Letters

Treason

Mike Macnair’s ‘Rethinking imperialism’ (October 3) is third-campist and his long historical analogies are ahistorical. Like his Alliance for Workers’ Liberty opponents in the original debate he reports on in 2004, his task is to deny what is specific about modern imperialism, as analysed by Lenin, and to elevate the secondary features to make comparisons.

What is different today is the domination of finance capital and its alliance with transnational corporations and their domination of the entire planet. There is no historical precedent for this, which began with the great depression of 1873 and was completed by the early 20th century. His description of Lenin’s position is wrong - in order to allow him to equate it with its opposite, the Stalinist opportunist popular front alliances with the nationalist bourgeoisie, to the detriment of the working class in the oppressed nation and also in the oppressor countries.

Lenin insisted on the split between oppressed and oppressor nations, but the whole point here was that the oppressor nations were the home of finance capital and the monopolies, and the oppressed nations were the victims - including the national bourgeoisie (a “semi-oppressed, semi-oppressing” class, in his marvellously dialectical phrase). Of course, Lenin understood the concept of the aristocracy of labour, and, of course, it is true that more than just a narrow layer in the imperialist countries benefits from the booty of empire. Nonetheless, what is essential is the ideological domination of imperialism over the whole working class and the opportunities that crises like the current one give to revolutionaries to challenge that domination exercised today by the trade union bureaucracies, from Len McCluskey to Bob Crow. But it is absolutely untrue that “the logic of Lenin’s analysis is the alliance with the national bourgeoisie in the exploited countries; and in the imperialist countries the broad democratic alliance, including the petty bourgeoisie, against ‘monopoly capital’.”

This describes unprincipled popular frontism, but Lenin and the early Comintern were very careful to draw a very sharp distinction between the operation of the workers’ united front tactic and the anti-imperialist united front, on the one hand, and Menshevik-type class-collaboration, on the other - as practised by Stalin and the degenerated Comintern post-1924. “No mixing of the red and the blue” was Trotsky’s line on China, as in the domestic class struggle. Stalin mixed and drowned revolutions in blood in China in 1927 (through centrist opportunism), Germany in 1933 and Spain in 1936-39 (these latter two through a conscious counterrevolutionary strategy).

Ian Donovan too (Letters, October 10) is wrong in thinking that the domestic united front or the anti-imperialist united front (AIUF) is a political alliance, although it must involve a certain political measure of support for both the union bureaucrats and the national bourgeoisie when they are in conflict with capitalism or under imperialist attack. Trotsky did not supersede the AIUF by a generalisation of permanent revolution, because he did not emphasise this in his analysis of why politically capitulating to Chiang Kai-shek led to the Shanghai massacre in 1927; the forces of world imperialism were not involved in that particular incident. But it is clearly the AIUF that he is defending in his 1937 letter on China to Diego Rivera against the Eiffelite third-campists of the day:

“In my declaration to the bourgeois press, I said that the duty of all the workers’ organisations of China was to participate actively and in the front lines of the present war against Japan, without abandoning, for a single moment, their own programme and independent activity.

“But that is ‘social patriotism!’, the Eiffelites cry. It is capitulation to Chiang Kai-shek! It is the abandonment of the principle of the class struggle! Bolshevism preached revolutionary defeatism in the imperialist war. Now, the war in Spain and the Sino-Japanese war are both imperialist wars. ‘Our position on the war in China is the same. The only salvation of the workers and peasants of China is to struggle independently against the two armies, against the Chinese army in the same manner as against the Japanese army.’

“These four lines, taken from an Eiffelite document of September 10 1937, suffice entirely for us to say: we are concerned here with either real traitors or complete imbeciles. But imbecility, raised to this degree, is equal to treason.”

Treason
Treason

Petty point

I really appreciated Ben Lewis’s analysis of ways forward for Die Linke, but take issue with his pigeon-holing of the German Greens as a “petty bourgeois” party (‘Principled opposition, not coalition poker’, September 26).

