Weekly Worker 269 Thursday December 17 1998
Letters
Religious sect?
In picking over the bones of the now defunct Workers International League (WIL), John Stone of the Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International (Weekly Worker December 10) shows graphically how not to proceed when analysing why yet another left grouping has disappeared.
The WIL was probably the only healthy group to emerge from the mad world that Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party had become at the time of its collapse. Although always small, it quickly gained new forces from a range of different traditions (in my own case, the SWP). The Leninist Trotskyist Tendency to which it affiliated (Stone is quite wrong to say this was formed by the WIL) was also similar in this respect, and was one of the few international groupings not dominated by a single national organisation. By the early 1990s the WIL had developed an enviable reputation for consistent principled Marxism that rejected the sectarianism that characterises most of the British left. It also held a critical attitude to the sterile and dogmatic ‘orthodoxy’ of most Trotskyist groups. It is this latter trait that most annoys Stone, as can be gauged from his shocked tones when discussing the WIL’s support for the position of Roman Rosdolsky on the national question in eastern Europe.
I doubt if Stone has even studied Rosdolsky’s position, but, that aside, his horror is over the fact that Rosdolsky, and the WIL, believed that Marx and Engels made a number of mistakes on this issue, mistakes mindlessly repeated in recent years by countless epigones who rejected Bosnian muslim self-determination on the grounds that Engels had claimed they were not a genuine people at all (try telling that to one to the survivors of Serb and Croat death camps). Of course, if you treat Marxism as a religion, and the writings of your chosen saints as gospel, then politics merely becomes the art of the bibliophile, once in a while coming out with an appropriate quotation from your idols to ‘prove’ that you are right.
This surely is the real hub of the matter: how ‘Trotskyists’ such as Stone have succeeded, yet again, in turning Marxism from a guide to action into a rigid dogma. Of course, the nature of the period we are in is central to this. The lack of major class battles, and a recent history of serious defeats (from the miners to the Liverpool dockers) have meant that it has been incredibly difficult to connect Marxist practice to the workers’ movement and build an organisation in this period, as the WIL found to its cost. But despite all the problems, the WIL did make a far better political analysis than most.
For example, while the majority of the far left (including the CPGB) were impressionistically carried away by the launch of the SLP, it was the WIL who correctly argued that this was not a significant split by the class away from Labourist reformism, but a small breakaway caused itself by demoralisation. It was on this issue in particular that the WIL found impossible joint work with Stone’s LCMRCI (which, it should be said, has always had more initials in its name than members), particularly when LCMRCI members were wildly predicting actual electoral successes for SLP candidates. It was the WIL who restated that you cannot break workers from reformism simply by telling them how bad the Labour Party is.
However, the WIL could not escape the material circumstances in which it operated. The result was increasing demoralisation that slowed production of its paper, Workers News, to only a few issues a year. This was an impossible situation, and needless to say produced further demoralisation.
Into this situation burst the tragicomic figure of Steve Myers, whose politics basically consisted of grandiose, get-rich-quick schemes that most of the time had no connection with reality. Then, in 1997, Myers was accused by a female member of sexual abuse. After a long investigation by a control commission it was concluded that although the incident was confused (all those concerned had been drunk) there was enough evidence to suspend Myers from the WIL for a period of six months.
However, by this time Myers was one of three members who had launched a faction in order to publish what would become Workers Fight (WF). WF members deliberately ignored Myers’ suspension, and insisted he attended every meeting in order to bolster their meagre forces (it should be noted that not a single female comrade supported WF, which itself is very telling).
Rather than fight this politically, as I believed should have been the case, the majority of those members left decided to dissolve the WIL and establish Workers Action (WA), minus the three WF members. It was at this stage that I left, having been appalled by the contempt shown for democratic centralism and lack of referral to the LTT by both sides. It is now the case that while WF continue on an ultra-left adventure into the land of the sects, WA retain some of the better sides of the old WIL, but have also been pulled to the right by some of the ex-Outlook members involved.
