Letters
Better in
I welcome Mike Macnair’s call for socialists to fight both inside and outside the Labour Party (‘One fight, inside and out’, April 12) and completely agree with his answers to the questions raised in the letters column over the last month by Dave Vincent (Letters, March 22 and April 5).
Macnair recognises that Labour is an instrument for extracting concessions within the capitalist order and mitigating capitalist attacks. In the spirit of comradely debate, acceptance is one thing, but political power is quite another. To gain these concessions from the bourgeoisie, Labour must actually be in power either at local or national level - and preferably the latter. Therefore, any action which undermines the ability of Labour to gain power can also be seen legitimately as a shot in the foot for the working class and the left as a whole.
Where left candidates have stood against Labour - George Galloway excepted - they have had little success. Galloway may well have gained over 50% of the vote in the recent Bradford by-election, but in 2010 Respect’s best result was in Birmingham, where Salma Yaqoob gained 25.1%. This must out of necessity be compared with the success of the Labour left in London and the south east, where John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn were both returned to Westminster - and increased their respective majorities. It cannot simply be the amount of money poured into supporting Labour Party candidates which explains these results.
However, from a different angle, it represents a severe test on resilience for Labour Party activists to campaign for individuals who have betrayed working class causes on a number of occasions, even though they purport to share the same political colours. Nearly every year a motion comes up to the Labour Representation Committee’s national conference calling on that organisation to support candidates to the left of Labour. I have seriously considered the possibility, and do not mind admitting it. After all, it is not always the case that left-of-Labour candidates perform badly.
One example of a political party which has built a solid working class support from the bottom up is the Independent Working Class Association, which has held at least one seat on Oxford city council since 2002 (regrettably for the left, the councillor who held this seat has decided to stand down this year). They take a fresh, unorthodox and pragmatic view on many issues, which have certainly raised eyebrows, even on the left: not least their unwillingness to describe themselves as ‘socialist’ (eg, ‘No vote for IWCA’ Weekly Worker April 28 2005). Whatever the faults with its ideology, the IWCA have left a permanent mark in Oxford, although they were small in number, and the left has a lot to learn from their community-based activism. There are a number of drawbacks to this strategy: the IWCA is focused on specific wards in local elections. Its programme has been criticised for being too narrow and its foray into national politics was unsuccessful (its candidate gained 2.1% of the vote in Oxford East in 2005).
There are a number of practical problems with deciding which Labour MPs ought to be opposed. How would we decide whether a particular Labour MP should be supported? What criteria would we use? Are there some issues which would be more important in considering support than others? For example, when Jon Cruddas stood for the deputy leadership in 2007, many Labour lefts eventually decided not to support him because of his refusal to nominate John McDonnell in the latter’s first attempt to become Labour leader, as well as Cruddas’s ambivalent voting record with regard to New Labour policies. Similar issues arose when Diane Abbott stood against John McDonnell for nominations to stand for election as Labour leader. It should also be remembered that MPs’ voting records do not necessarily reveal an MP’s true views on legislation. Some Labour MPs are better described as ‘pragmatic Blairites’ - as opposed to ‘ideological Blairites’, in the sense that they may not support the New Labour neoliberal agenda wholeheartedly, but are willing to go along with it for political purposes. Would it not be better for Labour left and left-of-Labour activists to simply pile pressure on vulnerable MPs rather than reject them as being lost causes?
Furthermore, a series of articles published in Weekly Worker earlier this year ought to provide food for thought for all parties on the left both inside and outside Labour. Socialist policies will carry no weight without a population which is receptive to them. I refer to Paul B Smith’s three articles on class-consciousness (‘Politics of fear and despair’ January 9; ‘Impediments to consciousness’ January 19; ‘Overcoming despair’ January 26). He discusses Hillel Ticktin’s views on the influence of both Stalinism and social democracy on class-consciousness, as well as the role of despair and fear in creating support for individualised forms of ‘escape’ from the realities of capitalism.
Related to this, one of the main issues which the left must come to terms with is how to develop the class-consciousness in that section of the proletariat which self-identifies as ‘middle class’. Smith does posit some suggestions as to why divisions can exist within the working class and how the bourgeoisie uses these divisions to prevent the working class from coming into existence. Unfortunately, the ‘middle class’ (and I use inverted commas to show that I use the term in its sociological context) is very resistant to socialist ideas. It constantly fails to recognise the contingent nature of its own economic position and the fact that in plain terms its material affluence is based on a fundamentally unstable economic and political system. No-one seems to have an answer to the ‘middle class’ problem: New Labour’s answer was not political education and argument, but rather to accept the idea that most of British society is ‘middle class’ and by implication impermeable to socialism. The issue is not going to go away, though. How can we help increase trade union membership? How can Labour and the left use community-based politics to raise political awareness and promote collective solutions to economic problems?