By using this epithet, he seems to be indulging in empty Marxist mud-slinging. What is the evidence for stating that members of, and voters for, the German Greens are any more “petty bourgeois” than Die Linke themselves? It’s important because ‘petty bourgeois’ is one of the most common terms Marxists use for dismissing what they dislike, without having to bother analysing it in political terms. If the term is to retain any meaning, it needs to be used accurately. Interestingly, I’ve heard the very same accusation made about Die Linke - albeit in German, using the German term kleinbürgerlich.

The overuse of the term ‘petty bourgeois’ is for me a ridiculous form of Marxist snobbery, a term that can alienate hundreds of thousands or millions of the oppressed and unemancipated. That is, people whom the left - now meant in a wider, global, non-party sense - should be engaging with.

Let us first agree on a standardised meaning for the term ‘petty bourgeois’: ‘small-scale capitalists such as shopkeepers and workers who manage the production, distribution and/or exchange of commodities and/or services owned by their bourgeois employers’ (paraphrased from Encyclopaedia of Marxism and the Communist manifesto).

If we agree on that definition, then anyone who, through necessity, is on the make - in the burgeoning underclass and precariously employed classes in Germany - drug-dealers, mobile phone-sellers, on-the-ground managers of cleaning services, self-employed English teachers - all these people are ‘petty bourgeois’. What purpose is served by snobbery towards all these people, who are just as much limited by the conditions of capitalism as the working class are?

Last point: why is the user interface on the CPGB site built so that you have to send an email to post a comment? Another type of interface would be friendlier and give a stronger impression that the CPGB is also inviting dialogue.

Petty point
Petty point

Inept

I just wanted to say something about the launching of the Communist Platform in Left Unity (‘Communist Platform formed’, October 10). I think this is totally contradictory to your aims to build Marxist unity, towards building a unified Marxist party. I agree that the Socialist Platform should have allowed amendments and debated democratically, but, by launching your own platform, you have split the Socialist Platform before it has had a chance to develop.

Amendments can be put at the conference coming up, by a branch or by a group of members, so it’s not been determined yet if the amendments agreed indicatively at the Socialist Platform meeting couldn’t have been agreed at conference. You seem to have walked away from a fight within the Socialist Platform for the sake of your secondary amendments.

I don’t agree that those amendments were actually central politically, as even your Communist Platform does not exactly define itself as revolutionary, as opposed to fudged or reformist. The Socialist Platform wanted to define Left Unity as definitely socialist and chose fudge on committing it to be revolutionary. This was a tactical decision, seeing as there is a vocal grouping within Left Unity that refuses to define Left Unity as socialist. It seemed that the Socialist Platform would win a sizeable minority within Left Unity and I thought it was correct to critically support it and put forward revolutionary politics within it.

Your article doesn’t even give an opinion on whether you will call for a vote for it. And your previous articles were over-the-top denunciations, which came across as personal attacks. You seem to have split from the Socialist Platform before many in Left Unity have had time to consider your criticism of its operation. You are actually reinforcing the crap caricature of the far-left sects perpetually splitting.

Inept tactics, in my opinion. Are there others in the CPGB or around it who would agree?

Inept
Inept

Glass houses

I was very disappointed to follow the latest falling out of comrades on the left between the Socialist Platform and now the Communist Platform.

Such fine-tuning hair-splitting between concepts and words meaning essentially the same thing - but somehow resulting in division, hostility and acrimony - makes the whole of the left look and sound ridiculous. No wonder we measure our support in terms of hundreds rather than hundreds of thousands or even millions.

Even more ridiculous that it was patently obvious that two protagonists in this latest acrimonious fall out - Jack Conrad and Nick Wrack - were in almost complete agreement with each other, given their two speeches printed in the August 29 issue of the Weekly Worker (‘Communicating across the archipelago of isolation’ and ‘Self-liberation, not manipulation’).

