Letters
Baby workers
Interesting as the history of the mass murderers Hitler and Stalin undoubtedly is, they are not the only ones: there have been over six million murders of unborn infants since abortion was legalised in Britain.
The main reason given for women having abortions is financial circumstances: that they cannot afford to bring the baby up. This usually means single parents who are mostly from the lower classes and depend on the state.
I struggle to understand how communist policy can be pro-abortion when it murders the lower classes (the true working class) and is a tool of social control used by the state and capitalism. Is it the case, as many working class people believe, that ‘official’ communism is led by the university-educated children of the capitalist classes who have no interest or knowledge of the working class and treat us with as much contempt as their parents?
The point is that by defending abortion you are defending mass murderers, who are the enemy of working class people today. Yet most communists seem to be more concerned with mass murders carried out 60-plus years ago.
Baby workers
Baby workers
Screwed up
Unsurprisingly, I’ve been reading a good deal of left economics coverage recently. Permanent Revolution’s website has had two lines: Keith Harvey saying much the same as the rest of the left and Bill Jefferies sticking to the idea that we are in a long up-wave of capitalist expansion led by the development of capitalism in China. Nothing wrong with that in itself: there is a legitimate debate to be had.
Bill’s most recent post on China (October 2) is no longer on the front page of the website and for some reason isn’t on the economic analysis page either, but can be found under ‘China’. It has a remarkable feature. If you look at the footnotes, it can be seen that Bill’s analysis is heavily dependent on reports published by the bankers.
The material largely comes from the following sources: Wachovia (bailed out by being taken over); UBS (bailed out by the Swiss state; under investigation by Swiss prosecutors for possibly failing to disclose risks); Goldman Sachs (converted to a regulated bank; to sack 10% of its workforce); Morgan Stanley (converted to a regulated bank; bailed out by Mitsubishi); and The Economist, which strikingly failed to predict the crisis and has downplayed the risks at almost every stage.
Bill might ask himself: if these economists’ assessment of China is so much better than that of the majority of Marxist writers (and for that matter the analysis of other, more downbeat, conventional bourgeois economists), how come they screwed up so badly in judging the credit crisis itself?
Screwed up
Screwed up
AWL camp
According to the excellent ‘Splintered Sunrise’ blog, Hal Draper once looked to a Buddhist group in Vietnam called Cao Dai to represent the third camp in that war, but was bitterly disappointed to discover that it was only interested in worshiping Confucius, Jesus, Victor Hugo and Joan of Arc and attempting to convert Vietnam into a theocracy.
Undaunted, Sacha Ismail and the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty turned up on September 28 to demonstrate against an Al Quds march. The march was called in solidarity with the Palestinians, but the real original purpose of Al Quds’ day, according to Sacha, was to strengthen ayatollah Khomeini back in 1979, so Zionism should not be opposed by these unworthies. “Unite against Israeli apartheid,” proclaimed a placard that Solidarity showed on the 2007 demonstration (‘Third camp at Piccadilly’, October 16).
To counter-demonstrate against a Palestinian solidarity march in the name of the third camp or for any other reason and call it socialist takes some brass neck. It fared no better than Hal Draper’s efforts so long ago.
Also supporting the counter-demonstration was the pro-imperialist Worker-communist Party of Iran, which seeks open discussions with the monarchists and has a long-running campaign calling on imperialist countries to shut down Iranian embassies. A few other British socialists (third camp followers?) showed up, together with a large group of mainly nationalist, rightwing Iranians (no doubt monarchists).
Things were looking decidedly dodgy for the third camp at this stage, but it was to get worse. A new group called March for England appeared and turned out to be out-and-out fascists and friends with the Iranian nationalists - which upset Sacha, because he wondered why they mixed with these racists. Maybe they agreed with them on some things. “Hang them”, “No surrender” (Ulster loyalists?) and “White power”, chanted the AWL’s unwelcome allies.
So the AWL wisely distanced themselves from these and then went to join the Al Quds demo, where they handed out leaflets and got into heated arguments. To prevent violence, the organisers called on the police to move the AWLers away. Determined to learn nothing, Sacha hilariously pledges to be back next year to do it all again, but this time “socialists should get organised” with a “clearly leftwing and internationalist mobilisation”.
But, unfortunately for the AWL, as mad Max Shachtman and Hal Draper discovered before them, there is no such thing as a “clearly leftwing and internationalist” third campism in the political and ideological battle between society’s two fundamental classes.
