Letters

RSF view

Once again I’d like to thank Anne Mc Shane and the Weekly Worker for their informative analyses on Ireland. The recent example is the article, ‘For a secular republic’ (June 4). I totally agree with her call for secularism in Ireland.

But I’m sorry to say that once more Anne Mc Shane ignores the position of revolutionary republicanism. So let me give the position of Republican Sinn Féin. I’d like to quote from a press release by Peter Fitzsimons, RSF PRO in Kells, county Meath.

Fitzsimons said that the “scandal has brought serious doubts to light, in relation to the secrecy that was kept in place, and about why the state and department of education never ‘noticed’ that this abuse was going on”. He continued by saying: “It is clear that sexual predators were working under the cover of the cloth … and that it was evident that they were constantly moved around from school to school. It is astonishing to think that nobody will be held accountable for there crimes. A deal was struck out between the government and the church to keep certain members … free from prosecution.”

RSF view
RSF view

Planet Turley

Comrade James Turley accuses me of missing the point (Letters, June 4). However, it is clearly Turley himself who is missing the point.

He says that there is nothing to polarise working class people at the moment, as Iraq had done previously. He is clearly living on another planet! Mass redundancies and attacks on many public services, as well as the expenses scandal, have most certainly polarised many ordinary people. Comrade Turley would know this if he ventured out on the streets of the South West during the election campaign (where there was an 84% increase in the vote for the far left). He would have been able to speak to people and realised that their anger is polarised and all it needs is a party to bring them together (that, comrade Turley, is political education that you cannot simply read in a book).

The BNP were elected because of disgust at the mainstream parties and particularly the Labour Party - the same one that you advocated a vote for. You say that there is nothing to polarise people despite a 29% increase for the far left compared with 2004 and with No2EU polling better than Respect in many regions, even while also contending with the SLP, who did not stand in 2004.

You say that workers have not significantly broken with Labour. This is rubbish. No class-conscious workers, or very few, vote Labour any more. In saying this, you have simply aligned yourself with the Labour aristocracy and stood on the sidelines, as the BNP walked away with two seats. Comrade, it is time to realise the significance of the movement you have denounced so badly.

Planet Turley
Planet Turley

Dad's Army

Across Europe the chief beneficiary of the banking and economic crisis has been the centre-right. In Britain, No2EU helped the Eurosceptic virus spread, aided and abetted by the ‘Dad’s Army, Fortress Britain’ viewpoint shared by William Hague, Norman Tebbit, Ukip and the BNP. The Labour Party has been embroiled in the expenses scandal, and its ‘natural’ vote sat on their hands, or voted Eurosceptic and BNP, in protest, revealing a very low level of political consciousness. The Labour Party, however, has to choose to support the people or the bankers and their friends.

As Ian Traynor pertinently notes, “The usual labels can also be misleading. A summit of European leaders next week in Brussels, for example, will see Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy challenging Brown to agree to tighter regulation of Europe’s financial markets. Brown will resist, to defend the City of London from EU intrusiveness. The mainstream centre-right leaders of Europe are often to the left of British Labour prime ministers” (The Guardian June 9).

This is exactly the logic of No2EU’s position of retreat to the myth of ‘Warmington-on-Sea’: Britain fighting its corner ‘against the dictators of Europe’ in Brussels (instead of Berlin). But Captain Mainwaring would have commended the CPB’s retreat into nationalism and mythical Britishness. The left helped spread the Eurosceptic virus and the decline of international consciousness. After World War I, the Comintern posed the need for a ‘Federal United States of Europe’ to prevent war and build a Europe of cooperation and peace. After World War II, even Churchill and statesmen like Jean Monnet realised that the nation-states of Europe would destroy civilisation and new transnational institutions would have to be created to prevent war.

The left cannot afford to retreat to a Dad’s Army view of the world. It must build unity around constructive engagement across Europe as a single, federal party of labour. There must be a united front to remove the BNP’s MEPs by the next European parliamentary election in 2014. There must also be a campaign for a united centre-left agenda in support of the people and against the banking system and capitalism, as and when it fails the working class and the people as a whole.

Otherwise, the left in Europe may continue to decline, the centre-right will gain further hegemony and the neo-fascists will make further inroads into democracy and civil society across our common European home.

