Weekly Worker 431 Thursday May 9 2002
Letters
Argentina debate
I do not want to side with comrade Christopher Pike against comrade Ian Donovan on Argentina (Weekly Worker April 18 and May 2). However, I must take issue with comrade Donovan over his approach to the constituent assembly slogan specifically and parliaments in general.
He raises three basic objections to the call for a constituent assembly in Argentina. First, Argentina has had a system of “bourgeois” democracy since the fall of the Galtieri regime in the aftermath of the Falklands war in 1982. Second, the call for a constituent assembly makes no inroads into capitalist relations of production. Thirdly, a constituent assembly can only be a bridge to a “parliamentary-type institution” and such bodies, ipso facto, “must defend capitalism” and, he emphasises, are “incapable” of representing the workers as a class.
Surely the call for an constituent assembly, raised as an integral part of an immediate programme, is a legitimate slogan in a pre-revolutionary situation when the broad masses are not yet ready for a direct assault on the state machine or, to put it another way, they are for the moment unable to transform their popular committees - which must come to embrace the overwhelming majority of the population - into ruling organs of a higher, more direct, form of democracy.
What do the workers’ and citizens’ committees represent at this present juncture in terms of the whole of Argentina? Have they armed themselves? Have they split the army? These questions require sober answers. Premature bids at seizing power are brutally punished or descend into pure farce.
A constituent assembly in the context of Argentina should be advanced in order to challenge the presidential system - modelled on the United States. The president controls the executive and chooses the cabinet. Members of the two houses of congress - 254 deputies, elected for four-year terms, and 46 senators, appointed for nine years by the 23 provinces - can pass or block legislation but possess no executive power. Throughout Argentina’s history there have been many periods of instability, despotic interruptions and numerous army takeovers.
To demand the abolition of the presidential system, a centralised state and a single-chamber parliament of recallable delegates, elected annually, does not rule out other demands. Eg, for a system of workers’ militias and the abolition of the standing army, nationalisation of the banks and the restoration of the value of private savings, confiscation of all wealth gained through corruption and speculation, generous food rations, healthcare based on need, cancelling foreign debts, etc.
Nor does the constituent assembly slogan contradict self-activity from below and the overcoming of the division between “politics and economics”. Citizens’ and workers’ committees must take matters into their own hands, beginning at the bottom and moving progressively upwards; a socialist process enhanced and complemented, not derailed, by championing a democratic programme. The struggle for democracy trains the working class and brings socialism nearer by drawing in wider and wider forces, including middle class allies.
As comrade Donovan knows perfectly well, the Bolsheviks fought simultaneously both for the soviets to take power - against the ineffective and illegitimate provisional government - and for a constituent assembly elected by universal suffrage.
Surrounded by a peasant sea and in the absence of the German revolution, it is, with hindsight, not surprising that the Bolsheviks did not secure a constituent assembly majority in 1918. But nowadays in all advanced and medium developed countries communist parties can and must aim to become a clear majority.
Comrade Donovan’s insistence that parliaments elected by universal suffrage “must necessarily defend” capitalist society and capitalist relations of production is, I believe, fundamentally mistaken. Communist MPs in the House of Commons would not “represent” workers “as atomised individuals”, but as class fighters. The same applies to a communist majority.
Such notions, to all intents and purposes echoed by comrade Donovan in some key passages of his article, are characteristic of that school of thought which falsely claims that capitalist society is almost synonymous with what is dismissively called ‘bourgeois democracy’. That is wrong.
Every real democratic step forward has had to be fought for from below against, often fierce, opposition from above. True, advances are constantly subverted, hollowed out and turned into their opposite by the forces of capital. Nevertheless the task of communists is clear - give new content to existing democratic forms, spur on new democratic gains and encourage into life new democratic bodies of the working class and its allies.
Jack Conrad
London
Fascist Le Pen
The front page article ‘1 million march in Paris’ above editor Peter Manson’s name is in error (Weekly Worker May 2). Specifically, in the third paragraph Peter says, “While it is wrong to describe Le Pen as a fascist - he has no counterrevolutionary fighting squads, nor has he a programme for abolishing parliament or smashing the trade unions ...” It would be a nice point to know from where this definition of ‘fascist’ arises. Peter’s definition would not include many well-recognised fascist groups and formations from the 20th century, including Britain’s NF and BNP, let alone Hitler’s and Mussolini’s organisations in their infancy.
Some bourgeois journalists have done a better job of examining Le Pen’s ideology. John Lichfield, for example, examines the words Le Pen uses to code his fascist values to the FN’s hard core. Lichfield quotes ex-FN communications director Laurent de Saint-Affrique, who explains Le Pen’s use of words such as rafle (police raid), which “is only ever used these days to describe the arrest of jews in wartime France”; and grand patronat apatride (stateless big business) - “a European far-right code phrase for ‘jewish money and influence’ for more than 100 years ... He is ... obsessed with the 30s and 40s and with the jews” (The Independent May 4).
