Letters

Curmudgeons

Paul Smith (Letters, January 13), in his response to Andrew Northall’s challenge to the mythology of the ‘great terror’ of the late 1930s (Letters, January 6), found it “remarkable” that any contributor to this newspaper should present the former USSR as “in some way socialist or progressive”.

This would, of course, have had to include Trotsky himself whose ‘The problems of the development of the USSR’ (1931) accepted the main lines of Stalin’s programme and defined Stalinist Russia as a proletarian state. Trotsky argued not for the destruction of the Stalinist system but for its replacement by an alternative group of leaders. In his Bulletin, Trotsky was later to write: “If the bureaucratic equilibrium in the USSR were to be upset at present, this would certainly benefit the forces of counterrevolution.”

What Northall was challenging was the prevailing mythology of those influenced by Trotskyite curmudgeoning and the self-serving blame-shifting of Khrushchev in order that we can recognise the immense amount of research that has been carried out by academic historians in the archives of the Stalin era.

Oleg Khlevniuk’s previous work with Yoram Gorlizki on the ‘cold peace’ of 1945-53 is equally commendable for its insights into the realities of the Soviet leadership.

This should be complemented by other publications by J Arch Getty and Oleg V Naumov on The road to terror and the biography of Yezhov. Sebag Montefiore may have brought the Court of the red tsar to a wider audience, but the need for a deeper political assessment of the experience of the building of socialism in the USSR requires far more than the outworn shibboleths of Paul Smith.

At a time when even the presumption of Stalin’s guilt for the assassination of Kirov has been thoroughly questioned by the research of Matthew Lenoe, we deserve much better than the repetition of disproven mythologies.

Curmudgeons
Curmudgeons

Historical documents

The Workers’ Film and Video website collates a number of good films about the key events of the last two centuries. Topics so far include the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, May 1968 in France, 1968 in the United States and the key strikes of 1930s America.

My intention is to build up a collection of good films about all the key events since the French Revolution to the present available in the one place. Hopefully, the films will stimulate discussion and debate. Any suggestions for additional films or topics will be welcomed.

Historical documents
Historical documents

Scottish lessons

The Republican Communist Network welcomes the vindication of those Scottish Socialist Party comrades who refused to go along with Tommy Sheridan’s attempt to use his public and celebrity position to extract money for personal gain. Whilst fully recognising the political damage and personal hurt to SSP members resulting from this debacle, the RCN opposes the jailing of our former SSP comrade, Tommy Sheridan, and looks forward to the day when such issues will be dealt with within the organisations of our class, not those of the bourgeoisie. Lessons, however, must be learnt.

The rise of the SSP to a position of influence and respect within the working class of Scotland owes a great deal to the hard work and dedication of many comrades. No-one can underplay the contribution made to this by Tommy Sheridan. He became the public face of the socialist movement in Scotland and inspired many people to become involved in class-based activity. However, Tommy is a human being and is flawed like the rest of us. He grew to believe his own rhetoric; he courted the press on personal and family matters and set himself up to be the epitome of the clean-cut family man. He grew to believe that he was the SSP.

As we said at the time of the split within the SSP, the decision of Tommy Sheridan to pursue his court case against the unanimous advice of the SSP national executive represented a rejection of inner-party democracy and the accountability of party officials to the membership - an anti-party action, which has had dire consequences for the SSP. It was a gross political mistake.

The subsequent decision to form a new organisation, Solidarity, on little political basis other than personal support for Tommy Sheridan, represented a continuation of this anti-party action and heralded one of the most serious mistakes made by socialists in post-war Scottish politics. It placed personality and individual egos above principled politics. It weakened the working class in the face of the current ruling class offensive.

The decision of the Socialist Workers Party and Committee for a Workers’ International to back this split further demonstrated their own sectarian agendas. These organisations’ lack of commitment to principled socialist unity has already been clearly shown by their recent separate ‘unity’ initiatives in England and Wales, and in Northern Ireland.

