Letters

Denigration

Whilst flattered to be a topic of the CPGB’s last aggregate, I can’t help but feel a little disappointed that the personal denigration that was usually reserved for e-lists, meetings and whispers of the gossips has spilled over into public (‘Perspectives for the left’, May 3).

I will answer the two charges of lack of commitment and not understanding the CPGB method here and deal with the political issues elsewhere. Firstly the amount of money I have put into the CPGB, Communist Students and Hands Off the People of Iran in Manchester far exceeded regular dues and in an email to the Provisional Central Committee on March 27 I noted that I could not afford this and regular dues. Funnily enough, I was asked to continue shelling out for rooms, printing, stalls, etc instead of paying dues. But this is now something to denigrate and attack me? In terms of active involvement in the group you only have to look at the quantitative and qualitative difference of the work I have had the pleasure to be involved in through Manchester Communist Students to know who has been doing what.

Secondly, it is frankly nonsense that I did not understand the CPGB’s politics or approach. Problems arise because the approach is exceptionally hollow and often has no practical direction for comrades. Hence the slow, drip-drip-dropping out and resignations from comrades involved in trade unions or the broad movement. It is also a typical response within the left to claim those who leave failed to understand this or that: it is a self-preservation mechanism, usually the reserve of sect apparatchiks.

Strangely these kind of attacks only undermine the assertion that the CPGB is an open and democratic organisation.

Denigration
Denigration

Get serious

Ben Lewis’s criticism of the new Anti-Capitalist Initiative exposes not the weakness of our new project, but the problems of his own sect and its approach to politics (‘Ditch sects and fronts’, May 3).

Firstly, deriding the meeting as small is petty and misleading. The meeting was initially planned as a small get-together of people who were interested in the project. Indeed, it was an organising meeting and was never intended to be a ‘conference’. It was only after it captured some momentum on Facebook and over 100 people were down as ‘attending’, with a further thousand invited, that it became a de facto open event. Even then, not a single leaflet was given out for it - it was only advertised through Facebook - but we still got 80 people along. They were all activists, in one way or another involved in building the movement, who wanted to organise a new kind of left, people who wanted to get stuck in, not just talk.

And even though it was just an organising meeting, it was still bigger than anything the Campaign for a Marxist Party - the CPGB’s one-time ‘baby’ - was ever able to pull off, and was it as big as the initial meetings for the London Socialist Alliance back in the late 90s, an initiative which at the time the CPGB heralded as the “start of a real fightback”.

We believe, like the CPGB once did, that “what characterises the left throughout the country is a fatal lack of ambition, a timid paralysis in the face of the task of challenging Labour and bourgeois politics in general for the allegiance of our class. Organised on a militant platform of independent working class politics, the left has the possibility to start to exercise hegemony over far wider sections of society than simply itself.” Today that possibility could be realised with the Anti-Capitalist Initiative, yet the CPGB seem too bitter to take part and have absented themselves from this struggle.

Lewis goes on to bemoan that the meeting dared discuss the situation in the unions and how to organise a genuine rank-and-file initiative. No-one at the meeting claimed that “80 people are going to go off and build” such an initiative, but those involved in the conference can be part of the steps that are being taken to rebuild basic working class organisation. There is nothing “delusional” in wanting to link up existing forces fighting for this, such as Grass Roots Left or the rank-and-file committees in the building industry. This task is an immediate necessity for the working class and any revolutionary organisation of any worth or relevance would see it as a priority.

On the charge of liquidationism - let’s get real. It is true that some of us involved in the project have recently left small, narrowly defined propaganda groups to build something larger and more plural. No-one has renounced Marxist politics, but we are realistic that we cannot simply slap down a Marxist programme and rally thousands to our banner. We need to convince and be prepared to be convinced over political questions, and recognise we do not have all the answers, although we have some ideas and principles on how to proceed.

Of course, Lewis is right that liquidationism can be the reverse side of the coin to sectarianism, but he does not realise that in his accusation of us as liquidators he is simply revealing himself to be a sectarian of the highest order. The ex-Workers Power members did not want to form a new Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyist micro-grouping with their own website and regular publication. That would have been sect-building. Instead they are trying a different approach. However, the Weekly Worker has accused the ex-WP grouping of both building a sect and liquidating themselves, all within the space of a week. Our heads are spinning - we can barely keep up with the polemic!

