Weekly Worker 127 Thursday January 25 1996
Letters
Leagues of struggle
I am writing to express my thoughts on the recent debate about the SLP, which took place at the Halkevi Centre in Hackney, London. The meeting was co-hosted by the CPGB and Militant Labour. Both speakers criticised the proposed constitution of the SLP. Interestingly though, they only criticised the section which forbids the affiliation of already existing political organisations.
No left organisation is actually made up of the leading section of the working class, and therefore any claim to be a party is patently ridiculous.
I got the impression from the meeting that many left organisations, most notably ML, are desperately searching for a larger vehicle in which to operate. The same criticism can be made of the CPGB and Workers Power. It struck me that none of these organisations criticised the SLP’s qualification for membership - that someone had to live in Britain for a year or more. The irony of this was compounded by the fact that the Halkevi’s membership includes many political refugees who, because of the racist Asylum Bill, will be denied SLP membership under the present proposed SLP constitution.
Neither did any of the aforementioned organisations criticise the fact that the SLP is being targeted almost exclusively at trade unionists. This ignores the fact that only one in five workers is currently in a trade union. Who is going to address the needs of the increasing section of unemployed working class people who are not, or may have never been in a trade union?
Of course, communists should organise at the point of production, but to do so exclusively is a denial of the changing face of global capital, which cannot afford the privileges formerly enjoyed by the European labour aristocracy.
Some left groups even write off the unemployed as a lumpen element. Is it any wonder then that the fascists have already made a constituency, in which they are building with little opposition. It seems that the Trotskyist entryists have learnt nothing from their expulsion from the Labour Party. I fear that they will enter the SLP dishonestly and be expelled from the new organisation. A refusal to learn from history will bring about a farcical situation - the denial of open factions will lead to a stunted ideological debate and a leader centralist implementation.
The CPGB speaker, whilst agreeing with many of the points I’ve made here, chose not to explain why his organisation had not continued to participate in the Independent Working Class Association. Indeed, he may have been unable to explain it, as it goes against his organisation’s stated aim of the highest ideological debate for unity in action. In reality, we have seen that if the CPGB does not win the open ideological debate then it abandons the struggle.
A Workers Power delegate gave his now familiar diatribe about Labour being the true working class party and the left not having the potential to form a party without the masses. Of course, most WP members have no material interest in such a party, as their relatively privileged economic position allows them to survive quite comfortably in a bourgeois-dominated society.
The contributions from the SWPer Duncan Hallas were totally mystifying. Denying communist history, he totally wrote off elections even as a tactic - and perpetuated the myth that only workplace organisation could lead to revolution. If elections are irrelevant, why does the large sect to which he belongs urge people to vote for a Labour Party that is moving rapidly to the right and promising to attack the working class when it obtains power?
The Colin Roach Centre/IWCA were the only organisations to offer a positive alternative to the proposed SLP. The Colin Roach Centre Resistance believes that workplace and community struggle have to be given equal importance in the forging of a revolutionary movement. We believe that centres of resistance should be opened up in all working class areas, as a focus for working class militants in their struggle against state oppression. Only by meeting the needs of the working class can the left become trusted.
We are an organisation which believes that a revolutionary party will be built from the bottom up. We have affiliated to the IWCA, because many groups there share our views. The IWCA may or may not evolve into a communist party, but it is providing a forum for true revolutionary groups (ie, anti-Labour, anti-social democratic) to work together under one banner whenever possible.
We cannot afford the plague of sectarianism currently afflicting the left. If you don’t agree with all our statements, come and debate openly - and try to change our minds. Only those who are content to stay small will find an excuse not to affiliate. Real revolutionaries will become involved because only by combining our energies will we make any progress. It might be timely to remind the left that the RSDLP was formed through Leagues of Struggle and not on one sect’s programme. Affiliate to the IWCA now - we have a world to win.
Steve Hedley
Colin Roach Centre/IWCA
Make it happen
I welcome your paper’s expansion to cover more news and reports from the communist movement and trade union rank and file in Britain today. It has been some time since a leftwing paper started open debates, positive campaign work for ‘communist unity’ and to quote the left movement in daily struggle for rights, freedom and politicacl change in Britain in the 1990s.
For many socialists the development of a (new) Socialist Labour Party to challenge ‘new’ Labour is a positive one which after years of a shrinking and declining left, gives a new lease of life to work in local, regional and - as a national party - in parliament in future. We shall wait and see how the ‘left’ movement responds in either sitting on the fence or actively supporting the SLP in its election work and political campaigns on behalf of the working class.
As for communists, our challenge is to move together, as we presently have many parties and groups who were part of a larger British CP many years ago. We must firstly unite all communists - CPGB/NCP/CPB, etc - and other groups before we either support the (new) SLP or put forward a united ‘British’ communist party in the 1990s to offer the people an alternative to ‘new’ Labour where the SLP does not stand.
Our first challenge must be to have communist unity conferences and co-ordinate work across the communist movement to build our strength and mass membership which should push forward our demands. We know what we want. All of us have to make it happen, after too many sectarian hassles of the past 20 years of communist decline and bitter fighting.
