Letters

Unmentionable

The Tories are getting nervous, as well they might. In Ypres, Belgium, the English Premier League is constructing a football pitch for completion in time to re-enact the December 1914 Christmas truce. No-one dares mention it, but the event being officially commemorated was a mutiny. As every schoolchild knows (or soon will!), troops on both sides stopped killing one another, shook hands, exchanged gifts and played football in no-man’s land. At the time, needless to say, this caused panic among the top brass, prompting ferocious measures to discourage any repeat. Pontificating 100 years later, what will Michael Gove have the nerve to say?

In 1967, I visited the Essex home of Alf Killick, who was among thousands of British troops stationed in Calais when hostilities ceased, all awaiting demobilisation. My sister and I published his memories as a short booklet, The Calais mutiny. As far as we knew, all record of this massive uprising had been lost or forgotten by mainstream historians.

In January 1919, a soldier was arrested for making a seditious speech. Instantly, his comrades decided to mutiny. The officers’ quarters were surrounded. Killick “had never before or since seen such panic as showed on their faces”. The Calais Area Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Association was quickly formed, inspired by the Russian soviets. A general strike took hold, as 20,000 mutineers marched through Calais, complete with regimental bands. To crush the revolt, the army command had to send in the 5th Army Corps. “However”, as Alf Killick told us with a twinkle in his eye, “the first thing the men of the 5th army did on arriving was to ask us for information as to how we did it and for advice on organisation”. Advised to join in, they promptly did.

Michael Gove won’t like it, but all schoolchildren should be taught that what Europe’s governing elites termed ‘Bolshevism’ was not political extremism at all. On the contrary, it was something human and compassionate. It was an amplified internationalist echo of that 1914 Christmas truce, now given political expression.

In one sense, Calais was nothing new. Even when not in open mutiny, both sides after 1914 found ways to fire into the air, exchanging ‘live and let live’ messages to minimise casualties. A state of semi-mutiny was the norm, at least during periods between offensives. 1917- 18 saw unprecedented outbreaks of fraternisation and desertion, men repeatedly embracing across the trenches, raising the red flag and singing ‘The Internationale’. Schoolchildren sometimes ask why the top brass on both sides insisted on doomed, suicidal offensives? Historians broadly agree that the carnage was as much to shatter ‘live and let live’ - to crush revolt from below - as to defeat the official enemy.

By 1918, Europe’s rich and powerful feared Bolshevism more than they feared each other. They had reason to be worried. The 1919 Calais mutiny was building from strength to strength, just as a massive general strike was breaking out on the Clyde, and just as 20,000 mutinying troops were seizing Southampton docks. In the summer of 1918, 12,000 police - virtually the entire Metropolitan force - had organised a solid and successful strike, prompting the government to deploy troops across London. In the early months of 1919, police trade union membership was still growing fast.

In feeble opposition to Gove’s ravings against “leftwing historians”, the best New Labour’s Tristram Hunt can do is insist we keep politics out of remembrance. What a disgrace! Europe’s near-revolution is the great unmentionable fact about what happened 100 years ago. Instead of colluding with this cross-party political censorship, let’s commemorate the waves of mutiny which in February 1917 culminated in the overthrow of the tsar, followed by the November 1918 sailors’ mutiny which toppled the kaiser.

Beginning with that Ypres football match, how should we commemorate such victories? One small group of radical historians and activists have come together under the name ‘Remembering the Real World War I’. We’ll soon be holding a conference, aimed at providing information and support to local historians and activists determined to remember our movement’s dead, as they would wish to be remembered. As these important centenaries approach, building toward 2017, the Tories are getting nervous. Let’s make them more nervous.

Unmentionable
Unmentionable

At long last

Scanning through back copies of the Morning Star the other day, I came across an article by Communist Party of Britain general secretary Robert Griffiths from December 24, entitled ‘A mixed year for the left in Britain’.

Halfway through his brief look at the “highs and lows” of the previous 12 months, comrade Griffiths comes up with this sentence: “On the far left in Britain, the biggest news in 2013 has been the continuing implosion of the Socialist Workers Party.” The “biggest news”? Yes, it was a big story, but, unless I am very much mistaken, the Star itself did not carry a single report or article about it! Yet comrade Griffiths writes as though his readers are all up to speed - no doubt many are, but I suspect a good few ‘official communists’, for whom the Morning Star is the only source of information about the left, will have had no idea what he was talking about.

For their benefit he explains: “Its mishandling of rape accusations against a leading party member - and of the consequent revolt - reflected an internal regime which is deeply undemocratic, inflexible and dictatorial.” Totally unlike the state of affairs historically inside ‘official’ communist parties, of course - including the Communist Party of Great Britain and its CPB offspring.

