Letters

Zero sum gain

I can state categorically there was no SEP candidate in Scotland in the recent elections. It is a bit puzzling that such an error could arise. The BBC was unable to explain it, but removed the incorrect entry from its website. As a zero vote would have been fairly bizarre, it is a pity that the Weekly Worker did not check directly with the SEP.

However, Peter Manson was quite right to state that the SEP considered it significant that it overtook the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition campaign in Sheffield Walkley. The SEP’s position - calling for rank-and-file committees and exposing the fraud of the TUC-led campaign against spending cuts - was sharply distinguished from that of Tusc. The two positions had a public airing at a hustings meeting called by the PCS union. Candidates present were challenged to endorse a PCS five-point pledge, which hinges on supporting the PCS’s ‘There is an alternative’ campaign. Apart from the SEP candidate, the rest readily fell into line (Greens, Labour and an independent who all accept ‘some’ cuts). The SWP Tusc candidate for Burngreave endorsed it and went on to insist that unions could be pressured to lead the fight against cuts.

A fuller account was posted on the World Socialist Web Site: “The Tusc position, even when they don’t go on, like the Socialist Party, to work for a mark two Labour Party based on the unions, fully embraces the union-inspired ‘alternative’ that simply calls for taxes to be collected from businesses to avoid the need for cuts to make up the deficit due to the financial collapse. Brendan Barber and his chums at the Bank of England would have no trouble with that.”

Tusc and the entire ‘left’ fraternity that merely calls for more action on the basis of such a feeble platform are ideologically welded to the unions and will never lead the kind of struggle that the situation demands.

Zero sum gain
Zero sum gain

Internationalist

The debate over whether to back George Galloway in his failed attempt to get elected to the Scottish parliament has seen some ridiculous responses from a number of comrades. This and the open letter (‘No vote for Galloway’, May 5) has exposed the mistaken approach and narrow tactics adopted by the Provisional Central Committee during the elections.

The CPGB adopted a perspective document which called for support for anti-cuts candidates, naming all of the more high-profile left groups who stood. The Weekly Worker suggested no preferences for any other constituency or list where the left were competing against each other. It did not state that we back Galloway in the document; yet come election time Galloway was singled out for support. So why was he given special treatment?

In Glasgow the Weekly Worker picked Galloway ahead of the Scottish Socialist Party and Socialist Labour Party because the latter organisations did not meet the extra conditions which elevated Galloway above others. It argued that internationalist comrades were wrong to place extra conditions on candidates beyond opposing all cuts and proposing vaguely working class politics - even if you can consider a popular front in miniature the politics of our class. Galloway’s British unionism was argued to be better than the SSP’s call for an independent socialist republic in Scotland.

Other comrades attempted to paint the Galloway list as some sort of left unity endeavour. Ridiculous when you consider the reality of what happened. Dangerous when you acknowledge the sectarian politics Galloway pitched to during the election. The lack of numbers out campaigning for Galloway was testament to the fact that it was simply an opportunist stitch-up. There were no open meetings, no conferences and no serious debate about the politics of the list. You would find more democracy and working class participation in Scottish Labour in deciding candidates and policy. Furthermore there was no tangible organisation or strengthening of the anti-cuts movement in Glasgow. It is a very odd unity endeavour that leaves the left fractured, weak and marginalised.

Apparently the CPGB gave only critical support to Galloway. Yet the only serious critical comments in the paper against Galloway came from my previous letter (April 7) and the open letter printed on the day of the elections. Whilst the Weekly Worker has exposed Galloway’s awful politics and his links with the Iranian regime in the past, it failed to do so for this election, weakening our intervention.

The worst of the attacks on the open letter is the hysterical claim that the 30 or so comrades who signed it are promoting a social-imperialist line. The leading comrades who signed the letter have collaborated with the CPGB in attacking social-imperialism through Hands Off the People of Iran and in the pages of our paper. Yet they are shamefully smeared as social-imperialists and accused of backing Alliance for Workers’ Liberty-type political attacks on Galloway. This is a desperate and pathetic insult to internationalists who have proved in deeds and words their opposition to imperialism many times. Such attacks weaken our anti-war and solidarity work and cedes what are essential criticisms of Galloway as the sole property of the social-imperialists.

