Weekly Worker 453 Thursday October 24 2002
Letters
Inspire
In a recent lead article you refer to the Muslim Association of Britain paper Inspire, which was distributed on the September 28 anti-war demonstration (Weekly Worker October 3).
You say the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty is wrong to consider the MAB “a reactionary, fundamentalist organisation”, because the paper includes articles by John Pilger, Robert Fisk and Scott Ritter and refers to the September 11 attacks in the USA as “atrocities”. In fact the paper confirms the estimate that we had made from the MAB website, the MAB Palestine demonstration on April 13 and conversations with MAB activists. The MAB is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, the biggest islamic-fundamentalist party in the Arab world.
An article on page 16 of the paper lays out the “Historical roots and background” of the MAB, tracing them back to Hasan al-Banna: “The ultimate collapse of the Khilafah [caliphate; the Ottoman Empire] in 1924 left the muslim Ummah with no figurehead or leadership ... [But then] he [al-Banna] founded the Ikhwan al Muslimoon or Muslim Brotherhood, whose teachings to this day inspire people the world over ... After him came characters such as Sayyid Qutb and Zainab al Ghazali, Shaikh Yusuf al Qaradawi and Shaikh Rashed al-Ghanouchi, standing at the forefront of islamic teaching and revival ... Another revolutionary scholar ... would later set in motion the largest muslim reformation party in the Indian subcontinent: Sayyid Abu’l A’la Mawdudi and the Jamaat-e Islami ... The Jamaat-e Islami continues to work for the establishment of a society governed by allah’s laws.”
The MAB identifies unambiguously with the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood is a moderate, reformist, islamic-fundamentalist party, which builds its upfront public profile around welfare and religious education. It is no surprise that it should use writers like Pilger, Fisk and Ritter to give itself a plausible public face. Its basic politics are, however, the same as those of the shriller fundamentalists: the overthrow of secularism, democracy and women’s rights, and the introduction of a state run under islamic law.
Another article in Inspire (p14) explains a little of what the MAB understand by an islamic state. In their ideal state, a person who “chooses not to embrace islam” may have the right to be a citizen, but only if they “express loyalty to the state and recognise its legitimacy so that he or she does not engage in any activity that may be construed as threatening to its order”. Even then that person’s citizenship is “qualified”, “and such qualification is only lifted when the concerned person embraces islam”.
People who have been muslims and then stop believing face something worse. “There are two muslim schools of jurisprudence on the matter.” According to one, they should face the death penalty; according to the other, they are guilty of “mutiny or treason”, but the penalty need not be death.
Yes, the MAB is a reactionary fundamentalist party. The left should not ally with it.
Martin Thomas
AWL
Brazilian danger
In the first round of the Brazilian presidential elections, Lula, the candidate of the Workers Party (PT), gained 47% of the votes cast, leaving the candidate of the current government, Serra, trailing far behind. The party of the left, the PSTU, the United Socialist Workers’ Party, put up their own candidate for president, Ze Maria, who polled 402,000 votes (0.5% of votes cast). One by one, the left groups such as the PSTU, Workers Power, etc are all lining up and calling for a critical vote for the Workers’ Party and Lula, in the second round. As the Workers’ International Vanguard League, we think this is a big political error.
Let’s look at the fundamentals. Is the party of Serra a fascist party and are the unions and workers’ organisation in grave danger of being smashed if Serra becomes president? No. In fact from left to right, all acknowledge that Serra and Lula are standing on very similar platforms. Both want to keep links with the IMF and World Bank. Both are committed to capitalism.
So now the question arises: how to best expose Lula, Serra and the bourgeois parliament? To call for a vote, albeit critical, for Lula, gives the impression that the working class really has a choice between the two of them, when in fact both will attack the working class. In fact, Lula is the greater danger. He can be called the enemy within. He has respectability within the ranks of the working class and his actions will be similar to what happened in South Africa, when Mandela and the ANC used their legitimacy to launch massive attacks against the working class that no bourgeois party had the credibility to do. There were massive wage cuts in the public sector, many thousands of teachers were retrenched and so on - all in the name of equity and fairness.
Such are the massive attacks which Lula and the PT will launch on the working class. We say that the left should have considered a campaign for a spoilt vote, saying that the working class rejects both candidates and putting forward a set of transitional demands as the beacon that the working class should be striving for. These demands should be spelt out and not vaguely put as just a demand for land reform, etc. A vague demand such as this will mean all things to all people and does not raise consciousness in any way. Workers should be encouraged to set up action committees to oppose both Serra and Lula.
On the crisis in Brazil, we must never forget that the capitalists, when they are under threat, will support any reformist, even one who sounds just like a revolutionary but who in reality will carry out their bidding. In crises even the capitalists will sound like the most radical democrats and promise all to everyone, as long as they remain in control. We need to raise the consciousness of the working class and assist in the preparation in the massive fights that lie ahead.
