Letters

Self-serving

Bob Clough (Letters, October 21) says: “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?” (Why an Exeter graduate in particular?)

Perhaps Bob would care to tell us what percentage of his Revolutionary Communist Group have a higher education qualification? This would go some way to reassure the cynics amongst us that the RCG’s misuse of Lenin’s ‘labour aristocracy’ theory to apply to almost everybody but themselves is not a piece of self-serving hypocrisy.

Self-serving
Self-serving

Inherent?

The question of the correct attitude to the Labour Party is the most important one for communists in Britain today. While I can agree with the idea that the party, through its leadership, is pro-imperialist, the view that it is ‘inherently’ so, as argued by comrade Ted Talbot, is highly debatable (Letters, October 14). I think that Comrade Talbot, an opponent of the RCG on other issues, is here uncritically upholding their sectarian communist position.

The view that Labour is inherently pro-imperialist is an ultra-left position held by those who incorrectly reject Lenin’s position that it is a bourgeois workers’ party. The sectarian communists fail to understand the contradictory nature of the Labour Party, or the more impatient of them have decided that the contradictory nature has been resolved in favour of a pure bourgeois party. This same type of logic led Trotskyists to argue in the 1930s that the contradictory nature of the Soviet bureaucracy had been resolved in favour of counterrevolution and so the bureaucracy had to be overthrown.

The truth is that, while at present the capitalist roaders in the Labour Party rule the roost, the party still remains a contradiction which has not been resolved in favour of capitalism, although the domination of the rightwing side of this contradiction certainly can give and has given this impression. However, we cannot base ourselves on an impression. We must base ourselves on the contradiction, and try to grasp how this contradiction will develop during capitalism’s irreversible decline.

Serious Communists have to remain flexible in relation to the Labour Party and should not hesitate, if need be, to work within it to strengthen those elements who still believe in socialism, or have socialist tendencies, especially as we face the long-term decline of capitalism. It is these developments which will resolve the nature of the Labour Party, not the abstract dogma of the RCG.

Inherent?
Inherent?

Red Ted RIP

Edward Rowlands, father of Vivienne Carr and grandfather of Tonya Taylor, died on September 27 at 93 years of age. He was proud to be known as ‘Red Ted’ to many in his local community - a name given because of a lifetime’s commitment to changing the power structure of this country.

He worked as shop steward and union representative all his working life and was a committed member of the Communist Party, campaigning in local and national elections to raise the profile of the cause. Through his long life, his passion for the improvement in the life of the working class never diminished.

His family are very proud to have known him, privileged to have shared their lives with him and will miss him very much. His funeral was held at Durham crematorium on October 13.

Red Ted RIP
Red Ted RIP

Left options

As a regular reader of the Weekly Worker, I agree with comrade David Bates that recent exchanges between members of the Socialist Workers Party, the CPGB’s Provisional Central Committee and Communist Students are welcome (Letters, October 21).

Comrade Bates writes that he has in the past “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.” Surely, he cannot be referring to those I am thinking of?

All that aside though, what I am most interested in, after reading a recent CPGB leaflet titled ‘Left unity needed in anti-cuts fightback!’, is what members of the CPGB believe constitutes a front group?

Let’s hope that such debate continues not just over computer screens, but on the ground, where together members of the SWP, CPGB, CS and even somebody like myself - a socialist still considering my options - can get stuff done.

Left options
Left options

Growth ideology

The left’s response to the Cameron/Osborne comprehensive spending review annoys me. Their alternative seems to be either taxing the rich to offset the deficit, so we can carry on as before, or ‘revolution now!’

Both of these arguments are wrong in the current period because working class struggle is all but dead and most of the remaining left are just zombies who should fade away. The ‘rich’ would never go for the first alternative, so, in the absence of a demanding and rebellious public, it can’t happen, and the second is simply delusional. Instead, we need a rethink and an understanding of how much has changed.

Firstly, although the Tories are certainly going to make life tougher for many, the past 13 years of New Labour are not worth defending. Cuts to the bloated bureaucratic public sector and getting people off incapacity benefit would be admirable ideals if there was an alternative in place for decent jobs that those affected could take up. The problem with incapacity benefit, initiated by Thatcher and expanded exponentially over the New Labour years, was that it was an attempt by the state to get a large section of the working class to see themselves as forever ill and thus incapable of exercising freedom. This was a smokescreen designed to cover up the failures of the market to adapt production to people’s health needs.

For example, in our hi-tech age, why couldn’t all the agoraphobics on this benefit be given decent work from home? And, ultimately, it created a self-fulfilling circle, as those on the benefit became depressed. Meanwhile, the civil service, which expanded by one million workers under New Labour, was complicit in obscene injustices, such as deporting immigrants and taking away people’s freedoms in over 3,000 pieces of legislation. It’s not worth defending either of these anti-human things and we might give whoever takes them away a pat on the back.