What we defend in this new initiative is that we are launching a process of discussion, debate and united action, with the aim of launching a revolutionary organisation in the future - one which is more united and brings in wider forces of the left. Have we achieved that now? No, which is why we are taking it slowly and carefully, despite the demands of various sects that we must adopt a programme and policies and all sorts of slogans straightaway. Our answer to all the sprinters is that this is a marathon: you are welcome to come with us on this journey, but you will have to slow down your pace a little. Be more cautious and pragmatic about which political battles you pick and how you fight them.

It is a curious situation that the CPGB can find a problem with an attempt to engage the widest range of those on the left in serious discussion. Yet in almost every issue of your paper, stitched-up conferences that end up with Labourite platforms are condemned. Arguing for an open process of unity and then dismissing such a process is hypocrisy and demonstrates a lack of seriousness in approach. Amongst the British left, there is a common approach that each and every group believes and thinks it has all of the answers. In their isolation, they comfort themselves with the idea that the objective situation is awful, or the other groups are the problem, but ultimately what most left groups have in common is the belief that they are fighting for unity, but having to wait for everyone else to agree with their particular method and programme. We believe that this is a failed, self-replicating dead end and that, as communists, we need engage in a wide-ranging rethink to clarify what a revolutionary programme looks like today. That takes time, not one afternoon in London.

But for all of Lewis’s bluff and bluster, the CPGB did not submit a single resolution to the conference, let alone their much fabled Marxist programme. He urged us to adopt a Marxist programme “right away”, calling for workers’ control of production and internationalism. Yes, Lewis says the meeting was disappointingly small, implying it had no basis to really do anything. Do we really want another small left meeting declaring a revolutionary programme and party? Isn’t this what we should try and get away from? Aren’t we sick of the latest sect declaring itself, bells and all, with a new international programme without first going through the essential task of discussing and debating out what should be done with activists from across the unions and social movements? The CPGB is fond of Marxists working within the NPA in France - but that party took nine months of pre-founding meetings and discussions over policies to decide on an initial programme before it was launched. How come our French cousins have almost a year to organise their party but we have less than an afternoon before we are written off as liquidators? This is not a serious criticism.

In his previous article about the split in Workers Power, we find a similarly unserious piece of advice for us. Lewis’s suggestion to the ex-Workers Power members was that they should have stayed in our group and carried on a protracted faction fight and broken discipline in public. If they had followed his advice, it would have resulted in a demoralising year of internal struggle, as well as bitter acrimony from their former comrades, for flouting the group’s rules on public debate.

What appalling advice! If you disagree with a group’s method or line, then you have to follow the organisational principles your group lives by to try and change them; if you disagree with them fundamentally and there is no hope of reform, then you leave. Advocating breaking party rules just because you don’t agree with them strikes the ex-WP members as unprincipled. Furthermore, we are not talking about large organisations, let alone a mass party. It can sometimes be the case that the fight for unity can be better served by having the debate openly, not just within the confines of narrow Trotskyist grouping.

Finally, by cutting through the tone and ferocity of the CPGB’s criticism, we arrive at a stark truth. The CPGB is going nowhere fast, its various attempts to unite the left on their version of Marxism have failed and now they have collapsed into the Labour Representation Committee. It is not us that is moving right, comrades: it is you. We have supporters in the new initiative who are active in the anti-cuts movement and playing an important role in student struggles. We do not want to build a sterile sect fixated on reliving the glory days of Kautsky and Plekhanov. We are looking to the future and want to build a revolutionary organisation that is suited to the conditions and tasks we face today.

Those of you who want to come with us are more than welcome; to the rest, we wish you luck in the Labour Party. You are going to need it.

Get serious
Get serious

Small rooms

Stuart King provides a defensive and unintentionally hilarious missive on the Anti-Capitalist Initiative, which sees his ex-Workers Power grouping attempt to butter up another ex-Workers Power grouping, in full view of yet another (smaller) ex-Workers Power grouping, and - for good measure - Workers Power itself (Letters, May 3).

Comical enough to begin with - a unity initiative consisting primarily of the fragments of a single small Trot group. Yet the real kicker is added, unnecessarily, by comrade King, when he disputes the CPGB’s focus on Marxist politics. “If we started only with people who only agreed with ‘Marxist fundamentals’ (whatever they are), we could meet in a very small conference chamber,” he writes; but, of course, the ACI was launched, indeed, in a very small “conference chamber” (or, as the University of London Union might less grandiloquently call it, a seminar room), with the vast majority present members (or recent-vintage ex-members) of extant Trot groups.

