Letters

Crisis

As chancellor, Gordon Brown claimed to have ended the cycle of boom and bust - which is, of course, impossible under capitalism. The New Labour government borrowed heavily to prolong the boom and we are now entering a severe recession. Big business and its New Labour allies are trying to make working class people pay for their crisis - escalating food and fuel prices and a housing slump, with big cuts in living standards unless we go on strike.

The credit crunch is mainly blamed on ‘subprime’ mortgages in the USA, sold to people with a poor credit history and with high interest rates starting low. This caught many ordinary people out, since most US mortgages are at a fixed rate for the entire term, which (due to high inflation) could lead to many banks around the world that have lent the money for such ‘prime conforming’ mortgages facing bankruptcy.

The government would be forced to stump up any shortfall, presumably by increasing borrowing, if a major high street bank goes under - the Tories had previously suggested they would not bail out a bank in trouble, but in reality they would also be forced to nationalise.

If socialists get our act together, the economic crisis will lead to socialist revolutions in many countries of the world. The Convention of the Left will be a marvellous opportunity for leftwingers inside and outside the Labour Party to prepare the ground for a revolutionary anti-capitalist party - which in the current economic climate could even win the next general election, if there’s not a revolution first!

Crisis
Crisis

Me myself

Earl Gilman expresses concern that my advocacy of critical support to Ralph Nader (who is standing independently for president, and has not been a Green Party candidate since 2000) may create the impression that the CPGB endorses Nader as well (Letters, September 11). He asks that the Weekly Worker correct this impression.

Let me save the editors the trouble. Like a number of others in this paper, I make use of the invaluable forum it provides for Marxist opinion in order to express my views. I have never written anything here as a spokesperson for the CPGB (or any other organisation). My articles speak for no-one but me.

Me myself
Me myself

Dishonest

Andrew Northall is being dishonest (Letters, September 11). The expulsions of two branches of the Socialist Party in 1991 arose out of their persistent refusal to abide by a democratically arrived at conference resolution - on the use of the party name in advertising (that it got so far is terribly sad). The details are no secret - the centenary Socialist Standard of June 2004 mentions it, for example.

He distorts the Socialist Party’s attitude on democracy. The party has always supported workers achieving basic trade union and democratic rights in the face of repression, whilst also opposing pro-capitalist groups and urging workers to form socialist parties. Only a fool would imagine you could stand on a square in Tehran or Beijing et al and sell the Socialist Standard like you can on Trafalgar Square in London.

Furthermore, our case is that a socialist-minded working class can capture the machinery of the state for the overthrow of capitalism (not its reform) using the vote. As Karl Marx put it in the introduction to the Programme of Parti Ouvrier (1880), “universal suffrage which will thus be transformed from the instrument of deception that it has been until now into an instrument of emancipation”.

Northall merely mouths claims peddled by Socialist Studies and doesn’t tell readers. Even then, his born-again Stalinism cannot prevent him from being dishonest. Not even my old comrades described the events of eastern Europe 1989-91 or Tiananmen Square 1989 as “counterrevolutionary”.

Northall cannot accept that the people who wanted to get rid of Stalinist dictatorships were the very workers oppressed by them. Unable to debate, Northall would rather dig up a sorry episode from the past, probably in the hope it will keep me shtoom.

On a personal note, I was terribly angry in 1991. With the incredible changes as walls fell and with the drum of war sounding in the Middle East, my comrades were being terribly foolish.

Now that is honesty.

Dishonest
Dishonest

Rabid

Paul Smith must be one of the most rabid anti-communists writing to the Weekly Worker (Letters, September 11). There are so many errors and falsifications in his letters, it is difficult to know where to begin.

He paints the Soviet Union as some form of freakish, nightmare, slave, horror society in colours which verge almost on the psychotic. Such a society could not have survived for any length of time, let alone achieved the massive economic and social changes and development to which I drew attention in a previous letter (June 26), including creating a new socialist civilisation and becoming a world superpower.

Contemporary writings and interviews with ordinary Soviet working men and women demonstrate clearly that the Soviet Union was not a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense, that the socialist economy, state and society were run in the interests of the vast majority of the working masses and had their overwhelming support on that basis.

