Letters

Relevant option

Comrade Chris Jones is the latest to take up the cudgels against the CPGB’s long-standing call for the left to adopt a serious attitude towards the Labour Party (Letters, July 14).

He thinks it would be a very bad thing if trade union leaders were forced by the rank and file to demand Labour implement pro-worker policies in exchange for the unions’ millions in sponsorship paid to the party. Instead it would be preferable for the affiliated unions to follow the course taken by his own Fire Brigades Union and ‘break the link’. But, in the absence of any other mass political organisation of the working class, this can only result in a drift towards union depoliticisation.

Comrade Jones is as consistent in his auto-anti-Labourism as we have been in our view that it is necessary to engage seriously with Labour. Yet somehow he seems to think that the CPGB has adopted a new “line”. It is true that for more than a decade we have participated in left-of-Labour formations that stood against that party in elections - Socialist Labour Party, Socialist Alliance, Scottish Socialist Party, Respect - but we never ceased to call for those groups not to oppose any Labour candidate willing to accept pro-working class demands.

We were always against the foolish notion that the unions should disaffiliate from Labour instead of fighting for their money’s worth. We welcomed the Socialist Alliance’s publication in 2002 of Matt Wrack’s excellent pamphlet, Whose money is it anyway?, which was for “democratising the trade unions’ political funds” and which demanded, “Support only those [Labour candidates] that support our policies”. I fail to see why comrade Jones views our position - which used to be upheld by the current general secretary of his union - as “breathtaking arrogance”.

Before the SA had been formed as a national organisation we had been urging a rebellion within the Labour Party against Blairism. When in 2000 Ken Livingstone stood as an independent candidate for London mayor (after Tony Blair rigged the selection process to ensure he was not chosen as the official Labour nominee), we called for a vote for Livingstone, who “aims to challenge Blair’s control of the Labour Party from the outside, hoping to use his victory [in the mayoral election] as a bridgehead to continue the fight for the support of party members” (Weekly Worker March 9 2000). We urged working class partisans to step up their engagement within Labour at that time.

In the 2001 general election we demanded that the Socialist Alliance offer to stand down in favour of Labour candidates who came out openly for the SA’s ‘priority pledges’; and, because the other SA components preferred not to take the question seriously, we took it upon ourselves to test out Labour candidates when the situation arose. We reported how one Labour left reacted at a hustings meeting and commented:

“Diane Abbott’s public commitment to our priority pledges shows an important missed opportunity for the Socialist Alliance in Hackney. There should have been a big Socialist Alliance campaign for her - then she really would have been in trouble with Tony and Millbank .... In order to win those who at present place their trust in the Labour Party, we need to have a serious strategy towards them. That entails putting pressure on those like Diane Abbott so that they come out openly for definite working class politics” (Weekly Worker June 7 2001).

We further developed this approach in 2004, through our Labour Party theses, which stated: “Communists ... seek to unite with Labour leftwing candidates and crucially their organised mass base of support. But through our political programme - even presented as a set of minimum demands - we seek to simultaneously challenge and offer an alternative” (Weekly Worker January 29 2004).

To repeat then, our current approach to Labour represents a continuation, not a break. But comrade Jones imagines that our attempt to further develop this principled approach is somehow in contradiction to our consistent call for a single, united Marxist party. In a rather garbled passage, he writes: “Now we are told we must rejoin the Labour Party because in the past the CPGB has argued that there are no halfway houses and that the only relevant option is a Marxist party.”

It remains true that a Marxist party is “the only relevant option” in the sense that it is the only formation that can lead our class to emancipation. But, when it comes to a choice of the tactics we adopt in order to realise the strategic goal of founding such a party, then, self-evidently, participation in all manner of organisations is “relevant”. Our dispute with comrade Jones, and co-thinkers such as Steve Freeman of the (erstwhile?) Revolutionary Democratic Group, is not over participation in halfway houses, but whether we consider them a necessary stage that communists should take the lead in initiating.

We are against alleged Marxists setting up a new organisation where they pretend to be reformists in order to attract, and unite with, those to their right. That was how the SWP viewed the SA and Respect; how the Socialist Party in England and Wales viewed its Campaign for a New Workers’ Party and Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition; and how the RDG viewed its imagined ‘republican socialist party’. Revolutionaries who deliberately set out to establish a party-type formation that is not Marxist will have no option but to water down their Marxism.

