Letters

Transition

Jack Conrad’s efforts at dialogue with other radical left currents would be more impressive if he could overcome his knee-jerk anti-Trotskyism (‘The spirit of ’45’, May 9).

He ridicules the Transitional programme but is really only addressing the garbled versions presented by some who once upon a time made a pretence of Trotskyism, or even the Socialist Workers Party. As I recall from arguments long ago, the International Socialists/SWP rejected the Transitional programme as part of their obsession with the immediate wages struggle at the expense of a political perspective.

Other groups that once held Trotskyist views have proved equally degenerate. So why wheel them in as its advocates now? If they do not tell the truth to the workers, how is that the fault of Trotsky?

Conrad ignores the most important features of the TP. Firstly, recognition that a crisis of leadership of the working class existed in the 1930s, on which hung the fate of humanity. This referred to the domination of Stalinism, busy butchering the opposition, and social democracy, joined in a popular front to strangle the revolution (as in Spain). Such a crisis of leadership exists today, albeit with a different configuration of forces.

Secondly, it is the programme that is transitional rather than individual demands; Trotsky referred to a “system of demands” and these are part of a perspective of taking power. The demands are logically connected rather than stages that must be followed sequentially. The TP was written in the light of the Russian Revolution at a time when it was entirely plausible to expect fresh revolutionary upheavals, despite the treacherous role of Stalinism. It was necessary to challenge the old leaderships. The demands, a series of steps aimed at taking power, drew on the experience of the Russian Revolution, actual factory committees, workers’ control, soviets not just as organs of struggle, but as a foundation of class rule. Likewise, defence guards at factory level, leading to workers’ militia and Red Army, emerging out of the needs of class struggle.

Conrad and the CPGB seem to want to collapse all demands into a minimum programme, which is like saying there is no programme at all. It gets worse, as he creates an unprincipled amalgam linking the discussion of programme to the modern-day sects, which keep workers in the dark. There is nothing of this in the Transitional programme or Trotsky’s writing on the subject. The work of the Left Opposition and the Fourth International was a courageous attempt to tell the truth to the working class and offer an alternative to the systematic betrayals by the Stalinist movement (which had the enthusiastic support of the CPGB of the day). Such an alternative is urgently needed today, but is unlikely to be found in the shape of The spirit of ’45.

Transition
Transition

Real pro

In light of Jack Conrad’s article on Left Unity, I would like to revisit something from Mike Macnair’s article on Riddell’s Comintern translation and from past articles: the false dichotomy of unity with diplomatic or no criticism, and of criticism without unity.

On April 2, there was an Open Democracy article, ‘Young and good-looking: the saviours of Europe’s left’. Part of this article that really interested me as a professional worker was mixed, that part about being “well-spoken”, having “media-friendly manners”, “middle class [language] based on references to justice and fairness rather than class”, “terms that combine social indignation with the language of justice and democracy” and “packaged in a more middle-class-friendly language”.

In the course of professional self-development, I have come to realise that, surely, there has to be a spectrum of criticism that includes forms that facilitate longer-term unity and forms that don’t. I agree that diplomatic criticism isn’t enough, but surely we should be capable of offering professional criticism - and neither criticism for the sake of criticism nor more amateurish forms (like polemical slurs that only drive people away)! How can there be unity with critical critics or those whose polemical bread and butter are ad hominems? It may have worked in Lenin’s day, but it doesn’t work in ours.

Professional criticism can be worded in ways like informed concerns, or alarms over another group’s lack of due diligence. Surely this is the case in the time-tested and failed reform coalitionism strategy! We should be the ones internalising the political equivalent of due diligence as part of offering professional criticism.

Real pro
Real pro

Last strawmen

Arthur Bough raises strawmen arguments in his total misinterpretation and “projection” on what I was saying about the Soviets and World War II (Letters, May 9). But first the facts.

Arthur repeats: “By 1941 [rather than in 1941], the USSR had seen off the Japanese in the largest tank battle ever, to such an extent that Japan decided it was easier to attack the US rather than USSR.” This is like saying ‘by 1945’ the USSR did this. True, but a false picture of events. The Japanese were roundly defeated by 1939, not 1941. The fact they hung out on the border of Siberia didn’t mean they were not defeated.

They wanted nothing to do with their old dreams of turning the Soviet Far East (the region east of Siberia) into a Japanese colony. They had too many other irons in the fire: most notably the rising resistance to their occupation of China; secondly, and more importantly, their Far East Asian Co-Prosperity empire, which meant removing the far more important military force(s) in Asia - the US navy and its colonies/base in the Philippines.