Adam Buick of the Socialist Party of Great Britain seems to think the division is between Leninism and Marxism, and supports the Socialist Platform on the latter basis (Letters, September 26). Well, the unamended Socialist Platform reads, inter alia: “Its [ie, capitalism’s] state and institutions will have to be replaced by ones that act in the interests of the majority”.

In contradiction, the SPGB’s position is in fact that the capitalist state has to be ‘transformed’ or ‘converted’, and certainly not ‘replaced’, let alone ‘swept away’.

And what is the SPGB up to, requesting “unity discussions” with the flotsam and jetsam who are bobbing around the Socialist Platform? I thought the SPGB was “hostile” to “all other parties” and would never until recently have even contemplated “unity discussions” with a collection of Trotskyists and ‘independent’ leftists of dubious lineage and promiscuous political CVs.

Either the SPGB is attempting to make some cheap points - very unlike the SPGB of old - or it has genuinely moved away from some of its key underpinning principles, which have ensured its sectarian and fossilised longevity. The alternative Ashbourne Court SPGB accuses the Clapham version of having been taken over by anarchists, liberals and single-issue campaigners.

Perhaps they should sort out their own differences before trying to score cheap propaganda points in relation to other people’s.

Glass houses
Glass houses

Skirts

Missing from your new Communist Platform is a statement confirming the lessons of the Paris Commune, such as:

“The working class cannot simply take control of the capitalist state apparatus and use it to build socialism; rather the working class must smash the existing institutions, which were built for and serve to preserve capitalism and instead conquer higher forms of workers’ democracy which correspond to the tasks of building socialism. Those higher forms of democracy may include factory committees, wage and price committees, neighbourhood councils, workers’ councils, workers’ militia and councils of specially oppressed peoples.”

The part stating you will use parliamentary and extraparliamentary means to convince the masses that the capitalist state must be “swept away” skirts this issue, while paving the road to Kautskyan obscurity before the Left Unity party even gets out of the starting gate.

Skirts
Skirts

New platform

Weekly Worker readers may be interested in the new Republican Socialist Platform of Left Unity:

1. The global financial and economic crisis since 2008 has been transformed by governments imposing austerity policies into a massive redistribution of income and wealth from working people to the rich and powerful.

2. This has led to a ‘crisis of democracy’, as people have protested against the lack of democracy in their governments. Democratic uprisings and protests have impacted on authoritarian and liberal regimes alike. Since Iceland in 2009, democratic movements spread from Tunisia and Egypt right across the Middle East, and on to Russia and more recently Syria and Turkey. There have also been the Occupy protests in Spain, America and elsewhere. Meanwhile, in Greece the banks have imposed austerity policies on the people, rendering Greek ‘democracy’ more or less irrelevant.

3. The UK is not a democracy. The country is governed by an oligarchy which rules in the name of the crown through the constitutional laws of the ‘crown-in-parliament’. This involves the hegemony of the crown over parliament and the people of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The so-called Glorious Revolution was the beginning of an historic compromise of crown and parliament forged between 1688 and 1707. This was never intended as a popular democracy. Despite subsequent democratic reforms, a largely unaccountable bureaucracy, with more and more centralised control, has ensured that political power remains concentrated in the institutions of the crown, governing ‘from above’.

4. The contradiction between this lack of popular democracy and the official ideology of liberal parliamentarianism has been regularly highlighted by corrupt practices and exposed by protests and popular struggles, most notably over the poll tax and the Iraq war. During the economic and financial crisis, support was freely given by Labour to City institutions, while austerity was imposed by the crown. The subsequent coalition package of cuts and privatisation was never endorsed by the electorate, but cobbled together after the 2010 general election.

5. Today, the public is increasingly disillusioned with ‘politics’ and alienated by corruption, a lack of democracy and a lack of public accountability. However, people do not necessarily draw radical conclusions from this. The Tory right and UK Independence Party point to Europe as the source of Britain’s failing democracy.

