Letters

Tea Party

Jim Creegan says he thinks I am having difficulty with the idea that the wrath of the Tea Partiers is aimed at politicians, not the ruling class for which they act (Letters, October 7). No, that’s not the case. Firstly, I’m sure that Jim would accept that in the US more than anywhere else it is difficult to make a clear distinction between the politicians and the class they represent. Most of them are multi-millionaires or billionaires. Secondly, in this instance, in attacking the ideas those politicians represent they are attacking the interests of the ruling class. Moreover, my main concern was the other point I made, which was Jim’s identification of the Tea Partiers with the interests of the ruling class.

In fact, in raising the issue of the state I think it is Jim who is confused. The state is not at all the governmental power. Whilst the state - which comprises its permanent bureaucracy, its bodies of armed men and its ideological institutions - is an instrument of class power, and represents the interests of the ruling class, the same is not true of the government. Allende’s government, for example, did not represent the interests of the Chilean ruling class. The nature of bourgeois democracy does mean, contrary to what Jim says, that even bourgeois parties are faced with the problem of being elected, and, therefore, are faced with other pressures than just being a mouthpiece for the ruling class. Indeed, that is the reason for the rightwing populism of parties in Europe at the moment, and the reason that the Republican establishment are having to respond to the challenge from the Tea Partiers.

I do not insist on a strict demarcation between the interests of the middle class and ruling class, but I do insist that there is no necessary coincidence between the two. Jim refers to the upward shift of income that has occurred since the 1970s. I am aware of that, and I am also aware of its causes located within the nature of the US economy. Alan Greenspan was also aware of it, and its causes too. In a number of his testimonies to Congress, he emphasised that the US had to address urgently its severe educational deficiencies, which failed to churn out sufficient people with the necessary skills and qualifications to fill those higher paid jobs, and which caused US capital a problem, not just from the deficiency, but as a result of the over-inflated salaries such a shortage of supply resulted in.

Jim speaks of the people in the top 1% of income earners, and says these people are too rich to be called middle class. Even if Jim is right, it doesn’t matter, because the whole point of my argument was that it is the separation between the interests of small capital, the middle class, etc, as against the interests of big capital, which is the dominant section of the ruling class, that is important. In fact, Engels argued that by the end of the 19th century this big capital had essentially adopted the programme of social democracy. It was promoting a social democratic consensus as the best means to further its interests, including squeezing its smaller competitors by imposing upon them state regulations that provided minimum standards for workers that big capital could afford, but which undermined the profits of small capital.

That is why the reality of most of the 20th century is that it has been social democratic parties and their ilk which have been the real representatives of big capital, whereas conservative parties have been the representatives of small capital and the middle class. It’s not surprising that in the US the Democrats have been the party promoting the kind of state capitalist policies that big capital needs, while the Republicans, at least in rhetoric, have been the small staters.

Jim allows his confusion of government and state to once again cloud his understanding of the policies being pursued by that populist right in Europe. Jim tells us that this policy of austerity is the explicit programme of the American ruling class. But the Democrats are the political representatives of the US ruling class - or has Jim swallowed the propaganda of the Tea Partiers that Obama is a socialist? This is the same ruling class which only a year ago was demanding that the state grow to almost any size to bail out the banks and other sections of big capital! If it wanted a small state, 2008 was the perfect opportunity to have got one. Has Jim forgotten that it was not Obama that stepped in to bail out big capital, but Bush. Nor was that growth of the state just a response to the financial meltdown. The libertarians and Ron Paul were decrying the ‘socialism’ of Bush way back in 2002, as the size of the state expanded, along with the deficits.

The other bogeyman of the Tea Partiers - health reform - has also long been the cause of big capital, which has complained persistently about the huge burden it faced compared to its foreign competitors, who benefited from socialised systems. And it was not Obama who first responded to that, but Bush. Additionally, there is hardly an ideologist of the big bourgeoisie who is not arguing that austerity is the wrong course at the present time. In a forum hosted by the BBC last weekend Strauss-Kahn agreed with Joe Stiglitz that in those economies where fiscal stimulus was possible it should be employed. There is, of course, a difference between big capital seeing the advantages of a big state in providing economic and social stability and of being a rational means of providing those commodities, such as education and healthcare, vital for the reproduction of labour-power.