However, I won’t be giving one to Osborne or Cameron. The cuts are a serious problem because there is nothing better being put in its place - ie, plans for a massive expansion of wealth and creation of new jobs. The state is barely investing in job creation, except for doing up the odd tube station and sorting out the Olympics. And, as for the private sector, capital is still sulking through fear of making a loss or doing something ungreen. So the swelling unemployed haven’t got much to look forward to.

The second thing that annoys me about the left’s criticisms is that they portray Cameron as just a new Thatcher and the ideology as identical. This is lazy. In truth, Cameron has very little ideology to speak of. He’s merely fumbling about in the dark. The cuts are not part of a thought-through vision for energising British society. They are cautious, half-baked attempts to recharge the life support system (bailouts) for the sluggish economy. By contrast, Thatcher’s ideology was to unleash a confident individual entrepreneur through undermining the old collectives that once existed. Of course, confident individual entrepreneurs did not emerge - only a fragmented class that felt despondent and defeated. But at least she wanted people to be wealthy. Now no party promises prosperity.

The alternative that’s needed to get us out of our current quagmire is a struggle of ideas against all the calls for austerity, be they Tory or green, and one that champions the concept of prosperity for all and the benefits this brings. Once society has a new ideology that says growth is a good thing, capitalism will be shown up to all as a system that only feebly meets people’s needs. Then people will be able to create an alternative that is actually positive.

Growth ideology
Growth ideology

No alternative

Around 30 people braved the paranoid security arrangements at Portcullis House to attend the Labour Representation Committee’s rally in the aftermath of George Osborne’s spending review.

Much of the meeting was taken up by a whole series of more or less identical speeches from union tops, including Jeremy Dear of the NUJ, Bob Crow of the RMT and Steve Gillen of the POA. Interestingly, many of these trade unionists spoke of the need to articulate an alternative vision of society - in the details, such ‘alternative visions’ turned out to be on the model of post-war social democracy, of course.

It was more than we got from the revolutionary left’s representatives, though. The chair, John McDonnell, invited a comrade each from Right to Work and the Coalition of Resistance to Cuts and Privatisation.

Speaking for RTW, Socialist Workers Party central committee member Chris Bambery made a number of points which, in the light of his organisation’s history, were laughably mendacious in character. It was time for left groups to give up on self-appointed leaderships, we were told, without any apparent trace of irony (not a faculty for which comrade Bambery is famed, of course).

The Coalition of Resistance sent the young James Meadway - like many of its key members also a member of the Reesite SWP split, Counterfire. As a professional economist, he had to sit through George Osborne’s speech - which was full of lies. The broadest possible unity had to be achieved against the cuts - not just unions and left groups, but also NGOs like War on Want. He did not attempt to polemicise against Bambery (although he concurred with the Janus-faced comment about self-appointed leaderships). He did, however, render abundantly clear the political character of Counterfire - that is, a third-rate parody of 1980s Eurocommunism.

Neither, as noted, made any mention of fighting for an alternative society. Although perhaps that would have been more likely to pass from either’s lips than a serious call for non-sectarian unity.

No alternative
No alternative

Abbott bad

When I first came across the Weekly Worker, I was surprised at its fascination with the SWP, yet impressed by what I saw as the paper’s attempts to break those in the SWP who were truly interested in democratic socialism from its worthless politics. Behind the weekly articles that discussed the internal politics of the SWP, there seemed to be a tacit trust that the SWP’s new recruits and old cynics, groups uncorrupted by the auras of Smith, Rees, German and Callinicos, might be won over to the cause of building a real Communist Party.

Then, the SWP disappeared and there was the Campaign for a Marxist Party. I joined. I hoped the CPGB (PCC) might be a pole of realignment for the communist movement. Alas, I was wrong. The first meeting I attended had CPGB (PCC) members sitting as a bloc at the right-hand side of the meeting and CPGB (PCC) members argued as one voice. Many at the meeting - and, alas, I have had many years experience as a fixer in the CPGB so I knew what was going on - many of us had no doubt that this was an attempted takeover of the campaign, not an attempt to build a genuine meeting of minds and a new Marxist movement (the kind of thing Marx called ‘the party’).

And now the CPGB (PCC) is interested in the Labour Party, at a time when the Labour Party ‘Marxist’ left no longer exists, and at a time when the ‘left’ candidate for the leadership was Abbott. Lenin broke with Kautsky, but the CPGB called for a vote for Abbott.

So it did not surprise me when the Weekly Worker reran Lenin’s critique of leftwing communism: ie, the people who refused to subject themselves to the Comintern’s demand that they abandon the struggle for worldwide communism in order to defend Russia alone.

If you are going to support Abbott, you really have to put the boot into real communists.