Labour lefts are not ‘dullards’, and if we can be criticised it is only for our conservatism and our desire to opt for the ‘safe’ option, as opposed to taking a leap into the unknown. Appeals to unity should not undermine internal debate, but sometimes we collectively cut off our noses to spite our faces - and that includes Labour lefts like me. It is good to see the Weekly Worker showing willingness to take the Labour left seriously. I am willing to accept an olive branch when it is handed to me, in the spirit of comradeship and open dialogue.
Better in
Better in
Disdainful
I am not clear as to why Mike Macnair believes that there is any significant difference between the Labour Party as a bourgeois workers’ party (which continues to be seen by the large majority of workers as its party, which is closely linked to the trades unions) and the US Democrats, for whom those things are also largely true. The Democrats are not directly based on the trade unions - there is no constitutional link - but it is no less true that the US unions provide large amounts of funding and, more importantly, physical support. The only difference is that the Democrats have far more millionaires and billionaires involved with it, partly due to the fact that you can’t get yourself even on the ticket unless you have several million dollars to fund your campaign - and, with no real party discipline, these politicians are more able to pursue policies in the interests of their class than are Labour politicians.
The point is, does this make any real difference to the way in which Marxists relate to such a party? The answer to that question comes down to what you believe the real reason for Marxists being in such a party to be. If you believe in parliamentary socialism, if you believe that the function of Marxists in such a party is to commit it to socialist politics, then clearly such limitations are important. Even then, however, it is not clear how the condition of the Labour Party now is significant for what you intend it to become. The difficulties of building a mass workers’ party remain essentially the same, whether that party is a transformation of the existing Labour Party or a brand new party built in opposition to it. In fact, the experience of the latter suggests that it is far more difficult than the former, as there have been several instances of the Labour Party being transformed from a rightwing moribund rump into a large, active party.
But, surely, the important point here is that Marxists do not believe in parliamentary socialism, and our perspective is not simply one of transforming the Labour Party, pushing it left in the shape of adoption of largely meaningless ‘left’ conference resolutions and so on. The whole point about a Marxist perspective is that it is based upon the idea of the working class liberating itself via its own self-activity and self-government, and our goal is to be able to assist the working class in achieving that. As Engels said about workers’ parliamentary representation, it is nothing more than an index of the class-consciousness of the workers. The programme and development of the workers’ party is in reality nothing more than that either, and cannot be if it is to be an actual reflection of the workers as their party - though, of course, this is not a mechanical, one-to-one relation.
The true function of a workers’ party in the parliamentary sphere - both at a local and national government level - is to act to legitimise the actions of the workers outside those parliamentary structures, to use them as a tribune to promote, and organise the workers’ struggle. But it is necessary to understand by this that, when we speak of the working class here, we are speaking of the class in its majority, not simply of the tiny minority of activists.
Engels, in his writings to the US socialists in relation to the establishment of a workers’ party, emphasised that he and Marx in 1848 had joined the German Democrats, despite them being a bourgeois party, because they were the party to which the German workers looked. It was by being members of the Democrats, Engels says, that they were able to get the ear of the workers. In other words, what we have here is an application of the dialectic as Lenin understood it: “The truth is always concrete.” That is, the question, ‘What is a workers’ party?’, can only be answered concretely according to the reality existing at the time. In this case, the workers’ party - the party which had the support of the German workers - was an openly bourgeois party. That merely reflected the reality of the stage of development of workers ‘class consciousness of the time. It was in this context, Engels continues, that the phrase in the Communist manifesto, “The communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working class parties”, was to be understood. Sectarians can proclaim as many new workers’ parties as they like, but experience demonstrates that they are no such thing, but only adventures by petty bourgeois dilettantes, who have no stomach for the real working class and who prefer their own sterile purity.
Engels put forward views similar to those he advocated to the US socialists in relation to Britain. Then as now, there was no shortage of petty bourgeois sects scrabbling to promote themselves as the saviours of the working class, each with their own particular truth, their own philosopher’s stone that would unlock the secrets of creating socialism. But Engels’s recommendation to Eleanor Marx and her comrades was to keep a distance from all of these sects, including those that called themselves Marxist, such as Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation, as well as the Independent Labour Party, and instead to go directly to the mass of workers, who at the time were organised within the Liberal Party, and particularly the liberal clubs. In the end, it was this strategy and, from it, the decision of the trades unions to create their own political party, separate from the Liberals, which created the real mass movement for the creation of the Labour Party.