According to Jack Conrad et al Galloway is no different to the Communist Party of Britain’s John Foster or the Workers Revolutionary Party. This is a lie. Many comrades both in our organisation and outside who refuse to back Galloway went to polling stations holding their noses and voted for all sorts of backward and centrist candidates. What makes Galloway different is the role he plays in the repression machine of the Islamic Republic. We know his links with the Iran through his work on Press TV. A channel where tortured, beaten and exhausted victims are paraded and forced to make false confessions. A channel that declares the murdered comrades who lie under the stars at Khavaran and thousands of graves across Iran as terrorists, drug smugglers and rapists. A channel where Galloway attacks the masses and pledges support for their murderers when they rise up for freedom. Galloway is a conscious cog in the machine of terror directed at the Iranian people. To ignore this and focus on what happens on this little island alone is narrow opportunism and a betrayal of our internationalist duty.

It does not matter whether those that play a part in discrediting and repressing our comrades in Iran stand in Tehran Central or Glasgow, as Jack Conrad and James Turley have bizarrely claimed. The class struggle knows no borders. What happens to workers in Tehran matters for the struggles of workers in Glasgow. The open letter represented a consistent internationalist approach that puts the global struggle of our class ahead of the vanity of parasite reactionaries like Galloway.

Internationalist
Internationalist

No apologies

The CPGB has developed a pattern of denouncing the AWL over its positions, only to quietly adopt similar positions later on without any apologies or acknowledgment - eg, on the Middle East, Ireland and the Labour Party. I wonder how long it will be before the ‘social-imperialist’ slur is quietly dropped in favour of a more consistent third-camp approach?

And, as someone living in Glasgow, I’d like to know how exactly I campaigned against Galloway in the Scottish elections (‘Constitutional crisis beckons’, May 12)?

No apologies
No apologies

Pointless

I fail to see why your pages donated such space to a debate on whether the left should back George Galloway in Glasgow. especially as the left in Glasgow had the choice of three protests votes who stood no chance of being elected (the SSP and SLP being the other two).

It also had the choice of trying to boost the Greens, who had a left reformist programme and maybe a more imaginative and democratic one than the other lists. Another interesting debate would have been what the left should have done in the constituency votes, where it had to choose between the Scottish National Party and Labour.

The debates on George Galloway come across as ultimately pointless. The only observation I would make is that you shouldn’t think you can parachute into an area and have support.

Pointless
Pointless

Defeatist

I believe that Mike Macnair is wrong in his analysis of the position of the early Comintern and Trotsky in relation to the question of the ‘anti-imperialist united front’ and the tactics of communists in relation to the national and colonial question (Letters, May 12).

Besides the fact that the Comintern in its Fourth Congress theses explicitly talks about opposing pan-Islamism masquerading as anti-imperialism, Mike fails to take into account what Lenin had said in the debate around the theses, or indeed in previous discussions within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party on the question. In those earlier discussions, for instance, Lenin talks about guarding against movements that were in effect acting as agents of external powers. But, more clearly, in his contribution at the Second Congress, he says: “... as communists we will only support the bourgeois freedom movements in the colonial countries if these movements are really revolutionary and if their representatives are not opposed to us training and organising the peasantry in a revolutionary way. If that is no good, then the communists there also have a duty to fight against the reformist bourgeoisie ...” (www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/2nd-congress/ch04.htm).

Mike says that there are lots of examples in the 20th century where nationalist movements have simply turned into Stalinist regimes. That is true, but is that in itself proof that the tactic of supporting a non-imperialist state against an imperialist state in a war, where the latter is trying to subjugate the former, is falsified? No, of course not.

Simply applying the correct strategy is no guarantee of victory in anything. Given the extremely weak forces that revolutionary Marxists had at their disposal compared with the forces of reformism, Stalinism and imperialism, it would have been remarkable if simply having the correct strategy were sufficient to guarantee success. But it would be opportunistic in the extreme to conclude from that balance of class forces that we should abandon basic Marxist principles.

The main problem has been that in many of these struggles, the revolutionaries have not adopted the position of Lenin and the Comintern, as set out in the quote above, and have simply turned themselves into cheerleaders for the nationalist forces rather than setting themselves the task of building up a genuine revolutionary movement in the process of opposing imperialist aggression. Take Trotsky’s position in relation to Mexico under Cardenas. Was Trotsky right to support the Cardenas regime in opposing British imperialism and nationalising British oil interests in Mexico? I find it hard to believe any revolutionary Marxist could answer no to that question. But Trotsky did not simply become a cheerleader for Cardenas in the way some today have done in relation to Chávez. He argued against Mexican revolutionaries submerging themselves in the Institutional Revolutionary Party, and argued instead for the need to build a Mexican workers’ party.