Even MS Gorbachev in his book Perestroika - a programme for dismantling the centrally planned socialist economy established in the 1930s - saluted the heroism and solidarity displayed by the Soviet people in that period. Alongside the rapid economic and cultural progress, “there was also a new life, there was the enthusiasm of the builders of a new world, a keen feeling of pride that we stood alone, unassisted and not for the first time, were raising the country on our shoulders. People lived and worked creatively and productively at all stages in the peaceful development of our country in an atmosphere of ease, equality and immense opportunities for the working people.”

Hardly a picture of a population repressed, atomised, sullen, frightened and so on. Or perhaps Mr Smith regards Gorbachev as an incorrigible apologist for ‘Stalinism’?

Ironically, the publication of a number of anti-Soviet books based on researching the Soviet archives have proved beyond all doubt that the so-called Yezhovschina between 1937-38 affected only a miniscule proportion of the population (1.5 million arrested; 700,000 shot), was based on genuine concerns and evidence about Gestapo and other foreign intelligence activity on Soviet soil, that political defeat and exclusion of the right and ‘left’ oppositionists did lead to their involvement in treasonable and terrorist activities, including contacts with hostile foreign powers, in order to overthrow Soviet power and restore capitalism.

The NKVD (the peoples’ state security service), “the armed vanguard of the party”, was always under full party control during the Yezhovschina. Its actions were extremely focused, well directed and planned, and were targeted, almost exclusively, at “people of the past”: ie, displaced class enemies and their allies, former kulaks, alien and hostile anti-Soviet elements, unreformable criminals and other socially dangerous people. Yes, there were some mistakes and excesses, but these were identified and corrected at the time. When the job was done, the Nazi fifth column had been eliminated. The operations were brought to an immediate and disciplined cessation in December 1938.

It was sad, even tragic, that the personal bitterness, hatreds and inadequacies of the oppositionists, the “former people”, caused their political activity to pass to sabotage, agitation and terrorism aimed at murdering key Soviet leaders, damaging the economy, and provoking a coup d’etat in concert with the fascist states of Germany and Japan. But, having been given numerous opportunities to abide by majority decisions and to work for the common good of the Soviet people, it was right they did face people’s justice and some the ultimate penalty. Today’s Trotskyists ought to be ashamed of the name and tradition they associate themselves with.

Rabid
Rabid

Free Pà³l

On September 25 1983, 38 Provisional IRA prisoners of war dramatically escaped from the Maze prison. Many were recaptured immediately, with some returning to active service, whilst others left to begin a new life in the United States. One of the latter, Pól Brennan, entered the US illegally in 1984, but after a massive campaign by supporters and friends he was allowed to stay. However, he was arrested in Texas in January this year over a lapsed work permit and has been held without bail since then. He is facing possible deportation.

Pól has been moved around so much that it has been hard for his family to see him and he is under constant supervision for his own safety in prison. He was also held in solitary confinement during the first four months of his detention for his own ‘safety’. To quote the September 13 issue of An Phoblacht, “So what initially for Brennan was a misunderstanding over a lapsed work permit has escalated into a full-blooded attempt by the department of homeland security to deport him from the United States.”

Pól’s family, friends and supporters are calling for people to raise his plight and to help in active solidarity in any way they can. I urge all readers of the Weekly Worker to sign the petition at www.polbrennan.com, write a letter to Pól and do what they can to get his campaign more support. His address is: Pól Brennan, A88 785 324, Pearsall Detention Center, 566 Veterans Drive, Pearsall, TX, 78063, USA.

Free Pà³l
Free Pà³l

No rebellion

I noticed in the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty national committee motion published in the Weekly Worker that that group continues to “support Israel’s right to defend itself”, while of course remaining silent on the question of Israeli nuclear weapons and their oppression of the Palestinians (September 4).

It seems that Sean Matgamna has got his way, without a peep of criticism from the members (or at least, those who didn’t leave the group). Note the AWL national committee’s failure to call for opposition to a (disastrous) attack on Iran, while shoring up their own membership by wildly flaying against those on the left who do so.

I am absolutely opposed to all nuclear proliferation, by Iran or anyone else. But that doesn’t mean socialists shouldn’t oppose an Israeli attack as well as Israeli nuclear weapons. Hands Off the People of Iran has these positions. Of course, the reason the AWL refuse to engage in Hopi is not that they seriously believe that it is ‘Iranian defencist’: it’s that they refuse to oppose aggression by ‘democratic’ Israel and they support the occupation of Iraq.

