Letters

Left Unity

The first meeting of all those in Sheffield with an interest in working under the banner of the Left Unity campaign saw 24 people gather in the upstairs of the Red Deer pub. The vast majority were made up of the usual suspects, with 18 of those present self-declaring as revolutionaries or Marxists of one variety or another.

These revolutionaries were a diverse bunch, with a couple of reps each from the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and CPGB, a member of Socialist Resistance, a young Workers Power comrade, a couple of ex-members of the recently deceased Permanent Revolution and a fair number of self-declared “former members of the Socialist Workers Party” - amongst them the former local organiser, Ged Colgan.

There were also six comrades from Sheffield Revolutionary Socialists (RevSoc), the successor group to the local Socialist Worker Student Society, which all but disbanded in the aftermath of the Martin Smith case. Some of the young ex-SWPers are now members of the International Socialist Network and there is a debate going on within RevSoc as to whether it should explicitly become part of ISN or simply remain a ‘united front’ of leftwing students.

In fact, a few RevSoc comrades have remained members of the SWP. As one recent (longstanding) ex-SWP comrade present told us, this degree of latitude is absolutely unprecedented. Such involvement in a rival organisation would have been an expellable offence in the SWP just a few months ago. Now it seems the leadership is incapable of even dealing with such ‘open’ rebellion. The obvious conclusion is the one that the former SWP comrade drew when chatting to us in the pub after the meeting: the SWP apparatus remains paralysed, unable to engage in further splits or purges, because the result would weaken the organisation even more. Consequently, they are forced to tolerate the remaining elements of the opposition. The ‘enemy within’, as it were, is now thinking about splitting itself, according to the comrade. A large number of former members of the In Defence of Our Party faction are said to be very close to leaving the SWP, probably in order to join ISN.

Not surprisingly though, the old method of doing things ‘SWP style’ is still deeply engrained in the recently departed members. With the support of Phil Ward of Socialist Resistance, the meeting started in a rather mundane fashion, with former SWP members somewhat taking charge of the discussion in order to exclusively focus on organisational matters. The idea was proposed that we elect a secretary and a treasurer, that Left Unity Sheffield ought to focus on “going out into the real world” in order to campaign “in the community” and doing leafleting, as opposed to sitting in “smoke-filled rooms talking to ourselves”. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

There was initially an evasiveness about wanting to confront exactly what Left Unity is for, what the political basis of any activity should be or why previous left unity projects did not succeed. Phil Ward even went so far as to claim that there is no point rummaging through the past. After all, this Sheffield gathering was totally “uncharacteristic” of the “much broader” turnout at Left Unity events elsewhere. “Today’s meeting is much narrower than other meetings we hear about. If today’s turnout is replicated nationally, Left Unity will be a failure.”

The solution lies “out there”, in the millions of people fed up by Labour - and there’s a truth to that. But how do we connect with these people? By pretending that we’re not overwhelmingly made up of Marxists? By pretending that the answer lies in building another Labour Party? In other words, by repeating the mistakes the left has made in the Socialist Labour Party, the Socialist Alliance, Respect, etc (albeit on a lower and lower political level)?

The discussion was diverted from these apolitical lines by interventions from the AWL’s Gemma Short and comrades of the Marxist Discussion Group (in which CPGB members participate). Andrew Smith (ex-PR) made the point that the state of the existing far left is a disaster and that we should be seeking to ask why this is. Given that Left Unity was bringing different parts of the left together, now was the perfect time to discuss politics with each other. He added that “we don’t want to have another organisation just for the sake of it. We need to clarify what Left Unity actually is”. He proposed that a ‘festival of ideas’ or some other political event should be the first task for the group in order to begin a process of debate. Michael Copestake (CPGB) echoed this point, stating that we are bound to “constantly repeat our mistakes and failures” if we don’t learn from the past.

PCS activist and Weekly Worker supporter Lee Rock stated that, far from politics being a threat to ‘activity’, giving such activity a proper basis by rooting it in our Marxist understanding of politics was in fact the best way to prevent demoralisation. By contrast, those who engage in activism in an apolitical way are more prone to demoralisation when things go wrong, as they cannot place events in a wider political understanding and see that their activity forms part of a coherent strategy. ‘Discussion’ and ‘activity’ are mutually complementary, he said.