How could you defend Russia alone? Wasn’t that defending ‘socialism’ in one country? Of course it was, as Bordiga pointed out in 1925, a capitalist Russia, a Russia with state-owned companies replacing privately owned companies, a labour market, wages, money, no popular democracy. Lenin threatened Kollontai with a gun in 1921 in case she spoke against this ‘new turn’.

Communism requires a full democracy, not threats with a gun. Else there is no social ownership or social control of the means of production, neither is there the unity between the individual and society that is the point of communism: “The free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”. Notice how these ideas are ordered in this signal communist slogan.

The vote in the Reichstag for war credits in August 1914 was nothing as compared to the Labour Party’s invasion of Iraq. How could Abbott stay in that pro-capitalist, warmongering, imperialist party? Quite easily, I think.

The Weekly Worker in October appears to mock Sylvia Pankhurst for being a communist. We don’t want communists: vote Abbott! Yet where are we? The world economic system, the capitalist system, is now vigorously pitching the British working class against the working class of the whole world in terms of the value of their labour. There is no capitalism in one country, as the Labour Party falsely holds out.

Paul Mattick once wrote: “Reformism presupposes a reformable capitalism. So long as capitalism has this character, the revolutionary nature of the working class exists only in latent form ... Some day, however, the continued existence of capitalism will no longer be able to rely on a ‘reformism in reverse’; it will see itself forced to recreate exactly those conditions which led to the development of class-consciousness and the promise of a proletarian revolution. When this day arrives, the new capitalism will resemble the old, and will again find itself, in different conditions, facing the old class struggle.”

That is where we are today. The working class needs to be told, or reminded, that the economic storm we face is not a storm of nature, but a consequence of the system in which the capitalist class rule. Diane Abbott will not do that. Neither, I think, will the CPGB (PCC).

Abbott bad
Abbott bad

Grandiose

In ‘Two open letters’ (October 21), it’s correctly written that, in 1920, the Workers’ Socialist Federation of Sylvia Pankhurst (who was later to be the world’s first rasta) “mischievously misnamed [itself the] Communist Party (British Section of the Third International). This was, in fact, neither a Communist Party nor the British section of the Third International.”

As we all know, the real CPGB only lasted between 1920 and 1991 (and was not communist for the large majority of its existence). I’m sure that no-one nowadays would be pretentious and grandiose enough to call themselves the ‘Communist Party of Great Britain’ when we have no more than an assortment of left groups, would they?

Grandiose
Grandiose

Petty bourgeois

Robert Clough’s correspondence gets more and more extraordinary as the weeks go by - and less coherent (Letters, October 21).

It is, at least, admissible now to refer to bourgeois sources - just not to reproduce their “prejudices”. Perhaps he would care to enlighten me as to what “prejudices” I share with The Guardian regarding the principal point of dispute between us: Cuba. Would it be that socialism is a nice idea but does not work? That Cuba would benefit from adopting a classic capitalist economy? Indeed, that Cuba is socialist in any meaningful sense at all? I disagree on all these points. Rory Carroll and I are left with only the notion in common that Cuba is not a workers’ paradise on earth - a concurrence devoid of any political implications for all those who do not completely and cravenly identify with the Havana regime.

Also reduced to an utterly empty phrase in his lexicon is ‘petty bourgeois’ - indeed, it seems simply to apply to any trend on the left with which he and the Revolutionary Communist Group disagree. The characterisation of opponents as the agents of petty bourgeois ideology manufactures an utterly fictional ‘objective basis’ for those disagreements while explaining nothing. It is possible to argue that the general conditions for the emergence of bourgeois ideology in the workers’ movement are secured by buying off elements of our class in some way - it is quite another thing to argue that a relatively privileged individual’s deviation can be convincingly explained on its own terms on that basis.

After all, to follow his logic to the end, we can forget about Marx, Engels and Lenin altogether - these were not horny-handed sons of toil. Engels even owned factories! If they were somehow able to escape the dull compulsion of objective conditions which by the same token rules out my ideas in advance, then Clough is nothing but an idealist. If not, then the political dynamics of the ‘petty bourgeoisie’ are a lot more fluid than the utterly mechanistic picture painted by Clough allows, and he will just have to suck it up and resort to actual arguments.

For a glimpse of where this all leads, I commend Ted Talbot’s letter from the previous week (October 14) - he disagrees with Clough on the canon of revolutionary states, and thereby accuses the accuser of petty bourgeois deviation! Though I disagree with Talbot quite as profoundly as Clough, I must concur with his observation that the RCG seems to have an orientation to the students it so heartily despises - for such a moralist as Clough, that is a suspiciously perfect bit of slave morality. In any case, this form of argument is evidently absurd and utterly childish.