Comrade Griffiths continues: “This is ironic” - but he is not referring to the sad parody of democratic centralism that has per tained amongst Britain’s ‘official communists’. He goes on: “… considering that the SWP established itself as the biggest force on the far left primarily on the basis of ‘anti-Stalinism’ and trade union ‘rank and filism’, larded with quixotic theory concerning ‘state capitalism’ in the Soviet Union and leavened with ultra-leftist slogans”.

The CPB leader seems to think that the SWP is already dead, for he writes: “While the ability of the SWP to play a leading role in popular front-type initiatives, such as the early Anti-Nazi League and more recently the Stop the War Coalition, may be missed on the left, its anti-communist ideological influence will not.” I think you may be jumping the gun a bit there, Robert. It is true that the SWP has undergone a very severe crisis, leading to the haemorrhaging of hundreds of members, and things inside it can never be the same again. But it is still - at least for the moment - “the biggest force on the far left” in Britain (does comrade Griffiths include his own organisation in that category, by the way?). It could struggle on for many a year yet.

And note also the entirely positive use of the term, “popular front”. Although the SWP itself has always referred to organisations like the ANL and STWC as ‘united fronts’, comrade Griffiths’s label is accurate: they are indeed inevitably organised on the basis of popular front ‘principles’, in that the ‘revolutionaries’ running them, and providing most of the organisational muscle on the ground, tone down their professed Marxism in order to attract and retain forces to their right (sometimes far to their right).

Amongst those for whose benefit the SWP has watered down its politics is, of course, the CPB itself - although nowadays it is that former SWPer, John Rees, with whom the CPB has been cooperating most closely, within the People’s Assembly, for instance. So why does comrade Griffiths call the SWP “anti-communist”? It has hardly been directing its attacks at people like him very much in recent years.

Anyway, at long last the SWP crisis has been publicly referred to by a CPB leader. Griffiths takes for granted that most of his readers will have got their information about this important question from ‘sectarian’ websites and ‘gossip sheets’ like the Weekly Worker, of course.

At long last
At long last

Committed

Michael Ellison should not believe everything he reads in the Weekly Worker (Letters, January 9). I have not “retired” and am certainly not contemplating suicide (with or without a bomb). I remain a Marxist, I remain committed to the struggle for socialism. I just don’t happen to belong to an organisation at present.

Committed
Committed

Polish SWP

Not many people in Poland, even on left, are aware of the crisis of the British SWP. But the Polish section of the SWP’s International Socialist Tendency is in the same crisis and doesn’t do anything to avoid the mistakes of its British comrades.

The failure of ‘pluralistic’, ‘broad’ parties is clear from examples such as the collapse of Respect, the rise and fall of the Scottish Socialist Party (of which I am aware from the Weekly Worker). But not for the Polish Cliffites: the Polish section of the IST is in crisis too. They have stopped organising weekly forums - their meetings are held just once every three months now and only in Warsaw. And they don’t organise any active front groups any more - they just sell their paper.

In the current issue of their monthly, Workers Democracy (January), they invite people to join an initiative for a populist party started by former Polish Socialist Party MP Piotr Ikonowicz calling for a “broad, pluralist ... organisation of ordinary people demanding their rights”. At the same time the newspaper backs the demand for ... the European Basic Income (!), supported jointly by Ikonowicz and the left liberal Palikot Movement (a combination of Beppe Grillo and Vitaly Klitschko - populist liberal kind of thing).

Polish SWP
Polish SWP

Mythical future

Although Moshé Machover ’s article on the Palestinian single state-solution was interesting and thought-provoking, it suffered from being too schematic, including a mechanical and false separation between the tasks and processes of national democratic liberation and social emancipation (‘Belling the cat’, December 12). Lenin argued against erecting a Chinese wall between these two stages. Perhaps an ‘apartheid wall’ would be more appropriate in this case, especially as that physical wall happens to be part of Moshé’s argument.

In essence, Moshé argues that Palestinian national democratic liberation has to wait for and be part of an Arab-wide socialist revolution. Goodness knows how long this will take to achieve, but the effect in practice would be to preserve and defend the existing state of Israel for decades.

Moshé claims a single-state solution would be a “pure” bourgeois-democratic, capitalist state, indeed - that its advocates wish to advance no social and economic progress at this stage, putting this off to a future socialist revolution. Others claim this is the Stalinist theory of stages and the betrayal of the revolution. What nonsense!

The masses of the Palestinian people are fighting not simply for nationhood, but for substantial concrete improvements in their basic living conditions - for housing, water, and food, and for decent education and good health - seeing the struggle for national liberation as intimately and integrally connected with the struggle for social emancipation. Maybe a small minority of the Palestinian leadership would be content simply with the trappings of nationhood, but this is hardly true for the mass movement.