So what should be learned from all of this? Stone sees everything from the point of view of defending ‘orthodoxy’. I have always seen this term as one of abuse, as it is surely the opposite of what genuinely revolutionary Marxism should be! What Stone’s ideas amount to is how to build yet another sect. What we need is not a return to veneration of holy texts (“the classics”, as Stone revealingly calls the works of his idols) but to Marxist method. Al Richardson has recently outlined very well the struggle of Marx and Engels against sect building (What next? No9, 1998) which I would recommend to all readers.
This process should be our real starting point, and the best way to keep alive not only all that was good about the WIL, but also to build on the programmatical advances by Trotsky in relation to the workers’ movement.
Jim Dye
President, Liverpool TUC
(personal capacity)
Stalin only choice
Phil Sharpe (Weekly Worker December 3) brands Stalin a subjective idealist because he stood for socialism in one country. Nowhere does Phil describe what he means by socialism. Socialism is essentially the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the October Revolution the proletariat actually achieved power.
When Lenin died in 1924 there were several possible contenders for leadership of the proletariat and its party, the Communist Party. Trotsky and Bukharin, from left and right standpoints, did not believe that it was possible to build socialism in one country. Remembering the definition of socialism above, this amounts to saying that the proletariat would have to surrender power. The proletariat had not made the revolution and established its dictatorship in order to surrender power.
There was only one serious candidate for leadership who was in favour of building socialism in one country - that is, continuing with the dictatorship of the proletariat. His name was Stalin.
Whether the proletariat liked Stalin, whether he instituted mass democracy, whether he found it necessary to lock up or kill people who might cause trouble, whether he was a nice man, etc are all irrelevant. He was the only choice that the proletariat could make. If Phil knows that a better candidate was available, perhaps he will let us know his/her identity. It is a fact that a proletariat which wishes to continue with its dictatorship will support the appropriate leader.
This does not mean that socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, is destined to continue for ever in a particular country. Socialism ended in the Soviet Union when Stalin died in 1953. There were no candidates for leadership then who stood for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Phil, like perhaps a majority of communists, Trotskyists and socialists in this country, would himself appear to have a subjective, idealist notion of what socialism is - an ideal state of affairs where everything is nationalised, there is mass democracy, production is for use, not for profit, everybody loves one another, etc.
Sorry, Phil. Socialism is the dictatorship of the proletariat or else it is mere playing with words.
Ivor Kenna
Central London
Left nationalist
Phil Stott, Allan Green and Ritchie Venton of the Scottish Socialist Party argued, according to Tom Delargy (Weekly Worker December 10), that the only possible unity deal on offer to the Socialist Workers Party “was for them to join the Scottish Socialist Party”.
The comrades seem not to have noticed that the SWP is an all-Britain organisation and the SSP purely a Scottish one. If the SWP ‘joined’ the SSP it would no longer be a Scottish Party. But of course this apparently minor point seems to have escaped everybody’s notice. What comrades Stott, Green and Venton are in reality calling for is for Scottish members of the SWP to split and break away from their own party and join the SSP. It seems that these Scottish nationalists are ‘non-sectarian’ because they want everybody to become nationalists and join their left nationalist party.
Instead of creating illusions in this kind of ‘non-sectarianism’ Tom Delargy should point out that the call to split the SWP along national lines is itself a sectarian slogan - it puts forward not the interests of international working class unity, but the petty power play of the splitters from the Militant/Socialist Party. Tom Delargy should call on the SSP to seek talks with the SWP on the basis of joining forces to form a new all-Britain/UK organisation which is committed to fighting for Scotland’s right to self-determination and for a federal republic.
Dave Craig
RDG
Brazen lie
I am surprised that a letter from the Spartacist Group Japan (SGJ) is printed in the latest issue of the Weekly Worker (December 10). The letter printed in your paper is a bit different from what I received from Bob Malecki in Sweden.
The original letter included a brazen lie that the New Socialist Party, the only party which refuses to join the imperialist hysteria against the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, “supported” the government’s resolution condemning the DPRK. This is removed from the version printed in your paper. Who ‘corrected’ this? The editor of the Weekly Worker? The SGJ?
Anyway, you should be more careful about publishing Spartacist leaflets, because they very often contain lies and falsifications about their opponents.
Cheng Maonan
Tokyo, Japan
Editor’s note: Each edition of the Weekly Worker advises readers that “letters may have been shortened because of space”. We do not consider it necessary to also warn readers that their contents might not be true.