Dad's Army
Dad's Army

Naive

Rather than naïvely calling for a Labour vote, surely you should be hoping for the destruction of the party? Its presence has held back progressive, working class politics for decades. It is now a thoroughly anti-working class party and support for it can only be seen in that context. Its absence would allow a radical force fit for the 21st century to emerge.

History cannot wait for your orthodox Marxist ideas to gain traction. And, let’s be honest, they almost certainly never will.

Naive
Naive

Next best

The fascists made significant advances in the north of England in the recent European elections. Around 5,000 more votes in the North West region and there would have been a Green MEP elected rather BNP chairman Nick Griffin. Meanwhile, the Socialist Labour Party won over 26,000 votes and No2EU 23,580 in the North West.

Simple mathematics shows that these parties of ‘the left’ could have helped prevent the fascist victory by supporting the Greens as the next most progressive option. Maybe next time they will use a more imaginative anti-fascist political strategy.

Next best
Next best

Foresight

Such foresight. I was reading Mike Macnair’s article (‘Against rightist populism’, June 4) on why we should vote Labour in the June 4 elections in order to oppose a ‘Berlusconi-style’ media takeover of politics in Britain when Sir (soon to be Lord) Alan Sugar was appointed the government’s enterprise champion. By a Labour government! ‘A government of all the talents’.

Foresight
Foresight

Transferable vote

So vote Labour, vote for imperialism, vote for racism, vote for repression, vote for attacks on the working class, vote for war. Anything else?

Transferable vote
Transferable vote

Military mates

Jack Conrad asks: “Why trust the thoroughly undemocratic British army? An armed body which relies on inculcating unthinking military discipline in the ranks” (‘Open letter to Peter Taaffe’, June 4).

The Socialist Party of Great Britain’s case is that the armed forces and police have much the same attitudes as other workers, since they are conditioned by the same economical, social and historical forces operating in society. Eventually, the world’s workers will respond to capitalism’s inhumanities to the extent that they understand and desire the socialist alternative. Then socialist ideas will be just as prevalent in the minds of the army and police. They will be for the revolution, not against it.

When socialist ideas begin to spread among the working class, it is most unlikely that those in uniform will remain unaffected. When a majority of workers generally are socialists, so too will be most of their fellow workers in the police and armed forces.

Jack Conrad reminds us of the role of the army in the overthrow of Allende, but, to recall another situation, let’s not forget that the first act of Franco was the summary execution of 200 senior officers loyal to the republic. Military and police stayed loyal to the republic in many areas.

We in the SPGB have no difficulty in accepting the vast majority of the armed forces as thinking, sentient, critical members of the working class, who, despite their military training and discipline, are quite capable of deciding what’s in their best interests. They are no more slaves of ideology than the rest of us.

Military mates
Military mates

Non-nation

Unsurprisingly Moshé Machover disagrees with my assertion that there is a separate Hebrew nation. I think I made it clear that in my view the term ‘nation’ is a label, not an exactitude. I termed it a ‘chose in action’. It is at the very time that ‘nationhood’ asserts itself that it becomes most problematic. What does it mean to assert a British (or is it English?) nationality?

Does it have a progressive context? In my experience it is used in a racist context, not as a celebration of some intangible celebration of the thing itself.

Moshé particularly takes exception to my claim that nations and states correspond. “Patently false,” he objects. Well, is it? There is hardly a state in existence that does not have a national minority. Fine. Where is the British national minority? Cornwall? Or the French national minority? Of course, there are many members of other nations who come to work and sojourn in this and other countries, but that doesn’t make them a national minority. On the contrary, in the absence of embedded racism, those who do stay in this country become British. Indeed it is one of the arguments of the racists that black and Asian people are national minorities and not part of the host nation.

In fact the creation of nations such as the French, Italian or British did indeed take the form of the creation of the nation-state. Or maybe Moshé has forgotten the Conte de Clermont-Tonnerre’s declaration that ‘To the Jews as individuals everything, to the Jews as a nation nothing’ in the wake of the French Revolution. The bourgeois revolutions that created the French, German and Italian states, among others, did indeed create states that encompassed all their inhabitants as one nation. The idea of national minorities would have been a concession to the reactionary clerical castes. It was in countries like Hungary, where the national revolution was aborted, that the idea of Jews as foreigners pertained until the Hungarian holocaust in 1944.

