Letters

Good company

David Walters makes the following repudiation of Trotskyism: “It is globalisation, not nationalism, that is seeking to roll back the gains of the working class and is the cutting edge of the class struggle” (Letters, January 19). Where does that leave us historically? In the context of the 1930s and 1940s, the main enemy was Roosevelt and Churchill, not Hitler and fascism? In seeking a solution within the system, he takes the line of great-nation chauvinism to defend the nation-state as the lesser evil.

He is in good company. This is the line of the US Sparts: “However, on a sufficiently large scale, immigration flows could wipe out the national identity of the recipient countries … Unlimited immigration as a principle is incompatible with the right to national self-determination … an ‘open’ US-Mexico border would not only introduce impoverished Mexican labourers to flood the US labour market, becoming an unprotected pool for capitalist super-exploitation, but would also lead to well-financed American ‘colonists’ buying up Mexican enterprises and real estate … If, for example, there were unlimited immigration into northern Europe, the population influx from the Mediterranean basin would tend to dissolve the national identity of small countries like Holland and Belgium” (Workers Vanguard January 18 1974).

I think we can all identify the great-nation chauvinism under the guise of defending the native working class here. So David Walters and Dave Douglass can demur when VN Gelis draws the logical conclusion from his chauvinism and becomes an anti-immigrant arch-reactionary, but cannot see how he got there. David says: “Imperialism, under the guise of a kind and gentle ‘globalisation’, seeks to roll back the gains of our class, all won within the traditional borders of the capitalist nation-state, by going after that very nation-state. The thesis argues that such violations of national sovereignty go against the interests of the working class on an international basis. This, of course, can be debated, and should be.”

I have to inform David and Dave that imperialism, under the guise of the nation-state, is called fascism; it would do something far worse than just “roll back” the gains of the working class, as the German working class found to their cost in January 1933 and after. What monstrous theoretical and political confusion is contained in the passage above that “can be debated, and should be”!

All imperialist finance capital is nationally based. We cannot return to the idealised world that existed in the epoch of the historically progressive role of the bourgeoisie, the heyday of the British empire when the productive forces of the planet were being developed, albeit in the most brutal and oppressive manner. And it just never was the case, as the word ‘empire’ shows, that the productive forces could be developed on a national basis. Why do I have to make these elementary points to repudiate David Walters, a supposed erudite Marxist and Trotskyist? Dave Douglass at least has the excuse of an anarchist, Class War, localist political education.

As this crisis of global capitalism deepens, it demands ever more urgently the political elaboration of the theory of the world revolution, repudiated by Stalin and the Soviet bureaucracy and defended only by the Trotskyists, however inadequately at times.

Which brings me to Arthur Bough, David’s apparent opponent. He makes many good points of clarification in this debate. He hits the nail right on the head in the following unanswerable passage: “I reject Dave’s nationalist solution of calling on the British workers to line themselves up with their own bosses at the expense of the German workers. The ludicrous nature of Dave’s approach can be seen by simply asking him what his response would be to German workers threatened with losing their jobs, had the decision been reversed as a result of pressure being placed on the government. Would he then, as a German trade union militant, have been calling on workers to have lined up with their bosses and the German government to demand that the decision be reversed once again to protect their jobs? How far are you prepared to go down that road?”

But then he too shows his lack of understanding of the communist methodology. Ludicrously, he rejects nationalisation demands as reformist, seemingly unaware that ‘workers’ control’ can be added to make that demand a fight for workers’ power. And then the real disappointment. Having raised our expectations that he has now developed the argument for world revolution, he flops back to workers’ cooperatives and praise for Jimmy Reid’s work-in of 1974 as the way forward: “I argue for the workers to take over the means of production themselves when they are threatened with loss of their jobs. That is what the workers of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders did during the 1970s and it is what the French workers did in 1968 … if they did do that, then I would be in favour of arguing for work to go to them rather than to foreign capitalist firms - not because they were foreign, but because they were capitalist!”

The French workers lost in 1968 because they were betrayed by the French Communist Party. The PCF persuaded them to leave their occupations, which were immediately threatening the whole system of private property and the state itself, and instead opt for the dead-end parliamentary road to socialism. Jimmy Reid, from the same stable, also defended capitalism, led those militant workers into a dead-end work-in, which defused the rising class struggle against Heath into a question of immediate jobs, and sold pay rates and conditions to defend capitalism. For this, he was mightily praised by a very grateful ruling class.

