Weekly Worker 454 Thursday October 31 2002

Letters

Ten percent

How daft can you get? What kind of “breakthrough” is it when, against the trend, a mayoral election is won by Labour in one of the most corrupt, rotten boroughs in the country (Weekly Worker October 24)? A completely incompetent council that continues to fail its impoverished community gets its man in and you call that a breakthrough!

I blame indulgent leftist posturing that prevented the selection of a candidate representing a common platform of progressive forces who could have had a more realistic chance of winning the post. The London leftists could learn from the Turkish election rather than patronise the Kurdish and Turkish communities. In Turkey some left parties have come together to form a credible alliance under the party Dehap, which might just make a real breakthrough and surpass the 10% margin to win seats in the parliament.

These parties have been able to reach agreement on a common platform without sacrificing their individual integrity. If the left can do it in Turkey, why can’t the left do it in London?

David Morgan
email

Waiting …

As someone looking for an alternative to New Labour I couldn’t be more downbeat. Has the left in the country ever been so remote and in the wilderness? Perhaps many other voters have wondered the same. Is the left even in their consciousness? Why do we find ourselves in this state?

It is simple. Firstly, we have a mass of parties seemingly disunited and disorganised. Secondly, these parties offer few credible policies ­ too few that would appeal to enough voters. We have a plethora of marginalised parties that seem to think they have the luxury of infighting and point-scoring. A brief survey of leftwing parties gives us the Communist Part of Great Britain, the Communist Party of Britain, the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Party, the Socialist Labour Party and the umbrella Socialist Alliance, to mention a few.

I see resignations, defections and squabbling over constitutional and theoretical issues that are secondary to people’s lives. Meanwhile the Blair bandwagon marches on. Talk of ‘workers’ control’, ‘squeezing the fat cats’ and ‘overthrowing the state’ is not the language of the people and not the language of voters wanting a better society.

We live in an information-based, knowledge-driven, networked country, where communication technologies and knowledge form the new infrastructure. Outdated websites, with few up-to-date articles or editorials and with no connection to people’s lives, dreams or concerns only reinforce a message of outdated policies and slogans. More slogans than policies, of course. Anger without alternatives. Out of date. Out of touch. Out of power.

When will the people rise against their ‘evil capitalist oppressors’? Answer: never. The theories of Marx and Engels have of course influenced public policy. We have some sort of welfare state, some redistribution of wealth, some equality between the sexes and ethnic groups, some equality between people of varying sexual orientations. But there is much to do. Students live in poverty, pensioners live on a pittance, social housing is a national disgrace, public transport is chaotic, our city streets are an embarrassment. With so much to do, why is the left not more focussed? Why so distracted?

Of course, the fateful coming of communism has no support in modern science. Social democracy gave up this belief in fate at an early age. Consequently countries such as Sweden have enjoyed for decades the equality, freedom, justice, solidarity and prosperity that most us could only dream of. They rightly rejected the false dichotomy between socialism and capitalism long ago in favour of a more sophisticated theory of social democracy. A theory that has kept them in government virtually without interruption.

We desperately need a broad-based social democratic party, as opposed to the arguing factions currently undermining the left. The voters’ discontent with the government’s approach to public services shows the need for a coherent, cohesive party of the left. The gap is there: Blair’s New Labour can hardly be called social democratic.

Secondly, we need this one party to promote policies that resonate with people. We need a party that seeks to build a strong welfare state in which people are secure, well educated, free from discrimination, safe at work, safe on our streets, and in good health. We need this so that our economy can flourish ­ to create the conditions for full employment, to encourage companies to set up in the UK.

In short, the left needs to redefine both itself and its policies. A Socialist Alliance is perhaps inevitable, given the current fragmentation. We need to disband our outdated ideologies and irrelevant parties to form a broad-based coalition looking at a common horizon. Right now we need to unite. With the election still perhaps three years away, we have time to put together a programme of social democracy. A programme of change. A programme of inspiration. A programme of hope. A programme of credibility.

I am waiting. The people are waiting.

Fraser Hamilton
London

… and hoping

Just like the creation of the Labour Party, you are reaching a point when the games of a particular group (1900 the Social Democratic Federation - today the SWP) are wrecking the plan.

The SWP really only ever viewed the Socialist Alliance as a front, and like all fronts - Anti-Nazi League, Stop the War Coalition - they serve a purpose and then go back in their box when they are not needed. The CPGB and other factions within the SA really have to put the SWP on the spot: are they willing to see the creation of a socialist party or what?

The facts are clear - whilst the CPGB and others are pissing in the wind, pussyfooting around a single group who really aren’t committed, the British National Party are winning consistently strong votes - are the Socialist Alliance?

