Letters

Learn lessons

Much of the blame for the authoritarian nature of Soviet socialism and its dominance over many of the other socialist countries which followed, or were forced to follow, the Moscow line is laid at the doors of Joseph Stalin, and it is certainly true he carried these dictatorial methods to the extreme. Many good socialists and communists died in his purges and in the gulags. However the brutal nature of the Soviet regime manifested itself long before Lenin’s death.

In a recent Weekly Worker article a comrade wrote about Lenin and Trotsky contemplating shooting one in 10 idle workers in the early days of Soviet Russia, and also about the massacre of whole families, including children, because some family members supported the white armies (‘Putting revolution back on the agenda’, July 14). There was also the unnecessary massacre of the tsar and his family, of course. However, the real turning point, when the intolerant and undemocratic nature of Soviet socialism was established, occurred in early 1921 in the crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion by Lenin with the help of Trotsky’s Red Army. This clearly indicates that even without Stalin the Soviet Union would have developed into an oppressive dictatorship, had Lenin and Trotsky both survived to remain at the helm.

The Kronstadt sailors, originally supporters of the Bolshevik revolution, issued the 15-point Petropavlovsk resolution, which stated that the soviets no longer represented the workers and peasants and demanded new and secret elections. It called for freedom of speech for anarchists and left socialist parties and the liberation of their political prisoners; for the right of assembly and to organise trade unions and peasant associations; that no political party should have special privileges or state subsidies; equalisation of remuneration for all workers except those in dangerous or unhealthy jobs; the abolition of Bolshevik Party combat detachments in the military and guards in factories and enterprises, and their replacement by those nominated by the workers themselves; freedom for peasants to cultivate their land and to own cattle, provided they did not employ hired labour. All progressive demands, which sought to restore the original values and aspirations of the socialist revolution.

When the Kronstadt rebellion was brutally crushed, along with other revolts and strikes by peasants and workers during the famine of 1921, then the course was set for the one-party dictatorship of what later became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Not even socialist opposition to the current CPSU line was to be permitted. The crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion certainly meant the end of any hope for a more inclusive socialist regime which took account of views of other leftwing parties. It in fact meant the one-party dictatorship of the Bolsheviks, and because of the failings of inner-party democracy led the way to the brutal dictatorship of Joseph Stalin.

After Stalin’s death in 1953 the Soviet Union became slightly more liberal, but remained a one-party dictatorship. It also continued to exert dominance over the socialist countries of eastern and central Europe with the crushing of rebellions and what it saw as deviant or counterrevolutionary developments. Only with Gorbachev were real reforms implemented, but by then it was too late: the Soviet economy was in a dire state partly due to the enforced arms race with the United States, and socialism collapsed.

We must learn the lessons. The idea that the dictatorship of the proletariat could be forcibly exercised by one political party was a very dangerous one. In actual fact, although the CPSU had a mass membership, the most active members turned out to be dominated by careerists and opportunists just out to further their own prospects and that of their families.

At the time I felt the way to deal with these bourgeois infiltrators and tendencies was via Stalinist-style repression, such as the ‘fraternal assistance’ (ie, military intervention) which the Soviet Union and four other Warsaw Pact countries used to crush the Prague Spring in 1968. I now recognise that these brutal methods - and those used inside the Soviet Union itself, such as the incarceration of dissidents in labour camps and mental institutions - just protected the bourgeois ruling cliques and the bureaucratic officials and party politicians, many of whom became corrupted by the privileges of absolute power.

Comrade Tony Benn has so correctly pointed out that if you entrust political power to anybody on your behalf you must also make sure you know how to take this power away from them if they misuse it. In the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries once the ruling Marxist-Leninist parties had become infiltrated and taken over by those more interested in the perks and privileges of power, or by genuine communists and socialists who had become corrupted by this absolute power, then there was no way of effectively reversing this process other than by mass action to overthrow the regime, which happened in the events of 1989-1991. I still think it was a great mistake that they threw out the socialist baby with the dirty bathwater of corruption. Indeed in many cases they kept the corrupt politicians and bureaucrats in place, so they now have the worst of both worlds.