I would suggest another concrete case where Mike might wish to consider the implications of what he is saying. That is France under German occupation. Is he saying that, if the Free French resistance movement had proposed some joint activity with the communist resistance, he would have opposed such a joint action? That seems to me to be ultra-left, third-periodist madness. Of course, in any such case, the revolutionaries have to go into such an arrangement with their eyes wide open, and believing that those with whom they are making this tactical alliance are likely to stab them in the back, but to refuse to agree to such action would undoubtedly condemn the revolutionaries in the eyes of the masses.

What Mike’s argument really comes down to is the fact that we cannot apply this strategy because we are too small. But history shows that revolutionary organisations that refuse to defend basic principles are doomed never to become larger forces. But I would ask Mike then what the conclusion of his thesis is in relation to Libya? Presumably, if he is opposed to supporting Libya, as against British, US, French imperialism, etc, then he will not be unhappy to see imperialism install its own puppet regime in Tripoli.

I contend that the revolutionary Marxist position remains to oppose imperialist aggression and intentions, to support any truly revolutionary forces in Libya, and to propose joint action with other forces against imperialism, whilst continuing to ruthlessly expose the class nature of those forces, to expose their inability to wage an effective struggle against imperialism and, where necessary, as Lenin says above, “the communists there also have a duty to fight against the reformist bourgeoisie”. For Marxists outside Libya, our duty is to support any genuine revolutionary forces - I am not at all convinced that the ‘rebel’ forces come under that heading - and to assist in whatever way we can the building of independent working class organisations.

We should attempt to assist in the building of links between workers in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt and other adjoining states. We should attempt to make contacts with genuine revolutionary socialist organisations in Libya and provide them with arms, finance and other practical support. I cannot for one moment imagine that, were I a revolutionary Marxist in Libya, adopting the defeatist position as Mike suggests, in the face of massive imperialist aggression, would be a credible position.

Defeatist
Defeatist

No mention

It’s a wee bit disappointing that Anne Mc Shane totally leaves out the results of militant nationalist and republican candidates in the local election in the six occupied counties, only mentioning the Irish Republican Socialist Party in Belfast (‘Governing parties consolidate’, May 12). She doesn’t mention the particularly strong votes of the IRSP in Strabane, Gerry Donnelly of the 32-County Sovereignty Movement in Derry or Éirígí in West Belfast and Fermanagh, where they got a councillor elected.

Are militant nationalists not worth mentioning in a communist paper? The platforms of these groups are in many points much more progressive than the petty bourgeois, anti-nationalist manifestos of tiny Trotskyite groups like the People Before Profit Alliance, the Socialist Party or the Socialist Workers Party.

No mention
No mention

Dreary

Anne Mc Shane’s article on the assembly and council elections in the Six Counties rightly notes the importance of the national question there and the failure of the SP and SWP to address it.

But, unfortunately, Anne’s report itself fails to note the vote gained by Éirígí at all, and the combined vote for the socialist republicans (Éirígí and the IRSP). In the council elections, the two socialist-republican groups gained 4,200 votes, compared with the 2,300 of the SP and SWP/PBPA. The fact that Éirígí scored over 2,000 votes in West Belfast is a significant achievement, especially on their first outing and in such a Sinn Féin stronghold.

Given the centrality of the national question, it seems odd that even when socialist-republicans perform better electorally, as on this occasion, they are largely ignored in the paper.

The one thing about the Éirígí and IRSP campaigns that I found disturbing, however, is that two groups with very similar politics stood against each other in one Belfast ward - madness! - and didn’t call for a vote for each other elsewhere.

I’m not bothered about the divisions between the opportunist groups who pursue what Connolly described as the “screamingly funny” idea that Belfast is the same as some industrial city in Britain. However, the divisions between socialist-republicans are counterproductive and do actually matter because these are the political forces which are right on the key questions of Irish politics. Moreover, both Éirígí and the IRSP are far more forthright in talking about socialism than the likes of the PBPA and the SP.

Joint action and, further down the track, unification by socialist-republicans could create a significant new and genuinely revolutionary party in Irish politics, something at least on the scale of the IRSP of Costello’s time. This is more likely to offer a fruitful way forward than the dull economism of the United Left Alliance and its dreary competing component parts.