6. A progressive resolution of the ‘democratic deficit’ requires the building of a mass movement for radical democratic reform. The anti-poll tax movement and the mass opposition to the Iraq war contained the seeds of such a movement. In Scotland opposition to the poll tax fed into demands for a Scottish parliament. But in England both movements failed to generalise beyond these particular issues into a ‘permanent’ democratic movement. In 2011, the Occupy movement re-awakened the democratic impulse, from which emerged demands for a new constitution or ‘Agreement of the People’.

7. Crucially, the Labour left and Trotskyist parties in the UK have failed to champion the cause of fundamental democratic change. They have occasionally paid lip service to the ‘democratic deficit’, seemingly unaware of the direct economic and social damage this has inflicted on the lives of working people. In essence, Labourism does not fight for republican democracy, aiming instead to secure reforms by accommodation with the crown. By not fighting for republican democracy, the Trotskyists have been a mirror image of Labourism, posing against it a demand for total ‘socialist revolution’ in theory, while in their practice not going beyond defending the welfare state.

8. We need a different kind of party to the traditional ‘parties’ of the left. Such a party would recognise the central importance of the struggle for democracy in mobilising all oppressed sections of society into a mass movement for radical change, a new democratic constitution and a social republic. This party, drawing on the republican and socialist traditions going back to the Levellers and Diggers and inspired by the militant struggles of the Chartists and suffragettes, would seek to build and provide leadership for a broad democratic movement, thus becoming a republican socialist party.

Haider Bilal, Russell Caplan, Jane Clarke, Rada Daniell, Steve Freeman, Mick Hall, Peter Morton, Diane Paice, Danny Thompson, Julie Timbrell, Phil Vellender.

New platform

Transfer request

The better elements of the left in Britain are again meeting to try and thrash out the programme and structure of a party of the left.

I have been involved with many of the initiatives over the past few years, from the Independent Labour Network, the Socialist Labour Party, the network of Socialist Alliances, becoming the Socialist Alliance, to Respect and the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition. All have either stumbled or failed to develop for a variety of reasons. Tusc recently gaining only 21 votes in a by-election in Salford.

In my view, the Left Unity conference in November could well be the last occasion, perhaps for a generation, where the left tries to come together on a national scale. In my own borough we are having some success with Lewisham People Before Profit, gaining 23% in a by-election in March and over 400 votes.

My good friend, Toby Abse, and I have submitted a proposal to the pending conference arrangements committee of Left Unity. We are suggesting elections to the proposed national committee are held on the basis of a single transferable vote. An election held on this basis is likely to allow those who hold minority views to have their voice reflected at the highest level of the party. This will avoid a ‘winner takes all’ approach and hopefully keep within the organisation the range of skills, talents and energy that will be needed to get our project off the ground.

I would urge all readers to give our proposal their support, regardless of which fraction or platform they support.

Transfer request
Transfer request

Not big enough

I was very pleasantly surprised to read David Douglass’s sensible and intelligent letter (October 10). I had been beginning to feel very lonely on the left, believing myself to be the only one who hasn’t bought the climate change swindle, hook, line and sinker. I will be sure to purchase a copy of his publication Clean coal technology, climate change and the miners.

I am writing simply to thank you for putting such a refreshing alternative on this subject in your paper. Personally, I have never believed anything of the absurd notion that humans could affect the massive complexities of the weather system that is generated by the sun. Common sense alone should tell us that we are simply far too small in comparison to the immensities of the powers involved to have any bearing upon them. One million planet Earths could fit inside the sun.

Sure, I do believe that at the local level we can create havoc, such as pollution in towns and cities and landslides caused by deforestation, but we cannot, have not and never will be big enough to change the climate.

Not big enough
Not big enough

Science first

In answer to Dave Douglass, I have no doubt that previous reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change contained information or papers that are dubious.

I acknowledge that the IPCC report is a construct of the dominant ideological trends in society and from our perspective can be criticised for that. However, what cannot possibly be denied is the overwhelming evidence, agreement and consensus about the science of climate change and the effects that this is having on the life of this planet, some of which I mentioned in my article. However, what Dave Douglass wants to show is that the whole of climate science should be junked, because it is a conspiracy theory directed against his favourite industry, coal mining, and the communities that were built around it.