Another missive on Arthur’s part: he argues that, due to the huge industrialisation of the USSR, “Japan believed the United States was an easier target!” Wow, really? Where does he come up with this stuff? The reason for going after the USA rather than USSR was because it was “easier”? I didn’t think Japanese imperialism was quite so fickle, Arthur. It was the USA, not the USSR, that represented the biggest obstacle to Japanese territorial expansion in Asia. This is why the Japanese welcomed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1939. It removed the USSR as an obstacle by being allies with their allies, the Nazis. The Germans were meeting with the Japanese the same day in Berlin that Ribbentrop was in Moscow toasting vodka with the Russians. This allowed the Japanese free reign to take on the US, but not because they were “easier”!

The misinterpretation. I never downplayed Russian/USSR industrialisation as the material basis for the defeat of the Japanese or the Germans. Seriously, the industrialisation notwithstanding, the 1,500 Russian tanks (pre-T34 tanks of light and medium size, if anyone is interested) that defeated the Japanese were largely the result of the lack of armour on the Japanese part and the numbers of Russian and Mongolian troops that were able to envelop the Japanese armies and push them back into Manchuria. The Japanese were at a huge logistical disadvantage in these battles (not all of which the Russians won, but they won the war).

My point was never to de-emphasise the five-year plans or industrialisation. My point was that folks like Arthur only begrudgingly admit that the aid the US provided played any role in the demise of the Nazi war machine. I think this false view makes it seem that the events of World War II, had this aid not be given, would have been no different.

The aid was provided via lend-lease, not Moscow gold, as Arthur contends. The gold he is talking about was based on trade agreements prior to the lend-lease that all nations had to pay the US for war material, since the US was a neutral non-belligerent. Once the Germans declared war on the US after Pearl Harbour, lend-lease was passed and then the gold basically stopped flowing. (The same discussion involves Spanish republican gold going to Russia for guns during the revolution there in 1936.)

Could the USSR have survived without its industrialisation and, in my opinion, far more important ‘Gosplan’ or central planning that allowed the focused allocation of resources to weaponise its economy? Nope. But it is also likely to have raised the iffy proposition of a much longer and harder war, had US aid not been granted throughout the US involvement.

Last strawmen
Last strawmen

Hate factories

Rightwing Tory justice minister Chris Grayling’s declaration that prisoners would now be made to “earn” basic privileges by “working harder” probably wasn’t just the usual ‘popularist’ promise to stick the boot into one of the most powerless and demoralised social groups. During times of economic austerity and potential social unrest, scapegoating marginalised and outcast groups, like prisoners, is always useful as a means of deflecting and refocusing public anger away from the true culprits of the country’s economic ruination - in this case Grayling’s pals in the City of London. Behind the rhetoric and the guise of ‘getting tough’ on prisoners is the actual purpose of the prison industrial complex: to turn prisons into privatised forced-labour factories.

Prisoners are, it seems, to become like third-world workers - a source of extremely cheap and compliant labour for multinational corporations. This is a practice which draws its inspiration from the US, where one of the largest prisoner populations in the world has increasingly replaced outside unionised labour as a source of profit. Under the UN Charter of Human Rights, forced labour is, of course, unlawful, but prisoners don’t seem to count and, during times of economic crisis and a burgeoning prison population, there is a cold rationale in the capitalist intention to focus its rapacity on those behind bars.

It also harks back to the original purpose of the Victorian-inspired model of what was then a modern prison system: to instil conformity and the work ethic in the rebellious poor. After decades of the ‘control and containment’ model, prisons are to be returned to their original function as places where the errant poor are taught their true place as producers of profit for the rich.

The tabloids who cheer Grayling’s ‘get tough’ treatment of prisoners and whip up mob support for him omit to mention or question why prisoners are being forced to do work that its unemployed readers could be invited to do on a legally enforced minimum wage. And, whilst large corporations and companies constantly ‘rationalise’ their operations by shedding labour and creating unemployment, some of these same companies are using prison cheap labour to top up profits - all with the willing assistance of Grayling and his rich and powerful colleagues in the Tory government.

Not only is prison slave-labour an absolute negation of the basic human rights of prisoners, from whom Grayling has now prevented any legal challenge by stopping legal aid for prisoner litigation cases, but also the removal of a means of employment for many of those outside prison who are influenced by the lies and witch-hunting of the tabloids and an increasingly rightwing political establishment.

Grayling should also ponder this: forcing a slave-labour regime as a condition for basic privileges on prisoners serving increasingly longer sentences might just be a catalyst for some extremely expensive prison repairs further down the line.