Contrary to what Jim says, I don’t think I was equating the Tea Party to European fascism. I thought I said it wasn’t the same, whilst likening it to the kind of rightwing populist movements of the early 20th century. The point I was making was that, in the absence of any credible solution provided by socialists, such populist movements can win support across a wide spectrum. Indeed, that is why parties like the Tories in Britain have adopted such policies to be elected even though they contradict the interests of big capital.

Tea Party
Tea Party

Realisten

Jack Conrad wrote: “Lenin cited the Spartacists and the left wing of the Independent Social Democratic Party. And it is worth adding that, with the merger of these two organisations in October 1920, the resulting united Communist Party of Germany assumed genuinely mass proportions” (‘“Leftwing” communism’ Weekly Worker October 14).

In a blog series on internationals, Louis Proyect said: “The German Communist Party would have been much better off if the Comintern had simply left it alone.” I’ll go further than what he said or what Lenin wrote, considering that he didn’t truly appreciate Kautsky’s framework for what a revolutionary period was and what it wasn’t.

The German worker-class movement would have been better off if the ultra-left KPD hadn’t been formed in the first place - at the expense of “an outstanding role model for left politics today” that, through its own state within a state, “paid attention to the daily demands and needs of workers without yielding its claim to revolutionary, anti-capitalist politics” (to quote Die Linke’s Dietmar Bartsch).

‘Leftwing’ communism did not contain the one key suggestion that was needed to counter that infantile disorder that was German Spartacism: dissolve the KPD itself into a majority tendency of the USPD to counter the rightwing, SPD ass-kissing renegades in that party’s leadership.

Conrad conveniently forgets that the USPD had a centre tendency as well as a right and a left. This tendency, which was hostile to both the SPD and the Comintern, consisted of ‘Realisten’/‘Realos’ (yes, I am using Die Linke language here, but I distinguish between real Realo-ism and the pseudo-Realo-ism of the Die Linke right wing): Theodor Liebknecht, Arthur Crispien, Wilhelm Dittman, Georg Ledebour, Tony Sender, etc.

Internationally, this means that the Comintern itself should have folded into the International Working Union of Socialist Parties, the closest organisation to a proper third worker-class international (between communist left sectarianism and reformist labour internationals).

Realisten
Realisten

Launch

I agree with Robbie Rix that my point about moving the Weekly Worker to a digital-only format is flawed (‘Another good week’, October 14). I often trawl through the main political websites in the UK and the US looking for a guide as to what politics holds for the future. My suggestion in last week’s Weekly Worker was one of the many conclusions I have come to by visiting these websites.

I have been an active Marxist since 1978, but all I can see is a swing to the right. The growth of the Tea Party movement in the US is a prime example of this. Leadership is sadly lacking amongst the Provisional Central Committee of the CPGB, which has become obsessed with supporting Diane Abbott. Political organisations are not static entities. They either grow or they shrink. The PCC should have a balanced plan for the growth of the CPGB membership and also the readership of the Weekly Worker and the CPGB website.

It is therefore good to hear from Robbie Rix that the launch of a new redesigned and modernised CPGB website is imminent. I would also like to see the return of the ‘Party notes’ column, which always orientated itself to the growth in CPGB membership.

Launch
Launch

Deportation

Peter Cohen proposes an interesting scheme for “the complete decolonisation of Palestine” (Letters, October 14). It consists of “the Zionist colonists going back to where they or their parents came from.” Most ingenious.

Presumably these colonists will have to await their turn for deportation until those of older colonies - including North America and Australia - have been similarly dealt with. Meanwhile, Peter Cohen will have ample time to ponder a few technical problems.

One such problem is exemplified by a working class couple I am acquainted with. Both are Israeli born. The wife’s father was born in a part of Poland that has since been annexed to Russia; her mother was born in Iraq. The husband’s mother was born and raised as a French citizen in Algeria, when Algeria was officially part of France; his father was born in the USSR in a town that is now in Azerbaijan. Presumably, the couple would have to separate. Peter Cohen will have to work out where each partner should be deported to. Then he will have to decide where the couple’s children should be sent: Poland? Russia? Iraq? France? Algeria? Azerbaijan? He will also need to persuade or force the countries in question to serve as dumping grounds for these foreign deportees.

Of course, my friends and millions of their Hebrew compatriots will not peacefully accept being deported from what for most of them is the land of their birth. They will defend themselves and resist, using all the weapons at their disposal. But no doubt Peter Cohen will, in the interest of decolonisation, personally volunteer to muster and serve in the armed forces that will be needed to drown that resistance in blood.

