the existing unions are not up to waging any real struggle.

Endorsement
Endorsement

Necessity

With reference to the debate on ‘socialism in one country’, I agree with Tony Clark that getting to grips with the origins and consequences of it is essential.

Too much analysis of this period of Soviet politics is seen through the prism of Stalin versus Trotsky or permanent revolution versus socialism in one country. This in turn leads to inadequate conclusions being arrived at, greatly exaggerating the policy differences between major political figures of the time.

Whether it was Lenin, Stalin or Zinoviev who first coined the phrase ‘socialism in one country’ makes no great deal of difference. Socialism in one country was a reaction to the political and economic paralysis the Bolsheviks found themselves in at the end of the civil war.

Tantamount to packing their bags and handing power back to the tsar or the liberal democrats there was no alternative. Trotsky was as much in favour of building socialism in Soviet Russia as any of the other Bolshevik leaders, and indeed had advocated a form of New Economic Policy in early 1920, which at the time was rejected by the central committee.

For Trotsky one of the major problems was lack of inner-party democracy. The Bolsheviks had failed to effectively evolve into a party able to run a country from one which had existed in a semi-clandestine state. The long-term consequences of the ban on factional groupings was ultimately used to stifle debate within the party, and the repressive measures against other political parties in time saw the Bolsheviks infected by a neo-Narodnik tradition, resulting in a semi-nationalist drift in policy.

Finally, post-civil war, with a shrinking political base the party struggled to maintain contact with its rank and file, culminating in the administrative machine which engulfed it.

Necessity
Necessity

Tosh break

Anyone with the slightest political understanding will laugh at James Turley’s attempt to explain the epithet “virulent third worldist Stalinism” (Letters, August 7). His definition of Stalinism omits any reference to the Soviet Union; it is no more than a superficial description of some strains of European social democracy. For Marxists, the concept of Stalinism has relevance to internal developments within the Soviet Union following the death of Lenin, not to developments in communist parties externally in either imperialist or colonial nations.

His concept of ‘third worldism’ is Eurocentric chauvinism. The fact is that such revolutions as have taken place since the end of World War II have been in the oppressed nations; the exception that proves the rule is Portugal, where the liberation struggles in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau triggered the popular uprising in 1974. His use of the term ‘metropoles’ is a petty bourgeois euphemism whose purpose is to obscure the relations between oppressor and oppressed nations which are at the heart of imperialism. Even today the most significant mass anti-imperialist movements do not exist in his ‘metropoles’, least of all in Britain, but in Latin America. No “belief” is needed here, just acknowledgement of facts.

His dismissal of those who acknowledge the significance of anti-imperialist revolutions in oppressed nations as a “left PR team for anti-colonial bourgeois nationalists” reinforces my assessment that he completely rejects everything that Lenin wrote about imperialism and indeed the right of nations to self-determination. Any socialist in an oppressor nation who does not defend bourgeois or any other nationalists in oppressed nations when they are taking an anti-colonial or anti-imperialist stance is a social-imperialist. The tasks of socialists in the oppressed nations are, of course, different: how they relate to such “anti-colonial bourgeois nationalists” - if indeed they exist - will depend on their assessment of whether any possible alliance will take the movement forward. It is always a concrete question, as Lenin argued.

When I recall that Turley’s attack on Cuba depends on utterly reactionary sources - his Dave Osler is a member of the Labour Party - I am completely bemused as to how he can see himself as a socialist, let alone a communist. I would advise him to take a break from writing tosh and study some Lenin.

Tosh break
Tosh break

Splitters

I am sorry I upset Graham Taylor by becoming confused and getting the name of his group and journal wrong (Letters, September 4). He is right: his group changed its name “for public use” in the late 1980s from ‘Socialist Party of Great Britain’ to ‘Socialist Party’. One reason was, rather preposterously, to style the group as ‘the Socialist Party in Britain’.

Critics in the then SPGB alleged that the decision was part of a general move to distance the group from its previous traditions, to open membership up to people who had previously not been attracted or allowed to join, including anarchists, gay liberationists, environmentalists and other single-issue leftists, and to break with its previous sectarianism by developing tacit alliances with other ‘democratic’ movements.