AWL camp
AWL camp
Fascinating
I found it fascinating that Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer (October 19) felt it necessary to claim, in order to defend the system of the capitalists, financiers, traders, speculators and landlords, that no-one apart from “revolutionary socialists” was advocating a “command economy”, such as existed in the “discredited” Soviet Union, as an alternative to the chaos and destruction of the crisis of the current system.
Perhaps Andrew is fearful that some people are indeed advocating such an alternative and this may appear right and sensible to many more!
Fascinating
Fascinating
SA appeal
The Workers International Vanguard League has decided to contest South Africa’s 2009 elections. We call on working class activists, organisations and sympathisers to support us.
The mere fact that we will be the only group engaging in the revolutionary exposure of parliament means that the bourgeoisie and their agents will put every obstacle in the way of our participation. This means, as they have done in the past, the electoral commission is likely to impose prohibitively high deposits as a means of sidelining us. Further, the mass media are likely to give little or no coverage to activities and protests organised by us. Thus, we would have to generate our own media across the country. This means that enormous resources are needed for our campaign, while at the same time building structures of resistance to capitalist exploitation, primarily branches of the WIVL, across the country.
By the time the electoral commission makes its announcement on the new deposits needed it may be too late to raise the funds just to get on the ballot paper. Overall we feel we need a minimum of R1 million ($100,000) for the campaign. We believe this is achievable (it means 1,000 people each giving R1,000 or more). However, any contribution, large or small, is most welcome.
The masses have begun to look past the ANC. Developments like this come rarely in history. Let us seize the moment and advance revolutionary politics by a thousand, if not a million, steps.
SA appeal
SA appeal
Before Stalin
It is somewhat sad to see socialists in this day and age having to explain why Stalinism was not remotely socialist.
Surely, defenders of Stalinism can be safely lumped into the same category as supporters of the Flat Earth Society. However, Jack Conrad’s latest attempt to explain why Stalinism is not socialist yet again presents problems for those seeking to assert that Leninism was fundamentally different from it.
Conrad argues that, isolated, “the Russian Revolution turned into its opposite ... The working class was politically expropriated.” Yet the working class was politically expropriated under Lenin. As Alexander Rabinowitch has conclusively proved in his new book, The Bolsheviks in power, it was the Bolsheviks who in spring 1918 gerrymandered the Petrograd soviet to ensure they had a majority, so making direct elections from the workplaces irrelevant. It was the Bolsheviks who in July 1918 gerrymandered the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets to deny the Left Socialist Revolutionaries their rightful majority.
And what of the other attacks on soviet democracy? It was the Bolsheviks who systematically disbanded any soviet that elected non-Bolshevik majorities in the spring of 1918. And, finally, it was the Bolsheviks, with Lenin, Zinoviev and Trotsky at the forefront, who proclaimed that the “dictatorship of the party” was the “dictatorship of the proletariat” from early 1919 onwards.
If being “politically expropriated” is the key, then why is Lenin’s regime considered worthy of support, while Stalin’s is not?
What of economic class, the social relations of production? According to Conrad, “nor could labour be controlled by the managerial controllers” under Stalinism, as workers “exercised negative control”. Yet who imposed a system of “managerial controllers” in the first place? The Bolsheviks under Lenin, who argued against workers’ control and for “individual executives” with “dictatorial powers (or ‘unlimited’ powers)”. Needless to say, under Lenin the Cheka was used against any workers who “exercised negative control” or went on strike.
Conrad argues that “bureaucratic socialism ... shows its own pattern of exploitation, primitive accumulation, killing and death ... though the capitalist class had been expropriated ... the peasant and working class masses remain slaves. There is organisation, but no democracy.” In what way was it different under Lenin? There was organisation, “but no democracy”. The working masses did not control their own work or workplaces and so “remain slaves”. Political and economic power was in the hands of the state and its bureaucracy. Surely the “counterrevolution within the revolution” and “bureaucratic socialism” started under Lenin and Trotsky?
This question is hardly new. I raised it in my previous letter on September 4 and it remained unanswered. Perhaps this time I may be more fortunate.
Before Stalin
Before Stalin
Evasion
Jack Conrad spends an inordinate amount of space attempting to steer a course between the inflated estimates of the number of victims of Stalinism from ideological anti-Marxists, and a range of apologists past and present on the ‘left’ who try to whittle down the figures to more explicable or excusable proportions. For the latter, we might suggest that if Stalinism is the syphilis of the workers’ movement, some must be in the tertiary stages.