As an aside, our comrade wonders: “Who can imagine that an Exeter University graduate is in the same boat as the machinist, hospital cleaner or shop worker?” Alas, the chance would be a fine thing. He had better get working on imagining Exeter graduates in the dole queue. It is not just me - graduate unemployment is very much on the rise (pushing 20% for men last year), and with enormous job cuts in the public sector on the way, he should expect this figure to skyrocket. Indeed, with my degree, the last statistics suggest I can expect to earn over my entire working life a whopping £40,000 on top of what I would have done with a clutch of A-levels - not exactly going to propel me into the lap of luxury, for which one needs more than a red-brick arts degree and a pretty face. But why let facts get in the way of dogmatic dismissals?

To move onto a point (almost) of substance - the back-up for all this is purportedly Lenin, who argued that imperialism, through the superexploitation of workers in the colonial world, could afford to buy off layers of workers (a labour aristocracy), which would then form the objective basis for reformism and opportunism. This is slightly more subtle than Clough’s mechanical identification of university education with false consciousness, but still weak on explanatory power. On the one side, throughout the semi-colonial world, there are substantial reformist parties and parties of the labour bureaucracy (the Castro regime included). On the other, the most ‘privileged’ layers of workers have very often been the backbone of working class activity in the imperialist centres (eg, the miners in Britain, particularly in the first half of the 20th century); conversely, the most pauperised, semi-lumpen elements of the proletariat are often the most racist and pro-imperialist sections of our class.

I happen to concur with my comrade, Mike Macnair, that the general practice of jostling for position in the world order - in which semi-colonies can engage quite as readily as America or Britain, albeit with less overall success - is a more satisfying explanation in accordance with the empirical facts before us. We must likewise accept that the ‘crumbs from the imperialist table’ fall more widely in a given country than Lenin’s theory allows, and do not straightforwardly lead to the formation of coherent ‘petty-bourgeoisified’ layers. Unfortunately, it scuttles the ‘objective basis’ for bigging up colonial nationalists in the RCG manner (and for a priori dismissing opposing views). Perhaps the facts are petty bourgeois, as well.

Petty bourgeois
Petty bourgeois

USPD and KPD

Jacob Richter’s letter raises some interesting questions about the German left during the formation of Comintern (October 21). A period rich in history, from which we can draw a lot of positive lessons today. However, I think comrade Richter is drawing the wrong ones.

Despite sharing his frustration with the leftism that was rife in the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) at its formation, I think he is wrong to say “it would have been better” if the formation of the KPD had not occurred. Actually, it should have happened a lot earlier. Unlike in Russia, when revolutionary crisis broke, there was no distinct, well known, mass, revolutionary organisation with a programme to lead the majority to power.

The final straw for those like Rosa Luxemburg, in splitting from Independent Social Democracy (USPD) to form the KPD, was the fact that USPD leaders Willhelm Dittmann, Hugo Haase and Emil Barth had decided to become the new government’s ‘people’s commissars’ alongside the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). Although the USPD leaders soon stood down from the coalition with the SPD, they had provided ‘left’ cover for the capitalist state it created and the brutal repression of the German working class which ensued.

Forged late, in the heat of enormous repression and semi-legality/illegality, the new KPD obviously had problems. Its best leaders were murdered within weeks. Paul Levi only survived because he was in prison. In such conditions of counterrevolution painted in ‘socialist’ colours, rank-and-file KPD members drew understandable, yet potentially disastrous, conclusions: reject working alongside the SPD supporters of the butcher Gustav Noske or USPD socialists in the unions, boycott the national assembly and so on. But “German Spartacism”, as comrade Richter puts it, was not one homogeneous bloc and, like the USPD itself, was to be radically transformed by the turbulent events of 1919-20.

Partly due to Lenin’s polemical intervention and the skilful leadership of Paul Levi, the KPD came round to the view that its future as a party depended on the rank and file of the USPD. Many of those who rejected this went over to the syndicalist dead end that was the Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD).

Fortunately, more and more German workers were looking to Russia and the example of the Bolsheviks as their model. And these were the people that the KPD, alongside the newly formed Comintern, were looking to win: the majority of those workers in the USPD committed to the dictatorship of the proletariat and unity with their brothers and sisters in Comintern. After the split at the Halle congress in October 1920, hundreds of thousands of class-conscious workers were united behind the banner of an openly communist organisation with an openly communist programme.

Comrade Richter is wrong to suggest that there was a tenable ‘third way’ between Comintern and the Second International in the form of the International Working Union of Socialist Parties. Despite making much noise about the “national reform socialists” of the SPD, within just two years those from the USPD ‘centre’ tendency around Dittmann, Arthur Crispien et al were back in the governing SPD, alongside those, like the new German finance minister, Rudolph Hilferding, with whom they had allied against the so-called “Moscow dictatorship” during the Halle congress. This was the nature of the split, and why things ended up the way they did.

USPD and KPD
USPD and KPD