Dreary
Dreary

Cell mate

I have just read your deep analysis of the local election results (‘Non Labour left election results’, May 12). Wow! What a massive amount of work you must have put in. Expressing your opinion on the Socialist Equality Party keeping quiet on their results in Scotland was genius, in-depth exposure reporting at its best.

The only problem is, the SEP had nothing to say on their results in Scotland because they didn’t stand a single candidate there. Hence their zero vote. About as many as you have brain cells in your head, I guess.

Cell mate
Cell mate

Platypus

On behalf of Platypus, let me express how greatly we appreciate Mike Macnair’s very thorough report on and critiques of the events at the recent Platypus convention in Chicago from April 29 to May 1, at which we were very happy and grateful to have his participation (‘No need for party?’, May 12).

However, I disagree with how Macnair characterises Peter Nettl’s argument, which I referenced, specifically to show how Luxemburg’s and Lenin’s Marxist revolutionism offered an alternative to both opportunist reformism and (anarchistic or Sorelian) actionism. I think Macnair avoids (or I didn’t present clearly enough) the issue I was raising about the inherent unavoidable authoritarianism of late 19th century mass (working class) parties that needed to be worked through by later Marxism (unlike circa 1848), and the problems of which Lenin and Luxemburg were aware, unlike the German Social Democratic Party centre (of Bebel and Kautsky) and later Stalinism (including Maoism).

Luxemburg’s pamphlets, Reform or revolution? and The mass strike, hone their critiques of the SPD and broader Second International precisely on this score, as does, more broadly, Trotsky’s Results and prospects (see especially the section on ‘The prerequisites of socialism’). This concern, the problem of the raison d’être of the social democratic (and later communist) party, is less explicit, but nonetheless present as a key background issue in Lenin’s What is to be done? and The state and revolution, as well as his Leftwing communism and Imperialism pamphlets. The Second International radicals recognised, after Marx and Engels, the modern state and its political parties as phenomena of Bonapartism - that is, the need for proletarian socialist revolution.

On ‘the bourgeois revolution’, the historiography offered by some members of Platypus by way of perspective does not treat the 1789-1815 Great French Revolution as the ‘first’, but rather the last of the great bourgeois revolutions, and somewhat late at that, explaining in part its pathologies; and in the Marxist view 1830 and 1848 were already ‘proletarian’. The importance of the earlier Dutch and British experience is very much present in our minds as the original emergence of modern bourgeois society, such that bourgeois Britain was the bastion of reaction against the French revolution. So I think the perspective we tend to adopt in the Platypus approach to this history is not so ‘new leftist’/post-1960s as Macnair suspects.

Our general perspective in Platypus is that, for Marx, proletarian socialism not only potentially ‘negates’, but also importantly potentially ‘completes’, the bourgeois revolution (at a global, world-historical scale), that the crisis of bourgeois society in capital is the need for socialism, but that socialism was not understood by Marx to be a final end-point: rather a potential new beginning for human history.

I look forward to the promised second part of Macnair’s critique of Platypus as a project. However, I would caution that it is important to note the actual basis of our project - that is, our “hosting the critical conversation on the left” (about Marxism), that we don’t think will take place without our project’s specific focus. This, and not any purported ‘Platypus positions’ to be derived, for instance, from my or other Platypus members’ writings, requires judgment and criticism. We’ve published the transcripts of most of our major public fora, so I think our project should be judged on the basis of whether these are productive. The convention that Macnair attended threatens to give a skewed perspective on our actual activities, which don’t usually put forward Platypus members’ takes so prominently or, in some instances, (nearly) exclusively as at our convention. There is a potentially important distinction between what we do as an organised project and the consensus of how we understand the need for our project - that is, our take on Marxism. As a project, we want to be judged on our practice rather than on our ‘theory’, whatever the latter’s limitations.

Lastly, the title of my online collection of writings for Platypus, The last Marxist, is indeed meant to be provocative (what would it mean to make such a claim or have such an aspiration?), but with what I hope is recognisable humour, if not exactly tongue in cheek.

Platypus
Platypus

Misconceptions

I wanted to clear up some misconceptions about the Democratic Socialists of America. I don’t know who represented DSA at the Platypus convention, but apparently she or he didn’t do a good job.

No, we don’t have 10,000 members at present (the high point of the organisation was in the early 1990s, with around 11,000 paid-up members). We have, last I knew, around 6,000. Some members may think we have more, but they’re misinformed.