The critics were subsequently expelled for continuing to use the term ‘SPGB’ in public, resulting in the loss of many of the Socialist Party’s best theoreticians, economists, writers and speakers. In 1991, they formed their own group - called the SPGB - and began to publish Socialist Studies, which can be seen very much in the tradition of the SPGB and Socialist Standard between 1904 and the 1970s. Another major point of disagreement was the Socialist Party’s support for Solidarnosc in the 1980s and of the counterrevolutionary events in eastern Europe and Beijing in 1989.

These orthodox critics now in the SPGB allege that the ‘Socialist Party’ had been taken over by the ‘newer elements’ and is now thoroughly reformist, a view which is difficult to argue with, given the complete absence of any revolutionary perspective or strategy in Socialist Standard, and the relegation of its 1904 declaration of principles to the back page.

Both SPGBs are essentially political flat-earthers which would like to think that the 20th century of imperialism, proletarian revolution, soviet power and the formation of an international communist movement simply didn’t happen, preferring to remain in the reformist social democratic tradition of the late 19th century, typified by the peaceful parliamentary road to socialism.

Splitters
Splitters

Incomplete

I found Paul Flewers’ article on Alexander Solzhenitsyn to be quite useful and informative, but a bit incomplete concerning the latter’s political views following his return to Russia (‘Solzhenitsyn: false prophet’, September 4). While at first supportive of Boris Yelstin, Solzhenitsyn soon turned on him.

As Douglas Birch noted in his article, ‘Solzhenitsyn: a life of dissent’, “After his return to Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn was outraged by what he found - a Kremlin, in his view, unable to stop the looting of Russia’s vast resources by politically connected tycoons and unwilling to stand up against what he saw as the encroaching threat of Nato and other western institutions” (The Independent August 4).

And Birch also notes that: “When Yeltsin awarded Solzhenitsyn Russia’s highest honour, the Order of St Andrew, in 1998 the writer refused to accept it. When Yeltsin left office in 2000, Solzhenitsyn wanted him prosecuted.” Given the fact that Yeltsin was being so strongly supported by the west, especially the United States, it is hardly surprising that so many of Solzhenitsyn’s old western friends would have nothing to do with him.

While at first hostile to Vladimir Putin, Solzhenitsyn soon began to warm to him and became one of his most vocal defenders. Indeed, Solzhenitsyn did not hold Putin’s KGB background against him. As The Times put it in its obituary, “He acknowledged Mr Putin’s past as a KGB spy in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel last year, but said: ‘He was not a KGB investigator, nor was he the head of a camp in the gulag. As for service in foreign intelligence, that is not a negative in any country’” (August 5).

Incomplete
Incomplete

No contradiction

In response to Nick Rogers’ article, ‘Anti-imperialism and the working class’ (September 4), I would like to point out, firstly, that there is no contradiction between the two statements of mine he quoted.

I wrote: “In reality it is very unlikely that the islamic regime, despite its bravado, will put up a fight against military attacks. Many of the leaders of the regime have already made their choices by sending their money and their families abroad. Others within the regime will try and find ‘diplomatic solutions’ (secret negotiations) before and during the conflict” (Letters, July 24).

Comrade Rogers responds that my comments about “the reluctance of the regime to put up a fight are somewhat at odds” with my prediction that a US attack would strengthen political islam and “could lead to an even more reactionary regime, with stronger military/fascistic tendencies”.

I don’t think an attack on Iran would strengthen the current regime, as it would not fight. Elements of the current regime would resist for a short time, as did the Ba’athists after the US invasion of Iraq, but this would be short-lived and insignificant. However, the collapse of the Iranian regime or its compromise with the US would strengthen political islam in the rest of the Middle East, as this would be seen as another humiliation for muslims. The reactionary fascist/military regime in Iran to which I refer would be nationalist rather than islamic.

Secondly, as far as I know, Val Moghadam was not a member of the Fedayeen; at least she had no association with the Minority. What she has written is based entirely on the views of the Majority of the Fedayeen central committee, whose line was at that time very close to that of the pro-Soviet Tudeh Party.

No contradiction
No contradiction

Explicit

Andrew Northall must be the most explicit apologist for Stalinist counterrevolution writing in Britain today (Letters, August 28).