The work-in Reid of 1974 was the political father of the scab Reid of The Sun column attack on the miners’ strike of 1984-85, just as VN Gelis’s economic nationalism to defend the privileges of the labour aristocracy is the political father of his vile anti-immigrant policy. We are communists. The clue as to how we treat immigrants is in our name; every working man and woman on the planet has the right, in our ideology, to seek the best price for their labour anywhere on the planet.

Now Arthur Bough thinks this other national road to socialism, which defends capitalism and its nation-state, is the way forward. He would become an economic nationalist himself under the illusion that a workers’ cooperative under the capitalist state and mode of production was a form of socialism. He clearly never understood Engels’ repudiation of Robert Owen in Socialism: utopian and scientific.

Good company
Good company

Debilitating

Concerning David Walters’ letter last week, I write to endorse his general views with some additional points of my own around aspects of his analysis, which, firstly, clearly opposes the reactionary side of VN Gelis’s pamphlet (“illegal immigrants”), which is never acceptable as part of socialist/communist terminology.

Walters said: “It is globalisation, not nationalism, that is seeking to roll back the gains of the working class …” Bourgeois nationalism is indeed obliged to fight nationally against the independence of the working class and its class interests, containing past successes, but, over and above this, the most coercive bourgeois powers are those amalgamations of monopoly capitalism as adjuncts of imperialism, acting out their forceful economic and political roles as pacts and groupings.

Of these global amalgamations, the European Union is the most forced, disparate and contradiction-ridden. In so far as the national bourgeoisies have their own elective parliaments and vying parties, they will invariably seek to exploit bourgeois party political coalescences to rule in the name of bourgeois majorities where possible, either singularly or in coalitions with coerced parliamentary partners. This throws up sharp differences within those nations, particularly as they approach their own designated elective stages.

So how do we communists fight this? Today we find on the supposed revolutionary left a general debilitating attitude espoused by any number of groups and their spokesmen throughout Europe, projected toward the proletarians of Europe. They do this by saying that any perspective or programme by socialists and communists that would seek to delve deeper into the national ramifications of the existing, concerted bourgeois conspiracies of the Brussels centre - which itself does successively exert political, social and economic control into and over any country, through their bourgeois body politic and legislatures - are necessarily wrong. As if all critiques are fixed and limited to the bigger and more inclusive bourgeois framework. So socialists and communists must restrict their perspectives and programme to the demand for a European-wide revolutionary party in general, for national opposition cannot be Marxian and is bound to come to a sticky end.

Even James Turley, presumably writing on behalf of the CPGB, argued this when he wrote: “David Cameron’s veto is a dangerous blunder, so why does the left reproduce Tory stupidity on the EU?” (‘Europe and the delusions of leftwing nationalism’, December 15). Here Turley chastises the Morning Star and Bob Crow, going right back to Tony Benn in the 1970s, for their nationalism in regard to the European amalgamation. Later he appears to roast Alex Callinicos of the Socialist Workers Party for his ambiguity toward the European Economic Community, though the article was sparse on analysing the recent Tory (88 MPs) and Labour (11) revolt, when they posed the referendum question against Cameron, Clegg and Miliband.

I would counter this by saying that not only was Lenin correct to identify the slogan, ‘For the United States of Europe’, as being a utopian and abstract bourgeois ground for socialists to engage their commonality of purpose in propaganda or organisational terms, but that, importantly, Trotsky expounded his developed and well-reasoned later critique, which retained both his and Lenin’s earlier critique of the United States of Europe, under conditions and through the medium of the soviets, that emanated from the Russian Revolution of October 1917 itself.

Trotsky wrote: “Lenin, as is well known, was hesitant at the beginning of the war in regard to the slogan of the United States of Europe. The slogan was originally included in the theses of Sotsial Demokrat … and then rejected by Lenin. This in itself indicates that the question involved here was not that of the general acceptability of the slogan on principle, but merely a tactical appraisal of it, a question of weighing its positive and negative aspects from the standpoint of the given situation. Needless to say, Lenin rejected the possibility that a capitalist United States of Europe could be realised. That was also my approach to the question when I advanced the slogan of the United States of Europe exclusively as a prospective state form of the proletarian dictatorship in Europe.”