Looking at fascist movements historically, whether or not they achieved state power, would be more fruitful than conjuring self-serving and ultimately useless definitions out of the air, as Peter has done. If we do this, we certainly see that these movements have various manifestations, which often change over time. For example, Mussolini’s party produced a series of constitutions that first elaborated a concern with issues of the day that socialists might sympathise with, then progressed to more and more openly bolster capitalism through corporatism.
Perhaps Peter is suggesting that Le Pen was a fascist and has now become something not quite fascist, or that the FN is not fascist any more because of its electoral work (like the BNP, then). It’s difficult to tell. What is difficult to swallow seems to be a tendency to see fascist organisations and regimes as generally improbable and even unlikely in this day and age; this is reminiscent of the attitude taken by some Trotskyists to the Evren fascist coup in Turkey in 1980. Their argument then was that the coup was Bonapartist rather than fascist. Unfortunately we cannot wish fascists and fascism away that easily.
Fascism comes to head off a revolutionary situation, or sometimes only a potentially revolutionary situation. But the instruments of fascism may or may not be the fascist organisations that prepared the way. Thus, the Brownshirt SA was eliminated by Hitler’s SS men in black exercising fascist state power. Similarly, the fascist Evren regime in Turkey depended on the army rather than the echelons of the fascist Grey Wolves. But this hardly means that fascist groups before a fascist takeover are not fascist - any more than it means that fascist regimes failing to utilise fascist groups are not fascist; it merely means that reaction uses whatever tool is at hand to do the job of crushing the working class.
However, it is interesting and welcome further inside the same issue of the Weekly Worker to read what appears above David Hunnam’s name. He writes, “... whatever spectral form fascism takes, it must be recognised as fascism and fought as fascism.” I couldn’t agree more. Though the nub then is still the tactic of how we fight fascism, whether fascist organisations emerging into political life or fascism as an incipient state form. One of the biggest problems the left faces still is the need to see that popular fronts merely give credence to other, more respectable parts of the bourgeois political spectrum like conservatism, liberalism and social democracy. What we need to address are the reasons fascist organisations gain credence and what failings in bourgeois liberal democracy they exploit, not bolstering class enemies who may not wear the badge of open fascists.
What then is the point of Peter’s definition? The suspicion must remain that it avoids having to counter the popular frontists’ arguments that anti-fascism takes precedence over class war. If so, this is a false dawn: the argument we need to have with the rest of the left is instead based on recognising fascism and fighting it effectively, not pretending that it does not really exist. Once we get away from the religious fear of calling fascists and fascism what they are, we can get down to the work of combating them properly in a proletarian manner.
Jim Gilbert
London
Israel CP
This is just a short note to express my appreciation for your ideologically sound and politically relevant approach to the Middle East conflict, as expressed in the draft theses proposed for the CPGB aggregate of May 11. I read them in the current issue of the Weekly Worker (May 2).
The general line adopted by the CPGB, if indeed this draft is accepted, is very much in tune with the one advocated by the Israeli Communist Party, of which I am a member. Not that this is surprising to me: I’ve come to admire and respect your political work ever since I began to read your publications on the internet.
I believe though that you should make more efforts to establish formal relations with the ICP, most of whose members are completely unaware of your existence. Currently, the ICP’s leadership regards the New Communist Party as its ‘sister party’ in Britain, which I find to be almost an aberration. Would you consider sending a representative to Israel in order to meet with both Israeli and Palestinian communists?
Nimrod Amzalak
Jerusalem
Upper case
By and large I liked your draft paper on Middle East and Israel, and would have placed it in our Jewish Socialists’ Group members’ bulletin for discussion, but unfortunately the May issue has just gone out.
One small but not unimportant point, however - the consistent use of lower-case ‘j’ in ‘jewish’ is irritating. The dictionary definition of ‘jew’ in this form is either a money-lender or somebody who drives a hard bargain; or, as a verb, to cheat somebody.
This derogatory use of such identity words is not unique in application to Jews of course - there is ‘welsh’, as in ‘to welsh on a deal or a debt’; or ‘arab’ as in ‘street arab’ - someone of no fixed abode; and ‘turk’ - ‘a violent or domineering person’; and of course ‘gypsy’. Such usages tell us something about English history and culture! They were probably most common in the arrogant Victorian heyday of British imperialism. Happily they are becoming obsolete, if not already so.
Obviously I don’t suspect communists of harbouring such backward views, and the resolution is plainly against anti-semitism and racism. Either it’s a dodgy spellcheck, or you were seeking to make some point about Jews not being a nation, or whatever. However, unorthodox spelling or orthography in order to make some theoretical point is always a poor method for Marxists, and has a whiff of crankishness.