The most immediate lesson for socialists is the incompatibility of trying to build a socialist organisation through promoting a celebrity leader. The consequences of the internecine warfare for the SSP and the working class movement have been catastrophic. Our credibility as an organisation which can lead the struggles that face us and unite the left in Scotland is severely diminished. However, we have survived and in pockets around Scotland have continued to work democratically and been leading fighters in various struggles.

Although we hold Tommy Sheridan responsible for the initial damage to the SSP, we also recognise the potential for subsequent and continuing damage caused by the misguided actions of a number of our own comrades, some of these actions in direct contradiction to party policy.

The membership of the party must be trusted. Some of the fallout from the court case could have been mitigated if the minutes of the EC had been dealt with in the normal manner and been made public to the membership. Only the RCN argued for the minutes to be open.

Socialists should not go to the bourgeois courts for rulings on how we conduct ourselves. Such appeals should only be made to the democratic institutions of our class. What chance have socialists got of bringing about socialism in the face of capitalist economic and state power, if we have to run to their courts to sort out our problems in the here and now?

We accept that individuals found themselves in exceptional circumstances. However, the George McNeilage tape should have been seen to be dealt with by the party. This has been damaging for the SSP amongst the broader labour and trade union movement. The end does not justify the means.

Frances Curran’s use of the courts for a ruling being called a “scab” by The Daily Record was also a political mistake and against party policy. Party members who handed minutes to police or who gave affidavits to newspapers must now see that, however well intentioned, their actions were not helpful and once more were against party policy.

Once again, it is our contention that we must bring the continuing self-inflicted damage to an end. The mistakes we made must be acknowledged, breaches of policy on the part of office-bearers should be addressed and we must show ourselves to be a democratically accountable party.

Also, the party must now seek to carry through the decision of the post-split 2006 SSP conference, which welcomes back former members without recriminations, especially now that they can clearly see the tragic implications of the misguided actions of Sheridan, Solidarity, the SWP and CWI leaderships.

We must also try to win back the largest group of all - those former members who left the SSP and did not join Solidarity. They have raised criticisms, not only about the egotism of Sheridan and the unattractive sectarianism and splitting tactics of the SWP and CWI, but also of some of the badly misjudged actions of the SSP in attempting to deal with these problems. This group currently forms an important bridge to those wider sections of the working class whom we need to win over once more to principled, socialist unity.

Scottish lessons
Scottish lessons

Scottish disaster

John Rogan’s letter (January 13) counterposing my comments in my 2006 article on the Sheridan affair to Sarah McDonald’s January 6 article is misconceived. There is a radical difference between, on the one hand, driving someone out of the workers’ movement by political action and, on the other hand, calling on the capitalist state to vindicate the names of their opponents (inevitably by state prosecution) - or selling a video confession to the Murdoch press for a large sum of money.

The police and courts and the advertising-funded media are - when it comes to issues like the Sheridan affair - instruments of the class enemy. It is a little bit as if British soldiers in World War I, fed up with the incompetence of their generals, had demanded that the German army court-martial the British generals.

Of course, this half-belief that the capitalist state apparatus and media are somehow neutral instruments lies at the root of the whole problem of the Sheridan affair: the SSP promoted Tommy Sheridan’s family life. Then it adopted policy backing state action against prostitution.

Then the Murdoch press, inevitably, went after Sheridan on exactly this issue. Then Sheridan sought to vindicate his name in the bourgeois courts ... and so we arrive at the utter disaster that has resulted.

Scottish disaster
Scottish disaster

Anti-elitist leadership

Tony Clark writes that “people who are fighting to destroy leadership in the working class are really opposing formal leadership structures where the leadership is open and accountable, as far as this is made possible by political conditions.

"While concealing themselves behind anti-leadership rhetoric, they replace open leadership with informal, secret and unaccountable leadership cliques. Unable to escape the iron law of leadership, they opt for informal leadership, behind the backs of the working class” (Letters, January 13).

Surely, Tony is not accusing the Socialist Party of Great Britain of such practices. The SPGB expects any working class organisation to possess democratic self-organisation, involving formal rules and structures, to prevent the emergence of unaccountable, self-appointed elites, who may become the de facto leaders making decisions; and the SPGB endorses Jo Freeman’s Tyranny of structurelessness (libcom.org/library/tyranny-structurelessness-jo-freeman).