Relevant option
Relevant option

Weird

I am sadly coming to the conclusion that the CPGB has adopted some weird ultra-leftist utopian superinternationalist logic, which renders any struggle to save jobs in the British Isles private industry reactionary and ‘nationalist’.

Why private industry and not public services? One could be cynical and say because CPGB members who have jobs work in public service and not in private and manual industry, but more likely it is because private manufacturing industry ‘competes’ with some other countries’ manufacturing industry, whereas internal services don’t. Superinternationalism means you can’t defend or fight for anything produced here - ie, in Britain, by the workers here - because this would be de facto ‘British jobs for British workers’. So if the company decides to keep your plant open, OK, but if they don’t, you can’t demand that they do, as this is chauvinistic and nationalist. I say ‘the jobs they do’ instead of ‘their jobs’ because some purist zealot is bound to say they aren’t ‘our jobs’ and they belong to the capitalist. Yes, comrades, we know, but that’s not what workers mean by ‘our jobs’. They mean the jobs and skills that they have.

We see this illustrated in Dave Isaacson’s report on the Coalition of Resistance conference: “... an emergency motion proposed by the CPB opposing the job losses at Bombardier in Derby ... caused some consternation.” The scandalous resolution apparently talked in terms of defending these jobs here and not the need for international coordination. Eh? So rail companies drop Bombardier, who have previously made the trains, and throw all those workers out of work with devastation for their families and ongoing impoverishment of the region. And, although this is clearly callous, because the resolution went on to say “for workers in Britain”, it was beyond the pale. But they are workers in Britain and they were treated with callous disregard! We can’t say that, though, because it mentions ‘Britain’s workers’. Dave proudly tells us that “Workers Power, the SWP and CPGB voted against” the resolution opposing the job losses at Bombardier.

The contract was won, incidentally, taking the jobs away from the workers who previously had them, because the cost of manufacture here had not been offset against social costs, the dole, welfare payments, benefit entitlements and loss to the ancillary and wider economy, as it is throughout the rest of Europe. That it wasn’t signals an agenda which has been in place for the last 30 years and increasingly means the slow, torturous death of manufacturing and growing impoverishment of British workers. Sorry, comrades, but they are British workers. Not better workers, just the same as European workers or workers anywhere else, but they live in Britain so they are called ‘British workers’. You will know, of course, that Bombardier isn’t a British firm, and that was never the point. You insist on branding workers on this island who are fighting for the jobs they do and skills they have as chauvinistic and nationalist when they are no such thing.

So we certainly see the modern CPGB rewriting the leadership slogans of the working class in modern times. Shut UCS! Dole, not coal! Don’t fight for your jobs! Take the money, demand redundancy! It seems that, further to my last letter, not only is the fight for employment futile; it is also reactionary, racialist and nationalist. One wonders how you will explain this position to workers at Bombardier when you turn up to sell your papers. Fight for our jobs? Well, no, you need international coordination. Does that mean like the United States of Soviet Socialist Europe, and will that happen before we sign on or indeed our kids sign on? Well, there are no short cuts, comrades. Want to buy a paper with your redundancy money?

Like them, I would like to know what your concrete demand would be if you worked in that plant. Yes, occupy it, but to what end? Is your ‘leadership’ relevant and of practical use to the workers in the actual fight they are engaged in? This new found ultra-leftism of yours comes over time after time as sheer utopian irrelevance, which counsels us basically to accept whatever the boss does because we can’t do anything this side of a simultaneous world revolution, led by a single international communist party. I say this with no sectarian axe to grind; the CPGB over the last 20 years has had much strength and shown much maturity. I’m afraid that, as you’ve lost contact with rank-and-file workers and non-London attitudes, you have started to take on the persona of the council communists and utopian wing of the anarchist movement. The ‘holier than thou’, sacred and perfect slogan which, although utterly irrelevant to the struggle of the class as it is now engaged, leaves you untouchable in Jesuitical logic and revolutionary purity.

Finally, on an unrelated subject other than its abstract utopianism, what is “masculinist militarism” (‘Putting revolution back onto the agenda’, July 14) and did Maggie Thatcher suffer from it?

Weird
Weird

Wonderful

Congratulations to Dave Douglass on such a wonderful and spectacular demolition of Alan Johnstone’s case for the Socialist Party of Great Britain! (Letters, July 14).