I am not arguing that the Hebrews are not a nation solely because they don’t recognise themselves as such, though admittedly this is a powerful argument. I’m doing so because I insist on looking behind the label and asking what they amount to specifically. Is there a set of ‘objective’ - in fact Stalinist - criteria which define a nation: language, territory, economy? Yes, of course, these are essential, but do not, by themselves, define a nation. What the Hebrew ‘nation’ like all other settler nations do is to define themselves in opposition to those they dispossess, exclude or exploit. Theirs is a stillborn nationalism, based on the oppression of others. To them there is no ‘right’ of self-determination, because it is not only a meaningless concept, but is actually an assertion of the right to oppress others.

There is no comparison between the formation of nation-states in Australia and the USA and Israel. In this sense Israel was unique in being founded by a political movement - Zionism - which held that Jews were an indivisible nation. Unlike the former, where the national struggle was against the colonial motherland, in Israel the centre of political gravity shifted during the 1930s from the World Zionist Organisation to the Jewish Agency in Palestine.

In short the assertion that there is no Israeli nationality is not simply on the level of ideas, but has foundations in material conditions: namely the support of organised Jewish communities in the diaspora. Consciousness may indeed lag behind social being, but after 60 years one would have expected it to catch up!

It is therefore untrue that I look forward to the demise of Zionism, but refuse to accept its consequence. Quite the contrary. The demise of Zionism will go hand in hand with the unification of the people of Palestine, Hebrew and Palestinian. The maintenance of a separate Jewish nation will mean that Zionism has not been defeated because there will be no other reason for such a state to exist given the pre-existing circumstances.

Non-nation
Non-nation

No to mark two

In last week’s paper, comrades Dave Vincent and Terry Liddle took issue with the CPGB’s ‘Vote Labour’ position on the European parliament elections (Letters, June 4). Like many others on the left, they are of the belief that it is time to create a ‘Labour Party mark two’. This trend of thought worries me deeply and the proposal that unions should withdraw support for Labour would be a catastrophe if it happened.

I can sympathise with those who may despair at the rightwing domination in Labour (ironically a right wing that has just nationalised most of the top banks) but for the life of me I can’t see how the left wing jumping ship to float around in its own little boat will be of any benefit. It would mean the end of the Labour Party as a bourgeois workers’ party and as the party of the working class in Britain. There is no better way to give a gift horse to the Conservatives, Liberals, BNPs and Ukips of this world than to effectively liquidate the Labour Party because its policies are not being made by the left wing at the moment.

In fact, that has hardly ever been the case, but it has always been true that the Labour Party is a broad church that has had a socialist left throughout its history, and still does in every branch across the country, as well as a right wing of more social democratic/liberal traditions. For the socialists to decamp would be to leave the Labour Party to these social democratic members, who, without the trade unions’ support and with the party struggling for finance, would no doubt find themselves moving into alliance with the Liberal Democrats and restoring the status quo of the 19th century - ie, Tories and Whigs, with Labour Party mark two struggling for a seat on the bus, let alone in parliament.

There is no mass support for old Labour socialism, ‘official’ communism, Trotskyism or even the CPGB because ultimately the whole theory is widely discredited. And there is no road to credibility, let alone socialism, in No2EU, which is the latest in a line of miserable attempts by revolutionary socialists to break away from Labour and step into the ‘big league’.

Consider the history. The Socialist Labour Party launched and could have been something, but, when push came to shove, it became the Arthur Scargill appreciation society. The Socialist Alliance followed and lasted a while without ever really getting anywhere. Then the Socialist Workers Party went all ‘street’ with Respect and the oily Mr Galloway. Of course, the wedding ended in divorce and a leadership crisis in the SWP, that great ship without the compass of a party programme.

Now we have the No2EU formation - an alliance of trade union money, the mourning Starlin’s Communist Party of Britain and the Socialist Party of England and Wales, formerly the mighty Trots of Militant, who haven’t had half the success they did when they so successfully took entryism as far as it could go.

One can only imagine the unease in the minds of both sets of comrades as they sit in meeting rooms, with SPEW comrades looking uneasily around the room for ice picks in the hands of their new friends and CPB members looking across the table at what they consider ‘roadblocks on the road to socialism’. It is surely only a matter of time before SPEW are asked to leave the alliance without even a ‘thank you’ for all the work their comrades have done.