Most revolutions in practice go much further than what might be indicated by the rigid schemas set out by people like Moshé. The struggles after the initial revolution are often between those who would want to limit and contain the revolution, and those who see the logic and momentum of going forward. Marx and Engels described some of these interlocking and contradictory processes in The class struggles in France. Although these were bourgeois revolutions, they also marked the entry of the working class as an independent actor onto the stage, and which even then threw up potential organs of future proletarian power.

The national liberation of eastern Europe by the Red Army and local partisans during World War II resulted in massive and progressive economic and social change for working people, not just the simple rolling back of Nazism or re-establishment of capitalism.

Those fighting for the Spanish republic in 1936 wanted a ‘democratic republic of a new type’ - one which went beyond bourgeois democratic categories, but which would not immediately be socialist. It had already given land to the peasants, the big newspapers and the radio were in the hands of the working class, and large-scale industry had been nationalised for the prosecution of the war.

Moshé’s rigid and mechanical schema says that the Israeli working class will only ever be interested in socialism for itself, and can only ever be opposed to the national struggle of the Palestinians. As Israelis would lose their current national privileges in a single bourgeois democratic state, they can never be won to the cause of the Palestinians.

Moshé claims that because the Israelis would be a numerical minority within such a state, this automatically means the Israeli nation would be dissolved and subordinated to a Palestinian nation. But where is the evidence for this? Most serious advocates of a just solution to the Palestinian- Israeli conflict argue that both individual and national rights must be established and defended.

The state of Israel has existed longer than the majority of states in today’s world. The Israeli nation cannot and should not be wished, decreed or swept away. All we are saying is that the national rights of Israelis do not include the ‘right’ to oppress another people. Marx said that a nation which oppresses another nation cannot itself be free.

In the Soviet Union recognition of multinationalism was the very foundation of national liberation and self-determination. Underpinned by one chamber of the supreme soviet elected on the basis of ‘one person, one vote’, and the other elected on the basis of nationalities. Both chambers had to agree in order to pass legislation, reconciling universal individual rights with national rights. A similar system operated in Czechoslovakia after World War II.

As the White Lion, Joe Slovo, said in relation to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, “We need to understand the relationship between the national struggle and the class struggle. If we mechanically separate the two, we inevitably get wrong answers. We should be asking what is the class content of the national struggle and what is the national element of the class struggle?” How do elements of both intersect and interlace with each other? How can we connect and integrate all these into a coherent programme for change, and to unify and mobilise the greatest possible number in struggle?

Yes, if we mechanically rule out fighting for the national, cultural and religious rights of Israeli working people and rule out explaining how they are oppressed by their oppression of the Palestinians, they will probably not be positively engaged in the struggle of the Palestinian people. But we are not saying that.

We should be fighting now for the national, democratic, social and economic rights of both Palestinians and Israelis and for all working people who live in the region. Not postponing it until a mythical time when the Israeli working class has been persuaded of the case for ‘pure’ socialism or an equally mythical future Arab-wide socialist revolution.

This leaves both the state of Israel intact and places the key for Palestinian liberation and emancipation in the hands of the Israeli working class. Funny, that ...

Mythical future
Mythical future

Middle class

Ed Miliband obviously thinks he can gain votes by claiming that Labour alone can “rebuild our middle class”. This is a pretty crude attempt to Americanise politics in Britain.

In the United States there are “hard working families” .... but no working class. There are the unemployed, poor and homeless ... but no working class. There are Wall Street fat cats ... but no working class. It is amazing that anything gets made, built or done. But it does because some 70%-80% of the US population is working class (a category that must include pensioners, the unemployed, children, students, etc).

Nevertheless, both Republicans and Democrats spend millions of dollars appealing to the “middle class”, as if it was the great majority of the US population.

The fact of the matter is that the middle class is fast shrinking. True, various governments subsidise small businesses, small farms, the self-employed, etc. But those who uneasily hover between relying on the ‘wage fund’ and those plutocrats committed to the accumulation of capital have, yes, been “squeezed” by the great recession.

Indeed many of them have been thoroughly proletarianised.

Once, back in the 1930s, school teachers, nurses, office workers and so on were rightly considered part of the middle classes. Can that really be said today? No, school teachers, nurses and office workers are just as likely to be in trade unions as car workers, street cleaners and building workers. They are also just as likely to strike in defence of their pay and terms of conditions.

What Miliband calls the “crisis of the middle class” is in truth the crisis of the upper section of the working class. The idea that today the “pillars of middle class life” are “access to further education and training, good-quality jobs with reliable incomes, affordable housing, stable savings, secure pensions” is a joke. These “pillars” are nothing more than what is required to produce and reproduce average labour-power in countries such as the US, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, etc.