Alan frequently appears to claim to write on behalf of the SPGB, but it is quite clear from their discussion forum, this latest exchange has exposed severe and sharp divisions within the group. Ranging from those who like Alan would truly abstract themselves from any form of day-to-day struggle against the effects of capitalism to those who take a more balanced approach, like Dave, and in line with Marx, “that those who would cowardly give way in their everyday conflict with capital would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement” (Value, price and profit). One of the SPGB’s key writers has in fact declared “game, set and match” in favour of Dave over Alan!

I have for some time felt the SPGB to have been some sort of perfectly formed, but rather peculiar ultra-purist abortion from the Second International period: ie, a formation which claims to be based on pure 19th century Marxism, but is completely abstracted from any comprehension that by the early 20th century capitalism had been transformed from its period of ascendancy into its final phase of imperialism and decadence. You will find no recognition or understanding of even the concept of imperialism in the SPGB, despite this being absolutely fundamental to understanding the nature of 20th and 21st century capitalism, and the programme, strategy and tactics required to overcome it.

The SPGB hate and reject the experience of the world’s first successful proletarian revolution in 1917 in Russia. They, of course, totally reject the experience and practice of building the world’s first and successful socialist state - a new society, a new civilisation. In this, they apparently know better than arch-capitalists like Churchill (and shooter of striking workers), who, despite claiming the Soviet Union was “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”, had absolutely no doubt as to the class nature of Soviet society and in whose international class interests it existed to promote, and indeed famously wanted to “Crush the Bolshevik baby in its cradle”. Nice.

The SPGB still hold to Marx’s outdated view in 1852 that “universal suffrage is the equivalent of political power for the working class”, whereas from experience and scientific analysis, especially following the 1871 Paris Commune (and confirmed later by the experience and course of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution), Marx and Engels developed their thinking to: “Universal suffrage can only be a gauge to the maturity of the working class, nothing more” (Engels, 1884); and “that the precondition for every people’s revolution is that the bureaucratic-military state machine must be smashed, not simply transferred from one class to another” (Marx, 1871).

The SPGB represents a peculiar combination of ultra-purist 19th century ‘Marxism’ (which never existed) with a form of ultra-revisionism from Marxism, which holds that capitalism has not evolved into imperialism, or into decadence, that bourgeois parliaments control the state, and that all the working class has to do to effect socialist ‘revolution’ is to elect via a general election (controlled and managed by the capitalist state and capitalist class!) a majority of socialist MPs, who will then proceed to legislate in socialism!

Wonderful
Wonderful

Equals

Dave Douglass is 100% correct in his reply to Alan Johnstone. But SPGB members are, and always have been, involved in the struggles that Dave Douglass champions, and for the reasons he gives.

We get involved, however, as fellow workers, as equals in the struggle, not as vanguardists trying to take it over for purposes of our own. Hence our policy of not advocating reforms in an attempt to build non-socialist support and win votes, but instead promoting an understanding of the issues and, through that, an understanding of, and support for, socialism.

Equals
Equals

Multi-tasking

While I largely agree with David Douglass’s polemic against Alan Johnstone, Douglass could have been more accurate in the deployment of historically derived insults.

The inability to “walk and chew gum at the same time” was never imputed to Richard Nixon, who was always regarded as more devious than dull-witted, as his famous nickname of ‘Tricky Dick’ suggests. It was Gerald Ford, then Republican speaker of the House of Representatives and president-to-be, to whom this multi-tasking difficulty was attributed by president Lyndon Johnson.

Johnson also remarked that Ford had “played [American] football without a helmet” too often as a quarter-back for his college team. Ford, it will be recalled, lost the 1976 presidential election to Jimmy Carter after claiming in a nationally televised debate that eastern Europe was not then under Soviet domination.

Multi-tasking
Multi-tasking

Disgusting

Tony Papard follows in the furrow of leftwing anti-Semitism by asserting the false and disgusting conflation of Zionism/Israel and Nazism (Letters, July 14); but he is sure to reach such a conclusion when following the logic of his mentor, Tony Greenstein.

Mr Papard forgets that Arab Israeli citizens are terrified of living in a unitary Palestinian state, especially under Hamas or the Palestinian Authority, and under the influence of Arab states and Iran, because these political entities do not and cannot, given their current composition politically, guarantee the same human rights, equality before the law, freedom of association, a pluralistic and democratic political system, a fair legal system and west European quality of life which they currently enjoy as citizens of Israel.