Marxists could do worse than follow Engels’s advice today. The best, easiest route to the majority of workers within the workplace, within the communities, remains through the Labour Party. It is work in these grassroots places, in the daily lives of the workers, that Marxists need to immerse themselves in, not in the trades union branches, the CLPs, or any of the other forums which are inhabited by the same milieu of activists. In reality, the political programme is not in any real sense a hindrance to that work, any more than was the programme of the German Democrats a hindrance to Marx and Engels in relating to the workers in 1848, or that of the Liberals to Eleanor Marx. On the contrary, it is a basis upon which to encourage the newly mobilised workers to take their struggle into the political sphere, to transform the workers’ party, and make it more adequate to their needs.
Those who disdain the existing workers’ party in reality disdain the existing working class - of which it is merely a political reflection. In fact, the Labour Party remains significantly to the left of the majority of the working class. Those who believe they can simply short-cut this reality by proclaiming their own new workers’ party essentially base themselves on idealism, not Marxist materialism. They do not see that the dominant ideas are based upon material conditions within society. A workers’ party can act via a dynamic, dialectical interaction with the class to stimulate the class struggle, but it cannot substitute for it. To change the dominant ideas, it is necessary to change material conditions, which means addressing the immediate problems of ordinary workers on a daily basis, by encouraging and facilitating their own self-activity.
On that basis, the class-consciousness of the workers becomes transformed, which is the fundamental requirement for developing a mass workers’ party, whose programme develops along with it. As Engels put it, “It is far more important that the movement should spread, proceed harmoniously, take root and embrace as much as possible the whole American proletariat than that it should start and proceed from the beginning on theoretically perfectly correct lines … The great thing is to get the working class to move as a class; that once obtained, they will soon find the right direction, and all who resist … will be left out in the cold with small sects of their own” (Engels to Florence Kelley Wischnewetsky, December 1886).
Disdainful
Disdainful
'Idolisation'
Mike Macnair’s response (‘Both Pham Binh and Paul Le Blanc are wrong’, April 5) to my ‘Over a Cliff and into Occupy with Lenin’ (http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2012/03/27/over-a-cliff-and-into-occupy-with-lenin) mischaracterises my positions and arguments on a range of issues, so some clarification is in order. This clarification is more difficult because most of Macnair’s criticisms are based on passages that the Weekly Worker’s editorial board chose to remove in their rendition of that piece, which was retitled ‘Wanting to get Lenin wrong’ (Weekly Worker March 29). The paragraphs dealing with Bolshevism and Occupy were removed in their entirety.
Macnair writes: “The larger part of what we cut from Pham Binh’s article is directed to arguing that the ‘Occupy’ movement represented the 21st century equivalent of Bolshevism.” In the missing text of my piece, I addressed this line of criticism when I wrote, “It should go without saying that Occupy at six months does not resemble a disciplined, centralised organisation steeled over two decades of battles.” Does this sound like I put an equal sign between Occupy and the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party?
I hope Weekly Worker readers examine the full text of ‘Over a Cliff and into Occupy with Lenin’ and decide for themselves if I stand guilty as charged by Macnair. I would also request that the removed paragraphs be printed by the Weekly Worker as a separate piece with a fitting title (such as ‘Lenin and Occupy’, as opposed to ‘Occupy = Bolshevism’).
Macnair’s mischaracterisations become absurd when he writes: “What I have just said, however, is not what is meant by Pham Binh when he argues for a ‘multi-tendency party’ - as can be seen from the arguments idolising ‘Occupy’ which we did not publish.” As can be seen from the arguments which we did not publish? I feel compelled to protest this method of debate, where the relevant passages on one side of a question are excised wholesale, while the opposing side is permitted to write at length and in detail. This is at odds with the Communist Party of Great Britain’s commitment to rigorous and honest debate.
Macnair goes on to make claims about what I mean when I call for a multi-tendency party. The problem is that I have never written in any detail what I think the character of such a party should or could be. How anyone can claim to know my views and my vision better than I do is beyond me. This also seems to happen whenever people start debating Lenin and ‘Leninism’ - ‘everyone’ understands that Lenin built a ‘party of a new type’, even though Lenin rejected this in Leftwing communism’s analysis of why the Bolshevik RSDLP remained true to the revolutionary principles of the Second International, while the German Social Democratic Party and its leading orthodox theoretician, Karl Kautsky, betrayed them from 1914 onward.
