Letters

Double dealing

Pakistan can be called a Muslim state, where all institutions are determined by religion. Everything - their parliament, their legal organisations, society. Apart from some Marxist-Leninist Maoist parties, and pure socialist parties which don’t have much influence over the Pakistani common people, all the others are driven by Muslim religious influence. They may say they are the common people’s friend - they may even say they are socialist.

Naturally such a religious framework allows space within the state for staunch Muslim fundamentalist organisations like al Qa’eda. The religious state and the fundamentalist organisations feed off each other. But all this is a barrier to US imperialism. It prevents the development of a healthy capitalist market and control over Pakistani politics. These barriers also obstruct the US in its attempts to get its bloody hands on China.

That is why US imperialism wants to destroy these fundamentalist organisations, labelling them terrorists. A non-Muslim Pakistan would result in a completely American-dominated Pakistan - exactly what we saw in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places. But we must recall also that there was a time when the US funded these fundamentalist organisations to control other countries in the region. Double dealing!

Because the US doubted Pakistan’s intention to counter the fundamentalists it ignored the Pakistani army and killed bin Laden. Pakistan is no more a sovereign state.

Double dealing
Double dealing

Not right

I am writing with regard to an article by Dave Vincent on the PCS union, ‘Can the left win over the members?’ (May 5). Contrary to Dave’s classification of myself as being on the right, I am a libertarian socialist (see my NEC election statement in 2010. where I quoted Rosa Luxembourg.)

Dave is misinformed about my influence in my branch. However, the Burma and the Cuba motions he was referring to were indeed drafted by myself. There is nothing mischievous about the motion to affiliate to the Burma Campaign UK. I have supported human rights issues and Amnesty International for over three decades and I am scheduled to go as part of an Amnesty International North East delegation to the European parliament in October to lobby on issues of human rights. The motion makes particular reference to the fact that Burma is a slave labour state. Is that not an issue for trade unionists? Dave, please do not let prejudice get in the way of solidarity.

If you go to www.4themembers.org.uk/manifesto.html, you will find 4themembers unequivocally in support of human rights. I doubt you could say the same about some of our opponents.

The Cuba motion referring to the complete uselessness of the official Cuban labour organisation, falsely classified by misinformed people as a trade union, should deserve the support of Dave and all other true trade unionists. Real trade unionists, supported by the International Trade Union Conference, have often had to spend time in Cuban prisons.

I am an internationalist. Unlike those on the pseudo-left who claim to be internationalists, I believe that it is fundamentally wrong for trade unions to affiliate to organisations that are in ‘solidarity’ with police-state governments, rather than people or workers. As a trade unionist I have always felt offended by the affiliations of both the TUC and major TUC unions to an organisation, the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, that has no problem with people being arrested for daring to set up any political party not permitted in a one-party state.

Ever since my first national conference, I have also been offended by the fact that PCS allowed the Cuba Solidarity Campaign to run the social on the Thursday night. The free rum is not free. It comes from the Cuban embassy. A bottle of Havana Club seven years old sold in Britain costs more than a Cuban worker earns in a month. Sold in Cuba, it costs almost a monthly salary.

I also notice an interview published in the Weekly Worker with Circles Robinson, the editor of www.havantimes.org (‘More glasnost, less perestroika’, January 13). I have occasionally commented on their website. It is the best source of information on Cuba with a variety of opinions.

Going back to 4themembers, we are a group of trade unionists with very individual views, who share one goal: not to be bulldozed by a minority claiming to have the right to represent the majority. Clearly. there are many in 4themembers who do not see themselves as socialists. I much prefer their company to those police-state socialist friends of Fidel Castro, a guy who cannot seem to see the irony when he claims that the North Korean monarchy is a socialist country.

Not right
Not right

Stalin problem?

I am a 40-year-old Russian scientist working at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics. My father is a physicist and has been a Communist Party member all of his life.

I wonder very much what is wrong with Stalin? I can understand some old people in Russia because they remember Stalin’s terror. I can understand our local Russian anti-communists, many of whom are intellectuals, because of their faith. I can understand the modern Russian authorities, because they are criminals and capitalist thieves. But what is the buzz with Stalin to foreign communists? I read your paper and I hardly understand what all this is about.

Stalin was the Soviet leader who managed the USSR in the 1930s and provided something like six-fold growth in the Soviet economy in the first three five-year plans before World War II. Stalin definitely oppressed opposition and was responsible for about 700,000 to 800,000 death sentences.