I look forward to reading in the Weekly Worker further brilliant schemes for promoting the international unity of the working class.

Deportation
Deportation

Bring it on

As a supporter of the Coordinating Committee for the Refoundation of the Fourth International in the UK, it is not often that I agree with the shortbread socialism of Eddie Ford. On the subject of child benefits, however, he seems to be thrusting his sporran in the right direction (‘Tails and wagging dogs’, October 7).

In the 1920s, unemployed workers were subject to a means test which involved an officer visiting the claimant’s house, calculating the worth of the claimant’s furniture and then stating that ‘surplus’ furniture (such as a sofa) was capital that could be sold. Benefits would therefore be denied (an even more savage arrangement was in place for the earlier workhouse system).

The proposal to axe child benefit would entail yet another invasion of privacy, as family finances come under scrutiny. Would you like the details of your financial affairs to be fully accessible to the capitalist state? Furthermore, cutting child benefit to upper middle class earners will save a paltry sum, especially if you consider the extra costs of policing it. It is a crass attempt at justifying a ‘fairness’ cover for the savage cuts in services, jobs and pensions that are to come.

Another justification for universal child benefit is that the benefit (excepting payments in the rare cases where fathers are given custody by the misanthropic courts) is paid directly to the mother. I personally know women who have used this money to save for a fund to enable them to leave an abusive husband. Others have, for example, used it to fund a bond for a new home.

Finally, the complexities of dealing with means testing will mean that many low paid and vulnerable people who do not have the benefits of a university education will end up not claiming. It is an established fact that, the poorer you are, the more you don’t take up your entitlement.

If Eddie is proposing an alliance between the middle classes and the workers to fight this (under the leadership of the working class, of course, not the leadership of the petty bourgeoisie, as the Pabloites would have it), then I say, bring it on.

Bring it on
Bring it on

Exchanges

Recent editions of the Weekly Worker have contained some fairly lively and informative exchanges between members of the CPGB, Communist Students and the Socialist Workers Party, which is very welcome (Letters, October 7 and 14).

Perhaps SWP students in Manchester are rattled by the existence of an on-campus ‘rival’ which combines anti-cuts activism with a commitment to open and critical Marxism like that practised by Communist Students. Who knows? Being so far away, I can only speculate. But this is indeed the kind of open debate that needs to be had on the Marxist left, particularly as the cuts bite and the coalition launches its wholesale attack on working class people.

Aside from the exact issues at stake, one theme seemed to stand out: the dynamic between theory and practice. Aine Bike, for example, criticises CPGB and CS comrades for not being active enough in “the actual class struggle” (October 14). I’ve heard others dismiss as ‘talking shops’ left groups and meetings which exist for no other reason than to tease out ideas and provide a platform for informed strategic and intellectual debate on the state of Marxism past, present and future. But the existence of such ‘talking shops’ is healthy in itself and such groups are vital to the existence of a movement which is rational and democratic.

By the same standard, however, I do agree with Aine Bike on one point: the active dedication of many SWP members - despite their uniformly blind and uncritical devotion to the party line - should not so easily be scorned. On this, I am personally happy to give credit where I think it is due. I have encountered people on the Marxist left, some associated with groups where open debate is celebrated as the very highest virtue, who display almost utter contempt for the struggles waged on picket lines by trade unionists and socialist activists, purely because such actions are not pre-empted by hours and hours of intellectual pontificating over their strategic value to the history of Marxism and communism.

That is why I enjoyed recent exchanges in the Weekly Worker involving CPGB and CS comrades in Manchester who, by the sounds of it, are doing great work in the struggle to unite theory and practice in an active and democratic communist politics.

Exchanges
Exchanges

Biased prize

A few remarks to add to your interesting article, ‘For services rendered’ (October 14). In 1960, an earlier president of the African National Congress, Albert Lutuli, was awarded the Nobel peace prize.

When Henry Kissinger received the prize in 1973, it was to be shared with Le Duc Tho of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, a key player in the Paris peace accords during the Vietnam war. To his credit, Le Duc Tho, recognising the cynical pairing of his name with Kissinger, refused to accept the award.

An earlier and significant refusal was Jean-Paul Sartre, who was awarded the literature prize in 1960 and turned it down partly on the grounds that it had an imperialist bias.