Trotsky adds: “But even in this formulation of the question, Lenin saw at that time a certain danger. In the absence of any experience of a proletarian dictatorship in a single country and of theoretical clarity on this question, even in the left wing of the social democracy (communism) of that period, the slogan of the United States of Europe might have given rise to the idea that the proletarian revolution must begin simultaneously, at least on the whole European continent.

“It was against this very danger that Lenin issued a warning, but on this point there was not a shade of difference between Lenin and myself” (http://marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1928/3rd/ti01.htm#p1-03).

This whole chapter from Trotsky is most pertinent (as is its context within his tome on the Third International after Lenin).

Debilitating
Debilitating

MIA parrot

David Walters hasn’t read the book How the IMF broke Greece, but this doesn’t stop him entering the fray against it, despite the fact that around one third of the material wasn’t written by me. One presumes that soon the same will occur on the forthcoming book on what classical Marxists wrote and said regarding the issue of immigration.

Walters has the official role in determining what goes onto the Marxist Internet Archive and, following the well-trodden path of the globalist fake left, refuses to upload translations from the Greek revolutionary tradition. He and his avowed openly anti-communist collaborators on the MIA have made only one official pronouncement: to attack China using the pages of the New York Times (house organ of US imperialism).

He is a ‘left’ Zionist who permanently projects his self-professed Jewishness. He has, for more than a decade, parroted Bush’s new world order, covering for the 9/11 put-up job and the non-existent role of al Qa’eda emanating from the fake caves in Afghanistan, which led to the fake weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He lauded the hyperpower role of the USA, which a decade later has finished broken with unpayable multi-trillion dollar debts. That has created the situation where one of the candidates for Republican presidential nomination openly seeks the return of all US forces from abroad before more disasters befall them.

His venom against Ahmadinejad and, indirectly, Iran, fits in precisely with the ‘axis of evil’ diatribes from Washington. Anyone questioning the historic role of Israel, the justifications created for its existence, 9/11, etc, must be an anti-Semite - after all, Arab unity can only realistically occur with the ending of the US airbase going by the name of Israel and then the ‘left’ Zionists lose their political compass.

MIA parrot
MIA parrot

Stalinist!

Roscoe Turi is clearly a fantasist of the highest nature (Letters, January 19).

Firstly, on the comments of the reactionary, Christopher Hitchens. It is just a fact that being anti-war against Iraq and Libya put people subjectively on the same side as Saddam and Gaddafi. This has nothing at all to do with Stalinism. It was part of the demonisation of Saddam. He supposedly gassed the Kurds, which was later denied by the American army college, giving the game away. Ever since then, I have been aware that most of the left have rallied around imperialist ‘facts’ like these. This would be the moment I became a “Stalinist” in the eyes of Turi.

Secondly, he accuses me of not minding the roughing up of the fake Trotskyists of the International Socialist Organisation in Zimbabwe, who in 2008 came out with “unconditional support” for the imperialist-linked Movement for Democratic Change - that later changed to “fraternal criticism”. I certainly do mind; it is not a method I support. He is just telling lies here (like my supposed support for popular fronts).

Chomsky comes out with the idea that the role of intellectuals is to expose lies and to tell the truth. That might be a starting point. We should start by exposing all imperialist involvement in the efforts to achieve regime change in Zimbabwe. I don’t see the evidence to show that the elections were fake. Hey, what a ‘Stalinist’ I have become!

I don’t particularly support the slum clearances of 2005, but it is not clear to me what this has to do with Chinese business interests. Wasn’t it also supposedly about crushing the current partner in power? I don’t know how much Mugabe felt threatened by the violence coming from these slums. He did complain of it. However, it does appear to be an overreaction.

Unlike Turi, I don’t believe that socialism in one country is possible. Hold on. Is that not the central tenet of Stalinism? Is that not odd?

The left in the UK ought to learn that regime change begins at home! Here in the imperialist heartlands, where the pound is at a near state of collapse. That would be a major step in the goal of world revolution and do more to free Zimbabwe from the shackles of financial terrorism than imagining a doomed revolution against Zanu-PF with its mass base of support. I say doomed, in that it would be no more successful at producing socialism in one country than the present regime. It would not be a revolution, but regime change - exactly what the imperialists want.

Imperialism must die for the conditions for socialism to develop in a sustainable manner in these impoverished neo-colonies.

Stalinist!
Stalinist!

