Weekly Worker 439 Thursday July 4 2002
Letters
What we fight for
In his justification of the changes to the ‘What we fight for’ column Jack Conrad correctly notes that those changes proved largely uncontroversial (Weekly Worker June 27).
There were minority viewpoints - some incorporated, some not - but on the whole the column reflects the way in which the party and the global situation has changed over the last period. Although the membership of the party have the right to form permanent or temporary factions on party questions, these factions have not emerged over that time and this is partly because differences have been openly debated and assessed without recourse to factional organisation. What dismays me then is not really the substance of the column, but the process by which it arrived in last week’s paper.
In our first rigorous discussion of the column at the aggregate of May 11 it was decided that the debate would continue, and so it has, but at the aggregate of June 23 the draft column put forward by the PCC was tabled for immediate inclusion in the paper. Another working draft put forward by the Manchester comrades was discussed in the spirit of ongoing debate, but this was specifically not tabled by its authors for inclusion, immediate or otherwise. The PCC draft was overwhelmingly accepted and was published, on the grounds that the debate would continue and that the column would be changeable in order to incorporate both new realities and new formulations.
Imputations were made that the Manchester draft was a factional document, as it expressed the minority viewpoints (on Israel-Palestine, Ireland, the USSR) of the Manchester comrades. I am totally unconvinced that John Pearson and the Manchester members are engaging in factional activity of any kind - minority viewpoints do not lead necessarily to the emergence of factions. The fact that the ‘factional’ claim was made by the centre of the party against the periphery is a bureaucratic tool used against distrusted elements of the party as an attempt to politically isolate those “backward” elements from that membership which is neither in the PCC nor the Manchester branch.
The impression I received from the June 23 aggregate was that the PCC had decided that the column was going into last week’s paper and that was that. The democratic decision of the aggregate was that it should. I was in a minority which voted against it because I thought both the PCC and the aggregate as a whole were underestimating the importance of the column.
The ‘What we fight for’ column is not just an SWP-style advert, as Cameron Richards had noted, but should be the crystallisation of the programme of the party. The column is profoundly important in terms of those reading it and, yes, we should have got rid of the old one years ago. We do need, however, to take care over the expression of our programme in the pages of the paper and rigorously examine the formulations. A steering group or commission should have been created (if only by email) which would have incorporated minority viewpoints and so on. As it stands, the column is the product of one person, with minor revisions of emphasis and grammar.
The formulation on the Soviet Union, for example, seems to me to be ill-thought out. It points to a particular analysis of the social formation which is highly contentious and which contradicts Jack Conrad’s statement that any formulation of what constituted the Soviet Union should be left to “historians and theoreticians”. Of course, the question of democracy is central to any understanding of the Soviet Union, but to imply that the problem of “Stalin’s Soviet Union” was that it was socialism without the democratic content does violence to the complex history of the October revolution and what came after.
The left opposition was not eliminated politically and physically by the bureaucracy because of a lack of democracy in simplistic terms, but because of its inability to understand and master the kinds of social forces unleashed by a revolution turning in upon itself in the aftermath of the German and Chinese defeats of the 1920s. It is clear that the victory of the bureaucracy over the left and the united oppositions was, at least in part, a victory of a certain kind of democracy within the Bolshevik Party - the Lenin levy in particular. The enemy of workers’ democracy within the Bolshevik Party for the Democratic Centralist group, the Left Communists and the Workers Opposition was of course not Stalin but …Trotsky. Yet Trotsky and the group around him were the only ones capable, for historical reasons, of salvaging the democratic content of the revolution from the early 1920s onwards.
We need more discussion about such formulations. In our haste to publish a new column we are abdicating our responsibility to express the party programme effectively. We need a definitive column which, whilst not unchanging, is a relatively durable and scientific expression of the programme.
Martyn Hudson
Teesside
More fool you
I read your redrafting of ‘What we fight for’ and Jack Conrad’s explanation of it and was deeply puzzled. You make great play of the need for discussion and argument to “constantly add to and enrich theory” as a means of building communist leadership (which no-one could argue with) versus the sterile sectarianism of much of the left and its prescriptions and instructivist regimes. All true.
But you follow this through with … what? A whole series of prescriptions and instructions on what communists are supposed to be, what parties are supposed to be and what they do and how to behave. How is this different? And how does it develop revolutionary understanding?
‘Communists are this, communists do that, communists support the other’: instructions and method (in the abstract) litter the statement and the long, explanatory article about it, and all without any depth of understanding, justification or tackling of actual reality.
What you don’t do is give any explanation about why communists should be, think, do or organise as you suggest, and form the hierarchical organisation you declare to be the only way forward for mankind.
Worse than that, I would say all this ‘organisation’ stuff is a substitute for what really matters - understanding the world. There is not any explanation or warning for the working class of the tidal wave of slump, crisis and war that is coming their way and what to do about it; about why capitalism’s profit-making system must always lead into the devastating slump and war crisis that World War I and World War II have already shown us, and which is beginning to take very solid shape again. What nonsense it is to self-importantly tell the world about the need to “ready the working class” when you are so patently not ready for anything yourselves and, even worse, obviously don’t understand anything.