Please note that I speak in exact terms, because I am highly interested in Soviet history, not other ciphers which are not confirmed. We have done a great deal of work here in Russia to get objective and exact knowledge of the scale of Stalin’s terror. Yes, it was a bloody terror, but, as we understand now, most of that was not a direct aim of Stalin’s. It was a complex civil war, not just one man’s orders.

My question is, how can one remove this terror from its historical context? The historical context is that Russia could have been wiped off the world map by Hitler or someone else. World War II itself was produced not by German Nazis alone, but by western capitalism as a system. Stalin’s achievement was Russia surviving this west-made war. Moreover, it was Stalin’s USSR which saved the world from fascism. The Soviet army defeated 75% of all German troops in World War II.

I try to understand what western people can accuse Stalin of. Say the USSR attacked Finland in 1939 and so all people in the west, regardless of their political outlook. Yes, a bad war. But from a Russian perspective the USSR has to attack Finland to get territory to defend Leningrad in a future war. This is not specifically Stalin’s war - it was a war of generic Russia. So maybe it is not Stalin, but Russia itself which is criminal for the west? But rational people should estimate all sides, not just one. Russia defeated Hitler and saved the whole world. If Hitler’s plan to occupy Switzerland did exist, and he was ready to launch it, it was the battle of Stalingrad which stopped it.

As for Katyn, I know no genuine facts which lead us to accuse the USSR instead of Hitler. And we lost 600,000 soldiers in Poland in order to free it. What about overall balance?

It is alleged that Stalin killed Trotsky. Yes, in 1940, not earlier. The Spanish civil war showed that Trotskyists could act in collaboration with German Nazis. Trotsky, due to his large influence in the domain of the western left, was a huge threat to the USSR.

It is said that we had no democracy in Stalin’s USSR. How can a democratic country get ready for such a war - the most terrible war any country has ever had to face in history? We have never had democracy in Russia.

So could you explain me what is so very wrong with Stalin?

Stalin problem?
Stalin problem?

Conspiracy

Harley Filben’s article makes some very good points, including, very importantly, that the US originally supported jihadist forces in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia (‘Bloody end of US-created monster’, May 5).

The web page cryptome.org/shayler-gaddafi.htm contains an official document proving that MI6 funded associates of Osama bin Laden to assassinate colonel Gaddafi, as exposed by MI5 whistleblower David Shayler (leading to him twice going to jail when he came back to Britain, after going on the run with fellow ex-MI5 officer Annie Machon). The plot failed and innocent bystanders died.

What I take exception to in Harley’s article, however, is his dismissal of 9/11 conspiracy theories. He correctly points out that some rightwingers have ridiculously tried to blame Jews, and George W Bush clearly wasn’t clever enough to be responsible either. However, the US secret service, based in the third tower that collapsed despite not being hit by a plane, was almost certainly responsible for planning the atrocity. The BBC2 Conspiracy files programme on the third tower can be viewed on YouTube. Only four steel-reinforced towers in history have collapsed (supposedly) due to fire - the three World Trade Center towers on 9/11 each in about 20 seconds and a later Madrid fire in about 20 hours (and still not collapsing completely). The Conspiracy files programme points out the most likely cause - explosions from below using nano-thermite.

A lot of evidence is also supplied in the ‘Loose change’ videos, also viewable at YouTube, including clear photographic evidence of an explosion in a window below where the tower was collapsing.

The danger when discussing 9/11 conspiracy theories is that the main protagonists of such theories in the USA are rightwing - so-called ‘libertarians’ - due to the weakness of the left in that country. But that should not stop us from examining and revealing the truth.

The point of 9/11, as expressed in a Project for a New American Century document proclaiming the need for “a new Pearl Harbour”, was dividing Muslims from Christians, Jews and Hindus in particular, and non-believers. There is a need for religious and non-religious people of conscience to unite together against our common enemies - world imperialism and its ally, Islamic ‘extremism’.

Conspiracy
Conspiracy

Both wrong

The exchange between James Turley and Arthur Bough on Libya (‘No united front with Gaddafi’, April 7; Letters April 14, 21 and 28) contains errors on both sides regarding the Comintern’s and Trotsky’s position.

James’s error is the smaller. He identifies the anti-imperialist united front (in the sense of advocacy of the victory of nationalists against imperialism) as a line of Trotskyism derived from Trotsky’s writings in the 1930s. It is, in fact, a line of the early Comintern and is shared by Maoists and other anti-revisionists and episodically by ‘official’ communists.

Arthur denies that Trotsky or the early Comintern held the position of the ‘anti-imperialist united front’ with nationalists. The record is unequivocally against him (Fourth Congress Theses on the eastern question, point 6: ‘The anti-imperialist united front’).