Conrad does at least inform us that he is not attempting to give an explanation for the bloodletting. Why then, given that the numbers are simply beyond effective counting, use this as the yardstick for assessing left and right? Worse, he tends to lump all the victims targeted together as “people in general”. This gives some ground to those who portray the killings as Stalin’s paranoia, an irrational, out-of-control process. Just adding up figures glosses over the different characteristics of the collectivisation drive and the 1930s purges.
On the other hand, he hints at a rational basis to the terror as giving Stalin “control of the product”, and that, as bureaucratic socialism was not an extended mode of production, this could lead to an individual being raised to god-like status. This is a little problematic, since he speaks of a break in 1928, so that there was discontinuity between the October revolution and Stalinism. If bureaucratic socialism is the underlying problem and existed before then as well as after, how to explain the break? I would suggest that political struggles played a role, then and later, but Conrad overlooks this in the quest for statistics. Stalin understood that Trotskyism represented the heritage of the October revolution and was a mortal threat to the bureaucracy.
The Left Opposition had a critique and a programme even in 1928. They also had a significant following well into the 30s. It is precisely the existence of massive opposition to the bureaucracy that helps to explain the ferocity of the purges, together with the fragility of the bureaucratic caste. It may be that Conrad’s article is but a chapter of a forthcoming magnum opus intended to deal with the wider picture than just the numbers. If so, I hope he will take the trouble to read Vadim Rogovin’s 1937: Stalin’s year of terror (Mehring Books), which explores these issues.
It suits both the rabid right and the other anti-Marxists on the Stalinist-influenced left to deny the existence of a coherent political alternative to Stalinism, and imply that terror is always the logical outcome of revolution, or that a few errors and aberrations are only natural. There is no middle way in either the numbers or the politics. A different outcome was possible.
Some 1930s apologists are treated more gently on the grounds that they might have realised something was amiss but were unaware of the magnitude, “but so too were the Trotskyites and other leftwing critics”. However, this did not prevent Trotskyists from undertaking a political analysis of what was occurring; that evades Conrad to this day.
Evasion
Evasion
Confusion
Jack Conrad seems to think of socialism and communism as separate social formations (‘Dripping from head to foot with blood and dirt’, October 23). He describes socialism as a society with “working class domination” and communism as a “classless, moneyless, stateless” society. He considers the former Soviet Union to have been a socialist society despite its bureaucratic nature. Although the working class was “politically expropriated”, the USSR remained socialist because of the expropriation of the capitalist class by workers in the October revolution. It follows that Stalinism resulted from the failure to move from an already established socialism in one country to communism worldwide.
This separation of socialism from communism reveals Jack’s struggles to develop Marxist theory within a culture hostile to Trotskyism. It leads him to make absurd statements. For example, he proposes that the Soviet Union was “no different from feudal, bourgeois, Christian, state or military socialism”.
Here Jack appeals to the authority of The Communist manifesto in order to hide his confusion. If he holds that Stalinism - like fascism, Zionism and political Islam - was a form of nationalism, then he has a point worth debating. However, if he is suggesting that Stalinism derived from the thinking of 19th century European intellectuals, then he falls within the camp of those who attribute the genesis, maturation, decline and death of social formations solely to ideas. This is clearly un-Marxist.
Jack seems to have problems abandoning an essential aspect of his Stalinist heritage. This is to promote the idea that socialism and communism are stages of transition. He is surely aware that, in the Critique of the Gotha programme, Marx distinguished between the lower and higher phases of a socialist society and that the latter phase was characterised by distribution according to need rather than labour input. He cannot be ignorant of the fact that these two phases could as easily be described as phases in the emergence of a communist society.
Jack is aware that the political economy of Stalinism did not correspond to either of these two phases. Yet Jack persists in using the same word, ‘socialism’, to describe two completely different and mutually antagonistic social forms. Unfortunately, I suspect this stubborn adherence to an inconsistent position masks a form of conscious or unconscious anti-Trotskyist bigotry.
Jack’s attempts to expose the grosser aspects of contemporary Stalinist apologetics are most welcome. On the other hand, his ability to develop Marxist theory (and a cadre of Marxist leaders) will be limited as long as he continues to characterise the former USSR as a socialist society.
Confusion
Confusion