Formal rules and structures are required to prevent the emergence of unaccountable elites. We’re not talking about the sort of structures advocated and practised by Leninist organisations, which are designed to enshrine control by a self-perpetuating elite.

We are talking about structures that place decision-making power in the hands of the group as a whole, along the lines of the seven “principles of democratic structuring” listed by Freeman.

Mandating delegates, voting on resolutions and membership referendums are democratic practices for ensuring that the members of an organisation control that organisation and, as such, key procedures in any organisation genuinely seeking socialism.

Socialism can only be a fully democratic society in which everybody will have an equal say in the ways things are run. This means that it can only come about democratically, both in the sense of being the expressed will of the working class and in the sense of the working class being organised democratically without leaders - to achieve it.

The crucial part of the SPGB case is that understanding is a necessary condition for socialism and we see the SPGB’s job as to shorten the time, to speed up the process - to act as a catalyst.

The SPGB views its function to be to make socialists, to propagate socialism, and to point out to the workers that they must achieve their own emancipation. To “make socialism an immediacy” for the working class, something of importance and value to people’s lives now, rather than a singular ‘end’. We await the mass ‘socialist party’. Possibly, the SPGB might be the seed or the embryo of the future mass ‘socialist party’ but there’s no guarantee that we will be (more likely just a contributing element, in my humble opinion). But who cares, as long as such a party does eventually emerge?

At some stage, for whatever reason, socialist consciousness will reach a ‘critical mass’, at which point it will just snowball and carry people along with it. It may even come about without people actually giving it the label of socialism. At the later stage, when more and more people are coming to want socialism, a mass socialist movement will emerge to dwarf all the small groups and grouplets that exist today.

When the idea of socialism catches on, we’ll then have our united movement. With the spread of socialist ideas, all organisations will change and take on a participatory-democratic and socialist character, so that the majority organisation for socialism will not be just political and economic, but will also embrace all aspects of social life, as well as inter-personal relationships. We’re talking about a radical social revolution.

We actually have a knowledge test for membership.

The SPGB will not allow a person to join until the applicant has convinced the party that s/he understands and accepts the party case for socialism. This does not mean that we have set ourselves up as an intellectual elite into which only those well versed in Marxist scholarship may enter. The SPGB has good reason to ensure that only conscious socialists enter its ranks, for, once admitted, all members are equal and it would clearly not be in the interest of the party to offer equality of power to those who are not able to demonstrate equality of basic socialist understanding. Once a member, s/he have the same rights as the oldest member to sit on any committee, vote, speak and have access to all information. Thanks to the test, all members are conscious socialists and there is genuine internal democracy. And we are fiercely proud of that.

Consider what happens when people join other groups which don’t have such a test. The new applicant has to be approved as being ‘an okay comrade’. The individual is therefore judged by the group according to a range of what might be called ‘credential indicators’.

Hard work (more often than not, paper selling) and obedience and compliance by new members are the main criteria of trustworthiness in the organisation. In these hierarchical, ‘top-down’ groups the leaders strive at all costs to remain as the leadership, and reward only those with proven commitment to their ‘party line’ with preferential treatment, more responsibility and more say.

New members who present the wrong indicators remain peripheral to the party structure, finding themselves unable to influence decision-making, eventually resigning, often embittered by all the hard work they had put in and the hollowness of the claims of equality and democracy. (Does that sound familiar?)

The longevity of the SPGB as a political organisation based on agreed goals, methods and organisational principles and which has produced without interruption a monthly magazine for over a hundred years, through two world wars, is an achievement that most socialist organisations can only aspire towards.

Tony Clark should be envious rather than dismissive. Meantime, the best thing we in the SPGB can do is carry on campaigning for a world based on the common ownership and democratic control of the Earth’s resources in the interests of all.

We in the SPGB will continue to propose that this be established by democratic, majority political action. Other groups will no doubt continue to propose their own way to get there. And, in the end, we’ll see which proposal the majority working class takes up.

Anti-elitist leadership
Anti-elitist leadership