Like it or not, comrade King, you have indeed “started” with people who agree with “Marxist fundamentals” - albeit, people who are so embarrassed by them that they cannot even mention them in a motion to be voted on by other Marxists.

And yet there is that pregnant “whatever they are” in parentheses - it could be read as dismissive of our supposed ‘vagueness’ (read any issue of our paper, comrade), but also as an admission of ignorance. The most fundamental of Marxist fundamentals is science, and science is at the end of the day about marshalling the past to shape the future - experiment, and repetition of experiment, to toughen up a hypothesis that can guide us in action.

There is one hypothesis that has proven stubbornly difficult to dissolve, in spite of overwhelming evidence of its abject stupidity. It is the hypothesis of the masses ‘out there’, just waiting to join a group ‘broad’ enough to have them. The Socialist Alliance, in which - before all Workers Power’s misfortunes - we and they worked together productively, failed to attract notional thousands of disaffected Labour voters. Respect - from which WP abstained on pedantic Trot grounds - failed to attract teeming masses of angry Muslim activists. Most successors to those have been so insignificant as not to be worth mentioning.

There is an objective side to this failure - new Labour ‘parties’ run up against the fact that the old one still exists. There is also the subjective side, which is that everyone who has been in the movement for more than five minutes can spot a bunch of Trots pretending to be Labourites (or, in this case, anarchists) a mile and a half off - and, frankly, find this manipulative behaviour more than a bit weird.

Now, Stuart King imagines that the specific branding of the ACI will mean UK Uncut and Occupy types will transcend their obsessions with camping and Twitter to bother talking to him. I suspect, strongly, that he will be disappointed. If he thereby finally learns something about Marxist fundamentals, it will have been for his own good.

Small rooms
Small rooms

Liquidationist?

I have to unbend the stick yet again, since comrades in the Communist Party of Great Britain mischaracterise where I stand on parties and party-building efforts.

First Mike Macnair claimed I advocated a “process by which dissent is recuperated into the bourgeois political game” (‘Both Pham Binh and Paul Le Blanc are wrong’ Weekly Worker April 5); and now Ben Lewis accuses me of drawing “movementist” and “liquidationist” conclusions (‘Ditch sects and fronts’ Weekly Worker May 3). Unfortunately, Lewis cannot be right about my position against Macnair, since Macnair acknowledged that I favour multi-tendency socialist parties over single-tendency ‘Leninist’ organisations. If that is liquidationism, then I am as guilty of it as Lenin was in 1912, because he advocated just such a model for the Russian Social Democratic Party at that time.

Lars T Lih is absolutely correct to point out that liquidationism - that is, dropping the goal of a democratic revolution in autocratic Russia and confining socialist organising to what the tsar deemed legal - was viewed by many of the RSDLP’s Menshevik and Bolshevik activists as an existential threat, a danger to all factions and tendencies, because it threatened the RSDLP itself (See LT Lih, ‘A faction is not a party’ Weekly Worker May 3). I think Lenin and his comrades were right politically and organisationally in how they handled the problem of liquidationism, and I am certainly not a liquidationist (if I was, I would have written historical articles attacking Lenin and the 1912 Prague conference, as the liquidators did). What Lenin and the Bolsheviks meant by liquidationism is completely at odds with Lewis’s (ab)use of the term.

James Cannon, a founding member of the American Communist Party, was also accused of being a liquidationist, since he favoured scrapping the CP’s underground, illegal organising in conditions where legal organising was both possible and necessary (See, for example, www.workerspower.net/james-p-cannon-and-the-fight-for-communism-in-the-usa). In Cannon’s case and in mine the charge is bogus, without any merit whatsoever.

I suspect that Lewis sincerely believes I am a liquidationist because six months ago I called for regroupment on the American socialist left in ‘Occupy and the tasks of socialists’ (http://links.org.au/node/2657), a position I reiterated in greater detail in ‘Another socialist left is possible’ (http://links.org.au/node/2735). Calling for the liquidation of the existing Marxist groups does not make one a liquidationist in the way Lenin understood it, because we in America do not have a mass worker-socialist party to liquidate! Perhaps this is news to Lewis, but for us here in the United States it has been our central stumbling block for the better part of half a century. If we did have such a party, I (and tens of thousands of others) would be part of it and would fight against any attempt to liquidate it under any pretext.

