Weekly Worker 427 Thursday April 11 2002
Letters
Two-state nonsense
The debate over whether socialists should be advocating a two-state or a single-state ‘solution’ to the Israel/Palestine war is reformist and nationalistic nonsense.
The problem is class, not national, racial or religious origins. As a class, workers have no country. The British do not own Britain. The majority of Israelis have no significant stake in Israel. The impoverished Arabs do not share in their exploiters’ wealth. There are two classes in society: those who possess without producing and those who produce without possessing. States exist to protect the interests of the ruling from the working class, and from each other. Wars are fought over the interests of capitalists and would-be capitalists.
In the 1940s an aspirant Israeli ruling class used terrorist tactics to obtain their goal. Having obtained power violently, who could have expected the Israeli ruling class to have maintained power other than by the continued use of violence? Israeli workers identify with the aims of their rulers - they see their national identity as more important than their class identity with Arab and other workers. In this they are dangerously mistaken.
The Zionist and Palestinian nationalists who are arguing over the borders in the area hardly own between them a single acre of property. They are essentially arguing about where and by whom they will be exploited. Arafat and the PLO represent the interests of a would-be Palestinian class. A minority of Palestinians have benefited from oil-financed development, whilst most have become a propertyless army of labour.
Neither Palestinian nor Israeli capitalism can serve the interests of the vast majority of the population. The issue is not whether there should be two capitalist states, Palestine and Israel, or just one, either Palestine or Israel. As socialists we have no interests in redrawing borders, political deals, or the swapping of one ruling class for another. These amount to mere rearrangements of the capitalist furniture.
Only when Israeli and Arab workers join together as part of a worldwide movement for a society without class ownership, nations or armies will this war finally cease. This is not a pious hope for the future. Expecting leaders of rival capitalist states to stop the killing once and for all, to shake hands, make up and disarm, is to fail to understand that such conflict is inherent and endemic to capitalism. We can leave such dreams to the utopians who are fond of calling themselves realists.
For socialists it is clear that if there is ever going to be peace it is those who are the sitting targets of war who must actively pursue it. It is, however, impossible to create a durable and permanent peace without overthrowing the power of capital, by transferring state power from the capitalist to the working class.
Unfortunately, the working class does need a state and state power in the transition from capitalism to socialism. It is this view which separates socialists from anarchists. However, such a state cannot be the usual capitalist parliamentary state.
As Marx and Engels pointed out in The civil war in France, the lessons of the 1871 Paris Commune were that “the working class once come to power, cannot go on managing with the old state machine ... in order not to lose its only just conquered supremacy, it must do away with the old repressive machinery previously used against it. The former state power must be shattered and replaced by a new and democratic one.”
The state we need is not a state in the proper sense of the word as it is a state without a standing army, without a police opposed to the people, without an officialdom placed above the people. It will be a transitional institution which will dissolve and disappear as socialism is established.
Andrew Northall
Kettering
One-state nonsense
The direction being taken by the Weekly Worker on Palestine is wrong.
Of course we must always reconsider our positions of the past, but that is not to say that we throw out the obvious with the irrelevant. Short of restating the history of the Israeli state in detail, we should not neglect the expulsion of native Palestinians in 1948, the occupation of more of Palestine in 1967, the Six Day War, the invasion of Lebanon, the sacking of the refugee camps ... The catalogue is nearly endless.
Notwithstanding that, communists on the ground in Palestine have a different programme; since when did international communism berate the actions of freedom fighters against their oppressors? The terrorism of the oppressed and occupied Palestinians cannot be equated to the defensive actions of the oppressor and occupying Israelis.
Communists cannot agree to support a solution of ‘two states’, where one embodies a jewish sacred right and the other the law of islam. We must support a single united secular state for all jews, muslims, christians, atheists and others. On this issue I must give the point to the Socialist Workers Party when it says that a two-state solution “would mean an economically and militarily powerful Israel continuing to dominate a weak Palestine” (quoted in Weekly Worker April 4).
It is likely that when the dust settles over Ramallah, Nablus, Bethlehem and Jenin we will see a catalogue of Israeli atrocities over which the left will wring its hands and imperialism ring a bell. How many jews will equate this to the Warsaw ghetto? And how many of the left?