As a result of these interventions, it was decided that the first public event to be put on by Left Unity should be to openly contest and clarify what exactly Left Unity should be, rather than purely dealing with organisational matters or putting on a day of activism. In tandem with such a launch event, there will be open political debates around contested political issues and the purpose of Left Unity. It was decided that the group is therefore unable to send “delegates” to the May 11 national LU gathering in London, but that ex-SWP member Chris Hill and CPGB member Tina Becker would attend as “volunteers”.

The SWP and Socialist Party so far seem to be keeping their distance from Left Unity. Should the organisation take off, this will surely change quickly. While no doubt a fair number of participants in the Red Deer would not welcome such a development, the regroupment of the existing left along principled, democratic and openly Marxist lines would be a highly welcome and necessary move in order to build the alternative we need.

With all these caveats, Left Unity seems to be a forum where Marxists can (currently) push the idea that the left must rethink its decades of failure (of which Left Unity is in fact symptomatic) and regroup on the politics that comrades profess to have: the politics of Marxism.

Left Unity
Left Unity

Dicey

I would take issue with some of the points Arthur Bough has raised in his letter last week (April 25). Some of it reminds me of a craps player throwing dice on the board and hoping for the correct pair to show up to give him a win.

The big battle that kept the Japanese to within the borders of Manchuria did not take place in 1941; it took place in 1939. This is where the soon-to-be commander of the Red Army, from the Battle of Moscow to the occupation of Berlin, Georgi Zhukov, made his name after avoiding the grotesque purge of the Red Army but a few years before. Zhukov bloodied the Chinese puppet army of the Japanese colony of ‘Manchukuo’ and indeed was the largest tank battle up until that time. Around 1,500 tanks were involved on the Red Army side, maybe a third as many on the Japanese side.

The battle took place as Molotov sat down with Nazi negotiator Ribbentrop in Moscow to sign the infamous pact that gave far more breathing room to the Germans than to the Russians (an arguable point, but I won’t go into that here). But the Japanese got the word that they would not be supported by the Germans in their plan to seize Siberia from the USSR.

Second roll of the dice. Arthur states: “After 1939, Germany, as the world’s most advanced military-economic power, had rolled over western Europe and defeated Britain in every encounter. Britain was penned up and probably only survived because Hitler held out hopes of a peace deal with Halifax.” Penned up it was, but the use of “probably” means that Arthur needs to hit the books again to read up on this.

Sure, Hitler had no serious plans to actually occupy Britain. He wanted a peace deal, to defeat the Brits militarily, get a few bases, put the Belfast and Clydesdale shipyards to work for the Kriegsmarine. And the hope for a ‘peace’ on German terms was certainly why he didn’t wipe out the British expeditionary forces at Dunkirk. But that was it. The utter failure in the skies over Britain meant that trying to impose a peace settlement on the UK was simply not going to happen. Britain may have been penned up, but more like a wolverine in a cave. No-one in their right mind was going to go in and subdue the animal. The Heer (German army) was incapable of invading the British Isles and thus in effect a stalemate ensued. Plus, the sideshow at the English Channel was a distraction from the Nazi war machine’s real intent: to wage war on the Soviets.

Third roll: while we can ascribe the victory of the USSR in World War II to their industrial might, there is lot more to it than that. Most, especially those on the ‘workers’ state’ Trotskyist left, point out that it was the planned economy, or Gosplan, that provided the victory of a socialist, collectivised economy over the capitalist-fascist German state. I think that is only partially true, even if it’s the most important part.

Almost the entire left discounts the aid the US sent to the USSR. The USSR itself was most honest during their wartime assessment of this. Their position was: ‘We could not have won without the help of the US’. This might sound ‘revisionist’ coming from a Trotskyist such as myself, but if one really looks at the aid provided, as little as it was, it was also critical to keeping the Red Army both fed and clothed and, in terms of some equipment (21,000 fighter planes, 12,000 Studebaker trucks), was no small eyedropper. (It should be noted that the famous Katusha rockets, directed at the Wehrmacht and seen on hundreds of newsreels, were being launched from Studebakers!). About half the aid was unloaded in Vladivostok from 120 US-built and unionised crewed ships, but flying under the hammer and sickle flag of the USSR to prevent interception by the Japanese, who always controlled those waters.