The AWL view of the world shows their shift to rightwing Shachtmanism. This is not Marxism. They can excuse any military offensive by the Israeli government on the grounds of ‘self-defence’ - but even if Israel were not in fact an aggressive power backed by US imperialism, since when have socialists called for ‘national self-defence’? They hedge the issues, refusing to condemn an Israeli attack on Iran because that’s what the “kitsch left” want them to do and they are desperate to challenge left ‘orthodoxy’. But if they were really such critical thinkers as they make out, they would not delete dozens of critical comments on their website.

Peter Manson calls on AWL cadre to rebel. But what has happened? There has been hardly any comment on Israel and Iran on the AWL website for almost a month. Where is the rebellion? Where is there even meek dissent? Where are the articles criticising the national committee position? At the drop of a hat AWL guru Matgamna has changed their line from their conference position of ‘Support the occupation of Iraq; oppose an attack on Iran’ to ‘Support the occupation of Iraq; excuse an attack on Iran’.

No rebellion
No rebellion

Getting there

The difficulty Nick Rogers gets into in his article, ‘Anti-imperialism and the working class’, is a result of not fully appreciating the transitional method in regard to defencism/defeatism (September 4). As he quotes Hal Draper, it is often “impossible for the revolutionary to openly establish an independent fighting force to carry on military struggle”, where the leaders of the nationalist struggle “would give higher priority to the task of physical extermination of a revolutionary alternative to their own leadership than to fighting the common foe”.

Of course, if we had an army of roughly equal size to the government we could defend our flank whilst demanding unyielding battle against the imperialist invaders and thereby expose the vacillating, pro-imperialism of the government, as Lenin did against Kornilov. And this is a medium to long-term strategy: it may well strengthen the ideological hold of the government over the masses in the short term if they do mount a serious defence, as comrade Rogers thinks likely.

However, once having established the difference between military and political support, he lightly dismisses the political pole when Draper confusingly avers that it may simply be a question of adopting a “political position”, for “we frequently cannot implement political positions we take … the point of taking them is propagandistic, rather than a matter of agitation or action … which may be fine for comrades in the US, but utterly fails to provide any assistance to those activists struggling under a regime that seeks to ‘exterminate’ them”.

But comrade Rogers had earlier said: “I assume what we are discussing is the strategy and tactics communists should advocate within the working class movement in both an imperialist country (such as Britain) and in Iran. For Iranian workers these are life and death issues. The advice we provide to them should smack of neither armchair flag-waving nor sectarian point-scoring - which in the absence of practical proposals would seem to be the objective of the [International Bolshevik Tendency’s] intervention.”

But if that is our orientation then the defencist/defeatist position advocated by comrade Turley and the IBT is entirely correct. It is correct to confront the pro-imperialist sentiments of the British working class and its revolutionary vanguard by advocating its defeat and the victory of its semi-colonial opponent without preconditions.

And it is correct and mandatory to advocate the political position of seeking the defeat of imperialism in the semi-colonial countries, even by non-proletarian forces, because this is the transitional method of relating to the anti-imperialism of the masses by temporary political alliance, whilst ‘never for a single moment mixing the red and the blue’, never politically capitulating to the bourgeois semi-colonial governments or the petty bourgeois leaderships of national liberation struggles.

Many leftists who capitulated to the IRA, Sandinistas and so on went on to capitulate to Khomeini, but others, led by Sean Matgamna (and the CPGB of the time), ended up unable to defend semi-colonies from imperialist attack, on the Malvinas in 1982. This is not just propaganda or futile sectarian flag-waving, but must be the essence of our political programme in Britain and in the semi-colonies. The task surely is to adopt that political position in our approach to the semi-colonial masses.

Comrade Rogers, Yassamine Mather and others are correct to point out all the mortal dangers of capitulating to the crude anti-imperialism of the Tudeh, Fedayeen majority, Usec, etc. But we must also avoid the ‘leftist’ pro-imperialism of those who see the main enemy as Ahmadinejad in a nationalist Iranian class struggle. Hands Off the People of Iran has taken the correct stand that imperialism is the main enemy; revolutionists should be able to advance to the more advanced correct position of seeking the defeat of imperialism and victory to the semi-colonial forces without precondition. Some are clearly getting there.

Getting there
Getting there