Steve Riley
Manchester
Anarchy in Hove
Jack Conrad is incorrect when he says “the works of Marx and Engels are peppered here and there with now famous - infamous - references to the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’” (‘Extreme democracy and the limits of capital’ Weekly Worker April 4). In fact the phrase occurs nowhere in any of Marx’s works published during his lifetime. Either the phrase was of little importance to Marx - or perhaps we need to distinguish between the overt and the covert Karl Marx!
Records of Marx’s relationships with his colleagues of the First International give evidence of his dictatorial behaviour. Consider his treatment of Bakunin and his followers. Bakunin, eventually to be identified with ‘anarchism’, began with a genuine and humble admiration for Marx’s scholarship and achievements in social theory. He wrote to Marx (in 1868), declaring, “I am proud to be your disciple”, and began translating, into Russian, Marx’s Capital, which he greatly admired, enthusiastically supporting the economic arguments.
However, while Marx believed the state must disappear with the elimination of capitalists, Bakunin foresaw the continuance of the state and exploitation, even after the disappearance of ‘capitalism’. In September 1869, a congress of the International held at Basel supported Bakunin’s demand for the abolition of inheritance, rejecting Marx’s contrary view on this subject - thus reflecting the major breach between the two individuals and their followers: what was the role of the state in the socialist programme? The Marxians held the state must be used to bring about socialism: the Bakuninists that the state could never, in any circumstances, be used to attain socialism - the classless society.
By the 1870s, enormous ruptures were evident in the International: (German émigré members resented the dictatorial behaviour of Marx and Engels. Ever since Engels retired from his business in Manchester and settled in London, he had alienated even the oldest and most devoted friends of Marx, with his habit of talking to ‘comrades’ in the abrupt manner of a Prussian officer ordering about his ‘privates’ - hence acquiring the nickname ‘general’. Influential trade union leaders protested when their names were appended to a council address without their being consulted.
The struggle within the International came to a climax at a convention held at The Hague in 1872. The meeting was packed by the Marxists (in a manner which later ‘communist’ tactics made only too familiar). It was the first convention in which Marx personally participated and he had a safe majority of 40 delegates against 25. The opposition would have been larger were the Italians, all Bakuninists, not boycotting the proceedings. Marx’s tactics were ‘character-assassination’ - he called for the expulsion of Bakunin on the grounds that “he has used fraudulent means for seizing … the property of another person, an action which amounts to swindling ...” This, coming from Marx, whose well known methods of acquiring money when in desperate straits was hardly an example of model behaviour. (That was all in the past! Engels was now wealthy man!)
Even without Bakunin’s presence, the Marxian faction now represented a minority grouping within the International: with a manipulation worthy of his Stalinist descendants, the platform attempted to keep control by voting to shift the headquarters to New York - where the organisation soon withered and died in its alien new home. Marx and Engels preferred to see it dead rather than led by a grouping other than their own. So much for Marxian ‘democracy’ in action!
Jack Conrad wishes to ‘leave aside’ “the occasional problematical statements of Lenin and Trotsky” on the question of democracy. Lenin and Trotsky were, of course, much more involved in revolutionary practice than Marx and Engels and the mass of documentary material they left behind demonstrates quite clearly (to me at any rate) that were true disciples of Karl Marx.
To dominate effectively, rulers everywhere proclaim that ordinary people are incapable of understanding the intricacies of the modern world and their only solution lies in ‘correct leadership’ - provided by a ‘disciplined’ ‘vanguard’ ‘party’ that ‘understands’ the social processes and can guide the ignorant masses to the new society. “Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without,” wrote Lenin in his What is to be Done? (his emphasis).
“Just as the blacksmith cannot seize the red hot iron in his naked hand, so the proletariat cannot directly seize the power - it has to have an organ accommodated to this task”, added Trotsky in his History of the Russian Revolution. “Recent ‘defeats’ in Britain are because the workers “had no trusted organisation which could show the way to the new social order”, says Paul Foot in his Why you should be a socialist.
Just look at a few snippets from Trotsky in the early years of Bolshevik rule, addressing the 9th Congress of the Party: “The working class cannot be left wandering all over Russia. They must be ... here and there, appointed, commanded, just like soldiers ... compulsion of labour will reach the highest degree of intensity during the transition from capitalism to socialism. Deserters from labour ought to be formed into punitive battalions or put into concentration camps.”