The hope for peace with the British empire was simply ended when the Wehrmacht started the embarkation of troops in early November 1940 from occupied France to Poland for Operation Barbarossa to commence the following summer.

Dicey
Dicey

Happy to concede

Eddie Ford says: “If they wanted to, the British, German and US governments could borrow vast sums of money for next to nothing - unlike you and me or the small business down the road. What prevents this occurring is simple - the naked class-war politics of the bourgeoisie, determined to roll back the post-World War II gains of the working class” (‘Austerity myth debunked’, April 25).

Really? But, the US has been borrowing huge amounts of money, and engaging in significant fiscal stimulus since 2008! It would have been engaging in even more if Obama’s and the Democrats’ plans had not been frustrated by the Republicans. The significance here is that the Democrats are the representatives of the big multinational, industrial capitalists, whereas the Republicans, like the Tories, are the representatives of the angry petty bourgeoisie, the small, nationally based capitalists, and the historically associated money capitalists.

But also, if this is a policy of class war by the bourgeoisie, then how does Eddie account for the statements of all those representatives of the bourgeoisie, from the credit ratings agencies to the IMF, who are now more openly opposing the policies of austerity?

They have been joined by the actual administrators of capital itself in recent weeks. People like Bill Gross who heads up Pimco, the world’s largest bond fund, has also come out to say that the policy of austerity in Britain and Europe has to be ditched, and replaced with a policy of fiscal expansion to promote growth. He’s not alone: many others like George Soros have made similar statements, and in the last week José Manuel Barroso has said the time for austerity has passed.

The idea that the bourgeoisie would destroy its own capital, undermine its potential for making profits by engaging in a policy of economic suicide, to roll back supposed gains of the working class since World War II is crazy! Firstly, they have had the last 30-odd years to roll back any supposed such gains, so why choose now? Secondly, the only gains that the working class obtained since World War II are gains that capital was happy to concede in the first place, because they were gains that in reality were useful for capital itself!

Marx, quoting Adam Smith, noted that capital only ever goes along with improvements in wages and so on, in so far as it facilitates the accumulation of capital: ie, it can afford to pay higher wages, and the higher wages provide additional demand for the commodities it produces, thereby facilitating the realisation of surplus value. That was the whole basis of Fordism, upon which the welfare state itself is based.

Happy to concede
Happy to concede

Class organ

Mike Macnair refers, correctly, to the immobility of the left, the inability to develop a response to the rightward drift of politics (‘Murdoch’s Blairite offensive’, April 25). He proposes two objectives that ought to be taken up, the larger one being “to rebuild the workers’ movement at the base - trade unions, coops and mutual welfare funds and so on”.

I am not clear what he has in mind for coops and mutual welfare funds, but assume he means new formations responding to specific needs, as very little exists at present. As to unions, “rebuild” could mean anything from regeneration of existing unions to new organisations to rival the present ones. Another option is rank-and-file bodies operating within and without the existing structures.

Whichever road is taken - and new movements do not arise just from our wishes - the central question is politics. Unions are political formations, being one limb of the reformist division of labour, whereby unions look after their members’ immediate interests, the level of exploitation at the workplace, while longer-term political issues and even socialism was taken care of by a party. That roughly corresponded to the notion of a minimum and maximum programme. In practice the workers are cheated of both. Even at their best, helping to mobilise masses of workers (and that seems a long time ago), they were very much part of the system: schools for war, not war itself.

Marxist should operate with the aim of winning workers to a political perspective - the struggle for power - therefore recognising the limitations of trade unionism. Whether working in an existing union or setting up a rank-and-file body, it is the political perspective. The left, almost to the last man and woman, operate as though the unions can be pressured into leading meaningful struggles against austerity. The SWP, for example, is quite explicit about that, and members of left groups routinely hide under a trade union militant hat. The logic is to end up as political props to the unions. Even to set up rank-and-file bodies a political fight is required. If workers think that the economy can be mended by a little less austerity and some more spending (essentially what Labour has been peddling), they will submit to trade union leadership and meekly wait for Labour to effect a change of course (or not).