Today, the existing groups on the American socialist left stand in the way of and block the development of such a party. Does Lewis (or the CPGB) stand in favour of this status quo, or should the existing divides be liquidated in favour of a qualitatively better organisation - more democratic, fluid and open than the unchanging socialist sects and their proprietary front groups that currently clutter the left landscape? This is the real question that needs to be answered - not by Lewis and the CPGB alone, but by all socialists, Marxists and anti-capitalist revolutionaries; and not by words alone, but through deeds, through action.

This is precisely what the Anti-Capitalist Initiative (ACI) seems to be attempting to do and why I believe the project has merit, whatever its flaws. A living, breathing, provisional experiment like the ACI has a much better chance at succeeding than a group or publication that focuses on getting the demands, programme, formal politics, history and theory ‘right’ (or criticising everyone else’s demands, programme, formal politics, history and theory for being wrong), because the former has the possibility of real, qualitative transformation and development, while the latter can only repeat its criticisms ad nauseum and will in practice go nowhere, no matter how right those criticisms are.

The key for the ACI (or any new initiative) is whether it develops meaningful democratic mechanisms to create a culture of accountability and comradely, critical and honest self-reflection, the essential preconditions for straightening out the inevitable political and organisational errors.

The central disagreement I have with the CPGB is the following statement by Lewis: “What we say is that unless we openly commit to building a party committed to the programmatic fundamentals of Marxism, with space and room to debate tactical and indeed strategic disagreements, then we will not get anywhere at all. What do we learn from 1912? That at all times, whatever the level of the class struggle, the task of Marxists is to unite all those committed to a Marxist political party.”

Our task is not “at all times, whatever the level of the class struggle … to unite all those committed to a Marxist political party”. This is ahistorical. It is also wrong in a situation where the Marxist wing of a crippled workers’ movement is made up of fragmented, competing splinters and slivers. Getting these marginal elements to all agree on the definition of Marxist fundamentals would not help to recreate the powerful worker-socialist movement that Europe’s ruling classes feared and hated at the turn of the 20th century.

More importantly, making the “fundamentals of Marxism” the precondition for any party-building project guarantees that our efforts never get beyond the conceptual stage of abstraction for a simple reason: there is no consensus about what constitutes “the programmatic fundamentals” of Marxism among Marxists (Marx probably foresaw this absurd situation when he declared, “I myself am not a Marxist”). It would be impossible to obtain even an Occupy-style ‘modified consensus’ margin of 90% on the content of Marxist fundamentals if a national meeting with representatives of all the existing Marxist groups as well as independent socialists were held either in the United States or in the United Kingdom.

Discussions of theory and programme should not be a precondition for working together in the same party, network or whatever word it is we use to label our political associations these days. These discussions can only be fruitful on the basis of common activity, common experience, common struggle, against common enemies and for common goals. A little common sense would not hurt either (http://links.org.au/node/2836).

If the CPGB’s ‘anti-liquidationist’ approach of “uniting all those committed to a Marxist political party” had prevailed in 1875, the German Social Democratic Party would have never gotten off the ground, because it was a merger of Marxist and non-Marxist elements (followers of Lassalle) on a thoroughly non-Marxist basis: the Gotha programme. If this merger had not occurred on the basis that it did, there would have been no German SPD, no international social democracy, no Erfurt programme of 1891, no Bolshevism, no Russian Revolution, no Lenin. In that case, we would be in really big trouble, building new models from scratch and having to learn all of the painful lessons these experiences gave rise to all over again in a period where the very existence of unions and social safety nets is on the line.

If the permanent marginality of the Trotskyist movement has anything to teach us, it is that the ‘theory/programme/ideology first’ approach must be liquidated if we want to make real-world progress. The longer we wait, the less likely there will be a world left for us to win.

Liquidationist?
Liquidationist?

Fantasy thesis

Paul Demarty’s ‘Crisis and creeping despair’ is too fundamentally lacking to be an actual analysis (Weekly Worker April 26). What actually is the Islamic ‘threat’, as seen by the mad Anders Breivik? One would have thought a careful examination of Islam in Norwegian society today would have been a fundamental requirement of any proper analysis. Actually Paul doesn’t give it a mention, notwithstanding the fact it was perceived great enough an issue to drive a young man to kill scores of his fellow young citizens.