“…that free labour is more productive than compulsory labour is not true for the transition to the socialist order ... and no serious socialist will deny the right of the labour state to lay its hands upon the worker who refuses …”
“The young workers’ state requires trade unions not for a struggle for better conditions of labour ... but to organise the working class for the ends of production.”
From here it is the logical step to see the ‘party’ as above those it claims to represent. Thus Trotsky, with the full support of Lenin, attacked the Workers’ Opposition in 1921, in the following terms: “They have come out with dangerous slogans. They have made a fetish of democratic principles. They have placed the workers’ right to elect representatives above the Party. As if the Party were not entitled to assert its dictatorship even if that dictatorship temporarily clashed with the passing mood of the workers’ democracy.” These quotations trace the consolidation of the Bolshevik ‘party dictatorship’.
In its beginnings, the Russian Revolution represented something very different. ‘Soviet’ rule was self-rule, and autonomous soviets (or ‘councils’) had sprung up throughout the country. Some were based on places of work - factories, rail depots, etc - and some on localities. All were based upon ‘grass roots’ democracy - all delegates were elected, all were revocable. In fact the soviet represented just the sort of rank-and-file management of affairs that anarchists fought for - which is why anarchists were very involved in the events of 1917.
The Petrograd Soviet Military Revolutionary Committee included four anarchists; indeed the soldiers who dissolved the Constituent Assembly and dispersed the deputies were ‘led’ by the anarchist Zhelezniakov, a sailor from Kronstadt. ‘All power to the soviets’ was an anarchist slogan, adopted by the Bolsheviks for purely opportunist reasons because of its popularity. Following their ‘coup’, the communists set about dismantling ‘soviet’ power. In the process, not only anarchists, but all other political parties, and indeed all opposing factions within the Bolshevik Party itself, were suppressed. (In describing how one should deal with opposing factions - ie, members of the same party - Lenin advocated “the spreading among the masses of hatred, aversion and contempt for the opponents”).
It is no surprise the Soviet Union developed into one of the most totally repressive regimes in world history. What else could have developed from the victory of Bolshevik philosophy?
On the road to power, ‘party’ politicians pay lip service to democracy from below, not because they believe it, but because its advocation wins the support needed to ‘capture’ the state apparatus. Like Lenin, party politicians might write a State and revolution, talk about ‘every cook running the state’, adopt all the popular anarchist slogans of the day ... but again, like Lenin, when power has been captured, “Can any worker administer the state? Practical people know that is fantasy …”
And what about State and revolution? “Syndicalist nonsense ... to be thrown into a waste-basket.”
All a ‘disciplined, vanguard party’ will do (can do) is create a society in its own image, repeat what hundreds of other parties have done in the name of the ‘revolution’, install a new, more rationalised dictatorship. Those who separate ends and means, those who believe an authoritarian ‘party’ can conquer society for the people, are the true ‘utopians’.
Jack Conrad tells us: “There can be no revolution without the masses first educating and empowering themselves through the struggle for extreme democracy [ie, “democracy to the extreme of popular control from below”]. By the same measure there can be no socialism without extreme democracy.”
In this sense, genuine revolutionary activity (the only activity that might lead to a democratic society) is any action that hits back at ‘leadership’ ideas, wherever they are found. Genuine revolutionary activity is any activity that helps demonstrate that worker can do without bosses and ‘leaders’. It is any activity that tells worker how others have successfully fought and organised, in the contemporary world or in the past. It is an activity that builds the self-confidence of the ordinary ‘man in the street’. It is not offering alternative leadership.
Bob Potter
Hove
AWL red herrings
The CPGB should recognise that the Weekly Worker should never be surrendered for an official or unofficial paper of the Socialist Alliance unless there are put in place guarantees that the new paper is the organ of a democratic centralist organisation built around a revolutionary programme.
What has just been rejected by the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty is the latter proposal, partly because they don’t agree with the Provisional Central Committee line that the SA as a whole should develop in the direction of a democratic centralist party. Martin Thomas has made it clear that he is not opposed to the fusion of the two organisations and their respective papers (Weekly Worker March 14). Martin lists those areas that he thinks need clarification. Let us take him at his word, comrades. Almost all of these disputed areas can be dispensed with very quickly. A couple of substantial issues will still remain, but let us eliminate the red herrings so we can get down to business.