The place to start is the crisis of the capitalist system, which right this moment could not be more obvious in plunging stock markets, insanely inflating housing prices, torn up welfare provisions such as pensions and hospitals, rapidly intensifying trade war (planes, steel, agriculture, cars, currencies themselves) and a deepening atmosphere of breakdown, crime, chaos and upheaval. But I heard more about all this crucial stuff (quite literally) on the bourgeois TV’s Channel Four news this week (Stiglitz interview) - from an out-and-out imperialist IMF bureaucrat. Whole countries are tipping over the edge into starvation, chaos and desperation, like Argentina. And to prepare the world for imperialism’s only ‘solution’ to the clogging of the whole system with ‘surplus capital’ - war - the warmongering atmosphere is being escalated rapidly with George Dubya’s demonic ‘war on terrorism’. War on capitalist rivals is the real target of course: there is no such thing as ‘terrorism’ as the word is used by Bush.
Organisation and structure is totally secondary to being able to grasp the world - in the end, if the working class grasps a clear perspective of the imperialist system and the world class struggle (as detailed as can possibly be continuously fought for), it will find its own ways to organise and fight. Lenin did not invent or organise soviets in 1905 or 1917 - they arose spontaneously. But Lenin did crucially understand what they were: the rapidly emerging practical revolutionary expression of a working class and peasantry which had reached explosion point.
In this crisis you clearly do not grasp the emerging forms of worldwide struggle against the slump system, from the Palestinian fighters to the third world hostility expressed through such bizarre forms as Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, Hamas and the general muslim rejection of capitalism. Not Leninism of course and ultimatively not the answer - but no reaction either. But you stand against such an overwhelming expression of hatred of imperialism, instead of seeing the revolutionary forces that drive it.
Lenin convinced the party he was right, many times over, winning the argument. For the CPGB the “full open debate” (which is good) goes nowhere - you anticipate only “even greater internal contradictions”. These will not be fought through to grasp the truth (and there is only one reality in the universe) but simply will fester in a great stew of factions and indecision. How can you get “unity of purpose” without battling out the understanding? When the government is run by the CPGB and has to decide, say, on revolutionary war - how will it be done? Clearly you won’t even agree who is the enemy.
Worse still, you don’t care. The most profound question for the working class and brake on struggle is to understand whether communism works (no point in fighting for it if it doesn’t) and central to that is to celebrate the heroic, successful, 70-year history of the Soviet Union workers’ state, and its achievements, while understanding the philosophical and leadership failings that led to its eventual liquidation under the dunderhead revisionist, Gorbachev. But for the CPGB this “can be left to historians and theoreticians to argue over”. Talk about abandoning the battlefield!
More fool you. It is the working class that will be arguing over it as they overtake all the nonsense of all the sectarian left groups, and sadly you look as if you will be indistinguishably among them.
Mitchell Blann
Liverpool
Eyewash
I note that the CPGB has rewritten the ‘What we fight for’ column.
There is no mention of the ending of imperialist exploitation. There is no mention of self-determination for Scotland and Wales. There is no mention of the dictatorship of the proletariat. There is no mention of dialectical materialism.
In the absence of the above, the ‘What we fight for column’ amounts to pious eyewash.
Ivor Kenna
London
Sectarian SA
The Socialist Alliance is the only vehicle of working class struggle in Britain. Everyone should join it and no one should stand against it. A new workers’ party can only come from the mighty alliance. All unions should fund it. All community groups should stand on its programme. All groups in it should toe the SWP line.
The SA is completely sectarian in its approach towards the working class with an over-inflated opinion of itself. Welcome to reality, comrades. Perhaps next time you might like to carry out consistent work in the class - or at least get your mates to vote for you.
Time to discuss how we build a new workers’ party, not a ‘united’, SWP-led, sectarian front group.
John Thornaby
email
SWPEW
Just out of interest, why is it that you don’t refer to the Socialist Workers Party as the ‘SWP in England and Wales’?
Rightly you say ‘Socialist Party in England and Wales’ (because the Committee for a Workers’ International in Scotland are separate), but don’t apply that to the SWP and Socialist Worker platform of the Scottish Socialist Party.
Any logic or an error?
James Thomason
New Zealand
Support England?
John Reid says there is nothing wrong with socialists supporting the England football team and that really there are no consequences flowing from this support (Weekly Worker June 27).
I read an article in the Independent on Sunday saying the English team’s strategy in the World Cup was negative, to say the least. One of the World Cup coaches was quoted, who said the performance by England against Argentina was entirely cynical. I saw none of these comments in the rest of press because they wanted to keep the mood going and this is, whether we like it or not, political. My work colleagues weren’t interested in the Independent on Sunday’s article. Surprise!
I think saying there aren’t problems with supporting the English football team - or Tim Henman - is a very dodgy road.
John Dove
email
Breakthrough
It’s been just nine weeks since I discovered the Weekly Worker and the CPGB. I did this while surfing the worldwide web in search of information about the local election results in England. And haven’t things changed in those nine weeks!
The breakthrough came when I used the form on the CPGB website to take out a subscription to the Weekly Worker. I decided to subscribe after reading the interview with four CPGB Socialist Alliance London local election candidates (Weekly Worker May 30).
After receiving the first couple of issues, I decided to take up the special offer of six CPGB books for £21.50, together with Towards a Socialist Alliance party. As a former member of the Socialist Party, I found Towards a Socialist Alliance party and Which Road? of special interest. I left the Socialist Party in March 2001 after its national agent, Hannah Sell, would not give me a certificate saying that I was a bona fide SP candidate in the June 2001 county council elections.
Until I came across the CPGB/Weekly Worker website I was politically all at sea. I have just spent the last week going through all the archive editions of the Weekly Worker spanning from 1996 to the latest.
I have now applied to become a Communist Party supporter and I will be looking forward to attending the Communist University 2002 for an intensive period of ‘re-education’!
John Smithee
Cambridgeshire
