Letters
STWC question
With reference to Dave Isaacson’s letter (March 12) about the Stop the War Coalition and individual members not being given voting rights at this year’s annual general meeting in April, I have emailed the STWC office three times since January to ask why individual members’ voting rights have been removed. I received one reply suggesting that they are waiting for the executive to meet and discuss the issue.
My own thoughts are that this denial of voting rights for individual members is in the interests of a minority on the STWC executive.
My question is, what key resolution or group are they trying to prevent from being raised and voted on? I would like to hope that readers will question this and force a response from the executive.
STWC question
STWC question
Comfort blanket
In response to Communist Students’ criticisms of our proposal for a national student coordination (Letters, February 19), we believe that the meeting on April 18 is an excellent opportunity to gather together activists radicalised by recent events, particularly around the university occupations, and unite in action around common goals.
This coordination has been called not just because of the anger at the attacks on Gaza, which has seen the largest anti-war mobilisations since the invasion of Iraq, but also because these protests come at the same time as the severe attack on democracy within the National Union of Students.
To top this off we are seeing the recession bite even harder. Students have seen £200 million cuts in their grants, face a push to lift the cap on tuition fees, which could see some universities charging up to £10,000 per year, and vicious cutbacks to university budgets, with London Met and Liverpool University already hit and many more facing similar attacks once attacks on public sector spending really get underway.
It is against this background of a historic crisis in the capitalist system, with the bosses demanding workers pay for the crisis in the system, that the student movement has an opportunity to develop and coordinate a united resistance on the streets and in the campuses that links up with workers’ struggles.
The development of the student movements abroad provide great lessons as to how we can organise here. The prime example is the non-CPE movement in France of 2006, where well organised national delegations of students united with workers and immigrant youth against government attacks.
CS have wrongly counterposed the need for uniting students in struggle to the need for a revolutionary communist students’ organisation. It is through organising against the injustices that are part and parcel of the capitalist system that students and workers will turn to communists for answers. We need a strategy that links the fight for the most immediate and pressing demands of students, workers and youth with strengthening our organisations and making real incursions on the economic and political power of the ruling class.
Unless we fight to build a united front with layers far wider than the small organisations of the far left and, in particular, fight for real organs of struggle, like coordinations at a national and local level, then we will never be able to show in practice that revolutionary communists have a programme that represents the fundamental and historic interests of the working class. Steps we can take towards strengthened organisation and unity in action even though they may alone be small steps at first are an absolutely essential part of this, one that false counterpositions between a united front and revolutionary organisation cannot grasp.
You say you argue for principled Marxist politics, yet you fail to see the need to unite with other forces to fight for common goals. Rather, CS appears to shout from the sidelines on the need for Marxism with no message at all as to what the next step for the movement should be at any time.
But the inconsistency of CS is astonishing. When wildcat strikes took place at the Lindsey oil refinery and Staythorpe brandishing the slogan ‘British jobs for British workers’, CS decided to support the strike. We are now left with the bizarre situation in which CS does not support a radical coordination of student struggles, but does support a strike with a reactionary goal: British workers first, before migrants.
This is, to be honest, what happens when Marxism ceases to act as a guide to action for the class ie, a real revolutionary programme - and becomes instead a comfort blanket that the CS comrades use to make up for their failure to advance a perspective and strategy for the concrete struggles of workers and students today.
Comfort blanket
Building solidarity
Members of Manchester Hands Off the People of Iran and supporters from the Iranian community held a demonstration in solidarity with the Iranian students’ movement on March 25. The demonstrators held pictures of the recently arrested students and carried a banner which read, ‘Free our comrades’.
We called the demonstration in solidarity with members of the Students for Freedom and Equality group, who have been arrested and tortured by the Iranian regime for standing up to imperialism, militarism, homophobia, patriarchy and state repression. They were arrested under the guise of presenting a threat to national security.
The regime uses the threat of war and further sanctions as an excuse to put down student and worker opposition. Students have been at the forefront of the fight for democracy and liberation, linking up with the workers’, women’s and national movements in the process.