Our image of an alternative society is not Sweden or Finland. We say that the immediate struggle in the United States is to force reforms into existence that make the US economy more ‘Scandinavian’, if you will, but that does not exhaust our vision. We’re explicitly for workers’ self-management and democratic planning and such. A number of members are taken with the model in David Schweickart’s After capitalism, which I think is a well-written book, if too ‘market socialist’ for my taste. I think the work of Pat Devine provides a better vision - one of more comprehensive planning - and I’ve promoted it within the DSA.

This brings us to the Democratic Party question. I’ll present the mainstream DSA position (one with which I’ve traditionally agreed, but am currently somewhat sceptical of).

The DSA is in and around the left wing of the Democratic Party mainly because (a) most of the people we want to work with and recruit are there, including rank-and-file unionists, and (b) the US has an electoral system which makes the formation of a mass left/labour party uniquely difficult. In a parliamentary system where the members of parliament select the prime minister as head of government - especially in countries with proportional representation - electing minor party legislators is much easier. But in a system like that of the US, where the president is elected separately by nationwide votes and members of Congress are elected in single-member districts, only two parties can survive.

You note the organisational looseness of the Democrats (and Republicans). In fact, today they are both quasi-state institutions - no longer political parties in the European parliamentary sense; they are legally regulated structures with fixed times and places, where anyone can register. Open to all, they have no ideological requirements for membership. To become a Republican or Democrat, you just register as such. In fact, these are not really parties at all, but coalitions of more or less compatible social forces, in which various groups contest for influence under a common banner. Of course, it is still difficult for any individual or group to succeed in this process without lots of money. But organised groups with clear programmatic ideas and a long-term commitment can become forces within either party. The mainstream of the DSA thinks that labour and the left should do precisely that within the Democrats - to become ‘a party within a party’. The DSA supports left Democrats like Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers to that end. (I admit that this is not always spelled out explicitly within DSA literature, but that’s the thinking.)

Is this popular frontist? It’s not intended as such. It has nothing to do with old CPUSA arguments for supporting ‘representatives of the progressive wing of the bourgeoisie’ or what have you. The argument is that Democrats such as Kucinich and Conyers are not representatives of the capitalist class; that they are traditional social democratic-type workers’ reps, because the Democratic Party is in fact basically a structureless line on the ballot which is open for (class) contestation.

Now all this may be wrong, but I’d say it’s something better than “not even Lib-Lab”.

Misconceptions
Misconceptions

De rigueur

I thought Mike Macnair’s article on the Platypus convention was very interesting. The only thing I would want to raise for the sake of clarity, as opposed to a dispute over politics, is his invocation of philosophical rigour.

While it is true that philosophical rigour is part of a ruthless critique of anything existing, Adorno in Minima moralia writes: “The injunction to practise intellectual honesty usually amounts to sabotage of thought.” And he goes on to detail how the antithetical function of thought is undermined by this injunction.

Naturally, there is an issue with simply affirming or denouncing intellectual rigour: neither nonsense nor triviality will suffice as modes of thought today, nor could they ever, but I think that the issue Adorno raises of intellectual rigour falling into affirmation is a very real one. Indeed that is what has largely happened to analytic philosophy. Wittgenstein’s literary executor was Anscombe: while a brilliant philosopher, her Catholicism was compatible with her philosophy because of its irrelevance.

The real question about philosophical rigour is not textual analysis, but philosophy as a method of thought about our world and our place in it. In that respect the advent of philosophical rigour has been only one side of a defeat, either in the form of obtuse French theory or positivism that, while intriguing and better than its modern followers, cannot say much about the questions we all face today.

As for Mike’s account of the convention itself, while it is true that Richard Rubin did coin the excellent phrase, ‘neo-Kautskyan’, at Mike’s presentation and most of the Platypodes were sympathetic to his critique of your project, it is not true that a lot of us thought the splits in the Trotskyists were principled. I regret that there was not a chance to push the sectarians in the room on the principled or unprincipled nature of their splits. I think this was a result of how well Mike presented the case for unity as a practical matter, and indeed ‘Pythonism’ in splits has been a deeply ingrained feature in the movement on this side of the Atlantic as well - a fact we all know well in Platypus. Afterwards I heard quite a bit of sympathy and agreement around Mike’s position on the need for unity at this moment, although most also felt this would be insufficient for resurrecting the left.

Anyway, I am looking forward to the upcoming article on the Platypus project itself and following the CPGB with great interest.

De rigueur
De rigueur