Biased prize
Biased prize

Timeless dogma

There are just a number of points I need to make about James Turley’s response (Letters, October 7) to my letter (September 30). His little fling on the use of bourgeois sources is, of course, a sleight of hand: Marx and Lenin never shared the backward prejudices of their many bourgeois sources. On Cuba, however, the Weekly Worker and the Trotskyists do. And as for China - well, don’t be so idle: our position is clear and in the public domain.

Throughout his response, Turley cannot help his reactionary prejudices coming through: Cuban communists are Cuban ‘communists’ in quotes; and Cuban socialism is Cuban ‘socialism’. But, in the Weekly Worker, that nonentity John McDonnell is always comrade McDonnell without quotes, the left in the Labour Party is always the left, never the ‘left’. The inverted commas of disdain are most certainly applied with differing standards! And I do not see the Weekly Worker or James Turley supporting their comrade McDonnell as ‘the rope supports the hanging man’. Does anyone else?

Turley complains that I accuse the Weekly Worker of ignoring Lenin on the basis of opportunism in the workers’ movement, and then adds in parentheses: “actually, I disagree with Lenin, but that’s another matter”. But it is not! Lenin’s materialist analysis of opportunism is not ‘another matter’: it is the essence of communist politics today. British Trotskyists reject it: Tony Cliff, of course, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and the Weekly Worker replace it with idealist notions about ‘reformism’, which conveniently lead them into opportunist accommodation with the Labour Party.

Let us be clear: Lenin no more invented the notion of the labour aristocracy than Marx invented the concept of class. Both Marx and Engels had related the emergence of a privileged upper stratum of the working class to British capitalism’s monopoly position in the second half of the 19th century. Bourgeois historians and political commentators of the time took the existence of this stratum as read. All Lenin did was to take the analysis of Marx and Engels a step further in the context of monopoly capitalism or imperialism, and those who reject Lenin’s materialist position on the split in the working class in imperialist nations seem inevitably to go on to reject Lenin’s analysis of imperialism as a whole (Tony Cliff of course, the AWL and the Weekly Worker).

Because the RCG shares Lenin’s strategic conceptions, we can understand his tactical advice for what it is: tactical advice, not the timeless dogma that the Weekly Worker makes of it. The idea that 2010 is the same as 1920 - “Then as now Labour had bloodstained hands - and the communists were weak”, as Turley puts it - is absurd. In 1920, Labour had yet to form a government, the defeats of the 1920s had yet to happen, the bans and proscriptions had yet to be imposed, while the communists actually amounted to something in the context of an international movement.

His notion of class is just self-serving. Yes, the fact that 60% of the Labour membership had a higher educational qualification in 1987, as opposed to 11% of the general population, tells us something about the relatively privileged position of Labour Party members even a quarter of a century ago. Who can imagine that an Exeter University graduate is in the same boat as the machinist, hospital cleaner or shop worker? And his claim that “the vast majority of trade union members in the country had a say in who the Labour leader was” is more idleness. The readily available figures show it was just over 40% (2.75 million ballot papers issued; there are about 6.7 million trade unionists), of whom 9% actually participated in the election (247,000); and, of that 9%, only 10% voted for Dianne Abbott. Exactly where are all those Labour-supporting “class-conscious workers”?

Finally, Turley accuses me of overwhelming “moralism”, the dismissive term for morality favoured by the reactionary petty bourgeois left. Yes, when we call the Labour Party warmongering, imperialist and racist, we are making a moral judgement - and an objective statement of fact as well. It is, as you rightly sense, a different morality to yours.

Timeless dogma
Timeless dogma

Religious right

There is much that I agree with in Mike Macnair’s ‘Disorientated establishment promotes Popemania’ (September 23) - such as his take on the argument that ethics depend on religion as their foundation stone. This is a dogma much loved by the bigoted and blinkered.

I remember arguing on the internet with an American Christian fundamentalist with this view. My response was that he should look at the evidence as to where Christian ethics have led in America’s bible belt, the deep south. Use of the death penalty against the poor and blacks, slavery and then the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and the lynch mobs, to say nothing of its support for war and its equal opposition to things like welfare and any state-provided medical provision. And also the Protestant fundamentalist president of Guatemala, Rios Montt, who presided over the slaughter of over 100,000 Amerindians in the war against communism. The proof of the pudding is in the eating and the religious pie leaves a lot to be desired! In fact, most of the barbarities in history have been sanctioned by ‘ethical’ religions or, as Dylan wrote, in every war god is on ‘our’ side.