Speakers at the rally included Ben Lewis (CPGB), who spoke of the need to fight imperialism and militarism - it would be criminal to leave democratic forces within Iran to be manipulated by the US. Vicky Thompson (Permanent Revolution) saluted the bravery of the Iranian student movement and called for the immediate and unconditional release of those arrested. Dan Lee (Green Party) and Robbie Gillet (Manchester student union) also spoke. Messages of solidarity were read out from the Iranian Workers’ Solidarity Network and a letter from imprisoned teacher Farzad Kamangar, who has been threatened with execution.
Many people signed a petition to be sent to the Iranian consulate and took away literature on the movements in Iran as well as Hopi’s new Smash the Sanctions campaign.
After the action we held an organising meeting, where we discussed building the Smash the Sanctions speaking tour.
Building solidarity
Building solidarity
Stalin's mistakes
It seems that all the advocates of ultra-left versions of communism have one thing in common: they regard the world revolutionary process as a continuous offensive, with no detours, manoeuvres and certainly no retreats. Indeed, Trotsky, the most prominent spokesperson of this trend, in my view, in his time gave this peculiar conception a name: he called it ‘permanent revolution’ (not to be confused with Lenin’s concept of uninterrupted revolution), which he sought to apply internationally to all those countries with a belated capitalist development.
Unfortunately, for Trotsky and his present-day followers, revolutions, like life in general, are often forced to make detours, manoeuvres and retreats, which are unavoidable. However, when a person or an army is forced to undertake such operations, this does not necessarily mean they have abandoned the final objectives.
The same must surely apply to revolutions in general and the Russian Revolution in particular. This elementary fact appears to be beyond the understanding of those who interpret the struggle for communism from the standpoint of ultra-leftism, in terms of theory, strategy and tactics. I must therefore take issue with the contribution of Jack Conrad, who shares Trotsky’s view that Stalin sold out the Russian Revolution because he rejected Trotsky’s permanent revolution theory in favour of socialism on one country.
Again, it is important to remind people who think in this way that for both Lenin and Stalin socialism in one country represented a stage in the world revolutionary process, which was developing unevenly. It was never a question of choosing socialism in one country over world revolution. This is underlined by the Comintern’s later, in my view, mistaken ‘class against class’ policy, an ultra-left attempt to speed up the world revolution which, in Germany, made it easier for the rightwing of social democracy to betray the working class in the 1930s. Although it had a negative result, third period Cominternism belied Trotsky’s view that Stalin was only interested in ‘national’ socialism: that is, limiting the revolution to the Soviet Union.
It is important to understand that the defence of socialism in one country carried out by Stalin was a necessary detour, manoeuvre or retreat, implicit in Lenin’s view that socialism in one or several countries was a possibility in the period of the transition from capitalism to socialism.
Jack’s claim that ‘socialism in one country’ symbolically broke the Soviet Union from the world revolution is no doubt music to the ears of Trotskyists, but the bourgeoisie, right up until the collapse of the Soviet Union, didn’t think so. In fact, the opposite was the case. It was precisely because they saw in the Soviet Union the symbol of world revolution that they expended so much ideological and financial resources to defeat this threat, including nuclear brinkmanship, blackmail and economic warfare.
For over 85 years, Trotskyism has kept Lenin’s view on socialism in one country under lock and key in the bottom draw. It is possible that Jack wants to continue with this ‘venerable’ Trotskyist tradition, in the hope that the less informed will not notice. If Lenin’s views can be suppressed on this important matter, which seems to have been the aim of Trotsky, it makes it easier to get away with blaming Stalin for everything negative in the Russian Revolution and at the same time having a ready-made theory which claims to explain why the Soviet Union collapsed.
It is true that the communist movement has always had people who refused to criticise Stalin or the Soviet Union, and here the motives are no doubt mixed. On the one hand, there was the fear that any criticism of the Soviet Union would strengthen capitalism and weaken the revolution. On the other, a tendency of humans to defer to greater authority played a role. There was, of course, also the element of opportunism of those who depended, to some degree, on Soviet largesse.