It was not climate science that decimated the coal industry: it was the determination of the Tories to smash a workforce that had brought down previous governments and from its perspective was too powerful. However, coal is certainly ‘in the dock’ for its contribution towards increasing CO₂ emissions. Until a safe and secure way of burning coal for energy can be developed on a mass scale, we should keep most of it in the ground.

Dave accuses me of ‘sexing up’ the IPCC report in my article (‘The problem is capitalism’, October 3). Yes, perhaps I have. As I mentioned, the report does not say anything about feedback loops, and, of course, it works within the paradigm of bourgeois society, so in that sense is ‘conservative’. In all these respects, the report can be criticised, including by climate sceptics.

But what sort of world does Dave want to live in? Does he want to be the canary down the coal mine for ever? Is it not better to let the science speak? Yes, be wary of the underlying politics, but Dave is using such politics to rubbish the science. In other words, he is just as bad as those in the ruling class who seek to pervert science for their own purposes. Science, not ideology, should come first - only then can it be wielded as a weapon by the working class, to be utilised to overcome bourgeois intransigence on issues such as climate change.

But Dave and the defenders of coal seem to be trapped by a paranoid fear of a global conspiracy against them, of which the IPCC is presumably a part.

Science first
Science first

Dilemma

Aside from the usual kinds of cherry-picking and whole-cloth invention that are usually used by denialists of anthropogenic global warming, and that fills the rest of Douglass’s letter in order to support false conclusions, his final comment on the potential destruction of coal miners’ jobs is very relevant.

Those of us who advocate an end to the use of fossil fuels as the main source of the sudden current acceleration of global warming have also to develop an approach that takes into account the way that millions of workers’ jobs are tied to fossil fuels. It’s similar to the weapons industry, where thousands of workers’ livelihoods are tied up in manufacturing devices and tools that are intended to kill workers around the world.

There is no solution to this dilemma that fails to advocate replacement of the entire system with one that does not depend for livelihoods on the destruction of lives. The essay that Greg Meyerson and I have published takes that issue directly head on (http://bravenewclimate.com/2012/04/12/the-nuclear-energy-solution). But Douglass does not.

Dilemma
Dilemma

Not fascist

Just a few further remarks to Jack Conrad’s commentary on the English Defence League in the podcast of this week’s political report, available on the CPGB website. If we remain faithful to theses of the fourth congress of the Comintern, according to which fascist movements are characterised by populism and anti-proletarian street fighting squads, it is not only possible for an organisation to be fascist without being ‘Nazi’: it is also possible to be ‘Nazi’ without being fascist.

Prior to fascism’s ascent, there existed parties in the German-speaking countries which, for all intents and purposes, had ’Nazi’ political programmes that were pan-German nationalist, anti-Semitic, anti-Slavic, and anti-Marxist. They sought to build a mass base among petty bourgeois and, to a lesser extent, proletarian layers, yet most of them did not employ reactionary street violence. These were the parties that most strongly influenced the young Hitler, who went on to merge their aims, principles and ideology with the methods of the Italian fascisti and the French Action Française.

One such grouping, which existed in Austria and Czechoslovakia from 1919-1933, was the German National Socialist Workers’ Party (DNSAP). While its programme and theoretical writings lacked none of the elements made famous by the similarly named organisation based in Munich, it operated in a legalistic manner, had a collective leadership and practised a certain degree of internal democracy. After forging stronger links with Hitler’s party in 1923, it did become a fascist organisation in the latter’s image: ie, it established an SA-styled paramilitary wing called Verband Volkssport and adopted the Führer principle.

The DNSAP was opposed in Austria by fascist militias such as the Heimwehr, and by militant anti-German, anti-Nazi formations such as the National Fascist Community in Czechoslovakia.

Not fascist
Not fascist