It seems to me that, without a clear view on dealing with the unions politically (which the left lacks), the other, ‘smaller’, of Mike’s objectives falls flat. A strategic alternative, a party built through regrouping some or all of the existing left, would evolve into yet another pressure group in the existing labour movement rather than an independent organ of the working class.

Class organ
Class organ

Talk to EDL

Jack Conrad takes to the letters page to argue of the English Defence League that: “It is fascist in the classic Marxist sense. It is a non-state, street-fighting organisation - anti-Muslim, anti-left and anti-working class” (April 18). I presume that he means ‘anti-working class’ in a political/ideological sense rather than as a social formation, because the EDL has many working class supporters. My question to Conrad et al is: did it need to end up in this way?

It is worth mentioning that the only substantive attempt to research the EDL is by the Demos think tank, entitled Inside the EDL (2011), which indicates the radically unserious nature of the ‘left’ and especially those like the Socialist Workers Party/Unite Against Fascism who appear to perceive the EDL as the main enemy. We don’t need to analyse it: we just know.

As most people will know, the origins of the EDL lie in an attempt by the Islamic terrorist supporters of Al-Muhajiroun and Ahlus Sunnah wal Jamaah to disrupt a march in Luton in 2009 to commemorate the return home from Afghanistan of the Royal Anglian regiment. This excited the spontaneous anger of a large section of the crowd, who proceeded to give them a good hiding. At this point it would have been tempting to view the whole thing as a fracas between well-wishers of the repressive force of British imperialism and proponents of Islamic terrorism and to have washed one’s hands of it.

However, after this event a grouping termed the United Peoples of Luton was formed, which eventually led to the formation of the EDL, with Tommy Robinson as its best known spokesman.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the ‘left’, to use that term broadly, were flummoxed. After all, new groupings were historically set up under their auspices at Conway Hall in London with Tariq Ali and Tony Benn presiding. And a group with at least some working class leaders - outrageous!

From the start the EDL had three major policies: support for the armed forces; support for the monarchy; and a pro-Israel stance, which made it extremely unattractive to people like myself who are alienated from the ‘left’, actually crass liberals, due to its apologies for Islamic fundamentalism, even to the extent of downplaying or even disavowing women’s rights, abortion as a woman’s right to choose, equality for gays and so on. I personally took the pro-Israel stance as an ‘in your face’ riposte to Islamic fundamentalists.

The Demos report argues: “The most common reason for joining the EDL was opposition to Islam (expressed in various ways) (41%). This reason was particularly common among men - 45% of men compared with 28% of women gave this reason. While some directed abuse at all Muslims, others made more nuanced criticisms, condemning ‘political Islam’ and ‘Muslim extremists’.

“The second most common reason for joining the EDL was related to identity. Respondents referred to a love of England, commitment to preserving traditional national and cultural values, and belief in representing the interests of ‘real’ countrymen (31%). In many cases this amounted to a defence of liberal values from perceived outside forces such as Islam: Islam also needs to be recognised as a threat to our freedoms, also Sharia law isn’t fair play, it isn’t British and has unequal rights and should be outlawed in the UK for these reasons alone.”

My contention, in the light of this information, is that it could have been productive for those on the left who did not identify their reason for existence as being to apologise for Islamic fundamentalism to have engaged in a substantive dialogue with the EDL, difficult as that would have been, considering the overwhelmingly petty bourgeois composition of the ‘left’ and their inability not to sneer at working class people. It may even have been possible - and I have to give the CPGB credit here as proponents of the battle of ideas - to have won the EDL to a leftist position against Islamic fundamentalism.

However, it was much easier for the SWP/UAF axis to simply identify the EDL as fascist and then implement a ‘no platform for fascists’ policy. Loads easier than having to actually think about how to engage a politically chaotic cross-class formation. Anti-communism, which was virtually absent from the initial EDL (most of them would not have known what it meant), is now rampant, thanks to the leftist liberals and their utterly stupid, intellectually dishonest and ultimately completely counterproductive, ‘no platform’ position.

Talk to EDL
Talk to EDL

Feminism

I read with interest Anne McShane’s and Ben Lewis’s accounts of Alexandra Kollontai and August Bebel, and their relationship to feminism (April 25).