I don’t think that politically we are at the position of needing a Leninist vanguard - we need a broad organisation to encourage normal rather than politically experienced people towards socialist ideas. I also believe that ‘communism’ and ‘socialism’ have sadly joined the ranks of ‘fascism’ and ‘Khmer Rouge’ as fear words.

Average punters on the street need some work before they flock to even ‘left’ socialism, let alone communism. I still think that this is possible!

Libertarian lad
email

Never Stalinist?

Before responding at any length I’d best wait until Mark Fischer gets further in his promised series of articles. By then Weekly Worker readers should have an idea of his substantive arguments and, with luck, sight of the “substantial piece” by Sean Matgamna’s ‘Critical notes’ which he is “centrally” responding to (http://www.workersliberty.org.uk/files/tour_de_cpgb). Hopefully we will read this in the Weekly Worker rather than some quotations filleted so as to “prove” that the AWL misrepresents CPGB/WW politics.

One point, however, cries out for immediate comment: Stalinism. In the Weekly Worker of October 11 2001 Mark himself proudly introduced a reprint of an article published in 1982 on the April 1978 Stalinist coup in Afghanistan. Mark admitted some “flaws, reflecting the illusions and theoretical errors characteristic of the extreme left wing of ‘official communism’” in the article, but did not find it necessary to specify those “flaws” further, and on the whole praised the article as excellent proof that the Stalinist PDPA had led “a genuine democratic revolution”. The article itself compared the April 1978 coup at length and without disfavour to October 1917 in Russia.

Sean was “astounded ... that you still hold to the line on Afghanistan which you held when you were Stalinists” (‘Critical notes’). Mark responds: “We were not ‘Stalinists’ in 1981, when we begun publishing ... our previous stance [before the early 1990s, when the CPGB/WW broke from the idea of the Stalinist USSR having been any sort of workers’ state] had far more of ‘Trotskyism’ about it than ‘Stalinism’ ...”

I then turn to From October to August, a book published by the CPGB in 1992. “For all his faults, his mistakes, his championing of bureaucratic socialism, nothing should be allowed to detract from the positive developments in the Soviet Union during the years when Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin led the USSR ...”

Further: “The conditions were established for a string of socialist states in eastern Europe and the emergence of the Soviet Union as the second most powerful country on earth. To say the least, this achievement owed not a little to Stalin ... Against Gorbachev we obviously defend the Stalin of the five-year plans, the Stalin of collectivisation, the Stalin of industrialisation, the Stalin of World War II and the Stalin of the spread of socialism into eastern Europe. We proudly and unhesitatingly defend the forward march of socialism over which Stalin presided...”

And further: “The Soviet Republic’s war against Poland [in 1920] ... was no different in essence from its war against Nazi Germany, except that the war against Poland failed and that against Nazi Germany succeeded. They were both revolutionary wars which from being defensive became offensive. Being an international continuation of the Soviet state’s policy by violent means, the victories of the Red Army of 1944 and 1945 created extremely favourable conditions for the creation of socialist states in eastern Europe. This is as clear an example as one could want of the class struggle conducted on an international scale by the Soviet Union.”

The book also contained criticism of “bureaucratic socialism” and even of the great Joseph Vissarionovich himself. In 1955, say, that criticism would have got you expelled from the (real) CPGB as “Trotskyites”. By 1992 it was commonplace.

You didn’t see any “Trotskyism” in your views then! “Because of their worship of anti-bureaucratic spontaneity [ie, their support for elemental working class resistance to Stalinism] the Trotskyites have always in practice been calling for counterrevolution in the socialist countries.”

That the Socialist Workers Party, in particular, espoused “the most reactionary conclusions” was “clear from its response to the August [1991] counterrevolution [in the USSR]: ‘Communism has collapsed,’ it headlined, and this supposed ‘fact’ should ‘have every socialist rejoicing’. The SWP is simply the most explicit anti-communist group on the revolutionary left.” And: “There can be no playing ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow’ games when it comes to counterrevolution,” you insisted. “What the SWP indulges in is typical of most of the left in Britain - workerism and a worship of abstract democracy.”

You also denounced the SWP for another of its more creditable activities, its money-raising for an attempted independent socialist-oriented trade union movement in the USSR in 1990 - “Communists should guard the unity of the trade union movement in the USSR.” You took pride in your slogan of “unconditional defence of the socialist countries” - against the working class if necessary - “Tony Chater, the editor of the Morning Star - whom the ignorant bourgeois media dubs a ‘tankie’ - says tanks don’t solve anything. Well, that’s not true. Under certain circumstances tanks do solve things. Ask Stalin. He solved the problem of German invasion with tanks.”