None of these attempts at a Labour Party mark two have brought about mass support for socialism. Nor have they done anything to make the left credible once more. And that is because they are simply not up to the task, and for the most part living in the past and clinging to nationalisation, extortionate taxation and parliament as the road to a workers’ paradise of Britain (for ‘British workers’).

Within the next 18 months, it is likely there will be a Conservative government overseeing a chronic recession, which will mean an attack on the working class and the end of New Labour. What happens in the Labour Party when back in opposition should be the focus of every one of us, both inside and outside the party.

I believe that Labour will move to the left in opposition to a Tory government that has no solutions for the crisis but to cut back and attack. What if we have run away and formed Labour Party mark two or are engaged in electoral front No299 when that comes about?

How we deal with the Labour Party is a major tactical question, to which the answer is not to attempt to split it. The result of that will not be a socialist alternative or a Communist Party, but liberal rapprochement. Whilst efforts to reforge the CPGB and get the vanguard organised must continue, we have to recognise that now is not the time to be Labour’s hangmen.

History is not on our side, but patience and time is. The question of the Labour Party is one that must be tackled by comrades whether they are as ‘intellectually challenged’ as you or I, comrade Vincent, or as apparently ‘clever’ as comrade Conrad and the rest of the PCC may be.

No to mark two
No to mark two

Far rightist

Robert Wilkinson, the South East No2EU candidate, seems to argue for authoritarian state controls over labour that are potentially more extreme than those of the far right (Letters, May 21). Like the latter, he wants to control immigration. However, he goes further than this. He wants to limit workers’ movement within a locality and stop emigration abroad.

Wilkinson states that workers wanting to migrate should “remain where they are in the midst of their own family”. If they “desert their own community”, their decision functions to “undercut and divide the recipient community”.

Wilkinson misrepresents Marx as a nationalist and Lenin as a Russian chauvinist. This suggests he has a favourable perception of the former USSR. I guess this has influenced his judgement that workers have a “collective responsibility” to stay at home. He will know how successful the Soviet regime was in confining workers to particular localities and restricting their movement. This was done through an internal passport system.

Imagine how this might work in Britain. The state has personal files on all workers. These record how much the community has, in Wilkinson’s words, “invested social capital in their upbringing”. The cost of each worker’s education, housing, health and social security is monitored and estimated.

The state issues every worker with a labour book. This records any deviations she or he has shown from abiding by “the hard won terms and conditions established by the working class”. Administrators use information about the expense, probity, conformity and diligence of workers in order to decide whether or not they deserve jobs in different localities.

Fortunately, this nightmare will not come true. Stricter controls over the movement of labour do not respond either to capital’s or workers’ needs. According to a recent survey by the broker Foreign Currency Direct, a quarter of UK workers are thinking about moving to live and work abroad in the next two years (‘Foreign jobs lure 25% of workers’ Financial Times May 29).

Fifty-five percent of those questioned stated they wanted to “embrace a new culture”. This is a need realised by only a few skilled workers at present. It was denied to Soviet and east European workers for a generation. Economic and political oppression denies it to the majority of unskilled workers and the unemployed worldwide today.

The lack of workers’ freedom to move around the world is one of the reasons why they have not been able yet to embrace the new culture of a socialist future. It has served to prevent them organising and communicating on a global scale. Moreover, Stalinist governments, purporting to be ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’, restricted movement more effectively than capitalist ones. As a result, workers associate socialism with bureaucratic controls over their freedom.

Demands preserving and extending this freedom (by linking it to policies of free transport to destinations at home and abroad) are therefore one of the elements in a political programme transitional to socialism. To workers not blinded by narrow, cross-class, patriotic prejudice, they would also be popular and attractive.

Far rightist
Far rightist

Left deformity

James Turley argues that the International Bolshevik Tendency’s rejection of the ‘No to EU, Yes to Democracy’ campaign as a popular front “misses the point” because the involvement of the bourgeois Liberal Party had no effect on No2EU’s “chauvinist, red-brown programme” (Letters, June 4). But comrade Turley is mistaken to imagine that the issue of whether or not to offer electoral support (however ‘critical’) to cross-class, or overtly bourgeois, formations is merely a tactical question for Leninists.