WIVL
Cape Town
Which road?
In 1983 the young Jack Conrad asked the old Stalinist leaders of the then CPGB a question. Which road: reform or revolution? The young comrade invoked the authority of the only Lenin he knew. The Lenin of 1917, the Lenin of State and revolution, the revolutionary Marxist of October.
But what the young Jack Conrad did not know at the time was that there was more than one Lenin. The old CPGB based itself on the politics of old Bolshevism. This was the politics Lenin disregarded in 1917, but did not theoretically repudiate. It was the politics of Kamenev and Zinoviev in 1917. The left wing of bourgeois democracy. The politics of the democratic revolution.
The older Jack Conrad has now discovered the Lenin of old Bolshevism. This Lenin was influenced by Kautsky’s revisionist theory of the capitalist state. In his notes on Marxism and the state, written in early 1917, Lenin’s discovery of the Marxist position on the state, obscured by the theoreticians of the Second International, is palpable. The Marxist project is to destroy the capitalist state, including the most democratic, in the process of eventually destroying the state. In Lenin’s words, a society based on the free and equal association of producers will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into a museum of antiquities.
Then we come to the criticism of the young Lenin’s position on the democratic republic. But a republic, like any other form of government, is determined by its content. So long as it is a form of bourgeois democracy, it is as hostile to us as any monarchy. Therefore, it is a baseless illusion to regard it as socialist in form. Lenin declares in angry astonishment that Kautsky and Plekhanov had bungled things. Since Lenin deferred theoretically to both for many years the implication is clear: Lenin’s theory of democratic revolution was also flawed.
To speak of freedom is not to speak of democracy, but to speak of the end of democracy and the state. Against his old position Lenin acknowledges complete democracy is not the same as incomplete democracy. Forward development does not proceed simply towards greater and greater democracy. The previous position was undialectical. Quantity turns into quality. There is a dialectical combination of dictatorship and democracy.
This is an echo of the French Revolution. There was the revolutionary democracy of the sans-culottes and revolutionary violence and terror against the violence and terror waged by reactionaries attempting to restore the old order. The Swiss guards defended the French monarch by shedding the blood of the sans-culottes. The sans-culottes shed the blood of the Swiss guards to overthrow the monarch. Marx approved. Revolutionary violence shortened the birth pangs of the new society.
For Marx the Paris Commune demonstrated proletarian democracy. But he criticised their good nature. They did not want to start a civil war (“peacefully if we can”). So they did not march on Versailles soon enough to use force to crush the opposition.
As long as the state exists, even a proletarian semi-state, it exists to ultimately hold down its adversaries by force if necessary. Class antagonisms are irreconcilable. Even Mark Fischer concedes that communists have to be ruthless in a civil war. As Lenin pointed out, there will be restrictions on the freedom of exploiters and oppressors. “We must suppress them in order to free humanity from wage slavery” (‘The state and revolution’ CW Vol 25, Moscow1977, p466).
This brings us to another point made by Lenin. That is that only sham socialists dream of the peaceful submission of the minority to the majority in the most advanced bourgeois republics. There is no peaceful road through the apparatus of bourgeois democracy. The democratic republic is the best political shell for capitalism. Revolutionary dynamics even in the most democratic republic lead to forms of capitalist Bonapartism, bypassing peaceful parliamentary channels. Bourgeois democracy when challenged gives way to military repression and fascism. As Trotsky neatly puts it in his commentary on events in Germany in the inter-war years, bourgeois democracy transforms itself legally, peacefully, pacifically into fascist dictatorship. The secret is simple enough: bourgeois democracy and fascist dictatorships are the instruments of one and the same class: the exploiters (The struggle against fascism in Germany London 1987, p363).
There are more valuable things than bourgeois parliaments. Workers defend and build on the elements of workers’ democracy within capitalism. The rival proletarian organisations destroy bourgeois democracy by removing all the bourgeois restrictions on the participation of the poor in politics. This perspective of the self-government of the people or the self-emancipation of the working class was the political expression of the heroic period of the Russian Revolution, when the involvement and creativity of the masses was at high tide. But with the ebb tide the view of an end to all political bosses was lost from sight.
Orthodox Trotskyism has overemphasised the objective circumstances. But the general drift of post-1917 Bolshevism was a return to the Kautskyite strain of the self-limitation imposed on the class from above by the Bolsheviks. In 1905 Trotsky, before he became snared in the cult of Lenin, had noted that Lenin’s idea of restricting the revolution to minimum democratic demands would sever the organic links with the class. In other words there would be substitutionism: the party would dole out what it considered to be historically feasible.
As a young revolutionary Jack Conrad was inspired by the politics of Lenin’s State and revolution. Indeed, the Leninist group and the new CPGB were based on these politics. But now there are two Jack Conrads. The other comrade is an advocate of pure democracy, democracy in general. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary in the theory and experience of Marx, he writes: “The workers’ state represents victory in the battle of democracy and is nothing whatever to do with a denial of democracy” (Weekly Worker September 26). He adds that there is no implication of violence either. This turns Marx into a left democrat.