It is perfectly clear that the line defended by the Comintern was more than Arthur’s attempt to explicate it as a matter of either exposure or tactical agreements in action.

Second Congress 21 conditions, point 8: “Any party wishing to join the Third International ... must support - in deed, not merely in word - every colonial liberation movement” (www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/2nd-congress/ch07.htm#v1-p303); and Theses on the national and colonial question, point 11a): “All communist parties must support the revolutionary liberation movements in these countries by their deeds. The form the support should take must be discussed with the communist party of the country in question, should such a party exist. This obligation to offer active assistance affects in the first place the workers of those countries on which the backward countries are in a position of colonial or financial dependence” (www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/2nd-congress/ch05.htm#v1-p177; emphasis added).

Fourth Congress Theses on the eastern question, point 2: “The Communist International, though well aware that in different historical circumstances fighters for national political independence can be very different kinds of people, gives its support to any national revolutionary movement against imperialism”.

On Trotsky’s later writing I have assembled in Revolutionary strategy (London 2008, pp78-84) more references than either James or Arthur uses on the issue of supporting colonies and semi-colonies in wars. Arthur’s account muddles two different issues: Trotsky’s line in the 1920s (urban CP and the KMT’s struggle with warlords) and his line in the 1930s (small Trotskyist groups, the CP having withdrawn into the countryside, and Japanese invasion).

Add the Transitional programme (1938), ‘The struggle against imperialism and war’ section: “Some of the colonial or semi-colonial countries will undoubtedly attempt to utilise the war in order to ease off the yoke of slavery. Their war will be not imperialist, but liberating. It will be the duty of the international proletariat to aid the oppressed countries in their war against oppressors” (emphasis added; www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/tp-text.htm#iw).

I offer a criticism of this line in the passage of Revolutionary strategy just cited and have also done so in my 2004 series on imperialism (with criticisms and a response Weekly Worker July 29-September 23 2004). What it boils down to is that the course of the 20th century provides unequivocal proof that the line of the ‘anti-imperialist united front’ and its derivatives are false: the victory of the nationalists over the imperialists produces at best Stalinism, more usually merely a new form of semi-colonial tyranny, not an advance for the working class. To defend the ‘anti-imperialist united front’ in the 21st century is like defending creationism, Ptolemaic astronomy or the theory of phlogiston.

Communists have reasons to fight against imperialism and to be defeatist in imperialist wars. These reasons do not include wishing for the victory of the nationalists (or Islamists or whatever).

Both wrong
Both wrong

Nonsense

James Turley (‘Fighting Stalinism politically’, May 5), criticises Paul B Smith for wanting to go back to Capital. Apparently, Marx studied a lot and wrote many things, but everything boils down “to a single proposition: the working class needs to organise itself collectively to politically expropriate the bourgeoisie”.

Why the disdain for studying Capital, when it is generally acknowledged among Marxists of all shades that it provides a scientific basis for understanding the capitalist mode of production and the possibility for socialism to emerge based on real material processes rather than a utopia spun from someone’s imagination?

Marx’s work forms an integral whole, a doctrine of human liberation. Comrade Turley thinks Marx had less to say about philosophy in the later years. I suggest that dialectics are demonstrated in Capital. He thinks it does not matter much whose interpretation of dialectical materialism is used, so I am tempted to ask if it would have mattered much to him if Marx had muddled up dialectics and never explained surplus value. After all, it could be said that the revolutionary potential of the working class holds good, regardless of what Marx wrote in Capital. It seems he is mainly interested in the political conclusion, not the reasoning behind it. Hence the name-dropping ramble through the groves of academe.

Turley goes on to tell us that Stalinism was not all bad and should not be rejected in toto. However, the nearest we get to hearing about the good bits is to be told that Stalinism did not succeed in killing off Marxism entirely. Could not the same be said of the Nazi movement? In fact, the Stalinist bureaucracy could not finish the job and kept printing the books, despite killing most of the actual Marxists, because it rested on the Russian Revolution and needed the legitimacy of the Bolshevik tradition. This did not prevent the bastardisation of Marxism in the shape of Soviet ideology and of the whole trajectory of Stalinist movements around the world.

He acknowledges the many crimes and betrayals committed by Stalinism. He could hardly deny them, but spreads the blame a bit by accusing Trotskyists of popular frontism and other sins. This is true only to the extent that Trotskyists (and mainly ex-Trotskyists at that) adapted to the dominance of Stalinism over the workers’ movement in the post-war period.

If the CPGB wishes to present itself as a revolutionary Marxist tendency, it should drop the nonsense about being in a line of descent from the party that died politically in the 1920s.

Nonsense
Nonsense