Claiming that “there is no class character that automatically precludes Marxists from giving support to a political formation”, Turley cites as evidence the willingness of the Bolshevik leadership “to vote for the liberal bourgeois Cadets” in 1906. At the time Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks adhered to the organisational conceptions of the Second International, and functioned as a faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, a Kautskyan ‘party of the whole class’. They also accepted the idea that a revolution against Russian tsarism would necessarily usher in a period of capitalist development - rather than begin to lay the basis of a socialist economy. This is reflected in a comment in a key document Lenin wrote on this issue: “The central issue is: on what lines should the socialist proletariat enter into agreements with the bourgeoisie, which, generally speaking, are inevitable in the course of a bourgeois revolution” (‘Blocs with the Cadets’, November 1906).

Because they conceived of the tasks of the Russian Revolution as essentially bourgeois-democratic, the pre-1917 Bolsheviks were prepared to discuss the idea of electoral agreements with what they described as the ‘revolutionary bourgeoisie’; that is, “only with parties which are fighting for a republic and which recognise the necessity of an armed uprising” (ibid). This category did not include the Cadets, as Lenin made clear in his November 1906 ‘Draft election address’.

In reviewing Lenin’s writings at the time, we find that he had in fact opposed the idea of a bloc with the Cadets at the RSDLP’s Tammerfors conference in November 1906, but was outvoted. The conference approved the bloc in principle, but left it up to each local organisation to decide electoral policy in its own area. Lenin did not like the policy, but accepted it in order to maintain a ‘united’ party with the Menshevik reformists: “The sanction of blocs with the Cadets is the finishing touch that definitely marks the Mensheviks as the opportunist wing of the workers’ party. We are waging a ruthless ideological battle against the formation of blocs with the Cadets, and this struggle must be developed to the widest possible extent … The question is how to combine this ruthless ideological struggle with proletarian party discipline … Does the sanction by Social Democrats of blocs with the Cadets necessitate a complete severance of organisational relations - ie, a split? We think not, and all Bolsheviks think the same way ... Therefore, our duty at the present time is to avoid intellectualist hysteria and preserve party unity, trusting to the staunchness and sound class instinct of the revolutionary proletariat” (‘Party discipline and the fight against the pro-Cadet Social Democrats’, November 1906).

But party unity with the Mensheviks proved to be a dead end. The precondition for successful proletarian revolution, as the October Revolution demonstrated so powerfully, is a political split between revolutionaries and reformists. The greatest single contribution of Bolshevism in the organisational sphere is the recognition that revolutionaries must organise themselves independently of reformists. Lenin and the other cadres of the Bolshevik faction did not fully come to this understanding until 1912, when the final definitive split with the Mensheviks occurred.

The Bolshevik Party’s struggle for hegemony in the Russian working class in 1917 hinged on exposing the attachment of the ‘socialists’ in the provisional government to their liberal bourgeois partners, codified in the slogan ‘Down with the 10 capitalist ministers!’ When Lenin introduced this orientation in his April theses, he was regarded by many ‘old Bolsheviks’ as venturing into the “arid terrain of ultra-leftism”. The adoption of the April theses marked the completion of the qualitative transformation of the Bolsheviks from a revolutionary social democratic to a communist formation.

It is quite true that the nationalism and protectionist logic of the No2EU programme are poison for the workers’ movement. That, of course, is why the Liberals find it so congenial. The Liberal Party presence in No2EU is indeed minor, amounting to what Trotsky once called the “shadow of the bourgeoisie”, and even without Liberal participation No2EU’s reactionary programme would be a sufficient guarantee to the capitalist class that the ‘socialist’ backers of the project are harmless reformists. The adherence of the Liberals to No2EU is chiefly significant because it has formalised and concretised the “fundamental class-collaborationist character of the front”, as comrade Turley put it.

Working class independence from all wings of the bourgeoisie is the first step on the road toward ending unemployment, racism, poverty, war and all the other pathologies that come with life under the tyranny of capital. Of course, reformist workers’ organisations do not necessarily need a bourgeois political partner (or even the shadow of one) in order to betray their base. We need only look at the Blairite New Labour traitors to see that. There is a curious symmetry between Turley’s mistaken assertion that “the CPGB stands in the tradition of Bolshevism” in being open to “giving support to bourgeois political formations”, and your current attempts to once again recycle the same old Labour loyalism that has deformed the British left for so many decades.

Left deformity
Left deformity