On the face of it an intrusive Islamic presence in Norway, where one perceives the dominant Nordic population to be classically blue-eyed and blond, seems unlikely. Of course, Islam is a religion and not actually a race, but, unless the Scandinavian, formerly pagan, then Christian, population has experienced a mass conversion to Mohammed in recent times, where would such a presence come from? Norway hasn’t ever had an empire as such and outside the days of Viking colonisation and settlement one would have thought it rather an isolated sort of a population. To the best of my knowledge Norway isn’t a member of the EU and so wouldn’t suffer from enforced inward labour and ethnic minority migration either.

So if there is an Islamic - and presumably that would mean Asian - presence in Norway, where and why has it got there? Breivik has concluded that they were deliberately introduced and invited for no other reason than someone in the ruling class and establishment decided the overwhelmingly predominantly white, secular, Christian population needed breaking up and required manufactured diversity, like it or not. If this were the case (and I say ‘if’), then that surely would be a thoroughly racialist conclusion and plan wouldn’t it ? It’s reasonable to ask whether this has in fact been the case - in the absence of any other explanation one is forced to give it at least a starter for 10.

Following this thesis, Breivik then goes on to draw the conclusion that it is the middle class, liberal, left political establishment that has drawn up an agenda of race-fixing and social engineering aimed at producing a mix more in line with their own visions of what populations should look like. If multiculturalism is your gospel and you live in country which has no race and ‘cultural’ mix you may feel it’s your task to create one. Has that in fact happened, or is there another explanation?

Paul Demarty does nobody any favours by just assuming the Islamic presence in Norway is some ‘natural’ process which requires no explanation whatever. Breivik would doubtless see this as par for the course - the ‘left’ acting as the Trojan horse for the jihadist constituency to form and develop in Europe and so pave the road with good intention to a fundamentalist, theocratic hell.

There may be some other explanation for the sudden and surprising presence of an Islamic population of Norway, and I would be grateful to know what that is. Needless to say, although this paper is rotten with Islamophobia-phobia, I have to say that nothing in imagination or reality warrants the bloodbath of death and destruction wrought by Breivik on the hapless Labour youth he murdered. The man is clearly mad, but the social and political nudge which pushed him over the edge (and to one extent or another is present across Europe among traditional populations, which feel themselves to be manipulated, marginalised and ignored) warrants more of an analysis than the one Demarty attempted.

The whole picture, please.

Fantasy thesis
Fantasy thesis

Caffeine rush

Ben Lewis reports on his attendance at the April 28 Anti-Capitalist Initiative meeting with all the fervour and accuracy of a Daily Mail exposé. Shock, horror ­ he walked into an organising meeting before the event, one that was openly publicised in the ACI beforehand. Worse, he was actually asked to do something!

As for the rest of his ‘report’, either he was having a caffeine rush to the head or had put something stronger in his coffee. Ben repeats his charges of liquidationism, running to the right, etc, that he wrote about the week before he came to the meeting, and once again declares the CPGB is in favour of unity around “Marxist fundamentals”. Strange then that in the CPGB leaflet given out at the meeting, a leaflet which laid out “the principles we think should inform any anti-capitalist alternative”, we find only a set of democratic demands: the need for republican democracy, accountability and recallability of labour leaders, common action in Europe on strikes and days of action.

We find no mention of revolution, overthrowing the state, worker council democracy, the need for a revolutionary party ­ that is, ideas most of us understand to be “Marxist fundamentals”. Surely this is a case of the pot calling the kettle black? When it comes down to it, the CPGB offers only its minimum democratic programme as a basis for anti-capitalism and regroupment.

Ben also reveals to his shocked readers that he discovered another secret in the University of London Union café ­ that Permanent Revolution are considering launching a “new journal”. This is no secret to WP or the comrades who left WP, who saw it in our perspectives last November. We are indeed canvassing sensible people on the left about having a broader Marxist journal, which is why the CPGB hasn’t known about it.

And congratulations to the artist who did the accompanying cartons for the article ­ they got Ben’s finger-wagging style at the ACI meeting down to a tee!

Caffeine rush
Caffeine rush