Rumour mill

There are a lot of rumours going around the left about who’s actually behind the CPGB (PCC) and the Weekly Worker. I’ve been aware of these for some time and paid little attention. I like the policies of the organisation and the paper is a fairly open forum, especially the letters pages, for various groups and individual comrades on the far left. This alone justifies its existence, in my view.

All non-mainstream parties and organisations, and probably those as well, will have been infiltrated, but what I find strange about the CPGB is that its membership seems to have increased very little in the past 20 years. For an organisation which professes to want to build a Communist Party of the European Union, this seems odd, to say the least. By now it should at least have a network of party or organisational branches across the country and links with similar organisations/parties across the EU. Even though it says conditions are not yet right for a mass communist party, one would expect the pre-party organisation to have greatly increased its membership beyond a largely London base who can all apparently be fitted into a fairly small meeting room, along with sympathisers.

From my own personal experience, I know that actually joining the organisation, rather than just being a sympathiser, seems to be incredibly difficult and drawn-out, if not impossible. I’m afraid this lends credence to the rumours circulating on the left as to who is behind the organisation, since it appears they don’t want members, but are happy to have sympathisers who are invited to aggregates and other events.

These monthly aggregates and the Weekly Worker’s letters page make a very good sounding board for current thinking among the broad far left and, as I say, this can be useful for those of us on the left, as well as for the opposition.

For this reason I’m happy to continue reading the Weekly Worker and perhaps contributing to the debates via the letters pages. I am not now actively pursuing membership of the CPGB as, apart from the difficulties I’ve encountered, I really don’t have the time or inclination to attend various seminars and aggregates.

I feel that, whatever they feel about the CPGB (PCC), other comrades on the left should perhaps consider its policies and adopt some of them. An internationalist stance is surely what is needed, and the ‘Little Britain’ and anti-EU mentality widespread on the left needs to be overcome. Yes, the EU is a capitalist club at the moment, but this can change. A breakaway group of socialist EU countries could be an option for the future.

Meanwhile, the current EU has forced much progressive legislation on Britain, including equality laws against ageism and the abolition of homophobic laws which existed into the 21st century here, nearly 40 years after the 1967 Sexual Offences Act.

I hope the Weekly Worker continues to provide a broad and open forum for those on the left. We badly need this if we are ever to cease being just small ‘confessional sects’ and develop into real socialist and communist parties building up their memberships and giving the masses real alternatives to the present three-party political set-up preserved by the outdated first-past-the-post electoral system, which penalises all other political parties.

Rumour mill
Rumour mill

Yachts up

The proposal to build a new royal yacht has rightly angered many at a time of great hardship and suffering. It shows the utter contempt that the Con-Dem government has towards us, rewarding not just the 1%, but also one parasitical family, while destroying the families and livelihoods of the 99%.

It is clear that this gives the anti-cuts movement and republicans a duty to work together to say that not only is the monarchy a completely undemocratic and corrupt ‘institution’, but it is also unaffordable. With ‘yacht-gate’ and the jubilee just months away, the question about why we are spending so much to keep one of the richest families in the world in their position needs to become a central question for us all.

For that reason, we would like to invite you all to attend a conference to debate, discuss and organise resistance to the monarchy, their power, privilege and wealth. ‘Building the republican movement’ will be taking place in Manchester on Saturday April 21. If you would like to register or find out more, see www.socialistsforrepublic.wordpress.com.

Yachts up
Yachts up

Where are you?

We write to you out of concern at the lack of any real unity on the left, despite the most ferocious onslaught on our class in living memory, and despite the beginnings of a fightback by the trade union movement. Clear evidence of this lack of unity is the existence of four different bodies all claiming to be the main national anti-cuts organisation.

One specific concern is the dwindling attendance at Left Unity Liaison Committee meetings. The LULC was set up four years ago to encourage greater cooperation on the left and promote ways of working more effectively together. It worked well for three years, gaining the active and regular support of 15 different organisations on the left and green left. Discussions took place to avoid electoral clashes. Organisations had the opportunity to critically discuss proposals such as the People’s Charter and learn what motivated such initiatives. During the 2010 general election campaign, the LULC acted as a kind of liaison committee for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, feeding ideas into Tusc and attempting to resolve potential problems that emerged.

Since then attendance at LULC meetings has declined. A number of organisations who used to attend quite regularly now no longer do so. No-one has complained that the LULC has not met since the summer. We would like to know why this has happened, so that we can together decide how best to attempt trying to promote greater unity across the left in the future.