I look forward to many communists and socialists putting forward new ideas for re-uniting the Communist Party and our views towards the (new) SLP in its forming months ahead. Please try to do this in your paper.
Andy Melville
Reading
A most dangerous concept
In responding to my observations (Weekly Worker 122) concerning the advanced workers and non-proletarian intellectuals, Ted Rowlands (Weekly Worker 125) should have read my writing more carefully. Although I referred to non-proletarian intellectuals who have “thrown in their lot with the working class”, I did not refer to advanced workers in that way, as they are obviously already part of the class. Oddly enough, Rowlands himself seems to accept the existence of the stratum of advanced workers in his very strange formulation, “There are workers who could compete more favourably with some of our would-be revolutionary political theorists”. Or perhaps I am mistaken. Perhaps he takes the view that in becoming capable of the independent elaboration in theory the worker ceases to be a worker and becomes something else.
Ted Rowlands extols Mick O’Farrell’s statement that, “The very idea that there can exist outside the working class a theoretical centre which knows the interests of the class better than the class itself is a most dangerous concept”. He insists that this statement is not simply an Aunt Sally, so it would be useful if he could identify those who actually uphold this most dangerous concept.
As regards theoretically fragmented, advanced workers influencing the Socialist Labour Party or, for that matter, any other ‘party of workers’, the first task before the stratum of advanced workers is their own unity around a common theoretical programme as the means to establish the ‘party of communists’. It is the failure to make the distinction between these two kinds of organisation which constitutes ‘a most dangerous concept’.
John Sandy
For a Permanent Party Polemic Committee
Public attack
You will be aware that in October last year José Villa was expelled from Workers Power for making a public attack on the LRCI of which he was a member. The Bolivian section was also suspended at that time for putting itself outside the discipline of the LRCI. In December the Bolivian section (POB) was expelled by the International Executive Committee of the LRCI.
On January 1 we also received a letter from the only member of the LRCI in Peru, Justo Cordova, renouncing his signature on the split document of POB and Villa and putting himself back under the discipline of the LRCI.
In his letter the comrade recognises that he was misled by José Villa into believing that the LRCI did not call for the defeat of Nato in the clash of early September in Bosnia. He recognises that he was wrong to support the document. He rejects the accusation that the LRCI is undemocratic and insists:
“The LRCI has always allowed differences to come to the surface and be discussed, and that discussion of these differences must be within the framework provided by the statutes and democratic centralism.”
The other three signatories to the document in Peru were not members of the LRCI and therefore could not split with it. They are loosely connected friends of José Villa; they were members of the LRCI in Peru in the late 1980s and early 1990s but left for personal reasons many years ago.
The LRCI has published its official reply to the documents of the POB and Villa in Trotskyist Bulletin No7, which can be purchased for £2.00.
K Harvey
For the LRCI
Anti-Soviet?
Danny Hammill’s article on the Russian elections in Weekly Worker 125 was factually accurate in its broad outlines. However, its interpretations and the general trend to articles in the Weekly Worker on the former Soviet Union both raise some unresolved problems, to my mind.
Danny comments on the urge several successor groups to the old Soviet Communist Party have towards trying to revive the USSR and its ruling party. First of all, Danny pours scorn on this, seeing it as an attempt to revive an “imaginary golden age”. What Danny is displaying is a lack of empathy however. The few weeks of the Paris Commune of 1871 had an effect on French politics that has lasted to the present day. The USSR lasted for almost 70 years and only collapsed four and a half years ago. Views on it - for and against - are still the major fault line separating trends in ex-USSR politics.
Moreover, the December elections showed how potent ‘USSR nostalgia’ can be. In my view, any intelligent opposition group in the former USSR would try to build on this sentiment. Nostalgia is not enough, but in the former Soviet context, it can be a start.
Back in 1989, the Leninist listed “anti-Sovietism” among the cardinal sins of opponents, and in 1991 it denounced Trotskyists for the line most of them took on the August coup and the USSR’s collapse. However, more recent articles and analyses of the USSR in the Weekly Worker have tended to cover their subject in a manner ranging from coldly neutral to hostile.
When Danny criticises Russian groups for wanting to revive the USSR, for example, is he condemning them for wanting to revive a state body he considers well and deservedly buried? And is the Weekly Worker gradually undergoing an anti-Soviet conversion on the road to Damascus that most Trotskyist groups traversed decades previously? Such a viewpoint may be correct, but if so, should it not be more explicit?
Danny calls on Russian groups to look to the future and adopt internationalism. I think he is being a little too narrowly West European in his approach. It is easy for West European leftwingers to withstand the lure of nostalgia. A heritage of complete failure tends to reduce nostalgia’s appeal. Things are a bit different in the homeland of October. Actually, in Russian society it tends to be the most capitalistic and pro-Western elements who look ahead in the manner prescribed by Danny. They achieve this feat by pretending that nothing happened between 1917 and 1991. Is this the road to go down?
Finally, Danny condemns the Communist Party of the Russian Federation for pro-capitalist statements by its leader, Zyuganov. However, as a general rule (there are exceptions, but not significant ones) the groups in Russia most inclined to damn capitalism to hell are the ones most inclined to hold aloft portraits of Stalin.
Steve Kay
Reading