Northall argues that the restriction of commodity production in the former USSR proves that - prior to Stalin’s death - the country was socialist and a step away from “the higher phase of communism”. He states that criticism of the former Soviet Union and regimes modelled on it (such as China, Korea, Laos and Cambodia) is “pathetic”. He suggests that the only alternative to these regimes was an imperialist “holocaust”.

Northall is not a Marxist. If he were, he would know that the absence of commodity production and an internal national market is compatible with slavery. Stalin’s purges were an attempt to extract a surplus through forced labour and the atomisation of the population by police methods. As a result, 20 million people were worked to death in conditions worse than Nazi concentration camps. Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Kampuchea copied Stalin’s policies and caused the deaths of millions more.

There were no socialistic features in such regimes. In the absence of workers’ democratic control, nationalisation is compatible with the survival of capitalism. Both military dictatorships and social democratic governments have nationalised industries and advocated policies of full employment. The Stalinist economy was inefficient, wasteful and - despite the setting of production targets - unplanned. Atomisation and forced labour were unable to produce a surplus stable enough for bureaucratic elites to reproduce themselves. China is a good example of how Stalinism leads inevitably back to capitalism.

As long as these regimes existed and called themselves ‘communist’, there was no hope that workers could gain an awareness of the possibility for self-emancipation. If ‘communism’ was opposed to workers’ democracy and control, opposed to social equality, anti-semitic, sexist and racist, then workers would naturally reject ‘communism’ as an alternative to capitalism.

Stalinist regimes were opposed to workers’ revolution at home and abroad. At home, they attempted to destroy any collective proletarian resistance. The Soviet Union exterminated the left. The purges wiped out all the old Bolsheviks and Mensheviks completely. Hundreds of thousands of people were denounced as Trotskyists before being killed. No trace of the generation that made the October revolution was left alive.

Finally, Northall acclaims Stalin as a Marxist theorist. There is doubt whether Stalin was capable of writing the literature attributed to him. Certainly The History of the CPSU: short course was constantly referred to as a book by Stalin, but written by a brigade. If he did write the articles given his name, they are characterised by distortion, inaccuracy, oversimplification, superficiality, dogmatic schematisation, ignorance, crude expression and chauvinism.

These characteristics, coupled with a hatred of intellectuals, captures the “spirit and content of the Stalinist leadership” that Northall’s advocacy of counterrevolution represents today.

Explicit
Explicit

Alter ego

In reply to Paul Smith, who seems to be Hillel Ticktin’s alter ego, I did not “insinuate” that leftwing criticism of the Cuban and Venezuelan regimes and by implication the former Soviet and other socialist regimes are wrong (Letters, August 28). My intention was to show that ultra-left Trotskyist opposition to socialism in one country as a tactical imperative in the strategy of world revolution serves the interest of counterrevolution.

There is no need for communists to fear criticism of socialist regimes and their leaders, and indeed should advocate it when such criticism serves the interest of socialism. Only misguided elements and petty bourgeois revisionist power-seekers are opposed to legitimate criticism of socialist regimes and their leaders. There is, of course, a difference between slander and criticism, which serious people bear in mind.

My interlocutor next goes on to display inexcusable ignorance of the theoretical history of Bolshevism when he claims that there is absolutely no evidence to support my belief that socialism in one country is derived from Lenin. There is no court of law, after the evidence had been presented, which would not support the conclusion that Stalin did, indeed, derive socialism in one country from Lenin. This is not only my personal belief, but the conclusion reached by the majority in the international communist movement in opposition to Trotsky. The position of leading members of the communist movement was based on several key passages in Lenin’s writings which developed his views on the world revolutionary process.

For instance, Lenin’s article back in 1915, when comparing the slogan of the United States of Europe to that of the United States of the World, the latter of which he preferred but warned against adopting, gave two reasons why he considered it premature at that time: “... first, because it merges with socialism; second, because it may be wrongly interpreted to mean that the victory of socialism in a single country is impossible, and it may create misconceptions as to the relations of such a country to the others” (VI Lenin CW Vol 21, p342).