Socialism in the Soviet Union was perfectly able to be reformed. Much was achieved even under the distorted form which existed: full employment, abolition of illiteracy, security in old age, good health services, equality for women, good education, low rents, homes for all, subsidised basic foodstuffs, etc. Other political parties could have been allowed to contest free elections. This would have allowed corrupt regimes to be voted out and for other socialist models to be experimented with. Such as, for example, the very successful Yugoslav system of worker and consumer cooperatives and individual publicly owned enterprises all competing in a friendly socialist market place as an alternative to the huge, often inefficient state monopolies producing everything under the laborious five-year Stalinist production plans.

The term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is an unfortunate one and should be discarded. For one thing it suggests no human rights for minority groups. Political parties would be allowed to administer their own brand of socialism, but capitalism and the privatisation of industries and services would not be permitted under the constitution. So, while not a dictatorship, it would give stability for the basic socialist nature of society. The socialist constitution could be protected and safeguarded by an elected president aided by the state security services.

There is no reason why this formula for socialism could not have worked, and why it could not work in future. It would open the way to progress towards communism. I personally feel, in view of the 20th century experience, that the state withering away, along with the need for money and other regulators, is such a utopian idea that, if it is possible, it is far into the distant future. I would be content to achieve a real socialist society. If, however, true communism is to come about, then it requires a great deal of maturity and willingness to take on the responsibilities of running society by the masses.

Learn lessons
Learn lessons

Disappointing

In last week’s paper, Dave Douglass described my recent article as “abstract utopianism”. This is a bit disappointing, considering that Dave is a committed revolutionary and that the whole intention of the article, ‘Putting revolution back on the agenda’ (July 14), was to show that communist revolution is a very real, not a utopian, prospect.

The fact that humans lived without property, hierarchy or alienated work for over 80% of their time on Earth in itself shows that there is nothing utopian about communism. And the fact that, since the decline of this hunter-gatherer communism, people have never stopped rebelling against hierarchical authority, shows that people will always be dissatisfied with class society.

In the past, scarcity always prevented such rebellions from recreating communist relations. But, now that we have the technology to end all significant scarcity, Marx’s prediction of a “return of modern society to a higher form of the most archaic type” is a real possibility in the 21st century (MECW Vol 24, p357).

Unfortunately, the militarism of the 20th century produced horrific wars and Stalinist dead ends that have delayed any return to communism. This militarism and war was particularly effective at diverting popular discontent from the 1900s to the 1950s - a time when masculinity was very much about military values and a fear of feminine ‘weakness’.

In answer to Dave’s question about whether Maggie Thatcher suffered from this “masculinist militarism”: Of course - rightwing women could promote it, just as leftwing men could oppose it. However, it required the huge social changes since the 1960s, combined with the failure to revive the cold war as the ‘war on terror’, to fatally weaken masculinist militarism. One recent result of this has been that the US was reluctant to repress the uprising against Mubarak. Another result has been that, without cold war-style discipline, governments are reluctant to risk the levels of state investment necessary to revive industry and end the present economic crisis.

The overall result is a capitalist system that can neither fulfil workers’ expectations nor rediscipline them through scarcity and war. This situation puts anti-capitalist revolution firmly back on the agenda. Whether such a revolution will occur in five or in 50 years time is unpredictable. But the moment that working class struggles show that a practical alternative to capitalism is possible, this anti-capitalist alternative will spread like wildfire - spreading even faster and wider than the recent uprisings in the Middle East.

In the extreme poverty of the revolutions of the 20th century, the only practical anti-capitalist alternative seemed to be some sort of democratic management of alienated work. For example, in State and revolution, Lenin argued that workers’ democracy should control everyone in society, including any “workers who have been thoroughly corrupted by capitalism ... [and that any] escape from this popular accounting and control ... will probably be accompanied by such swift and severe punishment [by] the armed workers ... that the necessity of observing the simple, fundamental rules of the community will very soon become a habit. Then the door will be thrown wide open for ... the complete withering away of the state.”

In other words, Lenin believed that by democratically imposing work-discipline, workers could create a genuine stateless communism. Anarchist activists in the Spanish civil war had similar beliefs. Yet the experience in Russia and Spain, and in the Israeli kibbutzim, shows that such self-managed work-discipline tends, instead, to lead to even more repressive social relations than those of capitalism.