Retrospectively you endorsed the Russian invasions of Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968) - “The only way to save the situation for socialism in Hungary was ... a call by the new government, led by Kadar, for Soviet intervention.” Further: “What was posed in 1968 was defending existing bureaucratic socialism or the Dubcek capitalist road. For genuine communists the interests of the world revolution demanded the former and we must have the courage to say that, faced with such a choice, Czech and Slovak national rights had to take second place.”

You “supported the banning of Solidarnosc in 1981 because of the imminent danger of counterrevolution”. You “support[ed] the presence of Soviet forces in Afghanistan”. You semi-supported the attempted conservative coup in the USSR in August 1991 - “The road to counterrevolution in the USSR will not after all be paved with Gorbachevite good intentions. The State Emergency Committee has seen to that. For communists, for all genuine partisans of the working class, anything that, even momentarily, stays the hand of counterrevolution is good!”

You thought that by 1991 the power of bureaucratic tanks to “solve things” for socialism was reaching its limits - “You can only keep the masses passive with tanks if, after you have sent them [tanks, not the masses] onto the streets, you give the population steadily increasing living standards. Yes, that might have been a crude bureaucratic way to handle problems, but as long as bureaucratic socialism was only a relative fetter, it could do it.” Nevertheless, your chief pride was that even at the last, “genuine Leninists never wavered in our pro-Soviet stance”. Right up to the end, you defended the USSR as “the world revolutionary centre”.

In previous discussions with the AWL, you conceded frankly that you used to be “left Stalinists”. There is no shame in coming to think that one started off at the wrong place in politics, and that one has learned many things since - so long as one’s previous errors are unsparingly recognised and analysed. But how can you learn the lessons of your break from Stalinism if you deny that it ever had to take place?

Martin Thomas
AWL

Absurd

Jack Conrad’s series of articles on the dictatorship of the proletariat contain the illusion that Lenin never consistently understood what Marx and Engels meant by ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.

This is an absurdity. It was Lenin who rescued the term from obscurity and, with the help of Bukharin, related it to Marx’s conception of the commune state in State and revolution. As Neil Harding comments, “From February 1917 Lenin increasingly came to view the soviets as the authentic embodiment of social initiative and action. They were the contemporary bearers of the commune idea” (N Harding Leninism Basingstoke 1996, p150). Hence soviet democracy equals the potential for the commune state and the dictatorship of the proletariat envisaged by Marx.

So what happened between 1918-21? Civil war, economic catastrophe, the mistaken policy and illusions of war communism and the continuing isolation of the revolution represented the adverse material conditions and context for a theoretical regression on the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Between 1918 and 1921, Lenin, Bukharin and Trotsky justified a substitutionist stance that equated the rule of the party elite with the dictatorship of the proletariat. The party leaders were not Blanquists in 1917 - this was the slander of Kautsky - but they became Blanquists as a response to difficult and complex circumstances. Hence the text of Marx and Engels did not dictate what happened in reality, but rather it was primary objective conditions that were mediated and expressed in theoretical terms.

When conditions started to change in 1921, the introduction of the New Economic Policy led Lenin, Bukharin and Trotsky to once again modify their conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

For Lenin and Bukharin, cultural revolution, and the support of the peasantry, became crucial prerequisites of an authentic dictatorship of the proletariat. Trotsky’s New course showed that without party democracy the party was liable to bureaucratic conservatism and the undermining of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

By the late 1920s Trotsky was once again reclaiming Lenin’s conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat in terms of the redevelopment of soviet democracy.

The point being made is that Lenin and Bukharin between 1916 and 1917 reclaimed Marx’s conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but the bureaucratic degeneration between 1918 and 1921 led to theoretical regression on this question. Jack Conrad wants to reject this simple truth and replace it with another one. I wonder why?

Phil Sharpe
email

Correct?

I am interested in your comment that Jim Higgins became “politically incorrect” (Weekly Worker October 17). If, as you say, an obituary is not the time or place to illuminate on this then why mention it at all?

I have discussed your article with many of Jim’s friends and colleagues and no one agrees with you.

Julie Benson
email

Irresponsible

The email you published alongside the article ‘Taaffe pulls out at last’ “purports” to be from Julian Goss, whatever that means ... (Weekly Worker October 24).

Considering the amount of malicious spamming and false identities, etc being spread around the internet (albeit mainly by Zionist hackers), it would seem rash and irresponsible to print emails that only ‘purport’ to be from someone ... or are you just trying to pretend you don’t know how you got hold of someone’s personal emails?

Ben Courtice
Australia

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