Speaking of Leftwing communism, I strongly disagree with Macnair that Lenin “rewrote the history of Russian social democracy before 1917 so as to write back the independent party existence of the Bolsheviks all the way to 1903”. I am assuming Macnair is referring to this line from the book: “As a current of political thought and as a political party, Bolshevism has existed since 1903.” Taken literally, Macnair is right.
However, there is another way of looking at this that goes back to Marx and Engels, both of whom often referred in their writings to ‘our party,’ by which they did not literally mean the Communist League. Elsewhere in Leftwing communism Lenin refers to the Bolsheviks as a ‘trend’ and that is how I understood Lenin’s use of the word ‘party’ in that particular instance. I seriously doubt Lenin thought or sought to convey to foreign communists in 1920 that he helped establish a national organisation called ‘the Bolshevik Party’ way back in 1903, especially since that phrase never appears in his 1903-1916 writings or speeches - but I could be wrong and Macnair could be absolutely right. Again, people should read Leftwing communism themselves and make up their own minds.
The conclusion of ‘Over a Cliff and into Occupy’ does not say a word about multi-tendency versus single-tendency organising. Instead, it compares and contrasts the divided state of the Russian socialist movement that Lenin grappled with in the 1890-1903 period and the divided state of the American socialist movement today. How Macnair can extrapolate from that comparison and determine where I stand on the character of the multi-tendency party I think is appropriate (and how where I stand is dead wrong) - again - is beyond me.
According to Macnair, “Pham Binh is wrong because the ‘broad movement’ or ‘broad party’ conception without solving the problem of unity of the Marxists does not work as anything other than a form of process by which dissent is recuperated into the bourgeois political game.” This is news to me, since I never advocated uniting “the Marxists”, nor do I see “the problem of unity of the Marxists” as being a conceptual problem I need to ‘solve’, since it is a practical problem and a collective problem that we all need to have a hand in solving.
Before there can be any intelligent discussion of whether or not revolutionaries and reformists can unite in a single party, we have to straighten out what we mean by ‘reformist’. ‘Reformist’ and ‘reformism’ are now used as pejorative rather than descriptive terms, hence why Macnair is absolutely correct to point out that reformists in the workers’ movement are “very difficult to identify at the present date”, but does not provide a succinct definition for this trend that we must be very careful about uniting with. The commonly accepted definition for ‘reformist’ and ‘reformism’ has been lost since the context it emerged from - the international mass worker-socialist movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s, known as social democracy - changed so dramatically, as the socialist movement repeatedly fractured into warring camps after 1914 (World War I), 1919-21 (Third International), 1938 (Fourth International) and 1968 (Chinese revolution, Vietnam’s long war of independence, Cuban revolution, many other social upheavals).
This fractured heritage has been completely uprooted and destroyed on a mass scale where I hail from, the United States. Macnair stresses that “the fundamentals of Marxism”, as expressed in the German SPD’s 1891 Erfurt programme, were crucial to the Second International’s success. However, he does not address the period before the Erfurt programme was adopted, from 1875 to 1891, which saw an almost two-decade political struggle waged between Marxists and the followers of Ferdinand Lasalle within the SPD - itself the product of a merger between the two different ideological trends in Germany’s worker-socialist movement at that time.
The point here is that the triumph of “the fundamentals of Marxism” in the SPD in 1891 became possible only after a long period of struggles, trials, errors and false starts, a struggle that the Marxist left has yet to seriously begin within Occupy and its offshoots.
My arguments about party-building are not ‘one size fits all’ formulas applicable internationally, but are specifically geared to the 21st century American context I find myself in. There is no doubt that these questions and answers are radically different in Britain. Here in the States, we have yet to produce our own George Galloway or even a Respect-like experiment, much less a non-socialist Labour Party with a mass following. I do not pretend to know enough about the contexts that the Scottish Socialist Party, the Brazilian Workers Party, Rifondazione Comunista in Italy, the NPA in France, MAS in Bolivia, or PSUV in Venezuela operate in to tell them what they are doing wrong. In general, I think socialists in America would be lucky to have their problems, because our main problem is this: unlike the aforementioned groups, we are totally irrelevant to local, state and national politics. We are so weak that we cannot influence the direction or shape of Occupy in its shrunken, post-eviction state.