Workers in the 21st century will never risk the upheavals of revolution just to create a more restrictive society than capitalism. Workers will only be attracted to revolution if it enables them to create a freer society than capitalism, a society without any alienated work - a genuine communist society. In other words, communism is now the only practical alternative to capitalism and we communists should not be shy about saying it.

Of course, this does not mean we should not also get involved in struggles over wages and jobs. But we should be honest with people and say that it is utopian to hope that British capitalism would ever recreate the secure, and therefore rebellious, industrial proletariat of the 1970s. Or, at least, it would only do so in order to hold back a future revolution - and, at such a time, it would be far better to abolish the miseries of wage labour than to try to consolidate them.

It remains to be seen whether my article was right to suggest that a future revolution will be centred more on the transformation of personal and gender relations than on workplace relations. But history has always progressed through unexpected social transformations and revolutions. And, whatever happens, future revolutionary movements will have to develop new ideas and tactics that are radically different from those of the 20th century.

Disappointing
Disappointing

Abysmal

I agree with David Douglass that the CPGB has “lost contact with rank-and-file workers and non-London attitudes” (Letters, July 21).

Trade union coverage in the Weekly Worker, to put it mildly, is abysmal. There is much going on within the union movement about which comment and analysis in the paper would be eagerly read.

Three stories that immediately spring to mind are: the election of Michelle Stanistreet to be the first female general secretary of the National Union of Journalists; the appointment of George Guy as acting general secretary of the construction workers’ union, Ucatt; and the possible merger of rail unions RMT and TSSA, which would create a union with more than 110,000 members.

A turn of the CPGB towards the trade unions and the workplace would certainly bring the London-centric Weekly Worker down to earth.

Abysmal
Abysmal

Dirty work

All the talk of saving the 200 (or so) jobs at News International makes me feel a bit uneasy. Socialists should really be arguing for workers in journalism to start taking control of the media rather than simply doing the dirty work for the Murdoch empire.

That is why the battle taking place in South Yorkshire - where journalist workers are fighting not only in defence of jobs, but also against management attempts to seize control of the editing for themselves - is so important.

Socialists and trade unionists should show solidarity with these workers and go about trying to set up solidarity networks drawing in different layers of workers cutting across the so-called public-private divide. Such a vision would give the call for a general strike much more strength.

Dirty work
Dirty work

Oppressor role

Comrade Moshé Machover should try to resist the temptation to put words into my mouth and deal with the arguments I do make, not those he wished I’d make (Letters, July 14).

Nowhere have I ever advocated replacing the oppression of the Palestinians with that of Israel’s Jews. What I did do was try to make sense of what self-determination means in practice. No nation or group ‘determines’ its future other than in the negative, hence why I say that it is freedom from national oppression. No more and no less.

Whatever else they are, the Hebrew-speaking people - or more accurately Israeli Jews, because many Arabs speak Hebrew and many Jews do not - are not oppressed by virtue of their nationality or group status. It is for this reason that the question of self-determination is irrelevant. Far from having the right to self-determination, Israel’s Jews continually try to determine the future of others.

Indeed if we look at what these theoretical abstractions mean in practice, then the first question to ask is ‘What makes the Israeli Jews a nation?’ What is the core of their national identity? There is an artificial dollar economy and Israel’s military role as an outpost of western imperialism and western arms salesman. There is the Hebrew language, which many cannot yet speak and there is a territorial contiguity, although it is hopelessly intermixed with Arab Israelis. But these are the surface manifestations of Stalin’s tick-box approach to nationality.

The key defining quality of Israeli Jewish ‘nationality’ - the quotation marks represent doubt, not fright - is the imperial and colonisatory role of that population. What defines ‘Israeli’ Jews über alles is their role as a settler people, the guardians of western interests. And it is this which comrade Machover doesn’t get. To Moshé all nationalism is the same, whereas for Lenin and the Bolsheviks you cannot confuse the nationalism of the oppressed with the nationalism of the oppressor. Nowhere do I recall the slogan of ‘self-determination for the Russian masses’. Russia was a prison house of nationalities that were oppressed. The essential component of Israeli Jewish ‘nationality’ has nothing to do with language, a cheap imitation of US culture, common roots, etc, but their roles as oppressors.