Perhaps Mr Papard is unaware of the fact that Israel is multicultural and multi-ethnic and that the Jews have a right to national self-determination under the United Nations mandate which led to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Before that, Jews and Christians had lived in what was termed ‘Palestina’ by the imperialist Romans who wanted to deprive the Jews of their country. There never has existed a state called ‘Palestine’, which is an invention of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and became part of hard-left ideology after they bought into the PLO/Islamic narrative after abandoning an independent socialist analysis.

The legal constitution of the state of Israel was not just a response to Nazism, but part of the realisation of the founder of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, during the infamous Dreyfus affair in France, that the best solution to counter anti-Semitism would be a Jewish nation. Perhaps Herzl was naive to think that a nation-state would be the antidote to anti-Semitism, but would the English, French, Italians or Russians feel safer in this world if they were ‘set free’ from the bounds of their nation-states and left to fend for themselves as disparate communities?

The two-state solution is not only the most realistic solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; it is the most just in the circumstances. But not as a stepping stone to a unitary state; rather as a transitional phase to a united federation of socialist states, in which Israel can co-exist with its neighbours in solidarity, peace and prosperity (like Britain in the EU).

But the real task is for the Arab and Muslim states to catch up with Israel and establish the rule of law, plurality of political parties, human rights, freedom of religion, assembly, etc. Thus the real obstacle to the crisis in the Middle East is not Israel - the whipping stick for the ultra-left - but the Arab and Muslim states that have yet to pass through their own reformation and enlightenments and enter the road to modernity and democracy.

Disgusting
Disgusting

Idiotic

Mr Papard writes: “... like the British settlers in the Malvinas and other colonised nations, they are living on stolen land. This also applies, of course, to countries like the US, Australia and New Zealand, though ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population has resulted in the latter being marginalised.”

How tedious. For the Falklands to have been “stolen” one must first identify the rightful owners. Are they the Argentines who ethnically cleansed Patagonia of its earlier inhabitants and are themselves nothing but colonisers and usurpers? I think not: these people have no more ‘right’ to the islands than their current inhabitants.

Mr Papard admits that the same ‘theft’ apparently went on in the USA and the antipodes (leaving out, for some reason, all of Latin America). He might like to think a bit more and recall that the British Isles were ‘stolen’ by Normans from their Saxon (and Celtic in Ireland) ‘owners’, who of course had ‘stolen’ them from the original Iberian-origin inhabitants. A glance at continental Europe is even more unclear; we have waves of ‘thieves’ robbing ‘thieves’; Romans robbing Etruscans, who are then stolen from by Vandals and Goths, and so on.

Attempting to unpick the ebb and flow of population migration and sort inhabitants into ‘thieves’ and ‘dispossessed’ is impossible and, quite frankly, idiotic.

Idiotic
Idiotic

Racist Israel

Surely Zionists are racists and, as such, Israel is racist. As communists, we are anti-racist and we should be united, as we always are, against racism, no matter where it is or who it comes from. If we wish to see a world free from inequality with open borders, opposition to Israel is a must.

Racist Israel
Racist Israel

Improvement

There was an inaccuracy in Ben Lewis’ account of Marxism 2011 (‘Impressions from sectarian alley’, July 7). Other organisations could have their stalls inside the quad, on payment of £50 - as did Revolutionary History and a number of small groups, including Workers Power, Socialist Appeal and the SPGB.

Whether a prohibition would have been extended to the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty or the Spartacists (let alone the BNP), had they tried for a stall, I do not know. There were also a number of people inside the quad wandering around selling their literature, such as the Sparts, who were doubtless hoping to be violently ejected and probably already had a leaflet of denunciation set up. I found this interesting and a big improvement, as it suggested the new-model Socialist Workers Party was far more open and more tolerant than it had been under Mr and Mrs German.

The Bookmarks shop was much bigger and easier than last year and Revolutionary History was given a good spot, so we sold well. Bookmarks is undoubtedly, whatever one’s criticisms of the SWP, an asset for the whole left. They claim to have sold more than 500 of Ian Birchall’s biography of Tony Cliff.

I went to only two meetings; Ben did not apparently go to any. I was impressed by the speakers, including Peyman Jafari on Iran. However, I was taken to task when I spoke because, although it was about Iran, some ‘cadre’ insisted on speaking from the floor at length about Egypt. In the course of my intervention, I committed two heinous sins. I pointed out that they were perhaps too optimistic about Egypt, as opposed to Iran. I was more optimistic about Iran, because it is socially more advanced, more urbanised, has a smaller peasantry, etc, and said that in Iran religion would not really be a problem. You cannot say that sharia is the only answer if that is what you are suffering today.

