Letters

Confused again

I note from previous issues of the paper that we have been very generous to comrade P Conlon (a fact that has not stopped him complaining about our “censorship”, however). His latest offering (Weekly Worker 83) should have been spiked. He accuses us of creating confusion “once again” in our reporting of South Africa.

He first quotes our article to the effect that communists in that country must now “organise against the bourgeois state, whether it is fronted by black or white faces ...” He then quotes from an interview we conducted with Harry Gwala from the South African Communist Party to the effect that “I don’t think we have reached the point of breaking with the government yet.” Comrade Conlon finds this all very confusing - “What is the policy of the CPGB on these contradictory positions?” he asks us.

It hardly seems credible that someone can be that stupid. However, for comrade Conlon’s benefit: the first is a report, written by a communist journalist, and broadly within what the CPGB has consistently said about the struggle in South Africa for a number of years, both in our paper and elsewhere; the second is an interview with a member of the SACP who gives his opinion.

Confusing? No I didn’t think so. Seems like it’s just you then, comrade Conlon...

Mark Fischer
London

More confused

P Conlon’s letter confused me. He seems to agree with the Party’s line on South Africa, as with most important issues. Yet he continues to criticise from a distance.

But when it comes to really offering uncritical support to individuals with confused and - yes - ‘Stalinist’ viewpoints, Conlon’s Independent Communists cannot be beaten. His tiny group is entirely constituted of individuals united only in their determination to be independent of the Communist Party, and - as he well knows - often independent of rational thought as well. These people confuse the workers and sometimes talk such rubbish as to bring Communist politics into disrepute.

It is impossible to build a revolutionary movement from the bottom up, especially from such disparate elements. At the end of the day Paul is just like Harry Gwala: he is taking a political line that deprives the working class of his talents.

Phil Kent
Rochester

Hobsbawm revisited

Readers might be interested to know that Eric Hobsbawm, ‘official communist’-cum-Kinnockite-cum gloomy guru, appeared on Radio Four’s ‘Desert Island Discs’ this Sunday. According to Hobsbawm there are “two types” of communists: “sectarian” communists and “responsible” communists (Sue Lawley agreed). Naturally, our Eric likes to believe that he has always fallen into the latter category of “responsible” communist.

Guess what? “Sectarian” communists are those nasty ‘extremists’ who form separate communist parties and organisations and actively oppose social democracy Labourism. “Responsible” communists, on the other hand, dedicate themselves to the noble task of getting social democratic Labourite governments elected.

Still, what can you expect from a man who wrote in his latest book that “it was in 1920 that the Bolsheviks committed themselves to what in retrospect seems a major error, the permanent division of the international labour movement”?

Eric seems to go even further than the New Communist Party types when he refers to “the so-called First International” (my emphasis).

I don’t know about anybody else, but I can’t wait to read Eric’s next book - The Age of Sectarianism: Karl Marx, Lenin and the Communist International. Pre-order your copy now.

Eddie Ford
South London