Moshé’s position belongs to the economistic traditions of Marxism, which thought that if you put to one side questions of colonialism then you could forge workers’ unity. Militant - now the Socialist Party - best exemplifies this tendency. As a war was being fought in Northern Ireland, against which the loyalists were ranged, in close alliance with the British secret state, Militant argued that the national question could be put to one side to engender ‘unity’. As the hunger riots of the 1930s demonstrated, such economic unity never failed to break down when social struggles emerged. That is why Moshé had an abstentionist position on the Falklands/Malvinas war in 1982 and didn’t see it as a question of British imperialism reasserting itself in the South American continent.

The right of self-determination for Ireland as a whole would not involve, contrary to loyalist scare propaganda, the oppression of the Irish Protestants, nor have they been oppressed in southern Ireland. Likewise the scare stories about the oppression of whites if blacks attained majority rule in southern Africa have been just that.

Or perhaps the failure to accord the Afrikaners the right to re-establish the separate Boer states of the Orange Free State and Transvaal also involved national oppression? It may be amusing, but Moshé’s Khrushchev-Nixon analogy is worthless and irrelevant, demonstrating only that Moshé cannot make the necessary differentiation between oppressor and oppressed. What Moshé is doing is repeating that old canard that all revolutions are hopeless because they end up with the oppression of another group.

In fact the Irish republican, the South African apartheid and Palestinian national struggles have been remarkably free of racism, despite the fervent claims of loyalists, Zionists and nats. The ANC did not advocate apartheid in reverse and republicans didn’t clamour for a Catholic ascendancy and nor do the Palestinians, despite the hysterical contortions of Zionism, long for the subjugation of Israeli Jews.

Moshé has a naive view of what revolution consists of. Zionism will not be overthrown like some medieval dictator. It is a powerful movement, which has effectively rewritten Jewish history and welded together most Jews behind both Israel and the western imperialist project in the Middle East, although today there is an unprecedented questioning of Zionism and Israel outside that country. It will take a struggle throughout the Arab east, the overthrow of existing social relations and the elimination of the parasitic ruling classes in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, as well as their destruction in Egypt, Syria and Iraq, before Zionism too is threatened.

Comrade Machover is fond of pointing to the fact that there is no solution within the Palestinian ‘box’. I agree, which is why I don’t understand why, when revolution spreads to the entire region, Moshé is so intent on rebuilding that very same box. This is not so much nostalgia as a concession to social chauvinism. Why should the Israeli Jews, after the defeat of their sponsors and the elimination of the Arab regimes that Israel has protected, wish to retreat into the Jewish box other than to re-enact their Masada complex?

Yes, there are a minority of Israeli Jews (Hebrews) who identify with Moshé’s project, but they are no stronger now than they were when Uri Avneri, Tom Segev and others first put forward the Canaanite thesis that David Ben-Gurion derided.

The question of Arab unity and the role it has or has not played in recent events, its hold upon the masses and whether this is really a bourgeois chimera, whose time has passed, is another debate. However, I do not accept the Zionist thesis that the conflict in Palestine is really a conflict between two nations - the Israeli Jews and the Palestinians. On the contrary it is precisely this mistaken notion, born of the racist and at times genocidal oppression of the Palestinians, that has caused the Palestinians not to take the path of black South Africans, but to instead argue for a new UN/US partition plan and to try to re-establish the Green Line 1967 borders. I would argue that this has been a key strategic error on the part of the Palestinians.

The struggle in Palestine for a democratic, secular state, as part of social revolution in the Arab east, is the struggle for one Palestinian/Israeli nation within the borders of what was the British mandated territory of Palestine. A nation that will be part Arab and part Israeli Jewish. The fight is not a national one, but one for equal rights, regardless of culture, language, religion or ‘race’. To even imagine, with the overthrow of Zionism, that one wants to recreate the conditions for a re-emergence of Zionism, which is what Moshé is arguing for, would be to support counterrevolution in Palestine.

Having driven a stake through the Zionist Dracula, Moshé would then like to resuscitate him as a vegetarian!