Hate factories
Hate factories

Sex repression

Eddie Ford’s back-page article on the current ‘abuse and rape’ mania was an anaemic wee effort, taking as it does all the state’s terminology and jurisprudence at face value and without challenge (‘Fear and harassment as the norm’, May 9). He mocks the Daily Mail, but his piece could have come straight out of its pages, since he accepts as read all references to ‘abuse’ and ‘rape’ as if the way they are being used has universal acceptance.

I don’t accept that perfectly consensual and voluntary sexual activity is ‘abuse’ and ‘rape’, but it’s clear that a great many caught in the current wave of hysteria, sexual outrage and repression are guilty of no more than that. The law they have offended is the arbitrary age-of-consent law, the law that says some anonymous person in the state will decide for us when we can have sex. A voluntary sexual relationship or one-off encounter is not ‘abuse’, because both parties decide for themselves and defy that anonymous and arbitrary judgment.

It is certainly true that in the 60s and into the 70s this law started to fray at the edges under the pressure of a more enlightened sexual freedom and liberation movement, which was simply ignoring the state and doing its own thing. There was a fairly widespread attitude - sex as long as it was voluntary and consensual was your own business. A whole generation of under-age people were having sex with each other, and whoever else seemed interesting or cool at the time. There were armies of groupies who made it their own private competition to sleep with celebs. Yes, many of the rock stars took advantage of hot young girls jumping into their beds, but this wasn’t abuse, this wasn’t rape: they were not doing anything against anyone’s consent.

What we have now is a witch-hunt, an inquisition by moralists, religious loonies and authoritarians pledged to kill such ideas of sexual freedom and individual liberty. Blair set loose armies of these creatures, along with ‘child protection’ social policy evangelists imported from America. There has been wholesale adoption of repressive childcare and anti-libertarian policies, which is starting to permeate every level of society.

The current situation reminds me of scenes from The crucible, with widespread accusations of digression against all and sundry. We don’t have the public hangings any more, but the press does its best to achieve the same thing without any need for a guilty verdict, never mind what that guilt might actually be. The hapless stars caught in the headlights are victims of this social policy regression which is meeting a widespread compensation culture.

Trip and Stumble no-fee compensation solicitors have ensured millions remember injuries they sustained years ago. They hawk their wares: ‘Are you being bullied at work? Is your child being bullied at school? You could receive tens of thousands of pounds.’ In this case, the rustle of those thousands in compensation from stars accused of abusing you decades ago is an added incentive.

Now, I’m not saying Savile and on a far smaller scale Hall and possibly others didn’t actually abuse young people - clearly they did. Kids who didn’t welcome Savile’s vile attentions, kids on whom he forced himself. Hall simply let vent his lust without any consideration whatever of the feelings of the victims involved. But those, I dare suggest, are not the bulk of these allegations, which appear to be retrospective judgments - cash or spite-induced by people who voluntarily engaged in sexual activity and now see the chance to make some money and gain some fame from it. There is certainly widespread bandwagon-jumping too: without the need for any sort of corroborative evidence, anyone who had even a chance meeting with Savile, for example, could add their name to the industrial-scale list of accusers in line for big payments from his estate, the BBC and others. This has let loose a feeding frenzy, with solicitors scouring the hedgerows for randy stars, politicians, radio and TV celebs, plus new victims ready to spill the beans on their sexual encounters 20 or 30 years ago.

This is the top end of the repression. At the bottom end a predatory ‘child protection’ industry, with a rigid code of what is abuse, neglect and rape, conducts mass arrests, child kidnapping and cruel detention. This is state abuse, and it is real abuse. Children snatched from their classrooms, off the streets, banned from talking to parents, siblings or friends.

The accusation is enough. Evidence isn’t needed - suspicion will do. Seventy thousand children are now in detention - they euphemistically call it ‘care’. The conditions of the stolen children and young adults are far, far worse than the conditions they are snatched from in the vast majority of cases. Meantime hundreds, maybe tens of thousands of children and young people are themselves charged as ‘abusers’ and ‘rapists’ for sexual activity, be it ever so mild, with their near peers. Teenagers a year or two years older than their partners jailed and put on the ‘sex offenders’ register for consensual sex with their girl or boyfriends. Little children below the age of criminal responsibility taken away and punished, brainwashed, subject to mental reconditioning or else put on the ‘at risk’ register and locked up for innocent childhood sexual games.

Eddie is right: “fear and harassment” are the norm, but not in the way he highlights.

Sex repression
Sex repression