We ask that you discuss the situation within your organisation and provide a collective response which reflects the views of the majority of your members. To this end, we would suggest a timescale of six weeks for responses, with a deadline of Saturday March 10, after which we will publicise the responses as they are presented, with a summary of our own at the end with conclusions.

• We ask for answers to the following questions. They can be as long or short as you choose:
• Does your organisation want to help promote left unity?
• If so, why does your organisation no longer attend LULC meetings, if that is the case?
• What concrete suggestions do your organisation have that would help promote greater unity on the left?

Where are you?
Where are you?

Consensus

The appearance of a number of members of the ‘Occupy movement’ from St Paul’s on the Andrew Marr programme on Sunday should have been an opportunity to present a clear alternative programme and vision of what an uncapitalist society might look like. It didn’t.

Outwith the perfectly acceptable defence of the right to protest, and reflections on how protest movements have shaped actual social policy in the past, when it came to a social policy of their own, they were more than let down. There was no radical presentation of a communist society, there was no exposition on where wealth comes from, there was no advancement of systems of workers’ control. No ideas about production for use, not profit, meeting the real social needs rather than invented ones, etc. Instead we had a sort of plea that things could be shared out more equally, and bankers and money investment perhaps more democratically controlled: the questions of ‘by who and how’ were not engaged.

As other topics came up, any liberal vision began to slip away, particularly with the latest US-style evangelical cry to control wanton teenage sex pots. Some Tory female MP is introducing a private members bill to demand that schools and teachers teach abstinence and ‘just say no’ during sex education classes; that moral sexual behaviour and ‘relationship’ classes should be included preferably instead of basic sex education. The aim being that young adults (she kept saying ‘teenage girls’ actually) should not engage in sex until they are in fixed and permanent relationships, preferably married.

I waited for this post-hippy generation to advance the prospect that actually bodies belong to those who live in them, that when people are ready to have sex they will have sex and this is a human right, and that anyway what is wrong with sex? It never came. Worse, there was a sort of meeting of minds that, yes, teenagers (mainly girls, but also boys) should not see their own bodies as consumer items to be consumed by each other! That capitalism and consumerism had created this problem of teenage pregnancies (and presumably the sex which led to them). That somehow teenagers were only having sex because ‘society’ urges them to, and they are more or less tricked into doing this stuff, which they actually don’t really want to do. No-one advocated the right to say ‘yes’ as well as ‘no’ or separated moral proscription and repression from health and information and the opening up of social choices.

There was much lording of the Dutch and Swedes for their low teenage birth rates and the way they dealt with this issue. Odd then nobody noticed that the Dutch have a far lower age of consent law than here, or that the only country with a higher teenage pregnancy rate is the good old USA, which has a higher age of sexual consent and invented the whole ‘Just say no’, ‘Jesus says sex is dirty’ morality tirade. That banging this same old, tired sexual abstinence drum doesn’t work: it just leads to more repression, more guilt, less openness and sensible review of free choices - and, of course, more poor souls locked up in jail for simple acts of human nature.

One would have thought a whole vision of a new society of sexual, economic and class freedom would have been presented here in prime TV time before an audience of millions. Instead, in my view anyway, the presence of Occupy only went to reinforce the media and bourgeois political line that there is lots of smoke and little of political substance in the movement.

Scratch any liberal.

Consensus
Consensus

Rated

I rate Toby Abse very highly among commentators on Italian politics, and his shrewd reports appearing in the Weekly Worker are one of the main bonuses of the paper. ‘No surrender on article 18’ was no exception (January 12).

May I just add that what really does look worrying is the massive extent to which the Monti coalition’s slogans are making inroads into the middle class left and the intelligentsia generally. Currently it is far from uncommon to hear lifelong Rifondazione voters and campaigners for all the right causes gravely suggest that ‘We’d better not go to the barricades over article 18’ (ie, the law protecting employees against unfair dismissal), as the article is supposedly not helpful to either the young unemployed or small business employees (where article 18 does not apply).

Such reasoning is strongly reminiscent of the ‘Fox without a tail’ fable - and yet here’s the most dangerous trap for Italian workers at the moment.

Rated
Rated

Big picture

Just one reader’s opinion: the graphic art for the article ‘Europe’s mutual suicide pact’ (January 19) is a little too graphic.

Big picture
Big picture