Oppressor role
Oppressor role

Fit

After the ‘Declaration of the European Anti-Capitalist Left’, which was made public on June 18 on the International Socialist Tendency website (tinyurl.com/3atg9ly), I couldn’t help but find myself asking, what is the EACL?

On the left, and particularly in Europe, there are a number of internationals and tendencies, but where does the EACL fit into these? If anybody has either read the declaration or has knowledge of the EACL, can they please reply and let me know?

Fit
Fit

Cul-de-sac

Nobody, least of all myself or the Socialist Party of Great Britain, are for abdicating “fighting for as high a wage as union power and your bargaining position can achieve”. Nor would we support “Taking whatever the boss slings you across the table, without forming your workmates into a union and working class social unit to fight for collective standards” (Letters, July 14).

Dave Douglass and myself surprisingly do agree when he states that he (and the working class, I will add) is well capable of “arguing through unions for shorter hours, safer conditions and better wages”. Dave may have overlooked my statement that “There is little wrong with people campaigning to bring improvements to enhance the quality of their lives and some reforms can indeed make a difference”, because I never couched it in his fervent, revolutionary rhetoric.

But where we differ is in the role of a socialist party. That is an organisation which has to transcend the sectional and nationalist battles of the trade union movement. The socialist party fights for the working class as a whole without distinctions, whereas a union represents and fights for its own particular members’ interests, which may well run counter to other workers’. Nor does the socialist party take national sides in global capitalist competition between one geographic area’s workers and another - a position that cannot be so lightly dismissed.

What will your first struggle be - bad housing, bad health, bad education? And just how are you planning to address it? We fully realise that, as a National Union of Mineworkers representative, you were an able defender of the best interests of your members, but that role sometimes does conflict with society’s wider concerns - as indicated by your defence of coal-powered electricity rather than promoting renewable alternative means of producing and conserving energy.

The logical outcome of laying claim to “practical” solutions for those many social problems you list and for that restructuring of the traditional industries you demand will require political action by government intervention and capital investment, and when you appeal for the support of the working class, do you admit that it is doomed unless it involves either an alliance with the governing capitalist party or the establishment of socialism?

I oppose the idea that capitalism can be made more palatable with the right reforms. Nor do I think we should mislead fellow workers with such hopes. Socialists do not seek to attract support by advocating reforms, as no series of reforms can ever solve the problems inherent to capitalism. No-one is telling workers not to defend themselves or others, but it won’t necessarily have the revolutionary influence or effect that Dave believes and, assuming it will, it is simply self-deluding.

You may claim a papal infallibility in the righteousness of your demands, Dave, but things go awry. We must recognise that many reforms simply contributed to other problems arising. Who could have opposed the demolition of slum housing and the provision of inside toilets for all? A worthy demand for decent houses would be an example of well-meaning actions eventually leading to the wrong solutions of the sink council estates and soulless schemes.

While we are happy to see the workers’ lot improved, as I have already said, I will nevertheless reiterate that reforms can never lead to the establishment of socialism and tend to bleed energy, ideas and resources from that goal. Unions are economic weapons on the battlefield of class war but, unfortunately, trade union action on its own is unable to bring about socialism. Successful struggles may well encourage other workers to stand up for their rights in the workplace, but the victories are partial ones. Only by organising ourselves into a socialist party to do political battle in the name of common ownership will a general gain come to workers. A socialist party cannot be a popular reform party attempting to mop up immediate problems and be revolutionary at the same time. We cannot be a halfway house, nor accommodate our fellow workers who question our ‘impractical’ or ‘impossible’ policies, and spend their time looking for convenient compromises. There is no shortage of diversions, but for socialists it is all or nothing. No short cuts.

Dave, you are suggesting a dangerous detour that’s been advocated from the beginning of the labour movement and has always led to a cul-de-sac.

Cul-de-sac
Cul-de-sac

Unclean

Andrew Northall characterises the Socialist Party of Great Britain as a purist sect (Letters, July 21). If true, it might make us wonder what kind of ‘impurities’ have crept into Marxism over the course of the 20th century.

I got an idea of the kind of impurity we could do without in Marxism from Northall’s letter, where he characterises Winston Churchill as a shooter of striking workers. Perhaps that’s where the Bolsheviks got the idea from.

Unclean
Unclean