Naturally Miliband pitches his solidarity with the “middle class” in nationalistic terms. In his Daily Telegraph article he writes that to compete with China, India and Brazil - all of whom supposedly have a rapidly expanding middle class - Britain must also have a “strong and vibrant middle class” (January 13).

He therefore mourns the “hollowing-out of those white-collar professions that used to keep the middle class strong … under David Cameron, life is getting tougher still.”

If he is serious - that is, if he is serious about more than getting votes - then he will champion the trade union power that could actually shift the balance against capital and in favour of labour. But that would mean actively siding with strikes, actively siding with the revival of the shop stewards movements and making a binding commitment to repeal the anti-trade union laws that the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown governments were more than content to leave intact (governments which Miliband uncritically supported).

Marxists do support the middle class ... to a limited degree. We should defend doctors, lawyers, middle-ranking civil servants, small business people, etc against the “squeeze” they face. But in the longer term this is a dying class. Something we welcome.

Once, in Britain, the working class was a minority. But, with the decline of feudalism and the rise of capitalism, their numbers have constantly grown. Those with some kind of independent existence - artisans, guild members, yeomen farmers, shopkeepers, etc - have correspondingly shrunk in numbers.

Miliband’s bid for the “middle class” is as much to do with obfuscation as it is about securing votes. Bourgeois politicians, including in the bourgeois workers’ party, want to pretend that it is the working class that has shrunk and is now almost an irrelevancy. The reality is, of course, the other way round.

Middle class
Middle class

Criticism

David Morgan is wrong if he imagines that autonomists were provoked into overturning an SWP stall at the University of Sussex by the CPGB’s criticism of that organisation (Letters, January 9). Autonomists have their own agenda, which may include a reading of bourgeois feminist polemics portraying the SWP as ‘rape deniers’. This has never been the basis for the CPGB’s criticism.

The CPGB has attacked the SWP leadership’s bureaucratic centralism, bullying and arrogance - for its cynical abuse of the members. This abuse constitutes a barrier to creating a united, democratic working class party. But it is not only to be found in the SWP: most of the left suffers to a greater or lesser extent from these same faults.

We also criticise the left for following opportunist policies disguised as the so-called transitional method. These populist programmes, based as they are on frontist stunts and outfits, have a long history of failing, spreading disillusion and apathy in their wake and helping to promote the sectarian blame game.

But if such hard criticism is the prelude to violence then the comrade’s letter by the same score could surely provoke physical attacks on the CPGB! Comrade Morgan’s logic is absurd and takes us into ‘three brass monkeys’ territory - we are supposed to ‘see no evil’ in other left groups, etc. But it is not an imagined overabundance of criticism that is responsible for the disunity of the left. It is precisely the lack of serious criticism (and self-criticism) that prevents us from advancing towards the kind of party that is necessary.

Yes, ideas can sometimes push people to employ irrational violence, but they can also inspire people to decisive, rational action - revolution. The lesson to learn is not that criticism should be muted - many on the left believe that it is only through ignoring or playing down our disagreements that we will be able to unite our forces and lead the masses to victory.

But that is the wrong way of looking at things. It is the masses that must achieve their own liberation, and to do that they need to understand every political position. So many on the left have failed to develop a thick skin and so they respond to criticism not with calm thoughtfulness, but with outraged and thoughtless anger. Not good for them and not good for the class - or for left unity.

Criticism
Criticism

Pond life

I don’t think I’ve ever read through such a bigoted pile of bullshit in my entire life as ‘A rat on a sinking ship’ (January 9).

What you say about Griffin is true enough, though his seat in the EU makes much more sense as a pay-off for services rendered to the current scummy establishment, rather than any kind of campaigning success. No, it’s that inbred far-left bigotry that’s got my bloody hackles rising. Take a look at Britain today and tell me this endless immigrant invasion has been good for these islands. Explain how giving away the wealth accumulated by numerous generations of Brits to ensure the care and welfare of our pensioners, armed forces and children’s education, or the handing over of our culture to that of cave-dwelling troglodites, is in any way in Britain’s best interests?

The problem doesn’t lie with people like me, but with propaganda-peddling media morons like yourselves, who seem never to be more content and complacent than when giving away the ancestral lands of the British peoples to a host of third-world scroungers. I think that if this is the direction in which your beliefs lie you should pack your bags and go and live amongst these people in their own lands, before the patience of the Brits finally snaps and race traitors like you are forcibly removed from these islands, along with the infestation of crud that has been dumped here against the will of the majority of Brits.

Pond life
Pond life