Jack now looks to Rosa Luxemburg’s critique of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution for political inspiration. Rosa was concerned that without general elections, without freedom of assembly, without the public clash of opinions, political life in the soviets would be crippled. But the political life in the soviets lost their vibrancy when the factories were emptied and the revolution for all the well known reasons became declassed.
But the Lassallean streak in Bolshevism, particularly in Trotsky, was also a factor. The element of nationalism in old Bolshevism resurfaced as well. The notion of a national democratic revolution is present in Lenin and Zinoviev’s ugly polemics with Trotsky in 1915. Stalin had a foothold in this Bolshevism and in Lenin’s talk of world revolution as a fairy tale as early as 1918. The orientation to capitalist anti-Versailles forces in Europe and bourgeois democrats in Asia, which had disastrous consequences for the class struggle, did not start with Stalin. Rosa’s phrase that freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently is profound and true.
Here at least we find only one Jack Conrad. He has been consistent in this, if in nothing else. This explains the success of the Weekly Worker and the CPGB. But there must be a class limitation. In the Russian Revolution when the Mensheviks violently opposed the workers’ state there could be no freedom for them to think and act differently in that historical context. Rosa’s comments are what Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Programme called the tired old democratic litany.
As the young Jack Conrad was aware, it is not a choice between a violent and a peaceful road, but a question of which road: reform or revolution.
Barrie Biddulph
Stoke-on-Trent
Proletarian wisdom
At my local club tonight, having finished our weekly trivia quiz, the team descended into a great debate about the euro and membership of the European Union.
The team which I’m talking about constituted a fair representation of the south Wales ‘proletariat’. In other words, an 82-year-old ex-bricklayer/steelworker, one ex-NUM lodge official, one ex-Llanwern steelworker shop steward, an HGV driver, a fireman, a teacher, a railway worker and a factory worker. Age range: 29-82. This, I would suggest, constitutes a gathering which lives a far more everyday working class existence than most left wing parties’ central committees.
The discussion came down to the following agreements:
- to accept the euro would save manufacturing jobs;
- to accept the euro would align us with the French, where workers are not afraid to throw up blockades and stick two fingers up to their government, the continual encroachment of US consumerism and anyone else attacking workers’ rights.
This was not a theoretical discussion as such, but a genuine gut reaction to the advantages of siding with our European brothers and sisters for what is perceived as better workers’ rights and an escape from the crap we have to put up with from Blair and the rest of the politicians who everyone thought were in it to line their own pockets and for their own egos, class and privileges.
Simplistic maybe, but a genuine discussion. It made me think that until the ‘left’ starts engaging in real discussions with ‘real’ people it will continue to be seen by many we claim to be the ‘vanguard’ of as irrelevant and as out of touch as everyone else.
I enclose a £10 cheque for your fighting fund, as I am yet to be convinced that you are agents of the state, as was recently suggested in your letters page.
Steve Bell
ex-Welsh Socialist Alliance
Rank and file
As proved during the dispute surrounding Steve Hedley at Euston in 1998, Greg Tucker is not a rank and filer (‘Rank and file workers’ organisation needed’ Weekly Worker October 17).
Well done to him for winning his industrial tribunal victory, but even with additional time on his hands this will not mean he will build a rank and file organisation. He doesn’t believe in one.
Mark Metcalf
email
Turkey poll
We are writing to thank you for the support you have given to Dehap (Democratic People’s Party) at a time when the authorities in Turkey have been trying desperately to prevent it from taking part in the forthcoming elections on November 3.
The Supreme Council of Elections (YSK) was to make a decision this week on Dehap’s participation in the elections, having considered the allegations that Dehap is not organised in a sufficient number of provinces. As we have stated previously, this was not the case at all and in fact Dehap is among those very few parties which are expected to pass the 10% national threshold.
We are very pleased to let you know that, thanks to both national and international support, the YSK has announced that there is no impediment for Dehap’s participation in the elections. However, despite this victory, the authorities are still trying to do everything in their power to find other excuses to stop Dehap. Now, a number of prominent candidates are being accused of preparing forged documents about the organisational structure of the party. However, legally it is not possible to eliminate any party from the elections once voting has started, which is now the case.
All this proves once again that the authorities are trying very hard to create confusion among the electorate in an effort to stop them from voting for Dehap, which they consider as a threat. Thus, it is of great importance to keep up national and international pressure to prevent present and future repression of Dehap.
Dehap
London
Buy
this book
|
State
and revolution |
|
The
struggle against fascism in Germany Leon Trotsky £19.96 |
|
Critique
of the Gotha Programme Karl Marx £3.95 |
Price correct at time of uploading