Anyway, Lenin, while making no concessions to any form of Jewish nationalism, had no hesitation in referring to Jews in Russia with an upper-case ‘j’, as a ‘nationality’ (in English the term ‘people’ will do), and if the upper case was good enough for Lenin (and Trotsky) it should do for us too!
Charlie Pottins
Jewish Socialists’ Group
Blushes
In what is an exquisite moment of embarrassment for me, I must apologise for a wild inaccuracy in my report on the Socialist Alliance election campaigns in the Greater Manchester region (Weekly Worker April 25). I reported that no SA candidates were standing in Wigan. I had clearly misheard the regional report given by comrade John Baxter at my South Manchester SA branch meeting. In fact ‘none’ should have been ‘nine’ - two more than the Liberal Democrats!
Not only this, but the results returned must rank amongst the best in England for the alliance. Wigan is a very untypical borough, where Labour has in recent years enjoyed a clear run in some wards. This would have been the case again in Newtown and Norley, but for the intervention of SA candidates who scored 21.61% and 16.09% respectively. This alone would have been a very creditable achievement, giving as it does a clear message to our national executive committee to knuckle down and get on with building the Socialist Alliance Party. But in the other wards too, the comrades’ work produced excellent scores - 12.45% in Ince, 9.91% in Worsley Mesnes, 7.06% in Whelley, 3.63% in Hope Carr, 3.37% in Ashton Golborne, 2.94% in Aspull Standish and 2.21% in Swinley.
Again I stress that Wigan is an unusual area. This was noticed also by the fascist British National Party, who made a late decision to run a candidate in the Abram ward, as an offshoot from their main campaigns in Burnley and Oldham. They scored 22.9%. Two Labour councillors, one the deputy leader, were ousted by the ‘Community Action’ candidates, who contested five wards. The Manchester Evening News reported that the latter achievements were “despite putting forward no real policies”. Voter turnout in the borough was just 24.45%.
So, although the significance of these election results must not be overstated, they nevertheless demonstrate that some serious cracks are appearing in the shell in which the Labour Party has politically imprisoned the British working class for so long. The reaction of the Labour bureaucrats will undoubtedly be to accelerate the process of taking the streets out of elections - more postal voting and redoubling of their push to criminalise postering in public places.
Our reaction must be the opposite one. Insistence on door-to-door canvassing in our prioritised wards, candidates in every possible ward, street meetings and stalls, and, in between elections, agitation against every anti-working class action by councils and government and counterposition of the demands of the Socialist Alliance. To effectively organise these activities; to educate our class (including those presently being duped by fascists); to transform the SA into a party without further delay.
And - to spare my blushes by reducing the need for (mis)hearsay reporting - we must decide, at our conference this autumn, to launch an SA newspaper.
John Pearson
South Manchester SA
Evil
Cameron Richards’s review of Welsh Socialist Voice is correct to say that the Socialist Workers Party is suspicious of the publication’s “secret political agenda”, but doesn’t explain how it can be dominated by “the evil influence of Cymru Goch” (Weekly Worker May 2).
CG has just one member sitting on the editorial board, the SWP has two, the SP has one and there are two non-aligned. I’m flattered by our ability to influence beyond our numbers, but the truth is that attempts to spur any lively debates have been neutered by the SWP rep.
Cameron describes the publication as “left nationalist” without explaining what that means. A casual read of WSV would reveal a paper with some roots and understanding of Welsh working class culture, history and communities with a sprinkling of Welsh-language articles. This refusal to kow-tow to what could be termed “globalised socialism” is, I take it, left nationalist.
The debate about the WSV, as Cameron recognises, is a much deeper one about whether Wales needs separate socialist organisation. On this much, both he CPGB and the SWP are agreed - they want Wales to become a regional SA of England (ideally it would be an all-Britain SA but the SSP’s strength knackers that at the moment).
Both are wrong, but the CPGB’s argument has the merit of being open, consistent and thought out. The SWP’s approach, by contrast, is to hint at its desirability without openly debating it. If there is a left nationalist tendency within the WSA, it’s a British nationalist tendency that is totally out of step with the growing republicanism of Welsh youngsters.
Mike Davies
Cymru Goch, Wrecsam
May Day to forget
Local worthies in the Stockton labour movement gathered on the Saturday following international workers’ day to celebrate the struggles of the working class … not!
The real crime of this virtually unadvertised gathering, including two allegedly left trade union general secretaries, was the diabolical organisation, with less than 30 attending. A couple of Socialist Party members I stumbled across in the pub informed me that they had only heard about the event in a hidden away column of the local paper!
If any lessons can be learnt from this, it is the utter degeneracy of what passes for the workers’ movement in this country and the abject sabotage of our movement and traditions. They are happy to take our union subs but do precious little for us.
Bill Jeannes
Teesside