It is remarkable how many different understandings of the term have been making the rounds in the pages of the Weekly Worker recently, and I am confident that we are now moving beyond merely mirroring the left’s lower-case feminism - often a pastiche of post-Stalinist ideologemes, coupled with an aggressive voluntarism - towards a better informed evaluation of the various currents. In an atmosphere where left feminists and their often dubious allies shout down any critical investigation of feminism, it is incumbent on Marxists to insist that it is not the will, but cognition that will lead us to the truth.

With this in mind, more ground needs to be covered, seeing as there is an underdocumented history of feminist intervention on the left, going all the way back to Olympe de Gouges, who defended her text, The rights of women, before the Paris Commune, but especially Claire ‘Rose’ Lacombe, who, as a member of the radical-left Enragés during the French Revolution, advocated a feminism that specifically voiced the social concerns of working class women and pushed beyond mere equality before the law. Both women are cited in Bebel’s Women and socialism, as are some of their pioneering demands.

As Ben Lewis reports in his review, Clara Zetkin had a hostile attitude to the bourgeois feminism of her time and opposed the idea of women comrades organising separately from the workers’ movement.

Yet it cannot be denied that her women’s groups in the German Social Democratic Party were at least partly inspired by bourgeois feminist groupings such as the German Women’s Association, and that the very concept of organising along gender lines was not uncontroversial among women communists. In Rosa Luxemburg’s view, these groups ultimately served to keep women away from leadership positions. While there was no formal requirement for female comrades to join such a group, there arguably permeated an internal culture in which they were expected to ‘stay in their group’ and worry only about ‘their issues’.

Hal Draper writes in his introduction to the Luxemburg piece, ‘Women’s suffrage and class struggle’: “It is one of the myths of socialist history that Rosa Luxemburg had no interest in the women’s question. The kernel of truth is that Luxemburg certainly rejected the idea that, simply because of her sex, she ‘belonged’ in the socialist women’s movement, rather than in the general leadership. In rejecting this sexist view of women in the movement, she performed an important service.”

In light of this, Kollontai’s campaigning for women-only caucuses surely deserves a more critical evaluation. As has also been the experience of the 1970s new left, permanent women’s caucuses bring with them the danger of confining female comrades almost exclusively to ‘women’s issues’, while at the same time shielding male comrades from these debates. Personally, I am far more sympathetic to the idea of positive action as regards questions of confidence and potential leadership - even if, according to my humble observations, these issues are not as gendered as is commonly believed on the left.

To conclude, it is safe to say that ‘feminist’ intervention of one sort or another has been a permanent feature since the very dawn of what we would consider the left. These dialectical responses - whether they come in the shape of second-wave feminism, which began as a critique of the existing left, the writings of Raya Dunayeskaya, or the activism of the self-described ‘socialist feminist’, Clara Fraser, a positively heroic working class militant - point back to real contradictions. But that does not mean that any such response automatically points the correct way forward or can be considered beyond criticism.

CPGB comrades have made a good start documenting some of this history, and I hope we will be able to gain more insights, arm ourselves with more knowledge and develop our own analyses on contemporary gender relations in the future.

Feminism
Feminism

Decent parent

Bob Potter makes a valid point that my letter (April 18) underestimated the opposition to the recognition of the need for equality between the sexes in Marx’s and Engels’ lifetimes, but he then confuses Marx’s right to parent his children with the political issue of the recognition of equality (Letters, April 25).

My point is this: socialism has and will always be rejected by the majority of the population as long as we are seen to subordinating issues like parenting to a political line or lifestyle. Karl Marx was right to take an interest in his daughter’s suitors. Any decent parent would today, too.

Marx’s style of parenting may not be Mr Potter’s cup of tea - I suspect he favours a more permissive approach. That would be his privilege (and responsibility). But we socialists should avoid the type of party or state that interferes with our personal lives. This is an area where socialists and communists have a bad reputation. This is the type of party nobody should vote for in a society that values human rights.

The right to a private life, for starters, Mr Potter!

Decent parent
Decent parent

Welcome

Thanks for waiting for us to get back to you. We welcome your commitment to working with us in the future (‘Message to ISN’, April 18). However, as we’re sure you will understand, we are a very new organisation, and we think it would be premature to enter discussions at this point.

While individual International Socialist Network members are free to attend any events they choose, we do not think that as a steering committee we should nominate someone to speak at the Communist University on behalf of the IS Network.

Welcome
Welcome