These are writings which ultra-left Trotskyist elements, claiming to be Lenin’s heirs, have kept under lock and key for decades, so that many Trotskyists are not even aware of them. History records that Trotsky proceeded to make the very mistake which Lenin warned would develop out of an incorrect understanding of the world revolutionary process. So only left opportunists can confuse Lenin’s theory of world revolution with Trotsky’s.

In the same passage, Lenin found it necessary to emphasise his position, arguing: “Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence, the victory of socialism is possible first in several countries or even in one capitalist country alone” (ibid).

How long will Trotskyists continue to mislead the left on this issue? Some left opportunists have attempted to argue that what Lenin was referring to was the victory of revolution in one country, not socialism per se. This argument is ridiculously unconvincing, suggesting that Lenin confused the word ‘socialism’ with the word ‘revolution’. In any case, this paltry and desperate argument is demolished by Lenin in the next sentence of the above passage where we read that, “After expropriating the capitalists and organising their own socialist production, the victorious proletariat will rise against the rest of the world”, etc.

My interlocutor claims that my letter of July 31 is a good example of how “Stalinism” impedes attempts to build an effective left worldwide. But an effective left is a united left, and unity cannot be achieved without raising the main issues which divide us. To my knowledge, Phil Sharpe, an ultra-leftist, is the only Trotskyist who has ever admitted, in the journal What Next?, that socialism in one country was derived from Lenin, although he incorrectly attributes this to the specific conditions of the Russian Revolution rather than as a tactical imperative in the strategy of world revolution.

Alter ego
Alter ego

Usual deal

On September 4 Greater Manchester Stop the War Coalition held a quite interesting rally featuring academic Terry Eagleton, Guardian journalist Seamus Milne and Socialist Workers Party leader John Rees.

Most of the contributions were the usual deal - the importance and strength of the STWC (in particular the notion that it provoked the fall of Tony Blair!) and the need for us to continue “building”. Seamus Milne talked of the STWC’s “staying power”, despite the fact that the leaders may have stayed, but the majority of the two million people who took to the streets of London in 2003 have drifted away.

Terry Eagleton provided his usual witty contribution, and spent most of his time discussing state terror. He argued, quite rightly, that ‘terror’ is a form of political authority that creates states and is then institutionalised to defend those states - barbarism and civilisation are “two sides of the same coin”. He also talked of the fact that the conflicts which make up the ‘war on terror’ are part and parcel of the system of advanced capitalism - something implied but never openly said by the others.

John Rees made much of the hypocrisy of the US and UK condemning Russia for attacking a ‘sovereign nation-state’ when they were guilty of exactly the same offence. He argued that we were now in a period of “new imperialism” since the end of the cold war, but that this period of a “unipolar world” is in the process of being replaced by a “multipolar” one - a fact apparently demonstrated in the Caucasus recently. The US ‘war on terror’ is now destabilising the world relations of “major powers” and consequently we are now entering into a much more dangerous period. He concluded that the STWC must educate people about these developments and build a movement to stop these processes, before the rivalry between the US and its regional rivals (such as Russia) turns into a “hot war”- our central task, is, of course, to stop the plans of “our leaders”.

While all the speakers and contributors spoke of the need to build a movement to stop imperialism, the strategy offered was to march and march again. The only alternative to that was offered by Jason Travis of Permanent Revolution and Bolton National Union of Teachers, who talked of the power of working class action, and that the only force that will ultimately be able to defeat the imperialists is the working class - both nationally and as part of an international working class movement.

This contribution resulted, of course, in the usual murmurs of shock and derision by local SWPers. Injecting real working class politics into the anti-war movement is, of course, a complete ‘no-no’. It is fine to talk of imperialism, but never in the context of taking on capitalism as a system. The solution is the ‘broad movement’, not the international working class. When SWPers talked of an ‘alternative’, they meant an alternative to Brown and Miliband, not to global capital.

Unless the logic of hiding your politics and hiding the real solutions from people in a bid to build a bigger ‘movement’ is challenged, we won’t be able to stop these wars, let alone build the force needed to defeat imperialism, bring down capitalism and usher in human freedom and peace - a peace which the ‘movement’ is supposed to be all about.

Usual deal
Usual deal