Mike is correct, albeit for the wrong reasons, in saying that the role of anti-Semitism was far more critical to the Nazi project than romantic nationalism. A good example is the decline in fortunes of Nazi agriculture minister Richard Darre and his ‘back to the earth’ ideas, when he fell out with Hitler in 1942. Darre represented the romantic nationalism of the German peasant tilling out his land as the future of Germany, and anti-Semitism and ‘blood and earth’ racism was its ideological accompaniment. For Hitler, the achievement of Lebensraum in the east demanded a highly monopolistic capitalist economy with the industrial production of food, not a peasant food economy.

In theory, of course, the Nazi idea of the Jew as both capitalist and communist, as symbolised in the Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy, was indeed designed to have mass public appeal. But this was a failure. The role of anti-Semitism was as an integrative ideology within the Nazi party. It is not for nothing that in the years 1930-33, when the Nazi party sought to expand its vote, Hitler made virtually no speeches on the Jews and anti-Semitism. Even after 1933 very few such speeches were made, albeit for different reasons, the reaction abroad being one.

In particular, Ian Kershaw, in his books The Hitler myth and Popular opinion and dissent in the Third Reich, based on extensive research in Gestapo and Social Democratic files, is quite clear that the majority of the German civilian population, even in conservative Catholic Bavaria where the study was based, were not anti-Semitic in the Nazi sense and deplored in particular the Krysalnacht pogrom of November 1938. In his memorable phrase, “the road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference”.

The anti-Semitism of the Catholic church, its Rome ghetto and its fixing of Jews as Christ killers undoubtedly played a part in the development of Nazi ideology, but this should not be overestimated. The Nazi party took the medieval religious and social myths about the Jews and fashioned them into a modern scientific doctrine of racial anti-Semitism. If anything, the worst offenders (and also the best) among German churches were the Protestants. The Catholic Church went along, but never willingly, with Nazi anti-Semitism because of its anti-communism. This was what explained the refusal of cardinal Pacelli, who succeeded Pius XII as pope, to speak out at any stage against the extermination of the Jews. He feared undermining the war against the Soviet Union.

The role of anti-Semitism among the Nazi rank and file was, however, very important in maintaining the flame of their ‘radical anti-capitalism’. A sharp difference should be maintained between religious and racial anti-Semitism. It was because of this difference that many Christian Jews, including in Germany itself, escaped murder. The only successful protests in Germany against the deportations to the death camps were those at Rosenstrasse in Berlin by the non-Jewish wives of those the Germans had seized. All were released on Goebbel’s orders.

There are, of course, many criticisms that could be levelled at the Catholic church in the holocaust but also a number of examples of where its initiatives saved thousands of Jews. It certainly saved more than the Zionist movement, which sat back and saw the rise of the Nazis as an opportunity with which to build a Jewish racial state after the war. Many thousands of Jews survived the war because they were sheltered in Catholic monasteries and convents.

Christian anti-Semitism and Nazi anti-Semitism were two very different creatures. The former was an outcome of the distorted class struggle of the peasantry. It was not genocidal. The latter was potentially genocidal from the start. That the Catholic church was never enamoured of blood racism, despite the collaboration and cowardice of the German church, was epitomised in Pius XI’s encyclical of 1937, Mit Brennender Sorge, which, although not mentioning anti-Semitism, did condemn in clear and explicit terms the very concept of race.

Banned in Germany itself, Mit Brennender Sorge was primarily a product of the attacks on the Catholic church itself within Nazi Germany. The role of the church, its failure to speak out against anti-Semitism, the cowardice of its whole episcopate and the fact that bishop Galen could denounce in 1941 the euthanasia programme that killed thousands of mainly German children and adults, whilst saying nothing about the isolation, marking and later deportations of Germany’s Jews, speaks volumes. It was no coincidence that the death camps were located not in the old reich, but in Poland or the incorporated territories.

The holocaust and Nazi anti-Semitism cannot be laid at the door of the Catholic church, for all its faults - even if the pope displayed utter hypocrisy in the beatification of pastor Listenberg, who died after two years in a concentration camp, as he was being transported to Dachau (where over 2,500 Catholic priests were held) for having spoken out against the deportation of the Jews. Even in November 1943, 4,000 Berliners turned out for his funeral.

Religious right
Religious right