While I certainly do not subscribe to the ‘Stalin made no mistakes’ school of thought (even Stalin admitted his mistakes, a point which is often overlooked by the proponents of the above school) it is clear that for Jack Conrad, Stalinism led to totalitarianism. I am not sure if he is using the concept in the way I understand it, but, as far as I know, a state is totalitarian if it controls all organisations and institutions and allows for no autonomy or independence. The concept ‘seems’ to be partly related to organisational phenomena. It is easy to see how totalitarianism can develop out of a socialist revolution, as its supporters naturally will fight against counterrevolution gaining control of various social organisations. Thus, it is entirely misleading to blame Stalin. Would those who are so quick to condemn him for totalitarianism be as quick to oppose their own party gaining control of all the trade unions in the country and other social organisations?
When the Trotskyists use the concept of totalitarianism to describe the Soviet Union, they may be referring primarily to political repression, and again Stalin is seen as the source. This is rather like trying to remove the mote from your brother’s eye without first trying to remove it from your own. In other words, we can’t blame Stalin one-sidedly for totalitarianism within the former Soviet Union; rather we need to see how this tendency develops in the communist movement in general, if indeed, such a tendency exists.
The first thing to say here is that Marxism, like every school of thought, will tend to attract some dogmatic elements. A totalitarian tendency can develop from these elements that readily resort to political repression against their opponents within the communist movement. One can say that dogmatism is the mother and father of totalitarianism in its political aspect. My experience is that on the left the Trotskyist groups are the most dogmatic of all. For instance, even after the capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union, the Workers Revolutionary Party still claimed that ‘the Stalinist bureaucracy’ ran Russia - a pristine example if ever there was one.
Given the right conditions, dogmatism can easily lead to totalitarianism. It is not the product of any single individual, but the outcome of a way of thinking that defers to authority and depends on external guidance for one’s views. When Hillel Ticktin tried to ban any potential supporters of Stalin from joining the now failed Campaign for a Marxist Party, that was dogmatism in action.
Rather than blaming Stalin and the Soviet Union for ‘totalitarianism’, it would be better to ask how this tendency is introduced to the communist movement as a whole. We must begin by examining ourselves, how we respond to differences and how we behave in our own circles and organisations. A good starting point would be for the revolutionary left to debate openly, what Lenin meant when he wrote: “Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence, the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone” (VI Lenin CW Vol 21, p342).
This, in my view, is necessary because it is the cardinal issue which divided the two most prominent leaders of the revolution after Lenin: Stalin and Trotsky. I hope that Jack will not run away from this important debate, but rather will seek to throw as much light on it as possible.
Stalin's mistakes
Stalin's mistakes
Not so clean
In reply to Dave Douglass’s response to my comments about his article on ‘clean coal’, Dave misquotes me as to the biggest sources of CO2 emissions (Letters, March 19).
I never stated that coal was the biggest source; I stated that it was the biggest stationary source, which is true. As a non-stationary source, transportation fuels provide the biggest source, despite Dave’s point about agricultural and deforestation remaining serious contenders as well. And I won’t dispute the facts, or theories, surrounding these as potentially the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions.
It’s nice to know the National Union of Mineworkers has been talking about ‘clean coal’. The reality, in the United States at least, is that the United Mine Workers of America, the sister union to Dave’s NUM, has also “talked about it” since at least the 1970s. But there is simply no campaign around it and, as part of the recent discussions, latched on to by various interests from the rhetorically heavy green movement to the US department of energy, it emanates from the Bituminous Coal Association. That is, we have them to thank for its popular and latest manifestation.