I was shocked that John Molyneux, for whom I have some respect, attacked me in a rather cheap way for being a pessimist and anti-Muslim. (No, John, I have not yet joined the English Defence League.) It confirmed my impression that the SWP is far too optimistic about the Islamists. I hope they are correct, but I fear not.

Improvement
Improvement

Questions

I bought the Weekly Worker at your stall at what, with relatively scant justification, was called ‘Marxism 2011’. You also provided me with a copy of the Draft programme of the CPGB (and the Kautsky/‘April theses’ supplement). It was good to come across some closely argued Marxist writing.

So, first of all, please find enclosed a cheque for a year’s subscription to the Weekly Worker.

Secondly, a question about the Draft programme. You mention it will be put before a special conference of CPGB members before the end of 2010, and so it still says on your website. The question is, are comments, etc still welcome, as I may have some.

Thirdly, could you point me in the way of a thorough assessment of the current crisis of capitalism? I have seen the theoretical publications from the ‘7th Interplanetary’ (which to my relatively untrained eye seem erudite and so much more intelligent than the obligatory rants against the - doubtlessly greedy - bankers), but then I see the content of Workers Power and I despair.

Lastly, I understand (partly from a somewhat scurrilous article by a Phil Watson, which I found on the internet) that you comrades are pretty serious about stimulating debate among the serious, non-reformist left. My question is about the Communist Party of Britain and its Morning Star. After the blight of Eurocommunism eliminated itself, these guys managed to continue a daily newspaper as the official organ of what is happy enough to call itself a Communist Party, more than either the Italian or French comrades managed.

I am not au fait with what went on at the time, although I have vague recollections of references to the ‘Chater faction’ in The Leninist - the former, I believe, made off with the Morning Star, and did a Rifondazione. I read the Star almost on a daily basis, and must admit that I am struck by the almost complete absence of Marxist analysis. However, as an alternative to the bourgeois press (however confused at times - eg, the Chávez- Ahmadinejad conundrum - the complete lack of analysis of the so-called People’s Republic of China and, closer to home, the lack of clarity on the pro-imperialist Labour Party) they are still providing a service no-one else does on that scale. To come to my eventual question, how do you comrades try and relate to the CPB, which allegedly has about a thousand members?

Questions
Questions

Rebuff for Alex

Weekly Worker readers may be interested to know about the slap in the face delivered to the Socialist Workers Party’s international secretary and senior leader by the July 17 meeting of the SWP national committee.

Alex Callinicos has been claiming that after the June 30 mass strikes the appropriate slogan is now ‘All out, stay out’ - in other words, a call for an indefinite general strike. However, the central committee motion agreed by the NC takes the form of a sharp rebuff.

While it correctly emphasises that “The key task now is to build for a bigger strike in the autumn”, it goes on to state: “We rightly raise the slogan for a general strike ... Five trade union conferences this year passed a motion calling on the TUC to organise a general strike. It is therefore a mainstream idea, even if groups like Coalition of Resistance remain hostile to it. But we should be careful to raise the general strike in a way that flows from the upward curve of resistance, not a demand plucked from thin air that we just repeat in every situation.”

Now, who on earth has been doing that?

Rebuff for Alex
Rebuff for Alex

New charge

The six International Socialist Organisation comrades facing trial in Harare have been remanded until August 22. They are Munyaradzi Gwisai, Tafadzwa Choto, Tatenda Mombeyarara, Hopewell Gumbo, Edison Chakuma and Welcome Zimuto.

The prosecution has come up with a new charge of “inciting public violence”, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years’ imprisonment, in place of “subverting a constitutional government” and the original treason. We are not satisfied with this development. We remain committed to our resolve that there should have been no charges in the first place. The meeting on February 19 was legitimate and a democratic right.

These trumped- up charges are coming at a great cost. One of the original 45 treason trialists, David Mpatsi, has now died, following a rapid deterioration of his health arising from his incarceration and denial of medical treatment. We hold the regime responsible for this death and the fate of his three children that he has left behind. He indeed has paid the death penalty.

Comrades, this is a ruthless regime which will not stop at anything to maintain its illegitimate hold on power and serve the interests of the ruling class. Our comrades still face up to 10 years in the regime’s horror prisons, where many have died. Only international solidarity, backed by militant mobilisation locally, will stop this regime. We therefore call for your continued support.

New charge
New charge