This brings me to the last charge Macnair levelled at me, that I ‘idolise’ Occupy. For all its many faults, Occupy succeeded in mobilising more workers and oppressed people in four weeks than the entire socialist left combined has in four decades. It quickly grew into what can only be described as a nationwide upsurge or uprising, an elemental outpouring of rage and hope that has irreversibly altered the American political landscape for the next decade.
The Marxist left first ignored Occupy, then focused on its allegedly serious problems, derided its so-called immaturity, and pointed to its ‘fatal’ shortcomings before Occupy blew the Marxist left’s doom-and-gloom predictions of failure and defeat out of the water, as relevant social forces like unions began to march to the beat of Occupy’s drum - literally.
Macnair lauds Jim Creegan’s report on west coast unions and Occupy (‘West coast rebound’ Weekly Worker March 29) for being “closer” politically to the views CPGB wants to promote and contrasts it with my supposed idolisation of Occupy - never mind the fact that our respective focuses were entirely different. Creegan discussed concrete developments on the west coast, while I took a more general, historical view of Occupy in light of Lars Lih’s work on Lenin and examined what Occupy, the Bolsheviks, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and the four students who launched the wave of sit-ins in the Jim Crow south all have in common (rest assured, it is not an equals sign).
If Macnair feels that the content of the comparisons I made are not correct then he should say so and explain why instead of erroneously claiming that I think Occupy is Bolshevism for the 21st century. If the Weekly Worker would like to print my take on the state of Occupy à la comrade Creegan, I would be happy to oblige, since most of the socialist left is busy making bogus accusations of ultra-leftism, substitutionism and elitism against groups like the Black Orchid Collective and preaching about ‘mass action’, although they have yet to inspire or lead mass actions involving a tiny fraction of what Occupy manages to do even now, in its weakened state.
'Idolisation'
'Idolisation'
Secular limits
Tony Greenstein’s ‘Pragmatism in the service of imperialism’ (April 12) is a generally good analytic account. However, I must disagree with his final point: “If equal rights for Arabs and Israelis means no Israel, then that is a price well worth paying.”
No! Equal rights for Arabs and Israeli Jews does mean no Israel and that should be an essential objective. Israel is based on colonialism and racism and its continued existence means tolerating a state that has expelled most of the original inhabitants of the land it occupies and which practises apartheid and repression against those who remain. Finkelstein asks rhetorically whether it is “reasonable for six million Palestinians to descend on a country which right now has 1.8 million Palestinians and five and a half million Jews”. Was it reasonable for several million Jews to “descend on” a country with a million or so Palestinians? The Israeli ‘law of return’ means that this is continuing: it should be stopped and the wrongs need to be redressed as far as they can be. While recognising that must not mean expulsion of Israeli Jews, it will mean reparations and return of property to Palestinians, whether or not they choose to ‘return’.
Israel also imposes oppressive religious laws on secular Jews as a result of Ben Gurion’s deal with the National Religious Party. There is no civil, only religious, marriage or divorce, which prevents intermarriage between Jews and Arabs, or Christians and Muslims. To give just one example of Jewish personal status laws: childless Jewish widows have to go through a disgusting and degrading ceremony if they want to free themselves from their brother-in-law’s right to have a child by them, as proxy for their dead husband. This involves kneeling to take off the brother-in-law’s shoe and being spat on by him; some brothers-in-law blackmail the widow for money or other favours before they agree to this ceremony.
It may seem strange that such medieval barbarism is accepted by Israeli Jews. However, the direct victims of it are a small minority of the population, are mainly women and are often embarrassed to speak out. As Ben Gurion realised, there was a basic flaw in the idea of Jews returning to Israel to become secular (like he was), as that would in time undermine the Jewish exclusiveness of the state and might lead to intermarriage and assimilation between Jews and Arabs. So Israeli Jews can only be secular within certain limits. Israeli Arabs are similarly forced to abide by the personal status laws of their assigned religious community (Muslim, Christian or Druze), which I am sure must be similarly oppressive, particularly to women.
By way of information, I am a Jewish former Zionist, who lived in Israel for eight years. I am also an ex-member of the Socialist Workers Party and do not recognise the separation of “ideological spheres” that Tony Greenstein claims exists in the SWP’s analysis. However, I have not been involved with the SWP for quite a few years now, so perhaps this is something new. I’d need more than one line quoted from Callinicos to be convinced of that.
Secular limits
Secular limits