Yes, Dave is correct: there are dozens of clean-coal technologies being researched and talked about, but, most notably, not implemented. Anywhere. This does not bode well for the future of so-called ‘clean coal’. I personally endorse the continued research into this because I’m pro-science and believe valuable technologies can come out of such R&D, even it fails to do what is promised. I’d actually like to see a full-scale pilot plant built. For example, we have hundreds of millions of tons of coal ash lying around the US. Perhaps there is something that can be done with this and it can get cleaned up. I don’t know. No one is talking about that because it’s so massive, so toxic, that people had largely ignored it until the recent accident in Tennessee.
All clean-coal technologies still produce CO2 and ash, and the same amount. The ‘mass’ doesn’t change. So there is a huge problem of what to actually do with this stuff. The deadly particulate from fly-ash issue is still emitted, albeit some of the technologies can reduce this to the level of natural gas particulate in the 2.5 micron range (the carbon soot that is quite deadly because of its small size). And then there is, in the US and most other countries, the huge issue of tailings and the way in which coal is removed from the ground. But that is another discussion.
Dave is correct about the continued use of coal in the steel industry. But steel is the most recycled industrial material in the world. Very little coal is used this way, at the beginning of the iron-ore-into-pig-iron process, since 95% of all steel is from scrap, which does not require the use of coal at all. Coal is also used as a source for industrial carbon applications and I don’t, nor should anyone, have any problem with its continued use in either of these two industries.
Nuclear remains the most effective way of displacing coal. This is the other half of the debate, because Dave understands that only natural gas and nuclear can effectively replace coal on a mW-per-mW basis, given that all three are effectively base-load sources of generation. The green hoopla around renewables doesn’t address the real issues in grid stability and that’s (24/7, 365 days per year) 50 Hz power for the grid (60 Hz in the US). Tidal, wave, wind, solar are interesting intermittent, expensive, unreliable sources of power that simply cannot exist except in the mode of permanent industrial welfare recipients based on the absolutely huge tariff feed-in to keep it going.
The battle is, and will remain, between coal and nuclear.
Not so clean
Not so clean
Other dead Russians
Jack Conrad’s ‘Dead Russians’ raised the usual host of contradictions (supplement, March 12).
He dismisses the idea “that the October Revolution and the theory and practice of Lenin and Trotsky led directly to Stalin”, urging Leninists to “show … that this is untrue.” Yet he does not do so. Instead, we get the platitude that, “while Lenin and Trotsky made mistakes, they were committed body and soul to the overthrow of capitalism and did their utmost to achieve human liberation.” Given that he subsequently admits that both Lenin and Trotsky advocated party dictatorship, it is hard to see what they did to achieve that goal.
“Repression,” he argues, “enabled the Stalinist state to disorganise workers to the point of atomisation.” He fails to mention the repression of strikes under Lenin, which aimed for the same goal. Without irony, he states: “… paradoxically the atomisation of workers was facilitated by the anti-capitalist nationalisations inherited from the October Revolution. The state was the employer, the trade union as well as the gendarme, and state power reached down to each and every shop floor. The workforce was spied upon and lived in constant fear. The KGB was ubiquitous.” Change KGB to Cheka and we have an accurate account of workers’ life under Lenin.
Yes, Lenin did want “first to curb Stalin’s power and then to crush him politically”, yet he had no problem with the party’s monopoly of power. Yes, “Trotsky devoted himself to exposing Stalin’s system”, but, again, he helped build that system and advocated party dictatorship right to the end. Neither of them supported workers’ self-management of production and the Bolshevik nationalisations were not remotely “anti-capitalist”; they were state capitalist and to suggest otherwise shows how far a theory is from genuine socialism.
Flying in the face of reality, it is proclaimed that “every party was ... tested to its limits. Alone Bolshevism passed ... and it did so with flying colours.” As evidence, Conrad points to “the first day of revolution” in 1917, when proletarian women “took to the streets against the advice of the left”. Strangely, he fails to note that “the left” in question were ... the Bolsheviks. He then suggests these workers were “clearly influenced by Marxism”. Wonderful!