There is the counterposing of a workers’ government versus the federal republic. I would draw the attention of Jack Conrad, the PCC, and the rest of the CPGB membership and wider periphery to the source of the slogan for a workers’ government: pages 397 to 399 of the Theses, resolutions and manifestos of the first four congresses of the Third International - thesis 11. I don’t have a copy of the text at hand, but would recommend that large chunks, if not the whole lot, should be reprinted in the paper.
We have to get Martin and the rest of the AWL to clarify their attitude towards the theses passed by Lenin, Trotsky et al. Do they accept that among the most elementary tasks of a genuinely workers’ government is the arming of the working class and the disarming of the counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie? Do they really count Attlee’s government among a list of workers’ governments in this respect?
The real rhetorical and agitational force of the ‘workers’ government’ slogan comes into its own when bourgeois society is particularly unstable, and when the balance of forces between workers’ parties and parties of the bourgeoisie place the question of government on the order of the day as a practical problem requiring immediate solution. Is this the reality of the situation in Britain in 2002? Of course not. Who is to form the AWL’s workers’ government? The genuine kind - the one committed to arming the working class and disarming the counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie - does not appear prominent on the horizon.
Then there is the question of permanent revolution. Martin says the CPGB rejects this. The reason he thinks so relates to Jack’s downplaying of the shift in Lenin’s perspectives for the Russian Revolution before and after the February revolution. But what matters for getting this red herring out of the way is to stress the areas of agreement between Jack’s position and the fully developed position adopted by Trotsky during the Chinese revolution. I hope I am right in believing that the approach adopted by Trotsky and Jack are essentially identical. If so, then Martin loses another excuse for the maintenance of two separate organisations.
Next, transitional demands. Once again, I think his is a red herring, but one for which the CPGB has to accept considerable responsibility. I think the draft programme submitted by the party for the SA was an exemplary document. What I find frustrating is that it has been defended using a terminology that makes it easy for those in the AWL who are opposed to unity with the CPGB (I do not count Martin as belonging to this group) to come up with yet another excuse for keeping the two organisations apart.
Martin says the CPGB supports a minimum programme that does not go beyond capitalism. Clearly rubbish. The passage in the draft programme to the effect that the minimum demands presented are not limited to what capitalism can afford, but are based on what workers in Britain need in order to live a decent life, and that these demands form part of a plan for leading the working class to the goal of self-liberation and socialism is strikingly similar to a passage in Trotsky’s Transitional programme. The method that informs this draft programme is the same as that of transitional demands, as far as I can see. Indeed, as has been pointed out by Jack and others, it is not the CPGB but many of those who call themselves Trotskyists whose demands seem minimalist in the reformist sense of the word: ie, a figure for the minimum wage that the EU bureaucracy can live with.
The question of economism is possibly the most tricky of all. I think one of the key strengths of the Weekly Worker is also one of its weaknesses. It is a paper written by revolutionaries for revolutionaries. Those Trotskyists who are the CPGB’s partners in the SA - the ones summarily dismissed as ‘economists’ - have a different target audience in mind. They take it for granted that their respective papers will be read by other revolutionaries, but their aim is to build a readership of workers who make no claim to be revolutionaries, and indeed have no conscious desire to become revolutionaries.
In my opinion, the CPGB should recognise the need for the paper of a revolutionary party to reach out to such people. In order to build a party that is part of the class (rather than a self-appointed elite that speaks down to them), our paper needs to make itself indispensable for all worker activists, regardless to their attitude to a parliamentary road to socialism, to whether or not you can have socialism in one country, to whether or not the capitalist state can be taken over ready-made or has to be smashed, or whether the emancipation of the working class has to be the act of the working class themselves. Our paper needs to contain strategy and tactics for winning each and every battle in the here and now. We need to reach out to all those workers who keep asking themselves: why is it that those who keep identifying the best tactics for winning our disputes, and who repeatedly prove to be correct about which leaders of the movement will prove themselves unreliable, tend to be those whose paper is full of all that Leninist and Marxist stuff?