Equally surreally, Conrad proclaims Trotsky’s destruction of military democracy a “winning formula”. For whom? At least Trotsky admitted that the “demobilisation of the Red Army ... played no small role in the formation of the bureaucracy. The victorious commanders assumed leading posts in the local soviets, in economy, in education, and they persistently introduced everywhere that regime which had ensured success in the civil war.” So, yes, it was a “winning formula” (one of many) for the bureaucracy.
Then there is the distinctly vanguardist postulation that only thanks to Lenin was “the Bolshevik part of the working class” successfully able to “negotiate the many and varied hurdles that appeared on the long road to the overthrow of the provisional government”. At least Trotsky paid lip service to working class creativity when he admitted that the “masses at the moment were more revolutionary than the party, and the party more revolutionary than its machine”.
The placing of party dictatorship at the centre of Bolshevik ideology once in power is far too well known these days to be ignored, and so Conrad states that both Lenin and Trotsky “exhibited inconsistencies ... when it came to the centrality of democracy for Marxism”. Yet both consistently advocated party dictatorship and consistently denied the “centrality” of democracy until their deaths. This cannot be considered as passing the test of a revolution with “flying colours”; quite the reverse.
Ah, but the “substitution of the Communist Party’s full-time apparatus for the disintegrating working class collectivity” was “unavoidable under conditions of civil war, isolation and poverty. To argue otherwise is to abandon Marxism for utopian socialism, anarchism, etc.” There are two slight problems with this.
Firstly, does this mean that the CPGB now thinks that there will be a peaceful overnight global social revolution? If not, then “conditions of civil war, isolation and poverty” are likely to exist (as anarchists had argued since the 1860s). Secondly, party power existed from the start, with the Bolsheviks usurping power from the soviets from day one. Bolshevik packing and disbanding of soviets started before the revolt of the Czech Legion and the packing of the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets to ensure Bolshevik power occurred soon after it.
As well as being factually and logically flawed, it also fails to mention how the Bolsheviks’ own policies and repression contributed to the “disintegrating [of] working class collectivity” that is used to justify that very usurpation of power and its consequences! The working class was more than capable of taking strike action post-October. The notion of “decay” in collectivity is hard to square with a Bolshevik regime that regularly imposed martial law to smash (general) strikes.
Conrad states that “Trotsky was quite clear in his own mind that the Stalinite bureaucracy was not ruling on behalf of the working class, but against the working class.” Trotsky was also quite clear that the “the proletariat remains the ruling class” under Stalinism. But, then, Leninists to this day think that the working class was the “ruling class” under the Leninite bureaucracy.
Sadly, Conrad does not ponder the relationship of Lenin’s What is to be done? to his comment on the Bolsheviks “dismissing the importance of majority rule in the name of socialism”. Perhaps if he did he would see the ideological roots of how, once in power, “the Lenin-Trotsky-Zinoviev Comintern justified minority rule, a one-party state”. Ultimately, it is the notion that there is something in “the writings of Lenin and Trotsky” which “remain[s] a Marxist treasure trove” is what ensures that “any contemporary working class programme is hugely impoverished”.
Real socialism will come from elsewhere - such as the ideas of those dead Russians, Bakunin and Kropotkin. Conrad proclaims that “the anarchists proved entirely marginal”, failing to note the impact of Bolshevik repression post-October in ensuring that position. In reality, the “best of the anarchist milieu” did not break “with anarchism”- rather they ended up in prison, shot by the Cheka or in exile. As for having “few if any other worthwhile ideas”, I must surmise concluding (a mere 12 years before Lenin) that the soviets should be the framework of a socialist society is not “worthwhile”. Finally, the anarchist Makhnovists managed to support soviet democracy and allow freedom of speech and organisation for working class people during the civil war, showing that alternative policies were possible and could be implemented successfully.
Perhaps if Leninists learn from such comrades, then they may contribute to human liberation - but that would involve rejecting Leninism. Until then, I fear their ignorance of the realities of Bolshevism will ensure they will, at worse, repeat history or, at best (and more likely), be ignored by it.
Other dead Russians
Other dead Russians