We can afford to have a large percentage of articles in our paper that do not explicitly spell out our ultimate goal, but are based on a ‘we will agree to differ’ approach. As time goes by, our casual worker-activist readers will take the plunge into more and more of the most contentious articles and find them interesting, if not altogether convincing. The more comprehensive Marxist articles will turn out, in good time, to be among those they develop a taste for. But we need to sugar the pill to get them to give these articles a try.
Refusing to make this kind of compromise is as stupid as the best theoretical physicists wandering into a nursery in order to present the latest theories about 11th dimensional vibrating superstrings to a group of infants who, literally, lack their ABCs. First things first, comrades. I have no problem criticising the kind of compromises (and their extent) made by Socialist Worker, etc. But the CPGB needs to recognise that the kind of paper that the SA needs has to depart from the Weekly Worker approach in one or two crucial respects. The AWL’s Solidarity would prove a good template for the kind of paper that should be set up.
Finally, the language Jack used to describe the indies was, to put it mildly, unhelpful. Some of these have to be recognised as among the most talented people in the SA. True, many of them will be burnt out. But to dismiss them as a body as “flotsam and jetsam” is counterproductive (Weekly Worker March 28). It is to transform these potential supporters of an unofficial paper into partisans of yet another unofficial SA paper that specifically excludes the CPGB!
If the new paper is to be the paper of a non-democratic centralist tendency (as envisaged by the AWL), then many of the indies can come on board and play a positive role. In time the best of them can be convinced that the type of democratic centralist regime advocated by the CPGB is not just theoretically better than what they had to put up with in the past, but is intended to work precisely as advertised. Don’t write them all off simply because they don’t want to climb into bed with another Leninist organisation after being burnt once or twice before.
Let them enjoy their brief moment as free agents. These members can display an independence of thought that can help the CPGB to win arguments against the SWP (for which even the SWP will thank them in good time) - on individual terrorism, islamic fundamentalism, democratic rights, and much more besides. These people can play an important role in helping to loosen up the three-line whip regimes inside the sects, thereby metamorphosing the SA into a genuine democratic centralist organisation.
Tom Delargy
Paisley
SWP not to blame
In two recent issues of the Weekly Worker it has been interesting that in an article on the forthcoming local elections in England and in a polemic between the CPGB and AWL on a Socialist Alliance paper any faults on either issue is ultimately laid at the door of the SWP. Is this a joke?
The SWP has three members on the SA executive and the thought that our three members can control everyone else in respect to an SA publication is ludicrous and an insult to the other SA executive members. Similarly the CPGB claim that any fault for the scale of the SA’s local election campaign lies not with the SA itself but with … the SWP’s central committee!
The CPGB ascribe to the SWP miraculous powers which I wish we had but don’t. Come on, comrades. The ‘blame everything on the SWP’ line is wearing a bit thin.
Ian Thomas
Pontllanfraith
Gib protest
Peter Hain, the Minister for Europe, is heading up a campaign to sell out the people of Gibraltar to Spain in order to appease the Aznar government. Our elected leader, Peter Caruana, has declined to attend talks held with a predetermined outcome, where his presence is simply required as a token ‘native’ to legitimise the sell-out.
Unlike Ireland, there is no support locally for any union with Spain. The government of Gibraltar, in conjunction with the opposition - the Gibraltar Socialist Labour Party and the Liberal Party - have made proposals to HMG to update the constitution to change the status to something like the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man. So far they are not listening. Locally there was a peaceful demonstration in support of the Gibraltar government’s position, where 83% of the population took to the streets to say ‘no’ to the proposed deal over our heads with Spain.
Jim Watt
Gibraltar
Jim on decline
Peter Manson writes: “As SA local election campaigns begin to move into gear, we must ensure that our call for a republic enshrined in People before profit is given the prominence it deserves. Turn the general apathy that as greeted Elizabeth Windsor’s death into republican anger” (Weekly Worker April 4).
The Scottish Socialist Party leadership are also planning ‘anti-jubilee’ street parties. P Manson and the SSP leadership are, with these proposed activities, in danger of not winning the working class to socialism. The working class - with little education from the left - are increasingly seeing, for example, the monarchy as irrelevant. This is due to the nature of decline.
P Manson, and no doubt the SSP tops, will call for a republic, where people take prominence over profit. Appeals for people over profit smack merely of more opportunism and reveal that the reformist left has yet to see its historical errors, let alone reveal that it is equipped, currently, to lead the class to awareness.
Jim Drysdale
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